Birds of America

BEAUTIFUL GRADE

It’s a chilly night, bitter inside and out. After a grisly month-long court proceeding, Bill’s good friend Albert has become single again — and characteristically curatorial: Albert has invited his friends over to his sublet to celebrate New Year’s Eve and watch his nuptial and postnuptial videos, which Albert has hauled down from the bookcase and proffered with ironic wonder and glee. At each of his three weddings, Albert’s elderly mother had videotaped the ceremony, and at the crucial moment in the vows, each time, Albert’s face turns impishly from his bride, looks straight into his mother’s camera, and says, “I do. I swear I do.” The divorce proceedings, by contrast, are mute, herky-jerky, and badly lit (“A clerk,” says Albert): there are wan smiles, business suits, the waving of a pen.

At the end, Albert’s guests clap. Bill puts his fingers in his mouth and whistles shrilly (not every man can do this; Bill himself didn’t learn until college, though already that was thirty years ago; three decades of ear-piercing whistling — youth shall not be wasted on the young). Albert nods, snaps the tapes back into their plastic cases, turns on the lights, and sighs.

“No more weddings,” Albert announces. “No more divorces. No more wasting time. From here on in, I’m just going to go out there, find a woman I really don’t like very much, and give her a house.”

Bill, divorced only once, is here tonight with Debbie, a woman who is too young for him: at least that is what he knows is said, though the next time it is said to his face, Bill will shout, “I beg your pardon!” Maybe not shout. Maybe squeak. Squeak with a dash of begging. Then he’ll just hurl himself to the ground and plead for a quick stoning. For now, this second, however, he will pretend to a braver, more evolved heart, explaining to anyone who might ask how much easier it would be to venture out still with his ex-wife, someone his own age, but no, not Bill, not big brave Bill: Bill has entered something complex, spiritually biracial, politically tricky, and, truth be told, physically demanding. Youth will not be wasted on the young.

Who the hell is that?

She looks fourteen!

You can’t be serious!

Bill has had to drink more than usual. He has had to admit to himself that on his own, without any wine, he doesn’t have a shred of the courage necessary for this romance.

(“Not to pry, Bill, or ply you with feminist considerations, but, excuse me — you’re dating a twenty-five-year-old?”

“Twenty-four,” he says. “But you were close!”)

His women friends have yelled at him — or sort of yelled. It’s really been more of a cross between sighing and giggling. “Don’t be cruel,” Bill has had to say.

Albert has been kinder, more delicate, in tone if not in substance. “Some people might consider your involvement with this girl a misuse of your charm,” he said slowly.

“But I’ve worked hard for this charm,” said Bill. “Believe me, I started from scratch. Can’t I do with it what I want?”

Albert sized up Bill’s weight loss and slight tan, the sprinkle of freckles like berry seeds across Bill’s arms, the summer whites worn way past Labor Day in the law school’s cavernous, crowded lecture halls, and he said, “Well then, some people might think it a mishandling of your position.” He paused, put his arm around Bill. “But hey, I think it has made you look very — tennisy.”

Bill shoved his hands in his pockets. “You mean the whole kindness of strangers thing?”

Albert took his arm back. “What are you talking about?” he asked, and then his face fell in a kind of melting, concerned way. “Oh, you poor thing,” he said. “You poor, poor thing.”

Bill has protested, obfuscated, gone into hiding. But he is too tired to keep Debbie in the closet anymore. The body has only so many weeks of stage fright in it before it simply gives up and just goes out onstage. Moreover, this semester Debbie is no longer taking either of his Constitutional Law classes. She is no longer, between weekly lectures, at home in his bed, with a rented movie, saying things that are supposed to make him laugh, things like “Open up, doll. Is that drool?” and “Don’t you dare think I’m doing this for a good grade. I’m doing this for a beautiful grade.” Debbie no longer performs her remarks at him, which he misses a little, all that effort and desire. “If I’m just a passing fancy, then I want to pass fancy,” she once said. Also, “Law school: It’s the film school of the nineties.”

Debbie is no longer a student of his in any way, so at last their appearance together is only unattractive and self-conscious-making but not illegal. Bill can show up with her for dinner. He can live in the present, his newly favorite tense.

