The Adults (32 page)

“Here,” he said. “
Listo
. Tell me how it is I can . . .
ver
. . . you . . . again?” Like,
I am ready to see you again.

I thought about saying,
Dumbass, I’m still here
—but Jonathan was the only person in the world who would have laughed at this, so I just shrugged my shoulders and felt my grasp on Jonathan slip. Even though I wasn’t releasing my grip. Perhaps that was the problem; I was holding on to something that was dead. Walking around the city with a corpse in my hand. I couldn’t see Jonathan anywhere through the smoke. I nearly choked understanding that this whole time, I had felt his hands against me, but this whole time, he had been married.

“Aha!” said the French man. The man found a bottle opener on his key chain.

“
Escribir
on
mi
arm,” he said. “Scratch
suave
. Leave
solo blanco
marks on
mi
skin.”

I wanted to tell this man to go away, but I couldn’t say the words. I was too disconnected from my lips.

“Don’t you know where you live?” the French man asked, the only thing he said in perfect English.

Café Red’s architecture was designed to make you feel like you were dying; how apocalyptic to place a window in an underground bar.

“No,” I told the French man. “No, I don’t know where I live.”

I could feel ghosts climbing these walls, I could feel the dog attempting escape before the snow buried us in this concrete room forever. But I couldn’t even get off my chair. I couldn’t even feel my own hands. It was possible that a person could live their life and not really live anywhere at all. It was possible that Jonathan was never coming back. It was possible that I didn’t know Jonathan at all. It was possible that once you left, you weren’t allowed back in. It was possible that the woman with long blond hair dancing by the fake ivy in the corner followed him out and that this was entirely Jonathan’s motivation in faking his own suffocation. It was possible that she was a better partner than me, that Jonathan could have better partners than me, even though he was always my best. I couldn’t blame him. I would stop breathing if it gave me cheekbones as high as hers. Just like that, I had stopped breathing. I was suddenly so sad, I felt I could will everything out of existence, even my own breath. But how appropriate. I was dirty and alone and in love with a married man. I should have been out of breath. I looked down at my shoes. They were filthy. But the filth always counts for something. “The filth is what proves we drive the car!” my mother used to shout at my father when he complained about the car being too dirty. “The filth is what proves your father isn’t paying any attention,” Ester had said to me.

I was always acting as though I never had any choices, but in the end, that was the only thing I ever really had. So I made a choice. I took the bottle opener in my hand. I pressed it against the French man’s forearm.

“
Suave
,” the French man said. “No breaky skin.”

And my mother was right: the filth was what proved we were moving against things.

The French man slid his fingers through mine.

And then, “I’m backski,” Jonathan said, just like that. He sat down and leaned against the back of the chair. He sighed. Even though I wanted to tear his face off, I was grateful for his return. I was always grateful for his return. Even though I had a million questions, all I wanted to do was just let go of the French man and put my head on Jonathan’s shoulder. I wasn’t even mad. There were too many things I always assumed. Too many people I tried to claim as mine. And that was wrong. If there was anything I learned when I was fourteen, it was that people were not yours. Jonathan was never my happiness to be had. I put down the bottle opener and decided to at least be kind to the French man next to me—
Listen
, go away, I don’t need this. The French man looked at me and Jonathan and rolled his eyes. “
Putain
,” he said, and walked away.

I inhaled the last of the joint and it crumbled to ash in my fingers. With my lungs now wide open, I felt calm again. I spoke to Jonathan in puffs of smoke: Nice. To. See. You. Againski. Jonathan looked back at me. Forgiveski me, he mouthed. I could see that he was sad too, but maybe this was my imagination treating him as me. Jonathan grabbed my hand. Jonathan was still the only one who understood my impatience with the world.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,
le
Little Mole. Let’s go to the bone church.”

I nodded. I agreed. It was time to go to the bone church. I grabbed the suitcase. We got out of our seats and walked out of the café. The night air came at me like a wave and I closed my eyes, bracing for something.

But we lived. And we walked.

