Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,74

pulled back, he revealed Ruth, looking less wan than usual in a black dress of indeterminate taste. Her feet, however, were in thick-heeled laced booties that made Ana think of war nurses. But her face was ecstatic, flushed, her eyes alight, and James, when he turned to Ana, was panting as if he’d sprinted through a door, his forehead shiny, his hair on end.

“Ana!” he said, too loudly. He leaned in for a nuzzle.

“James was telling me about when he went to Liberia,” said Ruth, revealing the piled teeth. “I’m really into Afro beat.” Ana nodded. She had almost forgotten about James’s trips, how many years he’d spent travelling with a film crew, and how he would return with stacks of photos and anecdotes and some unwearable beaded garment as a gift. What struck her about those trips was how similar they were, how every country suffered exactly the same poverty and the same corruption. Back and forth between those two poles, with James vacuuming stories from the inside of the countries, all that heartbreak residue to collect.

“You used to spend so much time on the road,” said Ana, reaching a hand out as a server walked by, plucking another glass of white wine.

“Do you guys want to go dancing?” asked Ruth. And if he were a cowboy, James would have taken off his hat, flung it in the air and hooted: “Hell, yeah!” Ana considered the alternatives and nodded her assent.

The club was on a street between a Portuguese grocer – salted cod suspended in the window; a strange chemical soap smell as they walked past – and an auto garage. Ana rubbed her hands together to get warm while Ruth stood to the side, texting invisible friends about guest lists and entry.

James said: “We should call Ethel.”

“Should we?”

He dialled, his fingers growing colder. Ana couldn’t hear what he said, standing between two people on their cell phones in the nothing street light, watching the babies, babies going in and coming out, their unlined faces under knitted caps and curtains of long hair. This season, Ana noted, beards were back. Almost every guy entering had a grizzly backwoods coating. Is that where James had gotten the idea for his?

But around their eyes, only youth, flat and nervous and boyish, like they couldn’t believe they were out on a school night.

“Everything’s good,” James said, putting his phone in his pocket. Ana looked at him blankly.

“With Finn. Everything’s good.”

“Oh,” said Ana. “Good, good.”

“He went right to sleep,” said James, covering a little pull of disappointment over the fact that Finn didn’t require him at bedtime.

Inside the club, the band, too, was bearded, all except the female singer, who had bangs that covered half her face. There were so many of them, Ana felt like she was looking at a Dr. Seuss picture of alike creatures populating a village: This one has an accordion, this one has a saw, this one has a tuba. But when they turned it up, it sounded good, cacophonous, pure.

“It’s not a band, it’s a collective,” shouted James at Ana, delivering a new piece of information.

Ana laughed. “How Stalinesque!”

Ana sipped her beer, far from the band, near the bar, while James and Ruth attempted to talk over the noise, their heads tilted together, nearly touching at the top. They gave up and James separated, stood upright and stared, fighting the impulse to go to the front, to climb up on stage. I could have done that, he thought, I could have been that! That exact thought was already snaking through the room, especially in and out of the heads of the few guys over thirty. For the younger ones, there was no sense of regret yet; still a possibility, still a chance.

James bought two beers, knowing that the severance money was going to run out in six weeks and wondering what that would look like: Would he get an allowance from his wife? He shut up the thought, taking in the stink of old bar cloths and the deodorant of strangers. He saw his wife moving away from him, cut off from her by young men that looked like James used to look, and women in lipstick that seemed black in the dark.

“Do you want to smoke?” asked Ruth. James couldn’t see Ana, and he nodded, feeling bundled in bandages. He handed Ruth a beer.

He went outside with her, under the streetlamp. He lit a cigarette and offered her one. She raised an eyebrow, led him to