Musical Chairs

by Amy Poeppel

  18

  One day, thought Oscar, life is going along according to plan, and the next everything turns to complete shit. Waking up in Connecticut one morning, it occurred to him how nuts it was that instead of having breakfast with Matt in his own condo near Dupont Circle, Oscar was getting ready to take a fucking road trip with his mom.

  When she said she was driving to New York for a night to check on her now-empty apartment, Oscar decided he would go along. He needed a change of scenery. He craved a break from the quiet, the fresh air, and the relentless green of Litchfield County, and there could be no greater change in scenery than that provided by Manhattan’s gray sidewalks, smoggy air, and crowded subway cars. Oscar wanted to see faces he didn’t recognize, people who didn’t know him.

  The night before they were leaving, he’d walked across the dark field to the guesthouse to hang out with Isabelle. Eliza was there keeping her company as well, and Oscar rubbed her chin as she slept soundly on an armchair, in spite of the fact that the Grateful Dead was blasting from a portable speaker. Isabelle was standing on a ladder with a paint roller, having already covered two of the walls with a pale gray.

  “Not bad,” he said, turning down the music enough that she could hear him.

  “Don’t look too closely.” She pointed to the ceiling, where she’d gotten dove-gray paint on the crown molding. Stepping off the ladder, she showed him her paint-spattered hands.

  He smiled at her and quoted the song she was playing: “ ‘Oh well, a touch of gray kinda suits you anyway.’ ” He never felt that urge to tease her about the stupid shit she did or said when they were alone. Those ribbings were more for the benefit of an audience.

  “I know you don’t want my advice,” she said, “but I think you should skip New York, fly down to DC instead, and talk it out with Matt in person. This hiding out all summer is pointless.”

  “It’s not that simple.” Oscar was so sick of his family getting in his business.

  “You think he cheated, and that’s—”

  “He did cheat.”

  “So you say, and that’s upsetting,” she said, “but you have to address it—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You’re being so stubborn,” she said.

  “Are you done?”

  “Fine.” She found a rag and wiped her hands. “Sorry I’m not going with you guys tomorrow. I’ve got a shift at the store, and I don’t want to ask for time off already.”

  Her new job was a bizarre fucking choice, but Oscar kept his mouth shut. He might be on a better career track, but his life was a way bigger mess than hers. He’d visited her at Latham’s: a retail store that sold locally sourced, handcrafted alpaca sweaters and throw blankets. It had a coffee counter in the back with seating and free Wi-Fi; Oscar was surprised to see how crowded the place was and how happy his sister looked, chatting up the shoppers.

  “Can you take care of Hadley and Bear?” he asked.

  “Sure, if you bring me back Kiehl’s,” she said, putting her paint-flecked hands together, begging.

  “I don’t even know where to find—”

  “You can get it all over New York, like at Bloomie’s. Please? My skin is shit these days. Look at this, do you think I’ve got some weird disease?” She rolled up her sleeve and showed him a bumpy rash on her arm.

  “Poison ivy. You probably got it from Kevin.”

  “Very funny,” she said.

  He hadn’t meant it as a joke. “Do you have a suitcase I can borrow?” he asked. “A small one?”

  She went in her room and came back with a carry-on bag. “You better rest up,” she said. “Alone with Mom in a car for two and a half hours? I hope you’re in the mood to share.”

  “And what if I’m not?”

  “Pretend you’re asleep.”

  * * *

  Oscar loved his mom, sure, but that didn’t mean he found it easy to spend endless amounts of time with her. She had habits he’d forgotten about in his years away. She talked to herself when she washed the dishes. She laughed way too easily at his jokes, and even louder and harder when they weren’t very funny. She literally didn’t know how anything worked in terms of technology. Like anything. She’d peered over his shoulder at his laptop screen in the middle of an important Skype call, and when he shooed her away, she laughed and ruffled his hair, saying, “Silly, it’s not like they can see me.”

