“Okay,” I say, “I’ll try.” And I pinkie-swear on it.
A couple of hours later, I say good-bye to Kate and Mason. It is an airport good-bye, the kind with tears and hugs and dramatic sniffling. I feel silly, since I know I will be seeing both of them next week. But I can’t help it. For the three of us, this is an ending of sorts, and though it is time for me to go, it’s still sad to leave. It’s like saying good-bye to my war buddies. They are the ones who crouched with me in the foxhole. The ones who lit my cigarettes and shielded me from enemy fire.
When I walk out of APT for the last time, I have a box tucked under each arm. I get the impression, as I ride downstairs on the elevator, that I look like I was fired. There is something demeaning about the cardboard, my stuff poking out of the tops and the wetness around my eyes. The other people back away into the corners, as if getting laid off is contagious. I feel like telling them that I quit, announcing it with relish, but I know that would be weird. Instead, I hold my head up as high as it will go, straighten out my back, and walk off the elevator with as much dignity as I can muster.
At the security gate, I see Marge standing guard in her blue suit. I want her to congratulate me, to tell me good luck, to give me closure, but I know that is too much to ask for. As I slide through the turnstile, it clicks behind me, and the number etched on the side increases a single digit. One more nameless person has left the building.
“Good-bye, Marge,” I say as I pass her. And maybe because of the boxes, maybe because it’s clear that this is the last time I’ll ever bother her, Marge answers.
“Good-bye,” she says. Her accent, it turns out, is British after all, but not posh like I imagined, more cockney and down to earth. I look at her, shock and glee pasted on my face. Marge just spoke to me. She actually spoke to me. She meets my eyes but doesn’t crack a smile. She just looks over, thoughtfully, as if taking stock of this woman and her cardboard.
And then, like a flash, she winks.
Nineteen
I feel crazy sitting here in my striped pajama pants, eating toast and jam with sticky fingers and brushing off the crumbs that cling to my sweatshirted breasts. This is something that just last week would have sounded fun and novel, something I used to long for, but today seems pathetic. What happens now? I wonder. Do I just sit here all day and pray for some sort of reality show marathon?
I promised myself two weeks off before I started looking for a new job. The idea was to give me a chance to clear my head. But now that it’s Monday morning, and I have woken up and not gone to work, and the only shows on television are soap operas and the local news, and all of my friends are busy at their jobs, I have no idea what the fuck “clearing my head” actually means.
I consider the possibility of getting some exercise, seeing if my legs still work and can take my body places, but decide against it. I am too tired to change, and then to sweat, and then to shower, and then to change again. To be honest, I feel too tired to do anything at all. Too tired to sleep, even. I lie down on the couch, my feet propped up with pillows. I flip on the TV and let my eyes stare blindly at the screen. This is how people relax, I tell myself, as I lay here and quickly slip into something resembling a catatonic state.
Though I can’t follow the story lines, I watch soap operas continuously. There is something comforting about the way these beautiful, glossy-haired people talk, and move, and kiss, and yell at one another. I like that much of the story is implied from meaningful looks, most often just after closing a door. I mean that literally, of course. The actors constantly close these huge mahogany doors and then look at the camera, as if to say I love him, or I am going to kill him soon.
To avoid any subtlety, the music fills in the gaps, deepening if someone is dangerous or in danger, lightening up when the characters are about to kiss.
I come up with elaborate backstories to make up for the years I have missed. Evil twins and the resurrected dead. Siblings newly discovered and reunited. Backstabbing, in both senses of the word. Loves lost, gained, lost again. In my imagination, the characters get lots of do-overs.
By Friday I consider the possibility that there might be something wrong with me. Without my noticing, I have seamlessly moved beyond relaxation. There was no sinister transition and no musical accompaniment. I have not left the couch in five days. I even sleep here. I tell myself that I like the feel of the nubby material against my back, that it takes too much effort to move across the room to my bed. There doesn’t seem much point.
