by J. Thorn
But he couldn't put fish in his gas tank or in the envelope to the water company. Besides, all the time he'd spent down on the pier, he'd never seen anyone catch a single fish. The Depression was another world. There were too many people to live off the land. That was the lesson from the parking lot. This America, you made money or you died.
Mia had been saving a couple hundred dollars towards a laptop that didn't crash three times an hour. She'd have a paycheck at the end of the week. If they ate beans and rice and left the heat off, he figured they could last about two months. Maybe enough time to find a real job. This economy.
Gulls bobbed on the swells. A pelican drifted ten yards above the water, then dropped like a feathered stone, tucking its wings the moment before it shattered the surface. Kelp and fish guts mixed in the breeze. He'd moved here for Mia—if they'd just sold the house, even at the current market, neither of them would have had to work for a decade. But she'd wanted the sunlight. The palms. The ocean. A place where winters were only a memory. He'd wanted her to be happy—for them to be happy together. It was time to stop hiding, to give up the dream of design freelancing, or at least put it on hold for a while. It was time to come clean to Mia and work it out together. They were supposed to be there for each other. If he kept trying to go it alone, he'd destroy them.
He texted Mia to get ready for dinner. He watched the waves a while longer, drove home, changed, and took her to the Indian place down the street. She waited until the naan arrived, then, over the smell of garlic and coriander, asked him how it had gone.
"I didn't get it."
She reached across the table, lips forming a concerned O. "I'm sorry, cutie. Next time."
Raymond nodded, rallying his nerves. Reminded himself that, no matter what happened next, all he could control was his reaction. He took her hand. "What if there isn't?"
She snorted. "Like what if an earthquake kills us tomorrow? No! I haven't even chosen a cemetery!"
"We're out of money." He stared at their hands on top of the red table. "I owe money. I don't know what to do."
2
In the city that prided itself, quite wrongly, on being the center of the universe, Walt Lawson moaned and carefully returned Vanessa's breakup letter to the drawer where she kept her theater tickets.
A letter. How like her: dramatic, elegant, and perfect. Slyly impersonal, too, another symptom of her actress' ability to make everyone and thus no one the full center of her attention. Worst of all, it was permanent. A decade from now, he'd still have to read the same words he'd read minutes ago. If she'd told him face to face, even a phone call, his self-defense systems could have gone to work, distorting his memory, convincing himself, day by day and month by month, that her words had been selfish, crazy, bitchy. Enough time, he might even have been able to make himself believe he'd left her. But a letter? That was a preemptive strike. He couldn't interrupt, he could only listen to a decision that couldn't be swayed. And her side was on record. His side, if she'd been able to deploy her handwritten sneak attack before he'd stumbled on it (quite innocently; he'd just wanted to check what she'd seen last night, catch up on the reviews), would be jangled, panicked, shameful. Every time he'd reread that letter, he'd be reminded of his own tongue-tied response, supporting evidence of the very inadequacies her carefully regretful sentences had cunningly accused him of.
Of course, she knew he wouldn't be able to throw it away.
Six stories below the window, cars and cabs raced and weaved, the perfect combination of mass and aggression to smash out his brains and lungs. Or should he go somewhere higher—the Empire State Building? Shouldn't his last action be a big one? His last seconds strange ones? There should be more to it than simply dying. He didn't want a neighbor recognizing his face. He wanted obliteration. The kind a gun couldn't provide (besides, he didn't have one) or he could count on from the currents and fish of the Upper Bay (nor would he trust himself not to kick for shore after the first salty gulp). The plain truth, a truth he'd faced several times a day for the four years they'd been together, was he'd rather not exist than be without her.
Traffic banged over the metal plates welded over the holes in the asphalt. He was six stories up, but the roar was such the cabs and delivery trucks may as well be driving straight through his bathroom. He crossed to the window and shoved it open, smelling exhaust, kebabs, and humidity. Did he feel small because he lived in New York? Or did he feel small because he was?
He hated those metal plates. He could sleep through horns, car alarms, drunks shouting from ground-floor bars, but each time a truck crashed over one of those plates, he woke with a heart-yanking jolt. Instead of laying a thunderous iron plate over the potholes, why didn't they just fix the fucking holes?
Walt withdrew his head from the window. So Vanessa thought she was leaving. She thought he was a pothole. What if he could create a plate for himself?
Not in the sense of something to be run over. In the sense of a temporary fix with the illusion of permanence. The letter had once more mentioned her gauzy desire to move to LA, implying it might not be so much that she wanted to leave him as that she wanted to leave New York. And she hadn't actually given him the letter yet; there existed the possibility she didn't intend to—straw-grasper!—or, less unlikely, that she was waiting for a particular time to hand it over. Assume the possibility he could alter the destiny she intended for him. How could he convince, trick, or strongarm her into staying?
