From downstairs Marco’s clock chimes out the half hour. Outside, around the corner, the busted church bell sounds its metal gag. I’ll be thirty-five at midnight. The phone rings. It’s Gavin.
“Mush, what’s up?” His speaking voice, accent, and tone are always in flux. It’s never contingent on whom he’s speaking to, but on what it is that he’s saying. Now he uses a thick Boston accent. Not the bizarre Kennedy-speak that movie stars believe is real outside that family. Rs don’t exist and only the o and u vowel sounds are extended: Loser becomes loo-sah. It’s a speak that sounds like it needs a six-pack or two to make it flow, to make it sing. He sounds happy, full of coffee, still inside, yet to be struck by the day.
“S’up?”
“Nothin’, mush.”
“All right.”
“Happy birthday, mush. I’m a couple of days late.”
“You’re a couple of hours early.”
“Sorry.” He switches to another speaking voice, closer perhaps, to what his must be — a smoker’s voice, in which you can hear both Harvard and Cavan County, Ireland. Gavin spent much of his adolescence with his father in jazz bars and can sound like the combination of a stoned horn player and a Jesuit priest.
“It’s all right.” I’ve been told that my accent’s too neutral for me to be from Boston.
“You don’t sound so good, man.”
I almost tell him why — more out of resentment than camaraderie. He owes me at least four hundred dollars: a credit card payment, or a couple of weeks of groceries.
“I’m fine.”
“What’s the matter, white man gettin’ you down?”
“You’re the white man.”
“No, baby, I’m the Black Irish.”
“No. I’m the Black Irish.”
“Whatever, man. You drinking?”
“No.”
I had three friends in high schooclass="underline" Shaky — née Donovan — Brian, and Gavin. Brian had to become a Buddhist monk to sober up, went missing for a decade in the Burmese jungle, disrobed, became a stockbroker, and died in the Twin Towers attack. Shaky, who in high school and college had been named Shake because of basketball prowess, had moved with Gavin and me to the East Village, where he had a schizophrenic break. He was now roaming the streets of Lower Manhattan and south Brooklyn. Privately, between Gavin and myself, his name had evolved to Shaky. Gavin fluctuated between poems, paintings, and biannual death-defying benders, losing apartments, jobs, and potential girlfriends along the way.
When I moved out of the place I shared with him and in with Claire, he’d come to visit and use her mugs for his tobacco spit. We’d drink pots of coffee and cackle about institutions and heebie-jeebies and never ever succeeding. Gavin never dated much. Never settled down. He rarely had a telephone and was reachable only when he wanted to be. “He checked out,” Claire once said in such a way as if to be asking me if I’d done the same. She liked him, perhaps even loved him, but she was scared of him and he felt this. By the time C was a toddler she’d unconsciously pushed Gavin out of our lives — to the point where I didn’t even think about him in her presence. But after a while, when Claire could see that I’d had enough of the gentrifying neighborhood and private-school mixers, she tracked him down and invited him to a party at our place. He’d had a good five years clean and had managed to start over again in Boston and get himself a Harvard degree. “He’s too smart and cute to be single,” she’d said, looking at a commencement photo. When he returned to New York, she’d thought it would be a good idea for us to escort him back into the mainstream.
It was this past spring and he looked well — tall, dark haired, blue eyed, strangely russet skinned, as though some of his many freckles had leaked; the Black Irish. He’d made the transition, despite a good decade of delirium tremens and shelters, from handsome boy to handsome man. His lined face and graying hair made him look rugged and weary, but his freckles and eyes still flashed innocent. He’d just had a poem rejected by some literary rag, but on arriving, he seemed fine. We sat around the table. My girl was in my lap playing with my food. There were three other couples besides us, a single writer friend of Claire’s, and Gavin. The woman, his alleged date, asked him what kind of poems he wrote.
“Sonnets.”
“Sonnets?”
“Petrarchan sonnets.”
She giggled. “How quaint.”
“Quaint, hmm.”
He emptied his water glass, refilled it with wine, and swallowed it in one gulp. Claire looked at me, concerned. He drank another glass, excused himself, and stood to leave. I caught him in the hallway.
“Where are you going with this?” I asked.
“Down, I suppose.”
Three days later he showed up, beat up and already detoxing. Claire used to try to swap stories with us, about drunken uncles and acquaintances that had hit it too hard. She’s never seen me drunk. I never had a fall as an adult. I never suffered Gavin’s blood pressure spikes, seizures, or bat-winged dive bombers — only some lost years, insomnia, and psychosomatic heart failure. But she watched Gavin convulse on her couch while her babies played in the next room. She realized that the stories we told had actually happened to us and not to someone we used to know. The damage was real and lasting. And more stories were just an ignorant dinner comment away.
“How are you, Gav?” I ask. It sounds empty.
“I’m all right, I guess. My bell’s still a’ringing a bit.” He pauses for me to ask where he’s calling from, how the last jag went down, but I don’t. He covers for me. “You bustin’ out for the weekend, or are you staying around?”
“I’m supposed to go.”
“So you’re going to be away Friday?”
“I suppose.”
“Kids making you a cake?”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“Hey, man?”
“Yeah.”
“Your kids start giving you Old Spice yet?”
“No.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“C’s going to count to thirty-five, and even though he knows the answer, will then ask me how old I’ll be when he’s thirty-five.”
He snorts a laugh. “Children — a paradox.” He shifts to Mid-Atlantic speak, the accent of one who hailed from an island between high-born Boston and London. “I have no wife. I have no children.”
“Yes.”
“I’m calling from a pay phone in a detox.”
“Yes.”
“I went on a twelve-week drunk because a girl didn’t like my poems.”
I should say something to him — that I’ll come visit with a carton of cigarettes, or pick him up, like I always used to — but Claire’s list opens up in my head like a computer file and I stay silent.
“Mush.” He switches back. “Do something. Get your head out of your ass. Go get a coffee.” More silence. “Happy birthday.”
I go downstairs. It’s dark. Out of respect for my host I leave the lights off. I go into the kitchen. It’s posh and industrial, clad in stainless steel, maple, and absolute black granite. I open the oversized refrigerator. There’s a Diet Coke and a doggie bag. Butter. Marco is a good bachelor. The house seems far too big for the three of them. I close the door and wonder if it’s better to have an empty large refrigerator or a full one. There’s a white ceramic bowl on the center island full of change. I pick through it, taking the nickels and dimes, leaving the quarters, as though big-change larceny would be too great a crime.