Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  He was the quintessential corporate lemming, but even so, Adam thought, there was something to admire about guys like that: the übercompetent road warriors who always knew where the business centers were, who knew exactly how much time they had before their two fifteen and just how to spend it. It was like they’d gone native in the soulless transitional places he’d described to Marissa. They persisted there, they thrived there. Sure, this guy had Cindy and the girls to meet—but Adam’s guess was that that was the obligation, and the walk from the cab into the airport hotel was where he felt most at home.

  Adam wondered if he could learn to do that, master that style of constant motion: the ceaseless flying, riding, chatting, chuckling. Maybe he could get a job taking business trips, selling shit or whatever, and just float across the country, skyway to carport.

  He considered this for another second or two—then sneered into the lapels of his coat. He had two years of college toward a music degree. He needed an app to figure out the tip at restaurants. And now he was going to make sales presentations, write on whiteboards, dial in to conference calls or whatever the fuck? Not to mention, a job that had him bouncing unpredictably back and forth across the country would be as dangerous, sobriety-wise, as having no job at all. At Stone Manor, he’d been instructed that since he’d only ever been a musician, he had to become accustomed to the rhythms of a well-ordered life—and the foundation of such a life was a consistent nine-to-five job. This is what had led him to the bank: More essential than the paycheck, his work at the Alabama Street Citibank in San Francisco provided him a Sunday through Saturday routine that helped him avoid, say, wandering into a bar at two in the afternoon because he found himself with nothing better to do. It didn’t matter that he needed a calculator to do even the most basic math; his manager wanted him to use a calculator to do even the most basic math.

  Every morning of the workweek he took the BART from his apartment in the Outer Mission to the bank in Potrero Hill, did his job, ate lunch at his desk, then took the BART home. He’d order in dinner or microwave something, watch basketball on TV, then go to bed at ten thirty so he could be up for work the next day. On weekends, he ran errands, went to the movies, went out on the dates. And five nights a week, he went to the gym. It was a dingy chain place on the border of gentrified and ungentrified blocks in the Mission, but it had a swimming pool, and Adam could now do as much as a mile’s worth of laps at a time. He knew a lot of recovering alcoholics replaced their compulsive need for booze with the compulsive need for marathons or hot yoga or baking, but he didn’t think of his swimming this way. Rather, he saw swimming as an affirmation of something, a further commitment to a particular way of living. And he’d gotten to like being in the pool. The sound was pretty extraordinary: the rumbling breath from your nose, the windmill slaps of your forward palm, the muffled voices on the surface that would leap to echoing clarity when you turned your ear to inhale. You became aware of your body in a particular way in the water: the weight of your limbs, the twisting of your torso, the heat of your lungs. Swimming was a way to be alone with yourself that wasn’t boring.

  He was making it work in San Francisco. Anyone would agree with that. Often, when he looked around the BART, or the sidewalk in front of the bank, he saw people a lot like himself: in their thirties, on their way to work, coffee in hand, grateful to have found refuge from whatever their twenties had been about. At times, seeing those people made him feel like an impostor, as though they were the authentic version of something he could only try his best to imitate. But even if he sometimes felt like a stranger in his own life—might look up from his desk, or see a young woman in a cashmere sweater smiling at him from a table in a restaurant, and think, How the fuck did I get here?—that didn’t mean that it wasn’t a sufficient life, an appropriate life. And taking a clear-eyed look at who he was, what he’d done and risked and escaped and might still fall victim to—weren’t sufficiency and appropriateness the essential qualities?

  A cherry-red Sonata was stopped in front of the hotel; the airport shuttle pulled up behind it. It was really too bad he hadn’t been able to go through with the family Thanksgiving. Next year, maybe, he’d do better.

  The door of the shuttle opened with a whine and the white-haired driver got out, his face pinched, sour. He stretched his arms in the cold, shivered, and went inside the hotel, leaving the van’s engine idling. Adam figured he had time to smoke a cigarette. And he put the filter between his lips, he noticed the driver in the Sonata still sat in the car, had her head bent over her smartphone. Peering through the passenger-side window, he recognized Marissa.

  Adam was a superstitious person, susceptible to signs, omens, portents. He crossed the street to avoid walking under ladders, treated black cats like they carried the plague, wasn’t absolutely convinced the collapse of his music career couldn’t be attributed to a mirror he’d broken in a Milwaukee bathroom in 2009. He recognized this magical thinking had never served him well; what bad luck had he ever avoided? But even if this wasn’t a sign, wasn’t it at least an opportunity? An opportunity to get it right.

  He tossed the unlit cigarette away, walked up to the car, and tapped on the window. Marissa looked up with surprise that deepened into suspicion as she recognized him. But she lowered the window. “Hi,” she said.

  “So I was thinking,” he began. “The thing is, I returned my rental car.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you said you’re going up to Vermont. That’s pretty much straight up ninety-one, like I told you.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “And my house, my parents’ house, in Roxwood, could not be more on the way.” She brushed a black twist of hair off the side of her face. “What I was thinking—maybe you could give me a lift? I mean, like you said, it would be a waste not to see them . . .” She was giving him the wary, vaguely irritated look he’d gotten familiar with over the years. “Only because you’re going up that way. I mean, you can one hundred percent say no. It was just, I don’t know, keep each other company . . .” The driver of the shuttle passed behind him, walked up the steps back onto the van. “Just an idea,” he concluded.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Yeah? You sure?”

