The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

  And then Joe’s phone rang with an unidentified number. With a small, hopeful smile, he picked up.

  “Hello? Yes, this is Joe Skinner.” I leaned forward to hear the other side of the conversation, but I caught only a deep, ominous babble.

  “Uh-huh, okay. . . . Yes. . . . Okay, I will,” Joe said. “Okay. . . . Yes, thank you, Officer.” He hung up. “Well. Kyle reported me to the police. They’re investigating an assault charge. I have to go down to the Seventeenth Precinct and turn myself in.”

  “Oh, Joe,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Let me go with you.”

  “No. Absolutely not. But can you call Sandrine? I can’t talk to her. Not right now.”

  I nodded.

  “But don’t call Noni, okay? Don’t tell Caroline or Renee either, not until . . .” Joe paused. “Not until I know what to tell them.”

  I nodded again. I waited for Joe to make the first move toward departure, but he just sat in the deli’s flimsy plastic chair, legs crossed at the ankles, back curved, folded into himself as though seeking to protect some tender inner spot. Once I would have said that I knew my brother better than any other person. At the pond we would play gin rummy for hours, barely speaking, and then rise together at the exact moment when the heat became unbearable, run into the water, and then return, dripping and cool, to the game. Now I didn’t know what to say, how to comfort him, or if comfort was what he deserved.

  “Fiona,” he said without looking at me, “do you think it’s unfair that we never had a chance to know Dad?”

  “I don’t think about it very much,” I answered.

  “I wonder if Noni really loved him,” he said. “I don’t think she did.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “She never talks about him.”

  It was true: Noni rarely talked about Ellis Avery anymore and, when we were younger, only in relation to her regrets.

  “Maybe it hurts Noni to talk about him,” I offered. “He was there for her, and then he was gone, so suddenly.”

  Joe shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, it’s not like it makes any difference. Does it? He’s been dead so long. I don’t even remember him.”

  “I remember him,” said Joe. “I loved him.”

  “That makes sense. You were older.”

  “Fiona, sometimes I think I see Dad,” Joe said.

  “See him?” I repeated. A memory of that day in the yellow house came back to me. Standing in our parents’ old bedroom. I’d thought it was silly, almost a joke. But Joe had been waiting for our father. Maybe Joe had been waiting his entire life. I remembered what Caroline had told me about the night of the frat party, Joe’s disillusionment with baseball: Dad told him to stop playing.

  “Usually it’s when I’m high,” Joe continued. “Really high. Or drunk. When my mind is . . . elsewhere. When it’s relaxed. It’s not a hallucination, it’s not. I’ve been trying to do it without the drugs. To relax enough, like meditation. So I can see him when he’s here.”

  “You don’t see him,” I said.

  “You’ll see him one day, Fiona. We all will. I told Renee too.”

  “You don’t see Dad,” I repeated.

  But Joe wasn’t listening to me. He was looking at the floor, appearing to examine the dirt-filled cracks of the linoleum.

  “Joe?” I said.

  He lifted his head. “What?”

  “Should I be worried about you?”

  Joe smiled. “Me? No. Don’t worry about me. I’m great. I’m always great.”

  * * *

  Joe caught a cab downtown to the police station. I took the subway to my office. That morning I edited a press release about the upcoming UN climate-change conference in Buenos Aires and posted some website copy. I ate lunch at the bagel place down the block. I walked back to the office and saw on the way a man without legs scooting himself along the sidewalk on a dolly, his hands black with the filth of the street. I remember these details exactly. Some days continue to exist year after year, decade after decade, as though they are happening inside you concurrent with the present. A persistent, simultaneous life. One that you consider and wish more than anything that you could change.

  I returned to the office, and I picked up the phone. I called Sandrine. I said hello and how was your weekend? And then I began.

  “Something happened today, and Joe wanted me to call you.”

  “Oh,” said Sandrine. “What?”

  I told her what Joe had told me: the bad numbers, the partying, the anger, the punch.