Sometimes I don’t even get up to go to the bathroom and just wait patiently, hoping the need to pee will subside. It usually does.
I don’t call anyone, and though the phone rings a couple of times, I don’t get up to answer it. My answering-machine light is on, but I don’t have the energy to count its blinks, to push its buttons. I wonder if this is what depression is and try to think back to the warning signs described on television commercials. I don’t feel like hurting myself, so that’s good. I don’t feel sad or irritable. Check, check. I don’t feel happy either. Maybe it’s the flu, I wonder. But my head doesn’t hurt, and I don’t have a fever. I consider taking Tylenol, but I don’t know what for.
I just sit here and watch television, and sometimes fill in the backstories, and sometimes not. Sometimes I sleep. Countless hours go by, and because I can’t account for them, I assume I have spent them sleeping the sleep of the dead. The kind unmarred by nightmares or the need to turn over. Just empty, still sleep. There doesn’t seem to be anything I am supposed to do next, so I just stay here. Where it’s warm and not scary in the least. Work, I realize now, was mere background noise, a way to fill my empty days. Without work, it is as if all the sound has been turned off.
I think about Andrew a lot of the time. I pretend he’s sitting here with me, not saying much but watching the television too. He might hold my hand or get me a glass of water. He would come up with better plots than I can. His would involve more passion. More sex. Maybe revenge.
I even let myself imagine my mother here also, hanging out on my couch. I don’t let my mind go there too much, but sometimes I picture her putting her cool fingers against my forehead and checking for a fever. She would probably make me eat something, because I haven’t ventured much beyond bread these last couple of days. I am almost at the end of the loaf now, but my fridge is empty, and I can’t be bothered to order delivery. Too much work to find some cash.
In my imagination, my mother sits quietly, but that’s mostly because I can’t remember her voice. But I’m distorting things, because when my mother was alive, she never sat quietly—she always talked, talked, talked right through whatever we were watching, even The Cosby Show. She always thought real life was so much more interesting than television; she never understood the need to escape.
I give my mother story lines too. Hers tend toward science fiction. Medical miracles and the like.
This is the opposite of love, I realize, when I look over and see my empty couch, see right through my imaginary companions. The opposite of love isn’t hate; it isn’t even indifference. It’s fucking disembowelment. Hara-kiri. Taking a huge shovel and digging out your own heart, and your intestines, and leaving behind nothing. Nothing of yourself to give, nothing, even, to take away. Nothing but a quiet pulse and some mildly entertaining soap operas.
If to love is to hand over self and heart, then this, my friend, this—to self-disembowel—is its opposite.
I wish I knew how to needlepoint so I could stitch it onto a fucking pillow.
Twenty
I wake up to the sound of loud banging. I open my eyes, and at first I’m unsure of where I am. The view is unfamiliar. I see blond wood, sharp corners, and oatmeal-colored carpet. It comes back to me slowly. I am still lying on the couch. The heat must have kicked on during the night, because my clothes are sticky from sweat and my hair is damp at the neck.
I hear a key in the lock, but I’m too groggy to turn to see who it is. I’m not sure that I care. If
it’s a robber, they can help themselves to my belongings. I don’t think there is anything of real value here. Other than my television. They will have to kill me before they take that.
“Emily? What the hell?” Jess walks into my apartment and sets her keys down on the kitchen table as if she owns the place. She stares at me lying on the couch and takes a long look around. I can see her mentally calculating the days since we spoke last, see her trying to figure out how long I have been lying here. I would make things easier and tell her, but I’m not sure what to say.
“Why haven’t you been answering your phone? I must have left a hundred messages.” Jess crosses the room and stands in front of me, blocking my view of the TV. I wonder if I have to answer her. Maybe I can close my eyes again and pretend to be asleep. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but I’m too tired to listen, too tired to do the talking thing. I am even too tired to be embarrassed of her seeing me like this.
