“So how’s your TV star boyfriend?” Nicole asks across the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. “Are you guys serious?”
“I think so,” Phoebe says. “But I sorta feel like I’m holding him back.”
“Well, he obviously doesn’t see it that way,” Nicole says. “How about you? What are you looking for?”
Calling Chase’s apartment, trying to remember his bedroom and what he looked like in it. Adopting a dog and the cushion of quiet. Wishing she knew how to fix her father.
“Remember how you made a million flash cards to help Evie study for the SATs?”
Nicole tilts her head in the mom way she was doing even before the babies. “You want to go back to school?”
Phoebe nods, says the tests are being offered a few times next month.
“Yeah.” Nicole smiles. “I’d be honored to help you.”
* * *
Coming through the garage to the kitchen, Phoebe hangs her father’s car keys on the holder Chase made in sixth-grade woodshop, notices a stack of outgoing mail on the counter underneath. The top envelope is addressed to the management office of the Madison Plaza in New York City.
Flicker of recognition: her brother’s building.
Ripping it open, Phoebe finds a check written in Gennifer’s curly script.
And Phoebe is calling her stepmother’s name, making her way through the kitchen to the living room, where her father is watching Sam Waterston deliver closing arguments to the jury on television.
“Where’s Gennifer?” Phoebe asks.
Her father looks up, eyes briefly focusing in concern.
“She got back from the gym a little while ago. She might be in the shower. Everything okay?”
Out of the room and up the stairs before he finishes.
“Gen,” she calls, throwing open the door to the master suite, where her stepmother is fastening a lacy bra that matches her panties, towel swaddled around her head.
“Why are you sending checks to Chase’s apartment?” Phoebe demands. “Are you paying that girl’s rent?”
That girl, Sharon, who’d said “Thank you” and then seemingly vanished. Sharon, who may have known that her brother was sick, could have stopped him from getting on the plane.
“No,” Gennifer says, but looks at the Oriental rug under the sleigh bed. “The building manager said she moved out a few days before Chase died.”
“Then why are you still sending money?”
“All of your brother’s things are there—”
“You’re paying four grand a month so Chase’s stuff can sit in storage? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
It certainly isn’t a great use of cash, but Phoebe’s anger isn’t really about the money. Chase probably left enough to pay the rent for years, and even if her father never looks at another chest film again, it’s unlikely he and Gennifer will starve or have to start driving domestic cars. It’s something about the principle. About Dad watching daytime television and Gen sitting in Chase’s room when she thinks no one knows. About Phoebe still calling his apartment and trying to piece together the puzzle of who her brother had become.
“Why not just have them donate everything?” Phoebe asks.
Gennifer sighs. “You’ve seen your dad; he can’t deal with it yet. But there might be things there you guys want, things to remember him by.”
And with the most direction she’s had in months, Phoebe volunteers to go and sort things out.
* * *
New York is still cold in late April, and Phoebe shifts her weight from foot to foot, hands jammed into her pockets as she waits in the JFK taxi line.
“Eight Twenty-ninth Street,” she tells the driver, and has to root around in her coat pocket for the scrap of paper with her brother’s address when he asks if she means east or west. “East.”
“Between Madison and Fifth?” the driver asks, over a grating news announcer giving traffic reports from the radio.
“I guess.” Slight embarrassment that she doesn’t know. From her cab window, she notices the spire of the Empire State Building.
When Phoebe was a kid, her family had gone to New York, stayed at the Marriott Marquis (before her mother worked for the Four Seasons), seen Cats, and taken the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. “How long would it take you to fall?” her brother, maybe seven, had asked.
Phoebe’s father stopped trying to adjust the viewfinder for her. “That’s a good question,” he’d said. “How long do you guys think it would take?”
“Five minutes?” Phoebe had offered without consideration, realized the answer was wrong immediately by the way her father shook his head.
“Fifteen seconds,” Chase had tried.
“It’s about ten seconds to the ground.” Her father had smiled. “Good answer.”
* * *
At her brother’s building—which also juts up stories upon stories into the sky—a uniformed man with the name tag RODNEY holds open the door, and the building manager, whom she’d spoken to yesterday, comes out to shake her hand.
“Shall I show you to the apartment?” he asks, taking the handle of her suitcase when she agrees.
Two young professionals hold the elevator door for them, both about her brother’s age, both wearing the kind of charcoal wool coats Chase had been partial to, carrying the same type of leather messenger bag. She wants to ask if they knew him but suspects they didn’t.
The building manager ushers her off on the thirty-fifth floor, leads her down the hall to 35K, and unlocks the door.
“Let us know if we can help you with anything,” he says, handing her his business card. “We’re all very sorry about your brother.”
Behind him the door closes with the solid precision found only in buildings less than twenty years old, not at all like the splintering wood of her own place in Los Angeles.
Though it’s much nicer than hers, the unit feels strangely sterile—stainless-steel appliances and granite countertops in the galley kitchen, clean hardwood floors free of scuffs and damage. Everything paling in comparison to the glass wall of windows directly facing the Empire State Building.
