Dive From Clausen's Pier (35 page)

“Isn’t that something you do in a field?”

“Urban tromping,” he said. “It’s a subcategory.”

“Where would we have gone?” He thought for a moment. “Gramercy Park.”

I’d spent over three hundred dollars on my plane ticket, another big charge on my credit card. I’d RSVPed to the wedding, for which I’d worked diligently to make a very expensive dress. I was expected at the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night—Rooster’s mother had called me herself to echo Rooster’s invitation. My own mother had asked me to save at least one evening for a special dinner with her. And I’d sent Mike the Empire State Building postcard with
See you soon
written on the back—I’d sent it to him at home, because he was there now, out of the hospital, ready to start the rest of his life.

But I didn’t want to go. I was very clear on that all at once: I didn’t want to go.

“Maybe I’ll stay,” I said.

Kilroy raised his eyebrows. “Do you want to?”

I nodded.

“Then do.” He touched my shoulder, stroked it a few times and then moved his hand down my arm. He had the nicest touch, dry and firm. He ran his fingers up and down my forearm, then over my collarbone and down the very center of my chest, between my breasts. Next was my face. He traced my forehead, my jawline. He took his time, gave attention to every part of me. Mike had been a faster lover, less democratic. My dream rose up in my mind and I tried to bat it down: Mike’s big, heavy body on me, pressing me to the gurney. Kilroy’s fingers were between my toes, up my shin. My knee and the inside of my thigh. His palm slid up my hip and higher, to my breast. I ran a hand up his leg, to the soft, wiry nest of his balls. I closed my eyes but it didn’t matter: Mike was there, too, standing against the door watching us.

I had to call my mother at work, and I got her voice mail, left a message saying there was a change and I’d try again later. Then I phoned the Mayers’ house. I was sure I’d get Mrs. Mayer, but John Junior answered, his voice lower than the last time I’d talked to him. Mike? Sure, he was right there.

“It’s me,” I said, and right away I knew he knew: he stayed silent, let me hear his breathing. “Listen—”

“Don’t.” There was a pause, and he said, “OK? Let’s just—let’s talk for a while, can we?” And I nodded, as if he could see me, my heart bent
on itself, a mangled thing. I’d brought the phone into the bedroom and closed the door, but I could hear Kilroy in the kitchen, moving around, making coffee.

“How is it to be home?” I said.

He hesitated. “Good. We’re still kind of working things out.”

“And where are you right now?”

“In the living room.”

The living room. Sitting in his wheelchair. Would he stay in one place for a long time, or would he wheel around, antsy? The Mayers’ living room was crowded with furniture: couches and tables and the big antique Mrs. Mayer called the whatnot. At Christmastime everything got moved around, crammed even tighter.

“Is there a tree up?” I said.

“An eight-footer.”

It had always been Mike’s job to string the lights—how hard it must have been to watch while someone else did it. The ornaments in their tissue paper, the mugs of hot cider, the carols on the stereo—the whole process had always been such a reminder, of that first kiss of ours under the mistletoe.

“So why aren’t you coming?”

I’d decided that a good, solid excuse was the way to go, but now I balked—an excuse would be for me, not for him, to make me feel a little less unkind. “I just can’t yet, Mike,” I said. “I don’t want to.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“When you heard my voice?”

“No, when Rooster told me you said yes. I didn’t tell anyone, but I figured you’d change your mind.”

I sighed, and then I sighed again, for having let him hear the first sigh. I said, “Don’t hate me, OK?”

“Why not?”

It was a good question, a question for which I had no answer.

“I don’t,” he said. “But I don’t know why I don’t, either.”

A little later, Kilroy and I went out for a late breakfast. I felt happy and sick. People walked gingerly past the restaurant windows, careful on the snowy sidewalks. Traffic moved at a crawl. When we were done we headed for the brownstone so I could take a shower and change. It was a Saturday, but no one was around—out Christmas shopping, maybe. I felt a pang, remembering we’d opened our presents last night. What would
we do on Christmas Day? Go to a movie, maybe. Or cook something Kilroy would know about, something involved and delicious. Or both.