  She used a roundabout and yet totally transparent method of handing out criticism. “Now that’s strong coffee,” she would say whenever he was the one who made a pot. “Easy does it,” when she thought he was drinking too much. “Are you getting sick?” when he slept in past ten.

  But everything was relative, and compared to Matt’s mother, his mom was a saint. Matt’s mom was a terrible person in disguise as a put-upon victim. At the wedding she whispered bitchy comments to Matt about everything from Bridget’s dress (“Black at a wedding? That’s not very festive.”) to the food (“My steak isn’t cooked, look. Is yours raw, too?”) to the tone of Oscar’s grandfather’s toast (“Bit of a blowhard, isn’t he?”). Oscar held his tongue because it wasn’t Matt’s fault his mother was boorish and insulting. But it was weird that Matt never seemed bothered by it.

  In comparison, Bridget was a rock star. It was true she asked too many questions, leaving him to wonder why the hell she gave a shit about the mundane details of his day. But at least it showed she cared. “What’d you eat for lunch?” she would ask. Why the fuck do you wanna know? he was tempted to respond. He wouldn’t; he wasn’t a teenager anymore, and he wasn’t going to be an asshole for no reason.

  Spending two hours in the passenger seat of the station wagon, the same blue Volvo he and Isabelle had ridden around in as kids, would be super uncomfortable in a flashback-to-middle-school kind of way. Don’t get snippy, he told himself, no matter how many questions she asks, no matter how slowly she drives.

  Strangely enough, as he and Bridget got in the car on the last Monday morning of July (ridiculously early, as she’d insisted on “pushing off” at six thirty) and buckled their seat belts, she was unusually quiet. They were heading down the driveway when she leaned forward over the steering wheel and sighed loudly, as though they were at the end of the trip, not the very beginning.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. But it’s too bad Isabelle couldn’t come.”

  Given that the three of them had spent more time together this summer than they had since high school, her desire for more family togetherness seemed greedy. “She has more important things to do, tending to the customers at Latham’s, the much-needed, one-stop-shopping paradise for alpaca ponchos and caramel macchiatos.”

  “Hey,” she said, ignoring his bitchy remark, “do you feel like driving?” She stopped the car and put it in park. “I mean, would you mind?”

  Oscar was surprised by the request, feeling a shift of some kind between them. “Sure, no problem.”

  They unbuckled their seat belts and got out, each walking the half circle, Oscar around the back of the car and Bridget around the front, to switch seats.

  Oscar knocked his knee getting back in and slid the seat back. His mom wasn’t four feet tall, so why she drove with her seat practically under the dashboard was a mystery.

  “Did you have breakfast?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d you eat?”

  Oscar adjusted the rearview mirror. “Fine, I lied, I didn’t have breakfast.”

  “You’re going to get hungry,” she said in a singsong warning.

  “I never eat in the morning.”

  He prepared himself for a lecture, but she didn’t say anything more. She settled in and looked out the window. She was right, of course; he’d been driving only ten minutes when his stomach started grumbling.

  His mom did not backseat drive. She did not turn on the CD player and sing Broadway show tunes, nor did she pry about his marital problems.

  “At least you�
�ve got me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Isabelle isn’t here, but at least you got my stellar company.”

  She reached over and patted his shoulder. “What are you going to do today?”

  “See some friends,” he said, meaning buy some pot, “have lunch with a colleague,” meaning go on a job interview, and “eat sushi,” meaning exactly that; Litchfield County was not known for its kamikaze rolls. The job interview was the main reason he’d come along, of course, but if he told his mom about it, she’d spend the rest of the drive questioning him. He wasn’t up for an inquisition. “What about you?”

  “Same,” she said. “Errands, a meeting. Want to have dinner together tonight?”

  He didn’t. He’d had dinner with her about a thousand times this summer. But as he imagined her sitting home alone or eating at a restaurant by herself, he had a change of heart. “I’d love to.”

  Bridget turned on a classical CD. He didn’t know what they were listening to, but it was familiar enough that he knew he should know. By the time he got onto the Saw Mill (at her suggestion, though the Hutch would have been faster), they had settled into a comfortable silence, leaving him to think about what the fuck he was going to do with his life.

