long his eyelashes were. Not the point. “Well, Dean, it’s money. I have bills. Of course I want it.”
“But you’re not using it.”
She turned away again so she was looking at the ceiling. “Nope.”
“You want to tell me why?”
She breathed evenly, still gazing upward. “Not really. Not right now.”
He looked up there, too. “Little weird,” he finally said.
She laughed. “So are you.”
They lit up the gas fireplace and sat there resting their hands on their full bellies and doubling back to the evening’s better pieces of local gossip until he finally admitted he was beat and he was going to get some sleep. She sat up, and he hauled himself off the couch with considerable and noisy effort, then stood stretching out his back and shoulders and rubbing the back of his neck. “All right, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Night,” she said, like always. But then, not like always, he suddenly bent down toward her and she turned her face toward him with absolutely no time to react, and he kissed her on the forehead, just right of center.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” he said and went off into his apartment and shut the door for the night.
“Happy…Thanksgiving,” she weakly called after him. Her fingers went up to her forehead.
THE ESSAY WAS CALLED “TOWARD a Philosophy of Failure.” It ran in Esquire in December, and it set out to define how Americans process, write about, feel about, and define failure. It used four case studies, and one of them was former New York superstar pitcher Dean Tenney, who was the example of a type the writer was unseemly proud of having named: “The WTFailure.”
He said that it was one thing to process a failure in which a good idea didn’t pan out or a series of unexpected obstacles placed success out of reach. But it was another to see failure, as he put it, “float free of all common sense.” He wrote:
Tenney will be remembered like New Coke. He will be like Edsel, but in human form. He began as a prospect. A physical marvel. A specimen standing for all that we can do. But none of that will matter now. Now it would be better if he’d never succeeded at all. Because now, all that will be remembered is balls sailing past catchers, runners baffled by their good fortune barreling toward home, and teammates straining not to speak ill. If you’re watching, there is nothing to explain any of it or to tell you it couldn’t happen to you—not unless you listen to the murmurs of players who believe this is a matter of mental weakness and broken minds unable to repair themselves. Those murmurs are real. And they are real about Tenney specifically.
Tenney is not a pitcher anymore. He is now a bogeyman fantasy. He is a living, breathing worst-case scenario for anyone who has achieved any level of success. This is the story in which all your hard work turns out to mean nothing. This is the story in which your life, for no apparent reason, becomes the draft of a book that’s no longer being written, abandoned at a table without even a final word.
In the evening on the Monday in December when these words were published, Andy’s car pulled up in Evvie’s driveway. Evvie opened the door to two girls bundled up in pink and purple coats, and their father, who shot her a wary look the minute he saw her face. “Those assholes,” he mouthed. She nodded.
“Come in, come in,” she said to Rose and Lilly, taking their coats. “You guys go upstairs and get in the big bed, and I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“Little Mermaid!” Lilly shrieked.
“We’ll talk about it. Be nice to your sister, Lill. Slumber party manners, remember?”
“Little Mermaid!” Lilly shrieked again as she and Rose ran up the rest of the stairs.
Andy cringed. “Sounds like you’re going to have a lot on your hands. Thanks for doing this. Has he said anything to you?” Andy asked.
“No,” Evvie said. “He went into the apartment, shut the door, didn’t say a word.”
“Okay. I’m just going to take him for a drink, see if he feels like talking.” He and Evvie walked into the kitchen, and Andy yelled Dean’s name toward the apartment. “Hey, you ready to go?”
“Give me a few minutes.” Dean sounded tired.
Andy and Evvie sat at the kitchen table. She raised one eyebrow. “So, how is the new woman friend?”
Evvie knew Andy had taken Monica Bell, a teacher at the