Dive From Clausen's Pier (26 page)

His jacket was draped over a chair, and he crossed the room and
pulled it on. He gave me a smile and a wave, said, “See you,” and moved past me to the doorway. I turned and watched as he made his way down the dimly lit hallway, less and less distinct in the growing darkness until he opened the front door and disappeared.

My heart was pounding. I could still feel the place on my neck where he had touched me, all the possibilities that touch had suggested.
Our first fight
, I thought, but it didn’t seem cute, it seemed incomprehensible. What had even happened? Not a fight. He’d been angry, but not at me.
I
was angry—at him, for leaving—but more than that I was mystified. Why hadn’t he said the name of the person he’d known who went to Lane’s school? Why say you knew someone and then refuse to say whom? And what about what had happened with Greg?

Once I was done with my work I put everything away and carried my sewing machine back upstairs. I’d hang the curtain tomorrow, once I’d bought a rod. For now I flopped onto the futon. Near my pillow I’d hung a little cardboard-mounted watercolor of a pear that I’d bought from a sidewalk vendor in SoHo. On the vendor’s table it had looked refreshing, a breath of summer, the perfect yellowy green of the pear, but hanging in the alcove it just seemed forlorn—it made the wall look all the dingier. The floor space of the alcove was barely bigger than the futon. I was living in a little beige box. And yet I wasn’t—I hadn’t slept here in almost a week. I thought of Kilroy’s bedroom, his bed, how quickly we had established which side each of us slept on, he on the left and I on the right. It had taken some getting used to, being on the right, because with Mike I’d always slept on the left. When Mike and I lay like spoons with him behind me, it was my right side his arm lay across, my right shoulder he held. For many, many nights of my life, up until five months ago. I remembered what he looked like sleeping, and then what he looked like in the hospital, not-sleeping, unresponsive. I’d never asked him exactly what it had been like to emerge from that. The resumption of consciousness. I’d seen what it had been like, I knew he’d been confused, but what had he thought? What had it meant to recognize himself as not entirely himself—as unable to move? To feel? I’d never simply said
Tell me
. I hadn’t wanted to know.

Out on the landing there was a telephone with a long cord, and I pulled it into the alcove. It was almost ten, almost nine in Madison. Mrs. Mayer answered, and then stayed absolutely silent once I’d identified myself. I waited a moment, then another, and finally asked how she was.

“Fine,” she said, and then, “I’m fine,” as if I might have thought she’d been speaking for him, too.

“Can I talk to him?”

There was a lot of rustling, and then he came on, saying, “Hi, Carrie,” in a bright voice that made me ache. “How’s it going?” he said. “You haven’t sent me my postcard.”

His postcard, of the Empire State Building. I’d completely forgotten. “God, I’m sorry.”

“Whatever. Do it when you can. So what’s up?”

I looked down at my ring, the stone dull in the dim light of the alcove. Why was I still wearing it? I couldn’t take it off, but I couldn’t say
Tell me
, either. What could I say? I said, “I was thinking of you.” He was silent, and I added, “I’ve been thinking of you a lot, wondering how you’ve been doing.”

“Not bad,” he said. “Really pretty good. How about you—what have you been up to?”

I hesitated, wanting only to avoid the truth, to avoid Kilroy. “Walking,” I said, and then immediately felt sick, ashamed. Walking? Why not just say
Something you can’t do?

“Is it fun?” he said.

I swallowed. “Yeah. It’s like every day I discover some new part of the city I’ve never heard of. The neighborhoods all have these names, like Turtle Bay.”

“Turtle Bay,” he said. “Sounds like a good place not to go swimming.”

“It’s not a real bay.”

He was silent, and after a moment I added, “I’m sorry, Mike. I just wanted to say I’m really sorry.” And then there was more rustling, and his mother came back on.

C
HAPTER
20

I woke the next morning feeling disoriented and leaden, guilt and doom returning to me instantly. Trying to fall asleep, I’d spiraled from Mike to Kilroy to Mike, and right away I was at it again. Mike’s voice all metallic with the effort to sound upbeat. Kilroy walking away. Mike unhappier even than he had to be, because of me. Kilroy receding down the hall, always out of reach.

