Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  Atta girl.

  Twenty minutes later, she was wrapped in a towel and standing at the sink, brushing her teeth at the sink furiously for the second time that day. Robbie was naked and loving it—dancing like a bee showing the others where the honey was, his cock flapping back and forth. Men were so simple, she thought, spitting water and toothpaste into the sink and starting to brush again. It took so little to make them happy; only, it didn’t last.

  As she brushed, he came up behind her, kissed her on the neck. “I needed that,” he said. “We needed that.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said dryly, working the toothbrush in her mouth.

  “Want me to get you back?”

  “I need to see your parents in a minute.” And it took her considerably longer than a minute to get off, and then she’d have to shower again . . .

  “After, then. I’ll give you something to think about when you’re on that flight,” he added in a joking whisper.

  She guessed they’d both be so stuffed later all they’d do would be pass out on the bed—which sounded just fine to her—but she told him, “It’s a date.”

  He kissed her neck again and danced over to the toilet, kicked up the lid with his foot, started to piss, humming. She felt sick. She dropped the toothbrush in the sink, grabbed its sides, squeezed her eyes closed. “You all right?” he asked over the thrum of his urine.

  She felt like her stomach was trying to climb up toward her throat.

  “Just . . . light-headed,” she managed, swallowing down bile.

  “You gotta get more sleep, Izzy,” he told her. Then, a moment later, “Didn’t you puke the other morning?”

  “Delia had a stomach bug, I think I caught it from her.” The nausea passed. The lie had come so quickly, so naturally. She opened her eyes—she hadn’t wiped the condensation off the mirror, could only make out the contours of her face, globs and splotches in the dripping gray sheen on the glass. After she had the abortion, she’d never tell him another lie, she promised herself. Or was that a lie, too? It didn’t matter. You swallowed as much bile as you had to. She repeated Delia’s words to herself: He never has to know. She picked up the toothbrush and started brushing again.

  “Did I tell you I finished the latest draft of the screenplay?” he said, shaking the last drops of piss from his dick.

  “Yeah?” she said, doing her best to sound impressed.

  “Yeah, Tuesday night.”

  “So now what?” she asked, looking at him over her shoulder. He lifted one foot in the air, flushed the toilet with his toes.

  “On Monday I’ll go over to the copy place, have new bound copies made, then give it to Zach and those guys to read. Get their notes, see where I’m at. It might need one more rev. I’m still waiting for that agent guy to call me back.” She nodded, smiled around the toothbrush, returned to the sink, and spat. “What?” he said.

  “What?” she answered.

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  They were back at the edge of the chasm, staring down into all they knew the other one was thinking. “Nothing,” she said. “That’s great news, Robbie.”

  There was a pause. “Okay, then,” he finally answered. And then he walked out of the bathroom.

  And there you had it: Just like that, all the goodwill of the day—the smile at seeing each other, holding one another on the bed, the blow job in the shower—it had all evaporated. They didn’t even need to have the fight anymore. Just knowing the fight was there to be had was enough. She could walk out of the bathroom and they would have the same argument they always had—about money: the problem that encompassed all their other problems or was merely the canary in the coal mine of a marriage that was all out of goodwill.

  She’d come out of the bathroom, he would have his jeans on, begin with something like, “Is it wrong for me to expect you to be happy when I accomplish something?”

  She’d sit down on the bed in her towel, wearily—trying to show him, in the way she sat down, just how weary she was. “I am happy for you.”

  Sharp and accusatory, “Is that true?”

  And then, running out of patience—from the flights, the day, from all the times she’d been forced to give the same reassurances—she’d reply with, “I’m sorry, Robbie, but how many drafts of that screenplay have you written this year?”

  He’d answer through flat lips, chin pushed out, his eyebrows forming a spastic V between his eyes, showing her the effort it took him not to lose his temper: “I’ve explained this to you. It is a process.”

  “Okay. That’s fine. But all I want to know is—”

  “You make me say this a million and fucking one times—”

  “—when the process ends!”

