The Weight of Air

by David Poses

  The next morning, I ask about a getaway. “You can take a few days, right?”

  Jane suggests the Croatian coast. I don’t want to be anywhere in the former Yugoslavia, but I don’t protest. We take a bus to Split, a city with old European architecture and windy cobblestone streets, largely spared from the bombings.

  The only open restaurant is in a plaza overlooking the Adriatic Sea. No menu. Two choices: spaghetti or bread with ajvar, a red pepper puree that functions as a sauce, condiment, stand-alone dish, and alternative to concrete.

  On the other side of the plaza, a sign reads, “Ferry to Ancona, Italy.” We buy tickets for the overnight crossing and lie on reclining lounge chairs on the cold, windy deck, talking, stargazing. I tell Jane about my summer internship, working almost exclusively as a courier, and then I say, “Oh, I almost forgot. My father cut me off, and my mom is suing him to pay for the rest of college.”

  “You say that like it’s no big deal.”

  “Well, he wins if I fall apart, so I don’t think about it. I’m just living my life.”

  In Ancona, we hop a train to Venice and check into a swanky hotel on the Grand Canal. Our room has silk wallpaper and gold-plated tables and lamps. I pay for everything—lodging, meals at the finest restaurants, gondola rides, city tours. Late at night, we feast on overpriced room service—crudité platters with carrots carved into flowers and crackers arranged in the shape of a heart. Jane laughs when I ask the server if he lays out the crackers in the hall or carries the trays upstairs carefully. She laughs at my TV show translations: The Golden Girls dubbed in Italian with Spanish subtitles.

  “Oh, Rose, you big galoot. A “lanai” is a deck, but I call it a lanai because I’m a classy Southern ho. Hey, look at me. Thanks to a nonsensical jump cut, I’m in the kitchen, shoving cheesecake down my throat. Sofia, say something witty.”

  For three days, we live it up and have daily missionary sex, multiple times. Then Jane gets homesick—for the youth center. I pretend to understand while my insides burn with jealousy. We leave Venice a day early.

  On my last night, the college-aged volunteers stay late, drinking and hanging out. During an impressive rendition of “Wish You Were Here” on a twelve-string, I compliment the player and mime a flick of an invisible coin in his direction. Through a translator, he asks what the gesture means. I explain the concept of busking. The guy pins me against the wall and cocks his fist and yells at me—in English.

  “You fucking American mosquito. You think we’re savages? Maybe we are. Maybe I’ll fucking kill you right now.”

  A rush of people, including Al and Pero, stop the carnage before it happens. Jane yells at my attacker in Croatian. He yells back in Croatian.

  In the morning, my CDs and Discman are missing, along with my Levi’s and Converse. I pretend not to care. Jane is outraged.

  “Everyone knows how much you mean to me,” she says. “I can’t believe they’d steal something of yours.”

  I don’t point out the irony of her statement.

  The guy with the muscles and the green car drives us to the airport, where Jane tries to explain her flings.

  “I was lonely,” she says. “And I missed you. But I didn’t want to have my heart set on us, not knowing how you felt.”

  “It wasn’t obvious? I made all those mixes and sent a million emails.”

  The hot air tastes like jet fuel. I breathe it in as Jane brushes stray strands of hair from her face and rubs her misty eyes.

  “I don’t want to be with anyone else,” she says.

  “Me neither.”

  “So can we promise to be faithful from now on?”

  I nod. Jane nuzzles her head into the crook of my neck. I wrap my arms around her and pull her close and try to etch the moment into my memory.

  “I love you,” she says.

  My mouth won’t open.

  “I fucking love you, David. Okay?”

  “I. Love. You.”

  eighteen

  Mom meets me at the baggage carousel with hugs and kisses. Then she pulls my shoulders back.

  “You’re twenty-one years old, David. Don’t you think you’re too smart and handsome not to stand up straight all the time? You want people to see how confident you are, right?”

  My yellow duffel comes down the conveyer. I squeeze between an older German-speaking couple and grab it and walk perfectly, uncomfortably erect to the car.