The living room boasts a chocolate leather couch and armchair, a sleek television mounted to the wall. There’s a glass desk with an elaborate-looking office chair and a filing cabinet. The detectives on Law & Order would probably start with the files or the lightweight laptop computer, but they’d be looking for the cause of death. She’s looking for the way Chase lived.
File folders are labeled with headers like Warranties, Utilities, Medical, and Investments. That file should probably go home to her father. She sets it on the couch in a mental “to keep” pile.
Three tall bookcases line the wall by the desk, but they’re largely empty and look as though things have been plucked out at random.
That’s right: Sharon’s moved out. The remaining volumes include clunky textbooks on economics and history, Malcolm Gladwell and Christopher Hitchens paperbacks, a few novels by men like Richard Ford and Bret Easton Ellis. The novels are signed on the inside flap—not by the authors but by Sharon Gallaher—in script so tortured it’s almost illegible. Thought you would love this.—S; One of my all-time favorites.—Always, Sharon.
Phoebe wonders if Chase read them or just nodded and thanked Sharon, like he did as a child when a distant relative gave him socks or a hideous sweater as a gift.
Do the books deserve space in the pile of things to be saved? She’d known so little of her brother these past years, how is she qualified to determine the importance of his life objects?
Reaching for The Tipping Point, she feels something behind it on the shelf and pulls out a wrinkled, forgotten issue of Eons & Empires.
Adam had bought several of the collected volumes when he was auditioning for the show, but she hadn’t really looked at them. She’s amazed at how much Ron Brosh looks like a real-life Jason Bryce, and the Jericho Jeans girl is a dead ringer for Cordelia Snow. With Adam and Captai
n Rowen, there’s less of a physical correlation, but flipping through the issue, she sees it in some of the panels: a cagey, weather-beaten quality that’s somehow sexy. It’s something she’s seen in Adam before, used to see all the time in the days when they were just fucking. And Phoebe realizes E&E: Rising could be very good. That Adam is going to be very good.
He doesn’t even know she’s in New York. In all their mini-conversations, where they talked about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and neighborhoods they might want to live in, this trip never came up. She wonders if she’ll tell him when they talk later, or if this, like all the phone calls to this very place, will remain her secret.
On the bottom shelf is a wooden cigar box that still smells of tobacco but holds ticket stubs from Wonderful Town and Yankees games, receipts, metal admissions badges from the Met, a ceramic turtle that might be from a tropical vacation or some junk store down the street, and a ring of keys to locks unknown. Because these things were singled out, stored by her brother (or Sharon Gallaher), she puts the box in the pile.
The bedroom is small, just enough space for a light-wood dresser and a queen-size bed neatly made with a beige comforter.
Eight crisply pressed suits and rows of shirts still in plastic film from the dry cleaner hang in the closet. There’s a rack of ties ranging from conservative stripes and solids to bold patterns. Everything high-end. Nice clothes, but for whom? Did her brother dress this way for work, or did he truly enjoy the fine craftsmanship and prestige labels? Did Sharon pick them out?
For the “to keep” pile, Phoebe takes a tie with little martini glasses on it. I can taste the difference. She’ll ask the building manager about having Veterans of America take the rest. It’s fun to think of some down-on-his-luck guy looking for a passable interview suit and finding her brother’s Armani; she hopes that would have made Chase happy, too.
Half the dresser drawers are nearly empty, most likely Sharon’s things. The top one contains boxer shorts, a little bowl of cuff links and collar stays, swim trunks, an athletic cup. Under those Phoebe finds a nearly empty box of condoms, tube of KY Jelly, pair of handcuffs, bullet vibrator.
Had Phoebe talked with her brother about sex, ever? When she was in high school and in love with Oliver? When Chase was in college dating all those blondes? Had Chase ever asked her a question too embarrassing for their parents or his friends? Something exclusively in the territory of an older sibling? No, it was more the issue that came between them. The way he was always annoyed and hostile when his friends would say she was hot or ask for introductions. How he followed her around on her first date with Oliver and poked into her relationship with Adam on his last visit. How sad that this had been a wedge between them, that their romantic lives couldn’t be something to share and bond over.
In the third drawer, there are gym clothes, a Cubs baseball cap, and white undershirts. Under those are a few of the ironic T-shirts—Oscar the Grouch, Mr. Bubble. These she remembers Chase wearing as they fought over the television remote or when she dragged him to the mall so they could buy their father’s birthday gift. When she went to visit him at college and he had the goatee. Without really thinking, Phoebe holds one shirt to her chest and curls into herself on the bed.
* * *
When she wakes (something about airplanes), the skyscrapers have come to life against the dimming sky, the city ablaze all around her.
She goes to the bathroom to pee, not to find keepsakes, but the sight makes her gasp. It looks like an actual crime scene for the Law & Order detectives to unravel.
Cordless phone in pieces on the marble floor above a dent in the wall. Open first-aid kit balanced precariously on the lip of the sink, gauze unraveled and hanging over the side. Reddish brown splotches pepper the white porcelain of the bathtub and the lid of the toilet seat. A plush white towel with even more red stains is crumpled by the door.
Deep breath: Whatever happened in this room, Chase didn’t die here.
