Dive From Clausen's Pier

by Ann Packer

  “What did he say?” Kilroy said.

  I stared straight ahead. “Well, for one thing Rooster’s getting married. To Joan, the Intensive Care nurse. And he has a new roommate—Mike, I mean. In rehab. He’s in rehab, you know—his mother had to press the buttons on the tape recorder for him.” I stopped talking and faced Kilroy. I wanted him to feel what I was feeling, the same wildness. Or I wanted him to reach in and soothe it, tame it down. He didn’t speak, though, and after a moment I turned back to my beer glass and lifted it for a long swallow. “Why is it,” I said, “that you don’t want to tell me about any of your old girlfriends? When was the last time you were involved with someone?”

  A weary look passed over his face. “Does self-involved count?” He sighed. “Sorry, that’s a line from a movie.” He scratched his jaw. “I don’t have old girlfriends the way you have your old boyfriend, OK?”

  “Then how do you have them?”

  “I don’t.” He laid his forefingers side by side on the bar. “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  Joe leaned against the bar sink, his arms crossed over his chest, and I thought of what Kilroy had said to me our first evening together—I’m just a guy who likes bars. I wondered if over the years he’d laid out his life for Joe, bit by bit, or if liking bars meant laying out precisely nothing. I faced Kilroy again and found him watching me with an odd look on his face, a look on the edge of becoming something else. In a small, crowded voice I said, “Which tree should I bark up?” and when Kilroy looked away I couldn’t help it, I had to press harder. “Well? Which tree?”

  “Why don’t you try not barking?” he snapped. He stared at me with a terrible sneer capsizing his mouth, and finally I got off my stool and slunk away, past the bar, between the empty tables, through the heavy door, and out into the night.

  I set off down Sixth Avenue, skirting idlers and saunterers, walking fast. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with me, to have put up with what I’d put up with so far, the secretiveness of him, the fortress? Oh, he was kindness itself, he was compassion, understanding, but it was all coming away from him and there wasn’t a single way in.

  A block or two before 14th Street I cut east, through dark canyons, past old warehouses and stalled, waiting trucks. I saw a couple pressed against a building, both tall, both wearing black leather jackets. Three guys about my age, walking fast without talking. A skinny black man wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat, standing in a doorway saying, “I’m waiting for the moment, I’m waiting for the moment.” A lumpy old woman in a bathrobe, standing under a low roof of scaffolding, a dazed look on her face. And a beautiful girl who climbed out of a taxi and stepped up onto the sidewalk just as I went by, her hair a silk sheet, her pants fashionably short over square-toed boots, her face tranquil but covered with tears.

  I thought: If it doesn’t work out with Kilroy, I can stay in New York anyway, I can become a New Yorker.

  New Yorkers were different. Old or young, crazy or brilliant, plain or gorgeous—they didn’t just walk outside, they made a presentation, they presented themselves. They said, This is who I am, today I’m someone wearing these boots, I’m walking with this look on my face, I’m having this intense and troublesome discussion with this difficult but beloved friend.

  I walked for a long time. I went down Broadway, took in the parade along St. Mark’s Place, followed Avenue A until I’d crossed East Houston and entered the narrow old streets of the Lower East Side. The city was lit up, the streetlights, the windows of people’s apartments, curtains or blinds open so that looking up you could see the top of a picture, a doorway leading to darkness. I’d forgotten my gloves, and I pulled my arms inside my jacket and walked with my hands tucked in my armpits, my empty sleeves dangling.

  I didn’t get back to the brownstone until nearly nine. Simon, Greg, Lane, and even Alice were sitting around the kitchen table, drinking red wine and eating from a platter of sliced peasant bread and marinated vegetables, the reds and purples glistening with oil. A quick glance at the whiteboard told me Kilroy hadn’t called.

  “Pull up a chair,” Simon said. “You look like you could use some wine.”

  I found a chair against the wall and dragged it over to the table, next to Lane. She wore a baggy thermal T-shirt, and her pale face was pink across the nose and cheeks, as if she’d dipped a fine paintbrush into her wine and tinted herself very faintly.

