“Not like your brother. Tom was the one to get you howling.”
She notices more than I realize. His name, no longer attached to anyone, moves through the room like a haunting, like the bellboy rolling a table into the elevator where he will no doubt get stuck for hours.
My mother and I stand in the lobby, thinking of my brother. I decide to be honest. “I wish he was here.”
She says, “I wish everyone was here so we could eat.”
The groom’s aunt Henshaw bursts from the dining room in mid-conversation with a person who does not appear. She says she’s not doing well, sciatica, bad neighbors, joint pain, you name it. She says, “Sometimes I feel like I get older every day.”
I instantly hear how Simone would answer, That’s the way it works, old lady, but I say, “I know what you mean. Some mornings I wake up and I’m a hundred years old.”
She nods. “It’s like every day, more and more time passes.”
My mother and Aunt Henshaw retreat into the dining room. I realize the concierge has been waiting.
“Guess I’ll go,” I say. “Though I’d rather stay and chat.”
We smile at each other.
“I forgot to tell you,” she says. “We fixed the elevator!”
“No more bird guts clogging everything up?” She hadn’t said anything about bird guts, but she participates.
“No more guts,” she says. “That bird was a mess but we got it out. Well, James did.”
“But James hates birds,” I say.
“Sometimes we have to do what we hate?”
“To that end.” I jerk a thumb toward the dining room.
“I thought you could rest easier knowing you can rely on our elevator.”
After a few more go-arounds of gratitude, I enter the dining room of flickering candles where everything is golden, wine-charmed, and near, as if the room hovers above itself.
Seated are many important players of the wedding: the groom, forking shrimp out of a festive glass. Rose, swaddled in a gleaming pashmina. My mother, pointing to my stepfather. The groom’s mother and father, white-haired, meant for the top of a cake, dignitaries of impressive meringue. We pass plates of luminous meat to one another. After dinner, people excuse themselves to the bathroom or out for smokes. Vacancies occur, people move from table to table, visiting.
I turn to the groom. “Before we marry, there’s something you should know.”
He moves closer so I can speak into the area of his folded collar. I’m grateful for his cilantro-and-club-chair smell.
Weeks before, thick slices of fondant and sponge had been placed in front of us on trays. We were to choose one for our wedding cake. One confection was presented with more ceremony than the others.
“Vanilla almond,” the woman said, “with lemon basil icing.”
“The bride does not like almond,” the groom said proudly. To have a bride and to know what she doesn’t like.
But the woman anticipated this. “Not a problem,” she said. “You can’t even taste it.”
“A client once invited me to his house for a party,” I tell him. “He was the young musician injured while walking. I thought I’d only stay for half an hour, but I ended up having fun. After midnight it was only me and him and his core friends. They decided to have a dance party to an obscure band.” I pause, noting his confusion. “Christopher? Who loved to walk and was hit by a texting single mother? I stayed for the dancing. I didn’t know anyone else liked that band let alone a whole roomful of people. I chatted outside with one of his roommates. He was sweet. I took him home. The next morning the subways were closed so I drove him back to where the party had been. There was a hurricane coming and I didn’t want to be stuck with him. Then the hurricane came.”
I remember the silence before the storm, the eggy light after, the couple I knew from college who’d been injured by a falling tree.
Guests return.
“Speech,” a cousin yells.
“I forgive you,” the groom says.
“Speech,” from my stepfather.
“For what?” I say.
“Sleeping with a client’s roommate.”
“Forgiveness is not the reason I’m telling you this story. I won’t ever be able to arrive at a party of strangers and fuck a young man again. It’s not about the fucking, it’s about the feeling free. Doesn’t that worry you?”
He chortles, a benevolent sound that cheers me. I believe he will comfort me. “Not at all.”
“Speech,” Rose says. Aunt Henshaw, the cousins. My mother returns from the bathroom, furious with the contents of her pocketbook, and joins the chorus.
Someone tosses the groom a microphone. “Speech,” he says. The amplification startles him, he hands it to me.
