Everything Happens Today

by Jesse Browner

  In bed, Wes tried to read the book by the French monk, but he had a raging hard-on, which he refused to touch, first because he thought it would gross Delia out to imagine him jerking off in the maid’s bed, and second because there was always the remote chance that she would come to him some time in the night. She hadn’t given him the slightest cause to believe that she might, and he repeated its impossibility over and over to himself like a mantra, but he could not shake the intuition that it would happen precisely because it was so impossible. Somewhere in the house—Wes suspected the parent’s bedroom—a television was playing and a conversation engaged in low, light-hearted tones. Wes strained to listen; was it two voices or three? He couldn’t bear the idea that the three of them were staying up and prolonging the day without him, and perhaps even talking about him. If they were, one of the parents would surely ask Delia if she had any romantic intentions towards Wes, and then she would have to put into words what she might not have considered at all up to that moment, and that would make it real and final for her in a way it would not have been if they hadn’t questioned her. It could, of course, work to his advantage if the question suddenly caused her to recognize feelings of affection that she had suppressed, either because Wes was a year younger than her or because he was supposed to be her apprentice, and then maybe she would after all decide that there was only one thing left to do to make this perfect day even more perfect. But she didn’t, and Wes awoke to birdsong the next morning in exactly the same position in which he’d fallen asleep.

  How could he be sure he was in love? How could he know, now that it was so important to know? Is it easier to tell that you’re in love if you’ve never been in love before, because it’s something so different from anything you’ve ever felt, or if you have been in love before, because you recognize the feeling? And if you can’t remember the feeling, is it because you’ve never had it or because it’s different every time? Wes groaned under the burden of these luxuriant mysteries, but they were at least very interesting to contemplate. He noted to himself, however, that he had slept quite soundly despite being in love, and that was a little worrisome. Surely you weren’t supposed to be able to sleep so well if you were in love? Or eat? He realized that he was painfully hungry. Maybe it wasn’t love after all, or if it was it was the kind where you can sleep and eat, and also think about sex a lot, instead of about how much pain you were in. But surely that would have to be a kind of second-rate love, and Wes didn’t think he was in too much pain, and this love that he was feeling now couldn’t be that kind. It would bear further thought after breakfast.

  Wes didn’t remember much of what had happened the following day, except that they had left for the city early and stopped for steamed lobster at a restaurant overlooking an inlet. At the table, Wes had told the story about his mother, who had been raised in a kosher household in Inwood, and the first time she had eaten lobster, thinking it was some sort of fish, and had been violently ill when told what it was she had eaten. That was supposed to lead organically to the story of her first driving lesson, when she had crashed into the only car in an otherwise empty and enormous parking lot, but instead Delia’s parents had latched onto the wrong part of the first story and started questioning him about his Jewishness. Wes would be naturally reticent on this subject, and had been particularly so on this occasion, where he hoped to keep their minds on his ailing mother and build up a store of sympathy that could lead to a second invitation for the weekend.

  Crossing Hudson Street, Wes realized that all this had taken place eleven months earlier, and that he never had been invited back to Napeague, although he had had several hearty chats with Delia’s parents on the phone and was convinced that he’d left a good impression of himself. In fact, his relationship with Delia had not really advanced in any distinctive way since then—they did not now exchange intimacies more intimate than those they had exchanged since then, if a shared preference for Twain over Dickens could be called an intimacy; they did not speak more often now than they did then, an average of once or twice a week outside chance encounters in the hallway; they did not touch each other casually on the arm or the back of the neck in the way close friends do without noticing, although Wes surely would have noticed if they had; and Wes had not come any closer in these long eleven months to telling Delia how he felt about her than he had when “accidentally” brushed against her naked shoulder on the beach. There was something wrong in all this, something he realized probably should have disturbed him a long time ago if he had not been so fixated on his own struggle to better himself on Delia’s behalf. The way he had struggled and struggled without making any headway was, in fact, perfectly Tolstoyan in its total lack of self-consciousness and, apparently, of tangible out­come. So what could she now suddenly have to tell him that was so important?

  The moment he turned the corner, Wes saw Lucy sitting on the stoop of his house, halfway down the block. It was odd and a little shocking, seeing her like that because, despite everything that had happened between them, it was almost like looking at a stranger, as if he would have to walk up and introduce himself and start from zero, the way they’d done the night before. That feeling of trepidation and possibilities was what had remained with Wes most clearly, and Wes relived it now as he advanced down the block. Last night at the party, James had hunted him down and was goading him to make his move, but Wes had been deeply distracted and disturbed by his conversation with Delia.

  “Delia’s behaving all weird tonight. What’s she doing here, anyway?”

  “Weird how?”

  “I don’t know. She’s all . . . flirty. I’ve never seen her like this. It’s driving me nuts.”

  “Forget about Delia, man. Try to stay focused. You’re here for Lucy, remember?”

  “I know, but I haven’t seen her anywhere.”

  “Don’t look, but she’s standing right there, and she’s staring right at you. I’m gonna stand up and walk away, fix you another drink, then when I’m gone you look up, as if you’re looking for me, and catch her eye. I’m gone.”

