Then, she mouthed to me, two hundred thousand dollars.
"For the whole house," she said. "Everything."
When good things happened to me, I called Kevin. He took me out on Sat.u.r.day nights. We ate Spanish food, and then Brazilian food, and then plain old pizza, and then talked about his job at the 7Up plant. We had gentle s.e.x, and he read long historical novels in the park while I flipped through pages and pages of photographs of homes in the greater New York area. On the weekends, we ate brunch on floral patios where I sipped black coffee and sorted fabric prints while he announced news headlines to me.
"Florida Authorizes Python Hunt."
"New Jersey Has School Districts Without Schools."
We had s.e.x on couches and looked up at ceilings while he talked about the changing face of soda (all-natural now) and I contemplated the consequences of circular skylights (were they just holes?).
"Did you know there was a psychological study that has proved certain colors can affect a person"s sense of time and s.p.a.ce?" I asked him.
"I like how you tell me things," he said, but what he meant was, he liked it when I defended my profession in the name of science.
We started bringing each other to major life events that required dates. His cousin"s wedding, his cousin"s graduation, his cousin"s birthday; he was so Irish, he had so many cousins.
"For weddings," I told him half-naked, getting dressed for his cousin"s wedding, while he watched from the edge of my bed, "I wear short black dresses with varying degrees of elasticity. For graduation parties, I wear knee-length skirts with unpredictable floral patterns. For Bat Mitzvahs, I wear box dresses that I got on sale from Macy"s."
Kevin laughed. Kevin was good like that. We made each other laugh before we brushed our teeth in the morning.
At Kevin"s cousin"s wedding, the bride and groom were twenty-one-year-old college students. The reception was held in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Village Care of New York, a convalescent home. Standing in the room with blue tables, I felt like I was at my confirmation. The carrots were serrated. The fruit platters were sectioned in plastic containers so the cantaloupe wouldn"t touch the strawberries. The meal had been turkey and ham sandwiches with banana peppers and Coca-Cola. The bride was blond, young, excited, and leading a group of her friends in a ch.o.r.eographed dance of the Macarena. She was very nice. "Feel free to eat the food," she had said.
I sat on my leather chair and wondered why a bride would want to eat a ham and turkey sandwich in a satin backless wedding dress. Or why she would cater her wedding as though it were a middle school lunch. Or why a bride would allow her love to be celebrated beneath a building of old people who were mistaking their spoons for grandchildren. Then, Kevin, tall thin man, cousin to the bride, walked up to me with a plate of broccoli and sour cream dip and said, "You have got to try this B6." He smiled. So I did.
Kevin was a flavor scientist. He worked in Trumbull, Connecticut, at the 7Up plant, and started making the daily reverse commute from Brooklyn after he moved in with me. We were so different that our only expectation was miscommunication. When we watched movies on Friday nights, I made the popcorn. When he ate it, he licked the b.u.t.ter off his fingers, I kissed him on the mouth. When I brought him to dinner so my new family could meet the man they presumed I was spending the rest of my life with, he sipped on his Jack and c.o.ke and said, "This phosphoric acid is awesome, Mrs. Vidal."
Adora rolled her eyes. My stepbrother, Nick, stared at me. Nick was the tallest one in the stepfamily, and he considered his height a certification in forming good opinions. He tapped a quarter against the counter as if to say, this is what you bring to our stephome?
"It"s Mrs. Trimble now," my mother said.
My mother was patient and kind as Mrs. Trimble. My father had been diagnosed last month with lung cancer and this had somehow softened her, like all my father had to do was reveal himself as a mortal with failing organs and my mother would stop feeling so defensive. My mother, with an ap.r.o.n wrapped neatly around her waist, actually responded to Kevin. "And how is the 7Up going, Kevin?"
"Still all-natural," Kevin said. Kevin said this every time someone asked him about the state of 7Up. I became embarra.s.sed for him in his short-sleeved plaid T-shirt, gray pants, and white tennis sneakers, spouting catchphrases, next to my stepbrother, who was always sincere in his brown cashmere sweater with black boots, who was finishing his PhD at Yale in engineering. I smiled at Kevin from across the kitchen to let him know he was doing fine.
But at night, I had horrible dreams about children who wouldn"t look at me, who could see only ghosts plucking out their teeth behind me. I woke up in a sweat. I was trying to teach myself not to be scared of things. I was learning: every time I woke up, Mr. Resnick"s blood was never on me.
I got up to make popcorn, to relax, turn on the TV.
