What Comes Next and How to Like It

by Abigail Thomas

  “I drip it off a toothbrush,” I tell him.

  New Year’s Eve

  Chuck and I were going to have supper and go to the movies. We both hated New Year’s Eve, but needed the company. Rich was in a rehab facility, Chuck was getting divorced. When he came by the apartment Catherine was there, getting ready to go out with her friends. She was working at a farm upstate called Green Chimneys. There were five young women tottering around on high heels. They were putting on makeup in front of the bathroom mirror, fixing each other’s hair. There were shrieks and giggles. There were strapless dresses and one wig. Catherine was lovely, silly, distracted, young. In my company, like it or not, Chuck became a reluctant grown-up.

  We all left together, Chuck and I and the gaggle of girls, and we walked up 112th Street to Broadway. The girls hailed a cab and climbed in, shouting good-bye. I noticed Chuck’s face fall. Catherine hadn’t asked him to join them.

  Half an hour later my friend had disappeared, and in his place, sitting across the table from me, was a stranger. We were at Ollie’s, bowls full of wet noodles in front of us. This stranger had nothing to say; he might as well have been sitting alone at this table. So might I.

  Let’s parse this: my friend is my daughter’s former lover, and my daughter is the woman rejecting the man sitting across the table from me. What makes this intolerable is that I seem to have misplaced a friend and a daughter, or they have misplaced themselves, and now I’m angry with them both. We finished our dinner in silence. Chuck told me he’d changed his mind about the movie. He was tired. He disappeared into the subway at quarter to twelve.

  A day or two later he called to tell me what I already knew—that seeing Catherine had upset him, that he hadn’t wanted to inflict that misery on me, and so he’d bailed.

  Maybe if the woman he loved had been someone else I wouldn’t have been as angry. Maybe we would have talked about it, although he was never one to kiss and tell. But that night I was shut out of his world and, worse, shut out of my own, a world I’d put together, a world that contained my friend and my daughter.

  Hadn’t he seen the same girl I had seen? Laughing with friends? Tottering around in high heels? “She is too young for you,” I snapped. It was unpredictable, this moment, but it was always on its way. “Grow up,” I shouted.

  After that, conversation was joyless. We no longer trusted each other. Chuck had been hurt by the scorn in my voice. I was alternately furious and numb. We were going to take a break from each other. Our friendship had become too complicated.

  “Do you remember when we stopped talking to each other?” I ask. Chuck looks blank. “After that New Year’s Eve?” He shakes his head. We are sitting in my living room with the woodstove cranked. It’s winter again. I try to tell him what I remember. It’s painful. The more I talk, the more depressed we both get. I wonder if he regrets having started this ball rolling.

  “Remind me why you want me to do this.” He doesn’t say anything. I ask again. You have to be ruthless to get anything done in this racket. Finally he says he knows there will be things in it that will make him uncomfortable, but that it’s necessary, it’s part of the story. That’s all I can get out of him.

  But I can use it.

  Wanting to Tell Chuck

  The other day I came across something in an old diary. My badly injured husband must have thought he’d seen something over by the window, the kind of thing you see out the corner of your eye. He was in a hospital on Long Island, lying on his narrow bed.

  “What is it?” I asked, seeing him distracted.

  “I thought a bird had come detached from its shadow,” he said.

  It would have been Chuck I wanted to call. It’s Chuck I call now.

  I Can’t Lose You

  After months of silence, one of us wrote the other. “I can’t lose you like this,” the note said. We met for lunch. Our conversation was as careful as if we were ironing a shirt. It was not a success, but there was a reason we had been friends for so long, maybe it would unearth itself if we met again. It was hard work, like chopping wood, but we kept at it. Finally it was as if we climbed into two monster trucks and plowed over the rubble and crashed through the wall and came out the other side.

  What I mean is we had the will.

  Painting

  With painting there’s no doubt when it doesn’t work. You don’t hold it this way and that, hoping it will get better. Luckily, when you paint on glass, you can razor it off. Halfway through scraping off a bunch of apple trees, I turned it over, and there was the painting—a ghostly stand of birch. All I had to do was to enhance the accident. I love this painting now, with two red apples still glowing in the lower right-hand corner.

  Just Name It

  I made a forest of blue trees. Then I made another, smaller one. Then another, thinking myself on a roll, only this time I got the woodsy equivalent of a Sears family portrait. It was okay, you could see clouds and blue sky behind trees, but it was uninteresting. I should have known while I was making it—nothing surprised me except that when it was done it was dull.

  I scraped it off, and since the paint had dried at different speeds, the razor skipped on its way up the glass, and made jagged branch-like things. Interesting, so that was my starting place for a new painting. Unfortunately, when it was done, I found I had reinvented plaid. Then Ralph came down for a visit, and he held it at a different angle, pointing out the tiny houses and the railroad tracks and high-tension wires and the orange lights in the factory windows. “Call it the Industrial Revolution,” he said.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “You’re right!”

  That was the day he told me that washing my hands with turpentine was a bad idea. “That’s poison, Mom,” he said. We went to Houst and bought a big container of something orange that smells like PEZ. It works fine.

