Stealing Happy Hours

The wedding reception could have been mistaken for a wake.

I had never attended a gloomier celebration. The courtroom proceedings for my own divorce—as rabid and rancid a ruckus as any since the days of Henry VIII—would have passed as a Saturday night during the pinnacle of Studio 54 when juxtaposed with this dreary affair.

At my table, reserved for unmated oddball friends of the bride and groom, a middle-aged woman on my left was endlessly stubbing out the same dead cigarette in the remains of her potatoes au gratin. The trim elderly gent to my right had taken to polishing his eyeglasses to invisibility with a corner of his napkin. And across the littered expanse of tablecloth a twenty-something gal—hair gel sharp and colored like a tetra’s scales—chewed her drearily painted fingernails like a cougar gnawing its own trap-bound leg. And as for myself, I wallowed in an orgy of long, deep sighs, foot-tapping and wedgie-level squirming.

And the biggest scandal of the whole day was that there was absolutely no reason for this pall.

Stan and Andrea were a wonderful couple: witty, young, energetic and generous. Everybody loved them. The vibe in the church had been one of overwhelming joy. Any tears had been consecrated with pride and pleasure. Every part of the ceremony had gone off without a hitch. Even the weather had cooperated, the June sunlight like some kind of photonic champagne.

But as soon as everybody had settled down in the lush banquet hall—bang! Complete morbid ennui descended inexplicably like soot from a smokestack over the entire party. The band, much touted, began to play. They sounded as leaded and lackluster as an unprogrammed drum machine. The waitpeople circulated like bit players from a George Romero movie. At the head table, the bride and groom and their attendants wore smiles as wan as that on the face of a felon who had just learned he’d escaped the death sentence but gotten life plus ten.

And it wasn’t even like people weren’t still resolutely trying to have fun. You could see it in their faces and postures. They were straining to enjoy themselves, having anticipated this day for months. The collective amount of energy being exerted by the crowd could have powered an Arctic icebreaking cutter. People grinned painfully and tried to chat throughout the meal. Forced laughter brittled the room. Much liquor was consumed. Couples struggled to put some zip in their dancing. But all their efforts died on the vine. It was as if some invisible wet blanket an inch above our heads smothered all the excitement as soon as it was born.

When I saw Stan excuse himself; probably to go to the john, I got up too. I figured I’d catch him in the men’s room and broach the problem to him, get his ideas about what anyone could do, even at this late hour, to liven things up. Also, I wanted to make sure he didn’t hang himself with his bow tie from a pipe.

Strangely, in the lavatory I felt a little better. Stan nodded to me, and we peed at adjacent urinals without conversing, just relishing the psychic and physical relief. Then, zipping up, I spoke.

“Why’s everyone on such a sudden massive downer, guy? Something happen I don’t know about? Favorite uncle of Andrea’s die between the church and here maybe? Stock market went down the tank? Nuclear war declared?”

“Jesus, Mitch, how should I know? I can’t explain it. This was supposed to be the happiest day of my life, and instead I feel like I just got a ransom note for my unborn daughter. I’ve been racking my brain, but I can’t come up with an answer. Food poisoning? Sick building syndrome? Roofies in the champagne? Maybe it’s some weird fluke of the seating arrangements. But the majority of these people have known each other for decades. All hatchets have long been buried. I just can’t come up with any reason that makes sense.”

We started back toward the main room, and the closer we got, the more lackluster I felt, as if I were a balloon man leaking his precious helium. My unease caused me to blurt out precisely what I was thinking.

“I sure hope your honeymoon doesn’t suffer from this same mysterious malaise.”

Stan got a look on his face like someone had dropped an anvil on his head. “Oh, Lord, this gloom and doom couldn’t last past the reception, could it? Andrea’s been dreaming about Hawaii for a year now.”

“No, no, of course not.”

We re-entered the hall, and that was when I saw him.

The one person enjoying himself.

