Imagine Me Gone (29 page)

The journalists and political staffers I spent my days with were mostly single or divorced. They either slept with each other or dragged around convoluted stories of people in other cities who they were trying to figure something out with. On the road, we drank together in hotel bars. It was the communion of diehards I’d dreamed of being invited into four years earlier, leading into the Bush and Gore campaigns, and now had the assignment to join just as the early positioning and fund-raising in advance of the primaries were getting started. And yet whenever I traveled, I found myself making excuses to go to my room early to call Seth.

“I think someone has a boyfriend,” he said when I phoned him for the third night in a row from Des Moines.

I could picture him sitting in bed watching a movie, under the clean pine shelves he’d built and installed himself, his knees raised up under the covers, laptop balanced on top of them, all his laundry folded and put away. I’d never been with a man long enough to yearn not just for sex, or not even for sex, but for the mere presence of him.

“I want to stop using condoms,” I said.

“You make it sound like a heart attack.”

“I’m serious,” I said.

“I can tell.”

Something about his even-tempered nature made me feel like a child, which infuriated me, and meant I had to stay with him to prove that I wasn’t.

“Are you alone?” I asked.

“No, my other boyfriend is here, but he’s very understanding.”

“What if I thought that I might love you?”

“Now there’s a question,” he said. “What if, hypothetically speaking, you thought there was some possibility that you
might
love me? That’s what you’re asking? Like, what would my advice be?”

“Sorry, that’s unfair.”

“It’s somewhere between unfair and charming, but we can go with charming.”

I didn’t know why I kept getting hard when he said things like that, but I did. I wanted to slap him.

“I think I love you,” I said.

“Are you drunk?”

“No! I’m not drunk. I love you.” Take that, I thought, waiting for his retort.

There was a pause, and then he said, “Can I ask a favor? Will you say that again when you get home?”

“Okay,” I replied, grudgingly.

“Good. Because I love you, too.”

I barely took in what he’d said, wanting so badly to keep going myself, to confess that this was the first time I had ever spoken these words to any man, that I was ashamed to be thirty-one and never have reached this point before, that I was afraid my loneliness was a leprosy, a disfigurement, which, if he ever saw it, would repulse him.

“Lucky me,” I said, instead. “How’s your other boyfriend going to take the news?”

“He’ll be all right. I’ll let him down easy.”

Such lightness. It left me giddy. But right there, riding up the back of that swell of happiness—the thought of Michael. I saw him at his computer, filling out another dating-site questionnaire, trying to choose a picture, disliking every one. My brother—the perfect kill switch. So very reliable. The same switch thrown every time I reached the point of stepping outside myself.

I hadn’t told Michael anything about Seth yet, though it had been six months already. Being single was something he and I had long had in common. Something to commiserate about. Celia was the one who’d been in relationships. Michael and I didn’t want each other to be alone, but the fact that we were had developed over the years into a kind of solidarity. It gave us a means to be close. And to remain loyal, somehow, to the past. Part of me knew that this was a racket, that it fed on gloom. But I didn’t know how to give it up. I could play down what was happening with Seth, suggest that it was still preliminary, and who knew what might come of it. I could even tell Michael that I was in love. He would listen to such a declaration with thirst, at least when he stopped talking about his own predicament long enough to hear it. But that Seth loved me back? That if anything he was the more affectionate? Of course Michael would never be less than polite about it. He’d say he was glad, and yet I would be cutting him off, leaving him more isolated than he already was. And what for, if I could just soft-pedal it, allowing him the sense that nothing had really changed?

One of the things that had recently made it easier to imagine telling Michael at least something about Seth was that after years of trying, he had finally gotten into graduate school. Albeit at the advanced age of thirty-six. We had thought it would never happen. My mother had fretted to Celia and me that he just made himself more miserable by applying fall after fall, only to reap another set of rejection letters each spring. But somehow he’d managed to persevere, and now he had done it. He said he didn’t care about an academic career, he just needed to do his work, and that he would be happy teaching high school if there were no college jobs. It was a plan, at least, a way he might eventually support himself. My mother still helped him with his rent, wrote checks for his therapy, and ran down what little savings she had. Here, at last, was a solution. Only it turned out his stipend didn’t cover everything. He would need to find work, and take out more loans. Because of his lousy credit he needed a co-signer.

“He’ll be the one paying them back,” my mother said when informing me she had already agreed.

“And if he doesn’t?” I asked.

“What am I supposed to do? Tell him he can’t go?”

She worried about him every day. Now, finally, he had good news. She couldn’t deny him the chance. This left only the question of how he would get from Boston to Michigan. Michael driving a U-Haul for two days by himself to an empty apartment in a town he’d never been to seemed like a bad idea to all of us.

“He would never ask you,” my mother said. “And obviously you’re busy…but it would be such a help.”

Before she suggested this, Seth had invited me to meet his family in Denver on the same August weekend that Michael was due in Lansing. I’d fantasized about having in-laws. A comfortable, accepting couple who would be delighted their son had found a clean-cut professional, and who wanted to welcome him into their family. Their comfortable, intact family. Seth’s older sister, Valerie, and her husband, Rick, lived with their infant son just a couple of streets away from Seth’s parents. Rick worked at the construction firm Seth’s father ran. They were all, apparently, keen to meet me. I wanted very much to go with him, but if I could get Michael set up in his apartment and settled there, he’d have his new start. When I mentioned to Seth what my mother had asked of me, he said he understood. There would be other times, he said. I should do what needed to be done.

Michael and I left Ben and Christine’s apartment on a sweltering day in the middle of August, the old Grand Am that I had given him years ago hitched to the back of the moving truck.