It was dim in the alcove, the flat light of early morning. I reached for my watch and was surprised to find it was after ten. I got up and went to the soon-to-be-covered stairwell window. No wonder I’d slept in: the sky was close and gray.

I rummaged in my messy suitcase for clothes, then went into the bathroom for a shower. Afterward, in the foggy glass of the medicine cabinet, my face looked puffy. I used my towel to rub a spot clear, and my face
was
puffy.

Lane and Alice had made room for some of my stuff on a shelf that held their toiletries, and I reached for my blow dryer and plugged it in. I half dried my hair and then stopped, tired of the effort. I got into my clothes and tried to smooth out my sweater, but gave up. It was hopeless. Every so often I opened my suitcase and tried to get it organized, but it only lasted a few days. Wearing wrinkled clothes was just part of my life.

When I stepped out of the bathroom Lane appeared almost instantly in her doorway, as if she’d been waiting.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you need the bathroom? I was in there forever.”

She smiled. “No, I wanted to say
I
was sorry. About last night. I mean—I think I offended Kilroy.”

I shook my head vehemently, and she gave me a puzzled look. “I didn’t offend him?”

“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I don’t really know what happened.” To my dismay, tears pricked at my eyes, and I looked down. After a moment, I pressed my fingertips against my eyelids and wiped the wetness away. When I looked up again, a furrow had appeared between her pale eyebrows.

“Are you OK?”

I nodded.

“Do you want to come in? And sit down?”

I looked past her into her room. It was the nicest in the house: she’d repaired her walls and painted them a pretty pale green, offset by a glossy dark gray on the moldings. She was never home at this hour, and I wondered if she was sick. Her hair stuck up in places, but she was dressed, in skinny black pants and a gray top that dwarfed her, its neckline so wide it exposed one shoulder.

“Come on,” she said, and she moved in and stepped aside for me, then pointed me toward a little pale-blue armchair in the corner. She sat on her bed and gave me a warm smile. There was something comfortable about her, or maybe comforting. She always kept her door ajar, called “Good morning” or “Goodnight” to me as I went to or from the bathroom. When the door was closed I knew her girlfriend was staying over.

“Do you—” she began. “I mean, I don’t want to pry, but if you want to talk …”

I looked into my lap. I thought of the early years of my relationship with Mike, how I’d told Jamie everything. It had been as if things hadn’t really happened until I’d described them to her. The two of us on the phone, or lying on the floor in her bedroom … I wasn’t telling anyone about Kilroy. Simon had asked a few times, but I hadn’t felt comfortable.

My lips were dry, and I licked them. “Thanks.”

A series of waist-high bookcases lined Lane’s walls, and I scanned them. Their tops were covered with framed pictures and all kinds of objects, from seashells to baskets to ceramic bowls full of buttons and marbles. Near me, a blue glass bottle held a single sprig of lavender, and I leaned over and smelled it.

“Amazing how the scent lasts, isn’t it?”

I looked over and found her smiling gently. “It is,” I said. “Your room is so lovely,” I added, and my face warmed a little. “I mean, I’m not sure I’ve ever called anything lovely before, but it’s the right word for this.”

She smiled. “Thank you. I’m sorry not to have invited you in before.”

“Oh, no, please—I’ve been this weird neighbor, you didn’t know how long I was staying. You still don’t.
I
don’t.”

She shrugged. “What difference does it make? Miss Wolf says plans are for the bourgeois.” She smiled. “Of course, at the same time she’s asking if I can come at nine instead of nine-thirty the next day because she wants help dealing with the new cleaning lady.”

Miss Wolf was her employer, an elderly writer of some previous fame who lived near the Metropolitan Museum in an apartment with views of Central Park. Lane was her paid companion.

“No work today?” I said.

She shook her head. “She’s got her niece visiting.”

“How’d you get that job, anyway?”

“The old-girl network, lesbian track,” she said with a smile. “My favorite professor at Yale was this same niece’s best friend’s cousin. Miss Wolf is an unequal opportunity employer and I fit the bill perfectly: ‘a young, frail sapphist poetess,’ to quote her. Her last companion is now the director of a retreat for lesbian artists in upstate New York, so you can see the wide career path ahead of me.”

