Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  She hadn’t remembered the awesome bulk of it. Or the awesome disarray of it all, for that matter: No obvious starting point presented itself, no on-ramp into this miniature cityscape of stacked cardboard boxes and rectangular plastic bins and overstuffed square shopping sacks with various irregular bits (a pink bicycle handle here, a lampshade there) poking between the boxes. Everything had been pushed and piled toward the back of the ten-by-fifteen-foot unit, for which she’d been paying $59 per month for seven years, so that it sloped upward from where Sara, biting her bottom lip, and feeling like an irresolute mountaineer, presently stood. She considered bailing on the whole chore—that’s why they made disposable roasting pans, right? And the china, like everything from her first marriage, was tainted anyway. “Honey,” she said to herself, in the weirdly over-colloquial and vaguely black/Southern voice she often used when addressing herself in moments of indecision, as if equipping herself with her own personal Oprah, “you can bail on this.” But no, she decided. I can’t. It’s just stuff. Get over it, honey. Start digging.

  At forty-three, a widow and mother of a teenager (she wondered, now that she’d remarried, if she wasn’t a “former widow”—but that seemed oxymoronic, like being a former amputee), Sara still retained a bright tang of youth. Something of the cheerleader she’d been, back in Ohio, still clung to her: in the nutty, summer-camp tint of her skin; in the elfin gleam of her smile, the nervous flutter of her laugh; and in the wheaty, sunlit color of her hair, which was the same shade of blonde you saw, chemically replicated, on women idling away their afternoons at the Neiman Marcus at the Short Hills Mall. Hers was natural, however. This was her inheritance from the Anglos and Saxons (quite literally: her father’s people were English, her mother’s German) who’d seeded her family tree, and was a point of feminine pride. Like the organic produce accorded its own VIP aisle at the ShopRite, her hair was value-added for what it lacked: ammonia, peroxide, p-Phenylenediamine. Her daughter Alexis used to say it smelled like apples, “or maybe celery. Something you eat peanut butter with.”

  Her figure, short and supple, was not quite so natural—a point of mild discomfort. Throughout her life she’d never minded her small breasts—dainty little knolls, no bigger than ice cream scoops, that disappeared completely under the gentle compression of a sports bra. Or at least she’d thought she’d never minded them. Her husband, Dave, suggested otherwise: that a bit of surgical augmentation (“nothing ridiculous,” and his Valentine’s Day gift to her) would provide an incommensurate boost to her self-esteem. Eight months later, she still wasn’t used to them. They rode high and hard on her chest, pressing strangely against her clothing and threatening to spill out; and the way people stared, men and women both, she felt as if she was wearing a nametag (“Hi! My name is Candi”). She wasn’t sure if she’d ever get used to them—or ever come to like them, as Dave had promised. But Dave liked them. She supposed that was good, but a part of her didn’t like Dave liking them. It felt something like sexual roleplaying—not that she’d ever dabbled—but instead of having to wear some creepy nurse’s or policewoman’s outfit on the occasional weekend night, to maintain marital ignition, she had to wear it—or rather them—all the time. Even in the bathtub, where her silicone C-cups continued to surprise her, breaching the soapy surface like sea mammals rising for air. She missed the sight of her corrugated ribcage, looking elegant and slightly bohemian above the neckline of a dress. For years, since before her first marriage, Sara had gravitated toward women who, like herself, gravitated toward men in finance, but she’d never felt she was one of them. She’d lived in Prague, she’d had a decent if stunted acting career in her twenties (the unbalanced high points: her role as Anya in an off-Broadway revival of The Cherry Orchard and her appearance in a commercial for Coast soap, in which, ecstatically lathered in the shower, she cooed, “Oooooh, that scent!”), and now spent her summer weekends working a cooperative farm-share in Sussex County: She was different. Cold and gelatinous, her upgraded breasts argued otherwise, however. They introduced her before she could open her mouth, establishing (in her mind) the subjects of discussion: money or sex, both of which she found . . . uninteresting, or maybe just overworn. So they made the world go round: so what. Her silver Audi Q5 made her go round, and the only time she wanted to talk about it was when the car broke down.

