The scent of vindaloo is growing stronger, but seven and a half minutes remain on the clock.
He wants a task. Something physical but not strenuous.
He goes into the basement to collapse book boxes with his box cutter. Knife. Flatten. Stack. Knife. Flatten. Stack.
A.J. regrets his behavior with the rep. It hadn’t been her fault. Someone should have told him that Harvey Rhodes had died.
Knife. Flatten. Stack.
Someone probably had told him. A.J. only skims his e-mail, never answers his phone. Had there been a funeral? Not that A.J. would have attended anyway. He had barely known Harvey Rhodes. Obviously.
Knife. Flatten. Stack.
And yet . . . He had spent hours with the man over the last half-dozen years. They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?
Knife. Flatten. Stack.
And how rare is it to find someone who shares your tastes? The one real fight they’d ever had was over David Foster Wallace. It was around the time of Wallace’s suicide. A.J. had found the reverent tone of the eulogies to be insufferable. The man had written a decent (if indulgent and overlong) novel, a few modestly insightful essays, and not much else.
“Infinite Jest is a masterpiece,” Harvey had said.
“Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life,” A.J. had countered. “Style, no substance, my friend.”
Harvey’s face had reddened as he leaned over the desk. “You say that about any writer who was born in the same decade as you!”
Knife. Flatten. Stack. Tie.
By the time he gets back upstairs, the vindaloo is cold again. If he reheats it in that plastic dish, he’ll probably end up with cancer.
He takes the plastic tray to the table. The first bite is burning. The second bite is frozen. Papa Bear’s vindaloo and Baby Bear’s vindaloo. He throws the tray against the wall. How little he had meant to Harvey and how much Harvey had meant to him.
The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself.
No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset. No one cares why a thirty-nine-year-old man has thrown a plastic tub of vindaloo across a room like a toddler. He pours himself a glass of merlot. He spreads a tablecloth on the table. He walks into the living room. He unlocks a climate-controlled glass case and removes Tamerlane from it. Back in the kitchen, he sets Tamerlane across the table from him, props it against the chair where Nic used to sit.
“Cheers, you piece of crap,” he says to the slim volume.
He finishes the glass. He pours himself another, and after he finishes that he promises himself that he’s going to read a book. Maybe an old favorite like Old School by Tobias Wolff, though his time would certainly be better spent on something new. What had that dopey rep been going on about? The Late Bloomer—ugh. He had meant what he said. There is nothing worse than cutesy memoirs about widowers. Especially if one is a widower as A.J. has been for the last twenty-one months. The rep had been new—not her fault that she didn’t know about his boring personal tragedy. God, he misses Nic. Her voice and her neck and even her armpits. They had been stubbly as a cat’s tongue and, at the end of the day, smelled like milk just before it curdles.
Three glasses later, he passes out at the table. He is only five foot seven inches tall, 140 pounds, and he hasn’t even had frozen vindaloo to fortify him. No dent will be made in his reading pile tonight.
“AJAY,” NIC WHISPERS. “Go to bed.”
At last, he is dreaming. The point of all the drinking is to arrive in this place.
Nic, his drunken-dream ghost wife, helps him to his feet.
“You’re a disgrace, nerd. You know that?”
He nods.
“Frozen vindaloo and five-dollar red wine.”
“I am respecting the time-honored traditions of my heritage.”
He and the ghost shuffle to the bedroom.
“Congratulations, Mr. Fikry. You’re turning into a bona fide alcoholic.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. She lowers him into the bed.
Her brown hair is short, gamine-style. “You cut your hair,” he says. “Weird.”
“You were awful to that girl today.”
“It was about Harvey.”
“Obviously,” she says.
“I don’t like it when people who used to know you die.”
“That’s why you won’t fire Molly Klock, too?”
He nods.
“You can’t go on like this.”
“I can,” A.J. says. “I have been. I will.”
She kisses him on the forehead. “I guess what I’m saying is I don’t want you to.”
She is gone.
