Things We Nearly Knew Read online

  We didn’t have a fixed plan in mind, except to mosey round for a couple of hours, take some refreshment, and come home. Marcie wanted to see the farm equipment. It’s not as if she’s mechanically minded but, having grown up on a farm, whenever anything agricultural is in the vicinity, a primeval instinct homes her toward it. There was no keeping her away from the tractors. I think she’d have married a tractor if it had been legal. Arlene wanted to visit the rabbits. I told her she could do that at the pet store in town. That wasn’t the same thing apparently, so Davy and I had to look at rabbits, and say how cute they were, while Arlene cuddled them.

  Davy wandered off. I think he was irritated that Arlene cuddled the rabbits with more enthusiasm than she cuddled him. I could have told him that Marcie looked at tractors with more enthusiasm than she looked at me. After a while, I persuaded Arlene to abandon the rabbits and the two of us went off to find Davy. Along the way, we passed a guy, about my age, who smiled at us.

  ‘Hiya, Arlene,’ he said.

  ‘Hiya.’

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, just a guy I met at a bar in town,’ said Arlene.

  ‘In this town?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I thought you had better taste,’ I said. ‘What are you doing drinking at a bar in this town? You’re meant to be faithful to my bar.’

  ‘I’m not faithful to any bar,’ said Arlene. She pinched my arm. ‘Now don’t start getting jealous.’

  When we found Davy, he was pounding a hammer at the Test Your Strength booth. Marcie soon joined us. Davy had stripped to the waist and was clattering the hell out of the machine. The three of us stood a little way off and watched. He was not the only man doing it. Beside him was another guy, early twenties maybe, also stripped to the waist. It looked like they were engaged in a contest, trying to see who could shoot the chaser highest up the pole. The guy who ran the booth stood at one side, counting the money.

  ‘He’ll give himself a heart attack if he goes on like that,’ said Marcie. Arlene looked around distractedly and said nothing.

  Davy was taking the contest with great seriousness. When it was his turn, he walked slowly up to the machine, blowing on his hands, gathering his concentration and his breath like he was an Olympic shot-putter. He threw his last ounce of strength into each blow. After each one, he sighed, whether out of satisfaction or disappointment being a moot point. His body glistened with sweat, and his veins bulged. The younger guy did the opposite. He never broke sweat. He sidled up to the machine, barely pausing before he smashed the hammer down. He had nearly turned away by the time the chaser reached its apex. He seemed disinterested in the proceedings, as if he did it to keep Davy amused and it was no big deal to him. He kept on going, though, just as Davy did.

  The contest must have been about ten minutes old when we arrived. We didn’t know who was winning or, in the end, who won, although that was immaterial by then. At the time, the three of us said little to each other. It was only afterwards, when Marcie and I were discussing it back home, that we realized we each had a different take on what we’d been watching. How is that possible? How can two people look at the same spectacle and disagree about what they’re looking at?

  It was my point of view that Davy was trying to prove he was as fit and strong as a man half his age and wouldn’t accept nature’s verdict. So he pounded away, with diminishing effect, clearly in a fury, raging against his own faded powers. The other guy kept his cool, not because he didn’t care, otherwise why go on, but to emphasize the futility of the contest, and to rile Davy all the more.

  Marcie didn’t see it as a contest. She thought Davy and this other guy happened to have come to the booth at the same time and were taking turns at the hammer to give the other a rest. She didn’t think they were competing with each other, or paying particular attention to how high they got the chaser.

  ‘Why do you assume two men should be behaving like two women?’ I asked her.

  ‘Why do you assume everything in life is a trial of strength?’

  ‘Because it is,’ I said. ‘Especially when two guys are doing something that advertises itself as a trial of strength.’

  ‘Why weren’t they talking to each other?’ said Marcie.

  ‘What was there to talk about, for Christ’s sake? Waste of breath, and they needed all they had.’

