You Lost Me There (10 page)

“They wanted to participate.”

“My parents don’t so much communicate as signal their thoughts. Like Eric telling me he’s splitting apart inside, no small comment, but my father rolled his eyes when I told him, and slammed a door. You have to understand, my parents used to be hard-core. Part of the movement, and depression was something conformists suffered, the malaise of the bourgeoisie, et cetera. But to Eric, you know, he actually
was
splitting apart. As far as he knew, there was all of us in the real world, me, my parents, the animals, the neighbors, the kids in school, the people on TV, and then there was him, alone inside his head. I mean, he trusted me, I was the conduit. But then he found out what I’d told our father. I mean, I had to, he was sick, he had this need. But my dad got angry about it, he’d banged on the door until the deadbolt slid and confronted Eric. See, he thought by repeating to Eric this confidence he’d buy his own access, then Eric could cut the quote-unquote bullshit that way, the stuff he was feeding me, and they’d just talk straight, man to man. And of course that shut Eric up. Shut me out, too. I mean, eventually Eric understood why I’d told them, he came around two weeks later, to the idea it was me saying, ‘I’m worried about you, I want to help you.’ But part of him still blamed me when my parents weren’t able to fix anything. So he’s seventeen, I’m fourteen, he goes to school and actually does okay, otherwise he’s in his room with his headphones on, no hair, he’s a skinhead by that point—”

“Like a Nazi?”

“Well, you had skinheads, you had gangbangers, straight-edge, the crunchy kids, the dirtbags. Whatever, it was about music, not politics. Not that my parents saw that, either. He was just trying to belong to something, to attach himself. So they prayed harder. I told you my parents are Christian Scientist? This is after the Communism period.”

“No.”

“Right, well, pseudo at least, in a Whole Foods kind of way.”

“Organically.”

“One time they got a healer who hooked Eric up to a car battery. Anyway, they don’t trust doctors, the government, public works. So my mother now was convinced by TV that his school was at fault, the influence of his social group, so she should start homeschooling Eric. Great, well, then came the overdose. On Tylenol. My mother found him, she called the ambulance, they got him to the hospital, he came out okay. But now my parents were terrified, we all were. Eric especially. He called me into his room one night. He was really skinny by that point, and pale, like I could see through his arm. And he was so angry, but embarrassed more than anything. He tried to explain to me how he carried this burden not only of failing in life, but now with the suicide attempt, he’d failed at being a failure, so there was a double humiliation. Now he was nobody. We listened to Radiohead; he fell asleep with his head in my lap. So we started talking three times a day. I’d call him from the pay phone at the school gym. At night we smoked pot and watched Frank Capra movies. But nothing was improving. Then my parents decided Eric needed to go away, on their terms.

“They used me as bait, basically,” said Regina.

“What does that mean?”

“I was the only person in Eric’s world, besides Thom Yorke, he believed was on his side. They found this home outside Chicago where he was supposed to go stay for a year, a psych ward with nice landscaping, like a schizophrenic summer camp. First they had to get him there, though, so my parents pitched a trip: we would take a family vacation to the Art Institute.”

“In Chicago.”

“I’d been pleading for months how I badly wanted to see this Viennese show they’d just opened, but we had to go as a family, they said. Eric couldn’t stay home alone. So I worked on my brother: needling him, goading him. It took every chit I had, but one morning we got in the van and drove to Illinois, even stayed the night in a schmancy hotel near Michigan Avenue, which definitely was not our style. I mean, my parents don’t even like beds. But the next morning, I’m twitching I’m so thrilled, and my brother has caught my excitement; they had this big breakfast buffet at the hotel with salmon and bagels and an omelet bar. Then we come out on the sidewalk, and there’s these two big dudes and some woman, the three of them are talking to my parents, and Eric and I are only just at that point sensing something’s up when the guys appear, take up either side of my brother, carry him into a Suburban and Eric’s screaming, staring at me, yelling at me to help him, stop them, so then I start screaming, but then they’re gone. The Suburban drives away. Everyone’s crying, my parents included, my dad later thanks me ‘for playing my part.’ He says this, you know, for playing the role I would never have agreed to perform had I been apprised of the plan, as I’m sure they knew. That was our last family vacation. My brother stayed eighteen months, got on phenelzine, now he’s a reasonably functioning mattress salesman and proto-rocker. He doesn’t speak to my parents, though, and I don’t have much reason to, either. They tried taking me to the museum that afternoon as a reward.”

