If the Body Allows It

by Megan Cummins

  Per is the center of attention, commanding the room with his strange way of dancing. He squats low to the ground and glides around the circle we made for him. He spins on bent ankles, a little like a figure skater, his arms over his head. He stretches his legs in new directions, the rest of his body following. He rises and twirls and shoots out a leg that nearly kicks Thora in the stomach. Thora drops her cup and jumps back. My wine splashes over the top of my cup.

  The music falls in a thick layer over the room. Per’s dance morphs into a plea as he goes to Thora with his hands outstretched. No one seemed to notice except the three of us.

  “I’m sorry,” Per says.

  “It’s okay,” Thora whispers, but she looks grave.

  Per’s fingers touch Thora’s elbows, and without saying anything to me they rush to the corner where we piled our coats. I swallow what’s left of my wine, most of it spilled on my hands, and follow them, not sure if they want me to walk home with them. When we’re outside Thora grasps my hands and says, “I’m sorry, love, we have to go.”

  The gallery and the party next door are the only places open amid the gated storefronts on Market Street. Down the street, the courthouse blazes, its white facade lit from below with clean white light. It’s spring now and strong winds have passed through lately, leaving petals from Newark’s blossoming trees, the first trees of spring, scattered on the sidewalk like drops of paint. My hands are sticky, and I dig in my purse where I know there’s hand sanitizer.

  “Looking for a light?”

  I look up. I see him. He has a lighter in his hand and his thumb on the spark wheel. His irises are so dark they look black, and his jacket is zipped up to his neck.

  “No,” I say. “No, I’m looking for my hand sanitizer.”

  The difference between what he thought I needed and what I was actually looking for strikes him as funny.

  “Hand sanitizer!” he exclaims.

  His lips curl into a smile around his cigarette. Dimples appear, half-moon creases around his lips. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile and, of course, the smile changes his face. He doesn’t look like the sad sack shooting Jack Daniel’s with his elbows on the bar. I laugh, too, but then guilt nudges my heart because I couldn’t be bothered with his pain at the restaurant, or I’d turned his pain into my own pain—which I often do.

  I offer an open palm to show I recognize him, and he nods, and at the same time we say our own versions of “Right, yes, we’ve met.”

  We exchange facts about our meeting. The month, the weather, the bar. We shake hands and give our names. Patrick is his. We pass through a few moments of silence. Somewhere in the distance a siren wails. I rub my hands together even after the sanitizer has dried.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” I say finally. “How are you feeling?”

  Patrick shakes his head as he lights another cigarette. “I shouldn’t have bothered you with that,” he says.

  “No, it’s okay,” I say.

  A few people spill from the party. I look over my shoulder, but Per and Thora have disappeared from sight.

  “I’ll take that cigarette,” I say.

  He pulls the box from his pocket and holds the lighter near my mouth, cupping it.

  “I’m glad I ran into you.” I flick ash to the ground. “I felt bad for leaving you at the bar that night.”

  “God, don’t bring it up,” he says. “I was a mess.”

  I shrug. “We all have nights like that.”

  He nods, but he’s looking down the street. Maybe he’s tired of talking. “Well,” I say.

  He looks at me. “Your friends left.”

  “They had to go.”

  “Where do you live?” he asks.

  “I’m near campus. What about you?”

  “The Ironbound.” He checks his watch. “I’ll walk in your direction.”

  “That’s out of your way.”

  “It’s actually right by the nearest light-rail station.”

  That’s not true, but I start walking without agreeing or disagreeing. I have a feeling I don’t often get: that there’s something left to excavate in the night, something with more of a payoff than just going to bed.

  There’s another spill of people from the party on the sidewalk outside the gallery, but when we cross the street to a new block the sidewalk empties. We’re downtown, hardly anyone lives downtown, and outside of business hours everything is quiet. The smell of smoke from our cigarettes makes me feel peaceful, it lifts my lungs and leaves me floating on a cloud. My father was a lifelong smoker, and for me the smell of smoke belongs to him alone.

