She says, “By the park.”
Footsteps behind me. Danny stands in the doorway, glaring. “I don’t have all day.”
Ada and I make final agreements and hang up. I follow Danny into the family room, apologizing without mentioning the reason for the call. He is upset, perhaps because he does have all day. Like most of my clients, his marriage is splintering. It’s challenging to be around someone in pain. People worry it will get on them. When I was hired, my boss, an injury attorney whose collar is never completely folded over the back of his tie, assigned me a book called The Reptilian Brain. The cover is a drawing of a reptile in the act of contemplation. The head is transparent, its brain waves represented in blue squiggles that emanate out of the parameters of the jacket and into the world, this suggests, into the reader.
A reptile’s biggest fears are isolation and immobility. Most of my clients deal with both. “Think about the reptile,” my boss reminds me. “How the reptile in you responds to the reptile in them.” I am encouraged to phrase my reports in reptilian terms.
A reptile wants anything there is to want—the sun, your best ideas, the center of the center of the eclair, everything. It wants to flip itself inside out and emerge a new and shiny reptile encrusted in star matter. It wants to sit on a blanket with its friends, dominating everyone. It wants to control storms. Our waking reality is their dream state, and vice versa.
Who’s driving? my boss writes in the margins of my reports. The reptile or the human? I think it is the only book he has ever read.
Danny’s synapses are unreliable and finicky. Even if they convey the whole message, they can’t be trusted to keep conveying it. You are holding this pitcher. Continue to hold this pitcher.
“How many Percocet did you take today?”
“Two when I woke up, and two before you came.” He checks his pill case. “Maybe more.”
R2-D2 scratches at the back door. For the dog the only thing worse than being with Danny is being without him. Danny wants to watch an episode of an old sitcom but I want to finish the interview so I can leave.
“We only have a few questions we missed from last time, then done. Sound good?”
He mutes the television. “Do you think that sounds good?”
“Please remember I’m here to help you, and that your answers will not be shared with anyone except your attorney.”
“And the whole courtroom,” he says.
“Not without your permission. Number five. Are you able to achieve erection whenever you want, occasionally, or not at all?”
He flips through silent channels. “Not at all.”
“That means never.” I read the questions quickly, in an even tone. “Have you achieved erection at all since the accident?”
“Once or twice.”
“That would count as occasionally.”
He punishes me for the enthusiasm. “Check me out,” he says. “Brad Pitt coming through.”
I write: occasionally. “When you achieved erection, how long did it last?”
“A minute or two,” he says. “Not long enough for Clover to go for hers.”
“Are you able to ejaculate whenever you want, occasionally, or not at all?”
He shifts in his seat, stalls. “If I can’t get an erection, how could I ejaculate?”
“Sometimes in sleep, you’re able to … without really … also, it is possible to ejaculate while having a flaccid penis.”
“You’ll have to teach me that trick. What’s occasionally again?”
“Anywhere from one time on,” I say.
He hears my impatience, pouts. “Write down occasionally.”
Danny used to be quick to joke, according to his friends, but the accident triggered another man’s temper. He yells at Clover, the kid, the dog. He doesn’t even walk the same, Clover told me. This personality change is why certain lawyers present brain injury cases as fatalities. The client’s first life has ended.
“Are you able to go to the bathroom without assistance from anything or anyone?”
He waits for a truck commercial to finish before answering. My phone vibrates in my pocket with messages, e-mails. “I’m able to piss but not the other thing,” he says.
“You’re able to urinate,” I say. “All the time, occasionally—”
“All the time.” He lifts the waistband of his jeans to show me a diaper.
“How do you relieve yourself of fecal matter?”
He points to a stack of medical supplies in the corner. “I use gloves to remove what I need. Six or seven times a day. I don’t know when I have to go, that sensation or whatever is gone. I keep checking.” He slumps into himself on the chair. He’s crying, shoulders shaking, holding the remote like a sword.
