What's Important Is Feeling: Stories

by Adam Wilson

  “Academia,” said Elizabeth, “is just so academic.”

  “So what’s the screenplay about?” I asked, horrified. Why wasn’t I privy to this information before she’d made the announcement? Why hadn’t she asked me to collaborate?

  “Postmodern incest,” said Elizabeth.

  “As opposed to the other kinds of incest?” said #2.

  “As opposed to bullshit,” said Elizabeth.

  “This should be good.” Mike’s tone was sarcastic. He’d finished four bourbons during dinner. Mike slumped in his chair, pulled at his open collar.

  “I don’t follow,” said #2.

  “It’s the last taboo,” said Elizabeth. “The film is about a brother and sister who announce themselves as a romantic unit. Their parents don’t understand. Their friends don’t understand. Even you all at this table, my closest friends, my most”—air quotes—“enlightened friends, look at me like I’m sick for uttering the word.”

  Mike didn’t look at her like she was sick; he looked at her like he was sad. He had a pained wrinkle between his eyebrows that reminded me, for a moment, of the Lebanese man lying injured in the rubble.

  “Stop talking,” Mike said.

  “No, I want to hear this,” said #2. “Please enlighten us, Elizabeth.”

  “The shrink thinks the girl has Stockholm syndrome. That it all leads back to childhood trauma. Truth is, brother and sister are incredibly attractive, and they want each other. They”—air quotes—“love each other. The love”—air quotes—“that dare not speak its name.”

  “And what about kids?” said Mike. “What about the . . . the . . .” His arm made a circling motion.

  “Genetics?” I said.

  “Genetics,” Mike repeated. “What about the goddamn genetics?”

  “They don’t plan to have children. They see themselves—their lifestyle, really—as the end of the evolutionary line. They are the last generation. It’s a de-evolution, a return to amoeba sexuality, the final frontier for humans.”

  Mike made a fart sound with his mouth.

  “I think what Mike means,” I said, trying to diffuse the tension and make myself indispensable, “is that it seems unbelievable for them to be American characters. But what if you made them German? Could that work? I think that would make a lot of sense.”

  “But I still don’t understand what it’s about,” said #2.

  “She wants to fuck her cousin,” said Mike. “That’s what it’s about.”

  “And that makes it postmodern?”

  “I slept with my cousin years ago,” said Elizabeth. “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “You said you only did second base,” said Mike.

  “And that doesn’t count ? Is that what you’re saying? That the sex act is only complete once the man has come to climax?”

  “It’s a joke to you,” said Mike. “Everything’s a joke.”

  “Darling,” said Elizabeth. “I’m dreadfully serious.”

  “You’re ruining . . . ,” said Mike. “You’re ruining . . . and you’re so fucking noncha . . . noncha . . .”

  “Nonchalant,” I said, though I’d lost the thread.

  “Nonchalant,” said Mike. “So fucking nonchalant. You’re ruining your life.”

  “By writing a screenplay?”

  “You know why,” said Mike.

  Elizabeth barred her arms in an X across her body. “This is not your decision,” she said.

  In bed I asked #2 why he’d never dated Elizabeth. I’d assumed he wasn’t up to her intellectual standards.

  “Are you kidding? She’s a psycho.”

  “Eccentric.”

  “Psycho. You know she was in the nuthouse, right?”

  “You mean rehab. For heroin.”

  “That JAP’s never shot heroin in her life. Maybe she snorted it once or twice.”

  “Don’t call her that. It’s an ethic slur.”

  “But I’m Jewish.”

  “That makes it worse,” I said. I rolled over, checked my cell. There was a picture text from Jenny. She posed beside a pyramid of White Castle burgers. A tattooed dude leaned toward the pyramid with his mouth wide open. The way they’d shot it made it seem like he had a giant mouth, big enough to fit all the burgers at once. Jenny looked like she was laughing.

  “You don’t like me much,” said #2. “Do you?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.”