  I don’t want you to think this was a serious dispute. Marcie and I don’t have those. We keep a handful of arguments for special occasions, well rehearsed and produced from time to time to keep us amused. By and large, I don’t play the macho guy and I don’t treat Marcie as the dumb blonde, specially since she’s a brunette. She’s also not dumb, and she may have been quite right in her view of what was going on. I’m not saying she wasn’t.

  Actually, I am saying that she wasn’t.

  I suppose guys aren’t allowed to say things like that these days. We’re allowed to think them, for the time being, but not to say them. I’ve no rooted objection to gender equality. If I’d wanted to marry a doormat, there’s a good selection down the hardware store. Everyone says Marcie’s a lot smarter than me. In fact, they don’t say that either, but they think it. I think it myself. But sometimes I’m right. And even if I turn out not to be right, I regard it as my prerogative to make assertions. Marcie doesn’t agree with that. She thinks you shouldn’t make assertions when you’re not sure of the facts. She asks questions instead.

  After a strike of massive exertion, Davy slid down the front of the machine, his back resting against it. Marcie was the first to see that anything was wrong. She gave a small cry and rushed toward him. She’d been right: he’d given himself a heart attack. Before long, there were paramedics everywhere and he was being carted off to the nearest hospital. Fortunately, that was close by. The thieving bastards had stolen that from our town as well.

  Davy must have been mid-forties at this time. Despite what I’ve said, he was fit, just not as fit as a twenty-something. The attack had not been severe, it turned out, and Davy recovered from it quickly. He was in hospital for a few days and we went to visit him. For some reason Arlene didn’t. I think she went away for a while. Davy came back with a load of pills to reduce his blood pressure, which was a bonus. It didn’t take a heart attack, or a doctor, to spot that Davy’s blood pressure was way too high. On the face of it, everything went back to normal pretty quickly.

  Except it didn’t. Davy appeared to decide that he was now middle-aged, or at least not young anymore. He took a conscious decision to age. Davy knew who he was before. He was hot-headed and irritable, which was annoying sometimes, but it gave him character. He conveyed the impression of being mad at what had happened in an earlier life. He seemed to want to begin a new life, and to have chosen Arlene as part of the makeover. At least, that’s what we thought at the time.

  The new post-heart attack Davy had no idea who he was, and if he didn’t, we sure as hell didn’t either. He was trying on bits of a new persona as if he was trying on items of clothing, and few of them fitted. The things that used to rile him, riled him no longer. Or rather, they did rile him, but he tried not to show it. As a result, he became irritating, because we were always conscious that he was trying to suppress stuff.

  At some point, this began to have an effect on Arlene. When we get attracted to someone, we are attracted to the image they present of themselves, which is seldom the complete reality. If it’s close enough to the reality, it won’t make a difference. We expect a few things to come creeping out of other people’s closets when we’re no longer star blinded by them. In Davy’s case, what you saw was pretty close to what you got, or it had been until then.

  Things started to change between Davy and Arlene. There had never appeared to be much passion in the relationship, so far as we could tell. It was like their fire had been lit with damp wood. But the conversations had been animated, at least on Davy’s part. On Arlene’s side, less so, it seemed. Now Davy was no longer animated, and there were longer sil
ences. You could say that they ran out of things to talk about, but Davy had never had much to talk about. He just talked. And Arlene listened, most of the time. But you can’t listen to someone who’s not saying anything. For a while, they continued to sit together. I saw the glances, the glances away from each other, the glances that searched for a more interesting conversation elsewhere in the bar, the glances of disengagement.

  They stopped huddling in their corner. They wandered round the bar, joining other conversations. They stopped singing. Eventually Arlene began to come in less often and Davy appeared not to mind. You could say that she’d got bored with him, but I don’t think that was it. Arlene had got bored with herself, which is another way of saying she had got bored with life.

  ‘Davy shouldn’t have tried to reinvent himself,’ I said to Marcie one night.

