Sliding Past Vertical (12 page)

Chapter 19

The job that Sarah wouldn’t
hate in six months continued to elude her. Tired of being broke, she signed on
with a temp agency. For the most part her assignments were tedious, but not as
tedious as sitting around Emerson’s house smelling the damp moldy smell and
watching everyone else have lives. Even the Jordanians had lives, and important
things to do, and they just came to this country.

Several weeks went by. A
month. Summer hardened into the first clear snap of fall. Among other things,
she got used to the damp, moldy smell, the grimy kitchen, sharing a bathroom
with men, and weathering Emerson’s moods.

She looked in the classifieds
to see what the rents were like, although she didn’t have enough money to even
think about moving into her own apartment, let alone paying Emerson what she
owed him. Still, her earnings kept her in groceries, pantyhose, résumés, and
the occasional evening out.

She’d been looking forward to
this one all week. After cataloging Department of Public Works monographs in
the basement of the county building for five days straight, even pizza and the
movies with Emerson and Rashid seemed like the most luxurious of indulgences.

When she tried to chip in for
dinner, though, Rashid stopped her.

“This one is on me.” He slipped
the waitress a twenty, one step ahead of a glaring Emerson. “You can pay for
the movie,” Rashid told him.

“Gee thanks,” Emerson grumbled.

“I’m working now,” Sarah said.
“I can pay my own way.” Although she was beginning to wish she’d stayed at the
County Building.
Sludge Management
magazine
was better company than these two together lately.

“You ought to be saving your
money,” Rashid said.

She laughed. He sounded like
her father. “A couple of slices of pizza isn’t going to break me.”

His expression was
dramatically earnest. “Every little bit will help,” he said under his breath
and excused himself to the men’s room.

Then only one set of eyes was
staring at her.

“What was that about?”
Emerson asked.

Sarah blinked at Rashid’s
empty chair. “I have no idea.”
 

He picked at the label on his
empty root beer bottle. Someone fired up the pinball machine. It clanked and
beeped and whistled. “I, um, talked to the landlord today,” he said finally.
“There are some things in your room—the radiator, that closet door. I
told him I could live with it the way it is, but if you’re going to be staying,
I could have them fixed. And maybe a new coat of paint?”

His expression was one she knew
better than Rashid’s. It wasn’t about paint. It expected the next thing she said
to be hurtful. She touched his arm. His gaze dropped to her hand. She wanted to
tell him she’d grown fond of the sticky yellow walls, the damp, moldy smell, the
sun through the grimy curtains, the closet door that wouldn’t stay closed. And
the comfort of knowing he was just across the hall. He’d never believe her. Or
worse, he’d read too much into it. But he’d been so generous that she couldn’t
bear to hurt his feelings by telling him not to bother. As soon as she had
enough money, she’d move out, letting him get on with his life. After all, what
woman would want to come home with a man whose old girlfriend was living in his
spare room?

“Whatever you want to do,”
she said.

* * * * *

One of the second-shift
orderlies had to go out of the country for a funeral, and Emerson volunteered
to fill in. He liked the quiet of the evenings and was glad to have some time
away from Rashid, the virgin Casanova. And he never would have imagined
thinking this, but he could use a break from Sarah, too.

He couldn’t help himself, but
every time he looked at her, he saw an empty room across the hall. He
envisioned a new apartment, a job, and a replacement for Jay. So much for the
new life he had helped her move back to. Where, as he’d told Rashid, proximity
and time were supposed to teach her to see him not as the boy who’d consumed
her with his emotional frailty but as a secure man worthy of her romantic
attention.

A man who never stopped
loving her, not even when he wanted her set upon by the Seven Plagues of Egypt.

“Even the boils?” Rashid
said, aghast.

Emerson leveled a gaze at
him. “Especially the boils.”

He took the problem to the
infirmary, and as he went about the evening’s tasks, Emerson convinced himself
his expectations had been a foolish fantasy stirred up by Dirk and old,
sleeping desires she’d awoken in Boston. When she got back on her feet, she wouldn’t
need him anymore. Once again he’d become a big pillow she could take out of the
closet to cry on when someone broke her heart. A sexless thing with no emotions
and no expectations, its history erased.

“How’s my girlfriend?”
Charlie asked him.

Emerson grunted.

“That good, huh.”

“Just take your medication,
Charlie.” He didn’t relish this part of working second shift, helping the
nurses dope his patients into dreamless sleep, but in this case, he’d make an
exception.

