"The Fall of the Bevelacquas of Boerum Hill" by Samantha Gillison
This story from our archives is featured in Epiphany’s My Last White Boyfriend anthology, available now for sale from Ristretto Books, which collects the last 20 years of Epiphany’s greatest prose hits.
It was New Year’s Eve and Jim Bevelacqua’s apartment was in chaos. Everyone was getting ready for the Gryces’ party, shouting over hair dryers and throwing tantrums. A pan of brownies Matty made for the party had burned and the acrid, burnt-chocolate smoke set off the alarm, which had only stopped when Bevelacqua ripped it off the wall and yanked out the battery. His older daughter, Vanessa, had emerged from her bedroom, sullen over a fight they had had at lunch, and was now sitting on the couch, glowering, refusing to look at him.
Bevelacqua had a habit of writing everything in his head as it happened. But he dismissed what was going on around him right then. As he looked at his apartment—the scuffed walls, the clutter of books and magazines and CD cases, his younger daughter Janey’s toys scattered on the stained beige carpet, the archaic chili-pepper lights strung around the windows, with the smell of deep-frying oil seeping in from the Chinese restaurant next door—it all seemed like elements of a negligible life. Except for Vanessa. But he still hadn’t figured out how to write her.
Two years ago, Bevelacqua’s first novel, American Family, a 523-page fictionalization of the Charles Manson story, had received a full page in The New York Times Book Review and a few influential book blogs had said he was a writer to watch. But the literary glory had dissipated as quickly as it appeared. Now, the only discernible residue was a part-time teaching gig at The New School and Ada Ryan. Beautiful, sexy Ada, who translated French novels and wanted to leave her husband for him.
“I’m unhappy,” he had told Matty that morning. “I just think you should know.”
“Know what, Jim? Are you having an affair?” Matty had asked, her face white.
“No. Just you should know that I’m unhappy.”
But the past two years seemed more like a kind of itchy hell than unhappiness to Bevelacqua, a forty-seven-year-old man stuffed with citalopram, amphetamine salts, and aripiprazole, heady with a late, small hard-earned success, preoccupied with his lover’s cunt and the nauseating realization that the life roaming up and down Smith Street he had been living for the past fifteen years was narrow and dull and limited in ways that he could never even have fathomed before American Family was published.
“I need a drink,” he said. “Ness, you want a cranberry and seltzer?”
Vanessa didn’t lift her head up. Bevelacqua made himself a vodka-tonic and swallowed an Ativan. In the past few months, Vanessa had grown almost two inches. She had developed what Dr. Pingatore called “breast buds,” sprouted soft brown hair in her armpits, and got her period, a perpetually oily forehead, and a nose covered in blackheads. Bevelacqua walked back to the couch with his drink and bent down to kiss her on the part in her hair. He breathed in her familiar skin smell mingled with the chemical watermelon scent of L’Oréal Kids.
“Let’s be friends,” he said. “Please.”
“Leave me alone, Jim,” she said.
Bevelacqua looked up at the ceiling. He hated it that she had started calling him Jim. But he hated even that his hating it was a cliché. He felt the Ativan and the vodka seeping into his blood, softening the tightness in his chest. It occurred to him that death-row prisoners must get served anti-anxiety meds with their last meal. Klonopin probably. Maybe diazepam. He thought about it for a moment and decided he would ask for phenobarbitol and Seroquel.
Matty and her younger sister, Caro, followed by Janey, came clomping down the metal spiral staircase that connected the two floors of the apartment. Matty had on a gray dress covered in embroidered peacock feathers she had bought on a trip to Oaxaca before they were married. She was wearing fuchsia tights and the pearl earrings he had given her when he sold American Family. Aunt Caro was clad in a tight low-cut black dress that emphasized her lithe yoga body, and was wearing bright red lipstick and a plastic magnolia pinned to her bun.
“You two look lovely,” he said.
Caro shot him a dirty look. Ah, Bevelacqua thought, Matty has told her that I said I was unhappy.
