The Narrow Door (7 page)

We drive up and down the streets. One three-story is almost right for Emily but is immediately discarded for its vinyl siding. Another fails to make the grade because it is too close to busy West Avenue: bad for Lizzie, who likes to push her toys about the yard. We drive past the houses of the Gardens, with their suburban landscaping and surgically edged driveways. We drive past the Port-O-Call, near where Grace Kelly and her family once summered, but that’s not right either: Emily values trees, charm, wood shingles, and tradition—a smart, studied mess. Everything we’ve come across is blocky and practical. More than once we think Emily would never get any writing done in such a place, even though Nan and Gay Talese spend summers here. Maybe Emily would find Ocean Gate—the city based on Ocean City—deadening, stultifying. Maybe the Ocean City that Denise wants to exist doesn’t exist. She wants a perfected version of the perfected imagination of her childhood, just as Emily is a perfected version of Denise, even if she doesn’t think of Emily as having come from her. She doesn’t claim ownership of Emily, Lizzy, or Gene; that would be wrong. It’s as if they’ve already been fully formed, birth to death, outside of time. And that is as close to religion as Denise gets.

We’re headed down Atlantic Avenue now, drifty, overheated, probably a little exhausted from having spent so much time with each other. We’re already talking about coming back another day, when there’s no school prep waiting for us, no front on the horizon—see the swollen blue clouds coming in from the bay side? We’ve left our heavy coats at home. We’re probably wearing sneakers and our feet are numb. Then, when we’re not trying, we see it. On the ocean side, at Fourth Street. An old lifesaving station? Yes, from the late nineteenth century, without a hint of Cape May twee. It’s sided in a pale butter color, with barn-red trim. It suggests rigor, understatement; it can already foresee the Arts and Crafts movement. The house is beloved but not fussed with. There are bare patches on the lawn, bushes withered from the salt air. (Can’t we also imagine Lizzie’s toys strewn about the yard? Soggy bathing suits and towels hanging on the line?) It is the house of someone who has been places, who has lived in New York or San Francisco or London and come back home, not because it was Aunt Barbara, but because there was an extraordinary house here, a house that still pulses with the looking of everyone who’s passed by it, who’s dreamed through its red front door.

We park the car. We walk toward the ocean. We step across Corinthian Avenue, take in the view of the beach, Emily’s beach, where Lizzie digs with her hands through clean gray sand. We turn back. We listen to what she’d hear from her front porch: a talk show on the TV, KYW Radio: All News All the Time. A high school kid tossing newspapers onto yards. We don’t say very much. We look up at the house where Gene will betray Emily. We stand there long enough until a face appears at the second-floor window of the house next door. If we could translate that expression into a sentence, it would say,
who are these aliens and what do they want?
Then we get back in the car.

2010 | 
I sit closer to the stereo speakers, as if by leaning into them I’ll hear better. I click past the first track to the second. It is a winter day. I wait for the lyrics as the song builds, grows into itself. The song is a tree now; it shakes when birds pass through it. The song gets a little calmer when the wind stops blowing its branches. The song is for Denise—or at least about Denise, according to DyAnne, Denise’s other best friend. DyAnne has sent me the CD, and I stare at the guts of the padded envelope I’ve torn apart, hastily. Not so many years ago, the writer and singer of the song—DyAnne’s fellow band member, and is it brother?—dated Denise. A rock musician dating Denise? Why didn’t she ever tell me? Did she think I might not have been supportive of that, her taking up with a fellow artist? I had been privy to so much, to the details of sexual encounters and fallings out with close friends, and she’s an enigma all over again. I never knew her. Do I feel just a flash of betrayal? Well, yes.

M walks into the living room carrying an armful of cut willows. “Listen,” I say, gesturing at the stereo speaker. “Hear that?”

“What’s that?” M says.

I tell him the band is Smash Palace. I tell him it’s the song that was written for Denise, about Denise.

M stops his hunt for the suitable vase: pale green or gray? He’s looking into the room, eyes fixed on nothing, as entranced as I am. He’s taking the song in, or perhaps he’s been thinking about that poem he’s been meaning to write. He’s been as drifty as I am lately, and I can’t seem to pin him down.

