The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  I crawl in beside Paul. Even with his new muscles, his skin is still smooth like a kid’s. I shift him closer, and fold my softer limbs around his lean ones.

  “Hey, Mellie,” he says. He is groggy, but he swims through the fog of his hangover toward me. “Everything’s OK now. We’re all OK.”

  “I’m scared.”

  He struggles to wake for me, eyelids fluttering against the gum of sleep. “Mellie.” He turns and puts his arms around my shoulders. My skin is cold, his warm.

  “You know I’m in love with you, too, right?” he says. “Everything’s OK.”

  And it is. It is the sop that absorbs the spill, that cleans the mess. And for him, too. I may not be the girl he would pick out of a yearbook, but I can feel him taking me through his skin, my love. It seeps into all of his empty places, all the parts made sick by the strange selfishness of the adults who were meant to protect him, my love finds the bruises and learns to reside there. He lets me. This is him sober and real; I close my eyes and he kisses my face until my skin is the same temperature as his mouth.

  We slip off that day, go to Red Hook. A walk from the F under the BQE and beyond the vast and hopeless projects, you reach the water. Most of the warehouses along the docks are empty, but in one or two of the brick buildings, someone is welding. There’s an Italian sandwich shop which has been there since the ’60s and we get ourselves cold cuts with scoops of hot peppers. Later, we find our way back through Carroll Gardens, past Fulton and then toward the bridge. There is so much broken glass. It is as if the windows of all of the skyscrapers in Manhattan have fallen over Brooklyn, but in the sunlight it sparkles.

  Halfway across, we stop and look at the water.

  “Really?” I say. “Really? What do you love about me?”

  “That’s not a good question,” he says. “What do you love about me?”

  “I love your legs. I love the way your knees look when you bend them, how sharp and pointy they are.”

  He laughs. “I’ve never had a girlfriend that made me—” he pauses. “I didn’t know you could be with someone and that would make your life better. I didn’t know another person could do that.”

  We are halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge, and young enough to still believe that love can be its own reason, that its visitation can answer all challenges. Someday, people will fix locks here, to seal moments like these, make them tangible and marked. By then, Paul and I will have learned that being seized by love is not evidence, is something that can happen independent of right or wrong for each other. Those realizations are years from us now, like the craze for locks which will be snipped as soon as they are fixed.

  Now, Paul smacks the back pocket of my jeans. There are people behind us, an art school girl, a couple of shirtless teenagers in trunks. I don’t mind what they see of us. I smack him back, a little sting, and we start to move. Hello, New York. Hello Pearl Paint and Hello City Hall. Hello Little Italy and Lafayette and Court House. New York, here he is. The one I told you about. Now you know, New York. New York, I think he’s meant for you, but somehow I’m the one who got him.

  “There are these really spicy dumplings,” he says. “And after, we should have gelato.”

  I have been living uptown for three years, and my mental map of the rest of Manhattan is about six streets wide. He’s been here for a week, and already he can navigate, already he has graphed the city by its quadrants of best and cheapest food and now he leads me through them.

  At four, we find ourselves in the thirties. It is still bright and hot, July a few days off.

  “We should check in with Nancy,” says Paul. “See if she’s going to make it to the show.”

  I stop, unable to look at him. “Have you told her?” I ask.

  “Have you?”

  Maybe Nancy already knows, I tell Paul. Maybe we don’t have to tell her at all.

  It is time to head downtown. Tonight, it’s the cast party at the theater, and tomorrow, assuming Ansel and Albert have stopped arguing, assuming Westie has cast a lead, we begin to shoot on 125th. I can’t have Paul to myself. It is not going to be a cuddle-on-the-couch and container-garden-on-the-balcony kind of love affair, but until I release him, I will do what I can to fix a lock around him, to throw away the day’s key. Before he goes, I want to extract everything inside of him, to have all his secrets. I remember what Nancy said, about collecting stories, how that’s not the way to know someone, but she’s wrong.

