Paul gives us a look, like is anyone going to fill me in, and Nancy whispers to him, and my stomach plummets, but he still seems OK. It seems OK. Then, Nancy starts dancing backwards, cutting a path deeper into the throbbing dance floor. Of course, we follow.
I want to say this thing: when I was that age I didn’t get high to dance. The music was enough, the smell of bodies. I want to say this about teenagers. That all of them are a hundred times more beautiful than the most beautiful adult. It’s being uncorrupted by failure and gravity and entropy, but it’s not just that, not just youth and innocence. Teenagers, the chubby ones pulling down their too-short dresses, the ones who aren’t smiling because they are hiding their braces, teenagers are studies in vulnerability, have only the broadest cloth with which to cover themselves. Teenagers are lovely and when I see them now at the meetings, Jim from Mondays in Brookline, the pink-haired girl on day pass from the hospital, when I see them, I wish I had wings and breathed fire. I wish I could stand in front of them until they were good and ready to face the world. I wish I could go back, and stand in front of myself.
Still, how you consume danger as a kid, the way you eat it. The song is Dinosaur Jr. and Mudhoney and then it’s Black Flag and the Misfits. It’s getting harder as the night wears on. Nancy is fucked up and keeps leaning in to yell about this boy or that one against the wall, about were they watching our asses, or checking out our chests. Twice, I think I see Judah, but Nancy’s all, fuck it. She thinks the DJ is unbelievably beautiful, and the guy who plays bass in the second band, and the one kid who is operating the keg. The key, she yells, is always to collect them, to collect as many as possible. That way you don’t get bruised. Nancy shows me a girl in vinyl shorts, and she says that girl is a role model, is what we need to emulate. We dance near who we think we could love, and then away.
Someone bashes into me, shouldering my shoulder. I shudder, shocked, and then I bash back, and then we’re this arrhythmic mob, this organic mass in five dimensions. I see Nancy swimming over the crowd and then Paul is at my back, the golden of his eyes almost invisible around his dilated pupils and he puts his hands on my shoulders and moves up close to me. He feels fragile standing so near me in the shuddering throng of bodies, his frame unprotected by muscle or bulk. I can sense, in the way he gives against the motion of the other dancers, that he’s expert at absorbing blows; I know a story about him getting jumped by some Nazis in Kendall Square, but it’s not just that. There are other things which make him harbor at Nancy’s, other things he’s sheltering from.
The crowd pushes us closer and pulls us apart, closer and apart.
Long sleepy afternoons with Nancy, pulling off her stolen one-hitter and watching Quantum Leap: I could see how that might be a world someone like Paul needed to burrow into. I sense his need to fall into things, to hide inside someone. Paul’s hand slips into my pocket and I put my hand in on top of his. I can feel the welt on his bruised wrist like a swollen bracelet. There is a breath between us, still, but our touching is what the crowd wants, a geometrical figure in which the distance that separates us becomes smaller and smaller until it disappears entirely.
I have no choice. My body chooses, and I shift my weight, my whole length pressing into him, the bones and the bulges. I feel some bright spot at the center of him, a hot wound enclosed by his delicate shell. I want to armor him against the elbows and knees and occasional fists that thrust into us, the dance’s crazy brutality. I want to be armor.
Paul is touching me, his whole body touching me, and then, someone, deliberate, pushes into us. Above the crowd, I hear Nancy’s voice. “Do something, Mellie. Do something with your face.” The instant I break the connection, Paul is sucked back into the crowd. He mouths something, Don’t go or Too slow and then he’s gone.
It’s probably two in the morning when someone finally tells me Nancy’s already gone. Outside, I hear the distant sound of sirens. The mosh pit is disintegrating. I see a kid go past me cupping a bloody nose in his hand; limpers limp by; when I look up, I find Paul. He is up against a wall, the vinyl shorts girl grinding him against the brick. I’m too stupid for words, standing there. The look on his face is bewildered, as if he’s found himself in this candy funhouse by complete and total accident. It doesn’t feel like an accident, vinyl shorts and Paul. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence. It feels like a caution.
When Paul looks up, he still has those pupils, the giant vacant blackness set into the gold rings of his irises. Like a total hoser, I say his name.
