“Why? Why? Because why the hell not? Because Bowen got me a gig there, can you believe it?”
“Bowen? Your so-called agent? How much ravioli does he get?”
“Ha. Actually, I mean, you’re right. It’s going to pay only about fifteen hundred for the week, so the most he’ll get is his usual meal. But I’ve told you before he’s fine with that!”
“Uh huh.”
“Plus I’ll have to pay our airfare, but our room will be free, and so will any meals we eat at the hotel, so all we need is a rental car and snorkeling equipment and stuff like that, and if we want to eat somewhere else, we can probably get a Groupon or something…”
My voice trailed off. Alisa wasn’t saying anything.
“What’s the matter? We both need a vacation. I’ve never been to Hawaii. Have you?”
She said, firmly, “No.”
“So what’s the holdup? Don’t you want to go to Hawaii?”
“I guess. Yeah.” A pause. “Not really, no.”
“Hmm. Now, this is interesting. I mean, who doesn’t want to go to Hawaii?”
“Me. Your girlfriend.” She said it almost bitterly. I could see her jaw beginning to jut. I was glad I wasn’t in the same room with her.
“So I’m not paying attention to your needs, is that it? Should I call Bowen back and tell him to find me a gig in Venice, Italy, instead? Would that suit your needs better?”
“I don’t care. I don’t care about your ‘gigs.’ ”
“Oh, so is this about my music, then? Goddamn it, Alisa, you claimed that’s what made you like me in the first place, but every chance I get to do something with it, you’re not there for me.”
“Do something with it? Are you kidding me? How is working as a marketing communications consultant ‘doing something for it?’ You don’t do anything as far as I can tell, except tune your guitar and write a few songs…”
“You left out ‘shitty.’ Don’t you mean, a few shitty songs?”
“Don’t you fucking put words in my mouth. I think your music is beautiful. But this whole business of your music ‘career’ is just so fucking half-assed. You have this comfortable little thing where you go to the club and flirt with MariAngela…”
“Oh, so is that what this is about? A woman who’s dying of a terrible disease? And you’re using her to get at me by claiming I flirt with her? Real nice.”
“Oh, don’t give me that. First of all, she has a neurological disorder; she isn’t dying. And how do you think she’d feel to hear you say she is just to score a point in an argument with me? Huh?”
I felt ashamed, and couldn’t respond.
And yet it was indisputably the case that MariAngela was dying.
“Anyway,” Alisa said, “I’ve seen you flirt with her a thousand times. And then you have a dream about her.”
“Yeah, a dream that she’s sick. Do you think it was somehow, in some twisted and demented way in your brain, somehow sexual?”
“No, I’m sure you keep those dreams to yourself.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Yeah, Charlie, fuck me. You want to go to Hawaii for a gig at a little hotel cocktail lounge where they probably have a two-for-one mai tai special on the weekends and little pineapple spears in the drinks, and it’ll cost more for the drinks than you’ll earn from the gig.”
“The drinks are free!” I shouted this into my cell phone, and of course it goes without saying that the agency’s owner, whose name was Gilbert Bick, was walking by right at that moment. He gave me a sharp look, and when it came to sharp looks, he was a master. Gilbert was a stocky and ponderous fellow who was mostly bald and had skin on his forehead that was so tight and shiny that you could practically see a diminished version of yourself in it when he was lecturing you about something or other. Gilbert and his death’s head had lectured himself right out of two beautiful wives and his three daughters, all of whom hated his guts, along with many clients, and several business partners. So I braced myself for one of my encounters with him, but he kept on walking and then I braced myself a second time for whatever Alisa had to say next, but when I brought my cell back to my ear, she was laughing.
“Free drinks! Woo hoo! We get free drinks!” The amazing thing was, she wasn’t being mocking about this. I think the absurdity of my claiming that this was somehow an adequate form of compensation for having to pay for the airfare out of my own pocket somehow struck her as childishly funny.