But he must remember who is here at this party, people for whom history, acquired knowledge, the accumulation of days and years is everything — or is this simply the convenient short-hand of his own paranoia? There is Albert, with his videos; Albert’s old friend Brigitte, a Berlin-born political scientist; Stanley Mix, off every other semester to fly to Japan and study the zoological effects of radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Stanley’s wife, Roberta, a travel agent and obsessive tabulator of Stanley’s frequent flyer miles (Bill has often admired her posters: STEP BACK IN TIME, COME TO ARGENTINA says the one on her door); Lina, a pretty visiting Serb teaching in Slavic Studies; and Lina’s doctor husband, Jack, a Texan who five years ago in Yugoslavia put Dallas dirt under the laboring Lina’s hospital bed so that his son could be “born on Texan soil.” (“But the boy is a total sairb,” Lina says of her son, rolling her lovely r’s. “Just don’t tell Jack.”)

Lina.

Lina, Lina.

Bill is a little taken with Lina.

“You are with Debbie because somewhere in your pahst ease some pretty leetle girl who went away from you,” Lina said to him once on the phone.

“Or, how about because everyone else I know is married.”

“Ha!” she said. “You only believe they are married.”

Which sounded, to Bill, like the late-night, adult version of Peter Pan—no Mary Martin, no songs, just a lot of wishing and thinking lovely thoughts; then afterward all the participants throw themselves out the window.

And never, never land?

Marriage, Bill thinks: it’s the film school of the nineties.

Truth be told, Bill is a little afraid of suicide. Taking one’s life, he thinks, has too many glitzy things to offer: a real edge on the narrative (albeit retrospectively), a disproportionate philosophical advantage (though again, retrospectively), the last word, the final cut, the parting shot. Most importantly, it gets you the hell out of there, wherever it is you are, and he can see how such a thing might happen in a weak but brilliant moment, one you might just regret later while looking down from the depthless sky or up through two sandy anthills and some weeds.

Still, Lina is the one he finds himself thinking about, and carefully dressing for in the morning — removing all dry-cleaning tags and matching his socks.

Albert leads them all into the dining room and everyone drifts around the large teak table, studying the busily constructed salads at each place setting — salads, which, with their knobs of cheese, jutting chives, and little folios of frisée, resemble small Easter hats.

“Do we wear these or eat them?” asks Jack. In his mouth is a piece of gray chewing gum like a rat’s brain.

“I admire gay people,” Bill’s voice booms. “To have the courage to love whom you want to love in the face of all bigotry.”

“Relax,” Debbie murmurs, nudging him. “It’s only salad.”

Albert indicates in a general way where they should sit, alternating male, female, like the names of hurricanes, though such seating leaves all the couples split and far apart, on New Year’s Eve no less, as Bill suspects Albert wants it.

“Don’t sit next to him — he bites,” says Bill to Lina as she takes a place next to Albert.

“Six degrees of separation,” says Debbie. “Do you believe that thing about how everyone is separated by only six people?”

“Oh, we’re separated by at least six, aren’t we, darling?” says Lina to her husband.

“At least.”

“No, I mean by only six,” says Debbie. “I mean strangers.” But no one is listening to her.

“This is a political New Year’s Eve,” says Albert. “We’re here to protest the new year, protest the old; generally get a petition going to Father Time. But also eat: in China it’s the Year of the Pig.”

“Ah, one of those years of the Pig,” says Stanley. “I love those.”

Bill puts salt on his salad, then looks up apologetically. “I salt everything,” he says, “so it can’t get away.”

Albert brings out salmon steaks and distributes them with Brigitte’s help. Ever since Albert was denied promotion to full-professor rank, his articles on Flannery O’Connor (“A Good Man Really Is Hard to Find,” “Everything That Rises Must Indeed Converge,” and “The Totemic South: The Violent Actually Do Bear It Away!”) failing to meet with collegial acclaim, he has become determined to serve others, passing out the notices and memoranda, arranging the punch and cookies at various receptions. He has not yet become very good at it, however, but the effort touches and endears. Now everyone sits with their hands in their laps, leaning back when plates are set before them. When Albert sits down, they begin to eat.

