I sit back next to him. Then I say:
“Open your eyes, Shawn. Look at me.”
He doesn’t. So I say it again.
“Open your eyes, Shawn. Look at me.”
He complies this time, and I can see that they are lost, so much like mine.
Neither of us has a map.
23
I am drowning my sorrows in one of Raina’s Xanax when the doorman buzzes up. Raina and Jeremy have one of those massive, winding, jealousy-inducing apartments that you see in Architectural Digest thanks to one very wise investment that Jeremy made in a company that created the GPS in the iPhone. (These days, Jeremy is a “documentary filmmaker,” though I’ve never been totally clear on what this means exactly. Raina demurs whenever I ask.) Vera Wang lives two floors up; Donald Trump is rumored to have the penthouse for his mistress.
Tonight I’ve taken to her fainting couch in her living room, though the room is only for show and not for the children under any circumstances. (Raina to the kids: “DO NOT PLAY IN THE LIVING ROOM UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! UNDERSTOOD?”)
Nicky walks in reading the current issue of Jewish Living and says, “Doorman called up. Some guy is here for you.”
I sit up suddenly, and the walls morph to and fro before they steady themselves, the wonderful, glorious side effect of this mind-numbing pill.
“Is it Shawn?”
“Uncle Shawn?” he asks.
“Do you know any other Shawn?” I say.
“Actually, I do. A kid in my grade whose dad is like, the CEO of the Yankees, and he always has this really cool autographed shit that he brings in and sells under the table. I tried to pinch a Jeter ball off of him…”
“Well, obviously, it’s not that Shawn,” I interrupt.
“Obviously. But you asked. Hey, speaking of nothing of the sort, do you think you could take me to Jerusalem?”
“In Israel?”
“You and I really aren’t in sync today.” He walks off.
To his back, I yell: “Hey, that is not the behavior of a good Jew!”
He doesn’t answer, and I hear a door slam somewhere down the hall. I remind myself that I should really write Amanda, because I’m a poor substitute for a mother, but then I hear the doorbell and forget everything.
Theo offers me gardenias when I let him in.
“You remembered,” I say.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he answers.
When Theo and I first met, I was earning $22,000 at my crappy assistant to the assistant executive job. In New York City, this basically rents you a bathtub to sleep in and pizza slices for sustenance. My parents helped, but not much. My dad, no surprise, thought that I’d find a way to work it out, to work myself up, and actually, I did.
I couldn’t afford that much back then, for the first year that we were dating. But my one indulgence was gardenias. I bought a bouquet once a month, even when I should have been more prudent. But they were so luscious, and their scent reminded me of my mother. I’d keep them in their vase for three days after they’d wilted, unwilling to toss something that had such beauty in the garbage, until Theo would inevitably do it for me.
Tonight, I take the gardenias from him and set them on the coffee table.
“Raina invited me for the fireworks,” he explains, like he needs an excuse to be here. Then, gesturing to the flowers: “They need water.”
“I know.” I rest back on the couch.
He fiddles with his hands until he shoves them in his pockets and sits too.
Ollie wanders out, barefoot and wearing a hemp tank top and shorts.
“Oh hey, Theo! Wow, man. Hey.”
They clasp wrists, like some sort of man-shake, and then pull into a hug. Ollie looks at me, and then looks at Theo, then back at me.
“So hey. I was just wandering through. Off to the kitchen for a smoothie.”
“Good seeing you, Ollie. Let me know…if I can help in any way.”
“No worries, man. No worries. But I’d love for you to have a taupe ribbon. I’ll get one for you from my room.”
Theo narrows his eyes at him as Ollie walks off, then shakes his head and chuckles.
“Some things never change. Remember when he visited from Wesleyan? Talking about…what was it back then?”
I think about it, try to conjure it back up in my mind. Either it’s been too long or things are too fuzzy from the Xanax. Then it comes to me:
“Chinese medicine. He wanted to major in Chinese medicine.”
Theo laughs out loud now. “Right. And I couldn’t believe that Wesleyan actually offered that as a major.”
“Kids these days,” I laugh, but then run out of things to say. I glance at him, then away.
He’s better looking now than eight years ago. He was always cute, attractive in a way that made you look twice, with cheekbones that thrilled the Time editors. But now, the years have sunk in, the fine lines around his eyes have lent him a gravitas. He wasn’t just boyishly cute anymore in a way that you didn’t have to necessarily take seriously. I wish I didn’t notice the shift.
“I can’t remember the last time I was nervous,” he says.
“Why are you nervous?” I’m sure I’m nervous too but the Xanax doesn’t let it register.
“Well, for one, I’ve texted you. Twice.”
I sigh. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write him back, it’s that I had no idea what I should say. There’s too much. Or maybe not enough. I don’t know. For the same reasons I didn’t write him back on Facebook.
Accept.
Deny.
Ignore.
(Damn you, Mark Zuckerberg! How have you discovered the meaning of life??)
“Look, Willa, you turned me down once way back when, and if you don’t want me in your life, just turn me down again. Put me out to pasture.”
