Ever since his wife left, Eliot has been waking early to meditate. It is November, pitch black when he rises, but he has grown, unaccountably, superstitious. He has been trying, through discipline and virtuous deeds, to bring Sabina back.
This morning, Thanksgiving, he sits cross-legged on the floor. Eyes closed, breathing, he pictures a jade-colored light: the heart chakra, the seat of compassion. How does he even know this? Very likely, it’s something Sabina’s sister has opined about, or maybe he absorbed it from the millennial ether. He pictures Sabina: her graceful runner’s body, which, after twelve years of marriage, has not lost one ounce of its power to stir him. His head pounds with sleeplessness and thirst, but he sits.
Some minutes later, Eliot knows this: he cannot face dinner at his brother’s later, the courses of elaborate food, the showcasing of new gadgets, the showcasing of his brother’s four children, each born within two years of the last. And so he calls David to beg off, claiming the sudden onset of a virus.
“Ouch! We’ll miss you, too, bro!” David booms over the phone. “But who’s going to stand up for the lumpen when talk turns to affairs of the day?”
“Maybe one of your lawn care guys can come in my place,” Eliot says.
“Hate to say it, but my lawn care guys make more than you do.”
Eliot doesn’t doubt that this is true. Just the same, it’s a relief to walk away from it: all the food, the bonhomie, David’s baronial pride over his full-to-bursting family.
Once he hangs up, Eliot realizes his lie could come back to bite him. He is on shaky ground gastrointestinally, but all he has in the refrigerator is a half a carton of leftover Thai. He grabs his jacket and goes out to his car, a nine-year-old Civic, a teacher’s ride straight out of central casting. But now that he’s out in the air, well-being seems within reach. Driving, going anywhere, always steadies him. He waves as he passes the three Davis-Chen boys tossing a football around on their lawn. Calvin, the oldest, salutes in reply.
He drives through the small downtown, past the park with its gnarled, leafless trees and peeling bandstand. The park had once been one of the town’s most winning features, but three consecutive years of budget cuts have left it looking like some dystopian British Midlands spot from a film by Tony Richardson. He drives along a residential stretch, turns onto the main commercial strip. He has made this trip so many times, with a householder’s shopping list and sense of purpose, he could do it blindfolded. After he and Sabina bought the house, they debated passionately about where to shop: King Brothers – indifferently stocked and staffed, but, miraculously, holding on as one of the last locally owned supermarkets in the state – or the upscale national chain, which sells the image of virtue along with organic apples for three-fifty a pound. They decided on King’s – a decision driven ultimately by economics – although during the brief weeks of Sabina’s pregnancy, they defected to the other place for its superior produce. Today, he circles King’s parking lot twice before he finds a space.
Inside, he feels furtive, out of step. Part of what Sabina’s absence has brought is an excruciating, minute-by-minute awareness of his every psychic hiccup. He is tempted to grab a frozen meal and run, but he believes his intention to cook something real is the wire-thin line separating him from all the other schlubs who have veered so far off the tracks they now spend major holidays alone. Chicken piccata: he’ll make that. It’s something he used to make for Sabina in the early days of their courtship. Today, it seems a reasonable compromise between a Falstaffian joint of meat and a dinner on a cardboard tray.
In the produce section, he manages to score a decent lemon. He finds a bunch of fat-stalked asparagus, but at six dollars a pound, he returns it to the bin. As he combs through the beans for a decent handful, he sees a curly-headed boy of two or so gazing at him from his perch in a shopping cart. Young children have always liked Eliot. “It’s your roundness,” Sabina has told him. “Your hair, your eyes, your … personality,” she always concludes diplomatically, patting his belly. The twin embryos, implanted in the doctor’s office last April, stopped growing after twenty-one weeks. Fetal demise is somewhat more prevalent in medically assisted conceptions, their doctor said afterwards. There was no reason not to try again.
Now, near the checkout line, Eliot thinks he spots their doctor, the hired gun specialist he and Sabina began seeing last year. It isn’t Dr. Bertram, of course, just another sixtyish ectomorph beside whom Eliot feels sedentary and pudgy, but Dr. Bertram holds such sway over them that his likeness shows up everywhere. In her old life, Sabina took orders from no one, but under Dr. Bertram’s direction, she gave up her half-marathons to preserve her body fat. At the Globe, she traded the strenuous investigative assignments she used to relish for coverage of city council meetings, stories that left her so bored she claimed she’d rather stick herself with pins. “Eyes on the prize,” Dr. Bertram told them. “You can’t lose hope.”
