Another shrug.
The shrug had become a signature gesture. The shrug, the slump. Sometimes a limp. “Are you hurt?” “No.” Elisa began to get the idea that Sam was feigning injury, not for their sake but for his own, for the small pleasure of privately comforting himself. She shared this theory with Derek. He seemed faintly repulsed by the idea.
Lorraine said, “It’s genes. Nothing to be done. Luckily,” she added, patting Derek’s hand, “our family has never been moody.”
Moody. Elisa’s father used to call it “blue.” “Your mother’s a bit blue today.” “Poor Lisa,” he said during meals, when Elisa let her teenage hair fall into her face, and ground her teeth, and gripped the seat of her chair with both hands as though, if she concentrated hard enough, she might be able to fly away on it. “Poor Lisa is feeling blue.”
Sam was not blue. He wasn’t moody. He was depressed.
Elisa is exhausted from her weekend of gaming and the session with Amos. She finds a picnic table and sits down at it. It’s astonishing that it hasn’t rained yet; the clouds are heavy and black and the lake surface is lashed by the wind. She will sit here until the first drops fall. She imagines herself making a run for it, hands over her head. It seems important not to take cover now—she wants to be pushed to shelter.
Poor Lisa is feeling blue. Though when she reflects upon the way she actually feels today, it comes to her as no visible color, nothing as natural as sky. She feels like something blinding and artificial and impossible to look at directly. Ultrasomething. Infrasomething. She closes her eyes hard and hears the muscles tightening in her head. Betsy the physicist seems less real to her today, the possibility of madness more palpable.
When she thinks about that last year, before the accident, what she remembers is the desperate, guilty feeling of her love for Sam beginning to fray around the edges. The component of her love that was pity, curdling and turning into a kind of disdain. Resentment at his weakness. At the ways he was like her—or, rather, the ways he was like the parts of herself she disliked. His willingness to give himself over to other people’s ideas of him, his willingness to give up.
She stayed up late with him while he lay sweating, and smelling of despair—she sat hunched over with her elbows on her knees, trying to find the right combination of words that would make him talk to her. What is it? Did Silas say something to you? Sam would talk—he wanted to talk—but he wouldn’t talk about his brother. Instead he spoke in abstractions, in philosophical conundrums. And not very interesting ones. Why, he wanted to know, should he get up in the morning and go to school when nobody cared whether he showed up or not? (But your father and I care, Lisa told him, over and over. As if that would matter.) What was the point of it all? (She could not pretend to have an answer. The only one she knew was: the pursuit and expression of love. And she couldn’t say this to her son, who loved no one and, to hear him tell it, was loved by no one but her and Derek.) Why did people like Silas when Silas was a dick who mocked and belittled them? Why did those same people turn around and mock and belittle him, Sam? And why didn’t Silas tell them to stop?
She doesn’t remember what she said. But the answer, of course, was that power attracted and weakness repelled. At times, that power could manifest itself as charm, as intelligence: as the positive attributes that people pretended to seek in one another. But it wasn’t the manifestations that mattered, it was the power.
(Elisa remembers better what she wanted to say than what she actually did say: Goddammit, Sam, you’re older and bigger than he is. Don’t be a fucking pussy.)
Silas was powerful. And Elisa respected him for it. His evident indifference to, even disgust for, his own mother: she respected it. She respected it because she felt it herself, about her own mother, who liked to preempt criticism of her weakness by calling attention to it, with feigned pride. “Lisa’s toes have been poking out of her shoes for three months and I didn’t even notice!” “I forgot, completely forgot, to make Lisa lunch!” “I was so thoroughly drunk that night I had to send Lisa to the corner for cigarettes, if you can believe that.”
It was true that at the time Elisa liked it. She liked the squirrelly little threesome she made with her parents—the shield of nondescript scruffiness and cultural superiority they suspended between themselves and the world. She felt proud to be her parents’ daughter: she thought there was something real, some empirically verifiable quality, that justified their stance of amused condescension against other people. Now she knows it was fear.
It wasn’t until she was in college, when she began to meet confident people, powerful people, that she understood. It was Derek’s confidence, his ability to approach others to ask for what he wanted, to put the past behind him with finality, that crystallized her desire: he was the antithesis of her parents.
Of course Sam was not Elisa’s mother. Elisa herself wasn’t even like her, not really, and there was as much Derek in Sam as there was Elisa. But it was impossible not to see him as a manifestation of Gemma Macalaster, casually exerting her influence from afar. Or, rather: exuding, seeping. She was like a fog, like the mildly acrid cloud of cigarette smoke that had always surrounded her, that followed you out of the apartment in your clothes and hair and was with you wherever you went. She could still smell it sometimes, or believed she could, when she was drifting, finally, off to sleep: she could smell her mother’s cigarettes in the pillowcase, in her nightgown, as if the old woman had visited just long enough to lie here and imprint her particular brand of passivity on the bedclothes.
She didn’t want to think of her mother when Sam slouched off to bed, uncomforted, unconvinced. But she did, she did. And Silas, though he was, she understood, a deeply flawed young man, reminded her of nothing so much as the boys she loved, the bad boys her mother loathed, and the hard and obsessive parts of herself that she most valued.
