Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  “Nah, this is the good stuff. Medicinal.”

  They pour; they light.

  This is one of those moments Nick used to fantasize desperately about orchestrating. Miles is far enough away that Nick could ask discreet questions; the kids and Chad are already upstairs in bed. But the truth is that there isn’t anything more Miguel can tell him without Nick having to admit things he suspects Miguel of suspecting but can’t bring himself to confirm. Letting go, he reminds himself, and he waits for Miguel to steer the conversation elsewhere.

  “It’s so weird, isn’t it?” Miguel says, obligingly. “Gretchen and Ron?”

  “I don’t really know her that well,” Nick hedges, “but yeah, she didn’t seem like the romantic type to me, I’ll give you that.”

  “It’s strange being around it,” Miguel says. “I mean, you expect it from Miles—you remember yourself at that age and how big everything seemed. But it’s hard to believe Gretchen, at our age, can really buy into all that all over again.”

  “If you don’t buy in,” Nick says, “what else is there?”

  Miguel drags on the joint, awfully deeply for a man who’s claiming paranoia. Maybe the Guerras have a certain hunger for numbness—for altered states—in their DNA. I want to feel different, Lina always said, whenever she was stressed. I just want something to make me feel different.

  “But all that . . . passion,” Miguel continues, handing the joint back to Nick. “It seems like so much effort. It seems so tiring.” He actually shudders. “I’d rather just fall asleep in front of The Daily Show.”

  “You’ve got a toddler,” Nick says glibly.

  Miguel looks at Nick with a half-formed disappointment on his face, like he expected more of him. Nick shrugs, downs his tequila, says, “I don’t know, man. Marriage is hard. I don’t know anymore how people keep going at it. At least two men speak the same language.”

  “No one speaks the same language as anyone,” says Miguel.

  From the bench, Miles rises up on an elbow. “Are you guys getting high? Jesus, fucking hippies. Can I have some?”

  “I feel dirty,” Miguel says. Then, “Aren’t you supposed to be bringing us Molly or something? Or . . . wow, do kids still do cocaine? I loved cocaine.”

  Miles leans through the open window of the enclosed porch and reaches for the joint. He takes two long hits, passes the joint back to his father—not even touching the cocaine question—and walks back out into the dark night. The stars pop violently in the sky, in constellations Nick couldn’t identify if his life depended on it. The world is full of things to know, and you reach an age when mostly you realize all the things you planned on learning are things you’ve gotten by fine without. Miguel leans forward, looking after Miles as if to see how far away he is, then says, in that conspiratorial way of his, “I used to think . . . I thought Chad was mainly a surface person—I don’t mean that the rude way it sounds, I actually loved that about him—but watching his friendship with Emily, I realized no, that’s not exactly it. He was just surface with me.”

  Did Emily tell Chad the thing about feeling broken after Jay? “There’s more than one kind of intimacy,” Nick says, and he plans to leave it at that. But instead, a short beat later, he hears himself ask, “Would you ever have an affair?”

  Miguel, even stoned, looks startled. He grimaces a little, like he knows he started this and now he has to see it through. He drops his voice even further, says, “I used to think, maybe I should just go out to Barcelona—I used to live there—once a year, go to my old haunts, just . . . get together with old friends. I thought, maybe that kind of thing is even good for a marriage. Chad and I—sex isn’t the most central part of our bond, you know? We enjoy it, it’s not like, some problem . . . but . . . it’s not raw animal chemistry. I don’t mean now—who has that after almost fifteen years? I mean it was never what we were really about, even when we were young. I thought, maybe no one can be everything to another person, and we’re all responsible for our own needs.”

  “Fair enough,” says Nick.

  “But the thing is . . .” Miguel reaches for the bottle, then places it back down on the wooden slats of the floor, puts his hands back on his lap. “When it came right down to it, I’ve been cheated on, and I know what it feels like, and I couldn’t do that to Chad. Attraction is cheap. What we have is more than that. Not just Imogen but . . . I mean bearing witness to each other’s lives. That’s bigger than sex. Without that, we’re like the tree in the woods. Life is about compromises. Chad and I make each other real.”

  Miles, lit by starlight, laughs in the distance. Is he eavesdropping on them, laughing to hear two old men talking this way, or is he oblivious to them, laughing at his phone screen, at the words floating in intangible space between himself and his Michigan girl?

  Who will Imogen be to Nick’s boys, when he and Chad and Miguel and Gretchen are all nothing but stardust? Family? A story for the therapist’s couch? Anything? What does this cruel, achingly luminous world have in store for the men Jay and Gray will grow into, carrying the albatross and gifts of their diagnosis around just as Lina carries hers? It is dizzying not to know—not to be able to control any of it. Em, you needed to help me, you needed to stay, it’s too much. But Emily is still gone, along with everything he should have said to her to make it right, or everything in her that might have been better off without him. All of her but what remains in the children has disappeared into the great non-sentient unknown. Nick is free, and whether that is what he wanted at one time, or only another game of chicken he’d have pulled himself back from the edge of before the fall, doesn’t matter anymore. He stretches his hand drunkenly toward the Nothingness as though he can grasp it, then relinquishes the attempt, reaches out and touches Miguel’s arm instead, firmly places his hand there despite the way it makes Miguel twitch in alarm before slowly relaxing into something like solidarity in the vastness. Nick keeps his hand there, one moment longer, touching Lina’s shared DNA, touching the father of the baby his wife carried, touching his friend, holding on just one, two, three seconds more—and then slowly, gently, letting go.