  “If I were a roasting pan,” she said aloud, “where would I be?” In response, the piled boxes merely stared at her, unblinking, unyielding. She hadn’t visited the storage unit in years—why would they recognize her? She moved the topmost boxes closest to her from right to left, noting as she did the brief descriptions of their contents written, in fat black Sharpie ink, on the sides and tops (ALEXIS, DOLLS; SARA, CLOTHES; ALEXIS, ART; LIVING RM, MISC.; and two cryptically marked ATTIC, ???). “Aha,” she said, spying the word KITCHEN jotted on a box near the floor. The box was too small to contain a roasting pan, but she opened it anyway: an espresso maker; a citrus zester; a stainless-steel cocktail shaker onto which was etched MARKETBOLT ANNUAL MEETING, THE SCOTTSDALE PRINCESS, SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ., AUGUST 10–14, 2001; a pigtail-corded handheld blender; some individual tart pans; an analog meat thermometer; and a white apron, never worn (never even unfolded from the crisp square it came packaged in), emblazoned with the title WORLD’S BEST MOM. Nothing she needed.

  She fingered the apron for a moment, its virginate starchiness, its embroidered sentiment. She didn’t recall Alexis giving her this—oh, maybe vaguely—and almost snorted at the thought of Alexis giving it to her now: at the impossibility of it, that is. Alexis would probably just bookmark the title with asterisks, the way she noted sarcasm in her text messages: *WORLD’S BEST MOM*. WHATEVER. Alexis was at that age, seventeen, when mothers come into view as tyrants or imbeciles or both. Sara wasn’t sure which category she fell into, nor did she much care; she’d been seventeen once, too, and knew these phases passed. Not that she wouldn’t mind this one passing quicker. Just last night she and Alexis had had it out over college applications, over Alexis’s mulish determination to attend Richard Varick College in the city, which was where her father had gone—along with every other Long Island meathead who wanted to break into Wall Street. Varick was okay, she supposed, but just barely—mid-tier, and wholly devoid of cachet. The great sin of parenting, Sara felt, was letting your children aim too low. Allow them to settle, and that’s just what they’d do. Loose expectations were like junk food; kids just gorged themselves. She replaced the apron in the box and moved on.

  What caught her eye, on the next box that she lifted, was the handwriting. It wasn’t hers. BRIAN, it read, in unfamiliar blue cursive, and for a moment she failed to make sense of it. But then of course, she remembered. Her sister Liz had packaged up all of Brian’s stuff for her. “I don’t want to see it,” Sara had told her, “I don’t want to have it, I don’t want it near me.” But Alexis might, Liz had said, adding gently, “someday.” It was Liz, in fact, who’d rented this unit for her, who’d done the initial piling which Sara, over the years, had occasionally supplemented with boxed-up obsoletisms (like the zester, displaced by her microplane, or the analog meat thermometer, displaced by a digital model, etc.) and various other non- or no-longer-essentials. With a small huff, Sara transferred the box leftward, in order to keep digging for the roasting pan, then paused. That was seven years ago . . . seven years and two months. And now she had Dave: the completion of her circle, the satisfying epilogue: the closure everyone had urged her to seek. She stared at the box, wondering how many like it were stacked here, and what they might contain, and bit her bottom lip again. Something irresistible, in an electromagnetic sense, drew her nearer to the box—some archaeological allure, like uncovering a time capsule while digging in the garden. But this was her time capsule—her archaeological record—her life, or at least some broken shards of it, dumped into all these cardboard squares. What harm could there be, at this post-closure point? Sighing, she sat down on the KITCHEN box, its top slightly crumpling beneath her weig
ht, and after sliding some other boxes away with her feet, to clear some room, she opened the box marked BRIAN.

  His face was the first thing she saw: impossibly square-jawed, with those hard Clint Eastwood eyes above that slanted overcocky grin, a dimpled half-Windsor knot at the base of that thick, not-quite-loutish neck. He was staring up at her, in grayscale, from a cut-out piece of newsprint more yellowed and crispy than she’d expected it to be: his obituary, if that’s what you called it, from the “Portraits in Grief” series that the New York Times ran after September 11th. “Brian Tooney,” the headline read. “A Winner in Life, and Love.”