  The Platonic Ideal

  So here I am banging away wondering what this connection to Chuck is all about, and all of a sudden I get it. At least I think I get it. The connection with him is a connection with part of myself, and it has to do with a kind of insatiable curiosity. I mean the part of me that gets connected to the rest of me when I’m connecting to him. The insatiably curious part. Only connect! Only connect! That’s as far as I’ve gotten. It’s a little indistinct, but I am excited.

  Foolishly I tell him.

  Here is part of his response:

  “Sounds like the platonic ideal,” he says. “Meantime,” he says, and then puts Catherine’s name in a Randy Newman lyric that has nothing to do with the platonic ideal. It is in very bad taste. What’s wrong with you? I wonder, annoyed. Later I ask for a definition of “meantime.” I already know the song. “I meant in the past imperfect tense sense,” he writes. “I would say past perfect except it wasn’t. I mean, it was past. But it wasn’t perfect. And it was tense.” Now I must look for my ancient copy of Plato’s Symposium. I only read it once, sitting in the backseat of a Morris Minor while my parents drove around England. I was sixteen and didn’t understand a single word.

  The next time he calls I don’t pick up the phone.

  It occurs to me that there are two of him now—the walking-around dude with his own life, and the one I am talking to when I’m by myself. Sometimes the Chuck who calls me up isn’t in the same mood as the other one. When the one in my mind seems realer than the one who’s breathing and coughing, I begin to wonder if I’m making one of them up. Fortunately I couldn’t make up one without having made up the other. I’m good, but I’m not that good.

  Afraid

  I have always been half in love with Chuck, but it’s the top half. I love how his mind works. I love how he can take my fumbling for words for some idea and turn it into a coherent thought. I love how he makes me laugh.

  Every now and again I’m afraid Chuck will fall in love with somebody and I will lose him. This comes from the worst part of me, the possessive part. I used to
get upset if somebody I didn’t like loved a book I loved. That’s my book, I’d think. It’s not that I don’t want Chuck to be happy. I do. I just want him happy the way he is, but in a house closer to mine. He lives in Massachusetts. Sometimes I look through the Woodstock Times and send him real estate listings. He pretends to take them seriously.

  The Possessive Part

  Chuck’s wife never liked me. We met at a ball game, when friends of Cork Smith, my old boss, had rented Shea Stadium for an afternoon. I am certain I was pushy about our friendship in front of her, and had I been in her shoes, I’d’ve hated me too.

  I ask Chuck about that day. “I dropped a fly, hit a triple, and bunted in the winning run” is what he remembers, not that it was the day I met his wife.

  Nothing More Than This

  Chuck drives to Woodstock and leaves his dog with me for a day while he goes to a doctor’s appointment. This is the redbone coonhound I got for him because he was lonely. Pojd (which is Czech for “come”) is payment for all the good things and all the bad things Chuck has done.

  After the appointment Chuck comes back and spends the night. I make that chicken thigh dish we both like (although it means fending off four determined dogs), and we stay up very late. The next day he hangs around until the afternoon; we are having a particularly nice time. Ten minutes after he leaves he’s back, having forgotten something—the tickets to a game. Then he’s off again. Twenty minutes later his car is pulling into my driveway again. What is it this time? I wonder, and decide to open the door saying “What, you came back to ask me to marry you?” which I think is a good joke, but before I can say a word, he flings his arms open and says, “Marry me!”

  “Okay,” I say, and I tell him what I had planned to say and we laugh, a little stunned at the coincidence. After he finds his cell phone (between couch cushions) and gets back in his car, he rolls down the window to say, “That was funny, the whole marry me thing, wasn’t it?” and I say, “Yes, yes it was.” We are both, I think, actually happy at this moment. It is nothing more than what it is, two friends who think of the same joke at the same time, but it’s comforting to know that this is what we’ve always done, and all we have to do.

  Scraping

  The first time I scraped off most of a painting I turned it over and saw streaky white trees and a lot of Spanish moss. That wasn’t what I’d planned, it was better than what I’d planned. The next thing I did was next to nothing, and when I was finished I had a swampy ghostly forest. It was my first favorite painting. It occurs to me that what I’m doing is reinventing pentimento.

  Sex Again

  I don’t think of Chuck in a sexual way, except he is a man and I am a woman, and sometimes there is something in the air that adds spice to conversation. Sex isn’t what I wanted from him, nor is it what he wanted from me, but it is something I’m aware of. Attraction isn’t restricted to sex. One thing doesn’t always lead to another. But it makes a nice hum in the background.

  This morning I looked at an old photograph. It hangs on my wall, and it’s part of the woodwork, but today I took it down to examine. It’s a photo my daughter Jennifer took of our company softball team. There is Cork, a legend in publishing, and one day to be Catherine’s father-in-law; there is an old boyfriend of Jennifer’s, others I remember well. And Chuck.