  “Yeah, whatever, why not.”

  He pulled open the door, thinking how close he’d come to making the wrong choice—or, if this turned out to be the wrong one, how close he’d been to avoiding it.

  II

  Family

  [ 1 ]

  The Sonata (Four Movements)

  They didn’t talk for a while. Marissa relaxed into the calm she could find while driving: the streetlamps passing one by one, the gray guardrail trailing away like a ribbon, the highway ahead narrowing toward a vanishing point it never reached, no music, no conversation, no announcements to hear or be made, just the engine thrum and the wheels and the propulsive sensation. She’d always loved driving, especially at night: the headlights of cars in the opposite lane coursing like a river, the scenery beyond the streetlamps muted, tucked in darkness—and her, unseen and unencumbered, just another gliding pair of headlights for someone else to see.

  She’d hoped she might find some of this serenity flying on airplanes every day. But that hope had been disappointed. Staring out the window when she didn’t have maid duties to perform, a shuttered blankness might spread across her mind, but there was no full-gas-tank, open-road freedom to it. She never entirely forgot she was in a pressurized metal tube thirty thousand feet in the air with no control over the destination.

  Blasting icy wind filled the car. She looked over. Adam had lowered the window on his side. “You were falling asleep,” he explained.

  “No, I wasn’t,” she shot back.

  “You can’t mess around with that, though. You know what happened to the first bassist for Metallica, right?”

  “No.”

  “You should Google it, I don’t want to jinx us by talking about it.” He reached his hand into the pocket of his coat.
“Hey, cool if I smoke in here?”

  “This isn’t my car.” She found the button on the driver’s side and raised his window.

  “Whose is it?”

  She shifted her grip on the steering wheel. She didn’t feel like talking. These were the last moments of the day when she wouldn’t be required to be pleasant, sociable, polite. “There’s this flight attendant, Alice, who’s been flying for twenty-five years, so she never has to work any holidays or weekends. She leaves her car at BDL for anybody who has a layover there.”

  “That’s cool of her. Like, we gotta have each other’s backs.”

  This was true. The job wouldn’t have been bearable unless they looked out for one another in these small ways: picking up the slack when another attendant appeared on the verge of collapsing in the aisle, buying an extra coffee for anyone else on the four a.m. shuttle, switching sections when a drunk passenger started to get handsy. Indeed, she’d thought of Alice when Adam had asked her for a ride—though she’d also been conscious of the dread she’d felt, staring at the little red pin on the map on her phone that marked her in-laws’ Vermont address. Adam was a distraction from that.

  They passed the big Massachusetts Welcomes You sign, with its jovial white script, as if Massachusetts had written you a personal note of greeting. “I used to drive up and down this highway every weekend when I was a kid,” Adam told her. “My parents found me this piano teacher in New York, and every Saturday one of them would drive me there and back for my lesson.”

  “You have pretty good parents.”

  He made a noncommittal sound, a click of his tongue behind his teeth. “The teacher was this Russian guy, Mr. Ioffe, and he was a total fucking hard-ass. He was obsessed with posture. He had this yardstick, and before he’d let me play, he—”

  Marissa’s phone started ringing. She lifted it from the cup holder by her knee: Robbie. She looked at Adam. “Can you not talk for a minute?” He made a compliant zipping gesture across his lips.

  She answered, held the phone against her shoulder as she drove. “Hey,” she said evenly—not hostile, but not unguarded, either.

  “Hey,” Robbie said. “Hi.”

  “I’m on the way. I had trouble finding the car.”

  “No, it’s okay.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’m so over fighting with you, Izzy.”

  His use of the pet nickname confirmed that hostilities really had ceased. She felt her shoulders slacken. “Me, too.”

  “We’re good?”

  “Yeah, we’re good.” These were the words of reassurance they gave each other after every fight, gave each other more and more lately. But didn’t that mean they were worth less and less? She concluded she didn’t care. “I’m so fucking tired, Robbie,” she told him, quietly, though there was little hope of Adam not overhearing.

  “You get a chance to nap or anything?”

  “Not since yesterday.”

  “You’re a soldier, girl.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said.

  “In other news,” he continued, “guess who turned up this morning? Laila.”

  “I thought she was in Germany.”

  “Hence the surprise.”

  Laila was Robbie’s younger sister. Marissa had never felt strongly about her, one way or the other, but something (everything) about her bothered Robbie. Anyway, Marissa was more than happy to be his ally today. “So, what, she just flew in from Berlin?” she asked, feigning exasperation.

  “Got in last night, slept at the house in Cambridge, drove up this morning to surprise us. If you’d seen my dad’s face when she walked in. I seriously thought he was going to cry. Which would have been a first. Then cue a solid hour of her describing her NGO’s heroic efforts on behalf of mankind. The only thing that amazes me is that Laila’s been in therapy since she was eleven, and no one’s ever pointed out to her that she’s a narcissist?”

