Fourth Comings (18 page)

forty-three

A
nd that’s when Hope told me everything, or rather, her adaptation of “everything.” And I was going to document it for you word for agonizing word, you know, for posterity, but I just don’t have it in me. Besides, I don’t need to transcribe Hope’s version of your conversation because you were there. Here’s what I know:

After the Shit Lit Hissy Fit, you came back to the apartment all by yourself. You didn’t have a key. You were lucky Hope was there.

Lucky, indeed.

You were upset. You didn’t understand how an evening that had offended you on so many levels could be fun for me. You needed someone to talk to about the growing distance between us, and not just in terms of geography. Since coming off of the silence and solitude of Death Valley, you just couldn’t handle the city’s relentless overstimulation, or understand why I thrived on it.

When I think about you having your Shit Lit Hissy Fit, I can still see you twitching and fidgeting, all five senses shaken up from the inside out. You clasped your hands over your ears, closed your eyes, and tried to curl yourself into a semi-fetal position in your chair. A full-grown man with thick, wooly facial hair, you still looked like a child petrified of the imaginary monster under the bed. If the crowd hadn’t been as loud as it was, I probably would have heard you intoning comforting mantras to yourself.

I should have wanted to take you away from there, to protect you from the monster and return you to safety. It should have been instinctual. But since it’s all coming out now, I’ll tell you the truth: I didn’t feel bad for you at all. I felt embarrassed by your babyish behavior. But above all, I felt burdened by it. By you.

So you were totally justified in wondering whether it would be best for both of us if we broke it off before you went off to Princeton. But it would have been so much better if you had said it in front of me.

As it was, Hope confirmed that I had been contemplating the same. Yes, I had been thinking about it, though I had never told her that. She just knew, as friends know these things. And her uncanny ability to see right through me is what makes her betrayal so devastating: My best friend would have known to keep this unuttered secret to herself.

I must admit that it’s almost a relief to hear I wasn’t imagining our problems. But no part of our revelatory conversation explains how your breakup turned into a proposal. And yet even this absurd mystery makes perfect sense. Such perplexing developments are, after all, your stock in trade.

forty-four

T
here is only a page left in this notebook, which I will devote to the low point of the conversation.

“Nothing happened,” Hope pled. “I swear.”

That fear crouched shamefully in the deepest, darkest, furthest corner of my mind. It hadn’t leapt to the fore until Hope gave voice to it.

“Nothing happened!”

You have always been the great unspoken between Hope and me. I thought it was because you were guilty by association. You and Heath did drugs together. Heath overdosed and died. You cleaned yourself up and lived. Why remind Hope of this irreversible truth? I now realize that it was much more complicated than that. You and Hope had a shared history that had nothing to do with me. Your silence—not just over these past few weeks, but for the past ten years—indicates that you both wanted it to stay that way.

How many secrets exist between you?

“Nothing happened,” Hope kept on saying. “Nothing happened.”

I believe that nothing
physical
happened between you. But you two have colluded and collided as emotional coconspirators. And I swear to you, Marcus, that’s even worse than if you had fucked.

        note book
      number two

september 6–10, 2006

   wednesday: the sixth

forty-five

I
was dizzy and disoriented when I woke up this next morning, and not just because I had rather dramatically spent the night on the common-room couch instead of the Cupcake’s bottom bunk.

The proceedings documented in Notebook Number Two will only make sense when taken in consideration of those recorded in Notebook Number One. However, I have a proven history of losing/destroying journals like this one. In the event that this new composition notebook gets separated from its slightly older twin, here are:

MY MINDFUCKS: A QUICK AND HANDY REFERENCE GUIDE

(In chronological order)

1. You preempted my breakup with an absurd marriage proposal I could not refuse.

2. Bridget and Percy are not getting married, which just confirms my lack of faith in the whole institution. If there’s any couple who could make me believe in marriage, it’s them.

3. My sister asked me to be Marin’s legal guardian. If I say yes, this could make me—the least maternal woman I know—a de facto mommy for the rest of my life.

4. I lost out on a job because I was too busy thinking about how much you would hate the job once I got it, instead of focusing my attention on the job interview itself and actually getting the job before I started worrying about your reaction to it.