  We cut through Military Park, and we don’t say anything as we walk past a light-rail station. Soon the park will be full of summer activities: yoga and tai chi; movies on Tuesday nights; plays; and the carousel, which is boarded up right now, undergoing remodeling, but will soon alight and spin. We pass the magnolia tree in the yard of the church on Central Avenue. Its leaves are waxy and its mangled branches make it look fossilized.

  “What happened to your dad?” Patrick asks.

  “We don’t have to talk about that,” I say. “Tell me about your friend.”

  Patrick throws his head back and blows a stream of smoke into the air. “He was just one of those guys you loved even though he was a fuckup.”

  “You could call my dad a fuckup,” I say. My cigarette is down to its filter and I toss it in a puddle.

  Even though I said I wasn’t going to talk about him, grief is always looking for a mate. I immediately feel badly for calling my dad a fuckup. It’s a different thing to call a twenty-year-old a fuckup than it is to say that about someone who was almost sixty when he died. At that age it’s not about mistakes anymore. It becomes about who you are rather than the things you did—and that doesn’t seem fair, because now my father doesn’t have the chance to redeem himself. Patrick’s friend, meanwhile, is redeemed merely by the fact of his youth. He didn’t have enough time to know better. But I don’t feel like explaining this to Patrick. All I manage to say is, “I mean, he was, whatever.”

  “Yeah,” Patrick says, as though I’d actually said something descriptive. I laugh, and when he asks me what’s funny, I shake my head. He extends his cigarette toward me, and I take it and take a drag.

  We pass through campus, the long brick corridor with Rutgers buildings on either side—the law library, the nursing school. On the next street over there’s a row of 150-year-old brick town houses that have been turned into campus buildings. The creative writing program and the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience. We’re almost at my apartment. We pass the Catholic hospital, which I’ve read is near to filing for bankruptcy but for now still blurs with activity. The carriage house of the Ballantine mansion opens up to University Avenue, covered in vines and flowers.

  I ask Patrick if he wants a nightcap when we reach the foot of my stoop, and immediately I feel embarrassed. It’s not as though we were having a conversation that needed more time to reach its end.

  But Patrick agrees, and we go inside and up the stairs. A ribbon of light seeps under the door of Per and Thora’s apartment, and I wonder if they take note of the extra pair of footsteps, or if it’s only me who thinks the whole world can hear them. It’s been a long time since I brought someone home that I didn’t know, and it was a lifetime ago that I lived in an apartment I hadn’t shared with someone else. With Ralph.

  The door to my apartment fits loosely in the jamb, and I unlock the lock that’s only a formality. I left the window open earlier, and the glass rattles in the wind, and my tabby sits on the windowsill. He hisses when he sees Patrick. The white lace curtain blows dramatically, getting sucked against the screen and billowing back out into the room as the wind changes. I busy myself pouring wine into glasses, and my heart is an iceberg in my chest. I wonder how long before I can kick him out. We sit across from each other at my table and drink. “Nice apartment,” Patrick says, and I can’t help but smile. I look loving
ly at my high ceilings and big square windowpanes, the cracked wood floors and marble fireplace. I tell Patrick this row of brownstones was built in the 1880s as company housing for the Ballantines, the Newark beer family whose nineteenth-century home is now an annex of the Newark Museum, into whose yard you can see from my fire escape.

  “I’ll show you,” I say, and I lead him into the bathroom and hoist open the window that leads to the fire escape. He holds my wine as I climb out, and then I hold his. There’s a wedding tonight in the yard of the museum, inside a white tent, and music billows into the night. The small schoolhouse that’s part of the museum yard is dark and empty, the bell still in its belfry. I point to the back of the mansion, tucked between the museum and an office building. Beneath us, Per and Thora’s bedroom light glows. They’re still awake.

  The fire escape is small, and our shoulders touch. Our jackets are inside still, and soon my fingers will lose their color—Reynaud’s.

