“I don’t know,” Portia said. “He’s not doing that good of a job.”
Portia had never liked getting high when they were teenagers, but Lily asked around and found some weed sneaky enough not to panic her at first. But they overdid anyway, and after vomiting (Lily used the sink and let Portia have the toilet) they lay spooned on the bathroom floor the rest of the night. “Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?” Portia said in the morning, when they finally felt okay to go to bed. “But that was the most fun I’ve ever had with you.”
Portia had met Garrett when some of her friends brought some of their friends to the housewarming at her new apartment. Lily had disliked him—the leather jacket plus the soul patch plus the wedding ring. She overheard him telling Portia that he’d rather read Edith Wharton than Henry James—clever fellow—and then he whispered something and flicked her earlobe with his tongue.
“But what’s in it for you?” Lily asked her a couple of weeks later.
“Nothing,” Portia said. “I mean, the obvious. What you used to call it—uninhabited sex? I just don’t really trust him.”
“Why would you?”
“I don’t mean it like that. I mean, of course not. I mean, I think he could get really angry?”
“Oh, honey,” Lily said. “So does the wife know?”
Portia refilled her glass and passed the bottle to Lily. “Who knows what that’s about. Why are you trying to make me feel bad? I don’t go off on you. And your weird stuff. Actually, he reminds me of you.” Portia had promised to drive up with Lily to spend the Fourth with their mother in Dennis Port, just the three of them, and they would take the Hobie Cat out and scatter the ashes. Lily had already reserved a rental car. Then Portia called to say that Garrett had invited them both to watch fireworks.
“Great, so Mom’s going to be alone on the Fourth.”
“This can’t wait one day? Anyhow, the Rosenmans are going to be having their usual bash. She’ll be fine with it.”
“Are you going to be fine with it?”
“Listen, I just need to do this, okay?” Portia said. “I thought you were supposed to be the great mind.”
But surely only the mind of Omniscience could have foreseen that Portia would go into the bedroom with the host, a lean man in his sixties with a trimmed white beard, and his plump young wife. And that she herself would let this Garrett tell her these were “cool people,” that Portia would be okay, and that they could share a cab back to Brooklyn.
—
On Thursday night the parking lot at Tony’s is full—weekenders getting an early start. She’s chosen her black tank top, nothing under it, and taken out her contacts in favor of her black-rimmed glasses, to make herself look more violable. There’s a lone pool table with a faux-Tiffany lamp above it and three televisions over the bar, the sound off, playing what look to be two different baseball games. Lily takes a stool at the end of the bar with an empty stool next to it. The bartender looks like—it takes her a second—the gink who sings “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” with Ruby Keeler! Whose name she happens to know is Clarence Nordstrom.
She orders a gin and tonic and begins watching the Red Sox and Cleveland. The batter in the whiter uniform has pants that come down to his feet like pajama bottoms, but so tight you can see his kneecaps. When she was thirteen and had hit a home run in softball at summer camp, her father took her down to Philadelphia, where the Phillies lost a doubleheader to Atlanta. He’d said, “Only the Braves deserve the pair,” and refused to tell her why that was funny. She can’t really taste the gin, which is either why you should never order gin and tonic or why you should always. She turns to check out the room—stools that swivel! the best!—and some guy’s already coming toward her, as if she’s the drop of blood in a cubic mile of ocean.
“I almost didn’t recognize you with the hair,” he says. “Looks good, actually.” His eyes go to her breasts. “Evan.”
“Evan, right.” The video store. “Lily. Actually, it should be Portia.” Oh my: Clarence Nordstrom does pour a good one. “At least it’s not Elena, right?”
His eyebrows come in toward his nose. “What’s wrong with Elena?”
“Now that,” she says, “is genuinely funny. I’m liking you already.” She leans forward—okay, embarrassing, but—and fiddles with the hem of her jeans long enough for him to see what there is to see. Then she straightens up and looks him in the eyes, which is easier than you’d think: you look at the eyes. “What are you drinking, Evan?”
“Let me.” He raises a finger and Clarence Nordstrom is there. “Another one for the young lady,” he says, “and I’ll have…” He looks at the bottles behind the bar. “Knob Creek rocks?”
“Grazie,” she says. “So Evan. Is this a place where nothing ever happens?”
“Apparently not,” he says. Oh, now surely he’s in the right age demographic to have listened to Talking Heads. She thinks to check his ring finger. No. But he’s been married, you can just tell. The bartender sets the drinks down. “So tell me something, is that what you do?” she says. “Work at the video store?”
“Actually, during the year I teach media studies.” He raises his glass. “Success to crime. What do you do?”
“Work for a magazine nobody’s ever heard of,” she says. “I mean I used to.”
He does his eyebrow thing again; it’s imaginable that someone might find it fetching. “And you live in the city?”
“You’re remarkable,” she says.
“I’m not.” He takes a sip and she sees he’s already down to ice cubes.
“Oh. Well, maybe I’m just setting the bar low tonight.”
“Then you’re just up here visiting?”
“Tell you what,” she says. “Why don’t we finish up the due diligence, and then I have some very expensive sherry back at the house.” She’ll decide later if weed will scandalize him.
“Really,” he says. “Whatever the catch is, it must be a doozy.”
“Oh, I like a man who says ‘doozy.’ ” She fishes out her lime wedge, sets it on the bar and rocks it with her fingertip. “Do you know ‘Wynken, Blynken and Nod’?” She leans forward again—those pesky jeans! “What’s the trouble, do you not want to?”
“Oh no, believe me,” he says. “Just, I should probably tell you I’ve sort of been seeing somebody. Does that bother you?”
“Ah,” she says. “So you’re the one with the doozy. No, actually this makes me very happy. I mean, as long as she’s not waiting outside with a gun.” She drains her glass. “It is a she?”
His mouth comes open. “What the fuck?”
“That’s better. You were starting to lose me when you were being so nice. I have to go use the doozy.” She gets off her stool and stands up just fine.
—
“Daddy used to say he was a high-functioning workaholic,” Portia said at the memorial, and got the laugh. “But today I wanted to tell you some things you didn’t know.” Their father had asked them both to speak, along with Joe Hagerty, but Lily froze while trying to write something. It was Portia who’d pulled herself together to get up there and wing it from a half-page of notes, who’d dealt with the Harvard Club and even hired the fucking bagpiper.
Lily had been waiting in the cottage when they’d brought him home to die. They’d taken him off the plane on a stretcher, but her mother said he’d sat up straight in his seat all the way from New York. High on the morphine and the five-hundred-dollar-an-ounce hydroponic Lily found for him—a last-minute appeal to Matt—he asked her to read him “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” probably for some drifty Rosebud reason. She had to go online to find it, and now she can remember only something about rocking in the misty sea, and that the original title was “Dutch Lullaby.”