You Lost Me There (16 page)

“Can’t make it, going to New York for a conference, congratulations,” I typed.

Rather than SEND, I clicked DELETE.

I jogged out of the lab, down the stairwell, through the quad, past the maintenance building to the parking lot with the sun on my back, my suit bag flapping on my arm.

 

 

 

“Sir, I need to look through your bag.”

“Go ahead.”

“Please lift it over the barrier, thank you. Now, I’m going to ask you several questions about your luggage. I need you to answer them to the best of your knowledge. In this bag, do you have any liquid—”

“No, no.”

“Sir, I am required by federal airline safety regulations to ask you these questions.”

“I know. All right.”

“Do you have any liquid or perishable items in this bag?”

“No.”

“Whose bag is this?”

“What?”

“Whose bag is this?”

“It’s mine.”

“Sir, who packed this bag?”

“I did.”

“When was it packed?”

“This morning. Last night.”

“When specifically was it packed, please?”

“Excuse me? Last night.”

“Sir, I am required to ask these questions. If you cannot answer them to our satisfaction, we have the right to deny your boarding privileges.”

“Deny my boarding privileges.”

“Who packed this bag?”

“I said, I did. Last night.”

“Has any person, strange or familiar, approached you since you packed this bag?”

“You realize what a ridiculous question that is.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Forget it. No.”

“No, you have not been approached by anyone?”

“Right. No one has approached me.”

“Sir, has anyone offered you anything to bring on this flight?”

“No.”

“Have you or anyone—sir, what is this?”

“That’s a gift. Excuse me, what are you doing, that’s for a friend of mine.”

“Wrapped presents are forbidden. We are required by federal law to unwrap any wrapped items. In particular, when I asked you, do you have any liquids—”

“I said it’s a gift. My friend’s in the wine business, I’m bringing him a bottle of wine. I don’t understand.”

“Sir, may I remind you, when I asked if you had any liquids or perishables in this bag, you said no.”

“Oh give me a break. It’s a sealed bottle, I would need—you think I’ll endanger the flight with Pinot Noir?”

“Sir, please, if you will lower your voice, I need you to calm down.”

“Ma’am, I am calm.”

“Right now I need you to lower your voice. If you will not lower your voice, we will conduct this interview elsewhere.”

“Well, I can’t believe this.”

“Sir, are you going to calm down?”

“I am perfectly calm.”

“Sir, will you calm down?”

“What do you want me to say? I am calm. Can I at least go put it in my car?”

“Put what?”

“The bottle. The wine.”

“It will be confiscated here at the airport, but you may claim it upon your return with proof of receipt. Now, do you have any
other
liquid or perishable items in this bag?”

“No.”

“Very good. Thank you, sir. Stan, can I get a wand check? Sir, if you will step out of line, we need you to remove your jacket, belt, and shoes.”

 

 

 

The aging conference in New York was eight hundred strong, elite scientists from around the world presenting findings in brief slots and accepting awards, making speeches, picking from melon platters during breaks, and shaking hands. We were both priests and mongrels, musical prodigies with degrees in proteomics and chemists with Psy.D.’s, we cutthroat, graying Alzheimer’s researchers, each of us guarding secrets we might sell someday to Big Pharma and use to buy vacation homes for ourselves and a board of executives. Really, it was more a gathering of old friends, folks from NYU who used to work down the hall, men and women I’d known my entire career and whose children were doing interesting things with biofuels to save the world, people who shared a common interest and the same lumps and frustrations and budget cuts, for whom it mattered on a deeply personal level what progress we made.

Saturday, we broke for lunch and blinked in the daylight. I joined a group going out to an Italian restaurant off Fifth Avenue, former colleagues and lab mates from NYU, and sat next to Georgia Rhodes, wife of Sandy Rhodes, who’d recently transferred to Duke. Georgia, who proceeded to drink too much wine and tell me she was sad she hadn’t seen me in so long. “Now, how is Sara?” she asked. “Has she ever met that Colin Farrell? I swear, Victor Aaron, where are you keeping her?”

Sandy gave me a look and took one of his wife’s hands. She said, “What’d I say, don’t you apologize for me, why are you always apologizing when no one’s done anything wrong?”