“What about me, Daddy? Do I look lovely, too?” Janey asked.
The girl was wearing an old purple velvet dress of Vanessa’s, and two Hello Kitty barrettes held back her fine blond hair. Bevelacqua remembered her older sister in the dress, racing around at a long-ago birthday party. Janey, hands at her sides, bloodshot blue eyes fixed on him, was solemnly waiting for his approval. There was an element of subjugation about his younger daughter that he recognized intimately; it was as if his own despair looked up at him from her face, and it made him feel like crying.
“You? You and Ness are by far the most prettiest girls I’ve ever seen,” he said and kissed her.
As Bevelacqua helped Janey bundle up, Matty slowly buttoned her coat, watching him, on her face the wide grin she always wore to mask upset, regarding him with a too familiar, searching expression in her rich, dark-brown eyes—a dog trying to determine its master’s mood, as he had described the look in American Family. Matty, who had never been exactly pretty—jolie laide, his mother had called her—had a long, narrow nose, creamy skin, and brown hair starting to grey, which she had brushed into smooth waves that fell down her back. He felt a little sick because she had gotten more dressed up and was wearing more makeup than she had in years, and he knew it was for him. And Ada, with her heart-shaped face and lucid blue eyes, was so beautiful; so much better looking than Matty that right then it seemed cruel to him. He would have some moral rectitude, he thought, if only he were leaving his wife for a plain-looking woman.
Feeling contemptible, Bevelacqua followed his family out onto freezing-cold Smith Street. Matty walked ahead of him, her familiar, awkward, long-legged loping stride like something out of a memory. He considered, hopefully, that maybe he had never loved her. That once upon a time he had been overwhelmingly sexually attracted to her but in his deepest, most hidden soul had always known that she was a kind of emotional way station.
The bodega on the corner of Bergen Street was hopping, filled with people who had just gotten off the F train buying six-packs of beer and cigarettes and bouquets of wilted red roses. The colored lights around the awning were blinking furiously and tinny Spanish Christmas carols were being piped out into the cold air. Bevelacqua had a crush on the young Puerto Rican woman who worked there, and, as they walked past the bodega, he saw her, behind the counter, wearing a tight pink sweater and a pair of gold, glitter-covered 2006 glasses, ringing up customers. Feliz Año Nuevo, he thought, muy bella.
And then the five of them turned right, off Smith Street, away from the bodegas and the bars and the restaurants into the hushed world of the real Boerum Hill, of elegant brownstones twinkling under ropes of Christmas lights. They passed door after teak door festooned with enormous wreaths and childish drawings of Santa Claus taped to the windows. The air smelled of wood smoke. The wide, frozen, tree-lined streets were soothing, they felt like home—which they weren’t and never had been. Bevelacqua had grown up in what he described in American Family as the sort-of ghetto, the almost-slum: the simulacrum of genteel urban poverty of the 1970s New York renter. But he knew that he should have grown up in one of these rambling sandstone and brick nineteenth-century buildings. That they were where his girls should be spending their childhood—thundering around wooden staircases, splashing each other with a hose in the back yard in August, having their own bathroom to preen and shit and get their periods in. Regarding the stolid brownstones impassively decked out in holiday regalia, Bevelacqua decided it was only and forever the luxury of having your own space that could transform you from beast to human being.
But Bevelacqua had no idea—he had never had any idea—how to escape the sort-of ghetto, the almost-slum, the existence of the impoverished intellectuals who dwelt in mouse-infested, thin-walled, tiny apartments, and land inside a Boerum Hill brownstone. I am a child, he thought, shaking his head. A whiner, a self-pitier, and a child.
But even through sour envy Bevelacqua could see how especially beautiful the Gryces’ brownstone was, on a block of meticulously restored and maintained brownstones. It was on the corner and seemed bigger than the other houses around it; a severe and simple Gothic Revival, its only ornamentation was a thick, woody wisteria vine that twisted up its front.