  Simon poured wine into a tumbler for me. “So, Carrie,” he said. “How abjectly pathetic do you think I am?”

  I glanced at the others and saw from their suppressed smiles that they knew where he was going.

  “On a scale of one to ten,” he went on. “With ten being, you know, the kid in fourth grade who smelled weird and never got invited to any birthday parties, and one being Kevin Spacey.”

  “Kevin Spacey’s not pathetic,” Greg exclaimed. “He’s totally cool.

  He’s God.”

  “That’s my point,” Simon said, rolling his eyes. “Jesus.”

  “Simon,” Lane began, but he waved her off.

  “This is between me and Carrie. How abjectly pathetic?”

  “Three?” I said. “No, two.”

  He looked at Alice and they both burst into laughter. “You are way too nice to live in New York,” he said to me. “Greg and Lane probably wouldn’t give me more than a five, and Alice—” He tossed her an arch look. “I don’t know, doll, what do you think—eight? Or nine?”

  She smirked and ran a hand through her short, bleached hair, which she wore in a stylishly disheveled flip, the bangs flopping onto her forehead. “Sweetie,” she said. “Gosh. I had you at seven, easy.”

  He smiled and turned back to me. “It’s a question because of what I did today.”

  “What?”

  “I called Dillon.” He gave me an ironic smile. “From the gallery, remember?”

  I remembered: Dillon of the gorgeous face and the bored condescension and the pseudo-intellectual talk. “Wow,” I said. “Are you going to meet him for a drink?”

  His face went pink, and he started laughing again. Lane frowned a little and looked down at her hands. He laughed harder, his face redder still.

  “Careful,” Alice said. “You’re about to drool.”

  He shook his head, but he was laughing silently now, convulsively. He wagged his hand at Alice in a kind of summons.

  She took a sip of her wine and looked at me. “Dillon said, and I believe I’m quoting accurately here, ‘You know, I’m reorganizing my file cabinets right now, and I just feel really, really overextended.’ ”

  Greg giggled, and I looked at Simon. “Really?”

  He nodded dramatically, still laughing noiselessly. “In other words,” he managed at last, wiping tears from his eyes, “ ‘Would you please take your revolting self and cease to exist?’ ”

  Alice shook her head. “I think it’s more like ‘Would you please go pick up my Prozac refill for me?’ I mean, reorganizing his file cabinets?”

  “Alice,” Greg said with annoyance. “Don’t you get it? He’s saying he’d rather reorganize his file cabinets than go out with Simon.”

  A look of impatience passed over Alice’s face, and she opened her mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it.

  “Thanks for the exegesis, Greg,” Simon said.

  “You had a bad day,” Lane said suddenly. She looked at me for a moment, then turned back to him. “Just, you know—”

  “What?” he said. “Shut up about it?”

  “No,” she said softly. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  He sighed. “I know.” He reached for a piece of bread and dipped it in the olive oil. He took a bite and then set what was left on his plate. “So,” he said to Alice. “Where’s Frank, anyway? I don’t know when you were last here at this hour.”

  “Having dinner with his asshole cousin,” she said. “I came down with a crippling headache at the last minute.” She smiled. “Hey, did I tell you guys? He wants me to move
in.”

  “Move in?” Simon said. “You already live there.”

  “Officially,” she said.

  Lane studied her. “Are you going to?”

  Alice shrugged. “Maybe. His place is so tiny, if nothing else having me and my stuff there all the time would probably make us break up sooner.”

  Simon and Greg laughed. “You’re psycho,” Simon said.

  “Plus think of the great material,” she went on. “I could do a one-act where the whole thing took place on a bed.”

