Reunion: A Novel (12 page)

A
fter dinner, I go upstairs to shower in the guest bathroom and give the real grown-ups a chance to talk about me behind my back. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that I’ve got some issues that need sorting out.

I check my phone. Two more calls from Billy, no messages, nothing from Peter. Against my better judgment, perhaps against any judgment at all, I send a new text to Peter.
I’ll do anything.
Which is funny, because right after I send it, my very first thought is
Well, actually, no I won’t.
Then, a minute later—as if to test a theory—I write,
Please take me back. PLEASE.
And it’s like the theory might be valid, because my first thought after this text is
But I’ll be okay if you don’t.
I’m tempted to try one more, to nip this entire thing in the bud once and for all. But something stops me. It’s as though I don’t want to see what’s right in front of me. Not yet.

I take my phone with me to the bathroom—the game is afoot with Mindy and I know for a fact that my belongings (and more so, my privacy) are no longer safe—and I take, like, an hour-long shower. I turn on only the hot water, step under, and stand there. My skin gets pink and blotchy. I start itching. I don’t even care. At some point, I get tired of standing and I let myself sink to the floor of the tub. Bad things live in bathtubs. Take a look sometime. Take a look at the little crevices between the tiles, the ones that once upon a time used to be white. There are entire families of germs living in those crevices, whole planets, entire solar systems. I don’t doubt it for a second.

Here is what I’m thinking: I’m thinking that at some point soon I’m going to have to stop moping about and walking around feeling sorry for myself and make a decision about what to do next. At some point, much sooner perhaps than I’d like, I’m going to have to shake this wallowing off. There’s a very good chance that my marriage is over for good; there’s even a chance I’m happier about that than I’m letting on. What’s certain is that it’s beyond my control, which is probably what’s making me try so hard. I don’t want Peter to get the deciding vote. That just seems wrong. What’s also certain is that my debt isn’t going away, but my paychecks are, at least for the summer. A natural extension of that fact, then, is that I need money. Now. Eighteen thousand dollars. Marcy has made me an offer—an unbelievable offer—but it’s one I can’t consider.

What all this amounts to is going back to Chicago when the funeral nonsense is over, packing my things, renting a place, finding a summer job, and moving out. I’ll sign whatever Peter puts in front of me. It’ll be that simple and that messy. If Billy keeps calling, I’ll change my number. Classes will start and I’ll teach them. Days will begin and I’ll wake up and live them. Nights will fall and I’ll put my pajamas on. Life will continue, and at some point, enough time will have passed that it won’t matter as much. I’ll read more. Give up cable. To hell with Internet. Heat? Only when the pipes might freeze. A/C? That’s why God made ceiling fans and coffee shops. When I finally meet someone new, I’ll be a completely different person. I’ll be better. I’ll be a real grown-up. And perhaps I’ll even be out of debt. This is the plan. That simple, that messy.

I reach up and turn the water off and then just sit there and watch while my skin evens out and the blotches disappear. There’s nothing like a bathtub to remind me of how oversized my body is. I’m two inches too long in every direction. But as with my marriage, there’s nothing I can do about that.

I check my phone. There’s still no word from Peter, which I’m increasingly okay with. I should come clean to Nell and Elliot tonight. I should tell them the marriage is over. If they want reasons—well, if they want reasons I can always just come out and say it. It’s not like I cheated on them.

I can hear Sasha murmuring in the bedroom down the hall. She’s murmuring to Mindy, no doubt, telling her to forget about the big bad woman in the bathroom, to forget about the terrible things she heard me say. Nell and Elliot are downstairs on the back porch. If I wanted—if I were feeling desperately paranoid—I could open the bathroom window ever so slightly and hear what they’re saying. I could prepare myself for whatever bombs will be dropped on me when I finally go down. But the whole point of this shower was to give them an opportunity to get on the same page, to give them an opportunity to bitch and kvetch and kind of start to feel guilty about how much they’ve bitched and kvetched so that by the time I go down, there’s even the chance that no bombs will be dropped at all. All things are possible through prayer, right?

I do a cursory search in the drawers and behind the medicine cabinet for the bottle of whatever pills Sasha’s been crunching but find nothing. It’s the guest bathroom, after all, so I’m not surprised. I power off my phone for the night, slip past the master bedroom with the door cracked open and the murmuring voices, and go downstairs to my brother and sister. In cases like this, it is best to expect the worst. It is best to expect disappointment and anger and all that good stuff. That way you’re prepared for anything. That way, if it’s bad, you’ve known it would be bad and you’re ready for it. If it’s not bad, if it’s better than you thought, you feel suddenly light. You feel like a burden’s been lifted. You feel like a goddamned cloud.