“Sit,” I say, patting the empty spot beside me on the sofa. “You have to hear it from the beginning, the whole song.”

He puts the willow branches down, sits. He stretches out his long legs on the coffee table. “How are the shingles?” he says, pulling up my T-shirt.

“They say hello,” I say. “Thank you for thinking of us.” And I pull my shirt back down.

We listen. We press our knees into each other’s knees. I feel the warmth of his skin coming into my skin. The tree of the song is shaking again. We both look at each other, brows tightening, mouths loose. “He loved her,” we both say in the same voice.

1985 | 
B, the English professor, asks Denise out on a date. B takes her out on another. He takes her to nice restaurants, he buys her beautiful things. He talks of taking her to Paris, which he’s sure she’ll fall in love with. Now that she’s no longer his student, he can tell her everything, what it’s like to see that face, that shining face, not only beaming out toward the others in the seminar room, but toward him, whenever he tried to challenge her in class. She wouldn’t back down, unlike the others, who were too afraid or polite, and that was beautiful to him. The ferocity of intelligence that deepened the brown in her eyes! Not to mention the sweet and sexy husk in her voice.

But his face turned toward her? She’s not quite having it, not quite. The lavishness of attention is all a little much. She thinks it wants her essence, even though he tells her he wants nothing but to be with her, to talk about books with her. She’d prefer some mystery, some elusiveness, and—does she admit it to herself?—some hardness and indifference. A prize she has to win. She is not anyone’s prize, no gilded starling high on a shelf. Over and over she tells me, he’s not the one, he’s not the one. She is waving her hands around; we are walking down Walnut Street, heading toward Rittenhouse Square. I’m trying to nod, I’m trying to listen, to be of support to my friend. Maybe if I point out that baby in her father’s arms, she’ll be shaken out of herself and her blood pressure will go back down again. But on and on she goes, as if by resistance she becomes stronger, larger. Resistance straightens her back; resistance lifts up her chin, brings a smolder to her mouth and chin and eyes.

Months later, on a peaceful Wednesday night in spring, Denise tells me she is marrying B.

She tells it to me again, as if by doing so, she’ll vaporize the hundreds of hours I’ve spent listening to her saying no, no, no.

My face might color. Certainly the space just above my nose is so hot that it must be the color of raw meat. How could she not have betrayed a hint of their relationship during all those three-hour phone calls? I’d understand it better if she’d wandered away from me. The secrecy of it feels a little like lying. And this has been going on for, what—six months? I thought she wanted to be single.

She structures her explanation with the logic of a trial lawyer, but she’s not working too hard. She doesn’t expect me to be a hostile judge. After all, I haven’t yet lost my temper or grimaced or frowned. Would I ever lose my temper with her? Probably not, and maybe this frustrates her. This is what she wants of me, though she can’t quite say it. How would she tell a friend to get mad at her? I know she’s not getting married simply to raise my hackles, that would be flat-out absurd, but maybe my calm, accepting face is not the face she wants right now. If a friend is simply someone who says yes, everything you do is all right, well, maybe that’s not really a friend.

But maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I could also say that a real friend loves his friend enough to let her wander. He lets her drive off the road, down into the muck, if she has to. He does not push or possess. He is not bossy or parental. He waits for that friend to come back to herself, to him. He’s standing at the top of the stairs for her, with a neutral, expectant face. He takes her hand when she extends it up to him.

Denise: a woman whose heroines are Emma and Cathy. She invited me to build a fortress with her. Here I was, hefting stone columns on my back, and now she’s telling me there’s never been a house to build?

Maybe it is a relief that the dream of Famous Writer is over. Goddamn Famous Writer and everything he represented: East Hampton, literary ambition, dinners with the rich, always running around, always giving readings, sleeping with acolytes and admirers. She must have come to some revelation in Vermont. She must have seen it in his hectic face: he wasn’t a happy man. If anything, his work was a bear that was hunting him down. It lurked behind trees, it lurked outside barns in the form of a woman. It made him dial a number in the middle of the night, and hang up the phone before that same woman on the other end answered, just so he’d feel stirred up enough to write another page, the page of the book that doesn’t yet exist, even though he’s been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. I cannot blame Denise for wanting to replace him with a healthier ideal. At least with B, she’ll have a life of steadiness, calm, domestic routine. She’ll be able to write. Teach, but she won’t have to teach too much. Spend relaxed time with Austen, who deserves health care, a good room, good clothes, the best education.

