*
So we come to the day that young Beresford came banging unannounced on his door. It was the following October and the leaves were just starting to lose their green. A few yellow ones were stamped to the wet pavement, returned to sender.
“You’re a writer?!” the smiling Brit blurted out as Tenpenny opened up. Beresford was tall with short, reddish dreadlocks. He reeked of sweat and pot and some cologne that was doing a bad job of drowning out the sweat and the pot.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m told that you’re a writer. I’m a writer too!”
“Who the hell said I’m a writer?”
“Eleanor who used to live downstairs, she told me that . . . ? Are you Roger?”
Good lord, Tenpenny thought. It had been a mistake to protect her. No good deed goes unpunished.
“Yes. I write. What’s your point?”
It should be noted again that Tenpenny had been high on the day he met Ellie six months earlier—high on life—as he was inclined to be every four years or so, for the better part of a season. His shrink would describe his mood in more clinical terms, but it was happening to him, not to Dr. Samuels, and Tenpenny had a clearer insight into his own emotional ecosystem. He believed that every person had many people inside them: the angry guy, the happy guy, the loudmouth, and the quiet guy; the guy who always wanted to make him late for everything, and so on. When he’d met Ellie, the fun guy had been present and Tenpenny had taken advantage of him, but now that guy was gone and on the day that Beresford arrived someone else answered the door.
“Um, no point,” Beresford said, reeling a bit. “I just never met another real writer before, so . . . just wanted to say hello.”
“Yes. Well . . . nice to know I’m not alone.”
This was the realist Tenpenny, the one who recognized that women don’t give a pig’s ass about sporting goods stores, and his bank account was still shrinking, and the old girlfriend letters could officially be deemed unanswered, and he was still living on Admiral Street in a part of Providence he considered beneath himself—and now this Simply Red–looking idiot was standing there.
“So . . . anyway . . .” The kid leaned timidly toward the stairwell. “Eleanor told me to send her love.”
“Really,” Tenpenny said, not as a question but in that declarative, upbeat way. He was surprised but pleased that she’d chosen to remember him fondly, and this softened him enough to step from behind the door. “How’s she doing?”
“Okay, I suppose—she seemed fine.” Then: “To be honest, I don’t really know her all that well. I met her on a tram in France this summer, and when I told her I was a writer and was moving to Providence, she said, You’ve got to look up my friend Roger—he’s a writer too. I wouldn’t normally just pop in like this, but . . . she made kind of a big to-do about it, so . . .”
Ah, now it made sense. Ellie wasn’t helping the Brit, she was busting Tenpenny’s chops. Then Beresford opened his backpack, revealing something wrapped in brown paper.
“Here,” he said, “this is for you.”
Tenpenny lifted the package and opened it, revealing a half-gallon of rum.
“Ellie told me that’s what you drink. It’s Cuban.”
This took Roger aback. “What? No. What? You’re shitting me . . . ?”
Beresford held out the backpack and said, “You can stuff that paper right back in here—I’ll reuse it.”
Roger Tenpenny had been raised to always ring a doorbell with his elbow, and the fact that this poor, smelly Englishman lived by that same tenet gave him hope for all humanity.
“Well, come in, come in!”
*
Tenpennys had lots of tenets—like those about drinking too early or too late—but the fact that Beresford had gifted him with a bottle of Havana Club threw those rules out the window. This was an occasion, as opposed to a habit, which freed him up to enjoy a rare Monday-afternoon cocktail while the kid spilled his life story.
Charlie Beresford looked like any other British tramp running amok in America, but was in fact nothing like one. He was an Americanophile who had huge aspirations—a long-term plan, in fact—and, though still a few months shy of twenty, he had the confidence of a much older man. Two years earlier he’d been admitted to King’s College before deciding, to everyone’s chagrin, to stay home and kick out a novel. Now that he was finally in the States, his life was just beginning. His book had been sent off to one publishing company—Knopf—and he’d applied to one college—Brown University. While waiting to be admitted as a January transfer student, he was living a shit-stained version of the Kerouac life at the Providence YMCA. He wrote at night and bussed tables at the Rusty Scupper (Scuzzy Rubber, he called it) by day, trying to save up enough cash to put a first-and-last down on an apartment, preferably one not on the south side of town.