“Okay, Alisa. I get it. Never mind. It’s the idea that I’m trying to justify this trip as some kind of business trip that’s getting to you, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if I had just said, ‘Drop everything, we’re going to Hawaii on vacation because we fucking deserve a vacation,’ you’d be packing even while we speak.”
There was a long silence at her end.
“Wait a minute. No? No? That wasn’t it either? You mean to say that you don’t want to go to Hawaii, period? Is it about my father? I can’t help him any more from Chicago than I can from Hawaii, even if I wanted to.”
“It’s not about your father. I just don’t want to go.”
“Well, why on earth not? Who doesn’t want to go to Hawaii?”
“Charlie, everybody’s different. I mean, couldn’t we just go somewhere else like Lake Tahoe or something?”
“Sure, instead of going someplace really hot where everybody drinks frou frou drinks, we could just go someplace really hot where everybody drinks frou frou drinks. I get it.”
“I’m really sorry, Charles, but you don’t get it.”
“You’re right, I don’t. I’ll swing by later, and maybe you can try again to explain whatever the hell you mean.” But I said this softly, because I knew that whatever she did mean, it wasn’t just some sort of whim.
I didn’t figure it out until the next morning. More accurately, I didn’t figure it out at all; she just told me. We’d had a pretty good night together at her condo, no light-switch guessing or anything, and the next morning, she was using her fingertip to play with the condensation on the outside of her orange juice glass when she suddenly said, just like that, “I’m afraid of the water.”
“What water? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know how to swim. I never learned.”
I was so relieved that that was all it was that I laughed. We’d been dating for two years, and only now, for the first time, did it occur to me that we’d never gone on an island vacation or gone to a swimming pool or the beach. It was hardly the kind of thing I would have noticed—we’d taken vacations to New York, to Maine in the autumn, to Sedona Red Rocks, and to Santa Fe and Taos, and when we weren’t on vacation, we were too busy going to concerts and plays and movies and jogging and working out and having sex and going to our jobs. “So that’s it? That’s the big explanation of why you don’t want to go to Hawaii? Because you won’t be able to go snorkeling?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment.
Then something occurred to me. “What the hell, if you hate the water, why would you’ve suggested Lake Tahoe? Isn’t Lake Tahoe on a, you know, a lake?
”Yeah, but we could drive there, or, I mean, just take a taxi from the Lake Tahoe airport or something.”
“Huh? Meaning what?”
“Meaning I’m really afraid of the water.”
“Meaning what, again?”
“That I can’t be in an airplane that’s flying over water. I mean, it’s bad enough flying from the mainland to Hawaii. But then you have to take those little planes from island to island, right? Cause there’s no other way to get around, is there? You’d literally have to kill me first before I’d do that. Next year, one of my clients has a big show in London and I’m terrified they’re gonna want me to staff it. I mean it, Charlie. Kill me.”
She shook her head. “Forget it. You can psychoanalyze me all you want, but you’re still not going to get me to go. I think it’s because when I was in the first grade, a friend pushed me in the deep end and I was flailing and the bubbles and everything, and the sound of the water roaring in my ears, and I couldn’t grab onto anything. It was the most terrifying moment of my life. So okay, I got permanently warped, alright? And then when I became this big volleyball ‘star,’ everybody just assumed an athlete is an athlete, and then if they found out I couldn’t swim, they’d make a big deal out of it like I was somehow weird, which I guess I am. So I just stopped talking about it after a while. And obviously I don’t have any problem with flying per se, just flying over water, and all of our matches were in our conference, so that wasn’t ever an issue. But talking about it or not talking about it, or figuring out my motivations or whatever just isn’t going to change anything. I’m just not gonna go.”
“Look, if it makes you feel any better, I have an irrational fear, too.”
“Success?”
Why did she always have to ruin things by saying shit like that? “No, not success. I was gonna tell you, but never mind.” The more I thought about it, the more upset I was starting to get, so I said, “Just forget about it, okay? Don’t worry about Hawaii. I’ll go there by myself, do the gig, come home, and maybe we can take a vacation together in the fall. I mean, who wants to go to Hawaii in the summer anyway?”
