I’m alone, on my blue couch, waiting for my ex wife. I play a record on our old turntable because I feel like being nostalgic. I remember we discovered a beach made of glass. It made my heels hurt even through my sneakers. That night we peeled shrimp and ate them like oil barons lost at sea.

 

A man talks to a woman. The man is married. The woman cut her hair short, platinum blonde, above the neckline. She has a tattoo of a circle. She is learning French in the mornings. The man buys her flowers and cucumber-scented water.

The man stares at the tattoo above her panty line.

“Porquoi,” she says. “Do you know what that means?”

“Why,” he says.

“Yes, exactly.”

 

My ex wife drops off her son. It’s peculiar that she trusts me with the boy. I’ve killed so many houseplants.

“This is a good opportunity for you,” she says.

She’s dressed up to go out somewhere, not in her usual brand name yoga pants. She’s wearing the earrings I bought her when we went upstate, and I spent twenty dollars at the carnival trying to knock down wooden milk bottles.

The kid stares at me from the couch. He’s more interested in me than the “zookeeper” movie she put on for him. I can’t say I blame him.

“He likes radishes. Don’t ask me why,” she says, shuffling through her pocketbook. She doesn’t find what she’s looking for and snaps it shut.

“What am I supposed to do with him?”

She scrunches her eyebrows the way she used to when I’d say the c-word. “Do with him?”

“Yeah like I can’t take him to a titty bar or a party right?”

The kid giggles. He raises his hips and cups his buttocks firmly over his green corduroy pants.

“If you could take one thing seriously you’d be ruling a country,” she says, approaching the child for a kiss.

“Yeah, but it’d be Bangladesh or something stupid like that.”

“Bangladeshis need leadership, too,” she says in a kind of prattle as she hugs the boy goodbye.

She walks over to me and gets close with her finger. She’s just done her nails, emerald. “You know what to do if he hurts himself?”

“Bail. First train to Mexico, live under the name Caesar Malone. Grow beans, meet someone decent, prove I’m more than just a bean farmer to earn her respect.”

“You’re a dick.” She kisses me flush on the cheek.

I can’t even feel her lips through all the gloss. It feels like leather pants on my skin. I liked her lips natural when I could taste them.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says.

The kid has removed the couch cushions, and he digs his tiny fingers into the cookie crumb seams. My ex wife shuts the door behind her. I remember when she’d lock it with our keys.

 

She works in finance. She is ashamed of the way he dresses. Like a “bummy artist.” The man wipes his sweaty hands on his only pair of black slacks. Her father would never approve, except he does.

The man sits next to the girl’s father. They watch a Russian movie about a submarine. He doesn’t understand Russian, but he can’t believe his luck. They take a shot of port together.

“He is basically saying that if they’re wrong the whole world will die,” says the father, through his accent, pointing at a sailor on the T.V.

“Oh, ok,” says the man.

The girl watches them intently. “You don’t even drink port, Papa.”

“When you have guests, you drink port,” he says.

The man imagines the girl tied up in a big red bow.

“It’s like I don’t even know you,” she says.

 

The zookeeper in the movie falls for a girl “out of his league.” The boy has disassembled the couch. He pulls raggedly on the foldout bed. Crumbs and nickels quiver under the sheets.

“So what do you usually get up to on the weekends, kid?” I ask.

“I like baths,” the boy says.

“Yeah, I’m more of a shower guy myself, but I see where you’re coming from.”

The boy slaps his hand against the hard base of the couch.

“You hungry?”

He nods.

“Are you past the milk stage?” I should’ve asked that. “What do you like to eat besides radishes?”

“Fig Newtons.”

“Do you know who I am?” I ask.

He shakes his head.

“Does your mom talk about me?”

“Sometimes if I eat too many Fig Newtons I poot.”

“I have a feeling you’re not the font of information I hoped you’d be.”

He rubs his little boy belly like a beer drunk.

On the way to get Fig Newtons, a funeral procession passes by. I involuntarily make the sign of the cross—a vestigial compulsion of my childhood. Everyone seems to be in good spirits. Maybe it’s one of those expected things. Everything happens for a reason: Jesus said that.

The deli is just around the block. The counter girl smiles when she sees the kid. She’s Lithuanian or something equally sexy. I bet everyone in her village looks like that. She’s one of those girls you can’t believe is wearing an apron. I want to know what sadness brought her to this moment in time. I want to be a part of it.

“What’s your name?” she asks the boy.

“Thomas,” he says, shyly. Little boys are innate cowards around pretty girls—an instinct attempting to shield us from our fate.