  “Hang in there,” Marissa told him. “I’ll be there soon.”

  “Yeah, when do you think you’ll get here?”

  “An hour, I think. I have to drop off”—she glanced at Adam—“another flight attendant. But they live right on the way.”

  She heard some muffled talk on Robbie’s side of the phone. “Um, Izzy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “My mom wants to talk to you.”

  Her shoulders stiffened again. “Robbie, I’m driving, I should—”

  “Marissa? Marissa, it’s Roz,” she heard her mother-in-law say.

  “Happy Thanksgiving, Roz,” she said as warmly as she could manage. Fuck me, she thought.

  “No—I’ll be a minute, just shut—shut the door,” Marissa heard Roz saying. “Marissa?”

  “I’m here, Roz.”

  “Marissa, Robbie and I had a long talk last night.” On the steering wheel, the backs of Marissa’s hands were turning white with the strength of her grip. Her mother-in-law was five foot two, Jewish, a divorce attorney, one of the best known in the state; she’d married Robbie’s father, six foot three, black, the son of a famous civil rights lawyer, after they met at Harvard Law School. So there were plenty of things about Roz that Marissa could admire: her achievements, her independence, her strength of character. And Marissa found she needed to remind herself of these things often whenever they spoke.

  “Robbie opened up to me, son to mother.” Marissa was feeling nauseous again. “You two are having problems? Well, guess what? That’s what marriage is. You thought it’d be all sunshine and rainbows? There’s lean years and fat, that’s life, honey.”

  “No, that’s a good point, Roz, but I need to watch out for my exit, so—”

  “You think my marriage has been a walk in the park? There was a time, and Robbie didn’t know this, but I told him last night, and now I’m telling you: There was a time, right after Laila was born, when I moved out. For two weeks I slept on the couch in my office. The bottom line is, Leo and I had a decision to make. And guess what? We stuck it out. And that’s what made our marriage as strong as it is today. You know how long Leo and I have been married? Do you know, Marissa?”

  “Um, maybe . . .”

  “Forty years in June. You don’t make it forty years without getting through some times. You hear what I’m saying? Now, honey. I understand you and your mom aren’t close.”

  “Did Robbie say that?” She worried she was pulling on the steering wheel so hard it might crack off in her hands.

  “That’s reality, so why hide it? But I want you to trust me, Marissa. I want you to feel you can confide in me. Can you try to do that?” Roz was too savvy to wait for Marissa’s answer. “Tell me something: Does my son make you happy? Woman to woman, you know what I’m asking, in the important ways, does my son make you happy?”

  “Roz . . . Roz, I . . .”

  “Well, you make him happy. That’ll never be the issue, I can assure you of that. You hearing me, sweetheart?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, surrendering, just letting it happen, the way you had to when a passenger began screaming at you about every detail of their horrible day of travel, starting with the cab ride to the airport.

  “You make my son happy,” Roz was saying, “and let me tell you something, I’ve been around a lot of marriages. A lot of good ones, and plenty of bad ones. And you know what’s true, almost without exception? If the man wants the marriage to be saved, the marriage can be saved. That may not be PC, and God knows I’ve shed more blood for feminism than most, but I’m telling you what I’ve experienced, firsthand. And sweetheart, Robbie wants it to work. My son would give his right arm for it to work.

  “Did you know, when Robbie was born,” she continued, “I took a whole year off? With Laila, there was the nanny, I was back at the firm full-time two weeks later. But with Robbie, my first, I was always there for him when he was an infant. So maybe he needs a little more attention, he’s a sensitive boy, there’s no point denying that, and if I’m to blame, okay. When you’re a mother, you’ll understand. But you never need to question how much
he loves you. That’s all I wanted to say. Okay, sweetheart? You understand how much my boy loves you?”

  “Yes, Roz, I do.”

  “That’s my girl. Now, could you meet him halfway on certain things? Probably. But that’s not for me to say. That’s the two of you, and it’s not my place. But if you could meet him halfway, say, being more affectionate, remember, Jews and the African American community, we are talking about two very extroverted and physically expressive—”

  Marissa was tempted to drive headlong into the guardrail. “Okay, Roz, can you put Robbie back on, my—”

  “I’m done, I’m all done,” Roz assured her. “One day you and I will have a glass of wine and I’ll tell you some things about Leo—well, anyway, did Robbie tell you Laila surprised us? So it’ll be a great day. I’ll see you soon, dear.”

  Marissa heard shuffling with the phone. “Sorry,” was the first thing Robbie said.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Robbie.”

  “I said I was sorry!”

  “What did you tell her?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know, she’s my mom,” he mumbled.

  “You’re a thirty-year-old man!” She didn’t care what Adam heard.

  “C’mon, Izzy, I was upset, I needed to talk about it.”

  “What did you say about my mother?”

  “She wasn’t at the wedding. It’s not like it’s some big secret you guys don’t get along.”

  “‘Don’t get along,’ Robbie?” she hissed.

  “I was speaking generally! Look, we’re on the same side, okay?”