If the Body Allows It

by Megan Cummins

  “That was cute,” Aamina says. “The play.”

  Two martinis appear before us. Dirty gin for me, dirty vodka for Aamina.

  “That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

  “Cute is a compliment.”

  “What if someone called your poetry cute?”

  “My poetry isn’t cute.”

  “See?”

  We laugh. Aamina suggests another drink when we finish our first.

  “You sure?” I ask. “One is good, two is too many, and three’s not enough.”

  “Stop it,” Aamina says, signaling the waiter. “Tell me you wrote something down today.”

  “You know, Aamina,” I say. “I think I’m going to write a book about a woman who drinks a magic martini and is bestowed with the superpower of never spilling a drop when she carries her drink from the bar to her table.”

  “I’m not going to hang out with you anymore if you keep this up.”

  “Come on, though, isn’t that a pretty good superpower? You’d take it if offered. You don’t have to trade anything for it. I would take it.”

  “Of course you would,” Aamina says—and it makes me blush, it makes me think I really shouldn’t order that third drink.

  * * *

  Later, we part ways, and the wind and rain force me homeward. I cut through Washington Park, the scraggly cousin to Military Park. I haven’t read yet if they’ll revitalize it or not. Even though it’s July, the city hasn’t undecorated a squat pine tree strung with lights and ribbons for the winter holidays. The grass grows anemically, but the John Massey Rhind statue of George Washington and his horse still holds forth at the corner of Broad and Washington Place. I pay attention to the history of places because my father loved history.

  When I was a child I always kept a close eye on my father because he made me curious, he was so quiet and removed and I felt he needed protection. I would see him hide his canisters of pills around the house. Vicodin, Oxy, Xanax, that sort of thing—those were his favorites. I turned the bottles over in my hands, examined the labels, and then returned them to their hiding places. Because I loved him, and because I believed he had a reason for hiding these things, I didn’t tell my mother. Mostly I could forget that I’d seen him tucking pills behind books on the shelf or in garment bags in his closet, but I knew, too, that there was something to hide, and that if I told my mother then she would divorce him.

  Across Washington Street, the symmetrical face of the Ballantine mansion is dark, stately. I wait for the light to change even though there are no cars coming. Once I grew into a teenager, and I could see more clearly the ways my dad was hurting our family, I shunned him. Shut him out. Didn’t help him through his illness. I didn’t even think of him as sick, just as someone who couldn’t help himself. When I was sixteen, and he left to go to rehab just as my mom was finally divorcing him, I told him I never wanted to see him again.

  We did see each other again, but not very many times. For my mother, his death was the closure to her grief. For me it was just the beginning.

  I come up to my house and am happy to see Per outside. I need someone to lift me from my memories. I accept eagerly when he invites me inside for a drink. When Patrick was staying with me I saw Per and Thora less frequently, and now that he’s gone I hope they’ll welcome me back.

  The babies are asleep in the front room of the downstairs apartment, and the door to the back room is closed to keep noise from a museum wedding out. I try not to stumble or trip on the toys scattered on the floor. There are no windows in the middle room, with the small kitchen and an open space for the table, but Thora has lit candles, and a soft yellow bulb glows in a lamp on a shelf stacked with books and houseplants. We need more oxygen in the house, Thora had said when she brought the plants home. The very first time I met her, she was on the stoop repotting a ZZ plant. Ralph and I had just moved in.

  There’s the lovely sound of wine splashing into the bottom of a glass. I look up to see Thora’s filled three. I love the feeling I get being in their kitchen with them at night. The only light is soft and artificial—we’re tucked in the middle of a row of brownstones, tucked in the middle of the house. We’re safe.

  We clink glasses. I tell my neighbors about the show, how it had gotten canceled, but next time the company performs—at the end of August—we should go together and they can bring the babies.

  Per and Thora exchange a glance. I take an uncomfortable sip of wine and comb over my words, worried I said something stupid or offensive.

  “We have some news,” Thora says. “We’re going back to Denmark.”

  It’s gotten too hard to live in America, they say. They’d like more space than what our brownstone offers, but instead of finding a new apartment they’ll return to Copenhagen, where they’re from, and where they’ll have free health care and where the quality of life is much higher.

  “We loved our New York party days,” Per says. “But they’re over.”

  We laugh, and I agree with them about everything—if given the option of free health care, I would take it. “It’s cold there, right?” I ask. It’s the only negative thing I can think of.

  “It is,” Thora says, but she tells me that in Denmark, snow is cleared with large brushes, and she can’t believe Americans still tear up their roads with plows.

  “What will you do in Denmark?” I ask. “Besides paint.”

  Per shrugs. “There are a lot of unknowns, Marie.”

  I smile, because he seems fine with the unknowns, and I’m impressed that Per isn’t catastrophizing. He sips calmly and puts his hand on Thora’s hand absently. Their daughters sleeping in the other room make the unknowns something to be conquered, not surrendered to.

  “Well,” I say. “I’ll never find neighbors as good as you.”

  “Oh, not true,” Thora says. “You’ll be happy not to have babes crying in the night.”

