Nancy is afraid to move. She’s a frozen gargoyle, all terror and fear. Her heart is pounding hard. It was a good slip, she thinks. She fights the voices that want her to go sit in the middle of her living room – away from this precipice, and not move for three years. She blocks those voices. She should stay in the place that makes her afraid. Nothing good will come by avoiding the things that make us anxious. “I’m anxious now,” she says. “Really, really anxious. Astoundingly anxious. Stupendously anxious.” She starts to giggle, then calms down and focuses.
The glass is cold on the fronts of her legs. She takes a deep breath. One leg up and over, and finally her whole body over. She listens to the voices that are shouting for her to have a drink. She glances at the phone, thinks about picking it up, but she needs to take care of her fear. Her fear wants her to sit in the middle of the room and not move. Her fear wants her to stop breathing. Her fear wants to pour a hefty drink.
She grabs the first bottle on the bar. It’s the whisky that used to be Ray’s and she pours a good portion into a wine glass. She gulps it and the warmth sinks through the middle of her body.
She walks toward the edge and picks up the phone. “Hi,” she says.
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck are you doing up there? You have to promise not to do that sort of thing again. My heart stopped.”
“Did it really?”
“No. It’s a saying. It’s an idiom. Are you okay?”
“That was exciting, wasn’t it? I’m feeling alive now,” she says. “I’m also having a drink.”
“Good.” He wishes he could have another drink, or two, or three.
“Ray?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Do you think that woman who jumped from the Empire State Building died from fright before she landed on the roof of the car? Do you think it’s possible to be scared to death?”
Ray wonders if Evelyn McHale was alive in her crumpled car roof nest. Did she have time to cross her ankles and clutch the pearl necklace before she died?
“Ray?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if it’s possible?”
“I suppose it’s possible.”
“Then I hope that’s what happens to me.”
“Stop talking like that. If you want me to stay and keep talking with you, I need you to stop talking about dying, about jumping.”
“But you’re the reason I haven’t jumped yet, Ray. You’re doing such a good job of keeping me company.”
“Okay, I’m done. You know what? Fuck you, if you want to die. Go ahead.” He gets into his car, yanks the door shut, and pushes the start button, hard. He tosses the phone onto the passenger’s seat but he can’t leave.
“Goddamn it,” he says. He crosses his arms and stares through the windshield at the blue Lexus hatchback in front on his car. A ‘baby on board’ sticker beneath the rear window. And a stylized fish symbol. As if a ‘baby on board’ sticker will change everything – as if other drivers will see the sticker and immediately slow down, they will want to give space to the car transporting a baby. It’s bullshit. Tulah’s mom had tried to get him to put a sticker like this on his car when the girls were born and he had summarily rejected it as nonsense.
He looks at the phone. She’s not saying anything – there is no tinny thread of her voice. It’s as if she’s waiting. He glances at her building, twists and leans back and looks for her. She’s not there. Fear jolts up from his stomach. Ray wants to leave. He wants to hang up and drive away from this woman but he can’t. The threat of Nancy jumping, and the fact she holds the secret of them means he will stay until she tells him he can leave.
* * *
Joe’s crew is only following the rules. They dig the old sidewalks up and trench a new foundation. In the course of their digging, they tear away all the primary roots on the west side of a dozen mature elms. They don’t stop after three trees. They stick to their work plan. They follow the plan to the letter and the plan does not mention trees so they don’t concern themselves with trees. At the end of the day, as a courtesy, they decide to call the tree guys. They’re feeding tree roots into the wood-chipper when Ray arrives. They’ve already poured in the gravel bed and they’ve got a little packing machine going in the trench.
He doesn’t remember throwing the shovel. He picks it up in a rage and throws it hard at the first truck he sees. It flies end-over-end and hits the windshield with a sharp crack. Later on, they’ll say he could have killed someone.
“Did we, or did we not, have a conversation about the root-systems of elms?”
Joe is standing beside his truck, with a couple guys from his crew. The shovel handle is sticking straight out of the windshield. There’s a guy in the driver’s seat and one kneeling on the hood trying to figure out if they should try to pull it all the way through, or push it back out.
“These guys are witnesses. They saw you throw the shovel,” Joe says.
“Witnesses?” Ray is shouting, crazy loud. “Witness this. I threw a shovel at this prick’s truck. The shovel is a penalty for being the stupidest dumb fuck employed by the city.”
Joe starts to move at Ray and his boys hold him back, barely.
“Nobody talks to me like that,” Joe says. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” Joe is frothing. Ray has never actually seen anybody froth at the mouth before.
“I’m a guy trying to do his job, just like you Joe.”
“You’re nothing like me, college boy,” Joe says.
“Really? I have a couple degrees and you don’t, so you take that as permission to be stupid? Is that how your world works?”
“You’re going to pay for this.” He points at his windshield.
Ray is barely contained. He wants to throw another shovel. But his brain has come back and he knows that he needs Joe to appear more out of control than him. “Well, of course I am, Joe. And you’re probably going to keep your job, regardless of the fact that you’re the dumbest tree-killing fuck I know.”
