Hank’s head drained of all thought. He waited for her finger to move farther down but a second later it was gone.
She’d gotten up and opened the closet door. “John and Susan are having a party.” Lenora surveyed her clothes, then withdrew a gray dress. It was almost identical to the one she was wearing.
Hank felt his excitement sputter and die—shrink down to a pit of rage. “I hate those two.”
“There’ll be food.”
“What kind?”
“I don’t know. Cheese and crackers?”
“There aren’t enough cheese and crackers in the world.”
She shrugged. “You don’t have to go.”
So of course he went.
• • •
They were both pretty drunk when they left the party. In the cab they stared out opposing windows, flat blobs of colored light flying over their faces.
“I didn’t know it was Susan’s birthday,” Hank said. “We were the only ones without a gift.”
“They live in Brooklyn. The gift is that we came.”
He laughed.
“It was weird seeing all those guys I went to college with,” Lenora said. “They all looked so different.”
“You mean bad. They looked bad.”
“Sort of.” She patted a yawn. “They’re just older—they aren’t cute. Like, the exact thing I identified as cuteness is now gone.”
“We’re older too.”
“I know that.”
“It’s so awful.”
“What’s so awful?”
“That we feel uglier because we are uglier.”
“We’re not ugly,” Lenora said, a wound in her voice. “And maybe those guys aren’t either. It was just a shock. Their faces looked so different without the same fat there. Or with—you know—sudden fat.”
Hank laughed. “It didn’t just appear there.”
“Well that’s how it looks if you haven’t seen someone in a while. Like they just got hit with fat.”
They both laughed, then went quiet.
Hank looked up at the moon. He said, “What were you talking to John about?”
Lenora froze in profile. “Why?”
“Because you were talking to him all night.”
“So.”
“You know I hate that guy.”
“I still don’t understand why.”
“He’s a creep. And he’s a terrible writer.”
“I didn’t think his book was bad. It could be vastly corny at times but I thought the ending was very moving.”
“I didn’t get that far—I just didn’t believe it. He’s like Kevin Spacey doing Bobby Darin,” Hank huffed. “Some cheap commercial rendition of hipness.”
Lenora groaned.
“It’s okay for me to hate this person. You hate everyone.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do. You only like him because I hate him. It’s a turn-on for both of you.”
“You’re really starting to sound crazy.”
“Right—because you’re such a cheerleader for sanity.”
“Why would I hit on someone in front of you?”
“I don’t know. There’s obviously something wrong with you.” Hank faced the window once more, the harsh red light of surrounding cars cast over him.
“Well you were glued to what’s-her-face all night. The one with the tits,” Lenora hissed.
“You know her name.” He turned to see her expression but she was facing the window, arms crossed. “I like her,” he said. “She’s nice.”
“That’s her thing. I’m nice! But really she’s just boring.”
Hank laughed in spite of himself.
“And she looks like a fetus,” Lenora said. “I mean pretty but . . .”
“Unformed?” he offered.
“Yes. Not fully formed.”
“That’s the thing about fetuses.”
• • •
Once home they stripped down to their underwear and climbed into bed. Hank stared sideward at the freckled contours of her body, the red spoon glowing somewhere under her lacy black bra.
She lay there like paradise itself, he thought. An island all her own. He rolled on his side and thought maybe the trouble with paradise was tasting it. Maybe he could only touch the door—crouch before it and wait. Maybe it was waiting that he loved—not Lenora.
The thought took shape and died in a matter of seconds. I don’t like waiting, he decided. I don’t like staring this way—like a man in a museum.
The woman he loved was the one who loved him back, the one who had been wild for him.
Hank scratched his stubbly chin, then gazed at Lenora’s arm—hating its beauty.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Do you need to penetrate my mind every second? I’m having idle goddamn thoughts.”
Hank looked away. “Did you tell anyone what you’re doing?”
“What?”
“The book.”
“What about it?”
“Do they know you’re stealing some poor woman’s life?”
Lenora looked hurt for a second. It made her prettier. “Is that really what you think I’m doing?”
“Yes.” He blinked at the white wall. “You’re stealing her hell.” He shook his head. “Because you’ve never been to hell—you wouldn’t know how to describe it.”
“I don’t know. This feels a little like hell.”
Hank imagined throwing something at the wall. Like a lamp or a chair. Just to change the look on her face. “You think you’re so smart,” he said.
“You think you’re so moral.”
“Does that woman know you’ll disappear the second the book is done? Did you tell her that?”
“That woman’s name is Angie. And who says I’ll stop seeing her?”
“I know you.” He trained his eyes on her. “You’re a vampire.” He went on staring, coating her with disgust. “It’s why your books are so good—they’re full of actual lives.”
