by Laurie Boris
Sarah received a letter from Emerson.
For a long time Sarah sat on the stairs, absentmindedly flipping through the fashion magazine’s glossy spreads on giant shoulder pads and Madonna’s latest styles. Evidence of the life Dee Dee had made for herself in Boston lay scattered all around her. The professional associations, the friends, the mailing lists she was on.
Even the bills were in Dee Dee’s name.
Maybe Sarah was never meant to stay there. Maybe that was why none of the attachments she’d made had stuck. She heard her old high school diving coach’s voice in her head, after she’d over-rotated and blown a critical entry. Wind the dive backward to the point where you made your error and figure out why you did it.
It just seemed too daunting, too much damage done. With a sigh, she finally read Emerson’s letter. He’d already told her what was in it. Summaries of movies he’d seen, what was going on at the nursing home. Old news. But at the end, he’d written about a deal he’d made with the landlord to rent an additional room for a while, so he could spread out, maybe use the space for writing, and even have a place for guests.
Good for him, Sarah thought. Even Emerson is making a life. Instead of letting it happen to him.
“Sarah?” Emerson called from the top of the stairs. “Oh, there you are. Dee Dee just called. She’s staying over at her boyfriend’s again. So you’ve got a bed for the night. Maybe tomorrow we can go shopping for one.”
She decided in an instant. To make a new life, she had to go back and figure out where she’d screwed up her old one.
“Why bother?” she said. “I’ll only have to move it.”
“Move it?”
She blinked at him. “To Syracuse.”
He blinked back.
“You’ve got a problem with that?” she said.
She didn’t think he would.
Chapter 14
That night, Emerson dreamed about Dirk Blade. He, not Emerson, sat beside Sarah on the wicker sofa in the rain. Her head rested on Dirk’s chest, not his. He said all the things she wanted to hear. Magic words. Open Sesame. Her hand drifted to his thigh. Then Dirk became Emerson and he and Sarah were making love, half on the wicker sofa, half on the soft little rug in front of it. Rain whispered against the screens. There were no neighbors, no streetlights, only stands of evergreens and a pond, like on his grandmother’s farm, surrounded by hundreds of acres of green, rolling hills and Sarah’s big brown eyes.
Her hair fell all over him, and her body was as beautiful and limber as he remembered, except riper with age and with distance from her athletic past. She felt fuller. Softer. She told him he was good and he believed her. She said the other men had existed just to make Emerson look better, because none of them would have waited this long for her, so long that he’d thought about everything they would do together, if only fate gave him another chance. Each thought was a forbidden sweet melting on his tongue, but they had hollow centers and were gone too quickly.
Then ejaculation wrenched him from his dream. He woke in a panic in Sarah’s living room, gasping for breath, damp with cold sweat and hot stickiness, the sleeping bag clammy beneath him. His fists were full of the sheet he’d been using as a blanket, which had slipped off his body, exposing him.
After a quick detour to the bathroom to clean up and attempt to regain his composure, Dirk still needled at him, so he took his notebook and a glass of milk to the wicker sofa on the porch. Over the years, Emerson had found that the fastest way to exorcise Dirk Blade out of his system was to exhaust him. But instead of writing about chocolate syrup and handcuffs, he found himself trying to capture in words the feel of Sarah dozing in his arms, the rhythm of her breathing, and the smell of her hair. His imagination filled in the gaps, but he didn’t know if it was from earlier that day or years ago, if his observations were truly authentic or flavored by the mellowed sweetness of first love.
He stopped for a while, to gather up his thoughts. The air sat thick and cool and smelled like wet metal. Streetlights twinkled through the trees. The city wasn’t so bad, at night, when it was quiet, when everyone else was sleeping.
He wouldn’t have minded sleeping, too, but didn’t dare, not until Dirk was spent. Then he’d leave Emerson alone, at least for that night.
What would be visited upon him when Sarah was living just across the hall, he couldn’t afford to think about.
* * * * *
Dee Dee didn’t take the news as well as Emerson had. When she came home Sunday morning to find Sarah packing boxes—Emerson and Rashid had gone to rent a van—she blew up and then sulked like a jilted lover. She sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and killing the rest of her Marlboros.
A promise to mail her a month’s expenses didn’t help.
“You don’t have any money.”
“I’ll get some,” Sarah said.
Dee Dee lit another cigarette. “If it’s from Jay’s coke deal, I don’t want it.”
“I told you I didn’t take it. I’m borrowing some from Emerson. Until I find a job.”
“Hope for his sake you work a little harder at it than you did here.”
Sarah let out her breath. Her head pounded. She just wanted to get on the road and go. Start her new life. Figure out the details later. “I don’t need this crap right now.”
“And I do? You’re the one who got us into this. You’re the one going off with loverboy and leaving me with all the fucking bills.”
“He’s not—” She wasn’t having that fight again. “You’ll find another roommate. It’s a good location, the rent—”
Dee Dee sneered. “I’m not staying here. Are you kidding? After those guys...touched everything?”
