Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  “Sure I can,” Nick says, walking away.

  “Oh, great!” Chad calls after him. “Leave us to dig in the sand. Great ploy—a metal detector—right!” It’s a play for levity and Nick actually appreciates it—doesn’t want to be the afternoon’s tragic figure—but before he’s even out of earshot he hears Miguel reprimanding Chad.

  He keeps moving. Walks across the sand to the grass, the parking lot, and beyond. Wanders in one of those hideous little souvenir joints that doubles as a bait-and-tackle shop and asks the kid behind the counter, “Hey, you wouldn’t have a metal detector, would you?” and the kid, like it’s the most normal thing in the world (god bless America) says, “Nah, but you should try the police. They’re practically next door.”

  And so it is that Nick, some forty-five minutes later—because even the smallest police station on earth is a place you have to wait for everything—retraces his steps to where the others have reassembled the blanket and are sitting in some tentative state of collective disappointment, a metal detector in his hands.

  “I can’t believe this,” Gretchen says, and she is actually smiling; Nick hadn’t noticed until he sees her beaming that she often scowls when talking to him.

  When they’ve all stood up once more, Miguel dragging the blanket, Nick begins moving the detector around, slowly, in circles, patient, trying to cover every inch of ground.

  “You’re going to find every beer tab and bottle cap every underage Michigan kid ever threw in this sand,” Miguel warns. Nick pushes over and over and over again, the mood thick with anticipation. Even Jay and Gray wander over, thrilled by the detector, asking to hold it, and Nick decides in a split second not to refuse, to let them, process before product, Gray stumbling around almost as much as Jay, before Nick can’t go through with his good intentions and takes the detector back abruptly, continuing his mission. Again. Again. Again. His shoulders ache.

  The afternoon’s black flies have started biting, but still Nick keeps going, keeps pushing—he has, for Chrissakes, a metal detector, and there is no way that ring can hide from him forever. The detector is bound to sense it: that’s how this works—the ring didn’t get up and fucking walk away; it’s here, and he is going to find it.

  Except he’s pushed the detector around for so long he’s not sure he’s even in the right spot anymore. So long that in the end, Chad and Miguel have to go back to Strong’s Landing alone, for Imogen’s nap, and Gretchen soon follows, not asking Nick’s permission to take Jay along but merely co-opting him, citing that the kids are beat and have had too much sun. Except that finally, the sun beginning to set, the cop who loaned Nick the detector shows up, not in a squad car but by foot, as if it’s just now occurred to him that maybe the Irish dude who came by with such a weird request was actually a terrorist or something, and is using the detector for nefarious purposes, and needs to be checked out—the cop, seeming giddily excited to find Nick there as promised, actually combing the beach, even makes a couple of rounds himself before saying he needs to take the metal detector back; it’s gotten late, and he can’t let Nick have it overnight. And there is Nick: stranded without a car, the cop carrying the detector away with apologies. Nick: alone on the beach, ringless, as though it is possible for the world to simply eat things, to devour all traces of the past. And he’s crying, recklessly, foolishly, walking around in circles kicking up sand like a prat, making a complete ass of himself even though it’s gone late and there’s no one here to see him. He’s cursing and ranting and can’t stop, throwing a tantrum like Miles the year Jay was born and every night brought these jealous, infuriated theatrics, Emily and Nick so worn down they didn’t know how they’d live through the year—when Emily was at work, Nick sometimes wanted to hide under a bed to escape Miles’s wrath and Jay’s constant, fragile need. In the dark—even Miles may be back at Strong’s Landing by now, come home to feed—Nick punches a tree, the jagged bark immediately gashing his knuckles so he bleeds, and he’d like to hit the tree again except it hurts and he can’t make his hand complete the mission. That ring is here, and if only he had longer—if only he had more time—he knows he could find it.

