Elegies for the Brokenhearted

by Christie Hodgen

  One day toward the end of the semester you met for coffee and he told you he couldn’t see you anymore. My wife, he explained, my children. My job. I would never, you said, I would never betray you. But he told you he was ending things, that it was the right thing to do. As you sat across from him you felt part of yourself collapse, fall away and crash like a wall of ice from an iceberg. You lost your hearing for a moment. In a daze you removed a bill from your wallet and tucked it beneath your plate. You wiped the corners of your mouth with your napkin, placed it on the table. You stood to leave and the professor said something—made a protest or an appeal of some kind—but you didn’t hear it, you had lost your senses.

  You spent an entire week in your room, in bed, trying to recall every moment you’d spent with him. You wrote down every scrap of conversation you remembered, everything you’d worn, every gesture you’d made. You dragged your notes for clues. Had you said something? Had you betrayed a lack of intelligence, of taste? You were sick with shame, with grief, and you couldn’t return to class. You missed your finals, took incompletes in all your classes. All of the music you’d been working on flew out of your head. You thought about dying. You wanted to die.

  You had one friend at school, a rich girl named Tweedy Livingston—one of those tall, horse-faced socialites for whom nothing had ever been difficult—and to save you from your misery she invited you to accompany her to Ogunquit. You spent the month of July at her family’s rented home, living in opulence. You’d eaten every night at fine restaurants and had never seen, the whole time, a bill presented to Tweedy—she was one of those people who kept open tabs. You spent nearly the whole month in dining rooms, smoking and drinking, cracking open mussels and lobsters. One night you ate at the Oasis and on your way out saw its baby grand sitting empty in the corner of its bar. Tweedy had asked you to play. All evening you took requests, and as you played you felt at ease for the first time in months. At the end of the night the restaurant’s manager offered you a job—their player had just quit—and you agreed to start the next day.

  Initially you only planned to stay for the summer. But when August came around the idea of returning to school was still too painful. You decided to play at the restaurant until it closed in October, then return to New York and finish your compositions. You settled in at the Bavarian. You made a decent living, you had time to work on your music. You started to compose a symphony, and soon it obsessed you. You thought of it all the time, even in dreams, and there were days that it played so loudly in your head that you were obliged to take a sleeping pill just to dull its effects. You kept imagining the day you finished your symphony and put it into the hands of your advisor, who would immediately recognize its genius, stage it, record it. You imagined the prizes you would win. Upon your return to New York—after a long, self-imposed exile during which your reputation as a brilliant eccentric was solidified—you would be celebrated, redeemed. You imagined the look on your lover’s face when he heard your masterpiece performed. You saw him collapsing in tears, falling at your feet. You spent long hours playing out these scenes, and they appeared so vividly in front of you that you sometimes reached into the air to touch them. If you could only finish your work. All that season, closed up in the Bavarian with Mrs. Strauss, you were just on the edge, you sensed, just on the edge of breaking through.

  But fall had turned to winter, then to spring, and before you knew it you were back at the Oasis for another season. By then Mrs. Strauss had stopped charging you rent in exchange for your help around the house. You had become family. Sometimes when she called to you from the kitchen she accidentally called you Karl, and often in your mind you thought of her as your grandmother. Your real grandmother had disowned you—when you left school you had broken her heart—and Mrs. Strauss had replaced her.

  During your second year in Maine you’d started taking a regimen of pills. You took pills to stay awake and pills to sleep, pills to enliven and pills to settle your nerves. At times you believed that the pills were the only things keeping you alive. Other times you convinced yourself that the pills were killing you and you stopped taking them. But then you’d be overtaken with shakes, or sweats, or bouts of intense, insufferable panic, and you’d start all over again.

  You had taken on other lovers, from time to time, but had found all of them lacking. What pleasure they offered to you, eventually, amounted to far less than their inevitable disappointments. Love, you said, is for fools.

  With your work you’d gone through phases of striving and phases of abandon. But it hardly mattered now—you had struggled too long and now there was no solution. Even if you finished your symphony, it would have taken twenty years of your life and would hardly be worthwhile. And if you simply gave up, moved on, what could you say you’d been living for?

  Sometimes in the middle of the night I woke to the sound of your playing in the parlor. It was always the same little song, notes in a minor key, ascending and then descending and then ascending again, like a leaf blowing in the wind. It was the loneliest song I’d ever heard.

  It was only after I’d given up on Malinda that—in accordance with one of those immutable laws that seem to dictate the universe—she showed up. One night, while I was mopping the kitchen floor at the end of my shift, one of the cooks went out through the swinging door into the lobby, and in the gust of sound that came into the room I heard Malinda’s laugh. I knew it anywhere. It was brash and forced, and it cut through the noise of any room—it carried longer and louder than every other voice. The door swung open and closed, open and closed, and I stood leaning against the mop handle, listening, a hot twisting in my chest. In place of the excitement I’d expected to feel when I found Malinda there was a nervousness, and with it something else, something akin to anger. Malinda was here, alive and well, and with something to laugh about. Suddenly I saw all of the stories I’d told myself about her—the troubled circumstances she was in, the reasons she couldn’t manage to get in touch with me—as delusions, the pathetic fantasies of a desperate person.