An innocuous fortyish fellow, utterly average-looking, he sat alone at the worst table in the place, near the exit and half-hidden by a pillar. Brimming glass in hand, he was nodding his head and tapping his foot in time to the morose strains of the band. Unlike most other dinner plates, his had been totally cleaned, apparently with zeal, and he seemed to have consumed three pieces of cake, judging by the stacked dessert plates. A smile like the Great Rift Valley split his bland face, and his eyes gleamed.

I nodded toward the anomalous celebrant and whispered to Stan. “Who’s that?”

“I don’t know. Must be from Andrea’s side. I’ll ask her.” Curious, I accompanied Stan back to the head table to learn the man’s identity. But Andrea couldn’t provide a name based on our Identikit description, and so she came back with us to eyeball him.

But he was gone, vanished.

And at that very moment the party began to take off. The music grew sprightly, the talk scintillated, the laughter ignited happy echoes, and Stan’s 95-year-old Aunt Bertha hit the dance floor to illustrate the Charleston for all us youngsters.

I met Lorraine at a party some years after the memory of Stan and Andrea’s weird wedding was nothing more than a dark blot on my mental landscape. Possessed of middling Mediterranean good looks and an average body, she nonetheless stood out from the bunched partygoers for the sheer amount of fun she was having. More so, since no one else—including me—seemed to be having a very good time.

But Lorraine, seated on the floor by the CD player, bobbed her head in blissful rhythm to the music, pausing only to sip her tall drink with evident satisfaction, and never failed to give a bright big “Hi!” to anyone who happened to glance her way. Most of the people singled out returned only a desultory grunt, the affair having reached such a desperate sump of surly unease.

I made my way across the room to this bubbly woman whose name I did not yet know and dropped down beside her. Instantly, I felt immensely happy. I recall wondering, Was this love at first sight?

“Hi! My name’s Lorraine!”

“Mitch.” We shook hands. “Where can I get a glass of whatever you’re drinking?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem to be the only person here enjoying yourself. It must be the booze.”

“Silly! It’s only ginger ale. Here, taste.”

I did, conscious of the intimacy of the shared drink.

“Anyway, I never touch alcohol.”

“What’s your secret then?”

Lorraine shrugged, and I thought it the most charming shrug I had ever seen. Her gesture seemed to light up the room.

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just a talent, the right mix of brain chemicals. I just seem to enjoy myself wherever I go.”

“Life’s too short, right?”

“Something like that.”

“Think you could enjoy yourself if you left here with me?”

“Sure! I had you spotted first, though.”

We grabbed our coats and stepped out of the apartment. Behind me, I could hear a surge of ecstasy. I could almost feel a wavefront of relief, as if a thousand fat matrons had discarded their whalebone corsets simultaneously.

Eight months later, Lorraine and I were married. Relations never went bad between us. We were always happy at home, when only the two of us were present. Contentment was the rule, for over a year of unruffled domesticity.

But during that same year, I began to lose all my friends. One by one, they fell away from the tree of my life like desiccated autumn leaves. Invitations to dinners, movies, sporting events, parties—they all died. One-on-one, my buddies still seemed amiable and unchanged, joshing, confiding, treating me as they always had. But about half a year into my marriage, they all simply stopped inviting Lorraine and me as a couple anywhere. Conversations at work actually became quite awkward.

A co-worker would ask, “Hey, folks—anyone want to catch that concert on Friday with me?”

“Lorraine and I’d love to!”

“On second thought, I don’t think I can make it myself.”

Affairs finally reached the point where I approached Stan on the subject one day after work at our favorite bar.

“Stan, I have to know. What does everyone have against me and Lorraine? We’re pariahs! I feel like a goddamn leper. Did we do something so hideous that we’ve fallen into some kind of social black hole?”

Stan studied the depths of his beer as if the Delphic Oracle hid at the bottom of the glass. “No, Mitch, it’s nothing specific I can point a finger at. It’s just, it’s just—” He looked up and caught my gaze. “It’s just that Lorraine’s such a bringdown.”