After a fuzzy instant or two, he registers me, smiles, like isn’t it insane that he’s getting dry humped by this spectacular specimen of a girl?
I can feel hot tears gathering, heat in my cheeks. Man-slut, I think. Stupid man-slut.
I do what I do: flee. I zigzag across the loft and into the hall, then vault myself down the stairs. As I reach the basement landing, I catch my heel on the final step and the contents of my purse go scattering. Here I am, sucking beyond belief at everything, a stupid baby. I slide to the ground. Then, I see the cloud spoon.
Grow up, I tell myself. It’s a command. Grow up. Then, it’s a wish, an incantation. Grow up. Grow up. Grow up. I peel off the wrapping, and lean against the clammy wall. I recall Paul’s lips, closing over the spoon, the circuit. I flick the tip of my tongue to taste. It is less a taste than a sensation, like accidentally swallowing laundry detergent. It burns, like the acidic medium that carries the charge. I push the spoon toward the back of my throat. My tongue parches and then waters and then there is only the faint after-flavor of burnt lemon zest and soap.
—pop—
—the candy-look, the shorts, it all recedes and disappears. Everything gets sucked backward. I am momentarily a pure, blank mind, an amnesiac or a baby and then I’m walking through the boiler room and past the dumpster. I am easy. I am the coolest fucking shit in the world. The night is awake with red flashers, and the first fat drops of the promised rain. Drunken party-goers stumble from the main entrance into a line of police. I pull my coat over my head, and somehow this gesture makes me invisible. I stroll, unconcerned, past the paddy wagon, past the beat cops and into the night. I am taller, older, more beautiful, and nothing worries me at all.
Obviously, I’ll never be the woman for the job, am not going to be the frank adult volunteering in the high school health class, but someone capable should find a way to talk about adolescent desire to girls. The focus is on predators, on protection, which I get, which is important. The thing is, here the thing is, also harm is done by not talking about the other, by not talking about the impulses that come from ourselves, from the things we invite. Teenaged boys, that’s easy. You say how irrational they are made by the throbbing in their pants. But what I needed was for someone to tell me about my own throbbing. I felt it and did not even know what it was, did not know how to call it desire. I remember, swear to G-d, thinking my tampon was in wrong. That was how desire got power over me, by being unacknowledged.
My mother is asleep on the fold-out in the living room. I am exhausted, soaked through from the miles-long walk along the T tracks home. I have the bedroom behind the kitchen. Because of the carpenter ants, I cannot remove my shoes, and my mother is in a phase where she is not taking her sleeping pills, and so when I get home, inevitably, she wakes. I hear the tin beat of a pot collecting rainwater in the bathroom. Drip dripdrip Drip dripdrip.
“Amelia? What time is it? Are you all right?”
“It’s OK, mom. Don’t worry.” I am poised between footsteps. I imagine dying ants beneath my soles, mildew water through the sagging plaster.
“Why aren’t you at Nancy’s?”
“We had a fight.”
My mother rises on her elbow. “What about?”
“Drugs,” I say. “Nancy tried drugs.”
My mom doesn’t reply for a few moments. I think she is trying to see me in the dark, but we are far from the windows and there is only the line of the hall light under the apartment door and the si
ngle eye of the smoke detector indicator on the ceiling. The moon is not in phase for us.
“You know, I think you’re old enough to drink coffee,” my mother tells me.
I nod, and crunch my footsteps over the insect carcasses until I reach the carpet of my room. I am lying in bed, clothes on, my thoughts swimming gently in cloud’s current when I hear my mother again.
“That girl,” says my mom. “I never thought she was loyal. I never thought you could trust her with your secrets.”
“Is that why you didn’t want to regress her?”
My mom makes an unconvincing noise, as if she’s fallen back to sleep. I burrow under the comforter, my own familiar smell of powder fresh and girlsweat mingling with the new sharp smell of lemon. Outside, the wind is picking up. Hurricane Gladys is centered somewhere in the ocean between Virginia Beach and Delaware. At its heart, it has winds of eighty miles per hour. The weather forecasters marvel at how slow moving it is, at how broad the bands of rain are that surround it. People have been filling their tubs with bathwater and panic-buying cans of tuna since yesterday, and still we only have this, this accumulation of rain, this waiting for the disaster to hit.
