I Regret Everything (21 page)

An unfamiliar sensation gripped me. It's hard to know what to call it because certain words can get you in trouble, yet at that moment I was more intertwined and allied, yes, totally allied, with another human being than ever before.

—Why didn't you tell me this?

He kissed my neck and said he'd be right back. I watched him go. Good shoulders that tapered into a trim waist and a compact ass. Lightly muscled like a dancer. A lightly muscled poet. And his manhandle was beautiful, too. It swayed as he walked back into the room a moment later holding a small object. He sat next to me so our shoulders touched and showed me a green carving the size of my open hand. It was a seated child with the head of an elephant.

—A friend of mine gave this to me. It's a Hindu god called Ganesh.

—He's cute. Is this jade?

—Soapstone. It's not worth a lot of money or anything. I kept it for luck.

—How's your luck been?

—Abysmal. Maybe it'll work better for you.

He handed over the figurine. It was heavier than I had expected. When I put it on the table I noticed it was anatomically correct.

—He's an uninhibited little elephant-boy-god, isn't he?

Jeremy agreed that Ganesh was pretty freewheeling and led me to the bedroom. There was sex again and this time his tongue traced patterns between my legs and I shuddered and came and came and came.

M
y sleep was not untroubled and as I fought for consciousness in the early Brooklyn light I remembered there was a dangerous lunatic wandering Connecti­cut, traces of his presence were probably in Ed Simonson's house, and the chemotherapy was starting to make me unsteady. But the attack had been reported, it would take a forensic team to uncover anything, and as for the chemo, I could only hope it was working.

Spaulding was sleeping on her side, facing me. Not only was this tableau entirely unplanned, assiduous attempts had been made to avoid it. That is not entirely true. The truth is that my will had incrementally crumbled and now that she was curled up warm in my bed, all of my protestations, hesitations, and fears seemed pointless. Her father or her mother would be expecting her but that could be sorted out later. The collapse of my resolve was not surprising, only that it had taken so long. Days without Spaulding were an endless stream of anodyne tasks peppered with intimations of mortality. To deny small joys no longer made sense.

When she stirred I gently touched her shoulder. The sharp intake of breath startled me. She contracted and made an involuntary noise, somewhere between a squeal and a grunt.

“You scared me.”

“I only touched you with my fingertips.”

“Remember what happened last night?”

“You're right. I'm a dunce.”

Spaulding had dealt with the situation admirably and leftover fragments of fear and confusion were understandable. She was hungry so I scrambled some eggs. Draped in one of my old tee shirts, she sat at the kitchen table sipping orange juice and inspected the Ganesh.

“He's supposed to be the remover of obstacles.”

“Are you Hindu or something?”

“I'm not religious.”

“At all?”

“When we die, we die,” I said as I handed her a plate of eggs. I served myself and sat across from her.

“Okay, so. We should go to Chinatown.”

“What's in Chinatown?”

“There's this healer down on Mott Street. I swear he cured my mother of alcoholism.” This information was imparted in the awestruck tone of one who had witnessed a miracle. “I went with her, the two of us. The guy said he could cure anything.”

“I'm not in the market for some kind of woo-woo cancer cure.”

“How do you know it's woo-woo?”

“I'll think about it, okay?” She grunted and told me that was something her parents would say.

I spooned shade-grown Sumatran into a large press while Spaulding tapped on her phone. The silence was unwelcome so, although it was none of my business, I asked what she was doing. She told me she was texting her father to inform him she had stayed with a friend from her writing workshop. The idea of deceiving Ed bothered me but I was on a new path and did not suggest she do otherwise.

“Is this a real Andy Warhol?”

Spaulding stood by the fireplace in the living room with her hands on her hips and scrutinized the lithograph. I told her it was. “Who's the subject?”

“That would be my father.”

“Really? Your father knew Andy Warhol?”

“He did legal work for him. Sometimes they socialized.” Spaulding waited. She wanted to hear more.

“It sounds like he was cool.”

