Aimee was giving him a suspicious look — still psychoanalyzing him, if Ebon had to guess.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What, Aimee?”
“Maybe you’re just happier here because you’re away from all that ‘Holly stuff.’”
“So what?”
“Well, again, I don’t know how healthy that is. You can’t just run away.”
“Why does it have to be about running?” Ebon looked around the bunk room, out the window, out at the blue bay shimmering in the late-day sunshine. “You’ve lived here all your life. It doesn’t cost much to live on Aaron.” Ebon considered working out the economics of paying Aimee rent for living with her (or possibly just mooching, since both of her places were paid for), but it felt too intimate. “I could get a cheap place. I could work in your flower shop.”
She laughed.
“Again: what?” He felt vaguely annoyed. Aimee was always like this, always slightly condescending even when she was trying her psychotherapeutic best to behave. She laughed at him first and told him what she was thinking second. That way, she could get her dig in but still come out on top as she always had.
“You can’t have a flower shop on an island!”
“You’ve had one forever!” said Ebon, refusing to relent on one bit of Aimee miscellany he knew for sure. “Your grandparents’ place, on Main!”
Aimee rolled her eyes. “I’ve been blabbing on at you about flowers for almost twenty years now, Ebon. How the hell can you still be this dense? The Stalk Market barely survived even back then, when they were farming local flowers and rolling the dice on big summer seasons in order to stagger through the winter. Don’t you remember my whole thing with trying to resurrect the shop after I moved out of Dad’s place?”
“Sure,” said Ebon, not remembering at all.
“And do you remember my whole rant about refrigeration and shipping costs and the charges dumped on me by the ferry once I realized I’d need to expand beyond a few summer weddings to survive? Do you remember the debacle with the Ecuadorian farms, and how I was losing three extra days with all the back and forth and shortening their shelf life dramatically, and the only way to even make it go was to order my stems from Dole?”
“The pineapple company?”
Aimee slapped him on the leg. “Don’t you listen at all?”
“Of course,” said Ebon, wondering if Dole was obviously good or obviously bad. It was clearly one of the two, but reading Aimee’s letters (and, later, emails) was an endurance sport. He’d skimmed past most parts, including and especially her long-winded diatribes having to do with the flower business.
“And?” she said, waiting.
There was a pause. Then Ebon said, “I like pineapple.”
“The Stalk Market is closed, dummy,” she said. “For almost ten years now. But if you’d like me to check, maybe the doll shop that’s in the building now is hiring.”
“Well, why not? Or I could work in the liquor store. Or at the co-op. Whatever. Just enough to earn rent. Enough to keep me on the treadmill. I don’t need fancy ‘things’ anymore. Holly wanted expensive stuff, because her makeup clients were all rich and fancy and she got this taste for ‘the finer things in life.’ But I don’t need or want it. Give me a chair to set by the ocean and a beach to walk on. Give me a roof and a microwave and a budget for food. That’s all I need.”
Aimee was still looking at him.
“Jesus Fucking Christ, Aimee. Just say what you’re thinking!”
“I just get this feeling that you’re not Owning Your Shit. That you’re avoiding facing reality.”
Ebon reached over and tapped Holly’s diary. “Reality. Faced.”
“You’re just angry.”
“Haven’t we already gone through this?”
“Maybe it’s not that you don’t want your old apartment. Maybe it’s just that being in it reminds you of her.”
“Sure. It does.”
“Eventually you have to go back. You have to do the hard work of clearing out your old life before you can expect to start a new one.”
“No I don’t.” Ebon shook his head. “I can pick up your phone and hire someone to take it all away. I won’t have to lay eyes on any of it.”
“I meant the hard emotional work.”
Ebon wanted to protest, but instead it was as if Aimee had let all the air out of his balloon. He felt his posture sag, his head tilting toward the floor between his slippered feet. His elbows went to his knees, and after a moment, he felt Aimee’s comforting hand on his back as she moved to sit beside him.
