Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  “I’m sorry” was the first thing out of his mouth.

  “For what? Not getting on the bus? Calling? Whatever happened here?” She pointed to the yellow teepeed Wet Floors sign, standing at the head of the table like a scarlet letter. But before he could answer, she waved her hand. “Forget it, I don’t care.” She was all out of judgment—all out of blame, for him, for herself, for anybody. All that mattered to her was that she’d gotten there while he was still sober, which she could tell by now by looking at him: He had the skittish, eager-to-please appearance of someone very carefully doing the right thing, doubting how long he’d be able to pull it off.

  “I’ll pay you back the eighty bucks sometime,” he promised.

  “I didn’t drag my ass back up to Brattleboro for eighty dollars.” Besides, she might have told him, if she had money problems, it was by choice. It was one of so many, many choices in her life. Instead, she asked, “What about Johanna?”

  He chewed on his pinkie nail for a minute, then told her, in a plain, flat voice, “She killed herself a couple years ago.” Marissa felt herself recoil, like he’d slapped her, but she realized she wasn’t surprised. “They switched around her meds, or she stopped taking them or something. But she snuck out of her parents’ house and she jumped off a bridge into the Huron River. It was wintertime. She left a note, they didn’t find her body for a while. Then they did.”

  Marissa found herself mired in the same speechlessness she always did, that everyone did, in these moments. “I’m really sorry” was the best she could do.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. It’s hard because I guess she’d been doing better. Even if better meant living in her parents’ basement and watching QVC all day. But I don’t think Johanna ever believed she could have a normal life, y’know? Going to work every day, paying rent. She didn’t think she was cut out for that. See, Johanna was a . . .” He stared down toward the red lacquered table, as if making an effort to see through it—through the table, through the floor, down through the bones of the Earth, to some final, hard, specific truth about her. They both knew he wasn’t going to find it.

  “I watched a YouTube video of you guys playing,” she told him.

  He smiled, a rare, complete smile. “Oh yeah? What song? Where?” She shook her head, not knowing. “Maybe it was when we played Coachella. I know people still watch that video.”

  It was maybe the first time he’d appeared genuinely happy all day. “You don’t miss playing?”

  “No, not really,” he answered, the smile flatlining. “I mean, I can look back and say that Johanna and I played some good shows, that I wrote some cool songs . . . But all that failure? I don’t miss that at all. I don’t even mean my career, just the sitting down at the keyboard and knowing ninety-nine times out of a hundred you’re going to get it wrong. I’d say I’m pretty relieved that music and trying to reach people with music and all that is somebody else’s problem now. And I’m free to just . . .” He trailed off; his angular features settled in an embittered look. “It wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t sustainable. Playing started putting me in a really bad headspace. I kinda think being good at piano was maybe the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  Marissa was glad she reached him sober; and she didn’t deny that something like friendship, at some unremarked point, had spread between them. But she’d forgotten how fed up she’d been with him, even before she’d dropped him at the bus station. It was like he could thread any needle with a sense of victimization, even being born with a gift. “That’s such a bullshit thing to say,” she said.

  “That doesn’t mean it’s not true!” That was exactly what it meant, but she didn’t feel like arguing. And maybe he sensed she was out of patience with him, because he asked, “Why did you come get me, then? If it wasn’t for the eighty.”

  It was a good question, and she could have given him a lot of answers: because she’d learned for the umpteenth time today that it was hopeless with her mother, but maybe it wasn’t hopeless with him; because she would have done anything to take her mind off the decisions she had to make in her own life; because they were both a couple of strays, in the end, and she’d felt some loyalty on account of that. But what she told him was the truth: “I didn’t think about it. I just did it.”

  He grinned. “You know what your secret is, Marissa? You’re nice. You think you’re this callous hard-ass. And maybe you are, kinda. But actually, you’re like a really, really nice person.”

  She lifted her hands so her fingers hid her eyes. She wanted to cry again, or she didn’t want to cry; she couldn’t tell anymore. When she lowered her hands, she asked, “If I’m so nice, then why’d I cheat?”

