Dive From Clausen's Pier (31 page)

“Are you OK?” Lane said, looking at me with concern.

I took a swallow of wine and nodded.

Now everyone was looking at me, Simon with his head tilted to the side, his eyes narrowed behind the lenses of his glasses.

“I guess I’m kind of tired,” I said.

“You know,” Alice said, “this whole time I’ve been sitting here thinking how much I like your shirt, but, like, stupidly not saying it. It’s really cool.”

I was wearing a long-sleeved red T-shirt to which I’d added some embellishments about a year ago, one weekend when I was bored: red-and-gold braid around the neck and down the front, alongside which I’d sewn a brass button every couple of inches. I’d even put a three-inch slash of braid across where each of my hipbones hit, to suggest little pockets. “Thanks,” I said.

“It reminds me of my grandmother,” she added.

“Alice,” Simon exclaimed.

“It’s a compliment,” she said. “My grandmother has a lot of style.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Seriously, it’s like the jacket of one of her Adolpho suits, but with an ironic spin. It’s very postmodern and fin de siècle—Adolpho overtaken by the Gap.”

I looked around for someone who thought this was as silly as I did, then realized that the person I wanted to exchange a glance with—the person I was really looking for—was Kilroy.

I stood up and carried my glass to the sink.

“Where are you going?” Simon said.

I turned and saw everyone looking at me, Simon with his face still a little pink from before, Greg dark-haired and kind and half a step behind everyone else, Alice stylish in a polyester blouse and heavy black eyeliner, Lane quiet and watchful. Who were these people? Why was I with them? “Upstairs,” I said. “I have to make a phone call.”

On the third floor, I flopped onto the futon. I wanted to call him and didn’t, wanted him to call me and wanted him to vanish. I looked around the alcove, illuminated by a single ugly lamp, fake brass with a yellowing shade. It was empty of everything, this little space: myself and all my life, which I’d taken to Kilroy’s and hung carefully on the walls in the exact places where the pictures weren’t.

From the kitchen I could hear a faint murmur of voices, then the rise of laughter. I went out to the landing for the phone and carried it back to the futon. Halfway through dialing, I pressed the disconnect button. I sat there holding the phone on my lap, and then, without really thinking about it, I dialed Jamie in Madison.

When she heard my voice there was a long silence, and then she said, “How are you,” in such a way that I couldn’t possibly misinterpret it as a question. She laughed a short, cold laugh.

“I’m sorry, Jamie,” I said, aware that I was echoing myself, echoing what I’d said to Mike: I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. “I should’ve called earlier. I should have.”

She breathed in deeply, and I heard her let it out again, loud, like a sigh. I knew somehow that she was in her kitchen, the day’s dishes neatly arranged in the drainboard by the sink, just a single light on, hanging low over the speckled linoleum table.

“Jamie,” I said.

“What.”

“Please try to understand. I had to leave.”

She was silent for a while, and I imagined how she must look, her light hair framing her face, her clear green eyes. “I understand that,” she
said at last. “I didn’t at first, but now I do. But that was almost
two months
ago. Every day I wonder what it is about me that makes you hate me.” She began to cry, and as I listened I felt huge and monstrous and disconnected from her: her tears had exactly no effect on my heart. They filled me with pity, but it was a cold, cerebral pity—it was pity for myself, not for Jamie.

“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t hate you, Jamie. It’s just—”

“You called Mike,” she sobbed. “You called him twice.”

“I know.”

I heard her footsteps and then the muffled sound of her blowing her nose.

“Jamie?” I twisted the phone cord tight around my finger and then untwisted it again, my skin indented red like a barber pole.

“What?”

“Can I—can I ask how you are, what you’ve been doing?”

She blew her nose again. “Well, to give you an example, last Saturday night I played Parcheesi with my parents and Lynn. Oh, and get this—we broke for popcorn after game three.”

I had a vivid image of the four of them, Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher on opposite sides of the wobbly card table in their pine-paneled family room, Jamie and Lynn between them. Mrs. Fletcher vague in a blouse and sweater, needing reminding every time it was her turn. Mr. Fletcher barely there, Jamie wishing she weren’t. And Lynn—Lynn with too much eye makeup on, glancing at the clock. I thought of her at the Alley in that short, tight skirt, and I wondered how
I
could have been giving
her
advice: I, whose life was a mess. “How is Lynn?” I said after a moment.

