Lightning People (3 page)

She loved Joseph. More than anyone. But the unconditional “ever” might have been a bit of a romantic leap. In truth, there were other men that filled up the dark island in her head reserved for those names and faces she had once felt certain she had loved. Del had a habit of returning to that island, of sitting with those ghosts for concentrated minutes, desperate to resurrect details—accents, dinners, states of circumcision, arguments, intimate conversations that felt like walking over a cliff together—that made remembering
them worth the price. What was the value of holding on to someone if she couldn't hold them again later in her mind? As she walked quietly through the apartment on the night of her wedding, slightly drunk on the combination of whiskey and wine, she allowed herself to remember the first time love had inhabited human form to unbalance the contents of her heart.

Dash Winslow had been as striking and ridiculous as his name implied. Dash had seduced Del at Columbia on the grass lawn next to Rodin's
Thinker
simply by standing before her one afternoon, cutting a shadow over her
Anatomy of the Human Brain
reader. He had long red hair that descended into brown as it reached his elbows and a thick red beard that brought out disturbing green eyes, which made him look possessed by a marauding homicidal Viking. What he was possessed by, in their senior year at Columbia, was a family who had the audacity to name their second son Dashiell, owned a huge chunk of commercial real estate on Long Island, and bankrolled an entire hall in the Islamic wing at the Met. Thus Dash's ripped heavy-metal T-shirts and piled-on silver chains and even the yellow daisy that he tucked thoughtfully behind his ear could easily be written off as an attempt at low-grade rebellion while attending a middlebrow Ivy. But Dash really was possessed. His pupils held a dilation that could only be seen in others during the peaks of an intense acid trip. He brought Del back to his off-campus apartment and fucked her three times in two hours. He spread a bedsheet out on his balcony and, naked, they watched the sun cinder into New Jersey and the homeless build their tents in Riverside Park. They drank whiskey and smoked pot as they leaned against each other. That was the night she first fell in love with single malt scotch, a lasting indulgence, and also with him.

Like someone who came from extreme privilege and unlike someone tied to the responsibilities it obligates, Dash carried a reckless confidence that she had never seen in a man her age. She was used to settling for the occasional half-hearted orgasm with one of the cerebral loners who didn't have her work-study obligations, waking up at seven on weekend mornings to pack bags of fetal pigs in the biology freezer, which she favored to churning out collated
color copies for the junior faculty. Dash claimed her as his girlfriend right away, picking her up most nights in front of her dorm on 114
^th
Street, placing his gray wool fedora over her head, and taking her to underground clubs on the Lower East Side that he had frequented since he was thirteen. She couldn't believe this side of New York had always existed without her ever tapping into it. Somehow, like most Columbia undergrads, Del had been left stranded inside the wrought iron of the Upper West Side, living on the cool sophistication of subway rides down to Soho for student-teacher cocktail parties in renovated lofts with Abstract Expressionist prints the color of urine on the bathroom walls.

Dash was naked so often when they were together, the red curls covering his nipples and matching the flaming tuft above his hooked erect penis, a part of her felt detached when running into him on campus and seeing him dressed in camouflage pants with absurd yellow handkerchiefs tied around his wrists—like he was dressing for a world outside of the one they shared. Yes, she considered herself a feminist. Yes, she held a lit candle on the march down Amsterdam Avenue to take back the night and attended seminars on the brutality of fashion magazines and female genital mutilation in remote West African villages. But Dash could hand her a blade of grass that he picked on his way to meet her and she'd keep it preserved in the gold locket she wore around her neck. He played bass in a band called Splatter Pattern. She had briefly tried out as a backup singer, but, as Dash himself said, “You sing like you're being electrocuted for a crime you didn't commit.” Instead she sat behind the curtain at their shows smoking a dozen cigarettes and throwing death glances at the girls who assembled around the stage—models or junkies or wannabes of either camp who looked pretty and lost under the colored lights. Alas, she'd found her type: He was an artist. He bought Marcel Breuer metal chairs and twisted them into useless piles of junk.

