The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“Not really,” she says after a bit. “His sense of humor sometimes. But the best parts of him were in his books. I suppose I could always read those if I missed him too much. I haven’t wanted to read one yet, though.” Ismay laughs a little.

“What do you read, then?”

“Plays, the odd bit of poetry. Then there are the books I teach every year: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Johnny Got His Gun, A Farewell to Arms, A Prayer for Owen Meany, some years Wuthering Heights, Silas Marner, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or I Capture the Castle. Those books are like old friends.

“When I’m choosing something new, though, something just for myself, my favorite kind of character is a woman in a faraway place. India. Or Bangkok. Sometimes she leaves her husband. Sometimes she never had a husband because she knew, wisely, that married life would not be for her. I like when she has multiple lovers. I like when she wears hats to block her fair skin from the sun. I like when she travels and has adventures. I like descriptions of hotels and suitcases with stickers on them. I like descriptions of food and clothes and jewelry. A little romance but not too much. The story is period. No cell phones. No social networking. No Internet at all. Ideally, it’s set in the 1920s or the 1940s. Maybe there’s a war going on, but it’s just a backdrop. No bloodshed. Some sex but nothing too graphic. No children. Children often spoil a story for me.”

“I don’t have any,” Lambiase says.

“I don’t mind them in real life. I just don’t want to read about them. Endings can be happy or sad, I don’t care anymore as long as it’s earned. She can settle down, maybe open a little business, or she can drown herself in the ocean. Finally, a nice-looking jacket is important. I don’t care how good the insides are. I don’t want to spend any length of time with an ugly object. I’m shallow, I guess.”

“You are one heck of a pretty woman,” Lambiase says.

“I’m ordinary,” she says.

“No way.”

“Pretty is not a good reason to court someone, you know. I have to tell that to my students all the time.”

“This from the woman who doesn’t read the books with the ugly covers.”

“Well, I’m warning you. I could be a bad book with a good jacket.”

He groans. “I’ve known a few of those.”

“For instance?”

“My first marriage. The wife was pretty but mean.”

“So you thought you’d make the same mistake twice?”

“Nah, I’ve seen you on the shelf for years. I’ve read the synopsis and the quotes on the back. Caring teacher. Godmother. Upstanding community member. Caretaker to sister’s husband and daughter. Bad marriage, probably made too young, but tried her best.”

“Sketchy,” she says.

“But it’s enough to make me want to read on.” He smiles at her. “Should we order dessert?”

“I HAVEN’T HAD sex in a really long time,” Ismay says in the car on the way back to her house.

“Okay,” Lambiase says.

“I think we should have sex,” Ismay clarifies. “If you want to, I mean.”

“I do want to,” Lambiase says. “But not if that means I don’t get to take you on a second date. I don’t want to be a warm-up for the guy that gets you.”

She laughs at him and leads him to her bedroom. She takes off her clothes with the lights on. She wants him to see what a fifty-one-year-old woman looks like.

Lambiase lets out a low whistle.

“You’re sweet, but you should have seen me before,” she says. “Surely you see the scars.”

A long one runs from her knee to her hip. Lambiase runs his thumb along it: it’s like a seam on a doll. “Yeah, I see them, but it doesn’t take away from anything.”

Her leg had been broken in fifteen places and she’d had to have the socket of her right hip replaced, but other than that, she’d been fine. For once in his life, Daniel had taken the brunt of the impact.

“Does it hurt much?” Lambiase asks. “Should I be careful?”

She shakes her head and tells him to take off his clothes.

IN THE MORNING, she wakes before him. “I’m going to make you breakfast,” she says. He nods sleepily, and then she kisses him on his shaven head.

“Are you shaving this because you’re balding or because you like the style?” she asks.

“A little of both,” Lambiase replies.

