“Get the groceries.”
“God, don’t you see it? Don’t you see anything anymore?” I ask.
I sit in the front seat, waiting for an answer, or a punishment, as he gets out of the car and starts lifting the bags out. Then he opens my door for me. He’s gone before I can get the bags in my hands.
Upstairs, Mich is working on her latest obsession, some historic pasta sauce she found in a book. Yesterday, she went to three different shops on Arthur Avenue for the ingredients. I drop the bags at her feet. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks. Her face falls into a reflection of mine, sour. I wonder if we still look alike, the way we did during that brief period of time when we only wanted to be with each other, and suctioned ourselves to one another’s bodies on the street, on the subway. Mich went to middle school and that stopped, along with people commenting on our resemblance. “You look sick.”
“Yeah. I’m not feeling well,” I say, and go into the bathroom.
“Dad parking?” she calls out after me.
I don’t answer.
“Claude?”
I strip out of my clothes and get into a hot shower, where I can cry in peace. Mich comes and knocks on the door but that, too, I pretend I don’t hear.
Dad comes home with two bottles of wine, whistling again, but he isn’t talking to me. It’s muggy in the apartment, and the long cooking of sausages and tomatoes only makes it more so. I pour myself a glass of wine. Both Dad and Mich notice it, but neither says anything. They talk about the markets on Arthur Avenue, how much they’ve stayed the same since Dad was a kid, how his father, an otherwise observant Jew, once brought home a pork sausage and his mother lost it on him. My father eats with gusto, even though tomato sauce gives him heartburn, even though there are beads of sweat on his brow. Halfway through dinner he stands to take off his shirt, tossing it onto an empty chair. He finishes the meal in his undershirt, a white V-neck that barely conceals his hairy chest. “It’s good,” he says to her, and she says she’s glad he likes it.
Dad offers to do the dishes, and I go straight to my room. “You feeling better?” Mich asks when she comes in a little later. She takes her socks off, puts them in the hamper.
“Not really.”
“You need anything?”
“No,” I mumble into my pillow.
I listen to her undressing, zippers and the pull of a brush through her hair. She says, “Look, they’re never gonna be who you think they are. It’s better to start lowering your expectations now. It’s the only way to be happy.”
I want to tell her it’s not George, that it’s Dad, that it’s a woman who will always be a stranger to us, that I am scared I’ll never remember our mother correctly, but I’m so afraid of breaking Mich’s heart any further that I don’t, not that night, not ever. I pull my blanket up over my chin and say good night.
• • •
I invite George to dinner in the same breath I tell him about the fight with my father. We’re walking out of a movie. Outside, the late winter wind has returned like those muggy days never happened. It hits me in the chest, but George puts his arm around my shoulders.
“Ah, I don’t know if that’s the best idea,” he says.
“He’ll like you,” I say.
“No,” he says, “he will not.”
He’s right. No matter how polite George is, my father will sniff out his cigarettes, how easily I take his lead.
“So what?” I say. “Fuck him.”
“That’s your dad, Claudia. Respect him.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“You’ve only got one parent left. Don’t fuck it up, and don’t use me to do it.” His arm is still firmly around my shoulders. George was always kind to me, even when he wasn’t being gentle.
At the corner I stick my hand up for a cab as though I have the money. It’s a long ride, all the way west, uptown. Someone will be up; someone will pay for it. They will be upset, but they will do it.
“What are you doing?” George asks me.
“Going home. Alone.”
“Okay,” he says, and kisses my cheek as a cab pulls up.
By the time we hit the West Side Highway, the Hudson black out my window, all I can see is George as he held the cab door open for me, him letting me go. The cab takes the curves of the outline of Manhattan, and I concentrate on the sound of wheels going over the highway like the gallops of a large horse. Uptown, nothing glitters at you. Mostly what you see is New Jersey, not a rising skyline, not the possibilities of all the lives waiting to cross your path. You try not to look back when you head in this direction.
Mich is waiting outside the building, welcoming my heartbreak home with a credit card she hands me through the cab’s window. When I get out of the car she puts her arm around me, asks if I am okay.
“I just want to go to bed,” I say.
“I know,” she answers.
• • •
“I’ll come,” George says. We’re lying on my bed on our stomachs, watching the rain hit the windows.
“Invitation rescinded,” I say.
It’s predictable, how my saying no to him ignites a hunger for me, the way it makes him behave more like a teenage boy than ever before, as if he is remembering in one fell swoop all the yeses I’ve given to him before this no, the foolishness of his insistence that we be so sure, leave no room for doubt. He leans on his elbow, starts to rub my back. All of our clothes are off within minutes. I get what I want, and when it’s over he recovers everything he has tossed to the floor as he undressed me: each sock and T-shirt layer; he turns my jeans the right way around before he hands them to me.