“I don’t want to think about it,” he said.
“I think you have to. There’s too much to untie. Like with my dad.”
“I just want to hate her.”
“But you don’t only hate her.”
“She cheated. She’s gone. End of story.”
The hand rubbed his back; the floor and his slippers filled his field of vision.
“But before that, you loved her. And she loved you.”
“If she loved me, why did she cheat?”
“I’m sure she had her own baggage, Ebon. It’s how people are.”
His eyes were beginning to swim. “I don’t want to think about it,” he repeated. “I just want to go downstairs and do drywall.”
“You have to think about it eventually.”
“I’ve been reading that diary all morning. I’ve thought. I’ve wallowed.”
“But Ebon,” she said. “You didn’t look at the first half. You’re focused on her cheating.”
“So what?”
“You have to feel all of it.”
Ebon wanted to snap at Aimee, tell her to stop playing therapist, to stop bossing him around like always. But he couldn’t say it. He could only focus on the purest of the now: the sensation of the moving hand, the drop of salt water now rolling toward the tip of his nose. Aimee had no right to intrude. No right to tell him who he was, who Holly had been, and what complications may lie in his nest of emotions. She certainly had no right, now that it was all over and too late, to imply that he and Aimee had had something to hide. Holly had hidden plenty. And Ebon’s hands, unlike Holly’s, had never strayed farther than a keyboard.
“I don’t want to feel all of it.” He sniffed and straightened, trying to make his body conform to his words. It had been weeks. He’d waded through fury, rage, blame, and loss. There was nothing left. He’d done his part, and now he wanted to move on. If there was more, it could be buried decently, as Holly had been. “I just want to forget it ever happened.”
Aimee rubbed his back. He could feel her judgment in the small circles, in the minute scratching of her short fingernails.
“Don’t tell me how to feel,” he added when she didn’t reply.
Aimee wrapped her arms around him.
“I know what happened,” he said. “I know what she did. I’ve made my peace with it.”
Aimee laid her head on his shoulder, completing the full-body hug. For a silent moment, they sat.
“You only have to face it enough to move on,” she finally said. “You just have to keep remembering her, because she was part of your life.”
“I’ve faced it. It’s over. She’s gone.”
Aimee hugged him, rocking slightly.
“I know exactly how I want to remember her,” Ebon said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Death Forgives Everything
EBON LEFT AIMEE TO FINISH TAPING and mudding the new drywall in the cottage hallway after screwing it in place and verifying that it wouldn’t fall on her while he was away. Doing so had felt decidedly manly. Before his arrival on Aaron six weeks ago, he’d never so much as touched unpainted drywall. Now he’d done two full rooms in three-eighths of an inch 4-by-8 sheetrock, plus most of a hallway. It was dirty work, but using his hands and growing calluses felt strangely cleansing.
The weather had grown chilly, but for Ebon the cold had yet to dull the beach
’s lure. Before this trip, he’d only ever seen Aaron in full bloom, the world green, the air warm and humid, the colors bright like a painter’s canvas. The island’s autumn had turned out to be different but equally beautiful. The leaves had become a fantastic spray of yellows, reds, and oranges before falling. The sky had remained a crisp blue; the bay was dark denim capped with foamy eggshell. But since then, the rest of the island’s colors had been bled of their saturation. The cottage’s wood, siding, and decking were like something on a screen covered with a layer of dust. It didn’t feel like dying to Ebon though. It just felt different.
He’d seen a different side of Aimee too. And like Aaron itself, the disparity was unfamiliar yet reluctantly beautiful. She now annoyed him in a new way (this one superior instead of blindly bossy), and yet Ebon couldn’t help but admire the change.