I gave my presentation in the late afternoon and caught up with people afterward until I needed to meet Russell for dinner, leaving my friends to their orange decaf carafes. I was sad to leave. The heat was hanging around Washington Square, snared under the trees. Everyone was sweating. Boys going by me wore white T-shirts to their knees, like communion dresses. My plan had been to walk to dinner for a little exercise, but after fifteen blocks my jacket was wet, plus I was lost where once I’d known every corner.

And was I really preferring to spend the evening with Russell?

Sara and I had expected to miss Manhattan when we left, but we both caught movers’ amnesia. We fell in love with Maine and also with each other again, our older, more demure selves. We shared a feeling of being evacuated. It was a team effort. We didn’t swap our leather jackets for parkas, but we invested in proper boots. “I like the winters,” I told Sara one night in bed, the two of us staring at the ceiling, “how everyone waves on the road.” “When you’ve got a couple hundred people trapped on an island, you get to know the faces.” “Sure, and even if they don’t recognize you, they still wave.” “Who else but a neighbor would be on the island in January?”

It took me ten minutes to find a pay phone. Russell told me where to go. I passed the address to the cab driver, then asked him to roll up his window.

All those years schlepping to the lab as the doughnut guys hauled their carts into place, walking home at night past the drug dealers, I must have blocked out the smell.

 

 

 

Hoofer hits it big, but lacks the girl. Eventually gets his cake and eats it too. Donald O’Connor never got the credit he deserved.

For nearly two hours I didn’t speak, just played Sara’s game in my head. Russell ran the show once we were seated, somewhere below Houston Street, deep downtown, behind an unmarked door where a dining room had been decorated to look grimy, authentically though improbably a hundred years old. A brand-new artifact, though more like an English hunting lodge than a Tammany slum.

“If you believe this, she prefers it doggie style,” Russell said, pushing himself away from the table, balling up his linen napkin. “She prefers it, she gets off on it. You think I say no when she insists?”

Russell had sufficiently recovered from the last girl to find a new one, a Ukrainian blond, Larysa, he said, with chipped teeth and breast implants, who worked as a hostess for one of his clients. After the coffee he was still focused on how she liked it, how she took it, he put it, going into details to show off his good fortune for discovering a woman who didn’t mind facing away from him during sex.

“Look at me,” he said, yawning, one hand up in the air behind his head, “here I am, thinking we need variety.”

“Maybe she’s lying,” I said.

“What? Why would she do that?”

“So moneybags won’t dump her, possibly?”

He gave me the finger. “So, Connie wants to see you tomorrow.” “Yeah? Where do I meet her?”

“How should I know?”

He pulled out a cell phone from his jacket and handed it to me. “What now?” snapped a girl’s voice a moment later.

“It’s Uncle Victor. Are you always so rude?”

“Oh my God, Victor, how are you?”

Russell watched me, drumming his fingers.

“I heard you’re buying me coffee tomorrow.”

“Totally, oh thank you, but are you sure? I don’t want to bother you at all.”

“Honestly, it will be a treat,” I said. “Where do I find you?”

Outside, Russell lit a cigar, and I was shocked by the tightness of his blue jeans. We watched young people go in and out of bars like so many fireflies. Next to them, we were artifacts, though probably not of a mold they’d ever grow into. Russell said he wanted another drink and led me to a wine bar. Afterward, he suggested a strip club near Wall Street. Half an hour later, I was staring through a fish tank behind rows of liquor bottles, behind which naked girls were bending over to touch their toes. Russell rented us a private room and we spent twenty minutes with a girl Regina’s age wearing a rhinestone-encrusted thong, with a face like wet cement. I felt a crying episode coming on. Of all the places, I thought angrily, sitting on my fists.

The girl asked when she finished, would we like to have again, bik boyz? Behind her was a large ATM. Its green sign was the brightest thing in the room.

I caught a cab and Russell leaned in through the open window, jacket sleeves scrunching up on his forearms. The street smelled like urine and cabbage.

“This isn’t for me,” I said.

“It’s not like we all have our own private dancers.”

“Good night, Russell.”

“You know what I mean?”

“Why don’t you go home.”

