“What do you say to a night of heavy drinking?”
“What’s the occasion?” Theo asked.
“Oh,” I said. “No reason.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said. I could tell he was smiling. “But I accept.”
“On one condition,” he added.
“Anything,” I said.
“No getting sad-drunk,” he said, very seriously.
“I won’t,” I said, just as seriously.
We met at Nelly’s downtown, where you used to like to go, I know. While I stood by the bar, waiting for Theo, a man asked if I was Chelsea, and another man asked if I was Audrey.
“Why is that?” I asked, when Theo showed up.
“It’s a popular spot,” he explained, “for blind dates.”
This was because there weren’t many watering holes to choose from in town. Theo pointed out the regulars. There was a man who looked like Hemingway. Theo said he’s been there ever since the day he outlived his wife. Whenever he is here, he buys two drinks, one for her, which he intends not to drink. The first he drinks slowly, but in the end he can’t bear to let the second go to waste. He always drinks them both.
There was a man named Joseph, who spent years in prison, and in that time had managed to loosen and ultimately extricate one eye with a coffee stirrer. His left eye, because he’d heard about the heightened senses of the blind and wanted to better hear his heart, in case it ever stopped.
There was Leonard, who—after a few drinks—will stand on the bench outside throwing a cotton sheet into the air, trying to catch some old ghost.
“With a bedsheet?” I asked.
“You have a better idea?” Theo said.
What Leonard figures is that a ghost is something like wind, and the sheet will catch the shape.
“It’s not about catching, like a trap,” Theo explained. “More like capturing, like a photograph.”
Leonard sipped quietly at something that resembled a Shirley Temple, stood, and fed several quarters into the jukebox. His selection, it turned out, was “Blue Bayou.”
Somebody was telling his friend, in a conspiratorial way, “Listen, Louie. You’re never gonna see your name in lights unless you change your name to Exit!”
There was a couple who looked to be on a date, with numerous empty and uncollected glasses in front of them. The woman was fishing the lime out of the man’s drink, dropping it into the clear contents of her own cup. A way of flirting, I guess.
“You’re so pretty for no reason,” the man said, thoughtfully. He said it like he was proud to have arrived at that insight.
“Don’t get drunk,” Theo said all of a sudden, noticing me. He held my gaze. “Don’t get drunk, Ruth.”
And then to take my mind off what he knew it had troublingly rested on he started rattling off trivia.
He asked me did I know that, when you get a kidney transplant, they leave your original kidneys in your body? The third kidney goes in your pelvis.
He asked did I know that it rains diamonds on Jupiter? Did I know that Russia is bigger than Pluto?
And I asked did he know that Robert Kearns, inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, was blind in one eye from a champagne cork on his wedding night? And Theo said yes, for whatever reason he did happen to know that, and did I know that he was tangled up in patent infringement lawsuits with Ford and Chrysler, because after Kearns had tried to sell the technology to them, they installed his wipers anyway?
He won against Ford and Chrysler but lost against GM and Mercedes. His wife, Phyllis, whom he had married that champagne-cork night, ultimately left him because all the litigation got to be too taxing.
He explained that he had trouble sleeping through the night—he woke up in the middle of the night, almost every night. The trick was not forcing yourself to go back to sleep. The trick was to eat a bowl of cereal, go on the Internet, and read list after list of facts, until you’re lulled into something like sleep.
All of a sudden Joseph materialized in front of us.
“She’s Howard’s kid?” he said to Theo.
“I am,” I said.
“There’s a resemblance,” he said to me. “Tell your dad Joseph says hi.”
By the jukebox Leonard was repeating “I’m awed” or maybe “I’m odd,” over and over.
“I’m selfish,” I started to say. I stopped, realizing that saying so was, itself, pretty selfish. I hung my head.
I remembered the time Joel and I had met after work to have a couple of drinks at the bar down the street, and how we’d meant to stop by for only happy hour, and how we wound up playing pool until midnight—how, outside the bar, a man was standing with a cardboard sign that said: WAKE UP, YOU DRUNKARDS, AND WEEP. This was attributed to the Bible, Joel 1:5—how hilarious and how appropriate it had seemed then.
When I brought it up, months later, Joel said, “What are you talking about?” because he didn’t remember it—he’d forgotten it completely—and it was at that point I realized that I could remember something and he could remember something different and if we built up a store of separate memories, how would that work, and would it be okay? The answer, of course, in the end, was no.
“That’s not allowed,” Theo said. “Despair’s off-limits. That was the condition, remember?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do we do instead?”
“Instead,” he said, like he was really considering the question, “basketball.”
Another couple was outside the bar. “We had a time.” The man was agreeing to something or other the woman had said, a smoke in his hand. She seemed distraught. He’d taken a drag and blown, so they looked to be cocooned in smoke.
“But times end,” the man was saying. “Even the good ones. Especially the good ones. That’s what they do.”
Everybody everywhere, I think, is always talking about the same shitty thing.
We made our way to the park. Officially, it was closed. Unofficially, there wasn’t anybody around to enforce the rule. We stopped at the Shell station, on the way, and picked up a sixpack of those skinny cans of sugary black coffee. We played Horse first, then one-on-one. I knew he expected me to be terrible. Everyone does. I look like the sort of girl who throws like a girl. But I can play basketball because you taught me. I like to surprise people with that.
We played until the coffee ran out. We sat on a bench—just sat—and watched the sun light up the sky over the mountains. We sat close because we had no choice: the other half of the bench was covered in bird shit. He didn’t try anything and I didn’t try anything, and we only sat, without thoughts, tired and colder than we wanted to admit was comfortable. It was, I admit, nice. It felt like a stupid movie, and I knew I would waste all of the next day sleeping to make up for it, and all of a sudden I hated that word, waste; wished it didn’t exist; wished I’d been braver on so many long-gone occasions; wished things were not as they were.
Why don’t we get married? was how Joel had proposed.
“Why don’t we?” he liked to say. What a chickenshit way to say things.
“I don’t believe you,” I said to Theo.
“What?”