I smiled. “Are you a poetess? A poet?”

Lane’s pale face filled with color, and she nodded.

“I didn’t know that,” I said. I thought of the others, Simon with his illustrating, Greg with acting. I’d been in nearly as many conversations with Lane as I had with Greg, and she’d never mentioned anything but her job.

“It’s not something I really talk about,” she said.

“I’d love to read something you wrote. If that’s not too forward.”

She looked down for a moment, her face even redder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is ridiculous. I’m stupid about this.” She wiped her palms on her gray duvet cover, then went over to one of the bookcases and withdrew a slim paperback book, the cover a soft periwinkle blue. “Here,” she said, holding it out to me.

Parapraxis and Eurydice
, it said on the cover.
Poems by Lane Driscoll
.

“You already have a book?” I said.

“It’s just a chapbook.”

I took it and turned to the table of contents, which was like a poem itself: “The Blue Door in the Garden,” “Where You Stood,” “Knowing
the Vocabularies of the Body.” I flipped a few pages and read at random, conscious that she was watching me. Part of it went:

Of the you in me:
l’uomo vero
,
the true man.
The father of memory,
of all my time.

“Wow,” I said. “Did this come out while you were still at Yale?”

“It was printed then,” she said, blushing again. “It didn’t really come out, it’s just a chapbook.”

I handed it back to her. “Well, I’m impressed.”

She slid it back onto the shelf, where there were eight or ten other copies, their narrow spines carefully aligned. She turned back and smiled at me. “Simon, in typical Simon fashion, ordered a case and sat outside our dining hall trying to sell them—my publicist, he said he was. He had a sign made up. I’ve never been so mortified.”

I smiled. “What was he like then?”

“Like now, but with a little more Wisconsin around the edges.” She shrugged. “How about in high school?”

He was quiet in the French class we had together—not unfriendly, but very self-contained. Around school he smiled when he saw me, but to himself, as if he thought me vaguely comical. Which I probably was, joined at the hip to Mike. Out of nowhere I recalled sitting on Mike’s lap in the cafeteria one day and seeing Simon in line by himself, nothing on his tray but a container of red Jell-O. He paid and then carried it to an empty table at the far edge of the room. “I didn’t know him that well,” I said at last. “He was shy, I guess.”

“Closeted?”

“Definitely.” I looked at her. “Was it hard to be gay at Yale?”

“More hard not to be. We lucked out, timing-wise. It was more like certain people were closet heterosexuals.”

I thought of how open Simon was now. How he’d told me he no longer went anywhere where he had to pretend to be straight. If he’d stayed in Madison would he have reached that point? I doubted it.

“I didn’t come here expecting anything like this to happen,” I said.

“With Kilroy?”

I nodded.

“Because of …”

“Mike. I mean, Simon told you, right?”

“I adore him, but he’s
not
discreet.”

“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s fine.” I looked at her for a moment, then turned to a nearby shelf and stroked my finger over the rough surface of a tiny starfish lying there.

She took something off her bedside table and carried it to me in her outstretched palm. “Look at this,” she said. “Feel it. It’s really soft.”

It was a sand dollar. I took it from her and held it in my hand, a pure white disk etched with delicate spears. I touched the surface, so soft I imagined a fine dust would come away on my fingertips.

“I found it on the beach when I was a little girl,” she said. “I’m always amazed I haven’t lost it.”

I handed it back and watched her set it carefully on her table again. I imagined her alone on the beach, alone but not minding it. A little girl in a flowered bathing suit and a big straw hat. Digging in the sand. Knowing she was safe.

Lane had errands to do, so we headed out together, then said goodbye on a street corner. The cloud cover was lifting and separating, revealing ribbons of watery blue. I checked on my car, then headed for a hardware store in the neighborhood. The sidewalks were alive with people, passing me with their gesticulating hands and their focused expressions. Where but in New York could you see a woman in a pink sari walking alongside a man with green hair and a pierced eyebrow, their faces turned toward each other in obvious delight? I liked the juxtapositions of stores: Cool Comix next to Manny’s Shoe Repair; Laundromatic next to
Faïence de Provence
. For a while I just looked at people’s feet, wondering at the number of foot-miles each block of sidewalk supported each day.