“In the most superficial way. A week before I was going to leave for college he accused me of siding with my mother in the divorce and told me he wouldn't be contributing a penny to my tuition. So his timing wasn't that cool. And he did ruin my mother's life but I didn't take sides. I got that he was gay, that he'd been repressing it for years and needed to be true to his nature. But it didn't make him noble and that's how he wanted me to think of him.”

“So why did you hang his portrait?”

“Because it's a Warhol? I don't know. That's a really good question. It's the only thing he ever gave me, other than a biography of Winston Churchill.” My feelings about my father were not entirely resolved and I didn't want to explore the surge of emotion I was experiencing. “Let's not talk about this.”

Spaulding wandered around the apartment, trailing eros. Without asking she put a Pixies CD in the player and sank into the sofa with
The Collected Works of Allen Ginsberg
on her lap. I asked if she'd ever read Frank O'Hara.

“Who?”

“He's a poet who wrote a lot about New York City.”

I handed her a paperback copy of
Lunch Poems
.

“Read this instead of Ginsberg. No one better captures New York City. Killed by a dune buggy on Fire Island.”

“That's so random.”

“He was forty.”

I wanted to tell Spaulding that he was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art who would take walks during his lunch break then return to the office where he would coax poems about what he'd seen from an old Royal typewriter. That a high school teacher gave me this book and it was one of the reasons I became a poet. But I began to feel like I might start to cry again. What was at the root of these waterworks? My father? The uncertain nature of my illness? Or was it the dawning realization that after years of believing it to be impossible and nearly giving up hope someone could see what I saw, apprehend it the same way, that she was for me and because I wasn't dead yet there was still time to do something about it.

Spaulding closed the Ginsberg volume and opened the O'Hara. One leg crossed over the other, she flexed her toes. As the Pixies' jittering yip filled the apartment I fell to my knees and from sheer gratitude covered her feet with kisses. She giggled.

“Don't tell me you're a foot guy.”

“No,” I said, as she slipped the tee shirt over her head and my kisses migrated from her toes up her ankles to her calves, knees, thighs, pussy, stomach, ribcage, breasts, neck, ear, cheek, and lips and I swept Frank O'Hara out of the way.

In my obsession over last night, the most astonishing occurrence of all was elided: Spaulding had offered to cover for me. No one in my life had ever done anything so selfless. Yet Spaulding Simonson stared death in its rheumy eye and offered herself up. Had I not gone back to the house, Karl Bannerman would have killed her. Contrary to my dire view of myself, I had acted courageously. Dragon vanquished, maiden saved. The sensation of well-being I experienced was further intensified by the earthquake of my orgasm.

Whether because I was uncomfortable with this valiant role or with anything resembling actual intimacy, when we finished a familiar visitor arrived in the form of guilt and the condition of Karl Bannerman took on fresh urgency. Since I had nearly killed him, I wanted to know that he was getting medical attention.

After sluicing several cups of coffee down my throat I did an Internet search of every hospital in a ten-mile radius of Stonehaven. I told Spaulding that it was important from a moral perspective to find out if this man had survived. Maybe it was more paranoia but it didn't seem like a good idea to call the hospitals from my phone. When I mentioned I needed to go out for a few minutes and explained why, she did not tell me it was unreasonable and announced she would come too.

At an Arab-run store on Court Street I purchased a disposable cell phone, the kind favored by drug dealers and terrorists, and as Sunday morning Carroll Gardens ebbed and flowed around us called the two hospitals in the Stonehaven area. Neither would give me the information. We began to walk back to the apartment.

“Best. Freeze.” The voice was an assault. I froze. Across the street a school playground with Sunday morning kids cavorting on monkey bars. Ahead of me an old lady walking a small dog.

I slowly turned my head and saw—Margolis? He wore a frayed tee shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals.

“Do I look like a land baron?”

My expression must have been one of almost cartoonish incredulity since he immediately asked if I had forgotten our expedition to Montauk this morning.

“The house. Yes, yes, the house.” My head nodded violently.

“I'm Spaulding.”

In my nervous attack I had completely forgotten she was there.

