Robin and Ruby (12 page)

There on the couch, Robin goes back to Calvin’s script. He reads aloud the lines he would be saying, were he to take the part of Carter: “I’m excited by your tits…. Every guy who stares at your tits is like apunch in my face…. That top you’re wearing makes your tits look great.” He laughs. He’s never spoken to a girl this way, crudely, about her breasts. Then his laughter catches in his throat: Does Calvin think about Ruby this way? Does he say things to her like this? Maybe that’s why she’s not so eager to call him back. Maybe he’s a pig.

But Carter also says, “I’ve seen his world-famous dick,” and “Do you think I’m jealous of his dick?” and “You think you can intimidate me because my cock is smaller. Think again.”

Robin skips ahead to the last scene. Carter is standing in front of the bathroom mirror, holding a “straight razor” in one hand and “staring at the soft exposed flesh of his wrist.” Suicide is the implication, and then the film ends. He sets the script aside, as confused by the character as Calvin seems to be about himself.

Where is Ruby? Has she gotten herself into some dodgy situation with a strange guy, or with girls who hang out at boardwalk nightclubs getting into bar brawls? He finds himself imagining a call from a hospital, “Your sister was found…”

A sense of menace takes hold. What if she is simply…gone? Disappeared. Vanished. He hears his mother scream, sees her collapse, like last time, when the news came that Jackson had flatlined, when he himself was so young and still had to find the strength to hold her up, support the weight of her grief. He sees his father weeping, his reserve breaking apart, anger melting into tears. He remembers that day all too clearly. It was his own fourteenth birthday, and they had just eaten cake and opened presents when the hospital called. It would be a perfectly cruel twist of fate if Ruby came into harm’s way on Jackson’s birthday, Jackson like a curse hanging over the two of them, something they can’t shake, because they were there, they saw him fall. And he feels it again, that sensation: the air is being forced from his throat. Reflexively, he starts prodding at his neck, investigating his glands as if they’ve started to swell up. He makes himself stop.
Don’t start spiraling.

Ruby isn’t dead. She hasn’t disappeared, not for good. It would be too much for any of them to bear. He exhales from deep within, steadying himself, extinguishing unwelcome memories the way you snuff out a candle before leaving a room, so you don’t risk burning the place down.

When someone goes missing, you either search for her, or you wait it out.

The idea of a “search” is hard to pull into focus.

But the waiting is unbearable.

At one o’clock, right on time, Dorothy calls. She sounds surprised that he’s picked up. “I thought you were working today.”

“No, I don’t work on Sundays.”

“Hmm. Your sister said something about…” Dorothy cuts off her sentence with a cluck. He can’t quite glean the subtext, though there’s something she’s not saying. He hears her clattering in the kitchen: utensils scraping metal, water running, the shutting of a cupboard door. More and more, Dorothy cooks. She’s come a long way from her unhappy kitchen experiments in Greenlawn, when she was forever boiling vegetables into mush or burning lasagna in the oven. Now she concocts elaborate dishes, recipes clipped from the
New York Times Magazine
and saved in three-ring binders. What does she do with all this food, when she’s so often alone? It’s true that she’s grown plump, curvy in a way she never was, but she must be throwing food away all the time. Or giving it away. For years, an elderly couple upstairs, the Finkels, accepted Dorothy’s creations, thanking her profusely with “You shouldn’t have” and then inviting her in for a litany of medical complaints and grievances against their own faraway children. Then Mr. Finkel died and Mrs. Finkel was put in a home by one of those children, so Dorothy, Robin guesses, is making extra food for no one.

“I’m just chilling out,” he says.

“Chilling out,” she parrots, as if forced to bear the weight of this slang.

“George is at work.”

“George! When am I going to see him again? How is he?”

“He’s fine.”
Last night, he ordered me around while I jacked off.

The clattering stops, and Dorothy seems to turn her attention to him at last. “Something’s troubling you, isn’t it?”

“No, no. Just a lazy Sunday.” Breezily, he adds, “I’m wishing I was down the shore with Ruby, enjoying the beach.”

Dorothy lets out a just-perceptible sigh of exasperation. “I really hate the idea of her spending the weekend at a
house party
.”

“It’s good for her to have fun.”