  I finished mopping, letting my heart settle. Then I went out into the lobby and stood at the entrance to the bar. You were playing music from Brigadoon, and there was a small crowd still lingering around your piano. In the opposite corner of the bar the waitstaff sat around as they always did at the end of the night—counting and straightening the cash they’d made, making plans for the rest of the evening—and at the center of them all was Malinda. I hardly recognized her. She had bobbed her hair and dyed it a bright, flaming pink, and she had tattoos running up both of her arms, extending onto her chest and neck. She wore a black sleeveless dress wrapped around her like a bath towel. Sitting next to Malinda was a red-haired man in a green tracksuit. He had an unfinished, embryonic quality—he had a weak chin and a clipped, fleshless nose. In a hoarse shout he was telling a story about hitting a policeman in a construction zone. He spoke of himself in the third person. “So Scotty’s going real slow, trying not to hit those orange cones, and the next thing you know Scotty’s side view mirror clips a cop by the belt and spins him around like a fucking top.”

  People laughed.

  “So what do you think Scotty does?”

  “Take off, man,” someone said. “Take the fuck off.”

  “Nope,” he said. “What Scotty does, he pulls over and gets out and offers various solicitous ministrations.” He waggled his eyebrows. He was apparently one of those people who took pleasure in using words he considered to be rare and lofty. “I give him my card, my license and registration, I offer him all kinds of compensation. And you know what happens? He says he’s fine, he just lets Scotty go. And Scotty just drives on, my friend, with enough in the trunk to send me up for twenty years.”

  The whole time Scotty was talking he had his arm around Malinda, and she stared up at him adoringly. By all appearances Malinda was happy, but the sight of her under the spell of such a repulsive person turned my stomach. I stood and stared at her. Whoever this was—this pink-haired,
exuberant person—it wasn’t Malinda.

  Finally Malinda’s eye fell on me, and all of the mirth drained from her face. She sat frozen, and we stared at each other for a moment. Then, as if with the flick of a switch, she leapt up and squealed. “My little sister!” she cried. “My little fucking sister!” She crossed the room and hugged me. She smelled of some kind of sweet liquor. Brandy, rum. She was so thin I could have snapped her.

  “Oh my God,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

  “I was looking for you,” I said.

  “Oh my God.” She jumped up and down, pulled me over to her table. “Everybody, this is Mary.” She introduced me to the waiters and waitresses, as if I hadn’t already met them. “This is Pete, and Nick, and Jeff.”

  “I know,” I said. “We’ve met.” It occurred to me then that the waiters might as well have been meeting me for the first time. After the initial curiosity on my arrival, they had entirely forgotten about my existence—they had failed to even mention me to Malinda.

  “This is so great,” she said. “We’re gonna have so much fun.”

  She sat down and pulled me next to her. “Scotty,” she said, “this is my sister Mary.”

  “What’s up, man?” Scotty said. He raised his hand in the air. “Five me,” he said.

  I fived him.

  “That was halfhearted,” he said. “Five me again.”

  I stared at him with hatred. I had a vivid image of punching him in the face. But I fived him again.

  “Now that was hearty!” he said. “That was a five with some heart!”

  Malinda kept her arm around me while she talked with everyone, and I felt myself sinking into the watchful silence I’d always lived in when we were growing up. On the surface it was no different from my usual silence, but the feeling was different. Instead of the detachment and anxiety I’d felt all through college, there was comfort. I felt relaxed for the first time in five years.

  When your last customers left you came over to join us. Malinda made the same fuss over you that she’d made over everyone else. She threw her arms around you and kissed your face, your neck, your ears. You flushed under her attention. Please, you said, get ahold of yourself.

  “You were so right about New York,” she told you, “it’s the only place in the world worth living. Oh, my God. I had no idea.”

  I told you, you said, a wistful look in your eye.

  “We’ve been there all summer,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave. You should come back with us! This place is dead, it’s over. You should come back to New York.”

  A dark mood seemed to pass over you. Your eyes wandered about the room, and you were distracted in your conversation. You made it through a few pleasantries, asking about the places Malinda had been that winter. But when she asked you about yourself, you were vague. I’ve been incredibly busy, you said. I couldn’t possibly begin to describe it. As soon as someone else—a waitress named Mitzi—claimed Malinda’s attention you slipped off. You nodded to me on the way out. It seemed to me that you wore the pinched, bitter expression of a person who had been upstaged.

  Malinda started talking about a party, and Scotty started rounding up people. He was the only person I’d ever met who carried a cell phone, and he kept punching numbers into it and shouting at the people who answered. “Scotty!” he said, as a salutation. And I wondered what kind of person would shout his own name, with such exuberance, into a phone. “Major party down at Moody,” he said. And though this was nothing more than an idea, a bit of whimsy that had just struck Malinda, word spread quickly and by the time we got to the beach there was, indeed, a party. Groups of people were standing around drinking beer, listening to music, talking and shouting and laughing. Someone had lit a fire in a trash can. Though it was the middle of summer it was still cold by the water at night, and people stood huddled in pairs. I watched Malinda as she approached them, and she seemed pleased by the gathering, like a queen surveying her subjects. She had thought of something, and Scotty had made it happen.