Charlie eyed the
candy-colored pills in the Dixie cup. “You gonna get off your ass and do
something about that or what?”

Emerson looked out the window
and shrugged his shoulders. What could he do? She didn’t want him. He couldn’t
make her want him. He’d just have to get over it.

“Hell,” Charlie snorted. “If
I was you—a young guy with working parts—I’d be beating her door
down.”

So would Dirk. He did it
every night in Emerson’s dreams. “Well, you’re not me.”

“Okay, you don’t have to get
hot over it. Just seems a god-awful waste, moping around here when you got
paradise just across the hall.”

“Charlie—”

He waved the cup around. “I
didn’t mean it dirty. I’m talking about the real magilla.”

“You mean love.”

 
Charlie smiled. “I ain’t always been old,
you know. I’ve seen that look on a young lady’s face before.”

“On Sarah?” Emerson sneered.
“She looks at sick dogs the same way. That’s not love. That’s pity.”

“You keep telling yourself
that,” Charlie said. “And you’ll wind up a bitter old fart in a place like
this, with nobody to give a damn about you. Except some long-haired orderly
who’ll make you crazy ’cause he’s too chicken to live the life God gave him.”

“Good
night
, Charlie,” Emerson said.

Charlie tossed back his
medication. With a smile and a twinkle in his eye, he lifted a cup of water to
Emerson, in a toast.

* * * * *

With Emerson still on second
shift, and Indian summer offering mild, sweet-smelling evenings, Sarah couldn’t
pass up Rashid’s invitation to accompany him on a stroll around the
neighborhood. Once they reached Westcott, however, Rashid appeared to be lost
in thought, and they ambled along a while without speaking.

“I have decided something
very important,” he said finally.

She stopped in front of the
bookstore. So did he. She prepared herself for big news. He’d been spending a
lot of time in the lab, even on Sundays. She imagined it was about his
research. Or his fiancée. Or similar plans about his planned-out future.

He clasped his hands in front
of his belly. The gesture made him look a little taller, a little older. “If
you find that you need to move out before you have enough saved, I am willing
to lend you the money for your first month’s rent and security deposit.”

Sarah stared at him. So what
if he’d caught her looking in the classifieds at apartments. It was only to get
an idea of how much living space she could afford. And he’d said his piece
about her saving habits. Why the continued obsession?

He sighed and dropped his
gaze to his feet. “I have insulted you. It is just as I had feared. I knew it
was not my place to start this conversation. But I felt I must. Because he
would never.”

Fear crept through her. Maybe
Emerson wanted her to leave and didn’t have the heart to say it. “Why, um, why
would I need to move out?”

“I just thought...that if...”
Flustered, he fussed with his hands. “If things are not going according to
original expectations, I could be offering you a way to regain your dignity.”

Probably
an Indian thing,
she thought, and continued walking. Usually when she didn’t answer he repeated
himself in a way she could eventually understand.

“I expect nothing in return.”
He followed after her. “If you aren’t happy and it is only your financial
situation keeping you with us, then you shouldn’t be made to stay.”

“I’m happy.” But she was more
puzzled than ever.

“This is not what I have been
seeing. It’s tense there. Have you noticed this tension?”

“Between you and Emerson?”
Sarah said. “Well, now that you mention it...”

“No, no. I am meaning you and
him.”

She stopped.

He seemed so earnest that she
wanted to turn around and run.

“This is what I am saying. I
am his friend, and he would be angry with me for telling you this, but you are
my friend too. If you do not want—what he wants—” He fussed with
his hands again. “Then you should not have to stay.”

“What does he want?” Sarah asked,
her voice small.

Rashid’s eyes flew open wider
than the night and he took a step backward. “Already I have said too much. It’s
my mistake. It’s nothing. I am spending too much time staring into the
microscope and seeing things that aren’t there.”

Her pulse thumped in her
ears. If it were truly nothing, then Rashid wouldn’t be so upset. She wanted to
walk away, not listen, not know.

But she stayed.

Waiting.

“He will be
very
angry with me.”

“Does he want me to leave?”

“No. Absolutely that is not
his intention.”

She swallowed. It could only
be one other thing. “Then he wants to have sex with me.”

His mouth rounded with
surprise. “Never would he use words such as those!”

“Then what words does he
use?”