“Are you sick?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long have you been lying here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Emily,” she says, not a question or a demand but a sigh. A tired sigh, and I wonder for a moment if I’ve made the noise. No, it was definitely Jess, because after she sighs, I see her take control of herself and then of me.
“Get up,” she says, and rips off my blanket. She has no mercy.
“But I’m tired, Jess. Just a few more minutes.” I want more of this sleep, of the sleep that I have never known until now, the kind of sleep that sets deep into your soul, the kind you would inject into your veins if you could.
“No.”
“But—”
“Get up and get into the shower.” She grabs my wrists and forces me upright. I get light-headed; I don’t remember the last time I was vertical.
“Now,” she says, and points the way to the bathroom, as if I don’t know how to get there myself.
“Fine,” I say, because I don’t have the energy to fight with her and because she has been known to use her long nails as weapons. Jess follows me into the bathroom and turns on the water.
“Jesus, how long has it been since you’ve had a shower?”
“I don’t know.”
I start to take off my clothes, slowly, like a retarded stripper. My hooded sweatshirt smells like a teenage boy’s bedroom.
“When was the last time you ate?”
“I don’t know. Had some bread. Lots of it,” I say. And then, to win some points, “It was whole wheat.” Jess walks out of the bathroom, leaves the door open.
“I’m getting in now,” I call out, to show that I am here too, that I want to help her help me. But Jess ignores me, because she is already on the telephone.
“Two extra-large pepperoni pizzas, please,” she says, and then gives the delivery guy my address.
“Hurry,” she tells them. “It’s an emergency.”
About an hour later, we are both sitting at my kitchen table. I find out it is Saturday, a full week since I left my job. It is also four-thirty in the afternoon, though I would have sworn it was morning. I am wearing the clean clothes that Jess picked out and left for me in the bathroom. A white T-shirt and my favorite pair of jeans. Before we talk, I eat five slices of pizza, one after the other.
“I came close to my personal record,” I say. “Remember in college when I ate seven?” I am trying to get Jess over to my side, to win her over with our happy memories. To make her forget what I looked like just sixty minutes ago. I feel the shame of it creep over me slowly. Someone has borne witness to my unraveling.
“Yup. Drink some water too,” Jess says. I lean forward and down the glass she sets in front of me. She refills it, and I down it again.
“Thanks. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to not call you back.” I look at her, and she looks at me and then away. She seems unsure of how to talk to this new incarnation of me, whether to treat me lightly or to give me the kick in the ass I deserve.
“I’m okay now.” This is true; somehow, the exhaustion has broken. I feel awake and alive. I wonder if Jess snuck something into my pizza.
“Here.” She hands me a piece of paper with the name and address of her therapist. “You have an appointment on Wednesday.
“While you were in the shower,” she says, before I even ask the question.
“Thanks.” I realize I am in no position to protest. I have not gone that far off the deep end that I don’t realize what is happening is not normal.
“I didn’t mean not to call. I mean, I just got really tired and felt like sleeping. And I just lost my grip a little, you know?” Jess nods but doesn’t say anything. I know she knows. She once had a love affair with a couch too, back in college.
“You’re going to be okay, Em. People just fall apart sometimes. We are going to fix you,” she says. “Actually, you’re going to fix you.”
She takes the empty pizza boxes and stuffs them into a full garbage bag. I notice that the hood of my sweatshirt is sticking out of the top, but I let it go. Maybe it’s time.
“Yeah,” I say, taking a moment to let her words echo in my head. People just fall apart sometimes.
Jess and I take a walk to get some fresh air, and it turns out that it is one of those spectacular autumn days in Manhattan, where the trees have turned to yellows and reds but most of the leaves still cling on. Not yet ready to litter the streets, not yet ready to surrender the fight to winter. The sun shines brightly, and its rays cut as deeply as the chill in the air. We walk slowly, arms linked, around the West Village, and all of the other people on the city streets feel like extras or backup dancers to our two-woman show. Jess does most of the talking as we walk and points out architectural details on the brownstones we pass, her favorite bagel place, her dry cleaner, and the corners on which she has had special kisses—all things I already know but enjoy hearing again. Over there at the corner of Eleventh and Sixth Avenue, right in front of PS 41, she kissed her ex-boyfriend from high school, again, just once, before he got married to someone else. It was afternoon, at the tail end of recess, and the kids in the playground cheered, ignoring their teacher’s attempt to usher them back inside.
