Everything Happens Today (16 page)

White: “can we talk”

Yellow: “Where r u?”

White: “behand u”

Wes turned, and there was Lucy, in tight jeans, a white tank-top and gold sandals, leaning against the jamb of a darkened doorway. Wes knew enough to recognize his immediate reaction as a sort of swoon, or what would be called a swoon in a book.

Wes recalled that swoon now as he neared the stoop, trying to recapture some of its power. Lucy had yet to notice his approach. He pictured himself as a satellite and Lucy as the Earth, because from a distance the only discernible feature of her face was her thick dark eyebrows, like the Great Wall of China. She was in a man's white oxford shirt, untucked and with sleeves rolled up to her elbows, blue jeans and the same sandals she'd worn the night before. She sat with her hands tucked beneath her thighs and her knees almost to her chin. Her blackish hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail that was draped over her right shoulder. The sight of her slim, bare neck unleashed a shockingly graphic flashback of Lucy hovering over him, that black ponytail swinging at the same rhythm as her small, pear-shaped breasts, and Wes remembered that at that moment he had thought that she looked just as Natasha would have looked if she had had sex with Prince André before she lost all her beauty to devastating grief.

Wes blushed at precisely the same moment that Lucy caught sight of him. She seemed sad and worried, which only emphasized her resemblance to Natasha. Wes stood at the bottom of the stoop and waved to her just with his hand. She waved back, and smiled forlornly.

“What's up?”

Lucy shrugged her shoulders in a way that was meaningless to Wes. He couldn't even begin to imagine what she was thinking, what she was doing here, what she might want from him, unless it was more sex, which would not be possible with two adults in the house, even if Wes were able to just set everything else aside, which he doubted he could. She would probably be wanting to talk about what had happened between them the night before, which was only reasonable and right, he supposed, but that, too, seemed like an insufferable chore that they might both easily dispense with. This was a moment, Wes considered, when it would surely be handy to have a Library of Babel to get lost in, and that led him briefly to ponder the notion that no matter what he and Lucy might say to each other this morning, they would have to say it in mutually unintelligible languages, and that when people do seem to understand one another, as he and she had the night before, it was usually a willful illusion. In the meantime, there was no Library of Babel, no infinite mansion, no countless light bulbs to be tallied, not even a room with a hole in the ceiling to be fixed; there was only the house and the street, and Wes would have to get past Lucy to get into the house, and Lucy would have to get past Wes to reach the street.

“My dad's at home. You didn't have to wait outside.”

“I know, I rang. He said you'd be right back, so I figured it would be better to wait for you here.” She spoke so softly that Wes could barely hear her voice.

“You want to go for a walk?”

Lucy shrugged again, and Wes thought that she might be getting ready to cry.

“You know, I've got some things to do in the house. Let's go in.” Wes bounded up the stoop, two steps at a time, keys already in hand, before Lucy had even had a chance to stand. His jeans brushed against her shoulder, making a kind of whispered rasp that to Wes sounded like sandpaper on glass, but by the time he had the door open she was close behind him, like a frightened child waiting in line behind her father in an intimidating crowd. Without turning, Wes walked straight through the front hall into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He leaned in and retrieved the bowl, which he placed on the counter. Lucy stood right beside him, looking into the bowl. The water was pale pink, only slightly more translucent than last night's Bloody Mary.

“What is that?”

“Sweetbreads. Pretty gross, right?”

“No, I love sweetbreads.”

“Really?”

“With chestnuts and port sauce. Yum.”

“You know how to cook them?”

“No, but there's this restaurant in Paris . . . ”

“I'm making them for my mom. I don't know if I can do it right.”

“So long as they're really crispy. They don't have much flavor.”

“‘Kay.”

Lucy watched in silence as Wes drained the bowl, rinsed the sweetbread, then placed it in a small, battered saucepan, covered it with cold water, and put it on the stove to boil. He stood over the range, glaring down intently into the pot as if it had offended him and he were giving it the evil eye, but with Lucy right beside him, they could also have been proud parents watching over their infant child asleep in a basinet.

