Valentine’s Day

This past Valentine’s Day, I was in Kingman, Arizona, with my wife, Nola, staying in the Motel 6 there, just off the I-40. You might not think of Kingman as a prime location for a romantic getaway (who would?), but Nola and I have been married for fifteen years now, and romance is just part of the continuum—sometimes it blows hot, sometimes cold, and we certainly don’t need a special day or place for it. We’re not sentimentalists. We don’t exchange heart-shaped boxes of chocolates or glossy cards with manufactured endearments inside, and we don’t go around kissing in public or saying “I love you” twenty times a day. (To my mind, couples like that are always suspect—really, who are they trying to fool?) Besides which, we were there to pay a visit to Nola’s father, who’s in his eighties and living in a trailer park a mile down the road from the motel, which made it convenient not only for seeing him but for strolling into Old Town, where there are a handful of bars and restaurants and the junk shops my wife loves to frequent, looking for bargains. View more Were we slumming? Yes, sure. We could have stayed anywhere we liked, but this—at least when we’re in Kingman—is what we like, and if it’s not ideal, at least it’s different. The local police creep through the parking lot in the small hours, running license plates, and once in a while you’ll wake to them handcuffing somebody outside one of the rooms, which is not a sight we see every day back in California. Plus, there are a couple of lean white bums living in the wash just behind the place, and they sometimes give me a start, looming up out of the darkness when I step outside at night for a breath of air, but nothing’s ever happened, not even a request for spare change or a cigarette. The afternoon of Valentine’s Day, after we’d visited my father-in-law (and treated him to lunch at Denny’s, the only place he’ll eat), Nola went up the street to cruise the antique emporiums and I made for the local bar, figuring we’d meet up there for a drink when she was done, then walk over to the Mexican restaurant for margaritas and enchiladas. This bar, which I’d been to before, is a cavernous place that was part of a now defunct hotel, and it features a high tin ceiling, a long, pitted bar top, three pool tables, and a jukebox that plays the hits of the sixties and seventies at hurricane volume. The front door stands perpetually open, so as to brighten the place up a bit with the best kind of light, the light that doesn’t cost anybody anything, and across the street is a web of train tracks that guide an endless procession of freight trains through town. Glance up from your beer or your gin-and-tonic and more often than not you’ll see a moving wall of freight cars rattling by. The important thing to emphasize here is that this isn’t an unfriendly place, despite the neatly inscribed message over the urinal in the men’s room that says “Fuck you, liberal pussies,” which I choose to take as ironic. And I wasn’t unfriendly myself, happy to sidle up to the bar alongside the mostly middle-aged regulars and order a Jack-and-Coke, though normally—that is, back in our little coastal town in California—I would have had a Pinot Noir from the Santa Rita hills or a nice, full-bodied Zinfandel from Paso Robles. This wasn’t the place for Pinot Noir, and I’m not knocking it, just stating the obvious. Beyond that, I was content to bend over my phone (I’d been engaged off and on all day posting on a financial forum run by the company I used to work for) and wait for Nola to tire out and come join me for a Valentine’s Day drink, which in her case would likely be a gin-and-tonic, a drink that nobody, whether they were in Kingman or Irkutsk, could screw up. There was a woman sitting at the deserted end of the bar, four stools down from me. I’d thrown her a reflexive glance when I came in, but chose to give her her space and sit one stool over from a knot of bearded regulars in plaid shirts, shorts, and work boots. This woman—late thirties, lean as one of the bums in the wash, jeans, running shoes, her face older than the rest of her, and a little rainbow-colored cap perched atop her dark, cropped hair—wouldn’t have been attractive to me even if I were in the market, which I wasn’t. But I was there without my wife, it was Valentine’s Day, and the single glance I’d given her must have meant more to her than to me, because three minutes later, before I’d had even a sip or two of my drink, she was standing beside me, so close we were practically touching. “My name’s Serena,” she said, trying for a smile she couldn’t quite arrange. “Brandon,” I said, and, because she was right there in my personal space, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I took her hand and shook it in a neutral way. “Brandon?” she echoed. “What kind of name