“I’m sorry Jackie wasn’t there,” I offer.
“I’m not.”
“No?”
“I didn’t come to meet her; I came to see you.”
This lands like a sucker punch. “Still, I would have liked to introduce you. You have a lot in common.”
Silence.
“Oh?”
The fluorescent lights start to hum, or they have been humming and it finally reaches my ears. Outside, someone lays on their horn and another kind soul honks in return. I can’t be sure of it, but I think I hear shouting. We’re only blocks away from my apartment, but the ambient sounds are jarringly different and they rattle my already addled brain. “You’re both my editor, cutting scenes from my story, sending the narrative in different directions.” I smile, thinking this quite clever, not immediately aware how it lands. When I look at my mother, I can read the distress on her face. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“It’s just . . . you let me stay here tonight. I shouldn’t come out on the attack.” My fingers feel numb and I make two fists but immediately unclench them when I realize it’s not the visual to accompany an apology. My mother is frozen, uncertain what to say or do next. “I’m not mad about Frank,” I continue. “I need you to know that. These things . . . happen.” Mark’s face with its stupid grin flashes in front of me. “But I struggled my whole life with identity. To know who I really was. Why I didn’t feel connected. Why I never truly fit in. And all this time you had the answer! You could have saved me when I was spiraling and you didn’t.”
My mother nods, and it’s a long time before she speaks. “It breaks my heart to hear you say that. From the day you were born, you’ve always been more yourself than anyone I’ve ever met. I guess I felt deep down you didn’t need to know anyone else in order to know who you are.”
I look at my shoes until the icemaker across the hall drops more ice, shattering the silence. It’s as disruptive as I had feared. “Can I interest you in some ice?” I ask. Jackie was right, I do have trouble hearing compliments.
My mother circles her bed to take a seat across from me, smoothing out the bedspread with her hands. “It’s okay to be angry.”
“I’m not angry.” I even think that’s partly true. “I’m actually grateful.”
“I wasn’t going to leave you on the street.”
I take a sharp breath. I can picture myself wandering all night through the city, seeking a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s or some other relatively safe refuge. “Not for that. Although I am grateful for that too.” The floating dark spot returns in my eye like a cloud threatening rain. I rub my eyelid in a vain attempt to get rid of it. “You chose me. Again and again, you chose me.”
She picks at a thread on the duvet, a perfect metaphor; I wait for everything to unravel.
“I just wish I knew something about him. Not about him, I guess you told me that. About what he was like. I think that’s the piece that’s missing.” I look right at her so she knows that I still want to know this, even if she doesn’t think I need to.
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Was he funny?” I flop back on the bed and stare up at the ceiling, wondering if I need to tick off a list of characteristics. “Never mind. You probably don’t remember.”
My mother turns on the table lamp with a loud click before turning it off again.
Click.
“I don’t have to remember. You’re just like him.”
I take a breath so sharp it’s almost a gasp. I’m awash in my own foolishness; everywhere I looked, and it never occurred to me to look within.
Eventually, I sit up and untie my shoes and kick them off my feet, then place them neatly at the end of the bed. I walk in across the room in my socks and secure the chain lock across the door and adjust the thermostat to cool. It takes thirty seconds or so for the fan to kick on.
“Kind of funny, this,” I say.
“How so?”
“You and I. Locking ourselves away.”
My mother looks at me, not getting it.
“It’s like the quarantine. From the book.” A siren speeds by and then fades. “The book is coming to life.” I can only imagine this is my mother’s worst nightmare.
“Maybe I should read it again.”
My ear immediately dissects that sentence.
“Wait. Again? I thought you didn’t read it.”
“Of course I read it. Are you insane? I read it the moment you first gave it to me.”
“Then why would you say that you didn’t!”
My mother shrugs. Why do we do anything.
