“Ready?”
She nodded, and Wes hoisted her to her feet, keeping a firm hold around her waist. He could feel her lower back tense as she prepared to take her first step, but the muscles were so weak and fluttered a little, as if they were talking in their sleep. For the first few steps she actually lifted her feet off the floor, but she soon gave that up in favor of sliding them, like skis, across the carpet. It took a full minute to cross the room to the washroom door, during which time her breath grew labored and Wes, his face pressed against the side of her head, inhaled the subtly toxic miasma of steroids seeping through her skin. But the hardest part, as always, despite the slanted chrome bars that had been installed on opposite walls of the washroom, was simultaneously turning and lowering her to the toilet without chafing the healing bedsores on her buttocks or jarring her unpleasantly. It also had to be done with some urgency, because she never called for Wes until she really needed to go, but once she was seated she would still need to raise herself to slip the velcroed diaper around her ankles and raise her housecoat above her waist, which she did only with difficulty. The time would not be long in coming, Wes knew, when she would be incapable even of that, and it would fall to him—at least when Narita was away—to do it for her, just as the charge of escorting her to the toilet had fallen to him. It would be several years before Nora was big and strong enough to do it, but by that time who knew where any of them would be? Wes waited just outside the door for her to finish, because sitting on the toilet was painful for her, and being assisted by her teenage son a relatively new and unaccustomed humiliation, and he liked to accomplish it with as little fuss and delay as possible. He leaned against the doorjamb, closed his eyes, and let Bob Ross’s voice wash over him like a cleansing stream. The feel of the cool, glossy wood against his lower back revived a sense memory from last night’s party.
Wes had not wanted to return to the living room, where Delia might see them, or go to the kitchen, where it was too crowded to talk, but the rest of the apartment was dark and seemed to be widely recognized as off limits, except to the necking couples propped against the walls in the hall. Wes was not about to suggest that they go to her bedroom, and she did not offer, so somehow they ended up in the open doorway to a bathroom down a side corridor at the far end of the apartment, which was large enough that the roar of the party reached them as a distant, incoherent mumble of bass tones and shrill laughter. Wes felt sick to his stomach, and worried about controlling his voice, but otherwise felt that he was performing an adequate counterfeit of nonchalance as he leaned against the doorjamb with his hands tucked into the small of his back. Lucy settled against the opposite jamb, sufficiently upright to avoid entangling their legs. The only light came from a bluish nightlight in the bathroom, but it was enough to cast shadows across her nose and lips, and to set off her glossy black hair against the tank-top. Wes had assumed that Lucy had prepared some sort of opening remarks, a thesis statement, but she did not seem to be in any hurry to speak, and they stood in silence for what felt like a long time, each staring at the other’s feet. Wes found it hard to credit that anything worthwhile could emerge from such inauspicious beginnings, and as the older party he felt that it was probably his responsibility to be collected, witty and detached, but they seemed to have set a trap for themselves by going off on their own where virtually anything either of them might say would come across as freighted. He wondered if maybe she just expected him to close the gap and kiss her without preliminaries, if that was just the way she rolled in situations like these, but such boldness was entirely beyond his capacities. Playing the awkward innocent, eager yet abashed, had sometimes worked for him in the past, yet he would feel foolish trying it on with Lucy, who was so much younger than him and at the same time, he imagined, far less burdened with romantic conceit. He realized with a momentary stab of panic that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing, and that it might have been better for all concerned had he stayed home in bed with War and Peace. This thought caused him to straighten up from his slouch, and the movement dislodged something in his throat.
“Your parents, what are they?”
“What?”
“I mean, they’re out of town?”
“For a week.”
“You’re here by yourself?”
“Our housekeeper is staying, but she’s away for the weekend.”
“Aren’t you afraid . . . ?”
“She’s cool.”
“Well, it’s a great party. Beautiful apartment.”
“Thanks.”
“You want to get a drink?”
“Sure.”
Wes heard the toilet flush, and a minute later his mother chirruped to him from the washroom, and he went in. No accidents this time, but she had not managed to fully lower her housedress, and her thighs were exposed, muscles hanging from the bones like pleated drapes, and before he had the presence to avert his eyes he saw the blotch of sparse, graying curls between her legs. He backed around to her side and hoisted her to her feet as she made the pretense of helping with her hands on the slanted bars. They shuffled back to the bed and he lowered her in, tucking the blankets beneath her legs.
“Lucy’s waiting for me upstairs.”
“She’s awfully pretty. Is she your girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Do you want her to be?”
“I like someone else, I think.”
“That’s too bad, Leslie. She’s the one for you.”
“You need anything else, mom?”
“I’m tired.”
