He hurried down the old, slanted staircase into their basement. On the workbench that was original to the house, amid the house paint and the tools, he found the brass cleaner he had used on the bed when they bought it. He grabbed a few rags from the bin under the bench and took the stairs back up two at a time.
In the bedroom, he chose a spot on Jane’s side and furiously scrubbed at it with the polisher. The black started to lift, but the brass remained dull. He grabbed a clean rag and ran it back and forth, hard, over the spot. Still, it wouldn’t shine. The brass appeared slightly greenish, as if it had been inhabited by a mold that had simply taken over the bed.
He squirted more tarnish remover on the rag, scrubbed again and again and again. He tried a clean rag. The tarnish couldn’t be removed.
“Goddamn it,” he said. “Goddamn it.”
His voice, low as it was, cut through the crisp, spring coolness of the house, and he heard the anguish there. For some reason, it was that sound, that tone, which overwhelmed him.
He sank to his knees and grief washed over him. He couldn’t go on like this. They couldn’t go on like this. He began to sob. He hadn’t cried in eight years, not since his grandmother, his dad’s mom, passed away.
But the tears were different now. They weren’t the soothing sobs to mourn the passing of a life lived well. These were angry sobs, full of despair. And mostly, full of fear.
Because he had no idea how he would handle this grief. He had no idea how to move on from here.
11
“Have you ever cheated?”
Sam shot a sideways glance at me. His green eyes sparkled like olives in a martini. “Not on you.”
“On anyone?”
His eyes moved away, looking toward the empty stage. As he did so, the overhead lights glinted in his cropped blond hair, making him look like the California boy he was.
We were no longer engaged or exclusive, but now, as we tried to figure out what to do with our lives and ourselves, Sam and I dated. Which meant that instead of spending our nights making dinner at home or watching the Cubs on TV, we went out for nights like this.
We were at Wise Fools, a bar on Lincoln Avenue, where we often went when we first met. Like a lot of the other bars on Lincoln, it was wood-clad and beer-soaked, the kind of place that brought out the twenty-somethings searching for Bud Light specials. But Wise Fools booked great bands, too, and since Sam was a guitar player and an all-around music lover, we’d been finding ourselves there every few weeks.
The band tonight was Mutha Goose, which I thought was just about the stupidest name I’d ever heard, but Sam’s friend R.T. was the lead guitarist. R.T. and Sam often played together, but Sam never had the time to be in a real band. He was always too busy with business school and then work. Sam, who had been Forester Pickett’s financial advisor at a wealth management firm, had lost his job, too, after taking off temporarily with Forester’s property, but unlike me, he’d landed on his feet. The fact that the whole mess had been in the news hadn’t helped me one bit. Lawyers don’t like even a whiff of a scandal associated with their law firm. The same was true with Sam’s business. None of the wealth management firms would take him on, but a friend gave him a job on the trading side of the business. He didn’t seem entirely happy, but I couldn’t tell if that was because of the new job or because we had broken up. Or maybe because he didn’t have the time to play much music lately, something which made him a little irritable.
R.T. came on stage. By day, R.T. sold computer software, but his passion was his music, and nights like tonight, he looked like a musician—jeans that appeared not to have been washed for weeks, leather flip-flops, brown bangs that fell in his eyes instead of being gelled into submission.
Sam waved hi to his friend, then turned back to me. I could see some kind of struggle in his eyes, but whether it was because he wished he were on that stage or he wished he didn’t have to answer my question, I didn’t know. I used to be able to read him so well.
“I’ve cheated.” He said it simply, almost resignedly, as if it were something he’d wrestled and come to terms with.
I felt a well of disappointment. Sam was a cheater. At that moment, I wanted to look at anything but him. I picked up my BlackBerry from the table and scrolled through the texts and e-mails. There was a time when my in-boxes would have been choked with cries for help, when someone always needed me or my opinion. Now they were fairly empty, save a text from my brother, Charlie, saying he might stop by the bar to say hello.
I could feel Sam watching me, gauging my reaction to his statement.
I put the phone back on the table and thought of his ex-girlfriend Alyssa, a woman who was beautiful and reed-thin. She and Sam had dated at the end of high school and into college. She was an angelic blonde who worked in geriatric research, making the world better for the elderly. In short, she made me feel like a shallow devil—the brassy, redheaded entertainment lawyer.
I didn’t necessarily like Alyssa, but I felt pain for her now because she must have been the one Sam was talking about.
Finally, I looked at him. “You cheated on Alyssa?”
Sam shook his head. “Carrie.”
“Carrie, your first girlfriend ever?”
“Yeah.” He lifted his Blue Moon beer from the table and poked at the orange slice with his finger.
“Sam, you were like a freshman in high school.”
I thought of the monumentally idiotic things I’d done during high school. Once, when my mother was out of town and trusted me enough to babysit my brother, Charlie, I forced him to be the bartender for the monster bash I threw. He was twelve at the time. Charlie ended up drinking beer as he poured it from the keg and later threw up violently over our balcony and into the alley behind our apartment, one of the most scary and heartbreaking things I’d ever witnessed. Doing stupid things made you smarter, I figured. I’d certainly never treated my brother like that again. If anything, I had cherished and babied him after that. Oddly, he remembered the incident fondly.
“Does that really count?” I asked Sam.
“Hell, yeah. She was my first love.” He grimaced, as if what he’d done still tortured him. And that made my heart fill with love, like a balloon given a shot of air from an inflator.
“You were so young,” I pointed out. “You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“Yeah, I did.” He looked straight into my eyes. “You want to know why I did it?”
I nodded, almost afraid to say anything. This was one of the things I liked about our breakup—despite the drama and the uncertainty, we were completely honest with each other now. Sure, we were honest before all this, too, but now it was different. Now, it was microscopic, as if we were both laying all our cards on the table and saying, If we’re going to do this, here’s the truth. The real, deep-down, not-so-tidy, sometimes-it-will-make-you-flinch truth.
“You know what my dad is like?” Sam asked.
“A drunken, selfish bastard.” I had never met Sam’s dad. Neither he nor his sisters had any consistent contact with him, but I’d heard the stories.
R.T. and his band began playing. Their first number was a cover of a song by The Killers called, appropriately enough, “All These Things That I’ve Done.” The lights in the bar dimmed. The stage lights, orange and bold, grew stronger, while the music grew louder until it seemed the stage pulsed like a heart.
Sam pulled his chair closer so I could hear him. “This was a few years before my mom finally got rid of him,” he said. “Then I kind of wanted to be like him. I thought the way he acted—tough and swaggering and hard-partying—was how guys were supposed to be. So I acted like that, you know? My mom was mortified, and she tried to stop me, but I didn’t