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“You know,” he says to Daniel one day, when they’re sipping their drinks at one of the round covered tables where the waiters put all those weird little carved pats of butter, “you sold out, man.”
“Sold out?” says Daniel blankly, hand stilled midway through reaching for a knife.
“Yeah,” says Johnny, “you know,” and gestures to all of it: the wide arched windows, the silent waiters, the guy with a piano in the corner plunking out something from 1953, the martini, the silverware, the view just visible through the heavy red curtains of the private section of the beach. “The whole thing.”
Daniel looks at him unreadably for a couple of seconds before his face shifts into amusement. “Johnny,” he says, “you went to a country club your whole childhood. I sold out?”
“Not my whole childhood,” Johnny protests. “Started when I was thirteen.”
“Oh, you started when you were thirteen, my mistake,” Daniel drawls, and then: “That’s when your mom got married?”
“No,” says Johnny, “no, that was way earlier. This was because—”
—because before, apparently, the state hadn’t put its foot down. If he were the state, Johnny thought mutinously as he watched the palm trees flick across the frame of Sid’s passenger seat window, he would let country clubs ban Sid forever. If he were the state, he would ban Sid from public sidewalks.
He didn’t get it. It wasn’t like Sid liked any of these people; or he didn’t talk like he liked any of these people, anyway, told Mom constantly what unbelievable hypocrites they were, what liars and pieces of shit, what lazy dumbfucks, as good as a hole in the head. But like, come on. If he really thought all that, why the fuck would he apply?
Johnny had thought, when they’d first moved in, that there would be—holidays; or food, or something. “None of that Old World shit,” Sid said. “Jesus, it’s fucking embarrassing.” He looked round at Johnny’s mom. “Besides,” he said to her, “I’m not gonna make you do anything you don’t wanna do,” which was already so obviously and blatantly a lie that Johnny wanted to scream.
At school there was Nancy Weissbaum, whose dad worked at a record company; there was Michael Zinger, whose dad had invented tissues or something; and there was Max Hirsch, whose dad also worked in music, but as a lawyer. There was also Daria Kashani, and Dave Ostrov, and Marcia Sokolovsky, and Rachel Baltasar, and Joey Levitsky and Joey Lowe, and Jake Gniewek, and Tracy Zlatova, and Billy Rubin, and Becky Franco, and Hannah Werkoffsky, all of whom lived down in the flatlands and whose parents ran laundromats and convenience stores and worked at the library and the cafeteria and the hospital and waited tables and swept the floors at the movie theater; but they didn’t count.
He brought up Joey Levitsky’s mom to Sid, once, when he was feeling like he wanted to jump off a cliff. Everybody knew about Joey Levitsky’s mom. She always wore long sleeves, and she never let anybody in the house, not even the mailman. Once she came to school and called Joey by the wrong name.
“They should throw her in the asylum,” said Sid. “She thinks she’s so special. Who the fuck cares what happened to her. Who cares.” He paused. “Why, you want to embarrass yourself like that? You wanna tell everybody what a loser you are? Like you have such a big sob story?”
This was related, in some obscure way that Johnny couldn’t quite follow, to the other country club, which was an hour and a half away, and which Sid refused to attend. Sid’s mom yelled at him about it when she came by the house, which was something she had used to do every month or so, and then stopped after Sid and Mom had been married about half a year. Mostly now she shouted at Sid on the phone. Johnny could hear it through the floor, rising and falling: meer tzu shond, yeah, same to you, Momma, vayb faint mich, don’t fucking tell me what to do, you old witch. But every so often she would still appear at the front door, wide as a house and squinting like her eyes could burn a hole through the roof, or through her son.
“What’s wrong with Crestmont?” she demanded one Saturday afternoon; Johnny was listening at the floorboards again. “You’re too good for Crestmont?”
“Yeah, I fucking am,” Sid snapped back. “What am I, a fucking comedian?”
“You should be,” she said, “the way you think you should talk to your mother. A comedian and a music-hall monkey. Own vos ton ir hobben a spanier in deyn hoyz?” she added, with sudden suspicion.
“I can do whatever the hell I want, Ma,” said Sid, and kicked her out of the house.
The next day he fired the maid, loudly. There was some silver antique involved. “You don’t know what you’re doing with this shit,” he said to her, “you’ve never put your hands on shit like this before, you don’t even know what it is. Why the fuck did I hire you, is what I wanna know, I should’ve known looking at you that you would fuck it up, a nice house like this.” The maid stood there silently. Johnny had always thought, with her straight back and her ponytail, that she looked kind of like a hammer. He liked the idea of it; he liked the idea of her, the pleasantness of her blunt round face. She took her apron off and left it on the floor, and called Mom a name that Johnny would not learn the meaning of for another thirty-eight years.