  “Were you with friends at the party?” I say. “You left without telling anyone.”

  “They’ll figure it out,” he says. “I don’t see them much anymore. They don’t really understand.”

  A pang of recognition hits me. It’s what I said to him the night we met.

  “It’s us, too,” I say. “Not letting them understand.”

  He ignores me. I shift on the metal grate, and my arm touches his. It seems to be this soft brush of skin against skin that launches him into an explanation of what happened to his friend. The way one whiff of a certain scent brings back a memory in all of its details.

  “We grew up together. Did undergrad together. The first time we did Oxy, I gave it to him. I was supposed to go with him to a meeting the day before he died. But I bailed. I didn’t even have a reason. I just didn’t feel like it. I was his ride, too.”

  He looks into his wine. His voice is thick, and he’s probably had a lot to drink tonight. I’ve known addicts like him, ones who think they can keep drinking once they give up drugs. Maybe they can, but for my dad it was always either all or nothing. Patrick tells me how he got clean, how he takes master’s classes at the Business School and has a part-time job at the halfway house near Lincoln Park.

  I listen. What is it that I want here? Someone to talk to—to understand? Do I just feel bad that he was alone on the night of his friend’s funeral, and I brushed him off? And then I see, looking out at my slice of the city and the slow-dancing bride in the wedding tent, that it’s already done. I’ve already brought him here.

  “My dad sent me an email a month before he died,” I say. “He told me he was lonely and asked that I keep in touch more often. I didn’t reply. I didn’t call him.”

  “Why not?” Patrick asks.

  “We would go through phases. Talking and not talking. I always thought it was after I didn’t write back that he started using again—that he felt betrayed.”

  “You know that’s not the truth,” Patrick says. “Or not all of it.”

  “And you know your friend could’ve taken an Uber to the meeting. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Okay. You believe that for me, and I’ll believe this for you, and one day we’ll be ready to swap.”

  I smile, close my eyes, tap my head lightly against the bricks behind me. I’ve had enough to drink to tell him about Ralph. I explain that we split up because I couldn’t get over my grief. At times I bottled it up and other times I talked about it in a way that accused Ralph of trying to get me to forget about my father when all he wanted was for the two of us to be happy again. I say it with my eyes closed so I don’t see Patrick’s face. He takes my hand and runs his fingers through mine just as I’m thinking that between the two of us, I’m the bigger fuckup.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, either,” Patrick says.

  “No,” I say. “I did.”

  I open my eyes and look at our clasped hands, suspended between us. The music from the wedding has stopped, and although guests are still lingering in the yard the caterers and museum staff are bustling around, cleaning things up, shooing people away.

  He kisses me. Our hands are clasped between our chests.

  “Can we go inside?” he asks.

  In my bedroom, we get out of our clothes without turning on the light or closing the curtains. Our closeness is a form of silence; it smothers everything we said on the fire escape.

  Per and Thora are sleeping beneath us. I saw their light snap off before Patrick and I crawled inside. If I’d left alone earlier, or left with them, Patrick wouldn’t be here. Instead I made the guy from the sushi restaurant the keeper of my biggest secret, that I’d ignored my father when he needed me most. I grab the skin on Patrick’s back, pull it taut with my fingers, take his earlobe gently between my teeth.

  Patrick keeps his lips close to mine but doesn’t kiss me. I try to close the distance but he pulls back. My head falls on the pillow. I wonder if this is a mistake. There’s so much I haven’t told him. Later on, if we’re being kind to ourselves, we can remember: we didn’t plan this.

  That Was Me Once

  Mara and I are trying to do normal things in the time I have left, so on Sunday afternoon we take Brian to lunch in town.