“Look, Daddy,” Janey said, squeezing his hand. “Look at their Christmas tree this year!” The tree was framed in one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, an immense thing the Gryces special-ordered from Vermont every year. It glowed with neon-blue lights and was topped with a slowly rotating disco ball in place of a star. The five of them were riveted to the sidewalk, staring through the windows at the blue-glowing tree, the milling, dressed-up guests, the bow-tied caterers with their silver trays of champagne; the cheery strains of a Zydeco band were just audible. Never idle, Bevelacqua’s mind wandered into a paranoid corner where he considered that Susannah Gryce’s cultivation of his wife was perverse; that she got off on the wild financial disparity between their families. He felt, all of a sudden, as if he and his children were the token poor people, invited to give the party a flavor of diversity and good cheer to the lower orders.
“And gawd bwess us, evew-ey one,” said Bevelacqua. “Shall we deign to enter?”
“Nice, Jim,” Caro said. “Count on you to take the joy out of everything.”
She turned away from him and walked up the stoop.
O.K., he thought. Caro’s my enemy now. Better to know. But he was sorry; he really liked Matty’s pretty, vital younger sister. Bevelacqua used to have sexually explicit dreams about her when she visited them in Seattle before Vanessa was born. And he had been ridiculously, overly flattered when she asked him to copy-edit her dissertation about D.H. Lawrence’s poetry.
“This will be the hardest thing either of us has ever done,” Ada had emailed him that morning. “You leaving Matty, me leaving Pete.” He thought of her then; she would be getting dressed for her dinner party, her short, green-painted fingernails buttoning up a peach-colored silk dress they had bought together. Ada loved beautiful, unusual clothing, and after two years together Jim knew every piece she owned, how the wool and silk and linen smelled, how each felt between his fingers, how the dresses draped and folded over her small breasts and her wide hips, how they made her ass look rapturous.
But then Janey was urging, “Go, Daddy, go,” pushing him up the stairs toward the Gryces’ door. They walked together, hand in hand, into the brownstone, and the whole world became radiant warmth and the sweet perfume smell of Diptyque Figuier candles, the thumping sounds of the three-man Zydeco band and the gentle waves of party guests’ laughter and conversation. A short, pretty Guatemalan woman in a blue maid’s uniform appeared and took their coats. Hundreds of silver and gold helium balloons floated up at the ceiling. The Gryces’ famous New Year’s raw bar was up and running: a serious-faced caterer in a black shirt and bow tie was standing behind a table heaped with ice and seaweed, shucking oysters. The chandelier, a postmodern deconstructed thing of crystals dangling from fishing line, threw prisms of light on the guests.
The party, the room, the soft, easy, enveloping luxury were overstimulating, and Bevelacqua’s heart started beating fast against his chest. Somehow, he began to feel he was part of everything, inside the shapes and movements and hovering faces. He felt for the bottle of Ativan in his jacket pocket; he had to calm down.
“Mah-teeee!” It was Susannah Gryce, a willowy blonde, as someone (not Bevelacqua) would describe her, with slightly crossed pale-blue eyes and ruddy skin. She clearly had been a great beauty when she was young. “I am so glad to see you guys!” She kissed the girls and Caro and then paused, just for a second, and put her hand into Jim’s. “Hey! Someone from my book group was just talking about American Family! How cool is that? I told her you were coming. She’s gonna die! Come get a drink.”
The five of them plunged into the party. Janey raced off to the kids’ room downstairs, Caro and Matty took off for the kitchen. When Jim came up for air he realized Vanessa was standing by his side on line for the raw bar.
“You going to try them this year?” he asked her.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No way.”
He knew that Vanessa hated the Gryces’ parties as much as he did, and he worried that she hated them because he did, but he worried more that she, too, was humiliated by the yawning, gaping, Grand Canyon-sized chasm between their lives and the Gryces’.
“Don’t you want to go watch ‘Shaun of the Dead’ downstairs?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s peculiar. But O.K.”
Vanessa smiled at him and Bevelacqua couldn’t help it, he felt like laughing with relief that she wasn’t pouting anymore.
They floated through the party together, Bevelacqua eating the oysters—perfect, briny, still quivering with life as they slipped down his throat—and Vanessa quiet, looking around her, assessing the world. He felt the same warm sense of companionship that he always did with his older daughter. Before she could walk, he took her with him to exhibits that bored her mother, to bookshops and the Chelsea flea market, to the Starbucks where he had worked on the opening chapters of American Family.
They saw Matty and Aunt Caro in the kitchen with Susannah Gryce and a group of laughing, champagne-drinking women. Bevelacqua felt an unwanted connection to his wife as she talked. Her self-consciousness, her eager-to-please smile, embarrassed him. He could sense how happy she was to be socializing with these rich women in Susannah Gryce’s beautiful house, half-fantasizing that she was one of them
“Come,” she called to him, “come here for a minute, Jim. You have to hear this.”
Bevelacqua walked over with Vanessa.
“Susannah’s going to the Galápagos!” she said. “The whole family, they’re going to be on their own boat for Easter break, just sailing around the Galápagos Islands. Isn’t that amazing?” Matty reached out and put her hand on Jim’s back.
“That’s terrific,” he said, feeling foolish.
“Oh, I just think it’s so wonderful. They’re going to see the blue-footed boobies and those incredible lizards! Remember, Ness, we saw them on Discovery?”
“Well, maybe you could go along as Susannah’s nanny,” Jim said.
Matty stared at him, her too-broad smile on her face. “Oh, maybe,” she said and broke into a loud laugh. “Could I be the nanny, Susannah?”
“Nice husband,” Caro said.
“Ha ha. Maybe, some year, we could all go together,” Susannah said. “Jim.”
Jim felt Matty and Vanessa watching him. He hesitated a moment. “The Galápagos sound great,” he said. “But honestly, a drink sounds even better.”
Matty laughed again, throwing her head back, as though he had made a great joke.
Bevelacqua got a vodka and tonic from the bartender and looked out at the party, his heart still beating hard, angry. Why did Matty insist that he admire the Gryces’ wealth? He wondered then if it wasn’t, in some way his wife was only vaguely aware of, pointed at him. At her disappointment in how little money he made and how much she had loathed working as an office manager for the past twelve years while he wrote.
“Daddy, the dog!” Vanessa said, laughing.
A long-eared, neurasthenic-looking King Charles Spaniel had its head in one of Susannah Gryce’s salami platters.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god! Miss Lucy, stop that right now!”
A woman Bevelacqua remembered from last year’s party came running over. She had tightly curled graying red hair and close-set, intense brown eyes, which flickered over Vanessa and Bevelacqua as she grabbed the dog by the collar.
“Oh, Sue is going to kill you, Miss Lucy!”
“It’s pretty funny,” Vanessa said, and reached out her hand to pet the dog.
“You know, I had the same idea as Miss Lucy,” Jim said. “Just stick my head right in there and gobble away.”
“Oh, you two are very silly. But I like that, we’re silly, too, aren’t we, Miss Lucy?” she said. The dog looked up at her sideways.
“I’m Phyllis, Sue’s friend. We met last year. Didn’t you write American Family?”
“I did,” Bevelacqua said. “I’m Jim, and this is my daughter, Vanessa.”
“I liked your book,” Phyllis said, lifting the dog up and stroking its ears. “Of course, it reminded me of Don DeLillo. Which is a huge compliment. He’s one of my very favorites.”
“Maybe it’s not such a big compliment to DeLillo.”
“Oh, you’re funny! I like that.”
“He’s not as funny as Miss Lucy,” Vanessa said. “Or DeLillo.”
“You two are a team, aren’t you?” Phyllis said to Vanessa. “Have you guys tried the ham yet? My husband made it, it’s so good.”
Holding Miss Lucy under her arm, Phyllis walked them over to a huge table laid out buffet style. An untouched ham, glistening, with round candied-pineapple slices skewered to it with toothpicks, sat in the center of the table, surrounded by sliced roast beef, bowls overflowing with salad, different quiches.
“Oh, have some, have some,” Phyllis said. “He spent two days working on that ham. It’s an heirloom breed from Georgia.”
“O.K.,” Jim said. “I like heirlooms.”
“So, let me guess, Vanessa. You go to St. Ann’s with all the other gifted children running around this house hollering and spraying Silly String at each other.”
“No,” the girl said. “I go to I.S. 436.”
“Oh,” Phyllis said, smiling, blinking, looking at Jim. “Do you like it?”
“It’s O.K.,” Vanessa said, shrugging her shoulders. “I get lots of homework.”
“Homework is important. My girls go to Brearley and they get just loads and loads of homework. And now I have to go clean up that plate of dog-slobbered salami so nobody eats it.”
“Dog-slobber salami, could be a new thing,” Jim said, smiling, watching Phyllis walk away. “Let’s go see what your sister is doing,” he said to Vanessa.
The Gryces’ entire garden floor, given over to the children, was in total chaos. A giant flat-screen television was blaring “Shaun of the Dead,” a group of boys were shouting and shooting on an X-Box, and Janey, in a hastily yanked on princess dress, was running and screaming and laughing with a pack of girls.
A young, pretty babysitter was on the couch holding a sleeping baby. She smiled up at Vanessa and Jim and shrugged her shoulders.
“Happy New Year’s,” she said. “Welcome to the Wild West.”
The babysitter was like a painting come to life, Jim thought, with her delicate, pale skin, dark hair up in a bun, and soft, long-fingered hands holding the baby. A year ago Ada had mistakenly thought she was pregnant. Jim realized that if she had been, their baby would be around the same age as the one in front of him. What if life had forced his hand? He shook his head. A craving to be with Ada, to breathe in her perfume and musky smell, overwhelmed him.
He decided to call her even though they had agreed it would be too difficult to talk. He told Vanessa that he was getting a drink and went upstairs and out into the back yard.
“Great to hear from you,” Ada said in a too-loud voice when she picked up her phone. He could hear people talking, Pete’s voice. “Text me,” she whispered.
The thought of Ada furtively reading his text filled him with self-pity. Why shouldn’t he be at a dinner party in Williamsburg with brilliant Ada next to him talking about translating Lydia Davis into French? They had decided to wait until the week after New Year’s to reveal their affair to Matty and Pete. But now he wished they hadn’t waited. This wasn’t his life, he thought. This party, these people, the unapologetic basking in wealth. It made him feel like a child. CALL ME WHEN YOU CAN, he texted her. IMPORTANT.
The back yard was silent and thick with the cold. The Gryces’ neighbors had draped Christmas lights around their trees and they twinkled at him, prettily. A memory of being in Vermont with Matty’s family when Vanessa was first born drifted through him. He had never felt air that cold; it was like walking through ice water. The frozen dirt road had crunched and crackled underneath his sneakers. He remembered thinking that he wanted to write about it and how lovely and red-cheeked Matty had looked in her white ski parka. Had he been happy?
There had been so much snow everywhere, rising in hills around them, the whole world quiet and freezing cold. But even then, so long ago, hadn’t he known that his ambition to write, to write something really good, had been inexorably muddied by his decision to marry; by the soft, tiny baby, so warm and helpless, sleeping, strapped to his chest under his down jacket?
Just then the back door opened and Bevelacqua, still dilated with memory, saw Susannah Gryce walk out. For a moment she was lit up, and in the distance she looked much younger, like a girl in college.
“Hey,” he said, smiling.
She frowned at him, the light in her eyes, then walked over, taking a pack of Parliaments from her pocket.
“It’s fucking cold,” she said.
“That it is.”
“I came out for my annual smoke. I have one every New Year’s Eve.”
“Good for you,” Bevelacqua said, smiling, although he was worried about Ada calling.
Susannah was wearing a long, plush, silver down coat with the collar up.
“You want one?”
“Oh, no, thanks. I’m the kind of ex-smoker who can never take a drag or I’ll wind up with an entire pack of Marlboros stuffed in my mouth,” he said.