He quickly rejected several alternatives. If he left this instant on a days-long trip, she would have no address to deliver his letter to, but that would only cement her perception of him as unreliable. Nor could he take her on a breathless tour of romance, hansom cab rides and dinners in Little Italy, a balloon ride from his parents' place in Long Island. Being such an expert herself, she had a nose for manipulation. He could make a visible display of renewed effort on the novel he'd been working on for months (and, counter to her epistolary claims, he had been working, even when it didn't look like work; at times he suspected the cliche of "the rudderless, irresponsible writer" had poisoned her opinion of his ambitions), but that could easily backfire. Much easier to dump a person who has something to keep them occupied through the upcoming period of mental anguish. Hell, great art came from pain, didn't it? To her, leaving might spur him to a literary success that would console his broken heart.
He smiled, cold as a Kubrick flick. He would pretend to be sick. It would take a person of intense cruelty to inflict breakup-level emotional pain on someone already suffering physically. Especially when she could be confident she'd have to wait no more than a few days, at most a couple weeks, before he cleared up. Once healthy, she could deliver her letter guilt-free.
Walt knew it wouldn't be enough to restore her love, but spooning someone chicken broth could hardly be more intimate, could it? He could call off work at the bodega, too. With all those free hours, he could plot out a more permanent plan, something to forestall the letter forever.
Vanessa came home on a breeze of lavender and fresh sweat. He sat up from his couchside nest, blinking, remembering to cough. What time was it? Ten? Midnight? She slung her coat on a hook and pulled the pencil from her swept-up hair, loosing her locks over her shoulders.
"How was your day?" he croaked.
"Don't ask," she laughed, splaying the fingers of one hand. "Don't even ask. By the time I finished someone will be dead."
"Preferably neither of us."
"So okay. Mark hardly knows any of his lines. No, that's being too kind—he doesn't know any. He's got fewer lines than a baby's ass. He thinks he'll be ready next week?"
He cleared his throat. "Is that where you were all this time? Mark's?"
She stopped teasing out her straight dark hair to give him a look of dying annoyance. He didn't like that look. It said: Calm down: he won't be here much longer. "What, we're going to rehearse in the park? Get stabbed mid-soliliquoy? I know, we could practice on the platforms at Union Square. Treat the commu
ters to a sneak preview."
"It was a question, not a snake. Don't get so wound up."
"It's not the question. It's the tone."
"Sorry." He cut himself short with a coughing fit. "Got the flu or something. Voice sounds funny."
She frowned. Disbelief? Concern? "You don't sound good. Need some water?"
"Tea?" he tested.
This time, her smile was as soft as her skin. She clicked to the kitchen while he watched from the couch. She ran the teapot under the faucet, leaning over the sink, breasts hanging against her shirt. He was already half hard. In ten or twenty years, Vanessa might be as fat as her mom, but at 25, her swollen tits and musical hips drove men's imaginations to feverish degradation. He'd possessed that body for four years now, touched it thousands of times, fucked it hundreds, but he still couldn't go swimming with her without wearing a jockstrap under his suit to bind his erection. She caught him staring and smiled over the stove. So what if she privately hated him? She lived to be looked at.
She handed him a steaming floral-print cup. "Maybe you should see a doctor."
"A doctor?"
"You know, one of those guys who pats you on the head until you feel better?"
"I'm familiar with the word. I didn't know you were."
She shrugged, breasts rising. "I don't want you to be sick."
He sipped. He didn't even like tea. "And normally you'd be pestling up some herbs right now. Doing the Dance of Good Humours."
She rolled her eyes. "Please."
"Thanks for the tea." He reached for her thigh, squeezing its springy muscles.
"De nada. I'm going to take a shower. I stink."
She rose, leaving him on the couch. The bathroom door snicked. He frowned over his tea. She didn't believe in doctors for anything short of cancer. Suddenly she was ready to ship him to the waiting room? Was he onto something with his ersatz illness? Would she strike as soon as he improved? And what about the Mark factor? She wouldn't leave him, Walt, unless she had someone else to go to. He knew better than that. That's how he'd gotten her himself, after all, prying her away from a high school boyfriend she'd been looking to leave since getting to NYU, some sad-sack future electrician who'd eventually agreed to an open relationship rather than dumping her like he should have. That had been the dude's death-knell. She'd told her good friend Walt the news on a Friday; Saturday night, he'd talked her into bed.
Ten minutes into her shower, he stripped down and snugged into bed. The shower hissed and splattered, muffled by the door. He closed his eyes and imagined the soap slipping down her skin. He wanted to be the soap, clinging to her curves and folds, touching all of her at once—but he already was the suds, wasn't he? Slipping away from a body he could no longer hold onto. Rinsed down a drain into darkness and shit.
Twenty minutes later, she slid in beside him, kissed him once, and turned her back. A truck banged over a metal plate.
* * *
In the morning, he let her overhear him scheduling a doctor's appointment for that Friday. He shuffled around the apartment, sipping tea, a sheet wrapped around his shoulders. When she left to read lines with Mark, he walked up to Washington Square Park and bought a falafel. Old men of all races played chess on the boards at the park's corner. Tall, thin black guys cruised through the cool spring sunlight, hawking drugs with their one-word mantras. College kids, mostly white, smoked cigarettes in the dry fountain and watched the skateboarders tricking on the asphalt hills.
After a couple hours, he went back home to ensure he'd get there first. She wasn't back until 11:37 that night.
Thursday, when she left to meet Mark for more work, he followed.