Out: of all the accusations anyone could have leveled against my wife, this was the single one I was completely unprepared for. The charge made no sense at all, given Lorraine’s zesty sociability.

“Hello? Are we talking about the same person here? Lorraine’s the life of any get-together! When everyone else is wearing a long face, she’s got a thousand-watt smile shining. She talks to anyone, acquaintance or stranger. I always feel like a million bucks when I’m with her, and you should too.”

“But nobody else does, Mitch. It’s just a fact. No one wanted to admit it at first, but the pattern eventually became too obvious to ignore. Whenever Lorraine shows up, the good times fall to ashes. She’s some kind of—I don’t know—some kind of jinx. It’s like she’s got an invisible albatross tied around her neck—just like that guy at my wedding.”

Mention of this ancient incident snapped a trap in my brain. “You mean that happy stranger we could never identify? I don’t see the connection—”

But I did. Painful as the revelation was, I could no longer deny it. If I were to believe my friend—and the suppressed evidence of many memories—then both Lorraine and that uninvited guest served as some kind of happiness sink, sucking all the ambient joy into themselves. I was immune only because I resided somehow in the sphere of her influence.

Stunned, I stood up from my stool and started to leave.

“Mitch, don’t go. You’re not hurt, are you?”

I was very hurt, in some deep way I couldn’t quite identify. Until this moment I had believed I loved Lorraine deeply. But now I began to fear that what I had identified as love was only some kind of shared spillage from her unnatural ration of happiness.

Bereft of friends, Lorraine and I took to spending a lot of our recreational time in public places: restaurants, coffee-houses and bars. And in these venues I witnessed with growing mute and stifled horror the exact phenomenon that Stan had described.

Whenever Lorraine and I entered a place, the level of joy dropped like a shotgun-blasted duck. It never happened to me alone, either, only when we were together. So it had to be Lorraine who was cursed.

Within me every day from this point two feelings warred: grief and remorse at these impossible disruptions, and a unending surfeit of unwarranted happiness.

And of course, I never said a word about any of this to Lorraine.

How could I? She was always so happy. It would have been a crime against nature to shatter that placid lake of tranquility.

From the first day of our marriage, Lorraine had insisted on having one night out alone every week. I couldn’t object, since I reserved the same right for myself—even moreso as our social status deteriorated, and I sought lone relief. Lorraine never really got too specific about these solo excursions of hers. I was led, I now realize, to make vague, unconfirmed assumptions about old girlfriends, hospital visits, spinster aunts, bowling leagues, health club appointments—whatever plausible reason might suit me. Still, how could I possibly protest? Lorraine always returned home at a reasonable hour, fresh as a corsage, no trace of carnal infidelity about her. Her affectionate attitude toward me and her desire for lovemaking remained unaltered. Curiously though, her homecoming after a night out never brought with it the same degree of happiness I felt when, say, I re-encountered her after a day at the office.

I don’t quite remember now exactly when I resolved to follow her on one of her nights out. I suspect I reached that dire decision spontaneously. We emptied a Starbucks one night in a quarter of an hour flat. But once the notion had taken root, it soon flowered into action.

The house I trailed Lorraine to that night was an unremarkable suburban homestead, some miles outside the city. Once she had parked, I drove past her as she strode happily up the walkway to the front door. Completely unsuspecting, she never looked back to see me. After parking my own car a block away, I scurried through a series of unfenced backyards printed randomly with the oblongs of lights from kitchen windows and TV screens, until I reached the lot that held the house Lorraine had entered.

Curtains were drawn nearly all the way across the doors, but one panel of glass had been drawn back several inches for ventilation. Through this slit I could see a tiny slice of the room—nothing more than a comer of a couch and a seated man’s trousered legs—and hear speech quite plainly.

Drugs. The answer hit me with the force of a punch.

Lorraine had fallen in with a bunch of high-class heroin addicts. But then the absurdity of that easy solution struck me. She exhibited no symptoms of drug use, no needle marks, no cravings, no secret expenditures. And no drug I knew of could explain Lorraine’s effect on others.