  He made a face like she’d just asked him the square root of an eight-digit number. “Shit, Marissa,” he said with sympathy. His hand started to reach across the table for hers, but then he thought better of it, and smiled instead. “I said you were nice. I didn’t say you were boring!”

  She looked over his shoulder at the bottles lined on shelves behind the bar. In different company, she would have ordered one of those sickly sweet cocktails with the paper umbrellas—ordered one, ordered five. She was so tempted she thought she just might do it. But she’d known since she was about eight years old she would need to spend her whole life being careful about alcohol. She pictured her mother, crumpled over in the recliner. She imagined Special K, struggling to tuck a blanket under her thighs. She looked at Adam, chin in his hand, drumming away at his cheekbone with his fingers.

  “Why don’t you go home?” she asked him. “Don’t you know how lucky you are, that you can just go home?”

  He jerked back, like she’d insulted him. “Like it’s so easy.”

  “It is easy,” she insisted. “Just . . . walk in the door.”

  “Yeah, that’s a long walk though,” he told her. “That’s a long walk . . .”

  “Fine, Adam,” she said, giving up. “Have it your way.”

  His eyes shifted down to the table again, up to the door of the restaurant, back down to the table. “What do you want me to say?” he asked her. “Look,” he went on, “you remember what you said in your voicemail about . . . Y’know, the ‘people who love me.’ And yeah, that’s great and all, but—my family never gave up on me. Even when they didn’t want me around, I knew they hadn’t given up. And Christ, I hated them for that. I hated you, too, for a couple seconds, when I knew you were coming.” He leaned forward, elbows underneath his chest, eyes still lowered. “You can’t imagine how awful it is, when you’ve given up on yourself, to know someone else hasn’t. I did a little AA for a while. I even went to church, if you can believe it, but none of that higher power stuff helped me at all. ‘Jesus loves you,’ they said. Fucking hope not! Kristen loves me. Jack loves me. That’s bad enough.”

  He looked so lost inside himself. She didn’t know what else to say besides, “You can’t make it on your own, though. Nobody does.” He shook his head, muttering something underneath his breath. “What?”

  “I said,” he enunciated loudly, “that that was a fucked up thing to say.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Adam, if that offends you, but believe it or not, I was trying to be nice. Remember me? Nice? Have you ever noticed what you do to anyone who tries to be nice to you?” She was swinging her hand in the air at him; he was making a show of ignoring her, so she dropped it to the table. That was a mistake—it was her left hand, already crowned with a black-and-blue welt from the steps. “Fuck!” she groaned.

  “You okay?” he asked her.

  “I’m great, Adam, I’m fucking fantastic . . .” She rubbed the hand against her pants leg. “Look,” she said. “I can take you home, or I can take you to the airport, or I can drop you at a meeting. But I can’t sit here with you forever. I’ve got to . . .” She needed to get back to the Sheraton soon if she was going to work this flight; or she was also maybe fifteen minutes from the Russells’ Vermont house, and if she told Robbie she never wanted to see his father again, t
hat might be something, possibly the only thing, he’d agree to. So she had to decide—only she couldn’t. But hadn’t she already made up her mind? What decision was there? She was going to refuse to quit her job, refuse to be the wife of a lawyer, refuse to live like a millionaire for the rest of her life—why? For what? She didn’t feel like looking at Adam anymore, so instead she turned and looked around the restaurant: at the fish tank by the door, the hostess glaring at her and Adam, the elderly couple eating slowly, the synthesizer and the iPod playing “Good King Wenceslas.”

  “Can I tell you something,” she said, turning back to Adam. He nodded. “I want to have this baby. I want to have this baby so fucking bad. And I know it was the stupidest thing I ever did in my entire godforsaken life, but, fuck, Adam, I did it. And when I did it, I felt . . .” Are you happy now? she asked herself. You told your sob story, you had your moment, and the whole world is bawling for you. Now go home to your husband. Have your abortion, you think you’re the first? There are a lot worse things a marriage can be than an arrangement. Only lucky people get to worry about love, and freedom. The Cavanos aren’t lucky. Somewhere in there, the voice in her head had started talking like Mona.

