The Adults (37 page)

“Are you thinking about us always
always
like I am?”

“Yes,” but I did not tell him the truth. Always
always
just sounded so exhausting.

“You don’t need to sleep with another man to prove to me that you aren’t ready for marriage. I wasn’t going to propose yet.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Of course it is.”

On the subway home, Kevin asked me to explain in detail the sex I had with Jonathan.

“How do you know it’s Jonathan?” I asked.

“It’s obvious.”

He said he needed to know if it was the kind of sex he could get over or the kind of sex that would haunt him forever.

“When did you first sleep with him?” he asked.

“Four days ago,” I said. “Wednesday.”

“That’s where you went that night you left?”

“Yes,” I said. “And then Thursday night.”

On Thursday, Jonathan had picked me up in Stamford after I spent the day at the hospital, and we drove to his father’s empty house in Greenwich (France for the winter), and this was where we finally had sex with our clothes off, and I noticed that Jonathan sweated more than he used to, sweated more easily indoors, more easily in the winter, and he didn’t understand why but that had always been the case. I didn’t understand why anybody would hire a maid to work in an empty house, or why Jonathan didn’t take me to his real house in Fairfield since he wasn’t technically married anymore, or why he needed to pretend like he was, and if he didn’t love me, then why did he stick his nose in my hair and say, “I wish I could describe what you smell like,” my very particular scent, that he just couldn’t put his finger on, “and your hair,” he said, my hair, oh my hair, he loved to feel his fingers in my hair, he loved to grab my hair, and I wondered if this was similar to the joy I felt when I held on to his back, if this was all that this was, the joy of needing and wanting and holding on.

“I barely remember Thursday,” Kevin said. “What was I doing on Thursday? I guess I barely remember so what does it matter that you were with someone else? Right? Is that what I should be telling myself?”

“Remember,” I said, “when you were at the dinner with your family and you called me to say good night in case I was going to bed before you got home, and I said good night?”

“No,” he said. “But that sounds like something that would happen.”

I thanked him for being funny. He said at a moment like this he was trying to find ways to be funny. But he didn’t think it was possible. He didn’t think this was going to be the kind of thing we laughed about ever, not even in ten years when we probably wouldn’t know each other anymore. I started to cry. Tell me more, he said.

“I was sleeping with Jonathan when you called.”

“I couldn’t even tell,” he said. “I can’t even remember the conversation we had.”

“I can,” I said. “You told me your mother was upset because a pearl popped off into her drink, and she was convinced she accidentally drank it. Since that moment, I’ve been thinking of how sad that is.”

“I don’t want to hear any more,” he said. “Don’t return to the apartment until I’m gone, please.”

I spent the week at home. During the day, we visited with my father, and after, we went out to dinner, where Uncle Vito always asked Bill to pass the salt and pecker, and Uncle Vince winked at the cute waitresses, then announced that my father and he were conceived in the same hotel, one year apart (something that had always made them close), and then once we finally got back to the house, I turned around and took the train to Greenwich, where I spent the night at Jonathan’s father’s house.

“Your hair,” he said when he opened the door to the house.

“Yes,” I said. I had cut my hair the night before to hurry the arrival of spring.

“Susan’s hair is three days unwashed,” Jonathan said. I didn’t know what to say but:

Jsi lhař. You liar
.

So I said, “Kevin knows breeds.”

“Susan speaks four languages, including functional Arabic, and she can’t remember what street the grocery store is on. The psychiatrist says she has pseudodementia. Dementia brought on by depression. And we had to go to a group meeting today,” he said. “Coping with Grief.”

He said that they attended this group once a week, Sundays at seven thirty.

“The lecture tonight was ‘Suicide and Grief,’” he said, running his fingers down my legs in the kitchen.

Jonathan pressed his back against the chair and held his breath. “Good, great, you’re just going to give her ideas, I thought,” he said, and looked over at me. I was fixing the hem of my short blue sweater dress.

“Did you ever fantasize about a way to kill yourself?” Jonathan asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “After Mark’s father killed himself, I was afraid my mother might kill herself. For a while, I thought that maybe I’d kill myself first, that way, I couldn’t be affected by her suicide.”