5. I can’t blame you for this hypothetical disapproval, because I couldn’t see myself working for Dr. Kate, either. I only went on the interview because I need to get a real job soon because my fake job doesn’t pay me enough to survive without pity handouts from my sister.

6. But I
can
blame you and Hope—my two best friends—for betraying my trust. You chose to confide in each other instead of in me. What other secrets are you keeping?

These are just the major mindfucks. A complete list of petty psychic fornications (Will Manda skank her way back into Len’s life? Does Shea still have a key to our apartment and will she use it to host a Pimpz N Playaz party while we’re out? Should I become a DONUT HO’? Do my eyebrows look like sperm? Have Scotty and Sara achieved a simple happiness that is out of our reach? How will I pay an extra $166.33 a month in rent?) would require too many volumes for any library.

I thought for sure the number would hold at six. Alas, I’m only midway through the week—“hump day,” as it is referred to in real offices where real workers work real jobs for real bosses. It should not have surprised me when my mother called this morning to add another item to the list, officially making it a cranial orgy.

7. My dad is in the hospital because he crashed his bike into a parked car.

My mother was strangely calm about it, exhibiting the kind of emotional detachment that is number three on the list of Bethany’s Signs That My Mom Is About to Leave My Dad.

“He’s fine,” my mom said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“But he’s in the hospital, right?”

“Well, yes,” my mom said. “That’s where I’m calling from.”

“People who are fine don’t go to the hospital,” I railed. “That’s kind of the point of hospitals. It’s where people who are not at all fine go….”

“Calm down, Jessie. He’s not going to
die.
He didn’t even break any bones.”

“Then why is he still there?”

“Well,” my mom said, snapping into an efficient tone, “the doctors tell me that he lost consciousness because he was severely dehydrated….”

“Dehydrated?” I asked. “Christ, it’s not
that
hot today. How long was he out on the bike?”

“How should I know?” my mom shot back. “A few hours, I think. He’s always riding while I’m out working. I can’t keep track of his mileage….”

This was true, and yet I found it so sad that my mom had no idea what my father did for hours on end.

“The doctors say he needs about four bags of fluid, which will take all day.”

“Four bags? That sounds like a lot. Is that a lot?”

“I’m not a doctor, Jessie.” My mom sighed. “I have no idea.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m coming home.”

“Why?” my mom asked.

“Bethany won’t want to take Marin out of school,” I said, “and I feel like one of us should be there, so that leaves me.”

“It’s not necessary,” my mom said.

“No, Mom,” I corrected. “I think it is. Dad’s in the hospital. I’m coming.”

We made arrangements for her to pick me up at the Pineville bus station. When I hung up, I caught Hope hovering in the hallway outside the Cupcake.

“Is your dad okay?”

The question stuck in the air unanswered, mired in the impenetrable tension between us. I had to make a decision: Would I rather harbor resentment about last night’s revelation or forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones and all that water flow under the bridge?

“He crashed his bike.”

“Oh.”

“He’s in the hospital because he’s severely dehydrated.”

“Oh.”

“I’m going to Pineville as soon as I can get my shit together.”

Hope shifted from one foot to the other, like a kid who needs to pee. She was nervous.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m…” I picked the ring off the steamer trunk/coffee table where I had put it the night before. I read the inscription for the bizillionth time:
MY THOUGHTS CREATE MY WORLD.
“I don’t know how I am.”

“I’m so sorry….”

I tapped the ring on the table. “You said the same thing on Sunday morning. Only you said, ‘I’m so sorry about you and Marcus.’”

Hope’s body jutted forward as if she were struggling against the current of all that water flowing under the bridge….

“So you thought that he was going to break up with me and…” I shut my eyes in pain. “You must have said something to Manda because she and Shea had actually bet on it!” I rolled forward and rubbed my head into the couch cushions. “Ooooohhhhhhh.”

“I didn’t say anything to Manda!” Hope said. “She eavesdropped on our conversation….”

I almost bit the pillow in frustration. “So you and Manda and Shea all knew that Marcus wanted to break up with me….”

“But Jess, he
didn’t
break up with you! He asked you to marry him!”

I sat up. “But the marriage would be null and void, right? Because he’s still married to you!”