  Wes stared into his tumbler and counted to five, but when he looked up Lucy was nowhere to be seen. He stood, pushed his way through a small scrum of dancing sophomores and wandered into a hallway that seemed to lead to the rest of the apartment. At the far end, beyond a half-dozen closed doors, a brightly lit doorway evidently led into the kitchen, which even from this end Wes could see was packed to overflowing. He turned back towards the living room, but his eye was caught by a wall of family photos, primly framed and symmetrically arranged between the molding and the oak wainscot. Wes knew that nothing could more severely compromise his cool than to be caught in a lonely corridor, perusing the artwork all on his lonesome in the midst of a drinking party, but he couldn’t help himself. All the pictures were essentially the same: a handsome couple with great posture and a conservative wardrobe, smiling for the camera in a variety of exotic settings with two pretty young girls, the younger of which was Lucy. Here they were on a white banquette on the deck of a yacht, probably somewhere in the Mediterranean; on horseback, in shiny black knee boots and riding helmets; an outdoor café on a piazza in Rome or Barcelona; squatting beside a tame cheetah on an African wildlife preserve. In all the pictures, the father’s hair was immaculate and immobile, the mother’s eyes were shaded by a broad hat brim or a hand at her brow, except in the very earliest one, in which she sat in pink satin nightgown in a luxuriant bed, propped up by fat white pillows, with a newborn baby in her arms and a look of weary apprehension. In all the pictures, Lucy’s sister smiled boldly, confidently, and more radiantly as she grew older, but Lucy kept changing, and the series told the story, Wes thought, of an ever-widening gulf between her and her perfect, antiseptic family. The littlest Lucys wore a face of open joy that gradually gave way to a sad, frozen grin as she got older, and ultimately to dull resignation and withdrawal. In these photos, she didn’t look duplicitous or manipulative at all; just sad. Wes was astounded that anyone should willi
ngly choose to broadcast such a dismal narrative in a public space. How could they be unaware of the story it told? He thought of the jumbled snapshots stuck to Delia’s refrigerator in Napeague, and how they too told a family story; and about Nora’s beloved photo albums of happier times, warehoused under a bed somewhere, and how long it had been since anyone had bothered to update them, as if his own family history had somehow come to a premature and shameful end and were being preserved, vaulted, only because the only thing worse than having to relive it was summoning the passion to destroy it. Tolstoy had been wrong in this as in so many things—Delia’s family was unique in its happiness, whereas unhappy families differed only to the extent to which they were willing to acknowledge their own failure. Lucy’s parents didn’t even know they had been stricken, that they carried the plague with them, whereas every single member of Wes’s family slouched about the world with the mark of Cain on their foreheads. Which only made Delia’s quest for spiritual enlightenment a painful, mocking indictment, like a millionaire whose judicious investments make him a billionaire, while the rest of us are still looking for loose change under the sofa cushions. The phone vibrated in Wes’s rear pocket.

  White: “can we talk”

  Yellow: “Where r u?”

  White: “behand u”

  Wes turned, and there was Lucy, in tight jeans, a white tank-top and gold sandals, leaning against the jamb of a darkened doorway. Wes knew enough to recognize his immediate reaction as a sort of swoon, or what would be called a swoon in a book.

  Wes recalled that swoon now as he neared the stoop, trying to recapture some of its power. Lucy had yet to notice his approach. He pictured himself as a satellite and Lucy as the Earth, because from a distance the only discernible feature of her face was her thick dark eyebrows, like the Great Wall of China. She was in a man’s white oxford shirt, untucked and with sleeves rolled up to her elbows, blue jeans and the same sandals she’d worn the night before. She sat with her hands tucked beneath her thighs and her knees almost to her chin. Her blackish hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail that was draped over her right shoulder. The sight of her slim, bare neck unleashed a shockingly graphic flashback of Lucy hovering over him, that black ponytail swinging at the same rhythm as her small, pear-shaped breasts, and Wes remembered that at that moment he had thought that she looked just as Natasha would have looked if she had had sex with Prince André before she lost all her beauty to devastating grief.

  Wes blushed at precisely the same moment that Lucy caught sight of him. She seemed sad and worried, which only emphasized her resemblance to Natasha. Wes stood at the bottom of the stoop and waved to her just with his hand. She waved back, and smiled forlornly.

  “What’s up?”

  Lucy shrugged her shoulders in a way that was meaningless to Wes. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what she was thinking, what she was doing here, what she might want from him, unless it was more sex, which would not be possible with two adults in the house, even if Wes were able to just set everything else aside, which he doubted he could. She would probably be wanting to talk about what had happened between them the night before, which was only reasonable and right, he supposed, but that, too, seemed like an insufferable chore that they might both easily dispense with. This was a moment, Wes considered, when it would surely be handy to have a Library of Babel to get lost in, and that led him briefly to ponder the notion that no matter what he and Lucy might say to each other this morning, they would have to say it in mutually unintelligible languages, and that when people do seem to understand one another, as he and she had the night before, it was usually a willful illusion. In the meantime, there was no Library of Babel, no infinite mansion, no countless light bulbs to be tallied, not even a room with a hole in the ceiling to be fixed; there was only the house and the street, and Wes would have to get past Lucy to get into the house, and Lucy would have to get past Wes to reach the street.