Del and the red Viking had fallen so hard for each other that the morning after they graduated—she magna cum laude in biology, he a “walking degree” until he finished a full summer semester of classes and a mandatory gym requirement—he asked her if she would
consider living with him and having a baby. “Isn't that what all this money I've got is for?” he asked, while kicking a combat boot toward the ceiling fan that circled slowly above his bed. “Let's make a child because we have so much love it needs to spill into something else.” What he didn't know—and what she did—was that her stomach was already carrying a dark secret. What she didn't know—and what he did—was that he was about to embark on a two-month tour with his band. They were both twenty-one.

Her parents were a furious chorus of answering-machine messages. She tried to stop drinking the scotch in his apartment for the baby she hadn't yet told him about. She had moved her clothes into his closets and spent evenings camped out naked on his balcony when she received the news that Dash had been with his two bandmates in a blue Mustang at 12:30 AM on Summerlick Highway outside of Boston when they were hit head-on by a semi traveling at seventy miles per hour. The driver was alive but in serious condition. The man in the front seat had been beheaded by the truck's grill. The passenger in the back had sustained such grave injuries that he bled to death as the police tried to cut him out of the Mustang's chassis. Dash had not said anything to the officers as they worked to pry him out of the skeletal backseat, but one of them got the sense that he had, for a while anyway, been conscious. Del's college roommate and best friend, Madeline Singh, held her hand for twenty-eight days. Madi held it when Del was not invited to the funeral by the Winslow family, held it as Del agonized about whether or not to have the baby, tried to hold it as they waited on the plastic bowl seats at the Planned Parenthood clinic, and used every inch of her hands to clasp on to Del at John F. Kennedy Airport before her flight back to Greece, to go home, to get away from New York, to be embraced by a family that had already framed her diploma over their living room clock, encased in glass to keep the sea salt from infecting the gears.

Del spent a year on Amorgos before returning to New York. In those four seasons drifting in the quiet Aegean she gained pounds and invested her afternoons in her own studies, first in the heart muscles of the human anatomy and then, with a strange interest in toxins and circulatory structures, in herpetology, reptiles, the
cold-bloods. The western diamondback drew her particular interest, fangs on one end, a rattle on the other, swerving through the deserts of America, reminding her of the country she missed. Madi kept a bed waiting for her return in an apartment on the edge of the East Village. By the time Del climbed out of a taxi on Avenue B with two pieces of luggage and a box of vinyl records—the only item she took from her dead boyfriend's apartment before she slipped the key under the door—the pain of losing Dash Winslow had pretty much dissipated into the heartbreak of failed possibilities. Or rather, Del saw him for the distortion he had always been, a gorgeous kid who had been amplified in the head of another as the perfect, all-answering, money-backed future. He had finally been consigned to a blade of grass hidden in a locket at the bottom of her jewelry box.

Eleven years later, she stood at the kitchen counter filling a glass with water from the faucet, and she could actually blame Dash's death as the reason she had tumbled out of permanent citizenship in the United States by leaving that summer for Greece. If she had stayed, gone to graduate school or landed a job in biology research, she would have been granted one of those passes that the INS bestows on students who remain in the beneficent kingdoms of the educated working class. Instead, she had to apply all over again for visas, collecting letters from employers and friends on her merits every few years, paying cash for immigration lawyers who said “the chances are good, Ms. Kousavos. You work at one of the city's top tourist attractions. Now when are you going to get that panda pregnant? My son loves pandas. Do you think you can swindle free weekend passes?”

The last thing her father had said to her when she was home for Christmas three years ago was, “Don't you do something drastic, young lady. Don't go marrying some fool American for the papers, for the citizen card. You do a wedding here with your mother. We decorate the whole town for you.” She hadn't phoned them yet to give them the news, and part of her wondered if she needed to tell them at all. Families far away are allotted such small windows into the lives of their children, wasn't it best to let them imagine her world the way they wanted to, as if every day the Statue of Liberty drifted behind her shoulder and cops cleared her path at night until
she was safely locked behind her door? It amazed her that she had survived fifteen years in the city, for much of that time staying out late enough to see dawn break through the yellow night sky, and still her parents cautioned her to be careful if she told them she was visiting a friend in Brooklyn. “Take a taxi,” her mother would plead. “We will send you the money if you cannot afford it.” (This from a woman who felt spending more than twenty dollars on a dress constituted financial delusion.)

