I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (19 page)

I pestered him to read what he'd written. He sent me a couple of paragraphs. They were more tantalizing than satisfying. There was nothing about me or Tatyana or Tashina. I could almost see where he had nipped out the juicy bits, the parts that might explain why he had shut us out, how he had been able to shut us out. I knew he'd written about us, about me, and it burned me to know I would never read it.

When the heat went off in my Bushwick apartment that winter, the landlord declined to turn it back on. Tired of seeing her own breath each morning, my roommate, a girl I'd worked with in Colorado, found a new space, an open loft in a warehouse. Reluctantly,
I agreed to move in with her and her friend, my fifth move in as many years in New York.

My dad was between jobs, so my roommates and I chipped in on a plane ticket, and he came east to help me build out the loft. I took some time off from Luxx, and for four days we worked every waking hour. I wasn't a total failure at carpentry, but my dad, man, he'd line a nail up and drive it flush with the stud with one strike of the hammer.

Allison brought us takeout food and leftovers from her job at the soul food restaurant. Each evening, she marveled at the progress we'd made. Each night, I slept like the dead. Each morning, it took me several minutes to get out of bed because my bones hurt, my teeth hurt, my fingernails hurt. It was the happiest I'd been since I was a kid.

After framing, sheetrocking, taping, and spackling four separate rooms, the last thing left to do was to hang my door. My dad set the frame in place, then looked at me.

“How do you want it hung?” he said.

He was covered in drywall dust—not just his hair and his face; there was also a light dusting on the lenses of his glasses, though he'd been cleaning them all day. Dust in his eyelashes, even.

“Well hung?” I said.

He grinned and rolled his eyes.

“Hoo boy. Gets it from his old man, I guess. I'm doing it so it will certainly be hung well. But do you want the door to swing open when you twist the knob, or do you want it to swing shut when it's open?”

It would be most convenient for the door to swing shut. But what would be the most difficult for him to do?

“Can you make it so the door just stays however I leave it?”

Three minutes later, he called me over. I wobbled when I got off the ladder. I was so fucking tired.
We
were so fucking tired.

Dad gently pushed the door. It swung shut and clicked quietly into place. He opened it three inches and took his hand away. The
door didn't move. He pulled the door five inches open and took his hand away. The door didn't move.

I started laughing. He started laughing. You had to give it to the old man sometimes.

The anniversary of my year off drinking came and went. I kept going: working long hours at Luxx, boxing at Gleason's gym, tinkering with guitars, practicing guitar and squeezing out a few songs about my old life, reading but carefully not writing. My dad and I talked, not a lot, but a little. Tatyana was doing okay; she had her nest and her baby and her husband. My mom was doing okay without any help from me, still down in the Virgin Islands with Paul, selling advertising for the local newspaper. She didn't make much money, but they didn't pay rent or car insurance, and she had lots of practice living close to the bone. Even Tashina seemed to have found her happiness, going to college in Toronto for radio production. What made me happy? I mean,
besides
alcohol.

I loved Allison. She loved me. We never fought. She was never mean to me. She was patient when I got squirrelly, which was often since I'd quit drinking. Allison was beautiful, and I loved every Allison she was: I loved her at my side while I worked the door at Luxx; I loved her singing my songs with me, on stage or at home; I loved her in Rochester, opening her Christmas presents like a little girl while her parents looked on. I loved her sober (to support me in my year off), as I loved her after one drink, the taste of wine or vodka-cranberry in her open mouth, as I had loved her wasted—Alcoholison. When I woke her in the middle of the night to show her how the plastic wrapper on the Tylenol PM made blue sparks in the dark, she didn't get angry. I loved her in public, and I loved her in private, gasping underneath me. I loved her asleep, her eyelids fluttering in a dream, loved her so much that I missed her even while I was beside her, while I was inside her. But . . . was this it? Were we just to go on loving each other forever?

I got an email from Riley. I had kept my name off the utility bills in every apartment I'd lived in and paid to keep my number unlisted. But finally she had found me.

I read her email. Then I read it again. Then I deleted it. Then I rescued it out of the trash can, created a folder called “Work,” secreted it there, and turned my laptop off. I closed the lid, zipped it into its carrying case, and stuck it under my bed. As if that would keep me safe.

I was finishing a guitar I had been working on for months, an old Hagstrom neck and body I'd found in a pawn shop, which I'd wired with Jazzmaster pickups—The Hagmaster. I had finally gotten all the electronics up and running, and I was ready to take it for a test drive. Before I strung it up, I opened a can of lighter fluid to clean the fretboard. I put some on a paper towel and rubbed all the old gunk off the fingerboard. The lighter fluid smelt oddly comforting, familiar. I sniffed the paper towel, greasy from the lighter fluid, gray from the dirt. Then I took a deeper breath. Then I opened the container, emptied my lungs of air, put my nose right over the opening, and drew its scent as far inside me as I could. God, it smelled so fucking good. I started shaking.

