Going Home Again (10 page)

Two months later I started dating one of the other teachers in the volunteer program. She was older, twenty-nine, from La Plata, Argentina, and taught Spanish. Marina had short red hair and enjoyed a reputation around the department as being a pleasant and dedicated teacher. I’d been interested in her from the moment we met. She had a pretty face and smile and always moved her hips with a lovely feminine rolling motion when I saw her walking between the staff room and her class. I’d catch up with her and flirt, making it clear I was interested but not desperate. We’d been on friendly terms since I started volunteering, but it took me a while to decide if her pleasant nature was natural and unprompted or had something to do with me or if she’d made some conscious decision that a winning attitude would serve her well in a new city.

After we started sleeping together, she asked if I’d ever lost anyone close to me. I didn’t tell her about my parents, only about Miles. We were in bed, shoulder to shoulder, staring up at the ceiling.

“Your best friend?” she said.

“Yes.”

She didn’t say if she’d lost anyone herself, though I suspected she had. Sometimes she’d curl into me and talk in Spanish—a language I didn’t understand then—for as long as an hour. Maybe she wanted to introduce me to the sound of it, or to express things to herself that she couldn’t in English, despite her fluency in it. I had no idea what she was saying to me,
of course. For all I knew she could have been talking about afternoon picnics with her family back in La Plata. There might have been a more sinister bent to these stories, I couldn’t tell. The disappearances, death squads, a family with a military secret, perhaps. I was beginning to read about these terrible histories in the newspapers. But if such stories touched her directly, I never knew. I felt like I’d stepped outside of my world for a short time when I was with her, though, and the sadness felt different, still there but somehow altered, and I was almost happy.

I spent many hours at her apartment that spring. She shared a flat with a roommate just twenty minutes from where Holly lived. On Fridays I met her at the high school after work and walked her home. I found out later she had more than one lover, that her kind nature was not reserved strictly for me. This thought didn’t bother me. We spent most of our time together in her bed. But one afternoon I brought her back to my pullout couch.

“These are very strange,” she said, leafing through one of my sketch pads naked, her knees raised against her chest. “What do you call these things in English?”

“Doodles.”

“You doodle. I like your doodles. English is a funny language.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is.”

One evening I went down to the basement and piled my books of drawings into the furnace, then sat with
the superintendent and watched them burn. He was an old Italian fellow with a big, round head and thin arms. He wore a white muscle shirt while he tinkered away at the building’s pipes and mysterious inner workings. I had a vague understanding that his wife had died some years before Holly and Miles arrived here and that he’d taken over from the previous super, who according to tenant lore had experienced some trouble with the law and was forcefully removed from his flat on the fourth floor. He was broad-shouldered and didn’t say much, this new man, and sat peacefully on a small paint-splattered chair beside his workbench, his platter-sized hands resting in his lap, while my graphite cartoon drawings went up in smoke.

The outdoor terraces on Saint-Denis opened again, and on a fine night sometime in early summer I stepped out onto the fire escape to enjoy the first pleasant evening after a week of rain. I climbed up to the roof of our building and found Holly alone, scooping soil into a five-gallon pail from a large burlap sack. I hadn’t seen her in days. At least twenty of these pails were gathered around her like a brood of children, and in each was a small circular garden. I took this in for a moment, my heart sinking, then started back down the stairs. But when she called my name I stopped, took a deep breath and turned around. “You’re busy,” I said, walking toward her over the flat tarry surface. Her hands were stained the color of the soil she’d been turning.

“It’s quiet up here,” she said. “It helps me think.”

“You’ve got a nice view, anyway.”

“We’ll eventually be able to do something with these tomatoes, once they come up,” she said. “The super grows them. You’ve met him, right? He’s from Verona or somewhere like that. I’ve been helping out a bit up here.”

I watched her for a moment without saying anything.

Then she said, “You really like her, don’t you?”

“Marina? Yes.”

There was another silence.

