II
Eyes
He sits down next to me at the bar of the sushi restaurant in Newark where I’m waiting for my takeout. With a sideway glance I realize he’s old enough to drink but only by a few years. So he’s younger than me by almost ten. As soon as he sits down I can tell he wants to talk—and maybe have sex? I seize up, I all but disappear like the new moon: you might be able to see me in the shadow of an eclipse but here at the bar I might as well be the bottle, or the stool, or the little plastic tub of limes.
But those red-rimmed eyes can see me. He tells me that his friend has died. He tosses back a Jack Daniel’s and calls for another: a newly minted sad-sack drinker.
I start to shut him out. The dinner I ordered is just for me. It’s been two months since my doctor told me I shouldn’t have children, and Ralph just moved his things out two weeks ago. At his angriest, he told me to stay in Newark and write my stupid book. He apologized, and on his way out of the house for the last time he took down the Christmas tree and dragged it to the curb. He’d gotten a job in California, and I wasn’t following him. It was my choice, but now I’m lonely, and embarrassed to be alone at this restaurant, and I don’t want this man to know I’m alone. I turn to my book, place my elbow on the bar, and rest my head in my hand so all he sees is hair.
But maybe I could listen. This man has something to say that might not ever get said if he doesn’t say it now. It’s safe to talk to strangers about grief. His friend, his stupid goddamn friend, has overdosed and died, and he hates him and loves him and wishes he’d never lived and wishes he would live forever.
I offer a smile. I even touch his shoulder once but pull my hand away in case he is looking for a lover, which I don’t want to be. I blunder my way through advice—I lost my father to drugs too, other people won’t understand what you’re going through—as though I can give him the answer, as though I could be a stranger who leaves an impression on him, but my words appear between us like a worm-eaten rose on a platter.
I should have let him talk longer. His anger had an engine, and he needed to run it out. And I didn’t have anywhere to be, or anyone to return home to. Later I would wish I’d asked him what meal they’d last shared together. Tell me everything, I might have said. I want to know about the mayo on your lip, the coffee on your friend’s breath. And if he’d asked me—What was your last meal with your father, stranger?—I would have told him it was three years ago that we had blueberry pancakes on the lake with some of the family there, syrup pooling like luck on our plates, luck that would get sopped up and swallowed. Bacon on the side, and sunshine, and the sky a blue ballroom for a few puffy white clouds. The water rippling as though it was running from itself. There’s a little love in every meal, I could say.
Instead I mutter, “Well, feel better.” Or maybe not even. Maybe when he says, “I’ll stop bothering you,” I turn back to my book, and when my takeout is ready I leave without a word, still worrying that he probably wants to have sex with me. I’ll feel badly later for making it all about me, but for now I go out into the freezing rain, Newark a bright little lymph node clinging to the neck of New York, and I think, My father never knew I would end up living here. He never would have guessed.
Future Breakfasts
In fact Byron and I hadn’t seen each other in many years but we found ourselves at the birthday party of an architect whose name I can’t remember now. Our greeting was smooth and natural, his hand on my elbow and my lips on his cheek, though when we parted neither of us spoke immediately because it was also a hello between people who no longer know each other well.
A historic blizzard was on its way, but the SoHo loft radiated warmth and light. Tea lights guttered hopefully on coffee tables, illuminating the hand-cupped chins of people deep in conversation. Trays of pale-pink lobster rolls sweated on card tables, and a near-perfect chocolate torte waited on a cake stand in the kitchen to be devoured. I’d had an urge to stick my finger in it when I’d gone for a glass of water because the bandwidth of my self-control had been too low lately. I was just out of a brief and devastating relationship with a poet from the college where I taught. It was the first affair since my divorce. I didn’t even want to be at this party, didn’t feel ready, but friends urged me to be done wallowing, to get on with my life, and so I went to shut them up.
Before I saw Byron I’d been standing alone against a wall, feeling like an outcast, a feeling I brought on myself often in those days postdivorce, postpoet. I’d had a lot of room-temperature white wine already because when I talked to people I grew distressed and panicky and couldn’t stop thinking there might be food in my teeth. Still I craved conversation the way lonely, nervous people do: anxious for another chance to get it right. From the middle of the room Byron gave me a look that said I’d better come and talk to him, that there was no avoiding it.
None of my friends knew what had happened between me, Byron, and my brother, Duck, all those years ago in Florida, where we’d grown up. If they did they might have stopped me from going over there. As it was, one of us, Byron or I, should’ve left—gently or rudely, whatever it took to get the hell out of there. But neither of us did. I wondered how much Byron remembered from the night everything had gone wrong, also the night things had begun for the two of us. How much was still important to him?
I also wondered if he ever thought of my brother, if he’d forgiven us, or at least forgiven me. In and out of jail in his twenties, Duck was now flying the straight and narrow in Boston. We spoke regularly. We liked each other still; we liked each other even more than we’d liked each other back then.
As we spoke Byron made gestures I recognized—rubbing the back of his neck, leaning his ear toward me to listen better—and sometimes the reason you don’t listen to reason is that you’re still in love and you won’t be able to move past that love until you see it through.