“If you could put your bones in the bone church, what would you want to be?” Jonathan asked me while we were waiting for the late-night tram. He leaned against me as he explained why he wanted to be the chandelier: even after he was dead, he still wanted all his bones to be together in one place.

“I’d be the bell that tolls at midnight,” I said.

“
Is
there a bell that tolls at midnight?”

“Fine, then,” I said, and I can’t explain why this felt like the cruelest thing he ever said to me.

When the late-night tram never came, Jonathan walked me back to my apartment. He wouldn’t kiss me on the mouth. Now that I knew about his wife, he said it felt like cheating. He was sorry for coming. “I shouldn’t have come,” he said. Jonathan said he was leaving the next morning for London, and then New York. Susan was in Africa. She was coming home to be with him. I nodded like I understood something. I closed the door. I put the suitcase down. No matter where we went, we always ended up back where we started. I laid my head down on the pillow and when I tried to dream of some other life, Jonathan was right—there was no bell that tolled at midnight. But there was a garland of arms lining the entrance of the church. There were elbows flanking the altar. There were strings of skulls draped over windows like curtains, like,
welcome
, like,
hey
, like,
Why don’t you kneel down and make yourself at home? Why don’t you prepare your bones to be something more elaborate than yourself?

I
had a new family. I always had a new family. “Isn’t that wonderful?” my mother had asked, popping blue-cheese-stuffed red peppers into her mouth on Christmas Eve.

That was how my mother liked to frame it: my stepsister, Adora, my stepbrother, Nick, and my stepfather, Bill. Bill kept his hair trimmed short and insisted on a real Christmas tree even though I reminded him that real things were too much work and pointed to his three dogs, chewing the couch. Bill smiled, stood in front of the Christmas tree, and proclaimed that this year, it was Functional Christmas.

I was twenty-six. I lived in Brooklyn, above a deli. Being in my apartment meant feeling like I was always eating something. Every day, I was forced to think of things on top of things on top of other things, or me, in this box, alone. Or the box that sat in the front window of the deli that read 3,000
PEPPER PACKETS
. Nobody ever moved it. Nobody ever needed that many pepper packets. So it just sat there, forgotten, for a year. The apartment was too expensive to have floorboards that sank in certain spots when I touched them lightly with my foot, but it still did anyway. There was a leak in the ceiling and I called my landlord and he told me the toilet was running in the apartment above me and that was why it was leaking. “But nobody lives there?” I asked. Then he cut a two-foot hole in my ceiling and my heating bill doubled. I wore a hat to bed for a week and when I went home for Christmas, Bill made jokes about me being the star of some one-woman film where there were never enough vegetables.

“Santa says that when there is a girl riding the poverty line, Christmas becomes about the things she needs,” Bill said to me, holding out gifts.

“This is how my new family talks to me,” I told my father over the phone. My father was living in Moscow and called me to celebrate the fact that Russia had officially become a superpower again.

My father talked in jokes and Bill talked in code. Bill was always Santa and I was always this girl. Though I never sat on his lap. And we never drank eggnog and we never kissed. Heavy-cream-based drinks sat in our stomachs and made us feel ungrateful—so no eggnog, my mother said. I opened the gifts. Socks. A cookbook. Luggage identifiers. A printer cartridge. “Thanks,” I said.

I was the kind of woman who got printer cartridges for Christmas, and Adora was the kind of woman who got an all-expenses-paid honeymoon to Hawaii, saying, “Thank you, Father,” and then looked at me and my printer cartridges like she wished she could help in some way. My mother thought Adora was a phony, and I said, “What’s she pretending to be?”

“That’s what I’m not sure of yet,” my mother said.

We were all pretending. Anyone who thought differently was just pretending. I was pretending that I didn’t hear my mother in the kitchen crying into a cereal bowl most nights that week, and Bill was pretending that this didn’t bother him. He woke up, walked down the stairs, rubbed her back, and asked her questions like, “What’s wrong?” or “Are you sick?” as though her pain had nothing to do with the fact that my father was dying.