So that should’ve been that, but after work, I kept on brooding about the conversation—the “success” crack, the fact that she was right about my lack of accomplishment, my shaky job situation and shitty music career, her fear of water and how it was that after two years of dating I hadn’t even discovered this, the pointlessness of the gig in Hawaii, everything. So almost without wanting to, I ended up driving over to her condo. I apologized first, but at least she apologized too, and we ordered in Thai. She had green curry with shrimp, and I had some Thai version of sweet and sour with little wedges of pineapple that made me think of Hawaii, so I smiled, and then I remembered our argument, so then I lost my smile.
I was a mess.
That night, I dreamed for the first time of the light switch. I couldn’t tell when I recalled my dream the next morning if it was the same as the real one, but the laundry room itself looked different, just as Diane would have said. It was narrower and much darker, and there seemed to be a skylight that was letting in a soft, diffuse light from somewhere up above, and despite this light there seemed to be a violent, roiling thunderstorm high in the sky. In my memory of the dream, all I saw at first was the light switch above the long, aluminum laundry table, in the up position. After a second, I saw Alisa’s bikinied white butt hovering over the table, like she was lying on her back but supporting herself on her elbows, but I couldn’t see her face. It was like a video that was the wrong aspect ratio, and the sides of the scene were cut off. Then I saw the torso of a man, and the torso was pressing down on Alisa’s belly like he was trying to enter her even though she still had the bikini bottom on and he had swimming trunks on, and when he pressed against her, her butt inadvertently flipped the switch to the down position.
The dream came back to me a few minutes after I woke up, while I was standing in Alisa’s bathroom, peeing. She was still asleep. The more I thought about the dream, the more excited I got. She hadn’t told me last night whether or not she was still doing our little experiment, but regardless, if I went down to the condo basement and the switch was in the down position, that might really mean something. So I threw on some pants, raced down the two flights of stairs to the basement, and located the switch, just above the long, aluminum laundry-folding table.
It was in the up position.
Laughing at my credulousness—I mean, even if the switch had been down, what exactly would it have proven?—I came back upstairs. Alisa was still asleep. I pulled the light sheet off of her and admired, as I did whenever I had the chance, her long, sleek torso. Two years of dating, and I still hadn’t tired of seeing her body in the morning. She was on her side, wearing only her panties, which allowed me to admire her flat belly and pink-nippled breasts and incredibly long and strong legs all at the same time. My cock was throbbing, so I pulled off my pants and started rubbing it against her panties to wake her up so we could have sex, and then I realized that the butt I’d seen in the dream was exactly the same as Alisa’s. And why shouldn’t it have been? After all, it was Alisa I was dreaming about. But according to Diane, and according to my own experience as well, it should have looked, somehow, different. Again, I had no idea what this was supposed to mean, if anything, but I stopped poking at Alisa like a fifteen-year-old, and I closed my eyes for a second to see if I could remember if the male torso had been mine.
9
I stopped by Berto’s after work the next day because it was a night that MariAngela usually worked, and I wanted to see how she was doing. I guess I also wanted to brag a little bit about my gig in Hawaii, but only because I knew that, even in the wake of her devastating diagnosis, she’d be happy for me.
She and I ended up ordering a plate of gnocchi with bacon and an endive, blue cheese, and walnut salad to share, but MariAngela hadn’t eaten anything all day, so I just sat there and sipped my vodka gimlet and watched her vacuum up everything and wash it down with a glass of apple-beet juice with a splash of vodka. It made me feel good to see her eat so heartily; it made me think that maybe she wasn’t really that sick.
She wasn’t too bad at all, in fact. “It’s kind of an illusion,” she said, waving her fork around like a magic wand. “The early stages are just like this muscle weakness here and there, like I told you about in my calves and my hands. But you start to get used to it after a while, and it really isn’t that hard. It’s like that feeling when you’re carrying some really heavy grocery bags and then you put them down on the table and your forearm is trembling and it’s kind of scary, but you’re not really scared because you know the trembling will go away in a couple of minutes? It’s exactly like that.”
