Losing It (8 page)

“Well,” I said. “This is—”

“My friend Trevor?” Bill was looking away from me, toward a redbrick apartment building in the distance. “He's such a cutup, he'll do anything!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, we went to Meade Park the other day. You ever been there?”

“I've driven past it.”

“We went out there to”—he made a knocking-back-a-bottle drinking gesture—“‘relax' yesterday. There were all these little kids. There were rides and stands. It was some kind of festival. So me and Trevor, we go over to that giant chessboard, you know, the one under the tree? And you can haul all the pieces around?”

“I've always wanted to use one of those!” I said.

“So we go over there, and there are all these little kids on it, you know, pushing around the pawns and things?”

“Okay,” I said.

“So Trevor goes over there, and he's been drinking from his flask of tequila? So he goes over and he starts talking in a Mexican accent.” Bill suppressed a giggle. “He goes, ‘What do I do with theeees theeeeng?' And this one kid is like, ‘What?' And Trevor picks up the king and goes, ‘Theees keeeng, man, what do I do?'”

Bill's eyes were shining. I started chipping a piece of paint off the ear of my horse.

“The kid is all serious. He's looking around, looking at his mom. And she's standing in the corner and she is, I mean, she is mad.”

Bill pushed down another gale of laughter. He bit his fist. The sky was turning orange and there were faint musical notes in the distance—an ice-cream truck getting closer. “But the best part, the best part is— Okay, so all the kids have gone back to playing their game, and we're watching from the side. And then just when they start up again, when the same little kid decides to make a move, Trevor, he goes over there and takes the king and runs off with it—everyone is like, ‘What?'—and puts it under this, like, canopy, and then he runs back and he's like, ‘Checkmate, you little shit!'”

He bursts into helpless laughter.

I laugh, too, drawn along, though I'm not sure what the joke is.

“Checkmate!” Bill says, doubling over again.

“Yeah,” I said, giggling. “An age-old chess maneuver, getting drunk and cheating.”

“What?” he said.

“What?” I said.

He turned his head away from me, back toward the redbrick apartment building. A plastic bag crawled by in a warm breeze. Somewhere, the ice-cream truck blared and passed us. Bill was now quiet, looking at something in the distance. I wasn't sure what was going on.

“No, it's just”—I tried to laugh—“it's just a funny game strategy.”

When he looked back at me, his face was different.

“Why can't— What about you?” he said.

“What?”

An awful petulance had come over his mouth.

He jerked his chin up. “Look at you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. Look at you. You're disgusting.”

“What?” I was still half smiling.

I looked down. I'd had to hike up my dress to get on the horse, and it had ridden up my legs, but it wasn't showing anything.

“You look desperate.”

“Wait—”

“And you know what?” His features were twisted and malicious. “When you eat? Your gums stick out. It's disgusting.”

For a moment, all I could do was sit there and stare at him. An elderly couple walked by. One of them was holding a stuffed teddy bear. They looked our way, smiled at us ruefully.

Bill was staring to the side, fuming, his face cold. He shook the pole that went through his horse. “Just like fucking DeeDee,” he said.

I slowly started to climb off the horse. I let myself down onto the carousel floor; my skirt fell around my legs.

He shook the pole again. “Just
like
fucking DeeDee. She's this fucking bitch at work,” he said.

I stepped off the carousel and picked up my bag. Bill laughed a bitter little laugh. I walked over the chains, as if floating, and then floated silently down the street in the direction of my car.

It wasn't quite dark. Reggae music wafted over from a restaurant where a few people stood on the patio. A man in an overcoat, despite the warm air, stood under a streetlamp and talked to himself. I concentrated on my shoes.

All the way home I tried not to think of anything, but to focus on
the cones of light in front of my car. I didn't want it to drain back into me. I didn't want to think about what I felt—that I'd stayed and stayed and stayed, so far past the point when I should have gone home. I felt smeared with Bill's presence. His drifting, loud, unmoored face floated in front of me. The road was lonely and deserted. A minivan with the lights on inside passed me, someone jabbing at the ceiling.