  “What happened on your train, Paul? What happened in Siberia?”

  “It’s—I really don’t remember. There was the game. We played for some hours; you couldn’t tell how many. Time had become like that. It was my turn. Nadine and Ned were the only ones still awake, and Nadine asked could they have my bunk to sleep, and then Davos and I were alone. Sure, I told him. Sure, I’ll still play and then it’s all, all gummy. I lost the game. I’ve got the feeling of it. God, it’s like right here, below my stomach. It was bad, I know. But, I have no sense of what happened. At some point, maybe, I started pulling things off the bunks, maybe people in sleeping bags. I threw something, maybe a shoe, at the window. I can see the glass shivering. The corridor. Holding myself up against the partitions. There are soldiers on the train, cars without seats, cars with just green duffels. It’s cold. Your knuckles are cold, your feet. I want to keep going forever, but it’s a train, right. It ends. It’s the edge of the tundra. I find myself in a cargo car. I push through the last doorway, and something knocks into me from behind and I’m falling. There’s this landscape of purple and golden flowers, and the train is disappearing, and I’m in pain.”

  “Someone pushed you?”

  Paul shakes his head. “The train’s moving like only fifteen or twenty miles per hour, and we’re only it turns out like ten minutes outside of a station. But there was this interval when I thought I was being left behind. And now, I guess, it feels like some part of me is still out there, big nuclear fuckhole in the middle of the permafrost. In some life I forgot, I feel I’m still leaping from the train, still waiting to land.”

  “But they came back for me, or I caught up; so I wasn’t eaten by an arctic wolf or a black bear; even still, there remained fifteen hours between there and Moscow, fifteen hours with a fractured arm and chunks of ice and nothing but Tylenol to relieve the pain. The crazy old guy who pushed the refreshments cart ended up sitting with me, telling me tall tales about the first cloud factory hidden in the shadows of the Chernobyl power plant. I ate a shitload of drugs because it sucked.”

  “What about the part? The change in the cast?”

  “I don’t know. I reach for it—but I can’t recall it. Davos was trying to get a certain performance out of me, and I wasn’t getting there. I couldn’t let go. So, some kinds of directors will fuck with you a little bit. It’s manipulative, and not maybe the best way to go about things, but if someone’s really stuck, really just not opening up, then it can be worth it. I think it’s worth it. Maybe I jumped. Maybe someone pushed me.”

  Paul has cast his face up to the afternoon sun, to the skyscrapers which loom so high above us, you have to flatten yourself to see their tops. Beneath his almost-brown skin, he is flushed with heat. He is anything but ice. He looks young, but a new kind of young from his high school self. He wears his body-knowledge like an easy garment on his shoulders. His hips lead him. I want to push inside.

  I think of the actors from the audition on 125th street, the ones Ansel and Albert had rejected. I overlay them on Paul, imagine him among them. There’s a thing about my boyfriend, a thing I think would work. In fact, now that I’ve thought of it, I have no choice. I need to give him something that big, something as big as his future. At the entrance to the theater, Paul hands me my ticket along with the remaining three spoons from his backpack. “I don’t want to be tempted,” he says. “I’m no good on it. It takes the razor out of the apple. You know?”

  There is a throbbing in my chest, a beating at my rib cage.

  He tucks the spoon
s into my handbag, and I walk him as far as the dressing room. I tell him to break a leg, but I’ve already become invisible, he’s already been absorbed by the nervous static of the green room.

  Twelve

  New York City

  1993

  From the moment the lights come up, I know something has changed. Maybe seventeen people make up the audience on this, the second official night of the performance. The people seated in the third-floor black box are unused to downtown theater; the women wear dresses, the men ties. They know Guys and Dolls and The Pajama Game. They are carrying bouquets of flowers and fanning themselves with the programs. It’s their kid backstage, or their college roommate’s kid. I think of my own mother, whom I have spoken to for the first time in weeks earlier in the day.

