“No.”
“Will he find out?”
“Probably.”
“Am I going to have to fight him?”
“More likely you’ll have to listen to him sing ‘Norwegian Wood’ on the sitar under my window.”
“Then I’ll really have to beat him up.”
“Your neighbors will probably beat you to it.”
He laughed, hard. “They really fucking will.” He looked around. “Mandy is not going to like all these books.”
I didn’t have bookshelves so I’d stacked them in columns in various parts of the room. They looked like a grove of stunted trees. “No Ethan Frome as far as the eye can see.”
“Shut up. Now.”
“Just tell her that,” I said, louder. She wasn’t even home yet. “Tell her I’ve never read it.”
“No. We cannot mention it. Don’t you get that?”
“I’ve never ever wanted to talk about Ethan Frome more than I do right now.”
“She is going to fucking hate you.” But he was leaning back against the timeline on the wall and laughing again.
I got a job at another restaurant, the most expensive one I could find. It was out on the way to Lake Champlain and farm country and didn’t look like much from the outside but inside it was still a house, divided up into small rooms. Some rooms only had one table, some had a few. The restaurant was intimate. People came there for its intimacy. During the interview I was asked if I would be available to work graduation weekend, May 12 through 14, doubles if necessary.
“I can’t give you this job unless you can promise me that,” Kevin, the baby-faced manager, told me.
I promised. I was supposed to be the maid of honor at my friend Saskia’s wedding in Massachusetts that weekend. In one of my unpacked garbage bags was the lilac dress she’d sent me to wear.
“Your brother is the kindest, most generous man,” Mandy said. “I know because I’m an empath. My mother always told me, find the man with the biggest heart. Do you know, he scrapes the ice off my windshield every morning?” It was April in Vermont and still snowing some mornings, so we were not talking a few months of scraping. More like six or seven. That was kind of him. But her Wes and my Wes were entirely different people. My Wes was guarded, razor sharp, all edge. Her Wes was a “cuddle bear,” so open, so sweet. Sweet was not a word we used in our family. Sweet was for suckers. Honesty, generosity, tenderness were not valued either. We had been raised to sharpen our tongues and defend ourselves to the death with them. We loved each other, we amused each other, but we were never unguarded, and we were never surprised by a sudden plunge of the knife.
Mandy was tall and sexy and worked as an assistant in a physical therapist’s office because, she said, it was the place she’d been treated after “an accident in the home” when she was seventeen. Wes told me later her father had kneecapped her with her brother’s baseball bat.
Wes and Mandy had no books. I couldn’t even find a pen. That whole side of him—the awards at boarding school, the plays he wrote and directed in college until he dropped out—he’d buried to be with her.
I didn’t see him much. He worked days putting electricity into ugly new houses on beautiful parcels of land, and I worked nights running up and down stairs, serving families in their best clothes and couples getting engaged in the small rooms. Kevin didn’t fire me when I told him about the wedding in Massachusetts. But he was angry and put me on probation and made Tiffany give me the worst tables, the ones on the third floor. But we all drank together after the restaurant was closed, after we’d set the tables for the next night and tipped out the kitchen and bar. One night we all ended up on the floor of the Azul Room, the fanciest of all the rooms, the one where we put the governor and the provost of the university when they came in. We got into a big argument about something, the assassination of JFK, I think. We were all pretty drunk and shouting at the same time and Reenie, who’d studied child psychology but couldn’t find a job, took one of the long, narrow porcelain vases off the mantelpiece—the Azul Room had a working fireplace and the waiter in that room always had to be stoking the fire on top of everything else—and said that only the person holding the vase could speak. She called it a talking stick, but I renamed it the Vessel of Power, and Kevin, who was trying hard to ignore me, laughed and I knew my probation wouldn’t last much longer. I don’t remember too many nights at that restaurant in Shelburne, Vermont, but I remember that one. I remember feeling happy among strangers, people I’d only known for a few weeks, which made me feel like things would be okay in my life after all.