Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” the stranger said uncertainly. “Can I take your coat?”

  “Yeah, thanks, man,” Adam answered, walking in.

  “And if you wouldn’t mind taking off your shoes,” he requested; he spoke with a faint but detectable accent. “There is mud.”

  “No, there isn’t, but sure, you got it,” Adam replied, pulling off his sneakers. “So did you and Marissa meet when you were, like, a foreign exchange student?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Marissa said, interrupting this as she walked in. “That isn’t Robbie.”

  “I’m Fred,” the young man said helpfully.

  “So you’re a friend of Robbie’s, or . . . ?” Adam asked.

  Fred shook his head. “I came from Craigslist.”

  “Craigslist?” Adam responded, as if more confused than ever.

  “He means they hired him off Craigslist to help out today,” Marissa said, the needle of worry expanding into something more like a drill.

  But in the next moment, Adam was all smiles, and Fred was all smiles, too. He had a certain charm, she reassured herself; it didn’t last long, but maybe they’d be out the door this afternoon before it wore off. She lifted her hair behind her head as she took off her trench coat, she straightened her blouse, she told herself she’d seen them a thousand times and either they were accepting of her poor-white-Boston ass by now or they weren’t. Her heart thumping its way out of her chest wouldn’t change anything. But she couldn’t help remembering again (it was one of those memories that only got more embarrassing with time) the first time Robbie told her his parents wanted to meet her, had invited her to join them at a ramen restaurant—and ramen to her was twenty-five-cent slabs sold at Stop & Shop. So she’d been confused and pissy until Robbie had explained (without condescension, to his credit) that ramen restaurants were “a thing.” This set a precedent of discomfort that had never really been broken.

  By now, Adam and Fred had started chatting away about Chinese basketball players or something. Marissa had the sudden flash of hope that meeting him today had been lucky after all—that she’d stumbled on the perfect person to bring to a potentially awkward Thanksgiving. He’d smoothed things over with the waitress—maybe he could smooth over any conflict he wasn’t responsible for. “To be honest, I don’t even think about great players, I only think about great teams. It’s not tennis, y’know?” Adam told Fred as he kicked off his shoes.

  They walked up the stairway—sanded half-log steps, latticed cedar railing—toward what was called the great room. “Let me do the explaining,” she said to Adam under her breath. She could hear a woman’s voice—rapid, assured, a touch husky: Laila. As her head rose above the level of the floor, the first thing she saw was Mash, the Russell family dog, leaping from Laila’s arms. Marissa was not a fearful person, but dogs fucking terrified her, even this floppy-eared spaniel, which was yapping and growling at her as she edged up the stairs, her back against the wall.

  “Marissa!” Laila cried. She hurried across the room, lifted up the animal. “He only does that because he knows it scares you.”

  “Right . . . ,” Marissa said, watching Laila’s grip on the dog mistrustfully. Laila walked up and threw a free arm around Marissa in a hug. Marissa tried to lean her torso away from where she knew Mash’s mouth would be, but Laila was strong, willowy—ran marathons, did hot yoga. She took a step back, gave Marissa a wide-eyed, smiling examination, Mash still growling at Marissa behind his sharp little teeth. She reached up, ran her fingers through Marissa’s hair. “You don’t know how lucky you are to have follicles that obey the fundamental laws of physics.”

  “Right,” Marissa said, not sure how to respond. “You look great, too.”

  “Liar,” Laila shrugged. Her skin was the same light brown shade as Robbie’s, but where his face was square, his chin firm, her face was a long oval, crowned with a nimbus of coiled black hair, splashed on the right with blonde. She wore square, black-framed glasses, Harvard sweatpants, a faded Boyz II Men T-shirt. “I flew international yesterday, I’m not even pretending to try.”

  “At last,” Roz said from behind Laila. She was seated on the leather couch by the fireplace, wearing a (frankly gorgeous) blue-and-silver knit jacket over her stout frame, had a copy of the New Yorker in her lap, a thin, watchful smile on her lips. She got up and crossed the room; in lieu of a hug she squeezed Marissa’s biceps. “We were about to call the state police,” she said, eyeing Marissa, her look more subtle but no less probing than her daughter’s. A full foot shorter than Laila, there was no question that she was the more intimidating of the pair. “You’re still in your uniform? You came right from the plane or what?”

