by Lisa Gornick
I turn on my stomach so I can see your face. I touch your cowlick. “Why is that?”
“Because I want you in this primal way. You’re pining after some other guy. And yet here I am. It’s like eating the leftovers off somebody’s plate.”
You crinkle your nose in disgust. “It’s amazing, fucking amazing. Laney’s old man has offered me a training position at Lehman Brothers as a trader starting whenever I’m ready. Those guys are making eighty, ninety grand their first year, upwards of two hundred by the second. Carrie Carston, who’s probably sitting on ten million just from her trust fund, has been chasing me all spring, inviting me to visit her at her family’s place outside of Rome, sending me perfumed letters, and yet here I am in Ocean City, Maryland, with no money, no plans, blowing up rafts just to have some crumbs of your time.”
You laugh. It’s a cruel laugh, mocking of both of us. In that moment, I can see that you hate me as much as you love me. I think of Carrie Carston, who was in my sophomore English class, always dressed in a pastel cardigan and a white turtleneck, little pearls in her earlobes, always, it seemed, in tandem with some other similar-looking girl. Carrie was considered a catch—a rich, popular, cute girl, petite with big breasts and hair cut like Dorothy Hamill—but I know that for you, she seems shallow and somehow ordinary, that what you are smitten with in me is my foreignness to you, that you don’t know the authors I read or the painters I admire or the places I’ve traveled with my father. You say it’s the length of my limbs, that I am, you say, “a long, cool drink of water I can’t get to the bottom of,” and although it sounds both vain and simpleminded, I have to admit to thinking that you are right, that something about my arms and legs makes me elusive, that the nineteenth-century physiognomists understood but then overstated something true about how our bodies form the outlines of our selves—that with my kind of fingers and neck I had to aspire to a certain kind of thought, just as you, with your towering height and bouldering shoulders, had to find a trail and blaze your way through, that my body would no more allow me to giggle like Carrie Carston than yours would permit you the footnoted shuffle of James.
You want what is at the bottom of the glass but I want what you have, what my father had in his youth: a belief that one can find a path and fashion a life by sticking to it. I long for your faith in an order to the world, the analog to my father’s faith in science. My father’s faith was born and bred in his skin—not shared by his father, not passed on to me. Now my father complains that science has become no more than a cog in the technocratic machine—the romance of Crick and Watson buried under anxiety about grant applications, the degree of specialization having reached such absurd proportions that a developmental embryologist will look at my father, now classified in the annals as a theoretical geneticist, as though he were talking Urdu.
After this, after you paint us as the cruel mistress and her dog, you sleep curled around me but we don’t make love. Each night you climb into bed in a pair of clean gym shorts; I keep on my bikini underwear. You breathe with deep even sounds, your arms folded over my breasts. Often, I lie awake, staring out the window, listening to the sound of the waves hitting the shore. I think we could be Hansel and Gretel huddled under a tree. I think I am the wicked witch and you are Hansel trapped in my garden. Bound in the lock of your arms, I think you are the wicked witch and I am Gretel caught in your cage.
*
Midsummer, my father forwards a letter from Andrew. Andrew writes that he has reached Machu Picchu and that trekking the Inca Trail is like walking in the footsteps of God. Next week, he writes, we head to the Indian village of Chichicastenango in Guatemala to meet up with some silver merchants from southern Mexico. It is unclear who the “we” are or what exactly Andrew is buying on this three-month journey. Indeed, his apartment is filled with native textiles, but then the money being made and the aura of intrigue suggest something more contraband. When I told this once to Corrine, she said, “What a taste you have for being a moll.” I must have grown silent because she then said, “Don’t act indignant. Being a moll is exciting.”
