I Thought You Were Dead (5 page)

“There,” Paul said, returning to the table. “Apparently fate wanted him to have it.”

Bits rolled her eyes, having witnessed similar scenes countless times. Carl scowled and said nothing, but Paul knew that deep down, Carl wanted to go dig the little strip of paper out of the wastebasket and read it. Paul foiled him by helping Bits clean up and dumping their leftovers into the wastebasket on top of the fortune.

When Bits offered to give him a ride to their parents' house, he told her he'd ride with Beverly.

“You go on ahead. I think I'll stay here one more night,” Beverly said. “The chair in your father's room folds out. It's really quite comfortable. If you'd just check when you get home to make sure I didn't leave anything plugged in …”

“I already checked, Mom,” Bits said. “We'll be fine. I have my key.”

“I'll be home to change clothes before church,” Beverly said, gathering up her coat and purse. “I think everybody needs to get some sleep.”

They walked her to Harrold's room. Paul was surprised to note, as he leaned in to kiss his father good night on the forehead, that Harrold had tears running down both his cheeks.

“The nurse said that's just a neurological response,” Bits told him. “Supposedly it has nothing to do with how he's feeling.”

“Supposedly,” Paul said. As Beverly used a tissue to dry her husband's eyes, Paul realized it was the first time he'd ever seen his father cry.

3
Brrzzlfft!

A
s his sister drove, Paul stared out the window. The city had changed since he'd moved away, but mostly at the extremities, where its distant suburbs continued to expand into the surrounding farmland, and at the center, the downtown area where commerce and culture collided. Between the center and the outskirts, it all looked much the same. They passed his old high school, which Bits said was now a school for the performing arts, attracting kids from all over the city. Paul saw the alleyway where he used to get high before homeroom. He recalled the day he thought the pot he'd smoked was oregano or Minnesota ditch weed, a rip-off, then realized, as the bell rang, that he'd been reading and rereading the first sentence of his
Scholastic Weekly
for over an hour.

The house was a three-bedroom stucco Federal-style home in South Minneapolis. His parents had put on a new roof the summer before, with plans to sell, but they hadn't found any condos to their liking yet. There'd been talk of their finding some retirement community down south, in Arizona or Texas, but it never got beyond talk. He couldn't imagine them living anywhere but Minnesota.

Bits showed him where Beverly hid the spare key, under a flowerpot on the front porch, then used her own key to let them in. Paul dropped his bags at the bottom of the stairs. Bits told him he might want to build a fire in the woodstove and asked
him if there was anything he needed. It was going to be strange. As best he could recall, he'd never spent a night in the house alone.

“Just the phone,” he told her.

Bits asked him who he was calling. “You've got a girlfriend?”

“Yes, she's a girl, and yes, she's a friend.”

Bits furrowed her brow. They were in the kitchen.

“What's that supposed to mean?” she said, leaning against the counter. “Are you seeing this person or not?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of'?”

“What are you?” Paul asked. “A private detective?”

“Don't get all whiny, Paulie,” she said. “I'm just asking because I didn't think you were ready to jump back into the dating pool.”

He noticed his mother had removed his wedding pictures from the photo gallery she kept on her refrigerator door, including the five-by-eight of him and Karen cutting their wedding cake, him in his tux, her in her gown and veil. He wondered what Beverly had done with the photographs. She had boxes of thirty-year-old Christmas cards in the attic. She'd never get rid of something as historically significant as a wedding picture.

“I'm not ready,” he told his sister. “That's the whole point. I'm in the pool but only up to my ankles. It's sort of a mutual I-don't-want-a-relationship relationship. We just really like each other, but we're trying not to get ahead of ourselves.”

“Is it exclusive?” his sister asked.

“For me it is,” he answered. “She has a preexisting relationship.”

“She does?”

“Yeah, but it's not going anywhere. She's free to see me if she wants to, and she told him about me. There's nothing sneaky going on. Nobody's playing anybody. We're very open about
everything — there's no rule that says you're not allowed to date more than one person at a time.”

“Well,” his sister said, “just make sure she's good to you. I don't want you getting involved with the wrong person.”