is that?” “Just a name.” I shrugged. “It’s what my parents gave me.” “I have E.S.P.,” she said. “Great,” I said, after giving it a beat. “But really”—I gestured to the phone—“I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve got some business here I have to catch up on.” The music hammered us like the tailwind of a jet plane. I glanced out the open door to where a freight was rolling silently by, its mechanical shrieks and clanks negated by the forward thrust of the music. “You want to play a game?” she asked. “No, I’m sorry.” It was then that I began to realize there was another conversation altogether going on here, between her and herself. She was muttering, commenting on my comments and her own, maybe even cursing under her breath. She repeated her question and I shook my head and went back to my phone, but she wouldn’t give up, just hovered there, holding her private conversation in public. I didn’t want trouble, and, liberal pussy that I am, I didn’t relish being cruel to anyone, no matter how irritating or crazy she might be, so, after taking it another moment or two, I picked up my drink and ambled down to the other end of the bar, choosing a seat between two groups of Valentine’s Day revellers, men mostly, but a pair of women there, too, everybody mutedly raucous ahead of the evening to come. But then—you guessed it—the woman was back, Serena, wedging herself in between me and the guy on the stool beside me, invading my personal space. She said, “I have E.S.P.,” and, when I didn’t react, she said, “You want to play a game?” Angry now, I shoved back the stool, took my drink, and crossed the room to one of the empty booths against the far wall behind the pool tables. If it had been a man harassing me I could have bluffed or blustered my way out of it—or at least left the place to avoid a confrontation—but this was different. This was a woman. A woman with God knew what kind of mental Ferris wheel spinning around in her head, and I wasn’t going anywhere. I was going to finish my drink and have another one and wait for my wife to come and get me. I’d turned my back on the bar and was hunched over my phone, responding to one of the lamebrained provocateurs at #moneymostly who seemed to exist only to spew insults, when suddenly the E.S.P. woman was back. And here we went again through exactly the same scenario, word for word, but this time, when I didn’t respond, she got upset and kicked the side of the booth so hard it nearly sent my drink flying. At which point I got up and stalked back to the bar, where I summoned the bartender, a heavyset party girl gone complacent with the delivery of the years. “Look,” I hollered over the din, “that woman over there is driving me out of my mind.” “I’ll take care of it,” she said. “You know her? Is she a local?” I couldn’t keep the edge out of my voice. I felt weak and ashamed of myself. “She turned up a couple weeks ago—to stay with a friend. Nobody here really knows her.” At that moment I glanced up, distracted by a disturbance of the light, and there was Nola, poised in the doorway with the sun behind her and a pair of shopping bags dangling from one hand. She came to me, graceful, light on her feet, and smiling with pure pleasure, which wasn’t simply the pleasure of seeing me, her husband, but of the invigorating hour she’d spent sifting through the overlooked treasures of an out-of-the-way town. We had a drink. When I looked up again, the E.S.P. woman was gone. Before long, the bartender handed out Valentine’s Day balloons—pink for the ladies, blue for the men—and we all started inflating them and batting them around the room, and it was real and honest and beautiful. I got swept up in the moment. The jukebox played a song we’d known all our lives, and I leaned in close to my wife, guided her face to me with my fingertips, and kissed her. When the Mountains Come Down to the Sea

The reason we’d gone to Kingman at that particular time, rather than a month earlier or later, had to do with the mudslides—or debris flows, as they are more accurately called—that had devastated our town early in January. We’d been evacuated for ten days in December because of the wildfires that had burned for weeks along the ridgeline and enveloped everything in a black mantle of smoke, but we’d been lucky, and our house had been spared. In fact, thanks to the efforts of the firefighting crews, very few structures were lost, and when the evacuation order was lifted, just before Christmas, we came home and celebrated the holiday as best we could under the circumstances. But, as any student of the topography of Southern California can tell you, the fires are a prelude to the floods that inevitably come with the next heavy rainfall. Which was exactly what happened. A storm cell hit at two in the morning a week after New Year’s, a cell so concentrated and powerful that the meteorologists called it a once-in-two-hundred-years event, and it generated a debris flow that drove everything before it to the sea—houses, cars, trees, boulders, and twenty-three of my neighbors, who were engulfed and killed in the dark, cold, grinding hours that succeeded it. Again, we were lucky. Our house, which is situated on high ground, was undamaged, and though I knew some of the victims by sight, we didn’t lose anyone close to us. People kept offering us sympathy, practically everyone we’d ever known telephoning, e-mailing, texting—Were we all right?