The train rides so close to the water’s edge, it’s like I could just tumble into it. I get off at Dalkey. Walk through a little town with a Dalkey News and the ubiquitous Paddy Power. I stick to the twists and turns of the road as it follows along the ocean. There’s a tiny island offshore with a roofless stone building that I’m sure is from the seventh century or some such. Through the clouds and the rain, it looks like the most lonely, desolate place on earth. I walk and walk and walk until I am pouring sweat and find myself suddenly too exhausted to go any further. I take the DART back to Dublin and sleep all the way, as if I were passed out rather than just sleeping.
My sinuses hurt. I really feel like I’m getting sick, though whenever I think that, a little voice pops into my head and says, Shut up. You’re such a weakling.
I think, please, not these voices. I survived the tangerine room. Isn’t that enough?
Went back to Dice Bar with the Irishwoman from the art gallery. The bartender was wearing a T-shirt that said, “Do I look like a People Person?”
We got very drunk. I told her for the first time about Kieran. She said, “Oh, those boys from Galway. Everybody knows. You have to be very careful.”
I said, “Why did I come to this country anyway? I was supposed to be working on a story, but I feel like it ended up being all about sex.”
The art gallery woman said, “Well, that would be very Irish of you—to ignore your work in favor of cavorting.”
“Trust me,” I said. “If you ever get the chance to have sex with Kieran O’Shea, you should.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Then I kept drinking pints until she practically had to carry me home. Before this whole separation business, I didn’t even like drinking.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
American Airlines
Who will I call when I get home? Who cares about my geographical location? Nobody. Nobody cares, says a voice in my head. I feel like I’m coming down with some kind of epic cold. You’re such a weakling, says a voice in my head. Kieran and I were going to have lunch before my flight, but when my phone rang this morning, I knew. There’d been a flood in the building where he was shooting, and he had to take care of it. I barely even responded to his “sweethearts” and “I’m sorry, girl, I’m sorry.” I just thought, of course there was a flood where you’re shooting. “Good-bye, Kieran,” I said. “Good luck with the movie.” And I called a cab. Again, I felt a sense of relief. I want Sakura. Sakura loves me even if no one else does.
The pilot says we’re almost in Manhattan. I can’t believe how much I have to do when I get home. I haven’t heard from the guy at the New Yorker this whole time. My finances are in even worse tatters than when I left. My house is filled with the furniture of a life that is over. What am I going to do? You’re not going to do anything, says a voice in my head. You’re going to die. I squeeze my eyes shut to the voice and think, no, no, no.
There’s Manhattan coming into view in all its glittery, golden glory. It’s like a fairy dream emerging out of the blackness of the sky. I’m home, whatever that means.
BOOK SIX
THE GARDEN
Sunday, January 20, 2008
New York
Has there ever been anything more depressing than arriving in JFK after a long time away? That looping video of happy multicultural Americans welcoming you to the US as you spend an hour inching forward to get your passport stamped. Waiting half an hour in a cavernous room with fluorescent lights for your luggage. Airplane smell coating your skin and clothes.
Then you realize JFK was nothing compared to what’s outside. You wait half an hour for a cab; it’s dark and bitterly cold; there are plastic bags hanging off the bare tree limbs and a wind that burns your skin. Then you get into a taxi and it’s foul-smelling and that fucking TV screen is singing you songs about what a great place New York City is. You find yourself on the BQE stuck in traffic because it’s rush hour even though it’s the middle of the night. The driver curses and swings over to Atlantic Avenue, and you stutter, bumper to bumper, horns blaring, past shuttered-up row houses and fried chicken chains and auto shops. Blackened heaps of what once was snow at every corner. And you think the world is an ugly place and you will never feel good again as long as you live.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Been home seven days. I haven’t been writing much. Working desperately. So many things due. So many bills. My chest hurts. My throat hurts. I keep breaking out in sweats, not only at night but during the day. I cannot, however, be sick. The minute I walked into my apartment from the airport, I knew I had two choices: (a) burn the place down, or (b) pack up Josh’s things. I cannot live another day in this horrible apartment surrounded by the remnants of a past life. I choose the latter, narrowly. I have to do this.
Kieran emailed three days after I got back. He says he’d been waiting to hear from me and is confused. He’s afraid I’m mad at him. He says when I left he took a long look in the mirror and he didn’t like what he saw. He says he’s filled with regret for not making more time for me. He says it hit him the first day I was gone that he’s a wreck and he has to change. He writes, “Please tell me if you still want me to come to New York and I will sort immediately. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.”
No. The minute I write back, you will only disappear.
No.
I have things to do.
Am I over you? No. Not even close. You are like a bruise that has left me black-and-blue. But am I done with you? Yes. I have to be.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
For the last two weeks, I’ve been inventorying everything in the house. Josh says he’s too busy to come get his stuff, so I’m packing it up for him and sending it to LA.
Faith says, “I’d put it out for the trash collectors.”
Summer says the same thing: “If he can’t come get it himself, dump it on the street.”
But for all my spite and venom, I would never do that.
