We shook hands. They’d be in touch. I went downstairs to the enormous Starbucks and bought an iced latte. A splurge! I fantasized about drinking iced lattes on my breaks. I took out the giant phone and called Aaron. “How’d it go?” he asked. He was in Florida, visiting his dad. “I have a good feeling,” I said. It was September 10, 2001.
* * *
It was shortly before 9:00 A.M. when my brother Sam called from D.C. Had I seen the news? I sat up in bed. More than a hundred blocks north of the towers, the sky out the window was, as everyone knows, a beautiful blue.
“Where’s Aaron?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Aaron’s in Florida.” I was confused, still half-sleeping. “He’s supposed to be flying back soon.”
“He’s not there?”
“It wasn’t his plane? That’s not why you’re calling?”
“No. It’s not Aaron. Aaron is fine.”
I tried to reach Aaron, again and again, but I couldn’t get through. It wasn’t a busy signal and it wasn’t dead silence. It was a new kind of sound invented on that day.
* * *
The airports reopened and Aaron came home. We lay on our futon bed and held each other. Outside the bedroom window, beyond the fire escape, the leaves were changing in the trees in the neighborhood below.
One night, we were walking home from dinner on Broadway when we came across the 24th Police Precinct. A table was set up outside. Officers were recruiting for the Auxiliary Police Force. All over the city, people were signing up for the NYPD, the FDNY, the Armed Forces. “Hold on,” Aaron said. He walked over and picked up a pamphlet. He gave his name and number to one of the officers. The next day, he received a call. Did he want to begin training? He signed up.
It wasn’t like he was going to fight terrorism on the streets of the Upper West Side. He didn’t even seem to want to. I remembered Aaron’s quiet fury at the police car that had followed us home after our first date. “I fucking hate cops,” is what he’d said. Now he wanted to be one?
“They’re not cops,” he told me. “They’re volunteers. They can’t arrest people. They don’t have guns.”
“That’s even worse!”
“You want me to have a gun?”
“Well, no.” I wondered what it was he felt he needed to fight.
“They’re peacekeepers,” he said. “I want to do something. I want to help.”
* * *
Mornings, I went to the art dealer’s studio in Tribeca, where the dust had been professionally cleared; afternoons, to SoHo, to the Poets & Writers office. Some days I still freelanced at the first magazine, stopping by the Midtown office to pick up bags of letters to answer. I didn’t like to take the subway anymore—it made me panic. So I took three buses to work and three buses back, an hour and a half each way. It was far past dark when I got home.
At Poets & Writers, I loved having my own desk and my own email address, my own lamp that I dusted each evening. I loved the ceiling-high bookshelf full of books. I could see a glimpse of the self I’d hoped would materialize in New York: a self typing in hushed offices with extravagant plants in the windows, talking to people who loved books all day. I was safe from the city there, from all the toxic loss it endured that year, and all the toxic loss in my apartment.
New York likes to mess with you. One fall day after work, as I exited Starbucks drinking an iced coffee (I couldn’t afford a latte), I saw my ex-boyfriend—the poet who had broken my heart in Florida—smoking a cigarette. We exchanged a startled hug. “You live in New York!” we each said. We worked, in fact, in the same building. I pointed upstairs to my office at the magazine. He pointed to the literary nonprofit a floor above. We caught up. “Wow, that’s great,” we said, congratulating each other on how far we’d come since high school, which was another way of congratulating ourselves. We no longer had the same Kurt Cobain haircut, but we had traveled practically parallel paths to find each other standing here on the sidewalk.
If we were in a Lifetime movie, we might have rekindled our romance. But he had made his choice, and I had made mine. The heavy-handed fate of our reunion only made my choice that much starker. I had chosen difference, difficulty, a wild and illogical love. A life with a person whose life was not the mirror image of mine.
* * *
I went to work. Aaron went to his cop class. I hadn’t seen him sign up for anything since he’d tried college four years before. Maybe he wouldn’t finish the course. It was good for him to be out, I reasoned, doing something, keeping busy.