—

Back at Aunt Viv's, the sound of my key in the front door lock seemed to boom through the night. There were crickets and currents of honeysuckle in the air. A hot belt of tears formed behind my eyes.

I was surprised to see a light on in the kitchen. I hesitated at the stairs, and then wandered down the hallway. Aunt Viv was at the table, wearing a floor-length nightdress, writing in a leather book with a newspaper open on the table. Next to her hand was half a glass of wine.

She looked up and smiled a sleepy smile. “It was too hot in my studio,” she said.

“Oh, that room upstairs?” I said, standing in the kitchen doorway. I almost added, “That you always keep locked?”

She nodded.

“I'm sorry.” I walked in and dropped my bag on a seat, trying to seem casual. I got a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water. I took a few deep breaths, standing there, looking into the drain. Then I turned around and leaned against the sink. For the first time I noticed that the tops of Viv's shoulders were completely red.

She caught me staring. “A bad sunburn,” she said, “from when I was a teenager. I fell asleep in the sun. It never came out.”

“I didn't know that could happen,” I said.

“Me neither,” she said.

“It doesn't still hurt, does it?”

“No, no.” She pushed down in the book with her pencil, scraped it back and forth a few times as if to sharpen it.

“I'm mapping out my project,” she said, “with the plates.”

“Oh, okay.”

“I want to tell the whole story,” she said. “Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table. I'm even going to have a title plate.”

“That sounds great.”

Maybe it was the intimacy of being up together, or maybe I just didn't feel like being alone after what had happened, but I kept standing there at the sink.

She glanced up and asked me how my evening was with a kindly indifference that made me want to put my head against her shoulder and weep.

“It was—” I was trembling, about to break, but I pulled it together. I exhaled. “It was fine.” I laughed a little. “Bad date.”

“Oh?” I couldn't tell if Viv was touched or unnerved by this admission, veering, as it was, into more personal territory.

The lacy curtain above the sink fluttered in a warm breeze. How good it felt to be somewhere softly lit, and warm, and private. I felt relieved by all the land, the sheer mileage between me and Bill Meeks.

“Yeah,” I said. “The guy was . . . not a nice guy.”

“I see,” she said, nodding. I could tell she wanted to offer more.

I didn't know anything about Viv's romantic history. I thought I heard that she was involved with someone named Richard a very long time ago, but I couldn't remember the details. I knew she'd never been married. I studied her. She was in her late fifties—but her forehead was smooth as a stone. She looked pretty with her long red hair behind her shoulders and her regal posture, her face calm as a pond. I could see some raggedy old soldier laying his head in her lap.

She dropped her hands to her knees. “Yes,” she said. “That can happen.” She looked at me, her eyes friendly. “I'm sure you told him off.”

“May I?” I said, pointing to a bottle of wine on the counter.

“Of course.”

What did she think of me? What would she think if I told her I was a virgin? I wanted to tell her right then, because I was sick of lying about it, sick of pretending to be something I wasn't and contorting myself to cover it up. I opened my mouth, but then I couldn't—I couldn't stand watching her try, in her polite, reserved way, to assemble some kind of sympathy.

I got a wineglass out of a cabinet and walked to the table and took the bottle and poured some and said, “Told him off? Not really. I wish I had. Have you known guys like that? Or men? Who just sort of want to put you down?”

She gave a sort of shrug. “I think so.”

“He was strange,” I said. “It was like trying to talk to a pinball machine.”

This made her laugh. “Well, at least it wasn't boring,” she said.

“But he was boring, too.”

She looked at me with curiosity.

“I know, it doesn't make any sense.”

“It doesn't sound like a very good combination,” she said, smiling.

“I still had to be the one to make the conversation go.”

“I know what that's like.”

“It's horrible, isn't it?” I said. “Having to do all the work?”

She nodded.

“You have to hope something will catch.”

