No More Us for You (13 page)

The days moved slow and fast at once, like a dream of standing in place while the world reeled in front of my eyes. At the museum it slowed when the pieces were unplugged, taken down, dismantled, carted off, and slowed again when two men slipped the rag doll Jesus into a giant plastic bag, carried him to the parking lot where the artist waited in his truck. In Spanish another two men spoke while they shoveled the large pile of green sand into a wheelbarrow, then swept, then vacuumed. The chest of the sleeping museum guard stopped moving up and down,
his cord yanked from the wall socket. And then Richard Spurgeon arrived with a paint-spattered black T that looked like he was wearing a galaxy, with the same yellow blanket folded under his arm, and together we transported his neon sign once more to his car minus the ash floating into my eye. He started the engine and I motioned for him to roll down the car window and when he did, half the sky disappeared in the glass, and I asked him flat-out if he used to date Ms. Otto, and he gave me this big shit-eating grin and said,
Not sure if I would use the word “date.”
The minutes hovered, fell, rose, and through the museum entrance arrived the artist who made the self-portrait entirely out of wads of bubble gum, and I asked if she'd heard about the boy in Detroit who pressed his gum onto a painting worth $1.5 million, and she laughed and said,
I'm glad no one did that to mine,
and I said,
How would you know?
I was there when the two televisions facing each other were unplugged, and Nadine was there too, and when the artist was out of earshot (a shy man in corduroys and a plaid shirt), she said,
Thank God I don't have to hear that again,
so I kept repeating the video's looped
message—
My starling…Come back…The key is under the doormat…My starling…Come back
—until Nadine threatened to strangle me with the Red Vine I was chewing on. I laughed, it might've looked like I was doing okay, but in the back of my mind I was always thinking about Snake—his face, his voice, his face, his laugh, his face—and finally one day after work I drove to the hospital, went up the elevator to the Trauma Center, and told the woman in a yellow shirt behind the counter that Jeffrey McKenzie was my friend, one of my best, that I wanted to see him. The world paused. Then a woman in a white jacket came and down the hallways I followed her as her white tennis shoes moaned softly with each footstep. It killed me when I first saw him, his closed eyes, his head still swollen and faintly bruised from the accident, a watercolor of pale green and yellow clouds on his cheek and forehead, the valleys of his sockets. His lips were chapped and his mouth was partially open as if he was about to speak, but I did all the talking and scooted a chair by his bed and said,
Hey,
and said,
I know you're going to come out of this thing,
and said,
Pretty soon it'll be the three of us again on the bleachers.
You, me, and Will
. For a good ten minutes I talked to him and said nothing with him for another ten and left weeping and ruined, left wishing he'd just wake up and get back on his feet so we could hang out again, so we could laugh and talk about stupid shit like whether or not it's better to use dolphins or carrier pigeons instead of puppies to smuggle in heroin from Mexico. The world stalled, lurched forward, its mosaic of colors, its elaborate sound track. Behind my desk I sat, half listening to Mr. Hunnicutt's lecture on the Great Depression, and then the room changed, the configuration of desks, and I was in Ms. Vann's class, doodling geometric shapes on my notebook as she talked about
The Red Badge of Courage,
the epiphany Henry Fleming had with the squirrel in the woods, and I thought,
Screw the squirrel—my friend's in a coma
. So it was mostly me and Will on the bleachers, a herd of clouds stampeding silently across the sky, and sometimes this scrawny kid named Eric Fontaine joined us, a freshman who talked incessantly about all the girls he nailed at DeMille Junior High and all the girls he was going to nail at Millikan. We egged him on, Will and me,
and laughed at the absurdity of his accounts, our sides aching, tears sliding down our cheeks,
I had her feet on my shoulders like this,
Eric said, demonstrating with his hands curled beside his neck. But usually it was just me and Will in the bleachers, and a few seagulls milling around the basketball courts, and on those days we talked about Snake (still in a coma after two and a half weeks) and Suji (whom I saw at Millikan every now and then, cheerless, slow-footed, her head bowed like a wounded animal) and the shittiness of life in general. I avoided both Mira and Isabel on campus, I scanned the quad before crossing it, I turned corners anxiously. Still, Mira called and sent me emails, some I deleted and some I read, a handful of sentences or long-winded letters filled with words like
love
and
us
and
hiding
, until finally she sent an email with only one word:
coward
. Will tried desperately to get in touch with Suji (on campus, by phone, by email) to say how sorry he was, to explain himself, but Suji would have none of it and sent him a text message that said
Leave me alone,
which he did, which drove him nuts—his clothes became more wrinkled, his hair more oily. Like a dream, the world
rolled in front of me, shadowy and dazzling. Back at the museum, workers spackled over the holes and repainted the walls white, their paint-speckled boots echoing throughout the empty museum, and so for two weeks while the exhibits changed over I was off from work, two weeks without Ms. Otto, Nadine, Leonard, or Bridget, my uniform hanging inside my closet like a giant bat, and with my extra time I caught up with homework, I cleaned my room and watched television mindlessly, and read articles about comas on the internet, the persistent vegetative state that sometimes follows, about falling into a deep state of unconsciousness simply by drinking too much, that silent abyss, and I remembered all the times that Snake and Will and me pounded beers at some party, how wasted we got, how unbalanced, and the night a girl came up to us with vomit in her hair, weaving, slurring, asking us if we could take her home, and we steered her instead toward the chaise lounge by the swimming pool and left her there by the lapping water, alone, like a patient in a hospital bed. I dreamed Mira gave me a blow job at a graveyard. I dreamed Snake was a museum guard sleeping
in his chair until someone came and took him apart, wires dangling from his hollow torso like black spaghetti. I dreamed of Isabel's face—smooth, egg-shaped, radiant, her eyes green and caring—and at school the next day I scanned the quad again, looking for that face, that wavy dark hair, and when I couldn't find her I went to the cafeteria, to the administration building, to the concrete steps outside the theater building, wind blowing through the nearby trees, its leaves silently clapping. Down the halls I strolled, looking, looking, until I spotted Isabel coming out of the girls' bathroom with her friend Heidi, both of them chattering away until Isabel saw me, then a silence filled the hallway and hardened like glue, so the three of us were frozen there, our words caught in our throats, and then I said,
Can I talk to you for a second?
and Isabel said,
Yes,
and Heidi said,
I'll meet you by the planters
. And once we were alone, I apologized for avoiding her, for the way I'd acted at Vanessa's funeral, how unsympathetic I'd been, my hands fidgeting,
You'd just said good-bye to your friend,
I told her,
and then you had me afterward, acting like an asshole.
She smiled, her eyes shimmering like
green tinsel, and she asked if my life was still too complicated right now, throwing my words back at my face. I winced, fidgeted, and said,
Did I really say that?
and she nodded and I said,
No, it's not too complicated for you
. I dug into my backpack then and took out the glossy postcard for the opening at the museum on Saturday and handed it to Isabel and told her she should go, free drinks and food, that the exhibit was interactive, how fun it would be. She slipped the postcard into her purse and said,
If my life's not too complicated on Saturday, I'll go.
And then the world moved leisurely again, the seconds dripped like honey, and as Isabel walked away down the hall—that tunnel of lockers and corkboard and Xeroxed flyers—her hair sailed like a dream over her shoulder blades, so slow and vivid I could've counted each delicate strand.