“I can’t quite put
fun
and
beer keg
in the same sentence.”

He licks his lips; his mouth is quite dry. “Did she leave you a number?”

“Mmm, yes. Are you trying to get in touch with her?”

“Actually, I wanted to talk to Calvin about this script he sent me.”

“Really? I can’t imagine he has anything to say. What’s it about?”

“Nightlife. Friendship. My generation.”

“Remember, you’re a
stage
actor, Robin.”

“You’re right. I might have to let him down easily,” Robin says, playing his part.

The phone number Dorothy recites for him is the number at Alice’s house, the same number Calvin gave him; he’s hit a cul-de-sac. Dorothy mentions that Calvin is supposed to drive Ruby back to the city this evening. “I’m making paella,” Dorothy says. “I’m sure she’ll be famished, after eating junk all weekend.”

“Paella’s not vegetarian, Dorothy.”

“Oh, yes.
Meat is murder
, how could I forget? Well, I made gazpacho, too. She can eat that.”

He wants to say something more direct, but it’s just impossible. His mother can be quick to jump to dangerous conclusions, especially about Ruby. He says, rather firmly, “I don’t think you should expect her too early. If she’s having fun, she’ll come home later.”

“Oh. I see.” Dorothy’s voice hardens. “She’s put you up to this.”

“What?”

“She told you to call me, to prepare me.” He can hear her smack something down onto the Formica countertop.

“No, no. Just be realistic. They might need to sober up before the long ride home.”

“You don’t think Calvin would drive under the influence?”

“No—”

“I’ll absolutely strangle him.”

“Stop! All I’m saying is, they might have a mimosa or two at brunch, and then need to sober up before the ride home.”

“It’s a good thing I didn’t put the paella in the oven.” For a few moments he hears breath moving heavily from her nostrils. Then she delicately sniffles, as if fighting back tears. “There was a plan,” she says. “Ruby was going to see your father and visit the grave. I was thinking about joining them, but she said you had a shift at the restaurant today. And I thought, well, I’d rather not do it if you weren’t going to be there.”

So that’s it. Yes, it’s true, Ruby had tried to wrangle them all to spend some time at Jackson’s grave, “as a family,” was how she’d put it, which had infuriated Robin because it sounded like a guilt trip at best and a willful distortion of reality at worst. They weren’t a family, not since the divorce, perhaps not since Jackson died, when the fracturing and splintering accelerated between Clark and Dorothy. He’d told Ruby bluntly that he couldn’t handle it: neither the grave nor the memories it would stir up, and certainly not the idea of the four of them together.

Dorothy says, “I wanted to be with at least one of my children this weekend.”

“I know, Dorothy. I know what day it is. June 16th.”

“And what year,” she adds.

It takes him a moment to understand what she means, and then he computes: Jackson had been ten in ’77. Softly, he mutters, “Wow. I’d lost track—”

“Yes,” she interjects, “your brother would have been eighteen today.”

“He’d be going to college this fall.”

“Old enough to vote. Old enough for the government to take his Social Security number for their Army records.” She falls silent; he can think of nothing to say, because all he can think is Ruby, Ruby, Ruby.

“Why don’t I call again later, Dorothy?”

She clears her throat, seems to pull herself together. “If you speak to your sister, tell her I’m going visit the cemetery on my own, with or without her. If she
deigns
to call me sooner rather than later, perhaps I won’t have to read her mind.”

He agrees. He gets off the phone and calls the number at Alice’s house, and talks to Calvin. There’s still no word from her.

His mind expands to a vision of Jackson as an eighteen-year-old. Jackson would have graduated from high school, would be living at home, getting ready for college. Maybe he’d be going somewhere on athletic scholarship. Even at age ten, he had been great at sports, baseball especially. By eighteen he’d have transformed into a sturdy, all-American jock, a state champion, the pride of Greenlawn. And in a startling flash Robin sees that the “home” he has been picturing here is Greenlawn, not Manhattan. Jackson alive means all of them still together, Clark and Dorothy still married. No divorce, no move to Manhattan: the life he would have lived.

