The Life of the World to Come
Page 8
YDF,
Fiona
Fee,
It’s been sixteen days since you left home now. Sixteen days: that’s even a little bit longer than Sinéad O’Connor sang about in “Nothing Compares 2 U,” for fuck’s sake. I don’t know where you are with any sort of certainty, but I guess, if what you said was true, then I guess it’s Los Angeles. So, I’ve been thinking lately about what it’s going to be like, these next fifty years without you. I’ve been thinking about death again, too, and I’m shaking like a child—why did it have to be this one? Why were we born into a world where such big things can go wrong? You know? We could have been born into anything and not known any better: same people, no death. Same trees, no fears. No horses, or maybe everything is a horse. You’re there, but I never was, or the reverse. That’s the thing—you can be born into anything at all. You just show up on the first day, and those are the rules of the world: proper number of horses and trees, of you and me, various laws concerning gravity, motion, biology, and time, whole preexisting histories involving endless generations of others who have already been here and gone. So why did it have to be this one? I bring this up because what I really need here is a world where I can make it be untrue that you’ve gone away. How many tries do you suppose that takes, all told? How many billions of planets will I have to wait for you to change your mind? Just please listen: I get that being you wasn’t easy; I know how much it took out of you just being the way you were. I know that better than anyone ever will. But also, I know this—I know that the things that came with that difficulty are what made you great, once. You weren’t supposed to be simple, Fiona, and you weren’t supposed to be easy. You were complicated in a rare and wonderful way. And you may think what you’re doing now is something like growing up, but I think you know better. I think you know it’s just giving up. I think you gave up on Fiona Haeberle. I believed in her more than you could have known, and there were times when I was the only one. That’s what really destroyed me, I think, more than you … going away, or whatever. Leaving. I had faith in the thing we made; I had faith in Our thing. And when your faith is, I don’t know, predeceased, I guess, by the thing you have faith in, well … it is really quite hard to come back from that. Do you understand, Fiona? You were the best person I ever met, and I wanted to spend the entirety of my only life growing up with you. Now you’re one of them, one of those other people, and I’m going to grow up alone. And I still—I still—I still believe that I’ll always be in love with you in some way, even far down that road, and when the feeling becomes fainter, when I recognize it only as a familiar sweetness in the air I breathe in and out every day, it will be softer but no less significant to me. It will linger the way I now realize it has been lingering there for years, waiting for an explanation that finally came to me on the night we met. Do you remember that awful party? For forty short/long months, every portion of me has been whispering your name and gesturing frantically like a weathervane toward you. Is that sappy enough to be silly? I cannot believe you’ve gone.
Your Dearest Friend,
Leo [undelivered of course]
I was blown open when she left—blown open, and I couldn’t get closed. Everybody knows that, when you’re talking about a person, open things can get infected and closed things cannot. That’s basic medical science. And I lay there, open, taking in all the world’s bacteria, all the atomic details, every microscopic fact let loose to putrefy my self.
It was them, of course; it was they: Fiona and Mark Renard in horrible concert. It was Theirs and not Ours that, since spring, had ruled the Earth. Mercy General had in fact been canceled, and the characters played by the two of them had in fact been killed in that boating accident—that was all true, and that was all known. But it was no accident, no: Mark wanted out of his contract; he demanded that they die. He killed her. It wasn’t the harbormaster at all. She must have wanted to go.
She must have wanted to go because they were involved with each other. An integrated item, to borrow a phrase. I hadn’t seen the signs at the time, so I went back and planted them in my memory: the frequency of mention, the constant protestations concerning Mark’s intellect and talent, the late nights on set, and the distance towards the end, while I was, for once, distracted by my legal education. I never received my moment of j’accusatory revelation, my chance to rip away the curtains or the mask. My cathartic confrontation not forthcoming, I had to make do with a set of sputtering assumptions: loose rumors, drips and drabs. I resented Fiona for not having the decency to let me find out, and be the one empowered to tear Our world apart in righteous sadness.
