The Adults (35 page)

“Without Susan, there was no difference between home and not home, you know what I mean?”

So he stopped buying fresh vegetables, since he couldn’t eat them all before they rotted anyway, and bought frozen broccoli florets in a thick soy sauce. He ordered shrimp fra diavolo from Tony’s. He did this every night at six or seven or eight or whenever because without anybody watching, he said that everything he did was suddenly inconsequential.

For nearly six months, Jonathan said, he ate pepperoni out of a bag as dessert and watched late-night talk shows to renew the sense of humor he lost fighting with real estate agents and battling Susan about the severity of the faucet leak. He became friendlier to the lawyers in the office. He found that having nothing to take up one’s time left a lot of time just to be nicer. He talked to women at the grocery store. He had morning coffees with paralegals and late-night whiskeys with Jon and Jay, the two other product liability lawyers in his firm. They sat out on the balcony and he listened to Jon mock the blond stenographer from the courtroom.

“Who everybody secretly wanted to sleep with,” Jonathan said. “Who would sometimes stop the proceedings just to ask the witness, ‘Wait, did you say “no” or “
nah
”?’”

Sometimes, Jonathan said, he attended formal dining gatherings hosted by his law firm and talked to a young woman with blond or brown or red hair.

“Well, was it blond or brown or red?” I said. “You couldn’t even take the time to notice?”

“I guess it didn’t matter what color her hair was, that’s not the point.”

The point was that he wasn’t interested in any of the women, not until one of the lawyers’ wives would come up to him, stick her nose in Jonathan’s cocktail, and say, “Where is your wife?” This was always an accusation, Jonathan said, “Like my words were unbuttoning the woman’s shirt right there.” Jonathan said he wanted to shout back, “Where is your sense of decency?” but he just sighed and said, “Africa.”

So Susan traveled for two years, up the coast of Africa, where she stayed in run-down buildings that were on occasion shot at. Where on occasion, she sat stiff as a board on her cot with her male coworker from Nebraska whom Jonathan said he assumed she fucked when it got tense, and even though the violence was routine and they were locked in and mostly safe (that was what she always said before she left), she called Jonathan to say, “Jack, the building is being shot at,” so he would be equally impressed and concerned by her dedication and say, “Susan, come home, just come home,” and she would say, “Okay, Jack, I’m coming home.” But he said he never really understood the exact danger she was in, or the exact country for that matter, because it seemed no matter where she was, she got heat rash, she drank bad water and ate rotten meat, she came home for Christmas with tape-worm, and she sat on the toilet and cried and said, “Oh, God, Jack, don’t look at me.” But Jonathan said he combed her hair and kissed her on the forehead and the worms crawled out of her.

“Jonathan,” I said, “I don’t think your wife would appreciate me knowing this.”

“It’s important,” he said. “Because I would tell her, ‘Susan, you are my wife,’ but when we climbed into bed, I didn’t put my arms around her. And that was when I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That I didn’t love her.”

And he said Susan couldn’t stop talking about the look on his face earlier when she reached for the knob of the stove, like it wasn’t even her home to cook in. She ran to the bathroom, and they both agreed that they couldn’t believe how inhumane the intimacy had become. Jonathan said he lay in bed imagining what it would feel like when she left again for Libya or Egypt or wherever, and how kissing her on the mouth at the airport would feel like nothing at all, like licking an envelope closed, and the sour taste on his tongue in the cab would taste exactly like falling out of love.

“I was going to divorce her,” he said. “Then, I got your letter. And after she left again, I thought of you. I just thought of you. I saw you so clearly in my mind. I thought of you for days. So I went to Prague to see you. And it was perfect. And I was going to tell her that it was over.”

And then Susan called while he was in Prague to tell him that she was coming home early from Ghana because she was two months pregnant, and Jonathan—who looked at me at Café Red and thought, Oh God, oh how sad, when did Susan and I even make love? But he said good-bye to me and hello to Susan. At dinner, he was so sad to be home, and Susan was so happy to be home. Jonathan said he thought of me at every meal, while Susan sipped on ice water and started the Name Game. “Ben,” she said, “or Peter or Judas,” and then laughed to confirm that she would never name her child after a traitor. Ben, Peter, Judas, Jonathan thought. He knew that if he asked, “Are you sure it’s mine?” it would be over before the wine glasses dented the walls.

