Truth in Advertising Page 0,82

then can’t help himself and stares at it for several seconds.

Everyone wants to leave, to go back to their families, the families they chose.

I slide the box across the table to Eddie. “He’s all yours.”

• • •

Outside the plane window, Manhattan from three thousand feet. Silent and clear and a partial moon. The weather says it’s twenty-three degrees. We bank left at the Brooklyn Bridge, make our approach to LaGuardia. I made the last Delta shuttle.

The cab driver asks where to, and at first I’m not sure. Work comes to mind. Home. But neither is very appealing. I am suddenly hungry and in need of three glasses of wine. I give him the address of a place in SoHo, a small French place called Jean-Claude.

I have texts from Ian and Phoebe and a voice mail message from Keita.

“Fin. I hope your father’s better. I am here if you need me. Maybe we could have a drink or dinner. Tell me please and I will help. This is Keita, by the way.”

I call Phoebe.

“How are you?” she says.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called.”

“I’m so sorry about your dad. Are you okay?”

“Not really.”

She waits, the good listener.

I say, “Have you had dinner?”

“Fin, it’s ten-thirty.”

• • •

There are two other couples in the place, a bitterly cold Tuesday night in January. The tables, maybe twenty of them, are small, with squares of brown grocer-bag paper held down by silver clips at their edges. A candle on each table. A small zinc bar, the two waiters speaking French. One pours two glasses of wine.

Cornish game hen and risotto and for Phoebe a bowl of potato leek soup and very good bread and we’re on our second glasses of Bordeaux. She’s windburned from skiing and her hair is down and a mess and lovely and she has her glasses on because she’d taken her contacts out for the night. They were her father’s frames, dorky, forty years old. Bad imitations are available now at Barneys for $350.

I’m watching the waiters and she’s watching the beautiful couple in the corner and we’re close enough, the place small enough, to hear goodly parts of their conversation.

The music is low, Chet Baker, I think. I hear the gentle scrape of fork and knife against plate, of a chair moving against the wood floor as someone adjusts their position. I smell Phoebe’s perfume, faint at the end of the day. She’s leaning forward, arms splayed out on the table, head tilted a bit to one side, face open and inviting, flushed from the cold, the wine. I am intensely aware of this moment. Here I am, in New York City, in a restaurant, on a winter’s night, eating this food and drinking this wine, and I am alive and for a moment, just a moment, before it flits away, I am happy, feel, in fact, an overwhelming joy. And then, just that fast, as I try to hold on to it, to stay in it, the noise of thought pushes it away, like coffee spilled on a table, spreading out, covering everything. What have I been doing, why have I never been to Morocco, why don’t I speak Spanish, why can’t I kickbox, why didn’t I take a night course in philosophy/art history/Euclidean geometry, how is it that Eddie and Kevin and Maura are strangers to me? I watch my mind come back to the moment, unable to pick up the thread from before, the feeling from before. But right before it ends I want to touch her face, put my hand to her cheek, feel her lean into my hand. I need to tell her about the ashes. I need to tell her that my mother met another man, had an affair. I need to explain my confusion and anger. She’ll help me put it into perspective. I have heard that people can talk like this.

I say, “It was all a hoax. My father was there. We all laughed and hugged and then went to Olive Garden, whose new tagline is ‘When you’re here, you’ve made a horrible mistake.’”

Phoebe waits. I swirl wine in my glass, watching myself, a suave man in a restaurant swirling wine in a glass at dinner with a beautiful woman. Except I do it too fast and a small amount of wine jumps the rim and spills onto the table.

Phoebe says, “I’m sorry. That must have been awful. Especially the Olive Garden part.”

I smile. She listens to what I mean, not what I say.

The