  “Where’s Joe? Why isn’t he calling me?”

  “He had to go to the police station. Kyle is pressing charges. Assault.”

  Sandrine began to breathe shallowly into the phone.

  “Sandrine, I’m sure it’ll all be okay,” I said. “They’re like brothers, remember?”

  “Will Joe get his job back?”

  “Job?” I asked, surprised. “I doubt it.”

  “But why? What happened?”

  I wanted to say it and I didn’t want to. I had never liked Sandrine. I didn’t like the way she appraised and quantified, looking over Joe’s suits, his apartment, the menu at every restaurant. After he proposed—on bended knee, a champagne picnic in Central Park—she’d asked to exchange the ring for diamond earrings, Joe had told me. More carats, he explained. Two instead of one. He’d ended up just buying her the earrings for her birthday later that month.

  “There’s been a claim of sexual harassment,” I told Sandrine in a rush. “Against Joe. That’s what Kyle said.”

  “What?” Her voice was now a whisper. “Who did he harass?”

  I paused. “Sierra. His old secretary.”

  “Sierra.” Sandrine breathed the name. “Of course. She’ so pretty. Have you met her? She’s very, very pretty.”

  “But he says he didn’t do anything.” I inhaled, exhaled. “I mean, nothing serious. Not recently.”

  For a moment there was complete silence from Sandrine. “Fiona, I know we’ve never been friends,” she said slowly. “I know you don’t like me. None of you do. I’m not good enough for your perfect brother, Joe. But what are you trying to tell me?”

  The moment stretched forward, branching, lifting, dividing. There were many things I wanted to tell Sandrine: That it was true, she wasn’t good enough for my brother. That I didn’t like her or her friends or her cadaverous mother. That I wished Joe had chosen someone more like us, his sisters. And what did that say about his regard for us, that he had selected the exact kind of person whom each of us would despise equally, but for different reasons? Did he want to push us away?

  Yet I said none of these things to Sandrine. I thought about the Joe I’d seen in the deli, the person he’d become at his Alden College fraternity and then at Morgan Capital. Sandrine seemed part of this. The unraveling of Joe Skinner, my brother who had loved Celeste, who had taught me to swim, who would play Battleship late into the night, ignoring his homework and all the phone calls, who could knock a ball straight out of the park as though it were as easy as breathing. What should I tell Sandrine? Was it worth the betrayal? In that moment I believed that it was.

  “Something happened with Sierra,” I said. “Something more than a flirtation.”

  Sandrine again went silent. I was telling her the truth, just as I did on the blog. I was speaking the truth about all those men, some of them honest, some of them unfaithful, some of them sweet and lovely, others calculating and mean, driven by a need to dominate, to make a woman, any woman, feel inferior. I was telling Sandrine the truth about Joe. I was telling her what she needed to know.

  Sandrine said something more, but I can no longer recall what it was. We said our good-byes, the tones less pleasant now, the words crisp and fast. That was the last time I ever spoke to Sandrine Cahill.

  * * *

  What happened next was predictable, as sentimental tragedy often is. Sandrine left Joe. She began a relationship with Ace McAllister, moving from
Joe’s apartment on the Upper East Side into Ace’s on the Upper West. Joe swore they had not been having an affair, and perhaps this was objectively true, but something must have passed between them. Perhaps Ace made the first move. Perhaps Sandrine. It didn’t matter.

  “She wanted a certain life,” Joe told me. “It wasn’t really about me. I was incidental. Once I couldn’t give her that life, that was it.”

  We were drinking gin and tonics at a noisy bar near his apartment. George W. Bush had won again, and Caroline had decided not to host Thanksgiving at her house, opting instead to visit Nathan’s sister in Vermont, and Renee was suddenly and miraculously in love with Jonathan Frank, an event that caused considerable heartburn for Noni, who now believed it inevitable that Renee would leave her transplant fellowship despite all the years she’d put into her training. Caroline had made Noni gun-shy about what her daughters might give up for a man.

