Scrooge looked around the room and saw what he apparently wanted, a plastic bottle of water; he scuttled over to it, and returned, handing it to Abel. Abel did not argue. He had become desperately warm beneath his woolen suit. He drank, then offered the bottle to Scrooge, who shook his head, sitting once more with his back to the wall.
“What business are you in?” Scrooge asked. A toothpick was lying on the table, and he took it and picked at his teeth.
“Air-conditioning units.” Abel fleetingly pictured the young girl in the conference room today, so overprepared for her presentation; she was from Rockford, where he had grown up. “People still work hard,” he said.
“Air conditioning. You make a bundle.”
“And every year I give to the arts.”
Scrooge tilted his head, looking at Abel. His lips were colorless, cracked in places. “Now, please,” he said quietly. “Don’t be like that.”
Abel said nothing. A private nail of shame was driven into his chest; he could feel himself perspire. He remembered how earlier he’d thought of people reciting a line, and he understood now that he was one of them.
“Look,” Scrooge continued. “I just need you to listen to me and then you can go.”
Abel shook his head. A disc of nausea spun through him, he felt saliva rushing to his mouth. In his mind arrived a full understanding: Zoe was unhappy.
“I’ve scared you,” Scrooge said, in a voice that seemed to have scared Scrooge as well.
Abel said quietly, “My daughter’s unhappy.”
Scrooge asked, “How old is she?”
“Thirty-five. Married to a very successful lawyer. Has wonderful kids.”
Scrooge blew out his breath slowly. “Well, sounds like death to me.”
“Why?” Abel asked sincerely. “It should be perfect.”
“Perfectly lonely. A successful lawyer’s never around. She loves her kids, but it bores her, all the kid chores. And she feels irritated with the nanny and the cleaning woman, and her husband doesn’t want to hear it—and so she doesn’t like going to bed with him anymore, that’s a chore now too. And she looks at the rest of her life and thinks, God, what is this? Her kids will grow up, and then she’s really in Dullsville, and she’ll buy a new bracelet, and then a new pair of shoes, and maybe that will help for five minutes, but she gets more and more anxious and pretty soon they’ll put her on Valium or antidepressants, because society’s been drugging its women for years—”
Abel held up a hand to indicate that he should stop.
Scrooge said, “I know you want to go. You will, you will. Relax.” Scrooge opened his mouth wide, poked at something with the toothpick, then expelled the bit with a large sigh. “Sorry,” he said. “That was gross.”
Almost imperceptibly Abel nodded, to indicate that it was okay with him.
Earlier in the month Abel had celebrated a birthday that put him smack in the middle of his sixties. You look great, people said. You look wonderful. No one said: Your capped teeth—your pride and joy so long ago—seem to get bigger as you get older. No one said: Abel, too bad about those teeth. And maybe no one thought it.
“So dumb,” Scrooge said. “The telling-someone-to-relax thing. When did you ever relax because someone told you to?”
“I don’t know,” Abel said.
“Probably never.” The tone of Scrooge’s voice had become gentle, conversational, as though he’d known Abel a long time.
Had he more energy, Abel might then have told this strange and tortured man how, many years ago, he had worked as an usher at the theater in Rockford, just steps away from the Rock River, and that’s what he had smelled tonight when he’d entered the side door, that secret scent of theater. He had secured the job during high school. Sixteen years old. The very year that his little sister had been brought before her sixth-grade class, the stain on her dress pointed to, and told that no one was ever too poor to buy sanitary pads. Dottie had not wanted to return to school after that, and Abel had promised her something, he could not remember what. What he did remember was the power of those paychecks. At sixteen he had learned the astonishing power of money. The only thing money could not buy was a friend for Dottie (or for him, but that did not matter as much), but it bought a twinkling bracelet, that’s what she got! And that had made her smile. Most of all, money bought food.
