And Again (11 page)

“But doesn’t it feel a little weird? With that on the wall in front of a crowd of people?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But no one really sees me when they look at it. Here.” I took his arm and pulled him in front of it. “What did you think when you first saw it?”

“I’m not sure if I want to tell you,” Sam replied, and his expression made me laugh.

“I’m not thirteen anymore. I can legally drink and everything. Please, humor me.”

“I guess I thought she looks lonely,” Sam said. “I wondered what kind of idiot would leave a girl like that alone in his bed.”

I had to look away from him for a moment then, until the sear of heat across my cheeks subsided. “See, it’s not me. I’m not lonely.”

“No?”

“Well, you’re here, aren’t you?” I said, and I wanted to be thirteen again, so the younger version of me would know that Sam
Foster would one day look at me the way he used to look at Lucy. To reassure her that her loneliness wouldn’t last forever.

Sam saw all of my tattoos that night. The dark lines of poetry on my ribs, the oleander blooms sliding down my thigh. The roman numerals on the insides of my wrists. The marks I had amassed in the years since I realized that it was easier to love my body as a collection of stories than as something sacred and holy, the body my mother had given me. It was easier to make myself into something I recognized, something I could love.

He asked about them, of course, about what their stories were. Men always asked. But he was easy to distract in the inky darkness of his bedroom. It took him three years, finally, to get all the answers. And then in the fourth year I was wiped clean, and there was no point to the questions anymore.

I’ve never liked Chicago much. It’s a city just big enough for its residents to have an overinflated sense of their own importance, while still harboring a deep inferiority complex because they don’t live in New York or L.A. That, and the Democrats have such a stranglehold on the political system that there hasn’t been a clean election here in the past hundred years. It’s the perfect example of liberal hypocrisy; the bleeding hearts and the unions and the welfare-dependent masses have had their way for so long that they’ve created a bankrupt clot of buildings surrounded by war zones on two sides, and one side by water. It’s a microcosm of corruption and institutional failures. Everything from its school system to its police force to its public transit system is either irreparably broken or chronically useless. And everyone who lives here thinks the deep-dish pizza makes up for it.

My home is a house in upstate Wisconsin, in my district, where the people also might have a chip on their collective shoulder, but they work damn hard to make up for it. Unfortunately, somewhere in the stack of paperwork I signed before the transfer there was an edict requiring me to remain within an hour of Northwestern Memorial for the next few months, so for the time being Beth and I have rented a condo on Lake Shore Drive.

I’m sprung from the hospital on a Friday afternoon, and that’s where we go. Beth drives, because I technically don’t have a driver’s license yet. It’s something you don’t really think about when you get a new body, that you’ve never passed a driver’s test and not even the photo on your license is accurate anymore. I don’t know if I’m even capable of driving a car. After all, I just learned to walk again.

Beth waves to the parking attendant as she pulls our gray Audi into our parking space. She’s been living here alone for the past few months while I’ve been in the hospital. This is her turf. It’s an off-putting sensation, like I’m an intruder in my own house. But considering how much time I’d spend in D.C. every year, Beth is well accustomed to living alone by now. It was one of the reasons she stopped wearing her wedding ring. One of the reasons there were divorce papers waiting on my desk only a week before my diagnosis.

Beth leads me into the building and unlocks our door with a silver key, just one of many on her key ring. I can’t remember where my keys are. It turns out getting released from the hospital isn’t much like getting out of prison in the movies; they don’t hand you a plastic bag full of the clothing and possessions you had on when you went in. No, I only signed some paperwork in my shaky scrawl and was wheeled out to the curb like a helpless invalid. Hospital policy, of course.

The apartment we rented is modern and fully furnished, all chrome and glass and well-lacquered wood. It makes me homesick for the high vaulted ceilings of our remodeled farmhouse in Wisconsin, or even the antique faux-European accents of my apartment in D.C. This is yuppie artifice, as inauthentic and gaudy as a stretch limo. But Beth doesn’t seem to mind. She cares less about the soul of a place than I do; all she cares about is the price.

