These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  “Hello?” He was ready to hear any voice but the one that answered.

  “Hey, Pablo.”

  Paul was so overwhelmed by elation and impatience and sheer, savage relief that he thought he might collapse. Then he realized there was something wrong with Julian’s voice. He was affecting a carelessly cheerful tone, but it sounded tinny and flat even through the echo of the line.

  “What happened?” Paul asked quickly. “What’s wrong?”

  A brief, crackling silence.

  “Oh, it isn’t that something’s happened, really,” Julian said, every word more airless and atonal than the last. “I just thought you might like to come stay for a few days.”

  The reversal was so abrupt, and Julian’s urgency so badly concealed, that Paul felt a flare of suspicion. But he played along, reflexively, because he couldn’t imagine any catch that wouldn’t be worth it. “When?” he asked. “It’s just that I—”

  “Soon—tomorrow, ideally.” Julian gave a sudden, sharp laugh. “I actually already called the airport, they have a flight a little before noon. Once I’m certain you’re coming, I’ll call them back to buy your ticket—”

  “Tomorrow?” Paul heard Audrey tap impatiently on her car horn, so he hurriedly stuffed the shirt into his knapsack. “I don’t know if I can that soon, we’re having sort of a family emergency—can I call you back later?”

  “Oh—no, naturally, of course you can.” There was something like sympathy in Julian’s voice, but it wasn’t quite convincing, as if he were taking measure of his position and trying to hide it. “But you’ll need to call tonight at ten o’clock sharp, it’s the only time I’ll be able to . . . What’s going on, anyway? Anyone I know?”

  Paul scrambled for a pen; Audrey tapped the horn again, more insistently. “No,” he said. “No one you know.”

  They were on the interstate ten minutes later. In the urgency of the moment, Paul had written the number on a napkin; its folded mass was thick and awkward in his breast pocket, impossible to ignore no matter how many distractions his family offered him. Laurie slumped wordlessly beside him in the cramped back seat, but the shock had put Audrey in a relentlessly chatty mood. She narrated the familiar drive to Mount Lebanon as if she were afraid to stop talking. “‘Waiting at Hazel’s,’ isn’t that so messed up?” she said more than once, as if the callousness of it had surprised her anew. “Waiting. It feels so sick to sit around waiting for someone to die.” When Audrey was distracted by a left turn, Paul turned toward Laurie and mimed throttling their sister to shut her up. This teased a weak smile to Laurie’s face, but it didn’t linger, and after a moment she looked away again.

  What followed, in the suburban quiet of Hazel’s house, felt like an uneasy marriage between sitting shiva and a children’s slumber party. Hazel’s daughter, Debbie, went out for a case of beer and some cheap Chinese food, and the cans and cartons slowly migrated from the kitchen to the far corners of the house. The young children were in the den, watching The Sound of Music on the color television. The older cousins chatted around the tension and drank more than any of them usually liked to do.

  Every now and then Hazel’s telephone would ring, and a bleak, nebulous update would make the rounds. Paul deliberately forgot the details as soon as he heard them. He wanted to remember his great-grandmother as something other than a withered fragile creature in a hostile world, but she had been right—only her own memory knew her as anything else.

  When they couldn’t bear it any longer, Paul and Laurie retreated upstairs to look at the progress of the bathroom Hazel and Harvey were renovating. Paul made fun of the new orange-and-gold floral wall tiles, which coaxed another small smile from Laurie. They sat cross-legged at either end of the plaster-dusted bathtub, eating from a carton of tepid sweet-and-sour chicken. The television downstairs was muffled but still audible; every silence between them was accompanied by tinny, distant singing.

  “Can I have some of that?”

  Laurie wasn’t quite smiling as she gestured toward Paul’s nearly full can, but there was a trace of her usual mischief in her face.

  “I’d be a really bad influence if I said yes,” Paul said, leaning forward to hand it to her. “It’s vile, though, fair warning.”