On his own eighteenth birthday, he had been a college freshman, home from Carnegie Mellon on winter break. He’d dyed his hair platinum for the occasion. Dorothy set up a dinner party. He remembers being nervous, because they never made a big deal about his birthday, since it was also the anniversary of Jackson’s death. But Dorothy filled the apartment with some of his pals from high school and college. George was there, and Alton and his girlfriend, plus a few of her own friends, chatty women she’d known since her days at Smith or from her single-girl years in New York, who had reemerged after the move to Manhattan and were now part of Robin’s life. They drank champagne, opened gifts, ate chocolate soufflé for dessert.

His night ended in a cab, with Marco, a South American guy, a friend of a friend who had tagged along to the dinner party and flirted with everyone all night. He was lean, his eyes the color of caramel, his dark hair thick and wavy, his smile devilish. Marco directed the cab to a club on White Street, but the drinking age had gone up from eighteen to nineteen just ten days earlier, and Robin couldn’t get past the bouncer. So on the early hours of the morning, Robin found himself in a studio in a high-rise at the edge of Tribeca, making out with a guy who whispered in his ear, “I want to dominate you.” Scared, he still said “OK,” because Marco was probably the sexiest guy he had ever been with. Marco tied Robin’s arms to the bedposts during sex, but loose enough that Robin could twist around (and, he hoped, escape, if it came to that) and take in a view out the picture windows, a view across the Hudson River, looking back on New Jersey, the place where that life he used to live was being lived by other people. At eighteen, it seemed to him that he had already become the person he was going to be always. Now the memory of that night is tainted with something else, with the sex they had, and what sex has come to mean. Because who knows if Marco was healthy or not. Who knows where Marco is today.

The phone rings again.
Finally!

But no. Not Ruby. George.

“The place is dead,” George says. “It’s too nice out, no one wants a restaurant.”

“Are you staying through dinner?”

“I could, but—” There’s a moment of humming silence. “I guess I’d rather come home.”

Robin lets this hang in the air. He hears the emphasis on “rather,” the suggestion it contains. Will it be that from now on, every time they’re both in the apartment, they’ll end up naked? It can’t be, it’s too much. But if they’re both into it…

“You just got real quiet,” George says.

“Sorry. The Ruby situation is stressing me out.”

“She hasn’t turned up yet?”

“No.”

“That seems bad.”

“I called Dorothy, but I just couldn’t tell her. It’s Jackson’s birthday today.”

“Oh, boy.”

At once, Robin finds himself expressing an idea only just making itself known to him: “What do you think about a road trip?”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with Peter, does it?”

“No. Just you and me. Seaside Heights is just a few hours away, right?”

“Are you talking about tonight?”

“As soon as you get home.”

After the briefest hesitation, George says, “You wanna drag me to the Jersey Shore, huh?”

“Believe me, I don’t like the idea, either, but—”

George finishes for him. “Gotta do what you gotta do.”

Robin hangs up the phone, and the air seems freshly voltaged. The time for waiting has passed. He knows immediately what to do next: pack a bag with overnight clothes, pull a couple bottles of Diet Coke from the fridge, fold his tips into his money clip. He makes a list of the relevant phone numbers, scavenges for dimes and nickels in case they need to use a phone booth. He finds a road map in a drawer.

He goes into George’s room to grab some clean clothes to pack for him, too, in case they wind up staying overnight somewhere.

The bed is unmade, still. He can picture everything they did, unfolding all over again. Next to the bed is the K-Y Jelly. He replaces the cap, wipes it off, carries it back to his room, and finds his condoms. Before he can change his mind, he packs all of it with their stuff.

The last thing he does is find the letter from the university, in the pocket of his work pants. He smoothes it out. Rereads it.
Congratulations…London…highly competitive…a true challenge.
He understands that he hasn’t given them his answer yet. He hasn’t confirmed that he’s actually going to do this. Why is he putting it off? He leaves the letter resting in a beam of sunlight, faceup on his desk. It seems to pulse with its own power. When he gets back from this trip, when he finds his sister—he will find her, he must, he absolutely must—he’ll know what his answer is.

He’s clenching his jaw, he realizes, as if he’s primed for a fight. A fight with whom? When he tries to envision his opponent, he sees only himself: two nights ago, at the restaurant, framed in the mirrored wall, sweating through his white shirt, doubled over a bottle of wine he is struggling to open, while everyone stares, waiting to see if this time he’ll get it right.