Hope, Eliot thinks now. That elusive slender boat.
The express line cashier announces his total. As he fumbles for his wallet, he notices the skinny young man standing behind him. The patchy goatee is new, but Eliot recognizes the slouching hands-in-pockets stance, the Rangers cap he wore to class each day – a brave move in such die-hard Red Sox country – the apple cheeks no tough-guy pose can hide. This young man was a student in Eliot’s French class two or three years ago. Not his Advanced Placement class, with its girls who fall in love with the poetry and legend of Rimbaud, but in level three, the incongruously named bottom track, where seniors struggle to conjugate regular verbs. Eliot waits near the bagger’s station for the boy to finish checking out.
“Hello there! Happy Thanksgiving!” Eliot calls out after the boy has paid and moved down to collect his bag. Off duty and on, he is avuncular Monsieur Blum, hearty and generous. In class, he organizes poetry slams; he teaches his students the most off-color language he can get away with – anything, anything to keep them awake.
“Oh, hey, Monsieur Blum. Happy Thanksgiving to you.”
The boy does not seem particularly bothered to be bumping into his former teacher. Eliot is touched by this, by the boy’s “monsieur” mangled in his north-of-Boston accent. He sifts through the hundreds of student names that have collected in his memory. Matt? Brady? Brandon? Most level three kids are easy to recall, with their hallway fights, the endless detention slips to sign. But this boy drifted from one day to the next, on the brink of invisibility. Still, there was something about him, a nervous twitch in his left eye.
Ryan: the name leaps up like a frog from a murky pond. Ryan Dekay. He came to Eliot once about some missing homework – “I’m wicked sorry,” he kept saying – and Eliot believed him. It might have been that twitch or it might have simply been Ryan’s guilelessness, his inability to dissemble.
“Having dinner with your family today?” Eliot asks, although the two cans of ravioli he saw rolling down the conveyer belt said everything about Ryan’s prospects for the holiday.
“Nah.” Ryan gives a loose-limbed shrug. “I’m not a big Thanksgiving person. My girlfriend’s working today, and my family, we’re not, you know, that close.”
In a strange trick of memory, Eliot recalls meeting Ryan’s father. It was parents’ night; Eliot probably held forth about the wit in Molière, the humanism in Voltaire, when, in truth, level three French is je suis, tu es, year after year after year. Afterwards, an unsmiling man, neither stocky nor thin, walked up to Eliot with a burly man’s yawing stride and introduced himself as Mr. Dekay. His handshake was less a greeting than an assertion of power. He said: “I hope my son’s not making any trouble.” Then he said: “You’re still teaching French? Our kids learn a dead language while the Chinese eat our lunch.”
“Family, yeah … can be hard,” Eliot tells Ryan now. The limitations of the setting prevent his saying anything of greater substance. He taps Ryan’s shoulder with the coupon circular he picked up at the entrance, out of habit. “Well, it was great seeing you again.”
Like nodding acquaintances trying to balance cordiality with privacy in a public place – an elevator, say, or Dr. Bertram’s waiting room – they walk together through the sliding doors and out into the parking lot. Because it would be poor form to say nothing, Eliot asks, “So, Ryan, what have you been up to these days?”
“Not much. I’ve been working for my buddy’s cleaning business, and my girlfriend and I have a place in the Scotch Arms. But that’s all ending pretty soon. I start basic next month. In Kentucky. It’ll be my first time down South, so that should be interesting.”
Eliot considers the elements that comprise Ryan’s life: the cleaning job; the apartment in the sprawling, unprosperous Scotch Arms complex at the edge of town; his enlistment for a war he very likely believes will make a man of him. The high school where Eliot teaches is in another town, much wealthier than the one where he, and now Ryan, live. Most students enroll in four-year colleges; few go on to military service.
“Do I know your girlfriend?”
“Nah.” A grudging, indecipherable smile flickers across Ryan’s face. On many levels, his smile says: why would you know her? “Her name’s Carmela. She’s Brazilian. The rest of her family’s still back there. In Minas Gerais?”
Ryan delivers this last fact as a question; he’s clearly uncertain of the pronunciation. It occurs to Eliot that Ryan, too, might be grabbing at conversational tidbits to guard against silence.
“Listen,” he says. “My plans today kind of … changed. If you want to come by for dinner, please feel free.”