  “Jesus Christ . . .” Dismissive, like she was an idiot.

  “What about your short?” Because he’d made her mad now.

  “Honestly, Marissa, just don’t.”

  “You were working on that short for months. You spent months on your laptop editing it.”

  “What do you want me to say!” Defensive, indignant, swinging his hurt feelings like a cudgel. “It was a shit project! Sometimes you find that out the hard way!”

  “You didn’t even submit it to the festivals!”

  “Yes, because it was shit. You think it’s a good strategy to send around bad work? That wouldn’t be very smart, would it, Marissa?”

  You shared your insecurities with people you loved—why? For reassurance, for protection. Because you believed you could trust them never to turn those insecurities against you. And while he had her stunned, “You knew what I wanted to do with my life. I told you that a long time ago.”

  “A long time ago I was twenty. Now I’m thirty-one! I want to have a family, Robbie, I want to have the freedom to—”

  “Jesus, here we go again. You had expectations, Marissa, when we got married? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  And here, annoyed by the absurdity of the accusation, of what he was implying (or maybe feeling somewhere that what he was implying was not quite as absurd as she wished to think), here all the Russell and Syracuse and Needham in her would vanish, and only Cavano would be left. Which is to say, she would lose her temper. As loud as she could: “My expectation was that my husband would get a fucking paycheck at least once in his life! I’m such a dumb bitch, right, Robbie, because I care about paying the rent?”

  “Like we’d ever had a problem paying the rent. You are being hysterical.”

  “I don’t want to take money from your parents!”

  “Right, you want to be independent.”

  “I do want to be independent!” Screaming now.

  He’d be pressing his fists into his temples, like he was trying to squeeze his contempt or disgust or whatever it was out of his eyeballs; he’d make threats that ended without the hook of consequence. “You know what, Marissa? You know what, Marissa? Sometimes I really think . . .” Or maybe he’d drop to the floor like a toddler, let out long, slow, deep groans. “All I ever wanted, all I ever wanted—”

  If the latter, and if self-restraint was still recoverable, she might hurriedly say, “I’m sorry, Robbie. I know you’re doing your best, you—”

  But it was usually too late. He’d bury his face behind his hands, sob into them, wail, “I feel so alone. I feel so alone.”

  She did, too. And how awful that was, because if their relationship had ever been anything, it was a promise that neither of them would ever feel that way again.

  Had they just been too young when they got married? Sometimes she thought so. If he’d believed she’d always be content waitressing while he got the odd freelance job and worked on his screenplays, it was probably because for many years, she had been. What had changed? Something biological—her body screaming at her to have a kid? No, she suspected that in the end, the problem was all the things that hadn’t changed, and could never change: the differences between them, the way they’d been raised, what they thought about money, what t
hey thought about themselves. Marissa had never changed.

  “Fuck,” Robbie said.

  Startled, she turned from the mirror, almost slipped on the damp floor. He was still naked, staring at her from the doorway. “You look like you saw a fucking ghost.”

  She nodded. “I really am happy. About your screenplay.” It might do them no more good than throwing a penny in a fountain, but you had to try.

  Something tightened briefly in his face, then softened. “Thanks, Izzy. I know you are.” Izzy: She wanted to cry again. Instead, she rubbed her hand all over the skin of her face, like she was trying to rub out the fight they hadn’t had.

  “Will you get my bag from the car? The keys are in my coat.”

  “You got it.” She watched through the bathroom door as he pulled on a pair of boxers and jeans, took a T-shirt from his bag, pulled it over his head.

  “Robbie,” she said as he was sticking his left arm through the T-shirt’s sleeve. He turned around. “You know how you say sometimes you don’t know how to make me happy?” He nodded a little. “You shouldn’t say that. You do make me happy. We’re good.”

  He smiled a little. “I know we are. You’re tired,” he added, sympathetic, consoling. “We gotta find some time for you to get some sleep.” He winked at her. “We’re so good.”

