“I know,” she said, and I saw with surprise that she was close to tears. “I’m sorry. For everything.”
“Look, you did what you had to do. I never held it against you.
“No,” she pushed at the corner of her eyes with her index fingers. “You just let it wreck your marriage.”
“Hey, it was all part of the plan.”
“Oh yeah? Where’d it get you?”
“Right here,” I said. “To this exact minute. My whole life, my divorce, my insomnia, Jack’s drug problem, it’s all been leading me right here, to this lake, to this minute with you.”
We just stood there looking at each other, and the planet spun around a little bit more. It was as if we’d entered a daydream and forced it into focus. I felt the force of what I’d just said mingle with the power of the mountains around us, giving the air an electrical charge. “This is one of those moments in life,” I told her. “When you know you’re having one of those moments in life.”
“I love you, Ben,” she said, laughing as the tears came. “I really do.” Although I hadn’t been conscious of either one of us moving, we seemed to have suddenly gotten much closer to each other.
I was going to tell her I loved her too, but before I could she was in my arms and was kissing me so hard and deep that I almost fell over. She already knew it anyway. When Lindsey kissed you she really took you in, her tongue pulling, her soft, full lips pressing, consuming. This was not, I think, something you could learn. When we ended that first kiss, my knees were trembling, like I’d just run a race. I was quivering.
I caught my breath and said, “Does this mean you’re my girl-friend?”
We came up the stairs to find Chuck sprawled out on the floor outside Jack’s door in boxer shorts and a Blue Angel T-shirt, reading the paper out loud. The floor surrounding him was covered with discarded sections of the paper, a box of Entenmann’s Pop ’Ems, and a bottle of Bushmills. “Hey guys,” he said, bestowing an avuncular smile of inebriated benevolence on us as we ascended. “Welcome to the program.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m keeping Jack company,” Chuck said, indicating the locked door with an exaggerated gesture. “We’ve been talking all day.” There were little balls of gray carpet caught in the stubble on his cheek.
“Has he answered you?” Lindsey asked.
“Not as such,” Chuck admitted, taking a generous swig of the Bushmills. “He’s my imaginary friend. But I was alone here all day while you were out gallivanting around—”
“We were at a funeral, remember?”
“Whatever.” I could see he’d drunk about a quarter of the whiskey in the bottle. “The point is, I wanted someone to talk to, and I figured Jack could use the company. I think we’ve grown much closer.”
“Where’s Alison?”
“Napping.”
I started to say something about it being a little early in the day to be drinking, but Lindsey was dragging me insistently toward my bedroom. “We’ll leave you two alone,” she said, kicking open the bedroom door.
“Okay,” Chuck said, sounding somewhat befuddled. He rustled the newspaper theatrically. “Hey, Jack, where was I? Umm . . . Fuck it, I’ll read you the sports pages.”
Making love to Lindsey again was the sweetest of paradoxes, heart-breakingly familiar and excitingly new at the same time. The taste of her skin, the slope of her breasts, the smell of her scalp, the soft crush of her lips, all of these sensations were familiar to me, and yet I felt them all as if for the first time. It was like returning to the home you grew up in and finding it completely unchanged, and yet inexplicably new, because your own memory, incapable of preserving each minute detail, had generalized it in your mind. I kept breaking off kisses to look at her, because I could finally look at her without hiding anything. It was a gentle reunion, slow and easy, uncomplicated by sexual acrobatics or overly strenuous coupling.
Afterwards, I sat up with my back against the wall, pulling her into my lap, her back to my chest, so that we could both look out the window as twilight turned into night and the lights came on around the lake. I leaned my cheek against her temple, inhaling her scent as if I could fill myself with it.
“Well,” Lindsey said, rubbing the outside of my thigh. “That was fairly inevitable.”
“I know,” I said. “I guess I always knew we’d be here again.”
“Me too,” she said. “Can we keep it this time?”
“You’re not worried that I’m on the rebound?”