Eliot can’t quite believe he has said this. He waits for a look of alarm to appear on Ryan’s face. His own high school French teacher wore corduroy slippers on his remarkably tiny feet and could always be distracted from popping a quiz with a strategic question about his glory days at the Sorbonne. If Monsieur Charpentier had invited him for Thanksgiving dinner, Eliot would have fled in horror. But Ryan’s face remains placid, good-humored. In class, he did the best he could.
“Come around three. We can catch the game on TV. It’ll just be the two of us. My wife’s out of town.” He feels it necessary to make this clarification. Ryan might find it a little creepy if he sees the framed wedding photo on his hall table but … surprise! No wife in evidence. “You eat chicken, I hope.”
Ryan’s left eyelid twitches, but he pockets the receipt on which Eliot has scribbled his address. “That’s awesome. Thanks a lot, Monsieur Blum. I’ll see you later.”
On his way home, Eliot calls Sabina to wish her a happy Thanksgiving. His call bounces to her voicemail, as his calls to her often do. He pictures the small, grim Thanksgiving at her sister’s, with its tofu turkey substitute and Janis’s doomsday prognostications about peak oil. Eliot has been practicing compassion; he harbors no ill will toward Janis or anyone. And having extended his invitation to Ryan, he believes his crabbed, ungenerous soul has expanded by a few more degrees. Very likely he is flouting what most people would consider to be appropriate boundaries, but he has finally ventured beyond the confines of his own chattering head.
It occurs to him he has nothing for dessert. He stops at the convenience store near his house, but the factory-made pies he normally sees piled near the snack foods are all sold out. He digs deep in the freezer chest for ice cream and pulls out what remains: two ice-rimed pints of Cherries Jubilee.
Back at the house, Eliot unpacks his groceries. He surveys the liquor situation and finds it good. There’s a decent selection of wine and plenty of beer: five bottles of a fashionable microbrew, four more of the cheap but drinkable domestic brand he and his brother used to drink in the woods during high school, when David was a skinny kid with bad skin, masking his shyness with abrasive humor. Eliot isn’t sure whether Ryan is, strictly speaking, legal to drink. He’s not about to card him. Better to put the alcohol on hold for now.
He loads the dirty dishes into the dishwasher. He throws out an empty merlot bottle and notes, with a twinge of dismay, the accumulation of bottles in the recycling bin. Where should he and Ryan eat? The dining room, with its walls painted melon, is the tidiest room in the house, but they’d be marooned, just the two of them, at the long, polished table. Better to batch it up on TV trays in the den.
There, Eliot picks up his socks from the floor, clears away the glasses and plates. He looks through his stack of LPs, which he will never stoop to call his vinyl. He flips past Devo and The Boomtown Rats, past Kraftwerk – a relic from his brief, intense fling with techno – past Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Patti Smith. Lately he has lacked the emotional wherewithal to listen to any of them. He finds Edith Piaf Live at Montreux, which he slides from its jacket and wipes clean while it spins on the turntable. Sabina hates Piaf’s nasal voice and what she calls her self-annihilating romanticism. But Eliot loves Piaf. He loves her scrappiness, her sly wit, her insistence on love. Every time he goes to Paris, he visits Père-Lachaise to lay roses at her stone. He always leaves a small pink flower for her daughter, too. When he travels there with his students – it’s almost always the AP kids who sign up for the spring-vacation trip – they indulge him in this and pay homage to the god they worship on reputation, adding their charm bracelets and Gitanes wrappers to the pile of whiskey bottles and cigarette lighters at Jim Morrison’s grave. Last time, he also stopped at the tomb of Victor Noir, a journalist and distant cousin of Napoleon. Nothing about Noir’s stern likeness suggests any such power, but his burial spot has become a mecca for the infertile. Sabina was then eleven weeks pregnant. Nonetheless, at the foot of Noir’s memorial statue, Eliot abandoned a lifetime of secular rationalism. With an eye out for his wandering students, he stepped forward to rub the boot. Countless hands had polished the bronze there and at the crotch to a golden shine.
He came home, and Sabina started to show. For ten more weeks, they lived in a state of cautious joy. Was it the caution or the joy that did them in? she wondered aloud afterwards, speaking in the dark.
The phone rings. He rushes to answer it, allowing himself a moment of hope that it’s Sabina, returning his call.
“Eliot.” This is his mother’s signature greeting: his name uttered as a statement.
“Oh, hi, Ma. Happy Thanksgiving.”
“David tells me you’re not feeling well.”
“Yeah. School’s a petri dish this time of year.”
“Do you need anything? We can easily stop by on our way to your brother’s.”
“I’m good, thanks. I ran out earlier for some ginger ale.”