Seth drives me to U-Haul to buy boxes and tape and rolls of Bubble Wrap.
I try to act very calm. I don’t want to push Seth away by being overly emotional. I’m still sort of amazed not only that he came to help me but also that I got up the nerve to ask.
He says, “How you feeling, Heath? It sounds like you have a cold or something?”
“There is sandpaper in my lungs, and it’s hard to breathe.”
Seth says, “Heather. Go to the fucking doctor.”
It’s true that since I’ve come home I’ve been having the strangest sensations—like when I’m walking, I feel like I’m not moving but that the street is rolling by as if it were the backdrop in an old-fashioned movie. This morning, I was going up Ninth Street and I felt like it was getting longer and longer with every step. It’s as if everything is shape-shifting around me. But when I think to myself that I’m sick and maybe I should rest, there’s a voice saying, Shut up. You’re not sick.
I turn my eyes away from my brother’s.
“I’m fine,” I say.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Katy and I go into the basement. Dust hangs in the air as if it’s another planet with another atmosphere. We have to break down half a dozen empty boxes with X-Acto knives just so we can get to Josh’s stuff. It’s like we’re hacking our way through some monstrous jungle. We stop even talking. We’re covered in sweat. Soon we’re covered in dust that settles on the sweat. We trek up and down the stairs. At some point, we just start dumping all the trash bags labeled “Stuff” I put here last year into boxes labeled “Stuff” and not even making decisions anymore. My breathing has become so labored that Katy suggests we stop. But I can’t. I need this to be over.
On the way back upstairs, I notice hives popping out on my skin—enormous white welts the size of small countries. First they’re on my arms and legs, then in my ears, then around my eyes and inside my lips. Katy runs to the store and gets me Benadryl and Epsom salts to bathe in.
When
I burst into hysterical sobbing, Katy says, “It’ll pass, H. This whole thing will be over, and one day we’ll laugh about it. I promise.”
I don’t believe a word of it but I’m too polite to say so. Instead I just continue to cry hysterically. At least I cleaned out the basement? I think tentatively.
When Katy leaves, I take the Benadryl, lie down on the floor exactly where I am, and go to sleep.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The sloping bookshelves—now perilously drooping on the end where Josh never put brackets—freeze me every time I go near.
“I can’t do it,” I say, or gasp, because since being in the basement, I seem to have lost my voice.
When I try to talk, it feels like there are giant sores in my throat restricting any sounds from coming out.
Peter is kneeling in Josh’s office area, wrapping cords around his elbow and the V shape between his thumb and the rest of his fingers. He’s laying each coil in a box, much more carefully than I would have.
“You can,” he says.
I go the first three steps up the ladder. This is the furthest I’ve gotten in my attempts to deal with the bookshelves. I’ve gotten the ladder out many times. But this is the first time the sight of all our books together hasn’t sent me slinking away.
I keep climbing. Even on the highest rung I can barely reach the top shelf. I don’t know what else to do so I start at the far left, as if I were reading a book. I’m trying to be systematic about this. But then, as I pull Josh’s books out, as holes begin to widen in the shelves, as books that were standing straight fall over onto their sides, I have a growing sense of horror. I realize that somehow over the years I’d come to think of everything in the house as representing me. That Josh was just some awful void, a leech sucking my blood. But as I’m searching for his books, I realize how unfair this is, that proof of its falseness is in my hands.
I think, all these pieces that I thought were part of me are actually part of Josh—and, at some point, of us together. It gives me the sense suddenly that I’m fracturing into a million disparate slivers. I’m not the person I thought I was. I thought I was so multifaceted, so interesting. But it was Josh and me together who were. I didn’t buy those physics books, those philosophy books. I can feel myself becoming more one-dimensional. People will no longer come into my living room and think, wow, how interesting she is, how marvelous. It hadn’t occurred to me before that perhaps alone, I’m not.
Then, I don’t know what changes, but suddenly I’m so angry, I feel as if I could rip the books out with my teeth. Peter goes off to get a slice of pizza and I start throwing the books on the floor. I pull out handfuls of philosophy books and then start reaching for the science books with both hands and dashing them onto the floor with enormous crashes. When I get to Josh’s fiction, I lose it entirely. I yank out the Burrows and I yell, “You third-rate piece of shit!” Bam! I grab the Dostoyevsky and the Faulkner and yell, “Only pretentious asshole men read you!” Bam! At Bukowski I nearly have an epileptic seizure. “Bukowski?” I cry. “Bukowski? Are you fucking kidding me?” Bam!
Peter comes back. He walks around the corner into the living room, one of his earbuds in, the other hanging down his chest. “Um, what are you doing?” he says.
I’ve got a novel by Carlos Fuentes held up over my head. I pause for about five seconds before going ahead and throwing it with all my might onto the floor. Bam! Peter jumps back a little.
“Who the hell likes Carlos Fuentes?” I shout.
Peter takes the earbud out of his ear, pulls his iPod out of his rear pocket, turns it off, puts it back in his rear pocket, coils the ear plugs, puts them in his front pocket.