Sid slammed the door when she left, and then he turned around and looked at Johnny, the smallness of him, standing in the hallway.
“Some people are always gonna be beneath you,” he said to Johnny. “You remember that.”
Johnny thought, later, that it was probably the kindest thing Sid had ever said to him.
Years later, when Sensei came, he would understand a little: his body, transforming into a new creature, as broad and easy and quick as the sunshine. But that was only half of it. Less than half; it was only the part of the alchemy that he could control. Neither did he mean the red-hot blushing three days one March, when the girls were shuffled into one classroom and the boys into another, and Johnny did his best to snigger along with the crude and cracking voices of the rest of the seventh grade. It was one thing to make jokes in locker rooms. It was another to, one entirely ordinary evening, meet Sid's eyes across the dining table and realize he was not looking up at him.
It was another thing, that night, to lie in bed and think: this had always been going to happen. There had always been a map inside his bones, from the moment his cells had begun to multiply inside his mother. Generation on generation, stretching back across years, had patiently passed down to him the moment in which he would be able to look down at Sid’s face.
When Johnny looked down at the back of Sid’s neck now, in the driver’s seat in front of him, the skin was red and speckled with white. His hair, when he had married Johnny's mother, had been a black fuzz, already beginning to peel back from his forehead. Now it was faint grey feathers, and it was only thick at his temples and on the inside of his ears. He hated to be driven, either by chauffeur or taxi, which was something Johnny wished he did not understand.
He had been unhappy lately, Sid had. Even before the country club there had been trouble at the neighborhood association that year. Theirs had been the only lawn with a Jimmy Carter sign. Sid, as it happened, had despised Jimmy Carter for forty-eight months: “a Commie,” he said to Mom, “a yellow ratfucking Commie taking my goddamn money, a sumbitch like all the sumbitches back East, good for who?, good for us?, good for the goddamn gas prices?” There was not one house along the winding block which disagreed. Johnny did not dare to ask why Sid would put up the sign. After a while, he thought he must know the answer: he thought, it wasn't about Carter at all. It was that there was nothing in a smiling man, a strong man, a man who was glittering and fatherly and clean-sunshine-Hollywood through every pound of flesh, that Sid could possibly want. Sid loved misery. He loved hating. He loved it better than he loved the morning sun.
The car slowed. “Finally,” said Sid, and, to Johnny, “Fix your tie. You look like a goddamn slob. How come you're always trying to embarrass yourself?”
For the first few minutes after they walked through the door, it seemed to Johnny that there could be nothing larger than that room in the world. Every piece of it gleamed: the ceiling, the floor, the dresses, the silverware, the ties on the windows, the tips of the men’s shoes, the covered dishes, the white teeth of the waiters. There was no square foot that was unoccupied by the moving body of a grown-up—pursed plum mouths, tightly combed hair parts and pink scalps beneath them, glittering wrists, glittering necks, glittering ears, broad shoulders in black or grey, hard lumped Adam’s apples bobbing just above hard white shirt buttons, the hot scents of polish and perfume and bread and boiled vegetables and, very faintly beneath them, sweat—broken only at odd intervals by the pale wide oasis of a tablecloth, and then the pale wide eyes of its occupants, blinking unhappily upwards at them.
“We’re sitting here,” said Sid. The table in the corner had no one else around it, only three folded cards in front of three chairs, tucked beneath the tablecloth as snugly as children. The cards read Weinberg in curling letters. He pulled out one chair for Mom, who folded herself into it like a bird onto a wire and tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled up at him and murmured something. Johnny sat down, too, and Sid looked at him and looked away and then looked up—there was something jerky about the movement, like one of the robots in the awful movies he made, painted silver cardboard and mouth a flat black slash—and waved a hand.
“Waiter,” he shouted. “We need a waiter over here.”
It was by far the loudest sound in the room. Someone at a table behind them coughed.
A man in a black shirt and neatly pressed black trousers eased himself toward the corner. “Welcome to the club, sir,” he said. “I assure you that someone will be along to serve you in a moment. If you don't mind my attending to our other guests.”
Sid stared at him, flat and hot. Johnny looked down at his plate, which had a second plate on top of it, and squinted at how the square lamps of the chandelier moved in the reflections there. If a man confronts you, said Sensei, just behind his ear, on the street, in competition, he is your enemy. He pressed his fist into his own leg until it stopped moving and went limp.