In the space between the bath and the commode sits a nearly empty bottle of Grey Goose.
I can taste the difference.
Another stabilizing breath.
Picking up the bottle, Phoebe holds it at arm’s length and thumbs off the cap, half expecting a ghostly kind of spirit to float up from the matte glass. There’s only the faint smell of alcohol. Sitting on the toilet seat, she closes her eyes and takes a sip. Warm all the way to her belly, the flavor slightly different than the Popov the restaurant uses if customers don’t specify a vodka brand.
Other odd things, too, are in that small space between the tub and toilet. A box-cutting blade and black marker. A yellow Post-it note, sticky side up.
Phoebe picks it up. The ink is swollen and blurred from long-dried water, but she can still make out two sets of handwriting. First her brother’s thick letters:
Had to go to work, Shar, but I love you very much. –C
Below that in the same barely legible handwriting as in the books in the living room:
I love you, too. I’m sorry.
And then Phoebe can’t breathe, hands trembling. She needs air, the central heat oppressive and stale.
On the terrace she fills her lungs again and again until they calm, then eases into one of the two patio chairs—the seat webbing cold even through her jeans. From out here the skyline is different. The towers shooting up beyond the thirty-five stories and all the roofs and water towers of the buildings below. Maybe her brother stood here admiring the forest of harnessed steel and concrete? Maybe he sat in these chairs with Sharon?
The girl with the large blue eyes and the grown-up clothes, who said “adore” every other sentence. That girl, that Sharon Gallaher, whom Phoebe met only once, had loved her brother and he’d loved her. And isn’t that what Phoebe really came here to find? The things that had mattered to her brother when she’d lost track of them? Phoebe likes the idea of Sharon and Chase sharing this view.
A minute or an hour passes, and the phone Adam gave her rings in her pants pocket.
“How’s my best girl?” he asks. For once it’s quiet in the background. He’s not on set or out with his cast members.
“Good, you?” Her voice cracks a little since she hasn’t spoken in so long.
“You sure? You sound weird.”
His concern brings a tennis ball to her throat. Maybe it’s being here in her brother’s apartment, where Chase had loved someone, too.
“Yeah,” Phoebe says, walks to the edge of the terrace and leans on the railing. “I was just thinking of you.”
Below her, yellow cabs dart around parked cars. Small dots of people. All the sounds muted by the time they reach her. The Empire State Building is lit up green and white, and she wonders why.
Ten seconds to the ground.
“I’ll actually be home for, like, twenty-four hours on Wednesday. Kathleen wants to meet with me—Marty says it’s a formality.”
“That’s wonderful, sweetie.”
“Well, you know he oversells things…”
“No, Adam, you’re gonna be awesome.” Phoebe believes this, always has.
“So I know you’re looking at schools in LA, but if this thing comes through, I want you to come with me to Boston for the summer.”
“Adam.”
Had to go to work, but I love you very much.
“It’ll probably only be a six-week shoot, but Pheebs, sometimes I miss you so much I literally can’t sleep.”
I love you, too.
“Well, we can’t have that. I guess I’ll have to come.”
Adam is excited now, talking about all the things they can do in New England, asking if she can get out of work on Wednesday when he’s in town.
Without really thinking about what she’s doing, Phoebe holds Sharon and her brother’s Post-it note over the rail, thirty-five stories above the street.
And lets it go.
8 you always swim home
MACAU
Liam Wing promised the world should you come to Macau.
He claimed you could be a part of something big, get in on the ground floor. “Ollie,” he’s said over and over on the phone. “We can be explorers in uncharted terrain.”
Because you’ve always been charmed by his enthusiasm (so much like Braden’s), you’d agreed. So after salmon season, you’d jetted off to Beijing and taken the high-speed rails all through China. Then to Thailand and Cambodia and finally Vietnam, where you’d spent weeks zipping around dirt roads on a motorcycle and had taken up with Mai, the exotic French-Vietnamese desk clerk at your hotel. An hour ago you boarded an Airbus A320 from Hanoi to Hong Kong, where Liam and his brave new world await you.
Somewhere over Moaming the plane bounces into a patch of rough air, and passengers grumble and grip their armrests. The pilot guns the engines, seeking something smoother, and you start thinking about throttle and velocity in a way you haven’t in years, not since you fled Chicago and Advantage Electric and your Ph.D. program. And you find yourself smiling, remembering how you used to be afraid to fly, even after you’d studied the mechanics and understood what kept planes in the sky—understood a little of what your father loved about the defiance of gravity.
Dad had tried to link up with you while you were in China. For days the two of you volleyed e-mails back and forth about meeting for dinner at a Mexican place he loved in Shanghai. But his flight got diverted, and then you were visiting a friend from the Jezebel Jones who taught English in Yangpu, and somehow you and your father couldn’t make it work. You’d figured he was only being nice and wasn’t all that serious about it anyway—like when you were a kid, before the Piper Saratoga, and he’d promise to take you to Six Flags or The Taste of Chicago if he was home—but this morning he’d left a voice mail about the two of you getting together in Hong Kong soon. So maybe he was serious.
In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel Page 17
