“I took a class,” he said. “In Paris, at the Cordon Bleu. When we go I’ll take you by there, it’s pretty great.”
We exchanged a smile that meant, on his part,
Because we are going, you know;
and on mine,
Yeah, right
. He mentioned France a lot, said,
You’ll love Aix
or
Wait’ll you see how much better the Metro is than the subway here
.
With his fingers he sprinkled some water onto the flour. He said, “I was thinking we could boil the carrots and sweet potatoes and then do them in a gratin dish with butter and a little Calvados.”
“No miniature marshmallows?” I said.
He looked up at me and smiled. “That would be the Wisconsin way?”
“The Mayer way.”
“You had Thanksgiving with the Mayers?”
“For the last eight years. It would be like twenty Mayers and Mayer cousins, and my mother and me. But really, it would be twenty-one Mayers and Mayer cousins and my mother, because I was one of them.”
Kilroy had worked the flour mixture into a loose dough, and now he washed his hands and wrapped the dough in plastic, then put it in the refrigerator. “We’ll give that an hour,” he said. “Did your mother mind?”
I thought about it. How before dinner she always stood in the kitchen while Mrs. Mayer and her sister, Aunt Peg, bustled around the stove and oven; how they gave her small tasks like putting out the butter, but more as a favor to her than so she could do one for them. Mike and I would be talking to his cousin Steve, or down in the basement with the younger kids organizing a darts competition, and whenever I passed the kitchen my mother gave me one of those mouth-only smiles. She usually went home right after we ate, left me to get a ride with Mike later. A couple of times she skipped it altogether, accepted another invitation but said to me,
No, go ahead—it’s fine
.
“I guess she went along with it,” I told Kilroy, and he nodded gravely.
“The famous line of least resistance, a real trap.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think,
Well, I’ll go along to get along
—and next thing you know you’re somewhere you never wanted to be without a ticket back.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was just Thanksgiving.”
He laughed. “Just Thanksgiving. That may well be an oxymoron.”
When the dough was ready, I peeled the apples, removing their green, lemony skins in long spirals. I cut the flesh into crisp, white slices, which I tossed with sugar and cinnamon and then arranged in the pie pan Kilroy had lined with thinly rolled pastry.
A little later, the pie in the oven and the vegetables cooked and
arrayed in a casserole, he went to take a shower. I poured myself some more coffee, thinking how much I liked his domesticity, the fact that
he’d
woken
me
to start cooking. I loved watching him in the kitchen, how he never used a cookbook but moved surely from step to step, as if he understood the ingredients so well that he knew just how much of each would yield the right combination of flavors.
I finished my coffee and then set about cleaning, sliding the peels into the garbage, washing the bowls and knives we’d used, wiping down the counters with a sponge that had been sprinkled with vinegar, one of his tricks.
I heard his shower shut off, and a moment later the phone rang. I stared at it. Somehow this was a first, the question of whether or not to answer his phone: it rang that rarely.
It rang a second time, and I crossed the room and picked it up, thinking it could be Simon asking us to stop for something on the way over. “Hello,” I said, and there was a long silence before a woman’s voice came over the line and said, very tentatively, hello back.
“Is this—” she said. “Do I have—” She started again: “Is Paul there?”
I nearly said she had the wrong number, but then I realized: Paul, his real name. “Just a minute,” I said, and I carried the cordless handset into his bedroom, my palm over the mouthpiece, and knocked on the partly closed bathroom door.
He pulled it open with his foot, naked, a smile about to alight on his face. The room was full of steam, the cedary smell of his soap heavy in the damp air. He held a drift of shaving cream in his palm, stiff like beaten egg whites.
“Phone,” I said, and I handed it to him and walked away.
I thought of closing the bedroom door on my way out, but I didn’t, and then it was too late. I heard his hello, and then a long silence. In the kitchen I turned on the water, then quickly turned it off again. The woman’s voice had sounded—there was no other word for it—cultured. Older. Although older than myself or older than Kilroy, I didn’t know.
“No,” he said, and then there was another silence. “Because I don’t,” he said, and then, “As a matter of fact I do,” and then I turned on the water and let it run until something caught at my peripheral vision and I looked into the bedroom in time to see the handset land with a small bounce in the center of the bed.