Heidi promised she'd go to the art opening even though she said she could think of a hundred other things to do on a Saturday night that were less painful and began listing them. Root canal, high school play, laundry, any movie starring Bruce Willis. I stopped her after she said bowling.
Nothing's more painful than bowling,
I told her.

We drove in silence for a while, staring out through the windshield at the traffic, all those taillights shining red before us like radiant hearts.

Heidi turned to me. “You look cute, by the way,” she said.

I was wearing a dark green dress, my favorite black sweater with the pearly buttons. Heidi was in a red skirt printed with black flowers, very Spanish, and a simple white top.

“You do too,” I said. “Too bad Matt Hawkins can't see you now.”

“No kidding!”

“You'd turn his head. And that's a lot of head to turn.”

“Ah, leave his poor forehead alone,” she whined.

At a traffic light, I glanced up at an apartment building and saw a woman framed by a window. She was holding a phone with one hand, sipping from a wineglass with the other.

“So do you really like this Carlos guy or what?” Heidi asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “It's sort of hard to tell. My emotions have been all over the place. First it was Gabriel's anniversary, then Vanessa…”

“I know what you mean.” Heidi turned down Alamitos and flicked on her headlights. “It's like your heart finally healed just before it got broken again.”

“Exactly.”

“Just let things happen with Carlos. Don't force anything.”

“That's what I'm planning on doing,” I said.

