The Adults (34 page)

Or maybe we didn’t. I really didn’t know anymore.

The maid said she called 911 as soon as she smelled the smoke, before she even left the food pantry. Orrin said this made her a hero; Adora thought this made her dumb. I agreed with Adora. The kitchen was on fire and when the kitchen was on fire, you just got the hell out of the house, like Adora, who popped her head out onto the patio after she announced, “Kitchen is on fire!” as though she were telling us, “Belts are fifty percent off at Caché!” She saw Jonathan’s hand that wasn’t on top of mine, but was next to mine, and our hands were clasped to the rung of the fence. I could feel him sigh like he was disappointed, and shake his head, and grumble, “Kitchen is on fire,” as though when you were with a woman, the kitchen was always always on fire.

Jonathan walked into the house, only to leave through the front door, and when he got in his car and drove away, I stood on the lawn and I felt I could breathe again.

I looked for Kevin.

When my mother and Bill showed up, we were outside with the fire trucks and the firemen were inside with their hoses. Bill and my mother were running to us; they were adults who had left their children alone for too long in a house that was too big and this was what they got for it. The fire was under control, the maid was upset in the back of an ambulance trying to explain: “Language barrier,” she said to the police. “Much hard.” Adora and Orrin were looking at their house and everyone held their breath beside them, and then exhaled as the smoke poured out through the broken windows.

“You’re late,” I said to my mother, who was by my side.

“Dear God,” my mother said like she was about to embark on a prayer. Like a prayer is some kind of journey toward something. “What happened?”

Everything. Nothing.

“The Austrian maid broke up with her American boyfriend,” I said.

T
he inside of Orrin’s house was ruined. Everything was covered in smoke. Everything in ashes. They were just going to start over. Build new cabinets, rip out the flooring. The perfect time to start a new life, anyway, Adora said. And I, Adora told me, would be the perfect person to help them.

“I won’t even begin to tell you how much Orrin would pay you,” she said. “I’m sure you know.”

“I don’t actually,” I said.

She wrote it down on a piece of paper, as though she couldn’t bear to say it aloud.

Then, she mouthed to me,
two hundred thousand dollars
.

“For the whole house,” she said. “Everything.”

When good things happened to me, I called Kevin. He took me out on Saturday nights. We ate Spanish food, and then Brazilian food, and then plain old pizza, and then talked about his job at the 7Up plant. We had gentle sex, and he read long historical novels in the park while I flipped through pages and pages of photographs of homes in the greater New York area. On the weekends, we ate brunch on floral patios where I sipped black coffee and sorted fabric prints while he announced news headlines to me.

“Florida Authorizes Python Hunt.”

“New Jersey Has School Districts Without Schools.”

We had sex on couches and looked up at ceilings while he talked about the changing face of soda (all-natural now) and I contemplated the consequences of circular skylights (were they just holes?).

“Did you know there was a psychological study that has proved certain colors can affect a person’s sense of time and space?” I asked him.

“I like how you tell me things,” he said, but what he meant was, he liked it when I defended my profession in the name of science.

We started bringing each other to major life events that required dates. His cousin’s wedding, his cousin’s graduation, his cousin’s birthday; he was so Irish, he had so many cousins.

“For weddings,” I told him half-naked, getting dressed for his cousin’s wedding, while he watched from the edge of my bed, “I wear short black dresses with varying degrees of elasticity. For graduation parties, I wear knee-length skirts with unpredictable floral patterns. For Bat Mitzvahs, I wear box dresses that I got on sale from Macy’s.”

Kevin laughed. Kevin was good like that. We made each other laugh before we brushed our teeth in the morning.

At Kevin’s cousin’s wedding, the bride and groom were twenty-one-year-old college students. The reception was held in the basement of Village Care of New York, a convalescent home. Standing in the room with blue tables, I felt like I was at my confirmation. The carrots were serrated. The fruit platters were sectioned in plastic containers so the cantaloupe wouldn’t touch the strawberries. The meal had been turkey and ham sandwiches with banana peppers and Coca-Cola. The bride was blond, young, excited, and leading a group of her friends in a choreographed dance of the Macarena. She was very nice. “Feel free to eat the food,” she had said.

