There were two YOU ARE HERE signs before the highway, one in front of a craft outlet, another by a scenic overlook, each temporarily true, and then a diner with a banner that said EAT HERE NOW. “It makes a good argument,” Tom said. The restaurant was in a shack connected to a small convenience store. On the far wall, there was a lunch counter; next to it there was a bar, a garish pair of abstract oils, and a lottery ticket machine that flashed out a series of numbers. The whole scene was like something of Tom’s, a graph of increasing despair.
They sat beneath a mirrored clock in the shape of a guitar. The obese bartender was talking to a balding man about his youth as a skier. “Two-day blizzard,” the bartender said. “Couldn’t even get out on the slopes.”
“You made me think,” the balding man said. He tapped his head to show the site of the injury. “The snow that year was up to the window in my garage.”
Tom brought two sandwiches and two beers to the table. “Just water for me,” William said. “It’s a little early.”
“Right,” Tom said. He moved both bottles in front of him. “I don’t think there’s a menu, even. You stand there and after a little while they push food at you.” He bit into his sandwich and made a face. “I hope you’re not expecting some kind of best-kept secret.”
Behind Tom, the balding man pressed a series of buttons on the lottery machine. “So how long has it been since you’ve seen Kenneth and Jesse?”
“That’s a story,” he said.
“I have time,” William said.
Tom set down his sandwich. “Well,” he said, “I first moved up here right after college, to study with Kenneth. She was just a girl, the daughter of my painting teacher. She was seventeen, maybe. But she had this unearthly glow. I would go to Kenneth’s house to drop something off or have a drink and I would spend the whole time looking at her. Have you ever read Rousseau?” William hadn’t. “Well, there’s a passage about when he was young and in love with a young woman. She starts to eat some food and he calls out to stop her. There’s a hair on it, he says. She puts it back on her plate in disgust and he grabs it and gobbles it down. It’s the closest he can get to her. That’s how I felt about Jesse. Then I got a job teaching, and I left town.”
“Was there a romantic farewell?”
“No, not at all. Kenneth drove me to the airport. She was in the back seat. I think when I was out on the curb she waved and told me to have a good time. I loved her, though, and the idea of her stayed with me wherever I went. You know: St. Louis, Belize, New Zealand, Timbuktu. My world tour. I had girlfriends, but they were substitutes, except that they didn’t do what substitutes are supposed to do, which is distract you from the original. They just reminded me of her. Now and again I came back to visit Kenneth, and I saw her then.”
“So then you got involved?”
“That would make sense, but it didn’t happen then either. I didn’t want to disrupt her life, or his either. But I kept coming to see her, and at some point I started to see that she felt the same way about me that I felt about her. It wasn’t a flash of lightning or anything that dramatic. It just became clear to me. At that point, I felt strong enough to stay.”
William was confused. “To stay with Kenneth?”
“To stay in town. I quit teaching. I took a job at a store, started sculpting a little. Within a month, everything was in place. Jesse and I did the whole thing, moving in together, forsaking all others. We were going to get married.” He fell silent. The story was over, except that it wasn’t.
“So what happened?” William said. “It ended?”
“It did.”
“And now you’re reconsidering? She is?”
Tom ate a little more of his sandwich, seemed to taste it less. He scratched along his chin. “We had a son,” he said.
William started to speak, but Tom, having started up again, wasn’t stopping. “It was about a year after we got together. We were ecstatic. He was the last piece of the puzzle. Big baby, laughed all the time, a real bruiser. He started walking the day after his first birthday, and we used to joke that you could feel the ground shake when he put his foot down. Then he started fainting. We took him to the doctor, who said it was convulsions from high fever. One morning Jesse went in to wake him up. His lips were blue. We got him to the hospital right away, but right away wasn’t soon enough.” William understood now; Jesse hadn’t been pointing at the ground, but rather beneath it. He was one and a half, Tom said, and that’s the age he stayed. “He had an underlying cardiac problem, something called long QT syndrome. It’s named after the part of the cardiogram that widens.” His fingers, deft from practice, drew a graph on the table. “When people say ‘dead and gone,’ what do they mean? Where do they think people go, exactly?”
William didn’t know what to say. “Louisa never mentioned anything.”
Tom let William wait for a while. He was looking past William, into the middle distance, and for once he didn’t seem as if he wanted to be seen. “That’s because she doesn’t know,” he said. “We weren’t talking for a few years there before I moved upstate: sister with happy, settled life doesn’t seem to care about brother with unhappy, unsettled one, to the point where, even when brother moves a few hours away and his life starts to come together, he doesn’t feel comfortable calling her. And then, when Jesse and I split up, I did anything I could not to think about it, which included not mentioning it to anyone. I got rid of most of the photographs, kept only one where he was sleeping in the crook of Jesse’s arm and one of him sitting up in bed. I didn’t want the rest of them because I didn’t understand what they were documenting. That’s when I started making charts, in fact. It was my way of struggling with facts and what happens to them when they’re no longer true in any measurable way.” Tom made a funny birds-fly-away gesture that didn’t belong to him at all, or to any man William knew. Maybe it was something Jesse had done. “When Louisa told me about the job at the college, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be only a few hours away from Jesse, wasn’t sure I could. But I took the job and didn’t think about her, except to think that maybe one day I would go see her. I got my courage up, lost it, got it back again. Once or twice I called but hung up when she answered. It was a mess. I was a mess. Then, a few weeks ago, I was here working. I was trying to think of what the baby looked like and I couldn’t,” he said.
“What was his name?”
“Michael.” The word crossed the space between them. “That was the day I went to the old studio. It wasn’t there. I broke down and called Jesse and managed to say hello when she answered. We started talking, carefully at first, about why we ended things, about how our lives had gone, about what we remembered and what we needed to remember. She agreed to let me come and see her. You were my ride. I had all the hope in the world. Then, last night, she said she didn’t think she could make a go of it.” He finished off the second beer, closed his eyes, and sat back in his chair. He looked completely bereft and, despite the fact that his eyes were closed, more like Louisa than ever. “So that’s that,” he said. “I guess it’s what the experts call closure.”
“I’m sorry,” William said, hearing the words emerge without any sense or meaning, and gradually the rest of the room returned: the men at the bar wrapping up the conversation about their ski trip, the intolerable sandwiches, the lottery machine strobing green.
Tom threw a twenty and two fives on the table. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said with great spirit.
The convenience store connected to the restaurant was stocked densely with chips, candy bars, sticks of meat, and a rainbow of sugared waters. The woman at the counter was speaking in rat-a-tat Chinese but understood enough to hand William down the pack of gum he wanted and to give Tom a small envelope of aspirin. Out in front, on a bench, there was a man about William’s age and a boy, no more than ten, stroking his father’s arm and looking impassively into the parking lot. One of them might have been blind. In the car, a few miles later, William mentioned them to Tom, but Tom was no longer with him. He had been musing on the passage of time, wondering whether people moved through it or vice versa, and he quoted Shakespeare on the matter, “I wasted time, and now time doth waste me,” and that last word had launched him into sleep.