THE BRIDE DOES NOT LIKE ALMOND
I’ve been thinking a lot about being wedded, which is good, you know, as I’m about to be wedded. I get the sense the number of people who are married is not equal to the number that give the institution much thought. Am I curious enough? Antonia, remember the time you asked so many questions about the beer’s hoppiness that the bartender finally poured samples of everything on draft? Yet how many questions do we ask before we get married? We proceed into this institution with nary a curiosity. Let alone an entire flight. So many people assume it’s a step we’re entitled to take. It’s difficult to unlearn all that water. I’m referencing that parable about a fish who was asked, What is it like to breathe underwater?
“I spent a week with a woman in Chicago, waking up and finding coffee and sitting at movies we chose together. She had a husband, a family. I had a life in New York. It was a stolen season. But she was some kind of wife to me.
“Rose’s grandmother spent forty years with Rose’s grandfather and told me she never liked him. Forty years with a partner she stayed with because she never had to go too deep. She said one day a certain light fell on him as he reached for a box on the top shelf and she felt a new jolt. Love, maybe. After forty years, the marriage begins.
“One of my clients has dementia and has fallen in love with her own son. She’s hot for him, can’t wait to be close, asks him: ‘Why did you leave me?’ You tell me that isn’t real, abiding. Marriage, of a sort.
“There’s a four-paneled painting of goldfish in L.A.’s Chinatown that I love, the fish swim in their separate panels, lonely and happy, and maybe that’s why my mind is on that analogy I’m possibly misremembering. In any case, What’s water? That’s what the fish replies when he’s asked: What is it like to breathe underwater?
“Does everyone love in a different way, like flavors? Mine is pistachio and someone else’s is chocolate cereal? Am I able to love stronger and more deliberately on command, or can love only be elicited? Are there limits? Are we born with a finite amount or is our capacity infinite? I’d bet that depends on the die you’re tossed around with and end up on the table next to. Chance. Is there a way to sharpen and refine love? And all the variations between the variations? If there is, I’d like to. Or I’d absolutely not like to. I’d like to know more about it before I decide.
“You’re all nice people and I’m sorry I did this to you.”
The groom takes the microphone out of my hand. “My future wife,” he says, flushing as everyone applauds. “Always with the questions.”
On most days, beauty goes unremarked upon in these people’s lives, but on nights like this they say: I am delighted to be here. Their happiness draws a line underneath me. I am sad in a happy place. With every exultation of gratitude, I retreat until my body sits on a chair at a table, but my soul is pressed into one of the corners, struggling to breathe. The problem with the room is that it’s gorgeous and shining but people are missing.
I cross the lobby to the elevator, get in, and press the button. Between floors, I crank the emergency release, call Simone, and watch myself in the mirror leave a minutes-long message.
“I want you to know,” I say, then stall. I’ve just said the word love a dozen t
imes yet find myself unable to utter it into her voice mail. “Please come to the wedding tomorrow. It’s not right you won’t be there. We won’t tell anyone. You’ll sit in the back. Come as a woman disguised as a man. We’ll Twelfth Night the shit out of everyone. You said yourself how easy it is for a middle-aged woman to disappear. Please. I don’t want to do this alone.” Before I hang up I say, “This is your mother.”
“Is everything all right?” The concierge’s voice drifts through the speaker.
“You really need to get this elevator under control.” I swipe tears from my cheeks. “Enough is enough. I’m trying to understand,” I say. “I’m doing my best.”
“We know you’re trying and we appreciate it.”
“One person can only be so forgiving.”
“You’ve gone out of your way,” the voice agrees.
“How hard is it to get someone to fix this thing for real? James or whoever.”
The voice sounds like it’s crying. “We’re sorry,” it says. “We don’t mean to ruin anything.”
“Now I’m supposed to feel bad because you’re crying?”
“No. We did this to ourselves.”
“You did,” I say. “Making your bed and all. Lying in it.”
