A Thousand Pardons (21 page)

“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” one of them said to Hamilton, who was straight-faced as far as he could feel. “We might not have jobs tomorrow. Where were you, in some bar?”

He nodded.

“Oh, great,” said the angry one. “And I’m sure no one whipped out a phone and took your picture there. I’m sure you were totally incognito there. I’m sure that picture isn’t on TMZ already.”

“That’s all correct, actually,” Hamilton said. “Though weirdly expressed. Why, were you out looking for me?”

The two handlers’ four eyes flashed toward each other, then back at Hamilton. “Seriously,” said the relieved one, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry right now.”

“Have a drink,” Hamilton said, clapping them both on the shoulder, “and for God’s sake, never, ever separate into two people. Because that is a slippery fucking slope.” He made the journey from the bar at
one end of the ballroom to the bar at the opposite end. People waved, and he waved back, and he hugged and kissed them lustily whenever they hugged and kissed him, but whenever they spoke to him it was as if they were a hundred feet away, and with no idea what they were saying he had to try to make the appropriate facial expressions until they stopped. Time passed and he had a vague sense of the ballroom being less crowded than it had been, unless it had somehow gotten bigger. He saw a young, red-haired woman in a very short black skirt—hot, but small, like some sort of curvaceous doll—sitting alone with her heavily tattooed arm across the back of her chair; at the far end of the arm was her hand with a martini glass in it; at the near end, her chin was sunk gloomily into her shoulder. With her legs crossed, she was more exposed to Hamilton and the rest of the room than she seemed to realize—

“Whoa!” Hamilton said. “Bettina!”

Bettina raised her eyes, the way a dog would do. “Well great,” she said. “There goes my last shred of hope, which was that you’d forgotten what I looked like.”

She was very drunk, which was exciting because it ran so afoul of his first impression of her. It was so boring to be right about people. “Bettina, don’t worry, Bettina,” he said, pulling up a chair in front of her; whoever had been at Bettina’s table had abandoned her there. She had the look of someone who had already embarrassed herself, who was regretful but also past caring. “Are you afraid of me? There’s no reason to be afraid of me.”

She looked at him and smirked, as if offended to be considered stupid enough not to be afraid of him.

“Bettina, it is so important that we found each other,” he said. “Let me go get you another martina. Martini.”

The crowd had thinned out to the point where he didn’t even have to wait in line at the bar. He held up the martini glass and then two fingers, as if it were very loud in the ballroom, which it no longer was. The chandeliers were so clean—whose job was that?—but he could not look up at them, he had to look down at the two precious martinis as he made his way across the floor, which seemed to have opened up
to the size of a parking lot. Please let her still be there, Hamilton said to himself, please please please.

Not only was she there but she seemed to have perked up a bit. Her head was almost vertical. She accepted her martini with a look of deep cynicism. “What are you doing?” she said.

“I need,” he said, “to get to know you.”

She took a sip and closed her eyes. “You mean you think you’re going to fuck me?” she asked him.

“It is not about that,” he said. “I mean it is honestly only partly about that.”

“I’m sure you’re used to getting whatever you want.”

“If only,” he said. “I wish. As if.” He tried to think of another phrase that meant the same thing.

“Can I ask you something? That old broad at the theater tonight, the one with the Asian daughter: you don’t even know who she is, do you?”

“No,” he said. “No idea.”

She sat back and flipped her hands up in the air, satisfied and disgusted at the same time.

“I get treated like shit in my job,” she said. “This is the part where I say: ‘But I’m not a bad person.’ But you know what? I am a bad person.”

“No,” Hamilton said soothingly.

She closed her eyes and nodded loosely. “This is the part where I say: ‘Seriously. You don’t know me.’ But you know what? I think you do know me. You look at me and say, ‘Oh, I know her,’ and you’re actually probably right.”