  “My dad’s at home. You didn’t have to wait outside.”

  “I know, I rang. He said you’d be right back, so I figured it would be better to wait for you here.” She spoke so softly that Wes could barely hear her voice.

  “You want to go for a walk?”

  Lucy shrugged again, and Wes thought that she might be getting ready to cry.

  “You know, I’ve got some things to do in the house. Let’s go in.” Wes bounded up the stoop, two steps at a time, keys already in hand, before Lucy had even had a chance to stand. His jeans brushed against her shoulder, making a kind of whispered rasp that to Wes sounded like sandpaper on glass, but by the time he had the door open she was close behind him, like a frightened child waiting in line behind her father in an intimidating crowd. Without turning, Wes walked straight through the front hall into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He leaned in and retrieved the bowl, which he placed on the counter. Lucy stood right beside him, looking into the bowl. The water was pale pink, only slightly more translucent than last night’s Bloody Mary.

  “What is that?”

  “Sweetbreads. Pretty gross, right?”

  “No, I love sweetbreads.”

  “Really?”

  “With chestnuts and port sauce. Yum.”

  “You know how to cook them?”

  “No, but there’s this restaurant in Paris . . . ”

  “I’m making them for my mom. I don’t know if I can do it right.”

  “So long as they’re really crispy. They don’t have much flavor.”

  “‘Kay.”

  Lucy watched in silence as Wes drained the bowl, rinsed the sweetbread, then placed it in a small, battered saucepan, covered it with cold water, and put it on the stove to boil. He stood over the range, glaring down intently into the pot as if it had offended him and he were giving it the evil eye, but with Lucy right beside him, they could also have been proud parents watching over their infant child asleep in a basinet.

  “You should probably cover that. It won’t boil otherwise.”

  With the pot covered, it seemed somehow more foolish to stand and stare at it, but Wes tried that anyway, and Lucy joined him. At one moment, she muttered something under her breath that sounded like “Typo.”

  “What?”

  Lucy just shook her head and went on staring at the pot. Perhaps Wes was just imagining it, but with nothing to go on it still felt that the mood had softened a little, that a moment of crisis had passed, and that the future of the planet did not now depend on what he said next. He tried to think about some of the things they had said to each other the night before, something he knew might be of interest to her, but nothing came to mind. He knew they had spoken to each other at some length, but because of the Bloody Marys and other things, the memories would not come when summoned, so he allowed his mind to relax and wander a little, and it flitted about for a moment or two before alighting on port sauce. That had been an oddly specific thing to say, as if Lucy had been referring to her birth sign or her mother’s maiden name, and it had carved out a little niche for itself, like a dog digging in the hot sand to make a cool hole in which to rest. Wes wasn’t sure if he had ever tasted port sauce, or if he would recognize it if it were placed before him, and he knew that he had never been to Paris, but both sauce and city were clearly familiar territory to Lucy, something she could refer to without blushing or exaggerating. Wes thought he might ask her about Paris, but he had a feeling that it was something they had talked about the night before and that did not necessarily have positive associations for Lucy, and then he realized that it was because of one of the photos on the wall in Lucy’s apartment, in which she had posed with limpid dejection against the railing of an upper level of the Eiffel Tower. That left port sauce.

  “Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What does this mean to you: ‘Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures?’”

  “Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures?”

 
; “F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it in The Great Gatsby. Any idea what he meant?”

  “I’ve never read The Great Gatsby.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Just free associate. ‘Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.’ Top of your head.”

  “‘Personality is . . . ’ I don’t know. It could mean anything, I guess.”

  “No it couldn’t. Fitzgerald had something really particular in mind when he wrote that. It doesn’t have to mean what he thought it meant when he wrote it, or what he said it meant after he wrote it, but it’s got to mean something. What does it mean to you?”

  “I really don’t . . . ” Her voice petered out in helpless bafflement.

  “See, like this is what you might say. You might say ‘What does he mean by “successful?”’ Or, ‘What does he mean by “gesture?”’ Is he saying that a gesture is successful if it conveys precisely the meaning it was intended to convey? Or that any gesture that bridges the gap to the next gesture is successful? Is a gesture an act, an exertion of the will, a posture, or is it merely an attempt to communicate? Maybe our entire conception of individuality is based on how we try to describe ourselves to others?”

  There was an oven glove on the counter besides the range, and Lucy now slipped her right hand into it and removed the lid from the saucepan, in which the water was boiling furiously. She returned the lid to the pot and with her left hand turned the gas down to simmer. She pulled the glove from her hand and redeposited it on the countertop.

  “Maybe he didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe he just wrote it to make himself sound cleverer than everyone else, and to avoid saying what he really meant. How long does this need to cook?”