Death was just an image, I told myself, a coming together of events in a single frame, and pain was just a part of the painting and haven"t we learned our lesson? Meaning is most poignant when never fully accessed. I sucked the b.u.t.ter off a cold popcorn kernel. I became intolerably sad when I made popcorn, standing by the microwave, listening to the pop pop pop as if it were a ticker tracking all the moments I spent alone. I bit into the kernel and thought of bodies on top of mine. I thought of Jonathan"s hands at the engagement party. I thought of Jonathan"s stomach in Prague, full like a smooth, sustainable weight. Standing up, Jonathan had the disposition of a man who might crush me, but lying down, he never did. Mr. Basketball was the one who always crushed me. He crushed me in the backseats of cars, on futons, in hallways, on desks. He crushed Janice too, standing in front of our freshman English cla.s.s. Mr. Basketball stared at me from his desk, while Janice couldn"t concentrate on what she was saying, because she was watching Mr. Basketball stare at me, and said, "The river that bears no empty bottles! No sandwich papers, no cigarette ends, or, G.o.d, what was it? No other testimonies of a summer night!"
"You forgot silk handkerchiefs and cardboard boxes," Mr. Basketball had said, marking it down in a notepad. "And "The Waste Land" is not supposed to be read with that much enthusiasm."
I thought of all the empty bottles and cigarette ends I had created and all the men I had created them with. There were so many things I had loved as my own, and these things never ended up being mine. All of the gla.s.s lights strung on other people"s porches, houseplants that were someone else"s, rugs and paintings and lighting fixtures and curtains and different men who looked different in every room, and I closed my eyes, overwhelmed by the infinite ways to live a finite life. I wanted to run out of my apartment until the street signs and pa.s.sing cars ripped me of my belongings, until the wind had worn me down to sand.
32.
Two months later, Jonathan didn"t even call, he just showed up at my apartment when I was packing for Connecticut. My father was home from Moscow, and I had been going to my mother"s house every weekend to visit him. It was five o"clock, and Kevin was likely starting his commute home. Jonathan walked around my apartment, saying, "Wow, this is great," and it all felt so patronizing, like he couldn"t even believe in the idea that I had my own place, like my toaster was just for pretend and he was going to prove this by sticking his tongue in the slots. "Really great," he said, and looked around, trying not to stare at the stained windowsills or the slanted kitchen floor.
Jonathan and I sat on my couch and listened to noise from outside. In Brooklyn, I could always hear the pedestrians shouting through the windows, no matter how well I insulated them in the winter, and no matter how loud the fan was spinning in my ear during the summer. "You ready?" a man by the lamppost asked another man. No, he wasn"t ready, he had to go back and get something. "What the f.u.c.k?" the other man said, and then they were gone. We listened to the men outside disappoint each other while Jonathan ran his fingers across Kevin"s collection of chemical science dictionaries and the woman downstairs played C-major piano chords. That was all she ever played.
Jonathan looked outside and put his nose to the windowpane like a dog. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and ask him why he was behaving like the dog. We could have had a dog together by now, I wanted to say. The dog could be sitting right there by the television. The dog could love us. And we could love the dog. But I didn"t speak. I watched him sit in my chairs and drink tea out of my cups until I couldn"t stand the silence of waiting.
"Let"s go somewhere," I said. "Let"s go get coffee."
"But we"re drinking tea right now."
We went to a coffee shop.
"Did you know that there are people in this world who complain about their necks all the time?" Jonathan said when we sat down with our coffees. "Since I"ve been back from traveling, all I do is sit at my beige office chair, press the Line 1 b.u.t.ton, and listen to a lady tell me about the worst thing in the world: she can"t turn her head left. Well, she can, it just hurts. You know, the way it feels when something doesn"t hurt all the time, it"s just a nagging sort of pain that hurts more in its persistence rather than degree?"
"I know what you mean," I said.
"And the paralegals," he said. "They"re the worst. It"s like they are constantly surprised by the world. At lunch, they sit together, and their mouths hang halfway open and they look at each other"s lunches and they say, there are Cheetos in there? You got what on your shirt? Camels don"t mate for life?"
"It"s true," I said. "They don"t. I saw that on the Discovery Channel."
I told Jonathan about the new company I was launching with Melinda, and we both sat in our brand-new office while she sank her teeth into the same lunch every single day: microwavable chicken marsala.
"She tells me it was her father"s favorite," I said. "And now that he is dead, she just can"t stop eating it. She is always on a quest to discover if that means something is wrong with her."
"Sometimes my day is only about a fence," Jonathan said.
"You"ve told me this before," I said.
"Or a boy, or a boy and a fence and whose fault was it? Maybe the fence"s. But the fence didn"t know what it was doing. That"s what it sounds like, and how can you punish a fence that was unaware of its influence on the boy?"
Jonathan said the point of the workday was that someone always needed to be held accountable for the fence"s mistakes. The unaccounted-for objects needed someone to stand up and say, hey, that"s mine, I made that, and when it doesn"t do what you programmed it to do, we"re real sorry, sir, let me just write you a check.
