The Opposite of Love

by Julie Buxbaum

  “I love you, Andrew,” I say. “I love how you laugh in your sleep. Who laughs in their fucking sleep? It is the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. And it’s you. There are six billion people in this world, and granted, a lot of them are babies and women and men who don’t speak English and people I haven’t met, but that’s not the point, is it? It’s you. That’s the point. That’s not complicated. We can pretend like it is, but it’s not. At the end of the day, I can’t walk away from that. I am not afraid anymore. Okay, that’s a lie. I’m still scared shitless, but I won’t let the fear hold me back. I can’t and I won’t.” I say it like it’s final, like I have made a decision for both of us, though I know that’s not true. This doesn’t work without him.

  “I laugh in my sleep?” he asks, and puts his hands on both sides of my face.

  “Yeah,” I say. “You didn’t know that?”

  “Nope, I didn’t.” He moves his face in closer, as if he is trying to get a better look at me.

  “You do. A lot. It’s not normal.”

  “There are six billion people in the world?”

  “Maybe closer to seven.”

  “You cry in your sleep,” he says. “That’s not normal either.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, you do. It’s the saddest sound I’ve ever heard.” He leans in an inch more. His hands still rest lightly on my cheeks, and he kisses me on the forehead. I close my eyes and memorize the kiss.

  “But I’m not going to lie. It’s not beautiful when you do it. Not at all. It’s heartbreaking. Please, please stop doing that,” he says, and then kisses my cheek. I don’t want to look at him. I don’t want to see if this is his way of saying Let’s be friends.

  He doesn’t stop, though. He kisses the tip of my nose. My eyelids. My forehead again. He moves in slow motion, deliberately, as if each kiss is a conscious decision. A word that he wants to articulate just right.

  Andrew takes my hands in his and kisses my fingertips, lightly dusting them with tingles. Kiss me for real, I want to scream, but I don’t. I can wait for as long as it takes.

  Instead, I take back my hands, kiss my fingertips again, and touch them to the grooves at the corners of his eyes. I trace them slowly, noticing where the lines crisscross, trying to decide if the pattern was different the last time I was this close to them. They feel deeper somehow, as if they have recently set.

  “Look at me,” Andrew says, and I look him directly in the eyes. The world goes quiet again. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.

  “I’m sure,” I say again, loudly, to make him hear me, to make me hear me. A tear sneaks out of the corner of my eye, and Andrew catches it with a kiss. “Are you sure?”

  Andrew doesn’t answer me, though. Instead, he brushes his lips against mine, a whisper of a kiss. He kisses me again, this time harder, and I kiss him back hungrily. The kiss is a promise. A vow. A declaratory sentence.

  Later, when we are naked in his bed, we lie facing each other. Our limbs are tangled, stitched together, like a zipper. It is here, within the safe confines of the gray duvet cover, where it is warm and soft, that Andrew and I begin to talk.

  “I don’t want to go back to the way things were,” he says, and tucks a stray hair behind my ear.

  “Me neither.” I trace my fingers up and down his arms. I draw balloons, and hearts, and circles.

  “I’m serious. We can’t just pick up where we left off. I’m not going to do it.”

  “I know. That’s not what I want. I want a do-over. Can we still get do-overs as adults? Is it possible, you think?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either.” I shrug. Andrew kisses my bare shoulder. “But I want to try.”

  “Me too.”

  “Really?” I ask, even though we are already naked, and it seems like that decision has been made. But I want to hear him say it again.

  “Really,” he says, and I savor the word. I feel like I can pluck it out of the air. Really.

  “I need to know your thoughts on Brooklyn.”

  “Brooklyn?”

  “Yeah, Brooklyn. Or maybe Queens.”

  “Cheaper rent.”

  “More space.”

  “Might be nice.”

  “Really?”

  “We could get a dog.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I have always wanted a dog.”

  “Why?”

  “Unconditional love,” he says.

