Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (5 page)

Claudio was used to her summits, her debriefings and bad days.
Is everything okay?

Nothing is going to be okay.

What did he do?

He was singing “American Pie.” Tonight. We went to an open-mic night on campus. That's what we did. There were about a dozen people there, and Sawyer sang, and all of them saw me cry. Even though I definitely wasn't in the spotlight at all, I was sitting toward the back, you know how hard it is to cry quietly? I was so ashamed.

I'm sorry it happened. What made you cry? Your old man liked that song?

I'm not sure,
chirped Mathilde, with adolescent inflection,
but my father had a magnificent singing voice.

Again she was making a fuss out of a fake memory too many
degrees removed, but he nursed her.
That must hurt so much.
With no hint of the vague indignation kneading inside him. And then, a startling vision appeared in Claudio's mind: a dead dog. The one he could have loved.

Will you ever leave me, Claudio?

Never.

I
can't believe you're in college,
Mathilde said.

Sawyer had been doing well. His major was undeclared, but he liked Portuguese class. He wasn't so crazy about biology because his lab partner was an international student from Jamaica named Clifford. Clifford was handsome, long-boned, and worked on what he called
island time,
which must have been why they always finished last. Sawyer ate all his meals in the cafeteria with friends on his hall. He wrote editorials about American international policies in the school paper and played club tennis. He went to parties about twice a week and sometimes walked drunk girls home, kissing them good night on the mouth with his lips closed. He practiced kissing when he was alone, giving his knees love bites. He was going to make the dean's list.

Sawyer lived in a double with a football player named Jermaine, who was cool, and who'd made a girlfriend during orientation.
It's like you have a single!
Mathilde declared, kicking her shoes off and throwing her body on his bed in a way that many people would probably find affectionate but which Sawyer found slightly woeful.

The campus coffee shop hosted open-mic nights on Fridays. Singing in public was always a consideration in the cache of Sawyer's mind. His father had loved to sing. Sawyer thought
about his father dying only sometimes. It was getting to be less and less.
I'm thinking we can catch this open mic,
Sawyer said.

How many people go?
asked Mathilde.

It's a little more low-key, so I'd say about a dozen or two.

I don't know, Sawyer,
said Mathilde.
It seems pretty boring. I thought you'd show me a better time.

But you love to sing,
said Sawyer. Mathilde loved to do anything with an audience. He'd bought her a karaoke machine for her birthday.

I want to meet people,
said Mathilde.

There are no small audiences, just small singers,
Sawyer adjusted the quote.

It'll be full of nerds.

Instead of the open-mic night, they went to a party at an off-campus house rented by football players. Jermaine was there with his girlfriend and gave Sawyer a high five, which let Sawyer feel hip. Mathilde left the room to fill their cups with beer from the keg, and Sawyer spoke from rote with several people he recognized from class or other parties. Oh god, there was Danny, six-one and smelling of biscuits, with his Earl Grey glaze in his eyes, Danny who was kind to everybody. Sawyer felt like he'd caught a cold, placing a fist to his dumpling of a Heart.

Sawyer,
said Danny.

Oh and,
said Sawyer, because he wasn't living in his body anymore. He was in the corner of the room, sitting crisscross applesauce, watching himself carol consonants and conjunctions to Danny.
- Suck it up, buttercup, -
he admonished himself. This was supposed to be a normal part of life.

Now he understood what people meant when they said they
needed
stiff drinks.
Necessary
was the word. Sawyer and his sister took shots, round after round, with other guys and girls. Everybody was somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two. Everybody was ready for a good time. Music and eye contact
and golden strangers. Astonishment; a collection of pedestals. The night freckled with cold stars.

In two hours, Danny left with a girl named JJ, a psychology major. Fussy, vanilla, and, because she was a girl, everything that Sawyer was not. Sawyer tried not to feel too bad about it. Time for him to check on his sister. He hadn't seen her in how long? Twenty minutes? Two hours? He hiccupped, debauched. He was hungry and he wanted to have sex and he wanted to go surfing.

Have you seen a girl? Small. She looks like the girl version of me.

Finally, he found her. He found what he was letting happen, in the kitchen glutted with kids. They were laughing at whatever was funny. Mathilde standing on a chair, giving a monologue.

I came into this world against my mother's wishes.

He recognized this one: Miss Julie.
The most difficult and respected woman's role in show business,
she'd always said. Mathilde was being Miss Julie in addition to this horrible production of being herself: exposed, injured, everybody's business but her own.