  The roof overlooked Manhattan from across the river. A film crew was set up on the street below. A fifty-foot crane lit the neighborhood, sharing long beams of light like a small, near sun, giving the city in the distance a surreal mystic shimmer, as if it weren’t there at all but were only a hologram sprung forth from the crane’s godly glow. Jenny held her phone over the edge to snap a photo. The photo came out blurry, black with a dot of white light at its center. “Ill,” said Jenny.

  There were no more dudefriends or lovers. Elizabeth had ignored Mike’s calls for three days. #2 hadn’t even texted.

  Jenny took my arm. We crossed the roof and then descended the ladder back into the party. A dozen donkey piñatas hung by tinsel from the ceiling. The piñatas were decorated with Polaroids of battered women. Every hour, the artist would ceremoniously smash one with a Wiffle bat, spilling an assortment of loose pills onto the partygoers. A group sat Indian style on the floor, sifting for Adderall among the Advil and CVS-brand antihistamine. The installation was called Mules.

  Some dancers made a circle at the room’s center. Jenny said, “I love this song,” and pulled us in. Her style of dancing approximated jumping. She bounced farther toward the ceiling with each upbeat, mouthed the words. It looked like Jenny was speaking in tongues, perhaps in prayer to the great lord of gravity, asking to be lifted, weightless, above us all.

  Jenny’s eyes were closed. The other dancers looked around as they jangled, trying to match each other’s moves, or gauge the aptitude of their own. A dude made exaggerated air-humps in my direction, buffering against rebuff by pretending to be joking. I pictured Mike on the dance floor, pre-accident. In my head he was confident, fleet-footed. He wore a fedora, tap shoes, a white tuxedo.

  I thought about leaving the party and showing up at his apartment. Mike in a bathrobe and day-old stubble, pleasantly surprised when he opened the door. We would not say a word. He would open the robe, and I would press my body against his, head to heart. He would close the robe around us.

  I knew I was not someone who would show up at Mike’s apartment. Not out of loyalty, but because I was afraid. At some point, I let the air-humper hump my leg.

  The clinic was just around the corner. The magazines were either in Spanish or stupid, so I stared at the TV while I waited for Elizabeth. The UN had urged both states to ceasefire, but Hezbollah refused to stop sending rockets and Israel refused to stop dropping bombs. CNN’s aerial camera circled over northern Lebanon, zooming in and out on devastated areas. From above, the region looked like a beat-up map, with certain sections so heavily creased and worn they’d become literal gray areas, topographical erasures.

  In a few days, the current conflict would end, but I remember thinking, as I sat in the Planned Parenthood waiting room, that both parties were too stubborn and hateful to ever truly change, and so were condemned to an eternal cycle of murder and mourning, with occasional respites in between. Sometimes the respites were brief—a month, a year—but occasionally there would come a long in-between, long enough for the people to forget their grief and enjoy the prevailing peace. And I remember thinking that this state of being—the long in-between—was the best life had to offer.

  On the walk to the clinic I’d asked Elizabeth if she was sure she wanted to go through with it. I’d seen enough movies to know I was supposed to ask.

  “I’m forty-one,” said Elizabeth.

  “That’s not too old,” I said, though I wasn’t certain of the science.

  “I’m not against procreation,” she said. “But I’m not sure I’m in favor of
it either.”

  Two weeks later I will come home to find Elizabeth fucking my nemesis Brian Feldstein on the floor. He will be on top, arms clenching her neck in a not so gentle strangle. Elizabeth will moan, “Don’t stop.” When Brian sees me, he will turn and say, “Sup?” but he won’t stop strangle-fucking, and Elizabeth won’t even notice that I’m there. Shaking with anger, I will get back in the elevator, ride up to the penthouse, and trail a group of young women into the Host’s apartment. The room will be filled with people I vaguely recognize, and the Host will weave among these people, stopping for handshakes and back-claps before moving on to the next group. The Host won’t stop smiling, as if any change in expression might transform him into another, lesser being. When he approaches me, I will lean in and kiss his cheek as if I know him. His breath will smell of cough drops. His hand will grace my hip. A blogger will snap a photo from across the room, and in the morning I will be referred to as “Mystery Woman.” The photo will make it look as though he’s blushing at something I’ve said. Jenny and my other coworkers will ask for details, and I will tell them I don’t kiss and tell, but say it in such a way—slightly smirking, one eyebrow raised—as to imply that, yes, perhaps I am not so innocent as they might have imagined.