I sat on my leather chair and wondered why a bride would want to eat a ham and turkey sandwich in a satin backless wedding dress. Or why she would cater her wedding as though it were a middle school lunch. Or why a bride would allow her love to be celebrated beneath a building of old people who were mistaking their spoons for grandchildren. Then, Kevin, tall thin man, cousin to the bride, walked up to me with a plate of broccoli and sour cream dip and said, “You have got to try this B6.” He smiled. So I did.

Kevin was a flavor scientist. He worked in Trumbull, Connecticut, at the 7Up plant, and started making the daily reverse commute from Brooklyn after he moved in with me. We were so different that our only expectation was miscommunication. When we watched movies on Friday nights, I made the popcorn. When he ate it, he licked the butter off his fingers, I kissed him on the mouth. When I brought him to dinner so my new family could meet the man they presumed I was spending the rest of my life with, he sipped on his Jack and Coke and said, “This phosphoric acid is awesome, Mrs. Vidal.”

Adora rolled her eyes. My stepbrother, Nick, stared at me. Nick was the tallest one in the stepfamily, and he considered his height a certification in forming good opinions. He tapped a quarter against the counter as if to say, this is what you bring to our stephome?

“It’s Mrs. Trimble now,” my mother said.

My mother was patient and kind as Mrs. Trimble. My father had been diagnosed last month with lung cancer and this had somehow softened her, like all my father had to do was reveal himself as a mortal with failing organs and my mother would stop feeling so defensive. My mother, with an apron wrapped neatly around her waist, actually responded to Kevin. “And how is the 7Up going, Kevin?”

“Still all-natural,” Kevin said. Kevin said this every time someone asked him about the state of 7Up. I became embarrassed for him in his short-sleeved plaid T-shirt, gray pants, and white tennis sneakers, spouting catchphrases, next to my stepbrother, who was always sincere in his brown cashmere sweater with black boots, who was finishing his PhD at Yale in engineering. I smiled at Kevin from across the kitchen to let him know he was doing fine.

But at night, I had horrible dreams about children who wouldn’t look at me, who could see only ghosts plucking out their teeth behind me. I woke up in a sweat. I was trying to teach myself not to be scared of things. I was learning: every time I woke up, Mr. Resnick’s blood was never on me.

I got up to make popcorn, to relax, turn on the TV.

Death was just an image, I told myself, a coming together of events in a single frame, and pain was just a part of the painting and haven’t we learned our lesson? Meaning is most poignant when never fully accessed. I sucked the butter off a cold popcorn kernel. I became intolerably sad when I made popcorn, standing by the microwave, listening to the
pop pop pop
as if it were a ticker tracking all the moments I spent alone. I bit into the kernel and thought of bodies on top of mine. I thought of Jonathan’s hands at the engagement party. I thought of Jonathan’s stomach in Prague, full like a smooth, sustainable weight. Standing up, Jonathan had the disposition of a man who might crush me, but lying down, he never did. Mr. Basketball was the one who always crushed me. He crushed me in the backseats of cars, on futons, in hallways, on desks. He crushed Janice too, standing in front of our freshman English class. Mr. Basketball stared at me from his desk, while Janice couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying, because she was watching Mr. Basketball stare at me, and said, “The river that bears no empty bottles! No sandwich papers, no cigarette ends, or, God, what was it? No other testimonies of a summer night!”

“You forgot silk handkerchiefs and cardboard boxes,” Mr. Basketball had said, marking it down in a notepad. “And ‘The Waste Land’ is not supposed to be read with that much enthusiasm.”

I thought of all the empty bottles and cigarette ends I had created and all the men I had created them with. There were so many things I had loved as my own, and these things never ended up being mine. All of the glass lights strung on other people’s porches, houseplants that were someone else’s, rugs and paintings and lighting fixtures and curtains and different men who looked different in every room, and I closed my eyes, overwhelmed by the infinite ways to live a finite life. I wanted to run out of my apartment until the street signs and passing cars ripped me of my belongings, until the wind had worn me down to sand.