The apartment is so far-flung from the house I grew up in, it’s almost comical. Simply the fact that it’s two stories already makes it a step up. My family lived in a squat little ranch house on sixteen acres of farmland just outside of Athens, Wisconsin. My early life was flat and gray, speckled with mud, sweat stained. Everything was like that, the house, the land, my family. Everything smelled like hay and manure and empty air. The idea of living in an apartment like this was laughable; of being a congressman, unthinkable.

I was never the smartest guy in my high school. Or, if I was, I worked too hard on the farm to ever spend much time studying,
so my grades never reflected it. But I knew how to talk to people. I learned it early, after my mother died and my father took off, leaving my grandmother to take care of me and the farm by herself. I was suddenly the one to haggle with our equipment suppliers and barter with our grain distributors and fight with the mortgage lenders. I learned fast, how to get what I wanted. It was a survival skill back then, as important as knowing how to build a fire or find water in a desert. I loved my grandmother, probably more than anyone else in the world, but had it been up to her alone, we would have lost the farm in that first year. It was my responsibility to step in, to keep everything running as it had. And no matter what I did, it wasn’t ever enough.

In the end, we had to get help from the federal government to keep from losing everything. That was the worst part of those years, the food stamps, the subsidies, the government relief for small farmers. I hated those checks, hated my free lunches at school. Those were indignities my grandmother and I should not have had to bear, not in America. It should have been enough that we worked, and worked hard.

Of course, the Wisconsin where I live with Beth and David Jr. is very different from the Wisconsin where I grew up. Beth was New York City through-and-through when we met, when I was a freshman congressman and she was a budding reporter for one of those trendy Internet news sites. I had to all but crowbar Beth out of the Big Apple when we married, and she’s never been quite at peace with Wisconsin, even though we live in a veritable estate, even though she plays tennis at our country club every weekend, even though David Jr. is attending the best private school in the whole damn state.

“How’s David Jr.?” I ask.

“Well, he got into an argument with one of the other boys at school the other day,” Beth says, as she pulls a bottle of Perrier out of the fridge with perfectly manicured hands. “I guess he saw some cartoon of you on the Internet or something.”

“An argument or a fight?”

“His teacher called it an argument. She says he’s been volatile lately, and it was only a matter of time. But don’t worry, I’ll handle it.”

“No,” I say, leaning on the counter to give my legs a break. “Tell him I’ll Skype him this weekend and we’ll talk about it. I don’t want him getting pushed around.”

“Sweetie, I’ve got it,” she says, her perfect rows of teeth showing under red lips. “It’s kid stuff. Don’t bother with it.”

Time was, I would’ve been more than happy to let Beth deal with our son’s problems. After all, how could they compare with what I had to deal with at his age? I had work on the farm and a part-time job and a grandmother who would forget to eat if I let her stare out the window for too long. It’s been a concern of mine for a while that my son has it too easy, the child of a congressman with his private school and our big house and the best of everything. How on earth will he be prepared for the world with that kind of an upbringing? It’s been easy to blame Beth for coddling him, for giving him the sort of posh lifestyle she grew up in. But now I think it’s my own failing, not being around enough to insure he’s got his feet on the ground. It’s just one of the things I intend to address now, with my second chance.

“No,” I say to Beth. “No, I’ll handle it. I’ll make it a priority.”

“All right,” she says, her mouth quirking up at the corners, as if she is afraid to smile too wide just yet, when my reform is still so new. I’m beginning to feel like everything is a test, to show her proof that I am truly changed, that she made the right decision in tearing up the divorce papers and taking care of me when I got sick. She rounds the counter to me, smoothing out the shirt I’m wearing, her hands brushing down my chest. “I’m happy you’re home, you know,” she says, sniffing a bit, batting at the corner of her eye with her fingertips.

This is such an uncharacteristic turn from my wife, such a strange show of emotion for a woman who is so deft and elegant and remote, that I’m caught off guard. Even more so when she takes my face in her hands and kisses me, full-on, in a way I remember
from when we were first together. It takes me a moment to get the hang of it, this suddenly fervent kissing thing, because I would have been out of practice kissing Beth even if I wasn’t in an entirely new body. Just when I’m really finding my footing, she pops the button on my jeans with her fingers, and my fortress of concentration collapses in on itself as if it were made of toothpicks. She slips her hand into my boxers and it feels soft and cool and my hips lurch forward of their own accord.