“They didn’t come for you. It was my fault. I told you. And they didn’t even touch your room...well, except for Petie.”
“Frankie.”
“Wasn’t it Petie, before?”
“I forget. I’m still not staying. And I really liked this place, too. Thanks a whole fucking lot for ruining my life.”
“I didn’t—” Forget it, Sarah thought. Nothing I can do about that now.
Dee Dee sucked so hard on her cigarette that she must have been drawing whimpers from men in a one-block radius. She’d probably killed her boyfriend. Maybe that was why she’d come home so early on a Sunday. “God, Jay must have gone apeshit when you told him you flushed it.”
Sarah didn’t answer.
Dee Dee’s eyes widened. “You didn’t tell him?”
“I couldn’t.”
“So he thinks they stole it.”
Sarah nodded.
“And they think you still have it.”
“Or that I sold it. Or gave it back to Jay. I really don’t give a rat’s ass what they think, to tell you the truth.”
“Jeez...Sarah...you know he could be in a lot of trouble.”
Sarah had considered that and didn’t like being reminded of it. “He can take care of himself.”
What was probably a rental van squealed to a stop outside the house. Doors clunked, and she heard Emerson’s and Rashid’s voices. She ought to hop to on the packing. Rashid had an early morning at the lab the next day, and she was already putting them behind schedule. She rinsed her coffee cup (one of Dee Dee’s; hers were already packed) and left it in the sink.
“So what am I supposed to tell him?” Dee Dee said. “You know he’s going to be back here, wondering where you went.”
Like he doesn’t have a gaggle of women waiting to comfort him. “Tell him whatever the hell you want. Tell him—” She needed something that would make Jay insane with jealousy. “Tell him Emerson’s got writer’s block and I’ve gone to give him inspiration.”
* * * * *
Rashid waddled up to the van, struggling with two of Sarah’s milk crates.
She hopped into the back and showed him where they went, how best to distribute the weight around what the three of them had already loaded—mostly books, records, clothes, her stereo, and a piece of furn
iture or two her parents had given her over the years, which would be stored in Emerson’s basement. Rashid set the crates down with a grunt and wiped his hands on his shirt.
“We are almost done?”
She smiled at him. Emerson was accustomed to the physical labor of lifting patients and moving beds and tables for mopping. Rashid, by his own admission, tried never to pick up anything heavier than his briefcase. But he’d carried down more than his share of boxes.
“Almost.”
“Then soon we will be going.”
It had already been decided. Sarah would ride with Emerson in the van, and Rashid would follow in his car. She started to feel guilty about the arrangement, which would result in making him drive almost six hours alone.
“You want to borrow some tapes?” Sarah asked.
“I have plenty,” he sighed.
“Maybe halfway I’ll switch and ride with you?”
The idea seemed to cheer him. For a second. “But only if Emerson is agreeable to this. I don’t want to steal you from him.”
She laughed. “I’m not his property.”
He said nothing.
She was not used to people being so polite. “Look. It’s a long trip. You came all the way up here to help me. Why should you have to drive all the way back by yourself?”
After a moment, he grinned and then said, “Yes, why should I?”
* * * * *
Rashid’s car was scrupulously tidy and more comfortable than the rolling chiropractic adjustment of the rental van. He played moldy oldies on the cassette deck. It was a riot to hear all those stupid songs she remembered from high school and college. She wanted to know the Hindi translation of “Muskrat Love,” and he obliged as if he’d been waiting forever for someone to ask.
“You like this music then?” he said. “Because on the way here Emerson asked that I turn it off.”
“That’s just Emerson being a pisspot,” Sarah said, waving a hand.
Rashid looked puzzled.
“It means sometimes he’s in a bad mood.”
She’d just endured two and a half hours of it: long stretches of silence between bouts of forced conversation.
“Yes, I know this about him,” Rashid said. “I figured out that he was being this pisspot when earlier he chewed my head off for nothing. He apologized and said he didn’t sleep very well last night.”
Emerson had told Sarah this, too. When they’d started driving, he had been frighteningly quiet. He hated coffee, so she’d made him get a Coke at the first rest stop. Then he’d been nicer to her, even joked a little. Still, she turned to check on him.
He stuck like glue. She waved. He waved back.
Convinced Emerson was sufficiently alert, she settled into her seat for the remaining three hours of the ride.
Another song came on. Rashid translated for her. In Hindi. In Arabic. In French. She looked at him with incredulity. All she knew was her native tongue and enough high school Spanish to find her way to the ladies’ room in Cancun. Should she ever go there.
He noticed her staring. “My father works for the government,” he said. “We traveled when I was young.”
“I would have loved that,” she said with a sigh. She imagined exotic foods and interesting playmates, boys with pretty accents and girls in wool jumpers and knee socks. Coming home to the United States sophisticated and elegant. “My father sells insurance and my mother teaches at the community college. We never went anywhere. God, it would have been great to see something besides the same stupid, boring town I grew up in.”
He smiled sadly. “I wouldn’t have minded a little bit of boring. It would have been easier to make attachments if I hadn’t been relocated every term.”