So I walk onto the back porch with my hair in a towel, fully expecting to be excoriated for ten or fifteen minutes. What I don’t expect is to find Elliot with his head in his hands, sobbing, and Nell with her arm around him, telling him it’s going to be okay.

“Oh my God,” I say. I kneel down in front of them. “Ell. Hey.” I put my hand on his knee, and he sobs even harder. I look up at Nell, who gives me the saddest of all smiles and shakes her head. But it’s not like she’s disappointed in me. It’s not even like there’s anything I’ll be held accountable for later when this is over. She mouths the words
tomato plants
and I find I am filled with relief and even, oh God, joy. This is not about me. This is not about me at all. This is about E
llio
t and his own crumbling world. Lucretius was right. There is nothing like another person’s pain to put your own life into perspective. My brother is in tears and all I can think is
Thank God, thank God, thank God.

E
lliot goes upstairs to wash his face or whatever it is men do after they’ve cried, and I make up the downstairs couch for him to sleep on. Nell watches me while I tuck sheets around the cushions and put fresh pillowcases on the pillows Sasha brought me. It’s strange being in this house that I don’t know, being with these people who are at once as familiar as familiar gets but also foreign. I can’t say I like the feeling.

“Peculiar night,” says Nell.

“Yes,” I say, picking up a pillow and fluffing it like I’m some sort of chambermaid.

I’m dying to ask Nell for specifics about Elliot’s breakdown—there’s no way he didn’t fill her in—but Nell, attuned as she is to the ether—
my
ether—says, out of nowhere, “Rita is on the fence.”

“On the fence?” I whisper the words and sit down on Elliot’s couch. “What does that even mean?”

“She’s not sure she wants to be married.”

Wait a minute. Maybe somebody
is
reading my mind. Maybe it’s Rita. If I believed in the supernatural, I might even think she’s gotten tangled in my brain waves, forever cursed to a life of unhappiness, a life of looking around and thinking,
Maybe the grass over
there
is a little bit greener?

“She’s approximately three kids too late for that,” I say.

I think of Peter. I think of the adoption business. Then I think of this boy I once dated in college. We moved in together senior year to save on rent. A few months went by. He suggested we get a dog. I moved out the next day. He didn’t mean anything to me, and so, when he asked for a reason, it felt safe to be 100 percent honest. What I said was, “The dog. I knew when you talked about the dog. My first thought wasn’t ‘How cute.’ My first thought was ‘But then I’ll get attached to the dog and it’ll be so hard to leave that I’ll never leave.’ That’s when I knew.”

Nell says, “Yeah, well.” She sits down next to me, ruining the fluffiness of the pillows.

“The grad student?” I say.

Nell nods. “But nothing’s happened,” she says. “Supposedly.”

“Oh God,” I say. “It would be so much better if something
had
happened.”

Nell owls her neck in my direction. “Excuse me?”

“Easy, killer,” I say.

“Tell me what you mean.”

I bite my teeth together a few times, as if I’m searching for words. Finally, I say, “If something had happened, then she’d get over it.” Obviously, I am thinking of me. I am thinking of Billy. I am thinking of the shared wavelength Rita and I are currently riding. “But if it’s all just fantasy,” I say, “if it’s all just spiritual connection, then Elliot’s fucked. You can’t compete with the fantasy of a better life.”

What I’ve said is completely at odds with the family’s stance on adultery. But before Nell’s mouth is able to drop open any farther, Elliot appears in the doorway. Normally Elliot is like this substance you want to be in a room with. Even while he’s pissing you off, you find that you’re kind of craving it. Here’s the thing, though. These last twenty-four hours, it’s been like his addictive quality is missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

“I’m beat,” he says. He looks at the now-rumpled couch. “Thanks for making up my bed.”

“Sorry,” I say, and scoot Nell off so that I can reassemble the sheets.

“It’s fine,” he says. “It’s a place to sleep and I’m totally beat.”

The story is, when I was a baby and was brought home for the very first time, Elliot punched Nell in the face. They’d been fighting over whose room I’d get to sleep in. Elliot wanted me in his. Nell wanted me in hers. A blow to the nose sorted everything out.

