The Narrow Door

by Paul Lisicky

  We have three days. We talk about work, as usual: the colleagues and friends who drive Denise nuts. We walk down the boardwalks and point to houses we like. Interestingly, Denise points to the single, traditional Cape Cod house among the hundreds of modern houses as her favorite, which puzzles me, but not enough to ask her about it, to make a big deal out of it. I don’t know what she sees in that house that she doesn’t see in the sleek wooden boxes surrounding it. We walk on the beach and look out at the cold, hard sea. I even tell her I’m going to write for two hours every day, which I do. I close the bedroom door, perch my laptop on my legs, and push a new novel just a few sentences ahead into the next scene, into time. It feels like an achievement to ask for this time alone, even though she’s just a few feet on the other side of the wall. I’m still prone to her big shimmering aura, but I need some space of my own. It will be good for me, I tell her. It will be good for you. So we honor the plan. I write, while she sits curled up on her bed, in the stream of the heating vent, marking up student stories in red.

  The best thing, though: we cook. Or at least I initiate the cooking. I’m not sure Denise knows how little I know about cooking, but I fake it as if my life depended on it, the way I faked typing with ten fingers rather than two, and did it instantly when I worked as a technical writer in my twenties. I cut tomatoes and peppers for the salad. She stirs the sauce on the stove. And soon our cooking is a fifty-fifty thing, and the fact that we can move, without bumping or getting in each other’s way, seems like a beautiful thing. Denise sways side to side, then back and forth, holding up a hand as the music plays on the sound system. She’ll talk about this night until the end of her life, not about the food we made, not exactly. That wasn’t the point. The point was that we cooked together, and there was no better sign, for her at least, of two people’s connection.

  M writes and calls from Houston to see how we’re doing. He is glad we’re having a good time. I am happy to hear from him, even though the weekend is only about Denise and me. Our time, our space—we haven’t had much time alone since the earliest days of our friendship. Always another boyfriend, partner, husband, friend to pull one of us away from the other.

  On Sunday morning a windstorm slams up the coast. No rain, but the gusts shake the house on its posts. They whistle through the sliding glass window frames; they tear leaves from birches, holly, sassafras, shadbush. And that strange sound from outside: is that really the sound of the ocean from a block away? Denise packs—her coffee, her coffee pot, her papers, her clothes: all of it pushed inside her suitcase. She pulls the rolling suitcase down the boardwalk to the ferry; I walk beside her. We lower our heads and use the tops of our heads to push forward into that wind, to stop the sand from blowing in our eyes. A trash can lid lifts up and flies onto the boardwalk and miraculously flies back onto the can, just missing us. A doe leaps across the boardwalk as if looking for a place to cover herself. And just when we think it couldn’t get any windier, it does get windier. Here we are, the two of us, walking west through what appears to be a hurricane so harsh it doesn’t have moisture.

  Yet no one’s waiting for the boat to pull in to the dock. All morning ferries canceled, says a guy standing under the shelter. I can’t but take in the concern in Denise’s eyes, the pulling in of her lips. I must have some version of that look on my face, too. We’ve been so good, we’ve had the ideal weekend, the weekend that took back, reversed, retrieved the awful weekend in North Carolina. We’ve engraved a shape. We’ve built a story we’ll want to remember, and now we’re left with time on our hands, an endless coda to the song that will probably go on and on till it wears out its welcome. Imagine all those great songs from the sixties ruined by the fucking coda that will not stop.

  We walk back to the house uneasily. Surely Denise will explode at any minute. She can feel it, I can feel it, and I don’t see how we’re going to deal with that eruption out on this desert island, even though Islip, Long Island, is in sight across the bay.

  We walk back to the house. The pine boughs thrash. The backs of our necks are cold. We try to mask our disappointment from each other. We go in the house, sit in the living room. We pitch ourselves on the edge of the couch, wary of giving ourselves over to the cushions, cautious of settling in.