Her parents would not have approved of the scant fifth-floor apartment she and Joseph called home. The ceiling in the kitchen had turned a septic brown from water leaks, and scabs of paint dangled over the table, ready to drift like dandruff over their meals. The dark oak floorboards in the living room were severely warped, sprouting loose nail heads that left the soles of her feet in a constant callus. But the worst was the heat. Even when she moved into the apartment in the bitter January cold, carrying box after box up five flights and tracking snow across the wood until most of her belongings sat in puddles, the rooms hung to their fever. That winter the windowpanes shriveled until they no longer sealed out the wind. But a few feet from the frosted glass, Del and Joseph danced to her collection of old records, sweating in shorts and stretched-out T-shirts, as if they alone had fallen into a billboard advertisement for a tropical timeshare while the rest of the city was submerged in ice.

They used the air conditioner sparingly all summer. The mayor and the evening news warned of tri-borough blackouts. “They'll pull the power whether we use it or not,” Joseph said, fingers threatening to engage the on-switch. “They're telling us this because Con Edison's already worked a few well-timed blackouts into their yearly budgets.” “Don't be stupid,” she replied. “They are afraid of mass revolts in the street. Can you imagine what crimes would go on if this city were left for a night in total darkness? Do you want to be stuck in an elevator for ten hours? It's serious, Joe.”

She carried the glass down the hallway and into the living room, where she noticed the stereo's needle skipping on the last grooves of a record.
Her
stereo. Now
theirs
. The stereo had been one of her chief contributions to the mingling of appliances. She wondered how long
it would be until those distinctions would dissolve, possessives failing to modify,
his
and
hers
being
ours
without the slightest impulse to claim. They never argued over drawers or closets or cabinet shelves. The fights they had about the heat or his juvenile actor friends could hardly be classified as arguments. Often when her voice hardened into the first signs of irritation, Joseph would draw a slow smile, nod his head in quiet concession, and let her opening assault be the last words on the issue. Madi always said that silence was the male form of hysteria, “All that quiet is just another way of screaming their dicks off.” But Del couldn't help but be impressed by Joseph's composure, and usually her highly charged rage would suddenly transform into a hungry adrenaline, her lips guiding toward his mouth and her hands wrapping around his ears, and then she'd go hot for him, because he was so attractive when he didn't realize he had done anything to stop her dead in her tracks.

“Del,” he called from the bedroom.

It amazed her how quickly the evening had returned to normal. The night she asked Joseph to marry her almost a month ago, she walked into the living room ready to supply him with a list of incentives. She had spent her subway ride home from the zoo merging love with legalities—“You see, I don't have to be tied to a working visa,” she rehearsed, “You see, they can't kick me out of the country just because I feel like quitting. You see, I'd only be tied to you”—until those words almost reduced her to tears. She imagined him looking at her like an extinguished bulb, two eyes with popped filaments, skin the shade of gray glass, and her teeth chattered and her throat went dry. Why the hell would he agree? Why would anyone get married if they didn't have to? She asked him while she straddled his lap on the couch, unable to keep a cigarette from her mouth, and for the first time in all of their months as a couple, Joseph answered immediately without a single pause coming between them.

She entered the bedroom, letting go of that island where Dash still dwelled, climbing on to the warm, open stretch of their mattress. Joseph pulled off her clothes and lifted her pale, skinny body with its moles and snakebite scars on top of him. He put on a condom before he went into her, and she shifted her weight to trigger the little beast
that goes loose in her brain. She wondered what made her think of Dash Winslow from eleven years ago, because he hadn't been the only love of her life. At one point, that had been Madi's older brother, Raj, who was even more disposed than Joseph to prolonged silences. It didn't matter who found her first or who claimed her the hardest. What mattered was who stayed on.