  That afternoon, Elizabeth will come into the kitchen and ask if I am angry at her. I’ll lie and say I’m not angry, because I have no real right to be angry. Elizabeth will say, “Well, I’m starving,” and eat peanut butter from the jar with a plastic spoon. She’ll say, “Don’t you get it?” and I’ll say, “Get what?” and she’ll say, “I did it ironically. The whole thing was ironic.”

  When we got back from the clinic it was already evening. The Apple Store’s sign lit the street, opulent white, iconic apple frozen in its bitten state.

  Elizabeth plugged in the TV. There weren’t any channels, just fuzz. “Shit,” she said. “I never called Time Warner.”

  The fuzz was antiquated, analog, a remnant of another era. Elizabeth left the TV on. She laid her head in my lap.

  “I have you,” she said. “You’re mine.”

  I took a long, deep breath. The A/C was cool against my neck. I wrapped a strand of Elizabeth’s hair around my finger.

  “I’m yours,” I said.

  Things I Had

  For S.R.

  My grandfather was an old queen, and when he was dying he would grab me through my pants and try to make it hard. He had Alzheimer’s and called me Sam, and sometimes I let him because it wasn’t his fault and I liked the attention.

  There was a tenderness in the way his fingers moved—up and down like slow typing—that I’ve yet to find in any lover, a word I hate; it implies love, a condition absent from my life, though I’ve replaced it with the companionship of late-night television.

  The problem with love is that I had it for my wife, but also for the one I was cheating with. Both were Latina, young, beautiful. One broke things—vases, wineglasses—the other cleaned up the mess (she was the maid). What I had was nostalgia for the things I’d never had. What I also had was money, which counts more when you’re older.

  The thing with my grandfather started in the new house, which was not so different from the old house, except it was in a different state, one where the heat crept under your skin and lived in the space between your bones and your veins. Jane and I were at a school meant for Catholics. Our mother told us that after making the sign of the cross we should wipe over it with our palms in order to erase it. She was an old-school Jew torn between her fear of gentiles and her desire to get us into good colleges. St. Anne’s of the Divine was Miami’s best, and my father had to pull strings to get us enrolled.

  As it turned out, half the students were Jews, also the children of string-pullers: textile magnates, software moguls, commercial real estate tycoons. The other half were the Cubano elite out of Coral Gables. The girls wore skirts hiked up so you could see the inward slant between the fall-off of their ass cheeks and their paler backs of knees.

  In the cafeteria, Jane sat with her new friends and I was left alone, at the end of a long dining table, removed from the flirtations and legs, crossed and uncrossed, ad infinitum.

  I mainly watched Celia Escarole, the light-skinned, dark-eyed Cuban Jew ( Jewban) who smelled like an ultra-earthly combination of oranges and baby powder. I liked the way she fit in with her crowd, content in the middle, content to let her eyes wander. She didn’t pay attention in class either, just played her click-pens like castanets and tapped her boots against the tile.

  My grandfather taught me all I know about seduction, the way you start out slow, hands grazing, smiles short and repeating like blinking eyes. He didn’t say much, only “Sam,” in a way that barely involved his mouth. His fingers were wrinkled and felt like recently bathed skin.

  The thing my grandfather didn’t teach me was how to start conversations. This was problematic; in high school, introductions are necessary. And though I hoped that by sitting alone—head in a book I wasn’t reading—I radiated new-kid mystique, in actuality no one looked at me.

  It was probably a good thing that no one looked at me. My boners came and went like the billboard ads I watched through the tinted window of our town car, the one my father had hired for Jane and me, complete with driver, just until we got our licenses.

  We moved slowly, gliding beneath palm trees, watching bikinied skateboarders weave between cars. Our driver’s name was Luis, and he played Little Havana on the radio at a volume slightly lower than the sound of his hum over the music. Jane sat in her corner doing homework with a felt-tipped pen in girl-perfect freehand (she was no lefty like me, all smudged ink and oddly angled letters).