And this made him think of Lucy Barton again, how terribly poor she had been as well, how when he went as a kid to stay with her family a few weeks each summer she would go with him to look for food in the dumpster behind Chatwin’s Cake Shoppe. (Oh, the look on Lucy’s face when she saw him last year in that bookstore, all that time having passed by! She held his hand with both of hers, and did not want to let it go.)
What puzzled Abel about life was how much one forgot but then lived with anyway—like phantom limbs, he supposed. Because he could not honestly say anymore what he’d felt when he’d found food in a dumpster. Gladness, perhaps, when he discovered large parts of a steak that could be scraped clean. It gets terribly practical, he told his wife many years later. Then came the moment of her ill-concealed horror: Weren’t you ashamed? And the answer—the understanding—so immediate that it was coming to him even as she spoke: Well, then you’ve never been hungry, Elaine. He did not say it. But he did become ashamed, once his wife asked him that question. Then he surely became ashamed. She requested that he never tell their children how their father had been so poor as to eat from garbage cans.
—
“It has made me sick,” Scrooge said. “I believe it’s made me ill. I’ve been teaching these little devil-brats for twenty-eight years.”
“You don’t enjoy it?” Abel was aware of a sense of cognitive distance, and he hoped he had asked the right question.
“Oh, it’s the most perverse thing in the world.” Scrooge waved a hand in annoyance. “We take the students with money, you know. Unless there’s no rich crier. We always need a crier, of course, someone who can cry on demand. Criers always think they’re particularly sensitive, particularly talented, but criers are just particularly nuts, is what they are.” Scrooge appeared exhausted, and rested his head against the wall, looking up at the ceiling.
“Say, what I think—” Abel started, but it took him a moment to find the words. “I think you’re upset about that review—”
“Hey.” Scrooge was suddenly on his feet. He pointed a finger at Abel. “Don’t you even. Trust me on this, Mr. Fancy Pants. I’ve been coming to the end of my rope for a very long time.” He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket. He didn’t light it, just tapped it against his leg. “I told you at the start I felt like talking. And we were doing that. Talking. Okay? I want to talk. We were talking.”
Abel nodded. “We were.”
“So then,” Scrooge said, exhaling a big sigh and sliding his back down the wall slowly until he was seated on the floor again. “Where were we? You were getting ready to marry your way to the top.”
“For the love of God.” Abel forced himself to sit up straighter. “We are not going to discuss my wife.” He spoke in almost a whisper. His mind did not know where to put itself. Fatigue was like a piece of cloth covering him.
“Okay. We won’t discuss her.” Scrooge was quiet for a moment, and then— “But I’ve been lonely,” he said.
Abel looked at this man, whose face was looking up at him now, the scalp still with its gray streaks from where the wig had been. “I understand,” Abel said.
“You understand?” Scrooge asked.
Abel almost smiled, but he did not know why he had the impulse to smile. And then surprisingly—horribly!—he felt he would weep. Only barely did he prevent himself, but it affected his speech. “Because—I am too.” Scrooge nodded with what seemed to Abel to be a simplicity of understanding, and Abel said, “Say, I could be your crier.”
Scrooge said, “Not nutty enough. But you’re honest. Oh, thank the gods. I wanted to talk to a person, and here you are a real person, you have no idea h
ow hard it is—to find a real person.”
They were both silent for a moment, as though such a thing needed to be absorbed. Then Scrooge said, “Did you like your mother?” His voice—to Abel’s ears—was almost childlike again.
“I liked her.” Abel heard himself saying this. “I loved her.”
“No daddy around?”
It was strange for Abel to hear this phrase, reminiscent of a schoolyard taunt, yet it was not a taunt now. Still, he felt flushed. No, his daddy had died when Abel was very young. Once, briefly—was it days only?—there had been a man, and Abel remembered it mostly because after the man left, Dottie had got a store-bought dress and Abel had been bought a new pair of pants. These pants became too short quickly, and stayed that way almost a year. But they were the pants that allowed him the job as an usher, after his mother’s cousin—Lucy Barton’s mother—who did sewing had managed to lengthen them when he’d gone to stay with them.
