We Are Not Ourselves(135)

He walked across Forty-Second to the B, to head down to West Fourth. A girl he’d briefly dated had told him about a place on West Tenth called Smalls, where she’d stayed literally all night once. They let underaged kids stay as long as they didn’t try to order alcohol. It was a jazz club. He didn’t know anything about jazz, but it was better than sitting in a diner and having to fight to stay at a table.

He handed over the cover charge. The place wasn’t full. He sat at an empty table near the stage, under the lights, and ordered a Coke. The set was a mellow trumpet backed by drums, a piano, and a sax.

Faces in the crowd smiled warmly at him. The waitress didn’t seem to mind that he wasn’t running up a bigger tab. When the trumpeter finished blowing a solo, the audience drizzled him with applause—a comforting pitter-patter, like a summer shower glancing off an air conditioner.

The crowd could have been anyone. He decided they were important people, decision makers. He imagined they were pleased to see a young person in their midst—that they endowed him in their minds with maturity and grace. He tried to look as keen as he could, though he didn’t understand the music. He performed the arousal of a true aficionado, twisting his face in agonized appreciation of a long-held note.

As the set wound down, the crowd dwindled. The performers seemed to relax. They nodded to people seated near him, spoke to a few. They took more time between numbers. He sensed that a different jazz was being cooked up, one that needed to marinate longer.

As four o’clock approached, people spread out on banquettes behind him. The players on the stage changed. His Coke glass kept getting refilled. The night felt full of possibility. Time was on his side; he could be anything he wanted.

His family, asleep at home, seemed a world away. He was ready to commit himself to the strivers, the lovers of life—these would be his new guides.

At five, the waitress began bringing out some trays of food. She left them on a long table by the front entrance. He watched a couple of people head over to them.

“Is this for us?” he asked the waitress.

“It’s for whoever.”

He’d never seen anything like it. First they let him stay all night. Now they were feeding him breakfast. It wasn’t anything special, but it was so strange and unexpected that it felt like a feast to him.

He piled his plate with rolls and butter, spooned out some eggs, and filled his cup with orange juice, looking forward to the little ritual of ceding his place in line, the brief exchange of shared enthusiasm, but the guy behind him just grabbed a roll and sat back down, and no one else followed. Connell hovered awkwardly, pretending to contemplate the spread, until he got self-conscious and walked back to his seat with his head down and ate a lonely meal.

? ? ?

When he walked in at seven, his mother was asleep at the kitchen table. Tins were piled up on the island; powdered sugar dotted the floor. He and his mother were supposed to have made Christmas cookies together that night. It was a little tradition they had. He’d gone out with his friends in the afternoon and never come home, so he’d forgotten all about it.

He counted the tins; she’d made as many as always. He lifted the wax paper in one and saw some cookies missing sprinkles, some misshapen ones.

She was hunched over the table, her head in her folded arms, looking as if her back would ache in the morning.

He shook her lightly. “Ma,” he said. “Go upstairs. Go to bed.”

It took a moment to rouse her. She rose slowly and began to head for the stairs. She stopped in the doorway, turned.

“I will never wait up for you again,” she said calmly, and his heart stopped for a moment. “I will never worry when you don’t call. I will never again worry about you. I promise. You are free.”

? ? ?

Connell drifted into his parents’ bathroom, the smell of Swedish meatballs giving way to lavender soap. It was Christmas Eve. The radio in the bedroom was tuned to the same Christmas station as the radio downstairs, as though his mother couldn’t be away from “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” for long enough to change her clothes.

His father had applied the shaving cream in a grotesquely liberal dose. He picked up a blue plastic razor, one of those bulk-pack, single-blade jobs he insisted on using and with which even a dexterous man could injure himself. Connell watched him raise the torture implement to his face and begin to make groping stabs at his jaw. He had to leave before the carnage began.

He went downstairs. His mother was checking on the turkey in the oven.

“Your father has informed me that he doesn’t like Christmas, that he never has, that I go overboard, that things are out of control.” She doused the bird with a baster and the juice that escaped from the tray sizzled on the bottom of the oven in loud hisses. “Do things seem out of control to you?”

All around were trays of prepared foods, folded napkins, polished silver, washed crystal, proliferating decorations, cookies she’d baked alone, scores of gifts she’d bought and wrapped herself.

“Not on your end,” he said.

“I try to preserve niceties like Christmas because it’s going to be hard no matter what I do or don’t do. The mind needs to be tricked sometimes.”

He had no idea how she withstood the deluge of inanity that flowed from his father. Connell couldn’t even be in the same room with him. He brutalized her, and when you confronted him on it he denied it like a scheming boy. He wanted her ready to attend him at a moment’s notice, yet he showed no sign of gratitude.