  Laurie held the can delicately and took an experimental swig. “Totally vile,” she agreed, but gamely sipped again anyway. “I’ve got to get one of those, um—the little bottles they put in gerbil cages or whatever, but human sized and full of beer. Because,” she said with sudden vehemence, “if I have to go to another fucking funeral and not be blotto, I’m going to throw up.”

  Paul thought about telling her that this one would be different. He could have said that some tragedies were socially acceptable, and when the neighbors offered condolences for a natural death in old age, they weren’t secretly asking Yes but why? What did you do to make this happen? But he couldn’t articulate it without revealing too much of his own anger, so it wouldn’t have been much of a reassurance.

  For a long while they didn’t talk. Paul picked through the carton with his chopsticks but couldn’t force himself to eat anything; Laurie smoothed her skirt against her knees and drank skeptically but steadily from the beer can.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  Paul lifted his cuff and checked his watch. It was already a quarter to ten. He hadn’t forgotten his promise to Julian, but he remembered in the way he might remember a waking thought in the middle of a dream. The hour might have passed entirely before he noticed.

  “Almost ten.” He handed Laurie the carton of chicken as he stood. “I need some fresh air—if anyone asks for me, tell them I’ll be back soon.”

  “Well, if anyone asks for me,” said Laurie with theatrical pathos, “I’ll just be sitting here alone, drinking beer and eating cold Chinese food in an empty bathtub.”

  “Well played.” Without really knowing why, Paul leaned down and gave her shoulder a shake. “Do me a favor and don’t tell anyone I let you have that, all right?”

  The air was clearer in the suburbs, but muggy and clinging. Paul followed the sloping sidewalks to the neighborhood baseball diamond, where there was a bank of pay phones parallel to the right-field line. He’d played a few away games here with his Little League team; he remembered one of the telephones ringing once when there was a development in one of his father’s cases that couldn’t wait until the start of his next shift.

  The operator had barely put Paul on hold before Julian answered. His voice was hoarse and soft, as if he were trying not to be overheard. “Pablo?”

  There was a faint clattering sound in the background, muffled voices heard from a few rooms away. It was more context than Paul had received in weeks; he imagined Julian excusing himself from dinner, shutting himself into a back room, and waiting to pick up the phone before it had a chance to ring.

  “I don’t think I can do it tomorrow.” He fidgeted with the metal-wrapped coil of the phone cord and watched a moth circling the streetlight—small, brown, too indistinct at a distance to identify. “She—my great-grandmother—the funeral will probably be the day after tomorrow. I could come after that.”

  Julian was silent for a long time. Paul could hear his fury even before he spoke.

  “I’m so sorry to hear that.” He spoke with such stringent courtesy that Paul could see the way his hands were shaking. “Of course I was hoping to see you sooner, but . . . Are you close to her?”

  He didn’t quite ask, but Paul could hear him not-asking. He only acknowledged the tacit question; the one Julian had asked aloud, so much more benign, was also far too complicated to answer.

  “Everything used to revolve around her,” he said coldly. “She’s my grandfather’s mother, he’s crazy about her, so is my mother. It would upset a lot of people if I tried to get out of it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “It isn’t,” said Julian, too defensively for Paul to believe him. “I was only asking if you were all right—”

  “It’
s fine, Julian, I’m not mad.” Paul laughed as if to prove that he meant it, but it came out as more of a nervous exhale, and suddenly the words wouldn’t stop coming. “God, don’t you think I want to get out of it? I’d rather have a root canal, the last funeral I went to was—but they’d never let me live it down, ever, no matter what I tried to tell them. They already think I’m a freak, all I ever hear from behind my back is how I’m too quiet and give people the creeps and don’t know how normal people are supposed to act, and oh, he’s always been like that, and remember how he wouldn’t even go to poor Bubbe Sonia’s funeral—”

  “So stay,” Julian interjected. “Stay as long as you need to, I’ll be fine without you until then.”