I want to tell him that tears are a bother and a waste of time. “This is normal for someone with your injury,” I say. “Most of my clients can’t achieve erections at all.”
“I lied.” He pats his crotch. “There’s nobody fucking home. I sit here and diddle my life away as my wife screws everyone in New York.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.” I check my phone. The florist, Sam.
“You’re weird today. Distracted, jumpy. Phone calls. Why are you so anxious to leave? Hey.” He launches out of the chair with surprising speed and stands over me.
The self I put away during these interviews returns as I slide my phone and book inside my purse. I am alone in a house with an unstable man who, even injured, can physically overpower me. I must leave without upsetting him further. “That’s good information, Danny. We can stop.”
“That’s it?” He shakes his arms over me, as if trying to rid a tree of fruit.
Excited by his owner’s motion, R2-D2 leaps up and down against Danny’s leg, barking.
I stand, my bag already looped over my shoulder. “I won’t bother you anymore.” As I walk to the door every atom in the room takes on the wrung-out nature of incident.
As Danny’s adrenaline wanes, his pain returns. He sits on a pile of magazines on the coffee table. “Sometimes I feel like I’m watching my family from far away. Like they’re on a stage and I’m in the nosebleeds. There’s even a little me, a little Danny. I want to join them but my limbs don’t work. I want to say to the little me, stop fucking everything up. My voice gets stuck. After a while, I think, well, why don’t they find me? They’re too far away. They may not even be my family. I may be using all this energy to signal to the wrong people. Do you know what I mean?”
“It’s disassociation.” I pause in the doorway. “A lot of my clients have it. You’re not alone.” I want to think about my grandmother. I want to buy a dress and get married so something new can happen.
“You got somewhere to be?” His volume reaches its highest and most pained register. His loneliness is tangible, it could leave with me and ride in the passenger seat of my car. “It’s no fun sitting with the crippled guy?”
His pleading eyes match my own peeled insides. Against my better instinct, I decide to be honest. “The truth is. I’m getting married. You’re my last appointment for the week.”
“Married.” His eyes brighten. “That’s a happy thing.” He pulls a faded wooden box from a shelf. He lifts the lid, revealing a gun. I open the screen door and step outside.
“Wait,” he says. “That’s just what’s sitting on it. What a shitty thing to do,” he apologizes. He holds the gun as if it is a delicate bird. Placing it aside, he removes a paper from the box. “A poem,” he says. “A good one.”
“Why do you keep a poem in a box with a gun?” I say.
“I like it.” He studies me. “Maybe I’m dumb. Will you read it?”
“I’m no good at poetry, Danny.”
“Okay, but keep it,” he says. “I hope he’s a good … man?”
“Yes.” I am surprised by this consideration. “A human man.”
“I didn’t know whether you liked men or women,” he says. “You’re like…” He makes a muscle, gives a bodybuilder’s pose.
As I’ve been many times during our interviews, I am insulted and flattered. “He’s a…” But like when explaining the Internet to a bird, my mind empties. “… very hard worker.”
“You got a bridal party?”
Another reason you don’t tell them anything. The digging. “No,” I lie.
“Brothers? I can’t imagine you with sisters.”
“Brother, singular,” I say. “Older.”
“No one understands you like your siblings.”
“I’m sure that’s true with many siblings but not with us. We don’t talk. He’s…”
“An asshole?”
My laughter surprises both of us. “A playwright,” I say. “Who likes to use other people’s lives in his plays. And, last I saw him, addicted to heroin.”
Danny’s eyes sober. “That’s serious stuff. It breaks my heart to think of kids getting hooked. They don’t have the tools to get out from under it.”
On television, a child dressed as Darth Vader attempts to move a dog with his mind.
“I used to be great at weddings.” He raises his arms to hold an invisible partner. “Most men don’t get how to partner. Please stay,” he says. “I don’t have anyone to talk to.”
“I’m sorry.”