In New York, everyone wants to lay claim to a piece of something. They write on the walls of the subway tunnels, where it’s dark and wet and full of rats. They stay long enough to write poems. I lay claim to George for a little while, and then I let him go because I think it’s good practice for the rest of my life, because I think the longer you love someone the more it hurts, the more you have to imagine them in places they’ll never be again. I thought at some point in my life I’d stop having those dreams about my mother, dreams so stupid and small they could be memories, but they’re not: her sitting in the passenger’s seat of the car, or locking the front door, then checking her coat pocket for her wallet. I thought I understood a way around loss. I wait a month before I tell George we shouldn’t be together anymore, before his breath on any part of my body stops making me crazy with desire, before I say that it hurts me more than it hurts him, because I need to believe that’s true. For years, I’ll picture him where he no longer is: the maroon sweater he folds, the school insignia faceup, and leaves on Mich’s bed, the gentle way he closes a door; I’ll fill the apartment with more ghosts.
• • •
On the evening after I have sex with George, I come home to Mich and Dad standing over three trash bags in the living room. Mom’s clothes are draped over the couch; the plastic hangers she so hated litter the rug in a messy stack. We’ve tried to clean out Mom’s room before, but it hasn’t ever been enough. I touch a dress over the easy chair. I want to remember her wearing it, but I can’t. There is a small pile on the end of the couch where I usually sit. Things for someone—it’s not clear who—to keep. The clothes don’t even smell like anything except our house, and that is a smell I won’t recognize till I’ve moved out, years later, when Dad mails me a jacket I left in the apartment by mistake.
“What can I do?” I ask, though I do not want to do anything.
Mich hands me a box of jewelry. “Pick out anything that looks nice.” She examines the bottom of a pair of shoes to see how worn they are. I look at her, but she isn’t looking back. “Or that you want,” she adds.
After a few minutes, I put the jewelry in my hands back into the box. Play stuff, my mother would say. It doesn’t remind me of her, but still.
&
nbsp; “I’m going to order a pizza,” I say. I am starving.
“I was going to make us cod,” Mich says.
“Pizza’s great,” Dad says. “Then you can both help. We can get it done, once and for all.”
I can’t, but Mich does. She saves me a few things—a pair of earrings my mother wore as a girl, a couple of dresses I am still not the right size for, whose shoulders bear the bumps of crappy hangers, untouched for too long. The shoes are nowhere. Maybe I should have asked for them, but I didn’t.
• • •
It’s summer and I’m at the park, walking a dog Mich says we are just fostering but that she’ll try and convince my father, unsuccessfully, to keep, till she moves out again, deciding that a life with a dog is a fine substitution for the company of a man, for us. The dog’s name is Taco. He’s small and scrappy and always sticking his snout along the baseboards, making me paranoid we have mice. Still, I like having a reason to get out, to separate the chunks of time between my babysitting jobs, walking kids home from camp and cutting up apples for them, and shopping runs for Mich.
I take Taco out to the edge of the peninsula, where even on a muggy day like today you can still find a breeze. Under the trees, the ground is dirt dry, littered with bottle caps and ribbons from balloons from birthday parties, two of which are in full swing around me. I’m pouring water into my palm for Taco, feeling a bit crazy for doing so, when I hear the whoops of the boys up on C-Rock. All summer long they jump from the cliff edge, scaling who knows what just for a chance to plunge into a dirty river with a current that could kill any one of them. Today, must be five boys up on those rocks. Bare chested, T-shirts tucked into the back pockets of their shorts. I know George has done it, not with the boys he goes to school with, but the ones he’s known since he was young, before private school. When he first told me, I refused to believe him. When I understood he was serious I asked, “Isn’t it cold? And dangerous? You could die.”
“Nah, it feels good. It’s beautiful.”
We were on the roof of a building down the block from me, where one of his cousins was a super. When the metal door closed behind us I felt like we were going to be locked out up there, in a place we weren’t supposed to be. And then I turned around to see the view. The last bend of the Harlem River. The other rooftops, empty. And George, freshly showered, grinning ear-to-ear, as though he’d built every one of the things before us, laid each brick, cut the pathway for the canal, made the leaves of spring begin to bud. He was wearing a clean white T-shirt, a nice pair of jeans; the breeze was warm. He’d brought a blanket, a bottle of wine.
I turned to look at C-Rock, the river below, how little shore there was beneath. I didn’t know which part of it he thought the beauty was in—the proximity to death, the feel of the freezing water rising to meet you on a hot summer day—but I didn’t want to picture him doing it. I covered my eyes. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, and took my hands off my eyes, placed them around his waist. Over his shoulder, I watched a lone yellow cab try to find its way out of a tangle of one-way streets, like a fish separated from its school, desperate and hungry and alone.
On the peninsula, Taco crawls under the bench, where there’s shade. And then I see George, next in line. I don’t know if it’s him, actually. It looks like him to me, how he holds his body, or in this case, doesn’t—no hands over his knees, not fetal and scared like the kid who went before, who yelped like a kicked puppy. This boy’s arms are out to the world. No screaming, just falling.
Floor Plans
When Lev says “things” he means our marriage, and when he says “fail” he means a decision he has already made without me. When he says this, both of us are looking out the living room window at the neighbors having a piano delivered, piece by piece, through their window three floors below ours.
“We’re young,” he says by way of consolation.