"G.o.d, what do you want?" I asked him. I was almost done with my coffee.
"I miss you," he said. "Please let me explain. My wife"s name is Susan."
"My boyfriend"s name is Kevin," I said.
"I met her at Columbia law. We got married sometime while you were away at college. And after she graduated, she decided she wanted to help represent people in other countries with unstable governments. So four years ago, she left for Somalia."
"Kevin"s a flavor scientist. He makes soda. Are you trying to make me feel ashamed or something?"
"You"re not listening," he said.
Jonathan said that after Susan left, he spent two years having late nights at his law office on Fifty-fifth Street breaking paper clips in half for no reason. He missed everything: Susan, literature, inherent meaning, laughing at midnight.
"Without Susan, there was no difference between home and not home, you know what I mean?"
So he stopped buying fresh vegetables, since he couldn"t eat them all before they rotted anyway, and bought frozen broccoli florets in a thick soy sauce. He ordered shrimp fra diavolo from Tony"s. He did this every night at six or seven or eight or whenever because without anybody watching, he said that everything he did was suddenly inconsequential.
For nearly six months, Jonathan said, he ate pepperoni out of a bag as dessert and watched late-night talk shows to renew the sense of humor he lost fighting with real estate agents and battling Susan about the severity of the faucet leak. He became friendlier to the lawyers in the office. He found that having nothing to take up one"s time left a lot of time just to be nicer. He talked to women at the grocery store. He had morning coffees with paralegals and late-night whiskeys with Jon and Jay, the two other product liability lawyers in his firm. They sat out on the balcony and he listened to Jon mock the blond stenographer from the courtroom.
"Who everybody secretly wanted to sleep with," Jonathan said. "Who would sometimes stop the proceedings just to ask the witness, "Wait, did you say "no" or "nah"?""
Sometimes, Jonathan said, he attended formal dining gatherings hosted by his law firm and talked to a young woman with blond or brown or red hair.
"Well, was it blond or brown or red?" I said. "You couldn"t even take the time to notice?"
"I guess it didn"t matter what color her hair was, that"s not the point."
The point was that he wasn"t interested in any of the women, not until one of the lawyers" wives would come up to him, stick her nose in Jonathan"s c.o.c.ktail, and say, "Where is your wife?" This was always an accusation, Jonathan said, "Like my words were unb.u.t.toning the woman"s shirt right there." Jonathan said he wanted to shout back, "Where is your sense of decency?" but he just sighed and said, "Africa."
So Susan traveled for two years, up the coast of Africa, where she stayed in run-down buildings that were on occasion shot at. Where on occasion, she sat stiff as a board on her cot with her male coworker from Nebraska whom Jonathan said he a.s.sumed she f.u.c.ked when it got tense, and even though the violence was routine and they were locked in and mostly safe (that was what she always said before she left), she called Jonathan to say, "Jack, the building is being shot at," so he would be equally impressed and concerned by her dedication and say, "Susan, come home, just come home," and she would say, "Okay, Jack, I"m coming home." But he said he never really understood the exact danger she was in, or the exact country for that matter, because it seemed no matter where she was, she got heat rash, she drank bad water and ate rotten meat, she came home for Christmas with tape-worm, and she sat on the toilet and cried and said, "Oh, G.o.d, Jack, don"t look at me." But Jonathan said he combed her hair and kissed her on the forehead and the worms crawled out of her.
"Jonathan," I said, "I don"t think your wife would appreciate me knowing this."
"It"s important," he said. "Because I would tell her, "Susan, you are my wife," but when we climbed into bed, I didn"t put my arms around her. And that was when I knew."
"Knew what?"
"That I didn"t love her."
And he said Susan couldn"t stop talking about the look on his face earlier when she reached for the k.n.o.b of the stove, like it wasn"t even her home to cook in. She ran to the bathroom, and they both agreed that they couldn"t believe how inhumane the intimacy had become. Jonathan said he lay in bed imagining what it would feel like when she left again for Libya or Egypt or wherever, and how kissing her on the mouth at the airport would feel like nothing at all, like licking an envelope closed, and the sour taste on his tongue in the cab would taste exactly like falling out of love.
"I was going to divorce her," he said. "Then, I got your letter. And after she left again, I thought of you. I just thought of you. I saw you so clearly in my mind. I thought of you for days. So I went to Prague to see you. And it was perfect. And I was going to tell her that it was over."
And then Susan called while he was in Prague to tell him that she was coming home early from Ghana because she was two months pregnant, and Jonathan-who looked at me at Cafe Red and thought, Oh G.o.d, oh how sad, when did Susan and I even make love? But he said good-bye to me and h.e.l.lo to Susan. At dinner, he was so sad to be home, and Susan was so happy to be home. Jonathan said he thought of me at every meal, while Susan sipped on ice water and started the Name Game. "Ben," she said, "or Peter or Judas," and then laughed to confirm that she would never name her child after a traitor. Ben, Peter, Judas, Jonathan thought. He knew that if he asked, "Are you sure it"s mine?" it would be over before the wine gla.s.ses dented the walls.
