Free Lawnboy by Paul Lisicky Page B

had been odd. Once I stopped resisting my aloneness, I gave myself over to it, relaxing, even cultivating this new privacy. There were certainly worse places to be. I felt confident, capable. I took a greater interest in the house without anticipating the repercussions of my gestures. I threw out the stained bathroom rugs. I threw out a malfunctioning lamp—a hurricane lamp, a divorce present from Lorna to William, which William had actually liked. I taped a picture of some sexy young daddy to the refrigerator, his smile, his black furry chest on display for the whole household. And all the while I read, staying up half the night, immersing myself in projects I’d been putting off for months: Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor, the Osteology and Lymphatics sections from Gray’s Anatomy.
    William undid his tie. He flopped into the sofa, loafers up on the coffee table, telling me about his adventures of the week, how Lilo Patrick had been arrested outside Sloppy Joe’s, drunk, sobbing, after taking a poke at a female tourist who’d made fun of her purse. The station was doing everything in its power to hush-hush the incident. He seemed overly excited, manic, as he relayed this tale to me. Spittle dried in the corners of his mouth. A bleak thought crept into my head: this is the person I missed so much?
    “And how was your week?” He looked at me directly. Had he recognized anything foreign, the stranger’s hands upon my body?
    “Stayed at home. Cooked, cleaned, walked the dogs, read.”
    Before we could get too settled we put on our jackets and left for Arigato, our favorite restaurant. I loved Arigato—the koi pond at the front door, its cool, tinkling music of koto and gong, its overly solicitous waitstaff, clad in their blacks and whites, smiling just a tad, never talking louder than a whisper. I followed William past the cash register; the inner legs of his 501s made loud rubbing sounds. I thought, since when did your ass get so big?
    Our waiter—middle-aged, unfamiliar, Caucasian—seated us in an alcove near the front, not where we usually sat. William regarded the gas grill in the center of the table, stricken. This wasn’t good. He didn’t take well to change.
    “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    He looked up. “Waiter,” he called out across the restaurant.
    The man walked to the table. “Yes, sir?”
    “What’s this?” he said, gesturing at the gas grill.
    “A grill, sir. Does that bother you?”
    I knew what was going on. I got the “sir” thing, the slight sarcasm of it, the waiter’s recognition that we might be a handful at the end of a long day. But I didn’t get the look on William’s face, a look which said, I don’t like you, though he’d barely given the waiter a chance.
    “Where’s Hatsuko?” William said. Hatsuko, a pretty long-haired woman from Nagasaki. Our usual waitress.
    “She’s off for the night, sir.”
    “She’d never seat us here. You can tell your manager that, he knows us. We come here all the time.”
    The waiter looked to me then, flummoxed, his face softening as if he felt some concern for me. He clearly didn’t know what was motivating William’s anger, and nor did I, for he’d seemed buoyant and cheery only a few short minutes ago. Or had I misread him? A hot, waxy bubble swelled inside my chest. The waiter left us now, shifting to another station.
    “What’s the matter?” I said, frowning now.
    “Oh, that guy. ” His eyes drifted over the menu listings. “It’s weird. He reminds me of my brother.”
    “Your brother?” This was even more of a surprise.
    “Yeah, Henry. You know, the one who never paid my parents back, who wouldn’t talk to me after I left Lorna.”
    His family was off limits. I knew better than to open up that subject. “That’s no reason to hate the waiter.”
    “I don’t hate him,” he declared.
    I heaved a sigh. What were we talking about? “Forget it,” I mumbled,