The Law of Loving Others (15 page)

“Don't ruin this by comparing us to Ross and Rachel,” he said. “But look up, there's Orion.” He pointed to the cluster of lights above us.

There was something about this wide open sky that felt so safe and comforting. I had never known what to think or feel about God. I always said I was an atheist but I crossed my fingers behind my back as I proclaimed it. But that night, beneath the beautiful, artificial sky, I felt protected by an invisible force. Like the whole world was one enormous womb, and I felt some maternal god stroking her belly affectionately. I said this out loud and Daniel laughed at me.

“My little stoned philosopher,” he said and he rubbed his palm against my stomach.

“I love you,” I said. “I really, really do.”

The walk back to Daniel's house was only four blocks along Central Park West. We were still feeling high and happy and I imagined that the moment we walked back into the apartment, we'd be shuttled back into another reality.

We stopped and sat down on the stoop of a building next to Daniel's. On the corner, a man stood beside a small cart, shielded from the wind by the long orange flaps of an umbrella. The smell of almonds and peanuts dipped into hot cinnamon and sugar was sweet and potent in the air. I leaned toward Daniel and put both my hands into the fleece-lined pockets of his parka. I told him that I might have to go to Florida for a couple of days to visit my grandmother, that I was just feeling so disconnected from my family and maybe it would be nice to get away for a while.

“That will be good for you,” he said, and I wasn't quite sure what to make of those words, but I tried not to read into them too much.

THERE were half a dozen pairs of shoes in a pile outside the door of the apartment: a pair of men's loafers, Daniel's charcoal-colored Pumas that he'd had since eighth grade, a pair of pumps and equestrian-style riding boots, and some navy blue orthotics that must've belonged to Daniel's grandmother. There was something about the sight of that messy pile of shoes that made me want to cry—that ordinary evidence of familial life. I held Daniel's hand and kissed the scratchy fabric of his jacket, pressed my mouth against the sleeve.

Inside his bedroom, Daniel removed his clothes and did a little striptease, theatrically taking off his clothes for me. He unzipped his fly, flung off his belt in a dramatic gesture; next was his T-shirt, which he twirled around with his index finger.

“Stop it,” I said. “You're too cute.”

He pushed me down onto the comforter.

“If you ever call me cute again,” he warned. I wrapped my legs around his naked body, pulled him toward me, pressed my face into the warm hollow of his neck.

THE next morning we woke up and discovered that the forecast was right; the sky looked as though it was fuming—it was snowing and hailing and flakes were flying sideways across the windows. Across the street, Central Park was cloaked in white, no one was walking their dogs, no doormen lingered beneath awnings. It was quiet and motionless.

All transportation was shut down for at least a day: MTA, Metro-North, LIRR, and New Jersey Transit. It was a relief to be trapped here, with Daniel and his family, a relief to have nowhere else to go.

“So much for global warming,” Daniel's grandmother Nora said. She was small but not frail, and at eighty-nine, she still lived alone in an apartment a few blocks west. She read the
New York Times
every day and could crack walnuts open with her bare fists. (
Don't you ever try to mess with her
, Daniel had warned me the first time I met her.)

“It's called climate
change
, Ma,” Daniel's father said. “
Change
doesn't mean it's always getting hotter.”

We sat around the living room and played Taboo. Nora said we all talked too quickly but it turned out she was the sharpest player, her guesses so swift and astute.

A bowl of pistachio nuts sat on the coffee table and I took a handful, tried to crack the shells open into my lap. Daniel took the tough ones and pried them open with his teeth, lovingly spitting the meat into my palms.

“Sweet,” I said. “So sweet.”

I wanted to be part of this family. And I felt flooded with guilt and gratitude and sometimes I couldn't quite distinguish between them. But within minutes, in the middle of a round of Taboo, while Jane was laughing, frantically trying to convey the meaning of some secret word, I was seized by panic. I stared at the purple and green Taboo cards that had been discarded onto the rug, each with a list of words on them, and I thought,
Is there some message here for me?
My mouth went dry, and all I could feel was this nagging, incessant feeling that something was terribly wrong in my brain. My body felt empty, like my muscles and bones—everything that kept me solid and together—were gone. It was just my heart, thudding frantically, bouncing around my insides like a marble inside a pinball machine.

I tried to make eye contact with Jane after her turn was over. She sat with the dog perched on her lap and curled the white fur around her manicured fingers. If I were losing my mind, she would know, wouldn't she? She was trained to look out for these things—to detect people's mental instability when they weren't sure of it themselves.

“I'm feeling kind of nauseous,” I said, abruptly. “I think I'll go lie down for a little bit.”