A couple of months after the cold facts set in, I bumped into one of Fiona’s actress friends, Alice Gerson, near my building, and she displayed for my benefit the scrunched, cock-headed, treacly-sad rendition of “Hey … how’re you holding up, man?” that can only truly be served up by a generally (but not specifically) compassionate woman to a man she doesn’t know well whom a friend of hers has cheated on.
I’d get my confirmation later on, seeing them born anew, living together in Los Angeles, on a television screen in November. This would be the news: Fiona Fox, the actress—she was rising. Mark Renard was tabbed to be the leading man in some new show.
Four days after Fiona left, I walked across the bridge to Manhattan, an island I’d tried almost religiously to avoid in the course of my Brooklyn years. I wandered that inglorious wen down to new-to-me sectors like a ghost, hip shop to hip shop, the King of Nothing, looking for a feeling in the callous faces of strangers, listening only for her brisk mezzo lilt among the crowd noises. How could I possibly be expected to listen to anything else? What was I supposed to find here when she’s gone? Old books. Winter coats. Dishware. A new watch. Walking home, the sky was almost completely black. How many years until I’d be back, hitting on the shopgirls?
* * *
“What’s the game?” asked Gracie from behind the echo chamber of her empty wine glass.
It was a winter night—our second year of law school—and the universe was fine.
“No game, sweetie,” Sona murmured with moony eyes. “I think Fiona here was asking a serious question. Right?”
“Oh, it’s quite serious,” chimed Fiona from high atop the kitchen counter. “Quite serious indeed. Should we open another bottle?”
Gracie was perplexed, and also drunk.
“That was the game—should we open another bottle?” she asked.
“It isn’t a game,” snapped Sona.
“Sorry! I meant: that was the question?”
Fiona slid down to join me on the loveseat, corkscrew in tow.
“The question,” she explained furtively, “was this: if you could live at any time in history, when would it be, and why?”
“Oh that old chestnut,” groaned Boots.
“It’s like summer camp!” Grace added giddily. “You know? Everyone goes around and answers some random deep question before you fall asleep? This is how you really get to know people, you know.”
“How much wine did you have at summer camp?” I asked her as I plucked free the cork from our last four dollars’ worth of red.
The study group had migrated from the William Burnham Woods Room of the law library to Our apartment, as it was wont to do in thirsty moments. Traditionally, it took just a couple of hours before we came to resemble the aftermath of a particularly devastating carbon monoxide leak—Boots glued to the hardwood, Emily, Sona, and Gracie sprawled out on the couch, Fiona and I sluggishly entwined on the loveseat—and this evening was no exception. Any pretense of legal education always yielded before long to Fiona’s insistent whim: what verb is saddest? Would we rather be fish or birds? Which poet would we most like to box?
“Boots, you’re first,” Fiona declared. “When are you going to live?”
“Good question,” he droned back from his spot on the floor. “But seriously folks. I’m going with 1977.”
“That’s awfully specific,” said Emily.
“Bootsie,” said Sona, “I think you’re supposed to pick a time when you weren’t actually alive.”
“Good one,” he said.
“That was a joke about how old you are,” Sona clarified.
“We got it,” I assured her. “Boots is super old.”
“Emily’s turn,” announced Fiona.
“If you insist, darling. Let’s see … I think maybe I’ll go to 1977 and make sure this one doesn’t overdose on anything.”
Boots rolled over to object, then paused.
“That’s probably smart,” he conceded.
“If not,” Emily continued, “then I’ll go to Paris in the 1920s.”
“What was going on in Paris in the 1920s?” asked Gracie.
“Oh, lots of things. Theater and cinema and jazz. The Folies Bergere. Picasso and Matisse. Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Coco Chanel. It was an incredibly vibrant place and time, and I think, as long as we’re free to pick here, I’d like to give it a try.”
