And Now You Can Go (18 page)

I put my bowl, spoon, and mug in the sink and then spot the fly strip. It's still hanging, like some strange baby's mobile, the kind that dangles above the crib. I take the "I'm sorry" poster and stick it to the fly strip. I let go and it stays.

Sarah is coming to town! She's coming back from Ireland to go to a wedding in Buffalo, and is flying into New York City. I haven't seen her since her brother's funeral.

In her e-mail she asks if she can stay with me the weekend before the wedding. The timing couldn't be better, since my roommate will be away. I get the news on Tuesday and I'm so excited I can't sleep.

I go into the kitchen to heat up some milk. Magnetted to the refrigerator is a note:

My eyes roll My teeth gnash

Must I always be the one To take out the trash?

I'm at the library checking out a book about the shipwreck of the
Medusa
when I turn around and see Tom. He turns and starts to walk away. Tucking the book into my bag, I run after him.

"Hey," I say, and he keeps walking. I run around him and stand in front of him. He makes like he's going to walk around me, but then stops.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I don't know why …" He stares at me, waiting for me to finish. "I don't know why," I say again.

We go to a coffee shop and order hot chocolate. His glasses are perched strangely on his forehead, between blond hair and brow. He looks at my dark, Botticelli-boy hair but doesn't comment.

"I hate to say to this, but we'd still be together if it hadn't been for that whole incident in the park," he says.

"You're wrong," I say.

"No, I think I'm right," he says. "You didn't open my letters, did you?"

I shake my head no. I spoon out some of the whipped cream in my hot chocolate. Why do they always give you so much?

"There's something I have to tell you," he says. "Okay," I say. I almost say "Shoot," but don't.

"I want to tell you why I was so obsessed with talking to you. Why I kept calling, why I wrote those letters."

I've never seen him cry, but I think that if he were about to, he'd look the way he does now.

"It was a timing thing," he says. "Bad timing. The day after what happened to you happened, I found out my mom was sick."

I stare at him. I picture his mother again, the woman fretting over the cancerous spot on his nose, the woman who wanted to meet me.

"That's why I was trying to call you," he says. I ask what's wrong with his mom.

"She has Parkinsons," he says.

He doesn't say anything more, and I get a moldy feeling in my stomach, my throat.

"She'll be okay—we know that now. But for a while there …" He sticks his fingers in his glass of water.

"How are your sisters?" I ask. "Not good."

Outside on the sidewalk I stand on tiptoe and hug him. Above me, I smell his chlorine-smelling hair. I hold him for minutes.

Buses pass. People stare. I hug him and hug him and know it's not enough. I think,
The next person I love, I will love better. When I'm ready to love, when it's someone else, none of these people but someone else, I will love better. I will give everything back. They won't even know what hit them
.

On Friday the intercom rings and I run down the stairs to greet Sarah. But it's not Sarah, it's a FedEx package. It's from the basketball player and she's enclosed a note: "
Here's a copy of our original letter and the one my father wrote back to us
."

She signed the letter to her father with both her name and mine.

When Sarah walks into the apartment, we hug tight. I try to pick her up and fail. She may be slighter than I am, but she's a few inches taller.

"Your hair looks so good," she says convincingly.

"Your dimples are so cute." I stick my index finger into her right one. She smiles and the dimple deepens.

I show her to my roommate's room. "She said you could stay here," I lie. Sarah and I have slept in the same bed before but she's a sprawler. And I'm starting to like sleeping alone.

"I'm starving," she says. "Lets get food and then get drunk."

We go to a pizza place and order twelve garlic knots. The Italian behind the counter, with the thick, weight-lifting neck, gives us three more for free.

We go downtown to a bar and I pace myself: one drink to her two. Since moving to Ireland, Sarah can drink double.

She tells me she's been on a few dates with a man who hosts a children's show. He's a puppeteer.

"Do you see his face on the show or just his hands?" I ask.

"No, it's not like that. He's not behind a wall or anything. He walks around, bumps into things, has adventures."

She laughs, the ends of her light brown hair slipping into her beer. "He's really short, like a child. But on TV he looks normal size," she says. "You'd love him."

