LITMIR.BIZ

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possibly work out. Yet his memories of being in bed with her are happy. It was by daylight that it all got too complicated.

      The thing that most appealed to him about Dawn was that she was the antithesis of his ex-wife. A high compliment, to be sure. He’d gotten married on what felt like the too-younger side, although much older than Quinn had. M. never stopped treating him as a boy—the way he watched M.’s mother treat her father, until that old boy’s heart gave out with a massive infarction. M. had quickly taken the air out of their marriage with what might have been called, in another era, henpecking. As the years went on, her disappointment in his failure to move beyond his local sportswriting job, and the pay that came with it, was palpable. Used cars and forestalled luxuries. She ran up the credit cards as if he had already succeeded, to punish him that he had not. He punished her in turn by letting go of any ambition at all. Coming out of that mess, he met Dawn, which felt like oxygen again. She laughed hard, they had real fun, and he came to have deep affection for her. He just couldn’t marry her.

      Then he heard she was back, from one of the secretaries at the paper who knew them both. A kind of “brace yourself” sideways warning, because coming home disappointed was never easy. A few weeks after that, he heard Dawn was back at the bar at The Wharf, a place he then frequented much less frequently. But then there he was, at the bar of The Wharf.

      Why was he here? He knew why: the whole thing always had the opposing forces. It needed to be done. He’d watched the door even as he’d fought the urge to flee. He leaned back over his beer, trying ineffectively to convince himself once more he didn’t come to see Dawn. The Celtics were on the big screen above the bar, playing the Nets, and he focused in on that, just as ineffectively.

      “Well, let’s get this done with,” she said from behind him.

      “Hey, look at you!” he said.

      He’d not have recognized her. The hair was cut so severely short it almost seemed applied. It seemed lacquered down with some kind of hair product and the smallness of her head was the shock. Her mane, shorn. She was deeply tanned, baked in a way he suspected came from extending it in the local tanning parlor. But he had to admit it was good to see her. She pushed her cold cheek at him, the awkward kiss, and he could feel the shaky vibe.

      “Your hair looks great,” he said.

      “Yeah, well, things happen,” she said. “I assume you heard I was back.”

      “I think I had.”

      “Come on, you knew,” she said. “I made sure you would, so this wouldn’t be an ambush.”

      “Thanks. Are you back for good?”

      “Oh, God, I hope not! I was trying to sell real estate in a place where every other house seemed to be abandoned. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up.”

      “Good for you.”

      She was dressed smartly, if not warmly. In their times together, she tended toward jeans and sweaters, but tonight she was bedecked as the tropical real-estate woman she had tried to be. Silk blouse, pencil skirt, jangling jewelry up and down. And that perfume he always liked, but the name of which he could never remember at Christmas.

      “And you’re still at the paper.”

      “Of course. Where else would I be?”

      She was smiling in a way, with the tan, that spoke of some gained perspective. She’d been places, as he had never, something he wouldn’t have expected.

      “Don’t you ever want to even try to do something different?” she said.

      “Such as?”

      “Such as moving to Florida, even if it doesn’t work out. To have an experience!”

      “But there’s Sarah.”

      Dawn, childless, backed off a little at the mention of the daughter. “And how is she?”

      “Great. As always.”

      “You know, she could come visit you somewhere else.”

      “Dawn, I can’t move to Florida.”

      “I’m not talking about Florida. I’m not even talking about me. I’m talking about you.”

      “Florida is too far away.”

      “Try Connecticut. Try New Hampshire. You can’t aspire for something better? You can’t try to move up a little before it’s too late?”

      Her phone was going in her bag, and she looked at it and looked over to her sister, sitting in a booth with her phone to her ear.

      “I’ll be right over,” she said in that direction, then turned back to Robbie. The exasperation was now patently noticeable.

      “I’m not talking about you and me,” she said. “For good or for bad I just had an experience where everything was exciting. I want that for you, because I know it’s what you really want.”

      “I do?”

      “Robbie, you’re stuck and you don’t even know it,” she said, turning away, her scent still enveloping him.

      6.

      THE PUCK’S ON YOUR STICK; NOW TURN UP ICE. THE PIVOT and quick look. See who’s open. The wide white expanse, the fresh layer. The wheeling of players, peripherally, planets in orbit. The bite of blades into the sheet, the churn of legs. The air, cold. The low thunder of everyone surging, skates pounding the ice and echoing from a rink’s low girders. Your hands are soft in the thick gloves, feeling the puck through the length of the stick. The moment seems attenuated. The faces seem familiar. Keep moving, keep moving.

      Quinn opens his eyes. Another of his limited slate of recurring dreams, again and again. In this dream he’s still in high school, on the ice, but in it he’s also a middle-aged man. He sometimes wonders why he goes back to it so constantly. But he knows it was the best time he had, and so brief. His frequent and painful return to the happy past.

      His dreams are all backward-looking now, and that’s a vague worry. The grind of the work doesn’t forge hopeful visions. He feels old. He feels spent. The radial ache in his shoulders when he falls back on his mattress makes him wonder: How do I keep on? The seduction of physical work is about not thinking of any future, not to anticipate the worn years and insistent aches. In a body sagging with fatigue, the mind doubles back to the crystalline moments of furious youth, which you didn’t bother to note at the time because you thought you couldn’t possibly run out of them.

      The end of winter hangs on. The snow still dusts the ground and the skies hang flat and compressing on the mirror-gray harbor. The pleasure boats stand in hibernation on their cradles, shrink-wrapped in white polyethylene sheaths and lined down the dirt road of the storage barn, a herd of eyeless beasts awaiting their spring molting.

      The only sound off the harbor is the waterline thrum of diesel work engines, the egress of the commercial fleet, barnacled hulks slipping out toward the far sky. March has a dour taste to the workingman, be it rubber-clad fishermen on the water or the flannel-wrapped roofers up in cold winds, or the road crews working into the early darkness of the winter day.

      Quinn has no taste at all for lobster. He hasn’t eaten one in twenty years. He generally eschews fish, the way an office type avoids seeing coworkers off-hours. They’re enemy combatants. With the bugs, he’s been cut and clamped so many times that to enter a restaurant on that rare occasion, and to see them docile in a bubbling water tank, elicits a strange melancholy, and possibly even fraternity.

      Restaurants no more, anyway. He’d gone underground after his release, but he knew Botelho’s wife was resolutely on the case. She was manic to have her say. He could have told her how it was: that they had the life vests per regulations, but the regulations didn’t say you had to be wearing one. That it was easy to get too blasé walking along the open stern as the trawl let out with the big polyball floats and the ground lines and ganglion whooshing wetly by your ankles. An article

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