by Jill Malone
She held my wrists, not answering, and I finally deciphered her meaning. Had my injuries predated Audrey? That was really the essential question, reduced in the stove of that minivan in the little dirt parking lot on a backstreet in Manoa by a stunning climber from grizzly land.
“Yeah,” I said, “long before Audrey.”
XVI.
Lit with hanging lanterns, the room felt as intimate as a park in the moonlight—the sake burning through us like laughter. Our table in the bar sat alongside the koi pond and our reflections in the mirrors that lined the walls ate even as we did. Grey, Emily, and I were downtown at Aki’s Sushi Bar. Outside, rain battered the pavement, rows of posh sedans, the glass-encased bus stop.
“So, next weekend,” Grey said, “is my parents’ fiftieth anniversary. You guys are coming, yeah?”
“Jesus, fifty years,” I said.
“I know, it’s crazy. I was the only kid in school, I think, whose parents hadn’t split up, yeah, Em?”
“Split up or died.”
“Dead is split up.”
“Your wife coming?” Emily asked.
Grey stuffed a piece of eel into his mouth and chewed slowly. Emily glanced at me as she shoveled down a mouthful of fried rice. She’d pulled her hair back into a bun so tightly that it looked painful, the skin around her eyes stretched toward her ears. Forsaking the lavalava for a short black skirt and sleeveless silk shirt, she looked stunning, her brown eyes resting on me a long moment while we waited for Grey to feed us a new and utterly unreasonable excuse for his wife’s absence.
“She couldn’t make it,” he said finally.
I drank my sake in tiny sips, the flavor not quite palatable in my mouth. I took a bite of ginger as an orange-speckled koi flicked past in the pond to my left.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like if my parents had lasted fifty years,” Emily said. “I don’t even remember what they were like together when I was little.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Not even if they were happy or if they fought all the time?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t argue—at least, I don’t remember any fighting—but I don’t remember much affection either. Mom worked every night and my dad was away for months at a time. I remember their absences more than anything, their ambition. Whenever my dad left, he used to wake me the night before to tell me good-bye—to avoid delays or a scene or whatever the next morning—and this one time he forgot. Mom said I was inconsolable for weeks.”
“Poor little heiress.”
“Ryan, don’t make this evening ugly.”
“And spoil your outfit?”
“I didn’t know she wasn’t coming.”
“No?”
“That’s why I asked.”
“I’m sure, Em. I’m sure you expected her to come.”
“Didn’t you expect her to?”
“You’re such a little bitch. Don’t try to make fucking innocent with me.”
“Grey, calm down, man. She was just asking. Seriously, you’re freaking out.”
“I’m freaking out? I’m freaking?”
“Yeah … a little.”
“Oh god, I’m so sorry to freak out. It’s only my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, not an important milestone or anything for my wife to attend. It’s not like the TV cameras will be there, for Christ sake. I mean, if she came, who would give the senator his blowjob?”
His voice was rising and, despite his tan, Grey’s face burned. I slouched in my chair, my chopsticks extended before my face to ward off his temper.
“Jesus, Grey.”
“Oh, am I embarrassing you? I don’t mean to embarrass you ladies in your Rodeo Drive outfits. This is a nice evening right, a celebration of friendship and camaraderie, so we should just kick back and drink our fucking sake.”
He drank the rest of his cup and poured another. He’d spat friendship at us like a poison dart. Emily raised an eyebrow and watched Grey pour his drink. I drank the rest of my miso soup and observed him over the rim of my bowl: his face tight with distress, his eyes glassy as though he might cry.
I ate my sushi rolls quickly, spreading a thick coat of wasabi over yellow fin tuna, unagi, and tako rolls so that they burned my sinuses with each gulp. We’d planned a festive dinner to catch up since we’d had few occasions of late to surf; my school schedule was still wigging me out despite the fact that we were in the last half of the spring semester. Though my students were exceptional and diligent, I wanted to prove that I could teach graduate classes and was spending more time with lesson plans and student conferences than strictly necessary.