Dressed in his usual jeans but also a pressed white shirt, Kilroy came into the kitchen a little later and clamped the handset to the wall unit. He bent and cracked the oven door. “Ten more minutes,” he said, and he let
the door fall back so hard that through the window I saw the pie jump a little.
“Who was that?” I said.
He licked his lips. “My mother.” He stood still for a moment, then picked up the sponge and began wiping the counters I’d already wiped, with sharp, jerky strokes.
“I did that,” I said, and he tossed the sponge into the sink from across the room. He looked at me, but in a strange way—at my mouth rather than my eyes, his face too blank. He turned and walked into the bedroom, and I followed, watched him stand for a moment at the window and then kick off his shoes and settle on the bed with a pillow behind him. From his bedside table he took up the book he was reading.
“Are you OK?”
He nodded.
I went and sat on the edge of the bed, down near his feet. He wore black socks, and I cupped his toes, then released them. “What’s she doing today? Or they. What are they doing?”
“They,” he said from behind his book, “are having a goose, although at this point, they are also probably having a cow.”
I waited for him to look up and smile at me, or at the very least receive my smile, but he didn’t—he just sat there, one knee crossed over the other, his face obscured by the book.
Outside it was cold and quiet—businesses closed, few cars on the streets. The sky was thick with dusk, pulling darkness down onto the city. Wrapped in my coat and warmest wool scarf, I held the casserole while Kilroy carried the pie, extended in front of him like a folded flag at a military funeral. For the sixth or seventh time in the last few hours, I went over his part of the phone conversation I’d overheard.
No. Because I don’t. As a matter of fact I do
. It was easy to imagine what his mother had said: Do you want to come for dinner? Why not? Do you have plans? What I didn’t understand was how curt he’d been, and then how bothered. That was the only word for it: bothered. Her hello had sounded sophisticated, worldly. Like someone who’d have a friend who said “veecheesoizzz”—or who’d say it herself. Like someone who’d eat at the restaurants Kilroy disdained, who’d have the patina of entitlement he abhorred. If he’d been a trust-fund baby, what had happened? When had he fallen off track? Or climbed off—I didn’t think he did much accidentally.
We turned onto Simon’s street and walked past my car, the windshield so filthy I’d have to bring paper towels and Windex the next time I needed to move it.
At the brownstone, we deposited our food on the kitchen table. Kilroy got himself a glass of wine and joined Lane and a few others in the living room while I stayed with Simon, who was standing over a saucepan at the stove.
“Making gravy?” I said.
“No one else knew how. I told them you had to get the fat out of the roasting pan, and they were all, like, ‘Gross.’ ” With a wire whisk he stirred quickly, running the loops all over the bottom of the pan. “Being from the Midwest has its uses,” he added.
“Speaking of which, did you talk to your parents this morning?”
He grinned. “My mother’s all business on the major holidays. The first thing out of her mouth was ‘Now don’t forget about the rice for your soup.’ I was like, ‘Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.’ Oh, and it’s snowing there, they got three inches last night.”
“Your soup?” I said.
“Turkey soup, babe. Gotta make it. It’ll be good, we’ll eat it for weeks. You’ll see, or you would if you were ever here.” He gave me a pointed look, then dipped a spoon into the gravy and handed it to me. “Here, taste this.”
From the deep, rising smell I could tell how hot it was, and I blew on it first. I sipped and it was like drinking pure sin, salty and fat enough that my lips felt coated. I finished it off and returned the spoon to the saucepan for some more.
“Double dipping?” he said. “From Carrie Bell? I can hardly believe my eyes.”
“Shut up.” I sipped again, then put the spoon into the crowded sink.
“Did you talk to your mother?” he said.
“Last night.” Hearing her voice had made me miss her, then made me realize I’d
been
missing her, without really knowing it.
“How about Mike?” Simon said.
I shook my head. I hadn’t talked to him in a month, hadn’t written to thank him for the tape, had somehow never even sent him the damned postcard of the Empire State Building. Three inches of snow. I wondered if Mike had gotten home. I imagined Mr. Mayer wheeling him up their shoveled walk to the front door, the lawn iced with white on both sides, but then the image broke down: I had no way to get him up the brick steps.
