The Next (10 page)

“On us.”

“I think he’s right.”

“I think she’s wrong.”

Oops. It’s not as if she hadn’t been going to the same therapist for two years.

“I think she just thinks you’re cute,” Johanna said, “and nobody likes to see cute people suffer.”

“That’s sweet. Well, go ahead. Close.”

She bit her lip. I don’t think she’d thought this through beyond this point. And that was not like her. I ought to have acknowledged the rare and beautiful opportunity to have a moment of unprepared candor with her.

I smiled for the first time in months. A follow-up conversation after a breakup is supposed to be emotional and all-consuming with the gravitas of two people who need to simultaneously express their love for each other while justifying their need to remain apart. It was supposed to help lift the fog. Yet here I was, with Johanna right in front of me, wondering if Ruben made it past the Princess, wondering if Mrs. Perfect put enough pieces together to start calculating a divorce settlement, wondering if the children were right behind Mommy in the hallway to complicate that lovely farce…

“Are you here?” demanded Johanna.

I refocused on Johanna being back in my apartment. I observed her demeanor. She was highly conflicted inside, yet attempting to adopt a comfortable posture in the chair rather than remain standing upright. She wanted me to feel comfortable—or at least safe—to speak freely. She wore a soft green dress with an elegant yet relaxed feminine cut. She was open to being thought of as sexy but did not want me to feel pressured into thinking of her that way. This was probably the most unguarded she’d been in front of me for years. She and her therapist really had been working hard. I ought not to take that lightly.

Honesty. Honesty.

“I haven’t really talked too much since you left. I’m not used to it. I’m sorry.”

Johanna took that in, and it appeared to resonate deeper in her than either one of us expected. For the first time she looked around the room. She saw a human tragedy mapped out in mounds. Her eyes watered slightly. She sighed softly and ran her fingers along part of the piano, eyeing all the remnants piled on top of it.

Looking away from me, she said in a soft voice, “I always loved your music. It’s important to me that you know that.”

“It used to be important to me that you loved my music.”

Used to be.
I actually said those words. I actually meant them too. I did not mean to injure her, but I had two reasons for saying them. One: I was never terribly trusting that Johanna’s esteem came from a creatively truthful place. Two: I was not terribly sure I would ever write another song again.

She wanted honesty, but I felt immediately guilty and pressured to compensate her in some way she’d value.

“You look beautiful.”

“Coming from anyone else, that would be flattering,” she responded.

Fair enough. Part of me strained to hear the soft padding of Ruben back up the fire escape in front of my window. Or the faint terse arguing of The Perfects across the courtyard.

Refocus.

“What did your therapist hope for us to do tonight?”

“Just talk.”

“With what result? To reconcile?”

She sized my directness up. Since day one, I was never clear whether she appreciated this proclivity in me.

Marzoli would appreciate it.

Johanna looked away from me toward the closed curtains, as if there were a view to be lost in.

“Possibly,” she said softly.

God, she really was beautiful. If only she knew and appreciated that she was beautiful—not in a Vogue cover shot way, but in an ageless, exquisite, incredibly inspiring way.

“In my mind,” she continued, almost at the level of a whisper, “when I used to picture our future, I would picture us as the Layworths.”

“As who?”

“The Layworths,” Johanna repeated, moving toward the curtain. To my terror, she pulled it open with one swift movement before I could stop her. “Your Mr. and Mrs. Perfect.”

She pointed her hand toward the Perfects, and I followed it across the courtyard.

But there was nothing to see. Ruben was nowhere to be seen. Mr. and Mrs. Layworth, as the Perfects were called, were not to be seen. No children were jumping about the living room or kitchen. No lights were on in the rest of the apartment at all. It was almost as if everything I’d seen a couple minutes earlier never occurred.

