Imagine Me Gone (19 page)

So Caleigh and I, with Myra’s assistance, set to work writing a brief, explanatory pamphlet, our modest contribution to the consciousness-raising effort. I wanted to put an eighteenth-century schematic drawing of the hold of a slave ship on the cover, to show how the ancestors of our fellow citizens had arrived here, but Caleigh favored an early-twentieth-century photograph of a black dirt farmer harnessed to his plow. We ran off five hundred copies at Kinko’s, and from then on I always made sure to have a supply in my bag so that when riding the bus or the T, I could spend a few minutes imposing them on my fellow passengers.

Lexapro

When I did get around to applying to grad school the year I turned thirty, I was surprised, given how much thought and study I’d put in, to be rejected by each and every one. Being white was probably not an advantage in my chosen field of African-American studies (though, naturally, that is an admissions preference I wholly support, no matter its effect on me). By this time, my roommate Ben had performed the hat trick of meeting a highly intelligent and alluring woman outside of his knitting circles, maintaining his sense of self-worth long enough for them to complete a course of dating, and eventually convincing her, Christine, to move in with us. As the rejection letters arrived weekly through March and April, the two of them didn’t know what to say after asking me how my day had been and hearing only another report of canceled possibility. Any more than Celia or Alec did. I’d never felt the least bit competitive with either of them (though Celia’s ease in finding a new boyfriend each time she broke up with an old one irked me at times), and I put out of my mind the fact that my sister already had a master’s in social work and that Alec had completed his journalism degree, despite being five years younger.

Wellbutrin

There continued, the following spring, to be no rational basis to resent either of them in particular when I got rejected everywhere I applied for a second time. The left-wing phone bank had cut back on staff by then and I was unemployed, which Dr. Bennet was helpful enough to remind me was a major life stressor. As in, justifying of increased doses across the board. Generalized anxiety, that’s how he now described my condition. He suggested a support group, which conveniently met just down the hall from his office. Where the support group met that would help me get over going to this support group wasn’t clear. But oh well.

I thought fibromyalgia in Arkansas was bad, but there was no telephonic remove from the Gulf War vet who slept curled around his rifle and looked at us as if we were bloody remains, or the woman being charged with child neglect because she could never clean enough to satisfy herself it was safe to feed her malnourished offspring. Our youngest colleague still wet himself at the age of twenty-two. When we weren’t hearing about melted corpses on Iraq’s highway of death, we could kick back to the tale of a bankrupt lawyer’s sixteen-hour odyssey to find a lightbulb in sufficiently undimpled packaging. Someone once said, It’s all about the parties you go to. No kidding. The facilitator was into what she called “aversion treatment.” The lawyer was instructed to go straight from the meeting to the nearest drugstore, walk to the housewares section, and pick up the first 100-watt bulb his eyes alighted upon. Not so clear that the vet should cluster-bomb downtown Attleboro for a little DIY reenactment, but the woman afraid of her groceries could force herself to cut broccoli right on the counter and then eat it with her little ones. Before my terror at the reality of these people’s lives caused me to flee the scene, I got two assignments from the facilitator myself: to leave the house just when I expected Caleigh to call, and to empty the drawer where I put all my unpaid bills and sort them in order of priority, presumably so I could figure out which one to talk with my mother about first. I completed neither.

Remeron

Flummoxed at my refractory symptoms, Dr. Bennet ran me through a complete re-eval, said I needed to stop talking about psychoanalytic theory in our sessions, and put me on enough uppers to cheer a POW. I recall a period of two or three months when my head felt compressed to the density of an anvil strapped to a potting wheel left on high speed in a sun-drenched meadow. It was like getting root-canal work while vacationing in the tropics. Indeed, the experiment came to an end when my stepped-up jaw-grinding caused me to chip a molar. But for a while there I did get out of my room at Ben’s a bit more often. I toured the remaining indie record shops on Saturday mornings when the new shipments arrived. It was on one such outing, after many dateless years, that I encountered Bethany. She had a tiny glistening nose stud, and a nearly shaved head, and was flipping through a bin of Aphex Twin. Need I say more?