We pulled into the parking lot and cruised up and down the rows until we found a spot. We stepped out and there was a nice breeze with the faintest scent of the ocean in it. The curved pathway to the front entrance was lined on both sides with tiny lights, reminding me of the aisles in a movie theater.

When we stepped into the museum there was this hum of excitement, the sound of conversations overlapping, the squeal of laughter. I held Heidi's hand and together we slowly pushed through the crowd, my eyes jumping around, looking for Carlos. There were lots of suits and ties, dresses and jewelry. Everyone looked stylish except for a handful of art punks in jeans and T-shirts with oily hair and multiple piercings. I got the impression that
this
was the place to be. And we were there.

Some people were holding clear plastic cups of wine and I motioned to Heidi with my hand to my mouth. She nodded and I plowed through—
Excuse me, excuse me
—until we were standing before a table covered with hors d'oeuvres: a cheese plate and a fan of crackers, carrot sticks and celery sticks, olives, grapes, miniature muffins, and these meatball-looking things skewered with colored toothpicks. We scooted over to the next table where a man in a white waiter's jacket and black tie stood with his hands behind his back. About a dozen unopened bottles of wine crowded one side of the table. I held up two fingers.

“Can I see some ID?” the man said.

I frowned.

“Aw, come on,” Heidi pleaded.

“We also have club soda and bottled water,” he offered.

“Forget it.” Heidi grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the table.

We were standing near a wall beside a large photograph of a silver-haired man blowing air into a red balloon,
cheeks puffed, his hand wrinkled and age-spotted. “We need to find someone to get us drinks,” Heidi said.

“Who?” I said. “We don't know anyone here.”

“Where's your boyfriend, anyway?” Heidi teased.

“He's not my boyfriend.”

“Yet.”

I shot her a look. “What happened to letting this happen and not forcing things?”

Heidi pointed. “There he is.”

I followed the imaginary line that extended from her fingertip across the room and spotted Carlos in a green button-up shirt tucked into black jeans, the sleeves rolled to his elbows. He was talking to a blond woman with glasses, a cup of wine sloshing in her hand. She was all smiles, standing close to Carlos.

“Uh-oh,” Heidi said. “Looks like someone's got her eye on your boyfriend.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Quick, do something.”

“She's, like,
thirty-five
.”

The woman leaned closer. Carlos straightened his
back and turned his head to the side.

“Oh my
God
!” Heidi exclaimed. “She
so
wants to kiss him.”

There was no denying it. The woman—whoever she was, however old, however drunk—wanted Carlos's lips. And he wasn't giving them to her.

Heidi nudged my elbow. “Are you going to let her steal your man?”

“Don't be silly,” I said. “No one's stealing anyone from anyone.”

A couple crossed in front of us, blocking my view—the woman in a shawl pointing at a photograph, the man saying something into her ear—and then they were out of my line of vision. The blonde had her hand clamped on Carlos's jaw like a chin strap, directing his mouth toward hers, kissing him.

“See,”
Heidi said.
“I told you.”

The blonde let go of Carlos's face and pushed up her glasses, drained her cup and handed it to him, then walked away, her shoulders thrown back. Carlos looked around the room to see if anyone had seen what happened.

I know it's dumb, but I was a little jealous at that moment. I felt it in my heart, this little pinch.

I zoned out, the room squeezed into a glass tunnel, but before I could imagine everyone around me dropping dead, Carlos swept his hand back and forth in front of my eyes like a windshield wiper. “Anyone home?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, shaking my head, embarrassed.

“She does that all the time,” Heidi said.

“Not
all
the time.”

“More than any normal person should.”

I elbowed Heidi.

“What time did you guys get here?” Carlos asked.

“About ten, fifteen—”

“Who was that woman?” Heidi said, cutting me off.

I elbowed her again.

Carlos blushed. “Oh no, you saw that?” He was looking right at me.

“Sort of,” I said.

“She's really drunk,” he said. “I work with her. She's a museum guard too.”

“She's a little old for you, don't you think?” Heidi said.

“Like I said, she's really drunk.”

I giggled, but I was still jealous. There was still a little pinch.

Carlos leaned close to my ear. “I'm glad you decided to come.”

“Me too,” I said, smiling.

“Did you guys do a balloon yet?” Carlos asked.

I had no idea what he was talking about. I looked at Heidi. She didn't seem to either.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand. “You have to do this.”