“Any word from Sabina?”
He thinks of Sabina’s calls, which tend to come between his second and third periods at school. He thinks, despite his best efforts not to, of the pause before she says she misses him too.
“Sabina’s fine. She’s great.”
Silence follows, freighted with all his mother’s unasked questions.
“So, uh, I was actually going to go lie down.”
“Go, go. Rest. But before you go, I just wanted to tell you one thing. I’ve clipped an article you might be interested in. Some doctors out at UCLA are doing some very promising research about your…situation. I was going to give it to you today, but now I’ll just put it in the mail.”
“Thanks, Ma, but save yourself a stamp. Every legitimate treatment is available right here in Boston.”
“If it’s a matter of money, your father and I are in a position to help.”
Eliot now feels as he once did in Dr. Bertram’s office when the nurse, all brisk discretion, showed him to the small, windowless room he still thinks of as the wankatorium. “Thanks, Ma. We’re fine. I’ve really got to lie down. Please give my love to everyone.”
In the den, “Le Petit Homme” plays on the turntable. Back when loneliness was a more speculative condition for him, the song was one of Eliot’s favorites. Today, it’s too much: the man’s shabby sweater, his rented mistress, his invisible sorrow. Eliot goes to lift the needle off the disc. In the kitchen, he cuts open the plastic wrap covering the chicken and pounds each filet flat. Then, because it’s still too early for anything red, he uncorks the Riesling. He figures his mother’s call has earned him a glass, and he is rewarded by the wine’s apple-tinged bite. It could be worse, he tells himself. He could have Sabina’s mother, who has always reminded him of a hostile parrot, with her blurted judgments – so-and-so’s getting fat, so-and-so’s kids need a good whack on the butt, Eliot’s getting a bit of a paunch himself. His own mother might have questionable boundaries, but at least the things she says are kind.
It is almost two o’clock. At his brother’s, the doorbell is probably chiming; Chloe, the seven-year-old, has very likely glided to the door to charm the arriving guests. Eliot used to amuse her by pretending to pull quarters from her ears. The last time he tried that trick, she sighed with exquisite patience and told him she could see the coin in his hand.
The wine in his glass is getting low. He pours himself another. He takes the goblet up to the bedroom to sip from while he makes the bed. He and Sabina have laughed and fucked in this bed; they’ve played Scrabble for blood and held each other silently. Last month it became the place where everything finally went to hell, thanks to him, or perhaps Kermit Hotaling shares just a scrap of responsibility.
No, Eliot reminds himself. All Kermit Hotaling did was come to town to address a group of journalism students at Boston University. All Kermit did was call Sabina and invite her out to dinner, nothing he hasn’t done many times in the past. Kermit Hotaling is just an old friend from J-school, no rival for her affection or esteem, Sabina has assured him more than once. (Will you stop saying his name like that? she once said to Eliot. Like what? Like you have to let everyone know you think it’s a dorky name.) Yes, she and Kermit slept together a couple of times, before she and Eliot got together, she once confided, but it was weird, almost incestuous, so they stopped. Anyway, what did it matter now?
And now Kermit Hotaling, conversant in Pashto, reports from Afghanistan for The New York Times. His ironclad command of the region’s political history, his monkish devotion to his work, turn Eliot back into the bike messenger, would-be actor, and full-time pothead he was when he first met Sabina, before her industriousness spurred him to make something more of himself. And so he leaves Sabina to her dinners with Kermit Hotaling whenever a speaking engagement or some other honor brings him to Boston.
Still. That night, nine o’clock became ten, and she called him: running late. Ten became eleven, and she called again: she’d be home soon. When eleven nudged up against twelve, and his call to her went to straight to her voicemail, he couldn’t help imagining the two of them engaged in acrobatic sex in Kermit’s hotel room. Did he really believe his wife would betray him like that? The truth was he didn’t know. He and Sabina were becoming adversaries, strangers.
When she finally walked in, flushed and apologetic, he dodged her kiss.
“You’re back,” he said.
“Of course I am. Where else would I go?” Her laugh was a sharp exhalation.
He watched her peel off the cashmere sweater he’d given her on her last birthday. Had Kermit Hotaling watched her strip earlier? Had he been the one to undress her? Despite everything, Eliot began to get hard.
Sabina pulled on her nightshirt and rubbed moisturizing lotion onto her legs. The sight of her, lean and smooth, even after all the hormone treatments, even after the pregnancy, filled him with irrepressible sorrow. He couldn’t look her in the face, even as she slid into bed beside him.