I headed back to the brownstone living room, which was hardly ever used. They’d worked hard to make it festive: there were tiny white votive candles everywhere, clustered in the dark corners of the room, lined up on the broken mantel. Simon had even begun a mural on one wall, a picture of a real dining room: a table laden with napkins and silverware and glasses of wine. He’d evidently run out of time, though; the entire thing was sketched, but only one edge was painted.
Kilroy was talking to Lane and her girlfriend, Maura, who was tall and broad-shouldered, with thick auburn hair and dark brown eyes, the darkest eyes I’d ever seen on a redhead. She wore a gauzy rust-colored dress and was beautiful in exactly the opposite way Lane was beautiful—tall and strong and colorful versus tiny and delicate and pale. I joined them, and she turned to me and said, “I was just telling Kilroy that he looks incredibly familiar to me.”
He raised his glass for a sip of wine. He shrugged and said, “I have one of those faces.”
She wrinkled her brow. “What faces?”
“You know, one of those dominant facial types some people have. You have one, too. Carrie and Lane are more recessive.”
Lane grinned. “I’m not sure I like the idea of being recessive.”
“You should,” he said. “It means the more unusual in you has power over the more usual. In your face it’s your chin and your eyebrows.”
Her pointed chin and her narrow, arched eyebrows. I remembered the photograph she’d shown me, in which her child self sat on her grandmother’s lap. Even then her chin and eyebrows had been distinctive.
“Is Kilroy your first or last name?” Maura asked.
“Neither, it’s just a nickname.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Paul Fraser.”
“Fraser,” she said thoughtfully. “Fraser.”
He pressed his elbow into me. “Shall I tell them how I got my nickname?”
“I don’t know how you got your nickname.”
He gave me a blank look. “You don’t?”
I thought of our first evening together, in Washington Square Park:
Is Kilroy your first or last name?
It’s neither
.
It’s your middle name?
My name is Paul Eliot Fraser. There’s no Kilroy in there at all, it’s just what I’m called
.
Why?
Because it’s not in there at all
.
What was he up to? Lane looked at me curiously, then looked away.
“Well,” he said. “I’ll tell you too, then. You know that Second World War thing ‘Kilroy Was Here’? That American soldiers drew all over the place, with that little face?” He shifted his wine to his left hand and drew something in the air with his right forefinger. “It was this big deal, a kind of graffiti—they drew these little faces and wrote ‘Kilroy Was Here’ next to them. Well, I was a big Second World War buff in high school, I read everything I could about it, and after a while I started writing ‘Kilroy Was Here’ on my friends’ notebooks and stuff, their lockers, just for the hell of it, Kilroy Was Here, Kilroy Was Here. Before long they started calling me Kilroy, and it stuck.”
I drank from my wine and didn’t look at any of them. I was embarrassed that he hadn’t told me before, that I’d learned the innocuous story of how he got his nickname along with Lane and Maura. There was a pressure behind my ribcage, a breathless feeling. I inhaled deeply and then let it out again. In Madison I’d wanted something different. I’d wanted life to be less predictable, people to be less predictable. Standing next to Kilroy, his hand holding a wineglass just inches from my shoulder, I thought:
Be careful what you wish for
. Then I thought:
No. Be different, too. Be OK with this
.
Leaving the brownstone after dinner a few hours later, Kilroy and I headed west, away from his apartment, without discussing it. We walked without talking, making our way south and farther west until we’d reached the Hudson—big, dark warehouses behind us and in front of us the river, fast-moving and streaked with light. New Jersey was opposite, but it seemed farther than a river’s width away, part of some other, lesser world. I thought of the thousand miles I’d crossed, the stretches and stretches of empty land that were quiet and black now. And Madison out there, its little spill of lights glimmering on Thanksgiving night.
He led me to a bench where we sat down, our shoulders touching. In front of us, a spent pier jutted into the water, caved between the pilings as if it were made of cardboard. He arched his neck and looked at the sky. “It might have been good to be an astronomer,” he said. “Living in the middle of nowhere in an observatory on a hill.”