With my focus on work, I’d missed Grey’s distress. It was evident now as he slouched over his fried rice, glaring into the ceramic interior of his sake cup: the scales of his even temper were no longer balanced. Grey always joked about his wife’s absence, about their non-sex; I’d never seen him get upset about her, or anything else. It seemed to me as I looked from Emily to Grey, that we were all liars—holding pieces of truth back from one another like businessmen—and I felt sick that I had never told them about my mother’s wreck. That any secret existed between us seemed false and cowardly. And though I had never mentioned to Grey that I’d slept with Emily, nor did I think she had confessed to him, I felt no urgency to impart that information. Only the death of my mother taxed my conscience.
Grey finished the bottle of sake, waved at the waitress for another, and stared stupidly at his plate. This youngest child of old parents, I wanted to comfort him. A red lantern above Emily’s shoulder swung in the wake of the waitress’ departure. What was the value assigned to family failure: did a suicide mother trump a shitty wife?
“My mother had an orange Camaro—a present from my father. She drove it into a cement retaining wall the spring I was fifteen—on purpose.”
It was the on purpose that opened inside me like a wound, this ill-advised betrayal of my mother—this sad summing up of a family tragedy. And suddenly I couldn’t go on. Baby, I thought, you fucking baby. Having already confessed so much, I told the rest of the story to my startled priests.
“I was eating gingersnaps on the kitchen floor, waxing my board. I didn’t notice she’d gone. I don’t remember the last thing she said. It was late that night when the police came. The older one patted my shoulder and asked my dad to come out on the porch with him. Dad didn’t say a word when he came back inside. I knew, though. I knew when she wasn’t in the orchard that afternoon.”
Grey’s face had drained of pigment and temper; he looked like he’d been punctured. He held his cup of sake clenched in his fist and stared at me with dilated eyes. Emily winced as though I’d struck her. I felt hollowed in the silence, a traitor to my mother. The pond gurgled beside us. I tasted bile and chugged the clear burn of sake down in two gulps to suppress the taste, to fill my mouth with a different sensation. It was the sake that stung my eyes.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Janie.”
Grey reached across the table and grabbed my hand, smashing my chopsticks into my palm. I resisted the urge to pull away from him, to leave the table, the restaurant. Emily hadn’t moved or fixed her face; her eyes still winced despite the tears. She’d ruin her shirt if she didn’t stop. I wanted to comfort both of them, to hold as the grief passed through our sieved bodies.
“Fucking hell, Janie,” Grey said. “I’m so sorry.”
He looked over at Emily and then back at me.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
I’d never told anyone before. Not even the Belfast dentist. I hadn’t wanted my mother to exist like that between us. I held tight to Grey’s hand. Emily hadn’t moved or spoken. How could I comfort them and not myself?
We sat like that a long time, statues of people at rest, eerily lifelike under the lanterns.
XVII.
Shivering and tightly huddled, I lowered myself into the scald of bathwater, and stretched my aching legs, my crippled back. As I’d biked up the winding climb of Tant
alus, the light rain had become a torrent and then a howling, blinding deluge: mud-caked, my thin layer of clothes sopping, even my bones felt brittle. I’d wrecked twice, the back tire skidding away, my leg burned from the pavement and seasoned with gravel. I’d peeled my spongelike clothes off, climbed into the tub, all the while cursing Dr. Adams, that collaborator, kowtowing to treacherous, pedestrian bureaucrats.
She’d left a note for me to visit her office for a quick conference and I’d caught up with her during one of my afternoon breaks between classes. Preposterous, thimble-sized slices of watermelon dangled from her ears.
“Oh, Dr. Elliot, I’m sure you know all about the imminent teachers’ strike, so it won’t surprise you at all, I’m sure, when I tell you that next year you’ll continue to teach second-year Latin.”
“Imminent?” I said. “I don’t know about an imminent strike. My students tell me every year there’s a strike rumor and nothing ever comes of it.”