The sarcasm eluded him. He looked
away, and back, as if in that moment of reflection away from the razor of her
stare, he had decided something new. “You must promise never to tell him I’ve
said these things to you.” He took a deep breath and let the words out in a
rush. “He believes you moved back here to be closer to him. Because you had
tired of dating
goondas
and perhaps
had reached a point where you could return his...romantic feeling...and would
once again want to be his...his...”

He fussed again and then gave
up. The air had never been so still, the sound of one unsaid word so loud. It
zinged around Westcott Street. Off the pizzeria window. The coffee shop. The
Laundromat. She could see it big as day, in a fat cartoon font, lipstick red,
making kissing sounds as it bounced from surface to surface. “His girlfriend?”
she said, a tremble in her voice.

Rashid took another step
backward, eyeing her. “Or at least with your being without a man, he would
stand a better chance. This is why I think he’d scolded me for being too
friendly with you. Perhaps—wrongly, I might add—he believed I’d
been interfering.”

Sarah was no longer
listening. She wanted to march over to the infirmary and punch Emerson in the
stomach. “So all this time he’s just been waiting for his
turn
, like I’m some kind of deli counter?”

Rashid pleaded with his
hands. “No, no, I’m sure it’s not like that. He loves you very much as a
friend. And…more. Always he has, even when he wished you covered with boils.
Often he has told me that if only the two of you didn’t live so far away and
you could spend more time with him and see how he has grown up and
changed...no. I’ve said enough already.”

“Yes, you have. You both
have.” She whirled on one heel and stormed away.

He followed. “Sarah. Please
wait.”

“Don’t talk to me.” She felt
tears starting and threw off his attempts to catch her. She couldn’t go back to
the house. Emerson would be there soon. So she headed the other way, toward the
university.

Chapter 20

Sarah pounded her anger
against the sidewalks. As she headed down Euclid toward Comstock and the quad,
she remembered a different Indian summer night, when she’d been a student. She’d
had the same feeling in her stomach, of disbelief and a drive to escape. But
this time she was fleeing something more sinister than a frat boy’s clumsy
groping. She had trusted Emerson: with her friendship, with her loyalty, with
things she didn’t give as easily as her body.

Yet her body was what Emerson
expected she’d come back to give him, confirming her suspicions as to why he’d
accepted her friendship in the first place, all those years ago—so he
might be around in case she changed her mind. Apparently, for some reason, he
thought she had. For him it could be anything. Because she moved in across the
hall? Because she wasn’t sleeping with anyone else? Because she happened to
touch his arm or look into his eyes a moment longer than she was supposed to?

God,
he takes everything so damned seriously.

Not until she reached brick
buildings did she slow her pace and notice her surroundings. The concrete
walkways looked freshly patched for the new school year. Structures that hadn’t
existed during her last visit had sprung up like weeds. But in the darkness and
in the place where Rashid had thrown her, she was lulled into thinking all was
just as she’d left it. She remembered Hendricks Chapel. She remembered the
auditorium where Emerson had caught a nine o’clock movie and happened upon her
afterward as she lay on the grassy quad, half drunk and spent from escaping a
frat party where a brother had tried to trap her in his room. The world had
been spinning a little, and she’d looked up to see pieces of a curious face,
glasses, and straw-colored hair.

I’m
Emerson, you’re in my Art History class. Do you need help?

Then like a twist in the gut,
she saw the Arts and Sciences building, bell tower and arched windows out of a
Hitchcock film, where she had caught Emerson following her after they’d broken
up. He’d been in sore need of a shower and a change of clothing. His eyes had
radiated a whipped-puppy hopefulness that with a few simple words, she could
put his entire crumbled universe back together. Waiting. Always waiting.

Still
waiting.

She stood in the same spot
where he had stood, on the sidewalk, just before the stairs. She pictured him
then, at eighteen, emotionally wounded and desperate to be loved. How it must
have gored him clean through to hear her say that she wished they’d never been
more than friends.

Then, over time, wish became
reality, and he allowed her to reinvent their relationship the way
she
had wanted it. Just friends. Like
the sex had never existed. Like they hadn’t sought refuge from the bumps of
young adulthood in each other’s narrow dormitory beds.

Like they’d never fallen in
love.

Only she’d gotten up, and he
hadn’t.

Coming
this way was a really bad idea
. Sarah pulled her cardigan tighter, tucked her head down,
and kept walking.