Five
Brookline
2010
It is late afternoon, cold rain sleeting down, the vista awash in gray, but the man before me is Technicolor, the driver of the SUV.
(things stir between my vertebrae, long-stilled sensations: fistanger sobloss teethrage musclerejection waterloneliness stomachguilt sugarshame tonguedesire scratchviolence and other nameless creatures that have lived in my knotted muscles these long years)
My vision sharpens, the details revealed like the distance closing in a tracking shot. His hand, a familiar curve to his lip, the new grays in his hair. The man resolves, becomes meatier. His muscles transform into unlikely patches of fat where no man should bulge (the finger pads, the palms). I recognize a peculiar gray beneath his skin which is a pallor particular to longtime substance users. I know him, not just from the smell of his cigarette, or the outline through the reflective window glass. I know him from way back. We’ve met before. But now I see he’s not here for some sweet reunion. I sense the coiled danger in him, but I can’t make myself run. It’s him. It’s him.
“Get in,” he says, nodding at his ride. He grips my arm, but I try to resist. It is like moving my actual body in a dream state.
“No?” he says. It’s so simple. This is so simple for him. G-d. Of course it is. He’s still getting high.
“My car.” I push the word from me. “I drive.”
He holds my forearm like a gun and we begin to weave through traffic. I feel the approach of cars like a collision already happened, flinch into myself. This is what it is to panic, the brain throbbing, lungs constricting. Then we are at my car. I halt without warning, use the momentum to pull him in. Now we are facing each other. The rain stops, suddenly. There is that instant clarity that can follow a New England rainstorm, the shivering brightness. Something shifts in his muscles—confusion, to mirror my own, a dawning and then a glimmer of something: recognition. He is close enough that I can smell the scent on him, the chemical burn of recent use. The smell is tinged with the familiar lemon, but there is something else in there, too. An exotic variety, I think. The drops of water on his skin are gold. He smiles at me, and now, we are in a different film entirely. The fear from a moment earlier does not leave me, but it slips into the background, like a parent’s advice you never intended to follow anyway. Openmouthed, I smile back at him.
“That’s what I’ve been waiting for,” I tell him.
“You sure?”
Am I sure? I know him, I know I know him. It is ludicrous, that I’ve been alone, that we’ve suffered apart, when I’ve been right here, just waiting, ever since he disappeared. Uncertainties remain, of course. Does he look like how I expect? Do I remember those exact eyes? Can I call up, precisely, with total confidence, his exact name? Continents recede; mountains swell up; every interval between every breath is another epoch passing. Yes, I am motherfucking sure.
“Too long,” I say. “Too g-ddamned long.”
I open the door, and he slides in a duffel bag I had not realized he was carrying, then climbs in beside me. I start the engine, the vibrations joining the hum already in my body. He, the man I have been waiting for, tunes in the college station from back in our pimple days. It’s the Talking Heads, playing their naïve melody, the drums beating just under Tina’s guitar. Home—is where I want to be.
I pull out and just start driving.
I forgive you totally, I want to say, but that’s not a fraction of it. I’ll never forgive you, and why are you here? and where the fuck have you been? But cloud makes it hard to hold onto resentment. Hey, you should say, Hey, you did some really bad stuff to me and you hurt me in terrible ways, but all the details have been sanded off the story, and it’s tricky to sustain intensity around an abstraction. Or this is just pushover girl stuff, just classic dumb bitch. I’m lonely, and he feels right and I’ll take whatever I can get.
I shift gears, pick up speed, then drop my hand onto his. He startles, physically, but I don’t take it personally. In the life, in cloud, intimacy is always a bit proximal.
“Is this how it’s supposed to be?” he asks. He’s shaky, an hour in on a double hit, or maybe the nerves come with the new variety, but I won’t let him off too easy.
“It’s like this until you fuck it up again,” I say. And then I’m just laughing with the pleasure of his company. G-d. Not being lonely. Just not having to hold myself in. It’s amazing. Now, he laughs, too, and my shoulders relax, and I begin to bounce to the music. Home—is where I want to be. Pick me up and turn me around.