I wasn’t exactly sure who I was still in love with. The worse my luck, the more I loved, but I felt something click into place while speaking to Byron, who’d been my very first love. Maybe it was just nostalgia acting as a thickening agent, but I felt something like hope come together in me. This would seem like fate, running into him, except I didn’t believe in fate.
We stood surrounded by people beneath a small but baroque chandelier whose crystals clinked in the breeze from an open window, open because the heat was on too high. Byron was dressed perfectly, I thought, in a white T-shirt with a black blazer over it. A pair of jeans with a few holes. A line of sweat shimmered around his hairline. He still wore his hair on the longer side. It fell almost to his shoulders, dirty blond and feathery.
We carried ourselves through the usual small talk. I did fairly well with giving the small, unimportant details of my life. I was clear, didn’t embellish. I explained that I taught history at Rutgers in Newark, where I lived, and that was what had brought me to this part of the country. I said this instead of explaining that after my divorce last year moving someplace new became a matter of survival. Involuntarily I looked out at the night, the moon I could see between two big buildings, translucent clouds passing over it, the effulgence of the city piercing the big windows, and I felt special the way people in New York sometimes do.
I was about to ask him for similar details when he shook his head and groaned. The groan, I thought, was unearned, and I felt persecuted. I brought my hand to my face, as though checking for pox. Still shaking his head, Byron took a sip of his drink, an amber liquid with one large melting ice cube. He laughed into his glass; exhaled air from his nose sent ripples across the surface.
“What?” I said finally.
“My therapist will be exasperated when she finds out about this.” He pointed at me and then pointed at himself.
It shouldn’t have but knowing that he spoke to his therapist about me made me feel intimate with him, as though we still had important places in each other’s lives. Sometimes it’s nice to know that another person finds you irresistible, even if the feeling you give
them, the one they crave, isn’t a good one.
“At least you’ll get your money’s worth,” I said.
Laughter passed between us. I had Byron’s attention, and I chomped down like a tick into flesh. He motioned to a couch nearby, one tucked away that I hadn’t noticed before, and as I sat down with him I saw my friends across the room nodding at me, the drunker ones raising their glasses in support. On the couch I was aware our knees were touching. Maybe Byron was oblivious, or maybe he wanted to touch me, too.
I looked at Byron and had this feeling he knew everything I was thinking. Sometimes words spill out of a person’s eyes, and sometimes I’m one of those people. Over the years the agony of the fact he’d never forgiven me had diminished. He’d never responded to the letters I wrote in apology.
“I’ve thought about looking you up,” Byron said. “Every so often I think about it.”
He started it. I would remember that later. He was the one who nudged the night toward a place where we could believe there was no danger in being honest.
“Maybe you didn’t look me up because you hate me.” I brandished my wineglass as I spoke. It was probably not something I would have said if I hadn’t been drunk.
“I don’t hate you,” Byron said quietly.
The urge to say things I felt needed to be said raced through me like a fire up a mine shaft. But I didn’t say everything I could have; memories returned to me in a surge, but I couldn’t remember what I’d embellished and what was true. I was certain I’d made myself out to be better than I really was and I didn’t want Byron to think less of me because I’d held on to a rosy version of what had happened between us.
A tea light on the table burned down to nothing until the flame finally pinched itself out. Byron watched the trail of smoke intently. He looked about to say something more when, from my purse, my phone released a shrill alarm. Then the sound sprang from other pockets and purses throughout the room and all the partygoers looked around, bewildered.
Byron fished his own screaming phone from his pocket. “Blizzard warning,” he said. “I’d forgotten. I don’t pay attention to the weather these days. Climate change makes it too hard to predict.”
I hadn’t forgotten. At home I’d checked the batteries in my flashlight and stored bottled water. All night I’d followed New Jersey Transit on social media to see what time they would shut down the trains. Weather was drama I could experience with other people. Even if it became dangerous it was different from the individual struggles of our daily lives. It was an experience to be had together and one local enough to grab our attention unlike other global disasters.
The party began to thin, though no one knew whether or not the storm would deliver its promise of twenty-eight inches, impassable roads, and carbon monoxide poisoning if you weren’t careful. The architect’s assistant swept away the trays of lobster rolls. Guests slid their arms into coats, everyone suddenly puffy in down jackets. The sleek black dresses covered, all the crisp button-downs obscured. I avoided Byron’s eyes; looking at him meant saying goodbye.
“It’s a long trip back to New Jersey,” I said, as though it were a confession.
“I have a car nearby,” he said. “Let me take you home.”
I was embarrassed because I thought he’d taken my meaning differently, as though by saying it would be a long trip I was fishing for an offer of a ride. “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect you to do that.”
He stood up and extended his hand toward me. I could smell his cologne. I could have pointed out that he would have to drive all the way back to the city, and the storm could start soon, but I was beginning to understand we would spend the night together.