Danny writes: DON’T FORGET TO GET MARRIED on a Post-it and hands it to me. He returns to his recliner. R2-D2 lies next to him, placing his head on Danny’s knee. “Bye, pup,” I say. Then, to Danny, “It actually is a lot of fun, hanging out with the crippled guy.”
His eyes remain on the television as he flips through muted channels. “See ya.”
I hurry down the street until the chased sensation dissipates. I stop at a DON’T WALK and listen to my messages. The florist reminds me that we have an appointment. Her certainty calms me, along with a message from Rose, who says she will join me after the movie. I am an ordinary woman getting ordinary married to an ordinary man. This thought fails to soothe.
A woman pausing next to me wears a coat over a red sarong. The light turns green and we cross together, reach the adjacent sidewalk in step. Our strides match though I’m younger and wearing sneakers. How is she so fast? We move down the street in such sync we may as well be lovers. I won’t slow my pace because I want to get away. I won’t move faster for fear of appearing aggressive. I hedge, debate myself.
I pump my arms subtly so she does not notice the effort. It is important this woman thinks I am winning effortlessly. My legs are strong from running. My pelvis is uncracked. My original heart beats solid in its cage. I have time to kill and the ability to see a movie in the city. Should I acknowledge the situation? A well-timed chuckle can engender camaraderie, even in strangers, but when I dare to check her face it is blank. She engages in no interior debate, unaware that she is doing the walking equivalent of doppelgänging me on the street. She is effortless.
I fill with unaccountable anger. Am I invisible? I should never have empathized. Fuck this woman’s ease and what it reveals in me.
She stops unexpectedly. Without thinking, I halt, too. She is younger than I’d have guessed because she wears the coat of a much older woman.
“You’re trying so hard.” Her eyes are pity-filled.
“I—” I say, but have no idea how to complete the sentence, which she seems to know because she turns and proceeds down the street with enviable agility.
EWAN MCGREGOR DOES HIS BEST
The movie is called Beginners and stars Ewan McGregor, a man who could easily be mistaken for another man. Perhaps this is why he is famous.
Ewan faces the slow, ecstatic dying of his father, played by Christopher Plummer, who comes out as gay, then spends the rest of the film enjoying a predeath Rumspringa, cavorting with a hunky boyfriend decades younger. Ewan meets a girl with laryngitis who has a nose I want to cover with my mouth. She is dressed like Charlie Chaplin and they end up on a gauzy predawn Los Angeles street. He offers her a ride but she says nah. They roller-skate down the hallway of her hotel. His smitten talking dog continues to ask when they will be married. Christopher Plummer is dying. Los Angeles waits by the phone for itself to call.
The theater’s stilted, matter-of-fact air makes me capable of clear thought. Ewan McGregor’s feckless, loose kindness reminds me of my brother, though in this moment everything does.
I remember Tom’s wedding to Sara Something, when I was twenty-nine and he was thirty-two. He overdosed, survived. His tuxedo shirt slit down the middle by the EMTs, the pulsing of his blood over his chest. I wasn’t nice about it. It came at the end of years of unanswered messages, sudden criticisms, distracted tones. I left him at the hospital, ate vanilla wafers in my parked car. After that we didn’t speak.
Ewan McGregor finds himself, when on the precipice of connection, lacking. He does what he thinks is his best. It doesn’t work. He does his actual best and the movie ends.
Descending the escalator I see Rose standing in her winter coat underneath the marquee. Pale sun blurs the buildings and lights up her pretty bun. I will tell her my grandmother visited me as a bird and she will understand the complexities of impending marriage. She will help me navigate this emotional terrain because we’ve spent our whole friendship dissecting the merits of everything from marriage to ice cream sandwiches. Case-by-case basis, both. A simple and moving thought, a friend. I am already calmed by the fact of her waiting.
The lobby’s clock reads one fifteen as I push through the doors to the bright outside and say, “Rose.” I love saying her name. When I say “Rose,” and she turns, it means she’s mine. I say her name and she makes a tinny oh sound as a frown creases her forehead. It cannot be disappointment because we have history longer than the entire world. I take her into my arms. Our hug lasts longer than she seems to think it will.
