Where the God of Love Hangs Out

WHERE THE GOD OF LOVE HANGS OUT

Farnham is a small town. It has a handful of buildings for the public good and two gas stations and several small businesses, which puzzle everyone (who buys the expensive Italian ceramics, the copper jewelry, the badly made wooden toys?). It has a pizza place and a coffee shop called The Cup.

Ray Watrous looked in The Cup’s big window as he walked past. He saw the woman he’d represented in a malpractice suit ten years ago because laminated veneers kept falling out of her mouth. He saw the girl who used to babysit for them when Neil and Jennifer were small, now a fat, homely young woman holding a fat, homely little kid on her lap. He saw his daughter-in-law, Macy, at a table by herself, her gold hair practically falling into her cup, tears running down her face. Ray turned around and went inside. He liked Macy. He was also curious and he was semiretired and he was in no hurry to go to Town Hall and argue with Farnham’s first selectman, a decent man suddenly inclined to get in bed with Stop & Shop and put a supermarket in the north end of town, where wild turkeys still gathered.

Ray liked having his son and Macy nearby. Sometimes Ray went down to New Haven for lunch and sometimes Neil drove up to Farnham, on his way to the county courthouse. They talked about sports, and local politics and the collapse of Western civilization. The week before, Neil mentioned that a girl he’d dated in high school was going to run for governor and Ray told Neil that Abe Callender, who shot out the windshield of his own car when he’d found his girlfriend and her girlfriend in it, a few years back, was now a state trooper in Farnham.

“Can I join you?” Ray said.

Macy twisted away from him, as if that would keep him from seeing her tears and then she twisted back and took her bag off the other chair.

“Of course,” she said.

Randeane, the owner and only waitress of The Cup, brought Ray a black coffee and put down two ginger scones with a dollop of whipped honey on the side.

Ray said, “These scones have Dunkin’ Donuts beat all to hell.”

Randeane thanked him. “Cream and sugar?”

Ray, who was normally a polite man, said, “The coffee could stand a little fixing up, I guess.”

Randeane put her pencil in her pocket and said, “People love our coffee. It’s fair trade. Everyone loves our Viennese Roast and our French Roast and I believe people come here for our coffee.”

Ray said, “I hate to disagree, but they come for the pastries or the atmosphere or because of you but they don’t come for the coffee.”

“I beg your pardon,” Randeane said.

Macy laughed and said, “Wow, Ray.”

“I’m just saying, people don’t come for the coffee.”

“I’ll make you a fresh cup.”

Randeane brought him another coffee and Ray drank it. It wasn’t great. Macy ate a little bit of her scone and she sighed. Two high school girls sat down at the table next to them.

“I’m not retarded,” the skinny girl with pierced eyebrows said.

“I know. But, duh, you can’t go for a job interview looking like that.” The other girl was chubby and cheerful and in a pink uniform.

“Fine,” the skinny girl said. “Fix me.”

Macy and Ray watched the two girls walk hand in hand into the ladies’ room.

“Girls are good at friendship,” Ray said.

Macy shrugged. “I guess. I was thinking about my mother when you came in and saw me crying,” she said.

“My father was a no-good fall-down drunk,” Ray offered. “My mother was as useless as a rubber crutch. But sometimes I miss her. That’s the way the dead are, I guess. They come back better than they were.”

“We weren’t close,” Macy said.

She’d been sitting in the kitchen just two days ago, thinking about gumbo and looking for filé powder, when the phone rang. Her mother said hello, she was just passing through and wanted to see Macy. She didn’t say hope to, or love to, she said, “I want to see you, kid. I’m in New Britain. There’s a place just off Route 9. It’s called the Crab Cake. Meet me there.” Her mother wore skinny black jeans and a yellow blouse and high-heeled yellow boots. She had a scarf pulled over her black hair and she sat in a booth, smoking, and when Macy came in, her mother didn’t get up.

“Don’t you look fat and happy,” her mother said.

Macy sat down.

“Surprised?”

“I’m surprised,” Macy said. It had been her plan that no one in her real life, meaning Neil and Neil’s family, would ever meet her mother.