We’re going to drive through the old streets with the windows down and the radio up playing all the old songs. The sun is out: maybe we’ll go to a drive-through. He’ll order for me, or I’ll order for him, and wipe the hot sauce off his lip and we’ll throw the wrappers over our shoulders, and pretend to bang our heads when the metal tunes come on, or he will let loose his beautiful voice, singing the girl parts in all the duets. Make it up as we go along.
The story of where he has been is one I’ll have to hear eventually. He’s gotten by somehow, made his own bad compromises, and I won’t like everything he has to say. For example, he has been following me for some days, and with some peculiar purpose in mind. Something pressing and desperate. I’ll have to hear about that thing he thought he was after. Too, I have my own urgent news about our time apart. Behind him is Juni’s car seat. In a moment, he’ll turn his head, and then I will tell him. Hey, I’ll say—we can have all this, just as before, but there’s just this one thing first. She’s a girl, a beautiful baby girl. What the experts say about them, about cloud babies, doesn’t tell her story. Her words may not have ordinary meaning, but Juni’s baby talk is song, has magic in it, sometimes even messages. I know I sound crazy, I’ll say to the man beside me, but I am her mother, the mother of someone so miraculous she could survive even me. Listen, I’ll say, listen to my confession, my outsize pride.
But he doesn’t turn his head, and so I don’t say any of it. Memories, in cloud, return sometimes slowly, in mosaic. Give it time. First the recognition, I think, and then the reckoning.
My phone buzzes on the seat beside me. He looks interested and not very interested at the same time.
“Go ahead,” I say, tapping in the code and handing it to him. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
He navigates through the windows. I hear a snippet of dialogue from the headless woman video. I reach over to grab for the phone, and he pulls it out of reach.
He scrolls through “Guess I’m not the only one coming back around.”
“That’s nothing,” I say. “Just work.”
“Nothing yet, lady honey. This is still preview season.” With his free hand, he unzips his duffel. I have a brief glimpse of what’s inside. There are dirty clothes and a frayed toothbrush, half-eaten sleeve
s of crackers and an archive of paper. He’s been living out of this bag. Now, he makes a note, and then zips the bag closed. He punches some buttons on my phone. “How they do, right? Get you suckered with the promo, feed you the reruns, so you’re hungry when the ratings kick in?”
“That’s West Coast time. Out East, we call this March. But it’s the same, stuff you thought was dead crawling back to the surface.”
“What you could maybe explain is, why the delay? Have we been waiting on something? Someone? Not that I’m in a rush. I’m in the exact opposite of a rush.”
Also, me. I’m taking my time. I turn onto Beacon Street, cruise slowly past significant parking lots and convenience stores and T stops. His face registers things, but I cannot read the meaning. I loop greater Brookline on a silent tour of everywhere I’ve ever been, George’s Folly, the Golden Temple, Dunkin Donuts. A stately side street that stretches to almost Route 9. We pass massive houses, old but not necessarily beautiful, set closer to the street than rich people elsewhere in America like to live. We slow as we come abreast of a blue three-story house. The oaks hang heavy over the street. There are children shouting from the nearby schoolyard. See it, I think, the rusting Escort in the driveway, the ancient cat sunning itself on the roof of the porch. Everything is as it was: Mr. and Mrs. Dussel still live here, refusing to retire from their medical labs. All of it’s the same, I say to him. Whatever purpose has brought you to me, whatever you think you’re doing, this is what matters. I wait for the one word which will connect these streets to the hole in my chest to the man at my side.
“Something’s missing,” he says. “That’s what we’re waiting on.”
“I’ve got time,” I say.
My passenger rests his cigarette hand on the window, gazing at the schoolyard kids. I inhale the familiar scent. It’s not an original Prince, is some Indonesian knockoff, but it smells just the same. He smells almost the same. Nancy’s fled, of course, absconded, expatriated—everyone has an opinion, but no one can say for sure. Still, in her attic room, the old artifacts remain, the blackened incense burner, the collar-cut t-shirts. Remember, I think at the man beside me. Remember her and remember me. Instead, he just flicks his cigarette onto the Dussels’ lawn, and motions for me to drive on. Fact: he always was a bit of an asshole. Always thought he was too cool. Obviously, I don’t hold it against him. Obviously.
The Likely World Page 7