  Chuck can’t have been much more than thirty years old in this picture, if that. My god, he was good-looking. These are the words that pop into my head, I can’t help it: you’re like a great big candy bar. Did I know that then? I must have. But I never broke him down into components: I never thought, My god, look at that ass, or those shoulders, or that you-name-it, the way I did the ones I wanted to sleep with. When I looked at him I saw friend. I’m standing to his left, a mess of blond hair and a smile. Maybe we’d won the game. He has a Brooklyn T-shirt on, I am wearing my denim skirt. I always wore skirts.

  Chuck was captain because he could do everything. Since I could neither throw, catch, hit, nor run, he made me the pitcher, betting that sooner or later the opposing team would be impatient enough to take a wild swing. One afternoon we used a couple of ringers, one of them an old friend of his. He wore a bright orange T-shirt, his hair was black, and he had dark eyes and a beautiful mouth. He came to my house at midnight a few nights later carrying a Sara Lee cheesecake. “I couldn’t think of anything else to bring,” he said.

  “I fell in love after ten minutes,” I wailed. “What’s wrong with me?”

  Chuck was most helpful.

  “You don’t slide into love, Abigail, you fall,” he said.

  Chuck says we made out once. He remembers it was after a Twelfth Night party and I don’t; I remember making out at a publishing party, he doesn’t.

  We had gone together, as we always did, only this time he went off in pursuit of a pretty woman, and by that time he was my best friend, so although I didn’t want him to pursue me, I didn’t want him to pursue anyone else when I was in the vicinity. I don’t know how he knew I was upset, but he came looking for me, and what he said made everything all right for the next thirty years. Today I ask Chuck if he remembers that night, and he does, in great detail, minus that moment. He remembers me dancing with two men whose very existence I had forgotten. In the course of recounting the evening, he begins to wonder why he remembers it so well, since he hasn’t thought of it since.

  “Do you remember talking to me,” I ask, “when I got upset?”

  He doesn’t.

  “Wow. That’s so interesting,” I say, but I don’t care. Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life.

  “Maybe the thing I forgot is what makes me remember,” Chuck says, which is why I love him. An entire novel could be written around that one remark.

  Here’s what I remember.

  I remember a wide empty wall behind me. I remember lots of people dancing ten feet away. If I said I remember colored lights I would be making it up, but they were certainly there. And the music.

  I think I remember seeing him walk toward me, but maybe not. I do remember him standing in front of me without saying anything, then shrugging his shoulders. I remember what he said. He said, “I love you. That’s all.” I definitely remember that, because of the “that’s all.” That was the part I loved. We kissed. Then he said, “But it’s better this way, isn’t it? This way we get to keep it.” And so we have.

  Triangles

  Chuck and I were driving around in the dark. We were lost in the country somewhere in Massachusetts. It was pitch black and there was nothing but woods and winding roads and no streetlights. Not much moon either. We’d been trying to find our way for an hour. “We keep driving around in triangles,” he said, and I had to tell him why I laughed.

  Bad Memory

  I have a bad memory. I have been trying to remember being young, which is hard because I don’t feel old until I try to get up from my chair. Or when I look at the photograph Jennifer took of me sitting on a stool next to her twins, and really, from the back, it looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. How did that happen? I think, but, oh well, I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It’s somebody else’s turn now.

  I am remembering walking along Fifty-Ninth Street after work when I saw a tall elderly gentleman in a long black coat, a cape, maybe, leaning on a cane. I stared. There was something about him, as if he had just stepped out of a Charles Dickens novel and was looking around for an orphan to save. As my grandmother might have said, he cut quite a figure. Unfortunately, being a good New Yorker, I couldn’t break stride and so sailed past, but every time I looked over my shoulder at him, he was looking at me. Then he was gone, vanished, I figured, into one of the buses that went wheezing past. I wondered who he might have been. I wondered what his story might be. I was still wondering when I came to the second red light and there he w
as.

  “It’s you,” I said.

  “What took you so long?” he asked, as if he had been waiting all his life.

  I put my arm through his. He rented a horse-drawn carriage that meandered through Central Park while in the back, under a lap rug, we kissed. I can’t remember what we talked about, or what his life had been, only the kissing, and thinking Oh my god, don’t die, because he was in his late seventies, an age I no longer consider quite so old, coming up on seventy myself. I must have given him my number because we met once or twice more, and then as life would have it, he called too many times and I stopped answering. It was a sad trailing off, and I regretted it. I told my boss.

  “You shouldn’t have seen him again,” Cork said. “It was a good story until then.” He had the reputation of being a brilliant editor.

  But I have never learned to edit my life while in the process of living it. For me, Cork’s comment is as much a part of the story as the story itself.

  But I can’t remember the old man’s name. What was his name?

  I call Chuck. “Remember that old guy I went out with for a minute a thousand years ago?” I ask.

  “Syl!” he says immediately. “Good old Syl!”

  He remembers what I forget and I remember what he forgets. It’s too late for either of us to make another old friend.

  II

  I DON’T GET TO LIVE FOREVER

  Sleeping with Dogs

  I used to feel about king-size beds the way I do about Hummers and private jets and granite countertops, but over the past several years I gained three dogs and thirty pounds, and my old bed, a humble queen, just didn’t cut it anymore. It was either lose the weight, lose the dogs, or buy something bigger.