“Except that in your case, eventually the trembling won’t go away in a couple of minutes.”
“Except that in my case, eventually the trembling won’t go away in a couple of minutes. You nailed it. But I’m still at the stage where it’s easy for me to pretend that it will. So I go to Berto’s or wherever, I forget about it, I hardly notice it, but it’s like I’m lying on my back at the bottom of a kayak that’s floating down a beautiful lazy river, except that it’s only a half mile from a waterfall. And I ain’t got no paddles, baby.”
“MariAngela, I mean, I don’t know how to ask this, but what are you going to do when you can’t work?”
“Ha! That’s the kind of question you ask someone who’s got cancer. She’s got chemo coming up, she can’t go to work during the chemo, but she needs a job waiting for her for when she recovers, which these days thank God she probably will. But in my case, when I can’t work anymore, I can’t do anything anymore, and then I just, you know, die. Okay? So. Hawaii. Why don’t you tell me about that instead?”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, it’s the most I’ve ever been paid for a gig, and also at the same time it’s the most money I’ll ever lose from a gig, when you factor in the airfare and everything. I mean, you pretty much just factor in a new Speedo, and I’m screwed. And Alisa doesn’t even want to go.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“Why do you say that?”
”Well, her being scared of the water and all.”
“Wait, what?” This one really caught me unawares. Alisa had met MariAngela on a half-dozen occasions, mostly when Alisa had come to the club to see me play and MariAngela had served her dinner, and maybe we’d had drin
ks once or twice afterward. But that was the extent of their direct connection. “How did you know that Alisa was afraid of the water?”
MariAngela shrugged. “I don’t know. You must’ve told me.”
“Uh-uh. I just found out myself, when she finally admitted why she didn’t want to go.”
“Then I don’t know, I guess it was just sort of in the air, like comet knowledge.”
“Common knowledge.”
She laughed. “What’d I just say?”
“Comet knowledge.”
“Ha! They say one of the first symptoms is slurred speech, but I thought I pronounced that very well, didn’t I?”
“Well, but wrong.”
We both laughed at that and clinked glasses. “Or wrong but well, maybe. Let’s hope it stays that way for a long, long time.”
After our dessert came, I rather hesitantly advanced the topic of my dream experiments with Alisa. I was a bit torn. On the one hand, the experiments were absurd on the face of them and hadn’t worked at all so far. Plus, I didn’t really want to remind MariAngela of my dream about her. I couldn’t articulate why, exactly, but somehow it seemed to me that she must have felt somehow violated by me, however inadvertently. Even though she had been the one inside my head, and not the other way around, the fact remained that I had somehow become privy to thoughts she believed to be private.
On the other hand, MariAngela was my friend, and I wanted to use the pretext of the dream experiments to slide into a discussion about Alisa, and whether or not I was right to feel let down by her on the whole Hawaii thing, and how it was that her own boyfriend wouldn’t have known a secret about her that seemed to be “comet” knowledge otherwise.
And I suppose I also wanted her to know that I actually had seen the light switch last night; even though it’d been in the wrong position, I was still a little excited by the dream and wanted to share it with someone.
But when I told MariAngela the whole story, she smiled indulgently and said, “I don’t know that you and Alisa really needed to go to all that trouble of doing experiments. I’ve been thinking about your dream too, and, really, the simple explanation is that there was nothing psychic about it at all. Why did I go to my doctor to begin with? Because I was just feeling so fatigued and weird lately and feeling weak and shaky in my hands and calves. So how implausible is it that the last few times we were talking at the club, you subconsciously picked something up? I mean, I don’t remember complaining to you that I was tired or anything, but maybe you picked up my body language, slumped shoulders, maybe my eyes looked a little dull, maybe you saw my hands trembling, who knows? That’s really all there is to it, I think.”
Everything Solid has a Shadow Page 6