  A little while later, we have moved our heads under the covers. Andrew’s bed is now like a tent, and we whisper with the reverence of ten-year-old campers.

  “Grandpa Jack told me to wait for you,” he says.

  “Huh?”

  “When I went to visit him. I didn’t think he recognized me, but while we were playing poker, he stopped the game out of nowhere. He told me to wait for you. That’s all he said. ‘Wait for her.’ And then he went right back to playing.”

  “He said that? What did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I just went back to playing. It didn’t really matter, though. Even though I didn’t want to or would never admit it, I was already waiting.”

  “I have to say something to you right now, but please don’t say anything back. Not yet, okay?” I say.

  “Okay.”

  “I love you.”

  Andrew doesn’t say anything, and I am glad the words aren’t reduced to an echo. I don’t want them to bounce off the walls and back at me. Instead, I want to wait until we are heavier, more rooted. It’s my turn to wait.

  I cuddle up next to Andrew and press my body even closer to his, to erase any seam. This is as near as I can get to what I really want. I wish I could eat him, maybe start with his fingertips, so that he can share my skin and become part of my insides. I want to mix our blood, to fill myself up with the double helixes of his DNA, to make us one whole. One being.

  I want us to have three spare kidneys. I want us to have a spare heart.

  Thirty-eight

  Today I am a superhero, dressed as a lawyer, dressed as a superhero. Ready to save the world. I am put back together again. Better than Humpty Dumpty. Reassembled. Sleeker.

  Better to play it down, though, not kick open the door with a dramatic Help has arrived! No, sir. I will walk in, shake the interviewer’s hand, and woo him and all of Legal Aid with my sharp legal skills and analytical mind. I will mention Yale Law School. I will exaggerate my experience. I will. Get. The. Job.

  I have psyched myself up. Drank multiple cups of coffee from my Wonder Woman mug. Used expensive exfoliating body wash. Shaved my legs. Did not miss my ankles. Did not skip my knees. I have pored over the Legal Aid Web site and memorized its mission statement. That mission has become mine. Andrew practice-interviewed me for hours, made me wear my “SuuuperLawyer” suit for the boost of confidence. I am ready as I will ever be. Here is my shot.

  “Ms. Haxby, Barry is ready for you,” the receptionist says, and leads me down a narrow corridor of gray industrial carpet, set off from a maze of half-walled cubicles. This place is the opposite of APT. No shiny nameplates, no frosted glass, no marble. Definitely no window washers. Instead, there is Formica, and cheap metal filing cabinets (hand labeled), and makeshift doors. It is perfect.

  “Barry Stein, nicetomeetcha,” says a woman with a frizz of black hair and thick appendages.

  “Emily Haxby,” I say, and try to hide my shock that Barry Stein is a woman, which means if I work here, my boss would be a woman, which means my boss would not stare at my cleavage and would in no way resemble Carl. This place rocks.

  “So, tell me about your public-interest experience.”

  “Well, I don’t have much. I spent the last five years at a large law firm, so…”

  “How about pro bono cases?”

  “Not really. No. There were these billable-hour targets, and never enough time…” Emily, get it together. Don’t blow this.

  “But you have litigation experi
ence, right?”

  “Yes, absolutely. I am very experienced. I am a very experienced litigator.”

  “Have you ever been to trial?”

  “Yes.” No.

  “Made an opening statement?”

  “Yes.” No.

  “Cross-examined a witness?”

  “Yes.” No.

  “Sat first chair?”

  “Yes.” No.

  “What kinds of cases?”

  “Uh, usually for smaller matters. The partners like to sit first chair on the larger stuff. A few insurance cases, some real estate. I don’t want to bore you with the details.”

  “You won’t bore me.”

  “No, seriously, it’s very dry stuff. Insurance, reinsurance, subordination of claims, nonmutual offensive collateral estoppel, carpe diem, anti-enterprise immunity doctrine, ERISA, perfected security interests.”