I read on. This letter could be to anyone, I think. A generic travelogue. Maybe he has sent it to two or three other girlfriends and his mother too. Because I am only interested in the subtext (how Andrew feels about me, what I might expect from him), the details about Lake Atitlán and the community of hippie women who run the Blue Bird Café and have taught the Indians how to make yogurt bore me. I skim forward, looking for what Corrine calls the good stuff. At the end, there’s a morsel: I’ll be back in New York the last week of August. Call my answering machine to let me know where you can be reached. And don’t leave the country whatever you do. I think it’s time we start to get to know one another. Thinking about you more than I wish, Andrew.
Leave the country? Where does he think I’d go? Thinking about me more than he wishes—what the hell does that mean?
I read the letter three times. The words might as well be a local bacterium; they have left me jittery and on edge.
He must be traveling with a woman, I think. I imagine straight ash hair and expensive tooled boots, Andrew with his leather camera bag and Gitanes cigarettes. The business must have something to do with drugs. It all seems sordid in a Euro-trash kind of way. All I can think of is that by comparison you seem so clean, every pore washed by the sea, and that I, bad child, want only to play in the dirt.
*
One Saturday, I walk out of work to find you leaning against your car in the parking lot. It is three o’clock, hot and sticky. There are ketchup stains on my uniform and coffee spots on my shoes and what I want is a shower and a nap and then to go to a movie with you.
“What’s up? Why aren’t you at your stand?”
“I closed it.” I can see your duffel in the backseat of your car. You reach inside for the bottle of Coke in the cup holder. “I’m headed out for two weeks.”
My insides speed up. You’ve not asked if I’ve heard from Andrew. I’ve not volunteered about the letter, stashed now at the bottom of my underwear drawer. I think of something Corrine said after I told her that you had moved to Ocean City to be with me for the summer. “Be careful, he’s going to give you your comeuppance.” Despite the nights worrying what will happen between us once Andrew returns, it shocks me that I now feel so panicked about your driving away. “Where to?” I ask.
“North Carolina. A guy who bodysurfs at Ninety-fourth turned me on to a fast-money job. It’s a two-week carnival, and they’re paying a hundred bucks a day under the table plus a three-hundred bonus if you stick it out to the end. No hours. You just sleep and eat and work.”
You stare straight ahead. Could there be another woman? For a moment, I wonder if it might be Carrie Carston.
“I’m broke. It’s almost August. I’m not Einstein, but then again it’s not dog food between my ears. Your lover-boy will reappear from wherever he’s been by September. You don’t expect for me to stick around after then?”
You swig from your Coke. I am silenced by the flint in your voice, by the glimpse I have that, to you, I seem like a prima donna, only worse, since I hide what I do under a layer of reserve. “What I like about a whore,” Corrine once proclaimed as we walked together down lower Market, home to San Francisco’s prostitutes and derelicts, “is she makes a clean contract.”
“I need to borrow some cash to get there.”
Everything is shifting without warning, as though a storm has unexpectedly blown onto shore and you are taking down umbrellas and deflating rafts while I lie still on my beach towel, unsure if the raindrops portend real danger or a momentary shower. You’ve never asked me for money before, and I wonder if maybe you don’t realize how delicate and private money is for me after four years of carefully parsing the allowances my father sent each semester, carefully budgeting the money I saved from my summer jobs, and now depositing my waitress tips in a checking account every other day, watching the balance rise even after the rent and expenses by two hundred, so
metimes even three hundred dollars each week. I have not thought about what I am saving for, only that, like you, I too will at some point need to get out of here.
“I’ll pay you back in two weeks,” you say. My waitress tips are wadded in my apron pocket. It was a good morning. One family left fifteen dollars after I helped them with their tantruming three-year-old. As always, I had counted the money, exchanging the ones and the quarters and the dimes for bigger bills. Today, Arlene gave me back a fifty, two tens, and a five. I reach into my pocket, hand you the two tens and a five. You stuff the bills into your jeans.
“Thanks.”
I feel a twinge of guilt. I should have given you more. If you’re asking, you must really need it. But I earned it, I think. You spent all day sitting on the beach drinking coffee and reading the papers while I carted around trays of greasy food.