  Over the past few weeks, Oscar, sweating under the ceiling fan in the heat and humidity of his childhood bedroom, staring out his windows at the trees, had come to accept that he was, in fact, an overconfident, act-before-you-think, impulsive dick. But he also knew that his flaws were not what blew up his marriage. He would have to work on himself, sure, but Matt’s actions were far more damaging than his own. And Oscar had sadly concluded that repairing the marriage would be impossible since Matt was irrationally angry and disgusted with him and yet wouldn’t even admit that he was chiefly responsible for their relationship’s demise. Oscar didn’t think this was up for debate, given that Matt was the cheater and liar, lying being the more egregious of the two sins, in Oscar’s opinion, although both really fucking hurt.

  Was it ironic, he wondered, or just plain pathetic that in one month—on the brink of divorce—Oscar was going to have to attend his grandfather’s wedding in the exact same spot where he and Matt had said their vows a year before? It was insensitive of his family, to say the least, and a hell of a lot to ask of him. No one seemed to have even considered how the upcoming event might make him feel.

  As far as grooms went, Matt looked better in a tux than anyone Oscar had ever met, his grandfather included. Oscar would have to get hammered at the wedding to avoid thinking about Matt, the vows they’d made that day, and the fights that followed. How they went from being in love to being at odds, from talking about getting a surrogate and starting a family together to not talking to each other at all.

  It had not been fun seeing his husband become somebody else’s right-hand man so soon after the wedding, to have his place by Matt’s side occupied not merely by some successful, good-looking guy, but by the man who was recently named DC’s most eligible bachelor. Jackson was vice-chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, an outspoken environmentalist, a leading voice for social justice, and his name was frequently mentioned when pundits discussed future presidential contenders. And he was smart, charming, and handsome on top of all that. Oscar fucking hated him. Even his name: Jackson Oakley. What kind of a prick was born with a perfect name like that? (And meanwhile, he was stuck with Oscar, like Oscar the Grouch or Oscar the Wiener, as the elementary school kids cleverly called him.) For months Matt brushed off Oscar’s worry, repeatedly denying that there was anything going on between him and his hot politician boss, in spite of all the late nights in the Rayburn office building, the overnight trips, and that way they had of looking at each other, like they were reading each other’s fucking minds or something. The coded text messages—Let’s meet at the place for the thing—and the less-coded ones—In a word: wow. What would I do without you?—started to drive Oscar mad. He had never thought of himself as a jealous person, but Jackson was impossible competition, what with his being absolutely perfect on paper and in real life. As the evidence piled up, Oscar began to think that Matt was gaslighting the shit out of him, and he hated it, hated being made to feel stupid. “It’s all in your head,” Matt would say. “You’re acting crazy again.”

  Matt was supposedly working late one Friday night when Oscar got a notification from their bank that a charge for a $340 boutique hotel room had been approved. Oscar felt like he’d been punched in the gut, and to alleviate the pain, he drank one martini after another until Matt finally came home at four o’clock in the morning, acting as if nothing had happened.

  When Oscar confronted him, showing him the notification on his screen, Matt came up with some bullshit story that the room was for Jackson’s sister, who had come into town unexpectedly. Jackson would be reimbursing him, of course. “Let’s not fight in the middle of the night, okay?” he said and kissed the top of Oscar’s head, smiling like it was no big deal, before heading off to take a shower and go to bed. Oscar—thanks to what his mom referred to as his underdeveloped frontal lobe—Googled the congressman’s office number, and left a drunk message, saying some bullshit he could barely remember. Back the fuck off, home-wrecker, maybe. Or Get your own husband, you fuckin’ assclown. Something really childish. A threat or two, maybe. I know where you live.

  An intern called the Capitol Police, and Matt almost lost his job.