“Okay,” slurred Grace. “That sounds lovely—I’m going to Paris in the 1920s too. Sona, are you coming with us? It’s gonna be so … freaking vibrant.”
Sona’s eyes bloomed open, and she craned her leaden arms back behind her head.
“Under no circumstances,” she deadpanned. “If I’m going to time travel, I’m going somewhere where I can take over the world, like a slightly thinner version of Cleopatra.”
“It isn’t time travel!” fumed Fiona.
“Cleopatra didn’t take over the world,” I pointed out.
“And how do you know how thin Cleopatra was?” asked Emily.
“Yeah!” Gracie shouted, a little too loudly. Startled by her own volume, she added in a self-conscious whisper, “you weren’t there.”
Sona surveyed us, bewildered, before Fiona took the reins.
“It isn’t time travel, Sona. You’re just born somewhere new.”
“Okay.”
“It’s an important distinction.”
“Okay,” Sona said evenly. “I will be a terrifying ruler at any time. Someplace warm, preferably. Has to be at least five centuries ago for it to work.”
This satisfied all.
“Your turn, honey,” Fiona said, boring a slim index finger into my left ear.
“Ow!” I yelped. “Stop being gross, please.”
She retracted, and I gave my answer.
“1857,” I announced proudly.
“Jesus Christ,” said Boots. “Not this Buchanan shit again.”
“A nation stands on the precipice of a bloody fracture.”
“Why are you the way you are?” inquired Sona.
“The whole of our American experiment poised either to collapse upon itself or survive by dint of a pyrrhic civil war.”
“Shut the fuck up,” said Boots. “Shut the fuck up.”
“A venerable diplomat of unrivaled credentials is called upon once more by his country to serve. His name—”
“Darryl Strawberry,” said Boots.
“James Buchanan! Distinguished, experienced, wise. Alas, devoid of courage and foresight and some other fairly necessary things. In need of an advisor—a trusted voice who could impart upon him the dire consequences of inaction. Together, we could squash slavery and mitigate the losses of war. No Confederacy; no legacy of disunion or treason. I bet I could do it. I could fix it if I were there—if I had the time. That is my answer.”
“Are you done?” asked Fiona.
“Indeed I am,” I replied.
“Glad to hear it, Professor Dipshit,” she said, before planting a loud kiss on the side of my face. “So it’s me now. And I choose: the future.”
“Well,” I said, “you definitely can’t do that.”
“Of course I can!” she objected.
“Professor Dipshit is right,” called out Boots, now resting on his stomach and speaking directly into the floor. “It’s against the rules to pick the future.”
“But I made the rules,” Fiona answered indignantly.
“But you said ‘history,’” countered Emily. “You said ‘at any time in history’—the future doesn’t count. It hasn’t happened yet, ergo it isn’t history.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Fiona declared. “Of course the future counts as history. It’s part of time! It’s on the timeline of, you know, existence. Who cares if we haven’t been through it yet? It’s on the timeline!”
“I’m not sure you can win this one,” I told my agitated love. “You’ve got five half-lawyers—which is basically two-and-a-half actual lawyers—who are interpreting history as to not include the future. Rebuttal?”
“Screw your legal bullshit; that’s my rebuttal,” she said. “Tomorrow is just as much a part of history as yesterday. And if you weren’t so wrapped up in textual interpretation—yeah, I know that term; I know ‘textual interpretation’—you’d all agree with me, because I am so very right about this.”
We went on drinking and talking and laughing then, and the night slipped into the past as seamlessly as any other. Later, when the future turned out to be history, just as she’d predicted, I returned to this conversation and got sad. And returning now, I am sad, and I will return again.