Susannah smiled and then glanced at him closely. “Everything O.K.? With your writing and everything?” she said, lighting up.
“Yeah, fine,” he said.
“Good, good,” she said.
“You were kinda mean to Matty,” she said. “Just now.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll go apologize. I’m a bastard.”
Susannah was very drunk. He remembered her last year, dancing around the house to the Specials, blowing a noisemaker. But she seemed drunk in a different way right then, contemplative and almost angry. She took a drag on her cigarette and exhaled a cloud from her nose and mouth, and Bevelacqua thought of the girls he had been in love with in college and how they had smoked just like that.
Jim looked out at the backyard and imagined Ada at her dinner party, her eyes gleaming in the candlelight. The ground was covered in ice and he could see a TV flickering in a window across the back yard.
“It’s probably close to midnight, right?” he asked. “I think those people are watching the ball already.”
“Did Matty tell you about me?” Susannah asked.
“About what?” Bevalacqua asked, slowly, resigned. He did not want a lecture about marriage from Susannah Gryce; to hear her confide the details of her own marriage’s ups and downs.
“That I have Stage Four breast cancer?”
Jim turned and stared, for a moment not believing her. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, so am I,” she laughed. “This is my last New Year’s Eve with my tits.”
“Oh, my god, Susannah,” he said. “What awful news.”
Without meaning to Jim kept on looking at Susannah, taking in her physical presence; her hands, small and cold-looking, her watery blue eyes. The house behind them, throbbing with the party, all of a sudden seemed unreal. An enormous pity for her surged through him as he thought, in a vague way, of surgery and hospitals and drugs and suffering.
“You know,” she said, and he saw that she had started crying. “When you’re confronting death you really want your family—your children, your spouse. I can’t tell you.”
“I’m sure,” he said, understanding she was trying to talk to him about his marriage.
She lit up another cigarette. “Don’t tell me not to smoke.”
“O.K.,” he said, smiling. “I won’t if you give me one.”
She cried harder then. “Can I hug you?” he said. “Susannah, I’m so sorry.”
“You have no idea how much I’ve started hating people who aren’t sick,” she said. “I really don’t want to be hugged anymore, nothing personal.”
“Do you want me to get you a drink, or a Kleenex or something?”
“Fuck, no,” she said. “I’m not a baby.”
“No, of course not. Right.”
Then she looked out into the distance, across the backyards, and Bevelacqua thought that she really was beautiful. He remembered Matty telling him that two boys had been suspended from Dalton for fighting over her in high school. Not any of it matters, he thought, not looks, not money, not brownstones, not having boys suspended from Dalton over you, not anything. Although he wasn’t sure if he really believed that. Maybe it all mattered more than he understood.
“I’m freezing,” Susannah said. “You want to go back inside?”
“No, I’m going to finish the smoke now that I started. And I’m waiting for a call, anyway.”
“Oh, God, Jim,” she said, looking at him sadly. “Can’t you see how hard life is without going out of your way to make it excruciating? Do you really need to wait for a call?”
“I do, Susannah.”
In a few minutes his phone started buzzing.
“Baby,” Ada said, her low-pitched voice caressing. “Happy New Year.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Bevelacqua said, on the verge of tears. “This sucks so much, Ada. I want to be with you, not at this godawful party.”
“Leave it! Come meet me right now,” she said, laughing. “Why not?”
“I can’t leave the kids.”
“So meet me after. Let’s meet for breakfast at the St. Clair. Like at 3 A.M. How about it?”
“O.K.,” he said, watching Susannah through the window, taking off her coat and rubbing her hands together, smiling at Aunt Caro. “I’ll see you at three.”
***
It was almost midnight and the party seemed drunker and more fun to Jim once he got back inside. Ada’s voice, his plan to meet her, was like a charm, everything around him gleamed since she now lay at the end of this night. For the past two years Jim had felt like this—that life was only doable if he was going to meet Ada after he dropped the girls off at school, after Matty went to work, when he could pretend he needed to meet a friend at a bar.