  She wrote plays, or maybe just wanted to: day after day I went by the open door to her empty room and saw her unused computer sitting on her desk, covered by a Barbie beach towel. I’d mentioned it to Kilroy once, and he’d made some remark about my living in a wannabe house. I remembered what he’d said of Simon—He’s trying to be something he isn’t—and my fury at him intensified. What was so terrible about wanting to be something other than what you were? How could you become anything without having wanted to be that thing first? All at once I was ashamed of having written off Alice’s writing. For all I knew she also had a laptop, or wrote longhand, or just thought about it a lot! Shut up, I thought at Kilroy, and then something fell in on itself and I felt myself sink into despair. What did it mean that I was yelling at him in my mind? Was I even in his?

  “Are you OK?” Lane said, looking at me with concern.

  I took a swallow of wine and nodded.

  Now everyone was looking at me, Simon with his head tilted to the side, his eyes narrowed behind the lenses of his glasses.

  “I guess I’m kind of tired,” I said.

  “You know,” Alice said, “this whole time I’ve been sitting here thinking how much I like your shirt, but, like, stupidly not saying it. It’s really cool.”

  I was wearing a long-sleeved red T-shirt to which I’d added some embellishments about a year ago, one weekend when I was bored: red-and-gold braid around the neck and down the front, alongside which I’d sewn a brass button every couple of inches. I’d even put a three-inch slash of braid across where each of my hipbones hit, to suggest little pockets. “Thanks,” I said.

  “It reminds me of my grandmother,” she added.

  “Alice,” Simon exclaimed.

  “It’s a compliment,” she said. “My grandmother has a lot of style.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Seriously, it’s like the jacket of one of her Adolpho suits, but with an ironic spin. It’s very postmodern and fin de siècle—Adolpho overtaken by the Gap.”

  I looked around for someone who thought this was as silly as I did, then realized that the person I wanted to exchange a glance with—the person I was really looking for—was Kilroy.

  I stood up and carried my glass to the sink.

  “Where are you going?” Simon said.

  I turned and saw everyone looking at me, Simon with his face still a little pink from before, Greg dark-haired and kind and half a step behind everyone else, Alice stylish in a polyester blouse and heavy black eyeliner, Lane quiet and watchful. Who were these people? Why was I with them? “Upstairs,” I said. “I have to make a phone call.”

  On the third floor, I flopped onto the futon. I wanted to call him and didn’t, wanted him to call me and wanted him to vanish. I looked around the alcove, illuminated by a single ugly lamp, fake brass with a yellowing shade. It was empty of everything, this little space: myself and all my life, which I’d taken to Kilroy’s and hung carefully on the walls in the exact places where the pictures weren’t.

  From the kitchen I could hear a faint murmur of voices, then the rise of laughter. I went out to the landing for the phone and carried it back to the futon. Halfway through dialing, I pressed the disconnect button. I sat there holding the phone on my lap, and then, without really thinking about it, I dialed Jamie in Madison.

  When she heard my voice there was a long silence, and then she said, “How are you,” in such a way that I couldn’t possibly misinterpret it as a question. She laughed a short, cold laugh.

  “I’m sorry, Jamie,” I said, aware that I was echoing myself, echoing what I’d said to Mike: I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. “I should’ve called earlier. I should have.”

  She breathed in deeply, and I heard her let it out again, loud, like a sigh. I knew somehow that she was in her kitchen, the day’s dishes neatly arranged in the drainboard by the sink, just a single light on, hanging low over the speckled linoleum table.

  “Jamie,” I said.

  “What.”

  “Please try to understand. I had to leave.”

  She was silent for a while, and I imagined how she must look, her light hair framing her face, her clear green eyes. “I understand that,” she said at last. “I didn’t at first, but now I do. But that was almost two months ago. Every day I wonder what it is about me that makes you hate me.” She began to cry, and as I listened I felt huge and monstrous and disconnected from her: her tears had exactly no effect on my heart. They filled me with pity, but it was a cold, cerebral pity—it was pity for myself, not for Jamie.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I don’t hate you, Jamie. It’s just—”

  “You called Mike,” she sobbed. “You called him twice.”

  “I know.”

  I heard her footsteps and then the muffled sound of her blowing her nose.

  “Jamie?” I twisted the phone cord tight around my finger and then untwisted it again, my skin indented red like a barber pole.