“But Emerson told me you have a fiancée in India. Seems like you stayed somewhere long enough to make attachments. Or one important one, anyway.”
“Actually,” he said, after a few beats of silence, “we have yet to meet in person.”
She blinked at him, cocking her head. “Excuse me?”
He let out a long sigh. “She is the daughter of a business associate of my father’s. Our parents thought we would make a good match.”
The tape ended and reversed itself. “You mean...it’s an arranged marriage? Is that what they do in India?” Then, as she heard it coming out of her mouth, she was horrified with herself for sounding so judgmental, so typically American.
He was charitable with her naiveté. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It’s becoming more popular among families of young people who are too busy with their studies or their jobs to search for their own partners.”
She couldn’t contain her curiosity. “And you don’t mind?”
“I trust in my parents’ judgment. And tell me this, Sarah. How often do you worry about whom you will someday marry? If any of these goondas will be good enough to spend the rest of your life with?”
“Embarrassingly often.” If I ever get married at all. She turned to check on Emerson. He was right behind them.
“This,” he said with a triumphant tone, “I don’t have to think about.”
Sarah shook her head. “But what about love?”
He spoke as if from a prepared script. “Romantic love will grow in time, with building a life and a home and a family together. I trust my parents have chosen someone compatible.”
“But what if they’re wrong? They don’t have to live with her, you do. You don’t know anything about her.”
“I know enough. She’s a suitable girl with good breeding.”
Sarah laughed. “Sounds like a race horse.”
“Sounds like a wife,” he said.
“But you’re half a world away! What if she falls in love with someone else? Or you do? Would the marriage be off, or would you end those relationships and marry each other?”
“You’re asking a lot of questions, Sarah.”
“I’m sorry. I’m getting too personal.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “It’s just that these are questions I have no answers to. I must have faith that when I enter this new chapter of my life everything will work out as it should.”
She sat back in her seat, watching the leafy Berkshires fly by her window, thinking about what Rashid had said. She vaguely remembered faith, from a sweet, unspoiled time long ago, before she learned how cruel people could be to each other. Long before men she trusted had crapped all over her life. Long before her favorite city had turned on her. She alternated between wanting to mock his naïve optimism and wanting to cuddle up to it as if it were a big, fluffy dog.
But he was a nice guy, Emerson’s best friend, and they had hours of driving ahead. “So when’s the wedding?” she asked.
“In May, when I finish my degree program and she finishes her MBA. We will marry in New Delhi and return to the States, where I have been considering offers from several very important laboratories. One in California looks particularly attractive.”
Part of her envied him for having a plan. “But I still think there’s something awfully medieval about this marriage thing. Especially for the woman. Being given away to a total stranger, like an acre of land or a cow.”
“I understand how you might find it odd, Sarah. It’s not what you are accustomed to. But look at your American divorce rate. And these are marriages entered into by choosing your own partner. How can this way be any worse?”
She shuddered, trying to imagine the type of husband her parents would choose for her. Someone boring, no doubt, maybe in the insurance business like her father. She saw brown shoes and an endless rack of neckties. They’d have sex on Saturday nights, meatloaf on Tuesdays, and a week at the shore every August. And then one night, coming home from a PTA meeting, she’d drive her mini-van off the side of the nearest cliff.
“I’d rather take my chances.”
PART 2: Syracuse, August-October 1987
Chapter 15
It was a room Sarah had slept in before: a small room with butter-yellow walls sticky from gener
ations of fingerprints and a warped closet door that wouldn’t stay closed. It smelled of wet wood, stale cigarettes, and old coffee. Even though the room had been vacant all summer, the damp, anxious-student smell hadn’t left and probably never would.
It’s not like I’m going to be here forever, Sarah thought, as she pulled on her new nightshirt, a giant blue tee with the Penthouse logo printed on the breast pocket. Emerson gave it to her when she’d realized that throwing out what the dealers had ruined left her nothing to sleep in. Even wrapped in its original plastic, the shirt had assumed the musty funk. It reminded her of college, when this charmingly shabby neighborhood, this house, this room, and Emerson had been her refuge from a variety of awful roommates, from bad phone calls home, from men who failed to live up to her expectations.
In the narrow bedframe sagged a thin mattress, and the sheet—Emerson’s spare—was worn transparent in the center. The springs complained as she sat and fluffed up the sad little pillow a former tenant had left behind. She tried not to think about the backache she’d have in the morning.
Sarah tossed for a while, trying to find a comfortable position, a spot that didn’t sag too badly. She gave sleep a chance but the stubborn bitch eluded her. It was the mattress, the smell, or maybe the T-shirt, too new from the package and itchy. Maybe it was the humid night. Or just knowing Emerson inhabited the room across the hall.
His typewriter hummed, and the clack of the keys, fast then slow then fast, became a kind of dance step. With a ping and the return of the carriage, it started again.
I’d never write about you.
Finally, she gave up. She cracked open her door and knocked softly on his.