  Three hours later the boats are running. Good-bye to our tense afternoon, good-bye to the perfect weekend that preceded it, good-bye to the dry hurricane, which has since moved eastward to Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard, and in the process scrubbed the wood siding on the houses clean. We’re standing in winter now. Even the air has a cleansed bite to it.

  We hug each other, completely unguarded now. We look into each other’s face. We kiss each other, not aiming for the cheek, as we usually do, but for the mouth. I watch her walk on the boat, which is alarmingly overcrowded, enough passengers and cargo for five boats—people standing inside, people standing shoulder to shoulder. I don’t see how that ferry will make it across the choppy bay without taking on water through its openings. She waves as she steps inside, that big grin turned to me once again. Then I can’t see her anymore through the fog on the windows. An hour later she sends a text. I’m on the train back to the city. I sat between two great big guys on the boat, they were so nice to me. Thank you so much for the perfect weekend.

  Romance and Betrayal and Fucking

  2010 | M is beside me, on his back, breathing in regular, steady intervals, none of the deep ragged snoring of recent weeks. I can’t keep my eyes off the window—it is a completely dark window. The days are longest right now, the first birds singing at 4 a.m. I want morning, just so I can get myself out of bed. I want to move around. I want to put on my shoes and pants, before more bombs start falling through the roof. The comparison is overblown. It’s inappropriate, inexact, I know that, but I suddenly understand the value of routine: the washing of the shirts and the pants, as the air raid siren rises in a wail.

  Though it is dark in the room, it is startling how much I see. In an earlier life, I’d have been lying on the carpet, just like I did after the night I broke up with Eric, my ex. But I am much stronger now for these months of grief, for having worked on this book. This book, walking me through the days, Sunday through Saturday, and a full paragraph comes to me, almost unbidden as a religious text. I say it over and over, so that when I speak it to M in the morning, he might see who I am.

  I’ve never made my map—that is the heart of what I want to say to him. I’ve looked at the plan handed to me; I’ve looked to see how I can make room inside that plan. My parents are a part of this, how they carried out their lives together. They lived as if expecting the other half to make the plan, and when there was no plan, they couldn’t tell who they were to each other, where one ended and the other began.

  By 7 a.m. I am out in the living room, in the butterfly chair, pretending to look at the news on my laptop, though nothing is catching my attention. M walks out into the living room, rubbing his face with one hand. We half-look at each other and say good morning. You’d never know he’d gotten a full night’s sleep. He walks to the kitchen for a glass of water and the coffee pot, and I tell him we need to talk.

  It is perhaps unfair to begin the day like this, but I don’t know any other way. He sits calmly. I say, I cannot submit to this plan for my good, for his good. I know I say it again. I’m not sure if he’s able to hear me. His eyes look a little hazy, as if he’s still dreaming. At some point, I move over to the couch with him. He is behind me—am I leaning back into his bare chest? I am asking him all the questions I wasn’t in right enough mind to ask the day before. I am hearing things that are the hardest things to hear, but I am taking it. But one thing gets to me, and now, unlike yesterday, I am the one sobbing and shaking. Yes, he’s still holding me tight, but I feel myself moving away from him. I feel my body moving out through the open window, up through the trees, into safety and light. He even says it himself: “I feel you moving away from me.” I am aware that my crying can probably be heard outside t
he window. I don’t know why I should be concerned about the sound of my crying out the window, but there it is. Maybe it is easier to think about the neighbors and how they might be hearing what they’re hearing, than it is to think about myself.

  The aperture of the morning widens. Who knows how much time has passed?

  Somehow our bodies have shifted on the couch. Then M’s head is on my lap, my hand over his heart, his warm heart. Four lines come out of his mouth with no connection to one another. A bottoming out, a cold zone.

  —My heart is broken.

  —I want to be buried in sand.

  As for the other two? I forget them as soon as they’re spoken.