We brush lips. I watch while you pull up to the edge of the parking lot. I finger the fifty in my apron pocket. How will you get down to North Carolina on twenty-five bucks? I run toward your car. “Bear, Bear,” I yell, my arms flapping like an agitated goose. For a moment I am certain that you are looking at me in your rearview mirror, but then the light changes, and you pull out onto the road.
*
A month passes before I go to your apartment. It’s late August, the end of the season. The kid from the University of Colorado is sitting on the porch reading a ski magazine and drinking a Slurpee.
“Hey, Louisa. What’s happening?”
“Not much.” I look around, half expecting you to walk through the screen door. “Anyone seen Bear?”
The kid rubs his eyes and leans back in his chair so he is propped on the back two legs. He fiddles with the Slurpee straw and then sucks hard, making vacuum cleaner sounds. I’m sure he’s checking me out for clues as to what I do and don’t know.
“Nope.”
I feel in a state beyond foolish, dangerously close to the dreaded desperate woman, stringy hair falling over her face, kids clinging to her skirt as she goes bar to bar in search of her alcoholic husband and his dwindling pay. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by. Could I use your bathroom?”
“Sure. Help yourself to all the toilet paper you want.”
I push open the screen door and walk back toward your room. The door is open. Inside, the bed is stripped and the pillow lies on top of the dresser. I look in the closet. It’s empty save for some bent hangers and a crumpled paper on the floor. I uncrumple the paper and read a circular for a grocery store’s weekly specials. I drop to my hands and knees to look under the bed: bare, your collection of running shoes and bodysurfing fins gone.
*
You call me two years later. It’s Christmastime, early morning, and I’m sitting in my father’s kitchen, poring over cookbooks, planning a Christmas Day menu. My father has requested duck. Juanita has taken up lacto-vegetarianism. Corrine wants plum pudding and Lily loves anything with apples.
“Louisa,” you say. Your voice is low and gravelly.
“Bear?” My own voice sounds like a squeak. “Where are you?”
“New York. My apartment.” You laugh. You sound like you’ve been drinking.
You tell me that both of your parents died last year: your father first, and then, a few months later, your mother.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, feeling terrible that I had not heard.
“Well, it was good for my nephew, at least. My sister was able to move them out of their trailer.”
Before I can say anything more, you change the subject to your job. You are trading bonds for one of the big investment houses. Seven of the guys in your group are Princeton boys, as you put it, four from your eating club. You tell me that Laney’s old man got you the job and that you slept on the floor of Laney’s apartment for two months before you could afford your own place. You tell me that right this moment you are fingering a check for one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, your Christmas bonus.
You laugh again and I can feel you filling the room. I imagine you stretched out on your bed, the pillow bent in half under your head, one arm folded under your neck, the sheer length of you. You rub the check between your forefinger and thumb, a line of running shoes against the wall, your fins thrown under the bed. I wonder what floor your apartment is on.
“Jesus,” I say. “What will you do with all that money?”
“Lots of guys put it up their noses. Can’t say I’ve never done that either. What a fucking waste. But with this mama, I don’t know.”
I’m surprised to hear you say this; not that you’re a teetotaler, just that you were so critical of Corrine. I tell you that I have been living with Corrine and Lily for the past year, working at a bookstore in North Beach, housesitting for my father during his frequent trips out of the country. You don’t ask where I’d been before, and I don’t tell you about the time living with Andrew or how I moved west after finding him in bed with a woman who called herself Cat-Sue. Nor do you tell me about Carrie Carston, who someone told me you’d been seen with.
“Why are you calling me?”
It takes you a while to answer. I can hear your breathing. Even though we are a continent apart, it feels like we’re talking in bed. “I don’t know. Holding all this goddamned money makes you look at your life.” You pause. For a moment I think you’re going to fall asleep with the phone cradled to your ear. I want to ask about North Carolina and whether it was before or after you stuffed my twenty-five dollars into your jeans that you decided not to come back.