  Luis also drove our grandfather and hated him because of communism—Grandpa was double pink, card-carrying. That’s how he met Sam. I know because he once asked me “Remember how we met?” When I said no, he took his thumb and rubbed it over my index and middle fingers, said, “Washington, DC, 1954, Joe McCarthy in our rearview. Bill Weiss’s party, that Elvis Presley record, which one was it?”

  “Blue Suede Shoes,” I said, and he nodded. When he told these stories I tried to act like I remembered.

  Once I asked Maria if she remembered how we met.

  “I was your maid, stupid.”

  “But when did you first have that feeling?”

  “When you leaned over and rubbed your pinga on my ass while I was dusting under the coffee table.”

  I come from a line of failed husbands. Grandpa had an excuse. His chemistry was XY to XY. My father was simply an asshole, a cheater. My mother knew but didn’t care, or cared but didn’t have anywhere else to go.

  I guess that makes me an asshole too.

  I’m not sure if my mother was a good wife. She mostly shopped and prayed. She’d never been religious, but in Miami she went to temple every Saturday. She spent the rest of the week touring the South Beach boutiques.

  Jane got a different gene. Her kids are beach beautiful, born into California. Daniel, her husband, eats low-carb in the Google cafeteria. We speak every few months. How are the kids? Daniel rides a Segway! Andrea Solomon is divorced, you know? She invites me for holidays, but I don’t go. She’s still mad about Bianca.

  “You loved her,” she says.

  If I loved anyone it was Celia. First I had to get her attention. Since I was shy and terrified of females who weren’t my sister, my method involved staring at her for an entire class in the hope that she would turn around and that we would “accidentally” make eye contact. The plan was foiled almost immediately when Celia did notice me, raised her hand, and said, very flatly, “Andrew Stronifer is staring at me.”

  It was a bittersweet moment—she knew my name!—but it was mostly bitter. The class laughed the way they laughed at geeks and nerds, which meant I was a geek, because I wasn’t smart enough to be a nerd.

  After school, Grandpa was the only one home. My mother should have been there, but she was out buying shoes or makeup or staring sadly at the ocean in
new shoes and new makeup.

  Jane and I both looked like our mother. We shared her build: all bones, no booty.

  Not many boys liked Jane. She was a wallflower who hadn’t grown into her face. It was strange being twins. If there was such a thing as a male wallflower I hoped that I was one. I felt like a part of the wall. Sometimes I felt like a flower, though I wanted to be something more manly than a flower.

  Grandpa was a flower, and now he was wilting. He would be dead soon, and our secret would be erased. I imagined that when he died my body’s memory of his fingers would lift easily, like lox from wax paper, leaving only oily residue.

  Grandpa lived above the garage in a small alcove that also had a bathroom and a room filled with items: files, sweaters, an exercise bike. These items had been accumulating dust in our old house in Boston, and we’d brought them to maintain a level of continuity.

  He sat up in bed, facing the television. The Lakers were playing the Knicks.

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  “Beautiful,” I repeated. Grandpa turned to look at me. It was his nonrecognition face, different from his recognition face and his déjà vu face.

  “Who are you?” he said. He wore flannel pajamas and was sweating.

  “I’m Sam,” I said.

  “You’re not Sam.”

  Some days he knew I wasn’t Sam.

  Before Sam died, Jane and I would go for weekends to their house in Vermont. Sam would walk with us through the woods, squeezing our elbows with his small hands. The two of them would spend mornings in bed, and Jane and I would climb in, watch television, bring them orange juice. I imagined their lives together in sepia-tinted montage: swirling strings carrying them hand-holding through fields of daises; across supermarket aisles with one in the cart and the other gleefully pushing; beneath an awning avoiding rain, Sam holding an unfolded newspaper over young Grandpa’s head. At the end of the montage the music becomes somber, the piano trills, the timpani beats a slow pulse. We see a hospital bed: now occupied, now empty. There is Sam’s gravestone. There is Grandpa in this bed, Sam’s pictures still in boxes, me lingering in the doorway.