  Rod Stewart’s “Forever Young” plays on the tape deck, Mom’s favorite song. She twists the volume down as I recap the trip. When I mention Split, she says she was there with Jeffrey, her last serious boyfriend before my father.

  “We went all around Europe the summer of our twenty-first birth days. I don’t know why we decided to go there, but I remember neither of us knew how to drive a stick shift, so Jeffrey was in charge of the pedals and steering, and I moved the shifter. It was hysterical. We laughed and laughed and laughed.”

  To the left of the Whitestone Bridge, Manhattan’s distended skyline glows in the sun. I ask Mom if she ever wishes she’d married Jeffrey.

  “Like I always tell you, everything in life is at the time. If I would have known then that I’d be divorced at thirty, have cancer at forty . . .”

  A pale pink marble fountain marks the entrance to Mom’s condo com pound. On either side, giant letters spell the name of the highly desirable, exclusive community. The first three letters are missing from the south-facing sign. “DORAL GREENS” is now “AL GREENS.” I chuckle. Mom groans.

  The road curves around the fourth hole of a championship golf course, past a pool, clay tennis courts, and a spa and fitness center. As we approach Mom’s unit, the suspected sign defacer appears in the road: Daniel, a brown Nat Sherman cigarette dangling from his lips. Mom pulls into the garage and we get out of the car.

  “David noticed the sign right away,” she says.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Daniel says, coming at me for a hug.

  “It’s not funny,” Mom says. She goes inside.

  Daniel and I smoke cigarettes on the front steps. Every other second, he flicks ash into the long, rectangular planter. A dozen plastic daisies rise from a shallow bed of bone-dry dirt. Daniel yanks one out.

  “Do you think the neighbors think Mom’s a crackpot?” he asks. “They have real flowers. She has these.” He presses the stem between his palms and spins it. A petal snaps off. He lobs it at nearby shrubbery, cigarette butts scattered in the mulch.

  “David, before I forget. Don’t throw shit into the bushes.”

  “‘Shit’ as in ‘poop’?”

  “Cigarettes.”

  “Was there an incident involving fire?”

  “No, but remember when I lit a firecracker and threw it out your window?”

  “The time when the tree caught on fire and I called 911?”

  Daniel lights another Sherman with the cherry of the one he’s about to finish. I walk to the street, stomp out my cigarette, and kick it into a sewer grate seconds before the front door opens. Mom steps outside and glares at Daniel, a cigarette in each hand. She launches into her reformed-smoker spiel. “It stinks. It’s unhealthy. It’s gross.” She was a heavy smoker until her first cancer diagnosis. I distinctly remember her smoking while riding a bike on multiple occasions. She smoked through both pregnancies.

  “Daniel, I really wish you’d quit.”

  “Then I’d miss it. You say you miss smoking all the time.”

  “I do.”

  Daniel extends his pack. “Here,” he says. “Smoke.”

  “If I took one puff, I’d be right back to two packs a day in a heartbeat.”

  Pointing to splotches of black ash rubbed into the light gray slate steps and the butts in the bushes, Mom says, “You’ve been home less than a week.”

  Through gritted teeth, Daniel says, “I said I’d clean it up.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud.”

  Mom turns to me, her expression softening. “I ordered p
izza and salad. Do you boys want to pick it up?”

  Daniel and I agree. Mom gives me twenty bucks.

  “Why does David get the money?”

  “Because I don’t trust you.”

  In the car, Daniel asks, “She give you shit about smoking all summer?”

  “Never.”

  “Urgh! That’s the double standard. With me, she’s—”

  “She doesn’t know I smoke.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “Because I drop cigarettes in the sewer and wash my hands after.”

  At the pizza place, Daniel adds a meatball sub to our order. When we get home, Mom is sitting at the kitchen table, reading the New York Times with the TV on mute. Other televisions are audible throughout the house, each tuned to a different channel.

  “Why am I an asshole for not turning off lights, but you have TVs on all the time?”