She’d always seemed flighty, and had remained so. Her hair was still a mess, and she still went in six directions at once. She still stumbled when she walked because she always moved slightly too fast. But those childish foibles were now laced with maturity. She had a few gray hairs in her blonde, and a few wrinkles had settled at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Now when Aimee bossed him around her missives came from a sense of earned superiority. She’d been through the war with issues surrounding her father — but Ebon, she insisted, had not. He’d lost a friend in a car accident as a child; his first sexual encounter had been with a woman more than twice his age; he’d been torn violently from Aaron and from Aimee. And yet he’d managed to stuff it all down, to keep moving forward by refusing to open those old boxes. Aimee — veteran that she was — kept asking him to open those boxes, to look past the anger to what lay beneath. It felt more legitimate than her old breed of pestering … but no less annoying.
She watched him with irritating therapist’s eyes as he tried to go about his business. She kept asking “And why is that?” whenever he made pat remarks. But Ebon didn’t want to consider the whys of every tiny thing. Some events had simply occurred, and were what they were. He had months now between him and Holly’s death, and he wanted nothing more than to move on. To close the box, not peer relentlessly into its guts, searching for meaning in a jumble of psychobabble.
And so he took his walks to get away. To smell the breeze. To feel the increasingly chill wind as it bit into his skin. To see Vicky — who, encounter by encounter, was replacing those old memories with newer, more pleasant ones.
Ebon wondered again if he should tell Aimee about Vicky. But why should he? Despite his best efforts, things with Aimee had remained maddeningly stagnant. He’d thought, on arrival, that they understood each other. Their chats had moved into old realms, always somewhat flirtatious, often recalling forgotten tenderness as Ebon dragged old feelings topside. She’d been such a tease back then, and he’d never been able to cash in. By the time he was old enough to do so — and distant enough from Richard’s arm to try again — he’d already found Holly. But now he was a widower, and Aimee was years divorced. Finally they were both free to do as they wanted. In a way, they had only each other. And yet Aimee held back — not refusing to move into intimate territory for lack of interest but because she seemed to think it was too soon. Not for her, necessarily, but for Ebon.
Ebon, she seemed to think, wasn’t quite ready.
But Ebon was plenty ready. He was thirty-one fucking years old. He’d put in his time. He’d mourned, and mourning was exhausting. Yes, things had turned out miserably with Holly, but they were over now. She’d betrayed him, she’d harmed him, she’d died. End of story.
But what was your role in all of it? Aimee would ask.
Aggravated, Ebon would go for a walk.
Were you true to her? Aimee would say.
Ebon would retort that of course he’d been true, then stalk off.
Was she truly a monster — or can you, if you try, see things from her perspective? Is there any way, if you look at your relationship objectively, that you can see what you might have done better?
That line of questioning annoyed Ebon most of all, because it turned an accusing finger right back at his own face. He wanted to yell at Aimee for saying those things — for having the audacity to presume she knew anything at all about his dating record and marriage. Sometimes, he did yell. But whenever he did, Aimee took the assault with obnoxious patience, allowing him to vent, suffusing him with a patronizingly kind smile. And then, instead of standing corrected, she’d wait a few hours and ask the same things again.
Unwanted emotions prodded at Ebon like thorns, striking at random intervals. He’d be hanging a light fixture, and the wire would snag, and he’d throw it to the floor in a rage. He’d be brushing his teeth, would recall Holly coming into the bathroom to brush beside him (usually giving him a toothpaste grin in the mirror), and would break down. He’d spring awake in the middle of the night, almost always at 3:33 a.m., and seem to sense a body lying beside him, then feel a scooped-out sense of loss when he reached out to touch only frigid sheets. A time or two, he’d masturbated to thoughts of Holly with her lovers, imagining the other man’s touch on her skin, the other man’s presence where only he belonged. He’d done it with a grimace, furious: an act of violence rather than lust.
Aimee could see the turmoil on his face, but waited until Ebon was at his weakest to speak up. Her questions — always said with supposed love, sounding to Ebon like meddling — never focused on Holly anymore. Now, they were always about him.
Did you do your best?
Did you let her in?