  ‘I don’t think that was the cause of it,’ said Marcie. ‘It happened before then. You and I watched it happen in front of us.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘At the County Fair. Before the heart attack. When Davy was straining every sinew on the machine, and Arlene stood there, looking bored, looking away, looking for someone else.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Something clicked in her. It was almost audible. It had to do with seeing the two men at the machine, side by side. I think it reminded her of Davy’s age, and of her own age too. I’ve been looking at the two of them these past months, and it doesn’t look right. I can see Arlene with a man half her age, or with one twice her age. But not with a man who’s close to her own age. That’s too much for her. Arlene’s terrified of getting old.’

  We spent so much time last year discussing Arlene, analysing Arlene, trying to work out the mystery of Arlene. And, of course, trying to work out the mystery of Jack. Two enigmas for the price of one. Arlene draped a magician’s cloak around the sanctum of her soul and left the world to guess what lay behind it. Possibly nothing much lay behind it. A jumble of neuroses and insecurities, some bad memories, the unreasonable hope that someone else would come along and do for her what she couldn’t do for herself. Outside, Arlene was the polished lacquer of a bamboo stem; inside, she was a series of hollow chambers, each insulated against the next. Christ, that sounds bitchy. It means, I suppose, that Arlene was much like the rest of us. She looked different. We wanted her to be different. In the end, she turned out to be the same, in a different way. And we were disappointed because we had expectations, and we had those because we were bored, and wanted something new to happen, like she did.

  As for Davy, I couldn’t say. I struggle to know the friends I’ve had all my life. At times, I struggle to know Marcie. I never met Davy in his previous incarnation, so I can’t tell you how Davy Mark II differed from Davy Mark I. And now here was Davy Mark III. My guess is that Davy suffers from low self-esteem, camouflaged by a lot of noise and dogmatic assertion. I reckon that, when he met Arlene and when Arlene took to him, he began to have a better opinion of himself. Then, when Arlene seemed to lose interest, Davy thought that it must be his fault, that his original evaluation of himself had been correct.

  What goes through our heads at times like these is such baloney, isn’t it? In our own estimation, we go from superhero one second to poor damned fool the next, with no stopover. As far as I could see, Davy and Arlene were good for each other. They got along great until these stupid mind things got in the way. They’d both had big disappointments. At least, we assumed they had. We thought, this is meant to be; this is their break; this is the time they put their pasts behind them and get on with the future. Maybe we always hope that for other people’s relationships. As well as for our own.

  I suppose only psychopaths get to put their pasts behind them. The rest of us carry them around with us, lumbered on our backs, swollen with the rainfall of the years. There’s no refuge from the weight of the past. It seeps into crevices we don’t know exist, and poisons the wells at which we hope to drink. Even if we’re not jealous, our pasts are jealous on our behalf, demanding fidelity, requiring us to be true to them unto death. The future doesn’t get a look-in. So it gets bored and goes off to flirt with someone else, and the same thing happens all over.

  Now I look at what I’ve said about the County Fair, and how it changed Davy and Arlene and their relationship, I’m not sure I agree with it. What I’ve said is what Marcie and I concluded at the time, based on what we knew at the time. Afterwards, a lot happened that changed our minds about many things. That should have made us revisit our attitude to the fair and its aftermath. Somehow it hasn’t. There’s no doubt that Davy and Arlene’s relationship changed around that time. It now occurs to me there could have been several explanations for that fact, apart from the one I’ve given.

  Anyhow, the County Fair stands out for me. It was the last act of a spring that had been full of drama, and the first act of a summer that would be fuller still. At any rate, we knew it was the day that summer began. The County Fair publicity said so. Who could fail to believe the lying bastards next door?