The curtains on the bedroom were drawn shut. Were Mama and Papa Perfect having makeup sex already? Could Mr. Layworth transition that quickly? Scarily, my intuition said yes. I could only assume Ruben had succeeded in crawling back down the fire escape, across the wall, and up our fire escape while my curtain was closed. I disliked the little twerp, but my intestines knotted at the idea of him being entangled in the damned domestic cracking of the Perfects’ perfection.

Johanna continued, “I used to picture us one day achieving what they achieved. Of you successfully at the top of your field, like Nicolas Layworth, and me at the top like Sophie Layworth. With children. Happy children. Beautiful three-bedroom apartment. A home in the country. Money. A powerful and creative circle of friends who can do things for us, and who we can do things for. A perfect life. What the Layworths have.”

She gazed out across the courtyard with a faraway look, as if gazing over her coffee plantation in Africa, and sighed, “That’s what I used to want.”

When I first met Johanna, I met this woman. This woman who spoke with a faraway, melancholic peacefulness of hazy dreams. She seemed to me to be a fulcrum between a distant tragic past and a distant hopeful future. She believed embracing both of these enriched life’s tranquility and excitement. She had once been a beautiful haiku, made unfathomably profound by its very simplicity, and she’d inspired song after song from my feverish fingers.

But too much New York, or too much hope and too few results, or, most likely, too much proximity to me changed her. The faraway look gave way to ambitious immediacy and speed. Dreams gave way to pragmatism and steps on a ladder. She evolved from a profound but ambiguous haiku to a detailed Excel spreadsheet, loathing lack of clarity. Our problems developed because I did not and would not evolve along that path. But then, my path hardly gave me cause for self-righteousness. Aside from completing “Paralyzed,” I was not writing any songs at all, was I?

But when she sighed, gazing over her coffee plantation in Africa, and whispered, “That’s what I used to want,” that timeless Johanna emerged again. Perhaps her missing what we once had revived the poetry in her, or perhaps it was, in fact, due to some successful intensive therapy. Or perhaps not being near me. This exquisite abandonment of desiring all that Manhattan ambition told her she ought to desire made my heart alight on some warm ancient breeze.

But my heart had fucking jumped the gun, for the tenor in her voice suddenly hardened as she completed her thought, “And it’s what we can still have. We can still become the Layworths. We can still have the apartment. If you just get on some goddamn anti-depressants and start writing again, we can have it all. We can have gorgeous children. The second house in the Hamptons. You and me.”

I bit my impulse to describe how marred the Layworths’ perfection really was underneath because I realized I’d need to reveal my prolonged observation of two men frothily fucking the shit out of each other.

“Johanna, you don’t even know the Layworths.”

“I know that I’ve got five years left to have a baby before I end up like that…” She indicated the Beached Whale. “And you end up like one of them…” She indicated the Couch Potatoes. “Look at me and tell me that’s really what you want to become.”

She was valiantly fighting back tears, stiffening her shoulders, swallowing hard, and I was saddened. She’d become much too much of a New Yorker to cry openly and freely anymore. To my surprise, I found myself suddenly very protective of my neighbors. Sure, I could smear shit over their lives in my silent monologue, but that was reserved only for me and my vituperous abuse, not for anyone else.

Marzoli’s words leaped back into my brain and out my lips. “You don’t know anything about them.”

“Do you still love me?”

Fucking awesome question.

“I haven’t written a song about you for a long time.”

Fucking rotten answer.

She absorbed the response like a crash test Honda against a brick wall at sixty miles an hour, but in excruciating slow motion. In spite of the cruelty of what I said, her slow response did her credit. It was acknowledgement that she was vaguely aware of how much she’d changed since we met, and not all the change was for the best. Johanna’s tears finally fell. It was not a kind of “hold me” cry.

She grabbed her purse and headed to the door.

“I wish you just wouldn’t have answered.”

Ouch.

“Johanna…”

She stopped me with a look of sudden sternness, punctuated by opening the door. She suddenly spoke with a firmness and coldness that would set aspic.

