Seven months after the wedding, and Mike can't keep on thinking of excuses to stick around Philadelphia. It is his ideal city, he explains to Liz, who would like to move somewhere else, get a fresh start, the two of them.
"But can't you see, Liz? Philadelphia is, well, it's everything I've ever needed in a city," he says one night as he holds her naked hands, naked body. Her hands are delicate, like she is, inside, sometimes, the times when he can see it. She is quiet, biting her tongue like she always does, and he wishes that she would finally just uncoil and spring like he knows she wants to.
"Everything you've ever wanted, Mike," she repeats, but doesn't, since he didn't say that, exactly. But then, she's always known what he wanted more than he himself knew.
"Yeah," he says, weakly. Because it's true.
Still, she doesn't move away, even though they both know that the city wasn't outside anymore, it was safely nestled at the foot of Liz' bed, just waiting for them to sleep so it could suffocate them.
...
Tracy is beautiful, especially now that she is pregnant. Mike never believed all the hoo-hah about some sort of glow that pregnant women had until he saw her, positively ethereal, on the doorstep to his apartment. He embraced her and took her to lunch, a martini for him, a salad and water for her.
"We swim a lot," she said, when he asked how it was being remarried to C. K. Dexter Haven. (Even now, he will never be "Dex" or even "Dexter" to Mike) "There is this delightful little lake on his property, all full of fishes and pebbles, and he carries me out there at midnight."
She smiled, and Mike was silent, thinking of the two bodies glowing in the moonlight. With a sudden burst of energy she reached across the table and grabbed his hand.
"You really should come see us more, Mike. Dex likes you: asked about you the other day." Her eyes were intense, looking right into his mind, like she always could. "I know you didn't like the idea the last time I brought it up, but I wish you would reconsider letting me take care of you. That cabin is awful nice, and I think, if you went up there, you would find you belong to it."
He looked at her, looked through the table to see her fingers splayed across her slowly burgeoning belly, looked through her skin to see the light trapped inside, bursting to get free, light that C. K. Dexter Haven would nuzzle and carry until it dimmed, and then he would dim with it.
"Alright."
Liz will understand.
...
After a week, Mike is friends with every woodland creature native to Pennsylvania. This is, mostly, squirrels, and there is one in particular that he is convinced is a repeat customer of La Casa Connor. She is a dingy gray, slender, with eyes that seem to know him, and he can't help but wonder where the black, quiet, solid quirrel is that should be with her.
"Hello, Daisy," he croons to the squirrel as he walks out onto his porch in the morning. The air is harsh, but he is getting used to it. It is cleansing to the soul. "What news of the outside world do you bring to me today?"
Daisy sniffs at the nuts he lays out for her, then proceeds to consume them as he leans over his railing, singing Cole Porter at the top of his lungs. When he looks back, Daisy is gone.
"Everyone's a critic!" he says, throwing his arms up into the air.
...
Tracy comes to visit him in a week with C. K. Dexter Haven in tow, already breaking the lengthy promises she made when he agreed to live under her wing. He is carrying a tremendous basket filled with food and necessities to the rich, obviously a gift from Tracy, who runs up the driveway to meet him.
He grabs her round the waist as she kisses his cheek and revels in her, still the most amazing woman he has ever met.
"What a surprise!" he chuckles as they sit down in his kitchen. She is finally beginning to show, a small whisper of what she will look like in a few months hidden behind her high-wasted pants, which he knows she will abandon for dresses soon enough.
"Well, Dex and I wanted to take the train and see some beauty for once," she says, absurdly, clutching her husband's hand. "And we thought we should come see you. His suggestion, really."
Mike looks at C. K. Dexter Haven madly, his own surprised eyes meeting the quiet calm that is C. K. Dexter Haven.
"She misses you," he says, finally, somewhere near the way of an explanation.
Later, they go exploring, and Tracy runs off ahead of them to find some childhood memory or another. The two men walk in silence, but only for a moment.
"How did Liz take it?" C. K. Dexter Haven asks.
"What, me leaving?" Mike asks, blushing.
"No, the most recent election."
"She threw my things out of our window," Mike says, thinking about how loud her shouting seemed as he was bent over, picking up the remnants of his dignity, as if it ever existed in the first place.