With feigned élan I declaimed, “Spaulding, yes. This is Margolis.” He gave me a quizzical look then greeted her the way someone might greet a maid cleaning a hotel room to which they had returned after having forgotten a pair of sunglasses. Ordinarily this would have bothered me—Couldn't he have been friendlier? Why the snobby reaction? Was he judging me for being with someone Spaulding's age?—but under the circumstances it barely registered.

“Spaulding's father and I work together. She was in the neighborhood and dropped by to say hello.” It was difficult to tell whether Margolis believed me. I asked Spaulding if she would give us a moment. Without a word she strode to a nearby shop window and feigned interest in a display of artisanal cheese. I told Margolis not to refer to our putative business transaction.

“Do you really work with her father?” His eyebrow rose to a nearby treetop.

“Yes.”

Margolis did not press further. It would have been easy enough to make an excuse, to claim work or a mild illness, but this was an excellent day to not be home. We picked up the pale green Volkswagen Beetle I kept at a nearby garage and headed toward Long Island, Margolis in the passenger seat, Spaulding in back staring out the window with an enviable aura of blithe unconcern. Fifteen minutes into the ride her eyes closed and she fell asleep.

In the manner of many people in the public relations industry, Margolis was a chatterbox, which largely relieved me of the need to talk for most of the two-and-a-half-hour ride from Brooklyn. Had he actually engaged me instead of merely jabbering, what would I have said?

The last eight years, three in law school and five at Thatcher, Sturgess & Simonson, were spent toeing the line, penned in by expectations and the wrong kind of ambition, but the uncertainty of the diagnosis and my newly fragile sense of the future had released me from these tethers. Not only had I nearly killed a dangerous man, I was pursuing an illicit real estate scheme and the boss's daughter lay curled in the backseat. As a slave to the circumspect world of trusts and estates my only outlet had been poetry. Now I was a gangster.

The house was on a bluff overlooking Fort Pond Bay. To say that it needed work would have been a considerable understatement. Although Mrs. Vendler was a woman of some means, none had been placed in service of home maintenance because what the listings would have called her charming saltbox had not been touched since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The most recent home improvement was the bomb shelter in the basement built by the late Mr. Vendler in 1962 and stocked with hundreds of cans of superannuated baked beans and a camp stove with which he presumably intended to heat them. Spaulding, Margolis, and I peered around the room from the doorway.

“This is creepy, Jeremy. I can't be in creepy places,” Spauld­ing said, and disappeared.

I tried to imagine the Vendlers huddled here as bombs rained down. They wanted to persevere in their subterranean hidey-hole yet it would have been nuclear winter above. People are eager to cling to life in the most appalling circumstances imaginable. Human beings seem incapable of accepting the simple fact that their existence must come to an end, but not me. I understood. There was no way to predict how the treatment would go, yet my life had a clock on it and the only gamble was playing a long game because what if there turned out to be no long game?

Margolis lifted a can of baked beans off the massive stack.

“Can you imagine,” he said, “down here with your loved ones waiting for a nuclear attack to begin, all there is to eat is baked beans, you don't know whether you're going to live or die, and everyone's farting.”

“A massive gas attack.”

“A fart-fest in the face of doom.”

Margolis was seized with a fit of laughter. His shoulders heaved and he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger to bring himself back under control. There was nothing amusing about the image he had invoked because it was entirely too close to my own condition: Terrifying, yet still somehow ridiculous. And while others would continue to view Jeremy Best as a circumspect trusts and estates attorney, I would know the bitter truth. We headed up the basement stairs.

The house was built nearly a hundred years ago and the doors and ceilings were low. The old-growth elms and birches in the yard allowed little sunlight to penetrate the shadowed interior. The furniture was bulky and dark. On the first floor there was a living room that faced the front yard, a dining room with a formal dining table, and a gloomy kitchen that featured an ancient black stove with one working burner. Upstairs were four bedrooms each with a wallpaper motif from a different conflict—Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I, and the master bedroom was, eccentrically, the Napoleonic Wars, which I could discern from the word Borodino in Cyrillic-style script near the molding. Through the master bedroom window I could see a garden in the backyard, untended and overgrown. Spaulding was photographing it with her phone.