Nell sucks in her cheeks in a way that both Elliot and I have come to know means she has something to say, which can only be to repeat my sacrilegious remarks from a moment ago. I’m tempted to call her a rat. I’m tempted to say, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” But then I figure,
Fine, let’s just get this over with.
Now’s as good a time as any. Shoot. Go for it. Knock it out of the park. Action.

She says, not looking at me, but looking at our brother, who is standing next to me, “You said something last night about getting high?”

“Yeah?” says Elliot.

“Sasha gave me this.” She holds up a small green medicine bottle. Not at all what I was expecting.

“I don’t like pills,” says Elliot. “But thanks.”

“Hit me,” I say, and hold out my hand.

Nell hands me the bottle without making eye contact—a sure sign that we aren’t through with the previous conversation—and says, “It’s not pills.”

I open the top and find two perfectly rolled joints.

“Stan’s wives get more and more difficult to pin down,” I say. I take a sniff. “Dear Lord,” I say. “It smells like a forest of weed in here.”

“Better,” says Nell, whispering now. “They get better.”

“You just like her because she’s our age,” I say.

Nell doesn’t respond to this, but Elliot takes one of the joints and inspects it.

“Anybody have a lighter?”

“Back porch,” says Sasha, who has materialized out of the blue in the doorway between the living room and dining room. She’s wearing a kimono that used to belong to Joyce, Stan’s most ancient wife. “Let’s get high,” she says, then flips off the light and heads outside.

Y
ou are fourteen years old. He is forty-nine. You know this because there are already plans in the works for his fiftieth at Benihana. You’re living—just the two of you—in the horrible high-rise near the duck pond. This is just after Nell has left for college and a couple of months before you and your father move into Joyce’s tattered stone manor on Woodhaven Road. Already, even that young—even before bills and rent and adultery—you don’t sleep well. You remember missing Stan Jr. and Lily, who were only toddlers when your father divorced their mother. You remember feeling guilty and weird about missing them, since you hadn’t shown much interest in either of them when they were living under the same roof. You remember thinking that emotions were unstable entities—not as they were happening, but as you recalled them in time. They were malleable things. Constantly changing each time you remembered them. They were not to be trusted. You remember trying to explain this to Stan. You have no recollection of his response.

The memory you’re thinking of now, though, is very small. A speck. A smidgeon. But you think it merits inclusion. It’s Sunday morning. Your father is sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper and listening to jazz. The condo smells like bacon, which makes sense because there are three pieces left on the counter. You eat them, then wipe your fingers on a dish towel.

You say to your father, “I’m going for a bike ride.”

He says, “Be safe,” but he doesn’t look up.

You take the elevator down to the lobby and get your bike from the storage room. But then you have a thought. It’s partly out of laziness. (You remember thinking,
But I’ll have to go to the trouble of putting it back.
) But partly it’s something else. Partly you are entertaining the idea of a psych experiment. You only half comprehend the hypothesis—but it’s there, knocking about in your brain.

You leave the bike where it is and walk outside. You cross the street and count the stories of the high-rise from the bottom up. You stop at eighteen, which is your floor. You see a person leaning over the edge of the balcony’s railings. This is impossible. The only person in your condo is your father, and your father does not go onto the balcony. You think it’s a fear of heights, but you’ve never asked and he’s never said. It occurs to you that you are living with a stranger. You perform the count one more time. The person is still there. This time, the person raises its hand. Again, this is impossible.

You take off running down the hill, toward the duck pond. As you get closer to the pond, you ease into a jog. You run around the pond four, maybe five times. Then you run back up the hill and pause at exactly the same spot where you were standing fifteen minutes earlier. You perform the count one final time. The balcony is now empty.

You cross the street and take the elevator to the eighteenth floor. Your father is sitting in the same position as when you left him. He puts the paper down and looks at you. You’re sweaty. It’s Atlanta. You look at him.

He says, “You went for a run.”

You say, “A bike ride. I told you.”

The two of you look at each other for an impressive amount of time. You feel the psych experiment—whatever it is—has gone in your favor. You feel that a hypothesis has been proven.

“Okay,” he says.

You think,
My god.
You think,
That was easy.

Peter says addicts begin to recover when they pinpoint the birth of their addiction. Well, as best I can tell, this is mine.