“I bet. Well, I thought it was time you and your old mother had a chat.”

It didn’t take very long. Macy called her mother “Betty,” which was her given name, and Betty called Macy “Joanie,” which was hers. Macy’s mother accused Macy of running away and Macy said that if she hadn’t run away she’d be a fucked-up coke addict like her mother or worse. Betty said she had done her best and Macy stood up at that point. She said, Don’t tell me that. Macy’s mother said that they should let bygones be bygones, that she’d dumped Brad’s mean, sorry ass anyway, years ago, and see how Joanie had turned out fine. She said she was on her way to Miami and if Joanie could spare her some traveling money, she’d get right into her car. Macy had four hundred dollars she’d put aside from housekeeping money and three hundred she’d gotten as a bonus from her company, another hundred she got for a winter coat she’d returned, and twenty bucks that she’d found in Neil’s pants when she took them to the laundry. She’d put it all in an envelope before she got in her car to drive to the Crab Cake and she handed the envelope to her mother, who counted it.

“That’s all I have,” Macy said. “We’re not millionaires.”

Her mother was cheerful, the way she always was when things were not as good as she hoped, but not as bad as they could be.

“You weren’t hard to find,” her mother said.

“I wasn’t hiding,” Macy said, and her mother smiled and put out her cigarette.

“Well, good. Then you won’t mind if I come around again, when I’m passing through.”

“You come to my house and I’ll shoot you myself. I’ll say you snuck in and I shot you in self-defense, thinking you were a burglar. And I will cry my heart out to have killed my own poor, crazy mother, who should have been locked up in the first place.”

Macy’s mother stood up.

“Aren’t you a kidder. It’s okay, you lie dormy, and so will I. Good luck,” her mother said, and Macy watched her drive off in a dusty blue station wagon.

* * *

A handsome black woman walked past The Cup’s big front window.

“Looks like Nellie,” Ray said.

“Nellie of the coconut cake,” Macy said.

Ray shook his head. “My wife can be a bitch.”

Macy said, “I can’t argue with you.”

Macy and Neil had met at his parents’ house. It felt like a houseful of people to Macy, who had lived with one person or none, most of her life. Neil’s sister, Jennifer, had brought Macy home with her after they ran into each other their senior year, at the Philadelphia Flower Show. (Just come home with me for the weekend, Jennifer had said. My parents will love you.) Neil was older than Jennifer and Macy by a couple of years and finishing law school; their cousin Howard, who lived in the maid’s room because he couldn’t face the real world after his time in Afghanistan, was making drinks for everyone.

Jennifer said, “This is Macy. You’ll love her.”

Neil squeezed Macy’s hand and looked her right in the eye and she could feel herself blushing. Eleanor Watrous served chicken fricassee with dumplings and glazed carrots and a separate plate of bitter green salad with a disk of goat cheese in the middle. For dessert, Jennifer carried in a gigantic and snowy and objectively beautiful coconut cake.

Macy said, “My goodness, that’s gorgeous.”

Mrs. Watrous waved her hand toward the kitchen and said that Nellie was gifted. (That’s the housekeeper, Neil said quietly. She cooks when my mother wants to impress people.) “I’ll have Nellie wrap some up for you,” Mrs. Watrous said, so that everyone could just picture Macy in her windowless room, sitting on her twin bed, unwrapping the slice of cake for a snack or for breakfast. Macy let her napkin slide to the floor so she could get a grip on herself. Neil’s hand came crab-walking across the rug, toward Macy’s napkin. He stroked her ankle and then he picked up the napkin and put it in her lap.

After coffee, Mr. Watrous had said, Let’s adjourn and Neil and Cousin Howard followed him into the study. The door to the study was not closed, and Macy sat in the chair nearest the door.

“Cute girl, Jennifer’s little friend,” Neil’s father said.

“She’s hot,” Cousin Howard said, and then he picked up a magazine and started fanning himself.

“Christ, Howard,” Mr. Watrous said. “How’s law school, Neil?”

“Okay,” Neil said.

“Getting any offers?”

“A few.”

“Stay out of the pigpen,” Mr. Watrous said.