—and that began to feel strange because, aside from the inconvenience of being without electricity or gas for the stove, we were untouched. Nola said that I was feeling survivor’s guilt, but, while there was an ontological dimension to all this that filled me with a kind of dread I don’t think I’d ever felt before, the concept made no sense to me. Why should I feel guilty? Because my house hadn’t been destroyed? Because I wasn’t dead myself? When, a few days later, the newspaper showed pictures of the victims, I recognized a couple of them, people I’d said hello and goodbye to a few times over the years—casual acquaintances—but no one whose name came readily to my lips. There was the tall, jaunty old man with the booming voice who always had a story to tell, the woman who owned the beauty salon, and another, a cool blonde I could picture at the bar in our favorite restaurant, always in heels and always standing, whether there was a stool available or not, almost as if it were a duty. She drank Martinis. Every so often she’d abandon her post to go outside and lean against the wall with the valets and have a smoke. Her posture—I could reconstruct it just from seeing her face in the slightly blurry obituary photo—was perfect, and even in her fifties she was slim, with an expressive figure. Nola didn’t remember her—or any of them. What I was remembering, though, was a story in that same newspaper ten years earlier, after a series of rainstorms had drenched the town—warm South Pacific storms meteorologists referred to as the Pineapple Express. It was nothing like the current cataclysm, just the loss of a single life, and why the story had stuck with me, I couldn’t say. It concerned an elderly couple, well-off, in their late sixties or maybe early seventies. Their house sat just above one of our occasional creeks—parallel to it, actually, with a long, spacious front room looking down on the streambed below. It was raining, and they were in their living room, a fire going, a string quartet on the stereo (I’m imagining now), wine poured, candles lit, the dog on the rug at their feet, giving off a rich odor because its fur had been soaked through when it went out to do its business. What else? He was a judge, a retired judge, and she’d been something, too. There had been no warning, no evacuation notice, nothing—just rain, that was all—and there was no way they could have anticipated what came next. Above them, on the side of the mountain half a mile away, something tore loose, a boulder that slammed into another boulder that in turn slammed into another and so on down the line, till a river of mud and debris came careering down the canyon and took out the wall of their house as if it were made of paper, like the ones in the Kurosawa samurai films Nola got me in a boxed set one Christmas. The wife, who survived by clinging to a door frame, said it was as if a freight train had come roaring through the house. The husband tried to hold on, too, but the torrent breached the wall on the other side of the room and took him and everything else with it. They found him on the beach the next morning, battered and abraded, his clothes scoured from him, and at first, because of his age and his long white hair and beard, they took him to be one of the transients who made their home beneath the bridge. The point was, he was no transient but a former jurist who’d no doubt passed judgment on whole truckloads of transients in his time, and the further point was that that didn’t make an iota of difference, except maybe by way of funeral arrangements. We woke the morning after the storm with no electricity and no sound but for the rain and the warring sirens of the rescue vehicles. Needless to say, the newspaper hadn’t been delivered; nor could we use the radio, the phone, the TV, or the Internet, so we really didn’t have any idea of the extent of the damage—or even that there had been any at all. I built a fire to take the chill off the house, enjoying the closeness of the moment as Nola and I sat side by side on the couch before it, spooning up cold cereal and listening to the wet witch’s hand of the rain on the roof. At ten or so, I walked down to the village to see if anybody knew what was going on, the