“You know, in Yugoslavia,” says Jack, chewing, “a person goes to school for four years to become a waiter. Four years of waiter school.”

“Typical Yugoslavians,” adds Lina. “They have to go to school for four years to learn how to serve someone.”

“I’ll bet they do it well,” Bill says stupidly. Everyone ignores him, for which he is grateful. His fish smells fishier than the others — he is sure of it. Perhaps he has been poisoned.

“Did you hear about that poor Japanese foreign student who stopped to ask directions and was shot because he was thought to be an intruder?” This is Debbie, dear Debbie. How did she land on this?

“Oh, God, I know. Wasn’t that terrible?” says Brigitte.

“A shooting like that really makes a lot of sense, too,” says Bill, “when you think about how the Japanese are particularly known for their street crime.” Lina chortles and Bill pokes at his fish a little.

“I guess the man thought the student was going to come in and reprogram his computer,” says Jack, and everyone laughs.

“Now is that racist?” asks Bill.

“Is it?”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Not in any real way.”

“It’s just us.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Would anyone like more food?”

“So Stanley,” says Lina. “How is the research going?”

Is this absent querying or pointed interrogation? Bill can’t tell. The last: time they were all together, they got into a terrible discussion about World War II. World War II is not necessarily a good topic of conversation generally, and among the eight of them, it became a total hash. Stanley yelled, Lina threatened to leave, and Brigitte broke down over dessert: “I was a little girl; I was there,” Brigitte said of Berlin.

Lina, whose three uncles, she’d once told Bill, had been bayoneted by Nazis, sighed and looked off at the wallpaper — wide pale stripes like pajamas. It was impossible to eat.

Brigitte looked accusingly at everyone, her face swelling like a baked apple. Tears leaked out of her eyes. “They did not have to bomb like that. Not like that. They did not have to bomb so much,” and then she began to sob, then choke back sobs, and then just choke.

It had been a shock to Bill. For years, Brigitte had been the subject of his skeptical, private jokes with Albert. They would make up fake titles for her books on European history: That Kooky Führer and Hitler: What a Nutroll! But that evening, Brigitte’s tears were so bitter and full, after so many years, that it haunted and startled him. What did it mean to cry like that—at dinner? He had never known a war in that way or ever, really. He had never even known a dinner in that way.

“Fine,” says Stanley to Lina. “Great, really. I’m going back next month. The small-head-size data is the most interesting and conclusive thus far.” He chews his fish. “If I got paid by the word, I’d be a rich man.” He has the supple, overconfident voice of a panelist from the Texaco Opera Quiz.

“Jack here gets paid by the word,” says Bill, “and that word is Next?” Perhaps Bill could adroitly switch the subject away from nuclear devastation and steer it toward national health plans. Would that be an improvement? He remembers once asking Lina what kind of medicine Jack practiced. “Oh, he’s a gynecological surgeon,” she said dismissively. “Something to do with things dropping into the vagina.” She gave a shudder. “I don’t like to think about it.”

Things dropping into the vagina. The word things had for some reason made Bill think of tables and chairs, or, even more glamorously, pianos and chandeliers, and he has now come to see Jack as a kind of professional mover: the Allied Van Lines of the OB-GYN set.

“After all this time, Bill is still skeptical about doctors,” Jack now says.

“I can see that,” says Stanley.

“I once had the wrong tonsil removed,” says Bill.

“Are you finding a difference between Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” persists Lina.

Stanley turns and looks at her. “That’s interesting that you should ask that. You know, Hiroshima was a uranium bomb and Nagasaki a plutonium. And the fact is, we’re finding more damaging results from the uranium.”

Lina gasps and puts down her fork. She turns and looks in an alarmed way at Stanley, studying, it seems, the condition of his face, the green-brown shrapnel of his dried acne cysts, like lentils buried in the skin.

“They used two different kinds of bombs?” she says.

“That’s right,” says Stanley.

“You mean, all along, right from the start, this was just an experiment? They designed it explicitly right from the beginning, as something to study?” Blood has rushed to her face.

Stanley grows a little defensive. He is, after all, one of the studiers. He shifts in his chair. “There are some very good books written on the subject. If you don’t understand what happened regarding Japan during World War Two, you would be well advised to read a couple of them.”