“I miss him,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“I’ve been horrible to you. I know that now. I’ve been horrible. I guess I got lost.”

“It hasn’t been the greatest year,” I said.

“Don’t ever let me do that to you again, okay?”

I didn’t say anything. I felt like crying. I felt like calling her a selfish fucking cunt. But I knew as I stood there that I’d been as bad or worse. The city lay before us under a blue dome of sky, and over the rooftops and the distant cap of trees a great cloud the size of a mountain rolled upward and split into fractals of brilliant color.

“It’s been harder than I ever could’ve imagined,” she said.

I felt my heart bursting in two directions. This was the first time we’d mentioned Miles since he’d died, so now the emotions came rushing in. I felt like screaming or jumping off the roof, but I was also jubilant. This was the sort of acknowledgment I’d been waiting to
hear for years from my brother, that he’d been wounded, as I had been, or that he felt something true and deep about our parents. He still hadn’t said anything of the sort, but here was a glimpse into Holly’s heart. It was as simple as that—the softness in her voice, this small sign of contrition and connection. Suddenly our grief was pulling us together, not tearing us apart.

“There’s going to be lots of tomatoes this year,” she said, wiping her hands. “They won’t be ready till the end of the summer, though.”

“I don’t know anything about tomatoes,” I said, stepping forward and kissing her on the mouth.

She just stared at me, speechless.

“You don’t need to be in love with me,” I said. “You don’t need to say anything.”

She turned and walked to the far side of the roof, where the evening was being swallowed and burned up by the city lights. I went back downstairs, thinking I’d just ruined everything, and when she entered the apartment an hour later, she pretended nothing had happened.

In August we picked and ate those tomatoes and felt their sun-warmed juices running down our forearms. We started spending time together. We carried a hibachi and two lawn chairs up there and often opened a bottle of wine and ate something and sat and talked for hours and watched the light change over the city. It’s difficult now to recall the conversations we had, or how much time we actually spent talking, but the weather was good, and I remember watching the flickering lights and believing that our lives had finally
been allowed to begin. I hadn’t kissed her a second time, nor had she responded one way or another to my declaration that she didn’t have to love me back. In the months that passed we never spoke about it. Each night after we came back downstairs, I pulled out the couch, stretched out and waited for the sound of the bedroom door to creak and the footsteps and the rush of pleasure as she slipped into my bed. But her door never opened.

If Holly had an opinion about Marina, she didn’t share it with me. I was still seeing her but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I stayed with her once a week and on a rare occasion, when Holly was off at her classes, she’d come home with me for an hour or two. One afternoon the phone rang. Marina was standing in the living room pulling her underwear back on, and she picked up the phone and said, “Bonjour, L’Académie de Montréal.” If it was pure reflex or an attempt at humor I don’t know. We burst out laughing, then I took the phone from her and said hello.

When the other end remained silent I knew it was Holly. Later that night I tried to read but wasn’t able to focus. My mind was going a million miles an hour.

Holly emerged from her bedroom and sat down on the sofa beside me, tucking her knees up into her chest. “You don’t even care about her,” she said. “I don’t understand you.”

I closed my book and slipped it between the cushions. “Probably not in the way you mean, anyway,” I said.

“What other way is there?”

“I feel good with her,” I said. “That counts for something.”

“You two can do that at her place. Please, not here. You’ve got your life, I know that. But please don’t do that here.”

“We usually don’t,” I said.

She looked around the apartment. It had changed little since I’d first sat here almost three years before.

“I have this strange feeling all the time,” she said. “You know when you do something and there’s only part of you that’s doing it? And the other part of you is watching it happen? You know that feeling?”

“I think so.”

“It’s like you’re trapped in a room of mirrors. Does that make any sense? Or am I just losing my mind?” She smiled a heartbroken, confused smile.

“I don’t think you’re losing your mind.”

“I hope getting old doesn’t mean being this fucked up the rest of your life.”

“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t,” I said.