“That's exactly why we're hanging out. If I met the right person right now, I wouldn't know what to do. We're not getting involved. That's what makes her right.”

As much as he'd always loved women (beginning in second grade, when he'd been unable to take his eyes off Miss Lasseter's pendulous boobs for the entire school year), he'd recently come to the conclusion that he didn't know very much about them. He honestly couldn't say if he thought about love too little or too much. He recognized that there was a mystery and a magic to it and had spent the past twenty years trying to solve the mystery, even though he knew he ran the risk of destroying the magic. By the end of his relationships, he'd usually spent more time analyzing and thinking about love than he'd spent actually enjoying or participating in it. Sometimes it seemed as if it was the guys who gave it the least amount of thought who had the best luck, the one-dimensional monobrows with minimal vocabularies whom women seemed drawn to. For Paul, the longer his relationships went on, the more confusing they became, and the whole point of his relationship with Tamsen was never to let it get that far. Keep it simple. She wasn't really wrong for him except insofar as she wasn't really available either. Had she been fully and immediately available, asking for or expecting more than he could offer, he'd probably run the other way, though winning her affections was nevertheless his goal. It didn't make sense, but it was fun as long as he didn't overthink it. He knew he wasn't going to have much luck explaining that to his sister. After the divorce, he and Bits had talked on the phone at length about what went wrong and how he and Karen had been a bad match from the start, and how Bits had had misgivings as early as the wedding.
Paul made her promise that if she ever had misgivings again, she would speak up immediately.

“What's her name?”

“Tamsen.”

“Tamsen? I like it. What sort of name is Tamsen?”

“It's an old family name,” he said. “French, I think.”

“She has a last name?”

“Prouty.”

“And she's old enough to name all four Beatles?”

“Pete Best, Stu Sutcliffe, Billy Preston, Brian Epstein, George Martin, and Alan Freed too. She's only five years younger than me.”

“You're sure you're ready to date someone from within your actual peer group?” his sister said. “That sounds like a pretty big step.”

“You're the one who told me I needed someone who could kick my ass,” he said.

“She kicks your ass?”

“No,” he said, “but she could.”

“How did you meet?”

“We had lunch together,” he told his sister. “Strictly business. At first.”

Tamsen had called to ask if he'd be willing to link his book's Web site to an e-commerce site she was working for. His name was on the cover of a book called
Windows 95 for Morons,
but he'd only finished the project, he explained, after taking over for the original author, who died before he could turn in the first draft. She told him not to worry about it. Her employer, a company called WebVan.com, just needed actual content to attract browsers to their Web site, meaning articles, news items, humor pieces, short stories, even poetry. That first phone call, they talked for over an hour. When she said she was going to be
in Worcester for a business conference and suggested they meet for lunch, his heart raced.

“Is she divorced?”

“Yeah, but I wouldn't want to see someone who wasn't.”

“Kids?”

He shook his head.

“They tried but they couldn't get pregnant.”

“So what's this other relationship she has?” Bits asked. “It's not serious?”

“He's a radiologist,” Paul said. “Stephen. He and his wife are separated and getting divorced, but they have two boys, ten and twelve. I guess it makes things fairly complicated. Her best friend, Caitlin, told me she likes me much better.”

“‘She,' Tamsen, or ‘she,' Caitlin?”

“Caitlin likes me better than she likes Stephen,” Paul clarified. He'd met Caitlin at a dinner party and had “passed the best-friend test with flying colors,” according to Tamsen. He usually felt as if he came off more awkward than charming, but it had been a fun party. Caitlin had confided to Paul, in the kitchen, that Stephen was predictable and a bit boring, almost a slightly taller version of Tamsen's ex-husband. Caitlin said she thought Tamsen needed someone who brought out her creative side.

“But as I said, she's free to see whoever she wants. And so am I. Not that I want to. We have a deal to be completely open and honest with each other and nonjudgmental. We can say anything to each other.”

“That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,” his sister said.

“You could be right,” Paul said. “If it doesn't work out, we still have jealousy and deception to fall back on.”