  “She makes it work, though,” Laila said. With fastest-gun-in-the-west quickness, she had her phone out, was taking Marissa’s picture before Marissa had time to smile or object—then was typing with her thumbs while keeping Mash in a headlock with one elbow.

  “You feeling okay, honey?” Roz asked, peering at Marissa’s face. “You look exhausted.”

  “I flew an overnight, so . . .”

  “On Insty, check it,” Laila said, holding the phone up in front of Marissa’s eyes. Marissa saw a washed-out image of herself, looking stunned and, yes, exhausted, with the caption

  Sis-in-law gourg in her uniform, per always #workingclasshero #hairenvy #familytime

  “Oh, cool,” she said to Laila. “Where’s Robbie?”

  At this point, Adam appeared behind her on the stairs. “Hey-o,” he began with a dopey wave. “Didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “Who’s this?” Roz asked.

  “Adam, he—” Marissa started.

  “I’m Adam,” Adam interrupted. “I’m a flight attendant. Marissa and I flew in together from Seattle. Roz, Laila, it is a super privilege to meet you. Okay, so, you know how you clearly have a warm and loving and accepting family? My family, not so much. Long story short, I’m gay, my family is not down with that, and honestly, they do not treat me very well. And because Marissa is the greatest woman on the planet, like seriously someone I admire, she was like, ‘Well, come over to my family’s.’ And I was like, ‘You can’t be serious.’”

  “Not serious?” Laila said, her face awash with pleased indignation. “Of course you’re eating here.”

  “Are you sure?” Adam asked. “Because I can get an Uber or something, I—”

  “First of all,” Laila declared, “Uber has not penetrated the Wantastiquet market. And second, we are not turning our back on you. Due respect, but this is the year of our Lord two thousand and fifteen: Fuck your family’s retrograde notions.”

  “Honestly?” Adam said. “Honestly, that is wonderful to hear.”

  “Are you crying, sweetie?” Roz asked Marissa, because she was squeezing the bridge of her nose with her eyes closed.

  “I’m allergic to dogs,” Marissa said, which she had mentioned at every Russell family gathering she’d attended for the last decade.

  “We’ll throw him in the closet,” Laila told her. Then she let out a bouncing, boisterous laugh. “‘In the closet!’ Right, Adam?”

  “Ha!” he laughed.

  “Roz, he’s totally eating with us, right?” Laila said to her mother.

  Roz looked Adam over. And then she shrugged. “You want to eat with us, you’ll eat.”

  “Awesome,” Adam said. “Tremendous. Fantastic.” He let out a laugh, as exuberant as Laila’s. “To feel welcome!”

  Robbie had appeared in the doorway at the back of the room; he stood leaning against the jamb with his hands shoved into the front pockets of a billowing black sweatshirt. He was several inches shorter than his sister, and was slouching, to boot, the fine features of his face locked in a look of irony and scorn. Marissa could imagine her husband skulking in doorways like this his whole childhood, almost basking in his resentment at being forgotten in the presence of his younger, taller, more outgoing sister. He grinned a little as Marissa’s eyes met his, and gave a sidelong glance at Laila—
and Marissa felt the recurrence of that tiny miracle that any marriage depends on for survival: She knew exactly what he was thinking. She passed between mother-in-law, sister-in-law, guard dog, crossed the room, and kissed him on the mouth.

  “Hi, Izzy,” he said, his hand on her hip.

  “Robbie!” Adam called. “It’s really great to finally meet you.”

  “Um, hi,” Robbie answered. “Who’re you?”

  “Marissa’s flight attendant friend,” Laila announced. “His family has a problem with his sexuality, ergo, he’s going to eat with us.”

  Robbie shot Marissa another sidelong glance at this, said, “Got it. Well, glad you’re here, dude.”

  His hand was still on her hip; she covered it with her own. “This fucking day, Robbie,” she whispered under her breath.

  “Now who is this little mutt?” Adam asked, taking the dog from Laila. Mash began licking his face with frantic affection.

  “Mutt?” Roz answered. “Take a look at his papers, then see if you want to call him a mutt.”