  Brian Tooney hated to lose. Whatever the game, be it Monopoly or one-on-one basketball or his latest passion, golf, he usually only lost once. “And that was always the first time he played,” said his older brother, Robert. “After that, he’d hunker down somewhere to study and practice until he had everything down cold. Then he’d come back and stomp you.”

  That competitive streak made Mr. Tooney, who was 34, a natural fit for Wall Street. He worked as a bond broker for MarketBolt, in the World Trade Center. “He loved the adrenaline, the charge of it,” said his wife, Sara. On their second date, the couple bumped into a not-quite-yet-old flame of Mrs. Tooney at a midtown bar. Mr. Tooney, she later learned, tipped a waiter to “accidentally” spill a drink on the competing suitor, forcing him to beat a quick retreat from the bar.

  But Mr. Tooney had a soft side, too. His 11-year-old daughter, Alexis, brought it out in him most. “If she scraped her knee, and cried,” his wife said, “he cried too.” Almost every night, before bedtime, Mr. Tooney and his daughter danced together, usually to a Bruce Springsteen song. “‘Thunder Road,’” Mrs. Tooney said, “was their favorite.”

  The family had just moved, in June, to rural Sussex County, N.J., because Mrs. Tooney dreamed of raising horses. “The commute was a killer,” his brother Robert said. “But if Sara wanted to raise penguins, he would’ve commuted from the South Pole. That’s the kind of guy he was.”

  For a long time Sara stared at the newspaper, her eyes darting from the text to the photograph and back, as if struggling to reconcile them. She heard the faint creak of her front teeth grinding. Finally, she said, “Fuck you, Brian.”

  And then it came back, as she’d feared (when setting that box aside) but not quite expected (when opening it). All of it: the initial splinter of that morning (Liz calling, saying, “turn on the TV”); the way Sara collapsed to the floor, rubbery and boneless, in perfect terrible tandem with the second tower’s collapse; Alexis in pigtails screaming “someone tell me!” while Sara and Brian’s mother clung to one another in the living room, Sara sobbing and Brian’s mother hacking up broiled bits of her lungs, both of them incapable of speech; Brian’s father’s silent, sleepless vigil in front of CNN, a single omnipresent tear trickling down his old prizefighter’s cheek; the four hundred MISSING posters they printed at Staples, and the clerk who glanced cautiously about for her manager before telling Sara there was no charge, go; the bobbing sea of yellow candles in Union Square; the smoke from the island’s charred tip that went on and on, forever. All of which felt endurable and even lenient compared to what, for Sara, came afterwards.

  Brian’s brother Robert suggested the memorial. He offered to rent out A. J. Byrne’s, the bar on 52nd Street where Brian had taken Sara on their second date and where Brian and Robert had had a standing date, for Monday Night Football, during the NFL season. Invite everyone, Bass Ale (Brian’s regular) on the house, maybe a slide show if they could all bear it. “That’s what Bri would’ve wanted,” Robert said, and Sara had agreed. All Robert needed, he said, was an invitation list; he’d do the rest.

  Brian’s Outlook address book struck Sara as the natural source. The recipient lists on his constant stream of email forwards—New York Giants scuttlebutt, mostly, but also chain letters (typical Irish, he was superstitious to the point of paranoia)—must have included one hundred or more addresses. It was password-protected but that was easy: Alexis. As Sara scrolled through his inbox, averting her eyes from the text of the emails to avoid conjuring Brian’s voice, she kept seeing one name—Jane L. Becker—over and over and over again. On September 8th, she noticed, there was a solid block of maybe twenty emails from Jane L. Becker. That Saturday, she remembered (because the days leading up to that Tuesday were engraved upon her memory in exquisite, even microscopic detail), she’d taken Alexis to her soccer game and then to West Milford for a matinee of The Princess Diaries, and Brian had stayed home to catch up on work. She wasn’t so much suspicious—at that moment, Brian was the winged angel she spoke to in the dark, the vaporous essence suffusing the pillow that she fell asleep spooning every night, that sponged her 4 A.M. tears—as she was curious about the abundance, so, randomly, she doubleclicked one of Jane L. Becker’s Saturday afternoon emails.

  I am completely worthless without your dick inside me, it read. I feel like a crackhead. [A dick-head? ;)] God, I’m addicted. [A-dick-ted? Make me stop!] Seriously. I can’t eat or sleep or work out or ANYTHING. All I’m good for is laying here thinking about you inside me. This is total torture. I’m suffering from withdrawal. What the hell have you DONE to me, Brian Tooney?