Lenora dropped her chin, stared at her legs.
Helplessly Hank joined her there.
“Do you think we love each other?” she asked.
He stiffened. “Why would you ask that?”
“Because I wonder.”
“You wonder? But I say it all the time.” He shook his head. “You mean do you love me. That’s what you fucking wonder.”
“I wonder about you too. You say it so much—like compulsively. You need it.” Her gaze zapped coolly around the room. “That’s not love.”
“Well you wouldn’t know, would you? Because you don’t need anything . . . but fame.”
Lenora had resumed staring at her legs.
“I miss you,” he said. “I wish you missed me.”
“How can I miss you when you won’t go away?”
Hank blinked at her a moment. Then he went white, stormed off to the bathroom, shut the door and threw himself down on the blue bath mat. He had come there to sob but instead vomited a dark sauce like blood or chocolate. It seemed there would be more but he just knelt there panting with his chin on the toilet seat.
The room twitched and spun and he tried to remember what the fuck he had eaten. Then he closed his eyes and saw all the little cheese cubes on toothpicks . . . a single cracker . . . three grapes.
He wiped his mouth and curled like a comma on the rug. He wanted to cry but couldn’t. He slept.
• • •
In the morning birds chirped and one apart from the rest, screaming a hideous tune. One bird always sings alone, he thought. The one who can’t sing—he sings alone. Hank unstuck his mouth from the blue bath mat. Sunlight splashed into his eyes like Clorox.
A few seconds rolled by and reality assembled itself. He grasp
ed his pounding forehead and remembered Lenora’s face, her smeary red mouth, the words: How can I miss you when you won’t go away?
In the mirror a creature blinked back at him. He ducked his face over the sink and shocked it with cold water, massaging his stubbly jaw. How can I miss you when you won’t go away? The phrase haunted his thoughts until it dawned on him: they were lyrics from a Dan Hicks song.
Anger moved him like a windup toy to the kitchen, where he paused in the doorframe to stare.
Lenora was smoking by the window, fanned-out papers and a small brass ashtray before her on the round wood table. She wore a pale orange silk robe patterned with silvery flowers, her tangled brown hair beaming in sunshine.
“Dan Hicks,” he said.
“What?”
“How can I miss you when you won’t go away.”
She stared.
“You fucking said that to me last night.”
“Oh.”
“It’s the name of a Dan Hicks song.”
“Okay.”
He stared. “Are you even listening?”
She took a drag and the smoke seemed to vanish inside her. “My mom died,” she said.
“What?”
“She fell.”
“When did this happen?”
“This morning. They just called me.”
“Shit.”
Lenora made an O with her mouth, released a pale cloud. “There isn’t enough time to impress people,” she said.
“You wanted to impress her?”
“I think I did.” She held very still with a pained look of contemplation. “I think I loved her.”
“Of course you did.”
“No—not of course,” she said nastily. “You don’t have to love your mother—a lot of people don’t. Maybe most people don’t. I thought I didn’t . . . but I do.” Her gaze flew around the room and crashed into his. “I loved her,” she said. “And I don’t love you.”
Hank heard static. He held the doorframe, his fingertips fused to the wood. He could stand there forever, he thought, become part of the wall.
“Why would you say that?” he managed.
“It’s what I’m thinking.” She stabbed her cigarette out. “I thought you liked that.”
“Liked what?”
“That I say what I’m thinking.”
“I do—of course I do. But damn it . . . I wish you were thinking something else.”
“I might go to Paris.”
He stared. I might chop your head off, he thought.
“I just want to be alone.”
“In the most romantic city in the world—that’s repulsive, Lenora.”
“Fine. It’s repulsive.”
Hank shut his eyes, listened to the pounding chamber of his poisoned body. He heard his heart—he thought he did. It sounded sick and broken, like a tin clock at the bottom of a murky pond, ticking somehow, one whiskered fish floating by.
Lenora slammed her fist down on the table and his eyes popped open.
“I should have known she would fall,” she said.
“How could you have known?”
“You should’ve seen her. She looked so small in her nightgown. She had the skinny—almost girlish legs of a skeleton. And she kept asking to see her father,” Lenora said, transfixed. “It’s so weird—dementia. Everyone you ever cared about comes back to life.”
“I know. It’s like one big wish.” Hank walked toward her, not knowing what he would do when he got there.
Lenora started to cry.
He took her head in his hands and stroked it, which felt absurd, tending to the woman who didn’t love him anymore. But his love for her—it was intact.
A block of light trembled on the table, faintly pink. A merciful light.
Hank looked down at the mess of papers before her. “What is all this?”
“The contest.” She sniffed. “The goddamn stories.”
“Did you pick someone?”