“Fu—S.O.B.,” said Sid, a moment later, sitting down. The someone behind them coughed again. “You saw how he was talking to me. You saw how he was talking.” Johnny looked out of the corner of his eye at his mother, whose face said nothing. Sid picked up one of the forks at his plate—there were four of them—and wrapped it in his fist, as completely if his hand were newspaper. Johnny could see each of the faint dark hairs on his knuckles. “Take it out of his tip.”
“I’m not sure how tipping works here, honey,” said Mom quietly. “Do you know?”
Bread descended. They were told to expect, in a little while, a salad. With the bread was butter in tiny white dishes, shaped into a careful spiral, which reminded Johnny of one of the fossils he had seen in science class, the tiny curled shellfish which had been flattened into chalk a million million years before anyone had been born who could have given it a name. Sid took a knife and smeared the little sculpture into a tire-track in the butter-dish, and wiped the knife off on one of the rolls, and set it blade-down on the linen tablecloth. He stuffed the bread into his mouth whole. Johnny took a roll, too, and did the same. It was as warm and good as fresh laundry, until it stuck in his throat, and he preoccupied himself for a while with keeping his face blank the way Sensei had taught him to while he tried not to choke. “Laura,” said Sid, “what, you're not hungry,” and she took a roll and carefully tore it in half with her hands, and they all sat there for a minute, chewing with crumbs on their fingers. The voice behind them coughed a third time.
“Weinberg,” said someone else, politely. Sid turned, and grinned big and crook-toothed, and stuck out his hand.
“Hollis!” he said. “How the hell are you?”
“Fine, fine,” said the blond man who had come to hover by their table, and he extricated his arm from the woman beside him to shake, bending a little awkwardly. “Good to see you. This is—ah—” The woman shrank back a little. Her mouth was pinched. She might have been anywhere between thirty-five and sixty; her face was very lined, and her hair was a neatly clipped black circle which rose two inches above her scalp and ended at the nape of her neck. “The wife,” said the man Hollis, a little stiffly. “And you must be Mrs. Weinberg.”
“Laura, please,” said Mom, and stood up to clasp the woman’s hand. At her smile the woman’s shoulders settled a little; people usually did, Johnny thought, when Mom smiled at them. The woman glanced over Sid, and her mouth folded up on itself again like newspaper.
“What a place,” said Sid genially. “I haven’t seen so many diamonds since I’m five years old on Forty-Seventh Street. Huh? Sit down, Hollis, sit down! Talk a little.”
“Oh,” said the man, and looked away.
“Come on,” said Sid, grinning bigger. Johnny knew that grin. He had seen Sid in his office: with business partners, with secretaries, with actresses no older than nineteen. “What, you don’t like us?”
“Oh, not at all,” said the man, and then looked confused. His wife coughed, and tugged at his arm.
“Howard,” she said firmly, “our table.”
“You know who that was?” said Sid, when they were gone. His smile was fading. “You know who that was? That’s one of the S.O.B.s on the Board. That’s the schmendrick who spent three months keeping me out of here. Now he’s trying to sit down with me, hey? What about that?”
“Oh, honey,” said Mom, “a little quieter, maybe.” Her head was ducked down.
The salad insinuated itself onto the smallest plates. Johnny, still watching how the ceiling lamps moved, was startled by its arrival into motion: he picked up the first fork he saw, a tiny silver thing with three very short tines, on the far side of the spoons. It did not want to lift up either the croutons or the bacon bits. He stabbed harder. Sid, looking at his plate, made no move to begin eating; the lines by his mouth were drawing down again, settling comfortably back in the places where Johnny was accustomed to seeing them.
“He would’ve stayed,” he said, “if your no-good son knew how to behave himself.” At last he looked up. “How come you don’t know how to shake hands, huh?” he said. His voice had risen; it sounded like a violin wire. “You already do your damnedest to embarrass me, now, what, now you’re embarrassing your mother?”
Johnny could feel his face going red. He always hated how he blushed, when he saw it in the mirror; in this crowded room, under these lights, he was nearly sure he had been red already. “I’m not,” he said, “I’m not—embarrassing—”
Sid's lip curled, and he said, “You want to talk back to me?”
If a man confronts you, said Sensei again, and then again behind Johnny's ear, skipping like a record: If a man confronts you, on the street—on the street—if a man confronts you, he is—
“I'm not embarrassing you,” Johnny said, more loudly.