“You got married on the rebound,” she said, pressing her bottom into me. “I was your first best shot.”
“What happened to enjoying ourselves without complicating things?” I asked.
She made a face. “Aren’t you enjoying yourself?” she asked suggestively, pressing down a bit harder on me.
“Umm, yes.”
“Sounds pretty simple to me.”
“I love you,” I said, reaching under her arms to stroke her breasts. She moaned and stretched herself out in a feline manner, luxuriating in the touch.
“I know,” she whispered. Then, in one athletic motion, she flipped herself over so that we were facing each other, and kissed me deeply. I rolled her onto her back and as I kissed her neck, I realized that I’d found one good thing about being thirty: It’s an age where maybe, just maybe you can start keeping things.
Later, we were lying in bed speaking softly when Chuck cracked open the door and stuck his head in. “Hi guys,” he said. “I was wondering when you’d get down to business.”
“Hi, Chuck,” Lindsey laughed, pulling up the blanket to cover herself.
He took that as an invitation and plopped down on the bed, lying across our feet. “Maybe now you guys can stop eyeballing each other at meals, you know? You were putting out all this sexual tension, it was like Mulder and Scully.” He sat up and sniffed the air. “Ah,” he said. “The smell of fresh sex. I have just got to get some of that.” He still had a nice buzz going. I kicked him from under the covers so that he fell off of the bed. He lay on his back looking up at the ceiling, his knees bent as if he might do some sit-ups. “Jack says he’s not feeling too well. He asked me to slip some aspirin under the door.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“I don’t like the idea of giving him any drugs at all,” Chuck said. “But he’s probably running a low-grade fever, which is standard for cocaine withdrawal. He’s also probably suffering from exhaustion right now, also par for the course, but it probably isn’t helping the fever. I should probably go in there and check him out. He said he’d fix the door so that I can come in.”
Just then Alison stuck her head in the room. “Hi guys,” she said drowsily, and then actually took the scene in. “Oh!”
“Hey,” Chuck greeted her from the floor.
“Finally,” she said with a smile, jumping onto the bed and giving me a hug. She reached over and grabbed Lindsey’s arm “I knew you guys would get it together.”
“Was it that obvious?” I asked.
“Um, yeah,” Alison said with a grin. She leaned forward to look down at Chuck. “What are you, the referee?”
“We’re going in to visit Jack,” Chuck said, sitting up. “Wanna come?”
“You bet.”
“Okay,” I said. “Can you guys just give us a minute to get dressed?”
“Sure,” Chuck said, making no move to leave. “Take your time.”
“Come on, Chuck,” Alison said with a laugh, pulling him out of the room.
“For Christ’s sake!” he objected as he went. “I’m a doctor. You think I haven’t seen a naked woman before?”
Lindsey rolled over and kissed me. “We’ll pick this up later,” she said.
“When?”
“I don’t know. What are you doing for the next forty or fifty years?
“Rocky II” I said, identifying the quote as I pulled on my pants. “When he proposes to Adrian in the zoo.”
“One of my favor
ite movie scenes,” she said, buttoning her shirt.
“So was that a proposal?”
“Better,” she said, quickly arranging her hair with her fingers. “That was a promise.”
Jack had the shakes. His eyes were sunken and bleary, his lips dry and chapped, his complexion pallid. He flashed us an anemic smile when we entered, and then went back to doing what he’d been doing, which was lying under the blankets in a sheen of sweat, shivering. The room still smelled of smoke, but there were competing odors of perspiration and vomit.
“Oh my god!” Alison exclaimed, nearly tripping over the shattered television set as she ran over to sit on the edge of the sofa bed. The place was still a huge mess, what with Jack’s raging fit the night before last and then last night’s fire. She placed her hand on his forehead, then her lips, while brushing the sweat-soaked hair out of his face. “He’s got a fever.”
