Writers & Lovers(40)

‘Bishop,’ the man says. ‘The great master of disaster.’ He’s old enough to have been her contemporary.

‘Indeed’ says Oscar.

‘I hope you and your little girl have a lovely evening,’ he says and shuffles off to his friends, the women adjusting their silk scarves with gnarled fingers.

Oscar leans toward me. ‘Did he just say, “little girl”?’

‘I think so.’

‘My little girl?’

The waiter comes up and asks how everything is.

‘Well, my fish is dead,’ Oscar says. ‘And she is not my little girl.’

The waiter laughs. He seems to want to linger as I did at brunch that day. I ask for more Parmesan to get rid of him.

When we’ve finished, he takes our plates and brings us a chocolate torte and a mango sorbet. ‘Compliments of the chef. He’s an admirer of your work,’ he says to Oscar.

Oscar is pleased but not as surprised or flattered as I would have expected. ‘Many thanks,’ he says.

The desserts are good. Everything has been good, but nothing comes close to Thomas’s scallops or Helene’s banana bread pudding.

The check comes, and I don’t even pretend to reach for my bag. I don’t even have a bag. All I have is my helmet under the seat.

‘I’m not ready for you to ride off. Shall we stroll a bit?’

We walk up to the Common. Students are smoking on benches, knees up, bare feet. A few others toss a football in the dark. It’s still strange not to be one of them, not to be in school on a September night.

Outside the gates of a playground, he points to the place on the monkey bars where John had knocked heads with another kid and to the baby bucket swing Jasper wedged himself into last year and couldn’t get out of.

‘I could have written three more books for all the time I’ve put in right here,’ he says.

We pass beneath a maple that has already started to drop leaves. They crack beneath our feet and release the smell of fall. I used to have calluses from the monkey bars and the tricks I practiced for hours, showing off for my mother. She and Javi did a good job of pretending it was my skill on the monkey bars they were interested in.

On Chauncy Street I show him the place I had with Nia and Abby and Russell, and two doors down he points to a house that he says he and his wife rented for a year when they were first married. I don’t ask when, don’t want to know if we lived there at the same time. We pass Harvard’s married housing, and he says his parents lived there for his father’s senior year and tells a story about his mother nearly burning the place down by setting a dishcloth on fire and how she did the same thing recently in his house.

He stops in front of a house at the end of the block. The lights are on downstairs, blue flashes from a TV in the corner. ‘This is us.’

It’s a square, perfectly symmetrical colonial, four windows facing the street on the ground floor, four on the second, a pair of dormers on the third. Gray with white trim and black shutters. At the back of the short driveway stands a basketball hoop and backboard on a post with sandbags on top of the black base. Oscar’s life.

I look at him looking at it. I can’t tell what he’s feeling. He turns to me. ‘My mother is watching the news. She has a thing for Ted Koppel.’

Upstairs three windows are dark, one a dim green. A night-light, perhaps.

‘Do the boys sleep in the same room?’

‘When I’m not home. Jasper will slip into John’s bed. They both end up in my bed by dawn.’

It’s important to him, presenting this to me. I take his hand and he pulls me in and kisses me on the temple and we look through the windows again as if the house and everything inside it belongs to both of us.





I meet Silas at the movie theater on Church Street. We choose seats close to the front. He’s wearing a striped wool hat that he keeps on the whole movie, and our bodies never touch. I’ve never been more aware of not touching someone in my life. Two and a half Merchant Ivory hours of not touching. Afterward we go back to his apartment in North Cambridge. It’s three flights of linoleum stairs up. He jiggles the lock, and inside it smells like his car plus tobacco and bacon. I follow him down a hallway, past two closed doors. Behind the second door a guy fake orgasms in falsetto, long and loud.

Silas pounds on the wall. ‘You wish, Doug.’ He waits for me at the end. ‘Sorry about that.’

We go into the kitchen. He pulls two bottles of beer out of the fridge and opens them by hooking the cap beneath a drawer pull. The caps fall into his open hand, and he drops them into the trash. We sit at a sticky little table in the corner. The two chairs are close together, and he doesn’t move them apart. There’s a newspaper and a pen on the table. Someone has been doing the crossword. He picks up the pen and slides the paper closer, and I hope we don’t have to finish the crossword. I don’t like them. I don’t like any word puzzles or Scrabble or any of the other word games writers are supposed to like. But he flips the paper over to a photo of Ken Starr and gives him long hair that looks like eels, then puts the pen down abruptly.

We talk and tear the labels off our bottles. He asks what Muriel said about my book, and I have to say I haven’t heard from her. I think he can tell this makes me miserable, so he tells me that his roommate Doug is in love with a lesbian who sometimes spends the night but nothing happens and that Jim and Joan, his other roommates, have the master bedroom but have to put all of Joan’s stuff in the basement anytime Jim’s father, a Baptist minister, visits from Savannah.