The Careful Undressing of Love

by Corey Ann Haydu

  A dozen memories flicker in my brain—my father’s talk of secrets and his search for the understanding of love. My mother’s late nights at work when Dad was alive and how certain she’s been that the Curse didn’t exist.

  Everything looks brand-new.

  A few months before he died, I caught Dad crying in the garden. He was on the bench. His face was in his hands. I remember the glint of his wedding ring, newly polished, in the sun. I sat next to him and waited for him to talk to me. Whenever I cried, Dad never told me not to. So I didn’t tell him not to then.

  I can’t believe this memory waited for so long to resurface. I wonder how many other memories are hiding out inside me, how many will visit me when I need them most.

  “Love’s not one thing,” Dad said, after a long, long while.

  I didn’t know what he meant, but we sat on the bench and he repeated those words two more times, and eventually they made him stop crying, they made him put his arm around me and pull me close. They made him pick up a bottle of wine and a cupcake for Mom on the way home.

  It wasn’t the sacrifice Angelika demanded of him. But it was sacrifice all the same.

  “Love isn’t what you know,” Dad said before we opened the door and reentered the apartment. He squeezed my arm. He sounded sure. “Love is what you don’t know.”

  It’s the last thing Dad ever told me about love.

  I don’t read any more of Roger’s old letters. I bring them with me, though. I bring it all with me. The letters. The suit. The gown. The eleven slim books of poetry. The memories of my father. The ones I’ve always known and the ones that are new, aching, uncomfortable, imperfect.

  Sacrifice. It’s the one thing Dad and Angelika agreed on.

  The fire has grown in the brief time I’ve been gone. So has the crowd. I push past them to the sound of my name being called over and over, Lorna, Lorna, Lorna. I don’t turn toward any of them. I keep my eyes on the fire, on Delilah, and on Angelika.

  Delilah’s head is bowed like she can’t bear to look at the flame.

  Angelika stares right into the fire.

  When I approach, Angelika looks at me.

  “Good girl,” she says.

  “At last,” she says.

  There is an ocean of feeling in my stomach and my heart feels overlarge, explosive, dangerous. I am all sweat and hollowness—in my stomach, my head, my limbs. I thought I would be dreamy and free; I thought I would be sexy and brave. I thought I would be loose and wise.

  I didn’t understand how the past and the future are intertwined. I didn’t understand that one came from the other. The present keeps changing. Even the past is changing. So the future won’t stay still, either.

  I throw everything in my arms and everything in my pockets into the fire. It hurts, like the fire is burning me and not the things I’ve hung on to for seven years. I buckle over.

  “It’s meant to hurt.” Angelika is next to me. “If it didn’t hurt, it wouldn’t be sacrifice.” Her hand finds its way to my shoulder and holds me steady but the pain is unbearable.

  “Is that enough?” I ask her or anyone or whatever God there might be. “Is that enough?” No one answers.

  • • •

  I don’t help the bench come down. They don’t need me. The masses have entered the garden, and they help dismantle it alongside the widows with hammers and screwdrivers and eager bare hands.

  Delilah, Isla, Charlotte, and I watch.

  “I loved that bench,” I say, unable to shake the memory of Dad sitting on it, crying over everything he learned about love.

  “All their names were on it.” Charlotte’s hands are white from holding on hard to memories that she eventually threw in the fire, too.

  “Jack and I wrote our names on it. In a heart.” Delilah’s voice is going hoarse from the smoke, and she sort of laughs but it turns into a cough. “Hubris,” she concludes. I wonder whether Mom might have written Roger’s name on it, too. Maybe hidden on the bottom, far from where she and Dad declared their love.

  A stranger throws the first slab of initialed wood into the fire. She hoots and hollers at the crackling noise it makes catching flame.

  “We have to dismantle everything?” I say, knowing the answer. I am living the answer.

  “Of course,” Delilah says, so serious it scares me. “We have to sacrifice everything.”

  Isla doesn’t say a word. She sways and I see her take out her flask.

  What is left when everything has come undone?

  Silence and sacrifice and a flask of something that will make you forget everything you’ve lost. And the smell of ash. Always, always the smell of ash.

  I can see the fire from here, Cruz texts me from his locked-away room.

  By midnight, everything is burnt and gone. The garden, too. The peonies. The basil. The rosemary. The air smells like herbs and smoke and burning plastic.

  Strangers walk the scorched ground.

  It is no longer ours.

  32.

  Roger is sicker.

  Mom brings him home the next morning, and he is pale and sunken in. I can barely look at him.

  “He’ll get better,” Mom says. “He needs rest. And water. I thought he’d be more comfortable here.” She has her floaty voice, the one she used after Dad died when people asked how we were. “Oh, just fine,” she’d say. “It takes time, but we’ll be okay, Lorna and I.” It would have scared me less if she’d talked about the long hours she slept and the empty fridge and the fact of her not showering for days on end.

  It scares me now, the way she has her hand on Roger’s forehead like he has a little flu.

  It scares me how easily Mom hides things, how many secrets she has. I thought living in a small space meant we shared everything. But so much can be hidden even in the most cramped apartment on one of the shortest streets in Brooklyn.

