The Adults (36 page)

“Of course they aren’t,” my mother told the lady. “They’re demons.”

My father was given a serious amount of morphine. “He won’t even realize he’s dying,” the doctor said.

“Oh, he won’t like that,” my mother said.

But the morphine was pumped into his veins anyway—procedure, the doctor said—and my father started having trouble seeing and organizing his thoughts. He told everybody in his hospital room that one thing was clear: his big regret was that he wanted to see his only daughter get married before he died—so sue him—no, really, why didn’t we?

“That’s sad,” said Uncle Vince, looking at me. “It’s sad when you put it like that.”

“If Emily is your only daughter,” Uncle Vito said, “then who the fuck is she?” He pointed to Laura by the plant. Laura opened her mouth as if to speak, but she didn’t.

“Oh, why, that’s my daughter, Emily,” my father said.

Nobody spoke.

“Emily, pumpkin,” my father said, looking at Laura. “Come here.”

We both approached my father.

“I’ll try to die tonight,” he said, not making eye contact with either of us, “so I won’t ruin your wedding day.”

“All right!” The doctor interrupted in his white coat. “He really needs to sleep. He’s going to get panicky soon.”

“No,” my father said. “Something feels wrong.”

We stared at him.

“That’s because you are panicking,” the doctor said.

“Everybody is being too polite!” my father shouted. “Especially you.” He looked at me. He said he didn’t understand why I worried about his neck position in the bed or if his feet were too cold. “It’s so sad. Don’t be so polite. It feels rude. Rude to be so polite about my death.”

A
dora’s wedding dress was a Priscilla of Boston with an envelope-draped bust. She stood tall in the corner of the room, her dress wide at the bottom with an embellished beaded train flowing out into the hallway. There was a silk corset tight around her torso while the red lace crawled up her neck and ate her bare skin like a wild disease. The dress was so complicated, I couldn’t decide what would be more impressive: to get it on or off. Adora stood in front of the mirror that morning, my mother wildly tugging at the silk ropes wrapped around her torso—pulling and tugging and complaining. “I can’t breathe,” Adora said.

“Of
course
you can’t breathe,” my mother said. “You’re getting married, for Christ’s sake.”

Adora’s wedding was held at the MoMa. “I want it to be as secular as it can be,” Adora had said. “If somebody is to sneeze, I don’t even want to hear a ‘God bless you.’ I don’t even care if it’s an old person.”

Adora didn’t wear white, and the priest was their friend Luke, who was just this guy. He conducted the ceremony, in which they were to eat herbs. Different herbs represented different emotions they were supposed to feel together, forever.

The caterer didn’t remember to bring the serving spoons, and the guests pretended not to mind that the service workers poured the Italian wedding soup directly into their bowls from the pot. We all cheered and clapped for Mr. and Mrs. Orrin Hallaby when they entered the sculpture garden and the lobby, which was full of two hundred and fifty guests, three-quarters of whom Adora didn’t even pretend to know.

They insisted on no cake (too tacky) and no first dance (so predictable). Heat was pumped into the sculpture garden so nobody got cold while we danced. Humans were hired to stand in the middle of the appetizer and dessert tables, with large frames around their heads. Human paintings. The tables had wheels on them, so the human paintings could move around the room and offer bacon-wrapped scallops, beef Wellington bites when they needed to. Between every course, the humans would crawl out from the tables and perform their painting. I stood by the bar, waiting for Mona Lisa to put on her show, while Kevin was dancing with my mother. Kevin was not wearing a tie because earlier that morning, he couldn’t find it in the mess of our apartment. “Just wear one of my father’s,” I said.

And he said, “No, that’d be too weird.”

“He’s not dead yet,” I said.

“I didn’t mean it like that.” He looked under the table and the bed. “How can you be an interior designer when you live like this?” he asked, picking up my clothes from the floor.

“Hairdressers don’t usually have good hair,” I said back. “But they can still be good hairdressers.”

“Well, that’s because they physically can’t cut their own hair. You can actually clean up the bedroom.”

“Oh, stop being like this,” I said. “You’re going to make me throw up.”

