The Law of Loving Others (22 page)

When my panic finally abated, my father reheated dinner and we prepared our fajitas together. We spread guacamole over the tortillas, filled them with chicken and peppers and a dash of sour cream.

There was nothing so good as the feeling of calm that settled in the wake of anxiety. If only there were a way to hold onto it, to savor that weightlessness, the pure feeling of relief that was so close to elation.

After dinner we sat in the living room together and read. I'd finally been able to sink into
Anna Karenina
—the torrid affair, Anna's intense longing for Vronsky.

I looked over at my father and asked him what he was reading.

He lifted the book up toward me.

“It's about Robert Moses.”

“Wait, remind me who he is again?”

“He was a really influential urban planner in the forties and fifties. He's responsible for so many big changes in New York.” My father lifted his glasses up off his face, leaned toward me the way he always did when he started on a subject he felt excited about.

“But he was also grossly racist and his planning was inherently skewed to favor the rich. It's really almost sickening to read about.”

“How was it skewed?”

My father told me about the highways that were built with overpasses that were too small to allow buses to go through, so poor people would be restricted to certain areas. He told me about parks and pools built only in wealthy white neighborhoods. For a moment, I felt in awe of him again, his knowledge, his passion.

“And another thing,” my father continued, “he was also sort of responsible for the demolition of the old Penn Station, which was an extraordinarily beautiful building. It's a shame you'll never get to see it. You would have loved it.”

“That's so sad. The one now is just so ugly.”

“I know. Here, hold on.”

He got up and walked toward the book shelf at the other end of the room. He scanned the rows and rows of shelves, and then bent down to choose a handful of the larger ones on the bottom, hardcover books of photographs.

“Look, here it is.” He opened a coffee-table-sized book of black- and-white pictures, old New York in sepia-toned images. The beautiful Penn Station with its lofty arched ceilings and marble columns. He turned the pages, showed me the elevated train tracks that ran along Third Avenue, and the Williamsburg Bridge being built.

We looked at old photographs together, compared street corners a hundred years apart, cobblestone ripped up and smoothed with cement, tenements torn down, replaced with high-rises. He seemed almost in pain as he showed me all the beautiful old landmarks that had been demolished. My father and I, we were both so fixated on preserving the past.

WHEN we arrived at the hospital on Saturday, my mother was sitting in the day room next to her roommate, Debbie. She was shuffling a deck of UNO cards and Debbie was engrossed in a biography of Axl Rose.

“Debbie loves Guns N' Roses,” my mother whispered. There was a slight lilt in her voice, suggesting something like sarcasm, and I reveled in it, this small indication that my mother, the music snob, was coming back to me, coming back to her old self.

I could somehow feel Phil's presence before I saw him—a slight tingling in my stomach, some charge in the air, and there he was. Dressed in washed-out jeans, a bit baggy because he probably hadn't put them in the laundry for weeks, a button-down shirt, and his hair the slightest bit shaggy. It had only been a week since I'd seen him but I registered all the subtle differences I could possibly detect, filling in the spaces of all the things I didn't really know about him.

He lifted a small duffel bag over his shoulder and stood beside his mother. She was tall and slim, with dark hair and a wide streak of silver near her bangs. She was looking intently at someone—a doctor or psychologist, somebody talking kindly, gesturing in a warm but authoritative way. I heard the words
recovery
and
promise
,
strength
. Ted, Phil's brother, was standing next to them, modestly bowing his head a bit, but he looked a little more poised than he had in the past. His face a little more animated. He smiled and shook the doctor's hand.

Phil and I made eye contact for a moment and then I approached him. Last night I'd finally texted him back and apologized for not being in contact sooner.
Things have been so hectic,
I said. This was obviously an oversimplification. There were too many things going on in my head, and I worried that if we actually spoke, all of my anxiety and guilt and confusion would pour out. I wasn't ready to let him see that part of myself.

“Hey,” he said coolly. “Ma, Ted, this is Emma, she's a friend of Zach's sister.” I loved the way he said
Ma
. And this small interaction felt so telling, the way he introduced me as Annie's friend and not his own. The way he didn't move forward to greet me, just stood there stiffly. I realized then how little I really knew about him. I had pieced together the small details he'd offered me: his mother from Cuba, his parents working hard and not being able to visit the hospital often. I had created a portrait in my head of a hardworking, stereotypical immigrant family. And on some level, I had used that to keep comparing Phil to Daniel, whose family had so much privilege. But really, I had made it all up. Maybe Phil had a trust fund, maybe his parents worked a lot because they were corporate lawyers. Maybe I didn't know him at all.

His mother nodded and smiled. “Nice to meet you.”

“You're heading home?” I asked Ted, though it was obvious that he was.

“I am,” he said. “It's been a long time coming.”

“That's so great,” I said. “My mom's here. I hope she'll be coming home soon too.”

They all nodded, and Phil shifted the bag from one shoulder to the other.

“Well, it was nice to see you,” he said, “but we should probably take off.”

“Of course,” I said. “Congratulations on going home, Ted.”

I wanted Phil to hang back for just a moment, to let us talk, but he was the first to start walking, his mother and Ted following behind him, and within seconds they were gone.

WE met up the next afternoon, Phil and I. The weather was grim—cloudy and cold, the sky the color of slate. He agreed to pick me up and then we drove around aimlessly for a while. I didn't tell him about what happened with Daniel, how he saw the text message and how maybe it was all over—I wanted to maintain at least a shred of dignity.