“We are?” I lean on my wrists, bored of watching the piano’s precarious journey, but not wanting to leave Lev alone, even as standing beside him makes me angry. Neither of us feels young. Not old, either, but old enough to know we’ll pay for these choices, the one over a decade ago, the one today. I don’t want it to be true, for our marriage to be so easy to let go of, but I sense he is right. I understand him, after all, my practical, fair husband who suggests we split everything fifty-fifty, including the apartment that we both want to stay in but will have to sell, even though his parents provided the down payment, even though it is Lev’s job that pays most of the mortgage. If divorce can’t ever be easy, we can aim for quicker, kinder, cleaner than what it could be. No raised voices, no shame, no going back.
Lev has moles, handsome ones, on his cheek. The morning after we agree to divorce, I study them, deciding to miss them, these marks I first found a distraction. He needs more sleep than I do, and usually I am out of bed before he is, but this morning I linger because it’s the end, the last time we share a bed, a room. I don’t touch him. When I’ve had my fill of looking at him, I pick up his wedding ring from his nightstand, next to his watch and two bills folded into thirds, and slide it on my thumb, the only finger it fits on, loosely. He doesn’t wake up. I can’t remember if he always did that, slept without it, or if this is the start of relieving himself of me. I am wearing one of his T-shirts; every night, I pick one up from the floor where he drops them. I wonder what I will sleep in once we are apart.
When I tell people about the divorce, their faces fall. They say something kind about him, wait for me to contradict it, but I don’t disagree, usually, even if I don’t want to hear it. My friends like him. He is likable, lovable. Some of these same friends say they are giving us space, by which they mean they are taking space from our messiness, afraid it will rub off on them, afraid that if we can fall apart, they can, too, even if they aren’t married or even in love, even if they loved one of us more than the other all along. They’re afraid of the questions they might start asking, the questions I barely want to ask now that I have to, the ones that Lev has been asking himself, but not me, apparently, for months: How much and for how long and why? Someone asks if we tried counseling. Talking our way out. Fucking our way out. Vacationing or center-locating or finding a way out that isn’t out. I stop telling people. They find out anyway—they call; they e-mail; they send vague, useless text messages. How are you? Let me know what you need. At least, begins a hundred sentences, not one of which makes me feel any better. They take sides, though we don’t think there are sides to take. Mutual, mutual. The whole world splits.
• • •
Two weeks later I watch boxes—Lev, sending his files to his brother’s house in Connecticut, as though this is what I am after, evidence of twenty years of half-finished book ideas—being carried out the front door by two men who seem impossibly young and I wonder how many people’s lives they dismantle on a daily basis.
While they work, I clean the fridge of everything I do not like to eat that Lev does: bottled salad dressings, olives, tubs of cream cheese. When I take the containers to the trash compactor next to the elevator, there is Juliet, from 7H.
“Redoing the floors?” she asks. She puts a hand on her belly, and though it is flat, I know what that means.
“Separating,” I say, because I can’t bring myself to say “divorce.”
She cringes, moves her hand over her heart. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers, and then waits for me to respond. I nod at her, reluctant to express gratitude, even as I know it is the right thing to do. I wait for her to look for her keys, or for the movers to need something from me, but we stand there, my door wedged open with a folded cereal box, her eyes taking a quick accounting of the light that comes through the kitchen window. She moves her hand to her own door, which is unlocked already. I stand by the compactor, waiting for her to move.
“Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do,” she says before she goes
inside.
Later, the apartment seeming no bigger absent Lev’s things—he barely took any furniture, leaving behind everything nice for staging purposes—I remember that 7H is a one-bedroom.
Within a week, we have an offer in our hands. In the handwritten letter they slide under the door, they address us both formally, as though we are ancient. Lev and I have been in the building for five years longer than they have, for sure, but there can’t be more than a few years between us. I work in landscaping, and I come home tracking mud. I wear dresses on the weekends, but my skin won’t recover from the sun; no amount of polish will hide the dirt under my nails.
They don’t mention the divorce. It’s clear they want to combine the apartments, to merge all the energy of a marriage that works, that is making things, to wash out the faultiness of ours. A once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity, they write in the letter, a restrained begging.
“We didn’t even have to die for their dream,” I say to Lev when I get him on the phone at his new apartment, a sublet he moved into not a week after we decided to go through with the split. He called the timing lucky. I sniff for someone else.
“That’s a good offer,” he says. I can hear him opening a drawer, the clang of silverware.
“We can get more,” I say. My half of the apartment sale is all I’ll have when we’re done.
“I don’t know,” he says, and pauses. “There’s no broker this way. If we put it on, it’s just so much hassle.”
“From them. We can get more from them.”
I hear him chewing on the other end of the line. It’s nearly eleven; he must be working if he’s eating this late.
“What makes you say that?” he asks when he’s done with his bite.
I think of Juliet’s hand on her abdomen, the ache she seemed to feel over the end of my marriage, a brand of sympathy, since all of this started, I’ve been working hard to shut out. Lev has always been practical. Before we bought our place, he made multiple spreadsheets; he wouldn’t let me say I loved any of the apartments we saw, because he thought it made the choice cloudy. I had always thought the clean workings of his mind were good to have on my side.
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