Again, Joe’s boys grab him as he lunges at Ray. Ray doesn’t flinch. He’d welcome the pain of a punch or two – and the opportunity to land a couple himself. He turns his back on Joe and looks at Arturo and Hank, bearded, steely-eyed guys from his truck who have protectively gathered at Ray’s back. He hadn’t realized they were there and feels grateful, and oddly moved by their support.
“Well,” he says to them. “Let’s weigh the damage.”
* * *
Ray picks the girls up from school and he is exhausted. He’s worn thin by a long, long day, and also by the prospect of being hauled into his director’s office in the morning. He makes breakfast for supper – bacon and eggs, cereal, and toast. The girls watch an hour of television, and then both Patience and Sarah want a bedtime story. Patience wants the story about the bear and the strawberry and Sarah wants the Tom Waits story about the little boy sitting on the overturned bucket in a world where everything is dead and everyone has died. Ray has told her more than once that the Tom Waits story is a spoof of what bedtime stories are supposed to be – it is, in fact, the opposite of a bedtime story. But she loves it. She wanted to know what a spoof was and after Ray told her, and then reassured her it was not like bullying, she thought the story was even better.
Ray honestly wants the girls just to go to sleep with no stories, but Tulah isn’t home yet. He takes a breath. And another. He tells himself the girls won’t always want to be with him, let alone listen to him read a story. They’re going to turn into teenagers who do all their own reading, and who will want to hang out with friends instead of their parents. He knows this in his gut and he dreads it. Already, he has fading memories of holding them in the middle of the night and singing them back to sleep. Even though he is beyond exhausted, he is pre-missing his daughters. He makes a mug of tea, the King Cole tea that he can only find at one grocery store in the city, and reads
the story of the big bear and the strawberry. Then he fakes his way through the Tom Waits story – he is astounded at how dark, and hopeless it is, and how much his daughter enjoys it.
When Tulah gets home, Ray is almost done the bottle of wine he opened after the girls were asleep.
“Hi honey,” he says. “There’s a little wine left.”
“Rough day?” She smells bacon and wonders if she’s imagining it.
“Lost some trees today – a stand of a dozen seventy-year-olds. They probably won’t survive because I am ineffect-ial, insigacent…because I suck. I suck at my job.”
“What happened?” Tulah pours herself a glass of wine and sits down next to Ray.
“I threw a shovel,” he says.
“Okay,” she says. “That’s not so bad.”
“I threw a shovel through the windshield of a truck. I threw a shovel right through a fucking windshield. But I had back-up so it’s okay. S’okay. Everything’s s’okay. My backups had beards. And they were big, big, big.”
“Oh, Ray,” she says, pouring the remainder of the wine into a glass for herself. “Start at the beginning.”
Chapter 6
The Lover turns her down
Tulah’s Snow Journal
Tuesday, November 23, 2008 #399
This snow is not beautiful! It just makes me feel weary, worn-down and flat. What the hell happened to me? This is yet another snowstorm and it’s not even December. Enough already! It seems like it hasn’t stopped snowing since early October. It doesn’t snow in Mexico and a sandy beach with someone to bring the margaritas seems like a great idea right now…
At yoga last night, Gerta showed us a meditation. “This is the Sa Ta Na Ma mantra,” she said. “Sa is the beginning, the totality of everything that was and everything that will be. It is the birth. Ta is life, existence and creativity. Na is death, the change and the transformation of consciousness. Ma is rebirth. It is the regeneration that allows us to experience the idea of the infinite.” I think I may have rolled my eyes. I love Gerta. She’s a gentle, intuitive teacher. But this was too much.
Christ was I wrong. She showed us the finger movements – Sa is thumb to forefinger, Ta is thumb to middle finger. Na is thumb to ring finger and Ma is thumb to pinky finger. We sat in silence, going through the finger movements of the mantra. We sat for eleven minutes and I broke. At the end of the meditation I was sobbing and I did not know why, or how. It was a gush of emotion from some hidden alcove. It shocked me. Gerta acknowledged that this could happen. She made it easy for me to be where I was. She accepted it and understood it, and then guarded my space. And this made me break a little harder.
The snow. The snow. If I were to define this snow, I would simply call it morning snow. I couldn’t sleep. I was up at 5:30 a.m. and I saw the snow as it fell through the street lights. Morning snow is really no different than any other snow, except for the way it makes you feel, because it’s morning. And the light is distinctly hopeful in the morning – even light that is subdued by snow and cloud. I saw the snow and felt hopeful. Maybe it’s because when it snows, the temperature rises a little. Maybe it’s about innocence – the snow covers everything and we begin again. Today, I will perform Sa Ta Na Ma for eleven minutes and see if I can come out the other side focused and calm, and clear. And hopefully not bawling my eyes out. Ha!
* * *
She is sitting at a Starbucks near Hamilton Square. The windows are fogged. It is not as romantic as she imagines a Paris café might be, but the fogged windows create a hazy comfort, a feeling that this café is cloistered and safe. The snow is a steady, unrelenting thing, and watching snow fall past a café window is always magic.