"That girl sure takes politics seriously," is all C. K. Dexter Haven says. Mike looks at him sideways, sees that C. K. Dexter Haven is looking back at him. Silence, only the crunching of pebbles beneath their feet, and Mike absurdly thinks about the two of them out in their lake.
"Yes she does."
C. K. Dexter Haven coughs, and Mike thinks for a second that their fingers have touched.
"Tracy and I think that she was never good enough, anyway," he says. "Not enough scandal in your life."
"You two would know about that, wouldn't you."
"Wouldn't we? We would, but you would, too," he says. "We all would."
More sideways glances, and Mike's head is spinning, and he is wondering why he likes C. K. Dexter Haven at all. (He doesn't.)
Tracy finds them again just as the sun is going down and drags them to an obscure tree that she claims is where her father had his first affair.
"Scandal, eh?" Mike says, and makes with the sideways glances.
"It's family tradition," Tracy sighs, touching the tree tenderly.
When they leave, Mike doesn't miss the bickering, or his name coming up often.
...
His book is coming along too slowly, and he is impatient with himself, and the town is too small for his tastes. Tracy and C. K. Dexter Haven have come only two more times, each carrying too many arguments with them, and for a moment he entertains the fact that he is the source of their lack of marital bliss until he remembers how they have always been.
That night, he dreams that he is carrying Tracy in his arms. They are back on the Lord estate, and they are singing Duke Ellington songs he thought nobody else in the world knew but them.
"Let's go for a swim," she says, with that excited look on her face that he can't resist. And, suddenly, they are in a lake he has never been in. The Haven lake.
They walk straight into it, until they are completely submerged. Hands reach for him blindly in the dark and he takes them, clings to the body next to him.
When the darkness falls away he is in C. K. Dexter Haven's arms, shaking and soaking and scared.
"Enough with the word play, Mike," C. K. Dexter Haven says, kissing him as though they were still under water and he needed air.
Mike wakes suddenly and soiled.
...
"There are too many words that start with the letter 's,' Mike declared to Daisy.
She is unsympathetic to his plight.
...
"I have writers block," Mike announced to Tracy.
"Even in Uniondale?" she asks, looking as though she has failed.
"Even in Uniondale," Mike confirms, feeling as though he has failed.
...
His old apartment is reoccupied by an old woman (who plays too much Billie, his old neighbor says) and therefore unavailable to rent. It takes him an entire day to find another place that he can move back to, in the city.
When C. K. Dexter Haven shows up to help him move, Mike isn't surprised. He just hands him a box from the car Tracy rented for him and tells him where it goes.
When it is all through, they sit on the floor, against Mike's old, busted couch with too many lumps, passing a bottle of wine back and forth that they both know if from his last house warming basket.
"If you didn't find a place soon, Tracy and I were going to let you live with us," C. K. Dexter Haven finally says.
Mike laughs, the laugh of a man uninhibited. Because he is.
"You're practically family, anyway," C. K. Dexter Haven continues, brow furrowed. "Except, well. You know."
Mike rolls his head to the side and looks at the other man. (His friend?)
"The fact that we share no blood?"
"There is that," C. K. Dexter Haven says. "And there is this."
In reality, he does not kiss like a desperate man, but rather like a man who is tired. (Sleepy, Mike thinks, 's' words.) But Mike is tired, too, even in this energetic city, and he can't help but bring his hand up to cup C. K. Dexter Haven's face.
"Oh, C. K. Dexter Haven," he whispers against chapped lips when he pulls back. "There is that."
"You can't keep calling me that," C. K. Dexter Haven says with a laugh.
"Can and will," Mike yawns as he slumps against his friend, spent.
...
We are not characters in my stories, Mike tells himself every time he sees Tracy. The world is not flawed tragically, in a slant way that will bring us together, where this will be alright.
Still, as long as I'm kissing her husband, I'm sure that this is okay on some level, he thinks as she wraps her legs around him. He kisses her like he will get a touch of that light, and she just shudders against him.
...
That night, he has the same dream about water and Tracy and Dexter and him, but it's all swirled up, confused. They are in the middle of Philadelphia, in a car filled with water, driving recklessly down Main Street, and they are all jumbled together, rubbing, holding, loving.
At the end of his dream, the car plunges off of a cliff and into the ocean, where the waves lap at their slick bodies, and the moon shines on them.
I will never be a real writer, Mike thinks when he wakes up, when the truth is stranger than fiction.