Hope stood up straighter, her arms thrust at her sides in defiance. “You can’t possibly be angry about something that happened in fifth grade!”

“Yes I can! And it’s not just the marriage. It’s anything and everything you did together that I didn’t know about. Splitting peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Putting on backyard puppet shows. Playing spin the bottle. Whatever! It doesn’t matter. But what does matter is that you never told me that you had once been close to the man who is supposed to be the love of my life!”

“I don’t see why this matters.”

“It matters because when it came down to choosing to confide in you or me, he chose you. Which means that your relationship must run pretty deep.”

Hope didn’t disagree.

“What if you had never moved? How do I know that he wouldn’t have ended up with you?”

“I didn’t want him!”

“But did
he
want
you
?”

Hope paused for a moment before answering, “No.” That seemingly insignificant silence contained the truth. And she knew it, too.

“Yes he did,” I said. “At one time he must have.”

Were you friends with Heath to get closer to Hope? Is that why you spent so many afternoons getting high in Heath’s room?

Hope didn’t refute it. “I’m sorry….”

“I know you are,” I said, standing up. “And I’m sorry that I’m still angry at you.”

Hope lowered her head.

“I don’t want to be,” I said. “But I am.”

And I suppose it’s that same desire to forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones and all that water under the bridge that compels me to keep my promise, to keep writing, even though I’m still angry at you, too.

forty-six

I
made it to the Port Authority just in time to catch the New Jersey Transit #76 Shore Points Express bus to Pineville, which goes against the tide of commuters and is therefore mercifully unfull. The seat next to me was empty, so I could stretch out and think in as much peace as one can get as one bounces and bumps along the Garden State Parkway at a maximum speed of fifty-five miles an hour, though we usually go slower because of the inevitable traffic snarls stretching for miles before any one of the ubiquitous toll plazas.

As a lifelong resident of New Jersey, I have been brainwashed into believing two things about traveling by car: 1. Highways can’t exist without toll booths. 2. Pumping gas is best left to professionals. This is the type of harmless propaganda you grow up believing until you experience otherwise and feel like a fool for being duped for so long. Imagine my surprise when Hope informed me that there is not a single toll road in the entire state of Tennessee. This amazement was only outdone by the passenger-side shock of pulling up to a self-serve in Pennsylvania and watching Hope deftly maneuver the gas pump all by herself. I was too impressed to be embarrassed by my own cluelessness.

See? I am working very hard at forgiveness, even though the childish part of me is thinking, Why are you telling Marcus this? I’m sure he already knows about Hope’s way around a gas pump. He already knows
everything
about Hope that you don’t.

I’m trying here.

Despite the luxury of a few more inches in legroom, the bus still seems less dignified than the train. But no rails lead to our hometown, which implies that it’s a destination no one needs to get to with any sort of expediency, which is frustrating because I want to get there as quickly as possible.

I keep returning to a semi-disturbing conversation I had with my dad the last time I saw him. It was not this past Sunday but the one before.

forty-seven

I
’d woken up that morning cursing that it was my week to cheer for him. It was already past nine
A.M.,
and his race was fifty miles long—fifteen laps at roughly ten minutes per lap. I remember thinking that if I hauled my own ass, I could get there to see him finish.

Bethany and I had urged him to join the Jersey Shore Amateur Cycling Association when we got tired of hearing how lonely he was. Apparently, now that Darling’s Designs for Leaving is thriving, my mom is too busy getting paid to “analyze the selling aesthetics” of other people’s homes to spend any time in her own. And it doesn’t seem as if she’s going to be a more reliable presence in the household anytime soon. “When the market is down, my business is up!” she chimes. And up it is. My mom has quickly become one of the top home stagers on the Jersey Shore, and she doesn’t even have to advertise. Darling’s Designs for Leaving is referral-only, which gives her business a certain snobbish cachet that my mother totally gets off on.

But now that she’s out earning and my dad is retired at home, it’s made for a bizarre role reversal that he, for one, has not gotten used to. It’s more than a little disconcerting to see my parents going through an awkward phase, even as they approach their Social Security years. Shouldn’t they have figured it all out by now? Shouldn’t they be over all that stupid maladjusted shit? Isn’t that one of the glorious advantages of old age?