Cousin Howard said, “Soo-eee. Here, piggy, piggy, piggy,” and Mr. Watrous said, “For the love of Jesus,” and the men came back into the living room. Neil sat down on the arm of Macy’s chair and patted her hair.

Sunday afternoon, he drove Macy and Jennifer to the train station. He told his sister to go get the tickets and behind her, he kissed Macy, his narrow lips opening like a flower. He smelled of cinnamon and smoke.

The next time Macy and Neil visited the Watrouses, they were a couple.

Mrs. Watrous asked Macy to help set the table, just to see if she knew where the glasses went and in what order. Macy laid glasses down over knives, water, white, and red, exactly as Emily Post recommended, and Neil’s mother glanced over and said, as if it wasn’t a test at all, Oh, who cares, really? These days, you could put a jug and four bowls on the table, couldn’t you? Let’s move to the patio. Macy drank three glasses of water, she was so nervous, and after Neil’s father had asked about her parents and Macy had said that they were dead and that her only relatives were an aunt and uncle in Des Moines, they moved on to Macy’s favorite classes. Everything went pretty well until Macy took a green olive out of the bowl next to her. It stuck to the roof of her mouth, its tip digging into the soft part at the back. She choked until she spat out the jalapeño pepper the olive was stuffed with, crying and swearing, Goddammit, oh, motherfucker, and Neil jumped up to get her water. Mr. Watrous said those olives were going to kill someone and Mrs. Watrous said that he’d eaten about fifteen of them so far. Finally, Macy took the glass of water from Neil and, in her relief, relaxed her arm and pushed the olive bowl onto the stone floor. Mrs. Watrous walked to the kitchen for a thick dishcloth and Nellie the cook came in behind her with a dustpan and the glass shards were disappeared. When Mrs. Watrous came back, Macy said, My God, I am so sorry. And Mrs. Watrous said, It’s all right. If I were the Queen of England, I’d have to throw another Baccarat bowl on the floor, just to make you feel at ease.

Macy was silent for the rest of dinner.

That’s what I get, she thought. You listen and you listen and you copy their ways and who fucking knew that that bat, that blond bat in a Lilly Pulitzer sheath with her fucking family retainers, who knew I’d break her fucking Baccarat. Macy lived in a boardinghouse a mile from campus and cleaned all the rooms in the house on Saturdays for a break on her rent. On weekends she went to parties and had people drop her off at a trolley stop. She didn’t have people over. She didn’t go on vacation with other people’s families. The girls Macy hung around with, girls like Jennifer and her friends, thought Macy lived with rich, strict relatives. They’d never seen a boardinghouse or a carpet sweeper or a shared bathroom. They didn’t make their meals on a hot plate in their room, unless they were doing it for fun, and they didn’t read Emily Post and Miss Manners like the Old and the New Testament.

Macy brought her lunch to campus every day and she ate in the handicapped-access bathroom. Afterward, she sat in the Student Center to socialize, and when the other girls ate two slices of whole-wheat pizza or a big bowl of soba noodles or a roast-beef sandwich, Macy smiled like Pietsie Cortland, who also didn’t eat, for more normal reasons. Pietsie was Macy’s favorite. Macy loved everything about Pietsie, including her name, which was so fancy, Macy wanted to take her aside and say, Good for you. (When they did get into the question of background, Pietsie said, Isn’t it awful — it’s for Van Piet, my middle name. You know, old name, no money, not a pot to piss in, and Macy heard the ping of real crystal.) Macy avoided anyone who seemed remotely interested in her family. Interesting was not good.

“It’s okay,” Neil had said on the way back to his apartment. “My mother has a strong personality. It’ll be okay.”

Macy looked down at her hands, twisting in her lap.

“It’ll be okay,” Neil said, “because I love you. Ha,” he said, when she stared at him. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

“No,” Macy said, and she put her head on his shoulder and cried a little, at the thought of being loved by Neil Watrous, who was apparently without serious fault.