“Yes!” she said. “I knew a man like that once. It was at a training session I had to do, at the Piedmont Center. We were partners and had to put together a presentation and spent the whole day together.” Viv was talking with a fluidity I wasn't used to, and I realized that she was a little drunk. “He didn't utter a peep the whole time, and so I found myself talking nonsensically about anything and everything. Making preserves.” She tossed up her hands. “Airport mosaics.”

“It's exhausting!”

She nodded, smiling.

“Have you ever been on a date like that?”

“Sort of,” she said. “But I haven't”—she shook her head—“I've never really been with a man.” She stole a look at me.

“What?”

“A virgin.” She put her hands up, trying to make a joke out of it. “What do they call it?—a maiden aunt.”

She studied me and then quickly turned back to her leather book.

Later, when I looked back on that moment, trying to unpack it
and go over it and study the exact grain, I remembered the feeling of being under a lot of pressure, because what Viv wanted was to gauge my reaction. I didn't offer her anything. I just stood there, dumbstruck. She was writing in her book, her brow furrowed, in what seemed like feigned concentration. I almost came out with it. I almost said, “Me too!” But what a weird clay that would have made in the air between us. Where would we have gone with it? Instead I watched in silence as she took another sip of wine and then erased something and tore the page and smoothed it out. There would be times thinking back when I wondered if I'd misinterpreted it. Why would she admit that in such a casual way? Maybe she didn't care. Maybe she'd reached a sage understanding about it. But then I would remember how she glanced over—her searching expression after she told me, and I could tell. It factored in. It factored into everything.

—

How could this be? I thought, sitting at the wicker desk in my bedroom twenty minutes later, unable to sleep, unable to read, clicking a pen. We'd both been embarrassed. I'd finally said, trying to be funny, “Well, you're not missing out on anything.” She'd nodded quickly, everything about her demeanor saying she wanted to get back to work and be left alone.

I listened to the night sounds outside my window, crickets, a birdcall. The house became alive with the rush of water—Aunt Viv in the bathroom, getting ready for bed.

I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. It could happen. It did happen. The train could pass, and disappear into the distance.
Everything you'd gathered for the right moment could wither in your arms and spiral away in the wind. It was like looking at someone who'd been in a plane crash, or struck by lightning. Someone who had fallen through a random crack of fate, and why, and how easy actually
was
it for this to happen and could it happen to anyone and how was it possible?

I tried to think of everything I knew about Aunt Viv and about the times we'd spent together when I was a kid. There were the card games. I remembered the soft, cool pads of her fingers pressing onto my arm in the hallway. I pictured her caught in the doorway with a bunch of bags, and a few sleeves of flowers, her face flushed, looking where to put them down; she's searching for her keys, upending a small glass frog on our kitchen counter; a spike of laughter from her—her and my mom, in a room somewhere in the house. There was so much time I didn't know her, so much time between then and now when we'd lost touch, and that whole time she'd been not having sex. All those minutes, hours, days, what had she been doing? What had I been doing? I heard the snap of her long denim skirt in the wind. We're at a park, she's scanning the horizon. There were car wrecks, tornadoes, foreclosures, but what about the disasters that could be visited on a person slowly, incrementally, over the course of decades?

It didn't make any sense. Aunt Viv was nice, pretty normal, relatively attractive. She smelled good and was organized. So she was shy and a little reserved. Plenty of people like that have sex. Maybe she was a lesbian and was all repressed and could just never admit it to herself.

Or maybe there was a scrim of need there, only detectable to
men, that threw things off, jounced her out of the right rhythm. Maybe she was
doing
something—there was some quality that over the years had gone unchecked, become more pronounced, because you can't see yourself from the outside—that caused her to stay single. That was when I started looking at Viv as a sort of specimen, when I began observing her with a more exacting eye. I had to know how she'd ended up like that, if there was something inherent there, from the beginning, a rogue mannerism or trait that leveraged her out of all of it.