She paused, her face filled with a kind of wonder at my evident incredulity—were those earrings whimsical?—then she went on as though I hadn’t interjected.
“It’s possible we’ll have to cut some of the assistantships too, which I refuse to consider right now. Anyway, I have to keep you where I have you.”
She went on to explain that every department in the university was under budgetary pressure to minimize course offerings and terminate subjects considered to lack “real-world application”; so we in Classics must continue to bolster our numbers in the introductory courses—to reinforce our students’ superb performance—and thereby the legitimacy of upper level and graduate course offerings.
“You’ve achieved so much with the students and the coursework, it would be idiotic not to exploit the students’ response to you. I know it’s a disappointment, Dr. Elliot, but you and I will reevaluate each term and hope for better accountancy.”
And that had been the quick conference. I’d been typecast. It was illogical to be stalled in my position because I did it well, because some asshole with a pie chart refused to understand that enlightenment and meaningfulness aren’t random and miraculous by-products, but the primary objective of teaching: the purpose of education. On my voice mail at work, Emily had left a message canceling our plans for dinner—for the third time in a week—so I’d determined to bike Tantalus in the rain instead of going straight home to another dinner of cereal. A brilliant day all reckoned.
By the time the water had become tepid and I was debating whether it was better to stay and shiver or grasp my way out, I heard Emily’s voice in the studio.
“Honey? What the hell happened to your bike? Jesus, look at your clothes. Jesus, look at you. What the hell have you been doing?”
It all seemed self-evident, so I didn’t answer as she set down the pizza box she was holding and helped me from the tub.
“God, your leg looks nasty; do you have betadine?”
I pointed to the cupboard. After she’d applied the ointment to my leg and roughly toweled me off, I threw on my sweats and crashed on the futon. She surveyed me a moment, then went to the kitchen to plate the pizza. Outside, the rain had stopped.
“I didn’t think you could get away tonight,” I said.
Emily and her partner had taken over production of a documentary about local photographers and she’d spent the previous three months—cell phone plastered to her ear, fax machine whirring bids and contracts—piecing together the funding to keep two film crews working. Relying on credit cards, the director had gone wildly over budget: he’d been following four photographers on three different islands intermittently over a period of fourteen months to capture as complete a picture as possible of each artist’s process. One of the Oahu photographers, Nick Reinhart, had called Emily when the project had stalled; it was precisely what she and her partner had been looking for, but it was also a financial catastrophe.
She sat in the chair across from me, her plate in her lap, and twisted her hair back into a tight bun that she re-secured with chopsticks.
“I’ve been feeling like a complete asshole about rainchecking with you all the time. I’m sorry, by the way. You’ve obviously had a crap day.”
“This pizza is definitely the bright spot.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that too. Things are just crazy for me right now. I know I said I wanted a local project, but I should have been more specific. Anyway, the director has promised me all he needs is six more weeks and I’ve given him three, so we’ll see how it goes. But I don’t want to talk about work, and I don’t want to have to apologize to you anymore—”
“You don’t have to apologize—”
“No, I mean, I hate that I feel lousy about neglecting you and I think it’s only fair to say that for the next few months I’ll continue to neglect you, so instead of having to apologize over and over and feel shitty and neglect you, I think it’s better to tone down.”
The pizza stopped tasting delightful. Tone down? Emily was talking too fast. I sat up on the futon; in the large room of the studio, she sat ten paces from me. Her eyes looked red, her slacks rumpled, and her black heels torturous.
“I’ve got the Spark to manage and this nimrod director and I hate to do things badly and I don’t want to do you badly, either—I mean, to suck—I don’t want to suck at my job or my relationship, so it’s easier to be upfront and just eliminate the possibility of failure in the one place I can, right?”
If anyone knew about eliminating the possibility of failure, it was me. Through my wretched tiredness, I smiled at her. And then it occurred to me.