rain tapping insistently at my umbrella and the surf crashing in the distance. At first I saw nothing out of the ordinary but for a dark scatter of palm fronds, lying like speed bumps in the street, and I kept tipping my umbrella back to get a better look at the scene ahead. There were few people around, few cars, but that was the way it was whenever it rained, everybody reluctant to leave the house and negotiate the slippery streets and fallen branches and the risk of fender benders and all the rest—again, nothing out of the ordinary. It wasn’t until I crested the long, gentle slope that rises through the center of the shopping district that I saw the mud and debris at the far end of it, where it intersects with Olive Mill, a road that runs perpendicular to the mountains and which, as I later learned, acted as a conduit for the debris flow. Curious, I kept going, downslope now, the mud becoming more of a presence in the street while sirens screamed in the distance and helicopters beat out their rhythms overhead. There was something in the air that wasn’t ordinary at all, a dark, fecal smell overlaid with a chemical taint, as of gasoline or propane. When I got to a point half a block from the main flow of the mud, where I could make out ridges of it, high, irregular ridges bristling with crushed automobiles, downed trees, and the shorn-off timbers and shattered roofs of houses, I stopped. To go any farther I’d have had to descend into the mud, which had lagooned here to a foot or so in depth, and that was something I didn’t want to do. I’m no hero. And the police and first responders were already on the scene, bulldozers roaring and fuming away, and more coming. Beyond that, and if this sounds ridiculous, forgive me, I didn’t feature ruining my shoes just to satisfy my curiosity, and it wasn’t as if I could really see or do anything—there were no babies floating by on rafts of tangled branches or anything like that. There was just mud. A big, stewing soup of it. What I did was turn around and retrace my footsteps up the slope and down the other side, where everything was pristine and glowing with the sheen of the rain, thinking to go home, refresh the fire, and sit by the window with a book till the power came back on and Nola and I could flick on the TV and assess the situation. At the last minute, though, I turned left, toward the ocean, still not satisfied. There was nobody around but a couple in hoodies and mud-slick boots, working their way up the beach toward me, the waves the color of chocolate milk and surging at the sand in a seething clutter of refuse, everything in everybody’s garage and under the sink and up in the attic spewed out into the water as far as you could see. They were young, this couple, in their twenties, I guessed, but till they drew closer I couldn’t make out their faces beyond seeing that one was male, the other female. “Don’t go down there!” the man shouted out suddenly. They were giving me a wide berth and walking briskly, as if there were something right behind them and closing fast. “Because, I’m telling you, it’s pretty gnarly.” The girl, I saw now, was in tears. “What do you mean?” “I mean,” he called, already past me now, “there’s, like, an arm sticking out of the mud, and it’s, it’s”—his face, framed by his wet hoodie, was like a slice of something unevenly divided—“bad, just bad.” I jerked around so fast my feet almost went out from under me. I’d never seen a dead body and I didn’t want to see one now. All I wanted was to go home, just that, but then the shroud of rain fell back a moment and something up the beach caught my eye, something substantial I at first took to be a heap of kelp washed up in the storm, and yet it was lighter in color than kelp, almost tan, like jute, a big pile of jute. When I got to it and saw what it was, I just stood there, looking down at it for so long I could have counted the sand fleas springing off its paws and snout and the great motionless muscles of its chest and flanks. What was it? A bear. A bear crushed and drowned and washed all the way down out of the mountains on a tide it never saw coming. I knew that my wife was waiting for me, and a fire, too, and a warm blanket if I needed it, but I just couldn’t seem to move. What’s wrong with this picture, I was thinking, and then I was saying it aloud, and then the surf sluiced in and got my shoes wet and the dead bear’s bulk moved ever so fractionally, as if the tide could bring it back to life. The Suicide-Prevention Hotline