Chuck came out of the bathroom with a soaked towel, which he placed on Jack’s forehead. “I’m dying, man,” Jack said, closing his eyes as rivulets of water ran over the bridge of his nose and his eyebrows. “Give me some aspirin.”
“You’re not dying,” Chuck said. “But you’re malnourished and you’ve got a low fever.” He turned to Lindsey and me. “Go downstairs and make him some toast and eggs or something light like that.” He turned back to Jack. “You haven’t been eating much, have you?”
“Just give me some fucking aspirin, man,” Jack said. “Please.”
“Can’t we give him something?” Alison said.
“I’ll give you some Excedrin,” Chuck said. “After I see you eat everything on your plate.”
We all sat around with Jack while he ate dinner. At first he was tentative, even unwilling, but the aroma of Lindsey’s hastily prepared cheese omelet overcame him, and soon he was stuffing himself greedily. Alison would occasionally try to slow him down, but her efforts were in vain. Within five minutes Jack had polished off the omelet, two English muffins with margarine, and a tall glass of orange juice. He sat back with a contented belch, and Chuck brought him out a glass of water and three Excedrins which he popped into his mouth and swallowed in one gulp.
“Thanks for dinner,” he grumbled.
“It’s the least I can do after practically electrocuting you,” Lindsey said. Jack flashed her a confused look, and I realized with a start that he had little if any recollection of the previous night’s insanity.
“Why don’t you take a shower, Jack,” Chuck said. “Get yourself cleaned up a little.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You do smell like shit.”
“We’ll change your linens and clean up the place a little while you’re in there,” Alison said.
“Okay,” Jack said. It was odd to see him so compliant. The animosity had been drained out of him, replaced with a trancelike indifference to all of us. I realized that I preferred the animosity. He pulled off the blankets, revealing to us that he was stark naked under them. He sat up, oblivious to Alison’s sharp intake of breath as she quickly looked down into her lap. Even in this dilapidated state, Jack’s movie star body was the epitome of lean muscularity as he got up and headed toward the attached bathroom. As he walked, I noticed two red marks like a vampire bite, where Lindsey’s stun gun had made contact with his lower back. “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked Chuck, who was following him into the bathroom.
“I’m just going to sit in there while you shower,” Chuck said. “You’re still pretty weak. I don’t want you to fall and hurt yourself.”
“You going to hold my dick for me while I pee?”
“Whatever floats your boat, Hollywood.”
“Well,” I said as the two of them went into the bathroom. “At least we know now that Jack doesn’t color his hair.”
Alison, who had already begun stripping the bed, let out a snort. “That’s not funny,” she said, smiling in spite of herself. “Now go get me some new sheets from the linen closet before I throw something at you.”
We cleaned up Jack’s room, sweeping away the ashes and the broken glass, and dragging the larger debris downstairs and into the garage. Alison changed the sheets while Lindsey cleared away all of the dirty Tupperware scattered around the room. Many of the containers still had the food we’d put in them over the last three days, and there were cold-cuts packages lying unopened where we’d slid them under the door. We’d assumed Jack would eat once we got the food to him. We’d been wrong.
When he came out of the shower, Jack looked a bit more like his old self. He still had about five day’s growth of a beard, since he’d been unshaven when we abducted him, but his hair was ten shades lighter and surrounded his head in a healthy golden mane. Chuck leant him a clean pair of scrubs that said “Property of Mt. Sinai Hospital,” and Jack climbed back into bed.
“Do you still hate us?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said, rolling onto his side. “Am I still a prisoner?”
We looked at each other and then at Chuck. “Why don’t we discuss that tomorrow,” Chuck said.
“Whatever,” Jack said.
“I’ll stay in here with you tonight, Jack,” Alison said.
“No thanks,” Jack said. “I’d prefer to be alone.”
“Are you sure?”
Jack turned away from us all. “Close the lights as you leave, please,” he whispered.
I was never able to sleep after making love. Sex always left me wired and inexplicably restless in bed beside the sleeping form of my partner. It was amazing how so soon after the most intimate of unions I could feel myself alone again.