Neil pulled over and they kissed and then they drove to his apartment. They ran up the stairs, and by the time Neil had unlocked the door, Macy had her shoes and her blouse off and she flung herself on top of him, kissing his floppy brown hair and his big ears and the nicks where he’d cut himself shaving. They landed on his sofa. He kissed her stomach and her armpits. He ran his tongue from her ankle to her ear and they bit each other at every round and yielding spot. At one point, they found themselves with their heads hanging off the bed, their bare feet making dark, damp prints all the way up his wall.

“I was made to love you,” Neil said. He sang the whole Stevie Wonder song, naked, with his head touching the floor.

“And I you,” Macy said.

* * *

The summer before she’d met Neil, even though she was pretty sure that what she was looking for was not creative expression but something more like the makeover to end all makeovers, Macy had spent a week on scholarship at a writers’ conference. She looked at the men and women around her and thought, We’re like the people at Lourdes or the ones who go to the mud baths of that disgusting town with the sulfurous pools that everyone dunks themselves in, except we’ve brought our poems and short stories and inexpressible wishes, instead of scrofula and dermatitis.

She smoked like a chimney and wrote about whatever came into her head, but only for a few pages and then she ran out of steam. She wrote about the man who sat next to her in the workshop, a seventy-five-year-old engineer from Salt Lake City, trying desperately to come out of the closet after sixty years and a wife, two kids, and six grandchildren. The engineer invited Macy out for a drink after class and they found a small table at a bad restaurant. He put his hand on Macy’s and said, Dear, I love men. I know, Macy said. Everyone in their workshop knew; the engineer wrote about thighs like steel girders and asses like ball bearings and biceps like pistons. It’s fine, Macy said. I love them, too. The engineer said, Women, I mean their private parts, make me want to vomit. Present company excepted, of course. Well, then you’re making the right choice, Macy said. She swallowed her vodka gimlet and went to another reading. She went to every reading and performance that was scheduled and she went late, in hopes of finding a seat next to a good-looking man, or even just a nice man, and she stood in line to have books signed by people she thought were complete idiots, just to improve the odds. She wrote down a few other things that happened at the writers’ conference, in a lavender suede notebook, and then she threw the notebook into the dumpster.

The day after he and Macy had had their tête-à-tête in the coffee shop, Ray stopped in on his way home.

“I hope I’m not keeping you,” Ray said.

Randeane smiled and said he wasn’t and she poured his coffee.

“Randeane,” Ray said. “That’s sort of a Southern name, isn’t it?”

“Left-wing Jewish father, hence the Jewfro”—she ran her fingers through her curly hair—“and white-trash Pentecostal mother, hence the Randeane and the inability to finish my thesis. Yourself?”

Ray said that his parents weren’t that interesting. English peddlers on his father’s side, Norwegian farmers on his mother’s, and really not much to them.

“Well, take some scones home. I’ll just have to toss them tomorrow and I will be goddamned fuck-fried if I’m going to stay up and make bread pudding all night.”

“Absolutely not. Someone must be waiting up for you,” Ray said, and he thought that although it was difficult to imagine dying of embarrassment at his age, it wasn’t impossible.

“Not really,” Randeane said, and she handed him a shopping bag of scones.

Neil had come to Ray a few weeks after the coconut cake dinner and told his father that he planned to ask Macy to marry him. Ray meant to say, Congratulations, but he heard himself say that although people of his generation married for life, he, personally, thought it was one of the worst and stupidest ideas ever foisted on mankind, second only to Jesus died for our sins, which was just ridiculous. Neil looked at him, a little cow-eyed, and Ray meant to shut up but instead he said, Everyone who gets divorced feels betrayed, whichever side you’re on. But what’s worse — everyone who gets married feels betrayed. The other person will let you down, son — they can’t help it. We are all basically selfish beasts, and also, your wife will love your children more than she will ever love you. You’re just the hod carrier, kid. You know what your mother says: You promised to love me for better or worse, Ray Watrous.

Neil said, “I understand, Dad. I mean, I do.” He put his hand on Ray’s shoulder and Ray was sorry he’d opened his mouth. “It’s a little different for me and Macy. It’s just different for us.”

“I’m sure it is,” Ray said. “She’s a lovely girl. Let’s not keep our brides waiting.”