“You should probably cover that. It won't boil otherwise.”

With the pot covered, it seemed somehow more foolish to stand and stare at it, but Wes tried that anyway, and Lucy joined him. At one moment, she muttered something under her breath that sounded like “Typo.”

“What?”

Lucy just shook her head and went on staring at the pot. Perhaps Wes was just imagining it, but with nothing to go on it still felt that the mood had softened a little, that a moment of crisis had passed, and that the future of the planet did not now depend on what he said next. He tried to think about some of the things they had said to each other the night before, something he knew might be of interest to her, but nothing came to mind. He knew they had spoken to each other at some length, but because of the Bloody Marys and other things, the memories would not come when summoned, so he allowed his mind to relax and wander a little, and it flitted about for a moment or two before alighting on port sauce. That had been an oddly specific thing to say, as if Lucy had been referring to her birth sign or her mother's maiden name, and it had carved out a little niche for itself, like a dog digging in the hot sand to make a cool hole in which to rest. Wes wasn't sure if he had ever tasted port sauce, or if he would recognize it if it were placed before him, and he knew that he had never been to Paris, but both sauce and city were clearly familiar territory to Lucy, something she could refer to without blushing or exaggerating. Wes thought he might ask her about Paris, but he had a feeling that it was something they had talked about the night before and that did not necessarily have positive associations for Lucy, and then he realized that it was because of one of the photos on the wall in Lucy's apartment, in which she had posed with limpid dejection against the railing of an upper level of the Eiffel Tower. That left port sauce.

“Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.”

“Excuse me?”

“What does this mean to you: ‘Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures?'”

“Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures?”

“F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it in
The Great Gatsby
. Any idea what he meant?”

“I've never read
The Great Gatsby
.”

“That doesn't matter. Just free associate. ‘Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.' Top of your head.”

“‘Personality is . . . ' I don't know. It could mean anything, I guess.”

“No it couldn't. Fitzgerald had something really particular in mind when he wrote that. It doesn't have to mean what he thought it meant when he wrote it, or what he said it meant after he wrote it, but it's got to mean something. What does it mean to you?”

“I really don't . . . ” Her voice petered out in helpless bafflement.

“See, like this is what you might say. You might say ‘What does he mean by “successful?”' Or, ‘What does he mean by “gesture?”' Is he saying that a gesture is successful if it conveys precisely the meaning it was intended to convey? Or that any gesture that bridges the gap to the next gesture is successful? Is a gesture an act, an exertion of the will, a posture, or is it merely an attempt to communicate? Maybe our entire conception of individuality is based on how we try to describe ourselves to others?”

There was an oven glove on the counter besides the range, and Lucy now slipped her right hand into it and removed the lid from the saucepan, in which the water was boiling furiously. She returned the lid to the pot and with her left hand turned the gas down to simmer. She pulled the glove from her hand and redeposited it on the countertop.

“Maybe he didn't know what he was talking about. Maybe he just wrote it to make himself sound cleverer than everyone else, and to avoid saying what he really meant. How long does this need to cook?”

“About three minutes, I think.” Wes referred to the cookbook, which was splayed open to the appropriate page. “Three to five minutes.”

Lucy consulted her watch, a surprisingly childlike Swatch with stars on the face and some sort of animal, a cat or a raccoon dressed like a superhero, on the strap. It was an ambiguous gesture that successfully suggested that she was both timing the sweetbread and running out of patience. “But what does ‘three to five minutes' really mean? Is it three minutes that feel like five when you're bored? If there's 120 seconds between three minutes and five minutes, does it actually have 120 different meanings?”

