Parts Unknown (26 page)

“It sounds like the perfect life,” I said jealously. “All day to yourself to write, and someone at your beck and call, awaiting your every whim.”

He looked at me closely. “You’d think,” he said. I watched his hands. The cuticles were red and raw, like they’d been before when I knew him. I wondered what worried him these days. What he didn’t have.

My stomach lurched. “Well,” I said brightly, “let me show you the neighborhood.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “I haven’t visited this part of town for years, really.”

It seemed natural to lean against him a little as we left Starbucks, tossing our cups in the already overflowing trash can near the door. I walked him up Beverly Boulevard, past the storefront synagogues and the second-run movie cinema, the stylish restaurants and cafes butting up to anachronistic TV repair shops and tailors from another era.

“It’s funny,” I said. “It’s like we were living our lives in parallel all these years. We got married. We both have a young child. We’ve struggled with our art. You’ve been more successful than me, obviously. Still--”

He finished for me, “It’s like separate lives, but the same life.”

Down the side streets, lined with beautifully restored 1920s-era stucco homes with tile roofs, subtropical plants leaking lushly out of side yards. The neighborhood crazy woman, who today was wearing only a slip and tube socks, pounded by, shrieking about spiders and Marmite. Pointing out the sights to Josh, I felt I was seeing them for the first time myself, even that sad woman washed clean and bright by my happiness, fizzing out of me like rainbow-colored soap bubbles catching the light, spinning in space.

“I’ve started painting again,” I told him. “Just recently. It’s been a long time. But I’m getting back into it. There’s so much . . . stuff just waiting to burst out of me. When I paint . . . it’s like I’m possessed, now—I feel like my body knows what to do, on its own, and my hand just has to follow along. It feels amazing.”

“I know what you mean,” he agreed. “It’s like that with writing. Sometimes, I have no idea where the words come from. They just . . . flow, and I try not to get in their way. It’s magical.”

I smiled at him shyly. “I knew you’d understand.”

He rubbed my shoulder, his touch an electric shock. “I always did.”

Then we were crossing Wilshire, and it was still only 10 am. I had planned to take him to the LA County Museum of Art, but, we discovered, it didn’t open till noon. And, there was my apartment—just across the street. “Want to see my paintings?” I asked impulsively. The sulphurous smell of tar from the La Brea Tar Pits, wafting on the breeze, stinging our noses. My shoulder tingling, still, from his touch.

Pinching his nose, he grinned. “I’d love to! I’m honored that you asked. That you’d like for me to see them.”

I knew, as I led him up the front walk, the jacaranda tree dusting our heads with purple petals as we passed under it. I knew, as I opened the front door. I knew, as we stepped inside and he pulled me hard into his arms, that all the promises I’d made to myself were lies. Everyone was going to get hurt, and I didn’t care. I wanted this feeling so badly I was willing to sacrifice everything, just for the pure joy of kissing him, right now.

I hadn’t understood how much I’d needed him, all these years. Feeling his arms around me, I felt all the empty spaces in me fill up completely. “You’re the water in the cracks of my sinking ship,” he murmured into my hair, and it was absurdly poetic, yet entirely true. I twined my fingers through his hair and kissed him, my lips rubbing his, over, under, biting his bottom lip, sucking hard. He pulled back and framed my face in his hands. “You’re so beautiful,” he murmured, “just so beautiful.” All the years slipped away, and we were just two kids again, in awe of the power each of us held over the other.

I couldn’t stop touching him, trying to memorize all the pieces I’d forgotten. His arms, thin and strong, spattered with thick dark hairs. The strange red mole on his neck. We were leaning against the wall, his hands unbuttoning my shirt, caressing my breasts. Each movement he made was somehow spiritual—each finger touching me a vow of some sort, a brand, coalescing love into touch.

There was our bed—my bed, George’s bed. George existed in some alternate universe. In fact, it wasn’t his bed after all. It was my bed, Josh’s bed. I had never wanted someone so badly.  “I love you,” he whispered. “I never stopped.”

But later, lying on my back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, I said, “This might not have been a good idea.”