A lot of Ray’s friends called their wives their brides. Ray referred to Ellie that way once, in The Cup, saying, “I’ll bring some of these bagels home to my bride,” and Randeane flinched.

“That’s an awful expression,” she said. “It’s like you keep her in a closet with a white dress and veil. Your very own Miss Havisham.”

“Not at all,” Ray said. “It shows I still think of her the way I did when we were first married. It’s flattering.”

“In a pig’s eye,” Randeane said, and she shoved the bagels in a bag and threw Ray’s change on the counter.

Before winter started, Ray bought a dog. (“Do you even like dogs?” Eleanor said.) He walked it every night past Randeane’s house. Often Randeane was reading on her front porch; sometimes she was around the back, where she had a hammock, an outdoor fireplace, and two white plastic lounge chairs.

“Hammock or chaise longue?” Randeane said.

Ray said that he was more a chair kind of person, that hammocks were unpredictable.

“Oh, life’s a hammock,” Randeane said.

“Exactly my point. I’ll take the chair.”

“Remember Oscar? You met him once. He’s asked me to marry him,” Randeane said.

Ray sighed.

“Don’t sigh,” she said.

“That’s what Ellie says to me. She says, ‘Don’t sigh, Ray, this is not the Gulag.’ You know what else she says — after a few drinks, she says, ‘Ray, I promised to love you for better or worse.’ No one should make such a promise. I don’t think I even know what it means — for better or for worse. Why would you be married to someone for worse?”

“You don’t think I should marry him?”

“I met him once,” Ray said. “Firm handshake.”

“Come lie in the hammock.”

“I can’t do that,” Ray said.

“I’m pretty sure you can,” Randeane said. She kicked off her green slippers and climbed into the hammock. Her pants pulled up to her calves. “At least you can push me.” Ray gave her a push and sat down again.

“You could marry me,” Ray said. “We both know I’d be a better choice.”

Randeane looked up at the sky. “I guess so,” she said. “You, younger, single, maybe not so deeply pissed off and inflexible.”

“I don’t think we’ll be seeing that,” Ray said, and he stumbled a little getting off the chaise and took the dog home. He drove to The Yankee Clipper for a beer.

The parking lot was barely half full and Ray knew most of the cars. Leo Ferrante’s BMW, that would be Leo, celebrating having persuaded the people in charge of Farnham that neither a Stop & Shop nor a horse crematorium was anything to get upset about. Leo would be drinking with his clients and sitting near Anne Fishbach. Every Tuesday night, Anne left her senile husband with a nurse and drove over to the Clipper. (“Aren’t I allowed?” she’d said to Ray. “Does this make me a bad wife? After fifty-three years?”) She sat in a back booth and drank Manhattans until someone drove her home.

Ray recognized his next-door neighbor’s green pickup. He saw two guys from the Exchange Club walk out of the bar and recognize his car and Ray knew enough to go somewhere else. He drove about ten miles and pulled into a town he’d been to only once, twenty years ago, to pick up Jennifer from a Girl Scout jamboree. There were two bars, on either side of the wide main street. One awning said PADDY O’TOOLE’S BAR AND GRILLE and had gold four-leaf clovers in the window and on the awning. The other said BUCK’S SAFARI BAR and had a poster of Obama in one window and in the other, a poster of a black girl, with an enormous cloud of black curls, standing with her oiled legs apart, falling out of a tiny leopard-skin bikini. Ray thought, When it’s your time, it’s your time, and he went in.

No one minded him. Back in the day, some young man might have felt compelled to defend his manhood or his blackness or the virtue of a waitress and Ray might have found himself scuffling on a wet wood floor or a hard sidewalk, but not now. A young woman and her date slid off their barstools into a booth and the man indicated that Ray was free to take the man’s seat. The barmaid was short and wide, wearing a gold leather skirt and gold nail polish. Her hair was cut close to the scalp and dyed blond. She put a napkin in front of Ray and looked at him the way she looked at every other man at the bar.

“Just a beer, please. Whatever’s on tap.”

He could stay in Buck’s all night. He could probably move into Buck’s. They seemed like nice people. They were certainly a lot more tolerant of an old white man in their midst than the people at the Clipper would be if some strange black guy bellied up to the bar. Ray ordered another beer and a burger and he watched the Steelers crush the Colts.

