White Horses

The funeral was over quickly because nobody had much to say. Aside from the priest, Davey was the only one who spoke, and the main substance of his eulogy was to invite everyone to a nearby bar following the service. He found me once we were there, and we moved away from the others who had come along.

“There’s probably no better way to honor the man’s memory,” he said. He had lost his tie but still looked uneasy in a suit.

“That’s probably true.”

We had a drink. We had several. I always felt a certain stiffness speaking with Davey and the drinking helped that.

“It was a nice service,” I said.

“It was good of you to come.”

The bartender came back with the drinks and I lifted my glass before speaking and then put it down again.

“He was my father, too.”

Davey nodded but I am not sure he believed it. I’m not sure I believed it. There was not much more than that to say and so we drank and eventually we turned around and Davey focused on a table with two girls and eventually they noticed him.

“Let’s give it a go,” he said. He finished his drink without taking his eyes from them. “I could use something to bury my grief in.”

“A real prince charming.”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, you don’t ride in on a white horse for a girl who doesn’t care much what she mounts.” It was a familiar line and I repeated the end of it with him in a half whisper.

“Besides,” said Davey, “there’s probably no better way to honor the man’s memory.”

“You’ve used that one already.”

Davey shrugged and shook his head and sauntered off toward the table.

You don’t ride in on a white horse for a girl who doesn’t care much what she mounts. I remembered the last time I heard my father say it, the last time I heard him say anything. He was drunk as he ever was when I brought Angie home for the first and only time because she thought it was very important that they meet. She had cooked because that was the sort of thing she could do in strange houses, and he seemed happy because he was always happy with the smell of food in the house. Probably no one had cooked for him in a very long time.

And then when she served it he confused his hungers or maybe just suffered an abundance of them and reached out and squeezed her while she bent over to put plates on the table, and she looked for a minute like she might cry and then looked to me and ran from the house. And then he said it, screamed it so violently that it made Angie turn and look to me as if I should do something. And I did do something. I drove my fist into his face and he was so filled with liquor and with sadness that he had not bothered to fight back and only lay there. Through the screen door, rebounding on its hinges, Angie was watching. I hit him again and again until his lips were slick with saliva and blood and he lay there sobbing and when I looked again she was no longer in the doorway.

It was the last time I saw my father and nearly the last time I saw Angie. None of that mattered now. He was dead and she might as well have been. There was something vulgar about recalling lost love after such a funeral but I did not have much say in the matter. It was not my father’s fault that I lost Angie and it certainly was not Angie’s fault that I lost my father. When you drew it out practically you could see the sense it made but it didn’t convince you. It didn’t convince you and so it didn’t stop you from hating her. It didn’t stop you from loving her either, and that was the more serious problem.

The best thing to do would be to think of nothing at all. I watched Davey at the table and suddenly I envied him. I envied him and thought that he probably envied me and probably everybody envied everybody else when they are caught up in such things as confusing a girl you used to fuck and a dead father you used to beat. I envied how correct Davey was—there was probably no better way to honor the man’s memory—and something about the barrenness of the bar and the town and the whole stretch of earth and the liberating knowledge that I would never be there again inspired me to do the same.

At the table I spoke to the one that Davey had lost already. She was not pretty, not exactly, but if a long time from now you would think of her as being pretty and remember her always as being pretty and never have to face her and argue with fact, then she might as well be. Why the hell not. I had drunk to the point where my face and skin were hot and the whiskey on my tongue did not feel sharp or bitter. I lost the present for a bit but when I caught back up I could tell that disinterest was the sort of thing that worked with the girl. Her name was Maura.

“Do you play pool?” she asked.

“No, but I’m willing to give it a shot.”

“That’s very good,” she said. “I’ll teach you a thing or two about shooting.”

The table was empty and I found the wooden triangle and racked. Maura rearranged the balls so that the perimeter alternated between solids and stripes. “It’s all that matters when racking,” she said. Davey and his girl came over and asked to play doubles. Something about being one on one with a girl always tightened him up and you could tell by the way they had come over that conversation had gone south the moment they’d been left alone.

Davey broke and was very good. His girl was not. Maura was and I was not. It equaled out. I missed my first shot by a little, and when my turn came around again, Maura wrapped her arms around my body from behind and showed me how to shoot correctly. Her slight breasts were firm against my back and she pushed my right arm. The target ball was on the edge of a pocket and I would have made it with closed eyes, but I let her guide my motion and when it sunk she got excited. I missed the next shot badly and scratched.

Davey and the girl he was with won and demanded that we buy a round of tequila. It set a precedent for the night that I was all too happy to play along with. After seven games we were drunk and the crimson felt looked like the inside of a coffin. The music seemed dull and far away and I wanted to be closer to it so I asked Maura to dance.

I was not much of a dancer and no one else was dancing. We stood close to the speaker and the volume seemed to dull our graceless steps. I twirled Maura around and dipped her and she kicked up her leg and we did it a few more times because there was not much else either of us could do.

“You’re a very good dancer,” she said.

“You’d be a very bad critic.”

“No, really. You’re very good.”

“I’m better drunker.”

“So let’s get you drunker.”

The bartender was not there and Maura grabbed a bottle of red wine from behind the bar. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Tuck this in your pants.”