Two years ago, just after I retired (at fifty, with a golden parachute strapped firmly around my shoulders), Nola began volunteering for the local chapter of the National Suicide Prevention Society—or N.S.P., as she called it. She went through a short course of training and then three nights a week she was on duty, answering the hotline and trying, in her soft, assuaging tones, to talk strangers down from the brink. This was necessarily a late-night enterprise—very late-night—and at first I begrudged her the time away from home, away from me, but all that evened out eventually, and after six months she gave it up anyway, citing the burnout factor. Of course, during those six months, she lived through countless hours of high-wire drama and, more often than not, when she got up the next day she’d come into the kitchen or my study or wherever I happened to be and say, “Boy, have I got a story for you.” Here’s one of them. Nola had a colleague there, a man in his early thirties named Blake, who always wore a tie and a jacket while manning the phones, though there was no need to and the callers in distress wouldn’t have known if he was naked but for his socks or wearing an evil-clown mask or dangling by his feet from the ceiling. But Blake said he owed it to them because they were crying out for help and, whether they’d reached the end or not, at the very least they expected a formal presence on the other end of the line, the voice of reason dressed up in a jacket and tie. For her part, Nola wore jeans and a sweatshirt, no makeup, and usually put her hair up in a ponytail so it wouldn’t distract her as she leaned in to the phone, fully absorbed in the halting voice of misery coming at her. She didn’t ask the callers for any personal information and she didn’t put them on the defensive—she just listened, and when there were silences she tried to fill them, to keep the people talking till, at some point, whether that was half an hour later, an hour, two hours, she could direct them to a mental-health professional in their area, or, in the most extreme cases, dial 911 and send the police and paramedics to save a life. Blake operated in much the same way—it was standard procedure—but sometime during Nola’s second week he stayed on the line all night long with a single caller. Her name was Brie, she was nineteen, and her boyfriend had left her, even though she’d gone to a clinic and got rid of the baby. She didn’t see the point in living. Why go to school (she was in junior college, studying to be a dental hygienist), why save money, why work—for that matter, why bother brushing your teeth, because what difference did it make if you got periodontal disease, when you were just going to die anyway, like everybody else? The usual stuff—Nola had already heard it dozens of times from her own callers—but what was the answer? Aside from cant, which nobody at the hotline believed in, there was no convincing argument to be made and nothing to say beyond “I understand, I feel your pain, everybody goes through it, you’ll feel better in the morning, believe me. . . . Are you there? Are you still there?” Needless to say, it was against the rules to get personally involved with the callers, but, before long, Brie was calling at 1 A.M. whenever Blake was working the phones, and if anyone else answered she’d say, “I want Blake,” and in the next moment he’d take over. It wasn’t appropriate. Everybody knew that. This wasn’t a dating site—and it wasn’t a teen chat line, either. It was serious business, and if Brie was going to kill herself (as Nola began to wonder), why was she so interested in Blake? Not long thereafter, Blake confided to my wife that he’d met Brie in person, though that was strictly verboten, and then that he’d actually begun dating her—and, inevitably, had had sex with her. “She was depressed,” he said, “and, tell the truth, so was I. Nobody’s depressed when they’re having sex, right?” “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Nola told him. “And I’m not a psychologist, but there’s a whole lot more to it than that. You’re not a professional, either. You don’t know what kind of state she’s in—this is the suicide-prevention hotline, for God’s sake.” He gave her a long, slow look. “That’s right—prevention. And I’m preventing, O.K.?” “But it’s not right,” she persisted. “It’s against the rules. If Barney knew”—Barney was the boss, the only salaried employee of the local chapter—“he’d go through the roof.” A shrug. Another look. “You worry about your callers,” Blake said, “and I’ll worry about mine.” Two weeks later, Blake and Brie were both dead. Blake had gone to her apartment with a bottle of wine and takeout Chinese, but she said she was too depressed to eat. She curled in on herself, her feet bare, her leggings clinging to her ankles like grasping hands trying to pull her down (I’m reading into this now), and said the stink of the food made her think of China, with its billion and a half stinking people all hurtling toward the grave. Like everybody else in the world. Like her. Like him. Then came the arguments she’d given that first day, the arguments they all gave, and, really, what was the