  My protector. My protected. My badge. My torch. My fugitive. My furnace. My doorway. My duty. My desert. My daystar. My well. My harbor. My wave. My promontory. My marshland. My dune. My plainsong. My psalm. My fascicle. My dictionary. My archive. My tower. My giant. My thunderclap. My spine. My rivering. My sprawl. My signet. My scarf. My fly-by-night. My bankruptcy. My secrecy. My greening. My saltwater. My howling. My yellow room.

  2006 | A month and a half after her visit to Fire Island, Denise stops at her parents’ condo in Mount Laurel after teaching. It’s their usual night for dinner. Maybe Denise has picked up some peppers for a salad from Wegmans, some cherry tomatoes. She has a hunch. She can feel it as she walks up the sidewalk, looks up at the knot in the wood siding. She can feel it even before she slips the key in the lock. Was that pot of flowers there the last time she was here? And on the other side of the door: her stunned mother, too stunned yet for weeping. Only dry sounds come out. Her father in the bathroom—a heart attack, a CVA. No surprise, her father has not been well in years, and yet it is always a surprise when a father dies. Immediately Denise springs forward, she does all the things she was taught in nursing school all those years ago. She feels for his pulse, puts a hand to his head. Later they’ll find out that he couldn’t have been gone more than five minutes.

  The email Denise sends later that night is crisp and austere, no embellishment, a state-of-shock note.

  A pact is sealed between us. The time is here, the time we’ve been afraid of all our lives, our parents passing out of the world, and we don’t know what’s next. Will it be my father, falling facedown on the sidewalk as tourist traffic passes him by? My mother, walking down six flights of stairs out the door into oncoming cars, thinking Mother is on the other side of the road? Or Denise’s mother, still vital, funny, worried, and beautiful after all these years? Of course it has always been the work of children to lead their parents out of this world, but we don’t know whether we’ll do it well or not. Our loved ones: will they suffer in our stead—who can say? We can go through all the requisite rituals. We can say all the right things, but there’s the furious child inside us that says parents aren’t supposed to die. Parents are supposed to take care of us, they’re supposed to be there for us. They’re supposed to be teaching us how to ride our bikes, to finish our math homework. They are not supposed to be leaving us behind to this cold, indifferent world.

  I take the train down to Philadelphia after the intensity around the funeral settles. Once I step into her apartment, we make little mention of what she’s been through, the family tensions, the compromises, the confusions. Those matters will not be the subject of our day. Instead, we eat dark toast with blackberry preserves. Instead, we drink coffee. We talk and we laugh. Then we head to Macy’s in order to redeem a gift card. But before we go to Macy’s we walk down Walnut and Chestnut; we wander through Diesel and West Elm. We could not care less about buying what’s on the display, the sleek sofas with putty-colored cushions, the raw denim folded on display tables. We’re making everyday life happen again, which feels like no small thing given the past few weeks.

  I walk through an entire day with her. At one point, while she’s picking up and trying on shoes, she stops as if she is looking at a door just beyond the dressing room curtain. One of her eyes fills up just a bit. Then she puts the shoe back down, turns to look me in the face, and asks in the plainest voice if I’d like to have lunch.

  2010 | Braunwyn is taking me to Cape May.

  One gift of the past few months is my friendship with the woman I’ll call Braunwyn. Braunwyn is a fiction writer whose work I’ve known and admired a long time. She teaches at the school where I’ve been a visiting writer. She grew up on the Main Line, across the river from Cherry Hill. Her husband’s relatives live in Cherry Hill. Philadelphia, Cape May—that is our glue. It seems almost uncanny that she is the same age as Denise. She’s light, where Denise was dark. She comes from a wealthy family. Like me, she likes to talk and laugh, to analyze people. She values closeness, so that when we spend a day together it feels as if we’ve stepped into a safe tight circle, where everyone outside that circle disappears.

  Friendship feels a little light a word for what we are to each other. Brother and sister? That doesn’t seem right, either. Boyfriend and girlfriend? Twins? In truth we are a little in love with each other, and we’re able to talk about what all that might mean. Can there be love without the bodily expression of it? Can one put one’s arm around another without persuasion, expectation? Where does it stop? Where should it stop? These are the kinds of questions I’ve never found language for before, and it is both compelling and unsettling to talk about things that have always batted around the room, never to come out from behind the furniture.

