The Narrow Door (10 page)

Then we are up on the boardwalk. I’m eager to try out the roller coaster, which has always been my favorite ride, even though I haven’t been on one in years. Austen, however, has a different idea. She wants to go on the Tilt-A-Whirl. We buy the tickets, and Austen pulls me up the ramp. In all my years of going on rides I have never been on a Tilt-A-Whirl. The operator lowers the bar across our waists. We hold on to the bar, to each other. It’s been so long since I’ve been on rides that I’ve forgotten I don’t do well with spinning around, and the Tilt-A-Whirl not only spins around but whips and lurches, jerking us from side to side. The two of us are laughing, squeezing our eyes shut, bare knees banging into each other. But this feeling in my head and stomach—isn’t this experience supposed to be gentle? I’m not talking salt and pepper shakers, rides that throw you down only to whip you back up again. My stomach is increasingly displeased. There’s nothing remotely fun about this. As for the sublimity of the scarier rides? We’re not meeting our deaths, oh no. No imaginary confrontation with the angel or the monster. I’m just reminded that I have a body that’s capable of being shaken while Austen laughs and laughs into my shoulder.

Denise waves at us the second the ride stops. Perhaps she’s been waving at us the whole time, her smile bigger than I’ve ever seen it. Somehow I make it down the ramp without throwing up or falling down. I stand still for a second, but that is not the best cure. Better to simply walk down the boardwalk, pretend that I’m feeling reasonably all right without bumping into rails, people. The sun is boring into the tops of our heads, the bridges of our noses. We’re in that pleasant, woozy state of mind when we don’t feel any pressure to fill up the silence. And later, back at the house as the sun goes down, we’ll eat our spaghetti out on the deck, looking out at the lagoon, while the usually rattled Boston terrier falls asleep, snoring, on Austen’s left foot.

2010 | 
By 8 a.m., I’ve tweeted about loggerhead sea turtles in Cape Hatteras, bears sunning themselves in suburban Los Angeles, happy potbellied pigs in Brooklyn, and plundered sea cucumbers in Mexico. I am perfectly content to find stories of animals. It is my morning project, the first thing I do after a first sip of coffee. I’ll find a few more links before I go to bed tonight. I scan dozens of news sites until my eyes are tired, until I can’t put off school prep any longer. I don’t believe there’s a one-to-one relationship between my animal project and Denise, though I wouldn’t be telling the full truth if I didn’t say my project took off around the time of her death. I love animals, but I have no grand purpose in mind. If my tweet about a rabbit makes you look more closely at a rabbit in a field: great. If it makes you look past a rabbit dish on a restaurant menu: even better. If not? I am not the rabbit police. It is the ritual of the search that’s important to me, the steady absorbing quality of the sorting, posting, passing on. I disappear into my project, dream into the forms of the animals I think about. For a little bit, I’m a turtle then a bear then a pig towing a drowning man across a lake to safety. The baggage of my human skin is a little lighter on my bones. We hear enough about humans, don’t we?

If I were twenty-three in 2010 and Denise were thirty, and we were both teaching assistants at Rutgers, I wonder if we would have become friends today. Probably. But would we have been on the phone three hours every night? I don’t think so. I imagine us sitting side by side in a darkish coffee shop, our faces purpled in laptop light. I’m tweeting, Denise is scrolling through Facebook. We’re in tattered armchairs, plum and gold, with holes in the upholstery. The room smells of dust, burned coffee, baked goods, candle wax, and old wood. A handsome bearded skateboarder walks in, sets off the bells on the door. We check out his skinny green pants, his thick brown beard; our eyes flit down again. Denise writes to five Facebook friends she doesn’t actually know: it’s mindless, oddly appealing work. Her tapping fills this corner of the room. There is so much less wanting on her face. The need can be spread out among many people, whom she writes to once a month. If Caitlin isn’t available, Denise can write to Johannes. I wouldn’t have to count so much for her, and she wouldn’t have to count so much for me. We feel the lightness of our arrangement, the freedom of movement.

From one friend we get immediacy, spontaneity, the exasperated voice, the shaken head, the occasional embrace. But the brain wants many friends, acquaintances. So much less to miss and mourn if there’s always someone else to replace the one you lost. One kind word means exactly the same as another kind word. The sweet relief of it. And maybe the brain has always known what’s best for us.