"I don"t think names really mean anything," Jonathan said. "I think children make their names, not the other way around, but really, why take the chance?" Susan agreed. No chances. So they bought a state-of-the-art stroller and waited for Ben or Peter or Judas"s day of birth. One morning, Susan cramped at the dishwasher, and they rushed to the hospital in his car while he held her hand. "I kept saying, "Almost, Susan," like a f.u.c.king jacka.s.s," Jonathan said.
He said he stood in the room and listened to Susan"s screams. He wiped the sweat off her brow and thought, even if it was Peter"s or Ben"s or Judas"s, he was okay with it, because the boy would wear his hand-me-downs and mimic his dialect. He would love Susan and he would love the boy.
"And then when he came out it was like looking at a broken windup toy," Jonathan said. "And Susan looked at the doctor as if to say, Why isn"t my child working? The doctor looked at Susan, as if to say, Almost, it-is-almost-a-baby, please just give us a second."
Jonathan said Susan laid her head back against the pillow as if it was her fault for never giving the child a name. Jonathan buckled at the knee. It was his fault, he knew this, for falling out of love with her.
"Everybody always knows the truth," he said. "Sometimes, it"s like the whole world can see you, all the time."
The doctors rushed Peter, Ben, or Judas to the table, where they strapped wires to his tiny chest and shouted one-two-three come on.
"But he never came back to life," Jonathan said. "Or never had life. I"m not sure."
"I"m sorry," I said. I really was. It sounded terrible. "That sounds very sad."
"It was. It is."
He took a sip of his coffee.
"So that"s the story," he said. "Well, not the whole story."
He reached for my hand. I recoiled.
"Kevin gets annoyed that I never heard of the word "amylase,"" I said, running my finger over the rim of my empty cup. "It"s a chemical. He thinks I"m stupid sometimes. I can see it on his face. But he gets my jokes and he loves me and when I have nightmares, he sits up and tries to psychoa.n.a.lyze them. We try to work it out together and that is why I love him. Please do not contact me again."
I walked out of the coffee shop, got on the Metro North to Connecticut, and made circles of fog on the train window with my breath. The sign on the window that was supposed to read EMERGENCY BRAKE had two letters missing. A Spanish man sitting beside me pointed to the sign, chuckled, and said, "Emergency bra."
"That"s funny, isn"t it?" I said. He nodded.
When my father came home from Russia, he stood at my mother"s doorstep and said, "uberraschung! It means, Surprise!" Surprise! I"m a dead man! Surprise! Will you let me die in our old house? The one that I bought for my family? That means you of course. I want to die around my old things. My old Norwegian pewter bowl. The brown velvet curtains that keep out the sun. Where is Emily? And where is my pewter bowl and what"s with the red curtains and what did you do with the sun? It"s raining. I have one month to live and it"s raining. Call Emily. Tell her that her father is dying and he could use a masa. She"ll know what that means.
"Why do you and your father always talk in this secret code?" my mother asked.
"It"s not code, Gloria," my father yelled from the bedroom. "It"s Czech!"
I stood in the kitchen and cried.
"Don"t cry, Emily," my father said when he walked in. "Don"t think of it as dying. Think of it as changing shape."
"Like you are becoming a rectangle?" I said.
"Yeah," my father said. "Like that."
My father"s brothers, Uncle Vito and Vince, were staying in the house with us. My father started having trouble swallowing food two weeks ago, so we were feeding him only soft foods now.
"How "bout I cook you up some Bob?" Uncle Vito said.
My father weakly smiled.
"Sick son of a b.i.t.c.h," Uncle Vince said.
The story goes that when they moved from the Bronx to Connecticut, they got so excited about living in a house with one acre of land, they got six chickens as pets, Neptune, Harry, Belvedere, Jungle, Puppy, and Bob. One day Uncle Vito took Bob out of the cage and broke his neck, skinned him, and cooked him into a stew. My grandmother came home and was pleased to find one of her sons cooking dinner so she asked no questions. During the meal, Uncle Vito said, "Well, doesn"t anyone want to know where Bob is?"
"We eat G.o.dd.a.m.n chickens every day, and you still act as though I"m some sort of psychopath," Uncle Vito said.
"They were our pets," Uncle Vince said.
I took out three eggs and picked up a pan. "We"ll make eggs," I said.
"What the h.e.l.l do you think those are?" Uncle Vito asked, pointing to the eggs. "You"re the sick ones."
"No, don"t use that pan," my mother said.
"That pan sticks," Bill said.