  To say she was stunned, as Sara later told her sister, trivializes the sensation—the overwhelming, airless, corporeal suck of it. The effect was like seeing the world turned inside out, and discovering that everything you thought you knew about existence was backwards and upside down. That trees caused pollution and smoking made you live longer and Santa Claus was real but also a well-known pederast: everything. Her stupor was so total that she didn’t even register pain. Fortified by that numbness, though aware she was committing a spectacular mistake, Sara read, then printed out, every last one of Jane L. Becker’s emails to Brian—from the earliest flirty messages (according to her email address, Jane L. Becker worked at Lehman Brothers; they’d met at a High Yield Bond Conference uptown) to the first, awkward postcoital note (Are you okay? I’m really sorry if things got a little too, um, crazy last night. Call me?) to the operatic, full-blown declarations that followed (I had no idea what love was until I met you . . . I feel like Dorothy discovering Oz) to the subsequent reams of hypersexed e-blather that caused Sara, weeping, and holding back her hair, to vomit into the wastebasket under the desk (Sitting on your face last night was a whole lot better than sitting here in this CDOs meeting . . . whatever it is you do with your tongue, kiddo, you should patent it). Precisely why she was printing them, she didn’t know, but she felt a pressing need to marshal hard, physical evidence—multipurpose, eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, twenty-pound, ninety-four-brightness evidence, to be collected and examined and analyzed for some unimaginable but imperative prosecution. When Alexis woke up for school the next morning, she found her mother at the desk, never having slept, the overheating printer still whirring out page after page.

  As for Brian’s emails to Jane L. Becker, she read perhaps a quarter of them, and printed out none. She didn’t quite recognize the voice of the Brian who’d authored them—his collected love letters to Sara, all of them predating their wedding, would fill five pages, six tops—and for a brief dizzying moment, slipping off the plane of reality as if stumbling off a curb, Sara wondered if this wasn’t her Brian who’d written all this—that some intergalactic mixup had occurred, and this was another Brian Tooney’s computer she was digging through. Because how could he have possibly written this to Jane L. Becker—When we opened the drapes yesterday, and stood there looking out over Times Square, I wanted to break the window and scream down at everyone, Look at this woman! Look at this beautiful naked beautiful fucking woman! Like a king, right? Jesus, you make me feel like some crazy king—just seventeen minutes (it was all there, timestamped in his Sent Messages box) before including Sara in a forwarded update, from the Daily News, about Tiki Barber’s hamstring? And just forty-three minutes before he emailed Sara—individually, this time: What did I need to pick up? Milk and what else? Total shitsho
w day.

  Two nights later, emboldened by a bottle of warm chardonnay she emptied after tucking Alexis into bed, she emailed Jane L. Becker. From Brian’s email account: Imagining Jane L. Becker’s expression, when his name appeared in her inbox, churned Sara’s stomach with a toxic mixture of grief and glee. The TV in the study was tuned to CNN, on mute; that single portrait of the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta kept appearing onscreen, in what seemed like an endless loop, the pundits seeking tea leaves in the glower of his expression. Yet somehow the sight of his face didn’t rattle her. She didn’t want to study it, or spit at it. Mohammed Atta had murdered her husband; Jane L. Becker, on the other hand, had murdered her. Sara emailed her a single question: Why did you do this to me?

  At 11:49 P.M., three nights later, Jane L. Becker replied. All I can say is that I’m sorry, she wrote. I am. He loved you.

  That final sentence wounded her worst of all, because it was a lie—even now, with Brian dead, with nothing whatsoever to be lost or gained, Jane L. Becker, this woman she knew only as a febrile swarm of words and emoticons, was lying to her. Because hadn’t Brian written to her, over and over again, in terse but tortured emailese, that he didn’t love his wife? (Sara was never Sara in his emails; only my wife), that he was no longer in love with her, had conceivably never loved her (not if you defined love as what he felt for Jane L. Becker)? After another bottle of chardonnay, this one properly chilled, Sara wrote Jane L. Becker one more email. It was a tremendously long note that she honed down to a single cold word: Die.