I don’t know whether to be annoyed that I’ve been lied to again or to be ecstatic that she’s read the book I wrote for her or to feel dumb for believing her in the first place. “Well, a lot has changed, if you wanted to”—I can’t believe I’m saying this—“read it again.”
“You’re an excellent writer.”
I’m too stunned to say anything other than “Thank you.”
She gets up to retrieve a bag of toiletries from her suitcase and walks into the bathroom. I hear the faucet and I head over to the window to give her the maximum amount of privacy the small room affords. The city’s heart pulses and I watch brake lights head toward the Battery and oncoming headlights shine like spotlights.
“So, remind me, in this quarantine.”
“Yeah?” The fan cuts out just as I speak, making it seem like I’m shouting.
Silence from my mother as she rummages through her lotions and makeup. Then, after a beat, “How long did that take?”
“Forty days,” I reply. I study my reflection as I look out at Midtown. Lights from the building across the way sear onto my face. “Do you want me to call the front desk and inquire about a weekly rate?”
My mother sticks her head out of the bathroom, a terry-cloth headband pulling her hair back as she wipes away her makeup. “Pass.”
Maybe I’m just completely drained, but her flat delivery strikes me as our funniest exchange yet. I laugh until she can’t help but laugh too. And then the ice machine does its thing and we laugh again until we can’t remember whatever was funny in the first place.
Then someone in the next room bangs on the wall to silence us.
I place my blazer over the desk chair and pull back the covers on my bed. “Don’t worry. The quarantine is fiction. Besides, I’m leaving on tour in a few days.”
“Just as well. We can’t really fix our problems by hiding from them.”
I guess that’s the difference between a novel and real life. “No. I don’t suppose we can.”
I lie back against the headboard, too tired to undress any further, and think about Daniel and what he is doing right this very minute. I hope nothing stupid. I hope not kissing someone else just to get back at me, even if I would deserve it. I hope he is lying in bed, missing me just as much as I’m missing him. I turn my head toward the phone on the table between the two beds and think about calling him, letting him know I’m okay, but worry about making things worse. I have to let us both sleep it off.
“You don’t have a toothbrush,” my mother calls from the bathroom.
“I don’t have anything,” I reply, the reality of my predicament sinking in.
“What do we do?”
“I think we both get a good night’s rest.”
“Yes, but what do we do about your teeth?”
They’ll still be there in the morning. “Do you have toothpaste? I’ll use my finger.” An old trick from dating before I met Daniel.
“That’s disgusting.”
Her revulsion makes me smile. Maybe the book is coming true for us. Not the actual quarantine part, but the healing that was the result.
What Tomorrow Will Do
May 1994
◆ THIRTY-FOUR ◆
&
nbsp; It’s dark and I barely hear the tapping on the door. I was dreaming, I think, of Jackie’s empty shoes sitting there in her apartment by the fireplace. There was more to the dream, but alas: Everything minus the shoes is a hazy, half-formed hallucination. I recognize the feel of my pillow underneath my head; I am definitely in my own bed. Was I really asleep? Was I drifting in that mysterious place between sleep and awake, where real-world sounds commingle with fantasy? I’ve been exhausted, I know that. Ithaca was well received. Strong reviews (each as surprising to me as the last), and while the sales were modest, my book sold enough copies to garner a second contract. I’ve been working late, night after night, fueled by caffeine and panic, obsessing over getting my new manuscript just right and wondering—in my darkest thoughts—why I signed up for this agony all over again. Jackie has called twice in the past few months to make sure that I’ve been writing, and I assured her I was. This seemed to please her and, wanting to please her, I left it at that. She called a third time, more recently, during a few-days’ stretch when I felt helplessly blocked, when I wasn’t writing. I didn’t return the call. I was hoping she would think I was busy.
The tapping comes again. Three soft knocks. Tentative. Halting. “James.”