  That night with Joe, my stomach ached from my own sense of irreversible disruption. I sat unsteadily on the barstool, sipping my drink. I wasn’t worried about Joe. My worry was that he knew about my conversation with Sandrine. I waited for Joe to raise the topic and had already developed a defense—She would have found out eventually, she had a right to know—but he never did. He simply ordered another round of cocktails, and then I had to get home, and we said our good-byes on the sidewalk.

  Kyle, in the end, dropped the assault charges. He was too busy, Joe said. He didn’t have time for the hassle of lawyers and police. And Sierra dropped the harassment claim, if indeed she’d had one in the first place. Perhaps it had been a pretense for Kyle, an easy way to relieve himself of the obligation of Joe Skinner, merely a fraternity brother, the two of them thrown together by chance so many years ago. Who could blame Kyle for not honoring that commitment? He wasn’t married to Joe. Kyle was running a business, and he couldn’t carry around deadweight forever. Joe had been lucky and charming, he looked the part, he talked the right kind of talk, but he was a man in need of something. What? Counseling, drug treatment, a less stressful job, a cheaper lifestyle, a better girlfriend, better friends, a more developed sense of self. Or maybe something entirely different, something that no one could name.

  We didn’t see much of Joe in those following months. After that night on the balcony, Renee released him. It was no longer her concern, she told us, what our brother did in his free time. He was old enough to take care of himself. Caroline was so busy with the new house, the kids, getting them settled in their new schools. And of course she heard about what had happened at the party, my poem and Joe’s dismissal of Renee. It was easy for her to cut Joe off.

  Joe stayed in New York for another six months, but there was nothing left for him here, that’s what he told me. He never looked for another job. He was too embarrassed, he said, and no one would hire him anyhow. Everyone knew what had happened with Kyle and Morgan Capital.

  “I’m leaving New York,” Joe told me on a Wednesday night. “Do you remember Brent, the Mavericks shortstop? He’s got an ad company down in Miami. Online stuff, banners. He offered me a job, and I’m going to take it.” We were again sitting on barstools, Joe drinking his usual gin and tonic, me a Diet Coke. I had recently been promoted at ClimateSenseNow!, surprising everyone, myself most of all, and now was attempting to make up for five years of lukewarm employment by arriving early to the office, fulfilling my responsibilities as conscientiously as I knew how.

  “Miami? But you hate hot weather,” I said.

  “Well, I’ll learn to like it.”

  “I hate it, too.”

  “Don’t use that as an excuse not to come visit.” For a moment Joe smiled one of his old smiles, both dimples engaged, a happy glimmer to his eyes. But just as fast as it had arrived, the smile disappeared.

  “Have you told Renee?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “She’ll be happy to get rid of me. One less thing to worry about.”

  “No,” I said. “She’ll miss you. We’ll all miss you.” Even to me my words sounded false.

  “It’s the kind of thing I should have done years ago.”

  “But you’ll be all alone down there,” I said. “No family. None of your old friends. No one who knows you.”

  Joe drained his drink. “That’s the point, Fiona.”

  I’ve often thought back to that conversation. Could I have stopped Joe from moving? Could I have persuaded him to stay in New York, to get help, to start again? Would the right words, the right level of concern, a new insight, a patient voice—would any of that have altered the outcome? For years I asked myself these sorts of questions.

  I believe now that certain events are inevitable. Not in a fateful way, for I have never had faith in anything but myself, but in the way of human nature. Some people will choose, again and again, to destroy what it is they value most. This is how I saw my brother. This is why I now believe that the accident would have happened in New York or Miami, with Luna or without her. The accident was searching for Joe, and eventually it would find him.

  Part III

  Miami

  Year 2079

  Year 2079

  “Hey—Ms. Skinner?”

  It was a man’s voice, a young man who stood very close to the stage. Somehow I’d missed his approach, and now here he was, only a few feet from where I sat beside Henry. The man was tall, thin, his head shaved, a small hoop earring in one ear that gleamed in the yellow safety lights. He had a roughness about him, as though he worked or slept outside.