“Christ,” Ray said, “no defense at all.”

“I hear you,” the man next to him said, and someone tapped Ray on the shoulder.

Ray’s elbow tipped his glass and the man to his left caught it and the barmaid said, Good catch, and Macy was standing beside him.

“What in Christ’s name are you doing here?” Ray said. “Where’s Neil?” In the five years since the wedding, Ray had never seen Macy take a drink, let alone in a black bar at the ass end of Meriden.

Macy shrugged. “I used to live around here,” she said. “I took a drive and … You want to get a booth?”

“I would,” said the man on Ray’s left. “I would definitely get a booth.”

“She’s my daughter-in-law,” Ray said.

“Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone,” the man said.

“I thought you were from Iowa. Kansas? Was I wrong?” Ray said, when they’d brought their beers to a table.

“No. I said my parents were dead and I had an aunt and uncle in Des Moines. Which I don’t.”

Macy drummed her fingers on the table.

“I love Neil,” she said. “I really do.”

“I’m sure you do. And he loves you. Christ, you have only to look at him — he thinks you hung the moon.”

“Really? He wants to have a baby.”

“Good,” Ray said. “Have two.” Babies having babies, he thought.

“He thinks I hung the moon? He’s the best man I know,” Macy said. “I’m just not who he thinks I am.”

“That’s not the worst thing in the world,” Ray said, and Macy put her hand, cool and wet from the beer, over his lips. Her hand smelled like grapefruit.

“I don’t mean he doesn’t know my essence on some metaphysical level. I mean I have lied to him on a million different occasions about a million things.”

Ray nodded.

“When I was ten, my mother fell down on the kitchen floor, and blood was pouring out of her nose. So, you know, I understood she was OD’ing on coke.”

Ray nodded again, like women OD’ing on coke in front of their children was as much part of his life as reading the paper.

“I had this amazing babysitter, Sammy. So — I don’t want this to take forever — when I’m fourteen my mother moves in with this guy, we’ll just call him The Asshole, and I moved in with Sammy. It turns out, Sammy’s a transvestite.”

Ray nodded again; he had defended a dozen middle-aged guys in dresses who were caught speeding.

“So, I do Sammy’s hair and nails. And I do his friends’, too, and Sammy basically sets me up in the tranny business in our TV room. I do hair, nails, and makeup every day after school and most of Saturday. When I graduate from high school, I have three thousand dollars in my savings account. Plus, I got into Bryn Mawr on scholarship and I graduated second in my class.” Macy smiled shyly. “My name’s not Macy. I changed it — I mean I changed it legally, when I was sixteen. Sammy’s mother’s name was Macy. So when we get to Bryn Mawr, Sammy is just the shit. All the parents love him. He drives off and he goes, Au revoir, honeybun, and don’t look back. He got a horrible staph infection, from the acrylic nails. Ten days in the ICU. It was terrible. He was a really, really nice man,” Macy said, wiping her face with a beer napkin.

“When I was in college,” Ray said, “I let a guy give me a blow job. Let me be clear. This guy paid me fifty bucks, which was a lot of money at the time, and I let him do me once a week for three years. If not for him, I would have had to drop out of college. You already know my father was a bum.”

“Thank you,” Macy said, and she laughed. Ray smiled.

“Also, you might already know this — I’m in love with Randeane.”

“I really like her,” Macy said. “Everything about her, she’s just so great. She’s read everything. I’m sort of in love with her.”

“Maybe,” Ray said. He sighed and spread his arms along the back of the booth. “I’m pretty sure not like this.”

One morning, Ray told Macy, he’d gotten to Randeane’s late, between the morning people and the lunchtime people, and there was a man sitting at Ray’s usual table.

