Her suitcase arrived at Caleb and Phil’s house three days after the funeral. Caleb and I opened it together. We lifted out her yellow rain slicker, her two cotton nightgowns, her one-piece bathing suit with the pink-and-white checks. We pressed our noses to every item, and every item smelled of her. We found gifts in a paper bag, a pair of beaded earrings and a man’s T-shirt. We knew they were for us. When the suitcase was empty I slid my hand into the interior elasticized pouches, certain there would be something in writing, a note or a sentence of goodbye, of premonition, in case of. There was nothing but two safety pins and a thin barrette.
The rest of the week goes badly. My writing flounders. Every sentence feels flat, every detail fake. I go for long runs along the river, to Watertown, to Newton, ten miles, twelve miles, which help, but after a few hours the bees start crawling again. I scroll the 206 pages I have on the computer and skim the new pages I have in my notebook since Red Barn. I can’t find one moment, one sentence, that’s any good. Even the scenes I’ve clung to when all else seems lost—those first pages I wrote in Pennsylvania and the chapter I wrote in Albuquerque that poured out of me like a visitation—have dimmed. It all looks like a long stream of words, like someone with a disease that involves delusions has written them. I am wasting my life. I am wasting my life. It pounds like a heartbeat. For three days straight it rains, and the potting shed starts to smell like compost. I arrive at Iris soaked through and barely dry off before I have to ride back home. I try to fold my white shirt carefully into my knapsack but it wrinkles, and Marcus scolds me for it. Each way I pass the Sunoco station on Memorial Drive, the ugly marigolds in their concrete bed, and hot tears mix with the rain. The date at the end of the week with Silas, for which I have swapped a lucrative Friday night for a Monday lunch, fills me with dread. But when I am not paying attention, I remember his voice on the phone and his chipped tooth, and a ripple of something that might be anticipation passes through.
Harry and I have two doubles together, Tuesday and Thursday. I’m not an efficient waitress when Harry is working — we get lost in conversation and cajole the sous chefs into making us BLTs or crab cakes and smoke cigarettes with Alejandro out on the fire escape and are never around when Marcus is looking for us—but I am a cheerier waitress. Harry’s charm rubs off on me. My service is worse, but my tips are always better.
‘He’s not panna cotta, is he?’ he says on Thursday lunch over vichyssoise and iced coffees in the wait station while Marcus interviews someone in the office.
Harry asked me to dinner after the first shift we worked together. He was handsome and hilarious, with a sexy British accent and a flawlessly hetero shield. He told me he’d been born in Lahore, but moved when he was three to London.
‘Northeast London?’ I asked, because he sounded exactly like a friend I’d had in Paris from there.
‘Yeah, Redbridge. Who are you, Henry Higgins?’
He said he became English at age nine when he switched schools and changed his name from Haroon to Harry. ‘My skin magically lightened. It was quite a trick. After that I was just one of the lads.’
Over dessert I planned to tell him about Luke, tell him that I wasn’t ready to date yet. But when the panna cotta arrived he mentioned an ex, named Albert. I was floored. Later we called it the panna cotta revelation.
‘Who?’ I say now.
‘This Silas fellow.’
‘Shit, I hope not. You can have him if he is.’
‘A writer? No thanks.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t want someone who’s all up in here all the time.’ He waves his fingers around his glossy black hair. ‘I like a thruster. Writers aren’t thrusters. Not the good ones. And I couldn’t be with a bad writer. God, that would be awful.’ Ooful is how he says it. He goes off to drop a check at his deuce. ‘Plus,’ he says when he comes back, ‘I want to be the wordsmith. I like to dominate, verbally. Your three-top wants hot tea. Tell them it’s ninety degrees outside and their lips are going to melt like wax.’
Marcus comes out of the office while I’m dropping the tea and Harry’s taking an order and finds our bowls of vichyssoise. ‘I’m not ever scheduling you two together again.’ He always says that. It makes us feel about six years old. We make faces at each other behind his back.
When I get home that night, late—there was an anniversary party for sixty-one in the downstairs dining room — Silas is on my machine.
‘Casey, I’m sorry. I had to leave town. For a while. I’m not sure how long.’ His mouth is really close to the receiver, cars whipping by behind him. ‘I’m sorry to miss our date tomorrow. I really am. It’s the one thing that. I don’t know. I barely know you. But. I had to. I had to go. Anyway, I’ll call you when I get back. Don’t. Well, I can’t really. Take care of yourself.’ There was a pause and then, ‘Shit,’ and the receiver crashed into the cradle.
‘Another fucking flake,’ I say to Muriel. ‘Could be a family emergency or something.’
‘It wasn’t. He was like, uh, had to leave town, uh, for a while. No idea how long.’
She looks at me doubtfully.
‘I’d like to meet a guy who wants what he says he wants. No more “I’m just moving slowly” or “I just need to go away for a really vague amount of time.” Jesus.’
‘Don’t write Silas off.’
‘I’m totally writing him off.’
‘I’m going to show you a story he wrote.’
‘Don’t. I do not want to see it.’
Muriel says she doesn’t want my Friday night off to go to waste, and she invites some people over to her place for dinner.
Harry swaps a shift with Yasmin and comes with me. He flirts madly with all the straight guys. He’s gone off gay men, he says. It went badly in Provincetown with the new busboy. Muriel serves Moroccan chicken, couscous, and sangria. She’s spread a batik cloth over her couch.
‘Very multicultural bohème,’ Harry says.
Most of Muriel’s friends are writers, real writers, not like my old friends who got over it like the flu. She’s put the food buffet style on her desk, which she covered with a sari and pulled out from the wall. I fill my plate next to a guy who calls himself Jimbo and had a novel published last year. Motorcycle Mama. It received mixed reviews, Muriel told me, but he got a six-figure contract for the next one anyway.
‘Beware the murky bowl of unidentifiable forcemeats,’ Jimbo says, nudging my shoulder with his. I can tell he doesn’t know if we’ve met—or slept together—before. We haven’t done either, and I ignore him. ‘Rudy,’ he says with unnecessary volume in my ear to a guy on my other side. ‘This looks like what we used to get at the A.D. on Pepe’s night off.’ In case there are people who don’t know he went to Harvard. He moves on bellowing through the room.
The only other person there who has published a book is Eva Park. Her short story collection was gorgeous, got a ton of attention last year, and won the PEN/Hemingway. She’s perched uneasily on a short stool listening to two of Muriel’s colleagues explain to her why her book is a masterpiece of contemporary fiction. I met Eva six years ago, when she was working on the collection. They aren’t stories, she told me, they’re hard little polyps I’m trying to remove from my brain. She was sort of ablaze with a lot of nervous energy then. All the stuffing seems to have gone out of her since. She looks embarrassed, sitting on that stool, to be who she is now. She seems pained by all the compliments Muriel’s colleagues are giving her. Success rests more easily on men. Across the room, Jimbo holds up a bottle and hollers that the Grey Goose has flown.