“Oh, I can see the question hurt your feelings,” Scrooge said. “I can be awfully insensitive. And then I get pissed off at people because I myself am sensitive. I don’t like sensitive people who only feel sensitive for themselves.”
“I’m sorry,” Abel said, blinking his eyes, which seemed blurry. “You know—I’m not feeling very well. You see, I had a heart attack a year ago.”
Scrooge was on his feet again. “Why didn’t you tell me? Jesus. Let’s get you help.”
“No worries,” Abel said. “Do you think you could get the pony down for my granddaughter?”
Scrooge looked at him so searchingly that Abel looked away; he had not been looked at that closely—that intimately—in years. “ ‘No worries’?” the man said in a voice almost tender. “Who are you?”
“A man who dresses well,” Abel answered, once more aware of the bizarre impulse to smile. “A man who doesn’t cheat on his taxes.” And again—the bizarre impulse to almost weep.
“You do dress well.” Scrooge opened the door and was gone from Abel’s sight. Abel heard him calling, “I’ve always known a tailor-made suit! Now I’m getting that pony and don’t you move. Stay calm, and stay right there!”
—
Abel’s tailor had been a man from London named Keith, and twice a year Abel strode into the Drake Hotel, arriving at a suite that provided vast views of the lake. In these overheated rooms, while the radiators hissed, Abel would be measured by Keith with a cloth tape, and in gestures so subtle, so assured and quick, Keith would place muslin against Abel’s shoulders, his chest, down the length of his arm, marking it with chalk. The swatches of fabric were laid out in the other room, and almost always Abel chose what Keith suggested. Only once or twice did Abel suggest that perhaps the fabric be more subdued, or that the stripes might just be—perhaps—too wide. “I don’t want to look like a gangster,” Abel joked, and Keith answered, “Oh, surely not.”
When word came that Keith had died of cancer, Abel was astonished. That astonishment had to do with death, with the wiping out of a person, with the puzzlement that the man was simply gone. The simplicity of the goneness was something Abel was familiar with; he was not a young man, he had known the death of others, starting with the goneness of his own father. But what followed this astonishment was a searing sense of shame, as though Abel had done something unsavory all those years by having Keith build his clothes. He found himself murmuring the words out loud, when he was in his car, or alone in his office, or getting dressed in the morning, “I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry.”
Even while he voted as a conservative, even while he took his annual bonus from the board, even while he ate in the best restaurants Chicago offered, and even while most of him thought what he had thought for years, I will not apologize for being rich, he did apologize, but to whom precisely he did not know. Waves of shame would suddenly pour over him, the way his wife had endured hot flashes for years, her face instantly bright red, rivulets of perspiration forming on the sides of her face. She could not be jovial about these incidents, the way he saw some women at the office were. But he felt he understood better now, the uncontrolled assault she must have felt, just as he felt the uncontrolled assault of his shame, which, he was perfectly aware, had no basis in anything real. Keith had had a job. He had done his job well. He had been paid well. (He had not really been paid that well.)
But when Abel came across two men in the manufacturing department one day, the first making a snide remark about “being part of a company involved with sheer corporate greed,” the second rolling his eyes, replying, “Don’t be a stupid, cynical youth,” it was this second man that infuriated Abel, who said to him, “We need the cynicism of youth, it’s healthy. Stop degrading the efforts of mankind by calling them stupid, for the love of God!” He worried about this later, because the workplace was not what it had been for most of his career, it was now a petri dish of potential lawsuits, and Human Resources was kept busy, though admittedly far less than at other companies. Abel was, in fact, respected. He was even loved. (Dearly, by his longtime secretary.)
But the point was—the sense of apology did not go away; it was a tiring thing to carry.