Without a clue regarding what was about to happen, I settled in behind the foliage and began to concentrate on the conversation. The chummy, clotted voices of those inside the house bespoke a bloated satiation mixed with an undercurrent of still unsatisfied avarice.

A woman said, “Now that Lorraine’s here, we can begin. Who’d like to start?”

“I’ll share first,” said a man. “I have something very piquant for you. Try a taste of this.”

A vague sense of happiness leaked out of the house and tickled my mind. The sensation was as familiar as the pleasure I felt in Lorraine’s daily presence. Impossibly, horribly, I found myself smiling, despite the rotten atmosphere of corruption I also sensed. Inside, a chorus of mmms and ahhhs followed the man’s proffered taste. The wordless sighs and moans were almost sexual in tone, yet I was somehow certain that no conventional orgy was in progress.

“Any ideas on the source?” the man asked after the sounds of appreciation had subsided.

“Give us a hint.”

“Young.”

“Oh, come on now—anyone could tell that much!”

“Well, how about young and outdoors?”

“A kid flying his first kite?”

Now Lorraine spoke. Her voice held that same note of jaded anticipation. “I sense the sea.”

“Exactly, Lorraine! What a nose! I snatched a toddler’s first dip in the ocean! You should have seer his mommy and daddy wondering why he wasn’t more excited!”

Laughter greeted this telling detail, and I felt the gorge rise in my throat. Now began the trading in earnest of stolen happy hours, pilfered from their rightful perceivers.

The audience at a circus when the clowns tumbled out. The viewer of a sunset as the clouds began to burn. The author of a book typing a period at the end of the final sentence. The winner of a footrace as the tape broke against her chest. The new owners of Detroit’s latest model as the dealer handed them the keys. The parents gazing through a maternity ward’s windows. The student receiving a higher grade than expected. The bum finding a quarter in the gutter. The politician winning a legislative victory. Lovers in bed.

Serially, like gourmets at a leisurely wine-tasting, the happiness vampires exchanged stored samples of other people’s joy.

And I, outside in my hiding place, experiencing the merest inebriatory edges of this awful communion wanted only to vomit.

At the same time I admitted a growing, unmasterable desire for more. After an unknown interval guiltily swallowing the crumbs from the thieves’ table, I finally tore myself away.

* * *

When Lorraine entered our living room that night with a big “Hi!” I did not greet her in turn, but instead asked her a single question.

Someone else might have demanded, “How could you?” or “What are you?” But I only said, “Are you happy, dear?”

“Of course.”

“That’s too bad.”

My hands were around her throat before she knew what was happening.

As I throttled her, I began to weep at the imminent death of all I had loved.

And to laugh with manic joy.

For in a reflex of survival, Lorraine poured out at me all the charge of exuberant stolen hours she still retained.

This close, the recorded sensations hit me like the blast from a firehose.

I was a horse eating my bard-earned oats, and a dog having its stomach scratched. I was a kid playing hooky, and scientist tabulating ground-breaking research. I sailed a yacht on gleaming waters, and piloted a plane I had built for myself. I roared at a touchdown, and hit a brilliant serve across the court. I was a supermodel on the catwalk, and a monk in my cell. Glory and exaltation burnt down my nerves like fire down a fuse.

But my grip on my wife’s throat never slackened.

I knew she was dead when the happiness stopped.

When I left our home for good, Lorraine’s corpse sprawled across the rug, I took nothing but any wallet. At a gas station outside the city I filled my car’s tank, as well as a jerrycan.

The front door of the house where the happiness vampires had convened had been left ajar; even though it was 3 a.m. Despite intact furnishings, the house radiated a deserted feeling, and I knew no one would be returning. Its owners, with their greater sensitivities, must have felt Lorraine’s dying burst all the way from the city, and fled, the coven scattering to new identities, new haunts, new victims. I torched the place anyway.

And then I fled too, with nothing left to me forever, except the American dream.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.