  At some points I imagine Denise watching Braunwyn and me. There she is, across the room from us, in a chair, invisible, purified of envy.

  At other points I wonder if she is fuming mad, kicking over the armchairs in the room next door, smashing the good lamps.

  Braunwyn and I are heading down the Garden State Parkway, through the marsh of Leonardo Harbor. It is the first outpost of green, active and glistening, past the hard, chemical strip between Newark and Woodbridge. We are going to Cape May overnight because I cannot bear any more thoughts of home right now. Or more accurately, I can’t bear the thought of S being in the apartment with M while I’m by myself in Springs. One of the beauties of Springs is the deep night, the spray of stars over the trees. No streetlights, few houselights, the sound of ocean carried across farmland and forest. The quiet can calm you when your nerves are jangled from too much city, all the worries about money, all the fears that you’re using movement and overwork to run away from your life. But that quiet can also kill you if you let your mind wander off into it. That might have happened to the woman who killed herself in the house behind ours last Christmas Eve. Sleeping pills, a plastic bag over her head. A cop next morning comes to the front door to ask if we “saw anything.” Why? we say. There was an “incident” out back last night. And that’s where the cop stops.

  I believe Braunwyn and I present a curious picture to the women behind the registration desk. Two rooms, two people, a man and a woman who like each other, but two rooms. Perhaps we seem very quaint and old school, asking for separate rooms. Perhaps that is why the ladies are extra nice to us. They appear to make mistakes with the billing just so they’ll get to hang out with us a little while longer. I don’t think they are used to people being nice to them, and we enjoy being nice, spreading it back and forth until it feels like the four of us have eaten too much candy.

  We walk the boardwalk. We stop for ice cream, which drips down the side of the cones before they’re even in our hands. The summer is as hot as it’s been in eleven years, and even though we’re two hundred feet from the sea, we need air-conditioning. The pale-yellow Congress Hall is up ahead, and we cross Beach Drive, walk past the hydrangeas and the lavender, underneath the portico. I decide to show Braunwyn the old photograph I’d seen with M earlier this winter. It is still in the same place, along the darkish passageway between a sitting room and the main hall. If anything, the passageway looks even darker in summer than it did in winter, what with all the brilliant sun outside.

  My guess is that no one has looked at this picture since M and I looked at it
six months back. We point out the various characters, their postures toward one another, whether they’re alone or in a group. Point out the people we’re drawn to, those who might be a little full of themselves. We wonder how the picture was taken—how could any lens be so wide? Maybe it was done over time, which would explain the bleached-out strip at the center. To me it is a picture about death, about people presenting themselves in the face of death. Not that they were necessarily thinking about any of that, but the participants know this is serious business, despite the casual air. They can already imagine the faces looking back at them, interpreting them.

  After some time on the porch with coffee (sex, sex: do we ever not talk about the mysteries of sex?) we’re on the way back to our hotel. Just as we cross Pittsburgh Avenue, Braunwyn’s shoe catches on a buckle in the pavement. Her fall happens in slow motion. It looks as if she will catch herself, and she clearly thinks she will, too, but then she hears herself say, oh no. She bangs the pavement. My initial impulse, before I give her my arm, is to radiate supreme calm, not just for the others around us, but for Braunwyn, who must feel vulnerable and embarrassed. As if the worst thing in the world were to be embarrassed, on an early summer night, in Cape May.

  I can’t say what my outward actions are, but there are people around, and I know I must build a protective bubble around us to keep those people away. Braunwyn is standing, and we are looking at her hand, which looks scraped and torn, but isn’t swollen—at least not yet.

  We take our first tentative steps to the motel when a woman calls out behind us. The voice has an intensity that you don’t hear much of in public anymore. “Sir, sir!” the voice cries.