use of going on living, and he tried to counter them, but he was down himself and sinking lower and she had some pills the shrink had prescribed and they both took them and sat in his car with the motor running in her garage, which was locked from the inside. When Nola told me this—laid it on me, that is—there really wasn’t much I could say. I hadn’t known them. Scenarios like that spin out every day. And she hadn’t known them, either, at least not the girl, and Blake only casually, as a co-worker, and if they’d had a cup of coffee together and a couple of the stale crullers people donated, that was the extent of it. She’d been on her phones and he’d been on his. When the shift was over, they went home separately, to separate lives. “It could have been anybody,” Nola said, and I could see the distress in her face. We were at the kitchen table, glasses of Chardonnay standing like sentinels before us. It was late afternoon on a gloomy day, the atmosphere so thick it was like concrete just before it sets. She looked away from my eyes. “It could have been us.” “No,” I said. “It couldn’t. We’re nothing like that.” Fredda and Paul

What I’m talking about is grace—or call it luck, if you want. Some people have it and others don’t; that’s just the way it is, a spin of the stochastic wheel. Same thing with good looks. Statistically, physically attractive people rise more rapidly in their professions, make more money, marry better, and position their children to do the same, passing down their good fortune—and good genes—to the next generation. Even if I were unbiased, which I’m not, I’d have to say most people would consider me better looking than average—and Nola’s a rare beauty who still turns heads in her mid-forties. (And beyond that, my first wife, Ursula, whom I met in Berlin while I was an exchange student, had cover-girl looks, too, and she made me happy for six and a half years, till she didn’t, but that’s another story.) I’m not trying to inflate my ego here, just stating the facts, especially in light of what happened when Nola and I tried to play matchmaker with two of our oldest friends. Fredda had been Nola’s roommate her freshman year in college, and they’d stayed in touch over the years. She used to live on the other side of the country, but she’d recently been phased out of her job and moved to the West Coast to be with her mother, who was ailing. Fredda was smart and capable and fast on her feet verbally, with the kind of sharp, ironic humor I savor—and miss out here in California. The problem was that she was overweight—or not simply overweight but obese—and her features were more mannish than feminine, so that she didn’t even have the advantage some overweight women enjoy of looking vulnerable and inviting at the same time. When she was a student (so Nola told me), she’d spend her Friday and Saturday nights not at dance clubs or fraternity parties or basketball games but playing pinochle in the student union with a few of the other girls—and guys—in the same physical boat. Losers, that is. And, while it’s harsh to say it, this is what I’m getting at here: some people are doomed from the start. Imagine Fredda, the heaviest kid in kindergarten, the dieting regimes, the heckling and hazing, the plus-sized jeans and tentlike dresses, and all the rest. I didn’t know her as well as I knew Paul, my own plus-sized friend, and, until she moved in with her mother, in Ventura, thirty minutes south of us, I thought of her only when we exchanged a few pleasantries over the phone before Nola picked up. “Why don’t we have Fredda over for dinner?” Nola said one night while we were sitting in the kitchen, the dishwasher humming and the radio tuned to the classical station. There were fresh-cut flowers on the table. The sun was balanced on the horizon, setting things aglow—the wineglasses and patterned china, the reflective surfaces of the appliances. It was a perfect moment, and it was as if we’d been positioned here by some unseen hand to enjoy it. I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. “Why not.” “It’d be good to see her, wouldn’t it?” “Sure.” “But who else are we going to invite?” she said, pressing her thumb to her upper lip in thought. After a minute, she said, “What about Paul?” “Paul? But we can’t—” I pictured the four of us standing around the living room with cocktails in our hands, the two of them looking in alarm at each other and then at us, as if we were playing some sort of cruel joke, when that wasn’t it at all. “No, no, I mean a dinner party, with, I don’t know, two other couples, Jenna and Jorge, maybe. The Traynors. Or Louise—how about Louise and Ira? We owe them, right? They’ve had us twice now since we had them over . . . or am I miscounting?” As it turned out, we were ten for dinner. At the last minute, we realized we couldn’t have Paul and Fredda there as the only singles among three couples—we didn’t want to be that obvious—so we invited our neighbor Arnold, who’d lost his wife six months earlier, and Katie, an energetic divorcée in her late fifties whom Nola knew from a quilting circle she’d joined over the winter. Paul was the first to arrive—he was out here on business, staying long-term at a hotel in L.A.