  I stood on the edge of the party and watched Malinda drift around between the people she knew. They greeted her with great cries of affection and astonishment. It was a long time before she drifted over and sat down next to me. “Wow,” she said. “It’s been, like, five years or something.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “So what’s new? What you been up to?”

  “There’s nothing at all new with me,” I said. “Not a single thing has happened since you left.” At home I’d always affected a deadpan sarcasm, to balance out the hysterics of my mother and Malinda, and I’d slipped into it again. And yet on one level it seemed to me that what I’d said was perfectly true. Since Malinda had left nothing much had happened—I’d simply marked time until finding her again.

  “I forgot,” she said, “what a bitch you can be.” She moved closer to me. She picked up a strand of my hair and let it fall. Again, and then again. “You look weird,” she said. “It’s like you haven’t changed since you were twelve.”

  “Something’s different about you,” I said, surveying her hair and tattoos—a red dragon rose up along each of her arms, their necks curling onto her shoulders, their heads turned sideways, extending onto her chest, bright flames emanating from their mouths, meeting over her heart. “But I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  “So me and Scotty are gonna be here awhile,” she said. “Scotty has business all over the place up here. We can catch up. Maybe have lunch tomorrow or something.”

  “What kind of business?” I said.

  “Mostly weed,” she said. “And pills. But some other stuff too. He’s real busy this time of year. He’s really stressed out. He’s got, you know, all these clients calling him all the time, and he can’t always get what they want and he knocks himself out running all over the place.”

  It pained me to hear her talk. It occurred to me that if I’d met her on a bus and she started talking to me, I’d take out a book and start reading. “I really want to spend some time together,” I said. “I really missed you.”

  “Me too,” she said. “I was gonna call. But I’ve been bouncing all around and I haven’t ever had, like, a single place to stay or a phone or anything like that. I keep meaning to stop home and see what’s going on, I just haven’t, you know, had much time, with work and everything.”

  We sat for a moment looking at the water. I felt the topic of our mother hovering between us. And indeed the next thing Malinda said was, “So how’s the bitch? Lemme guess. Married again.”

  “For the fifth time,” I said.

  She snorted. “Figures.”

  Then I told her the latest, the most absurd of all the absurdities in our family history. “She had,” I said, “some kind of religious crisis.”

  “Oh Christ,” said Malinda. She rolled her eyes, flopped dramatically back on the sand. “Please!” she cackled. “Give me a fucking break!”

  “She moved to Atlanta,” I said.

  “What?”

  “She married a televangelist. She runs a day care center at her husband’s church—she takes care of all these kids off the street. I think they send a van around and cart them in by the dozen.”

  “What?” she said again. She sat up at attention. “Are you fucking kidding me?” She clutched her head. “That bitch!” she said.

  “If it makes any difference,” I said, “she says she prays for you all the time.”

  “Oh please,” she said, “I think I’m going to puke.” She stood up and staggered toward the water. I watched her stand at its edge, playing in the water with one of her feet in a distracted, rueful way. It occurred to me that all of the problems that had grown up between us, all the distance, were connected with my mother. Somehow Malinda saw me as my mother’s agent, her emissary, and she’d turned against me, too. I stood up and started walking toward her, but before I got to the water she was off again, squealing, throwing her arms around someone else she hadn’t seen in a year. “Oh my God!
” she cried. “I missed you so much!”

  When I returned to my spot on the beach a boy was sitting there. He had a mess of curly blond hair, already receding at the temples—he looked like a young Art Garfunkel. “Mind if I sit here?” he asked.

  “Fine with me,” I said. I sat down next to him.

  “I live over there,” he said. He pointed to a house behind us. “That one. With the hexagonal windows.” The house was three stories tall, lit up against the night sky, brilliant.

  “Oh,” I said. I tried to sound unimpressed.

  “I heard everybody and came out to see what was happening. None of my friends are up for the summer and I’ve been kind of lonely.”

  “That’s a sad story,” I said.

  “I just graduated from Yale,” he said. “And everybody I know is, you know, scattered all over the place, starting new jobs and stuff.”

  “I feel really bad for you,” I said, “all alone in your beachfront property. With nothing but a Yale degree.”

  “You’re a pain in the ass, I can tell,” he said. “I’ll just have to ply you with wine.” He had a picnic basket settled beside him, and he opened it up and produced a bottle and two glasses. The whole scene struck me as suspicious, and I looked around for a camera crew.

  We drank a bottle of wine, talking about college and what it felt like to be out, what we were going to do with ourselves in the future. The boy was about to embark on a trip around the world. Mauritania, he said. Indonesia, the Seychelles. He’d spent the whole summer taking sailing lessons. “It’s just gonna be me,” he said. “And my dad’s boat. All around the whole fucking world.” As he talked about the ports he planned to visit, I kept an eye on Malinda, who was flitting about, smoking and laughing and dancing. I heard snatches of her conversation. “We were so wasted,” she said. “Remember that random guy, with the cowboy hat?”