  “Carpe diem?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You just said carpe diem. What did you mean?”

  “I didn’t say carpe diem.”

  “Oh, I thought you said carpe diem.”

  “Haha. No, you must have misheard me. Carpe diem! That’s very funny.”

  “I guess.”

  “Seize the day, and here I am seizing the day.” Emily, shut up. Just shut up.

  “Are you a little nervous?”

  “Yeah, sorry. It’s just this is a really great opportunity—”

  “So you’re not on drugs, then?”

  “Drugs? No.”

  “Good. It seemed like you may be.”

  “No. Absolutely not. I am way too uptight for drugs. Think I went overboard with the coffee this morning, though.”

  “That explains the leg.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your leg. It keeps jiggling up and down.”

  “Too much coffee.”

  “Right.”

  “Right.”

  “So here’s the thing. You come with great references, Yale Law School, you worked at one of the most reputable law firms in the country, yada, yada, yada. You are a bit weird, but lucky for you, I like weird.”

  “You do? I mean, thank you.”

  “So let me tell you about the job.”

  “Okay.”

  “Basically, we are looking for a staff attorney for our family-law unit. So you would be doing intake, working on adoption issues, custody, divorce, that sort of stuff. We do a lot of work on behalf of battered women, temporary restraining orders and the like, which is actually why I am here over the holidays. Our caseload always skyrockets during Christmastime. For some reason, husbands like to beat the crap out of their wives during the holidays. Seconded only by the Super Bowl.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Sick, right? We need people who are aggressive, who can give a voice to the voiceless, a platform for the disempowered. We need people who are not afraid to speak up.”

  “That’s totally me. You just described me. I always speak up.”

  “Okay, I have one final question for you. Why? Why are you here? Not in an existential way. Why do you want the job?”

  “Because if I am going to spend at least seventy-five percent of my waking hours doing something, I want that something to have meaning. I am tired of wasting my time. I am starting to realize that I want my life to matter in every way that it can.”

  “Finally, a perfect answer. When can you start?”

  “You are offering me the job?”

  “Yeah, I think I am. Truth is, we are desperate for help. So, do you want it? The job?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  I want to kiss Barry Stein flat on her strawberry-colored mouth or throw my arms around her fleshy neck. I want to say thank-you, you-won’t-regret-this, I-will-be-the-best-lawyer-that-you-have-ever-hired, you-won’t-regret-this, did-I-say-that-already? But instead, I shake her hand in a firm and professional manner, arrange to start the week after next, and walk back down the carpeted hallway. A confident swagger. I wait until I am four blocks away to put my hands together in front of my head. To run quickly down the street. To simulate flying. To sing the words “SuuuperLawyer.”

  Thirty-nine

  This is where it ends. Right here, on the constant-care floor of the Riverdale Retirement Home. We are ready. Or prepared, because you can never really be ready, can you? You can have the doctors spell it out, say “It’s time,” like these words mean something. You can be nervous, and braced, and have practiced in your head. But you can’t be ready. If you think you can, you’re kidding yourself. Because later, when you go to the movies, you’ll think, Grandpa Jack would have liked this film. And when you have a problem you don’t know how to solve, you’ll think, Grandpa Jack would have known what to do. And when you stand at the altar in a white dress and pledge your life to someone else, you’ll think, Grandpa Jack should be here to see this. For a long, long time, maybe even forever, it’s going to hurt like hell.

  When this day is done, after someone takes a shovel to my insides, I will have no choice but to attempt to regenerate my lost parts. And because he is old, and because he is ready, and because this is the natural order of things, I am okay with that.

  Grandpa Jack lies in the middle of the bed. My dad and I each sit on one side of him, taking our usual places. We have been here almost every day since Christmas and have our routine down by now; I sit on the right, my dad sits on the left. Andrew stops by when he can, hops on a train in between his shifts, and explains all of the gadgetry. What is dripping into the tubes attached to my grandfather’s forearms, why the doctors keep drawing blood when there seems like there can’t be any more left, who are all these specialists in white coats with clipboards. When we feel like we could be comforted by more cold, hard facts, we turn to Andrew, and he dutifully gives us our fix.