  5

  One evening in the middle of June, a couple of weeks or so after the fair, Franky Albertino walked into the bar. It was around six o’clock. A few of the way-home-from-work crowd were downing a fortifier to cleanse the day and prepare their psyches for reunion with wives and children. Steve had called in sick, so Marcie would have to help me out in a while. In the meantime, she’d gone upstairs to rest her feet. I was cleaning up in a desultory sort of way. Franky couldn’t have chosen a better time to find me nearly on my own, if that was what he wanted, which it probably was.

  ‘Hello, Franky. Long time no see. Want a beer?’

  ‘Why not?’ He moved as if to get some cash from his pocket.

  ‘No need for that,’ I said. ‘First one’s on the house.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Franky. ‘I’ll pay all the same, if you don’t mind. Don’t want to get the reputation of a scrounger.’ He smiled, in a charming sort of way.

  I didn’t pretend to be surprised to see him, and he didn’t pretend to be surprised that I wasn’t surprised. Franky knows what gossip’s like in this town. He didn’t look much different from the last time I’d seen him. Short, straight hair, still jet black, unless he dyed it. The same crooked grin, which suited in more than one respect. The same cherubic features, which didn’t.

  ‘Good to have you back,’ I said, not yet sure I was feeling that way toward him, but being used by now to welcoming anyone who came in to spend good money.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Franky. He gulped a draught of his beer, then took a long look round the place. ‘Nice joint you’ve got yourself here.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Never figured you for a barkeeper.’

  ‘No? What did you figure me for?’

  ‘I thought you’d become a teacher.’

  ‘I did for a while. Now I’m doing this. What are you up to these days?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ said Franky.

  ‘Are you working?’

  ‘I buy a bit of this, sell a bit of that.’

  ‘You’re a dealer,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I guess that’s it. I’m a dealer.’ Dealing what? Automobiles? Drugs? Low blows to all and sundry? Franky wasn’t about to be more specific.

  ‘And what brings you back to town?’

  ‘Business brought me nearby,’ he said, ‘and I had this notion to come back and see how the place was and who was still here. Curiosity, I suppose.’

  The man who runs the real-estate outfit on Main Street had supplied details of another sighting of Franky in town. He’d told me that Franky had come in to enquire about properties, so there seemed to be some sort of plan. He’d given his current address as a motel on the other side of town. More information would be forthcoming in due course, no doubt. There were plenty of people around who remembered Franky and would be wondering what he was up to, fearing that the general answer would be ‘no good’.

  ‘Have you seen anyone since you’ve been back?’


  ‘A few,’ said Franky. ‘Not to talk to much. Fact is, I get a little confused as to who everyone is. I recognize people, or think I do, but I can’t place them exactly. I don’t want to put my foot in it.’

  ‘Never stopped you before, Franky,’ I said. I might have mentioned that his foot was not the only part of his anatomy he put in it, but that would have been antagonistic, not to mention crude.

  Franky laughed. ‘No one lives down their past, do they? I leave here thirty years ago, and I come back and it’s like thirty minutes. The things I did then, I did yesterday. The guy I was then, I am now.’

  ‘I expect you think the same of us,’ I said.

  ‘I expect I do. I was making a general point, not being personal.’ He seemed defensive, no longer sure of his place in the scheme of things. He didn’t used to be that way. He was cock of the roost once, and knew it better than anyone.

  ‘So you haven’t looked anybody up?’

  ‘Not yet.’ He looked round the bar again. ‘Not yet.’ If Franky wanted to see someone, he’d need to know if they were in town and where they lived, and he would need to ask. It didn’t sound like he’d asked anyone else, so I thought he’d ask me. He didn’t.

  ‘Funny old life,’ was all he said for the moment. I left him to his drink and went to serve another customer. While I was doing it, Marcie came into the bar.

  ‘Hello, Franky. Imagine seeing you here.’

  ‘Hi, Marie.’

  ‘Marcie. As you know.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Hi, Marcie.’ He looked puzzled. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Marcie didn’t give the obvious answer for the moment. ‘Why shouldn’t I be here? Isn’t a girl allowed to have a drink?’