  “I never said you were an asshole for not turning off lights, Daniel. I said electricity costs money. And I have the TVs on because I like to walk in a room and—”

  Daniel sucks spit between his teeth while examining his sub.

  Mom shudders. “Your father used to make that noise. It drove me nuts.”

  Daniel hurls the sub at the wall. Marinara sauce splatters. The top of the roll sticks to the matte eggshell white paint. Everything else slides down.

  Mom’s eyes nearly bulge out of her head. “Are you kidding? Who throws a goddamn sandwich?”

  Daniel says “It wasn’t well put together” as if he were merely following standard protocol.

  I open the pizza box, slide three slices on plates, and serve them with a smile. Daniel storms into the living room. Mom closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly. As we eat, she brings me up to date on the in-court duke-out with my father.

  “The divorce agreement says he can legally cut you boys off when you’re twenty-one, but it also says he has to pay for college if he can afford it—nothing about your age. He keeps crying poverty but refuses to show any proof.”

  Through the wall, I hear Daniel say, “Could you please stop talking about this?”

  After three days with Mom and Daniel, I start packing for school. Daniel comes into my room, waving a CD.

  “Radiohead. OK Computer. Heard it?”

  “‘Creep’? Those guys? Not my favorite.”

  “Oh, David. This is the best album of all time.”

  He pops the disc in my CD player. Sitting on the floor between the speakers, I fall into the distorted guitar that opens “Airbag.” Halfway through the song, a car pulls into the driveway and Daniel leaves with his friends. I listen to the rest of OK Computer—a sonic masterpiece of glitchy, kill-switch textures and anxious, dystopian lyrics.

  When I wake up in the morning, Mom is at the country club. Daniel is outside, smoking cigarettes on the deck.

  “So?”

  “You were right.”

  Daniel smiles triumphantly. “You’re the guy who introduces everyone else to new music,” he says. “Now I know how it feels.” He flicks a Sherman over the rail and lights another.

  “Mom woke me up before she left,” he says. “Shook me and went, ‘You don’t know disappointment the way David does because you never asked your father for anything.’ No ‘good morning.’ No ‘how did you sleep?’ No breakfast.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “Same thing I say every time she brings it up. I told her it’s fucked up that he cut you off. It is fucked up. But she thinks I think he’s some infallible god.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “He gets me. When I’m so mad that I could kick a door off its hinges, I call him.”

  “And then you find some doors to kick off their hinges together?”

  “He talks me down. Honestly, he’s chilled a lot since the last time you saw him.”

  “He said my dick was going to get slammed in a window.”

  Daniel tilts his head from side to side. “I could see him saying that. But she shouldn’t make me feel bad about having a relationship with my own father.”

  “I don’t think she’s trying to—”

  “She totally is. She intentionally pushes my buttons the way she used to push his. And then when I explode, she goes, ‘See? You have his temper and his impulsivity.’ I think she sees him when she looks at me. I don’t think she realizes that her ex-husband is our father.”

  The best music doesn’t reveal its secrets on the first listen, or even the tenth or hundredth. But once you know it’s there, you never unhear it. I don’t know how many times I listened to The Dark Side of the Moon before I heard the spoken words at the beginning, or the sound of Glenn Gould breathing on the 1955 recording of “The Goldberg Variations,” or Lindsey Buckingham’s fingers sliding up the fretboard on Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again.”

  When I leave for school, my giant CD collection stays behind—with one exception. Eastbound on I-84, the sun shining, I roll up my windows so I don’t miss a second of OK Computer’s nuanced sound. The last song ends as I approach the exit for I-91. I glance at the cover—a heavily obscured highway—and start the album over.

  I’m living off-campus this year with another film major in a house on a dirt road. Upon arriving, I sign up for an international phone plan and call Jane. We talk for a few minutes, mostly about the hike she went on this morning.

  “We took almost all the kids,” she says. “And then we made ajvar.”

