Muriel and her friends are hovering behind him. Silas shifts slightly, putting a bit more of his back to them. I don’t think it’s deliberate. ‘You haven’t ever gone to it?’
‘No, I work nights.’
He looked at me like he knew that wasn’t the whole truth and started to say something, but Muriel broke in.
‘Look, real people from the real world.’ she says.
She introduces us. One is an infectious disease doctor specializing in AIDS research, and the other heads up a nonprofit in Jamaica Plain. They wear makeup and bracelets and dresses that don’t come from the T.J. Maxx in Fresh Pond. They have crossed the room for Silas, and they pepper him with questions. I drift out of the conversation, out of the room.
I don’t have the money for a copy of Thunder Road, but I follow the line from the entryway through the living room and into the dining room. I veer into the kitchen and peer at the writer through the window in the swinging door. His back is to me, and a small stooped woman is leaning over the table toward him, clutching the book he’s just signed to her chest. She’s still talking when he reaches for the book of the woman behind her. I can only see the back of him, the rim of a blue tie showing beneath his collar and a shoulder blade jutting up through the white dress shirt as he signs his name. I can’t see if his face is as chiseled and pissed off as in the photograph.
All the surfaces in the kitchen are covered with baking sheets and trays of hors d’oeuvres. Every few minutes a server comes in for a refill. It feels strange not to be the one wearing a bun and apron.
‘Prosciutto-wrapped fig?’ she asks, face full of overlapping freckles.
‘Oh, thanks so much,’ I say, trying to convey my bond with her. I take a fig from the tray and a napkin from her other hand. It bugs me when people don’t take the napkin, too. ‘Thanks, it looks yummy.’ But she’s moved on to a group by the breakfast nook.
When I get back to the library, Silas is gone, the women from the real world are gone, and Muriel’s in an argument about Cormac McCarthy with three men in moustaches.
The asphalt is purple in the dusk. We walk in the middle of the road down the hill. The sun has sunk but its heat hangs in the air. My ears ring from all the voices at the party. We talk about a book called Troubles that I read and passed along to her. She loved it as much as I did, and we go through the scenes we liked best. It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone. The short biography on the back page said that the writer, J. G. Farrell, died while angling, swept out to sea by a rogue wave.
‘Do you think that’s an Irish euphemism for suicide?’ I say.
‘Maybe. You go out to see a man about a dog. And if he’s not there you get swept away by a rogue wave.’
We both love Irish literature. We have a pact we’ll go to Dublin together when we have money.
I tell her Silas said that Wednesday nights felt cultish.
She considers that. ‘Well, a lot of people there want to be Oscar, and a number of others want to sleep with him. Maybe that is like a cult.’
‘And where do you fall on that spectrum?’
‘To be him. Definitely.’
‘Do people sleep with him?’
‘No. He wrote this essay for Granta last winter about his dead wife and how he can’t think about other women and it got some people all hot and bothered.’
We hug goodbye outside her apartment building, talk for another half hour, and hug goodbye again.
The streets are quiet on the way home, the river flat and glossy. The sky is the darkest blue it gets just before turning black. I’m halfway across the BU Bridge before I realize I’m finishing that scene in my head. They’re talking and I can hear them and they’re finally going down the stairs.
Last fall Muriel’s boyfriend told her he needed to be alone in a room with books. They’d been together nearly three years. He said that if they stayed together they’d just get married and reproduce, and he needed to write. So do I, Muriel told him. She didn’t give a fuck about marriage and kids. But he didn’t know anything, he said, though he had two graduate degrees. He needed to be alone in a room with books. He went to live on the third floor of his brother’s house in Maine. That was ten months ago. They hadn’t had contact since.
A week after the book party, Muriel goes to her niece’s bat mitzvah and meets a guy.
‘I liked him,’ she says. ‘Christian.’
‘Christian?’
‘My dad said, “Leave it to Muriel to find a man named Christian at a bat mitzvah.” ’
She’s a little giddy.
The next day David, the old boyfriend, calls her. They say women have intuition, but men can smell a competitor across state lines.
‘He wants to see me,’ she says. ‘He wants to go on a walk.’
‘Is he still in his room with books?’
‘I don’t know.’ She’s half laughing, half crying. ‘Christian was such a good guy. We were supposed to go out Thursday night. Oh, holy crap, I nearly forgot. That guy Silas asked me for your number.’
He calls me the next morning. I can’t remember what he looks like. Or I can’t match what I remember with the voice. It’s low and ragged, like a half-broken engine. An old-man voice. I’m not convinced it’s him.
He asks if I’d like to go to the Museum of Fine Arts on Friday night. ‘They stay open late. And we could get a bite to eat after.’
Bite to eat. It was something my mother would say. ‘Sure.’ I feel like laughing. I’m not exactly sure why, but I don’t want him to hear it.
‘You’re laughing.’
‘No, I’m not.’ I was. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my dog. He’s doing this thing with his ears.’
‘What’s his name?’
I don’t know the name of Adam’s dog, and he isn’t in the potting shed with me. Do I really not know the name of that dog? ‘Adam’s dog.’
‘Adam’s Dog is the name of your dog?’
‘It’s not really my dog. It’s Adam’s. My landlord. I take care of him sometimes. I don’t know his real name.’
Silence.
I should never answer the phone in the morning. ‘I mean, I’m sure I knew it. I’m sure he told me. But I’ve forgotten it. I have to walk him every morning right in the middle of my writing time and I resent him so much I don’t even want to know his name and I only do it for the fifty bucks off my rent.’
‘And he’s not why you were laughing, either.’
‘No, I really don’t know why I was laughing.’
Silence.
‘It’s just that I can’t quite match your voice to your body right now.’ I wince at the word ‘body.’ Why was I talking about his body? ‘And the expression ‘bite to eat’ reminds me of my mother.’ Do not tell him your mother is dead. He has called to ask you out on a date. Do not mention a dead mother.
‘Huh.’ It sounds like he was getting into a different position, reclining, smooshing a pillow under his head maybe. ‘Do you get along with her?’
‘Yes. Completely. Very simpatico.’ But I don’t want to pretend she is somewhere that she isn’t, like I did with the dog. ‘She died though, FYI.’ FYI?