Not like I was any better. I coexisted gracefully with all of them; my conversations tended to be mere call-and-responses, ahh-choo-bless-you-thank-you-Bill. But at some point, Bill and I would both need something out of the refrigerator and reach for the door handle at the same time. “I’m really sorry to hear about your father,” Bill finally said, opening the door. “I wish there was something more I could do. I feel completely helpless.”

“Thanks, Bill,” I said, and pulled out the last leftover slice of pizza. “Your helplessness means a lot to me.”

He didn’t laugh. He just closed the fridge.

“I’m joking,” I said, and then he laughed a little, then I laughed a little, and he looked at my slice of pizza, then laughed a little bit more to show me how cool he was with the fact that I just took the last slice of pizza, the one he had bought last night and planned on eating for lunch today, because my father was dying, and whoever’s father was dying was automatically the one who got the last slice of pizza.

My boyfriend Kevin seemed to be the only one who understood how to behave. When I told him that my father would be dead in three months, Kevin held my face in his hands. When I screamed and shouted and told him I couldn’t stand the feel of my clothes against my skin, he said okay, and took off my shirt, and then my pants, and ran a cool ice cube down my back until it melted and I was calm.

“He calls me A,” Adora complained, sorting through a pile of clothes in her bedroom chair while her breasts darted back and forth like nervous eyes. My stepsister, Adora, was the kind of woman who was always naked from the previous something or other. She was expressing doubts about her fiancé, Orrin, as I plucked her bra from the top of her desk. “Then he slaps my ass, like we’re on the same sports team or something. Is that
normal
?”

We were in Greenwich dressing for her engagement party at Orrin’s father’s house, which was to become Adora and Orrin’s house after they married. I was the kind, patient listener clothed in a black dress and amber earrings, hooking her strapless from the back, and I was the only one in the room, so it was my responsibility to ask all of the important questions, such as, “Is this what you really want, Adora, do you really want to be called A for the rest of your life by a man who gets his haircut from a
stylist
?”

“Don’t worry, Adora,” I was supposed to say, “we’ll just call the whole thing off because this time, things aren’t right.”

“What do you mean?” Adora would have asked, and I would have told her what I heard Orinn’s father say that morning after he thought I left the room:

Do you love her more than the Mets?

Of course, Orrin said. I
hate
the Mets.

Thattaboy. Hate the Mets. Hate ’em hate ’em hate ’em.

I hate the Mets probably more than I
love
her.

I hate the Mets more than I hate your mother.

And Adora would have found this confusing, but also appalling, and then would have expressed her concerns about dying alone, and I would have reminded her that she was only thirty-two, and there was always a next time, and next time was always better, and the time after that even better, and soon nobody would remember
this time
. This time was fleeting and already forgotten, and next time would be forever: crepe black minidresses that revealed knees and ankles and shins and we’d toast to your new tall dark and handsome man and we wouldn’t care about anything because caring was what invited the suffering in the first place, right? Next time, maybe we would even invite Jesus—did you hear he can turn water into wine? “Imagine how much money we’d save,” Adora would have said.

But I was done hooking the bra, and she was beautiful now in her engagement-party dress, a tea green that draped off her shoulders, and I was sipping on coffee, half-listening to her describe the pain of loving too much and half-listening to Phil Collins instructing us to Please Come Out Tonight.

“My name is
Adora
,” she said, walking out of the bedroom to greet the guests. “That’s what I tell him.”

Adora had a beautiful name to get married in. It was perfect for the invitations, perfect in purple and pink and gold cursive. Bill had named her Adora, Italian for second person singular present imperative of the verb “
adorare
,” Bill joked once. Then he started singing Adora for-a you-a, Adora for-a me-a, Adora for-a everybody! This is the song he used to sing to her at night in a fake Italian accent when she was a little girl, and a song he still sometimes sang when we were all together. But Bill was not here yet. Bill was not even Italian. And neither was my mother really; she was 50 percent, and if she had been there, she would have been not singing, but telling people that I spent a lot of time as a child learning how to spell my name backward.