  If “we” included a girl, Jane would have said, “Alma and I took the kids on a hike.” A guy was involved. My brain quickly produces a lowbudget porno: Jane and half a dozen big, anonymous, uncircumcised Bal kan dicks.

  A week into the semester, my mom calls. The court case is over. She won.

  “The judge finally subpoenaed your father’s bank records,” she says. “He only showed his checking account, but it had over a million fucking dollars in it.”

  Mom explains the sum is significant because you keep minimal money in your checking account and the majority in stocks and other investments. Before we hang up, she says casually, “Your father probably kept a lawyer on retainer this whole time to make my life miserable.”

  Last year in Religion, Literature, and Philosophy, we learned about Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”: A group of prisoners see the shadows of passing objects on a wall in the cave only where they’re chained together. These images form the basis of their reality.

  When a prisoner escapes and sees the sun and the objects in their true form, he doesn’t know how to process the information. Reality upended, he returns to the cave.

  nineteen

  In November, Jane returns to the States. I drive to her parents’ home in Pennsylvania, and somewhere in New Jersey, I’m struck by an inexplicable fear that she’ll want to have sex and I won’t be able to get hard. I’ve never had trouble before, but the thought is so disturbing and unshakable that I stop to disprove my concern in a gas station bathroom. It backfires. I try (and fail) a few more times while driving. Why is this happening?

  Jane bounds out of the house when I pull into the driveway. She comes at me and we kiss. Her lips taste foreign. Her embrace is stifling. We go inside and sit on a couch covered with sheets and colorful, rough wool afghans. When her parents ask how school is going, I lie about a short film that needs to be edited and handed in tomorrow. Jane doesn’t question me. When her parents go to sleep, she kisses my neck and runs her hand up my thigh. I squirm and, feigning disappointment, say, “I don’t want us to get caught.”

  In the morning, I leave in a hurry, repelled with a force far greater than the attraction I felt in the beginning. Why?

  Over Thanksgiving break, I attempt to assuage my guilt by making a reservation at Joe’s Pub at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, on a night when Woody Allen plays clarinet with his Dixieland Jazz band. Our table is practically on top of the stage. Before the band comes out, Jane gives me a pen and a notebook.

  “Write a note to Woody.”
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  “No way he’s going to reply.”

  “You’re always talking about the power of positive thinking. If you think he won’t, then he won’t. If you think he will, then he will.”

  I scribble a paragraph about myself and my studies, and I’ve been a fan since I was twelve years old and my favorite of his films is Stardust Memories. I carefully remove the perforated page and fold it. The lights go down. The band enters. I pass the note to Woody and watch him stick it in the inside pocket of his blazer. When I return to school, a letter from him is waiting in my mailbox, thanking me for my note and giving me a few book suggestions to go with my studies. I write back immediately. A response arrives a few days later. We become pen pals.

  In January, on her first day back at school, Jane comes to the editing room in the afternoon, pitching an idea for a summer sublet in Amherst or Northampton. She wants to be close to Frank, the photographer she met in Bosnia. They’re collaborating on a photo exhibit in a gallery on campus—in September.

  “I can work with Frank, you can write. We can get jobs and hang out. How awesome would that be?”

  “Super awesome.”

  “That wasn’t very convincing. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Just a little stressed.”

  “’Cause you want to finish up and be with me?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So finish up and come to the cottage. I’ll make my famous eggplant parm. We can pretend we’re an old married couple and you’re coming home from work.”

  At eight that night, I leave the editing room with enough acid in my stomach to dissolve Jane’s famous eggplant, the bane of my culinary existence. We eat while watching a documentary about the Bosnian war.

  In bed, Jane is all over me like a sex emergency. Jerking off isn’t a problem, so I fantasize about other girls, but the guilt is overpowering. I try to imagine I’m jerking off, but my brain won’t have it. You’re inside this hot girl who’s crazy for you, and you’re pretending she’s your hand? The fuck’s wrong with you? Finally, I let out a moan and say I came. I take off the condom, tie it in a knot, and fling it into the wicker trash basket under Jane’s desk.