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‘Yes, my squalid little serf,’ I said, and fluttered my hands in royal dispensation.
I huddled over my beer. I needed to sit and drink a beer or three. My nerves were still singing from the morning.
‘What’s up with you?’ she asked. ‘You look all twitchy.’ She flicked some suds at me, more water than soap. The air-conditioning kicked on, ruffling the tops of our heads. We spent more time in The Bar than we needed to. It had become the childhood clubhouse we never had. We’d busted open the storage boxes in our mother’s basement one drunken night last year, back when she was alive but right near the end, when we were in need of comfort, and we revisited the toys and games with much oohing and ahhing between sips of ca
We were thinking of introducing a board game night, even though most of our customers were too old to be nostalgic for our Hungry Hungry Hippos, our Game of Life with its tiny plastic cars to be filled with tiny plastic pinhead spouses and tiny plastic pinhead babies. I couldn’t remember how you won. (Deep Hasbro thought for the day.)
Go refilled my beer, refilled her beer. Her left eyelid drooped slightly. It was exactly noon, 12–00, and I wondered how long she’d been drinking. She’s had a bumpy decade. My speculative sister, she of the rocket-science brain and the rodeo spirit, dropped out of college and moved to Manhattan in the late ’90s. She was one of the original dot-com phenoms – made crazy money for two years, then took the Internet bubble bath in 2000. Go remained unflappable. She was closer to twenty than thirty; she was fine. For act two, she got her degree and joined the gray-suited world of investment banking. She was midlevel, nothing flashy, nothing blameful, but she lost her job – fast – with the 2008 financial meltdown. I didn’t even know she’d left New York until she phoned me from Mom’s house: I give up. I begged her, cajoled her to return, hearing nothing but peeved silence on the other end. After I hung up, I made an anxious pilgrimage to her apartment in the Bowery and saw Gary, her beloved ficus tree, yellow-dead on the fire escape, and knew she’d never come back.
The Bar seemed to cheer her up. She handled the books, she poured the beers. She stole from the tip jar semi-regularly, but then she did more work than me. We never talked about our old lives. We were Du
‘So, what?’ Go said, her usual way of begi
‘Eh.’
‘Eh, what? Eh, bad? You look bad.’
I shrugged a yes; she sca
‘Amy?’ she asked. It was an easy question. I shrugged again – a confirmation this time, a whatcha go
Go gave me her amused face, both elbows on the bar, hands cradling chin, hunkering down for an incisive dissection of my marriage. Go, an expert panel of one. ‘What about her?’
‘Bad day. It’s just a bad day.’
‘Don’t let her worry you.’ Go lit a cigarette. She smoked exactly one a day. ‘Women are crazy.’ Go didn’t consider herself part of the general category of women, a word she used derisively.
I blew Go’s smoke back to its owner. ‘It’s our a
‘Wow.’ My sister cocked her head back. She’d been a bridesmaid, all in violet – ‘the gorgeous, raven-haired, amethyst-draped dame,’ Amy’s mother had dubbed her – but a
‘Treasure hunt,’ I said.
My wife loved games, mostly mind games, but also actual games of amusement, and for our a
‘Should we make a wager on how pissed she’s going to get at you this year?’ Go asked, smiling over the rim of her beer.
The problem with Amy’s treasure hunts: I never figured out the clues. Our first a
This place is a bit of a hole in the wall,
But we had a great kiss there one Tuesday last fall.
Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy second after the a
‘An Irish bar in a not-so-Irish place,’ Amy nudged.
I bit the side of my lip, started a shrug, sca
‘We were lost in the rain,’ she said in a voice that was pleading on the way to peeved.
I finished the shrug.
‘McMa
‘Right! You should have done a clue with Confucius, I would have gotten that.’
‘The statue wasn’t the point. The place was the point. The moment. I just thought it was special.’ She said these last words in a childish lilt that I once found fetching.
‘It was special.’ I pulled her to me and kissed her. ‘That smooch right there was my special a
At McMa
When I’m down and feeling blue
There’s only one place that will do.
That one turned out to be the Alice in Wonderland statue at Central Park, which Amy had told me – she’d told me, she knew she’d told me many times – lightened her moods as a child. I do not remember any of those conversations. I’m being honest here, I just don’t. I have a dash of ADD, and I’ve always found my wife a bit dazzling, in the purest sense of the word: to lose clear vision, especially from looking at bright light. It was enough to be near her and hear her talk, it didn’t always matter what she was saying. It should have, but it didn’t.
By the time we got to the end of the day, to exchanging our actual presents – the traditional paper presents for the first year of marriage – Amy was not speaking to me.
‘I love you, Amy. You know I love you,’ I said, tailing her in and out of the family packs of dazed tourists parked in the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious and openmouthed. Amy was slipping through the Central Park crowds, maneuvering between laser-eyed joggers and scissor-legged skaters, kneeling parents and toddlers careering like drunks, always just ahead of me, tight-lipped, hurrying nowhere. Me trying to catch up, grab her arm. She stopped finally, gave me a face unmoved as I explained myself, one mental finger tamping down my exasperation: ‘Amy, I don’t get why I need to prove my love to you by remembering the exact same things you do, the exact same way you do. It doesn’t mean I don’t love our life together.’