Anyhow, you’ll never guess what happened: they ended up using most of the shit themselves. They pretty much stayed in her parents’ bed, watching cable, DVDs on Carl’s laptop and a video called Barely 18 that her father kept duct-taped up inside his radial saw. And Monday Night Football, which is how they figured out it was now Monday, or had been. Carl called his supervisor’s voice mail and said he had the flu. This Kerri—he’d briefly thought the i was a turn-on—called whoever’s voice mail it was and said she had food poisoning. Carl pointed out how stupid this was because she’d have to come up with something else tomorrow. And she said, “It would’ve been nice if you’d said that before.”
They’d gotten like two of their eight hundred dollars back when they had this fight—literally a fight, where she was hitting him and he hurt her wrists trying to hold her and she told him, “Get the fuck out, just get the fuck out.” She’d dug it that it took him forever to come—the Paxil plus the other shit made an orgasm just too high to climb up to—and then she stopped digging it. “I don’t like you, I don’t know you.” She hit first, remember that. He grabbed her wrists with both hands, found he didn’t have a third hand to hit her with, then tried to get both her wrists in one hand to free up the other, and she broke loose and hit again, “Get out get out,” in the middle of the night, middle of the afternoon, actually.
So he got in his car and made it onto the main drag, just barely, where he pulled into some non-Dunkin’ donut place, like an indie donut, guided the car between yellow lines and closed his eyes: it looked like all these flash cameras going off. No chance he could drive all the way back down to the city like this. Had to get something to take the edge off, and he had no idea where you went in Albany anymore. Sure, Aunt Lissa would put him up, but he was in no shape to deal with her: she was in the sort of space where she’d be “hurt” if he’d “come to town and didn’t call.” He had an incredibly scary thought that it was her sitting in the car next to his, but when he nerved himself to look it was just one of those Winnie-the-Pooh pictures.
He went in and bought a fat old sugar donut, which he thought might weight him down, take him earthward, but he had to spit the mouthful into a napkin. In all fairness, maybe it really did taste nasty. At least there must be a liquor store open, unless it was already Sunday again.
—
Morning sun on snow. Clean blue sky.
Carl’s sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window. Aunt Lissa’s gone to town for the paper and left him with what she biblically called “tea with milk and honey,” though it’s hard to trust its dimensionality: it appears to be a flat khaki disk fitted into the cup. Halfway up the hill, Henry’s house is hanging there and snow clings along the tops of the tree branches in simplified versions of their shapes, and dead apples, like dog-toy balls, hang from the leafless tree. Some of the apples have a curve of snow on top, like a phase of the moon.
When he hears Aunt Lissa’s car, he gets up and turns the radio back on. The good-morning classical music had been sounding too much like thoughts racing. What we’ve got now is some sprightly guitar piece. Almost certainly not a harp.
She sets the Times before him like the dainty dish before the king. “Voilà,” she says. “Glorious morning out.” She drapes her coat over the back of a chair. “Now, what would you like? I can fix pancakes, we have oatmeal…”
He shakes his head, holds up a hand.
“Toast? You can’t not eat.”
“Let me guess. Is breakfast the most important meal, do you think?”
“Stop.”
“What about the importance of dietary fiber?” That was when he remembered about the ring. Long gone. Must be.
“You’re welcome to sit here and make witticisms to yourself,” she says. “I’ve got to work on my presentation.” Aunt Lissa’s reading group is doing To the Lighthouse next week.
“Don’t we all,” he says.
He manages to hold back from retching until he hears her on the stairs, then gags up nothing and feels sweat popping out of his face. After a while, he stands up and sees how that feels. He scrunches up a slice of bread in his fist to make a bolus and eats it just for something solid. Then pops his Paxil and puts his mouth under the faucet. The cop got a hard-on, of course, when he found the Paxil—“And what’ve we got here, Carl?”—but they had to give it back. Actually, he really needs just to get off absolutely everything and purify, purify, purify. On the other hand, don’t the laws of physics suggest that all this not-unhappiness will have to be paid for by an equal and opposite period of negative happiness, an equal distance below the baseline? Lately he’s big on the idea of being nice to the right people on the way up because you’re going to meet them again coming down, “people” meaning entities in your mind.
He goes back up to the guest room to lie down again. For a nightstand, she’s put a lamp on a small mission bookshelf that she’s stocked with light reading. He picks out Try and Stop Me, by Bennett Cerf, and stacks the two pillows against the headboard. The idea is what, that Bennett Cerf has so many stories you better not try to stop him? Carl’s studying a cartoon of Dorothy Parker hurling a giant pen like a javelin when Aunt Lissa knocks on his open door.
“I was going through some pictures the last time I came down here.” She holds up an envelope. “I was going to get these copied for you, and then of course I forgot all about it. Don’t ever get old.”
“Yeah, you warned me about that.” He claps hands, then holds them out, meaning Throw it. She comes over and reaches it out to him.
He flips through with Aunt Lissa in his peripheral vision. The one of him as a baby, held by his mother wearing a black dress and pearl necklace, his father in a tuxedo, grinning like Mr. Skeleton, his fingers making a V behind her head. The one of Uncle Martin pitching to him in the backyard in Albany, when he was like eleven and had Henry’s old Hank Aaron bat, with “Hank” in quotes. The one of him at six, in that red flannel cowboy shirt with the white pinstripes and slant pockets. Chubby cheeks. Little heartbreaker.
“These cover the waterfront,” he says.
“Now, you can’t have them until I make copies.”
“I don’t know where I’d even keep them right now.”
“Well, they’ll be here. You know, it’s such a glorious day. You really should go out and get some fresh air.”
Outside, the cold makes his face sting, but he can feel no difference to his body thanks to Uncle Martin’s old Eddie Bauer coat. Maybe she’ll give it to him: a hoodie under a denim jacket doesn’t really cut it. He walks as far as the corner, to the house with the sign on the lawn that says STOP THE DREDGING. This is about the Hudson River.