When Bethany finally let them retire they put a rented tape, Casablanca, in the built-in VCR of Lisa’s little cube TV. This had been a point of contention after it came up that Stacey had never seen it.
“Are you fucking kidding me, bitch?”
“So it was never on my radar, Han. Why, you gonna cry about it?”
Nodding furiously. “Yes, I might. If we watch it, I might.”
“Naw. You won’t. You don’t cry. You’re not capable.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t know what it is about that movie, but it, like, guts me every time.”
“It’s in black and white!”
“Your soul is a cake full of shit.”
Stacey cracked up and felt a surge of an emotion she wasn’t mature enough to identify.
As the movie began, she showed her Jonah Hansen’s bottle. A red label named for a Russian peninsula. Lisa’s mouth curled up in a wry smile. “Thank you, Jonah.”
Beneath all Lisa’s posters of bad-boy musicians—she’d gone to great lengths to frame Nelly’s shirtless bod in white Christmas lights—they added the vodka to mugs of Sprite in drips and drabs and watched Casablanca. Stacey didn’t care much for old movies. Something about the way they’re staged, all the action and dialogue stilted and lacking verisimilitude. But Bogart and Bergman in that movie. Jesus. And sure enough, when the film began to wrap up, when the Nazis were closing in and Rick forces Renault at gunpoint to help Ilsa get away, she glanced over at Lisa and saw her biting the sleeve of her sweatshirt, cheeks shiny with tears. Then Lisa’s hand moved under the blanket. Stacey’s heart beat at her ribs so hard she thought Lisa might be able to hear it. Lisa’s fingers laced into hers and held on for the rest of the movie, her thumb occasionally rubbing the knuckle.
By the time the movie was over, Stacey was drunk and not thinking about anything. She leaned over and kissed Lisa gently on the cheek. She gave her time to flinch, but she didn’t. She tried it again on Lisa’s mouth. Then her tongue, thick and wet and delicious, pressed against Stacey’s. For once, Lisa didn’t have a snarky comment.
Soon they were necking like the uncertain teenagers they were, unsure of what to do with their hands, how to transition further. She didn’t think of anything while they did it. No shame, no questions, no worry, no fear, just the eager work of her lips, slivers of silk buds for her tongue and mouth to explore, pleasant in the way a man’s lips just cannot be. It was strange, but Stacey could not recall the necking as viscerally as holding Lisa’s hand as the movie ended. Nothing—not sex, not drugs, not waking on a train to the sight of dawn breaking over the Carpathian Mountains—nothing had ever been as exciting as watching the last part of Casablanca while she held Lisa’s hand under that blanket. She could still remember the way their palms sweated together, feel the ghost of that moisture—and how it would cloud everything for the coming year and all the ones beyond.
The poet waitress got Jonah situated with a thick stack of napkins, a glass of water, and a baggie of ice. He worked two of the napkins up his nostrils and went about cleaning his face off with water. Because she felt bad about these free-of-charge services, she ordered another Diet Coke with no intention of drinking it. She had a makeup mirror in her bag that Jonah used to clean the worst of the dried blood from his face, but some of it clung to the black of his stubble and each hair got a murderous crimson shading around the follicle that he couldn’t scrub out.
“Can I ask what happened?”
He made a scoffing noise in his throat. “Fucker sucker punched me in the bar.”
“A fight, huh.”
“No, like a faggot punched me when I wasn’t expecting it.”
“Why?” He rolled his eyes but said nothing, as though the answer was obvious.
“You know who I saw there?” he said. “Dan Eaton and Bill Ashcraft. Tonight’s like a class reunion or something.”
And she blinked at this hum of concurrence.
“What’s Ashcraft doing back? Which bar?” Just hearing Bill’s name, let alone that their ships had cruised so close on this night, awoke in her all the old resentments even though he’d had Lisa before she even knew that was who she wanted.
“Not sure. They came into the Lincoln. We had some beers. Guessed about The Murder That Never Was. Why are you back in town? Seeing your bro? Moving back to good ole New Cane?”
“Just passing through,” she said. “I haven’t been back in a while.”
“Not fucking much’s changed.” His spittle leapt across the table on the f-bomb, some of it hitting her face in that chilled shrapnel way. She hadn’t realized until that moment how drunk he was. His eyes lolled about in their sockets like the orbs were stumbling away from each other. His speech wasn’t slurred, but it had that sharp certainty that the best angry drunks get right before they black out.
“Do you want to report him? The guy who did this, I mean?”
“Wouldn’t give the motherfucker the satisfaction. He’s a Brokamp, a food stamper, so jail’s probably where he wants to be. Get-rich-quick scheme of the lazy.”
“You should put the ice on your left eye,” she said. “That’s the one that’s going to swell.” He examined his face in the mirror, a face that when they were young had looked sharp and dashing, a strong, sturdy nose and a tough, resolute chin with a perfect dimple in the center. What kids fondly called a “butt chin.” Now the face was well on its way to middle age with soft bloat growing around the jowls. When you reach your late twenties, you notice your peers beginning to go one way or the other. Some retain their youth effortlessly, others begin to take on time like water gushing into a breach in the hull.
He snapped the compact mirror closed and handed it back. “Remember we used to come here every weekend.” He removed the napkins from his nostrils, pointed into dual thimbles of wet blood, and stuffed two fresh corners up each. “Time does fly.”
It now occurred to her that Jonah, hanging around New Canaan all these years, woven into the fabric of the town the way he was, might have heard about Lisa coming back. The waitress returned with Stacey’s second Diet Coke of the night. As she walked away, Stacey opened her mouth to ask him if he knew or had heard anything about Lisa, but he spoke right over her.
“I got a helicopter.” The comment was sufficiently weird that her jaw closed. “Been doing real well. Making deals. Land development. And our house in Lake Erie. On South Bass Island. You and me can go there tonight. It’s less than a half-hour flight.”
How careful she was not to laugh in his face, the baseless confidence of his youth suddenly clownish.
“Wow, that does sound tempting.”
“You can’t be all lesbo.” He grinned. “You got needs like any other woman.”
“Don’t I know it.”
His mouth melted into a bemused smile. He ran each index finger along a sideburn, tracing the frame of his red-tinted beard all the way to his chin. She thought she could see the imprint of a skull on his cheekbone, almost like a stamp of two dark eye sockets gazing out from his cheek.