“It's your call,” his sister said.

“Which is why I need a phone,” Paul said. He hoped he wasn't too late. “I promised I'd call when I got home from the hospital.”

“Can I listen in?” Bits asked. She'd eavesdropped once in high school, when Paul had nervously phoned a girl, and never let him forget what he'd said: “I like what's you about you …”

“No,” he said.

His sister offered to pick him up in the morning before church, but he said he'd ride over with Beverly. He hadn't brought a suit to wear, but he had a nice shirt and could borrow a tie from his father's collection, probably one of the same ties he'd borrowed back in high school, and throw a sweater over it.

When Bits had gone, he opened the refrigerator, though he knew better than to think he'd find a beer or a bottle of wine or whiskey anywhere in the house. Upstairs, he threw his suitcase on the bed in the guest room and opened it. He had five nips left. The liquor stores would be closed tomorrow, so he saved four to tide him over and opened one as a nightcap, then went into his father's office to use the phone.

The idea of talking to Tamsen still excited him. That first time on the telephone, they'd been professional and stuck to business initially, but in no time they were sharing personal details, their favorite bands, places, and foods. Their tastes were similar, and he'd wanted to know more. He'd driven to Worcester two days later to meet her for lunch with nothing in mind other than to play it by ear. He found the restaurant without much trouble, a sushi place where they'd ordered plum wine. She was far prettier than he'd dared to hope, approaching petite with straight shoulder-length hair the color of Mexican rosewood. She had hazel eyes that caught the light, expressive eyebrows, good cheekbones, smooth skin, perfect teeth, and lips that he could only think of as kissable. Her hands were small and soft but her grip was firm. Her body was (it was only natural to compare) better than Karen's, who had something of a boyish build. Again, they'd eased into each other, talked about business, the weather, sports, New England, politics. She played poker. She liked to go
to the beach by herself and listen to CDs of female jazz vocalists who only needed one name, Ella and Billie and Bessie and Blossom and Judy. She had a fish tank. She'd taken cooking classes but often had yogurt and carrots for dinner. They'd talked until it became clear to both of them that they wanted to move beyond chitchat.

He'd asked her about her family. Her brother, Mike, lived in California. Her mother, Judith, lived in Kingston, Rhode Island, a teacher in the South County school system (that they were both teachers' kids was one of many similarities). Tamsen's father, John, had been an engineer for General Electric who traveled a great deal on business. Her fondest memories of him were of sitting side by side on the couch watching reruns of the TV show
Hogan's Heroes
when he came home from work. He'd just turned fifty when he was diagnosed with cancer. Tamsen had been engaged to a man named Donald, but they moved the wedding day up when they heard, even though she'd begun to have doubts about the relationship — in fact, she'd told Paul, she knew deep down that it wasn't going to work, but she'd been in denial and felt she couldn't call it off because of her father's illness. She wanted him to think she was going to be happy.

When it was Paul's turn, he limned his own failed marriage for her in brief, taking care not to sound bitter or blaming, aware that poor-mouthing one's ex was bad form. When Tamsen asked him if he was dating anybody, he told her honestly that he'd forgotten how. He'd asked women out twice and had been shot down both times, his overtures too tentative and timorous. Tamsen had advised him that if he wanted someone to know he was interested in her, he had to tell her in no uncertain terms, at which point he put his arms around Tamsen and kissed her. It was the most impulsive thing he'd ever done, resulting in the most exciting kiss he'd ever experienced, like in the movies, surprising him as much as it surprised her, given that he had zero confidence as a
lover, husband, or partner. The plum wine had emboldened him, but his first thought was to apologize. The way she smiled and kissed him back told him that no apologies were necessary and that he'd correctly interpreted the signs and signals she'd been sending. They'd kissed three more times, the last when they were standing in the parking lot, and she said she had to go, but not before revealing that her psychic had told her she was going to meet someone whose name started with
P.
He didn't believe in psychics, but he knew better than to say so. She'd kissed him good-bye in a way that didn't say good-bye at all. “Brrzzlfft,” he'd said. He'd meant to say an actual word.

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