The disaster begins slowly, as disasters usually do. I begin to think of Hannah. Hannah, on the roof, pressing her mouth to mine. And I have to stop it, to stop all of it, because I can’t allow myself to think of some girl while my wife has her hand down my pants. I try and think of Beth, perfect Beth, with her bubblegum pink mouth and perfect breasts and blonde hair. But it is like a switch has been flipped inside of me, everything shutting down from the inside out. I grab her wrist.

“What’s wrong?” she asks into my throat.

“I can’t right now, baby,” I say, extracting her hand.

“Can’t? Oh . . .” She drops a step back. “Is it something about . . . your SUB?” She says it like it’s some sort of fungus. Not the thing that’s saved my life.

“I have work to do, Beth,” I snap. “I can’t just drop everything in the middle of the day.”

“Oh. Of course,” she says, running a finger below her bottom lip, fixing the line of lipstick there. Perfect, my wife. “I just thought . . . Never mind.”

I let out a breath, wishing I had something to offer her. “Everything is still so new,” I say, because it’s all I can muster. She nods, though I can tell her impassive veneer is back in place, impenetrable. It doesn’t matter what I say now. “I’m gonna call the office. Are you making dinner or are we ordering in?”

“I was going to make us a couple of steaks for your first night of freedom,” she says. The idea of red meat conjures images of my other body, lying in a refrigerated drawer somewhere. I start to feel sick.

“Not steak,” I say. “Something else. Pasta, maybe?”

She nods, looking at me like she’s sprung me from a psych ward instead of the hospital. I feel that way, a little. Shifty, like something disastrous is about to happen. I have to prove to Beth, somehow, that I’ve turned a corner. I have to forget what happened on that rooftop.

“All right. Whatever you want,” she replies, as if nothing in the world has ever mattered less to her. I want to linger, want to try to explain how everything feels now, how everything in my mind seems to be wired wrong. But Beth doesn’t want explanations. She wants her husband back, and there’s nothing I can do to convince her that things will go back to normal. That things will be better than normal. I go in the bedroom to call Jackson. He picks up on the first ring and begins talking without any introduction.

“I want you to do a phone interview with the
New York Times
,” he says. “Prove to your constituents that you’ve still got your wits about you. They’re skewering you over the whole rehab story.”

“Fine, what else?” I walk the perimeter of the room as I talk, opening drawers and flipping lamps on and off. My hotel room procedure, checking everything out. But this isn’t a hotel, this is home for the better part of the next year. I slide open the closet. It’s mostly full of casual clothes. A dozen polos and my favorite Yale sweatshirts. Jeans and track pants and basketball shorts. There are a couple of suits hanging toward the back, and I pull out one of the jackets, holding the hanger up to my shoulders and looking at myself in the mirror.

“Burt Leeland wants to get on a call sometime next week,” Jackson says, as I study my reflection. The jacket dwarfs me. I toss it onto the bed as I head through the master suite to the hallway. The gym is two doors down, with its mirrored wall and its black and white exercise machines. I run my palm over the rows of hand weights sitting on their rack against one wall.

“Think it’s possible he’s calling in that favor already?” I ask, lifting a twenty-pound barbell off the rack and pumping my bicep
experimentally against the resistance. It feels like it weighs about triple what it should. I set it down with a clang of metal on metal.

“I think it’s doubtful that he’s calling to wish you a speedy recovery,” Jackson replies, and I know he’s right. Burt is the CEO of S&J Holdings, a conglomerate that deals in everything from airplane parts to media outlets to pharmaceuticals. And he was the first call after my diagnosis because he’s the only man I know with enough pull to break a double blind in an FDA trial. Or rig a lottery, in my case.

“Tell him I can speak to him at his earliest convenience,” I say, sitting down on one of the leg machines and pumping out a few reps on a sickeningly light weight. My muscles sear inside me as I count in my head. The weight crashes back into place on my last rep, and I sag a little in the hard cushion of the seat. I have such a long way to go. “I guess I was never going to be able to avoid paying the piper, huh?”