She sets a towel on the bed, then leaves the room. Lambiase takes his time getting ready. He opens the drawer of her nightstand and pokes around her things a bit. She has expensive-looking lotions that smell like her. He smears some on his hands. He opens her closet. Her clothes are tiny. There are silk dresses, pressed cotton blouses, wool pencil skirts, and paper-thin cashmere cardigans. Everything is in smart shades of beige and gray, and the condition of her clothes is immaculate. He looks at the top shelf of the closet, where her shoes are neatly organized in their original boxes. Above one of the stacks of shoes, he notices a small child’s backpack in princess pink.

His cop eyes clock the child’s backpack as out of place somehow. He knows he shouldn’t, but he pulls it down and unzips it. Inside is a zipper case with crayons and a couple of coloring books. He picks up the coloring book. maya is written across the front. Behind the coloring book is another book. A flimsy thing, more like a pamphlet than a book. Lambiase looks at the cover:

TAMERLANE

AND

OTHER POEMS.

BY A BOSTONIAN.

Crayon marks scar the cover.

Lambiase doesn’t know what to make of it.

His cop brain clicks in, formulating the following questions: (1) Is this A.J.’s stolen Tamerlane? (2) Why would Tamerlane be in Ismay’s possession? (3) How did Tamerlane get covered in crayon and who did the coloring? Maya? (4) Why would Tamerlane be in a backpack with Maya’s name on it?

He is about to run downstairs to demand an explanation from Ismay, but then he changes his mind.

He looks at the ancient manuscript for several seconds longer.

He can smell the pancakes from where he sits. He can imagine her downstairs making them. She is probably wearing a white apron and a silky nightgown. Or maybe she is wearing just the apron and nothing else. That would be exciting. Maybe they can have sex again. Not on the kitchen table. It is not comfortable to have sex on a kitchen table no matter how erotic it looks in movies. Maybe on the couch. Maybe back upstairs. Her mattress is so soft, and her sheets’ thread count must be in the thousands.

Lambiase prides himself on being a good cop, and he knows he should go downstairs and make an excuse to her now about why he has to go.

But is that the sound of an orange being juiced? Is she warming syrup, too?

The book is ruined.

Besides which, it was stolen so long ago. Over ten years now. A.J. is happily married. Maya is settled. Ismay has suffered.

Not to mention, he really likes this woman. And none of this is Lambiase’s business anyway. He zips the book back into the backpack and puts the bag back where he found it.

Lambiase believes that cops go one of two ways as they get older. They either get more judgmental or less so. Lambiase is not so rigid as when he was a young police officer. He has found that people do all sorts of things, and they usually have their reasons.

He goes downstairs and sits at her kitchen table, which is round and covered with the whitest tablecloth he has ever seen. “Smells great,” he says.

“Nice to have someone to cook for. You were up there a long time,” she says, pouring him a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Her apron is turquoise, and she is wearing black exercise clothes.

“Hey,” Lambiase says, “did you happen to read Maya’s short story for the contest? I thought the kid should have been a shoo-in to win.”

“I haven’t read it yet,” Ismay says.

“It’s basically Maya’s version of the last day of her mother’s life,” Lambiase says.

“She’s so precocious,” Ismay says.

“I’ve always wondered why Maya’s mother chose Alice.”

Ismay flips a pancake, and then she flips another. “Who knows why people do what they do?”

Ironhead

2005 / Aimee Bender

For the record, everything new is not worse than everything old.

Parents with heads made from pumpkins have a baby with a head made from iron. I have, for what I assume will be very obvious reasons, been thinking about this one a lot lately.

—A.J.F.

P.S. I also find myself thinking of “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff. You might give that a read, too.

Christmas brings A.J.’s mother, who looks nothing like him. Paula is a tiny white woman with long gray hair that has not been cut since she retired from her job at a computer company a decade ago. She has made the most of her retirement in Arizona. She makes jewelry out of rocks that she paints. She teaches literacy to inmates. She rescues Siberian huskies. She tries to go to a different restaurant every week. She dates some—women and men. She has slipped into bisexuality without needing to make a big thing about it. She is seventy, and she believes you try new things or you may as well die. She comes bearing three identically wrapped and shaped presents for the family and a promise that it isn’t thoughtlessness that has led her to pick the same gift for the three of them. “It’s something I thought the whole family would appreciate and use,” she says.