“No, I do not know you,” Hamilton said, his voice reverent now, a whisper. You are the one, he was thinking. Though he was unsure what he meant by that.
You are the one
. She was some kind of kindred spirit, that was for sure, some kind of sinner who understood what an unfairly hazardous world this was, at least when she was drunk, a state in which he determined to keep her. Himself too: usually these evenings shot up like a firework and ended in a blackout that was like a depressive rebirth, but with a partner like this at his side, a partner in crime,
he had an interest in keeping things going, in postponing tomorrow morning for as long as humanly possible. He now found himself kneeling on the floor in front of her, in order to hear her better and also to worship her. Right alongside these feelings of worship, but somehow not corrupting them or affecting them in any way, were sexual imaginings of the most baroque, polluted kind, having to do with her smallness, her perfect scale, her miniature manipulability, various humiliating scenarios in which no part of her touched the floor, in which he dominated her as a giant might do.

“I mean I don’t know why I should care,” Bettina was saying, “about my stupid fucking job, whether I lose it, whether I keep it. Public relations—what the hell does that even mean?”

“I don’t know anyone who knows,” Hamilton said. He patted her hand with his. She didn’t seem to notice, and in truth he couldn’t really feel it either. He looked around for her martini and handed it to her.

“Don’t you wish you could become someone else,” she said, “just like that? Just say, ‘This is the night I am absolved for every mistake,’ and then just start again as this other person? Look who I’m talking to, though. Hamilton Motherfucking Barth. Like you’d be free to change who you are even if you wanted to.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “I could do it.”

She laughed at him. “No way José,” she said. “You’re fucked in that department. The world owns your ass.”

He stood up. His anger only sharpened the sexual outline of his every thought. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said, with no idea what his next sentence would be. But he needed to stay with her, and he needed to be somewhere that was not here. “Can you rent a car?”

“What?”

“I can’t. I mean I can, but I know from experience that if they see it’s me they’ll drop a dime and five minutes later there’ll be photographers up our ass like Princess Di. So can you rent it?”

“Don’t need to rent any car. I own a car. I drove here. But where do you need to go?”

“We, Bettina. We. We need to go somewhere and be alone together.”
He lifted her gently to her feet. She was like a feather. “You have a coat somewhere, right? Where are you parked?”

“Is this really happening?” she said. They started toward the door. Already he felt reborn and invisible. “I need to tell you something,” she said. “Back at the theater? I lied to you when I said my name was Bettina.”

“That is the best news of all,” Hamilton said.

SARA AND CUTTER did not have any classes together—not so unusual, in a school that size—and by third period on Wednesday she still hadn’t seen him, though they’d been texting all morning, after texting well into the night before. They’d snarked on every camera-phone photo she’d sent him of that stupid ass-kissing zombie movie premiere, where everyone was so in love with themselves; still, she looked forward to doing it in person all over again. But when she got to the cafeteria, he wasn’t there. She went to his French classroom before the start of next period, and he wasn’t there either. Where had he been texting her from? She typed the question and received in return a photo of Cutter, grinning and wearing pajamas, in what she presumed was his own kitchen.

So he’d ditched. He did that more often lately. It wasn’t as bad as the day he’d actually come to school but then skipped all his classes anyway, hiding in the library or the unlocked maintenance rooms or other little interstices he managed to know about—exercising a sort of pointless, arcane freedom, and waiting for pushback, which he never seemed to get.

Things with Cutter had progressed quickly, in ways good and bad. Sometimes there would be afternoons spent in each other’s company—at some Starbucks, or on one of the benches in Carl Schurz Park watching the river traffic and the joggers and the checked-out nannies pushing strollers toward the playground, or even just in Sara’s apartment cracking each other up in front of daytime TV—that felt like love, or at any rate like ease. On the couch with their shoulders pressed into each other, they would laugh and eat leftover takeout and mock
the clueless neediness of the Real Housewives or whatever other sad sacks were whoring out their dignity on reality TV, a genre of which they never tired. They made out a lot too. Which was great, but if she was honest with herself the major appeal of having him in her home with the TV on lay in the reduced risk of his acting out in some public way that might embarrass her, or endanger him, or both. She had already begun, for instance, finding excuses not to go into stores with him, because no matter what sort of store it was—a Duane Reade, a Starbucks, a Sephora—when they were back on the street he would pull out of his jacket something he had shoplifted for her. She started to understand why his other friends were always so careful to limit their exposure to him, to stay outside his bubble. She did not want him to get caught, of course, but she couldn’t think of anything else that would stop him; and he never got caught.