The door opens and a sliver of the softest light creeps in, casting a golden isosceles triangle on the floor, connecting the doorway to the far corner of the bed. Daniel enters, closing the door most of the way behind him, narrowing the triangle into a dagger. He sits on the edge of the bed, and I can feel the mattress sink under his weight. He waits for his eyes to adjust, and then places his hand on my forehead, like my mother used to when she felt I might be ill. I lie perfectly still, wondering what this is all about, afraid that words can only ruin this beautiful tableau.
I break the silence first.
“I think my wrist is giving out. It might be tendonitis.” I roll completely on my back and make a fist and twist it around several times on the end of my right forearm.
For several weeks after the book party I wasn’t sure our relationship would survive. My mother returned home and I slept on the couch before leaving on a small book tour, mostly the Northeastern Corridor between Washington, D.C., and Maine, with Chicago and San Francisco tacked on like incongruous additions on an otherwise sturdy house. Daniel and I agreed on a break for those two weeks; as I checked in to each new hotel, I would ask the desk clerk for messages, hoping for a kind note from Daniel—but there were never any messages, except once from my publicist, who had booked a local radio interview. When I returned, I wasn’t sure that I still had a home. I braced myself for the sight of my things in boxes, crowding the landing outside our door, just as my father’s possessions were once stacked unceremoniously on the frozen lawn.
I remember I knocked, even though I had a key.
“Hi,” I said, when Daniel came to the door. I leaned in the doorway, hoping somehow it would make me seem cool and irresistible in a slouchy, James Dean kind of way.
“You’re such a loser.”
My backpack slipped off my shoulder, hitting the ground with a thud, followed immediately by my heart. I slowly pointed at his face. He was wearing eyeglasses, something that was new. “Nerd.” I wasn’t prepared to engage in name-calling; it was the best I could come up with.
“Are you going to stay out there, or are you actually coming in.”
“In, I think.” I lifted my backpack a few inches off the ground. “I hope.”
It took him a few seconds, but he stepped aside and I came home.
As he sits with me now on the bed, Daniel’s face is backlit, expressionless, blank. “I’m sure it’s not tendonitis,” he says.
In October we went to Paris, just the two of us; we strolled the Champs-Élysées and laughed about the time I asked Jackie about Charles de Gaulle. Slowly things resumed there, better than they were before. We bickered plenty over stupid things, like if we wanted to order crepes that were savory or sweet. Daniel’s residual frustration with me sometimes gurgled to the surface in unexpected ways, like when we were pushed around a bit in the Louvre by crowds waiting to see the Mona Lisa. I wanted to see her, knowing she too had a special history with Jackie, but Daniel got fed up and left to wait outside. I absorbed all the hits I had coming, and sometimes I looked at him like we didn’t know each other at all. When he wore his glasses they became like a simple disguise that made it look like he was masking a secret identity. But he had never been more of a Superman to me.
I roll my wrist again and again. “Are you sure? Do we not have tendons in our wrists? Because it really might be tendonitis.” I think of the typing and the book signings, and the long-form writing for when I can’t type and the thank-you notes and the masturbation as procrastination and banging my fists in frustration and everything the last ten months have brought. I start rotating my left fist and I swear I notice a difference. I feel Daniel’s touch leave my forehead, and seconds later he clasps my hands in his and forces me to stop.
Although things are good again, there is always part of me that fears he will awaken to the realization that he can do better. That, while he gave us a second chance, my selfishness is just too much. Conversely, the whole close call with Mark made me realize that I cannot. Do better.
And then Daniel leans in and whispers in my ear, his warm breath shattering my world. I look up at the ceiling expecting to see stars where there are none, then close my eyelids and mash them tightly together hoping to see stars there.
Instead, there’s just angry static—a satellite signal lost.
Daniel takes my hand and tugs. “Come.”
He pulls me into an uncomfortable sitting position like I’m some sort of monster come to life, stitched together from the awkward-fitting parts of other ill-matched bodies.