1987 | 
Who follows me out of the single gay bar outside Hyannis? He walks across the dark parking lot, without a word or a gesture, starts his car, follows my car as I drive south on Willow Street. I never even saw his face along the dance floor, where a lone guy in feathers danced too obviously, caught in some dream of himself, to the embarrassment of all six of us in the room. I should look in the rearview for the silent man’s headlights, but to do so would be to replicate some scene in
Psycho.
This is nothing so fraught. I am no Marion Crane. I suppose I could pull into Cumberland Farms, get out of the car if I wanted to, buy some grapefruit juice or cigarettes. But I’m too tired to head anywhere but to the motel, where I’ve been holing up all weekend to write. I’m trying to finish some stories, with the idea of applying to grad school for my MFA. In the past months, I’ve had two stories accepted by literary magazines as well as a grant from the state arts council, but it’s been hard to finish anything lately.

I turn right into the motel parking lot. Why am I not more shocked that his blinker is on, that he’s making the turn past the motel sign, with the orange letters and pale green backing? Is he staying here? Of course not. Until now, my car has been the only other car in the parking lot. No self-respecting gay man would stay in Hyannis in early April when Provincetown is an hour down the road.

I get out of the car. I walk back to the room, without looking to see what’s behind me. I slide the key into the lock, wiggle it, lock the door from inside. The room is silent, nothing but the taps and pings of the electric heaters. It smells of mold, but a pleasing, subtropical, Florida-vacation mold. Two drinking glasses in waxed paper sleeves sit beside an aqua plastic pitcher. All at once I feel an incredible exhaustion, and in due order, I unbuckle my pants. I kick off my shoes and socks, I pull off my sweater. I lie right down on the bed, naked but for my T-shirt, with the lights on.

The man stands at the window, with needy eyes, the droopy mustache twisted with white. I hadn’t realized that there was a part in the curtains, and I am too magnetized and stunned to get up and close them. He is mouthing some words: please, let me in, please. Maybe, like me, he’s someone who never does things like this. Maybe there’s a wife at home, and he probably wonders what she’d think of him if she saw him in this position: watching a young stranger jerk off on the other side of the glass. I wonder what Denise would think of me, too. She doesn’t think of me as a lonely person. She thinks of me as someone who is decent, loyal, sweet, which is why I shine those traits back at her. I wonder if her feelings would get cooler if she saw me right now. Maybe she’d start pulling away, calling less. The truth is she hasn’t been calling so much in the last month or so, ever since she and B started ripping their kitchen apart.

I lie there watching the man’s face as he watches me, until he tires of seeing what might be his own face transposed over mine-has the window become a mirror? He holds up his hand, presses it to glass, then walks back to his car. I pull the curtains closed. His handprint still smudges the pane. The car engine catches, and after a minute, I can picture the headlights drawing away.

2010 | 
The pond in the backyard of the Springs house is skimmed over with ice. On top of that ice is a coating of snow that hasn’t melted in weeks. The snow hasn’t really stopped since a few days before Christmas, and it bewilders me that anything could still be alive down there. But many things live here that aren’t supposed to live in this climate: the fig tree, the crepe myrtle, the needle palm by the door of my study.

Just where the pump flows back into the water, there’s an opening in the ice. What must it be like to look up through that opening, no wider than a foot or two? The smaller, younger fish draw to it, their mouths hitting the moving, wet surface as if they’re gorging on oxygen. Or maybe it’s nothing as extreme as all that. They’re curious. They want to see what’s up there, on the other side: the sky with its rushing clouds, the sun, the geese that fly overhead in groups of four. They want to see people.

But the older fish seem to think there isn’t any value in looking through that window. The world is cold and deep in these months, and they know energy needs to be conserved. They do what they can to turn away from that aperture, to abide the darkness above their heads. They know how tired they can get. They don’t need to know what they can’t have. They’ve seen light too often only to have it taken away again and again. For what is its purpose if only to show them what they don’t have? So they cradle near the bottom, in a mush of soft leaves, while the young ones keep tossing themselves up at that window above. They say, give us light. We want to see you.