“I don’t know. I thought maybe you’d gone off with Kermit Hotaling. To go rake muck together.” He’d come dangerously close to saying, “make fuck.” But on he went. “Go play Martha Gelhorn to his … Ernest Hemingway.”
Sabina crossed her arms, and sharp creases appeared on her forehead. She looked thin and worn.
“Eliot. Have you been drinking?”
He had not, in fact, been drinking, but he was under the influence of something darker: the urge to go to the limit, seize what remained, tear it down.
“Is he still a better fuck than me?”
“Jesus, Eliot, no. We were talking. Last month, his driver was killed outside of Kandahar. He’d left Kermit off just half an hour before. Kermit saw him every day. They’d become good friends. He was pulled from his car and his throat was slit. Afterwards, he was left like a dog in a ditch.”
“Shit.” Eliot let out a long whistle.
“Yeah. Yeah, exactly.” She squeezed his hand briefly then turned onto her left side, as if she were still pregnant and following doctor’s orders. “I’ve got to sleep. It’s really late.”
He thought that would be the end of it – dumb, persistent hope! – but the next day, she announced her plans to move in with her sister for a month or two.
“With Janis? Great. She’s the picture of mental stability.”
“I need a break, Eliot. I need to think things over.”
“What things?”
“What things?” he repeated when she turned to pull her suitcase from the closet. He nearly dropped to his knees and begged her to forgive him for his every thoughtless word. She set the suitcase on the bed and began packing her clothes. “You and me. The whole train wreck.”
It is now three-thirty. The graying sky resembles his mood at the end of a level three class: the sleepy, low-grade irritation; the nagging sense that, for all his preening and cajoling, his students have learned nothing. Did he excuse Ryan’s missing homework assignment or try to uphold standards? Could he have done anything to divert Ryan to college, toward middle-class notions of safety?
Downstairs, he refreshes the Riesling in his wineglass and and slides his latest Netflix offering into the player. After Sabina left, he watched his share of tonic, uplifting cinema: his Truffaut, his Carné, his Renoir. But recently his standards have fallen off and now it’s The Interesting Nights of Emilio Calderón, with an opening scene of upright copulation – the worst possible position for conception – but then, there’s a long scene in which a man sits in a café and muses on the various kinds of love. The whole movie is ripped off from Buñuel, to reassure the viewer he is an intellectual, not some poor schlub trying to get his rocks off. As it is, Eliot is as flaccid as a soggy roll. He shuts the movie off.
He picks up a recent issue of the news magazine he gets virtually for free with his educator’s discount and peruses the greatest hits of the year soon to pass. Oil continues to wash up on Gulf Coast beaches. Earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince are still crammed into cholera-breeding tent cities. The sea levels keep rising, and the war machine hums along; soldiers come home with metal plates in their skulls. This is the world that awaits any child of his. The young Marine in the accompanying photo smiles from his bed at Walter Reed. The sweetness of his smile is what haunts Eliot long after he puts the magazine away.
He goes back to the kitchen to check for Ryan’s car. When he sees nothing out the window but his own quiet street, he pours himself a fourth glass of wine – just a small one. He melts butter in a pan and drops in the flour-coated chicken breasts. He has let the butter go too long, and it begins to crackle angrily in the pan. He grabs a dish towel and moves it off the burner.
It is past four, almost dark. Chances are slim at best that Ryan is coming, but Eliot lowers the pasta into the boiling water and begins steaming the beans. He takes out two of the good plates. When the beans are done, he arranges them and the chicken and pasta on the china.
On second viewing, the TV trays look flimsy and provisional, stationed as they are in the den. The dining room really is better, so he clears away the accumulated mail and begins laying out the silverware. When the salesman at Jordan’s showed them the burnished mahogany table, with its hidden extension leaves, Eliot and Sabina turned to each other and said, why not? Together they anticipated years of birthday parties and Passover Seders; they pictured their growing family, children and grandchildren, an abundance extending far into the future.
Just before Sabina left, she said, “I hate this table. I hate this whole house.”
Now, he wraps each dinner plate in foil and places them both in a plastic shopping bag. He slips in the ice cream and – what the hell? – adds an unopened bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
Eliot isn’t drunk, but he knows he’s approaching sobriety’s distant border. Driving, he stares hard at the road and signals a good half-block before each turn. He passes clusters of parked cars, windows glowing in other people’s houses. Last year, driving home from Thanksgiving dinner at his brother’s, Sabina edged close to him, squeezed his leg, and murmured, “I’m so glad I’m married to you.”