We decide to go to another bar, with cheaper drinks and better music. Outside, on the street, someone throws a snowball at Sarah. She throws it back at him and keeps walking.

"God, I miss you," I say.

The next bar has a pinball machine with Remington Steele's picture. He's wearing a tux. We sit on picnic-table benches. The table is set with menorahs, and napkins that say "Ho Ho Ho."

"The decor's still Christmas," Sarah says.

"It's always Christmas here," I say. "That's the theme."

We talk about the dole, how she knows Americans who go to Ireland and live off it. "Pathetic," I say.

"El," a woman's voice behind me says. I turn around.

"I
thought
that was you," the woman says. It takes me a minute to place her: Melissa. She's in the art history program, writing a dissertation on Japanese landscape screens. I see her in the cafeteria in Avery Hall sometimes: she's usually by herself, picking at a scone. Her boots never have heels; with heels she'd be over six feet tall.

I introduce her and Sarah. "I'm meeting somebody," Melissa says. "Can I sit with you until he comes?"

I move my jacket off the bench and hang it on a hook under the table. While Melissa gets up to get a drink, Sarah mentions her recent trip to Northern Ireland, how people there think they're in the same situation as Palestinians. We talk about the potato famine.

"Speaking of potato famines," Melissa says as she sits back down, "remember that whole thing with Dan Quayle?"

The representative of the world walks in the door. At first I think it's a coincidence, but Melissa turns to face him. "Hey there," she says. He comes toward our table and stops when he sees me. Then he continues his approach and sits down with us.

"Hey," he says. It's the first time I've seen him since being back. His face is no longer red: it's the brown of walnuts. Maybe the color changed when he switched medications.

"Hi," I say. "Thanks for the ostrich." "I was trying to find—"

"I know," I say.

Somethings wrong with him. He's not blinking.

He talks for twenty minutes straight about a boy genius he saw on TV. Sarah yawns without covering her mouth. I've never seen him like this before; I've never seen him high. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom.

I'm in the stall when I hear someone else come into the women's restroom. Under the graffitied-door I can see Melissa's boots. I wait for her to reapply her lipstick or wash her hands, to leave. On the wall to my left is a metal mailbox-looking bin with a sign that says "Tampon Receptacal." Someone's crossed out the last two letters of the second word and written, "
le, you dipshit
." I open the bin's mouth and it falls shut loudly. I want Melissa to think that's my excuse for being in here for so long. Why do I need an excuse to not talk to her? Finally, I decide she's not going anywhere. I flush the toilet and come out. I go to the sink and turn on the water. The cold apparently isn't working, so the water's hot. It's scalding.

"I have to tell you something," she says. Her eyes meet mine in the mirror. "That whole time he was seeing you, he was seeing me too."

"What?" I say. "Who?"

Melissa nods her head in the direction of the bar. As she does this, her skeleton earring gets tangled in her hair. She tugs it out. "We worried about you. We felt bad, but we didn't know what to do."

"Don't worry about it," I say. In my head I have a calendar; I know what's happened every day since December second. "When did you start dating?"

She tells me: late November.

I push the button on the hand dryer and rub my hands under its warmth.

"I feel awful," she says, raising her voice above the hum. In the harsh bathroom light, her skin looks thin and creased, like papyrus. I remember hearing a rumor that at a party last fall, she drew a bath and tried to drown herself. Someone stopped her. I wonder who it was.

"Don't worry about it," I say. "Please."

"But I do. I mean, I'm his age almost. But you're so young and everything."

She lifts my bangs off my forehead as if to make her point: that I don't even have a wrinkle. I grab her hand. "Don't touch me," I say calmly.

Back at the table, the representative of the world is talking to Sarah about the Nicene Creed. "In the Catholic church they say Christ rose
in fulfillment
of the scriptures. In the Episcopalian they say
in accordance
with the scriptures." He's still not blinking. "That's a big difference."

I stand behind Sarah and lean in toward her scalp. "Let's go."

As we walk toward the White Horse I tell Sarah the rumors I've heard about Melissa and the bathtub. Sarah says something about the representative being a prayer.

I tell her that the first night he spent with me, he went home early because he had to wake up for church. I tell her about the cross above his bed.