  She managed a smile; he went out into the hall, closing the bedroom door behind him. She left the bathroom and dropped down on the bed again, not bothering to lift the towel as it fell open at her back. She felt a sort of carousel in her forehead of all the things she might feel, think, but found she was too tired to take hold of any particular one—fear and hope, sadness and guilt, resistance and surrender, rising up and down, repeating, repeating. Her eyes fell on Robbie’s laptop, sitting on the bedside table. She sat up, the towel falling to her thighs, opened it, typed in his password—a vestige of trust that seemed to do them little good. She stared at the screen for a moment, then remembered and typed “kiss and kill” into the search field.

  The page popped full of links: reviews, interviews, articles. Adam was right, this did look like success to her. She picked an article at random and scrolled to the middle, not sure what she was looking for. “Warshaw’s notoriously virtuoso if too often Byzantine synths make a strikingly PB-and-J-right pairing with Mayfield’s bell-clear vocals. You feel they’d both be better off doing something else, but for as long as they’re together, there’s plenty to enjoy.” Marissa didn’t find this terribly enlightening. She went back to the search results, clicked on a video. A much younger version of Adam appeared on the screen—singing, playing a keyboard, a brightness in his eyes she would have noticed even if it hadn’t been so entirely absent in the person she’d met that day. And onstage beside him was a young woman playing guitar—slender, her hair dyed silver, with striking, elfin features, and great round eyes. She really was beautiful. The sound was muted, and Marissa didn’t bother turning it on. She just watched this happier, healthier, in all ways more alive Adam, watched the ethereal woman next to him—watched as they played and sang and bopped around onstage at some outdoor festival, the crowd swaying and dancing and smiling. She thought of all the things that had once and maybe still bound her and Robbie together—trivial, essential: the sense of not belonging in their own families; a willingness to listen; an instinct to comfort; sex, in-jokes, Mexican food, Harry Potter movies . . .

  On the screen, Adam and Johanna played and sang silently. It was like an act of bravery encased in amber.

  Laila gave Adam a tour of the house: the media room in the basement with the leather recliners and the projector and the popcorn machine; the chef’s kitchen with the wood-block island and eight-foot refrigerators and Fred heating dishes in three ovens; the dining room with the salvaged Brazilian rosewood dining table, already set with the crystal and the china and a centerpiece overflowing with orange roses and chrysanthemums. Roz had gone into the master bedroom, Robbie and Marissa were in one guest bedroom, Leo was in his office, so Laila elected to skip most of the ground floor. She led Adam up the stairway at the back of the house into a lofted room with exposed beams, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking wooded hills rolling down to a frozen lake. Instruments adorned one wall of the room: a Gibson J-200, a lovely humpbacked mandolin with ivory inlays, a cream-colored alto sax, a battered mbira. Opposite these were custom oak shelves, filled end to end with records in sleeves. A pair of leather recliners sat on a Turkish rug in the middle of the room; a turntable on a black pillar stood nearby, beside a cabinet of speaker equipment.

  “This is the conservatory,” Laila told him.

  “Where Colonel Mustard killed Miss Scarlet with the lead pipe?” Adam answered.

  Laila laughed. “I know, it’s so Roz and Leo.”

  Somehow, he managed to notice the most compelling thing in the room last, a gorgeous six-foot Steinway grand in a corner by the window, fallboard up, lid up, brass pedals polished, the black maple of the cabinet shining like onyx: ready for business. Adam hesitated, then couldn’t resist. He walked over and with his index finger pressed down middle C. Sound filled the instrument like light fills a lamp—a half-step flat. Adam scowled. With the same finger, he pressed A above middle C. He could taste the sourness of the vibrations at the back of his throat. “Christ,” he said. “When was the last time this was tuned?”

  “Nobody really plays it,” Laila answered. “Leo made Robbie and me take lessons when we were kids, but we both sucked. It’s essentially ornamental. Do you play?”

  “Used to.”

  “Go on, then,” she teased.