  Even love.

  I do not tell her about what I burned last night, but she smells smoke in the air. “That smell.” She shivers, not finishing her sentence.

  I wonder whether she will go looking for her love letters or her wedding gown. I wonder when she’ll find out what I’ve done, and realize what I now know.

  Roger has a house-shaking cough and watery eyes and dry skin. I don’t want him in my home but I don’t want him to die, either.

  “You want tea, Roger?” I ask, and he nods. I pull lavender from the back of the cabinet, behind Mom’s collection of vanilla, and make him a pot. Mom smells that, too, her nose twitching and wrinkling.

  “He doesn’t need that,” she says while I squeeze in honey, watching it skim the surface and plunk to the bottom of the mug.

  “Maybe he does,” I say.

  Mom runs her fingers through her hair. She sighs and we can both hear chatter from the street below. I think I can pick out Angelika’s voice and Charlotte’s on top of it, the two of them probably holding down the stoop.

  “The building is sold,” Mom says.

  “Angelika says even if you move off the street—” I say, and Mom looks like she’s about to explode.

  “I won’t listen to any more of this! You know what you’re saying when you believe? You’re saying I killed your father. You’re saying that you will have a life filled with lovelessness or grief. You’re saying you’re giving up on your future before it’s even begun. Your father was right about living here, I’ll tell you that much. He was fucking right about it. We never should have moved to this street.”

  “Because we lost him.”

  Mom looks at me like I’m no longer her daughter, like I’m someone else entirely. “Because we’re losing you,” she says.

  Roger coughs on the couch and asks for a blanket. I deliver him his tea and a wool blanket. I turn off the news, which is playing a loop of the Chicago Bombing clips.

  “With none of our questi
ons answered, the country works to accept the unacceptable,” a newswoman in red says. “Senator Lee urges us to turn our attention to our lives and let the government search for answers about the Bombings.” Roger coughs harder.

  “What does that even mean?” Mom says, mostly to herself.

  Roger is turning red, then blue.

  “Mom!” I lift Roger’s head and it’s the first time I’ve touched him—his skin is warm and sticky; he smells like a father, just not mine.

  “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” Mom says, shaking her fingers and doing nothing. For a doctor, she’s terrible in certain emergencies. I broke my leg when I was six and she sat on the playground and wept while my dad brought me to the hospital. “I love that about your mother,” Dad said when I asked him how mad he must have been.

  I wonder if he was able to love all the worst things about her.

  “Water, Mom!” I say, but change my mind when Roger starts to shake. “No. Nine-one-one. Call nine-one-one.”

  Roger catches his breath but the coughing doesn’t stop and he closes his eyes and his skin gets sweatier and warmer.

  I move my hands off him. I am a selfish girl who doesn’t want to hold someone as he dies.

  • • •

  “I’ll call you,” Mom says on her way out the door, following Roger, still coughing, on a stretcher. Men in uniforms speak loudly and efficiently to each other in terms I can’t quite understand. “Devonairre Street,” I hear one of them say and I know what they’re thinking. I see them see me. I see them try not to think about the fact that if I took a liking to the bend of their arm or the sweep of their hair I could kill them too.

  I want to leave my skin.

  I want to go back to the day in the airport where it felt like there were options for how things would go.

  Those futures have all vanished.

  There’s just this reality: I will try to not fall in love but I will fall in love anyway. And I will lose it all, again and again, while the world watches. I will always be Affected. I will always be Cursed. I will always be a Devonairre Street Girl, and nothing else.

  Even my mother, Dr. Emily Ryder, with short hair and vanilla tea and shoebox of terrible secrets and fancy office on the Upper East Side, will only ever be Affected and Cursed and a Devonairre Street Girl.

  That’s all we are.

  That’s all we’ll ever be.

  Now it’s me who is on the couch, unable to breathe.

  33.

  We are in my loft.

  It is hot and sweaty and we are trying.

  We are trying but it’s not working.

  “Hold on, hold on,” Cruz says, holding his soft penis in his hand.

  “I want you,” I say. I’ve said it before and it’s made boys crazy, simple words turning illicit when we’re naked. This is the easy part—sex. This is the part that doesn’t scare me.

  I push against him, grind a little.

  “I can do this,” Cruz says, and it sounds like a pep talk. I stop the movement of my hips. I stop licking his neck.

  “I want you.” I don’t know what else to say. It’s never not worked before.

  The curtains are drawn and I am not wearing anything but bracelets on my wrists and keys around my neck.

  I have always been enough.

  I want the easiness of Owen and the passion of Denver. Instead there’s an awkward pause, nakedness that feels more terrifying than beautiful, Cruz’s voice shaking as he tells me, again, to hold on.

  He moves his hand between my legs, like that might help him, but I’m dry there and I can tell from the way his fingers don’t know what to do that he can tell. I want to want this. I have always wanted this. But my body won’t respond and his body won’t respond and one more thing that felt certain and solid—sex—is gone now, too.

  “You okay?” he says.

  I nod. “Are you?”

  He nods, too. We try kissing, but we don’t get lost in it. I keep hearing Roger’s coughs in my head, a warning of everything that will come.