  “Ms. Skinner, I’ve got a question,” he said.

  Where was Luna? My eyes scanned the crowd, and I found her, sitting in the front section, an aisle seat. She had her shoes off, her legs stretched forward, feet in red socks. She was watching the man intently; they all were. It was surprising to me that more people hadn’t left the auditorium for home by now. Perhaps with the electricity still off, there was some trepidation about what might be happening outside. I felt it, too.

  I turned my gaze to the young man. “Yes?” I said.

  “I was wondering—” He stopped speaking to scratch vigorously at his scalp with one hand. As he did, I noticed something off about him. Not quite right. A way he moved his body, as though he were on a boat and the rest of us on dry land. A drifting, an unsteadiness. Without lifting my gaze from the man, I reached for Henry’s hand and squeezed once.

  “I was wondering,” he repeated, “what you think of the current state of affairs. You know—what’s happening in this world, all the bullshit. All the corruption. Rich getting richer while we struggle and scrape and barely have a chance to make it, to do anything.” He paused. “What do you think of that?”

  “Well.” I cleared my throat. “I think it’s appalling,” I said. “The current administration. What’s happening to the environment, what’s happening to minorities. I think it should stop.”

  “You do?” The man squinted up at me, his mouth curling into the suggestion of a smile. “So why don’t you use all of this to do some good?” He waved his arms around to indicate the auditorium, the audience, the cameras. The gesture was made excessively large by the length of his reach, his thin, bony fingers. “Huh?” he said. “You’ve got all these people listening to you, and all you do is tell us a story about a family? The failures of love, isn’t that what you said? Visions and hallucinations?” The man snorted. Again he scratched his scalp.

  This was not the first time I’d considered or responded to this kind of critique, although it was generally delivered with more acuity. Given what was happening in the world of late, I had devoted more than passing thought to becoming involved in politics. My work at ClimateSenseNow! ended decades ago. In recent years, I’d attended rallies, donated money, private actions of a private citizen, but publicly I hadn’t done much at all. No op-eds, no speeches, no social media, no fund-raising efforts or lending my words to a campaign, although I’d been asked to take part in all these various ways.

  The dilemma was that any words I might s
ay at a lectern or in the pages of a newspaper would never achieve the same strength as the words I wrote as a poet. Inspiration, calls to action, can take many forms. It is not so much the persuasive force of an argument that prompts engagement, but a feeling that inspires it. A sense of injustice, a longing for redemption, empathy, rage. What better to provoke any of these than a poem?

  I thought of how best to explain this to the young man, but he had started to yell—at full volume, with profanity and frustration. What was I to do? The flame-haired woman in the front row shifted in her chair. Luna watched the man impassively, as though she were accustomed to this sort of display. I considered the balance of public engagement and private protection. I considered the power of poetry, of art. I considered my sources of inspiration and what might have moved Luna’s mother to select her daughter’s name from the last line of a poem written by me seventy-five years earlier. It took a madman to believe that individual involvement might change a system. It required a miracle, it required magic. Or maybe not. Maybe all it required was the alchemy of individuals who believe first that they can change themselves.

  “—fuckin’ imbeciles, assholes, how dare you try to do that, and then you can’t even—” The man was still yelling. I had lost track of what he specifically wanted from me. Henry and I watched him as he raised his hands and shook a fist.

  “He’s an angry one,” Henry said, leaning into me. “Times like these I’m happy the Second Amendment didn’t make it.”

  At last the young man quieted down. His face was red, sweat running from his temples. I glanced around, saw no security guards. They must have long since wandered off, perhaps to address the lights or to venture outside; or perhaps they’d been called by a higher authority to assist with a more pressing emergency.

  “My dear man,” I said. “Come up here. Please. Come onstage.”

  Henry turned to me. “Fiona, no,” he whispered. “This isn’t wise.”