I point to her wallet. “Where’s your bag?”
“At the office,” she says. “Too much to carry.”
“Not very safe in this town of crazies.”
She shrugs me off. “Thanks, Mom.”
Rose and I stood at seventh-grade gym mirrors in our sports bras debating whether we were ready to graduate to real ones. In high school we clipped boutonnieres to our dates’ lapels, took photos on the carpeted steps of her mother’s apartment. We learned to pull cigarette smoke into the part of the throat where important things go. We researched blow jobs and knew not to get so distracted by the shaft that we ignored the balls. We never, ever ignored the balls. We detailed our first sexual experiences to each other in reverent missives as we shed the veil of our baby fat. We were sacred, horny angels massaging the balls. We claimed to adore the taste of semen. We swore we were going to be famous simply for being ourselves, humble with the air of mystery of a jewelry-ad woman from our magazines, who checks her watch only to decide, fa-la, time doesn’t matter! Acclaimed for our dance moves, synchronized with outfits that didn’t match-match but winked at each other. Her mother remarried in high school and her family moved to the suburbs. My father had been dead since childhood, so I borrowed her stepfather, a heavily belted man who overused the phrase, Okeydokey, smoky. My mother couldn’t afford any of the colleges that accepted me, but Rose didn’t bring up the disparity in our situations. She never joined the others who mocked my skin color. We penned monologues to each other about our separate colleges, fascinated by who we were on the verge of becoming on our new campuses—hers leafy and liberal and mine in Queens, where I still lived in my mother’s house. Rose never mentioned my taciturn mother. I fretted in the waiting room of her abortion. When I spent a year in the hospital, she learned that ice chips allay anxiety. After we passed the age of fame she was still a celebrity to me, but after my injury, she retracted. She answered her phone less frequently and rarely accepted any of my offers to get together. Immediately after accepting the groom’s proposal I asked her to be my maid of honor. What I love most about being engaged are the opportunities to see her.
We poke at chicken salads in a Union Square deli. Rose can take long lunch breaks because
she practically runs her medical journal. A large fern walks by with a serious-looking woman.
Finally, I am capable of telling her about the bird visit. I explain that the closer the wedding gets, the smaller I feel, as if the world’s rooms are being taken away one by one leaving me alone in my junior one-bedroom apartment.
“I went downstairs to borrow toothpaste from the concierge—”
“You forgot toothpaste?” Her tendency is to leap to the story’s point, though she always guesses wrong.
“Really, I wanted to talk to the concierge. I was putting off writing place cards, come to think of it.”
“What are you even doing in the city? Aren’t you supposed to be taking it easy in Long Island?”
“It’s on Long Island, not in.”
She frowns. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“They’re oddly serious about it,” I say. “I’m here because I have this florist appointment.” This isn’t entirely true. I had been shaky at the Inn and wanted to see her. Her expression, as if I am a pile of laundry she hopes will be put away, makes this sentiment foolish. I keep it to myself. “I don’t think I want to get married.”
She asks, Did he cheat on me, is he abusing me physically? Emotionally? Did I find something out about his finances? When I answer no, she shakes sugar into her coffee, confused. These are the only acceptable reasons for not wanting to be married. “Does this have anything to do with your injury?” I like the way she says it, face-first. Most people mention it as if wincing under a low ceiling.
“It has nothing to do with my injury,” I say. “This insane thing happened—”
“I’m finished.” She pushes her chair away from the table.
“I’m finished, too,” I say. “Shall we walk to the florist?”
“I think I can manage that…” She glances at her phone, which glows with messages. “… but it has to be quick.”
We cross into the park. It’s early November but still warm. People who work in bordering offices scurry across the square holding their wallets.
“If I were to ever get married,” she says, “I like the idea of a destination wedding.”
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