The sky had clouded over again, and as we headed across town snow began blowing off the sidewalks, little gusts of it swirling at our feet. I’d never been to Gramercy Park before, a rectangle of townhouses built around a small locked park. A light snow began to fall, and the houses formed an intimate enclosure for the leafless trees. I might have imagined we were in another century but for the Acuras and Lexuses parked everywhere, many with their trunks open to receive the bounty of a holiday to be spent outside the city.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Kilroy said.

I looked at him, wondered for a moment if he was being sarcastic—because of the fancy cars, the obvious priciness of the houses. But he seemed serious.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “You can almost imagine you’re in the old days and cars don’t exist.”

He gave me a wide smile. “That’s exactly what I was thinking—exactly.” We’d paused in front of a red brick townhouse, and now we started walking again. He said, “I sometimes wish I’d been born in another century, you know? Things would’ve been harder. Just think of all we have now—think of electricity alone: lights, heaters, refrigerators. Not to mention all the fancy stuff like computers.” He looked at me hard. “Imagine if there was no electricity—no way to read at night without a candle. Imagine having to chop firewood and carry it inside, or freeze. Think of the physical exhaustion of achieving even a minimum of comfort.”

“You could still live like that,” I said. “More or less. If you wanted to.”

He shook his head dolefully. “No, it would be an affectation.”

We headed up the East Side, stopping when we got to the United Nations to cross the wide, flag-lined plaza and stand looking at the East River, steel gray and rushing under the pale sky. My hair was wet from the new snow, Kilroy’s damp at the edges under the wool cap he wore. He put his arm around me and pulled me in. He kissed the side of my face, then burrowed his head close, his frozen nose coming to rest against the side of my neck. Standing there, I imagined the two of us in a snowbound cabin, a fire in the fireplace, windows cold to the touch. Outside, icicles hung from the eaves, while farther away, encircling us, white-topped pine trees soared into the sky, creaking a little in the wind.

•   •   •

When we got home it was early evening. Kilroy defrosted some homemade mushroom barley soup, and we ate it without talking, my feet in his lap under the table. After, he washed the dishes while I took the phone back into the bedroom to call my mother. She picked up on the first ring, then listened silently while I explained that I’d decided to stay, my voice faltering as she failed and failed to speak. I heard Kilroy stacking dishes, and I wished I could be more like him, just say what I had to say and be done with it.

“Well,” she said when I was done.

“What?”

“ ‘What?’ ” she exclaimed. “You ask me
what?
Do you know how many times Mike’s called to find out what time you were arriving today? Three separate times. And it’s not easy for him to make a phone call!”

“I know,” I said. “I just don’t feel ready.”

“This isn’t about whether or not you’re ready,” she cried. “Are you heartless? This is about how Mike was waiting for you. This is about
cruelty.”

I began to cry, noisily, my eyes hot and drowning. I pressed the phone to my ear and it got wet, and my palms, and my wrists. My mother never talked to me like this, and I sobbed and sobbed, waiting for her to say something that would take it all back. She was usually so evenhanded. When we were little, Jamie always said she wanted to trade moms, have my calm one instead of her nervous one. Where Mrs. Fletcher worried and scolded, my mother said,
How did that make you feel?
Apparently there was behavior that was too dreadful for such an approach. An image of Mrs. Fletcher came to mind, a table knife in her soft, freckled hand as she spread icing on a cake, her pink lips pursed thoughtfully. For a time
I’d
wished Jamie and I could trade mothers, too, until I met Mike and it was his family I wanted—and his family I got. I imagined my mother in her clean, spare kitchen, the curtains I’d made last summer hanging cheerily over the black windows, and I wondered how she could have let me go. I sobbed again, my shoulders shaking.

“Honey,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s true,” I said. “It’s true.”

“It’s a rough time for you,” she said. “I know that.”

I shook my head again. I didn’t want to think about her alone in that kitchen, but I couldn’t help it. Maybe she’d cooked something for the two of us to eat. Maybe it was on the counter now, a lasagna she’d been planning to put in a low oven before she headed off for the airport. “Mom,” I said. “God. I didn’t even think about
Christmas.”