  “That’s Mash,” Laila explained. “It was a nickname for Art Blakey, my dad’s favorite musician. He was a sick drummer.”

  “He must be a real jazz aficionado to have heard of Art Blakey,” replied Adam, half-playful, half-sarcastic.

  “Can we go downstairs for a couple minutes?” Marissa whispered to Robbie.

  They left Adam tussling playfully with the dog, and walked down the window-lined corridor to the back stairway. “So who is that dude?” Robbie asked her.

  “Just somebody with nowhere else to be today,” she answered, glad she’d found a way not to lie. Maybe later there’d be a chance to tell him the whole truth. “Where’s your dad?”

  “Where do you think?” Robbie answered, with a note of bitterness. “His office.”

  Marissa could never fully identify with the simmering antagonism between Robbie and his dad: Whatever one of them did, the other seemed to regard it as a betrayal of some distinctly masculine obligation. But then, she’d never met her own father. The most Mona would say about him was that he was a bastard and a “full Italian,” as if this ought to be enough for Marissa to triangulate her own identity in terms of paternity. She liked to imagine him a million miles from Boston, not doing anything particularly noble or otherwise, just living a conventional life and not contacting her because Mona had never told him of Marissa’s existence. It was as good a theory as any other. In any event, if Marissa couldn’t understand precisely why Robbie found his father so vexing, the larger pattern was familiar enough: your parent as your nemesis. “That sucks,” she told him.

  “Something’s up, I don’t know,” Robbie continued. “Some agency probably wants another ten grand in appropriations or whatever.”

  “Yeah,” said Marissa, having lost interest in the subject. They turned down a hall at the bottom of the stairs, went into the bedroom the Russells called “the minaret room,” for the black-and-white photographs of minarets on the walls, taken by Roz’s father. Marissa didn’t know what a minaret was until she walked into that room. An antique wood dresser stood against one wall, twin painted lamps stood on the bedside tables, a beaten quilt lay across the king-size bed: rustic, seemed to be the idea. Robbie’s Nike gym bag was open at the foot of the bed, overflowing with clothes he’d wedged inside. She resisted the instinct to fold them, instead let herself fall sideways on the mammoth bed, curled her legs to her chest, and closed her eyes. She heard the door close, felt the mattress dip with Robbie’s weight as he sat down next to her, put his hand on her calf. “You all right?” he asked.

  “Did she have to say I look exhausted?”

  “It’s my mom being my mom.”

  “I was up all night. How am I supposed to look?”

  “She’s not a happy person,” he said, flopping back on the bed. “We were playing Boggle this morning, and Laila was talking about, I don’t know, how she doesn’t think she’ll have kids because of the water table or something, and I just mentioned how kids aren’t really our priority right now, either, and the next thing I know my mom knocked the fucking board over and walked out of the room. Loco, right?”

  This story had started what felt like a brushfire in her chest, but she ignored it, and instead pulled her legs up higher, curling deeper around herself. “Can you believe I have to fly again tonight?” she asked, indulging the self-pity.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “Just stay here.”

  “And just get fired,” she replied; attendants without decades of seniority who blew off night flights got axed, pronto.

  “I told you about that freelance gig . . .”

  She didn’t respond. She could sense the fight that was two remarks away waiting to pounce on them, like a mugger; he had to sense it, too. “Hey,” he said. He’d brought his face up to hers. “Open your eyes.” She did. She was close enough to see each individual coil of black hair in the straight line across his forehead, to see the mingling shades in his brown irises. She edged nearer to him, lifted her leg over his thighs, put her head against his chest. She spent her first two semesters at Syracuse frightened as a kitten, going nowhere but dorm, classes, library, lacrosse. She should be back in Boston, engaged to Brendan, waitressing at Legal Seafood, standing up for Caitlyn: She’d thought it every day. And then she met Robbie, who grew up with kids who were all at Harvard or Yale, who felt like the black kids didn’t get him and the white kids didn’t feel comfortable around him. But fuck if he and Marissa didn’t feel comfortable around each other. By the end of sophomore year, they were living together, and had never lived apart since. She closed her leg over his thighs. You had to know what you could live with and what you couldn’t live without. And she was sure she couldn’t live without these wordless moments of belonging.