He looked up the street. He laughed. “I mean, a girl doesn’t need a pole to know what she’s doing.”

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. We’re finished. Are you pleased? Is that enough?”

Fuck you, I said quietly. Fuck you.

“Look, look, I’m drunk,” he said, pushing himself back from the car. “You’re right about Larysa, she probably just wants to cuddle. Vic, call me tomorrow, I’m sorry. Hey, I’ve got something for you.”

He slipped an envelope through the window. When the cab pulled away, Russell slapped the trunk like he was spanking it, hard enough so the whole car jolted. The cabbie hit the brakes, but Russell was already going back into the club.

“Asshole,” the driver said under his breath.

We shot uptown. I opened the envelope. Inside was the sticker Russell had peeled off his windshield: an image of the twin towers smoking, with the words underneath, “We Will Never Forget.”

 

 

 

Sara once claimed that if movies were eliminated, if cinema were wiped off the planet and then somehow, a hundred years later, film was discovered again, two styles would instantly reemerge: kung fu and pornography. The genre’s cockroaches, but also in possession of its genetic code, the bonds of movies’ base pairs: athleticism and sex, war and love. I said slapstick surely came next, with westerns in tow, but Sara disagreed. She wanted romantic comedy in third place, so that any descendants of ours could have a shot at claiming royalties.

Slapstick always beats romantic comedy, I thought, staring out the back of the cab. Not that we produced any descendants anyway. Going up Third Avenue, I counted three new multiplexes that hadn’t been there when we were living in the Village. I stared at Russell’s sticker, then peeled off the back and stuck it on the door.

 

 

 

At three a.m. the night was still muggy. The crying jag never struck. I watched people in the dark walk their dogs, pick up dog shit with plastic bags over their hands like mittens. At five in the morning, the garbage trucks appeared.

Too tired to sleep, I caught an hour at best. Most of the time I sat in a chair by the window and pictured Russell and the airport security guard crawling around like insects.

For the second time in a month, I caught a sunrise. I showered and shaved and watched CNN. As I was packing, I found a stray jar of moisturizer inside my bag. One of Sara’s. It must have been from some trip ages before, when we shared a suitcase. The coincidence seemed overpowering—not a coincidence but a significant event with no correlative, the sudden appearance of this little pot.

I had an image of myself trekking and suddenly needing hand cream, and I’d reach into my backpack, and there would be a tube of Aveda, next to my water bottle.

We Will Never Forget
. As though it was a syndrome, not a pledge.

Was this the bag Sara had taken to California?

I couldn’t remember.

Then I had my big idea.

 

 

 

My goddaughter was dreadlocked as Russell had described, but her dreadlocks were blond and thin as twine, not the thick ones you’d see on a reggae album. Tied up in a bird’s nest, they made her seem top-heavy, her neck was so long. Cornelia made for a very pretty Rastafarian. She’d always had a gaunt, masculine face, wide eyes with her father’s heavy eyebrows, his turned-up nose. I found her sitting on a bench outside a coffee shop on West Eighth Street. She wore a billowing black skirt and black flip-flops, lots of jewelry, a rose-colored silk camisole, and glitter across her cheeks. The Cornelia I remembered had been an animal-rights activist, an A student, a smoker, and, of all things, a dedicated fan of
Singin’ in the Rain.
She’d stayed with us for a long weekend the month she graduated from high school, and on Saturday night, we presented her with an early graduation present: Sara had arranged for a late, private showing of
Singin’ in the Rain
at the Criterion. They even opened the candy counter.

Now she was a woman of twenty-two, alien to me. But there was something refreshing about her posing as an adult. For thirty minutes, Cornelia drank iced chai tea and filled me in on existence post-Cornell: the bar life with friends, sunbathing alone, some boy she had an eye on, an Internet animator she’d been hooking up with since graduation but now considered more, like, a friend with privileges, she said, perhaps. Cornelia’s voice was permanently caught between registers, hoarse and cracked like an adolescent boy’s. The last time I’d seen her was at Sara’s funeral. Cornelia had been in her first year at college. The day was cloudy. She’d worn a baggy tan cotton dress puffing out like a spinnaker, like a portable tepee. I remembered her nose had been red from a piercing that had become infected.