  Oscar was sorry for the message, but there was an emptiness to his apologies because he knew—knew—the sister story was crap, some lie they’d cooked up together while rolling around in the sheets at the George. As he told Matt, he was willing to discuss the affair, willing even to reconsider how they defined their marriage, set up parameters based on an honest conversation, just Dan Savage the hell out of their relationship. But how could they try to do that if Matt was still being a lying dirtbag?

  “Red light,” Bridget said.

  Oscar pressed hard on the brakes. He’d forgotten about the Saw Mill’s traffic lights that popped up out of nowhere.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No biggie, piggy-wiggy.”

  God. Kill me. Whenever Bridget said stuff like that, Matt just beamed, saying how adorable she was. She was, sometimes. Anyway, it felt good to have been jolted out of his shame-and-anger spiral. “What’s your plan today?” he said. Had he asked her that already? Had he even heard her answer?

  “See what shape the apartment’s in,” she said. “And I have a meeting with a manager who might have some advice for me. Maybe take a walk in the park.”

  “Advice on what?”

  “Will and I lost our violinist again.”

  Oscar knew what a drag this was for them. “Forever filling the empty chair,” he said. “You guys must be so sick of it.”

  “We are,” she said. “We might be done.”

  “Done?” he asked. “Done how?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, as though she were actually trying to solve the problem right there in the car. “We might launch into something new. On our own. We haven’t decided.”

  “Like a duo?”

  “No, I mean on our own, like separately.”

  She said it brightly, with an excitement that both confused and relieved him. Her nonchalance about the fate of the trio, given that it had been around a lot longer than Oscar had, was unexpected. It was hard to imagine Bridget without Will as her partner, although it didn’t really matter, he supposed, since Will’s membership in the family was irrevocable. It was true what Matt said: Will was way better than any real father he could have had because there was none of the fucked-up competition or unreasonable expectations or hideous disappointment, all of which Matt had suffered in his relationship with his dad.

  “What would you do instead?” he asked her.

  “Strap my cello on my back and take a leap into… something.”

  A cello, Oscar thought, is no fucking parachute. Whether she’d meant this idea to sound terrifying or thrilling, h
e couldn’t say. “What about Will?”

  “Same.”

  “Strap his piano on his back?”

  Cue: over-the-top laughter. “He might be getting a little old for his gig-to-gig, freelance lifestyle,” she finally said.

  “His new girlfriend’s cool.”

  “Very,” said Bridget. “Did you see her tattoo?”

  Oscar pictured the white flowers and delicate green vine on Emma’s upper arm and decided he might make another stop today: a tattoo parlor in the East Village. Maybe he could do something bold to show Matt how sad he was, how much he loved him. He spent the rest of the drive wondering what image would best express his feelings.

  * * *

  Manhattan, what a difference from the country. The traffic was gridlocked coming into the city, and they sat bumper to bumper on the Henry Hudson. They finally made it to the lot on Amsterdam and walked to their building on West 93rd Street. After saying hello to the doorman in the lobby, they took the quaint, rickety elevator up to the sixth floor and put their bags down in the hallway, while Bridget fumbled with her keys, dropping them once on the floor. Oscar picked them up for her and she tried again, this time turning the lock and pushing the door open.

  The smell brought Oscar instantly back in time: coming home from soccer practice at Riverside Park in November, dropping his puffer coat on the floor, and going into the black-and-white-tiled kitchen, where either his mom or Marge would be getting dinner ready: spaghetti and meatballs, garlic bread, ice cream. Good memories and bad came flooding back, as they always did when he came home. Childhood was a bitch, under the best of circumstances.

  “Are you kidding me?” Bridget was saying. “They didn’t even have the decency to turn off the lights.”

  He walked back to his bedroom, which hadn’t changed much since he’d left for college. His AP US History book was still on the shelf, a cheesy junior prom picture (with his friend Jessica Bollinger, who tried to make out with him that night until he finally outed himself to keep from hurting her feelings) was still tacked on the bulletin board, and a pair of old Adidas cleats were still in the closet. His electric guitar was in its stand, untouched ever since he grew out of his Green Day phase.