  “I mean, you could,” he said.

  “Could what?”

  “Have the baby,” he answered casually. He grimaced. “Fuck, are you listening to this ‘O Tannenbaum’? The treble is so loud you can’t—”

  “Hey, Adam?”

  “What?”

  “Fuck you!” she shouted, letting it all loose. “You mean, stupid, drunk fuck-up! And don’t you dare make your palms-up-me-so-sorry gesture, you whiny prick.” His hands were halfway in the air; he placed them flat on the table. “It’s a miracle if you can get your dick out to piss without screwing something up, but me, oh, sure, I can just go have a baby! Will you stop telling me to fucking do that? Do you have any idea how terrifying that is for me to think about? What if I can’t feed her, Adam?” She realized at some point, she’d started imagining the baby as a girl—there were things you couldn’t help. “What do I say to her if she’s hungry on Thanksgiving? What do I say to her if we get evicted, and all she can take with her is what she can fit in two shopping bags? What do I say to her about her father, if she never gets to—You’re an idiot, Adam. You’re a goddamn idiot.” Spit had been bursting from her mouth for a while now as she yelled. But his look was surprisingly measured: brows pulled low over his eyes, mouth clenched shut, like a man standing in a rainstorm. It occurred to her that of the times he’d been screamed at, even that day, this was relatively mild. She slumped back into the booth, stared down at the undulations in the grain of the table.

  “Sorry,” she heard him say.

  “How about we make a deal you never have to apologize to me again, and we call it even?”

  “Deal,” he answered.

  “I’m so scared, Adam,” she confessed, her voice quiet, trembling now. “God, I’ve never been so scared. I didn’t care about leaving Boston. I didn’t care about college. I cared, but only because . . . I didn’t want to be like my mother. That’s all I ever wanted in life. That was the only thing I ever set out to do. I know it’ll never be good again with me and Robbie, whatever was there got used up, maybe a long time ago. But I can’t turn into some mean drunk bitch, dragging my kid around outside the grocery store while I try to sell my food stamps for cash.” Tears she didn’t even feel, wouldn’t have guessed she was capable of, splashed onto the table.

  “Hey,” she heard him say, his voice gentle. “I’ve known my share of mean drunk bitches. That’s not you, okay? You’d be a great mom!”

  She understood what he meant earlier, about the torment of people believing in you more than you believed in yourself. “If I hadn’t left you a voicemail, you’d be blacked out on the floor of this shitty Chinese restaurant right now, because you’re too frightened of the last people on Earth who love you,” she told him, her voice lean and sharp, even as she saw more tears splash onto the lacquer. “I don’t need your advice about what makes a great parent.”

  At length, he said, “Don’t give up, Marissa.”

  She looked at him. She hadn’t noticed before how small he was—his thinness not lean but rather slight, like he was dwindling away in his own skin. “Haven’t you?”

  He could’ve said nothing, and let that nothinged silence be the end of their time together—their friendship, if you wanted to call it that. He knew they’d never speak again after today. Speaking would be a reminder they wouldn’t want: of a Thanksgiving when they’d had only each other to turn to. In a year, she’d be back at the Russells’ house in Vermont; he pictured her standing by the windows in the conservatory, dressed in a cardigan and this same necklace. She wouldn’t want pity, nor deserve it, really. (But then, who did?) He had no idea where he would be in a year, which was itself a clue that wherever he’d landed by then, he wouldn’t be sober. The odds weren’t great for any recovering alcoholic—and like she said, without family, without support, without people . . . Today, he’d ordered drinks, he’d sat down to drink them, come within an inch, a breath, an iPhone ding he could’ve just as easily never heard. Dumb luck. Next time, the luck would be different. All in all, though, the price of letting their day together end with nothing said was not so very high: an alcoholic relapses, a woman resigns herself to an unhappy marriage. If you didn’t know the alcoholic, if you didn’t know the woman, you’d never know it happened. You might pass Adam in an airport, you might glimpse Marissa’s face in a car window, you would never be able to tell. If it was tragedy, it was tragedy so ordinary it would sink in the world without a ripple.