  Harper, Michigan, is one of those places that for a long time could have been anywhere. There was a main street with a few dull shops and a Greek diner, but recently people have been trying to make it a more specific place to live. We go to one of the new restaurants that’s sprung up in recent years: a tavern with wood booths and bric-a-brac on the walls, twinkle lights strung from the ceiling, a menu full of dishes more expensive than we expected. We have to connive with the waitress to get her to admit the chicken medallions are close enough to chicken fingers, one of the few things Brian will eat, but when his food arrives he tears it apart and not much makes it into his mouth. Mara keeps saying Brian can sense the tension in our lives, that the big approaching changes are bearing down on him. I can never tell with Brian: he’s three and a half but doesn’t talk much. He’s frustrated with the limits being a toddler places on him. I’ve been with him since he was born but he seems to sense I could depart at any minute. I sometimes have this feeling he can tell when my eye is wandering from our little family, like it has been lately.

  Mara sits next to him, across the booth from me, and her hands worry over him: chasing spills and wiping ketchup from his face. I’m supposed to enjoy moments like this, quiet ones, but instead I’m ready to dive into something reckless. For this feeling I blame my moribund chances of avoiding jail time. My hopeless outlook, Mara tries to bulldoze with optimism, but some days, like today, she can’t muster it. So she sits and steams frustration—with me, with Brian—and punctuates her scowling with anemic smiles.

  It doesn’t help that the restaurant is bonfire hot. I twist in my seat to look at the completely still ceiling fan. As I’m about to turn back, my eyes fall on Dani, sitting in a booth by the back window.

  She’s grown up, though I know that already from the internet, where for years, and lately more often, I’ve searched her name and lurked on her social media profiles. Reading every post and comment, clicking through every photo. I’ve seen her here and there over the past three years, rarely speaking, but I feel like I know her still, like we’ve been circling each other, just waiting to reconnect. I’ve been hungry for more of her, but online she comes off as cynical.

  She was only eighteen when we got married, nineteen when we divorced. I was older, too old: twenty-four when we met.

  Now she’s twenty-two, and she has a foaming mug of beer in front of her. Her head is bowed toward her phone, and her hair has been electrified with curly blond extensions, new since I last saw a photo of her online. The change rolls me like a whitecap: who knows what else I’ve missed while I was underwater, out of her real life?

  She wears a chunky sweater with elbow patches despite the heat. The sweater blots out her shorts. Only a twig of denim peeks out, and strappy sandals vine up her ankles. It’s May and she must b
e home from school for the summer.

  Nostalgia makes quick work of me. It’s like I want to ride a motorcycle without a helmet: I forget all the terrible ways hearts and brains can get smashed, all just for a simple feeling. Wind in the hair.

  “Is that Dani?” Mara asks.

  She knows about Dani, but they haven’t met. I’ve worked hard to make sure of that. I keep my internet sleuthing secret, but Mara’s probably done her own. Mara’s not a jealous person, but we don’t talk much about our pasts. We’ve made mistakes, accumulated victims. Our biggest transgression: we both disguised ourselves as fun people, people you’d want to hang out with, when we were really just careless and stupid and we brought people down with us. Mara got collared by the world first, in the form of Brian, a baby she wasn’t ready for. We were seeing each other when she found out she was pregnant, and we never shared the results of the paternity test. I was willing, and I felt guilty for what happened with Dani. Maybe I thought being his father was a kind of penitence, or that it would bring me reward.

  Brian might not be my biological son, but whatever karma I earned from not leaving Mara in favor of a less-complicated paternity situation has dried up. The number of times I’ve been busted with drugs has surpassed the number of times anyone cares to forgive me.

  “Yes, that’s her,” I say.

  “Dani,” Mara says, her voice almost a whistle. She looks almost excited as she appraises my ex-wife. I can see her making judgments about Dani’s looks. She’s critical of people who put in a lot of effort. Her own, which are good, are nonetheless a nuisance to her. She has permanent accessories—tattoos on her shoulders, wrists, and ankles—and she dresses to show them. Otherwise she leaves the house with wet hair, no makeup. She never asks me how she looks. She knows she looks good.