GIVEN HOW MUCH we’d had to drink, I suggested to Marianne that maybe she should get a hotel room, or even stay on the extra bed in my room, instead of driving back to Topsfield. But she insisted she was fine. Plus she had her weekly tennis match in the morning. She promised to call when she got home, but once I was in my room, I fell fast asleep. When I woke this morning, there was a message on my phone from Marianne:“What a fun night, sweet Frank. We’ll see how I play tennis with an ice pack on my head tomorrow morning, ha! Please, let’s stay in touch. It’s almost spring, let me take you canoeing on the Ipswich River.”
No messages from Lulú, but it’s still early, barely eleven. I’d meant to save half of this giant oatmeal and chocolate chip cookie for later in the day because I always get hungry at the nursing home and there’s nothing I ever want to eat there, but I’ve just taken the last bite. I look around at the other customers in this techie-seeming café having their healthy breakfasts and coffees, so many fresh-faced, casually stylish young women, and, unusually for Boston, not all of them white, and doubtlessly all highly educated and knowledgeable about ways of life I don’t have an inkling of.
I might as well get going. I’ll walk all the way back to South Station, maybe swing past the Congress Street Bridge, too, pulling along my wheeled suitcase, knapsack over my shoulders, gym lock muffled inside a pair of socks, and carrying the tin of French butter cookies inside its pretty shop bag. The exercise and chilly Atlantic air will do me good, but my bad knee aches like it’s a little hungover too. So what about last night? I think Marianne and I both got from it what we’d wanted. She was still hurt, after all these years, by what Ian and so many of our classmates had done to her, from one day to the next shattering everything she’d understood and trusted about her world and who she was in it. She’d wanted to talk to me because we’d been close back when it happened and she knew that I’d been hurt by it, too, and that at least I’d be interested. There are people who think, Oh come on, that was adolescence, how can you not be over it? They’re like the people who say, Who cares what happened in faraway tiny Guatemala all those years ago now, why do you make such a big deal out of it? I don’t like people like that. So why shouldn’t Lexi talk to her shrink about what it did to her to watch Bert beating me up all those years, if that’s what she thinks she needs? Who am I to dictate what should and shouldn’t leave a mark? My walking pace actually quickens, I feel hyped up to tell Lexi and to apologize for having been nasty about it before.
Last night with Marianne I got to confess something I’d kept silent about for over three decades, and the way I’m feeling about it this morning, it’s like I had a requited high school love after all. So I can go back in time and start my romantic life all over, fast-forwarding to now: a man confident since adolescence in his ability to inspire love, who knows what to do with it. Some people passing on the sidewalk glance suspiciously at a grown man laughing out loud to himself, like maybe he’s about to pull an axe out from under his coat, but others genuinely smile, what is it that makes them react so differently?
Exactly out there, past the far side of Fort Point Channel, on a sun-scorched field by Logan airport, at the start of my senior year of high school, trying out for varsity football, we had a late August preseason scrimmage against the East Boston High School Jets. Just a few plays after having been sent in as a sub at cornerback, I twisted my body to wave at a pass fluttering wide of its targeted Jet, my cleats caught in a withered clump of turf, and I fell. I got up, hopped around on one leg, limped to the sideline, and my football career was over. I’ve never understood how it was decided in the doctor’s office to put me in a cast instead of operating, whether it was the decision of the doctor or m