What was worse was how bad he tried to make her feel for stressing. He mocked her for her fear of getting into trouble, but then, when she insisted she wasn’t afraid of that—and she wasn’t, not really—he critiqued her even more sarcastically, saying she was like someone whose jail cell door had been opened but she was too scared, too guilty to walk through it. Jail cell? As was often the case, she could follow what he was saying only so far, but no further. He’d always seemed older than she was, and one day he’d let slip that in fact he was almost sixteen. He’d been left back, despite being the single smartest person she had ever met.

His provocations could turn casually mean. But she forgave him everything. She could feel herself committing that cardinal feminine sin, the one you saw on reality TV shows all the time: she thought she could save him.

She answered the kitchen-photo message with a plea to return to school the next day. He promised that he would, but then on Thursday there was still no sign of him. She missed half of first-period chem standing in the hall outside his homeroom waiting to see if he would show up. Glumly she went back to her own schedule, and then, out of nowhere—at ten in the morning, in Spanish class, at a moment when she wasn’t supposed to have her phone on but had forgotten to switch
it off—she got a call. Mortified, she pulled the phone out of her bag and held it below the level of her desk, as if that would make any difference when it was blaring its ringtone; she started to shut it off, but then she recognized the phone number, even though she hadn’t seen or used it in many months now. It was still programmed into her contacts, though; above the number on the tiny screen was the word
Home
.

“Señorita Armstead?” the teacher said testily.

When lunch period came Sara ran into the corridor and turned her phone back on, but by the time she had two bars she’d decided not to return the call anyway, whoever it was from. The whole thing was too creepy. Like a horror movie:
The call is coming from inside the house
. Whoever it was hadn’t left a voice mail. She thought briefly, reflexively, about calling Cutter to get his take on it, but there was more than half a chance the call was from him in the first place—just using the time on his hands to prank her. They gave her only twenty-five minutes to eat anyway.

There were no missed calls when she checked her phone again outside school at the end of the afternoon. But then it rang while she still had it in her hand, almost as if someone was watching her. She was too freaked out to answer. She went home, did an acceptable percentage of her homework, and saw that Cutter had posted nine messages on her Facebook wall asking what she was doing; she called her mother at the office, ordered Mexican for dinner, and was sitting on the couch watching
16 and Pregnant
when her cellphone rang again.

“What the fuck?” was the way she answered it, having decided it was probably Cutter, who had hacked the number just to show her how far inside her head he could get.

“Is that Sara?”

She had a profound moment of unbalance, like tipping a chair back too far. She looked at the incoming number again. “Daddy?” she said.

“Hi, honey. I’m sorry I called you this morning. I was just so excited to call that I actually forgot—well, I didn’t forget you went to school, obviously, but I guess I forgot what day it was.”

“Dad, where are you calling from?”

He laughed, a sound she hadn’t heard in a long time, though it wasn’t enough by itself to calm the furious beating of her heart, or the anger that her fear provoked. “Caller ID, eh?” he said. “Okay, maybe it was kind of a gratuitous touch, but I called the phone company and they still had our old number available. I’m calling you from our house. Our old house. I bought it.”

“What?” she said. “From who?”

“From your mother, technically.”

“How did she not tell me that?”

“I don’t think she knows. I kept it anonymous, because I figured she would never go for it otherwise. She told you the house was sold, though, right?”

“Yeah. She’s all pumped to have the money.”

“Well, good, that’s kind of what I was hoping. Anyway, here I am. I don’t know where our furniture is, but otherwise everything’s the same. What do you think?”

What did she
think
? Even in moments of extreme weirdness like this, it was just easy to express herself to him. Much easier than talking to her mother.