Since I’d been a young kid I’d loved books and read constantly. I loved mysteries and horror stories and books on history and art and science and music, everything. The bigger the book, the better; I deliberately found the thickest novels I could, for the pleasure of lingering in other worlds and other people’s lives for as long as possible. I borrowed six books a week, the limit, from the library and devoured potboilers and war stories and histories of the Apollo space program and Russian novels I could make neither heads nor tails of and it was all thrilling. What I loved most was how the contents of each batch of books mixed up with one another in my mind to make ideas and images and thoughts I’d never have imagined possible.
School was another matter. I was a terrible student and regularly failed assignments and wrote pathetic essays and missed due dates. The only college I was accepted to was the state university, and that just barely. When I met Susan, I’d been on academic probation for a semester, and I dropped out the following fall. Susan and I moved in together while she finished her degree and I painted houses and mowed lawns and shoveled snow.
We moved to Enon when Sue graduated. By then, she was already three months pregnant. I went to work painting houses full-time for one of my grandfather’s neighbors, a guy named Louis, who’d hired me for summers in high school. Louis had moved into a converted boardinghouse across the street from my grandparents with his wife and four kids a few years earlier. My grandparents had been friends for decades with the woman who’d lived there and let rooms before, mostly to Enon’s bachelor civil servants: firemen, cops, mail carriers. When she died and Louis bought the house, he renovated and repainted it by himself. My grandfather liked to stand around in the side yard and pass the time talking about the neighborhood while Louis replaced shingles or primed the doors. Louis always called my grandfather “Mr. Crosby” and shoveled his driveway and the footpath to the front door whenever it snowed, “Because we’re neighbors now, Mr. Crosby, and that’s what neighbors do.”
Louis paid me well, but I had to work with an old ex-con named Gus, who bragged and complained and spewed vulgarity without pause all day, each day, and nearly drove me mad.
“Shit, Louie’s a dumb wop, but I owe him,” he’d say. “You don’t know fuck-all, kid. I killed a guy down in Florida. I bought his old lady some fancy drink with a fucking umbrella in it and he pulled a knife. On me? You got to be kidding. You pull a knife on Gus and you are fucked, pal; you got that? I threw him right through a plate-glass window and the glass went right through his neck and he bled out like a fucking pig. Ha! And you? Are you kidding? I’ll kill you right here, right now, no fuck. I’ll drown you in this bucket of paint. You look at me funny and I’ll throw you right off this roof, and then I’ll laugh. And then you know what? I’ll take a big drink of paint and go back to work and whistle a little tune called ‘I Just Killed That Little College Prick Louie Stuck Me With All Fucking Summer.’ I will because what do I have to lose? What? I’ll tell you what I have to lose—fuck-all, that’s what. And I love paint. It’s in my blood, you little shit. My blood. If you cut me open right now, paint would come out. Do it; cut me. I’d like to see you try. That would be funny, you college fuck. You do not know fucking shit about paint, kid. I love the way it smells; I love the way it feels; I love the way it tastes. I used to paint fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, and then I’d go home and me and my old lady would hop into the sack and smoke a joint and watch dirty movies until dawn, because I do not fucking care. Shit, it’s hot up here. I’m not going to bust my balls and have a heart attack for Loo-ee-gee, that dago dick squeezer. Fuck it; I’m taking five.”
Gus would work himself up into fits about Louis, that “skinny guinea who knows fuck-all,” and we’d climb down off the plank we’d run between two ladders across the front of the house we were painting, and Gus would cover his head with a wet towel and complain and threaten me. (Later, we painted with a guy named Frankie Shuey, who got paint all over people’s roofs and driveways, and Gus took to threatening to murder him instead of me.) I’d smoke a cigarette and think about the envelope of cash I’d get at the end of the week, and about Kate being on the way, and how strange it was to think of her, a little newborn girl, and Gus over there, all greasy and sweaty and decrepit, and to try to picture him as having been someone’s baby, once, to try to think of him as a newborn infant. I imagined Kate at about ten years old, wondering about me at work and what I actually spent my time doing and with whom I worked. I used to do that with my grandfather, when I was in school. Instead of paying attention to geometry, I’d wonder about what he was doing at that exact same moment — whether he was in the basement, in his workshop coat, dipping clockworks into an ammonia bath by a wire hanger, or in his black windbreaker and black Greek fisherman’s cap, driving one of his station wagons (he and my grandmother always had two matching station wagons, for which he always paid with cash that he took from one of the deposit boxes he had around the North Shore) to different banks, so he could cash the checks his customers paid him with where they had their accounts, so he didn’t have to report the income, a practice one of his neighbors, an accountant for the IRS, had taught him.
I used to think about Susan, at the room we rented then, in Matt Gray’s house. Matt Gray was the chief of the Enon police. My grandfather and grandmother knew him well because they had been friends for many years with his father, Matt Senior, who had been the police chief before Matt. I used to sit on the lawns of the houses I painted, smoking cigarettes, drinking cans of soda, Gus spewing his dreadful jive talk, and try to think about what Susan was doing at that very moment. I imagined her, in the cool, damp summer morning light, maybe doing the couple of dishes we hadn’t got to the night before, maybe folding some clothes and putting them away in the bureau we shared, maybe deciding to take a walk to the library to see if there were any books that interested her. She liked to read mysteries while she was pregnant with Kate. I’d get worried sometimes, thinking about what she was doing, because here she was, living with me, in a single room, in the police chief’s house, in her boyfriend’s hometown, with no job then and no money and me painting houses and her six months pregnant and summer getting hotter and hotter, and it made me half panicked to think of her being unhappy, maybe, and me being the cause of her feeling disappointed that her life wasn’t going as well as she’d always hoped and that I was a big part of the reason that the plans we’d talked about at the kitchen table all those nights weren’t working out, instead of being the reason they all came true.
ONE AUGUST NIGHT WHEN Susan was six months pregnant with Kate, she couldn’t sleep and so we went outside to see what it was like and it was clear and beautiful and there was a cooling wind flowing up in the trees and there were fireflies in the meadows and we took each other’s hand and started to walk together.
“Susan,” I said after a while, “I can’t wait to meet our kid.” I touched her stomach through her maternity blouse. “Who are you in there?” I asked. “I’m your dad,” I said. “Me and your mom can’t wait to meet you and see who you are and find out about what you’re like.” Susan took my hand from her stomach and kissed it.