He watched her hips roll from a half block back. He was dressed in a sweater he hadn't worn in years and a knit cap he bought yesterday. The morning was cold and steam drifted from the corner grates with a smell of laundry and sewers. Vanessa only looked back once; he'd ducked into the gap between two parked cars, heart on fire. At the Bleecker Street station, she jogged down the stairs for the 4-5-6 trains. He swiped his card and pushed through the turnstiles in time to see her descending to the uptown 6 local.
He went home. The next day she had a shampoo audition; he ate soup and a sleeve of saltines, claiming an upset stomach. She bought him ginger ale and vitamin C. He left for the "doctor's" and wandered all the way down to Bowling Green, where he watched the gray waves of the Atlantic.
Whenever he tried to think about how to hang on to her, he found his mind mired in sick, hesitant hate for Mark (what were they doing together all those long hours? He was an actor, too—did he look like one?) and sick, overwhelming love for Vanessa. That love was a boulder, an anchor, a devouring cancer that had eaten a hole through the man he'd used to be (another part of him said: the hole had always been there, he'd just let himself forget that). At first he'd been faking, but now he grew nauseous whenever he thought of her, unable to put down more than cereal and chicken soup. He felt infected, hot, dizzy. The world looked like a puked-up joke, unstoppable, crashing.
She had another meet-up with Mark that Sunday. When she left the apartment, he donned his sweater and cap. When she cut east for Bleecker, he sprinted north, then jogged parallel for Astor Place. The train pulled in as he hit the platform. The doors bonged, closing. What would he tell her if she caught him? The doctor's appointment? A call from an agent uptown?
He didn't have to worry. He pressed his nose to the scratched glass until he was certain she wasn't in the next car, then crossed forward, rocking on the narrow platform between cars. As usual, Vanessa was at the very front of the train. One car back, he slouched down in a seat. She detrained at 86th. Uptown.
The street smelled like bread and rain and Chinese chicken. She stopped in front of a brick walkup less than a block away. On the stoop, a man stood. His grin looked permanently installed in his jaw. His jaw looked like it spent the day breaking rocks. Vanessa grinned back at him, gave a tight, waist-high wave. He leaned in, kissed her—lips? Or the cheek? Typical overfriendly actor-greeting, or the hello of newly-minted lovers? They disappeared inside the building.
Walt found himself cold and half-lost in Central Park. He bought a soft pretzel, chewed down half, tossed the rest in bits to pigeons. Was she already gone? Then what the fuck did it matter what he did? He could propose to her, burn down her apartment, hold her mom at knifepoint. It wouldn't matter. She was gone.
He sat down in the grass. The dew seeped into his jeans. If he had a box with a button that could erase his existence, he would have pushed it.
This same park had been the start. In another sense, the year and a half of NYU classrooms and dorm rooms and Village bars where he'd dogged her had been the start, but the start, the start that had launched their first movie together, their first night of moany, eye-buzzing sex together, their first morning-after when he'd descended to a gray and silent Sunday AM in a city so empty it could have been built just for the two of them—all that had sprung from this park.
How had he talked her into coming here? He could no longer remember. He suspected it wasn't the particular words that had finally convinced her to a date with him, but rather his steady, undaunted presence. His persistence. So on that cool Saturday afternoon in spring, spurred, perhaps, by the dying of her last shreds of respect for the future electrician, she'd agreed to hop the train up to the park, where they walked around the paths before lying down in the grass on a quiet hill where she rested her head in his lap and he touched her hair above her ear and felt he'd never need to be anywhere else. They didn't move for an hour. It probably wouldn't sound that special to tell someone about. Everyone, at some point, sits in the grass with the person they love.
But after a year and a half of fruitless and corrosive pursuit, fueled by a desire his roommate Ajit kept calling "obsessive," it had been perfect. How often do you get to realize a dream? To put your hands on the exact thing you've always wanted?
Now that he was losing it, what wouldn't he do to keep it?
As if it had always been there, he had his answer. Stolen right out of The Royal Tenenbaums, which she'd seen, too, but tweaked just enough to elude notice. Smiling the unweighted smile of a man who's staked everything on the turn of one last card, he went back to the subway station, rode home to their apartment in the Village, and practiced his worried-face in the mirror. When Vanessa got home, it took her two minutes of how-was-your-day talk until she noticed.
"Everything okay?"
"The doctor called."
"What've you got? The flu?"
"There's a problem." He looked down at the carpet. It was a nice carpet, so thick your toes could get lost in it. He'd miss it if she kicked him out. "With my heart."
She reached for his shoulder, gaping, horrified. Her fingers never felt so good. "Your heart? Are you going to be okay?"
"I don't know. They want me back tomorrow." He covered his eyes with his hand, shoulders shrinking. "I'm scared."
3
Across the desk from Raymond, Lana Englund turned from her monitor, the wrinkles around her eyes highlit by the Santa Monica sunshine spilling through her great glass window. "We have a problem here. Our ad specifically asked for a degree in Communications."
"I minored in it."
"And maybe if you'd minored in English you'd know words have meanings."
He cocked his head. "The ad said experience would be the key factor."
