Losing It (19 page)

“Things change,” said Grace. “Everything changes. Everything sloughs itself off, renewing the surface, until there's nothing there from before.”

We were quiet for a few moments.

“Can I tell you something?” said Grace.

I always pictured Grace the same way, the way I remembered her from college—with a faint mustache, and her brown hair slicing along her shoulders, and her face tilted in reflection at a soapstone sculpture at the university museum.

“Yes.”

“My whole life—I've never told anyone this—my whole life, all the men I know, my dad, my brothers, Chad, everyone, I've always felt sorry for them. From the get-go. Even when I was a kid. Just a kind of ancient, inherent sadness for them.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I kind of know what you mean.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and then lay back, stretching my body so my legs hung off like dead weight.

“I don't know,” I said. “It still doesn't make sense to me. Maybe one of them is having an affair or something.”

My parents and Jack. Two suppurating questions, hanging in the air. Two things that would never be solved.

“Or maybe they really did just drift apart. Maybe it's that simple. Things usually are.”

“No, they're not,” I said. “They're usually really, really complicated.”

—

Viv was at the kitchen table, wearing a blouse with a pattern of palm leaves on it. She was poring over her little leather notebook and also had some large pieces of paper spread out in front of her. It struck me how her weekend or casual clothes all looked like they were bought from a gift shop in Key West. Her hair was carefully parted and resting behind her shoulders.

After getting off the phone with Grace, I'd wandered down, determined to distract myself.

I went over to a cabinet and rummaged around until I found a small tub of beef jerky. I yanked the top off and withdrew a piece and then turned around to face Viv.

“I like your shirt,” I said, chewing.

“Thanks,” she said in a distracted way.

“It's really relaxed.”

She looked down at it.

“It's like”—I hoisted myself up onto the counter—“beach time!”

“Yes,” Viv said, and jotted something down.

“I'd like to go to the beach,” I said. “I haven't been in years. Not since I lived in Texas. The last time I went, there was a wedding, and the wind blew away a bunch of linen bows . . .”

She was in the middle of a project. There were lots of pieces of paper arranged in front of her, and it looked like she was making some kind of graph in her notebook.

“What are you doing?” I said.

She put her pencil down and looked at me directly. Then she sighed and sat back. “I'm trying to map out my show,” she said. “But I'm having a hard time with it.”

“Why?”

“Well, I don't have a lot of space. Everyone gets a certain allotted wall space.” She tapped her chin with her pencil. “And I'm not sure what pieces to use.”

“Well, they're all really good,” I said unhelpfully.

“Thanks,” she said uneasily.

“I'll need your help,” she said, “if you don't mind. I'll need help getting the plates to the center, because I'm going to have to pick up some things after work, and I won't have time to do both.”

“Sure, yeah,” I said, and nodded. And I kept nodding, as she told me what I was going to have to do, and how it was all going to work, but all I could think of was my e-mail. And how I wanted to check it. And of Jack, and all the things he did—like how he'd taken that bottle of wine out of the cooler and sort of tossed it up and caught it again. So confident. So at home with things. And that's how it would be with me. He'd manhandle me in an affectionate
way all the time. He'd toss my hand up when we walked down the street, and I would be included in the easy, confident way he had of owning everything that was around him. Everything would be ours if we were together.

“But it shouldn't be too hard,” Viv was saying, “because I'll have all the crates packed up and ready to go, waiting for you in the living room.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

But when I thought about my e-mail I got this doomed feeling. I put down the tub of jerky and stared out the window above the sink. The day was thick and humid, and outside was an anguish of lush greenery.

“It'll be great,” I said.

I felt hot, claustrophobic, deranged. I kneaded my palm.

“Yes,” said Viv. She anxiously turned her watch around and around on her wrist. “Yes.”

Thirteen

When I saw Jack standing next to the wide plastic leaf of a fake palm tree, I realized he was one of those people who looked a little different every time you saw them. This time his face looked almost pretty—strewn blue eyes, ruby lips.

I had finally, finally gotten an e-mail from him, four days after I'd written, asking if I wanted to meet him at the restaurant where he worked, a place called the Lazy Parrot out on Route 29, at five o'clock that same evening. It was the day of Viv's art show. The reception was from seven until nine thirty, and I was supposed to ferry the plates over there after work. She'd wrapped them up carefully and they were waiting for me in the living room. I decided I'd go and get them first, then go and meet Jack, and go from there to the McCormick Center, arriving at six o'clock. Viv would be setting up the platters of hors d'oeuvres she'd taken it upon herself to provide. Then we'd hang up the plates together. I would have plenty of time.