Wes retrieved a fresh diaper from the drawer of her side table and left it on the bedsheet beside her pillow, where it would be within easy reach. He bent over and kissed her on the forehead. Wes knew that some day soon, maybe very soon, his mother would be dead, and that just the way he was looking at her now would become a memory that would make him sad for the rest of his life. He saw adults all around him who were saddened by their memories, and he knew it would happen to him, it was inevitable. He tried to see his mother now as if she were already a memory, but even this much diminished she was far too real for that. She was alive—she was still alive. He wondered if it were possible, if he concentrated every particle of his will and his being, to transform this feeling of her realness into the memory, so that in years to come what he would experience when he thought of her would not be a memory but a reality. He pictured himself twenty or thirty years from now, standing at his mother’s bedside and looking down at her. The sense of her reality would be so strong that, even at a distance of decades, it would overpower the truth that she was long gone. It would be as if she had never died. He could bend over her and hold her, he could bend over her and kiss her, he could bend over and tell her—something—and in thirty years she would be alive as she was now. Wes thought it might be possible to do something like that, but he also knew that he really didn’t understand how memories worked.
Lucy had her back to the door when he entered, studying the poster of Stuart Murdoch that hung over his bed, her hands folded behind her.
“I didn’t figure you for the kind of guy who puts rock stars on his wall. I thought you were more the Nietzsche type, maybe, or Sartre.”
“It’s Belle and Sebastian, not exactly Kiss.”
“Can’t stand them.”
“It’s pretty much all I ever listen to these days. I’ve got, like, four thousands songs on my iPhone, and I go through them all and I can’t find anything else I want to listen to. How can you not stand them?”
“How can you? Everything’s a big secret with them, like a personal joke that you have to be super cool to get, like they’re daring you to say you’re as smart as they are.”
“Someone once said that all of Western culture is based on secrecy.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well think of art, music lyrics, movies. The things you don’t say are always more important than the things you do say. You couldn’t write a novel at all without withh
olding information. Even saying ‘I love you’ is completely meaningless unless you save it for the end, unless you don’t say it before you say it.”
“That’s total crap. Real love is all about honesty. If I was in love with someone I would just say it. ‘I love you.’”
“But would he believe you? He has to think you don’t love him first.”
“What’s the matter with you? Love’s nothing but suffering and lies? Love’s not something beautiful and fun and celebrating? I mean, I’m not sure I’ve ever been in love before, but I always thought I’d know it when I was because I’d be really, really happy—not whining and crying like a little bitch.”
“I wasn’t talking about love. I was talking about culture.”
“Yeah, I noticed that about you.”
“How’s that?”
“You’re never talking about what you’re talking about. Now I see why you like Belle and Sebastian. It makes a lot of sense.”
“Does every conversation with you end up like this?”
“Sometimes I can get a little impatient.”
Lucy flopped down onto the bed in her former position, as if she owned that space. Wes noticed that the two bottom buttons of her shirt were undone, revealing the slimmest slice of her belly, and he tried to remember if it had been like that before and he hadn’t noticed. Had she undone the buttons while he was gone, as a preliminary to something? He didn’t think so, but then he’d also kind of given up trying to figure out what Lucy wanted from him, or even what she might say next.
“Your mom’s really sweet. What’s that thing over her bed?”
“It’s an electric sling. She’s supposed to use it to get in and out of bed, but she never does.”
“What’s the matter with her? Sorry, I mean, what’s wrong with her?”
“She has progressive relapsing multiple sclerosis.”
“What does it do to you?”
“It ruins your eyesight. Weakens all your muscles. You can’t balance. Makes you tired all the time. Sometimes you can’t eat, you can’t talk right, can’t control your bladder. Fun stuff.”
“Will she get better?”
“No, she’ll get worse. She’s already had pneumonia twice from lying on her back all the time. Even the bedsores can kill you if you’re not careful.”
“Bummer.”
“Mmm.”
“But you’re, like, a great son. Most kids would be embarrassed. I was kind of surprised, when I saw her, that you would just introduce me like that, bring me into her room. But you treat her just like a normal person.”
“She is a normal person. A normal really sick person.”
“You know what I mean. You’re just super kind, and devoted. Why does she call you ‘Leslie?’”
“Leslie is my name.”
“You’re kidding.”
“They named me after Leslie Howard. Of Human Bondage is my dad’s favorite movie.”
“So how did you get to Wes?”
“Any idea how hard it is for a boy named Leslie? No one can spell it, everyone thinks it’s a girl’s name. You call yourself ‘Lez’ and everybody says ‘Lezbo.’ You call yourself ‘Les’ and they all say ‘Les is more’ or ‘Never settle for Les.’ So one summer I went to camp, I was maybe eleven or twelve, and somebody asks me my name and I kind of mumbled it under my breath, as I usually did. And he says ‘Wes?’ and I go, ‘Yeah, Wes!’ Everyone called me ‘Wes’ that summer, and I loved it. When they asked me my name, I’d kind of shout it at the top of my voice. ‘Wes! My name is Wes!’ It was like I was a new person. And then when I got home, I told everyone to call me Wes, and then I transferred to Dalton so it was easy. No one calls me Leslie anymore except my mom.”
“Can I call you Leslie, Leslie?”
“No.”
“So what’s this homework you’ve got to finish for Monday?”
“I’ve got to rewrite a paper for English.”
“You’ve got a paper due Monday and you haven’t started it yet? Planning on community college when you graduate?”
“I wrote it, but Fielding wouldn’t accept it.”
“How come?”
“It’s a little . . . eccentric.”
“Can I read it?”