  But even so.

  It wouldn’t be wrong to say Marissa had saved his life that day, maybe more than once. And he owed her better than to let their friendship (what other word was there?) dwindle to nothing, when there was still so much he wished he could say to her, so much he wanted her to know. He’d probably fail but he owed her his best attempt.

  His fingers still ached from the cold, he hadn’t warmed up or played a goddamn note in years, the synth was a piece of shit, and there wasn’t even an amp. But you’ve either given up or you haven’t. You either play, or you don’t.

  So Adam took off his coat and he took off his sweatshirt and he walked to the synthesizer with what he hoped looked like dignity, or bravery, or something; he unplugged the iPod, he said a prayer to the face tattooed on his arm—“Just get me through the first chord, man”—and when he played that first chord he felt the sound rising up to his neck to swallow him, but he followed the sound out until he could lead it. It wasn’t agony; it wasn’t joy; it was keys and purpose, Adam staying within the boundaries of what arthritic, years-out-of-practice fingers on a hundred-dollar restaurant keyboard could do—but trying, eyes closed and with all his might; trying, so she could see that he was trying: darting notes, and then waves and ladders, taking apart every song they’d heard that day and trying to strike keys for every face they’d seen—playing like a poor man’s Thelonious Monk, making allies of skips and broken phrases and dissonances, weaving his accidents into grace, because all he wanted to say was that he thought she was brave, and that she had been the hero of his day, and she would be the hero of her child’s life, too, if that was what she wanted. He tried to play courageously, and to put courage into the music; he tried to play without succumbing to loss or grief or fear. He tried to play with freedom. Until he was panting, and out of breath, and handsore, and fucked out.

  When he lifted his fingers and opened his eyes, the elderly couple had left; the hostess was shaking her head in a scolding way, as if he’d found a whole new way to disappoint her; a busboy in a dirty smock had appeared, leaned against one of the booths, his mouth bent in too many directions at once for Adam to interpret. But Marissa had her hands clasped together in front of her mouth, like she was watching him walk across ice. He heard her pull in a breath, maybe relief, maybe wonder. And then she applauded—two hands clapping in the whole place. />
  [ 2 ]

  The Warshaws’ (Take 2)

  The driveway was steep, short, led straight up to the garage. Marissa pulled in behind two parked cars; several others were parked along the street at the bottom of the hill. “It looks like they’re having people over,” Adam said grimly.

  It was dark out by now; in the glow of the Sonata’s headlights, big, slow snowflakes fell, and to Marissa the view through the windshield was like looking into a snow globe: the windows of the two-story, slate-roofed house gold-yellow beneath the eaves, the porch light lit above the steps of the stoop, a wreath on the door around a brass knocker. “You grew up here?” she asked.

  “I know, right?” Adam answered. “Like if you Google Imaged ‘suburbia,’ this is what you’d see.”

  He’d misunderstood the wonder in her voice, but before she could explain, a little boy in a blue snowsuit appeared in the porch light, running around from the back of the house. He was five, maybe six, and as Marissa watched he bounded up the steps, wheeled around, stopped, and stared at the car. “Oh, there’s . . . my nephew,” said Adam. “We had a little chat this morning.”

  “What did you have a chat about with a six-year-old?”

  He didn’t answer. After staring at them another moment, the boy turned and ran into the house, slamming the door behind him. “Great,” Adam said under his breath.

  She looked at her watch. She wouldn’t have time to go up to the dayroom, would need to change back into her uniform in the car, and meet the shuttle in front of the hotel. It would be tight—but she’d made it under tighter circumstances. Even so. “Okay, Adam,” she told him. “I’m out of time. Just take a deep breath or whatever and remember—”

  The door opened. A heavyset, middle-aged man in a brown parka, jeans, and a Red Sox hat came out, looked at the car, and started walking toward them. He had an uneven gait, slouching shoulders, a scowling face.