But then sixteen weeks had passed and he hadn’t missed one class, and he was given a certificate and a walkie talkie and a billy club and a blue policemen’s uniform. You had to look closely to see Auxiliary Force lettered on the shield.
Every Monday night that spring, he worked a shift on the Upper West Side, walking Broadway with his partner. Mostly he directed traffic when the lights went out. Mondays were the nights I hosted a writing workshop in our apartment. I was taking the class, not teaching it, but I needed the tuition discount. I had gone down to the Pearl River Market on Canal Street to buy ten pale-blue coffee mugs for $1.99 each. I was playing grown-up in my way, Aaron in his.
My writing teacher would pass Aaron on her walk home, and she’d remark to me how handsome he looked in his blue police uniform, and I’d never felt such pride.
* * *
In the winter, the city started lighting the sky at night, the two white beams shooting up from Ground Zero. I could see them from the Upper West Side, and it filled me and everyone else with a sad chill and a stupid hope and you wished they’d stop doing it and that they’d never stop. It reminded you that you were small and alive.
* * *
Aaron went to Florida, returned. Went to Florida, returned. He was in a kind of purgatory with his dying, not-dying father. I started taking the subway again, and it was boiling down there, that terrible smell of burning trash and baking flesh.
I attended an info session with Aaron, for auxiliary cops who were interested in becoming real cops. There was a procedure for cops who didn’t yet have a college degree. For the NYPD, you had to complete your degree and pass the test before you were thirty-five, and Aaron had just turned thirty.
The procedure involved a lot of very big paperback college textbooks with bland pastel covers. They looked like phone books. It was a kind of home college course. You read the books, you took the tests. Easy! He was pretty sure it was what he wanted to do. He ordered the starter kit: the college textbooks, the practice tests. He stacked them up on the coffee table in our apartment, where they sat, untouched, for weeks. They sat and they sat. I said nothing. I watched them, collecting dust.
They were sitting there one ordinary evening when I came home from work, sweaty, hungry, weighed down with bags, letters and notebooks and groceries I’d hauled on three buses, after three jobs, to find Aaron lying in his familiar position on the couch. A plastic box of his father’s bills sat beside the stack of books. We had been in New York a year and had come so far, and had gone nowhere at all.
“How was your day?” he asked, sitting up. He turned off the TV.
I sat down on the blue couch next to him. There wasn’t much room, but I made it. I was practically on his lap, the couch was so small. I felt crowded and resentful and broke and tired. I replied, for the first time, with sarcasm.
“Great. How was yours?”
“Okay.”
Then I said what had been in my head all those months.
“Looks like it was hard.”
In my voice, he must have heard all the times people had looked at him and thought he had it easy. All the times people had looked at his Range Rover, his waterfront condo, and thought, Must be nice.
He shoved me away from him. Really shoved me. It was the first and only time he shoved me.
“Do you know what it’s like?” he yelled at me. His face had contorted into rage. “Do you know what it’s like!”
�
�What?” I was yelling back at him, but my heart was racing. I really didn’t know what he was talking about. Sitting here on the couch all day?
“Do you know what it’s like to take care of the person who was supposed to take care of you!”
“No! I don’t!”
“To pay all his stupid fucking bills?”
“No!”
“To watch him refuse to die?”
He kicked the stack of books and the box of bills and they sailed across the room and crashed to the floor.
“The person who raised you! Do you know what it’s like to be fucked by the person who raised you?”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said, very quietly.
I was shaking my head. “No,” I said, “no, no, no, no…”
“Yes,” he said. “It was him.”
“No, no, no, no, no,” I was saying.
“Yes,” he was saying, calmer now. “Yes.”
I’d had no idea. It had not occurred to me. I’d thought teacher, rabbi, uncle, coach. I had never, ever thought father.