Hence our insistence that he join the cycling club. The team travels to races all over the tristate area, and my dad often participates in the Sunday-morning series at Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. It gives him something to do, and provides his daughters frequent opportunities to spend time with him on our own turf. Unfortunately, the Masters race starts at the unholy hour of 7:02
A.M.
Bethany and I feel obligated to support him when he’s in town, and we switch off rah-rah weekends, a combined effort to help him through this difficult adjustment phase. So two weekends ago, it was my turn to be the good daughter.

I knew better than to even try to single out my dad among the scores of riders. In their racing gear and helmets, it was nearly impossible to tell them apart as they whizzed by. His club always sets up a small recovery area somewhere near the finish line, so I searched through the chemical Ben-Gay haze, following a trail of hollowed-out orange halves, protein bar wrappers, and conical paper cups stomped flat into triangles. The racers spoke in the exuberant yet exhausted tones of those who are out the door by four
A.M.,
drive one hundred miles to cycle fifty miles, then return home by noon and complain to their wives that they’re too wiped to mow the lawn.

“Oh man, I almost bonked on the twelfth lap….”

“I hammered it on the tenth….”

“Fierce field today….”

The whole scene was making me feel oddly nostalgic for high school cross-country practice, though I would never say this to Dad, since he considers my quitting the varsity XC team one of the greatest tragedies of
his
life.

I finally spotted the JSACA banner, and under it, my dad. I can’t help it: I get embarrassed whenever I see him in his acid-green spandex unitard. Yes, even when
all
the riders are wearing similar racing gear. He’s in great shape for his age, but I don’t need to see his fiftysomething physique in such scrotummy detail. Ack.

My father was stooped at the waist, resting his hands on his quads as he spoke to another middle-aged rider who would surely mortify his own daughter with his own nut-hugging ensemble if she were there to see it. I couldn’t tell from his posture if he’d had a good day or not. He always seemed defeated lately.

“You looked good out there, Dad!”

“I
felt
like shit,” he said. “I really did.”

“You still placed well in a competitive field,” said his friend, slapping him on the back.

My dad grumbled and rubbed the top of his head, which was almost as smooth and shiny without the helmet as with it. He didn’t even bother introducing me to his middle-aged friend, which I appreciated. “You want a bagel?” he asked me, gesturing to a huge bag sitting on the back of an open SUV. “You’re too skinny. You need to eat more. It’s free, so it should fit your budget.”

He feels bad about the sad state of my finances, but not too bad, because he thinks I’m an idiot for not joining Wally D’s/Papa D’s Retailtainment Corp.’s lucrative quest for global gluttonous dominion. And while he occasionally used to throw me a few bones, that’s not so much of an option now that he’s retired and on a fixed income.

I helped myself to a cinnamon raisin bagel.

“Take another, for later,” he said, thrusting an everything bagel into my hand. He tore at a sesame and stuffed a chunk of it into his mouth. “C’mon,” he mumbled through the dough, which was going staler and tougher by the second. “Let’s take a breather.”

This was as close as my dad would come to actually asking me to talk. I followed him to a slightly less chaotic clearing. Along the way, various spandex-clad riders congratulated him on his performance.

“Way to bring it in, Dar!”

“Top five this week!”

And my dad either grumbled a thank-you or said nothing at all. When we were far enough away from everyone else, we plopped ourselves down in the prickly brownish grass.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “It’s just my damn knee acting up.” He slapped it as if it were a bad dog that had dumped on a brand-new Oriental rug.

“Oh, sorry.”

“Jessie, here’s some advice: Don’t get old.”

“Ah, but the alternative is worse, right?”

My dad slapped his knee again. “Ask me another day.” Then he promptly changed the subject. And the new subject, appropriately enough, was you. “So Marcus is off to Princeton next week. That’s a great area around there.”

I knew what he was getting at. I picked a raisin out of my bagel as if it were an annoying hanging scab on my elbow. “I don’t know if we’ll get a chance to check out the towpath….”

“I hope you haven’t changed your mind about the bike trip.”

As you already know, Dad had this big idea about leading us on a bike expedition along the densely wooded dirt trails that wind through Princeton and other towns in Mercer County.

“I’m not sure we’ll be organizing that trip with Marcus after all.”

“Why not?”