“I’ll come back in two weeks. You’re not thinking straight. I can see it in your eyes. You’ll change your mind. We can have it all. I know you want it too. I know you at least want to try.” She put up her hand to stop my response, “Don’t say another word. Two weeks.”

Johanna pulled some bills out of her purse and placed it on a stack of dusty music on the piano.

“This is for your Verizon bill. And why don’t you think about cleaning up this dump? God!”

Fuck…you mean I didn’t have to put “Paralyzed” out into the world after all?

Johanna exited in full Manhattan stride once again, leaving the African coffee plantation millenniums away, and a carrot forty years in the making hanging from the door frame right in front of this ass’s muzzle.

I could bite it. I could bite it this time…

Yappity yappity yap yap.

I turned to the window. The Couch Potatoes had brought home massive hamburgers from Galaxy Diner and were slathering mayo on the buns. The Beached Whale hefted her body out of the futon and lumbered down the hall. The Perfects’ apartment remained in darkness with the bedroom curtain closed. When Johanna looked at these folks, I knew what Johanna saw. But she had no idea what I really saw.

The Beached Whale lumbered back into view.

In contrast to Johanna, the Beached Whale had none of the feminine habits New York women had. She did not toss perfectly conditioned hair back with a laugh, she did not tuck locks of highlighted strands behind her ear to guarantee everyone’s unobscured view of perfectly blushed cheekbones, she did not move her lips to form controlled lip-glossed smiles or measured expressions of concern, she did not keep her cell phone at her side and glance discreetly at it every five minutes for that next thrilling tidbit of communication, and she did not run her fingers through her hair to punctuate every sentence.

The Beached Whale sank deeply into her couch, positioning herself on her side to watch television, propped up on her left forearm and hand. She placed a bowl of popcorn in front of her and began munching in the flickering light. One dim floor lamp highlighted her features, obscured only by the soft gauze of a lacy curtain.

The lacy curtain began to lift on a night three decades ago in Northern California…

Paul and I woke up at two in the morning at the same time to a sliding closet door being slammed shut followed by equally hollow terse words between Mom and Dad. Some fragments shot through the dark, through the door, and bounced down the stairs:

“My liver is not your problem! Get a goddamn job and
then
we’ll talk about
my
issues!”

At eight years old, we were already trained to recognize the kind of night-time discussions Mom and Dad had that would fizzle into silence and the kind that would end up with the sharp hollow cracking of a window breaking and the high angry skid of a car pulling out of the driveway. That night the sounds from above were the latter. Without a word, Paul and I slipped off the bunk beds into our corduroy pants and shoes like firemen sliding into their overalls and boots at the sound of the alarm.

In the moonlight I could see our hotrod tracks on the stained yellow carpet. A daddy longlegs crawled across one track. The perpetually damp and moldy room attracted spiders. The first time we saw one, we cried for help from Dad. He promptly took down our pants and whipped our bare asses with an orange plastic racetrack in punishment for staying up after we were told to go to bed, so we quickly got over being scared of crawling things in the night.

Paul and I slipped out the window into the moonlight of the park. Crickets. Tall silhouettes of trees. The strong scent of damp bark. Cool moist air. A thin haze of fog translucent in the moonlight. An owl called in low encouraging hoots high above us in the eucalyptus trees. Berkeley Tilden Park was still. We could make our way to the Indian Caves and spend the night on the leafy bed. But on the other hand…

A single light was on in a shadowed house across the valley. This was the house of an older woman we knew as Sally. Sally knitted a lot, always toting a carpetbag full of brightly colored balls of string and long metal and wooden needles. Paul and I would see her at the bus stop knitting furiously, furrowing her brow beneath her glasses, a whirlwind of thoughts being contemplated. Like the Beached Whale, Sally was a large girl. In fact, Paul and I used to think of her when we watched Disney’s
Fantasia
and the hippos in the tutus appeared. Sally
walked delicately and preciously, doing her best not to cause ripples in the world. Cheerful, but shy. Friendly, but never presumptuous enough to expect friendliness in return.