Oh, Ray, Randeane said. This is my friend, Garbly Garble. Ray couldn’t make out the man’s name. He was taller than Ray, in his late thirties or early forties; it was harder and harder for Ray to tell anything except that someone was more or less his age. People under fifty looked like young people and people under thirty looked like children. The man stood up politely and shook Ray’s hand. He shook it twice, not the hard handshake that even men Ray’s age gave one another just to show they were still in the game, but a very gentle, slow handshake as if he was mindful of Ray’s osteoporosis or arthritis or some other damned thing that would make Ray’s hand crumble in his like an Egyptian relic. The man was clearly not thinking, So, this is the competition; he was thinking, Poor old Uncle Ray, or even poor Grandpa Ray, Civil War veteran. Nurse, get this man a chair. Ray walked out and across town to the office of Ferrante and Ticknor, Attorneys-at-Law. He walked along the narrow, cluttered river that ran through the park.

In Leo Ferrante’s office, Ray cleared his throat and Leo put his hand up.

“Don’t,” he said.

“What, you’re psychic?” Ray said.

Leo said he was sorry, that in the past three days he’d had two old friends come in to divorce their wives and marry hot chicks.

“I wouldn’t call her a hot chick,” Ray’d said.

Macy leaned forward, her face in her hands, lit up with the thought of Ray’s love for Randeane. She looked about twelve years old.

“You deserve happiness, Ray.”

“And Eleanor? What about her happiness?”

Macy did not say that Eleanor’s happiness was of no account to her.

Ray said, “Someone’s got to speak up for Ellie,” and he looked around Buck’s as if the gold-haired bartender or the young couple might say something on Ellie’s behalf. Like: Goddammit, that woman has — in her own way — devoted herself to you. Or maybe the bartender would say, Leave Ellie and your children will turn their backs on you. They think you’re a good man. Leave Ellie to shack up with a young lady from the coffee shop, half your age. No fool like an old fool. Ray turned back to Macy but he could still hear the bartender and Leo Ferrante talking to him. Your prostate alone’s enough to scare her off; you gotta get a guest room just to keep it somewhere. And your suitcase of Viagra and Levitra and don’t forget the Allopurinol and the Amlodipine and the Flomax, without which you’ll never piss again. And why shouldn’t she want children, young as she is? She could have them with that tall, good-looking man, Ray heard the bartender say, and he looked at her and she winked, gold powder sparkling on her eyelids and cheekbones, shining across her breasts. She brought them another pair of beers and a bowl of nuts.

“Do you have any food?” Macy said.

“What do you like?” the woman said.

Macy looked around and she sniffed the air.

“Catfish, maybe,” she said.

The woman shrugged pleasantly. “For two? Sweet-potato fries? Butter beans?”

“I have died and gone to heaven,” Macy said, and she almost clapped her hands.

“I don’t think I can eat all that,” Ray said.

“I love it. I’ll bring some home for Neil. Like they say, so good, makes you want to slap yo’ mama.” Macy took a sip of beer and smiled. “Sammy was a great cook. Actually, I’m a great cook.”

Turned on a dime, Ray thought. Two hours ago, she was going to hang herself in the garage because Neil didn’t know her essence; now she’s bringing him a Southern fried feast and they’ll eat in bed. Laughing. Ray thought of Randeane and his heart clenched so deeply, he put his hands on the table.

“You should bring some home for him. I really can’t eat that stuff anymore,” he said. “Call him. Tell him you’re coming home. Don’t be afraid to tell him about your mother and about Sammy. He’ll admire you for that stuff. For getting past it.”

“Okay,” Macy said, biting her lip. “You really think so?” She took out her phone and checked her text messages.

“He’s still at work,” she said, grinning like a kid. “He’s not even worrying.” She texted Neil and showed Ray: B home soon, w fab dinner. Love u so.

A big man came out of the kitchen and laid their food in front of them. He nodded toward the game on TV.

“That game’s over,” he said. “You know what Archie Griffin said, ‘Ain’t the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.’ These guys got no fight.”

“Hell of a player, Griffin. Two Heismans.”

The man paused, like he might sit down, and Macy moved over to make room.

“Great tailback,” the man said.

“Well, they measure these things differently now,” Ray said. “For my money, Bronko Nagurski was the greatest running back.”

“Ah,” the man said. “Played both sides of the ball. You don’t see that anymore.”

“No you don’t,” Ray said.

The man slipped the bill under Ray’s plate. “Come back soon.”