I knew it would be a mistake to write back to Riley, but I couldn't help myself. I let fly, all bile, just raging at her. She wrote back. I wrote back. Then we were writing to each other.

She was in Washington, DC, as she had been for all six years since she'd broken off contact. She had been trying to track me down. She knew I had gone to Columbia and had even screwed up the courage to call my old apartment less than a month after I left there. I had slipped up and put my name on the Con Ed bill, I recalled. Riley had never stopped missing me. Riley wanted me back.

Tatyana and Bill were down in Virginia for some military training. They had invited me down to see Mika. I booked a hotel room outside DC and caught a bus down a day before I was to meet
Tatyana. I would not sleep with Riley. I could not sleep with Riley. But I had to see her. I had to know.

When I got off the bus, she was nowhere to be found. I sat down in the bus station to wait. Ten years now with Riley, ten years with her absence, ten years of a rusty fishhook in my heart for her to twist whenever she got bored.

I waited for more than an hour. Of course she wasn't going to show. To lure me down here and then not show up, well, that would be the perfect punch line to this long, humiliating shitshow. The explanation I'd come so far for? The explanation was that life did not owe you an explanation for your suffering and that you were an idiot to expect it. It was what I deserved. Then there she was: a woman in her mid-twenties, reddish-brown hair or maybe now brownish-red. Heavier not just in the hips but everywhere, especially her face. She looked worried and anxious, late and stressed, more fearful than excited.

I had been remembering Riley as I'd first seen her at Simon's Rock in the fall of 1993. But had I even been remembering the actual experience of her on the lawn like a delicate rainforest sugar glider, fearful of being trampled? Or was I remembering the
memory
of that experience from being heartbroken over her for the first time, when I was seventeen? If you taped a song off a CD, and then taped that tape, and then taped
that
tape, well, with each new copy, the song got duller, weaker, diminished, until the music was finally swallowed by noise. Remembering Riley—compulsively, desperately, insanely—hadn't diminished her. It had perfected her. Memory hadn't preserved her but transformed her. The Riley in my head had become better, brighter, more alluring as the years had passed. For the real Riley, time had had the opposite effect.

Go, I thought to myself. It was stupid and crazy to come here. You have your answer. Stand quietly and slip discreetly out before she sees you. Then run. And don't look back.

She saw me. We both froze. Then she walked directly toward me.

We didn't hug or even shake hands.

“Hi,” she said, breathlessly.

For years and years I had been imagining this moment, encountering her again, and all the brilliant, cutting things I would say.

“Hi,” I said.

She drove me to my hotel. I made her wait in the car while I checked in and ran my bag upstairs to my room. This would unfold exclusively in public places.

We got a table at a fake Mexican chain restaurant across the street. We ordered, and a mute food runner put two limp, greasy Southwest Caesar salads before us. We discussed the banalities of our lives. She was finishing her master's. It was okay. She was excited about having been accepted to a PhD program in Montana. I passed her the two CDs of songs I had written about her. And then we both went silent. I looked down at my salad, as appetizing as a dissected, formaldehyde-soaked frog.

“Why, Riley? Why did you just disappear on me?”

I looked at her. She looked down.

“You were cheating on me,” I said.

“You've cheated on me.”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she said. “A boy at the dance program in Maryland. It's terrible, and I'm sorry.”

“I . . . I don't even care about that. It's actually a relief to get confirmation. I knew something was going on.”

She didn't say anything.

“Where did you go at the end of the summer? I mean, I know you went to DC to dance. I called your house one night when I was shitfaced, and I talked to your mom.”

“She told me.”

“I guess the question is
why
. Why did you go? How could you? You didn't just get accepted to that program randomly one day and
leave the next morning. You knew you weren't coming to Denver; you knew you were going to DC. You knew that for a long time. And you pretended everything was okay.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you tell me? You just disappeared. It was like you died.”

“I was afraid you'd react badly. You were just . . . you were kind of unstable then.”

I laughed.

“If you thought I was unstable before you disappeared, you should have seen me after. I went insane.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's okay. I'm not insane anymore.”

She didn't say anything.

“Why didn't you want to be with me? I loved you. You loved me. Or you said you did.”

“I know. I don't know. I just . . . I couldn't go to Denver. I didn't know why, but I knew I couldn't go. Something bad was going to happen.”

“Something bad did happen to me.”

She didn't say anything.

“Fuck it, whatever, I'm not going to be a crybaby. You made the right decision. You should have told me, but you're right. It would have been a mistake for you to come to Denver. I was out of control. It would have ended badly.”