I went into Daniel's room and I lay down on top of his red comforter—it was soft and worn, from his childhood, the reversible kind that was crimson on one side, royal blue on the other—and I tried to steady my breathing, control my thoughts, but my heart wouldn't slow. I felt certain that this feeling would never, ever go away. That I'd have to go to the hospital, and if I crossed that line, could I ever come back? Maybe I would need to go back out there and tell Jane I was freaking out.
I'm losing my mind, you have to help me.
I imagined myself in the closest ER, bleak and dirty, with bright fluorescent lights. In my mind it was more like an interrogation room. Maybe I would even end up at the same inpatient facility as my mother.
Mother-daughter hospital suites.

I tried to slow my breathing Lamaze-style, like I'd seen so many times on television. I relaxed my diaphragm. I stared at the decorated walls; the blown up cover of a Wilco album—pale yellow background and huge, looming circular towers in downtown Chicago; an old collection of Absolut ads from the nineties that Daniel had pasted onto one corner of his room; and that iconic Rolling Stone cover of a naked John Lennon in a fetal position clinging to Yoko, his arms wrapped snugly around her head. That was what I wanted right then—to hold on to Daniel, to find the deepest sort of comfort in his presence.

I kept waiting for him to come in, to come see if I was okay. I took his iPod out from the dock on his night table, and I scrolled through the album titles, trying to distract myself. I found a playlist called
For Nina
(Nina was a girl that Daniel dated before me, for most of his sophomore year) and if it had been any other time, I probably wouldn't have looked, but I wanted to feel that particular prick of jealousy, a tangible pang, anything other than that raw, unrelenting panic. I imagined Daniel combing through his thousands of songs, carefully picking out the tracks to impress Nina, to convey feelings that maybe he otherwise wouldn't have been able to. A lot of them felt mostly benign (some Talking Heads) or just really blatant (Bob Dylan's “Mama, You Been on My Mind”) and then I got to that Tom Waits song, “I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You,” and I stopped, had had enough. My panic had momentarily abated and was replaced by anger. Every minute that passed that Daniel didn't come in to check on me left me feeling more heated and lonely. I tried to sleep. I brought my knees up to my chest. I counted slowly backward from one hundred like my father taught me to do when I was a child.

Finally he came in and I kept my eyes closed and he touched the tips of his fingers against my cheeks to see if I had been crying.

“You don't even care!” I was sobbing.

“I'm trying Emma, I am! What do you want me to do? Am I supposed to know what you're thinking every minute?”

“I don't know! But what are you going to do if I actually start to lose my mind? Not everything is just easy all the time, and if you actually love me like you claimed to last week, you would give a shit!”

I had an urge to peel off my socks, show him my bare ankles, my slightly wilted flesh on display for him.
Do you see? Do you see how much I'm freaking out?
But I didn't, I just cried and I held on to him and I thought about how much I needed him, how clear it was that he didn't love me enough, not nearly as much as I wanted him to.

“I'm trying,” he said again, quietly. “I really am.”

Our bodies found each other and sex gave us that momentary respite, a diminishment of our problems for just that little while.

LATER that night, I was still feeling that slightly intoxicating relief that followed in the wake of panic. We went downstairs to the apartment of Daniel's friend Maggie, someone he'd known since childhood. She'd gone to a prep school in the city like Daniel but by eighth grade she'd developed a coke problem and had subsequently gone to half a dozen boarding schools. She had finally ended up at one of those reform-type schools in Utah, where I imagined teachers threw you out into the wilderness alone, asked you to defend yourself in the woods for days, with only a compass and a bag of trail mix. Maggie was beautiful and so confident in a way that I'd never understand. I was sure that she and Daniel had hooked up at some point but I just couldn't bring myself to ask because I didn't really want to know.

“I don't think Maggie likes me,” I told Daniel while we were waiting for the elevator.

“You always say that when
you're
the one who doesn't like somebody.”

“Shut up!” I punched him gently in the shoulder. “Sorry. I love you.”

He didn't say anything.

“I said, I love you-uh.”

“I know-uh. Look, Maggie's just one of those people who gets along better with guys.”

I groaned. “I hate that. I hate girls who hate girls.”

“Blah blah blah. You hate everything.”

“Not true! That is sooo not true. I love my friends. And playing Taboo with your family. And my family. And reading. And getting high and going to the planetarium with you.”

We stepped into the elevator—all mahogany and brass—and for a moment I lifted up my T-shirt and my bra, exposing my chest for Daniel to see.

“Emma!”

“Daniel!”

“Put those away,” he said. “There are cameras in here, you little show-off. Those are for me to see and no one else.”

I felt a pang of shame, and then something warmer inside my gut as I thought of Phil—his cold fingers, the feel of his facial hair against my mouth.