“I’m falling out, baby. Got to go.”
*
A year and a half later, I’m sitting in my kitchen in New Haven, my first year of graduate coursework in English almost completed, flipping through the mail. Looking out the windows, I can see the top of a white clapboard church framed by a frill of green treetops. It’s late May, hot but not yet muggy. I’m debating my summer options: teach high school students in mandatory summer school, work on the Emerson project (awful, I’ve been told; long hours in a windowless room in Sterling Library checking the punctuation and spelling in the now-typed version against the original handwritten correspondence), cocktail waitress at a new hotel out by the wharf.
The mail is a department store catalogue, an appeal from a world hunger organization, notification of an electric rate hike, and the Princeton alumni magazine. I flip through the catalogue, looking at jackets and shoes I could never afford, stash the hunger appeal and electric notice in the salad bowl, and turn to the alumni magazine. Like everyone else, I look first at the column listing news of our class: law firms joined, medical schools attended, babies born. As always, I scan first for your name.
When indeed it is there, for a split second I think I am hallucinating, a desert trekker conjuring water spilling over wet rocks into a deep, cold pool. It’s an announcement that you’ve been promoted to vice president at Goldman Sachs. Although I have never had reason to read the business section in the paper and couldn’t explain what a margin is, even I know that you have reached the big league.
I call Corrine. Lily, now eight, answers. “Hi, Lily Pad.”
“Hi, Louisa.”
“What are you up to?”
“I’m eating a Popsicle. Then I’m going to wash my pink troll’s hair.”
“Is your mom home?”
“She’s taking a bath.”
“Ask her to call me when she gets out, okay?”
“Mommy, it’s Louisa,” Lily hollers.
Corrine hollers something back and then Lily whispers, “She said to bring the phone to her in the tub.”
“Don’t do that!” I say, but Lily must already be holding the phone away from her ear as she marches down the hall to the bathroom.
“Oh,” Corrine moans, and then, “Lily, honey, I don’t want you to get in here with me. We’ll give you your own bath later.”
I can hear Lily fussing in the background.
“Scat. Let me talk to Louisa.”
“Call me later. Y
ou shouldn’t have the phone in the tub.”
“Thank you, Mom. You know I always talk on the phone in the tub.”
“You’re in a mood.”
“She won’t let me out of her sight. When I woke up, she was sleeping next to me.”
“I hope you were alone.”
“Just barely. She must have got up when she heard Danny leaving.”
Corrine goes on to tell me about Danny. As usual, he’s an artist, this time a sculptor, with a day job doing something else, this time substitute school teaching.
“He’s great with Lily.”
“I can’t imagine that’s the real draw.”
“He’s awesome. His hands. Oh my God. But he is good with kids. So, what’s up?”
Corrine has been disapproving of my celibacy since Andrew. I’ve tried to explain to her that between you and Andrew, I’ve been worried about the condition of my soul—that I think about my soul the way that my father thinks about genes: over time we acquire a map of where our ancestors have been, who they lay down with, so that we carry both in our chromosomes and our soul the history of these couplings. “Listen to this,” I say, and then I read the lines about you.
“He must be fucking rich.”
“It’s so weird. I had a feeling he’d be in that column. Though I guess it’s not the first time I’ve thought that.”
Corrine and I have talked at length about why you are still so much on my mind. We’ve gone through the guilty-party theory: I did you wrong and am waiting to make amends. We’ve gone through the wronged-party theory: you did me wrong and I am waiting for you to make amends. We’ve gone through the purity-versus-squalor theory: after the squalor of Andrew, I am eager for the purity of you. What I have not told Corrine about is the image I sometimes have of the strands of each of my chromosomes slowly untwisting, each gene a twirling ballerina, the motion choreographed like Balanchine, the strands floating across the stage toward the leaping, bare-chested dancers who make up the untangling strands of you.