She was making fun of him, and Wes liked that, he liked it a lot. Delia never made fun of him, and rarely made fun of anyone else for that matter, and Wes harbored the suspicion that people who forebear from mocking you secretly hold you in contempt. Of course, he understood that you can also make fun of those whom you hold in the highest contempt, but they are usually politicians or family members. He did not feel for one instant that Lucy held him in any kind of contempt, but the sensation of being caught dead in the crosshairs of someone who may be genuinely fond of you and might actually wish you well was delicious and dizzying, and Wes paused in the midst of whatever it was that he was trying to do to fix her with a frank gaze of admiration. At the same time, he was also aware that smiling at her warmly and gazing at her were ways of masking his failure to come up with a spontaneous, witty retort. Instead, he performed a gesture in her general direction, half-nod, half-bow, that was meant to convey humble recognition of a superior intellect momentarily bested. It was one in a lexicon of semaphoric markers that he had perfected in Delia's company, and had served him well in a variety of delicate situations. They returned to watching the pot boil, and shortly thereafter Lucy looked at her watch and announced the passage of three to five minutes. Wes donned the glove and walked the saucepan to the sink, where he removed the lid and subjected the sweetbread to a stream of cold water from the faucet.

Again, Lucy stood at his side and closely followed his performance. Now, of course, her proximity had an entirely different flavor, but still she was an odd person, the way she hung about him yet forcefully resisted being patronized. Wes was tempted to feel flattered, yet he was so baffled by her that he wasn't sure that that was an appropriate reaction, and now a sort of sense memory returned to him from the evening before, when he had been equally confused by the way she had behaved aggressively at junctures where others might have demurred, and passively just when he had expected her to demonstrate leadership. Again, he could not quite fix a visual recall to it; it remained a sort of vague, free-floating insight, like a familiar quotation from a book you had forgotten that you'd read.

The sweetbread had been transformed by its poaching into a more compact, paler and altogether more rubbery version of itself, the world's ugliest dog toy. The surface had been cooled by the tap water, but Wes could still feel a weak warmth pulsing from within. The slimy, stringy parts—what the cookbook referred to as “connective membranes”—were now rubbery, amorphic appendages, while the unsightly bulges appeared to have been inflated from within, like flawed inner tubes. The whole thing had turned a kind of autopsy gray. Wes cradled the mass in his two upturned palms, holding it low in the sink as if it might try to escape.

“That doesn't look very crispy to me, Wes.”

“It's not cooked yet. I still have to press it and fry it.”

“That sounds like a good idea.”

“Hand me those scissors, please.”

Wes trimmed off the fat and membranes, and placed the sweetbread between two clean plates.

“We need something heavy to weigh them down. Try the fridge.”

“How about a quart of milk?”

“Not heavy enough.”

Wes scrounged through the cupboards, but the pickings were slim. There were a few cans of chickpeas, a bag of French green lentils, and a liter of extra-virgin olive oil from Sicily, which all together might just do the trick, but it would all somehow have to be balanced in a pyramid atop the wobbly organ. There was nothing else would do the trick. Wes glanced around the room helplessly. The dog staggered in, attracted by the smell of boiling offal, and Lucy squatted down and scratched her between the ears.

“Who's this?”

“That's Crispy.”

“How funny. She's really sweet.”

“Come with me. I've got an idea.” Wes led Lucy from the kitchen, down the stairs to the garden apartment, through the French doors and out into the back yard, where his father, in shorts and sagging white tee shirt, looked up from his laptop at the old school desk under the sycamore, smiled and waved.

“Hello again. Found the Wes-man, I see.”

“Yes.”

“Dad, this is Lucy.”

“Lucy and I already met.”

“We're doing some school work together.”

“Wes, I happen to know that Lucy is not in your grade.”

“I'm tutoring her.”

“Okay. What can I do for you two?”

“Nothing. We need some bricks.”

“What for?”

“Oh for whatever. Come on, Lucy.”

Wes pushed past his father and the tree to a heap of old building materials that had once been a brick oven meant for bread and pizzas, or had nearly been until family inertia and lack of interest had brought construction to a halt. The top of the dome had collapsed, and a pile of loose bricks was conveniently at hand through the arched door. Wes brushed away some cobwebs, which clung to his fingers, and reached in.