Back at home, after leaving work early, I quickly shoved aside the maps and jumper cables and old books that were in my trunk to
make room. I carried the crates that were waiting for me in the living room down the porch steps and then hoisted them into the car. My hair got in my face. My armpits were prickling. I checked my watch.

I got in and drove off only to sit in unexpected traffic for fifteen minutes. I stared at the shimmering tar roof of a pancake restaurant. By the time I got to where Jack was, I would only have about half an hour before I would have to leave to get to the center in time. Maybe I could be a little late. Viv had, in my opinion, overestimated the time it would take to put up the plates anyway.

When I arrived, I immediately realized there were a number of things at odds with the laid-back island vibe the restaurant was trying to project: the scalding sarcasm with which the high-school girl at the entrance was passing out leis, the aggressive air-conditioning, the flat-screen televisions projecting a cage-fighting competition, and the handful of twentysomething men below watching it with an itchy air of aggression.

I was glad I'd brought a shawl. I stepped out of my shoe, which was stuck to the sticky floor mat. The lei girl was writing the specials on the whiteboard and pointedly not turning around to greet me, and then there was Jack, by the palm tree next to the host stand, looking, I got the distinct feeling, as if he'd forgotten I was coming.

“Heeeeeey,” he said, overcompensating, greeting me as if I were some college buddy. “How's it going?”

“I'm good.” I nodded.

“Cool. Cool,” he said, and looked around the restaurant. “I'm glad you caught me. This is my last night here.”

Caught him. As if he hadn't had nearly a week to respond to my
e-mail. I had to hide my disappointment by rummaging through my bag for some ChapStick. “Mmm-hmmm,” I said, using it liberally. “Great. Me too.”

He regarded me with a look that at the time I had a hard time deciphering. But later I knew what it was—the troubled expression of someone in over his head, who had bitten off more than he could chew, but knew that if he just tolerated it for a little while it would be okay.

“Thanks, Chelsea,” he said to the lei girl. And then to me, “You want a drink?”

I nodded.

We walked down an aisle between booths. I slid into the one he pointed to, and he went to the bar. I stared at the starfish tapestry on top of the table. I flipped through the huge laminated menu and wondered what was taking so long. I looked over to where he was standing with his friends and tried to identify by their postures or demeanors if they were talking about me.

It was like slowing down five hundred horses, but I forced myself to regain some measure of composure. It was purely survival. I couldn't stand it to let my center erode and sit there all vague and dispersed.

But when he sat down, I wasn't some paragon of poise nor did he immediately have the upper hand. It was all somewhere in between, both of us toggling between different versions of ourselves, glinting and dimming, trying to intuit where to give or take, what the stakes were, what the other person expected.

Whatever had happened at the funeral was there again, or at least some slight part of it. It wasn't just the fleeting alchemy of
that humid afternoon, I was grateful to realize—we actually liked each other. He was looking at me fondly, almost despite himself, as if there was some essential part of me that universally tickled him. There was something there, I knew it.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“I'm reading the ingredients in the drinks,” I said.

“They're just drinks.”

I felt delighted.

“Are you aware,” I said, “that you have a drink on your menu that's basically got a piece of pizza in it?”

“The Crazy Mary.”

“That's what it's called?”

“It's got cubes of cheese and pepperoni.”

“Why would you order something like that?”

He sat back and affected a faraway gaze and a raspy voice. “People come here to escape.”

I laughed. “Are you doing an impression?”

He looked happy.

“I'm being steely,” he said.

“I thought it was someone specific.”

“It was, sort of,” he said.

“I'll have the Zeus,” I said, pointing at the menu, when the waitress came. She looked at us knowingly and then left after Jack ordered a beer.

“You sure about that? The Zeus?” he said.

“You don't think I can handle it?”

“You ever seen the movie
Cocktail
?”

“Who was your impression of?”

He sat back. “This guy,” he said. “This old man that ran a lodge we would—my family—would stay at in Alaska sometimes in the summer.” A shadow passed across his face. Was he thinking about Alice? Later, when I reframed the whole night with that—that he just lost his mom—it all made more sense. The guy was a frayed cord, a jagged edge. But the other thing was that under the grimy stained-glass lamp of that restaurant and in that weird situation, we were still both actually having a good time.

“He was always saying these indecipherable but ominous things,” he continued, playing with a straw wrapper. “He'd be like, ‘Gray skies this morning, sure to spit on a goose's wing.'”

I laughed.

“Or like, ‘Wind is up, kiss a squaw.'”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Anyone's guess,” he said.

