This Is My Life (28 page)

When they finally arrived at the Tet, as everyone seemed to call it, they flashed their invitations at the door and walked past an eager and self-conscious crowd of hopefuls straining behind rope. Walt walked slightly ahead of Opal, still holding her hand, and he led her down an aggressively dark hallway lined with a tangle of jungle foliage.

The club itself was the size of a small stadium, with a lacquered dance floor lit by revolving lights. “Come on,” Walt said, and they descended a set of shallow steps until they arrived at the dance floor, where the music began to encircle them, percussive and overwhelming. Across the room she could see Stevie
Confino dancing with a young blond woman in a checkerboard dress, and nearby Mia and Lynn were doing precise Egyptian-style steps, heads and arms moving side to side, both of them concentrating on each other without ever touching. In the corner of the floor the two legendary rock stars were standing spindle-tall and motionless. The party was just gearing up; in` an hour it would burst open into something else entirely.

Walt and Opal managed to clear out a small circle for themselves on the floor. The circle got smaller and smaller, and soon Walt was flush against her. He was working now, she saw, dancing just for her—his eyes near-closed, points of sweat above his upper lip. He brought his mouth down to her neck and skidded there for a second, then settled. They stayed like that, Walt's face buried deep in her neck, her arms wrapping him. She stared out across the room, thrilled and wild-eyed.

Opal imagined her mother walking in here and looking around in wonder, shaking her head at this new world, everyone young and nervy and stripped-down and gleaming. All about the room, huge-screen televisions broadcast a series of disjointed images: a black woman walking a big white Afghan, a man in leather following another man down a narrow alley, an airplane cutting through a sky the color of blood. Even here, in the middle of all this, you could watch
television
if you wanted. Without a second thought, Opal closed her eyes.

B
ecause she now loved the apartment—loved its assortment of rooms, and the soft furniture planted beneath windows in slants of sun, loved its glowing chrome kitchen stocked for eternity with good things—Erica knew she would soon have to leave. It was amazing the way you could be lured back and
held
; sometimes you had to slap yourself awake to remember this was only a stopping place, a watering hole. Erica had once read a magazine article about grown children who move back into their parents' apartments, and the idea of it had been unthinkable. But this wasn't quite the same; she was in her mother's apartment, but her mother
wasn't
, although Dottie's ghost seemed present at times, especially late at night, when Erica went to fix herself something to eat in the dark kitchen. She would feel a hesitating ripple in the air, and would whip around to look. Everything was in order: The pilot lights kept vigil under the burners on the stove, and the refrigerator did its usual ice-making song and
dance.
Is it me?
she wondered, holding her plate and pausing for a moment in the middle of the room.

What had happened was this: Erica had suddenly become seized with loneliness. It struck her in the way that hunger sometimes did—in great, unpredictable gusts. When it did, she would walk around the apartment like someone who has been dealt a blow to the head, and who is trying to gather her wits about her. The apartment was shocking in its silence and its cleanliness—two aspects that Erica had not known, living with Jordan. Opal was around less and less often these days, and lately she had begun staying out all night. She had “met someone,” she announced one night over dinner, and before Erica could respond, Opal was stammering and shredding her napkin and looking pleased in a way that Erica had not seen in a very long time.

It reminded her of when she had first met Mitchell, and how they would sit at lunch together in the snack bar, separated by the distance of two red plastic trays that were still warm and wet from the dishwasher. She knew, if she saw him now, that he would be full of good advice about how she should conduct her life. He would lean back in his green swivel chair, the unoiled springs groaning beneath the serious weight of him, and he would link his hands together behind his head and say:
Let's see
.

Her loneliness, she knew, was specific to Mitchell. She had always been able to be alone with herself; that had never been a problem. But knowing that he was
out
there, and that she was still here, was too much for her. It was a simple equation, but each time she thought it through to its conclusion, she was left with an overwhelming despair. Erica was back in the lap of her childhood home; she could stay here forever, she knew, and lie in her big bed all day and night, as she used to, smoking dope
and watching the smoke disperse around her. She could start listening to her old records again, slide the orange crate out from under her bed and flip through the collection. She thought about her set of Reva and Jamie albums, and how they had gone untouched for years. These days, she knew, Reva and Jamie had become a lounge act, performing Sixties hits in revolving restaurants at the tops of hotels in lesser cities.