“I…” I start to say something but either my senses are too dulled to put together a coherent sentence or I just don’t know what to say.
“I came here to find out something…I have something I need to ask. And if after telling me the answer, you want me out of your life, then I will be. Forever.”
“No one knows what forever is.” I lean back and shutter my eyes. “Forever is just a thing my dad says.”
“Is something else wrong with your dad?”
I wave my broken hand and accidentally swipe my eyebrow with the back of my cast. “Ow! No. The surgery went well yesterday. Practically as good as new. If you consider ‘new’ to mean that he doesn’t give one respectable turd about dying and leaving us all behind.”
“Sorry? I don’t follow.”
“Open your eyes and write your map, Theo!”
“Are you okay?”
I roll my head up and meet his concerned gaze.
“Sorry,” I say. “I took a Xanax. I didn’t know you were coming. It’s been a bad couple of days.”
“Oh,” he says, with a friendly smirk. “Well, let’s talk later. When you’re…less stoned.”
“Why would anyone ever be less stoned?” I say, as I press back against the sofa pillows and let the warmth of the Xanax envelop me. “Life is so much better when nothing matters.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Okay.”
“Everything matters,” he insists. “I thought that was what you were trying to prove.”
—
The fireworks begin their dance around nine o’clock. Raina lets the kids stay up late, even though they’ll be disasters tomorrow. Theo lingers, thanks to Jeremy, who trespassed through the living room, didn’t pick up on the enormous bubble of awkward tension, and instead poured Theo a Scotch and invited him to stay. And also because he wanted to “pick Theo’s brain on this new film investment he’s considering.”
>
We gather on Raina’s building’s rooftop deck. It’s a perfect Manhattan evening: warm enough to feel it under your skin, not hot enough to make you curdle. The sky is clear, a few stars poking their way through despite the bright lights of the NYC skyline. Raina and Jeremy mingle with their neighbors, who have popped champagne and are passing stuffed olives and prosciutto melon skewers and other Upper East Side-ish finger foods. I lean against the balcony and feel the breeze against my cheeks, and I gape at the big bad world, wondering how everything ever became such a mess. I was always sort of a mess, even at five when I became Willa, not William; even at twelve, when my dad bought me a skateboard. I’m thirty-two now. How much longer could I go?
I feel Theo’s hand against the small of my back, and then he’s next to me, staring out, waiting for the spectacle of explosions to begin.
And then they do.
BOOM.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
There are yellows and pinks and purples. And stars and flowers and at the end, an American flag up in lights.
“I’ve never quite understood how they do that,” Theo says, his neck craned up at the sky. “Those shapes, the images.”
“I stopped trying to figure it out,” I answer.
He floats his gaze down toward me, and for a moment, his face is awash in something that I never see on him: sadness.
“Don’t stop trying,” he says, his eyes back on the sky. “There’s always an answer, even when you’re sure that there’s not.”
—
Later, once the fireworks have subsided and Theo has said polite goodnights to all, I realize that he never told me what his question was. I consider texting him to ask — I want to text him to ask.
What was your question to me and how will it change things?
I start typing with my good hand but my bravado fades. There are some things that are better left unsaid, and besides, now that I’m sober, I suspect I wouldn’t have an answer for him anyway.
24
My dad holds a press conference the next day. He sits at the podium and sips slowly from his water glass, looking a dozen years older than he did when all of us gathered at the Four Seasons and he announced that he was taking a lover. The cameras snap his photo for the front page of their websites, of their newspapers. The reporters, and there are many of them, hold their recorders in the air, as if my father has something so important to declare that it cannot be missed.
My dad leans into the microphone and starts talking about fate, about death, about embracing both. He gazes into the CNN camera and says that he hopes that he can offer comfort to those who are dying or those who are losing loved ones or those who simply fear the inevitable.
“It is inevitable!” His voice rises. “But let us all know that what will be will be. This was not my time. But if it had been…I would have been at peace with that too.” Then he shifts back into his wheelchair with a contented smirk, as if this is the most brilliant thing that has ever been said. I want to raise my hand and say, “Hey dumbass, you wouldn’t have been at peace with it, because, you know, you’d have been, like, dead.” But that’s not the part I play today. That’s not the part I play in the family. That would be something Raina would say, but she is simply focused resolutely ahead, staring at nothing, her eyes glazed over.
The nurse wheels my father out a back door, and the reporters holler more questions to his doctors. I watch him go and realize that the one thing my dad didn’t mention is family: how he was thinking of us, how we got him through. Nearly everyone says that on their deathbed, don’t they? When I saw that white light off in the distance, I was thinking of my dear wife, Rose, and how I couldn’t leave her just yet! But not my dad.
“Do you think your dad believes in God?” Nicky asks me after we usher out of the press room and down the hall. He drops quarters into the soda machine.
“I really don’t know.” I really don’t know him at all. “I think…he believes in something though.” His theories. His science. That’s what he believes in.
“So you think that he actually believes all this bullshit?”
The machine spits out a Dr. Pepper, and he pops the lid.
“Nicky, it’s ten in the morning. Should you be drinking that?” I feign an attempt at step-parenting.