“I don’t think names really mean anything,” Jonathan said. “I think children make their names, not the other way around, but really, why take the chance?” Susan agreed. No chances. So they bought a state-of-the-art stroller and waited for Ben or Peter or Judas’s day of birth. One morning, Susan cramped at the dishwasher, and they rushed to the hospital in his car while he held her hand. “I kept saying, ‘Almost, Susan,’ like a fucking jackass,” Jonathan said.

He said he stood in the room and listened to Susan’s screams. He wiped the sweat off her brow and thought, even if it was Peter’s or Ben’s or Judas’s, he was okay with it, because the boy would wear his hand-me-downs and mimic his dialect. He would love Susan and he would love the boy.

“And then when he came out it was like looking at a broken windup toy,” Jonathan said. “And Susan looked at the doctor as if to say,
Why isn’t my child working?
The doctor looked at Susan, as if to say,
Almost, it-is-almost-a-baby, please just give us a second
.”

Jonathan said Susan laid her head back against the pillow as if it was her fault for never giving the child a name. Jonathan buckled at the knee. It was his fault, he knew this, for falling out of love with her.

“Everybody always knows the truth,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s like the whole world can see you, all the time.”

The doctors rushed Peter, Ben, or Judas to the table, where they strapped wires to his tiny chest and shouted one-two-three come on.

“But he never came back to life,” Jonathan said. “Or never had life. I’m not sure.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I really was. It sounded terrible. “That sounds very sad.”

“It was. It is.”

He took a sip of his coffee.

“So that’s the story,” he said. “Well, not the whole story.”

He reached for my hand. I recoiled.

“Kevin gets annoyed that I never heard of the word ‘amylase,’” I said, running my finger over the rim of my empty cup. “It’s a chemical. He thinks I’m stupid sometimes. I can see it on his face. But he gets my jokes and he loves me and when I have nightmares, he sits up and tries to psychoanalyze them. We try to work it out together and that is why I love him. Please do not contact me again.”

I walked out of the coffee shop, got on the Metro North to Connecticut, and made circles of fog on the train window with my breath. The sign on the window that was supposed to read
EMERGENCY BRAKE
had two letters missing. A Spanish man sitting beside me pointed to the sign, chuckled, and said, “Emergency bra.”

“That’s funny, isn’t it?” I said. He nodded.

*   *   *

When my father came home from Russia, he stood at my mother’s doorstep and said, “
Überraschung!
It means,
Surprise
!” Surprise! I’m a dead man! Surprise! Will you let me die in our old house? The one that I bought for my family? That means
you
of course. I want to die around my old things. My old Norwegian pewter bowl. The brown velvet curtains that keep out the sun. Where is Emily? And where is my pewter bowl and what’s with the red curtains and what did you do with the sun? It’s raining. I have one month to live and it’s raining. Call Emily. Tell her that her father is dying and he could use a
masáž
. She’ll know what that means.

“Why do you and your father always talk in this secret code?” my mother asked.

“It’s not code, Gloria,” my father yelled from the bedroom. “It’s Czech!”

I stood in the kitchen and cried.

“Don’t cry, Emily,” my father said when he walked in. “Don’t think of it as dying. Think of it as changing shape.”

“Like you are becoming a rectangle?” I said.

“Yeah,” my father said. “Like that.”

My father’s brothers, Uncle Vito and Vince, were staying in the house with us. My father started having trouble swallowing food two weeks ago, so we were feeding him only soft foods now.

“How ’bout I cook you up some Bob?” Uncle Vito said.

My father weakly smiled.

“Sick son of a bitch,” Uncle Vince said.

The story goes that when they moved from the Bronx to Connecticut, they got so excited about living in a house with one acre of land, they got six chickens as pets, Neptune, Harry, Belvedere, Jungle, Puppy, and Bob. One day Uncle Vito took Bob out of the cage and broke his neck, skinned him, and cooked him into a stew. My grandmother came home and was pleased to find one of her sons cooking dinner so she asked no questions. During the meal, Uncle Vito said, “Well, doesn’t anyone want to know where Bob is?”

“We eat goddamn chickens every day, and you still act as though I’m some sort of psychopath,” Uncle Vito said.