After we got Jack into bed, Lindsey and I made love again, this time with a little more abandon than we had that afternoon. Soon afterwards she was fast asleep while I, true to form, was ready to run a marathon. As thrilled as I was to be sharing a bed with her again, I was much too fidgety to stay in it.
I went downstairs and watched the end of the late news. Sports and weather. Happily, I missed the meat of the newscast, so I had no body count for the night. After the news I flipped between a Cheers rerun and Baywatch. I realized that I still thought of Cheers as new, even though it had run for ten years and was now only in syndication. I thought about Lindsey, and prayed that this time was for keeps. At some point I dozed off.
I was awakened by the sound of the refrigerator door closing. I rolled over on the couch, and saw a lean form come out of the kitchen.
“Who’s that?” I whispered.
“It’s just me.” As the figure approached, I realized that it was Jack.
“What are you doing down here?” I asked him, only half conscious. In the dim light, he appeared to be shirtless.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep. I just needed a drink.”
“But how . . . ?” I didn’t finish the question, because I closed my eyes and sleep claimed me again. After what felt like a few seconds I opened my eyes again, as if suddenly remembering something, but Jack wasn’t there anymore and I wondered if he’d ever been. I fell back asleep and dreamed that Jack was on Baywatch, walking up the beach in his red lifeguard trunks carrying the red life preserver over his shoulder. I sat in a lounge chair near the ocean, waiting until he got closer to me so that I could congratulate him for being on the show. In the reverse logic of dreams, being on Baywatch was somehow a greater achievement than his movie career. As he walked by me I called out to him, but the pounding of the surf drowned out my call, and he didn’t hear me. I screamed his name again, but his eyes remained fixed on some distant point ahead of him and I could only watch helplessly as he strolled down the beach, until he was out of sight. For some reason, it didn’t occur to me to get up out of the chair and follow him.
The next morning Chuck woke me up by urgently shoving my shoulder. “He’s gone, man.”
“What?” I rolled over on the couch, my face peeling off the leather like a sticker off wax paper.
“Jack’s gone. He’s not anywhere in the house.”
Even in
my groggy state, I was not completely surprised. “What time is it?”
“Ten-thirty.”
“How’d he do it?” I asked, sitting up and stretching my arms behind me. Looking out the window I saw that it was raining hard, and only then did I hear the steady pounding of water on the roof.
“He took the hinges off the door.”
“That can’t be easy,” I said with admiration. “He must be feeling better.”
“Well, I’m sure he’s feeling great,” Chuck said sarcastically. “Because he’s probably high as a kite right now.”
“Maybe he just went for a walk. To clear his head or something.”
Chuck raised his eyebrows. “Yeah.”
“Does Alison know?” I asked.
“She’s out looking.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” Chuck said with a sigh. “Around. She’s driving around town.”
“Where’s Lindsey?”
“Still sleeping, I guess. I thought you were in there, too, so I didn’t go in.”
“Never stopped you before,” I said, standing up to stretch.
“So,” Chuck mused. “You’re in bed with the woman you’ve been in love with for years, and you decide tonight might be a good night to sleep on the couch? What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m funny that way,” I said, heading up the stairs to wake Lindsey. Before I was halfway up, though, the doorbell rang. I turned around and sat down on the stairs while Chuck crossed the foyer to open the door. It was Jeremy, in a bright yellow slicker that covered him from head to ankle. I remembered what it felt like to hear the rain from underneath a plastic hood, and felt a stabbing jolt of yearning for childhood, for walking through the woods in camp, insulated in my rain slicker, looking for the salamanders and slugs that came out during summer rainstorms.
“Hi, Jeremy,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I can’t find the Darth Vader mask,” he said, pulling back his hood to see me better. “I left it on the porch last night and it’s gone now. Did you take it back?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “Maybe your mom brought it in.”
Plan B: A Novel Page 17