  “I have to move a few things out of your room,” she said. “So give me notice, all right?”

  “Oh, mom. The internship runs through the summer.”

  “And what are you doing for money? Are you getting enough hours at the bakery? I can send you something, but the lawyers are still working out your grandmother’s affairs. These things can take months.”

  “Sure, mom. That’d be great,” I tell her. But she doesn’t ask for my new contact information and I don’t volunteer it.

  “I’ve been learning about these flashpoints, you know, in the evolution of mankind, of humankind. Atlantis, obviously, the reign of Akhenaten, the Mosaic age, and each life, you know, has a timeline too—”

  “Mom. I’ve got to go. The show is starting in a couple of minutes.”

  “Make sure I see you for a weekend. Amelia. Make sure you stay healthy—”

  “I love you, Mom. I’ll be in touch.”

  In the black box cabaret space upstairs at St. Mark’s Theater, there is no air conditioning, no windows. A couple of rotating fans thrum in the doorway. Theater, Paul has told me, shuts down over the summer. People will see a Shakespeare in the Park or take a weekend at Williamstown, but no one wants to be inside in the dark when it’s warm out. It’s too much like a power outage.

  Where is Nancy? As I watch the scant house collect, hear the painful small talk, I feel the crawl at the back of my throat that is my hunger for cloud.

  “What’s this, why does he play two parts?”

  I slide my ticket between the pages of my paperback and begin to rehearse things I might say to them to the cast afterward. The audience felt intimate, I might say, though possibly that is too obviously backhanded. People seemed really engaged. The dialogue was terrific. The pacing was very unusual. Nancy could make this bearable. I think of a poetry reading we attended in Western Mass, how Nancy kept squeezing my hand to keep me from laughing out loud. I could use her here, but she must be drinking tequila in her mother’s kitchen, or saving Andi from her bad boyfriend, or back on the farm because the late arrivals are being seated and the door is already closing. I think: I will not be able to sit through it. I will not be able to watch the whole thing. I will rush out at some point, unable to contain myself. I think of Paul’s cloud in my bag.

  So, but the lights come up, the music and Nadine is onstage. She is corseted and heavily made up, and she works in the part of the fortunate man’s beautiful daughter. She stands to the left of a Scandinavian thatched cottage. The villagers in their bright knits leave little gifts at her feet. She’s lonely, all alone, she sings.

  “I am friend to the trees and I speak to the fox, but none oh none reply. I track the stag and I chase the hare, but neither will be caught.”

  Things transpire in the darkened patches of the stage. The missing set piece has been found, an arch which shimmers without light, and beyond it, the trolls lurch and wrestle and grunt. The lights dim, and the villagers take up the masks of woodland creatures and buckets of flake which they scatter and broom across the stage. And what is happening beyond the gate? What are the trolls doing? The fans lift the snowfall, and the stage whitens and everything is obscured except for Nadine. Beneath her hands, somehow, an ice form begins to materialize, a lump of gray solidifies into a human form. “If he could be real, I would give away all of my gifts.”

  I feel the audience squinting at the ice form. Can it be? Is there a person underneath her hands? That’s when I realize: the show is working. Paul has appeared out of soap flakes onstage and when he moves, the audience gasps. Christ. It feels less like theater and more like magic, like black magic. Or something earthier and more crude: troll magic. We’re rapt.

  Another measure: the entire production, I’m riveted by a nasty bruise on Nadine’s leg. Through her fishnets, I can see the large, blue mark on her upper thigh. It’s in the exact spot as Linda Lovelace’s wound in Deep Throat, the bruise Lovelace tries to cover in the scene by the swimming pool.

  I saw Deep Throat with Paul and Nancy my senior year of high school. Paul worked at the Coolidge Corner Cinema, and so got us in during a festival of 1970s film, which showed Klute and Cries and Whispers and Lovelace. How I felt about watching porn is like I had to be pretty careful about what I did with my eyes and lips. It is hard to look regular while you are watching porn, like it is hard to look regularly at Nadine’s bruise.