Jonathan stood by the pond while little children threw in pennies, which were picked out by older children later when they thought no one was looking. Behind him, a statue of a naked woman, dipping her head in the water, classical Greek beauty—“Nudity,” my professor said in my college sculpture class, walking around the naked model in the center of the room, “is being exactly what you are and, in that way, unfamiliar to everbody who knows you.”

My mouth went hot, metallic, sore from something. Jonathan didn’t see me at first, and I took advantage of the luxury of being unseen. I stared at him for as long as I could without Kevin or Jonathan noticing. He was playing with a chocolate-covered pretzel in between his fingers, talking to no one. He took a sip out of his beer. There were women everywhere. Women in party dresses, women in gowns, women with bows, women with problems. Then he saw me. Another woman. He didn’t wave.

We didn’t speak, until—

“It’s like a fucking Broadway show here,” he said, walking over to me.

“I know,” I said.

“It’s sick,” he said. He stared at me. He stayed at my ear for a moment. He was a little drunk. I could tell by the way he touched my shoulder when he spoke. Kevin eyed me from across the room, doing the box-step with my mother.

“I can still feel you on my body at night,” Jonathan said in my ear. “When I close my eyes.”

“Don’t be a stupid creep,” I said to him. And then I moved to his ear and said, “I can’t believe you had sex with me when I was fifteen.”

“Gandalf sayeth, ‘Even the wise don’t see all ends.’”

“There. You appealed to a higher authority. Good job.”

He twirled his finger in the foam of his beer. “I was crazy over you,” he said. “You have to understand.”

“I was a
little girl
.”

“You were fine. You were always strong.”

Adora approached.

“Where’s the laser show?” Adora asked us like we were supposed to know.

Adora slumped down on a yellow lotus sculpture that also served as a chair.

We couldn’t help it. All three of us bent over in laughter.

When Adora and Orrin left early at ten, she hugged me good-bye and whispered, “Emily, be careful with him. Jack’s wife, she died three years ago. He just doesn’t like to talk about it. He’s a mess. And I don’t know, with your father dying and all, if this is the right time for you to get involved with a man who’s already in so much pain.”

I
stayed at the apartment for two days and worked from my kitchen table. Jonathan called me late at night there. His voice was raspy over the phone and this was when I hated him the most. I hated most people at this hour of the night, when nobody was as selfish as me, or as confused as me, and when I looked at the ceiling and at Kevin asleep next to me, and sometimes they felt like the same exact thing.

Then, the phone rang.

“Hi,” I said.

“Just talk to me for a bit,” Jonathan asked. “I can’t sleep.”

Neither could I. So I talked to him for a bit. I left the room and Kevin turned on his side.

“Might be up for sarcasm and
pivo
,” Jonathan whispered into the phone when I was in the kitchen.

“Sarcasm just put on her shoes.”

“I wrote an imitation of Chekhov today. Why?”

“You’re becoming incredibly obscure.”

“Meet me at Washington Square Park.”

“Where are you? In Fairfield?”

“In my Manhattan apartment.”

“Okay,” I said, without even thinking about it, without even bothering to give Kevin a reasonable excuse when he woke up and asked me where I was going. I said, “Melinda just broke up with her boyfriend,” and he didn’t bother to say, “But you aren’t really friends with Melinda,” as I put on my coat and walked through the door; he didn’t grab me by the waist, put me down on the bed. He never demanded to know just exactly who I thought I was, and this was my excuse.

*   *   *

“This is actually a burial ground,” Jonathan said as he came up behind me. It was one in the morning. We were in Washington Square Park. The cold fountain glossed our faces. We were both overdressed for the park, but the formality was refreshing so late in the night.

“Don’t tell me that you asked me here so you can kill me,” I said. “Because that would be disappointing.”

Jonathan reached out for my hand. He ran his fingertips against my knuckles. He sat down on the ground. A child’s shoe was left wet on the stone wall, and neither of us mentioned it. We didn’t speak and then we spoke.

“This is a potter’s field,” Jonathan said, patting the earth. “There are twenty thousand corpses underneath us right now.”