She watches him as he crosses the street and pauses by a large tree that has been wrapped in lights. Ray would know what kind of tree it is. To Tulah, it is just another massive tree in a boulevard of other massive trees. The lights are blurred and diffused by the snow. The Lover is wearing a black leather jacket and a navy blue scarf in a tight loop around his neck. He needs a haircut. He’s wearing a faded Mets baseball cap that is frayed around the edges. It is the third time she has seen him wearing this hat. “It was my dad’s team, and it became our family’s team,” he said, when she asked about it. “We are all about hopeless causes.”
The Lover stomps his feet at the doorway. He sits down and does not look at her. He is twitchy and holds his coffee mug as if it’s a shield – a barrier against what’s to come. Tulah can see something is wrong.
He takes a breath and exhales. “I can’t do this anymore,” he says. “I feel ripped up inside. I have an ulcer. I can’t…”
“…Because I’m married? Is that it?”
“No. Because I am.” He half smiles. He has decided this is a good story. It is a believable story that will make for a clean break. Because she knows what it is like to deceive, she will not chase after him. She will let him go.
She tells herself to breathe but she can’t seem to find her breath. Tulah had always assumed he was not married. He didn’t wear a ring. He just didn’t seem married. She’d never asked because it wasn’t any of her business. He never talked about his wife. Of course, he didn’t talk about his wife.
The Lover sees Tulah looking at his hands. “We don’t believe in rings,” he says. “It’s not something we believe in.”
“You have a wife.” Tulah takes quick, inadequate breaths.
“Yes.” He stands. “I’m so sorry. I have to go.”
She sits and pretends to read for an hour, as her breathing returns to normal. She feels rejected and hurt. He’d become a sanctuary for her and she thought she was the only one with the key. Apparently, she was wrong. Someone else had a key and they were there first, tucked into his bed, reading a book and sipping herbal tea.
Did The Lover’s wife know about her? This question swirls in her mind. Did she know anything? If they don’t believe in wedding rings, are there other marriage customs to which they don’t subscribe? All of these questions are moot. He’s gone. She’ll likely never see him again.
* * *
A few weeks later, Tulah and Ray decide they will make weekly dates for sex. Tulah had read an article in a magazine that recommended this make-a-date-for-sex strategy and they decide it will be a great way to spark themselves back into having a sex life. They always feel better after sex, no matter how awkward, no matter how stilted or incomplete. They decide that every Friday, no matter how tired or busy they are, they will drop the kids with Ray’s mom for the night, and have sex. They won’t call it anything. They’ll just have sex, make love, fuck – it doesn’t matter, they just want to be physical with each other.
“If it’s on our calendar, it’s more likely to happen,” Tulah says. “And it’ll be something we can look forward to. You know, anticipation as foreplay. It can just be about us, our pleasure.”
They do it for two weeks before it falls apart. The third week, Tulah is angry about something and she locks the bedroom door before Ray is in there. He hears her shut the door, and he can see the light is out. He tests the handle, gently, so she won’t know that he knows the door is locked, and then he sleeps on the couch. They never go back to weekly sex. The locked door reverberates in Ray. He goes into the calendar on their phones and deletes the appointments. He knows it’s immature and pouty. He realizes this as he is doing it, but he’s hurt and he wants Tulah to know he’s hurt. By locking the bedroom door, she was telling Ray that her anger about something neither of them will remember in a couple days was more important than the continuation of them.
Two nights later, Ray and Tulah sit down to watch a movie together with the girls. The girls usually sprawl on the floor or on the chaise, with Tulah and Ray stretched out on the couch, which was weathered, chestnut-coloured leather. On this night, Ray and Sarah curl up on the chaise – he makes a point of asking her to come and sit with him – Patience and Tulah take the couch.
“This is different,” Patience says.
“Change is as good as a rest,” Ray says. He takes his hurt feelings and resentment, and makes a conscious decision to carry them forward. In time, they will fade away to almost nothing, but even almost nothing is a fragment of a thing still not forgotten.
They fall back into the pattern of excuses, and resentment, and unspoken blame – and it all leads to a solid wall of sexual indifference.
* * *
Tulah was pissed off. She was beyond angry and she thought retreating to their bedroom and locking him out would be better than saying something she regretted – something she would not be able to take back. They’d met for drinks after work and Ray was flirtatious with the waitress. It was supposed to be their night – their special night. The girls were with Tulah’s mom, they had the night to themselves, and he decides this is the perfect time to flirt with their server. He should have been focused on her – he should have been moving the conversation toward something resembling foreplay with Tulah. The romance should have been directed at her, not the server, a woman barely mid-twenties and barely dressed. And it didn’t help that this woman touched Ray on his shoulder, and then on his hand. She was flirting back. Ray had no idea he was pissing Tulah off with each charming quip, with each playful comment. The fact he had no idea what was wrong pissed her off too. Her anger was compounded by his ignorance about what she was angry about.
This Is All a Lie Page 23