—and I think he was eager to escape the four walls, dreary views, and artificial relationships he’d established with the concierge, the barman, and the waitstaff. We’d grown up together, Paul and I, and I knew his habits and predilections as well as I knew my own—or I thought I did. As soon as he stepped in the door I handed him a cocktail—he was an enthusiastic drinker and a dedicated oenophile and foodie whose motto was “Everything in moderation, including moderation,” and he’d long since given up worrying about his weight. “My weight is my fate” was another of his sayings, and his chief hobby—his only hobby, as far as I knew—was frequenting the trendiest restaurants around and working his way through the menus as if he were a food critic. Which, in a way, I suppose, he was. We were standing by the fireplace, catching up on gossip about our New York friends, when the bell rang, and I went to answer it while Nola fussed around in the kitchen and Paul warmed himself by the fire. It could have been any one of the seven other guests standing there, but go ahead and throw the dice: it was Fredda. “You didn’t tell me it was going to be so dark out here, my God,” she said, grinning to let me see her teeth, as if that were the only way I could identify her. “And this mountainside—I was beginning to think you lived on Everest. Or at least K2—isn’t that the other one, K2?” She was wearing a kind of sari or toga in a shiny electric-blue material that only made her look bigger, as if this were the Mexican border and she were smuggling another person in with her, and I know that’s not particularly kind of me to say, but that was a fact. In the next moment, I was pouring her a glass of wine, and she and Paul were left to stand there looking balefully at each other while I tried to make small talk, along the lines of “It’s about time you two met” and “You’re our favorite people in the world, you know that?,” until Nola came in to rescue me and the doorbell started ringing and the party began. What can I say? It was a dinner party. Everybody had a good time, I think, and the meal—a paella that Nola and I cooked from scratch—turned out perfectly. Katie, the divorcée, who’d once been a co-owner of a Valencian restaurant in Santa Monica, said it was better than anything her chef had ever managed to come up with. Afterward, we sat around the fire with brandy and Bénédictine and encouraged the guests to browse our vinyl collection and each in succession play a single cut, so that it was as if we were hearing those songs for the first time. If we’d made a mistake, it was in not setting out place cards at dinner—the idea had seemed to me overly formal and fussy—which resulted in Paul and Fredda sitting at opposite ends of the table and barely talking to each other, let alone opening up in the way we’d hoped and expected. Fredda hardly touched her food. Paul ate steadily, enormously, his hands in constant motion, sopping up the juices from the paella pan with a heel of bread, draining his wine glass as soon as it was filled, enjoying three or four portions of the flan—I don’t know, I stopped counting, and what difference did it make, anyway? Of course—and I wouldn’t quite appreciate this until everyone else had left, Nola had gone to bed, and the two of us stayed on, talking—he’d been eating defiantly, angrily, fulfilling the role society had imposed on him and I, unthinkingly, had reinforced. The fire snapped. We sat side by side on the couch, cradling our snifters. The record—it was Paul’s selection, Ellington and Coltrane’s “In a Sentimental Mood”—haunted the speakers. There was a silence. A long silence. Stupidly, I asked, “What did you think of Fredda?” He gave me the kind of look you wouldn’t expect of a friend, his eyes fixed on mine, his lips curled down at the corners. “You would do that to me?” he said after a moment. “Do what?” “Mock me like that? You really think I want a fat woman in my life? If I want fat, I can just look in the mirror.” “But she’s as close to us as, as you are, and she’s a great person, she is—I mean, funny, funny like you can’t believe—” “And fat.” “Look, Paul, I would never . . .” I glanced away, fumbled over my words. “I mean well, you know that—” “Do you?” he said, swivelling his head on the pillar of his neck to look at me dead on, Paul, my oldest friend, whom I’d known since high school and who was as foreign to me in that moment as if we’d just met. “Do you really?” Be My Valentine