  “What?”

  “Can I—can I ask how you are, what you’ve been doing?”

  She blew her nose again. “Well, to give you an example, last Saturday night I played Parcheesi with my parents and Lynn. Oh, and get this—we broke for popcorn after game three.”

  I had a vivid image of the four of them, Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher on opposite sides of the wobbly card table in their pine-paneled family room, Jamie and Lynn between them. Mrs. Fletcher vague in a blouse and sweater, needing reminding every time it was her turn. Mr. Fletcher barely there, Jamie wishing she weren’t. And Lynn—Lynn with too much eye makeup on, glancing at the clock. I thought of her at the Alley in that short, tight skirt, and I wondered how I could have been giving her advice: I, whose life was a mess. “How is Lynn?” I said after a moment.

  “Ridiculous. She and Mom are driving me nuts about each other. She has to move out.”

  “Too bad—if I’d thought of it sooner she could have sublet my place.”

  There was a silence, and then Jamie said, “You sublet your apartment?”

  I felt a spike of fear. Didn’t she know? How could she not know, when everyone in Madison knew everything about everyone else?

  “Well?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  There was a thunk, and then nothing, silence, just the whoosh of all the space between us.

  “Jamie.” I waited and then I said it again, and again—“Jamie. Jamie? Jamie?” Then I understood: she’d set the phone down and walked away. I could picture it, Jamie standing across the kitchen staring at the receiver, enraged and teary. “Jamie!” I shouted, but although I stayed on the line for several more minutes, saying her name over and over again, she never came back.

  I hung up and carried the phone back out to the hall. At the little window in the stairwell, I pushed the curtain to the side and peered out. The brownstones behind us were patchily lit: a low window here, a high one there, then dark, dark, and a whole blazing four stories. Someone else might have looked for a message in the pattern of illumination, but I just stood there staring, filled with a sense of myself as occupying the smallest of places in the world.

  CHAPTER 23

  Kilroy came over the next morning. I was alone in the house drinking coffee, and when I answered the door I was shocked to see him: standing in the cold, bright light, barely more than a silhouette outside the dark, recessed entryway. He had his hands on his hips, a gruff, irritated look on his face: he was there on sufferance, under his own orders.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?” />
  “Do you want to come in?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  In the kitchen I poured him a cup of coffee, then sat down. After a while he sat, too, unshaven, dressed in his jeans and a torn gray sweatshirt and his leather jacket, which he didn’t take off. It was ten-twenty; he must have decided not to go to work.

  “That Kilroy,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee. “What is it with him?”

  I understood that he wasn’t going to apologize any more directly, and it was all I could do not to laugh.

  “What?”

  I shook my head.

  He lifted his mug and looked at me across the top of it. “So what’d you do last night?”

  “You mean after I walked to the Lower East Side and back?”

  A faint hint of surprise passed over his face and disappeared. “Yeah.”

  “I sat around drinking wine with Simon and everyone. Alice said my shirt was very postmodern and fin de siècle—Adolpho overtaken by the Gap.”

  Kilroy shook his head. “Oh, the frailties of youth.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s like that woman in the bookstore a couple weeks ago. ‘The complacence of extreme beauty.’ Talking for the sake of how it sounds, not what you really want to say.”

  “And what do you really want to say?”

  He held my glance for a moment, then looked away.

  I carried my coffee to the sink and poured it into the right-hand basin, which was jammed with chipped mugs holding the milky remains of my housemates’ coffee. Neither of the two basins was bigger than a mixing bowl, and they were both always crowded, no room to wash anything. In the left-hand basin, last night’s glasses gave off a winey smell. I moved the mugs over, then centered a rubber stopper on the drain in the right-hand basin, turned on the hot water, and added a squirt of dishwashing liquid.

  “What’s the shirt?” Kilroy said.

  He’d come to stand beside me, his back against the counter, one leg crossed over the other. He sipped from his coffee and stared at me.

  “The shirt?”

  “The fin de siècle one.”