“That’s a cool name.”

“Thanks,” he says. “My mom gave me it.”

I’m half searching for the Fig Newtons, trying to figure out a way to tell her he’s not mine. I’m as free as a Lynard Skynard pigeon. Thank God I didn’t say that out loud.

“You guys carry Fig Newtons?” I ask.

“Next to the flower and dog food over back,” she says.

I find the crinkly pack and bring it to the register. I hand her a twenty. She gives me change. I hold up a five, fold it, and stuff it into the coffee can slot on the counter, which reads: “WE EXCEPT TIPS.”

“That’s for you,” I say.

“Thanks.” She looks past me as she says this, to an arriving bus out on the street. The ground is a little wet, and the bus makes that swishing sound when it stops.

I cradle the Fig Newtons. I hold open the glass door, and the boy follows me out.

“When was the last time you felt good, kid?”

“Today,” he says.

“Thanks, I really appreciate that.” I pat him lightly on his miniature back.

Around the corner from the church, I hear an old hymn. It emanates through the stained glass like morning or firelight.

“You ever been to a funeral, kid?”

**

 

Porquoi had known all along he wasn’t quite right. He couldn’t imagine floors existed without her anymore. That if she were suddenly gone one day, he’d fall straight through his bedroom and into the earth and become a latent diamond some millions of years later. She had created him. He knew in that moment he’d lost them both.

It’s a Catholic mass like those from my childhood. Immaculate Conception. We sit in the back next to an old man in a trench coat who looks like he also shouldn’t be there.

“It’s important to whisper here,” I say, preemptively.

“How come?” whispers the boy.

“Because God has the hearing of a dog.”

The boy nods as if what I said makes perfect sense. I feel like I can tell him anything, and he’ll approve. This must be how CEOs feel.

The church isn’t that old. Nothing in America is as old as we think it is. We tear down our monuments and build them back up in their own images. The stained glass is vibrant, not faded, as I’d like it to be. Little fake red candles flicker next to my pew. I wonder if they are still operated by quarters.

Three bells ring.

 

The man confesses to a small Vietnamese priest. The man is frightened because he has forgotten the words to the Hail Mary. There is no screen between them like there used to be. Just him, the priest, and liquid sin boiling like chicken stock.

“I am unfaithful,” he says. “And the worst part is I didn’t regret it until I had to.” She does not belong to him anymore, he tells himself.

When her father dies, she asks him to be there anyway. He can’t understand any of the words at the service. All he can think of is that submarine.

 

“My peace to you,” says the priest from the pulpit to the mourners.

“My peace I give you,” I say, not knowing why. My hands sweat. I rub them on my black slacks.

“Let us show a sign of peace,” says the priest.

I turn, reluctantly, to the old man in the camel-colored trench coat. He smells like cooking. He extends his leathery palm to me. It’s shaking. I steady it in my own, then look down to the boy.

“Peace be with you,” I say, lowering my hand.

The boy is scared of the man in the camel coat, his hands out, discolored and dry. I rip open the Fig Newtons, clutching the box in my armpit. The bag’s crackle makes me wince. I offer a single Newton to the boy. He cups his hand, and I place it in his pink, interlaced fingers. He takes it in his mouth whole.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say.

When we get home, he and I polish off the bag of Fig Newtons and the zookeeper movie. Its abject hollowness makes me sleepy.

I give the kid my bed and a glass of milk by the side of it on my crooked modernist nightstand. I take the couch. I feel as though I am under the surface of the earth. I drift off, thinking of my ex wife and where she must be, all gussied up like that. I try to dream of her.

The next morning she comes by right on time. She has the humanity not to wear the same clothes. I put out orange juice and cereal and fresh strawberries on the sticky kitchen counter. The truth of the matter is that the kid and I ate Fig Newtons for breakfast. I went out to the deli before he got up and bought him a fresh bag.

“How was it? What’d you boys get up to?” she asks, pulling the kid’s puffy red coat that I forgot about, over his head.

“This and that,” I say. “The kid’s a real charmer.”

“Oh yeah? Want one of your own now?” she smiles in a way that tells me I should not give her the answer.

I smile back. “You know me.”

“I certainly do.”

The boy hugs my ex wife’s leg. I can’t think of a single valuable thing I own. I look at my stupid toaster that I don’t use.

“Everything ok with you?” she asks. “You look more morose than usual.”

I think back to a time when the world still belonged to us.

“Porquoi—do you know what that means?”

“Why,” she says, gently stroking the boy’s hair.

“Yes.” I say, “Exactly.”