I fell asleep listening to Radu Lupu play Schubert. In my dream, Regina was a projection dancing far away in a forest. I shouted at her to leave me alone. A fog came up from the ground, so I couldn’t see where I was going, and I ran straight into a tree, sticking up in the middle of a highway. The tree was coated with tar. I couldn’t move. Headlights from a car pinpointed me and flashed Morse code. Then the forest became a desert in New Mexico: infinite yellow sand, infinite black sky. But no stars. The driver in the car was a girl I’d dreamed about going down on when I was in the eleventh grade. I could see her face above the steering wheel, and I imagined her vagina as I used to in class, trapped between her legs, yearning to be exposed and kissed.

I was filled with the certainty that she’d run me over with her car and keep driving, leaving me to die.

The girl spoke through ESP. She informed me she’d crash into me soon, and then go after Regina, Regina who was starring in a drive-in movie projected onto the side of a mesa. But there’s a condition, the ghost said.

 

 

 

“Victor, you’re an awful boy.”

“I can’t say how sorry I am.”

The windows dripped with rain. Her voice crackling: “A nuisance. A
pain
to me.”

“Betsy, I am very sorry.”

“And you’ll never do it again, say that, Victor.”

“I’ll never do it again,” I said, coddling the phone.

“That’s right, you’ll never stand me up again. Why, Joel has never been so
awful
, Victor, leaving a woman stranded when it was freezing wet last night, you remember? And I cooked both steaks, and not cheap, mind you. The potatoes the way you like. I made a pound cake for dessert, I baked an extra so you could have something nice around that empty house of yours, but now it’s
dry
, Victor, in the trash. You know how much they charge for filet these days at Pine Tree? Do you?”

Sara would have pointed out that this was very true to Betsy’s character, to call early in the morning to own the slight.

“How can I make it up to you?”

“Too late, I’m going out to Cranberry.”

“Betsy—”

“Next Friday, you’ll take me to dinner.”

“There we go. Of course.”

“Well, don’t sit too comfortable,” Betsy snapped. “You pick up the check. And no whining about what I drink.”

“Dear, I am truthfully very sorry.”

“And we’ll go to Blue Sea.”

There was a second’s pause and I could hear her considering how I would react. Blue Sea was her son Joel’s restaurant, in Southwest Harbor. It was the island’s best restaurant, not inexpensive but worth the price. It was also open year-round, a rarity come January. Everyone raved about Joel and his cooking.
Gourmet
had published an article the previous year about contemporary cuisine in New England, singling out Joel in a sidebar: “Organic Prophet Hidden in Tourists’ Mecca.” I found the clipping one day buried inside a book on Betsy’s coffee table, though I don’t think she’d ever set foot in the restaurant.

In the breezeway came a bang from the door. Russell appeared wearing running shorts and sneakers. He opened the refrigerator and finished off the orange juice.

“All right, Blue Sea, sounds good,” I said.

“You eat there all the time, as though I don’t know. They must have something I can stomach. Is there a smoking section?”

“Next Friday, seven o’clock. I’ll get a reservation, okay?”

“In fact,” she said, dawdling, “I’ve wondered if I wouldn’t rather begin seeing Joel more often. Make it six-thirty. And that’s right, you
will
pick me up, and if you don’t then forget it, Victor, you’ll never see me again.”

At eleven years old, Joel had been shipped off to Uncle Bill’s prep school alma mater in Massachusetts. During the summers, they enrolled him at a boys’ camp in Vermont. Joel had told me about it one evening at the Blue Sea bar: that if his parents ever did see him as a boy, it had been at Christmastime, when Cape Near would be full of people, adults banging on the piano and philandering, a party every night. No wonder, I thought, Joel set fire to his dormitory. A great big burning plea for attention. Then he ran away and disappeared for two years. The Pinkertons and FBI were enlisted, to no avail.