The accident hadn’t been anyone’s fault. She’d been driving an author home after an afternoon event. She’d probably been speeding to catch the last automobile ferry back to Alice. Possibly she had swerved to avoid hitting a deer. Possibly Massachusetts roads in winter. There was no way to know. The cop at the hospital asked if she’d been suicidal. “No,” A.J. said. “Nothing like that.” She had been two months pregnant. They hadn’t told anyone yet. There had been disappointments before. Standing in the waiting room outside the morgue, he rather wished they had told people. At least there would have been a brief period of happiness before this longer period of . . . He did not yet know what to call this. “No, she was not suicidal.” A.J. paused. “She was a terrible driver who thought she wasn’t.”
“Yes,” said the cop. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
“People like to say that,” A.J. replies. “But it was someone’s fault. It was hers. What a stupid thing for her to do. What a stupid melodramatic thing for her to do. What a goddamn Danielle Steel move, Nic! If this were a novel, I’d stop reading right now. I’d throw it across the room.”
The cop (who was not much of a reader aside from the occasional Jeffery Deaver mass-market paperback while on vacation) tried to steer the conversation back to reality. “That’s right. You own the bookstore.”
“My wife and I,” A.J. replied without thinking. “Oh Christ, I just did that stupid thing where the character forgets that the spouse has died and he accidentally uses ‘we.’ That’s such a cliché. Officer”—he paused to read the cop’s badge—“Lambiase, you and I are characters in a bad novel. Do you know that? How the heck did we end up here? You’re probably thinking to yourself, Poor bastard, and tonight you’ll hug your kids extra tight because that’s what characters in these kinds of novels do. You know the kind of book I’m talking about, right? The kind of hotshot literary fiction that, like, follows some unimportant supporting character for a bit so it looks all Faulkneresque and expansive. Look how the author cares for the little people! The common man! How broad-minded he or she must be! Even your name. Officer Lambiase is the perfect name for a clichéd Massachusetts cop. Are you racist, Lambiase? Because your kind of character ought to be racist.”
“Mr. Fikry,” Officer Lambiase had said. “Is there anyone I can call for you?” He was a good cop, accustomed to the many ways the aggrieved can come undone. He set his hand on A.J.’s shoulder.
“Yes! Right on, Officer Lambiase, that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do in this moment! You’re playing your part beautifully. Would you happen to know what the widower is supposed to do next?”
“Call someone,” Officer Lambiase said.
“Yes, that is probably right. I’ve already called my in-laws, though.” A.J. nodded. “If this were a short story, you and I would be done by now. A small ironic turn and out. That’s why there’s nothing more elegant in the prose universe than a short story, Officer Lambiase.
“If this were Raymond Carver, you’d offer me some meager comfort and darkness would set in and all this would be over. But this . . . is feeling more like a novel to me after all. Emotionally, I mean. It will take me a while to get through it. Do you know?”
“I’m not sure that I do. I haven’t read Raymond Carver,” Officer Lambiase said. “I like Lincoln Rhyme. Do you know him?”
“The quadriplegic criminologist. Decent for genre writing. But have you read any short stories?” A.J. asked.
“Maybe in school. Fairy tales. Or, um, The Red Pony? I think I was supposed to read The Red Pony.”
“That is a novella,” A.J. said.
“Oh, sorry. I’m . . . Wait, there was one with a cop I remember from high school. Kind of a perfect crime thing, which I guess is why I remember it. This cop gets killed by his wife. The weapon is a frozen side of beef and then she serves it to the other—”
“ ‘Lamb to the Slaughter,’ ” A.J. said. “The story’s called ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ and the weapon is a leg of lamb.”
“Yes, that’s it!” The cop was delighted. “You know your stuff.”
“It’s a very well-known piece,” A.J. said. “My in-laws should be here any minute. I’m sorry about before when I referred to you as an ‘unimportant supporting character.’ That was rude and for all we know, I am the ‘unimportant supporting character’ in the grander saga of Officer Lambiase. A cop is a more likely protagonist than a bookseller. You, sir, are a genre.”