- - - - When he got back from the hospital his children looked up at him from where they were playing on the living room floor as if it were utterly immaterial to them that he was home, and well, and living still. As he stood in the hallway watching them watch him or not watch him at all, depending on how absorbed each was in their play at the moment, he said to himself: So that's the way it has to be, eh, well so be it then, and he proceeded to live his life the way he wanted to, outside the home, paying the bills of his family but that was it, that was the way it was to be. He walked around the city for twenty-five years with the odd self-assurance of a man who has deemed himself a total failure at everything he considered important, and so of course in the bars he became a legend, as a man who could not be insulted, whose only offenses were committed by himself against himself, and who would not come home before three in the morning. In the living room the furniture moved about every few years, covering and re-covering the place where his children had played; his wife had placed the children and later the furniture there; she was the one who was to blame if anyone was, which no one was, and she knew it and hid herself away during the day so he could leave with impunity, never needing to say the words that would blame her: So this is the way it's going to be, well, fine. In the bars the people leaned toward him, winking and smiling. They blew smoke all around him and he breathed it in, secondhand. He checked his hair in the mirrors that hung behind the bottles of hard alcohol. When people said hello to him he said hello back, gently and carefully, afraid to offend. In the mornings, the outsides of the bars always surprised him: They were ugly, like unknown women in natural light. One morning he stood outside with a drinking companion and counted the different shades of green that painted the Irish bar: Seven. They counted for twenty minutes, unsure if they had gotten it all. This was the way it was to be. Across the street he saw his son coming towards him, slowly and too carefully, at seventeen or nineteen too young to be out; too young to be with the woman next to him who looked like she held her liquor better than any of them. His son wore a sad grin that would someday get him punched in a bar, for that and for being too smug and handsome; he walked across the street from the seven shades of green without seeing them. At home the woman of the house was not waiting up for either of them anymore. She was watching television and trying not to think. Down the hall and up the stairs his daughter had brought a man into her room, for the third time in two weeks, and though they thought they were being discreet her mother could hear them, but she thought that she was only hearing things; she thought she was going mad. She finished her cigarette and lit another one. When she had found out that he was going to live she had been relieved and jealous; having been through that, she thought, of course he would make it through anything. But she had been wrong. She had been on her way to the kitchen when she turned around and saw him looking into the living room with a question in his eyes and his fists in his pockets. She had heard the low voices of her children immersed in their play, oblivious and pointedly so, as young as they were; and she had known that nothing would change after all, though everything had. He stood in the hallway counting to ten and he stood outside the Irish bar twenty-five years later counting the shades of green with his drinking companion, watching his son and his friend walk past him, set in their plans for the night, preoccupied by their own inevitable lives, knowing that this was the way it had to be, barring some extraordinary event. At home his wife turned off the television and fell asleep. Down the hall and up the stairs her daughter entertained her lover with dull interest, and her lover thought he saw something in her eyes that indicated that there were feelings there, but he was wrong, though it took him too long to realize this; when he left the house later in the evening and made his way down the street he did not know to recognize the same look in the eyes of the strangers he passed, lost as he was in the idea and memory of love.
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