He was in bad shape. The preparations for moving and the prospect of leaving the place he’d lived most of his adult life had addled him. I had to repeat the simplest directions two or three times before he could process what I had said. Whatever meds he was taking weren’t doing a very good job. I’d lost track by then of all the combinations he had tried. He talked about them whenever we spoke, but they had blurred together in my mind.

On the highway I had to remind him to keep up his speed on the hills and when to use his blinkers. He’d always had a poor sense of direction but after we stopped for gas outside Albany, he couldn’t even find his way back to the thruway. I lost my patience then, and told him to pull over and let me drive.

It took us another five hours in occasional rain to reach Niagara Falls. The quickest route to Lansing was through southern Ontario and back across the border at Port Huron. Niagara was an obvious place to stop for the night, and neither of us had ever been. I found us a motel on the Canadian side with a parking lot large enough to accommodate the truck and hitch, and checked us in on my credit card. There wasn’t much daylight remaining, and I wanted to get down to the water to see about catching a boat out to the falls.

“I should stay here,” Michael said.

We were both frazzled from the drive, but I couldn’t stand the idea of not getting out for a walk.

“What if someone calls?” he said in a stricken voice. He sat perched on the edge of one of the beds, staring at the motel phone.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not getting any signal,” he said. “They might try the landline.”

“They? Who’s they?”

He examined me in alarm, as if I were telling him to abandon a vigil for the missing.

“No one even knows we’re here,” I said. “No one has that number.”

He heard my words but didn’t seem to believe them. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll be here.”

“That phone isn’t going to ring,” I said. “Get your jacket.”

He hesitated a moment, tortured by the dilemma, and then he did as I said. I don’t know what I detested more: his reluctance or his capitulation. They both infuriated me.

Out on the street, he trailed a few feet behind me, and I had to slow up to keep him at my side. We passed through hordes of tourists milling at the bins of trinket shops and gazing like deer into the caverns of sports bars. I hadn’t expected much from the place, but I hadn’t realized how ugly it would be, either.

We reached the passageway leading under the road and down toward the water, and joined the other latecomers being funneled into the lines of metal stanchions. Before long, we were through the ticket booth and onto a boat.

As it eased away from the shore, we climbed onto the upper deck, and the cliff came into view, and behind that the high-rise hotels. I headed toward the front, glad for the cooler air. A few minutes later, as we neared the falls and the boat nosed its way into the mist, people donned their clear plastic ponchos and we bobbed back and forth at the edge of being enveloped by the spray. We had seen this sight at a distance crossing the bridge from the American side, and I had thought, Yes, there it is, as pictured. But without the perspective of distance it was suddenly unfamiliar. A white atmosphere billowed around us like the depthless, blank white that people claim to see as death approaches. And high above this cloud, the huge lip of water tumbled downward, a perfect disintegrating line against the waning sky.

I had heard someone describe seeing the Himalayas for the first time, how they appeared like the limit of the earth, an edge beyond which there could be nothing but the emptiness of space. I’d never understood what they were talking about until now. I knew what I was seeing—what I was supposed to be seeing—yet on that rocking deck, with the roar in my ears and the whiteness encompassing me, my points of reference fell away, and it seemed that I was gazing into the void.

It’s worth it, I thought. Just for this, for a few moments of the almost sublime, even if I had to half talk my way into it, and allow myself the cliché of being impressed by Niagara Falls. I was in awe. And the vastness washed the frustrations of the day away, and I forgave Michael his worry and his fear.

When I turned around, I spotted him at the stern, not glancing upward but off the side of the boat, his glasses beaded with water. Everyone had raised the hoods of their ponchos, but this somehow hadn’t occurred to him. His black hair was soaked flat against his scalp, and he was hunching his shoulders, as if that would protect him from the sky.

Just look, for Christ’s sake! Look! I wanted to shout, but he wouldn’t have heard me.

The boat began to chug in reverse, the prow reemerging from the mist. I walked back to join Michael. The other passengers were chatting with one another now, flipping through images on their cameras to see what they had captured.

“Amazing, right?” I said.

He nodded in a quick, automatic fashion, as if I had spoken in a foreign tongue and it was simplest for him just to agree.

“You’re soaked,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “I guess I am.”

We reached the border crossing at Port Huron by midmorning the next day, and East Lansing by early afternoon. His apartment was a few miles south of campus in one of the graduate-student housing blocks set along a wooded cul-de-sac. The building was a two-story stretch of concrete, from the early sixties by the look of it, with stairwells at either end of a wide, second-floor walkway. His unit had two rooms, a galley kitchen, and a bathroom, with white cinder-block walls and linoleum floors. Five hundred dollars a month, Internet and utilities included. Celia had done the research online, and she and I had agreed he wouldn’t get a better deal even if he made a trip in advance. It would be the first place he’d ever lived on his own. I wished it were nicer.

“It’s clean,” I said, and he agreed.

We needed to unload the boxes and get the truck returned before we were charged for another day. The records took nearly an hour, and the books that much again, despite his having left most of both collections in our mother’s basement. He had a futon, a chest of drawers, a desk, bookcases, a few lamps, and one of the old wingback chairs from the living room whose torn fabric my mother had pinned a cloth over. I asked him how he wanted the furniture arranged and he said he didn’t know. I suggested the desk by the front window, and the bookcases along the rear wall, and he agreed. The boxes we left in stacks by the door and in the bedroom. When we were done, I followed him in the Grand Am to the rental lot on the other side of town. I’d reminded him as we were leaving that we needed to fill the tank before returning the truck, but he passed one gas station after the next, until I called him on his cell and told him again.