“Oh, I see. Then we could have a better conversation,” says Lina. She turns away from Stanley and looks at Albert.

“Children, children,” murmurs Albert.

“World War Two,” says Debbie. “Wasn’t that the war to end all wars?”

“No, that was World War One,” says Bill. “By World War Two, they weren’t making any promises.”

Stanley will not relent. He turns to Lina again. “I have to say, I’m surprised to see a Serbian, in a matter of foreign policy, attempting to take the moral high ground,” he says.

“Stanley, I used to like you,” says Lina. “Remember when you were a nice guy? I do.”

“I do, too,” says Bill. “There was that whole smiling, handing-out-money thing he used to do.”

Bill feels inclined to rescue Lina. This year, she has been through a lot. Just last spring, the local radio station put her on a talk show and made her answer questions about Bosnia. In attempting to explain what was going on in the former Yugoslavia, she said, “You have to think about what it might mean for Europe to have a nationalist, Islamic state,” and “Those fascist Croats,” and “It’s all very complicated.” The next day, students boycotted her classes and picketed her office with signs that read GENOCIDE IS NOT ‘COMPLICATED’ and REPENT, IMPERIALIST. Lina had phoned Bill at his office. “You’re a lawyer. They’re hounding me. Aren’t these students breaking a law? Surely, Bill, they are breaking a law.”

“Not really,” said Bill. “And believe me, you wouldn’t want to live in a country where they were.”

“Can’t I get a motion to strike? What is that? I like the way it sounds.”

“That’s used in pleadings or in court. That’s not what you want.”

“No, I guess not. From them, I just want no more motion. Plus, I want to strike them. There’s nothing you can do?”

“They have their rights.”

“They understand nothing,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

“No. I banged up the fender parking my car, I was so upset. The headlight fell out, and even though I took it into the car place, they couldn’t salvage it.”

“You’ve gotta keep those things packed in ice, I think.”

“These cheeldren, good God, have no conception of the world. I am well known as a pacifist and resister; I was the one last year in Belgrade, buying gasoline out of Coke bottles, hiding a boy from the draft, helping to organize the protests and the radio broadcasts and the rock concerts. Not them. I was the one standing there with the crowd, clapping and chanting beneath Milosevic’s window: ‘Don’t count on us.’ ” Here Lina’s voice fell into a deep Slavic singsong. “Don’t count on us. Don’t count on us.” She paused dramatically. “We had T-shirts and posters. That was no small thing.”

“ ‘Don’t count on us?’ ” said Bill. “I don’t mean to sound skeptical, but as a political slogan, it seems, I don’t know, a little …” Lame. It lacked even the pouty energy and determination of “Hell no, we won’t go.” Perhaps some obscenity would have helped. “Don’t fucking count on us, motherfucker.” That would have been better. Certainly a better T-shirt.

“It was all very successful,” said Lina indignantly.

“But how exactly do you measure success?” asked Bill. “I mean, it took time, but, you’ll forgive me, we stopped the war in Vietnam.”

“Oh, you are all so obsessed with your Vietnam,” said Lina.

The next time Bill saw her, it was on her birthday, and she’d had three and a half whiskeys. She exclaimed loudly about the beauty of the cake, and then, taking a deep breath, she dropped her head too close to the candles and set her hair spectacularly on fire.

What does time measure but itself? What can it assess but the mere deposit and registration of itself within a thing?

A large bowl of peas and onions is passed around the table.

They’ve already dispensed with the O. J. Simpson jokes — the knock-knock one and the one about the sunglasses. They’ve banned all the others, though Bill is now asked his opinion regarding search and seizure. Ever since he began living in the present tense, Bill sees the Constitution as a blessedly changing thing. He does not feel current behavior should be made necessarily to conform to old law. He feels personally, for instance, that he’d throw away a few First Amendment privileges — abortion protest, say, and all telemarketing, perhaps some pornography (though not Miss April 1965—never!) — in exchange for gutting the Second Amendment. The Founding Fathers were revolutionaries, after all. They would be with him on this, he feels. They would be for making the whole thing up as you go along, reacting to things as they happened, like a great, wild performance piece. “There’s nothing sacred about the Constitution; it’s just another figmentary contract: it’s a palimpsest you can write and write and write on. But then whatever is there when you get pulled over are the rules for then. For now.” Bill believes in free speech. He believes in expensive speech. He doesn’t believe in shouting “Fire” in a crowded movie theater, but he does believe in shouting “Fie!” and has done it twice himself — both times at Forrest Gump. “I’m a big believer in the Rules for Now. Also, Promises for Now, Things to Do for Now, and the ever-handy This Will Do for Now.”