Someone had made a pot of coffee and it tasted delicious to Jim after being out in the cold; warming, burnt, and rich with Susannah Gryce’s organic half-and-half.
At midnight Bevelacqua kissed his wife and she kissed him back hard. Her warm, soft, familiar curves aroused him and as he pulled away from her, unbidden memories beset him. There she was in Seattle with Vanessa, cooking in their tiny kitchen, reading and rereading American Family for typos, telling him how great it was, that it was really something. And as she reached up to kiss him a second time and he tasted her and the sour champagne in her mouth, something burst inside of him like a blister and poured a thick, slow sadness into his blood.
Susannah Gryce was kissing Mike passionately in the corner of the room. If he were dying, is this what he would want? To stay in the shelter of Matty; the warm curve of her body which had protected him from the world for seventeen years? He had an overwhelming, frightening feeling that he was about to slip and break something and he held onto Matty and buried his face in her hair.
“God, I love you,” he said.
“I know you do, Jim,” she whispered. “And we love you so much.”
But then it was one o’clock and people were starting to leave: children were being scooped up and buttoned into coats, an army of town cars were backing up Bergen Street. He and Matty got the girls, who were wide-eyed with exhaustion, into their jackets and scarves and the little knit pom-pom hats that Aunt Caro had made them for Christmas. Susannah came over and hugged Matty.
“Oh, don’t leave!” she said, still drunk. “We can put the girls in the bed downstairs and make strawberry pancakes.”
“We really have to go,” Jim said, smiling at her. “But thank you for the wonderful party.”
“Oh, goodbye, you dolls,” she said. “I love you Bevelacquas so much.”
“Goodbye,” they said, mingling into the crowd outside the brownstone, waving back up at her. “Goodbye! Thank you!”
Janey was weeping by the time they got to the corner. Jim picked her up and carried her the way he had when she was little. Vanessa held his hand and complained about the movies and the kids at the party and how impossible and spoiled the two other girls her age had been. Bevelacqua thought about the way he must look—the paterfamilias walking home in the cold surrounded by his daughters and his wife and sister-in-law chatting and laughing. At that moment if they had been attacked or mugged he would die for them, he thought. Die happily.
He felt a kinship, too, with all the other men he had just spent New Year’s with, who were getting their families into cars, buckling up sleeping toddlers, directing tipsy wives. Looking around the cold, empty streets of Boerum Hill, Bevelacqua thought he could not leave Matty and his family on their own any more than he could leave his body.
When they got home, he put Janey and then Vanessa to bed while Caro and Matty made margaritas. He stayed with the girls while they fell asleep, breathing in the smell of their room, watching the lights from the cars driving down Smith Street splash against the walls. Strains of Ozomatli drifted up the stairs and he heard Matty and Caro laughing and the blender turn on then off.
He leaned back into Vanessa’s pink beanbag chair and felt the party filtering through him. He imagined Susannah Gryce in her house, the balloons starting to float down from the ceiling while the last few guests sat and laughed and drank with her.
He looked at his watch. It was 2:30 A.M. and he thought of Ada, sitting, waiting for him at the diner. This vision of her a little drunk, rumpled, sipping coffee, waiting for him in the fluorescent glow of the St. Clair overwhelmed him. And he knew he would—he knew he was—clumsily giving up the tangible world for it; for a feeling.
Vanessa opened her eyes and sat up. “Daddy?” she said. “Sweetheart?”
“Oh. I just wanted to make sure you were here.”
He knew she was asleep; when she was little she used to carry on long conversations with him and Matty in the middle of the night that she would have no memory of in the morning.
“I’m here, Ness. I’m here.”
As the girl closed her eyes and lay back down, he took her hand in both of his and held onto it as though she could pull him back. But it was too late. He was already gone.
Samantha Gillison is a journalist, travel writer and the author of The Undiscovered Country and The King of America. Her work focuses on gender equality, the politics and environmental issues of Pacific-region small island nation states, and food.