  Through the fishnets, her bruise is not without its filthy aspect. It doesn’t distract, but it colors my experience of the action, is a troubling subtext to my understanding of the narrative. Between scenes, when the hush falls, I wonder did someone do that to her? Did she have her own moment of falling off the train or did she receive it trying to fight someone else who was compelled to leap off the train into the permafrost? Did she inflict it on herself after Davos told her her rump was too big, that she was too thick-thighed?

  The applause at the end is astonished. Everyone is sweat-sheened and ecstatic; no one in the audience is confused about whether we have just seen something great. It was great, is all I can say after. I am shining from it. It was great.

  Nadine wears a micro-mini to the cast party after, and that’s when I understand about Davos, that he’s actually brilliant. Because Nadine does not have that bruise. Nadine’s bruise was made in the Green Room.

  The cast party packs out Blue and Gold Bar. There are easily eighty people there, spilling onto the street, running back and forth from the deli with packs of cigarettes. Davos regales the guests with stories of the Russian tour, which are somehow hilarious, claims they’d been being used to move contraband. Obviously, the bargoers haven’t all seen the show. Obviously, they’re not all there to celebrate the same thing. Someone’s got a cake. They’re singing in Russian and English. In the Russian song, a wizard comes on a blue helicopter and gives you one hundred ice creams. It’s Davos’s birthday, incidentally. The wizard song is a birthday song.

  His being an actual genius doesn’t make me like him more; to me, talented people who take advantage of others are like people who use any kind of power to mess with their inferiors. Before I disappointed her, Professor Mackin told me she thought a good measure of a human was how he treated his secretary. Mackin also wrote a book about sadomasochism in the American Congress, so it’s not totally obvious what she meant by that, but to me, the director is not better than the assistant manager at Yankee Muffin, who is no better than Ansel and Albert. A boss who takes care, truly takes care of his people, is a rarity.

  I ask the bartender to set me up a couple of shots, and watch the director fawning over Ned, the blond former lead, like the kid was Davos’s own personal invention.

  “This one,” he says. “Brilliant. I wouldn’t be surprised if they extended the show. But I’ll have to work hard to hang onto this boy. Someone has already tried to snap him up, haven’t they?”

  “I got an audition. It’s no big thing.”

  Davos beams. “They always do this to me. I pick them out, and train them up, and then they leave me.”

  Paul is at the edge of the circle, drinking hard and watching. He is particularly gorgeous tonight, but next to Ned he looks like the character part, the junkie, the street walker, the secret lover of th
e famous politician.

  “The thing about the play is that there just aren’t enough good roles. I wish I’d chosen something meatier, something like a Lear where all the parts are compelling.”

  Paul knocks back his whiskey and mutters something. The director turns.

  “We have to be fair, don’t we? We want to spread the love around.” He laughs, claps a hand on Paul’s shoulder, and moves off to introduce Ned to the owner of the St. Mark’s theater.

  Thirteen

  Roslindale/ Quincy

  2010

  Outside, the neighbor woman is still shrieking, though her voice is trailing off from panic into something more like a moan. On the street beyond the mouth of the garage, seasonal flags flap with leftover Easter bunnies, piles of wet winter weeds await tomorrow’s rake. Emily’s purse lies in the driveway, my own on the garage floor. American cars gleam. There’s a weeping pain at the base of my neck, a smoldering cigarette butt in the gutter. The man who was once my man is gone; he has done the violence he intended all along.

  Upstairs, in my office, the screen is still dark, unresponsive.

  Think, Mellie. Urgency grips me, and I seize what I can. I’m like a person arming myself, the paperback, the card reader, my dead phone, the two purses dropped in the driveway. I hesitate, and then I collect the dropped cloud paper. Some of it glistens.

  My sober brain: a crime has occurred. I should get someone with credentials to help—my therapist, an expert, the cops.