She stops walking. Sometimes this drives me crazy, the way she can't walk and think at the same time. "No, not prayer—a preyer." She spells out the letters, emphasizing the "e."

"What do you mean?"

"Someone who takes advantage of chicks who are going through a rough time." "Yeah," I say. "I guess so." I've never thought about this.

Sarah puts on an Italian accent. "American men, they are so weak," she says. She's imitating my mom. My mother always says this about American men.

I shake my head at Sarahs accent. We walk in silence for half a block. "So?" she says.

"So what?"

"What's going on with the man who held you up?"

I tell her they have no leads. I mention the posters with the handwriting on them. "I saw it," Sarah says.

"What?"

"At your apartment, in the kitchen on a fly strip." "Oh."

"What do you think?" she asks. "Do you think it's him?" I tell her I do.

We stop by a twenty-four hour bagel place on the way home. We ask how bagels are made. We get a tour.

"Please, move to New York," I say to her. "What would I do here?" she asks.

Through the window of the pizza parlor the man who served us garlic knots knocks on the glass. He and his coworker move to the door and he opens it.

"It's the garlic knot girls," the thick-necked guy says. Sarah and I wave gloved hands at them.

When we enter the lobby Danny calls out, "Daphne!" "This is Sarah," I say.

"Sarah," he says.

We go to get my mail.

In the elevator Sarah asks, "What was that about?"

"He has this weird idea that all the people he's lost—his wife, his daughter—are just going to show up in the lobby one night."

I open an envelope from the basketball player. It's a check for three thousand dollars. "
Your cut
," says the note attached.

I show it to Sarah.

Her eyes widen. "That'll get you to Ireland," she says, as we step out of the elevator.

Outside my apartment, there's a man lying on the floor. Sarah stops. I step back. He wakes up and rolls over. The ROTC boy.

"Are you all right?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says. "I told you I'd keep watch over you." I see him checking out Sarahs long legs.

"Come on in," I say. "You can sleep on the couch."

The ROTC boy wakes up late. He comes into the kitchen, barefoot. I have batter on my hands. "We're making waffles," I tell him.

He eats eleven waffles. Sarah and I watch in amazement. "Do you like Joyce?" he asks Sarah.

"Yes," she says. She says "yes" instead of "yeah."

The ROTC boy smiles. "Joyce is the fucking king!" he says.

He tells us how he wants to do ads for Guinness. He doesn't think the company's beer campaigns do justice to Ireland's literary heritage.

Sarah performs a Celtic dance for us. Her knees are knobby, her ankles turned out. It would be so fun if she and I were twins.

The ROTC boy goes to the bathroom and then he comes back out to the living room, snorting his piggish laugh. "Hey," he says, "I can't believe what I found in your room." Sarah and I follow him back there.

On the wall is an old poster of Bosch's
The Garden of Earthly Delights
. "I can't believe you have this," the ROTC boy says.

I ask why.

"This is what girls in college put on their walls to show they like sex." I stand on my bed and rip down the poster, one strip at a time.

On the wall are pieces of sticky blue gum. "That looks nice," the ROTC boy says.

As he's leaving, he says he'll call later, that his good friend, G. P., who he used to play hockey with, is taking the train up from D.C. and we should all go out.

"Is G. P. a doctor?" Sarah asks. "What?" he says.

"G.P., general practitioner."

The ROTC boy slaps his forehead with the palm of his hand. I laugh.

Sarah and I go shopping for shoes for her to wear to the wedding. We go to a discount chain called Strawberry. All the prices end in ninety-nine cents.

It's early February, so most of the shoes on display are plastic boots, but Sarah manages to find a pair of white high heels on sale.

Sarah tries the shoes on. "What do you think?" she says.

"I think those are the most ridiculous things I have ever seen."

She goes to the register to pay.

We go to a bargain movie theater where they're re-showing
Jaws 3-D
. Afterward, Sarah refuses to take off the 3-D glasses with the one red lens and the one blue. We walk through Central Park and she's wearing her glasses. We walk along Fifth Avenue, with all the awninged hotels and the tourists carrying Barneys and Henri Bendel bags, and still she won't take them off.