Brigitte glares at him. “Such moral excellence,” she says.

“Yes,” agrees Roberta, who has been quiet all evening, probably figuring out airfare upgrades for Stanley. “How attractive.”

“I’m talking theoretical,” says Bill. “I believe in common sense. In theory. Theoretical common sense.” He feels suddenly cornered and misunderstood. He wishes he weren’t constantly asked to pronounce on real-life legal matters. He has never even tried an actual case except once, when he was just out of law school. He’d had a small practice then in the basement of an old sandstone schoolhouse in St. Paul, and the sign inside the building directory said WILLIAM D. BELMONT, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW: ONE LEVEL DOWN. It always broke his heart a little, that one level down. The only case he ever took to trial was an armed robbery and concealed weapon case, and he had panicked. He dressed in the exact same beiges and browns as the bailiffs — a subliminal strategy he felt would give him an edge, make him seem at least as much a part of the court “family” as the prosecutor. But by the close of the afternoon, his nerves were shot. He looked too desperately at the jury (who, once in the deliberation room, and in the time it took to order the pizza and wolf it down, voted unanimously to convict). He’d looked imploringly at all their little faces and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, if my client’s not innocent, I’ll eat my shorts.”

At the end of his practice, he had taken to showing up at other people’s office parties — not a good sign in life.

Now, equipped with a more advanced degree, like the other people here, Bill has a field of scholarly, hypothetical expertise, plus a small working knowledge of budgets and parking and E-mail. He doesn’t mind the E-mail, has more or less gotten used to it, its vaguely smutty Etch-A-Sketch, though once he found himself lost in the Internet and before he knew it had written his name across some bulletin board on which the only other name was “Stud Boy.” Mostly, however, his professional life has been safe and uneventful. Although he is bothered by faculty meetings and by the word text—every time he hears it, he feels he should just give up, go off and wear a powdered wig somewhere — it intrigues Bill to belong to academe, with its international hodgepodge and asexual attire, a place where to think and speak as if one has lived is always preferable to the alternatives. Such a value cuts down on regrets. And Bill is cutting down. He is determined to cut down. Once, he was called in by the head of the law school and admonished for skipping so many faculty meetings. “It’s costing you about a thousand dollars in raises every year,” said the dean.

“Really?” replied Bill, “Well, if that’s all, it’s worth every dime.”

“Eat, eat,” says Albert. He is bringing in the baked potatoes and dessert cheeses. Things are a little out of whack. Is a dinner party a paradigm of society or a vicious pantomime of the family? It is already 10:30. Brigitte has gotten up again to help him. They return with sour cream, chives, grappa and cognac. Debbie looks across the table at Bill and smiles warmly. Bill smiles back. At least he thinks he does.

This taboo regarding age is to make us believe that life is long and actually improves us, that we are wiser, better, more knowledgeable later on than early. It is a myth concocted to keep the young from learning what we really are and despising and murdering us. We keep them sweet-breathed, unequipped, suggesting to them that there is something more than regret and decrepitude up ahead.

Bill is still writing an essay in his head, one of theoretical common sense, though perhaps he is just drinking too much and it is not an essay at all but the simple metabolism of sugar. But this is what he knows right now, with dinner winding up and midnight looming like a death gong: life’s embrace is quick and busy, and everywhere in it people are equally lacking and well-meaning and nuts. Why not admit history’s powers to divide and destroy? Why attach ourselves to the age-old stories in the belief that they are truer than the new ones? By living in the past, you always know what comes next, and that robs you of surprises. It exhausts and warps the mind. We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgmental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all.

“I believe in the present tense,” Bill says now, to no one in particular. “I believe in amnesty.” He stops. People are looking but not speaking. “Or is that just fancy rhetoric?”