I don't know how we got onto the subject but we were discussing what it would be like to be stranded at sea and how we would both react to the situation. And he said something I didn't expect that really threw me. He said, “I've always known that in a situation like that I would be the one to freak out or jump overboard or something.” The guilt on his face brought the conversation to a halt. It was obvious he'd said something he felt was true, something he'd thought about a lot. When I turned over this statement, it was all wrong to me. It seemed to negate everything preceding, everything buoying him and me and this whole night and all the unacknowledged assumptions we had about each other.

“No,” I said, with too much conviction, “you wouldn't be like that.”

He looked through the window and into the blue-lit parking lot. His smile guttered out a little. I watched him, and a fear rose around me, I didn't know where it came from, that he was going to be rudderless and unhappy, going through life. That he was going to be a sad man. I tried to shake it off.

My drink came. It was in a huge plastic cup, the kind of thing you would take to a baseball game, filled with blue liquid and green ice cubes and swirly straws and a few little umbrellas.

“Holy God,” I said.

“I told you,” he said.

“Is this even legal?”

“It's for sorority girls,” he said. “They like to order it to impress us with how, like, adventurous they are.”

“You shouldn't say stuff like that to me,” I said. “I'm not the kind of woman who doesn't like other women.”

“So you like sorority girls?”

“I don't not like them,” I said. “I don't really know any.”

“Well, I know a lot.”

“I'm an enigma, I guess,” I said, after a moment.

“An enigma wrapped in a huge scarf.”

“It's a wrap,” I said.

Now and then he would draw back a little and I could feel what he was doing. It was all too much, and it wasn't the right time, and he didn't want to get involved with this twenty-six-year-old woman and her complicated wrap. She was probably always cold. She would be needy and critical at the same time and he could see himself doggedly following her through a mall holding a bunch of shopping bags while she bought a ton of bath beads and acted insane, and
really, he just didn't have time for all this. Or maybe he was too young to envision all of that, but I wanted to tell him that it wasn't like that. I wasn't like that. And it didn't matter how old I was and also, what was going on right now, as we were talking, how easy it was—that was actually pretty rare. It didn't happen that often between two people and he needed to grab on to it while he had the chance and it's tragic the way so often the things we want are presented to us before we're ready, before we can recognize them for what they are.

We were talking about pets: “The reason I don't like cats that much is because I can tell that if they were just a little bigger they would try to kill me,” I said. By this stage there's a high red in both of our cheeks. Now and then I get the sense by the way he laughs or the way his eyes go all liquid, that he's never actually talked to a girl before for an extended, connected amount of time, or never really had a good time doing so.

I told him about a cat I had named Smoky who was killed in a car accident. He told me about a turtle he got when he was ten.

“Kitty,” I said, “another cat. Feline leukemia.”

“Brownie, a hamster,” he said. “Death by fucking boredom, I think, I don't even know.”

“Birdy, a parrot. Flew away.”

“Georgie, my mom's poodle. Still kickin' it.”

“Cleary, a fish, neglect. I was ten.”

“Cleary?”

“Yup.”

“Why Cleary?”

“He was see-through.”

“You're really killing it with these pet names,” he said. “You are trouncing it.”

“Well”—I shrugged—“I'm glad you can recognize genius when it's just staring you in the face.”

I'd made about five inches of headway into my blue drink and I was just on the knife's edge of being drunk and I decided to slow down, because I didn't want to tip it all over the edge. I knew there was a fine line between being pleasantly freewheeling and careening into red, ugly bombast. Also I still needed to drive in a bit. So I took it down a notch and started sipping my water. I peered back outside at the lot. I looked down at my phone. Two text messages from Viv. Jack was telling me about a kayaking trip wherein he found a gold watch. This segued into a story about how his stepfather was a dick. I then told him about my friend Katey, who lived down the street from us in Texas, and who had an evil stepmom who would make us walk very slowly down the hallways because she didn't want the pictures lined up on the walls to fall askew.

I said I'd be right back. In the bathroom (sticky, cold, dirty clumps of wet toilet paper) I found that my face was a little more red than I thought, and I had the beginnings of some hive-like splotches on my neck. I checked my phone again. Now there were two missed calls from Viv. I had to leave. I would be late, but some plausible excuse would be enough. We'd still have time to hang the plates. Maybe Jack could come with me. Then, afterward, we could go and get another drink.

But back at the table, he had a funny expression on his face. “You want to go to this lake I always used to go to,” he said, “when I was a kid?”

“A lake?” I said. “Right now?”