He closed his eyes. “Don’t think about it, okay? Just—don’t think about it.”

~ ~ ~

Tuesday morning, early, George was misting his orchids and clearing out the faded blooms. He was whipping up egg whites for the waffles just like always, but he looked unusually tired. He’d been tossing and turning at night for the past few nights, just as I’d been. I wondered if something was bothering him—some faculty disagreement, maybe—but I didn’t have the energy to ask. I was saving all of it for Josh.

The unfamiliar number flashing on my cell phone that morning turned out to be Josh. “I’m staying for a week,” he said. “I’ve got an apartment rental, I found it on VRBO—I figured we’d be more comfortable that way. I want to see you every day.”

It was amazing but disturbing, my fantasies becoming reality just like that. They were mine—my private little dreams. I didn’t think I’d actually believed they’d come true. But the fact that Josh felt the same—that changed everything. If two people could be connected that powerfully, after so much time . . .

“That’s amazing, Josh,” I said. “Thank you. Just . . . wow.”

“I’m right near you. I’m in this duplex on Vista Street. 210 and a half—what’s with these halves for addresses, here? So, you want to come over? See my, um, etchings?” I smiled at the teasing smirk in his voice.

“I’ll be right there.”

The building was the typical style of this Miracle Mile-area home: stucco, Mediterranean architecture, a red tile roof. A fountain burbled in the front yard; meant to evoke a Tuscan flavor, it ended up just looking kitschy surrounded by preternaturally green lawn. Every gardener in LA dumped fertilizer on the lawns in the winter, so that for a few weeks whole ZIP codes smelled like manure. Then new, pale green grass shoots would sprout. No lawn in this neighborhood was ever not green.

I walked up an inside accessway to the second floor, and knocked lightly. Josh opened the door, looking momentarily nervous; his faded Dodgers t-shirt made him look boyish, couldn’t set him in any series of memories I had of him. Behind him I glimpsed bland floral watercolors on the walls and utilitarian furniture—vacation rental furnishings, like any nondescript furnished apartment or hotel room. As he waved me inside, I saw that the apartment was spacious, with gleaming tongue-and-groove wood floors, and a fireplace with what looked like original Batchelder tiles. An enormous metal chandelier, with numerous deadly looking poky parts, bristled above the dining room table. The kitchen beyond was a vision of preserved 1920s tiles—bright yellow, grass green, in diamond patterns.

I saw all this in fast-forward, as Josh had picked me up and was bodily carrying me down the long, narrow hall. I felt so disoriented by the entire situation, I might as well have been Alice in Wonderland. Past a period bathroom, with small cream and black octagonal tiles set carefully in the floor. Past a couple bedrooms, featuring Levitz-style wood veneer furniture. He was staggering under my weight as we reached the end of the hall; he kicked open the door to the master bedroom with his foot. I was struggling by that point, trying to get down—I wasn’t sure I liked being carried—but he held me fast, then tossed me unceremoniously on the bed. “So,” he said, eyes gleaming. “We have ten years of fucking to make up for. Shall we get a move on here?”

Looking into his eyes, everything tilted back the right way. It was Josh, after all. This is what I wanted.

He felt so good, inside me. I’d never forgotten what it had been like with him, and had never experienced anything like it with anyone else. But afterward, I kept checking the clock. It was 10:30. Two more hours till I needed to pick up Lucy. It was plenty of time, but lying in his arms, I couldn’t help but compulsively look every minute or two. As if being late to pick Lucy up would immediately expose me, exhibit that big scarlet A I already was wondering how I would conceal.

“What would you do,” I asked him, snuggled nervously in his arms, “if you met up with your one true love ten years after you last saw him? And you were both married, with kids. Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

He sat up a bit, and gazed down at me. “A person wouldn’t know the answer to that yet, would he,” he said carefully. “A person would just have to take it day by day. Being with the other person. And seeing what happened.”

“What did you tell her?” I asked, unable to stop myself.

“I wanted to see my family. That’s what I told her. Spend time with my mom and dad, and my sister’s family. Maybe take a little break. And LA was the end of my book tour. Time for some time off.”