Sid looked at him for a moment, looked down. His mouth looked briefly as if it had been carved into his jaw. He grabbed the fork closest to the plate, lifted a mass of endive and shallot and vinegar and thick hard reddened bacon to his mouth—hesitated—shoved it between his lips and chewed, and swallowed, hard.
“We're going outside,” he said.
“Sid,” said Mom, her head jerking up, and Sid said:
“Shut it, Laura.” And then, setting down his fork: “Get up,” and when Johnny didn't move: “What, you can't hear or something now? Get up.”
There was a small island of silence, pooling around their table like a fallen parachute. Johnny moved through it the way he moved through water; the way he moved through exhaustion, some afternoons, when his lungs and his legs and his heart were burning, and Sensei had knelt down in front of him, and was telling him to get up. Get up. Get up, Johnny. It's not that goddamn hard. Just move your legs. Show me whether you can get up, Johnny. Show me whether you give up, Johnny. Show me whether you're the kind of man I should give up on, Johnny. Show me whether you deserve this.
His fist, he realized after a moment, was clenching and unclenching against his thigh. Ahead of him, Sid pushed open the door to the lobby.
“So, what,” he said when it had closed behind them, “you watch Bruce fucking Lee for a couple of months and you think that makes you a tough guy?”
Johnny said nothing. Sid had said nothing since he had begun the lessons, nothing at all.
“I thought you wanted to talk,” said Sid. His eyes had gone narrow and black with pleasure. “You got nothing to say? You forgot how to speak English, you're that goddamn stupid? Or you only care about being a brat in front of your mother?” He shook his head. “You think she doesn't get tired of that shit?”
“Shut up,” said Johnny, very softly.
“The crap that comes out of your mouth,” said Sid; he was almost smiling now. “Jesus Christ. You're such a bullshitter, kid, you know that? You're a fucking con artist. You're gonna be a criminal as long as you live. Don't think that nobody sees you. I see you. I see you pretending in front of your mother you're such a goddamn angel. But someday, when you slip—”
“She hates you,” said Johnny. “She hates you. She loves me and she hates you and someday you're gonna die.”
It was as much as he could manage. It did not matter. Sid's squat face went very blank. His hand, at his side, curled into a fist.
All at once Johnny's breath left him. His spine thrilled, electric, up to the base of his neck. His nails were digging into his palm. He said, fast, feeling like his throat was a drum, “Go ahead. Do it.” He wanted it, suddenly and very badly. He did not know what he would do: if he would scream, if he would stand there bleeding, if he would hit him back. “Do it,” he said again. “Come on.”
“I try so goddamn hard,” Sid said quietly, “every day, you know that? I try every god damn day of my life—” He stepped forward; Johnny did not flinch, did not move. He was on the balls of his feet, he was as light as air.
“Tell me something,” Sid said. “Before I came around, how much money do you think your mother spent on you that she could've spent on being happy?”
Johnny blinked.
He blinked again. Sid was still there, his flat square face, floating in front of Johnny's like a ghost. Beneath his bushy brows his eyes were beetles, glittering.
“You want to give me a number?” he said. “Huh? Give me a number. Show me you know how to think for once in your goddamn life. A ballpark estimate, even.” His words sounded as if they were being projected through a blanket, quiet and thick. “Jesus Christ. Tell me. What do you think a dollar buys? What do you think a penny buys, do you know that? You know how much a car costs? You know how much a diamond bracelet costs? A pair of shoes? A heating bill? A fucking movie theater ticket, how much does that cost, huh? A ticket on a—a plane, a train, a boat? What the fuck are you gonna do when you grow up and you have to write checks?”
Johnny said, “I.” Johnny said, “I don't."
“No,” said Sid. “No, you don't.”
He looked away, and then wrapped his arms around himself. It was a gesture Johnny had never seen him make before; shockingly childlike. “You don't,” he said again, and his throat worked.
“Your whole life,” he said at last, “your whole life, you never gave anybody anything. Do you understand that?” He shook his head. “Listen to me,” he said. “Listen to me, because one day you'll get, you'll get that I'm trying to do you a favor here.” He didn't even sound angry any more, not really. “Listen,” he said again. “You gotta get it into your skull, and you gotta get it in there now: your whole life you're gonna be in debt to her. Every single minute you're gonna be in debt to her. The way you live your life, the way you been living—you never had anything, not one thing, that you didn't owe somebody. You never had one thing that somebody couldn't take away.”