“Why not just get someone to manage the Spark for a few months? Tanya, she’d be great and you’ve worked together for years.”
Emily picked the mushrooms from her slice and nodded absently. She had yet to take a bite.
“Yeah, I don’t think I want to turn management of the Spark over to anyone else … even short-term. It’s mad busy at the moment and this summer it’ll be even more intense.”
This was beginning to sound like another quick conference. “So we’ll tone down: taupe or maybe even beige; something to go with your heels.”
“Yeah, so this is going well.”
Emily kicked off her heels, stood, and began pacing in front of the bookshelves. I didn’t have the stamina for this: the rest of my muscles were sore, why not my heart too?
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
Emily quit pacing and began a story that I stopped listening to after the first sentence.
“There’s this guy—one of the new bartenders.”
For a while she talked and finally I felt her hands on my shins and realized she’d sat on the futon beside me. But my punishing ride had inured me, I was only weary.
“Come on, roll over and I’ll give you a massage.”
I rolled onto my belly. At some point in the night I woke, the lamps dim, plates cleared away, the girl gone.
XVIII.
I met Nick Reinhart at the wrap party for Emily’s documentary film eight weeks after we’d been toned down. I knew his work: curious brown-tinted photos of hula dancers at rest, a sea turtle gliding with elementary school kids in a cove in Koko Head, young men cruising North Shore with their boards strapped to the roof of duct-taped cars. The photos had an impromptu sense of catching the subject’s secret self—an exposure of a fierce, snarling character that most people manage to shield from cameras. Because the photos were aesthetically beautiful, the light somehow manipulated like a Vermeer painting, the subjects were even more intriguing, sadder and richer.
I had seen many hours of footage at the production studio with Emily—Nick was the second photographer shadowed on Oahu—and was enraptured by Nick’s quick satirical commentary, his lack of interaction with his chosen subject, and the days of meticulous work he poured over each photo—altering the texture of the image so significantly that often the source of the photo seemed wholly unrecognizable from the finished piece. He seemed more like a painter to me
than a photographer. Dressed in blue jeans, deep-colored oxford shirts, and black Doc Martens, he was the last thing you’d expect after seeing his Hawaiian-style work. Also, the fact that he was exceptionally, even shockingly pale and wore his hair shaggy and unkempt like a skater, was in direct contrast to his prep-school style of dress. I told Emily I had to meet this guy.
“Nick? I dated him in college … briefly. Egomaniacal. We were doomed.”
“Jesus. You dated him, too? No wonder he knew you were good for the funding.”
“It’s a small island, honey. You have to learn to expect these things.”
Naturally. What was I thinking?
“What’s he like? I mean, besides being egomaniacal.”
“Really smart. History fanatic, addicted to popular culture. The guy could talk intelligently about any subject. You know how quickly people like that get old.”
I looked back at the screen: Nick in the dark room, perched on a wooden stool, his head half-cocked as he looked directly into the camera; his features illuminated as if by firelight. I had to meet this guy.
At the wrap party in Kahala Hotel, the posh event was catered: two tables of local-style grub (chicken katsu, poi, mahi mahi, etc.) and a sushi chef wielding several large knives and a remarkable dexterity with seaweed. The party boasted an open bar, and I was helping deplete resources as quickly as possible, gulping whiskey while hovering just outside the hum of the party.
On the off chance I might meet the gifted photographer, I’d worn my little black dress with my open-toed black slides and had actually attempted to control my hair with a comb. Well into the evening, he was still mobbed by the crew, their spouses, several of the elite investors Emily had set on him, and his assistant, a stunning Japanese girl with straight shining black hair that swayed along her waist. I’d never seen anyone in real life with shining hair; it was deflating and gruesome. I had a vision of sheep shears and sobbing.
Emily popped over whenever the mobs relented, but for the most part, I felt out of context. In the end, I walked outside the hotel dining room and wandered the courtyard, settling finally in one of the metal chairs gathered around the pool. The moon stalled, lonely in the pale of the sky.