He pulls again, but this time I pull back. I pull away. I know where he wants to take me. Through the crack in the door I can hear the muffled trombone voice of Ted Koppel or Sam Donaldson. I fall back against the pillow. As long as I lay here I don’t have to hear what they are saying. As long as I can’t hear what they’re saying, I can deny that what Daniel told me is true. Even if I knew this day was coming ever since Mark called the house a few months back.
“I thought we agreed it would be best if you didn’t call here.” I had instructed Mark after the book party that if he needed to reach me, it was best to get me a message through my agent. I couldn’t risk Daniel answering the phone.
“She’s sick,” he said. She wasn’t telling people yet, but she was sick and he wanted me to know.
“That’s not possible,” I said, knowing of course that it was. I held on to the phone long after Mark had to go; I remember wanting to cry, but no tears came, and the feeling was worse because there was no release.
“Come,” Daniel says again. He tugs, putting his arm around me this time and suddenly I am on my feet. Rise. I think about Jackie’s response to my question about de Gaulle in our first meeting, now more than two years ago. Like the Frankenstein monster, she had said as we sat in a conference room and just talked and everything about it was magic.
Jackie.
“I need to call her. She called here for me and I didn’t call her back.”
“Shhhh,” Daniel hushes, and he rubs his hands through my hair.
“No, no. She left a message. I wasn’t writing then so I didn’t call her back. I am writing now, so everything is fine. I’m going to call her and tell her that I’m okay.”
Daniel hugs me tighter, but that’s the extent of his compassion. “You can’t call her. You can’t call her anymore.”
The flash. Apparently official now. I don’t need to see the news. When he opens the bedroom door, the light shining across his face confirms everything. Daniel is Walter Cronkite. He even removes his glasses and pinches his nose to hold back tears.
“When.” I don’t have the strength to make it sound like a question.
>
“Earlier this evening. They just broke in with it now.”
And thus the ordinary end to an extraordinary story. In many ways the opposite of Dallas. This is the way the world ends. T. S. Eliot. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
We sit together on the couch, holding hands. Reporters are standing outside her apartment at 1040 Fifth, crowded by well-wishers. The images are searing, and it takes my brain time to attend to them. I’m already misunderstanding things. Not well-wishers.
Mourners.
I’ve been there, is all I can think. I’ve been to that building. I took the shaky elevator. I’ve been inside her home. There’s a copy of my book in there; I wrote a special note for her inside it.
The reporter and Ted Koppel do a back-and-forth, but I can only hear the stifled voices of adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon, their words muffled trumpets, nonsense.
“Did you know she was sick?”
“Of course.” A few weeks after the call from Mark, Jackie released a statement to the press, that was February or March. The announcement was upbeat and her prognosis seemed good. So much so that I couldn’t bring myself to raise it as a topic of discussion the last time we spoke. I knew the statement couldn’t have been her idea; if she had her way, she would suffer the whole ordeal in private—she certainly didn’t want to discuss it with me. Besides, she had access to the very best, cutting-edge healthcare available, treatments out of our reach. So it didn’t occur to me to worry. Not really, anyway. She was still young, and very much alive.
Forever young.
“Yeah?” Daniel asks.
“Everyone knew.” There was a story, after all, in People magazine.
“Did you know she was this sick, I’m asking.”
I think I shake my head no, but I’m not even sure I do that. I had reasoned the hospital wouldn’t let her make it seem like all would be fine if it wasn’t going to be; if something dramatic happened, the hospital would appear liable. But how could they have stopped her? No one dared tell her no.
There’s a spring in this couch cushion, a coil. A sproil? It makes sitting here uncomfortable. Why have I not felt it before? I look up at Daniel; we are huddled together in the center of the sofa like two people who had just escaped a house fire and are sitting on a curb across the street watching our lives go up in flames. I guess lately I’ve been too happy and distracted to notice this spring, this coil, snuggling with Daniel as I have. Passions reignited. That much is good.
The Editor Page 28
