She walked the path her youthful self used to tread on dates, when Jackson Heights was the neighborhood to be seen in. She’d pass Jahn’s, where she used to have a burger and a shake after the movie, and remember how whatever hopeful young man she was with would escort her up and down both sides of Thirty-Seventh Avenue before returning her home on the train. Sometimes she’d take them on detours onto side streets, not to find an alley to make out in—though she did that too—but because she liked to look at the co-ops and houses and imagine a future in which she lived in that privileged setting.
Sometimes, she would feel that sense of possibility reenter her chest, and then she’d keep walking until it had worn off and the blocks looked strangely unfamiliar. She would stop at Arturo’s and gaze in at the couples dining in neat pairs, or the families passing plates around, and wonder when things would settle down long enough for her to enjoy some of that hot bread with him, buttered to perfection, a glass of red wine warming the stomach, the two of them in no hurry to get anywhere, choosing from an inviting menu. There needed to be time for that kind of leisure, or she didn’t see the point in living.
One day, the heat was unusual for early spring, and Ed was at his desk in his underwear and T-shirt. She’d begun to resent that desk, beaten up around the legs and stained a dull brown. She knew she’d never be free of it, that it would follow her wherever she went.
Getting that desk, Ed had told her, had been one of the few happy times he’d shared with his father as an adult. His father walked in from work one day and told him to get up and come with him. They drove into the city; his father wouldn’t say what it was about. They went to the Chubb offices. “The place looked like it had been cleaned out,” Ed said. “He led me to a storage closet. There was a desk and chair in it—his desk and chair. He’d had a handyman buddy hold them for him. They were getting new furniture for the whole office the next day. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Pull out the drawers. Pretend to work.’ It was strange to have him watching me. My mother was the one who peeked over my shoulder when I worked. ‘Can you get your work done at it, or what?’ he asked. I said, ‘Who couldn’t get work done at this desk? It’s beautiful.’ My father, being my father, said, ‘Good. Now I can read the paper at the table.’ But I knew he was glad to do something nice for me.”
The story had touched her when she’d first heard it, but now the ugly desk seemed a symbol of how little her husband would ever be equipped to see beyond the limits his biography had imposed on his imagination.
She watched him work, his pasty legs sticking out absurdly from his briefs, and waited for him to swivel in his chair to face her, to be a normal man for a moment. Angry, disappointed, she walked over and turned the air conditioner on. Ed rose without a word and turned it off again, then went back to work. He didn’t even look in her direction. They went back and forth like this several times. She couldn’t believe she’d signed on to live with a man so committed to his own pointless suffering. They weren’t poverty-stricken by any means; they were even able to put aside a bit of money from every check for a down payment on their future house. But Ed thought even minimal indulgences were best lived without.
When they were courting she’d seen his eccentricities as a welcome change. There was a bit of continental flair about him. Certainly he was more charming than the doctors at work. He was as smart as any of them; he only hadn’t gone to medical school because he was too interested in research to stop doing it. There was something romantic about that, but living with him made his eccentricities curdle into pathologies. What had been charmingly independent became fussy and self-defeating.
The heat broke her. She told him she’d had enough and started walking to her parents’ apartment in Woodside. She sweated through her blouse, her resentment spurring her forward. Ed could have all the heat he wanted in that apartment by himself. She wouldn’t be cooped up for another minute with him.
When her father came to the door and saw her fuming and drenched, he knew what was up. “That’s your home now,” he said. “Work it out with him.”
In her rush to leave Ed, she had neglected to bring her purse. She asked for change for the bus.
“You walked here,” her father said. “You can walk back.”
By the time she got home, she had grown so angry at her father that she’d forgotten all about being angry at her husband. Ed didn’t say anything when he saw her, but after she showered she emerged to an apartment bathed in the cool of a churning air conditioner.
They made love for what felt like forever that night. She didn’t mind the sweat at all.
She was in Woodside visiting her parents when she saw a sign taped to the window of Doherty’s: “Big Mike Tumulty vs. Pete McNeese in a footrace. Friday, July 21, 7:00.”
She knew Pete, and she’d never much liked him. He was tall and skinny, and he always seemed to speak a little louder than came naturally, as if he were imitating another man’s voice.
“What’s this about a race?” she asked her father as she walked into the kitchen. He was sitting sideways at the table with a cup of tea, looking out the window. He wore a new white undershirt and slippers.
“He was running his mouth off about how fleet of foot he was.”
“You’re almost sixty years old.”
“So what?”
“Pete is barely thirty.” Her father put the kettle back on.
“So he’s half my age,” her father said. “He’s also half the man.”
She thought the whole thing ridiculous, but on the race’s appointed day, she couldn’t help dropping by Doherty’s on the way home from work. The bar was fuller than usual, almost visibly crackling with static energy, as if a prizefight was about to take place instead of an absurd pissing contest. Happy shouts rose over the din, and everywhere she looked, men huddled and clapped their palms to the backs of each other’s necks. Someone asked her father how he planned to beat Pete. “I’ll blind him with the tobacco juice,” he said through a cheekful of chaw, to a round of hearty laughter. Guys were taking final book. “Two dollars on Big Mike,” she heard one say proudly, and she imagined that if all the money her father’s adherents were willing to lose to support him were piled on the bar, it would be enough to buy the establishment from the owners, or do something worthwhile.
The course was set: they would start in the bar, at the back, run out to the sidewalk, circle the block once, and return to the bar. It wouldn’t be easy to watch. Pete and his horse-long legs would come around the corner upright and easy, and her father would follow with his cheeks puffed, his face carmine red, his legs churning. Everyone gathered would watch an era end.
“Give me a glass of Irish whiskey,” her father said, gently rapping his knuckles on the bar. “I’m warming up.” He took his shirt off, then his undershirt. He resembled a bare-knuckled fighter. Pete tried to smirk, but he looked unnerved. Her father put his foot up on a stool. There were packs of muscle shifting under his skin, and when he leaned over to tie his shoe, his back looked broad enough to play cards on.
“Jimmy,” he called out with mock sharpness. “Get those kids out of the street. I don’t want to run any of them down.”
Guys laughed, exchanged looks. Her father and Pete toed a line in the back of the bar. The bartender counted down from three and they headed through