“How would you do it?”

“I knew that I could never kill myself directly,” I said. “I’d have to get someone else to do it. I’d set up a gun with a pulley system tied to my door. When someone would walk through my door, the gun would be in my mouth and it would go off.”

“That’s selfish.”

“I know. But suicide is selfish in general.”

“I used to dream that I could die in an airtight room,” Jonathan said, “my body laid out on a glass table, and I’d be on heroin. And somehow, I’d be on fire.”

Jonathan took a long sip of his beer.

“It’s not that glamorous,” I said.

Jonathan didn’t turn to look at me. He didn’t even put his hand on my thigh. He wasn’t impressed.

“I don’t think we can meet in Greenwich anymore,” Jonathan said, staring at the maid, who’d just come into the room to dust the tops of the counters in the kitchen. “It’s starting to make me feel uncomfortable. The maid knows my wife.”

Y
our father is really dying this time,” my mother said on the other end of my cell phone. “Come to the hospital.”

I hung up the phone with my mother. I was naked. I couldn’t find my keys or my coat or my shoes or my hair elastic. I cried over his soccer trophies and Jonathan took my hand and said, “I’ll drive you.”

When we arrived at the hospital, Jonathan hung back. “Just come on,” I said.

He followed me to my father’s room but stayed outside on the chairs. After a while he said he had to get going. “I’ll come see you later,” he said.

In some ways it wasn’t all that different from home: my father was so distant and thin in his bed, it gave me the same feeling that I got when he came back from a long trip in Europe and something about his face looked painfully unaffiliated with me. My father said, “Mhmm?” every time he thought somebody spoke, to which my mother said, “Emily, say hello to your father,” to which my father said, “Gloria, I’m talking to
Emily
.”

“Emily?” my father asked.

“Hi, Dad,” I said.

“Oh, there you are, Emily.”

I took my father’s hand.

“Your hands are so cold,” he said. “Put some mittens on, will you?”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Put some mittens on. Stronzo, give Emily your mittens.”

Everybody looked around.

“Where’s Stronzo?” my father said. “Stronzo, give Emily your mittens.”

“
Stronzo
” was Italian for “turd,” or “piece of shit,” or “cheating liar,” and was a specific nickname for Uncle Vito after he drove his car into our garage by accident one night. It was a specific secret nickname that only the three of us knew. My mother smiled.

“Shh,” my mother whispered to my father.

“Where’s Stronzo? Oh, there he is!” he said, pointing to Uncle Vito in the corner.

Uncle Vito pointed to himself. “Me?” Uncle Vito said. “I’m
Stronzo
?”

The doctor came in. “Your father should get some sleep for an hour,” he said. “You all can come back in soon though.”

“I don’t need rest,” my father said dreamily. “For God’s sakes, people, I’ll be dead soon! Let me live.”

“
Victor
,” my mother said, looking at me and Laura. “The children.”

“Why am
I
Stronzo?” Uncle Vito asked. “I thought
Vince
was Stronzo.”

My mother ran her fingers over the IV. My uncles stared at the heart monitor. Laura took her fingers through her brown hair. The nurses walked by the room in a rush. I cleared my throat. My father opened and closed and then opened and closed his eyes.

“Property tax has gone up in Monroe and that’s a crying shame,” Uncle Vince said.

Silence.

“Emily,” my father said, pointing to Laura, “is that your daughter?”

“This is Laura,” I said.

“Why didn’t anybody tell me I was a grandfather?” my father asked. The needles in his arm were crowded by blue and red patches of skin.

“No, Dad,” I said. “This is your daughter, Laura.”

Laura stood still. “
Dad
,” she said. “No. It’s me.”

“Victor,” my mother said. “This is Laura. You know Laura.”

“Is it overwhelming?” my father asked me. His lips were thin and crusty. “She is beautiful. Is it overwhelming?”

“Dad,” I said. “This is your daughter.
Your
daughter.”

My uncles shifted uncomfortably. Stronzo thumbed the fan.

“Oh, I know my daughter when I see her,” he said. “Emily, honey.”