“It’s not that fancy,” says Jack.

“It’s fancy,” Albert says kindly, ever the host, “without being schmancy.” He brings out more grappa. Everyone drinks it from the amber, green, and blue of Albert’s Depression glass glasses.

“I mean—” Bill begins, but then he stops, says nothing. Chilean folk music is playing on the stereo, wistful and melancholy: “Bring me all your old lovers, so I can love you, too,” a woman sings in Spanish.

“What does that mean?” Bill asks, but at this point he may not actually be speaking out loud. He cannot really tell. He sits back and listens to the song, translating the sad Spanish. Every songwriter in their smallest song seems to possess some monumental grief clarified and dignified by melody, Bill thinks. His own sadnesses, on the other hand, slosh about in his life in a low-key way, formless and self-consuming. Modest is how he sometimes likes to see it. No one is modest anymore. Everyone exalts their disappointments. They do ceremonious battle with everything; they demand receipts and take their presents back — all the unhappy things that life awkwardly, stupidly, without thinking, without bothering even to get to know them a little or to ask around! has given them. They bring it all back for an exchange.

As has he, hasn’t he?

· · ·

The young were sent to earth to amuse the old. Why not be amused?

Debbie comes over and sits next to him. “You’re looking very rumpled and miffed,” she says quietly. Bill only nods. What can he say? She adds, “Rumpled and miffed — doesn’t that sound like a law firm?”

Bill nods again. “One in a Hans Christian Andersen story,” he says. “Perhaps the one the Ugly Duckling hired to sue his parents.”

“Or the one that the Little Mermaid retained to stick it to the Prince,” says Debbie, a bit pointedly, Bill thinks — who can tell? Her girlish voice, out of sheer terror, perhaps, has lately adorned itself with dreamy and snippy mannerisms. Probably Bill has single-handedly aged her beyond her years.

Jack has stood and is heading for the foyer. Lina follows.

“Lina, you’re leaving?” asks Bill with too much feeling in his voice. He sees that Debbie, casting her eyes downward, has noted it.

“Yes, we have a little tradition at home, so we can’t stay for midnight.” Lina shrugs a bit nonchalantly, then picks up her red wool scarf and lassoes her neck with it, a loose noose. Jack holds her coat up behind her, and she slides her arms into the satin lining.

It’s sex, Bill thinks. They make love at the stroke of midnight.

“A tradition?” asks Stanley.

“Uh, yes,” Lina says dismissively. “Just a little contemplation of the upcoming year is all. I hope you all have a happy rest of the New Year Eve.”

Lina always leaves the apostrophe s out of New Year’s Eve, Bill notes, oddly enchanted. And why should New Year’s Eve have an apostrophe s? It shouldn’t. Christmas Eve doesn’t. Logically—

“They have sex at the stroke of midnight,” says Albert after they leave.

“I knew it!” shouts Bill.

“Sex at the stroke of midnight?” asks Roberta.

“I myself usually save that for Lincoln’s Birthday,” says Bill.

“It’s a local New Year’s tradition apparently,” says Albert.

“I’ve lived here twenty years and I’ve never heard of it,” says Stanley.

“Neither have I,” says Roberta.

“Nor I,” says Brigitte.

“Me, neither,” says Bill.

“Well, we’ll all have to do something equally compelling,” says Debbie.

Bill’s head spins to look at her. The bodice of her black velvet dress is snowy with napkin lint. Her face is flushed from drink. What does she mean? She means nothing at all.

“Black-eyed peas!” cries Albert. And he dashes into the kitchen and brings out an iron pot of warm, pasty, black-dotted beans and six spoons.

“Now this is a tradition I know,” says Stanley, and he takes one of the spoons and digs in.

Albert moves around the room with his pot. “You can’t eat until the stroke of midnight. The peas have to be the first thing you consume in the New Year and then you’ll have good luck all year long.”

Brigitte takes a spoon and looks at her watch. “We’ve got five minutes.”

“What’ll we do?” asks Stanley. He is holding his spoonful of peas like a lollipop, and they are starting to slide.

“We’ll contemplate our fruitful work and great accomplishments.” Albert sighs. “Though, of course, when you think about Gandhi, or Pasteur, or someone like Martin Luther King, Jr., dead at thirty-nine, it sure makes you wonder what you’ve done with your life.”