  Grandpa Jack keeps on shrinking in the space between my father and me, and I wonder if this is the way he will go. Maybe his molecules will disintegrate right before our eyes until he is just a small pile of matter on the soiled hospital sheets. Or maybe he will implode, spiraling toward an invisible vortex. Maybe he will blow away, like a pile of paper in the wind.

  For the past couple of hours, since Andrew left to go back to work, Grandpa Jack has slipped in and out of consciousness. He hasn’t spoken much. When he does, it looks like talking hurts.

  “I brought you a present, Grandpa Jack,” I say, when the nurses stop coming in to check on him, like he has died before he has died. I reach into my bag and take out my tiara. My grandfather smiles at me and motions for me to put it on his head. I balance the tiara on his white tufts of hair, and he transforms into an infant prince. Shriveled, regal, and unafraid.

  “Thanks. Kid. Love. It.” Each word feels like a victory.

  Without asking, I take his newsboy cap that has been sitting on the window ledge and put it on my head. It is mine now. I don’t need something tangible like this to hold on to Grandpa Jack, but I allow myself the additional comfort nonetheless. I pull the cap down low on my forehead.

  My dad looks at his father in bed in a tiara and hospital gown and lets out a noise, halfway between a laugh and a sob. It sounds like the click of a camera, and I imagine both of us mentally taking pictures of Grandpa Jack as fast as we can. We will remember you. In a tiara and a gown, maybe, but we will remember.

  It is our turn now to wait for Grandpa Jack. We talk to him while he is awake, tell stories from the small trove of family recyclables that gets pulled out from time to time. We try to include my grandmother and my mother in the recounting, so that Grandpa Jack can think about going to them as opposed to away from us. I still don’t believe that’s how it works, but at times like these, it doesn’t really matter what you believe.

  We stroke Grandpa Jack’s hand, which looks exactly like ours, except shot through with blue and brown spots. Every once in a while we squeeze to remind him that we are here. That he is not alone.

  “Remember, Grandpa, when I broke my arm that time in fifth grade and you to
ok me to the hospital? Remember?” I ask, though my question is rhetorical. It’s not important now whether he remembers. I just want him to hear my voice.

  My dad nods at the story, as if he remembers too even though he wasn’t there. Tears spill from his eyes, they march one by one down his face, and he wipes them with his sleeve.

  “I should have listened to you more, Pop. I should have come here more.” My dad rests his forehead against Grandpa Jack’s hands.

  His body is bent in the shape of an apology.

  My father and I are talking in that way young children do, without the back and forth of dialogue, off on our own parallel tracks.

  “Remember when you visited me in Rome during my semester abroad? You said you came because my voice sounded lonely—”

  “Don’t worry, I found that will you asked me to look for. Right where you said it was. Under the kitchen sink on the left—”

  “We went to that restaurant that’s supposed to have the best pasta in the whole world. And we ate so much we felt a little sick afterward. Remember—”

  “And the arrangements will be exactly the way you asked. Promise—”

  “Remember when you chaperoned that school trip to the Museum of Natural History, and my teacher got mad at you for not using ‘child friendly’ language? We laughed so hard afterward, almost peed in our pants, picturing you writing on the blackboard I will not say damn in front of children a hundred times. And that became our inside joke. I will not say damn in front of children—”

  “I know we didn’t always see eye to eye, Pop, but—”

  “You whispered it to me just before my mom’s funeral. ‘I will not say damn in front of children.’ You always just got exactly what I needed. Oh, God, it still makes me giggle. Even now, sitting here with you like this—”

  “I’m sorry. You don’t know how sorry I am—”

  From time to time, I whisper in Grandpa Jack’s ear, so only he can hear me say the things I haven’t had a chance to let him know.