“Who I used to be, I think about that person now. I was such a kid. I can’t stand thinking about her.”

“I thought she was nice,” I said. “She was smart. I liked listening to her talk. You made me think about things I’d never really thought about before I met you.”

“I guess I should’ve learned something from reading all those stupid German novels.”

“Last winter was pretty horrible,” I said.

“I’m tired of feeling like shit. That’s one thing I’m sure of.” She looked around the apartment again, then stared at her hands for what seemed like a long time.
“I’m probably the most aware person there ever was. I’m not complimenting myself, believe me. It’s something I hate—being aware of everything you do at all times isn’t exactly a party.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

“My mind’s always going. Maybe I’m just a big fat solipsist or something. I don’t know if you understand what I’m talking about.”

“I think we all are in some way.”

“I haven’t known anything else since Miles died. And then today happens. I guess I felt shock. For the first time in so long it was just me, and I wasn’t just thinking about how sad I was. I wasn’t watching myself being miserable. You know what it was that did it?”

“I’d like to know,” I said.

“It was that laughing on the other end of the line. How it made me feel. I heard your voice laughing at me.”

“I feel terrible about that.”

“I know you do. But that’s not why I’m telling you this. I’m telling you this because that laughing made me jealous. It made me think about us.” She looked up at me. “I guess that’s surprising to you.”

“It is, a bit,” I said.

She leaned forward and kissed me, and in a flash of heat the greyness inside me disappeared.

Every fiber in my body pounded with hope for the future. Feeling my spirits lift, I touched her cheek. She didn’t stop my hands when I tried to open her shirt and jeans. We made love on the floor beside that couch I’d been sleeping on, where I’d dreamed of her, and then
I lifted her into my arms and carried her into her bedroom and made love to her again. My heart filled with joy. I had thought about making love to Holly hundreds of times, what she would look like naked, what we would do together, if she would do certain things that I asked her, but my fantasies were nothing compared with the perfect intimacy we felt together.

In the middle of the night she left the bed. Sleeping lightly, I reached over and found her side was empty. I heard the bathroom door close. A minute later the toilet flushed, but she didn’t come back.

“Are you okay?” I said, standing outside the bathroom door feeling confused and tired but still exhilarated. What we’d just done had solved everything, I thought. Clarified everything. Put everything else behind us. What we’d shared was natural and perfect and beautiful. When I’d held her in my arms, I knew nothing better had ever happened in my life, yet now I felt worried and full of regret. I pushed the door open. She was sitting on the edge of the tub, still naked, holding her hands to her face.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know what’s happening to me.”

Holly took me back into her bed the following night. Trembling with excitement, we made love with even more intensity than we had the evening before. But afterward the same melancholy took hold. She became
distant, worried, then apologetic. It wasn’t as bad and didn’t last as long this time. Still, it was terrible to watch. She was in pain, and I didn’t know how to fix it. I couldn’t understand how something as great as what we did and felt together could cause her to roll back into herself like this.

The fear and depression that overtook her after we made love seemed to diminish as time went on. I thought she was beating whatever it was that plagued her. Then one night I woke up in the dark, and again I was alone in bed. The covers were torn up, her pillow on the floor. She was in the living room sitting in front of the turntable wearing a pair of headphones. The room was completely dark but for the pale blue glow of the stereo lights playing on the side of her face, her head bobbing slightly to something I couldn’t hear. I wondered then what it must have felt like to be loved as deeply as she had loved Miles.

It happened again the next night, and then the night after that. It became a regular occurrence, a ghostly ritual. I’d wake up and feel the empty space beside me. I’d stand in the bedroom doorway and watch her listening to music in the dark. Finally I lost count of how many times I saw this. I never interrupted her. I knew she was with him, thinking of him, trying to bring him back. In the morning it was always the Waterboys record sitting on the turntable, the one we’d been listening to the night Miles died. He was still here in that apartment with us. It took finding Holly out there every night for me to really understand that.