“Ridiculous. She and Mom are driving me nuts about each other. She
has
to move out.”

“Too bad—if I’d thought of it sooner she could have sublet my place.”

There was a silence, and then Jamie said, “You
sublet
your
apartment?”

I felt a spike of fear. Didn’t she know? How could she not know, when everyone in Madison knew everything about everyone else?

“Well?”

“Yeah, I did.”

There was a thunk, and then nothing, silence, just the whoosh of all the space between us.

“Jamie.” I waited and then I said it again, and again—“Jamie. Jamie?
Jamie?”
Then I understood: she’d set the phone down and walked
away. I could picture it, Jamie standing across the kitchen staring at the receiver, enraged and teary. “Jamie!” I shouted, but although I stayed on the line for several more minutes, saying her name over and over again, she never came back.

I hung up and carried the phone back out to the hall. At the little window in the stairwell, I pushed the curtain to the side and peered out. The brownstones behind us were patchily lit: a low window here, a high one there, then dark, dark, and a whole blazing four stories. Someone else might have looked for a message in the pattern of illumination, but I just stood there staring, filled with a sense of myself as occupying the smallest of places in the world.

C
HAPTER
23

Kilroy came over the next morning. I was alone in the house drinking coffee, and when I answered the door I was shocked to see him: standing in the cold, bright light, barely more than a silhouette outside the dark, recessed entryway. He had his hands on his hips, a gruff, irritated look on his face: he was there on sufferance, under his own orders.

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

“Do you want to come in?”

“Yeah, I do.”

In the kitchen I poured him a cup of coffee, then sat down. After a while he sat, too, unshaven, dressed in his jeans and a torn gray sweatshirt and his leather jacket, which he didn’t take off. It was ten-twenty; he must have decided not to go to work.

“That Kilroy,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee. “What is it with him?”

I understood that he wasn’t going to apologize any more directly, and it was all I could do not to laugh.

“What?”

I shook my head.

He lifted his mug and looked at me across the top of it. “So what’d you do last night?”

“You mean after I walked to the Lower East Side and back?”

A faint hint of surprise passed over his face and disappeared. “Yeah.”

“I sat around drinking wine with Simon and everyone. Alice said my shirt was very postmodern and fin de siècle—Adolpho overtaken by the Gap.”

Kilroy shook his head. “Oh, the frailties of youth.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s like that woman in the bookstore a couple weeks ago. ‘The complacence of extreme beauty.’ Talking for the sake of how it sounds, not what you really want to say.”

“And what do you really want to say?”

He held my glance for a moment, then looked away.

I carried my coffee to the sink and poured it into the right-hand basin, which was jammed with chipped mugs holding the milky remains of my housemates’ coffee. Neither of the two basins was bigger than a mixing bowl, and they were both always crowded, no room to wash anything. In the left-hand basin, last night’s glasses gave off a winey smell. I moved the mugs over, then centered a rubber stopper on the drain in the right-hand basin, turned on the hot water, and added a squirt of dishwashing liquid.

“What’s the shirt?” Kilroy said.

He’d come to stand beside me, his back against the counter, one leg crossed over the other. He sipped from his coffee and stared at me.

“The shirt?”

“The fin de siècle one.”

“Don’t you mean ‘end of century’? What happened to your rule about foreign phrases?”

He smiled and shook his head. “Fin de siècle has to be fin de siècle because it connotes the depravity of eighteen-nineties Paris, the disgust.”

I turned the water off and started washing the mugs.

“I was a history major,” he added. “At Princeton. Have I ever told you before that I went to Princeton? I graduated magna, not to brag. I had a different roommate each year, but the one thing they had in common was they were all Southerners with drinking problems. There was a lot of throwing up, and I spent my weekends elsewhere. Oh, and many years later I happened to run into one of them at a movie theater, and he said to me, ‘Kilroy, you son of a bitch, are you still alive?’ ” Kilroy stared at me. “What do you think of that?”

