DEBARKING

Ira had been divorced for six months and still couldn’t get his wedding ring off. His finger had swelled doughily—a combination of frustrated desire, unmitigated remorse, and misdirected ambition was how he explained it. “I’m going to have to have my entire finger surgically removed,” he told his friends. The ring (supposedly gold, though now that everything he had ever received from Marilyn had been thrown into doubt, who knew?) cinched the blowsy fat of his finger, which had grown twistedly around it like a fucking happy challah. “Maybe I should cut the whole hand off and send it to her,” he said on the phone to his friend Mike, with whom he worked at the State Historical Society. “She’d understand the reference.” Ira had already ceremoniously set fire to his dove-gray wedding tux—hanging it on a tall stick in his back yard, scarecrow style, and igniting it with a Bic lighter. “That sucker went up really fast,” he gasped apologetically to the fire marshal, after the hedge caught, too—and before he was taken overnight to the local lockdown facility. “So fast. Maybe it was, I don’t know, like the residual dry-cleaning fluid.”

“You’ll remove that ring when you’re ready,” Mike said now. Mike’s job approving historical-preservation projects on old houses left him time to take a lot of lenient-parenting courses and to read all the lenient-parenting books, though he had no children himself. He did this for project-applicant-management purposes. “Here’s what you do for your depression. I’m not going to say lose yourself in charity work. I’m not going to say get some perspective by watching our country’s news every night and contemplating those worse off than yourself, those, say, who are about to be blown apart by bombs. I’m going to say this: Stop drinking, stop smoking. Eliminate coffee, sugar, dairy products. Do this for three days, then start everything back up again. Bam. I guarantee you, you will be so happy.”

“I’m afraid,” Ira said softly, “that the only thing that would make me happy right now is snipping the brake cables on Marilyn’s car.”

“Spring,” Mike said helplessly, though it was still only the end of winter. “It can really hang you up the most.”

“Hey. You should write songs. Just not too often.” Ira looked at his hands. Actually, he had once got the ring off in a hot bath, but the sight of his finger, naked as a child’s, had terrified him and he had shoved the ring back on.

He could hear Mike sighing and casting about. Cupboard doors closed loudly. The refrigerator puckered open then whooshed shut. Ira knew that Mike and Kate had had their troubles—as the phrase went—but their marriage had always held. “I’d divorce Kate,” Mike had once confided, “but she’d kill me.”

“Look,” Mike suggested, “why don’t you come to our house Sunday for a little Lent dinner. We’re having some people by, and who knows?”

“Who knows?” Ira asked.

“Yes—who knows.”

“What’s a Lent dinner?”

“We made it up. For Lent. We didn’t really want to do Mardi Gras. Too disrespectful, given the international situation.”

“So you’re doing Lent. I’m unclear on Lent. I mean, I know what the word means to those of us of the Jewish faith. But we don’t usually commemorate these transactions with meals. Usually there’s just a lot of sighing.”

“It’s like a pre-Easter Prince of Peace dinner,” Mike said slowly. “You’re supposed to give things up for Lent. Last year, we gave up our faith and reason. This year, we’re giving up our democratic voice, our hope.”

Ira had already met most of Mike’s goyisheh friends. Mike himself was low-key, tolerant, self-deprecating to a fault. A self-described “ethnic Catholic,” he once complained dejectedly about not hav-ing been cute enough to be molested by a priest. “They would just shake my hand very quickly,” he said. Mike’s friends, however, tended to be tense, intellectually earnest Protestants who drove new, metallic-hued cars and who within five minutes of light conversation could be counted on to use the phrase “strictly within the framework of.”

“Kate has a divorcée friend she’s inviting,” Mike said. “I’m not trying to fix you up. I really hate that stuff. I’m just saying come. Eat some food. It’s almost Easter season and—well, hey, we could use a Jew over here.” Mike laughed heartily.

“Yeah, I’ll reënact the whole thing for you,” Ira said. He looked at his swollen ring finger again. “Yessirree. I’ll come over and show you all how it’s done.”

Ira’s new house—though it was in what his real-estate agent referred to as “a lovely, pedestrian neighborhood,” abutting the streets named after Presidents, and boasting instead streets named after fishing flies (Caddis, Hendrickson, Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear Road)—was full of slow drains, leaky gas burners, stopped-up sinks, and excellent dust for scrawling curse words. Marilyn blows sailors. The draftier windows Ira had duct-taped up with sheets of plastic on the inside, as instructed by Homeland Security; cold air billowed the plastic inward like sails on a ship. On a windy day it was quite something. “Your whole house could fly away,” Mike said, looking around.