It was all very tempting, in the way that sometimes the thought of touching the third rail in the subway is tempting: You know what the results will be—the way your finger will beckon death into your body—but you are curious anyhow. Staying in this apartment would be a slow but equally certain death. Erica would fulfill all her old fears about herself. She would eat herself silly in the bedroom of her childhood, and she would never be able to leave.

What she needed, she realized, was an addition to this life. Living here for a while wouldn't be damaging if there was somewhere else she could go during the days, if there was another landscape that wouldn't claim her with the same kind of fierceness, but would instead just
shift
to allow entry. Erica thought at once of Mitchell, and the psychology building where he worked. She would go see him, talk to him; maybe, she thought, he could help her get a job there. She wanted to work, wanted to do something other than sell her innermost thoughts about being heavy or sad or lost. It wasn't just Mitchell she wanted, although even now, focusing on the idea of work, she could still picture Mitchell's face and hands, and then finally his whole body came spinning to the surface.

Erica found her keys and left the apartment before she could think this over. It was eleven-thirty in the morning,
and Mitchell was supposed to be at his office, unless he had changed his schedule since she had seen him last, unless he had packed up and left town with tiny Karen, abandoning his doctoral thesis and all those fat women who relied on him.

When Erica arrived at the psychology building, the fluorescent lights in Mitchell's office were humming like mad; she could hear them from outside in the hall. A tall woman in a lab coat walked past, and Erica pretended to be studying the bulletin board next to the door, where stapled-up flyers in jazzy colors tried to persuade you to go to graduate school.

Mitchell's door suddenly swung open without warning. He stood yawning in the doorway, the lights humming like a fleet of desperate mosquitoes behind him, and when he saw Erica he stopped with his mouth slack, and took a step backward. “Oh, Erica,” was what he said.

“Hi,” she said, her voice tentative. She wanted to show him, somehow, that she wasn't
armed
, that she wanted nothing from him, but it occurred to her that this wasn't quite true. She wanted whatever she could get.

“I was just going to get some water,” he said. “Want to come?”

They walked upstairs together, and when they reached the fountain on the landing, Mitchell bent over and took a long drink like an animal at a trough. She looked at the curve of his broad back, saw the way his flannel shirt was riding up and escaping the harness of his belt. When he was done he stood up, his beard spattering water, and then Erica took her turn. As she leaned over the low ceramic ledge, she thought that this was nearly a ceremonial rite: the two of them drinking together, as once they had eaten together, and made love together. Everything between them involved the taking
in
of substances, and she hadn't let any of it go.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “I wasn't sure if it was okay.”

“You stopped coming by,” Mitchell said. “I didn't know where to reach you. I actually called you at your apartment, but I kept getting
him
, so I hung up. You never answered the phone.” He paused. “Then I read about your mother,” he said. “I felt really bad, but I didn't know where you were.”

They walked back downstairs to his office. When he opened the door, the white lights were loud and hard. “I'll turn them off,” he said, and he slapped his hand down on a wall switch, and the windowless room went black and quiet. “Here,” his voice said, and in a moment he had pulled the chain of a small green desk lamp. The glow in the office made it look like a bedroom. She thought of Mitchell unbuttoning his shirt, his fingers skittering over a row of buttons.

“A lot has happened,” she said, sitting in the folding chair by his desk. “My mother, of course. It was terrible; I can't begin to tell you. We had a fight and she just took off.” She shook her head. “But it's not just that,” she said.

Mitchell sat across from her. He put his hands flat down on the blotter and said, “What else?” She remembered him with a pink index card in his hand, his eyes searching her face. It distracted her now, made her forget what she wanted to say.

“I left Jordan,” she finally said, as if in afterthought.

“Oh,” said Mitchell. “Well.” His face was impassive.

“Not because of you,” she added quickly. “No need to worry.”

“I wasn't worried,” Mitchell said. “I just wish I had known what was going on with you,” he said. He looked down at his desk and began to fiddle with his magnet of paper clips, scooping them out of their tight, connecting bundle and letting them
rain back down. “I've really missed you,” he went on. “I know I probably shouldn't, but I do. I'm still with Karen, of course, but sometimes I get frustrated about it all. Things get fucked up.”