T
wo months later, Jonathan didn’t even call, he just showed up at my apartment when I was packing for Connecticut. My father was home from Moscow, and I had been going to my mother’s house every weekend to visit him. It was five o’clock, and Kevin was likely starting his commute home. Jonathan walked around my apartment, saying, “Wow, this is great,” and it all felt so patronizing, like he couldn’t even believe in the idea that I had my own place, like my toaster was just for pretend and he was going to prove this by sticking his tongue in the slots. “Really great,” he said, and looked around, trying not to stare at the stained windowsills or the slanted kitchen floor.

Jonathan and I sat on my couch and listened to noise from outside. In Brooklyn, I could always hear the pedestrians shouting through the windows, no matter how well I insulated them in the winter, and no matter how loud the fan was spinning in my ear during the summer. “You ready?” a man by the lamppost asked another man. No, he wasn’t ready, he had to go back and get something. “What the
fuck
?” the other man said, and then they were gone. We listened to the men outside disappoint each other while Jonathan ran his fingers across Kevin’s collection of chemical science dictionaries and the woman downstairs played C-major piano chords. That was all she ever played.

Jonathan looked outside and put his nose to the windowpane like a dog. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and ask him why he was behaving like the dog. We could have had a dog together by now, I wanted to say. The dog could be sitting right there by the television. The dog could love us. And we could love the dog. But I didn’t speak. I watched him sit in my chairs and drink tea out of my cups until I couldn’t stand the silence of waiting.

“Let’s go somewhere,” I said. “Let’s go get coffee.”

“But we’re drinking tea right now.”

We went to a coffee shop.

“Did you know that there are people in this world who complain about their necks all the time?” Jonathan said when we sat down with our coffees. “Since I’ve been back from traveling, all I do is sit at my beige office chair, press the Line 1 button, and listen to a lady tell me about the worst thing in the world: she can’t turn her head left. Well, she can, it just hurts. You know, the way it feels when something doesn’t hurt all the time, it’s just a nagging sort of pain that hurts more in its persistence rather than degree?”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“And the paralegals,” he said. “They’re the worst. It’s like they are constantly surprised by the world. At lunch, they sit together, and their mouths hang halfway open and they look at each other’s lunches and they say, there are
Cheetos
in there? You got
what
on your shirt? Camels
don’t
mate for life?”

“It’s true,” I said. “They don’t. I saw that on the Discovery Channel.”

I told Jonathan about the new company I was launching with Melinda, and we both sat in our brand-new office while she sank her teeth into the same lunch every single day: microwavable chicken marsala.

“She tells me it was her father’s favorite,” I said. “And now that he is dead, she just can’t stop eating it. She is always on a quest to discover if that means something is wrong with her.”

“Sometimes my day is only about a fence,” Jonathan said.

“You’ve told me this before,” I said.

“Or a boy, or a boy and a fence and whose fault was it? Maybe the fence’s. But the fence didn’t know what it was doing. That’s what it sounds like, and how can you punish a fence that was unaware of its influence on the boy?”

Jonathan said the point of the workday was that someone always needed to be held accountable for the fence’s mistakes. The unaccounted-for objects needed someone to stand up and say, hey, that’s mine, I made that, and when it doesn’t do what you programmed it to do, we’re real sorry, sir, let me just write you a check.

“God, what do you
want
?” I asked him. I was almost done with my coffee.

“I miss you,” he said. “Please let me explain. My wife’s name is Susan.”

“My boyfriend’s name is Kevin,” I said.

“I met her at Columbia law. We got married sometime while you were away at college. And after she graduated, she decided she wanted to help represent people in other countries with unstable governments. So four years ago, she left for Somalia.”

“Kevin’s a flavor scientist. He makes soda. Are you trying to make me feel ashamed or something?”

“You’re not listening,” he said.

Jonathan said that after Susan left, he spent two years having late nights at his law office on Fifty-fifth Street breaking paper clips in half for no reason. He missed everything: Susan, literature, inherent meaning, laughing at midnight.