King of Hearts

A thing you got to notice about Richard--not the first thing necessarily, but somewhere in the middle of the long procession of noticings--was that he wore a pendant around his neck in the shape of a hollowed-out heart, with a pink stone dangling from the inner point. He called it a pendant; really it was a necklace. Some weeks after I met him, in a solemn hush, he told me that it had been a gift for his girlfriend, but three days before Valentine's she had been caught up in the middle of a liquor store job and was shot--once, here, and he pointed to the place where the necklace lay on his chest--in the heart. This story impressed the hell out of me, but it seemed to have an even greater effect on women. So what if he used it to gain a little sympathy now and again, or a little comfort from another girl? Everyone knows sympathy and comfort are coming to a man who has suffered great pain.

But it didn’t always have the intended results. There was one girl, a smallish brunette in black jeans and ballet flats with a tattoo of a heart on the white flesh of her wrist. That heart tattoo gave him an opening, and not long after he pulled that pendant out and flashed the little pink stone in the dim tavern light I listened to him tell that story again. The phrases were the same, and the little flourishes too, as befits a man who lives with a story like that and tells it often, and the girl seemed as rapt as any other girl. And when he was done she placed her small white hand on his wrist and told him a story of her own.

The story, as best as I can recall it was this: When she was fourteen or fifteen she had been dating a senior boy who drove a car—and she loved that car, and she could remember the make and year and everything, but I myself don’t recall it—and often took her for rides in the country where she had grown up. I remember thinking that this was a quaint idea, but I have always lived in the city where driving is a chore so perhaps it’s not as antiquated as it seemed to me. In any case, he had come to pick her up one night to go for a ride in his car and they had some awful fight about something, maybe some senior girl—and this detail I have not forgotten; I remember quite vividly that she had forgotten and that she said “maybe some senior girl”—and so he left without her. Well, that boy and that car were sent spinning into a pole by a drunk driver not half a mile from her house. He would have been all right, survived at least, with a couple of broken bones, if the driver of the other car hadn’t had had two other DWIs on his record and—it hardly seems believable to me now—crushed the boy’s skull in with his own shattered muffler. They might never have known what really happened if guilt hadn’t ravaged that man so badly that he turned himself in some days later. That part seems hardly less believable than the rest. And to Richard’s credit he looked awfully sympathetic during the whole story, and when it was over, he asked her if that’s why she had gotten the tattoo, as a way of remembering. But no, she had gotten it on her 21^st birthday.

And then it was as if his inner resources were simply drained away—he couldn’t find a single thing to say. You could see the machinery of his brain working, but they both fell silent. He seemed not to have expected this sort of response. Worse yet, that girl started quietly weeping, right there in the bar, and if I recall correctly she was the one who excused herself and shuffled off to the bathroom. “Yikes,” he told me afterward, “who would have expected that? Let’s go somewhere else.”

But I couldn’t stand the sight of him, and I left alone. Shame for myself outpaced my anger at Richard, as I had decided his story was a lie. Had that necklace ever really been intended for a girl? I hope so even still, because the image of Richard walking into some jewelry store or pawn shop with that lie already in his heart has been too much for me to bear. But either she was real and alive or not alive and never had been—for who could wear such a thing over their heart that way? Either it would be like opening a wound to fresh air, every day, and grinding one’s gash into the hard wall of living, or the grief of it would fade away and cease to matter. Which would be more unimaginable, or less bearable? No, a thing like that a man can do nothing with but keep in a box, beneath the bed or in the far reaches of a closet, for the rare occasions when he would wish to take again in his hand the great burning center of his life and hold it.

When I walked out of the bar I walked into one of those blue Havana days that New York puts on from time to time. The world seemed mendacious and worthy of my loathing. I turned up a street where a cluster of children fled from and returned to an opened hydrant, bare-chested, studded by opal sweat, and in such a heat I felt the smallness of my griefs, and grieved.