* * * * *

The steep drop to Van Buren
Street at the far edge of the quad used to look like the end of the earth.
There was a staircase, built into the hillside, covered with bleached wood
planks and lit with a string of naked bulbs, half of which were usually out at
any given time. Just to the right of the stairs, a grassy ledge overlooked the
rest of the city, beyond that the rolling plain between the Adirondacks and the
Finger Lakes. More importantly, it stood watch over the dormitory she and
Emerson had called home during their freshman year.

The wooden stairs had been
replaced with concrete, covered by a series of annoyingly modern Plexiglas
arches; the grassy ledge had been absorbed into part of a law building, but the
view was still the same.

In her mind, though, it was
no longer night. She saw but didn’t see the orange glow of the city, the lights
of the MONY tower, the marshmallow spectacle of the Carrier Dome. She saw a
stretch of time in early spring, after Emerson’s mother had taken him out of
school. When Sarah would stand on the ledge at the end of the day and watch the
descending sun spill gold into the far-off sliver of Onondaga Lake. She’d
counted the days, hours, and minutes until she too could go home. To a change
of scene, a summer job, and a place where she no longer saw Emerson everywhere
she looked.

For a long while, Sarah couldn’t
make herself move from what was left of the grassy ledge overlooking so many of
her past mistakes. Automatically, her toes curled into the soles of her
sneakers, body set as if contemplating a dive. She could almost feel the gritty
surface of the springboard beneath her feet and see the ripples of water below.
She imagined what it would be like to step off, to fall. Not the planned,
muscular leap of a dive.

Just fall.

Plunge.

Let gravity take her.

She wondered if Emerson,
leaning out his eighth-story window all those years ago, had imagined this same
feeling.

She wondered if he still did.

Finally she forced her
attention on the dormitory. It didn’t look any different, those twin pillars of
architecturally uninspired glass and concrete—girls in one tower, boys in
the other—joined in the center by a common lobby for a moat.

Habit, sense memory, or
unfinished business pulled Sarah down the long staircase, two blocks down the
street, and through the glass doors. She was no longer a student and didn’t
belong there, but no one stopped her. Maybe because of the way she was dressed:
jeans, sneakers, T-shirt, cotton cardigan, no makeup, hair down.

And because she looked so
young.

She crossed the lobby to the girls’
side and stepped into a waiting elevator. She pressed the button; the doors slid
shut. On the night of Emerson’s eighteenth birthday—he’d just returned
from Thomas’s funeral—he’d kissed her in this elevator, all the way up to
the seventh floor. She could still feel his body against hers, so ready, in her
imagination, to be delivered from his pain, if only for a while. Nothing had
felt more natural than to invite him to spend the night. While they kissed, his
hands rested softly on both sides of her face. She’d never wanted that moment
to end, of anticipation, of someone she liked and trusted—and maybe
loved—desiring her, needing her, with such intensity. When the doors finally
opened, Sarah and Emerson still locked together, half of her floormates were in
the lounge, waiting to take the elevator down.

Emerson told her later that
he had no idea girls could be so crude.

Sarah squeezed her eyes shut.
The elevator stopped and opened on the seventh floor. She almost expected to
see the same group of girls standing in the lounge, making animal noises and
rude remarks. But all that faced her were the pea-green walls of her student
days, the smell of fresh popcorn and old pizza, and the same institutional
furniture.

On a mud-brown sofa near the
window sat two young women dressed in black leggings and brightly colored, oversized
T-shirts. Cans of diet soda and textbooks were spread on a square white table
before them. As a unit, they turned to her.

“You must be Daisy,” one of
the girls said, in a pinched, nasal voice. Black-lacquered toenails peeked from
open-toed sandals. “Cat said she’d meet you at the poetry slam and you owe her a
martini.”

Suddenly Sarah was conscious
of no longer fitting in. She didn’t know what a poetry slam was, thought the
black toenails looked like her feet got caught in a car door, and she wasn’t
aware that anyone under sixty drank martinis.

“No, I’m... I’m Sarah, and, well,
I used to live here and wanted to come visit.”

The girl gaped. “Why’d anyone
want to come back to
this
dump?”

“Don’t be such a bitch,
Gwendolyn.” The other girl’s accent was similar. Long Island, probably. She
smiled at Sarah. She looked younger, and pretty, though not in such an obvious
way as her companion. Still, her nails, finger and toe, were painted a bilious
shade of green. “How long ago were you here?”