  She felt Robbie slide his hand beneath the waist of her skirt, under the elastic of her stockings and panties, rest his hand against her tuft of pubic hair. This wasn’t him initiating, she didn’t think, it was just how he liked to sleep—with his hand there, for some reason. Men were such a collection of secret needs, secret fears. How many could you indulge? Maybe knowing that was the key to a successful marriage.

  She probably would have drifted off to sleep then, but now he was initiating, closing his fist and gently tugging the hairs, the way she liked him to sometimes. But rather than get turned on, she started a mental catalogue of all the ways she didn’t look good, feel good: her hair greasy, the fabric of her blouse stiff under her armpits, clamminess around her feet and the backs of her knees. “I should take a shower.”

  “You want company?”

  “Sure, okay.”

  They got up from the bed and went into the bathroom. Robbie locked the door behind them—another habit of his, expressing some other category of nebulous fear. They got undressed without really looking at each other, like people comfortable with each other’s nudity, or like people sharing a locker room bench, their nudity not really the point of what they were doing—she couldn’t say which. But taking off her uniform felt wonderful, as if her work day ended only just then. She’d been acting something like Adam’s flight attendant, too, it occurred to her: at his service, all morning long.

  She paused as she looked at the shower, as if it shone bright against her fatigue: a glass-walled cube in the corner of the room, tiled with black stone, a showerhead the size of a pizza fixed parallel to the floor below it. Atta girl, she heard in Adam’s voice, as if he was perched on her shoulder like the little devil in a cartoon. She was suddenly so sick of him. And she recognized that for all her lamenting of her fate and her fortune, she just might be the luckiest girl to have ever got out of the Shittier Boston Area. And all she had to do to preserve that good luck, or all her hard work, whatever you wanted to call it, was have an abortion and keep her mouth shut. Surely, better women had done worse.

  Marissa stepped into the shower first, turned the nozzle, stuck her foot under the waterfall cascading from overhead. A rain shower, they called it. Satisfie
d with its warmth, she stepped into the stream, stood with her face inclined downward, letting the water soak into her hair, feeling its tendrils get heavier and heavier on her back, shooting jetties of water down her buttocks and thighs. Her eyes closed again, she heard the door open, Robbie step in. Instinctively, she wrapped her arms around his neck, like they were dancing. She was sorry, so sorry, so sorry—only she couldn’t say it. He put his hands above her hips, by her stomach, and she had to tamp down a burst of panic: There was nothing for him to notice. It couldn’t be bigger than a grain of salt, could it?

  She heard the squirt of a bottle and he began to rub the shampoo into her hair. “I love you, Robbie,” she told him.

  “I love you, too, Izzy,” he answered, working the shampoo from her scalp down the length of her hair. It was all so tender and fragile she began to cry. He wouldn’t notice that either, with the noise and the water.

  “Why’s it been so bad between us?” she asked, like a plea.

  “I dunno. Why talk about it?”

  Fair enough. She opened her eyes, her head still bent down toward his chest. She could see her nipples pressed into the copper of his pectorals. God, how they used to fuck: gleeful, shameless, a pair of recent virgins indulging every touch and taboo they could imagine, like it was their own secret kingdom, no rules against anything. Where had that gone, that revelry in each other? It was nobody’s fault. Time passed, you got older. It happened to everyone, familiarity settling in like a fog until you stopped seeing each other.

  Why permit that, though? Didn’t you need to fight for things? Wasn’t that all she’d ever done?

  She lifted her head and pushed open the shower door with her knuckles, pulled a towel folded over a metal rod and brought it into the shower with them. As she dropped it to the tiled floor, Robbie asked her, “What’re you doing?”

  “Sucking your dick,” she answered, which sounded dumb, but she was determined. She arranged the already sopping towel underneath her knees and knelt just about exactly eye level with his erection. When she was in college there were all kinds of outlandish porno-inspired things she might have done or said at this moment to enhance the event, but none of them seemed necessary, and so she tucked her lips over her teeth and did start to suck his dick. Nostalgia blow job, she heard in her head. Apology blow job. Last hope blow job.