  “I would have worn it forever,” he promises the empty beach, despite all his firmly held belief in Emily’s nonexistence. He’s crying stupidly, his hand hanging bare and pale at his side, scarcely even a tan line where the ring spent nineteen years. No proof of history but the extra-smooth indenture of skin that will plump back to shape against Nick’s will. What would his ring-wearing vigil have meant to Emily anyway? He was planning to leave her when she died—or was he? He isn’t sure anymore. All he knows is she’s gone, and he misses her, he wants his sons to have their mother back, he feels so guilty he’d gladly trade places with Em instead. Still, Lina’s the one he can’t stop spinning to after all this time, can’t stop wanting in the night.

  “Forgive me,” he whispers against the night wind, to his dead wife, his lost mistress, his sons. Hand pulsing like a bass beat, his throat raw from sobbing, Nick begins the two-mile walk (Lina said, he’s never measured it; Lina said) back to Sloptown Road, with nothing to show for himself. Back to all the people who do and do not belong to him.

  Being on Beaver Island feels like being in an Ann Beattie story, I texted you the first time I came here to see Isabel after her diagnosis, except we’re all spics. You said you had never read Ann Beattie, though in my imagination, Nick, by now you have. In my imagination, you have pored over every text I ever referenced, looking for traces of me, underlining passages you think I’d have liked. In my version of your life now, you cry when you hear Cat Power’s cover of “The Dark End of the Street.” But just in case none of that is true—in case your life, raising two sons alone and teaching playwriting and getting shows picked up off-Broadway—does not permit this sort of flagrant vigil to me, I will use an example with which I know you’re familiar, since Hanif Kureishi is a favorite of yours. In his short story (have you read his short fiction and his novels, Nick, or did you only mean you loved his films?) “With Your Tongue Down My Throat,” the narrator appears to be a fucked-up teenage girl, a cutter and a slut, basically someone not dissimilar to me except at a more appropriate age for such thrashing angst. But in the end, the girl’s quasi-stepfather (Howard, I think his name is—he’s a playwright like you) steps forward from behind the veil, revealing that he is really telling the story, appropriating the young girl’s voice, mocking the reader for believing she would even know certain words he’s used, would say things in the sophisticated way he’s phrased them.

  And so what I mean to say is that, for a long time, maybe the entire time I was first writing this when I was pregnant, I thought I would “pull a Howard.” I wanted to be writing myself as you—making myself into your creation, in a sense, to feel closer to you. I imagined myself as you might imagine me, trying to recapture our old symbiosis. I thought that, in the end, I would stage that kind of reversal and “unveil” you as the author—even if it wasn’t you, of course, just some narrative device—so that when you finally read this, you would be reading the inside of your own head.

  And then somehow you would know me, from the inside out.

  But here we are, finally at the end (“nothing really ends”; “narrative arc is an illusion”; “life doesn’t have a plotline”—the things you taught me are useless here, and I was a terrible pupil)—and I can’t give you the gift of yourself. There is too much at stake and you can never read this now. I walked away; I forfeited that ending.

  I might as well tell you, then, that when I first arrived at Aunt Pilar’s, I had the same recurring dream over and over again. In it, I go to you and Emily and ask you to keep the baby and raise it for me. The dream was so strong, and possessed such a perfect symmetry, that it seduced me, until what had risen from my subconscious at night became an obsessive daydream, conscious. In the fantasy, phantom Emily would even forgive me, because I was giving her back what she had just lost to my brother. But Emily can never forgive me in real
ity, because she’s busy being dead. Your wife died, Nick. I don’t know what that fallout looked like, but I knew the moment I heard the news that I would never be like her or Gretchen or Isabel: One who bears gifts. One who sacrifices.

  Only later did I stop thinking of myself—my role, my “destiny”—and start thinking of our actual baby. I always envisioned her as a girl, maybe because of Imogen, or because you wanted one. Only later did the recurring dream of turning her over to Emily—the good mother, the respectable woman—leave me with nothing but a blinding clarity, a force different than my shimmery fantasies, that I could never do to my daughter what Isabel had done to me. I could neither let her slide away into the ether of unrealized possibilities, nor could I let her come into this world to grapple forever with the immeasurable gap where I was supposed to be.