“I graduated, oh, a while
ago,” Sarah said. “I’ve just moved back to town. Guess this is...” She shrugged
her shoulders, mind slowly catching up with her body. Why was she there?
Running away from Emerson by running right back to him? “I don’t know, just a
little nostalgia tour. Look, don’t let me disturb you.”

“
Please
disturb me.” Gwendolyn flipped the book closed. “This is
completely irrelevant to anything I hope to be doing for the rest of my life.
Tell me why a marketing major needs to know anything about dead white European
philosophers?”

Sarah knew that as an alumna,
she was supposed to say something encouraging. But except for the occasional game-show
question or bizarre discussion with Emerson, when had she ever been called upon
to know the difference between Calvin and Hobbes?

“Oh, shit, Izzy,” Gwendolyn said.
“The
toad
. It’s back.”

Izzy twisted toward the
lounge window. Sarah followed her gaze and saw a smallish, roundish young man
waving from the lounge window of the corresponding floor on the boy’s side.

“Don’t look, you’re just
encouraging him!” Gwendolyn said.

Izzy gave the boy a little
wave and half a smile. But her reflection in the window looked sad.

Gwendolyn turned to Sarah. “I
swear, he has no self-respect. Like some stupid puppy, the way he chases after
her.”

Sarah wondered if the boy
across the way would try to kill himself over Izzy when she finally rejected
him. If he would have a roommate who’d come back unexpectedly and stop him.

Gwendolyn glared out the
window. “Damn. He’s getting on the phone. He’s calling here, I know it. Come
on, Izzy, let’s go to your room. You, too,” she said to Sarah.

She herded Sarah and Izzy
toward a room off the lounge that in Sarah’s experience, used to be the floor’s
kitchen.

The lobby phone rang. Izzy turned
toward it.

“Don’t pick it up,” Gwendolyn
said.

It rang again. Izzy bit her
lower lip. Sarah could see the divided loyalty on the girl’s face. Perhaps she
was already involved with this boy. Perhaps she wasn’t sure if she’d done the
right thing.

Been
there. Done that. Still doing that.

Another ring. Gwendolyn held
the door to Izzy’s room open, her mouth a tight slash.

Izzy looked at Sarah,
hopelessness in her eyes.

Sarah shrugged her shoulders.
I can’t help you. I can’t even help
myself.

Ring
.

Izzy crossed the lobby to the
phone.

* * * * *

Sarah and Gwendolyn waited for
Izzy. They sat opposite each other, on the bottom mattresses of two parallel
sets of bunk beds. Neither of them spoke.

Gwendolyn looked like she
could chew metal and spit tacks.

It was a long wait.

“Didn’t this used to be the
kitchen?” Sarah finally said, in an attempt to break the tension.

“Housing shortage.” Even her
voice was like a weapon.

Sarah nodded, and afraid to
ask anything else, looked away. The room was immaculate—three beds made,
one stripped, textbooks in tidy stacks on a row of desks, two metal armoires on
the side wall where mud-brown couches used to be, a third in the opposite
corner near the refrigerator, the only evidence of the room’s former use.

Before housing shortages and
poetry slams, the room had served not only as a kitchen but also as a second
lounge, more private than the one in the lobby. Sarah closed her eyes and remembered
another time, another night in October, her sophomore year. She and Emerson,
former lovers, had been testing the tenuous new friendship “they’d” agreed to after
a flurry of letters the previous summer. When he’d knocked on her door, though,
Sarah already had company. At the moment, she couldn’t even remember his name.
Just that he was someone she’d liked well enough but didn’t love, and she’d felt
annoyed with herself for giving in to him. Again.

“I’ll meet you in the
kitchen,” she called in a loud whisper, not wanting to wake her date.

“You look pretty,” Emerson said
when she came in.

She didn’t know where she was
supposed to put a compliment from him at that stage, so she ignored it.

“Too bad you had to study
tonight,” he said. “You would have liked the movie.”

At the beginning of the
evening, she truly had intended to study, until what’s-his-name called. Then
she started feeling guilty for blowing Emerson off so close to the first anniversary
of Thomas’s death.

“You want to go out, get
something to eat?” she asked.

It seemed like a perfect
plan. She would get her shoes and leave the guy a note. Hopefully, by the time
they got back he’d be gone.

Emerson smiled. “Yeah. Okay.
You sure it’s not too late?”