“I'm so sorry that I took so long to get back to your texts,” I said, even though I had already apologized about this the night before, over the phone. I hated the idea that I'd messed things up between us somehow, even though obviously it was a ridiculous notion. “My life just feels so chaotic right now. And I feel stupid dragging you into this cluttered, shitty situation.”

“I didn't mean to complicate things,” Phil said. His eyes were focused on the road ahead of him. He switched gears effortlessly.

“You didn't,” I said. “It's not like that.”

We were stopped at a light and I stared at a pair of pigeons who were walking delicately on a telephone wire, like tiny acrobats on a tightrope. He was silent.

“I really like you,” I told him. “Obviously. I just feel like such a mess. I really need to figure some stuff out.”

He moved his hand into my lap, and I took it eagerly, held onto his fingers with both hands. I was feeling overwhelmed with tenderness and desire, but then I stopped myself. I thought about Daniel. I thought of my mother and I focused on those images of her sitting idling at the supermarket on that frigid night.

“You want me to take you to make-out point? Where I take all the girls?”

I felt a twinge of jealousy as he said this. I knew he was joking but I also knew instinctively that there had been
so
many girls.

“Absolutely,” I said. “But I'm not making out with you.”

He laughed. “Fair enough.”

We drove a little while longer, down Route 35 and then onto a small gravel road. There was an empty white hatchback parked diagonally along the path, and we pulled over nearby. We faced an expanse of water, silver and still.

“The reservoir,” he said. We got out of the car and walked toward it, sat down on a ledge of rocks. “This is where we used to go in high school, have bonfires and smoke weed and drink forties and think we were so cool.”

“Ah, the cool kids.”

“I had sex in that water after prom,” he whispered.

“You were such a bad boy.”

I imagined his high school love, whoever she was, beautiful and self-possessed, a “free spirit” who would spontaneously shed all her clothes and dive into the water. That first day when Phil and I drove up to the hospital together, on New Year's Eve, we were listening to some classic rock station and “Norwegian Wood” had come on, and he'd told me this was the song he always thought of when he thought of his ex-girlfriend.
I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me.
I wondered if this was the girl he was talking about, the one he had been so taken with.

“I'm thinking of not going back to school this semester,” he said unexpectedly.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I know, it sounds stupid. It just feels too hard to go back right now. Maybe I can just make up the classes over the summer or something.”

“But you're at Purchase, it's so close,” I said. “Can't you just come home and visit a lot? Like, on the weekends and stuff. I mean you could probably even live at home if you wanted.”

“Yeah I know,” he said, sounding the slightest bit impatient. “Anyway it's not a big deal, I just need to think about it.”

I started to wonder if maybe I shouldn't go back to school either, if it was possible for me to transfer back to public school here for second semester. The thought hadn't really occurred to me to stay in Westchester. Or maybe it had, but I hadn't seriously considered it. The fact was, while I felt a sharp sting of dread when I thought about returning to school, I didn't really want to stay here either. I wanted to get swept up in the everyday activities of classes and library and homework, watching TV in the common room with my roommates, smoking cigarettes and masking the smell by exhaling onto sheets of fabric softener. I wanted some semblance of what passed for a normal life.

LATER, on the drive home, I asked Phil what it was like having his brother back home.

“It's good and bad,” he answered. “I'm so glad he's back, but it's also going to be a big adjustment for him. A transition, you know. So it's going to take some time. He's a little shell-shocked, I think.”

“But how is it for
you
?”

He laughed. “You sound like my therapist.”

“But really, I'm asking.”

“It's gonna take time for me too, I guess. I'm a little bit walking on eggshells. I just keep wondering how long it'll be until we'll be able to get into a fight. Until I'll be able to take the remote from him and say that I
need
to watch the hockey game. Until I'll be able to be in a bad mood in front of him, you know what I mean? All that stuff.”

“I haven't even thought about that at all,” I said. “Like, when can I be a brat and snap at my mom if she wakes me up too early and I'm cranky?”

“Exactly.”

“That feels like such a luxury.”

“One day!” Phil said dreamily. “One day you'll be able to be a little bitch to your mom and it'll be all okay again.”

I laughed. “Shut up! I'm not a
bitch
per se, but you know what I mean.”

“Of course, but seriously, like the goal is to be able to just be normal, and maybe that means being an asshole every so often and having that be okay.”

We were back at my house then, where my father's Volvo rested in the driveway and I could see the dim yellow light in my parents' bedroom. I watched my father's silhouette move around, open up a dresser drawer.

“I'm leaving for school in two days,” I told Phil. “But maybe we can talk and I'll let you know when I'm back here?”

“Of course.”

I kissed his face, his cheekbones, the soft skin beside his ear. I was careful not to touch his lips, as if any of those arbitrary rules really mattered, as if we hadn't already had sex and I hadn't probably ruined my relationship with Daniel.

“I know this sounds so completely sentimental,” I warned, “but I just feel so happy that we met, despite how fucked up the circumstances were.”

“You mean so happy that you were my tattoo artist, that fateful night?”

“Yes, exactly,” I said. “That fateful night.”

I already felt a pang of longing when I got out of the car. I wondered when I would see him again. Wondered if next time, that connection between us—one that felt both so erotic and cerebral—would still be there. Everything felt so impossible to predict, I just didn't know what I would be able to hold on to and what would disappear.