Celia

Jasper was an Anglophile from Coeur d’Alene. He did his best to monogram everything he owned. Today it was a royal-blue turtleneck with his chosen initials—JHP, for Jasper Henry Philips—done in three-inch brocade letters outlined with sequins and pinned at the breast like a Michael Jackson costume still under construction. So far, he’d avoided the shelters by couch-surfing and squatting. When Michael phoned me at work, we were almost at the end of our session, which Jasper had again idled away with his fantasies, this time of befriending Princess Diana, his all-time-favorite celebrity. I had five minutes left of my weekly effort to find him a job.

I told Michael I couldn’t talk.

“What about later?” he asked. “Can we talk later?”

A girl who hadn’t shown up in three weeks was waiting outside my door. I had appointments all afternoon. I needed to go running after work.

“I’ll try you,” I said. “But it’ll be later, your time.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he’d forgotten we lived on different coasts. “Okay.”

We spoke twice a week at least, but in the evenings or on weekends. I was surprised he even knew the name of my agency to look up the number. Something had agitated him; he was calling to be assuaged.

“I’ll try you,” I said. “I will.”

“Sooo,” Jasper said as soon as I hung up, “your boyfriend’s traveling—and he isn’t your husband because you’re not wearing a ring. Where is he? Paris, London?”

To help establish a rapport during our first meeting, I’d made the mistake of mentioning I’d lived in England. Now it was all he wanted to talk about.

I suggested we look over the listings together. There were openings for baggers at the Marina Safeway, temp-driver jobs he didn’t qualify for because he didn’t have a license, a copy-shop assistant position in Oakland, and the usual volunteer stuff, distributing condoms or working at the Meals on Wheels kitchen, what the agency called “community networking opportunities.”

I needed him to focus and commit to three applications before our next session. If I’d had an hour with him, I would have asked whom he was spending his time with, if anyone was pressuring him for sex, how he was doing physically and emotionally. But that wasn’t my job. I was supposed to prevent him from becoming homeless (which he effectively already was), help him find legitimate employment, and coach him on maintaining whatever support structure he already had, which in his case consisted mostly of asking each week if he’d been in touch with his mother. My older colleagues often didn’t bother with parents when a client was no longer a minor, but according to Jasper, his mother had left his stepfather—the person he’d fled from in the first place—so it seemed at least worth a try for him to talk with her, given what his options were.

He stood by the window now, gazing into the alley as if across a rough, romantic sea. “What does your boyfriend do in London? Is he an international businessman? Does he feature those fierce three-piece tweed suits? Or cravats, does he wear cravats?”

I couldn’t decide which of my brothers he’d get on with better, Michael or Alec.

“That wasn’t my boyfriend,” I said.

“Your lover, then.”

“Jasper, if you don’t apply to anything, I’ve got to put that in your file, and in a few weeks they’re going to tell me to terminate you from services.”

“If you lived in England, how come you don’t have an accent?”

“Listen—”

“Okay, I’ll apply. Just tell me.”

“I’ve lived here more.”

“Did you grow up in a house with servants?”

“Where do you get all this?”

He picked up and examined the tape dispenser on my desk as though admiring the facets of a crystal vase. I would have said he was high, but his speech and movements were too precise, his affect too consistent. He was practicing, that’s what he was doing, rehearsing for a future life.

“My grandmother said it was the classiest place she’d ever been, and that I would love it there. She had a videotape of Diana’s wedding. We used to watch it all the time. People thought she was pretentious, being into all that, so I knew she was onto something, pissing those jackasses off. She left me all that stuff, the books and music and the mugs with the coats of arms, everything she’d bought over there and all the stuff she’d collected. Most of it’s at my mom’s. But I brought a few things with me.”