Betsy once told me she and Bill were devastated at the time, feeling betrayed. “And just when I was becoming interested in him,” she’d said.

She chirped, “Ta, Victor dear,” before slamming down the phone.

 

 

 

I remembered Sara’s play going up on Broadway. I remembered opening night on Forty-sixth Street, applauding from backstage amid the support staff. I remembered how proud I felt. I remembered the conversation backstage: “What did you think?” “Best I ever saw. Best you ever wrote.” We kissed and she said under my nose, “Next time I’m doing a musical, how’s that?” And then, without missing a beat, we both started humming, “Some Enchanted Evening.” It was one of our old tricks.

The memory was vivid, remaining centered, but that had been Sara’s doing. She’d retold the story innumerable times at dinner parties, how the two of us hummed the same song. She was always her own favorite subject, and we by proxy, but all that subsequent retrieval, telling the story one more time, had reinforced the synapses for both of us, molding our recall, our marriage.

By that point, most of my memories were probably more Sara’s doing, neurologically speaking, than my own.

And apparently this absence of mine, in her critical career moment, had been pivotal, or so she remembered. It was my neglect that had been the impetus for the play.
The hunched shoulders, the earlier morning exits and later returns at night.
And yet I didn’t remember feeling excluded, never mind upset.
He’ll say I’ve got it wrong. He’ll say my remembering is incorrect, that I’m over-emphasizing , under-analyzing , the typical dramatist’s approach: emoting.

Our bodies weren’t more than habitats, was my take. How different were people anyway except for the memories we carried? At some level, weren’t Sara and Victor the same, wasn’t that marriage’s implicit guarantee?

Outside, the clouds were parting, and the sun broke through; the ferns and trees were bright green.

“What I call Connie eggs,” said Russell. He was stirring sausage around a pan with onions.

“I thought Cornelia was a vegetarian.”

“Vegan. Raw foods only. I tell her it’s that tofu bacon she likes, she never notices the difference anyway.” He looked up. “I’m kidding.”

“So how is Cornelia?”

“Misguided. Shitty peer group, all kinds of bad advice. Too much time on the phone with her mother, mainly. But I try not to meddle. That she even talks to me is a gold star. Oh, she told me to say, ‘What’s up.’”

“What’s up.”

“I’ll let her know.”

“I’m going to change.”

“Maybe we discuss later why you’re sleeping in your stereo chamber these days?” he called after me.

Russell toweled off the picnic table and set out breakfast. I watched him from the bedroom window. The place mats and napkins he put out, Sara had bought them during our trip to Puerto Rico. It rained day and night for a week. Sara bought a rain jacket and would go exploring after breakfast, past the beer and fried-seafood shacks, down the alleys, while I stayed in bed and read mystery novels.

One napkin would have a purple stain along the trim, I wanted to call out to Russell. Sara had used it to clean up a wine spill once, back in Manhattan. “That’ll stain.” “We’ll wash it.” “It’s red wine, it won’t come out unless you rinse it out now,” I’d said. She announced, “It’s a napkin, Victor.” Then I burst out, “Why don’t you ever think about anything besides yourself?”

This was when
Woman Hits Forty
was a month into its Broadway run, when I’d made my big change to be a better, more devoted husband.

“Well, it’s about time,” she’d said a moment later.

“So you think they have a corking fee?” Russell asked.

“Blue Sea?” We were planning to go there for dinner that evening. “I doubt it.”

“Look, I don’t want to offend local management, not if there’s a deal to be done.” Russell dunked his toast in his coffee. “You know,” he said, “last night, I heard you.”

“What?”

“Three in the morning, suddenly Beethoven was performing at Carnegie Hall.”

“Sorry, I didn’t realize.”

“The dancing queen?”

“Look, not over breakfast.”

“What I don’t understand is why you don’t just end it, if it’s such a pain, unless it’s the pussy?”

He was staring at me, my psychologist, my interrogator. Soon he’d ask about the cards in my shirt pocket.

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

“Pussy’s always simple.”

When we finished, Russell cleared the dishes like a waiter, stacking them on his forearm. He looked back at me from the door. “You know, we’re supposed to be talking about me here, concerning romance.”