1986 | 
Denise sends the revision to Iris. She tries to busy herself with all the chores she’s put off during these hectic months: putting up bookshelves, rearranging those bookshelves. She thinks about the next book and how she might arrange it. Maybe she’ll finally write the book based on her ex-husband’s colleague, Otto Krupp, the high school math teacher who stabbed the biology teacher forty-one times until she stopped screaming and fighting him off. But when she sits down to write, she can’t look at the screen without leaping up from her seat. Instantly she starts waxing the surface of her desk, and when she’s finished with that, she pulls the books down from one of those bookshelves and starts the tedious but involving work of rearranging them once again.

It’s not that she doesn’t like what she’s written, but the doubts spread. If she’d held on to the book for a few more days, she could have made it a better book. She fears the news isn’t going to be good. She tries to list all the things that Iris might hate about it: Emily’s capacity to be wounded, Emily’s capacity to fall in love with people who manipulate her, betray her, leave her behind. Is Iris even thinking about the book, Denise wonders, or is she thinking about Denise, or more likely, a quality Iris doesn’t like about herself? She wonders whether she’s prepared to write this book one more time—or many more times. She thinks about that question as she beats pillows, does five loads of laundry, anything to resist the impulse to lie down on the couch, stare at the wall, and smoke half a pack.

Then Iris’s phone call comes. The voice on the other end is neutral, supportive, relaxed. You’ve done it, Iris says, with a tiredness that suggests
she’s
been up night after night with the book. She talks about possible edits: the opening, the ending, the passages from Emily’s mother’s perspective. We can’t help but wonder whether Iris’s tiredness is disappointment, or more troubling than that, a hunch she can’t even articulate at her desk, twenty stories above the Manhattan sidewalk, where the people below walk three times faster than they walk in Philadelphia. No, it is far too early to think dark things. Iris might not have her
Good Deeds
, but she certainly has a book she can work with.

2010 | 
In the past month: an earthquake in Haiti, an earthquake in Chile. Three debilitating northeastern snowstorms. A total of sixty inches of snow in Central Park, the snowiest winter on record. What can we look forward to next? Another earthquake or superstorm? The world has always been in some sort of frenzy, but in the past several decades we’ve fucked up the world. We’ve cut down the trees; we’ve burned too much oil; we’ve put ourselves in a position where we’re using more electricity than ever. How many tools are in our hands right now, iPad, iPod, iPhone?

The TV is soundless as I write this morning. I peek out the corner of my eye and go back to my laptop screen. I believe I am waiting for tsunami waves to crush the docks and benches of Hawaii, the little buildings around the harbor. Raw destruction: that’s what we want. A man running down a green stretch of lawn, a smaller man grabbing a tree trunk as water swings his legs up to the surface.

But a wave does not come without warning, as an earthquake does. Neruda: “I awakened when dreamland gave way beneath / my bed.” No, a wave is all height and density. We can’t hope for a weather front to block it. We can’t expect it to take a different course. A wave is absolute. A wave is the voice we can’t hear coming; a wave is the song of fire. We watch helplessly, but greedily, as the unaware still sleep in their beds, the animal cry of the siren filling up the dawn. And then a porch light trips on.

1987 | 
I’m not sure how I’ve ended up working as a technical writer, in an office park in King of Prussia, a full hour west of Cherry Hill, but it’s a relief not to stand in front of several classes of comp students, which is what Denise is doing these days. She’s decided that teaching is preferable to my full-time work week, even though I tell her about taking full advantage of my job’s flextime policy, about slipping down and out the back stairs without telling anyone. The truth is Denise is probably on fire in front of the classroom. I imagine her getting larger: a generous, challenging, tough, wise creature. I imagine her walking back and forth in front of her students, gesturing with her beautiful hands. She’s talking about
Beowulf or Hamlet
or
The School for Scandal.
Certainly she knows her students are in thrall to her. She can see the glint in the eye of one young man with thick dark hair; he always sits in the back, knees spread wide apart, the back of his head pressed against the wall. She makes sure to make eye contact with him; it is good to see that hint of a smirk in the corner of his mouth, before her eyes move on to the next person.