She is pulled out of her thoughts by a change in the light. Behind her, from the west: sunshine. The wind is steady and slow now, and the clouds have moved on. The sleeping man on the beach is gone and families are arriving, laying blankets on the grass, unpacking baskets. It didn’t rain after all. It isn’t going to rain.
33.
Derek begins to seem slightly afraid of her. He has stopped asking questions and doesn’t attempt to initiate sex. Elisa doesn’t either. She feels as though her existence is a cup filled to the brim; she is trying to stand very still until her trip. For this reason she doesn’t accompany him when he goes to see Amos on Monday.
When he gets home he looks at her with confusion and distaste.
“You’re thinner.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you looked good. Before.”
She shrugs. Did Amos tell him what they talked about? Does she care if he did? She knows she should tell him herself. But she is afraid to.
Derek says, “And you’re not wearing makeup anymore.”
“No,” she says. “You’re just noticing now?” He doesn’t respond, and after a moment he goes upstairs to change his clothes.
There is a part of Elisa, an increasingly prominent part, that wants to follow him, to undress him, to make him love the woman she is turning into, which is to say the real her, the her of the other life. And there is a part of her that wants to push him away for good. The strange thing is, if she could have the Derek of the other life right now, the one from whom she is estranged, the hard one, the one whose love for her is rote at best, vestigial, she would love him, she would take him back and love him. But she does not want to let herself love this Derek, the one who has chosen her over their children.
She resists the temptation. She doesn’t follow.
Instead she e-mails Sam to tell him when she’ll be arriving—the trip is in a couple of weeks. He writes back within the hour: I don’t think you should come.
Why not? she replies. But he doesn’t answer.
Wednesday morning, still half asleep, she reaches out and wakes Derek by stroking his arm. It’s five
thirty. He gasps, leaps out of bed, then stands facing the window in a kind of ready crouch.
She sits up. “What is it?”
He turns and says, “I was dreaming.” But he doesn’t get back into bed, he stands there staring at her, blinking, still in a state of near-violent attention. In the gloom, backlit by dim gray sky, he looks like some kind of animal, or worse, something half human. For a moment she actually hates him.
That day she takes a long lunch and uses her new bus pass to go downtown. She walks the few blocks to the frame shop. Larry isn’t behind the counter. But on the low shelf beneath the frame samples lies a small flat package, wrapped in brown paper, with a yellow sticky note attached, and she knows it’s her picture. She asks the girl who’s there, “Is Larry in today?”
“He’s on lunch break.”
“I’ll come back,” Elisa says, and walks back toward the bus station.
But it’s lunchtime, after all. She goes into a Korean café. Was this place here in the other life? She doesn’t remember it. The worlds are blurring—she is slowly merging with the woman she was before, and she can’t remember all the differences. The thought fills her with desperation. Soon they will be so intertwined she’ll never get them apart. She sits down by the window. A crack runs through the glass. She stares through it at the people passing, the buses collecting and releasing passengers.
A man is crossing the street toward her, carrying a plastic drugstore bag. It’s Larry.
“Can I help you?” says a voice.
There’s a woman standing beside her, holding a notepad. Elisa stammers out an order. Larry walks in the door of the café and sits down at a table across the room.
“Anything to drink?”
“Just water.”
She has to crane her neck to see him. The café is almost empty—a silent couple in the corner, a man text-messaging over the remains of his meal. She shifts herself to the other chair at her table, in order to face Larry. He is reading the menu, though not for long. He speaks to the waitress for just a moment. A regular. Then he takes a magazine out of his drugstore bag and begins to read it.
He won’t look up. She’s sure of that. His ability to concentrate is tremendous. It’s irritating to go for a walk with him, because he doesn’t want to stop and look at anything, he just wants to walk. But when that concentration is trained on her, he sees nothing else. The intensity of his attention, in fact, can be overwhelming. Which is why he’s good to have as a lover. But not necessarily to be married to.
The magazine is about music—a jazz magazine. Does she already know this—that this is an interest of his? Perhaps this is one of the things that’s different.
She could go over there. If she waits until the food comes, it will be awkward. She could sit down and ask to join him. If he’s the Larry she knows, he will be disoriented, will appear annoyed. Then he’ll capitulate, adjust, accept. Enjoy.
Yet she must force herself to gather her satchel and glass of water and cross the room. She tries to convince herself that her reluctance emanates from anxiety. That she wants him so much, it is making her lose her nerve. Larry looks up.
“Mind if I join you?”
He is definitely surprised. “I—do we know each other?” But before he has even finished saying it, he recognizes her. His expression is one of puzzlement and slight relief.
“Elisa Brown. From the shop.”
“Sure. You didn’t give us your contact information.”
“I just stopped at the shop, just now.”
“Good. So you like it?”
“Ah—no, I didn’t—I didn’t pick it up. You weren’t there—I didn’t want to explain myself.”
He takes a quick look at the door, then back at Elisa.
“I was already here,” she explains. “Sitting by the window. And recognized you.”