It was a while before he met Johnny's eyes again. That hot whiteness which had filled the air was beginning to dissipate; what was left was a faint hissing, like radio static. Behind Johnny's ear, Sensei said: If a man confronts you, and then faded into another channel.
“You're getting tall,” said Sid abruptly, and then his mouth twitched a little, and he looked away.
“Jesus,” he said, “fine. Throw a temper tantrum.”
Some time later, a door creaked, and then slammed.
Johnny came, eventually, to an awareness of the floor. It was hardwood and pale. Someone had waxed it recently. He could see a dark spot where the tree which had made it had carried a knot on its insides. The reflections of the lights were golden on gold. In his nose was the faint smell of lacquer, and of dust.
He thought: my shoes hurt.
When he lifted his head there was a door. The door had writing printed on it in thin gold letters. MEN, they said.
The floor inside was covered in indigo tiling, and the tiling was very clean. To his right stood a long stretch of mirror, uncracked and clear. Inside the mirror Johnny could see a row of deep blue stalls, and a second row of sinks, and a tall blond boy in a woolen suit, slightly too big around his shoulders.
He went to the stall farthest from the door and pulled at it until it opened, and then he went in. The stall had the same lock that the boys' stalls had at West Valley Junior High School. The smell inside this room was sharper, more chemical; nevertheless it was not dissimilar, not entirely. Maybe every bathroom in the world smelled like this a little. When he closed his eyes it was not difficult to pretend that there were spitballs on the ceiling. It was not difficult to pretend if he stood up and walked out, he would be wearing tennis shoes. It was not difficult to pretend that if he kept walking, it would all vanish: his suit, his tie, his skin. He could walk faster. He would walk faster. He would leave it behind him, the heat of the room and the light and sound, his nerves and his memory, the way snakes shed themselves and kept moving onward, skin and face and blood and brain scattered on the concrete, still faster, still faster now, down into the night, through the dead yellow grasses and over the chain-link fences, out through the mist of the evening, without flesh or heart or breath, on and on, toward the sea.
The door creaked again.
“God,” said a voice from outside the stalls, “this place has changed.”
“Ah,” said another, more nervous, “come on, Dave. It’s gonna be like that?”
“Like what?” said the first. “There’s nothing wrong with me.” There was a faint zipping noise. “Anyway,” the voice went on, “there's some things money can't buy.”
The second voice laughed. “All right,” it said. “That’s for sure.”
“You saw dinner?” said the first. “What a pig.” There were faint noises, which might have been snorting; the second voice laughed. “The way he talks,” the first went on. “You can put a bow tie on an ape.”
“Think about it like this,” said the second. “You ever need to talk business, isn't it better than calling his house?”
“What business?” said the first. “Trying to get the rents raised in South-Central?”
“Shame about the wife, though,” said the second, with feeling.
“Jesus, you’re telling me,” said the first. “What a waste.” There was a pause. “And a son, right?”
“Yeah,” said the second. “The one who looks like her.”
“What a waste,” said the first, again.
“They already own the industry,” said the second voice, “I guess now they start buying up the blondes, huh?” and the second voice laughed, and there was the sound of zippers and running water, and the door creaked and slammed, leaving Johnny staring at the closed door of the stall.
He stood, and did up his pants with trembling fingers, and went to the sink and let the ice-cold water spit over his hands. From within the glass, the young blond boy in the woolen suit stared out at him. The clean white light came down from the ceiling and curled its fingers in the boy's hair and stayed there, and under the light the boy's hair looked like a halo.
“Cheese,” he said quietly to the mirror. The boy in the mirror smiled back.
Their table was empty, the chairs shoved away. Johnny hesitated, and glanced out to the dance floor. After a few moments he saw her: his mother, narrow shoulderblades, river of pale hair. These last few years she had always looked so thin.
“Johnny Lawrence?” said a voice behind him, surprised.
Johnny turned. There was a girl there, clutching a drink: a cloud of curly blonde hair, a broad white headband, a broad white face. Her dress was white, too, but her lips were pink, and her cheeks. She was biting back a smile.
“I didn’t know there was anybody else from our grade here!” she said. “Thank God! Everyone is so old! I’ve been dying!”
“Yeah,” said Johnny’s mouth, before his brain caught up, and then he remembered to smile back. “Hi.”
“Hi,” said the girl. She smiled at him again. Johnny placed her, very suddenly: third-period English, and before that—sixth-grade History, Mission San Fernando Rey de España, built out of Popsicle sticks. She'd laughed at all the stupid printed jokes. “Thanks. I didn’t know you came here! Do you come a lot? I can’t believe I’ve haven't seen you! Isn’t it the worst?”