  He pushed down the sostenuto pedal with his sneaker, feeling a sort of mournful sympathy for the piano. All this craftsmanship and beauty and the instrument was as good as pickled in formaldehyde; or worse, actually—rotting neglected on a shelf. Maybe he should sit down and play, show her what this thing had been built to do. Even years out of tune, it was a better instrument than many he’d played on. He could just work C major, walking bass line, like he used to do for hours and hours at the last bars he worked in, when he was so blotto he could barely sit up, or pull an arpeggio-laden “Round Midnight” out his ass or a forty-minute “Rhapsody in Blue.” She wouldn’t know if he faked his way through half of it. He imagined striking the keys so ferociously the piano would break apart before he was done: the strings snapping and popping like gunfire, the top board slipping from the prop and cracking in half, the legs buckling on the casters, the ivory chipping and splitting, the keys pounded at last into dust. He imagined playing the piano to death, pretty much. He knew he was angry, only he wasn’t sure at who. Kristen? All of them? At Stone Manor, they’d have insisted he was mad primarily at himself, and they were usually right about these things. He wiped the dust off the keys with his sleeve, gently lowered the fallboard over them. This wasn’t a day to be crossing the lines he’d drawn for himself. “All I remember is ‘Michael Row Your Boat to Shore.’” The skin around his eyes felt warm with fatigue, but he could keep bullshitting like this all day if he had to. It was a skill he’d honed with practice. At Stone Manor, they encouraged positivity.

  “Laila,” a low, disembodied voice said out of nowhere.

  Adam looked around, confused. “The fuck?”

  Laila lifted her toe (her feet at the bottom of her sweatpants were bare, the nails painted a lavender shade) toward the wall behind Adam: a little round intercom was set at the top of the stairs. “It’s so you can find people in the house without looking for them. I call it the ‘voice of God’ system.”

  “Laila,” the voice repeated.

  “You going to answer?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I don’t play that surveillance state shit.”

  “Me, neither,” Adam agreed, though not really clear what she meant. It was pretty obvious she was smarter than him. He also hadn’t failed to notice that from her blond-stained afro down to her ten painted toes, Laila was a good-looking girl: cute face, cute body, if a little on the broad-shouldered side. But he
figured if he restricted himself to flirting, he wouldn’t be breaking his vow to Marissa to keep things cool. Anyway, where could the flirting go, since he was pretending to be gay, too?

  He walked over to the shelves, began inspecting the record collection. Each shelf had a little brass label screwed beneath it: “Classical A–L,” “Pop/Rock A–L,” and so on.

  “Leo keeps the really expensive ones in a fireproof safe in Boston,” Laila told him.

  “They probably can’t hurt anybody there.” She laughed again. “And to think I used to keep my records in egg crates.”

  “Yeah, my dad gets pretty anal about his things. It’s one of the ironies of the modern American liberal, how progressivism and consumerism aren’t seen as mutually exclusive.”

  “Totally.” His eyes moved quickly over the Pop/Rock K’s, then shifted to the spines of the other albums. It was like anybody’s dad’s collection: the titles conventional, predictable, uninspired. You had your Pet Sounds and your complete Beatles, your Hendrix and your Joni Mitchell and your Creedence. So there was a first pressing of Exile on Main Street—whoop-de-doo. Some of the stuff in the Soul/R & B section was more enticing. He slid one off the shelf he decided he wouldn’t mind hearing.

  “So, that still might cost two thousand dollars,” Laila warned him.

  “You can trust me,” he told her. And yes, Adam might shatter the family coffeepot on Thanksgiving morning—fuck, he might shatter the Holy Grail if it turned out to be made of glass and his mind was elsewhere when Jesus passed it to him. But he wouldn’t shatter a record, not by carelessness. He pulled the cardboard sleeve out of its plastic covering, slid out the disc and freed it from its paper sheath—felt the disc’s weight as he pressed its edges between his two palms, turned its ebony face in the light, inspecting the concentric ripples on the surface. Not a scratch. Good for Leo. Adam hadn’t even managed to sell his records—just left them in the last apartment he’d shared with Johanna. He brought the record to the stereo, placed it on the turntable, wiped its face with the synthetic cloth tucked on top of the receiver.