She thinks, Why are you making this so goddamn difficult? She wants, very badly, her real life right now. Where all this has already been accomplished, and sex is already being had. He says, “Of course. I’m sorry—please sit down.”
She sits. He closes his magazine with some displeasure and tucks it back into his bag. Then he faces her squarely and folds his hands in front of him.
Even sitting still, he appears agile, efficient. His features are fine, the eyes alert. He isn’t her type, isn’t what she once thought was her type, which is men like Derek—larger, broader, more solid, as though they’re made of the same thing all the way through. Their strength obvious in their posture, their movements. Larry is more like a machine, a collection of moving parts. You can see every muscle in his face. He could be an adventurer, a traveler. Not that he actually is. In fact he’s a homebody. He lives in a tiny spartan house wedged between the lake and the train tracks, west of the park. Or at least he did, he’s supposed to.
She isn’t sure what she wants to say to him.
“I hope I’m not interrupting.”
“Not at all. I can read anytime.”
“You like jazz?”
He raises an eyebrow and it seems to pull up the opposite corner of his mouth. “I didn’t always. About six months ago I started thinking I needed a new interest. So I began to study jazz. I bought a turntable and amplifier—for some reason I thought I should learn via records, rather than CDs.”
The waitress comes out with Elisa’s food, looks temporarily puzzled, finds her, brings the meal to their table. Elisa thanks her.
“You were saying.”
“Yes—I’ve become preoccupied with jazz recordings. On records, I mean.” This is characteristic—interrupted and asked to continue, he will do so without the slightest hesitation. As though to be offended is beneath him. “There’s something about the physicality of it, I think. The needle dragging in the groove.”
She had used to find this kind of conversation pretentious; Larry taught her to enjoy it. She’s missed it these past few weeks. But now it is irritating her all over again. She sits on her hands and draws a breath.
“You should go ahead and eat,” he says.
“What did you get?”
He smiles. “The same.”
34.
They walk to the frame shop together and Elisa pays for her frame. She doesn’t open it, and he doesn’t ask her to. Unspoken between them is almost everything. He’s single. He saw her wedding ring.
“We should do that again,” he says, as she leaves.
She hesitates before saying, “We should.” The hesitation is almost, not quite, enough to be embarrassed by. She is bewildered by the effort it is requiring to achieve the proper mindset for infidelity. It seems important to want him. We should. A necessary obligation.
She returns late to the office and nobody cares. At her desk, she unwraps the photo. It’s a nice frame. Silas leers out of it—it’s as if he’s in a rock band, posing for an album cover. The cocky self-satisfaction. The pleasure of knowing that the family has shaped itself around him. (Stop that: He’s just a teenager. Of course he’s cocky. So were you.) She puts the picture back into the drawer it came from.
That last year, the year before he died, Elisa and Derek considered separation, seriously enough to make plans, to announce them even. They would separate the children, as well—in fact that was the entire point, or so they told themselves. Derek actually volunteered to take Silas. It was like him to do this. He was better at managing his aversion to Silas than he was his pity for Sam. Silas had begun to display the crowing satisfaction of the winner of a card game. He tidied his messy room, packed up some old things, had a friend drive him to Goodwill to drop it all off. (Maybe it was Ricky Samuelson, his killer. Maybe in the van he died in.) He was preparing for the next phase of his life, one he had created for himself, that he appeared enthusiastic about and eager to get under way. And Sam resigned himself to Elisa with depressing immediacy, looking up from the book he was reading, nodding once at her tear-stained face before returning to the book.
They had said too much, she and Derek. They had poi
nted out each other’s shortcomings, using the children as illustrations. They indicated what qualities of each parent had been brought to bear upon the suffering of each son, which problems might have been avoided but for which habit of being, which blind spot. And each had accused the other of the very thing they feared the most about themselves: that they regarded their own child as frightening and repulsive.
Rule 5. Do not use the children to attack your partner.
They changed their minds, of course. Self-disgust was punishment enough. Silas made his disappointment known, and so, cruelly, did Sam, though it barely had a chance to register before Silas’s death rendered it all meaningless. Did it happen in this life, too—the decision to separate, the announcement, the retraction? It is too exhausting even to speculate.
She peers at the clock in the corner of her computer screen. Two forty. She’s glad it’s still early. She doesn’t want to go home. She stalks Silas online for a little while, does a web search for his sig line, trying to find another online iteration of him.
It would be a relief to be mad, wouldn’t it? To accept Amos’s diagnosis and embrace this notion, that the events she remembers with such intensity and conviction are the products of an imagination broken by guilt and grief. She could submit to more therapy, to medication. She would be given paid time off from her job. She could wave goodbye as Derek went to work in the morning, spend the day catching up on her reading, allow herself to be treated gently and a little fearfully, as any sick person would be. She could put that weight back on and give herself over to Derek’s carnal needs. And her own, for that matter.
What does a crazy person look and sound like? Certainly not like this—showing up on time at the office every morning, staying until five, sending and receiving e-mail, taking meetings in clean and tidy clothes. No—she wants to be, she feels like, a person to whom something inexplicable has happened. If there is madness, it belongs to the universe, not Elisa Brown. The mind is not enough to explain it.
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