My heart pounded. He set his cup on the counter, reached for me, and pulled me close. “You know me
better
than that kind of information,” he said very softly, his mouth at my ear. “You may not think so, but you do.” He kissed me and I turned my face away, angry and then suddenly
wanting to kiss him, and then angry that I wanted to kiss him. I pushed away from him and went and sat at the table.

“I called Jamie last night,” I said. “For the first time. She didn’t know I’d sublet my apartment. When I mentioned it, she did something weird—instead of hanging up on me she just put the phone down and walked away.” I stared at him, no idea why I’d said this rather than something else:
What do you want? What the fuck are you doing in my life?

“She froze,” he said.

“Froze?” I was surprised he’d responded.

He shrugged. “Sure. She couldn’t do anything else. She couldn’t say anything, she couldn’t hang up on you, it was all she could do.”

“Why couldn’t she hang up on me?”

“Because she loves you,” he said. “As do I, though in a somewhat different way.”

A light sweat gathered on my forehead and upper lip. “You love me?”

He nodded solemnly. “Of course I love you.” His face was bland, his voice matter-of-fact. “Don’t you know? I’m head over heels. I’m knocked for a loop.”

He loved me, and it seemed that was all I had been wanting to know, all I’d been needing to hear to take the next step. I asked for a key to his apartment, and I took to being there when he returned from work, flipping through a magazine, drinking a beer, eager for a fuck.
Very
eager for a fuck—the more I had, the more I wanted. Sex was our medium, as enlightening as a long exchange of information.

Because what, really, did I need to know? I could know names and places and dates, or I could know that he liked to have his nipples teased by my tongue, that he read the newspaper from back to front, that there was a place on the outside of his left calf with no hair, as if someone had taken a finger and wiped it away.

My days were full of free time, but this didn’t change me so much as it changed time itself: mornings were busy with the walk back to the brownstone, a long shower and the decision over what to wear. I had breakfast at noon, coffee that I made in the empty brownstone kitchen along with, every single day, a soft-boiled egg on buttered toast, the egg yolk hot and runny, salt-enhanced, the white cooked just enough to hold a shape in my mouth. In the afternoons I barely had long enough for the little tasks and projects I assigned myself: move my car, do laundry, take a walk or even a subway ride to a part of the city I had yet to see. For company I had my
thoughts, my fascination with how it felt to be loved so cryptically, to let love stand in for so much. After all, love with Mike had been completely different: a fast plunge, the two of us falling together. We were in love with each other, in love with love. We waited for each other outside of classrooms, walked with our sides pressed together, sat as close as we could, his arm around me and his fingertips just inside the waistband of my pants. We talked on the phone for hours every night, fell asleep with pictures of each other under our pillows. We were fourteen, granted, but it was more than that: it was that Mike was wide open, without corners, while Kilroy was a maze I was wandering through, a place full of dead-ends that I occasionally stumbled into and then had to find my way out of.

I knew they were there. I knew it was just a matter of time before I encountered one again.

Thanksgiving morning. Wrapped in a terrycloth bathrobe, Kilroy dumped flour directly onto the kitchen counter and began pinching small cubes of cold butter into it, his hands snapping open and closed like someone showing how someone else did nothing but talk talk talk. We were taking a dessert and a vegetable to the brownstone later that day; though he’d lobbied for turkey sandwiches at his place, I’d argued that Thanksgiving wasn’t just about turkey, it was also about a big crowd of people, and eventually he’d given in.

Yawning and still muddled with sleep, I watched from the doorway while he worked. I took a sip of the coffee he’d made before waking me and said, “Some people would use a bowl.”

He looked over his shoulder and smiled. “Ah, but they’d be missing out. This is far superior.”

“It looks far messier.”

“It’s the French way,” he said. “The French have a genius for mess.” With the back of his floury hand he brushed some hair away from his face. “Can you get me some ice water?”

I set my mug on the counter and got a glass. I filled it with ice, added water, and then stirred the cubes around until my finger was cold. Setting the glass down next to him, I said, “How do you know the French way?” I half pictured him in some farmhouse kitchen with a dark-eyed mademoiselle showing him what to do, but I couldn’t really believe it.