  “It’s okay,” I say eventually, but it isn’t.

  I put my clothes back on. The dressing feels like it takes hours longer than the undressing did, and it’s depressing, buttoning buttons, zippering pants, covering up everything I wanted him to see.

  “That’s never—” Cruz starts a sentence I don’t want him to finish. There’s a waver in his voice and, when I look at him, there are tears in the corner of his eyes.

  I look away. “I shouldn’t have called you. I don’t know why I called you. I wanted to do the opposite of calling you.” I look at my phone like the answer’s there, but it’s not. There’s not any news from my mother, either, no updates on Roger, which I try to believe is a good thing. If he were gone, she’d call right away.

  “I shouldn’t have come over.” Cruz looks at the messy bed that we failed to do much of anything in. “Obviously.”

  In the after with Owen we catnapped and cuddled and made sandwiches downstairs and ate them over the sink or back in bed. Mustard tastes better after sex. Cheese, too. I don’t know what to do in an after where there was no during. My skin is ill fitting and my toes are tingling.

  “I guess we aren’t—I guess it isn’t—this is all—this is usually easier.” They aren’t the right words, but they’re the only ones I have. I almost ask him how it’s been with Charlotte, but I stop myself. I’m jealous of how comfortable she looked naked with Nisha. I want that with Cruz. I want not this. “Maybe it means there’s not love here? So you’re okay?”

  Even Mom and Roger have love in the way they sound in the early mornings.

  We don’t have that. I don’t know what we have.

  “You’ve got it all turned around, Lorna.” He touches my waist, over my shirt. When we were naked his hand felt cool and sticky. Now that tiny touch warms me up.

  My knees shake.

  Something slips into place.

  Cruz still has tears in his eyes. I don’t wipe them. I let them roll.

  “Will you take care of Isla?”

  “Take care of her?” I don’t think anyone would know how to take care of Isla Rodriguez. Not anymore. She’s stopped being a little girl and has become a legend.

  “When I’m gone,” Cruz says. “And my mom. Will you spend time with my mom? She says she likes to be alone, when she’s sad, but she actually really wants to be around people.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” I say. I check my phone again. Still nothing from my mother.

  “I could have five years. I guess I could do a lot in five years. Something meaningful. What could I do that’s meaningful?”

  “Cruz.”

  “My dad wanted to become a teacher. He was going to go back to school. Mom told me that. He was sick of the office job and wanted to do something that mattered and he was really going to do it and then he didn’t and I’m not going to be like that.” Cruz is talking so fast he’s slipping and sliding over the words and all I want is to hold him and kiss him and tell him everything’s going to be okay, except he won’t believe me because I don’t believe me.

  His phone starts ringing.

  “You’d be a good teacher,” I say. He shrugs. His phone keeps ringing. They’ve probably figured out we’re alone together, the neighborhood. They’ve probably realized they’re too late.

  Love isn’t one thing, Dad said, and it was the truest thing he ever said. I’ve been waiting for one thing, but love can be anything.

  I try to count everything I was wrong about: sex and love and my parents’ marriage and the Curse and lavender and my future. I lose track . . . I can’t add it all up.

  I am terrible. I am selfish and small-minded and reckless and filled with hubris.

  Cruz is thinking about something. He paces. “What do you think causes the Bombings? What’s the reason?”
r />   “I—I mean, no one knows,” I say.

  “It’s the question no one’s really asking,” Cruz says. “Who did it? Who killed our fathers?”

  I stay still and silent. There’s no answer. I try to peek out the window, to see how much trouble we might be in, but Cruz blocks my view.

  “Not enough rosemary? Too many mangoes? A cotton shirt instead of a wool one? I mean honestly, Lorna, what did it? A broken mirror or this fucking street or our mothers or the way we think love is safe and we deserve it or someone in another country or an act of God or some Curse from seventy-five years ago? And what will kill me? One of those things, too?” Cruz’s voice booms and he throws his arms in the air at the unfairness of it all, of love, and his angry elbows hit my dresser and knock over photographs of LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla together at seven and nine and thirteen—and last year when we thought we knew everything.

  I look at it all, broken on the ground, unfixable.

  He makes a growling noise, a sound beyond words that I never want to hear again.

  He climbs down the ladder and his phone keeps ringing and mine keeps not-ringing and I follow him and see outside the living room window that people are gathered on the sidewalk outside our building because this is now the way things are.

  “It’s like my funeral’s already begun out there,” Cruz says.

  The word funeral latches on to my skin, makes me ache.

  “They think we—” But it doesn’t matter. I am good at sex. If we’d been able to have sex, maybe it would mean the thing between us was just that.

  If we’d been able to have sex, it would mean we weren’t so afraid.

  Cruz shakes his head.

  “I love you,” he says. “But please don’t say it back.”

  His phone starts ringing again. I look at mine. My mother’s texted:

  Roger’s not doing well.

  34.

  We sleep in the garden. There is red wine from my mother’s stash and a six-pack of beer from Charlotte’s mom’s fridge and a bottle of vodka that Isla has gotten her hands on and no bench to sit on or gather around.