  I insist that they’ve never once woken me. In fact, I love hearing them squeal in the mornings.

  Their news has made it difficult to shift to a new topic; we find ourselves circling back to their preparations, their timeline, getting the EU passports for the babies at the embassy in New York. After a while the bottle of wine is gone, and as Thora takes her last sip, one of the babies starts to cry. “What timing,” she says, and she starts to clear away the glasses but I tell her I’ll do the dishes. She disappears into the babies’ bedroom while I wash the glasses and Per searches in the dish rack for the pacifiers. We hug, and though they’re not moving until later in the summer, it feels like we’re saying goodbye.

  * * *

  I visit Thora in the evenings, and we talk about the plans they’ve made, each of us holding a baby. She tells me what belongings they’re leaving here and what they’re taking with them. She gestures vaguely in the direction of a storage unit a few miles away and complains that it’s full of Per’s unsold paintings. It would cost a fortune to ship them to Denmark.

  I tell her I’ll be their U.S.-based art dealer. Just bring them upstairs, I say.

  She asks if I’m serious. “Of course,” I say. “No one uses the second bedroom. It was Ralph’s office, but I like to work at the kitchen table.”

  Thora looks startled. I haven’t mentioned Ralph casually since he left. Then she shrugs. “I’ll talk to Per about it.”

  * * *

  One day Per shows up with a U-Haul and brings a dozen large canvases into my apartment. I choose one for him to hang on the wall. It’s a depressing scene of a cemetery next to a baseball diamond, but in the right corner is a patch of bright blue sky where the clouds have parted.

  The next day, walking home from the train, I’m thinking about how the painting looks on my wall. Before I left that morning, I stood before it for several minutes just taking it in. Learning its specifics. When I reach my house, I come upon Patrick sitting on my stoop.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Hi,” he says.

  My hand twitches toward my keys in my pocket,
I’m itching to let him in.

  I sit down next to him instead of opening the door. I snake my arm through his and lean my head on his shoulder. I tell him the truth, which is that I miss him. There are no visible stars, the lights are too bright, but I search the hazy dark sky for something to focus on. Each minute that passes is another minute that I don’t let him into my apartment. I think of my mother, who worries that I’ve inherited her and my father’s addictive traits. I squeeze his arm harder.

  “Maybe we need each other,” he says.

  “I don’t know,” I reply.

  The night gets old this way. When he throws up what he’s been drinking, I care too much for him not to let him inside. I bring him in and get him settled on the couch. I return to the stoop with a pitcher of water to clean the sidewalk, my beautiful brick sidewalk on my quiet, beloved street.

  * * *

  I measure the waning of summer by the movies that play in Military Park on Tuesday nights. Each week the movie begins when the sky is completely dark, earlier and earlier until soon I’m not home from work in time to catch the beginning of the film.

  I haven’t let Patrick back in since the night I found him on my stoop, though he texts me, and I sometimes text him back, and then I have to convince myself all over again that it’s best just to let things go.

  August comes to an end, and it brings the departure of Per and Thora. I help them pack the last of their things and see them off the day they leave for the airport. I hold one of the babies as Per loads the cab. I watch the car turn the corner, and when it’s gone I go inside and look into the spare bedroom that’s so packed with Per’s paintings I can barely maneuver around them.

  I pull out a few storage tubs that are filled with things I took from my father’s apartment after he died. I finally feel intrepid enough to sort through which things to keep and which to discard.

  I find a case of burned DVDs, labeled with the names of songs. My laptop is old and has a DVD drive so I pop in the first disk. On the DVD my father recorded himself playing his guitar and singing, and since I haven’t seen him or heard his voice in almost four years, the tears come without warning. “Next,” he says, “Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Did She Mention My Name?’ ”

  He looks at the camera before he starts playing. “A little bit of trivia—Marie, this is the first song you ever heard, in the hospital, the night you were born. I don’t know why your mom allowed it. She was probably in too much pain to care.”

  I watch the video again and again because he’s talking to me. We’re talking, or as close as we’ll ever come again to talking. At the end of the video he recounts also having played the song to my mother on the second night of their honeymoon.

  “A bad idea,” he says, shaking his head and looking away from the camera. “Bad, bad idea.”

  The first time my dad met Ralph, we were at the lake house in Michigan, the house we later sold, but the three of us spent the weekend there—we were awkward at first, but then comfortable around each other.

  He came into the house from the porch where he’d been smoking as we were readying to leave on the last day.

  “The verdict is in,” he says. “I like Ralph.”

  Hearing those words had made me so happy then. I’m about to text Patrick to ask him to come over when the doorbell rings. It’s the mail carrier. She extends a package for Thora my way, and I’m about to tell her they’ve moved, but a letter from my insurance company distracts me. It’s thick and is stamped Urgent. I put the package on the hallway table, I’ll have to forward it later, and I tear open the letter.

  The company is bankrupt, the letter says. I’ll have coverage through the end of September, but afterward the company will be liquidated.

  “Oh, fuck,” I say, because they’d just approved an expensive infusion drug, the first drug I’ve tried that has helped my joint dysfunction and my fatigue.