“You must miss Amanda, though.” Why did I keep pushing like that?

“Let’s not talk about our families, okay? Let’s just have it be us, that’s all. Just for this week. When we’re together—they don’t exist.”

I nodded mutely. And then consciously let it all go, like the evening last week when I’d been so absorbed in researching Josh I’d forgotten all about Lucy. And so his body rubbing against mine excited me again, and for a while I was able to completely forget everything. In that bed, we could be anywhere. It was our haven. We could be outside the real world, protected in our own little universe, just like we used to be. Just our bodies and our minds, seared together, welded in place.

12:15. A sixth sense made me look at the bedside LED alarm clock as we drowsed in each others’ arms, our lips brushing, him still inside me so that we were totally connected, even while half-awake. A whole morning had gone by, but it felt as if only minutes had passed. I jerked out of bed convulsively. “I have to go,” I gasped, hastily pulling on clothes, forgetting my underwear in my hurry. I leaned down for a lingering kiss, feeling wetness leaking down into my jeans, soaking the crotch. Like stupid kids, we hadn’t even been using protection. He hadn’t asked, assuming I had it covered. I didn’t ask, because I wanted to feel him, whole and alive, throbbing inside me. And I simply hadn’t thought about going to a drugstore and buying condoms. And getting pregnant for the second time had been such a dismal failure so far, I was beginning to decide I was probably infertile anyhow, Lucy’s birth some fluke or miracle. But really, those were all pitiful excuses. I was really, secretly hoping that maybe I’d get pregnant, and I would be bound to Josh forever, through our child. It was both a calculating and self-destructive move, but I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night for more than a week. Right then, it seemed perfectly logical.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I murmured into his lips. “I love you.”

I hurried down the stairs into the afternoon breeze. The unseasonable heat wave of the previous days had passed. It was cool March weather again, windy, cloudy, in the 60s. The air had shifted.

~ ~ ~

Tuesday night, I closed myself in the office room, explaining to George that I needed to catch up on e-mail. I didn’t think I could manage spending the evening next to him on the sofa, pretending everything was fine, making small talk.

I checked my email. In fact, I was caught up on my correspondence, such as it was. The only people I emailed regularly were my high-school friend Kim and Padma, the friend I’d made that year in London. But there was nothing new from them. I clicked over to Facebook and noted Alex was online.

Hey mister
, I wrote on his wall.
Long time no talk
. That was an understatement. We rarely emailed, and spoke even more rarely. He hadn’t visited our parents’ house since he’d left for college so long ago. Not for Thanksgiving, not for Christmas, not ever, not once. He sent cards to everyone on the appropriate birthdays and anniversaries; he phoned me sporadically, and when he was in the Los Angeles area for work or vacations, we’d meet for lunch: hasty affairs in which we recounted facts about our lives, small anecdotes, and then after forty minutes he’d check his watch and explain that he was late, he really had to go.

Tonight, though, he posted back, within minutes:
Been busy. I’m sorry. Been meaning to catch up.

IM?
I typed, then double-clicked my instant messenger.

Seconds later, he logged on.

So what have you been up to these days?

Working mostly. I can never catch up. I don’t remember what it’s like to get more than five hours of sleep a night.

Poor you. That’s what you get for being a corporate lawyer.

Shut up.

What’s Sheila up to?

She’s pissed at me. I forgot our anniversary.

Recklessly, I went for broke.

I miss you.

Me too. Maybe I’ll get to LA this summer. Will let you know.

No
, I wrote.
I miss you. How we used to talk.

What do you mean?

A long time ago. When we were kids.

That’s dredging up some ancient history.
I could feel his impatience. He was going to log off soon, pleading work.

What if we could let it go? What if we didn’t need to hold on to it anymore? What if it’s crushing us inside, and if we just even talked about it for once,  we’d be okay?

A few minutes passed, but Alex was still there.

I know that if you don’t talk to me, or to them, you don’t have to remember. But it was a long time ago.

Why do you have to bring this up now?

Because maybe holding on to it makes it worse. Worse than it really was.

It’s true that nothing happened. But it could have. The thing that kills me is, would they have let it happen?