The Bar seemed to cheer her up. She handled the books, she poured the beers. She stole from the tip jar semi-regularly, but then she did more work than me. We never talked about our old lives. We were Dunnes, and we were done, and strangely content about it.
“So, what?” Go said, her usual way of beginning a conversation.
“Eh.”
“Eh, what? Eh, bad? You look bad.”
I shrugged a yes; she scanned my face.
“Amy?” she asked. It was an easy question. I shrugged again—a confirmation this time, a whatcha gonna do? shrug.
Go gave me her amused face, both elbows on the bar, hands cradling chin, hunkering down for an incisive dissection of my marriage. Go, an expert panel of one. “What about her?”
“Bad day. It’s just a bad day.”
“Don’t let her worry you.” Go lit a cigarette. She smoked exactly one a day. “Women are crazy.” Go didn’t consider herself part of the general category of women, a word she used derisively.
I blew Go’s smoke back to its owner. “It’s our anniversary today. Five years.”
“Wow.” My sister cocked her head back. She’d been a bridesmaid, all in violet—“the gorgeous, raven-haired, amethyst-draped dame,” Amy’s mother had dubbed her—but anniversaries weren’t something she’d remember. “Jeez. Fuck. Dude. That came fast.” She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch. “She going to do one of her, uh, what do you call it, not scavenger hunt—”
“Treasure hunt,” I said.
My wife loved games, mostly mind games, but also actual games of amusement, and for our anniversary she always set up an elaborate treasure hunt, with each clue leading to the hiding place of the next clue until I reached the end, and my present. It was what her dad always did for her mom on their anniversary, and don’t think I don’t see the gender roles here, that I don’t get the hint. But I did not grow up in Amy’s household, I grew up in mine, and the last present I remember my dad giving my mom was an iron, set on the kitchen counter, no wrapping paper.
“Should we make a wager on how pissed she’s going to get at you this year?” Go asked, smiling over the rim of her beer.
The problem with Amy’s treasure hunts: I never figured out the clues. Our first anniversary, back in New York, I went two for seven. That was my best year. The opening parley:
This place is a bit of a hole in the wall,
But we had a great kiss there one Tuesday last fall.
Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy second after the announcement of the word as you sift your brain to see if you can spell it? It was like that, the blank panic.
“An Irish bar in a not-so-Irish place,” Amy nudged.
I bit the side of my lip, started a shrug, scanning our living room as if the answer might appear. She gave me another very long minute.
“We were lost in the rain,” she said in a voice that was pleading on the way to peeved.
I finished the shrug.
“McMann’s, Nick. Remember, when we got lost in the rain in Chinatown trying to find that dim sum place, and it was supposed to be near the statue of Confucius but it turns out there are two statues of Confucius, and we ended up at that random Irish bar all soaking wet, and we slammed a few whiskeys, and you grabbed me and kissed me, and it was—”
“Right! You should have done a clue with Confucius, I would have gotten that.”
“The statue wasn’t the point. The place was the point. The moment. I just thought it was special.” She said these last words in a childish lilt that I once found fetching.
“It was special.” I pulled her to me and kissed her. “That smooch right there was my special anniversary reenactment. Let’s go do it again at McMann’s.”
At McMann’s, the bartender, a big, bearded bear-kid, saw us come in and grinned, poured us both whiskeys, and pushed over the next clue.
When I’m down and feeling blue
There’s only one place that will do.
That one turned out to be the Alice in Wonderland statue at Central Park, which Amy had told me—she’d told me, she knew she’d told me many times—lightened her moods as a child. I do not remember any of those conversations. I’m being honest here, I just don’t. I have a dash of ADD, and I’ve always found my wife a bit dazzling, in the purest sense of the word: to lose clear vision, especially from looking at bright light. It was enough to be near her and hear her talk, it didn’t always matter what she was saying. It should have, but it didn’t.
By the time we got to the end of the day, to exchanging our actual presents—the traditional paper presents for the first year of marriage—Amy was not speaking to me.