“Who’s Carlos Fuentes?” he says.
“He’s a hack!” I cry. “But his days on my bookshelf are over!”
“Maybe you should come down from there,” Peter says.
I stomp down the stairs. I can feel the ladder shaking, and I think, I don’t care, just let this thing fall and knock me off. Let it try.
I stand amid the pile of books I’ve created. I punt a copy of Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings across the floor, and then a fat volume of Wittgenstein I know for a fact Josh never read.
But when I look back up at the shelves, with their gaping holes and books collapsing on one another, I feel faint. Why is my breath so bitterly painful? Josh and I together were more than just the sum of either of our parts. In the best version of us, in the version we should have been but somehow weren’t able to be, we were a wonderful, tremendous whole. I thought it was all just me. But it’s not true. The bookshelf is more than half empty. I think, I will never in a million years have enough books of my own to fill those shelves.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Seth made me go to the doctor, even though the movers are coming tomorrow.
The doctor says, “You have to rest. You’re very sick. You have serious bronchitis. It’s on the way to becoming pneumonia.”
I’m stunned. I thought I was faking. Does this explain the shape-shifting?
“I can’t rest right now,” I croak through sandpaper lungs. “I have too much work and I’m in the middle of a move.”
I’m thinking of the two stories I have due. I’m thinking about my credit card bills. I’m thinking of my house torn apart as I pluck out the bits that are Josh’s.
“I can’t make you rest,” she says. “But if you don’t, you will end up in the hospital. There’s part of me that thinks I should put you in the hospital now.”
I don’t have health insurance, and I feel a wave of pure fear pass over me.
“I’ll rest,” I say. “I promise.”
Also, I weigh 104 pounds.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
By 11:30 a.m. the movers are gone and there is no furniture left in my living room. What was Josh’s office is now just empty space. Behind where his record shelves leaned are black lines of grime. There’s a similar black line behind where his desk was. They’re like etchings in a cave wall, a faint reminder of a whole other existence before you happened to stumble by.
I sleep all afternoon. I have permission to rest now because the doctor said she wanted to put me in the hospital. When I wake up, it’s dark. Why is it always so dark?
I cannot face going into my empty living room, so I sit in bed with my computer and open Facebook. The first thing I see is that a picture of Josh Reed has been tagged. It’s posted by someone I don’t know. When I click on it, there’s Josh standing by the Louvre. I think, huh? As I scroll down, more pictures pop up. There’s Josh in the Tuileries. I’m thinking this is maybe something akin to the shape-shifting? But no, there’s Josh buying a fish in an open market with a baguette under his arm. There he is under one of those art nouveau subway signs. And there he fucking is beside the Seine, a woman with blond hair and a shy smile on the other side of him.
I think, holy shit. I’m lying here on my deathbed, alone, after a week of packing up his stuff because he was too busy to come get it. And he’s off for a jaunt in the City of Lights with his new girlfriend.
And you know what? Thank God I’m Jewish, because all I can think to do is laugh.
I call Summer because she’s the only other person I know who will find this funny. I’m howling. I say, “Summer, can you even believe it? You cannot make this shit up!”
After she’s done being outraged, Summer howls along with me. Then she says, “Oh my God, Heath, it’s even better.”
“How can it be better?” I say.
“Heath,” she says. “It’s February fourteenth. It’s Valentine’s Day.”
And Summer and me, we laugh until we have tears running down our faces.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Still in bed. I’m not good at being sick. I’m crying a lot. I sleep during the day and am up all night. I haven’t even gone to the front of the house. I can’t bear to see it. I’m living off water from the bathroom sink.
Peter wants to m
ove in with me because Katy and Mac need their spare room back. This would be major help financially. Sure, I tell him. If you don’t mind that your roommate is having a nervous breakdown. Well, I don’t say that, but that’s what I think.
And oh Lord: voices, voices, voices.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
I get up my nerve and write Colm McCullough’s manager and tell him that I have pneumonia and can’t follow through on the story. I can’t bear to tell him the New Yorker has simply stopped returning my calls. Every time I think about it myself, I start to cry and then I can’t stop. Have I even mentioned that Colm got nominated for an Academy Award and that now probably every magazine in America is going to write a story on him—now, now that it’s too late for my story?
I’m lying in bed with my laptop. An email comes in telling me a book-editing gig I’d lined up has been canceled. There goes my income for the next two months.
Then a friend emails asking for an introduction to the main character in Josh and my book. The editor at the New Yorker who won’t return my calls has commissioned him to write a profile.
Then, because I wasn’t already crying enough, Josh emails that he was in Paris. Did he forget to tell me? He says he went to the Montparnasse Cemetery to see Simone de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s graves and he missed me so much he wanted to die. He wants to know if we’re still considering reconciliation. This makes me get up from bed and throw my pillows on the floor and stamp my feet and shout. I cannot stop crying.
“Why didn’t I tell Kieran to come visit?” I wail to Faith on the phone. “Why didn’t I say yes when finally he was ready?”
Reckless Years Page 24