“Ray,” Macy said. “If you want to be with Randeane, if you need, I don’t know, support, I’ll be there for you. Neil, too.”

Ray picked at the fries, which were the best fries he could remember eating. If he did nothing else to improve his life, he could come to Buck’s every few weeks, have a beer and a plate of sweet-potato fries, and talk football with the cook.

Macy tapped the back of his hand with her fork. “Ray. You be the quarterback and I’ll be, I’ll be the guy who protects the quarterback. I’ll be that guy.”

“Honey,” Ray said. “There’s really no one like that in football.”

Right after Jennifer was born, they found cyst after cyst inside of Ellie, and when Jennifer was two, Ellie had a hysterectomy. Ray brought her an armful of red stargazer lilies from the florist, not from the grocery store or the hospital gift shop, because Ellie was particular about things like that, and when he walked in, she smiled, closed her compact, and set her lipstick on the bedside table. She’d brought her blue silk bathrobe from home and had brushed her hair back in a ponytail and tied it with a blue ribbon. She made room for Ray on the bed and they held hands.

“The kids are fine,” Ray said. “Nellie’s got Neil making the beds and Jennifer’s running into the wall about ten times a day. Then she falls down and laughs like a lunatic.”

“Oh, good,” Ellie said, and she looked out the window and sighed.

“Hey, no sighing,” Ray said. “Everything’s all right.”

Ellie said, “No, it’s not. I wanted one more baby. I wanted to be like everyone else. I didn’t want to go into menopause at thirty-three, thank you very much, and I am not looking forward to having Dr. Perlmutter’s hand up my you-know-what every six months for the rest of my life.”

Ray squeezed her hand. “For better or for worse. Isn’t that what we said? So, this is a little bit of worse.”

Ellie tossed his hand aside and squinted at him, like the sexy, fearless WACs he admired when he was a boy, girls who outran and outgunned the guys, even in skirts and heels.

“You think this is worse?” Ellie said. “Oh, shame on me. Sweetie, if this is what worse looks like — we’ll be just fine.”

She’d said the same thing when his blood pressure medication chased away his erections and Viagra brought them back, but not the same. They were unmistakably old-man erections; they were like old men themselves: frail and distracted and unsure. He’d lain in bed with his back to her, ashamed and sorry for himself. Ellie turned on the light to look at him. She had her pink silk nightgown on and her face was shiny with moisturizer. She pulled up on one elbow and leaned around him. He saw the creases at her neck and between her breasts, the tiny pleats at her underarms, the little pillow of flesh under her sharp chin, and he thought, She must be seeing the same thing. She snapped off the light and put her hand on his shoulder.

“So what, Ray? You think this is the worst? You think, finally, we’ve gotten to ‘for worse’?”

Maybe not for you, Ray thought.

“It’s not. It’s not better, but it’s not the worse,” she said.

Eleanor slid her hand under the covers and wrapped her fingers around his cock. She gave a little squeeze, like a salute. She pushed the covers back and pressed him onto his back. She talked while she stroked him. She told him about the guy who had come to do the patio and brought his four giant dogs with him; she told him about seeing one of Neil’s friends from high school who’d said, when she asked how his mother was, Great, she’s out on parole; she told him that she’d heard that young men shaved their balls now. Ray lifted his head and asked her if she would like that. I guess I would, she said. Is it unpleasant otherwise? Ray said. Oh, I don’t know, Ellie said. It’s like a mouthful of wet mitten — what do you think? When he stopped laughing, early in the morning, with a faint light falling on Ellie’s silver hair held back with a pink ribbon and her slim, manicured hands, he came.

* * *

Ray followed Macy home from Buck’s. He could see her dark outline in the car when they drove under a streetlight, her right arm up the whole time, talking on her phone. She honked twice when she got to her driveway and pulled in. Their porch light snapped on and the moths gathered. Macy ran onto the porch and Ray could see Neil, in just his underwear, reaching out for her with both arms.

Ray turned left instead of right and parked in front of Randeane’s. From the car, he saw the white edge of her chaise. He saw just the green tips of her slippered feet. He honked twice and drove home.