Or maybe we just need to knock down those old ideals before they knock us down first.

2010 | 
I’m lying on the living room sofa, watching a video of Atlantic City’s Sands Hotel on YouTube. The view is from the boardwalk. It’s going to be blown up in minutes. The demolition firm has made a party of it, with fireworks, a crowd of thousands, and the soundtrack of Frank Sinatra crooning “Bye, Bye Baby.” Some clever PR person was smart to pick Sinatra, given the fact that he was regular here. Word had it that management actually knocked through the walls of several side-by-side rooms to save him the trouble of walking down the hall. The twenty-year-old hotel hosted his final concerts, in which he reportedly wasn’t in top form. Still, he sang with enough conviction to make up for the exhaustion in his voice, those occasional moments when his pitch faltered or he mumbled through a phrase.

My rash hasn’t gone away after a week. In fact, it’s gotten worse. There’s a hot-pins-and-needles feeling around my ribs and a general malaise that’s preventing me from doing anything of meaning or purpose. I know my body might be telling me that it’s had enough of death, of trying to float on its chilly surface, and maybe there’s a relief in saying,
no, I’m not going to resist you any longer. I’m giving in to you, Force that wants to take down my body.
Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned from obedience, submission. All the stamina I’d poured into meeting my classes, meeting my appointments, meeting my deadlines—who did I think I was? Did I think I was better at holding back sorrow than anyone else who had lost anybody? Mourning as some kind of graduate school assignment where some got better grades than others? Have I been thinking of myself as Superman, walking into the world with my cape, without even knowing I was wearing a cape? If I were looking at myself, wouldn’t I find that person a little pitiable, ridiculous?

Still, it is hard to give in, to
relax
, as they say, when your tolerance for boredom is low. Wet snow clumps on the lilac outside the window. I don’t have to be anywhere for days, having already canceled my classes for the next week and five college readings in Florida—what a time to be sick. I let my mind drift in the heat put out by the furnace, the crackling wood stove, the hazy malaise of shingles. How am I going to get anything done when I’m frittering away the hours, speeding from one YouTube video to the next?

The crowd presses toward the boardwalk railing. They watch the emptied tower shoot plumes from the roof, before the whole structure shimmers in a bilious green light. It’s the definition of spectacle: the crowd hoots and hollers; adults and children hold cell phones and cameras up to the rockets. Maybe they know the building better than I do. Maybe at least some of them have wandered its hallways and found it wanting. Truth be told it was the hardest casino to like. Always a little doomed, dark, never flashy or distinctive enough. The building could have been anywhere: Cincinnati, Bakersfield, Tampa, Anaheim, Phoenix. It would be foolish to think it was anything to mourn. I remind myself of that when someone in the crowd cries, with a lusty growl, “Take it down, baby. Take the whole ugly thing down.”

But the light changes after the fourth minute of the video. Its brilliance only ends up illuminating the space where the windows once were, and the rocketing fireworks feel desperate—ecstasy can only be sustained for so long. And can I be the only one who is thinking of war now? We are watching the ongoing, meaningless war (Iraq, Afghanistan) that the culture turns into entertainment.

Then everything stops, stills. A puff of smoke shoots up from the roof. The crowd is hungry. Three hundred fifty pounds of dynamite—what else should we expect of ourselves?

And just like that it’s gone. But the way it comes down? It comes down as a person would, balancing there for a minute, stricken. It takes a twist to the left, as if a leg had given way, and falls on its back. I take it personally.

1986 | 
The phone rings in my parents’ kitchen on a Thursday morning, sometime in the middle of March. My hello might not be in my actual voice, the voice I use to talk to my parents, but a little deeper, more serious. I don’t know why I talk to Denise in that huskier register, and I don’t spend any time questioning it. Denise will be done teaching for the week after one o’clock, and maybe we will take a drive to Avalon and Cape May.