“Tuck it in yours.”

“Isn’t any room.” She lifted her blouse to show the waist of her white jeans and pulled at one of the belt loops to illustrate her point. I took the bottle and slid it into my waist. The air outside was calm and warm and once we were a few blocks from the bar we slowed down.

“You can take that out now,” Maura said.

I stopped walking and hooked my finger into one of her belt loops and pulled her towards me. “You take it out for me.”

She laughed and pushed me away. “Does that ever work for you?”

“Of the girls who have me steal wine or just all the girls in general.”

“Just the ones with stealing wine. I don’t want to know about the others.”

“Yes, they all fall for it.”

“Well, I won’t.”

“You’ll come around.”

I took the bottle out myself and gave her my free hand.

“Let’s go to the water.”

We walked between the lake and the ocean. The far side of the lake was abandoned and dark but for a perfectly spaced row of streetlamps. A thin fog hung low in the air and the halos of lanterns on our side of the lake sunk into the darkness and turned the world a very pure yellow. We walked on the pavement until there was a break in the seawall and we turned toward the ocean and walked down the wooden stairs onto the sand and left our shoes. It was dark and the lazy waves of the Atlantic lapped against the white sand and we walked until our feet touched the water and then retreated onto dry sand again. Neither of us had a corkscrew so we pressed the cork down into the bottle.

“Is this wine any good?” she said. She tried it and handed it to me.

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Well, then it’s very good. Let’s pretend it’s very good and that you paid a whole lot of money for it.”

“All right, then. It’s a very good wine and I paid a whole lot of money for it. What’s the occasion?”

Maura found a shell in the sand and tapped it twice against my ring finger. “An engagement,” she said.

“I think I’d make a lovely trophy husband.” I took a fistful of sand and let it slide through my fingers and when it was all gone I took the bottle and drank.

“We’ll see about trophy.”

“You’ll concede on the lovely then? I’ll take lovely.”

“Yes. Take lovely. You’re lovely.”

Maura took the bottle of wine and twisted its base a few inches into the sand. I leaned back onto my elbows and she pressed her body down onto mine and kissed me.

“Come on,” she said, “let’s swim.”

Maura stood and undressed and I followed. The ocean was cold and Maura gave a soft sound of surprise when our toes touched the water.

“It would be very romantic if it were warmer,” she said. She was very thin and either I or the red wine or both were convinced that she was also very beautiful. Even as a silhouette against the yellow glow of streetlights I could make out the smooth, lean curve of her hips. We shivered together in the bay. She came close and wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my back and she came down softly onto me and we shivered.

I felt married that night. Maura occupied one room of a small yellow bungalow, and we occupied it together. The scarred wooden floors of her bedroom had that poor softness to them that translates to a feeling of being home.

“I’ll leave very early,” I told her. My head was against her shoulder and I whispered even though there was no one there to hear us. “You won’t be awake.”

“That’s all right.”

We were quiet for some time and I listened to the sound of her breath going in and out. Or maybe it was the sound of the ocean crashing down against the sand and then slithering back again. I was drunk and half-asleep and it was difficult to tell.

“Listen,” she said, long after I thought she had gone to sleep. Her fingers began moving in my hair. “I have to be up by nine. Could you call me from wherever you are then?”

“The alarm would be more reliable.”

“It’s not as lovely as your voice,” she whispered. Her fingers had stopped moving.

It was good to be in love for a night. We were tender in the way you can only ever be with strangers. I would leave in the morning and it was good to be so unmistakably in stringless love with such definite expiration. There was comfort in knowing that you could say just what you wanted and not worry about what the words meant because in the morning they would be gone and so would you.

When I woke the sky was gray and barely lit and I crept out from her room into the kitchen. I had not eaten since the funeral and was overcome with hunger. I found some eggs and cooked them on Maura’s stove. I could not find a plate and my head was filled with sound and so I set the skillet down on a paper towel and ate directly from it. The kitchen table ended in a window of old, warped glass and the white gulls were gracefully frozen in the gray morning sky like a slow parade of kites. They were mesmerizing and I nearly fell back to sleep watching them and the melancholy was only broken by the smell of burning plastic. Beneath the skillet, the table was burned and there was a great brown circle on the surface.

I could not think of anything else to do and so I left it there. Breath seemed very loud and I left through the side door. It was a screen door and it swung noisily open but I did not mind so much. I had made up my mind to leave and, once I had, the sound of a screen door groaning on its coils was very comforting because every screen door in the world made that sound.

It was a despicable thing to do. That much I know. It was a despicable thing to do but if I offered to pay for it she would refuse. And if she did not then I would rescind because I did not have the money to spare. So why not save everyone the breath. Better to let her down now than to make promises I could not keep and let her down a little down the road. Being let down by a stranger is not all that bad for the self and hatred is a better consolation prize than pity.

She would have been very adamant in refusing, I thought again as I walked down the quiet morning road. The pavement was littered with white sand, delivered on the early wind off the sea. Very adamant, I thought. She is just that kind of woman. I repeated it over again to convince myself, but in all the dark charisma of night I would not have dreamed of slighting her in any way, and I probably would not have known her very well in the morning.