“No.”
“Is this it here? ‘Language, Poetry and Narrative Trope in Operator’s Manual for Rifle,’ etcetera? Jesus, talk about freaks. Too late, I’m reading it.”
Wes could have argued with her, but what was the point? He moved over to the window and leaned against the sash, keeping one eye out for the oriole. He felt tired and depressed after seeing his mother, and then finding himself talking freely about her illness with someone who was practically a stranger, when he’d always done such a good job of keeping family matters private, even with close friends. How had she managed to get so much out of him? Was it always this way, that when you had sex with someone it weakened your resolve in every other particular? Was it a physiological trigger, like the release of some sort of hormone into the blood system? Wes hated the word “vulnerable”—as in, “it’s okay to be “vulnerable”—and he hated the idea of being “vulnerable,” mostly because it seemed so perfectly suited to every aspect of his being, and also because it was bandied about so freely by people who had no clue. It made him squeamish to imagine anyone lumping him into such a degraded category—like calling The Master and Margarita a clever book. But there was no doubt about it—Lucy was behaving as if she were his girlfriend, with certain rights to his privacy, and he seemed to have ceded those rights to her without a fight. He never let anyone read his papers except the assigning teacher, but there she was curled up in his bed. It seemed to Wes that he had exchanged more emotional intimacies with Lucy in the past twelve hours than he had with Delia in the past twelve months. It didn’t seem right, somehow; a little too easy, somehow. What was he supposed to do—just throw all that hard work out the window? He tried to imagine the situation if it were Delia on the bed instead of Lucy—but then, Delia never would be on the bed reading his paper because she was not the type to just come around and flop on people’s beds and invade their personal space. Delia was dignified and aloof and cerebral, everything that Lucy was not, which was everything he loved about her. And now that he thought about it, Lucy had been that way with him from the very first last night, lulling him with her open, uninhibited manner into all sorts of personal revelations. Wes couldn’t remember everything they had talked about as they wandered the apartment together, especially after his third Bloody Mary. There was a kind of broad outline of the topics they had touched on—parents, school, the election, his Nantucket bay scallop risotto, of course; nothing too close to the borderline of taboo—but very few details remained. More precisely, Wes was able to recall the issues he had been trying to avoid, most particularly boyfriends, girlfriends and sex, because, even though the entire set-up was artificial, he imagined that there must be a right way to go about it, in which everyone, including all the other guests at the party, played the role of people who had no idea what the immediate future would bring. His role, he believed, should be that of the innocent boy interested only in the quality of mind of a girl he had met by chance. If they talked about sex, or about the kinds of people who attracted them, or who were attracted to them, it would feel like a mechanical device, an ill-executed plot twist designed to move the characters to a predestined development, whereas Wes had hoped that they would find themselves on that threshold without quite knowing how they had got there, or at least in the plausible pretence that it had come as a surprise to both of them. Wes had a very clear memory of all this fretting, which was probably why he had such trouble calling up the least detail of their conversations. One thing, certainly, was that she was not at all what he had expected, or been led to expect. She was nicer, smarter, sweeter, funnier. And he remembered, too, being struck by the irony that, even as he struggled to avoid the mildest sexual innuendo, all he could think about was that this girl, this very pretty girl fully clothed righ
t beside him, fully intended to be lying fully naked beneath him before the end of the evening. He would try to listen to what she was saying, but then his gaze would lock on her mouth, and on the little pink tongue fluttering inside it and occasionally running along the rims of her glossy lips, and his mind would be immediately buffeted by stormy images of that tongue inside his own mouth and all the points at which their bodies would need to be in close contact in order for that to come about. Or he would be making a heroic effort to admire her hair as a Renaissance poet might, with the transcendent view to a delicate metaphor, when his eyes would stray to her ears, and then he was lost in an imaginary exchange in which he asked her, in all innocence, what perfume she was wearing, and she would tilt her head to the side and pull her hair back and invite him to sample it, and then suddenly they would find themselves naked with her ankles locked around the small of his back and his lips tenderly kissing the soft skin of her neck. And yet, she had behaved with such consistent modesty and passivity all evening that it was almost as if she’d been taken in by her own act. A good part of Wes’s jitters was frustrated curiosity; he’d expected her to be far more direct and aggressive. Trying to read her game plan was like enjoying a well-written thriller in which the murder is announced on the first page and the mystery involves not the outcome but the process. You already know how it’s all going to end, you just don’t know how you’re going to get there. Lucy was a very convincing ingénue, but of course Wes was not a big reader of murder mysteries.
Eventually, having roamed the entire apartment except for Lucy’s bedroom, they’d ended up back in the bathroom doorway, facing each other cross-legged on the floor, each with a full drink in hand. At some point, Wes noticed that he’d completely forgotten that Delia was still at the party and waiting for him; a few minutes later, he had realized that it really didn’t bother him one way or another. And then, odder still, it occurred to him that it had been some time, perhaps a whole Bloody Mary earlier, since he’d stopped picturing Lucy naked and had started really listening to what she was saying, mostly because she seemed interested only in asking him about himself. Wes was only seventeen, but it had been a very long time since anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.
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