* * *
I’ve had eight nights I was sure would be the last of my life: two fleeting dementias, one lightning-strike headache, five fevers-you-don’t-come-back-from. Eight nights, so I felt relatively relaxed when, on the night after the night that Fiona left, I accidentally swallowed a bay leaf. I thought perhaps that cooking would make me feel better; it was something we’d done together almost every night for several years, and I wanted to maintain whatever consistency I could. I wanted, I guess, to produce and consume the way that people do when they’ve not been hollowed out by fresh grief. Or maybe I didn’t know what I wanted; it’s possible that I was delirious. Either way, I cooked and I ate for hours without thinking—but a stray bay leaf was left behind, and before long I felt those crisp ridges start to tear at my throat. I thought I’d read it somewhere, but I wasn’t certain—can a person left alone be killed by swallowing a bay leaf? Among herbs, they are the closest to paranoia or regret: lie down with them at night, and they will cut you open from the inside.
I called her four times on the day after she left me a nonsensical wreck, baying primal bays, like the very first hominid evolved enough to comprehend the meaning of his own death. Four times, and she never picked up, never called back, was never enough in existence to ping back my last desperate signals. God only knows what kind of messages I left—I don’t remember what was said, and even if I did, I would spare you. The words didn’t matter much anyway; there was nothing I could do to stop the war. Our breaking up went very badly for me.
In bed I thought about the coming change; I thought about what my life was going to be like now that she was gone, and also I thought about the bay leaf swimming within me. I sweat, and turned, and tracked the little threat as it skulked across my body. In time I leveled out, and brought the heaving evening to its logical meridian. I remember the strange dream I had that night, which was a dream of a family—two parents and an infant son—running from something awful in the dark. They swaddled their boy hard in a checkered blanket to keep him from screaming. They hid in outhouses from Kiev to Constantinople, and on a ship called the Braga I watched them sail to New York—I watched the whole flight, all in those few hours of hot and wretched sleep. This was a dream of my history, and I knew who they were; I knew who that boy would be. This was March 1923, and his daughter is my mother. I have his affection for chipmunks, the paperclip he used as a stickpin. He came into his new world that way: as a treasure, a morsel, a secret prize. I came into mine as an infidel, barking
gin-soaked into Fiona’s voicemail like a bay leaf, shivving indiscriminately at her insides, and for what? A little desired bitterness. A more thorough stewing. The next day, I woke up.
* * *
My mother’s college roommate was a woman named Luz, a Colombian expat of deep intelligence and peerless magpiety. We’d always been close; I called her “aunt” growing up, and she was the only person who got to call me “Lenny.” Luz was a businesswoman of some renown—the CFO of a large multinational corporation—and her work took her frequently from her apartment in New York to the most distant centers of commerce for long stretches of time. Ten years widowed, and with her children now in graduate school, she found herself away more and more. Her home on the Upper West Side was opulent, expensive, and empty.
By early October, more than two months after Fiona and I dissolved, my apartment had still stubbornly refused to stop being The Place Where We Used to Live. The premises were littered with toxic artifacts, and crippling relics of her time there were strewn about everywhere like dead leaves. I couldn’t stop the infestation of memories; I had to escape. So I called Luz.
“Lenny! Mi querido! My little lawyer! Oh, Lenny, it’s been far too long! I’d force you to come over for dinner, but—ugh—sweetheart, I am in Houston, Texas, tonight. Oh, and Lenny, I heard from someone—I’m not going to say who, but it was your mother, and she’s very worried about you Lenny, so you need to call your mother more because you know how she worries about you—she told me that your strange little girlfriend ran away with some idiota. She didn’t say idiota—I say that. She said schmuck. Lenny! Sweetie! Tell me how you are doing?”
I tried to do just that, making use of the still-evolving vocabulary I’d been developing in order to communicate with the outside world: the wistfully encouraging vocabulary of consolation, which was bullshit. Aunt Luz listened expressively, and spoke at length about fleeting love and the fickle nature of women. She insisted that I stay in her apartment, from which she would be absent for seven months at least, and refused my repeated offers of rent. There was a catch, though: