The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  She’d never known a man she wanted to cook for before. She’d met guys, befriended them, had sex with them, left them—nothing as intimate as feeding them. Mark needed to be fed.

  When she’d arrived at his apartment that afternoon, darting through the snow that fell like volcanic ash from a darkening sky, she’d found him semi-conscious on the couch, the TV soundlessly broadcasting an old sci-fi movie, and an empty Stoli bottle lying on its side on the stained area rug. Drunk, she’d thought. Yet again, no sex.

  Which was okay. Dealing with Mark was her own version of being a nun, a fantasy Katie had abandoned, but one Elyse found oddly intriguing the more she thought about it. Not that she wanted to take a vow of chastity, but there was something noble about the sacrifice, the emphasis on giving rather than receiving, the focus on mind over body. Refusing to walk away from Mark was the most loving thing she’d ever done.

  When she’d roused him, he’d been groggy and grouchy. He’d groped for the bottle and cursed when he’d discovered it empty. He’d asked her to leave, and when she’d refused, he’d stormed through the kitchen, hoisted himself over the windowsill onto the fire escape, and clambered up the ladder to the roof.

  She’d followed him through the window. The ladder had begun to grow icy, the metal rungs and rails colder than the snow-dusted air surrounding them. She knew Mark liked to hang out on the roof of his building sometimes, but the wintry weather was not conducive to admiring the view from six stories above the ground.

  At least the snow wasn’t accumulating up here, she’d thought as she climbed over the brick threshold and onto the roof. Mark had wandered to the railing and gazed out at flecks of white swirling through the air. God’s dandruff, April used to call snow like this. That had always made Elyse and Becky laugh, but there was nothing to laugh about today.

  “Go away,” Mark shouted to her.

  “Mark.” She ventured closer to him, her boots padding soundlessly on the snow-speckled asphalt. “Don’t be an asshole. Come inside, and we’ll make dinner.”

  He swayed slightly, as if his knees had suddenly melted. “Fuck dinner. Fuck you. Go away.”

  April, April died in May. Fuck dinner, fuck you, go away. The poem jittered through her mind uninvited, unwanted. She watched Mark’s watery legs move beneath him again, and she realized this was more than she was ready for. Drunk, on a roof, in the snow. No jacket. No dinner. No friendship. Nothing but Becky’s stupid rhymes.

  She hit the speed dial, waited for Becky to answer, and said, “Beck, I need you.”

  A silence. Becky was probably sighing and gathering her thoughts, but all Elyse could hear was the muffled growl of an occasional car driving along the street below the building, tires spinning against wet pavement.

  “I’m working,” Becky finally said.

  For Becky, working meant working on her studies, polishing a brilliant essay, perfecting a project, memorizing code and formulas and whatever. Becky’s parents were footing the entire bill for her education; because they were both professors, even though not at MIT, Becky got some sort of discount on her tuition. She didn’t have to sell clothes in a boutique or model naked for art students to survive.

  Of course she would be working on something scholarly. Final exams were only a few weeks away, and she needed to get A’s in everything or the world would come to an end.

  But Mark was still standing much too close to the roof’s railing, and an empty vodka bottle still lay on the floor of his living room. “I’m on a roof with Mark, and he’s shit-face drunk,” Elyse said. “I’m scared.”

  “A roof?” Another pause. Undoubtedly another sigh. “Where?” Becky asked.

  “The top of his apartment building.”

  “Call 911.”

  Elyse’s gaze remained fixed on Mark, as if her eyes were iron and he was a magnet. When he moved, they moved. When he wavered, they slid back and forth, wavering with him. “If he hears a siren . . . I don’t want to think about what he might do. He’s not just hammered, Beck. He’s in a really bad place. Can you get over here and help me?”

  “Come on, Elyse. He’s, where, somewhere in Brighton, right? By the time I got there, he . . . ” She hesitated.

  “What? He could be lying splat on the sidewalk below?”

  “He could be safely inside,” Becky said, sounding less than convinced.

  “All right,” Elyse snapped. “You don’t want to help? Don’t help. We can have his death on our heads. Fine.”

  “You’ve dealt with him. You know him,” Becky argued. “The guy is a drunk. He’s self-destructive. That turns you on. It doesn’t turn me on, okay? He’s a lost cause.”

  “He’s our lost cause.” Elyse’s, at least, but somehow she felt Becky and Florie were a part of the cause, too. A part of the loss. “I’m up here on the roof with him, scared shitless, and an April poem went through my head. What does that mean, Beck? I think it means you should be here with me.”

  One final brief silence, and Becky said, “What’s the address?”

  Elyse recited it, then thumbed the end-call button and turned her attention back to Mark. He wasn’t leaning over the edge, thank God. But he wasn’t walking away from the edge, either. He just stood where he was, rocking in the icy wind as snowflakes landed on his hair and flannel shirt and melted into dark blotches. If he remained on the roof in this storm long enough, he wouldn’t have to jump. He could catch pneumonia and wind up a pretty corpse, instead of a smashed pile of bones and blood on the pavement below.

  She was afraid that if she moved closer to him, he would back away from her, lose his balance, and tumble over the ledge. “I’m hungry,” she called to him. “And I’m cold. Let’s go inside and get something to eat.”

  “You go inside,” he called back. “You’re the one who’s hungry and cold. I’m not.”

  “I hate eating alone.”

  “Big fucking deal.”

  “You’re being an asshole, Mark. Stop it.”

  “Go away.”

  He turned his back to her. At least facing the opposite direction, he could see the edge of the roof and the start of the sky. If he crossed from one to the other, it wouldn’t be because he’d tripped or lost his sense of where he was. She took some small comfort in that.

  She saw no point in arguing with him, listening to him tell her to fuck off and leave him alone, so he could self-destruct without an audience. But she couldn’t abandon him when he was this wrecked. The anger spewing from him wasn’t real. It was the vodka talking, and whatever else he might have ingested. It was the past, a twig of self-hatred floating along a river of alcohol and bile.

  So she’d stand on the roof with him, watching from what she hoped was a safe distance as he shifted from one foot to another, his hands tucked into his armpits for warmth. Glancing down, she noticed that he wasn’t wearing socks. Just a pair of ratty old sneakers that couldn’t possibly keep his feet warm or dry. The pretty-corpse pneumonia scenario flitted through her head again.

  Come on, Beck. Get here.

  The snow had thickened, swirls of white magically materializing out of the heavy gray sky. She shrugged her coat tighter around herself and wiped her hand over the top of her head. Her hair was wet and cold. If she caught pneumonia and died, too, would the headlines call this a murder-suicide?

  “We could sing a song,” she suggested, thinking a distraction might help them both. “‘Oh the weather outside is frightful . . . ’”

  “What the fuck do you want from me?” He didn’t turn when he spoke, and his words blew apart, reaching her in tatters.

  I want you to love me, she thought, then shook her head. She didn’t want anyone to love her. If someone loved her, she would have to hurt him because she didn’t love him back, couldn’t love him back, didn’t trust love, didn’t want attachments that could tether her to home. Sh
e wanted to run, to dance along the banks of the Seine, to view the midnight sun, to spend profligate sums of money in Turkish bazaars, to surf the waves in Australia—after she learned how to surf. She wanted to sleep with handsome men of every race and nationality, and grow old and reminisce about lovers named Manuel and Matsui and Mubaka.

  But she didn’t want to love them, or to be someone they loved.

  What did she want from Mark? She wanted him inside her, his beautiful body locked to hers. She wanted them to cry together and laugh together. She wanted him to forgive himself, because if he did that, maybe she’d be able to forgive herself, too.

  She wanted him to understand that even though April was dead, he was alive. She wanted him to believe that being alive would be what April wanted, that April was an angel raining benedictions down upon him. She wanted him to believe that because if he did, she could believe it too.

  “Come on, Mark. Come inside and have dinner with me,” she said.

  “Get the fuck out of here.” He stepped an inch closer to the edge.

  She closed her eyes and prayed. Our Father. Hail Mary. The old prayers she’d memorized in catechism class, prayers that meant nothing to her but comforted her with their familiar cadences, prayers she’d heard so many times in church when she’d gone, prayers that were worthless because her parents had recited them and had still screwed up their lives and hers, because people who said those prayers went on to lie and betray one another and corrupt everything they touched. She recited them in a breath, the words swirling and falling like the flakes of snow around her, drifting on the air and hitting the roof and vanishing into a wet sheen at her feet.

  A creak drew her attention. The door to the building’s stairwell opened, its hinges moaning, and Becky emerged onto the roof.

  Elyse touched her fingers to her lips, then angled her head toward Mark. She was amazed that Becky had arrived as quickly as she had, then acknowledged that she had no idea how much time had passed since they’d spoken on the phone.

  Becky spotted Mark, who remained perched near the building’s edge. Had he heard the door? Would Becky’s arrival startle him so much he’d lose his balance and fall?

  If Becky was worried about that happening, she didn’t let it stop her. She stalked across the roof, the treads of her LL Bean boots leaving ridged impressions in the slush accumulating on the asphalt. “Get away from the edge, Mark,” she said, her voice piercing the air, sharp as a needle.

  He rotated, his gaze sliding from Becky to Elyse and back again. “Shit. The whole gang’s here now? Where’s the tall one?”

  Before Elyse could speak, Becky said, “It’s cold, it’s snowing, it’s late, and you’re drunk. You’ve got a problem, Mark, and Elyse seems to think your problem is our problem. Let’s go inside and solve this problem so I can get back to Cambridge and finish coding the graphics to my Bimbums game.”

  He gave her a glazed look. Elyse shared his bafflement. What the hell was Becky talking about?

  Becky continued toward him, moving in sure strides as if unaware that the building ended in a sixty-foot drop less than a foot from where he stood. “Trust me, Mark, you don’t want to be a bimbum. Let’s go.”

  He seemed mesmerized by her. He didn’t move as she neared him, as she reached out and clamped a knit-gloved hand around his wrist and tugged him toward her.

  He actually moved, one step and another, as if she outweighed him. She pulled him, and he stepped closer to her. Close enough to tilt his head, open his mouth, and vomit.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “HOW DID YOU get here so fast?” Elyse asked.

  Becky was not in the mood for small talk. She stood in Mark’s disheveled bedroom, clad in one of his flannel shirts, the tails of which fell to her knees. At least his puke had missed her jeans and boots. But her jacket, her gloves, and the edge of her sweater had gotten splattered. Now Elyse was playing the solicitous hostess, gathering the soiled garments so they could be run through the coin-op washing machine in the building’s basement.

  “I took a cab,” Becky muttered. “You don’t want to know how much it cost.”

  “And you got into the building. I was wondering if you’d have trouble getting through the front door. It’s supposed to be locked.”

  “Someone else was coming in, and he held the door for me. Fabulous security they have here.” She eyed the fetid-smelling clothes in Elyse’s arms. “Go get the laundry going. The sooner my clothes are dry, the sooner I can leave.”

  Elyse seemed on the verge of saying something, apparently thought better of it, and backed toward the door of Mark’s bedroom. “You’re a saint, Beck,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Becky watched her leave, then examined her reflection in the cloudy mirror above Mark’s cluttered bureau. She didn’t see a saint in the silver glass. What she saw was her hair stringy with melted snow, her arms lost in the sleeves of Mark’s shirt. At least it smelled clean, the sweet tang of a drier sheet wafting from the soft, faded flannel.

  Once she, Elyse, and Mark had descended from the roof and entered his apartment, he’d staggered to the bathroom and barfed some more. She supposed she ought to be grateful that he hadn’t hurled the entire contents of his stomach onto her. She ought to be grateful that his building had laundry facilities conveniently located in the basement. She ought to be grateful that he hadn’t flung himself off the roof and into oblivion.

  But she wasn’t grateful that he’d somehow become her responsibility. If Elyse wanted him, fine. Let her have him. Becky just wanted to go home and tidy up the graphics of her computer game, and forget that this evening had ever occurred.

  She rolled the cuffs of the shirt’s droopy sleeves until her hands were free of the fabric and ran her fingers through the damp tangles of hair tufting from her scalp. She hadn’t brought a comb with her, but among the pens and scraps of paper and loose change strewn across the top of Mark’s bureau was a hairbrush. A few strands of dark, curly hair were snagged in the bristles. She did her best to pluck them free, then used the brush on her hair, smoothing the mess and hoping it dried quickly.

  Having run out of stalling tactics, she emerged from his bedroom. He lay on the sofa, his right arm flung across his stomach and his left across his brow. A groan alerted her that he wasn’t comatose.

  “You need AA,” she told him.

  “A-a what?” he mumbled without looking at her.

  “I’m not stuttering, you jerk. AA. Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “Stop cursing,” she scolded. “You talk like you’ve got a vocabulary of five words, and four of them should be bleeped.”

  A sound escaped from him—maybe a cough, maybe a laugh. He didn’t smile, but he lowered his left arm from his face and blinked his eyes open. “Why do you want to save me?”

  “I don’t,” Becky snapped. “Elyse does.”

  “I don’t want to be saved,” he said.

  Becky shrugged, then slumped onto a chair facing the couch. It smelled musty, as if crumbs of food had crawled into its upholstery years ago and given birth to a colony of mold.

  “Just have sex with her, and she’ll leave you alone.”

  “I don’t want to have sex with her.”

  “You don’t want this, you don’t want that. What do you want? Other than booze.”

  “She calls you Beck,” he said. “Like the beer.”

  Becky let out a long, weary breath. How long was the washer cycle? Her jacket would take forever to dry. Maybe she ought to borrow a jacket of Mark’s so she could go back across the river to the dorm, to her computer and Emerson and the world she knew.

  She could swim laps in his shirt. None of his jackets would fit her. She was stuck here. She wanted to hit him. “Forget beer. Forget booze. Dry up, Mark. You’re a mess.”

  Anot
her sound emerged from him, a cough-like sob this time. “All right, Beck. I want to be saved. I want you to save me.”

  Her? No way. “Elyse can save you,” she said, realizing she sounded petty and selfish and not caring. “I don’t do saving very well.”

  “I liked the candle under the tree,” he said. “That felt good to me. Can we do that again?”

  Her antipathy toward him slipped a notch. He’d appreciated her rituals beneath the April tree. She suspected Elyse and Florie went along with the rhymes and touching the trunk and the candle and holding hands just to humor her—and when they’d gathered under the tree at Thanksgiving, Florie hadn’t even been willing to humor Becky. Florie was so into Jesus and her church these days. The tree was meaningless to her.

  But what did church—any church, or any synagogue, for that matter—have to say about the irrationality of life? How did Jesus explain the arbitrary brutality of the world? All that crap about how God loved April and wanted her with him . . . No. That made less sense than anything Becky had ever done in the shadow of the red maple at the crest of Baker’s Hill Road.

  Mark said he’d liked what she’d done. He said he’d felt good under the tree, the way Becky felt good when she was there. Much as she’d prefer to dismiss him—he’d upchucked all over her, to say nothing of having killed April—she couldn’t walk away from him. Not now.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “You go to AA, and I’ll take you to the tree.” Apra apra dida may, she thought. Mark will have to try AA.

  “I’m not an alcoholic,” he argued.

  “I didn’t say you were. I said you were a mess.”

  “I’m sorry I heaved all over you.” The words tumbled out like pebbles, hard and scratchy. “But I’m not going to AA. Sit in some church basement and confess my sins? No way.”

  Apra apra dida may. Mark refuses to try AA. He says, “No way.”

  “You need help,” she said. “The first time I met you, you were coming out of the hospital. Alcohol poisoning, right?”