She was silent, and I imagined that she was thinking as I was, of the Christmas tradition we’d shared for as long as I could remember: breakfast by the fire while we opened our presents; the afternoon working together in the kitchen; and then, shortly after dark, the two of us in the dining room with a perfect rare roast beef resting on a silver platter, because we didn’t have Christmas dinner with the Mayers.

“Mom,” I said again. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. She was silent for a moment, and then she said, in a rush, “Oh, listen—that wasn’t on my mind before at all. I’ll be fine. I’ve got a big new book I’ve been wanting to read, I’ll just load up on firewood and lounge the day away.”

Which meant that because of me she’d spend Christmas in the exact way I’d been envisioning for Kilroy: alone, reading. I could just see her, book in hand while Vivaldi played, and a small, pro forma Christmas tree sat in the corner, strung with tiny white lights.

C
HAPTER
26

New York was full of men. Young men with pierced noses, old men with aluminum walkers. Black men, Latino men, Asian men. And middle-aged white men, thousands of middle-aged white men who might have been my father.

Away from Madison, I felt more and more aware of him—of his absence from my life. On the street I studied men I wouldn’t have noticed a year earlier, looking not so much for my father as an idea of him: a facial expression, a span of shoulder. I wondered if he had other kids, maybe a string of them left around the country, half siblings joined to me by all we didn’t know.

One cold day in early January I made my way up Fifth Avenue to the New York Public Library. The pre-Christmas snowfall had long since melted, but dirty water still filled the gutters, and I had to leap across great lakes of it. The library was warm and smelled of dust and sweat. I knew they’d have every phone book in the country, and I found them on microfiche and spent several seasick hours spinning through the little plastic cards. My father’s name was John Bell, and he lived everywhere, of course: in Chicago and Cheyenne; in Seattle, St. Louis, and Sioux Falls; in Houston, Austin, Arlington, Albuquerque, and Atlanta. Twelve of him lived in Manhattan alone.

I left the microfiche reader and wandered dizzily through the famous library, into the great rooms and down the wide corridors. I was down to
my last few hundred dollars. My mother had sent me a check for Christmas, but I could barely hang on for another month or two, especially with credit card payments to worry about. I thought of finding out how to put in an application to work here—I knew libraries, after all—but then I saw a lank-haired woman in her early thirties, standing with a cart of books, her hand resting on their spines while she stopped for a moment to read a notice pinned to a bulletin board, and I looked at her sallow face and thought
No
.

Back at the brownstone I set myself to folding laundry I’d done earlier. Library or not, I should get a job, and soon. I’d even asked Kilroy about temping, but he’d responded with horror, said it was like considering a career in pulling the hairs out of my head one by one. “You do it,” I said, and he frowned and shook his head. “Trust me,” he responded. “You’d hate it.”

Now, folding clothes, I thought instead of working in a store in SoHo. Being one of those women with perfect hair and perfect eyebrows, making sure the garments were spaced evenly on the rods they hung from. I’d get a discount on clothes, spend my lunch breaks walking around looking in the windows of rival stores. The only problem was I didn’t have the right stuff to
get
a job like that. The right clothes, though maybe I didn’t have “the right stuff,” either.

I heard a step, and Simon appeared below me on the staircase, coming up from the second floor in a T-shirt and sweatpants.

“What are you doing home?” I said. It wasn’t even four in the afternoon.

“All-nighter at work last night,” he said, running a hand through his disheveled hair. “I got home at seven-thirty this morning. Just woke up.”

“That sounds horrible.”

“Actually, it’s not bad. I get double for last night and I still get paid for today even though I don’t have to go in.”

I shook my head. “You are so lucky.”

“High-paying drudgery has its charms.”

“Could you get me a job there?”

He hesitated for a moment, then shook his head. “You don’t want to work there.”

I was holding a pair of socks, and I balled them together and tossed them onto my sock pile. “Everyone’s telling me where I
don’t
want to work. Where should I work?”

He stepped onto the futon and then settled himself against the wall, sitting cross-legged. “Hmm.”

I reached for a T-shirt and folded it. “Yeah, nothing really leaps to mind, does it?”