  You don’t deserve to be kept from the child we made together. Whatever “crimes” you have committed, my redheaded meteor boy, they were never against me. This isn’t punishment for anything. But a baby would have forced your hand, when you were already living on top of a landmine. How (please tell me how) could I walk into that explosion and somehow claim my place at your side, affront everyone from your sons to my brother with my swollen body? Tell me how I could ask you to focus on my child, on me, when your sons had just lost their mother and needed your undivided presence. Tell me how else I was to stop being the wrecking ball, except to carry this one last secret, and leave you all where you rightfully belonged. We were fucking atop Emily’s grave, whether we knew it or not. What was there left to hope for, for either of us, except a fresh start?

  And so, I’m trying. Here I am in grad school, even, bolstering up the spectacular false economy of need that drives us. After I healed from childbirth and my BRCA-induced hysterectomy, I even stripped again for a while—a whole other economy of need, this one quite real—since being Aunt Pilar’s assistant, a strangely glamorous gig at times but mostly just sitting in her house doing her correspondence, sending slides of her work to people around the globe, pays like shit because that’s Art for you. I’ve walked away from dancing again for the time being, but I’m not promising you or myself that someday I won’t go back. I’m trying, Nick, to be the person you—and even Bebe—would have wanted me to be for myself, to be a person I can be proud of, a person a daughter could be proud of someday. But if I think about that too long it feels like quicksand, so really what I’m trying to do is get through the day.

  You are nothing I ever owned, Nick, but for a time you were everything I ever loved and wanted, and everything I ever hurt, and every mistake I made, and every decent gesture or incongruous act of grace, and I still carry you inside me even though I let you go. I’d beg for your forgiveness, but since you have no idea what to forgive me for, since your heart is too forgiving anyway and you always saw me as better than I really was, I know that’s way too simple.

  Maybe I still wish you were telling this story so I could be the me inside your head instead of me. But I’m not taking that cop-out, so here I am: not a gift to you or anyone else, except maybe, finally, myself.

  So it was that when I gave birth, I wasn’t thinking of you anymore. Only my daughter.

  Now three years old, with the incongruous blend of your meteor hair and my brown skin, she is beautiful, she is herself. She is loved.

  It’s been a night of Nick’s mourning, of making everyone uncomfortable. Chad and Miguel always retire early anyway; Nick hears them upstairs reading Everybody Poops to Imogen and laughing, and waits for them all to silence before he can scuttle upstairs to his solitary guest room. Miles and Jay share the twin-bedded room downstairs, but despite there being plenty of beds to go around, whenever he’s here it feels like too many people in one shared space, breathing each other’s air: no privacy. It isn’t until Nick’s in bed reading, reaches mindlessly over to the bedside table to put away his book, that he sees his ring, right where he left it, unscathed.

  “No.”

  He says it aloud. He isn’t happy to see the ring—precisely the opposite—he is horrified, ashamed. The trouble he’s caused everyone! The disquiet he brewed in his own head! The ring stares back, round and endless and mocking in its unsullied solidity. He took it off last night to jerk off with some lotion he found in the guest bathroom, though the lotion was sticky and his orgasm furtive and regrettable, and he’d forgotten, when he woke this morning, that the whole sour endeavor had even occurred. He wasn’t wearing his ring at the goddamn beach when he was chasing his son down with sunscreen. The ring was here. God. He touches the ring gingerly, as though it may disappear or set off a siren. He can’t put it back on now, for fuck’s sake—can’t explain to the others how it was just sitting here. He puts it in his pocket, then panics and realizes it’ll only fall out, gets up again and shuts it away inside his toothbrush case, the only place where it cannot fall out and escape.

  Once the ring is silenced, Nick sits at the edge of the bed, cringing, loathing himself.