“Probably not.” He slurps from the top.
I sigh.
“How can he not see that it’s all bullshit?” he asks again. “Like with my dad.”
“He doesn’t think that any of it is bullshit,” my mom says from behind us. She pecks my cheek. “And thank God that pomp and circumstance of a press conference is over. Speaking of bullshit.”
“Did you know that he has a DNR?” I ask her.
“Of course he has a DNR, sweetie. Who wants to be a vegetable?”
I exhale again. “That’s not what I meant. I just...”
She squeezes my shoulder.
“He believes what he believes. Nothing’s going to change that.”
“So that means that he knows about you and Nancy? And that he trusts that it will all work out?” I plunk in my change and aim the back of my cast at the Dr. Pepper button. Then I remember that yesterday Vanessa dared me to get in shape, so I opt for a water.
“He does not know about Nancy, no.” My mom grows quiet.
“Do you think he believes in God, Minnie?” Nicky asks.
“Do you believe in God?” she asks back.
“As a Jew, I must.” Nicky puts on a solemn face.
“That’s not really an answer.”
“It’s an answer.”
“Not really,” my mom says.
“You asked, I answered.” He takes a long sip of his Dr. Pepper and swallows down a burp.
“That’s a rote answer. There’s no critical thinking involved.”
I squint at my mother. This is new territory for her, for me. Before she had Raina, she’d been a high school math teacher. I’d forgotten that somewhere in her, she’d once been pinned to logic, to 10+10=20 because you can prove it. I watch her now and wonder if maybe she hadn’t forgotten too. Maybe she can explain to me why 1 +1 no longer equals Shilla.
“I don’t get it,” Nicky says.
“You’re accepting that there’s a God because you’re a Jew. That’s wonderful. But you’re not asking yourself why you accept it so easily, when there are plenty of reasons not to. Sure, that’s why people call it ‘faith.’ But I’m not exactly getting the faithful vibe from you.” She reaches over and takes the Dr. Pepper from his hand. “And you shouldn’t drink that crap. It will kill you.”
She aims the can into the garbage, and it hits the bottom with a clang.
“Wow,” Nicky says, as my mom heads down the hall. “What was that about?”
I smile and am surprised to feel a twinge in my nose, tears ready behind my eyes.
“That’s about being a mom. I didn’t know she had it in her.”
“Huh,” he says. “I don’t really get it.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Some of us are slow learners.”
—
Email From: Shawn Golden
To: Willa Chandler-Golden
Subject: Your dad
W —
Saw your dad’s press conference and thought I should reach out and let you know I’m glad he’s going to be okay. All’s well that ends well. I have to go back to Palo Alto tomorrow. I know that you want to talk and that our August deadline is just a few weeks away…how about if I call you when I’m back? Nicky wants to stay here with you. Guess he got bored of the zipline. I still think it’s awesome. That kid. Who knows what goes through his brain?
-S
Email from: Theodore Brackton
To: Willa Ch
andler-Golden
Subject: Hi
So hey. I can’t stop thinking about you. And what’s going on. I’ve been asked to consult on a project for Goldman Sachs for the rest of the summer (insider trading, but you didn’t hear it from me), but I’m not going to accept if you don’t want me here. I’m trying to do the right thing, Willa. I know what that means for me. I have no clue what it means for you.
Email from: Raina Chandler-Farley
To: Willa Chandler-Golden
Subject: Theo
W — don’t kill me but I just called Theo to ask for his advice on Ollie’s case. The govt wants some heads to roll, and Ollie’s a high-profile head to axe. Theo said he might be staying in the city for the summer, so I figured it was cool to bring him on. Just wanted to ask you if that’s okay?
Email from: Willa Chandler-Golden
To: Raina Chandler-Farley
Subject: re: Theo
Please, you already called him so why are you asking me for my permission now?
Email from: Raina Chandler-Farley
To: Willa Chandler-Golden
Subject: re: re: Theo
I was trying to be polite.
Email from: Minnie Chandler
To: Raina Chandler-Farley; Willa Chandler-Golden
Subject: Your father
Girls –
Willa (I’m cc-ing you Raina because you should know this but keeping your brother out of it because lord knows he has enough problems), I wanted you to be aware of the fact that when I stopped by the hospital today, your father inquired as to the current standing with your book with Vanessa. He is and continues to be quite worked up over the thought that his own kin is publicly contradicting him — I believe that’s an exact quote — and he sat up in his flimsy hospital gown and with his thinning hair flopping every which way and with his teeth unbrushed and his rage turning his cheeks nearly purple and spit out: “I cannot believe that our daughter is publicly contradicting me!” and I must say, girls, I have never been less attracted to a human being in my life. Anyway, I think he may be struggling with facing his own mortality (despite what he says) or perhaps just getting old (it’s really no fun, though better when you’re a lesbian!) or maybe I just caught him at a bad moment. But…it is something to be aware of. His displeasure. Do with it what you want. Lord knows I have spent too much of my own life nurturing his pleasures and displeasures and now, I frankly don’t give much of a fuck.
The Theory of Opposites Page 18
