Page 76 of Lucky Night

Enough, Jenny. Give me the phone.

She snorts. Fuck off, Dad.

Fuck off, he says. Go to hell, Nick. You’ve never sworn at me like this.

Sure I have, she says. Inside my head I have.

Is that right?

She taps her forehead. It’s a raging river of obscenity in here.

She looks up from the phone, and they smile at each other. But the pleading voice calls her back. She sighs and taps the screen.

Love slips out the back, huh? Love’s a scam? How convenient: endowing love with volition, blaming it for disappearing, when surely he was the problem. Him and his struggle, what he would come to call his malaise. He was thirty-six, thirty-seven when it started. Jill had just started first grade. They showed up for Parents’ Night, and when he entered her classroom a hundred sense memories of his own elementary school reared up and knocked him sideways. The squeak of shoes on the floor, the colorful corrugated borders on the bulletin boards. And the smell—the smell wasexactlythe same.

He took it all in and was overwhelmed—swamped—with regret.

Because it was over for him. The hopefulness of youth. Possibility. He’d lost his chance when he came home from England fifteen years earlier, scurried home, running headlong into this life.My prime of youth is but a frost of cares.Because of course he would find the perfect poem to reflect his mood, a knack that only reminded him of what he’d really wanted, what he’d lost and could never get back.

So he was one, swamped, and two, infuriated at himself. Because as tormenting as the malaise that had descended was his awareness that it wasall so fucking ordinary.He was an unremarkable man,wallowing in the most banal self-pity. He had everything. This was when life was supposed to be roses. Instead, it was fucking…carnations, it was dull autumn mums, and he was a miserable cliché. Cultivating a midlife crisis, bang on schedule. Good job, golden boy.

And though he tried to hide it—the sense of loss, the self-loathing provoked by the sense of loss, a meta-malaise, how sophisticated—it must have showed. The disappointment and self-disgust must have emanated off him, like a stink. Surely that’s why Caroline lost interest. Pulled away. Started flinching.

Unless their growing distance was part of what prompted his struggle in the first place.

Which came first, the bullshit or the asshole?

Impossible to say.

He hadn’t even begun to describe to Jenny how awful it was. No physical closeness with Caroline, no warmth. He still had Jill, his girl who wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek and told him he needed to shave, which was heaven, but not the same. Not the same.

To want without being wanted. It’s the worst.

And so he muddled on for a while, several years in fact, an ungrateful cretin trapped in an enviable life. Another New Year’s Eve came around. Their next-door neighbors threw a party. Everybody got dressed up and left the kids at home. People let loose. Dancing, drinking like they were back in college, smoking pot—naughty parents!

Loud talk, loud laughter.

Good, good times.

He wanted to kill himself.

Not that it showed. Caroline wasn’t the only one who knew a thing or two about appearances. He was, as always, clever Nick Holloway, full of funny rants and stories and entertaining conversation.

Reliably amusing.

Quietly annihilated.

Because he looked around the party, at his friends and neighbors, and he knew nothing was ever going to change. These were his people, this was his life. Despair descended, choking and bleak. Then fury at himself for being so goddamn tiresome. He tumbled once more down the spiral, all by himself, because in this crowd of revelers he was alone, alone, he would always be alone.

He tried to rally the troops. Come on men! Look alive! He had a drink, then another, then three more in quick succession. Maybe they’d help lift the malaise from the cluttered seabed where it had lodged, raise it up so it could float away.

What has greater density—despair or Johnnie Walker? Let’s find out, boys!

And so he got drunk. Drunk enough, around two in the morning, to go looking for the mildly (okay, intensely) alluring stranger he’d been trying so hard not to notice for the previous year and a half.

He’d never gotten to know her, the woman who’d snagged in his mind, with her smile, her hapless charm. He’d kept his distance, not wanting to gothere,didn’t he have troubles enough? Yes, but just now he needed a kind face. She had one. And she was funny, wasn’t she? He thought she might be. Hot, too, but that was irrelevant. Was she even at the party? He thought he’d spotted her husband earlier. He’d track her down, they’d have a friendly chat. That’s all he wanted.

He found her at last in the kitchen, getting a glass of water at the sink. It was the year women wore their necklaces close at their throats and hanging down their backs. She was in black, a long loop of pearls falling between her shoulder blades. Her hair wasup.

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