“No no no no no.” I realized I was hyperventilating with a distant interest: so this is hyperventilating, it’s a real thing. Aaron got me a paper lunch bag from the kitchen and I breathed into it as I’d seen people do in movies. I was sitting on the floor now, and he had his hand on my back, and he was saying, “I’m sorry.” Sorry that I was hyperventilating, sorry he’d yelled at me, sorry he hadn’t told me. “I’m sorry I pushed you,” he said. “That was fucked up,” and I was saying, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I’m sorry.”
We were both crying, and I started to breathe again, and Aaron was telling me the details, what he remembered. It was in the condo. He was twelve or thirteen. Young enough to still sleep sometimes in his father’s bed. It happened while Aaron was sleeping. When he woke up, he asked his father to stop. And his father did.
I kept crying. My hand over my mouth.
There were other times. The memories came back to him in bits and pieces. Mostly he felt the force of not-remembering, his childhood wiped clean.
“I don’t know how many times it happened.”
“Did you ever confront him about it?”
He did. Later, an older teenager, moody, stronger. Passing him in the hall, he had thrown it out in disgust, as he had done just then.
His father had said to him, “Get over it.”
* * *
We talked late into the night. I sat for a long time on the floor, Aaron beside me on the couch, and by the time we had exhausted ourselves and were ready to fall into bed, we had passed through a doorway that we couldn’t go back through, a threshold of horror and understanding, but I didn’t know what would be on the other side.
Over the months, it had been building. Our unspoken fear, anxiety, weariness. We were broke, and broken. New York was breaking us. It was a relief to admit it.
What I wasn’t ready for Aaron to say was that he wanted to leave.
“What do you mean, leave? Where?”
I wasn’t ready. It felt like giving up.
He knelt on the floor, gathering the books and bills he had kicked over. I crawled over to help him.
“Back to Florida.”
I thought of my desk at Poets & Writers, my little patch of ground. My future of book-lined offices, vanishing before my eyes. I couldn’t imagine another future. Imagining another one felt like a death.
I thought of Aaron, a teenager trapped in that terrible condo in Florida, dreaming of the freedom of New York, and now he wanted to go back. Whatever he’d been looking for in returning to New York, he hadn’t found it. It had vanished with Ashmat, with his childhood. And what he’d been trying to fight with his billy club wasn’t in New York.
The condo in Florida sat empty. Rent-free, Aaron said. We could save some money. It would be easier to tend to his father’s affairs there. His father was still alive, alone in the nursing home. I did not want to face him, not ever. I shook my head. It didn’t make any sense.
“How can you want to go back to that place?”
Aaron shrugged. “He’s my Pop,” he said. “It’s home.”
DELTA RAY RADIATION
There’s something wrong with this schizophrenia diagnosis. It’s insufficient, a placeholder. Why is he seeing Dr. Friedlander just once a month, anyway? In April, I go back to the office with him. I’m officially that wife, the one with the little notebook and the giant handbag, the kind that makes almost everyone I meet say, “Wow, that’s a big bag.”
Dr. Friedlander doesn’t say this. We tell her about the trip to the ER, the psych eval. I ask her about schizoaffective disorder. My friend Ursula, whose husband works for McLean Hospital, mentioned it to me. “It’s kind of like schizophrenia meets bipolar? Is that right?”
Dr. Friedlander shakes her head in a way that makes it seem like she’s agreeing with me. “It’s what we call a wastebasket term,” she says. Wastebasket, as in it’s trash, or wastebasket, as in it’s as big as my catch-all handbag?
“What about bipolar disorder then?” I describe the nocturnal circus of his symptoms: a week of sleep, a week of no sleep, depression, mania, again and again and again. “Lately,” I say, “you can set your watch to it.”
She shakes her head, definitively this time. “Bipolar disorder doesn’t work that way,” she says. “Each phase lasts more like six months, not six days.”
She prescribes him Ativan, and we take our leave.
“Fucking Ativan,” Aaron says in the car.