  “Of course you will. You’re always fine without me. You’ve made that very clear. Obviously this time wouldn’t be any different—as usual you were probably just hoping I would drop everything in order to come amuse you, because you’re always so fucking bored and obviously that’s all I’m good for.”

  “You’re being ridiculous.” All the annoyance had left Julian’s voice, replaced by something that almost sounded like panic. “Why did you think I told you to keep writing? You can’t know how lonely it is here, you’ve been helping me stay sane—”

  “I hate it when you lie to me.”

  The silence swelled through the static. Julian was the first to break it; he spoke so quietly that it took Paul a moment to parse the words.

  “Please tell me what you want.”

  For weeks now he had felt unnecessary, useless, pouring his devotion into a void. At last he had a chance to demand better, and he seized it.

  “Say you need me to come.”

  “I thought that was obvious,” said Julian acidly, but Paul stopped him before he could say more.

  “No. It’s not a yes-or-no question.” His own voice was so cool and imperious that he barely recognized it. “Tell me you need me. In those words. I won’t come unless you say it.”

  Julian took a long time to answer. Paul wasn’t sure at first that his pride would allow him to speak at all.

  “I do need you. I need you. All right?” Paul would have doubted his sincerity if he hadn’t sounded so disgusted with himself for yielding. “As soon as you can possibly get here. I can muddle through for another day or two if I have to, but I need to know when to expect you. When, not if, or I’ll never forgive you.”

  Part of Paul would have been disappointed, even a little repelled, if Julian ever said outright that he loved him. It was more natural for Julian to be loved than to love. If Julian were to love him, it would feel like something he deigned to do. It meant more to be needed. That, far more than love, gave him enough power not to be completely at Julian’s mercy. He hated for Julian to be in enough distress to need his help—of course he did. But the exhilaration of Julian admitting it was so intense that Paul could ignore the worry for now.

  “No, it’s all right, tomorrow is all right, I’ll think of an excuse.” He’d forgotten ever being angry. He felt gentle and endlessly patient; if Julian had asked, he would have happily cut his chest open and handed over his heart, his lungs, every part of himself piece by piece. “I’ll be there as soon as I can—I’ll pay you back for the ticket.”

  “Don’t worry about the money, it’s nothing.” Julian didn’t thank him, but that was no surprise. He had already given more than Paul had dared expect.

  “Can I tell you something,” said Julian after a pause, “that I’m all but certain you won’t believe?”

  “Try me.” It was a peace offering, tentatively teasing.

  The barest pause. “I never lie to you, but sometimes I wish I could.” He sounded surprised, even frightened. “You never let me pretend the truth is all right when it isn’t.”

  “You’re right, I don’t believe you.”

  He was trying to joke, but Julian didn’t laugh.

  “I know,” he said. “You never do.”

  When Paul returned to his aunt’s house, he found the conversation replaced by a tense, artificial hush. He knew what it meant, even before he heard Debbie on the phone in her father’s study. Audrey had finally lost her voice; she sat at the kitchen table with the older cousins, fidgeting with her bracelets, an empty can folded in front of her. The television in the den had gone dark.

  “Was that it?” his cousin Myron asked Debbie when she emerged. It was the sort of callous thing Paul would never get away with saying, but because Myron wasn’t thought of as cruel or cold or strange, nobody would say anything about it.

  Debbie was already carrying herself with the grim dignity that would complement her funeral dress. “She passed away peacefully about half an hour ago. Uncle Frank is swinging by to pick up his and Susie’s kids, but I think our moms will all be at the hospital for a while longer.”

  Audrey wordlessly followed Paul up to the second floor to retrieve Laurie. The three of them sat for a long while in the car, waiting for the vents to cool the fennel-smelling air. None of them spoke, though Laurie opened her mouth once as if she thought she might.