—
“I married way up,” Abel said out loud, and for some reason he wanted to chuckle. “Oh, I did. She seemed as lovely as a Christmas tree to me. I don’t mean she looked like a tree, just that she represented all—”
“Here we go, here we go.” Linck McKenzie was back, holding out his hand.
“Thank you,” Abel said. He saw Linck McKenzie standing in the doorway; he heard Linck say, “You know, you’re a good man.”
But a darkening came now to the edges of Abel’s vision, and a sudden pain moved through his chest; in a moment he thought he might be sliding from his chair. He heard Linck on a telephone, saying Hurry, and this made him remember something earlier, Please, would you hurry, but he could not place it, and then there were lots of sounds and doors opening, and he saw an orange strip that he understood he would be placed upon.
A woman large and muscular enough that he thought she was a man, her hair cut short like a man’s, was in a uniform and helping—“dyke” is what she’d once have been called, this went through Abel’s mind. What marvelous authority she had as she got him on that strip of orange stretcher, asked him if he knew his name. He must have said it, because she began to talk to him. “You stay right with me, Mr. Blaine.”
“I’m sorry,” Linck kept saying in his ear. Or maybe Abel was the one saying it. He wanted to say “taxes.” He did not know if he said it, but he wanted to say to this marvelous woman, strong as a man, that she was what the taxes were for.
“Mr. Blaine, I have your granddaughter’s pony with me. Do you know the name of your granddaughter’s pony?” this big square woman asked.
He must have said it right because she said, “You hold right on to Snowball, we’re going to take you to the hospital. Are you able to understand me?” He felt a hard plastic thing placed in his hand.
Linck’s face was there as they closed the door of the ambulance; he seemed to be saying something.
Abel shook his head. He thought he shook his head, he could not tell, but he wanted to tell Linck McKenzie—so ludicrous that it was absolutely liberating—that he’d had a lovely time, which must be ridiculous but was not. He felt the chill of a fluid filling his veins, and so perhaps they had hooked him up to something and given him a drug, he couldn’t find the words to ask— And then later, as the ambulance went faster, Abel felt not fear but a strange exquisite joy, the bliss of things finally and irretrievably out of his control, unpeeled, unpeeling now. Yet there was a streak of something else, as though just outside his reach was the twinkle of a light, as though a Christmas window was there; this puzzled him and pleased him, and in his state of tired ecstasy it seemed almost to come to him. Linck McKenzie’s voice: “You’re a good man.” This made Abel smile even as his chest felt as if rocks were piled upon it. The calm voice of that wonderful big woman told him, “Mr. Blaine, you hold right on,”
and he thought perhaps his smile appeared to them as a grimace of pain, but what did it matter, he was moving very quickly and easily away now, leaving them, flying—how fast he was going!—past fields of green soybeans, with the most exquisite understanding: He had a friend. He would have said this if he could, he would have said it, but there was no need: Like his sweet Sophia who loved her Snowball, Abel had a friend. And if such a gift could come to him at such a time, then anything—dear girl from Rockford dressed up for her meeting, rushing above the Rock River—he opened his eyes, and yes, there it was, the perfect knowledge: Anything was possible for anyone.
For my brother,
Jon Strout
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank the following people for their help with this book:
Jim Tierney, Kathy Chamberlain, Susan Kamil, Beverly Gologorsky, Molly Friedrich, Lucy Carson, Frank Connors (a wonderful storyteller in his own right), and the inimitable Benjamin Dreyer.
BY ELIZABETH STROUT
Anything Is Possible
My Name Is Lucy Barton
The Burgess Boys
Olive Kitteridge
Abide with Me
Amy and Isabelle
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELIZABETH STROUT is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge; the #1 New York Times bestseller My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys, a New York Times bestseller; Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick; and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. Elizabeth Strout lives in New York City.
elizabethstrout.com
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Twitter: @LizStrout