“We’re resetting it. You’ll be down in a jiffy.”
“A jiffy.” I curse.
The reset elevator descends to the lobby. The doors open to reveal my family in hues of tipsiness. Seeing me they quack with delight, join me on the elevator. Everyone is thrilled. The groom and I return to our room where I remove my jewelry and clothes. He pulls down his underwear and chucks it with his toe. The graying hair against the paleness of his chest always surprises me, as opposed to mine, dark on dark. He tells me he’s been working out for me and I say he looks great, but I wish there were more of him, that even my widest embrace couldn’t hold all of him. He places his hands on my hips and positions me next to him.
“Your skin.” He kisses my shoulder. “I’ve missed it.”
“I called all week,” I say. “Where were you? There were things I wanted to talk to you about.”
He stops, aggravation dusts his smile. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
Yes, I say, because he is due for it, and I’ve promised. We don’t have sex often because his work makes him tired. I like this because it allows us to ignore other, bigger problems.
He appreciates everything as he climbs me: thighs, stomach, breasts. There is nothing technically wrong with how he touches me. He’s not strong enough to plank above me so he props himself on one elbow. From that fortified position, he enters me.
My subconscious has at least ten working, active planes. One conducts everyday business, hands money to the ticket girl. Designs appropriate responses to banal conversations. On the daydream plane I receive an award for courage, take my seat, am called onstage to receive it again. On another, an endless film of regrets: I refuse the childhood girl who wanted to be friends because her ugliness scared me. A boy gifts me tickets to a concert to which I take another boy. In the childhood plane my mother looks up at my entrance to a room and her expression remains unchanged.
The list-of-worries plane: climate change, terrorist attack. The rerun-of-great-sex plane—pulled hair, he holds me in a straddling position while he stands. Napping with my childhood dog. My mother looks up at my entrance into a room, her expression unchanged. One plane intones random phrases: THE BRIDE DOES NOT LIKE ALMOND. YOU COULD BRAISE BEEF IN MILK, I SUPPOSE.
YOU ARE HAVING SEX, says the practical plane, to remind me of the body, both mine and the one moving part of itself farther into me. I’m pleased he is close to orgasm and hope it will be over soon.
One plane, buried in the underground layers, works on philosophical tangles like what it meant when Rose said, “Don’t worry about me.” Conclusions I’m not ready for are secreted in deeper planes. The upturned-penny plane tries positive outcomes: promotion, connection to nature. My mother looks up at my entrance to a room.
YOU ARE HAVING SEX.
My clients’ injuries have destroyed many of these planes. A meteor careens through the framework of a skyscraper, shearing the beams in half. Thoughts halt in the middle. The structure sways. Only Danny’s literal plane remains. He is no longer funny. Post-its act as surrogates.
YOU ARE MAKING RICE.
Danny in his gently pulsing room of Post-its, and good sex, and how I should have gone with the boy who gave me the tickets, and said yes to the girl, the career of Ewan McGregor with its nebulous ebbs and flows. Like the Internet, simultaneous and indifferent. I shake back into my body and the groom comes into me, eyes wide and focused on the headboard.
He gives me a satisfied snarl. The phone rings.
“You’re going to get that?” he says. “You never answer your phone.”
On the other end a frantic woman asks if I’m there. “It’s Clover,” she says. “Danny’s wife.” She pauses and the details of her return to me: she borrows Danny’s meds to sleep, hair box-dyed a color called Spring Break. “I came from the hospital,” she says. “I was at the house earlier. Danny’s lunch was staying down, which I took as a good sign. He had a bug all week. The doctor said something was going around.”
The groom slides out of bed and crosses to the bathroom in the pallid light.
It is not uncommon for clients’ relatives to call to relay simple things like they would in a diary. “Clover?” I say. “Are you okay?”
“I came back from my meeting and he told me my sister had called. I think he wanted me to be on the phone when he…”
The groom curses in the bathroom, a dropped metal thing. I have a sister now, too, I think. To Clover, I say, “When he what?”