Did you see her through your own biases and rules, or did you try and look at your life together through her eyes?
It made Ebon furious. He was the one who’d been wronged. He’d been a good man, a good husband, a dutiful partner and earner. Holly had done the betraying; she’d broken the pact they’d made on the altar, her promiscuous past supposedly left at the door. Maybe she’d never loved him. Maybe they’d got married because it’s what society had expected. In Ebon’s mind, their good times together had already begun to dim. He refused to read the first half of Holly’s diary — the part that might praise and adore him. Doing so would only pour salt in his wounds. He didn’t want to consider the good times. He didn’t want to give Holly any benefits of any doubts. She’d let another man put his dick in her. She’d been a cheating whore. That was all that mattered.
Ebon watched Aimee work on their renovations, watching her ass in her tight jeans, watching her in paint-spattered capris, watching the way her body shifted under loose tank tops. What had he come here for? He and Aimee had unfinished business together. He wanted her, and he knew she wanted him. So what was the problem?
So no, Aimee didn’t need to know about Vicky. Not if she wanted to psychoanalyze him instead of treating him like a capable adult. Not if she wanted to remain platonic, to stay on the right side of some invisible line until Ebon dealt with things that didn’t need dealing. Vicky wasn’t any of Aimee’s goddamned business. Vicky was willing to be the dirty girl Aimee had once been, before Ebon had been robbed of his only shot with her. Vicky didn’t ask Ebon stupid questions. Vicky knew all about Holly, but she reacted to the story as a friend should: with support, with scorn for the offending party.
How could she? Vicky would say. Then they’d fuck for hours, and Ebon would drift into a cloud of bliss in which both Holly and Aimee were forgotten.
The beach walk had taken Ebon to Vicky’s door almost without conscious choice. He found himself on the doorstep and knocked, then was greeted by a vision in a pale-green robe.
“Oh,” she said. “Hey, Ebon.”
“Is there anything under that robe?”
Vicky cinched the belt tighter through her tiny laugh, then stepped aside and said, “Come on in. I was just going to take a bath.”
He strode into the living room and sat on one of the modern chairs. It felt more comfortable than it looked — one of Vicky’s many beautiful things, placed in sparse rooms as if for show rather than use.
Vicky went into the bedroom. He heard the bathroom door next, then the sound of water shutting off. A few minutes later she appeared in loose khaki pants and a T-shirt. Ebon felt an elevator drop’s worth of disappointment. The first day he’d seen her, she’d been wearing a stunning red dress that clung to her ample curves. Sometime later, after he’d stalked her sufficiently, they’d gone to her place where the same red dress had come off. That first impression would forever haunt his mind, coloring the way he saw her. She’d always be the woman in the red dress to him. Seeing her in something as casual as no-nonsense khakis (with, he now noticed, her bright-red hair in a simple pony tail and no makeup), was somewhat disappointing.
“Would you like something to drink?” she said.
“Wine?”
“Ebon, it’s 10 a.m.”
“You don’t have wine because it’s 10 a.m.?”
“How about lemonade?”
Ebon shrugged. A minute later she was handing him a tall, crystal clear glass filled with something cheap and overly tangy. It seemed wrong. Someone as elegant and dignified as Vicky should actually squeeze lemons for lemonade, ideally using one of those stainless contraptions with a giant pull lever on the front.
“So what’s up?” she said.
“Just thought I’d come over.”
“Oh. Okay. I’d figure you’d call first.”
“Do I need to call?”
Vicky sat. She didn’t cross her legs demurely, but that was probably because she wasn’t wearing one of her hot dresses. He almost wanted to ask if she’d dress up for him. He hadn’t come in here horny, but now he was beginning to be. Stress and aggravation had balled up in his gut, and there was only one obvious release, if Vicky would just get with the program and play along.
“I guess not,” she said, sipping.
They sat for a few minutes, staring at each other.
“So … ” Ebon said.
Axis of Aaron Page 38