I pictured him there with his grandmother, on their little island of manners. I wanted to draw him out on it, to hear what it meant to him. And from there maybe get him to talk about his growing up, and eventually about what exactly his stepfather had done that caused him to leave. Jasper was one of the clients who shared something of himself, if only because he desired an audience. Most of the kids I saw were sullen and defensive, and treated me as another scold of the adult world who didn’t care what they felt. It wasn’t that I wanted to cut him off now, just that our half hour was up. I told him he had to call me with the three jobs off the list he was going to pursue so I could set up the interviews, and that I needed copies of his applications at our next appointment.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” he said. “People do live in castles there.”

“Like ten people, Jasper. Most of them are just normal. They’re not that different than here. Really.”

“Normal like you? Like college and going to Europe and working here because you feel good helping ignorant people like me? That kind of normal?”

“Our time’s up,” I said. “I have someone waiting.”

“People always get angry when I tell the truth. Happens every time.”

On the outbound N Judah that evening I noticed a man in a three-piece suit. Instead of reading the paper folded in his hands, his eyes crept along the bodies of various young women, particularly those in skirts and lipstick, his glance occasionally falling on me as well, curious but uncertain, and a bit aggressive, a bit pissed off, as if I wasn’t giving him something that belonged to him.

Jasper’s image had stuck with me. Of my boyfriend dressed in tweed, like the suits Dad used to wear. Paul sitting at a big conference table with other men in suits and calling me after his meeting, as I suppose Dad had called Mom. I’d never wanted such a partner, or even been able to imagine why anyone would. Still, getting back to our apartment and finding Paul lying on the couch, reading under a blanket, a glass of bourbon beside him on the floor, I found myself wondering what it might be like if Jasper’s fantasy were even a little true.

The drink irked me. It threw his sugar off. Which made it more likely that he would have a low in the night, waking us both. But if it was just one, or maybe two, and he drank them slowly enough and timed his shots right, it might still be fine.

“What’s up?” he said. “How was the day?”

The fact that he was flat on the couch suggested his hadn’t been exactly fruitful. But then through the open French doors into the kitchen I noticed the sink was empty of dishes, and the cereal we’d needed was on the counter. So he’d been shopping. Which meant that he would make dinner, holding up his end of the bargain we’d struck: if he was going to work only part-time while he wrote his screenplay, he had to do more than his normal quarter share of the domestic work.

“The usual,” I said. “I badgered homeless kids to present themselves in a professional light.”

He chuckled, and took another sip of his drink. “Well, I finished my second act,” he said.

I was headed into the bedroom to change, but stopped in the doorway. “Really?” He grinned with an openness and satisfaction I hadn’t seen in him in a long while.

“That’s great,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“It’s just a draft. But thanks.”

He followed me into the bedroom and watched me start taking off my work clothes. He’d made the bed as well, and put away the laundry. For once, there was nothing to be disappointed in. Which left me with just the feeling of the disappointment itself. I tried to let go of it as I looked for my shorts and sneakers, to shuffle the weight of it off, the semiconstant low-grade suspicion that he was inadequate. That he didn’t have enough energy. That I had to provide it for both of us. That I would resent this no matter what else he did, or how well he managed his insulin.

He was standing by the door, smiling, as if his good cheer were nothing unusual. He hadn’t gotten his hair cut in a while and it hung down over his forehead, his dark curls set off by his pale, nearly unblemished skin. His boyishness had always been part of his allure. He was thirty-one, two years older than I was, but could pass for twenty-five. The most handsome man I’d been with. And the most ardent. At the beginning. Which had made a difference—his confidence.
I want you
. He’d been able to say that, clearly and aloud, before he knew what my response would be. Standing on the back porch of a triple-decker in Somerville, in frigid air, while the party carried on inside behind fogged windows. He’d put his red plastic cup down before saying it, his arms at his sides, unguarded, looking right at me. I’d had no time to think. When he leaned forward, I took the kiss, and gave it back. I wasn’t interested in being seduced. I was too wary for such credulity. But Paul had seduced me.