“We just started,” said Johnny, and then, “I just started,” and, “My stepfather—” He stopped. Ali Mills’ face was perfectly blank, curious, friendly.
“It’s all right, I guess,” he said, and smiled at her. “You come here all the time, huh?”
“Oh, Mom always makes us,” said Ali, and rolled her eyes. “Susan Wheeler used to come all the time, but barely ever now. She says she has a boyfriend, if you can believe that. Clair Calhoun comes sometimes, but she’s busy too, her mom is making her, you know, come out or something. Dad kind of threatened to, like, all of those classes have stuff for the dads to do—but Mom said—“ she scrunched up her face around her nose, and Johnny realized she was about to do a voice—“Well, I don’t think we’re in Virginia, Ted. So thank God. I mean, can you imagine.”
Johnny felt incredibly certain that he could not. He bobbed his head.
“Sweetheart,” said a voice behind Johnny, “I thought you were coming back from the bathroom. Is everything all right?”
Ali’s face brightened. “Dad, this is Johnny,” she said. “Johnny—” and paused, and looked at the table. “I thought your last name was Lawrence,” she said.
Johnny turned very fast, and stuck out a hand to the grey-suited man there. The man's eyebrows went up, but he shook. “Is this a friend of yours, Ali?” he said.
“Yessir,” said Johnny. “I am. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Mills.”
“You must be Walter Walker’s son,” said Mr. Mills, and let go of Johnny’s hand. He appeared to Johnny's eye less a man than a series of grey rectangles ending neatly in a clean-shaven jaw. “You look just like him. Surprised he hasn’t brought you around before.”
“No, I,” said Johnny, coughed, coughed again, said, “No, sir. Mrs. Weinberg is my mother. She’s—” he floundered, not sure whether it was all right to point, but the direction of his eyes gave the game away, and Ali’s father turned and his eyebrows went up.
“My mistake,” he said jovially. “Always good to see a new face. And you go to school with Ali, I suppose.”
“He’s in my English class,” said Ali.
“Good,” said Mr. Mills. “Good. I wonder sometimes about who's going these days to that school.” He considered Johnny a moment, head tilted a little. “How are you liking the club, son?” he said.
“I like it, sir,” said Johnny. “I like it a lot. I like the.” He meant to say food, and then stopped.
“The people,” he said at last. He didn't know why; like saying sir, it was only an instinct. There was nothing about this room which should have reminded him of the dojo at all. “I've never been around these kinds of people before.”
Mr. Mills looked at him a moment.
“I'm glad you're making nice friends, sweetheart,” he said. “It's a good habit to cultivate. There's a lot in life you can't take care about, but you can take care about who you associate with.”
“Da-ad,” said Ali, embarrassed and warm.
“Thank you, sir,” said Johnny. He knew how to smile, now. He did it again.
“Manners aren't so common these days,” said Mr. Mills. He smiled at him, thoughtful and a little curious, and glanced from the dance floor to Johnny, and back again. “Character,” he said, “can't be bought.”
“Dad,” said Ali again, and caught Johnny's gaze, and rolled her eyes. Johnny smiled back. His heart was thumping like a rabbit's.
It was nothing he had done. It was nothing that he could fail at. It was only that there was a kinship between them; that he was like her, that she was like him. That there was some essential brightness in her, some clean easiness, some true safety, that belonged to the two of them; that they, and the other people, moving softly through this wide and beautiful space, had a quality that no shame could touch. That it was good to be him—that he was good, he was good, and that someone thought so, someone knew it, and that was something that nobody, nobody, nobody could take away.
He rubs the label of his beer bottle between his fingers, unconscious. The light from the window spills through it, onto the tablecloth, gold over gold.
“I’m just saying,” he says to Daniel, who’s looking at him with a curious gleam in his eye. “You changed.”
“Changed?” says Daniel, laughing.
“Little coffee cups and shit,” says Johnny. “Whatever happened to the asshole from New Jersey.” He leans over to ruffle Daniel’s hair.
“Aw, Johnny,” says Daniel, “I didn’t know you liked him.” He ducks away from Johnny’s hand, smiling, and settles back against his chair. “Come on, now. You were right at home in that club, as far as I remember.”
“My stepdad was,” says Johnny, snags one of the dinner rolls. “I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member.”
“Sure, Johnny,” says Daniel.