We stared at each other like we were relearning how to see everything: You still have Jonathan’s nose, I thought, you still have Mr. Basketball’s eyes, but you have a completely new mouth. Whose mouth is that?

“Imagine,” he said. “Imagine if they could still see us from so far below.”

“Who?” I asked. His wife?

I walked around the field trying to decide what to do while Jonathan never answered me.

“Why don’t you come over here, sweetheart,” he finally said, and this was not a question. I walked over to him and stood over his body. He spread my legs and put his mouth in me, and I wondered if he could see any corner of the moon from inside my body.

K
evin and I went to Central Park and took a rowboat into the center of the pond. We each had our own books, and we stretched our legs out over each other to make room for leisure. He was reading something fantastically grounded in the legal politics of contemporary America. I was reading up on the birth of the organic chair. I told Kevin that no matter how we treated something, at its roots, everything grows and then dies the same way. The ducks circled around us, the ducks quacked around us, and the ducks factored us into the reflection of their tiny retinas but never considered us in any real way. Weird.

Kevin didn’t say anything until we were in one of those fusion places he sometimes admired so much. Something was wrong. They were serving Western macaroni and cheese with Vietnamese rice noodles. Smooth ceramic tiles on the floor, and gold-framed pictures of smiling women from distant lands, picking unidentifiable crops and putting them in their woven baskets. These were the happy women who lined the walls of Noodles N You. Kevin twirled the last of his rice noodles neatly around his fork just to be polite. Like what we needed was
more
polite.

“I think we should walk back home through the park after we’re done here,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “But I have to get back to Connecticut before it gets dark. I want to see my father before he goes to sleep.”

When we walked through the park, Kevin wanted to know what was wrong. Kevin wanted to know who was calling at night. Kevin wanted to know how he could be dating a woman who was so unsubtle. We watched the tiny dogs chase after a ball in the dog park.

“This isn’t just about your father,” Kevin said.

Kevin leaned over the fence and asked a woman which dog was hers.

“That one,” she said. “The schnauzer.”

“I used to have a schnauzer,” Kevin said. “But it didn’t have hair like that.”

“Well, then,” the woman said, “you obviously don’t know the breed.”

Kevin and I looked at each other and when we didn’t laugh, when he picked a piece of white lint off my shoulder and said, “I
know
the breed, lady,” I knew I would never love him. I would never wake up in the middle of the night screaming for his touch, and I was stupid enough, watching a tiny terrier piss against the fence, to still believe that terror was such a large part of love.

“Since when do you
know
breeds?” I asked him.

“Emily,” he said, “what’s going on?”

Jonathan and I had been having sex in restaurant bathrooms where the toilet paper roll sat on the floor. “Men’s or women’s?” he always asked. “Men’s,” I would say. “Women are too judgmental.”

“What do you mean?” I asked Kevin.

“Are you becoming someone else, Emily?” Kevin asked. “Someone I don’t know?”

“You’re the one who suddenly
knows
breeds. You don’t even have a dog.”

“Emily, whoever he is, I’d wish you’d say it.”

“Say what?”

“You’re cheating on me.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

“I’m not.”

“Just say it, claim responsibility for it.”

“It’s not free will,” I told him.

Jonathan had put me against the tiled wall and we had tried not to breathe out our noses. Sometimes we dangerously spoke like we had become the same careless person and said, “Let’s go somewhere else?” and we were off to the basement stacks of the public library, where sex was a dark art and we were just students. Where I had to keep on my wool dress for decorum’s sake and he just unzipped his pleated khakis and out he tumbled like a waterfall. We didn’t even have to look down to feel what was happening to us.
The History of Russia
, the tiled wall, the bathroom door handle cut hard lines against my clothed back and it had all begun to hurt again.

“You’re addicted,” he said.

“I don’t know what it is. Honestly.”

“If I tell you to go be with him all you want, will you be done with it and then come back to me?”

“I can’t. I can’t stop.”

“That’s pathetic.”

“He’s killing me.”

“Do you think about me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think about us?”

“Of course I think about us.”