  Paul just thought about the girl from the photograph, whom he’d tried to paint as a living person even though her likeness looked like an artifact under glass. Two years after she traveled to the portrait studio in Vilnius, both her parents were dead. He imagined her packing her entire life into a garment bag, preparing to cross the ocean and marry a man she barely remembered, with the soil from her parents’ graves still damp on the heels of her shoes. Leaving so soon after their deaths was a cold decision, no less so for its necessity. Age had sanded away every visible trace of that hardness, but Paul imagined it had still been inside her somewhere; she would never have survived so long without it.

  When his mother returned in the morning, Paul was already showered and dressed and waiting for her in the kitchen. He pleaded his case as she prepared her breakfast (cold cereal dressed with a fistful of frozen blueberries). He lied that the invitation from Julian had come before the news about Bubbe Sonia, and that the plan had already existed, the ticket already been bought, and he had just put off telling her about it. Then he explained, patiently, that he couldn’t bear to go to a funeral. “Not yet,” he said, “not so soon.” He didn’t specify after what; it wasn’t necessary, and he didn’t want to make her cry. But he would stay in town if the family needed him—of course he would—and he made sure to use the phrase “putting his plans on hold,” because he knew that was the phrase she would use if she wanted to insist that there was no need.

  He need not have expended the effort; his mother was tired and in no mood to fight back. He didn’t even get to the end of his script before she waved him off.

  “You’re going camping for a couple days,” she said flatly, “so you can clear your head. Anything else would break your Zayde’s heart.”

  Her acquiescence briefly struck him silent.

  “But I’m going? You aren’t saying no?”

  She chased a blueberry through the milk and sighed.

  “You’ll still be back before the end of the shiva,” she said wearily. “Do what you want.”

  It was well after he’d boarded his bus that he understood that “Do what you want” wasn’t the same as “Yes.” There would be consequences. She’d all but promised it.

  And it would be worse than merely offending the whispering aunts and uncles or making the neighbors gossip. He remembered all the times he’d confided in his grandfather, how often both of his grandparents had shut the others down about Paul when their worry over him tipped into needling. Setting the cousins to chattering was one thing, but abandoning his grandfather was a genuine betrayal.

  Paul slid down in his seat and reminded himself, ruthlessly, that his grandfather had betrayed him first. This isn’t going to go away by itself. He forced himself to remember the aversion in his grandfather’s voice, repeating it in his head until it distilled into hatred. He was no different than the rest of them.

  4.

  What he hadn’t dared
admit, lest Julian think less of him, was that he’d never been on an airplane before. The flight was little more than an hour, and Paul spent nearly every minute of it with his eyes shut tight against the impossible distance of the earth below, certain every patch of turbulence would send the plane into a spiral. He still wasn’t sure he would ever remember how to use his legs again, and the drive to Julian’s house wasn’t doing him any favors.

  The girl who had met him at the airport was named Joy Greenwood, a rail-thin doe of a girl who drove as if she’d learned by watching The French Connection. He knew a little about her, because Julian had mentioned her once or twice; now and again she had sent packages to Julian’s dorm, filled with candied ginger and Dutch chocolate. She had picked Paul out of the crowd by comparing his face to the picture on the butterfly garden brochure, and announced within moments of meeting him that she was nursing a hangover. When they reached her convertible, they were greeted shrilly by her dog, a grotesquely tiny auburn puff that was canine in name only. Paul couldn’t tell if its name was really Sweetpea or if that was just a nickname, but it inexplicably decided to sit on his lap as they drove.

  “Julian’s told me so much about you.”

  The countryside spilled past them in a blur. Joy steered one-handed as she lit a cigarette—a peculiar one, long and skinny, with a striking resemblance to a lollipop stick. Paul stared at her, trying to decide what she might mean by “so much.”

  Joy looked at him sideways and seemed, quite suddenly, to take pity on him.

  “He says you’re absolutely brilliant,” she went on. “And that you do wonderful creepy paintings of moths and dead things, and that he wishes you’d major in art instead of—oh, I forget, it was something dreadful—”

  “It’s ecology,” he said a little defensively. “It’s not dreadful.”