“We’ve done some things,” says Bill.

“Yes? Like what?” asks Albert.

“We’ve …” And here Bill stops for a moment. “We’ve … had some excellent meals. We’ve … bought some nice shirts. We’ve gotten a good trade-in or two on our cars — I think I’m going to go kill myself now.”

“I’ll join you,” says Albert. “Knives are in the drawer by the sink.”

“How about the vacuum cleaner?”

“Vacuum cleaner in the back closet.”

“Vacuum cleaner?” hoots Roberta. But no one explains or goes anywhere. Everyone just sits.

“Peas poised!” Stanley suddenly shouts. They all get up and stand in a horseshoe around the hearth with its new birch logs and bright but smoky fire. They lift their mounded spoons and eye the mantel clock with its ancient minute hand jerking toward midnight.

“Happy New Year,” says Albert finally, after some silence, and lifts his spoon in salute.

“Amen,” says Stanley.

“Amen,” says Roberta.

“Amen,” say Debbie and Brigitte.

“Ditto,” says Bill, his mouth full, but indicating with his spoon.

Then they all hug quickly—“Gotcha!” says Bill with each hug — and begin looking for their coats.

“You always seem more interested in other women than in me,” Debbie says when they are back at his house after a silent ride home, Debbie driving. “Last month it was Lina. And the month before that it was … it was Lina again.” She stops for a minute. “I’m sorry to be so selfish and pathetic.” She begins to cry, and as she does, something cracks open in her and Bill sees straight through to her heart. It is a good heart. It has had nice parents and good friends, lived only during peacetime, and been kind to animals. She looks up at him. “I mean, I’m romantic and passionate. I believe if you’re in love, that’s enough. I believe love conquers all.”

Bill nods sympathetically, from a great distance.

“But I don’t want to get into one of these feeble, one-sided, patched-together relationships — no matter how much I care for you.”

“Whatever happened to love conquers all, just four seconds ago?”

Debbie pauses. “I’m older now,” she says.

“You kids. You grow up so fast.”

Then there is a long silence between them, the second in this new New Year. Finally, Debbie says, “Don’t you know that Lina’s having an affair with Albert? Can’t you see they’re in love?”

Something in Bill drops, squares off, makes a neat little knot. “No, I didn’t see.” He feels the sickened sensation he has sometimes felt after killing a housefly and finding blood in it.

“You yourself had suggested they might be lovers.”

“I did? Not seriously. Really? I did?”

“But Bill, hadn’t you heard? I mean, it’s all over campus.”

Actually, he had heard some rumors; he had even said, “Hope so” and once “May God bless their joyous union.” But he hadn’t meant or believed any of it. Such rumors seemed ham-handed, literal, unlikely. And yet wasn’t reality always cheesy and unreliable just like that; wasn’t fate literal in exactly that way? He thinks of the severed, crossed fingers found perfectly survived in the wreckage of a local plane crash last year. Such fate was contrary and dense, like a dumb secretary, failing to understand the overall gestalt and desire of the wish. He prefers a deeper, cleverer, even tardy fate, like that of a girl he knew once in law school who, years before, had been raped, shot, and left for dead but then had crawled ten hours out of the woods to the highway with a.22 bullet in her head and flagged a car. That’s when you knew that life was making something up to you, that the narrative was apologizing. That’s when you knew God had glanced up from his knitting, perhaps even risen from his freaking wicker rocker, and staggered at last to the window to look.

Debbie studies Bill, worried and sympathetic. “You’re just not happy in this relationship, are you?” she says.

These terms! This talk! Bill is not good at this; she is better at it than he; she is probably better at everything than he: at least she has not used the word text.

“Just don’t use the word text,” he warns.

Debbie is quiet. “You’re just not happy with your life,” she says.

“I suppose I’m not.” Don’t count on us. Don’t count on us, motherfucker.

“A small bit of happiness is not so hard, you know. You could manage it. It’s pretty much open-book. It’s basically a take-home.”