I let him hold my coat as I slipped my arms into its sleeves. We left the warm, gleaming apartment and forced our way through the wind outside. The snow was light, a few flurries getting whipped around. It felt a little old fashioned, rushing to beat the storm, the promise of bare skin, except for me the promise of a night with Byron was cloudy with chalk dust from a story between us that had been started and erased. The story hadn’t been good; we were walking into a field land mined with our mistakes. Still, New York magicked away this feeling, the way it does—the way it makes being bad seem like a good thing, an intellectual thing. And an inconsequential thing. We were invisible among the tall buildings, the busy traffic, and the never-ending queue of people making their own decisions, bad or good.
The wind blew and stole our voices. It was too cold to speak anyway, but questions floated between us. And desire. Of course I’d begun to think about sex, the stirring inside when you’re almost sure you’re going to have it. My own desperation figured into how I thought about that night, but Byron must have been lonely, too, in need of intimacy, and so we were shedding skins, not bothering with formality. It didn’t matter that we were staring at each other as we walked, looking like fools as we almost tripped over bags of garbage on the sidewalk.
We came to his car, an old sedan he’d squeezed into a spot on a side street. He opened the door for me, and I lowered myself into its immaculate interior. There wasn’t a loose paper or old coffee cup anywhere, which was different from the way I lived, flinging the discards of my life all around me. He slammed the door shut, cutting off the sound of the wind, and I was alone in the car as he circled round front, hands jammed in his pockets. Being alone in someone else’s car is a privilege, something not allowed to everyone. As I took in the smell of it, I indulged the fantasy that one day we might look back on this night and consider it the night that brought us together again for good. By then we’d be in a place of togetherness and bliss. I was desperate to see us in those roles. Grocery shopping together, splitting the list down the middle to save time, or else going away for the weekend and having sex in nice hotel rooms. I’d have tenure by then. I still didn’t know what he did but he’d have made strides, too. Maybe a child in there somewhere—a baby, we’d be older parents, meticulous and devoted.
But I was always falling in love with a future that required more heart than I had.
Then he opened his car door and the cold air rushed in. The old sputtering engine woke with a little coaxing and choked out the fantasy in my mind. The dash lights glowed blue. A few spins of the wheel and we were on our way to New Jersey. Byron reached out a hand and our icy fingers intertwined. A snap of static passed between us. It was the first time we’d touched in a deliberate way, touching for the sake of touching. We held on to each other for a long time, but our fingers didn’t seem to grow much warmer. The heat in the car spilled out in a tepid flow. Feeling tender, I enveloped his right hand with both of mine, brought his hand to my mouth, and let warm air fill the pocket I’d made.
“Cold hands, warm heart,” Byron said.
I wondered if he was being ironic. I also wondered if he was being genuine. Maybe we’d both reached a point where we wanted to be gentle with each other.
* * *
Of that night in Florida, I remembered humidity, and the moonlight making a mess on the ocean. Waves crashing, too. We lived near the ocean, the four of us—me, my parents, my brother we called Duck. Byron lived with his family not far from us.
I was walking home from a party (I wasn’t supposed to have gone), tipsy from a few beers, everything feeling incalculably good the way it does when you first start drinking, before you start drinking too much. I heard Duck’s car before I saw it—he had the loudest engine in town—so I stopped and waited to flag him down and fling myself in the back seat and have him drive me home. As he approached I thought I was lucky to be running into him.
The car seemed to pass in slow motion, Duck driving with concentration I didn’t usually see from him. He didn’t notice me waving, but the road was dark, and I was wearing a tight black dress I’d gotten at the mall and hidden from my parents. Then I noticed Duck wasn’t alone. A boy sitting in the back seat locked eyes with me, though I suppose we didn’t really lock eyes because he was blindfolded. Still, it felt as though we had. His head
snapped my way and I felt attached to his eyes. The world slowed down and all light seemed to disappear except for the car’s interior light, which was on, so I could see that boy’s face and nothing else.
I would spend many years wondering why I’d stood there entranced instead of doing something. Cleary Duck had done something wrong—clearly Duck had kidnapped this boy—but the mystery of what I’d seen struck me silent. And by the time I’d come to I wasn’t sure if what I’d seen was true.
Duck could’ve gotten away with the kidnapping if he hadn’t painted his name on the side of his Mustang in big white letters. Byron had caught a glimpse before Duck slipped the blindfold over his eyes. Some people, people like Duck, become devoted to their nicknames. They put their signature on everything. On various occasions over the years this trait of Duck’s would lead the police right to him. He was ostentatious, yet always trying to hide something, my brother.
I’d slipped back through my bedroom window that night, set my alarm for 6:00 so I’d make it to school, and collapsed into bed. Later Duck would be forced to admit what he’d done—it was planned with friends as a mean trick, no doubt, though he claimed to have acted alone—but this would be two days later, after no one had seen Byron since the Blockbuster parking lot where Duck had grabbed him.
But as I fell asleep, all my tired drunk mind had thought at the time was that it was probably only a game. I’d heard about kids at school making teams and dropping off hostages in the middle of nowhere, hostages who called their teammates and tried to describe where they were. I remembered thinking that everyone would be okay.
If the Body Allows It Page 5