“No.” She wiped her nose. “People got less interesting the longer I looked.”
George Harrison and the End of the World
George Harrison was a Pisces, she thought. And I am a Capricorn. She was in bed with her laptop balanced on her stomach. On the screen she read that some Pisces and Capricorn couples can make it work, but only if the Capricorn can learn to be less controlling. I could be less controlling, she thought, feeling certain.
But he was dead. It was like everything else. She was too late. It’s not the end of the world, she imagined her father would say. Because her father always said this when someone was moping. But it is, she thought. It’s the end of the world.
All day she had been trying to write. She was so close but she was also lost. She was crawling in the dark. She minimized the astrology love-match screen, then read the last page she had written with building disappointment.
“It’s just a collection of stories,” she said aloud. “You just have to finish the last story. Why is that so fucking hard?” Instantly she felt a slap of shame for talking to herself. She realized she was impersonating her father. It was a familiar shock that left her feeling hollow and used, like someone entered by a parasite that hooks into the brain and rides the body around like a car.
She shut her eyes tightly, then opened them wide. It was obvious why the story was hard to finish. Because it was about her. And I hate myself, she thought. It was no secret. Everyone in her life was always saying, “You have to love yourself.” It made her hate them too.
She began scrolling through all the Beatles songs on her computer. Then she clicked on the most played song: “Here Comes the Sun,” and the same sweet little guitar came into the room, the same voice. Instantly it threw her into ecstasy. Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter. Little darling, it feels like years since it’s been here.
Her eyes filled with tears. She wondered how the same song continued to touch her this way. It has all the same little fingers, she thought, her eyes shimmering in the white glare of the screen. She sat up and a fat tear landed on the R key.
The Beatles wrote children’s songs, she thought, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. And George wrote the weird ones. That’s why I like him, she decided. Cause I’m a weird little girl.
But she wasn’t a little girl. She was twenty-eight, though it hardly seemed true. The thought shoved her into despair. I’m not old yet, she thought, frowning at the computer. But I’m not young either. She imagined two islands: one of babyhood, the other decrepitude. And she saw herself wading between them, seaweed flowing at her ankles. I could drown this way, she thought. Between worlds.
The song went on and the sweetness was crushing. She longed to fall into George Harrison’s vulnerability—that yawning abyss. But she couldn’t. She was too aware of how many seconds were left in the song: forty-six. Now it was forty-two. Why does everything have to end? she thought and paused the song in anger.
She moved her laptop to the foot of the bed and scratched her stomach. She wore just underwear and a T-shirt with an alligator on it. Out of habit she reached for the old record cover leaning against the wall by the bed: Rubber Soul. She didn’t have a record player but she wanted one. The record had appeared one day on a tan blanket in the street. It sat between some scuffed VHS tapes and an ugly brown leather jacket. It was four dollars. “Is two okay?” she had asked the bearded man but he shook his head. “Four.” So she gave him four.
Now she took the record into her hands and stared at it, moving her fingers over the four faces. When she reached George, she pulled her hand back. His cheek felt warm. Then she noticed he was blinking. He was staring at her.
Her heart raced. “It’s you.”
“Where am I?” His eyes zapped around the small pink room. Papers everywhere. A green bureau crowded with Coke cans. Cigarette butts presse
d out on the windowsill. He seemed to clock each thing.
“In my—well, this is my room.”
He stared a second. “Why am I here?”
“I don’t know,” she said but it felt like a lie. He seemed to be there because she had prayed for him to be. Because there was a God—a good God—the kind who returned phone calls.
For a while they just stared at each other. Then, cocking his head, he said, “You’re so nervous.”
“No I’m not,” she said and he went on staring. It made her squirm. “I mean, maybe I’m a little nervous,” she said. “About my book.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I have to finish the last story. And I can’t.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about me . . . and actually you’re in it too.”
“So it should be easy.”
“But it isn’t!”
“Maybe because you have to—”
“I know, I know,” she interrupted, rolling her eyes. “I have to love myself.”
George laughed. “No,” he said.
“No?”
“No.”
“I don’t have to love myself?”
“No. You have to play.”
“What—like a guitar?”
“No. You’ve got to have fun, that’s all.”
“Oh.”
“At some point play got banished,” he said in a rehearsed sort of way, like a monk had told him and he remembered. “Children play because they live in their own time. But most people when they get older, they leave their own time.”
“Where do they go?”
“Wherever the culture tells them to.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Play gets replaced with a desire to be accepted, a desire for identity,” he sneered. “Everyone wants to be someone.”
“It’s easy for you,” she said, feeling hurt. “You never had to be someone. You just were someone.”
“How would you know?” He sucked his teeth. “You don’t know me. You think wanting to fuck me means you know me?”
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