better the more you listen to it. I’ll get another one.”
“And play it with what? My finger?”
“You’re kidding me. You don’t have a record player?”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
“What are you-monks? Who doesn’t have a record player?”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’ll get you one.”
“You will not. We don’t need one. Joe wouldn’t go for this longhair stuff anyways. Miles Davis.” She sniffed. “How come you’re giving away your records? You going someplace?”
“No. This one’s getting scratchy. They’re better when they’re new.”
“You buy records twice?”
“You buy milk twice?”
Kat snorted. Yeah, okay, Ricky. She went to the kitchen, slid the pan into the oven and turned it on, then came back out to clear a dirty dish and a beer bottle from the coffee table. “When was the last time you cleaned this place?”
“Hm, let’s see, when did I move in…?”
“Didn’t Amy ever do it?”
“We tended to hang around at her place.”
“Her choice?”
“Mine.”
“No wonder.” Kat looked around at the bare walls and bare floors. Dust balls gathered along the baseboards. “You think I’m a monk? You’re just a monk with a record player. Look at this place.”
Back in the kitchen Kat stacked the dirty dishes on one side of the sink and began scrubbing them. “So how you doing here, Rick, all by your lonesome?”
“Swell.”
“Swell?”
“I’m fine. I mean, look, obviously it’s, it’s not-I’m fine. Really.”
“You’re fine. Well, that’s just great. I’m not.”
“No?” A ripple crossed Ricky’s face. A confession of sentiment was coming, with the expectation that he would reciprocate. Kat had found his front door locked; now she would rattle the side door.
“I can’t stop thinking about her. All day every day. Can’t sleep, can’t stop eating, I’m as big as a house. Look at me. I’m a wreck over here.”
“Me, too.”
“Yeah? You’re a wreck?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you. You don’t say that like you mean it.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t say anything like I mean it. But I do mean it. I loved her. I just don’t feel like coming all unglued. Doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.”
She turned off the water and looked across her shoulder at him. She wasn’t going to fall for one of Ricky’s cons. “Can I ask you something? Did you really love her?”
“Of course.”
“No, not ‘of course.’ I mean, did you really love her?”
“Yeah.”
“Because I loved her and I want to know. Did you really love her, Ricky?”
“Yes.”
“Because she loved you, you know.”
“I know.”
Kat stared a second more, and Ricky quickly inventoried his emotions as if he were checking his shirt for crumbs. He had loved Amy, in his way. Ricky wasn’t much of a lover. He did not really have the knack for it; he tended to shy away from intense emotion of any kind. But he had loved her as much as he’d ever loved anyone. And if the whole relationship, in memory, felt like role-playing, with Ricky cast as the dutiful husband-to-be…well, a lot of Ricky’s emotions felt inauthentic that way. Ordinary experience always felt slightly counterfeit. It was only when he worked-when he actually was role-playing-that he felt truly himself, that he seemed to fill his own skin. Anyway, people used the word love too freely. Who knew that love meant the same thing, felt the same way, to any two people?
“I was going to marry her.”
“You were?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Since when?”
“Since I don’t know.”
“Did she know? Did you ever…?”
“No. I was still, you know, getting ready.”
“Hunh.” Kat considered it. “Hunh.”
Ricky wasn’t sure why he’d said this. He had never actually decided to marry Amy. The words just felt right. They were the objective guarantee Kat was looking for, the currency she could accept. They made Kat feel better, so what was the harm? People wanted you to be something; you only had to intuit what that thing was, then be it, and they were pleased.
“Did you steal a ring for her yet?”
“Oh, that’s funny, Kat.”
She attempted another joke: “What would you do if she wanted to return it?” But her voice caught at the thought of a broken engagement.
The LP scratched in its catch-groove.
“Time to change the record.” Ricky smiled. “See? Miles has good timing.”
Ricky flipped the record with a practiced up-down motion. Held between his palms, by its edges, the record was precisely the diameter of a basketball. He said, “Don’t you have to get home for dinner?”
“I thought we’d eat together tonight.”
“Joe’s workin’?”
“No.”
“He’s just out?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
Ricky left it at that. Kat did not need much prodding; if she felt like talking, she’d talk. And talk and talk. It was probably nothing. A spat. Kat and Joe’s marriage was a Ten Years’ War anyway. It was hard to take every little skirmish seriously. Besides, Ricky and Kat had rarely been alone together. They had never spoken about things that mattered; they did not quite know how. They would have to rebuild their relationship now, without Amy to broker between them.
Dinner was a roast trimmed out with potatoes and carrots. By the end of it, Kat looked exhausted and teary. Her roast was consumed, and the money it had cost, and she was foggy with beer and the obscenity of Amy’s murder and rape and mutilation and whatever else she had not been told about it. She hunched over her plate. To Ricky, the strain had sapped her of precisely the quality that made her attractive: her indomitable straight-backed strength.
He, on the other hand, felt his emotions streaming in the opposite direction, from resignation to resolve, from confusion to clarity. The meal-the food, the beer, the company-invigorated him. He thought he could answer Kat’s earlier question, and he wished he could go back to it. Yes, he had “really loved” Amy. He loved her still. But love for Ricky was a behavior, a series of actions. The emotion itself was worthless, because it’s internal and immaterial. Even at its intensest and most intoxicating-which, Ricky presumed, was what Kat meant by “real love”-it could only be enjoyed by the one who felt it, not by the partner who inspired it.
Ricky thought he could clarify that to his sister-in-law, though the whole idea was not quite clear to him yet. It lurked in his mind, unresolved, just beyond articulation.