“Fucked up how?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing new,” Mitchell said. “Same old patterns. Sometimes I just want to shake her. She won't eat anything; she's like a bird. I think she eats in secret, when I leave the room. There's a lot she keeps from me.” He paused. “I know this is stupid,” he said, “but sometimes I think about what it would be like to get up in the middle of the night with you and have a little feast, like in
Tom Jones
. You know, spread everything out on a banquet table and just eat. I guess that's pretty transparent. But I never said I was complex.”

She thought of the two of them sitting at Mitchell's table at one in the morning, tearing apart a leftover roast chicken, their faces and fingers streaky with oil. It was easy to take the image farther, to build it into a series of tableaux that, taken together, equaled a whole life. But it was dangerous to even let herself imagine such a life. Erica forced herself back to this moment, to the fact that they were sitting in his office with a desk between them, that she needed to do something with her life—that she needed, in fact, a
life
.

“Mitchell,” she said, “I can't make myself crazy over this. I need something that's good for me.” She hesitated. “I was wondering if there might be any jobs here,” she said. “Really, I'll take anything. I'll sit in a room interviewing fat women, or bulimics. Whatever.”

“Come on,” Mitchell said. “That's not why you're here.”

“It is,” she said. “It's part of it.”

Mitchell's voice went flat. “Well, there are only lab jobs,” he
said. “But you're overqualified. You would just be working with
mice
, Erica.”

“I am not overqualified,” she said. She had no qualifications at all, in fact. She had somehow been able to send a blur across Mitchell's reasoning so he thought she had some power in the world, some recognizable worth. But just because he saw it didn't mean that it was true.

“Oh, I guess I could find you something, if you really want it,” he said. “At least you would be
around
me.” She didn't say anything. “Don't you want to be?” he asked. “I don't know what it will
mean
, but still, Erica.” His voice drifted off.

The overhead lights may have been silenced, but even so, there was a new hum in her head now—a steady, bristling drone. She stood, and in a moment Mitchell was standing too. He edged around in front of the desk and put his large hands on her hair, just touching the top like a halo. They kissed, and without thinking she leaned into him, against the scratch of his sweater and the softer scratch of his beard.

—

O
ut on the street, Erica let herself walk and walk. On the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, she stopped with all the other walkers and waited for the light. She peered down the broad gray street, at the storefronts and outdoor tables of jangly items that made you feel there was no room left in the world: keychains and mugs with wacky sayings and authentic hookahs and Smurf dolls fresh from Taiwan. Clusters of shoppers were scrabbling like crabs across the surfaces of tables. A small fight erupted. Someone was apparently being accused of stealing a Smurf doll, and voices were rising up over the traffic.
Erica started to watch. Her eyes drifted slightly to the left, and that was when she saw him.

She was not positive at first; he was wearing a familiar, ratty overcoat and rummaging among a table of bongs and spoons, lifting them closer to his face for inspection, and he might have been anyone. But when he looked up, Erica saw that he had a woman's eyebrows.
Jordan
. What was he doing here? she wondered. Probably waiting to meet a supplier; Jordan went to other neighborhoods to do that occasionally. His coat seemed so insubstantial; she could imagine him catching cold and not knowing how to take care of himself. He would lie feverish in the loft bed for days, sitting up just long enough to cut himself a line or skim another chapter of
Steal This Book
.

Erica quickly turned away so he would not recognize her. Jordan was a shaving, a clipping, a filament—anything slight and flyaway. But there would always be girls around to tend to him and cradle him and sing to him the songs that were lodged inside his head forever. She felt bad that he hadn't gotten what he wanted, that during the weekend of Woodstock he had probably been home making a diorama or learning the New Math. Nobody got a second chance at these things. He was disappearing up the street now, and soon she would think of him less. Other things would replace these thoughts; there was only so much room inside. She was not a deep well, a bottomless pit, as she used to imagine herself. There were limits, she thought, and it was a relief to feel that there were
edges
around you, a membrane that kept you from spilling out into the world.