“They were our
pets
,” Uncle Vince said.

I took out three eggs and picked up a pan. “We’ll make eggs,” I said.

“What the hell do you think those are?” Uncle Vito asked, pointing to the eggs. “You’re the sick ones.”

“No, don’t use that pan,” my mother said.

“That pan sticks,” Bill said.

I cracked the second egg on the side of the pan.

“Not three eggs,” my mother said. “He won’t eat three eggs.”

Uncle Vince argued. “Yes he will. He hasn’t eaten all day.”

“Give him a roll,” Bill said.

“Rolls are for pansies,” Uncle Vito said.

“Did you drink your prune juice?” my mother asked my father. “We should get him some more prune juice.”

“He’s not thirsty,” Uncle Vince said.

“Something smells like it’s burning,” said Uncle Vito. “Emily’s frying the little fuckers.”

“I’ll make the eggs,” my mother said to me, taking the pan.

“Didn’t they teach you to make eggs in college?” said Uncle Vito.

“She went to art school,” Uncle Vince said.

“Oh Jesus,” Uncle Vito said.

“People,” I said in protest, “I know how to make eggs.”

“I don’t suppose anyone cares if I go in the other room,” my father said.

When the empty plate got sent back from my father’s room, more debate followed.

“How many did he eat?” Uncle Vito wanted to know.

“Three,” I said.

“He left a bit of egg in the corner,” Uncle Vince said. “That was probably two and a quarter eggs.”

All month long we had been waiting for him to die like this. We had been waiting for him to die in the same way that we waited for the mailman. The mailman was always coming. The mailman was always coming and the dogs were supposed to bark to let us know this and all of this felt as reliable a pattern as a weather pattern that might go on forever and ever and somewhere deep down we all started to believe that maybe my father really couldn’t die. He just didn’t seem like the type.

Until one morning my father grabbed at his chest, and opened his mouth like he was choking, and we called the ambulance, which arrived quickly, despite the rush-hour traffic, despite the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit on our street. “Your father’s lung collapsed,” the doctor said.

At Stamford Hospital, my father was so thin in his bed his collarbone sat across his neck like a thick metal chain. My father was nearing the end of his rope, the doctor told us, as though he was saying, your father is on a rope. Life is just a rope, and we are people with hands.

Now we had to wait. They’d patch up his lung, but he had only weeks now. Weeks. We just had to hold his hand and bring him green tea that he wouldn’t drink and shout good nutritional advice in his ears. “Antioxidants help your heart!” my mother said.

“My heart?” my father asked. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Oh, Victor,” my mother said.

My mother sent Bill to Trader Joe’s, where he could buy a roasted chicken. To visit someone at the hospital, my mother explained in the car, you need food. You need brie and chicken and napkins and you need to act like it’s just so normal that you are there, sucking down a meal like you would at your own kitchen table. “Otherwise,” my mother said, “everybody gets uncomfortable.”

Mrs. Resnick showed up with Laura. My mother saw her walking down the hall and turned to me and said, “Emily, where’s Bill?”

“You sent him to get a chicken.”

“That’s right,” my mother said.

My father’s friends from work came, neighbors came, Adora and Nick came, and when my father asked them how in the hell their lives were going, they both nodded. “Good, good, our lives are good.” My mother and I listened on the chairs outside the room waiting for Kevin to show up. Kevin had never met my father and it was strange that the first time he did would be one of the last times he ever saw him, so for a moment, I considered not even introducing them. What was the point?

Mrs. Resnick sat next to Laura, combing Laura’s bangs over to one side.

“
Mom
,” Laura said. Laura was twelve and embarrassed of everything now. Her braces, her mother’s floral perfume, even her father a little bit, who was spitting up fluid in a dish down the hall. “Stop it.”

She was shy around me now. I asked about her schoolwork, how her classmates were, did she have a boyfriend, and was he nice, was he an upstanding citizen, did he vote? And all she did was giggle and say, “I don’t know anyone who votes, I don’t think.”

A woman in a wheelchair rolled by us, made scary eye contact, spewed crazy talk, asked if I thought all the demons were in hell. At first I refused to answer, but as she persisted I told her what I really thought: yes, probably. Did I think they were sorry for being demons? I didn’t know. I hoped so.