  He hasn’t slept with a woman in so long—there were a few, always when he was drunk, the first year after Emily’s death, but no one since—that it’s become embarrassing to masturbate: a stand-in for actual adult sexuality, like when he was a pubescent boy. His memories of Lina, that fuel him on toward his climax, crush him immediately afterward to the point that, at times, he’s wept on the heels of coming. Christ, how disappointed in him Lina would be. In this dimmer switch he’s come to use on his life for so long he doesn’t know how to turn himself back up toward living, with all the risks and desires that entails—he isn’t sure he wants to. Anyway, who is Lina to be disappointed in anyone?

  He thinks of that one night at Villa Moderne, of Lina lost for hours to the voices in her own head. Of the way she tried to take the room apart, clocks and televisions, as though at her center existed an impulse to break things down, to get inside, her constant interrogation of the world more important than whether anything could be reassembled. And that, in a strange way just as beyond language as whatever hole Emily was trying to fill with Imogen, was the wild beauty of Lina: the way she seemed closer to her core than other people—some raw, stripped-down essence of herself. That night, caught in the vortex of a brain-chemistry misfire, she was unable to in any way cloak herself in the artifice, the performance that permeates human interaction so completely that we don’t even question it anymore. She was locked inside herself, and there was something shockingly intimate about witnessing her in that place. She would never have believed him, maybe, but although he’d been infatuated with her for months, that was the moment—the moment in which she was not even conscious of his presence—he really fell in love.

  Lina, whom he loved for her lack of artifice, enabler of his artifice.

  Miguel says she is getting a PhD in literature, a pursuit both perfect for her and yet unfathomable. He says she only emails, won’t tell anyone where she is living, that he hasn’t seen her and she doesn’t want visitors. She’s become Isabel, Miguel told Nick, maybe a year and a half ago, the last time they discussed it. She’s become the woman who tormented her. I’ve humiliated myself and groveled and begged, but I’m done. She wants to be gone, she wants to abandon everyone and everything to appease some demon in her head, fine, I love her, but I’m not going to stalk her.

  Lina throwing her arms around him, biting his mouth like he was her sustenance.

  Her body, the tattoos and burnished skin of her, is hazier than it used to be, and that terrifies him. Unlike Emily, of whom he has framed photos and several albums and thousands of iPhotos, he has only a couple pictures of Lina—cast photos where hers is one face in a sea of faces, before they’d ever so much as kissed. His Lina exists only in memory. What will happen when he can’t see her anymore?

  A word about desire: there are no words about desire.

  She is the one who left. He has to let her go—he knows. What might have been romantic at first has become dysfunctional, self-destructive. He needs to move on. She wouldn’t want this for hi
m—though part of “moving on,” he realizes, is it no longer being about what Lina would want.

  New York looms, a promise or a taunt.

  On their last night on the island, Nick, Miguel, and Miles sit out on the back porch, looking at the stars. The girl Miles met his second day on the island went home today—just to Ann Arbor—and Miles has been loitering around the house, bereft, in a way Chad and Gretchen have been calling “adorable.” Now, he’s left the porch and is stretched out on his back on the picnic table, texting her unremittingly. Nick wonders how soon they will run out of things to say, knowing each other a scant five days on an island where neither lives, their reference points and contexts so disparate. When Nick was Miles’s age, he was already studying in London, had already left his home country in a day before cell phones and email and texting and Facebook and whatever the hell else the kids are doing that makes even those things half-obsolete. People touched and then just disappeared, no awkward fading away.

  “There was something about her,” Miles tells Miguel, in between texts. He has to speak loudly, since he’s in the middle of the yard, and it surprises Nick, frankly, that he’s making the effort. “She’s so different from the girls at home. She’s mellow and real, not all competitive and snarky. Maybe I should have gone to college in Michigan.”

  “Yeah,” Miguel calls back, “you should have chosen Michigan—I mean, Julliard sucks, who’d want to go there?”

  Miles laughs, but already he’s looking at his phone again.

  Miguel goes into the kitchen, then returns holding up a bottle of tequila like a question, and Nick nods. Then, remembering, Nick pulls a joint out of his pocket and says, “I’ll raise you one,” and Miguel looks nervously out toward Miles, though Nick shrugs.

  Miguel says, “I don’t know if I can—it makes me paranoid.”