“Dad, this is your daughter,” I said calmly. “This is your daughter Laura.”

“Dad!” Laura screamed. She was about to cry.

My mother put her arms around Laura. “Let’s go, Laura,” she said. “Your father is on a lot of morphine right now. He’s very confused at the moment. Of course he knows that you’re his daughter.”

“You look at me, Gloria, and tell me when I had the time to have another daughter!” my father said, pointing at us but not quite looking at us. “I’m a busy working man! I have a life, you know that, Gloria! Remember how busy I was? That was always the problem, wasn’t it?”

I kissed my father’s shaking hand.

“Oh, there was never any problem, Victor,” my mother said.

“I was very busy and I’m sorry,” my father said.

“We’ll let you sleep now,” my mother said.

His lips curled as though he was about to cry. And then he was crying, blubbering, wholly sad. “Oh, God,” he said. “Don’t go. This is it, isn’t it? This is it.”

“No, this isn’t it,” I said.

“Let me count on my hand how many children I had, Emily Marie,” he said. “One. Look. One child. And we felt so bad, you know that, Emily. We wished we could have given you a brother or a sister. You were always so alone. So alone. Out on that driveway. I cried. Forgive us? Can you forgive me? I am so old, Emily, too old to have a child.”

Mrs. Resnick arrived. We sat in the chairs outside the hallway in silence, and we continued to sit like this for an hour while my mother tried to make conversation (the chairs did not hug her back well), the doctors were so tall (don’t you just hate that), the coffee so-so (the way Emily likes it). Laura was droopy, slouching, confused in her chair, and Mrs. Resnick asked me questions about my business, if it was what I always dreamed of doing, if I thought it was going to sustain me throughout my thirties—and if not, what would I do instead?

I picked at my nails, pushed back the cuticle until I drew blood.

“Emily, stop that,” my mother said. “Oh, I’ll get you a napkin.”

My mother left and came back with a napkin, a tray of corn muffins, four coffees. She swung her hair over her right shoulder, and I couldn’t figure out where she thought she was. When my mother got close enough, she leaned over and presented the muffins to us like a consolation prize.

“I’m sorry your father is dying,” she said to both of us. “I’m sorry your father is dying.”

She said this as though my father and Laura’s father and her ex-husband were not the same person. She said it like we were losing three completely different people. I didn’t know what she was losing and she didn’t know what I was losing, but the doctors kept making it clear that what we were all losing was an
organism
. This was what happened after too much time in a hospital. When someone died in a hospital, you just said, okay, well, that’s sort of why we brought the organism here. The organism wasn’t looking so good. But when someone died outside of a hospital, you shouted, you screamed for help, you looked at their face and you wanted to scream,
This is a man! This is a man who can no longer breathe! This is a man who goes to Spanish restaurants in Prague and eats Italian!
You want to scream,
How dare you put that man in a bag!
You want to scream, even though nobody would hear you, even though screaming is the first clear indication that somebody, somewhere, is drowning.

“Take a muffin,” my mother said. She was still leaning over my chair. I picked out the largest muffin of the group. I was always a child, even in front of a child; I was still the child plucking off the tops of the largest muffins and handing the bottoms to my mother.

My mother ate the bottom of the muffin, despite her complaints, because at the hospital, she was the one whom people talked to; here, she was the one who kept her hair responsibly out of her face and I was the one who twirled the strands that fell limply across mine and thought,
We are running out of time to communicate with each other!
She was the one who knew the answers. She was the one who said to me on the bench outside his hospital room, “Emily, if nobody ever died what would be the point of living?” and I was the one who said, “The point would be to always be alive.” She was the one who stayed at our house and watched our silverware tarnish and I was the one who traveled the world and was constantly surprised that the houses I decorated were not my own, the vases I put inside them were not my own, the arched doorways were not my own, the people I loved were not my own, the feelings I felt were not my own, my feet were not my own, my mouth and hands and eyelashes and teeth and skin were not my own, because one day, it would all be taken from me.

“Laura, honey, take a coffee,” my mother said, handing the last one to her. “It’s good for you.”