It’s one of the drugs he was on during the bad time. He let it go because he was becoming too dependent, too tolerant, but mostly because it had bad associations.
“What you need is lithium,” I say. “Why will no one prescribe you lithium?!”
As soon as we’re home, I pick up the phone. Screw the no-calling-the-doctor rule. I am done with waiting for him to call. Aaron’s GP, Dr. Das, has left the practice, so I make an appointment with my dad’s new doctor. He looks like a professional golfer. He used six different metaphors to describe what was happening to my dad’s blood pressure, squeezing hoses, stopping traffic jams, as animated as a kid in a school play. He adjusted my dad’s meds in five minutes and by the next day my dad had more energy than I’d seen in months. “You gotta see this guy,” I said to Aaron. “I think my dad is in love.”
Aaron says he’ll see him. He’ll try the lithium. He’ll try anything.
The day of the appointment, I come home just in time to pick up Aaron and meet the school bus. Nico will stay with my dad while we pick up Henry from reading club and then go to Aaron’s appointment. He’s waiting on the deck, dressed and ready, but as he walks to the car, he is unsteady, lumbering. We wait in the driveway for Nico’s bus.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m great,” he says, goofy smile, but he can barely keep his eyes open.
“Did you take an Ativan already?”
“Yes. Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe two.”
“Aaron! Two? I’m supposed to be dosing you.”
“Where’s this fucking bus?”
“That was your idea. I would control the meds. I don’t want to control the meds. But clearly I need to control the meds.”
“I needed it. I was anxious.”
“Where is this bus?”
“There’s cops out there,” he slurs.
“Where?”
“There.” Traffic is heavy and slow down the road, and through the trees I do see flashing lights.
“I think that’s construction.”
“It’s cops. They’re always fucking things up.”
“There are no cops, Aaron.”
“Wanna know why all cops are such dicks? ’Cause they all got fucked.”
“Stop it.”
“I wanted to be a cop,” he says into his lap.
“Yeah, I know.”
“I’d make a terrible cop.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Cops all got CORNHOLED BY THEIR DADS!” he yells to the closed window.
“Jesus, Aaron. Are you drunk?”
It’s two forty in the afternoon.
“Not drunk.”
“Did you have a drink?”
“Yes. Maybe.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
And then here is the bus—there the bus goes—past our driveway. Then it screeches to a halt. Nico hops out and has to cut through the ditch at the edge of the yard. “Stay here,” I say to his father, and climb out of the car to greet him. It’s a sub, I see. I wave to the driver who is not Harold. At least I think that’s his name. Last week I yelled at him, waving Mom-style, “Thanks, Harvey!” and Nico, mortified, watching the whole bus watching us, whispered, “Mom, his name is Harold.”
I get Nico settled inside with his grandfather, and then rage-drive down the road to town. Aaron is practically asleep in the passenger’s seat. “I can’t believe you got drunk in the middle of the day. How much did you drink?”
“Whatever was in the fridge.”
“That bottle of wine?”
“Maybe.”
“The whole bottle?”
“I don’t remember,” he says, eyes closed.
“Fucking hell.” I dial the number to the doctor’s office while I drive.
“What are you doing?”
“Canceling your appointment. What a fucking waste.”
“Why?”
“I can’t take you there like this! You’re barely conscious.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re unbelievable, is what you are.”
Then he begins to vomit on himself. On his shirt, on his seatbelt, on the dashboard.
I stop at a red light. He opens the door, vomits on the street. Like one of the college kids in this neighborhood. Then the light turns green and I drive. He vomits on himself some more. I pull over into the parking lot of the abandoned power plant. He opens the door and vomits some more. Afternoon traffic is swimming steadily up the hill. I turn the car so he’s facing away from the street. He vomits for a long time. He’s leaning far out of the car. His ass is hanging out of his jeans. With one hand I’m covering my face. With the other I’m holding the back of his jacket. And then he falls out of the car onto the ground.
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