“Things are…” I paused here. Not for effect, but to find the right word.
“Unsettled
between us.”

My dad rubbed his head. “Do I even want to hear more?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Do you?”

He nodded reluctantly, a gesture that resembled more of a wince than an affirmation.

“It’s been something that’s been coming for a while, I guess. We’re at different places in our lives….”

“You two always seemed like you were in different places in your lives.”

“Well, maybe it always seemed that way to you, but our differences are just more…uh…
pronounced
now than ever before.”

My father surprised me by looking right at me when he said, “That’s such a shame.”

“What?”

“That you and Marcus are having problems. That you’re
unsettled.”

“Wow…I didn’t expect you to react like that….”

“How did you expect me to react?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I wasn’t even sure if you ever got around to, you know,
liking
Marcus or not.”

“Look, Jessie,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you. When I caught wind of his checkered past, the drugs and all that trouble he got himself into in high school, I wasn’t happy that this royal screwup of the first order was dating my daughter.”

“But he was clean when we got together.”

He waved his bagel in the air to stifle me. “I know,” he said. “But I still didn’t like it.” He then chucked his bagel into the nearest garbage can with a resounding clunk. “If I had tried to step in and put a stop to you two, it would have backfired. Just like it did with Bethany and Jerry.”

Jerry.

Wow.

Jerry.

I had not heard that name in almost two decades. How could I have forgotten Jerry? He was my sister’s first serious boyfriend, from her sophomore year of high school. I was only five years old during the Jerry Years, so when I think of him, I can only conjure his junior yearbook photo, which I studied intensely and with great interest. He had a rectangular flattop haircut, a conniving underbite that was apparently impossible to unhinge into any semblance of a smile, and thick black eyebrows like two censorship bars trying to block out his dirty thoughts. He was two years older than Bethany, and drove, I kid you not, a silver I-ROC tricked out with a neon-pink underbelly that made our driveway glow like a seedy no-tell motel whenever he honked for my sister. The horn was barely audible above the strains of Def Leppard’s
Hysteria,
the only cassette he ever listened to, which, naturally, as these things happen, became the only cassette Bethany listened to for like six months straight. To this day, I know every goddamn lyric to every goddamn song on that goddamn album, and not just the givens like the title track, “Armageddon It,” “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” and “Love Bites.” I even know all the words to the less obvious cuts, such as “Excitable”:

(Oh) (Whoa) Oh, you know I get so

(Excitable) I really get so (Excitable)

(Okay. Maybe those lyrics don’t seem so hard to commit to memory, but
you
try to put every “Oh” and “Whoa” in its proper place and see how easy it is.)

Anyway, to say that my parents hated Jerry is an understatement, one that requires me to consult my thesaurus to pile on the synonyms
reviled, loathed, detested, abhorred,
and
despised,
none of which do justice to the hatred they felt. They hated him with a passion that was only outdone by its inverse.

Oh, how Bethany loved him.

“Then you and Marcus broke up,” my dad continued. “He went to that crazy Buddhist camp in the middle of the desert, and you had that other boyfriend at Columbia. The prep school brat from Greenwich, Connecticut…The philosopher…What was his name?”

“Kieran.”

My dad all but rolled his eyes, because he knows it’s undignified and lamely
Laguna Beach
for a senior citizen to roll his eyes. “Well, I never met him, so you’ll forgive me for not remembering his name.”

There is a very good reason I never introduced my parents to this junior-year error in judgment: Kieran was an emo assclown.

“Then last Christmas, Marcus shows up on our doorstep and is back in your life again. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “And he had really cleaned himself up. Got his head on straight. Got himself into Princeton…” He trailed off.

“What?”

“It’s just unfortunate,” he said, forehead wrinkling, “that things are
unsettled
just as he was getting respectable.”

“That’s right, Dad, I broke up with him just to piss you off.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “He really seemed like he was getting his act together. It says a lot about a man’s character to overcome substance abuse problems and the like. And it showed real initiative for him to apply to Princeton.”

(I’m not disagreeing with any of these points.)

“Unsettled,” my dad groused. “Does your mother know about any of this?”

“No, I haven’t talked to Mom lately….”

“So I found out before she did.”

“Yes.”

“Ha,” he said with no joy whatsoever.