The next morning, when I wake up, I head straight for the shower. I do not go near my couch or the television, which is now facing a wall, unplugged. I figure that we could both use some time apart. I shave my legs, tweeze my eyebrows, put on clean clothes straight from the dryer, even wear some concealer, because though I have done nothing but sleep for the last week, I look sapped. Since it is time to resume the role of functioning human being, it seems only logical to look the part.
As I leave my building, Robert wolf-whistles at me, long and drawn out. Probably inappropriate of my doorman, but I appreciate the compliment.
“I don’t know where you’re going,” Robert says, “but you’re going to knock them dead.”
“Thanks,” I say, and decide it’s better to keep to myself that I am headed to the constant-care floor of the Riverdale Retirement Home. The one place where that’s a real possibility.
Twenty-one
I won’t let them stick a kaleidoscope up my ass. I’m not going to do it,” Grandpa Jack says, as he hands me the letter from the doctor. I am not sure which one this is from, because Grandpa Jack has been on a medical tour lately. Since our trip to the neurologist a few weeks ago, he has seen a psychiatrist, a cardiologist, an internist, a urologist, a gastroenterologist, and now finally what appears to be a colorectal specialist. He throws the paper at me like a cranky child, even though today he is perfectly lucid. We can almost pretend everything is all right when he is like this, when he looks exactly like the old Grandpa Jack, when we are not in another stupid waiting room. I am tempted to ruffle his white hair and to pinch his sinking cheeks, but I know that will only make him angrier.
We are in the diner again, this time our diner, and my mouth tastes both sour and sweet, the remnants of a meal consisting solely of sugared coffee and pickles. The place is more crow
ded than usual—there is a children’s party in the back—and our conversation keeps getting interrupted by a noisemaker. When they sing “Happy Birthday” to a boy named Steven with a bib full of spaghetti, Grandpa Jack and I chime in.
“It’s not a kaleidoscope. It’s just a microscope, or a camera or something. And it says here that they need to look at your colon. It’s important.” I glance at the note and feel the burden of our role reversal. I am in charge of his medical decisions. I sign the permission slips now.
“I am eighty-nine years old. Who gives a shit what my colon looks like?” I look up at Grandpa Jack and notice he is smirking. “No pun intended, doll.”
We laugh at his joke for longer than it is funny.
“Can I be honest with you?” he asks, and pushes the straw of his milk shake away.
“Of course.”
“I know what’s happening to me, Emily. I can see it. Would it be so terrible if there were some dangerous stuff going on in my colon?”
I don’t answer him. I stare at the letter in my hands, and the intensity makes the words bleed together into a Rorschach inkblot, into the shape of a stain.
“Seriously. It would be a good thing.”
His voice is soft; he is singing me a lullaby. I am tempted to rest my head on his shoulder and hand over its weight. But, instead, I cross my arms around my stomach and grip my sides.
“There is something…I don’t know, right about letting things just be, isn’t there? Letting things happen the way they are supposed to happen.” He says it like that would be easy, to sit back and let cancer cells, or whatever else might be lurking, ravage him. I picture his insides in my head. Angry ants rip, feast at his sacks of organs. They leave behind nothing but deflated balloons.
“It’s better this way. You don’t want to admit it, but it is. I may be the first person in the history of the world who can say with one hundred percent sincerity that I hope I have cancer. In fact, I am going to start eating more of that fake sugar crap right now. Emily, I pray that I have cancer. Please, God, give me cancer!”
The Opposite of Love Page 15