Suddenly, sadness is devouring him. The black-eyed peas! Why aren’t they working? Debbie’s face flickers and tenses. All her eye makeup has washed away, her eyes bare and round as lightbulbs. “You were always a tough grader,” she says. “Whatever happened to grading on a curve?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Whatever happened to that?”

Her eyelids lower and she falls soundlessly across his lap, her hair in a golden pinwheel about her head. He can feel the firm watery press of her breasts against his thigh.

How can he assess his life so harshly and ungratefully, when he is here with her, when she is so deeply kind, and a whole new year is upon them like a long, cheap buffet? How could he be so strict and mean?

“I’ve changed my mind,” he says. “I’m happy. I’m bursting.”

“You are not,” she says, but she turns her face upward and smiles hopefully, like something brief and floral and in need of heat.

“I am,” he insists, but looks away, to think, to think of anything else at all, to think of his ex-wife—Bring me all your old lovers, so I can love you, too—still living in St. Paul with his daughter, who in five years will be Debbie’s age. He believes that he was happy once then, for a long time, for a while. “We are this far from a divorce,” his wife had said bitterly at the end. And if she had spread her arms wide, they might have been able to find a way back, the blinking, intermittent wit of her like a lighthouse to him, but no: she had held her index finger and her thumb up close to her face in a mean pinch of salt. Still, before he left, their marriage a spluttering but modest ruin, only two affairs and a dozen sharp words between them, they’d come home from the small humiliations they would endure at work, separately and alone, and they’d turn them somehow into desire. At the very end, they’d taken walks together in the cool wintry light that sometimes claimed those last days of August — the air chill, leaves already dropping in wind and scuttling along the sidewalk, the neighborhood planted with ocher mums, even the toughest weeds in bridal flower, the hydrangea blooms gone green and drunk with their own juice. Who would not try to be happy?

And just as he had then on those walks, he remembers now how, as a boy in Duluth, he’d once imagined a monster, a demon, chasing him home from school. It was one particular winter: Christmas was past, the snow was dirty and crusted, his father was overseas, and his young sister, Lily, home from the hospital’s iron lung, lay dying of polio in her bed upstairs at home. His parents had always — discreetly, they probably felt, though also recklessly and maybe guiltily, too — enjoyed their daughter more than their serious older boy. Perhaps it was a surprise even to themselves. But Bill, in studying their looks and words, had discerned it, though in response he had never known what to do. How could he make himself more enjoyable? With his father away, he wrote long boring letters with everything spelled correctly. “Dear Dad, How are you? I am fine.” But he didn’t mail them. He saved them up, tied them in a string, and when his father came home, he gave him the packet. His father said “Thank you,” tucked the letters in his coat, and never mentioned them again. Instead, every day for a year, his father went upstairs and wept for Lily.

Once, when she’d still been pretty and well, Bill went through an entire day repeating everything Lily said, until she cried in torment and his mother slapped him hard against the eye.

Lily had been enjoyed. They enjoyed her. Who could blame them? Enjoyable girl! Enjoyable joy! But Bill could not attain such a thing, either side of it, for himself. He glimpsed it all from behind some atmosphere, from across some green and scalloped sea—“Dear Dad, How are you? I am fine”—as if it were a planet that sometimes sparkled into view, or a tropical island painted in hot, picture-book shades of orange.

But deep in his private January boyhood, he knew, there were colors that were true: the late-afternoon light was bluish and dark, the bruised tundra of the snowbanks scary and silver and cold. Stepping slowly at first, the hulking monster-man, the demon-man, red and giant, with a single wing growing out of its back, would begin to chase Bill. It chased him faster and faster, up and down every tiny hill to home, casting long shadows that would occasionally, briefly, fall upon them both like a net. While the church bells chimed their four o’clock hymn, the monster-man would fly in a loping, wonky way, lunging and leaping and skittering across the ice toward Bill’s heels. Bill rounded a corner. The demon leapt over a bin of road salt. Bill cut across a path. The demon followed. And the terror of it all — as Bill flung himself onto his own front porch and into the unlocked and darkened house, slamming the door, sinking back against it, sliding down onto the doormat, safe at last among the clutter of boots and shoes but still gasping the wide lucky gasps of his great and narrow escape — was thrilling to him in a world that had already, and with such indifferent skill, forsaken all its charms.