“He waited until I was on the phone,” she says. “I guess he thought that’d be a good way for him to.”
“For him to what?”
“For him to. He shot himself.”
She describes the smell of burning, the smear of blood still on her. The groom draws the curtains, revealing the lake and sky. I clamber under the sheets, still naked. Thousands of miles above, a plane glides out from a bank of navy clouds. Clover says, the nurses. The name of the hospital. The plane reveals itself again. I think of the passengers, feet swinging over plastic seats, watching movie screens above the city’s grid. The conflation of tin and sky. For a moment, Danny is a small thing seen from thousands of miles above. I’m not certain I know him or the woman on the phone who is overcome with tears. I tell her I’ll come to the hospital and hang up.
“One of my clients shot himself,” I say. “He’s at the hospital.”
“He’s alive?” the groom says.
“No,” I say.
He frowns. “If he’s dead, he wouldn’t be at the hospital.”
“He was still alive when they … Is this the fucking point?”
“I don’t know why I’m arguing. I’m sorry.”
I pull my dress on and fasten the important buttons, leaving the subsidiary ones for the elevator. “I’m going.”
“You can’t. It’s the night before our wedding.”
I lace my boots. “I’ll take a car. I won’t be long.”
“At least give me a hug,” he says.
I lean against him, he pulls me in. “My hardworking girl. So dedicated to the most vulnerable among us.” There are moments when he says the right thing so convincingly I can’t believe him.
“It sounds like you’re running for office,” I say.
“You’re a mean girl.”
I appreciate this honesty and think about it. I still think about it.
WHAT ELSE ARE WE HERE FOR?
I sit in Coney Island Hospital answering a police officer’s questions. Morning sun makes the waiting room appear basted. A room before a room.
She asks how long I’ve been seeing Danny and if he’d displayed suicidal tendencies. I say he had to remove his feces with his own gloved hands. She studies me through a pair of reading glasses. “What is your job exactly?�
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I tell her I map pain, which is not unlike aging, in that it is characterized by what we can no longer do. For most people, aging is doing less and less. It’s not the pain, I explain to the officer, it is the actions pain makes impossible. Those of us who are healthy should use our bodies as much as we can, I tell her. Threesomes, foursomes, moresomes. Detecting nothing useful in my story, she leaves.
Clover enters and we exchange a stiff hug. We sit on hard chairs and talk.
“I rushed him during our last appointment,” I say. “Did he mention? That I was weird?”
“Don’t blame yourself,” she says. “It’s his fault. And mine. He’d threatened to do it before when we fought.”
She looks blurred by shock, blinking to bring me and the room into focus.
“I’m beginning to think the dead are never really gone.” I want to say something helpful. “That they visit in different ways. Glints of snow on a mountain. Tea in a cup.”
“I don’t believe in that,” she says.
“I don’t either.”
And yet.
On my way out of the hospital I stop to pet R2-D2, leashed to a bench down the hall. Light coming from a surgical room makes his fur glow. He’s never run in a field. No one has ever tossed him a ball. He stares, alert, into a room I can’t see.
The cop leans against the nurses’ station filling out paperwork. “What happens to the dog?” I say.
It takes the cop a moment to figure out the animal I mean. She shrugs. “He’ll be taken to the shelter. The wife doesn’t want him.”
R2-D2’s tail wags. He sniffs happily around my ankles. The world’s mistreated things are still optimistic despite it all. The Coney Island shelter is understaffed and badly maintained. I’ve stopped in occasionally to visit the birds. “You’ll find a good home,” I tell him. The nurses at their station, heads tilted into their paperwork. The jaundiced light of illness.
Outside, the wind gains strength from the ocean and I lift my collar against whatever can be blocked. There’s been a rhythm in my head for days. A wordless, tuneless heart beating alongside my actions. It goes: Boom. Boom boom. An elevator song? Boom. Boom boom. Then I realize. It is my grandmother saying, Oh. He’s white.
Parakeet: A Novel Page 11