  I forget about Patrick. I look for a new plan on the internet, but most carriers seem to have left the New Jersey marketplace, and none of the remaining options covers the drug. I could buy a plan from a different carrier off the marketplace, but my search makes it clear I need the government subsidy. I don’t know what to search for next. Google stares back at me. I wish Thora were here. We could at least talk about universal health care in Denmark and agree that it makes much more sense.

  * * *

  “Why don’t you move to Brooklyn?” my mother says on the phone. “You work in the city.”

  I always call her when I already know the answer to a question but don’t want to listen to myself. I look out my window. Pink evening light falls on the brick buildings across the street.

  “It’s so expensive there,” I say.

  “Well,” she says, “you’ll have to weigh the difference in cost. The difference between paying for the drug and paying more in rent.”

  “I mean, it’s not a lifesaving drug,” I say. “It just improves my quality of life.”

  My mom laughs.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Can I ask what you see is the difference?”

  * * *

  I don’t want to leave Newark, but I find a health insurance plan on the New York marketplace, which will start January 1. I look for an apartment. My mom has to cosign, which makes me feel ashamed, but once I have an address, I can lock in the plan. I’ll have a gap of three months between my old insurance ending and the new insurance beginning, so I refill my medications and see all my doctors and suck every last dime from the insurance company before they turn out the lights.

  I could leave Newark without ever telling Patrick. I could block his number and when he next shows up at my apartment, he’ll find it empty. But since finding my dad’s DVDs I’ve become obsessed with closure, so I text him and ask to meet for a drink at the cocktail bar on Halsey Street, where Aamina and I go together. It has a leafy patio strung with bare white light bulbs. It’s different from our old haunt, the dive bar, so maybe that will encourage us to behave. He’s standing outside when I get there, his thumb caressing his phone screen, and when he sees me approaching he gives me a thumbs up, which makes me laugh.

  We get a table outside and wait a long time for our drinks, but I’m okay with the wait. There are wet leaves pressed to the brick patio and the air is cool, damp, and clean.

  Patrick sighs and looks at me with a sad smile when I tell him I’m leaving. He picks up the coaster and taps it against the table.

  “It’s only ten miles away,” I say.

  “Ten miles, with eight million people in between.”

  Then he says, with some love in his voice, that I’m going to become boring like all the other people our age moving to Brooklyn.

  “You might not be wrong,” I say. “But I was boring here, too.”

  “No, you weren’t.” He brandishes his pint glass. “Perish the thought.”

  Our server comes to place a flickering tea light on the table and clear our empty glasses. Against my better judgment I agree to a second round. The light rain from earlier in the day returns, and Patrick raises the table umbrella so the droplets bead down the fabric. It gets dark, but we’re the only ones outside and no one from the restaurant has plugged in the string lights yet. I can barely see Patrick’s face across the table. I want to end things the way we began them, by bringing the people we’ve lost to the table, except this time I want to prove to Patrick—and to myself—that if his friend and my father were still alive, we’d all be ready to be happy with one another.

  “What do you miss the most about Sam?” I ask. “I mean good things about him.”

  Patrick rubs his neck so hard it turns red. “I don’t know,” he says.

  “Come on. One good thing.”

  Patrick sighs. “He laughed easily. Even when things weren’t that funny. That made me feel good about myself.”

  “That’s good,” I say. “When we met, would you’ve been able to come up with that?”

  Patrick shrugs. I can tell he doesn’t want to
talk about the night we met. I ask him what’s wrong, and he says, “When you leave, there won’t be any chance of running into me again.”

  “We were good at that. Running into each other. More often than not, though, I think we orchestrated it. Time to stop living a lie, Patrick.”

  I mean to be funny, but his smile fades.

  “I get it,” he says. “I’m a fuckup.”

  “You’re young enough that it’s okay to be a fuckup. I can’t keep living my life like this. I have things I should be doing.”

  “And I don’t?” He looks offended. “I don’t have things I should be doing?”

  “You do. You just have more time to do them. I’ve only had one type of job my whole life, and I’m tired of being an assistant to power-hungry men.” I narrow my eyes. “Like the type you’re going to be when you finish business school.”

  Patrick chortles. “Remind me of this conversation when I have an assistant someday. If I have an assistant.”

  What he says implies a future in which we’ll still be in touch. I think of Yuejin, my landlord, and his fatalism. If it’s going to happen then it’s going to happen.

  When I don’t respond, Patrick clears his throat and goes on. “But you’re writing here. That’s something.”

  “I’m not really writing here.”

  Patrick tilts his beer so the meniscus slides up the glass. “I wonder what Sam and your dad would say about us. Us together.”

  “I think they’d be happy we weren’t alone,” I say. “For this time, I mean.”

  “I think they’d think it was weird. Meeting at a bar in a sushi restaurant.”

  I smile. “Maybe.”

  “You know,” he says, brightened by having just realized something. “If Sam hadn’t died I probably wouldn’t have talked to you at the bar. I probably wouldn’t have been in that bar. But look what happened, I got to meet you.”