He drives past King Brothers Market, which divides what is considered the good part of town from the more marginal. He passes the Jiffy Lube, the grassy strip outside the Dollar Store, where he once stood in a peace vigil with a handful of elderly Quakers. He passes the health clinic and its shopworn sign: Aceptamos MassHealth. Christmas lights twinkle in dark windows, and he recalls the exquisite whiteness of the two hearts pulsing on the ultrasound screen. Somewhere, in the depths of cryonic storage, their embryonic siblings wait for him and Sabina to make their next move.
At the Scotch Arms, Eliot brakes hard at the curb. The cold air shocks him when he steps out, but he left his jacket at the house. Never mind. He takes the shopping bag from the passenger seat and walks into the complex. He has no idea which of the squat brick buildings Ryan lives in. He tries to scan the names on the buzzers outside one of the units, but the light is poor and he can’t make out the list. He is not about to press every buzzer – it troubles him that he would even consider doing this. He continues on, following the snaking walkway through the complex. He no longer knows which building is which, which he has already passed; still he hopes Ryan will materialize in the dark.
“Mister!”
A little boy has appeared in front of him, wheeling a bike. He is dressed for a warmer climate in a windbreaker and thin cotton pants. Small as the boy is, the banana bike he holds by its handlebars was made for a child even smaller.
“Hey, little man,” Eliot calls back.
“Mister!” the boy repeats.
This inky-haired boy wouldn’t be out of place hawking Chiclets on a Mexican beach. Eliot and Sabina saw boys like him everywhere during their honeymoon in Cozumel. They bought everything those kids sold: stale gum, off-brand sunscreen.
Eliot kneels, eye-to-eye with the boy. “Conoces a Ryan Dekay y Carmela?”
Pulled as they are from buried memory, the words come smoothly. Even after he’s had a few, Eliot is good with languages. Nonetheless, the little boy stares at him and pushes the bicycle back and forth between his spread legs.
“Tienes hambre?” Eliot asks.
The boy continues pushing his bike, but Eliot hands the shopping bag out to him nonetheless. “Aqui. Dos comidas de Thanksgiving. Dos cenas! Dos cenas!” he corrects himself, striking his hand against his forehead, hamming it up the way he does for his brother’s kids, for his students every day in class. Silly Uncle Eliot! Goofy Monsieur Blum!
The little boy stares back, stolid as a kid much older. When he finally takes the bag, the bike’s handlebars slip from his grasp. Eliot steadies the bicycle for him. It takes everything he has not to reach over and smooth the boy’s hair.
“Wait. Wait. Esperas.” He takes the bag back from the boy and hangs it for him on the bike’s handlebars. “Bueno.”
“Fandi? Fandi!”
A light has come on over the building in front of them, and a woman leans out, propping the storm door open with her hand. She scolds the boy, whose name might or might not be Fandi, in a language Eliot cannot place. Her speech is high-pitched, guttural and rapid. She wears a long, loose skirt and a scarf over her hair.
Eliot raises his hand to wave to her, but the little boy drops the bike and scurries across the dead grass. When he reaches his mother at the top of the stairs, she shakes her finger at him and unleashes a fresh burst of language. But Fandi doesn’t cry. He disappears inside. The door closes and the light goes out.
Eliot walks the bike over to Fandi’s unit. He props it against the concrete staircase, but what should he do with the food?
L’espérance est un bateau maigre. Meeting Sabina had inspired him to try his hand at poetry, and he’d scribbled these words on the back of a phone bill. Hope is a slender boat. In that instance, there seemed to be no better model for him than the symbolists: fearless, pyrotechnic in their love.
Now he removes the foil-wrapped plates from the shopping bag and lays them on the steps. He places the ice cream and the sauvignon blanc between them. Then he walks away, leaving his wedding china and a bottle of not-inexpensive wine on the Scotch Arms grounds. He remembers lying in bed with Sabina in Mexico, how the palm leaves rasped in the breeze. He tries to hold on to that sound, to the smells of salt and coconut on her skin, as he walks back to his car with the empty bag.
L.E. Miller's short stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Drum, Scribner’s Best of Fiction Workshops 1999, Ascent, and Cimarron Review. Her story “Kind” was selected as a PEN/O. Henry Prize Story for 2009. L. E. Miller lives in Massachusetts with her family and has nearly completed a collection of short stories called Other People‘s Beds.
This story was originally published in our Spring 2015 issue (available for download as a PDF).