Sawyer thought about what they shared: a childhood, their parents. For a second, he hated their parents. Even their father. He hated them both for telling them they could be anything they wanted to be when they grew up. It was beyond clear his sister was just wasting her time acting. She didn't know when to give up. Hell, she didn't even know how to give up.

We have to leave.
He didn't like what he was saying, but not to respond at all, he understood, would be catastrophic.

What the fuck, Sawyer?

Let's go,
her brother said.
I'll tell you outside.

We're not going anywhere,
yelled Mathilde. Not only did she sound histrionic, but she also managed to sound radically old-fashioned too, with her squirty voice and overpronunciation. Like Elizabeth Taylor or an Andrews sister.

Let's go.

I was having fun.

Shut up. Shut up.
A scene had been unearthed in there. And already it was something painful to relish.

But—
Mathilde started crying in the middle of talking. Again? There was always something indecent about the way she cried—her tears were worth next to nothing, she expelled them so frequently.

Why are you crying? Just stop crying.

Why are you being so mean?
asked Mathilde, in that worthy way of hers. She was salty, astringent, like seawater or sour cream. She was humiliating, enormous, so stupid for being his sister.

Because,
said Sawyer. He signaled out to the back door, hands as commanding as an orchestra conductor's. Mathilde followed. They walked across a campus parking lot, gravel shifting and shrieking under their feet.

Telling the truth was so fucking hard.
You haven't been crying for Daddy. You've been crying for yourself.

That's not what you were going to say,
said his sister.
Just say what you have to say.

Sawyer took a breath. -
Just get it out of the way already. -

It's like this. Everybody in there, you know, the people you thought were listening to you? They were all laughing at you.

They weren't,
Mathilde said to her slobby sneakers. She looked up again, thinking, -
they were? -

Let's go home,
said Sawyer. The walk home was all law and order and nobody said anything. Mathilde was chewing the collar on the neck of her dress. Sawyer looked at his watch, which used to be his father's. Two-thirty a.m. was a vanishing time. A time where nothing you do could ever be of good use to anyone. He said one more thing, then stopped:
I'm just trying to help you.
To teach her a lesson about what happens when you are paid too much attention.

At the dorm, Mathilde announced that she was going to take a shower. She spoke in a stung, almost haughty, tone. Sawyer made Jermaine's bed with his own sheets. She came out in a piping fog, wearing a towel. Sawyer had set his table with baby sunflowers.

You're the only college boy I've ever met who owns a vase,
said Mathilde.

I love sunflowers,
said Sawyer.
They're my spirit plants. When I get married, I want to walk through a field of sunflowers.

Mathilde smiled sadly.

Both trying to salvage dignity, neither talked about the night. Instead, Sawyer asked if she recalled the time when Neil and his friends hurt him after school.
It still feels true, but distant,
said Sawyer
. I feel like I'm telling a story that isn't mine anymore.
As he said this, Sawyer tried to remember why he'd even brought this up. Because maybe it would make her feel better, reminding her of this true and harrowing story. Or at least show that he too could be at risk. Failure was a form of humility, maybe.

We suffer the same way,
said Mathilde.

No,
said Sawyer.
I don't think so.

But we do,
sniffed Mathilde.
We get each other.

You have to understand: I'm not like you.

His sister quirked her chin down so her split ends touched the blanket. Whose benefit had he said that for? Mathilde's or his own?

I didn't mean it to sound like that,
said Sawyer.
Look, I'm sorry.
She didn't get it. He'd only said this because, in these circumstances, indeed they couldn't be more different. Sawyer usually did everything in his power to hide his troubles. Mathilde went out of her way to
be
trouble.

Then Mathilde told Sawyer a story he'd never heard before, about how a boy in her biology class asked her out on a date as a joke. His friends had dared him to. The next day, Mathilde had found out that the friends had been six girls. Girls who doodled
phrases in their binders like
boom shaka laka,
girls who wanted to know more about outer space, ineloquent girls who feared closed-mouth kisses, girls who imagined world peace. Girls like Mathilde. That was what she'd thought, anyway.

They noticed me a lot,
said Mathilde.
They were good at noticing things about me that made them hate me.

Why do you like to be noticed so much, then?
asked Sawyer.

Sometimes, if something bad happens, do you ever have this craving to re-create it in a way? As though, if you could redo the bad thing, but in control, you would make it better?
Mathilde closed her eyes and resisted her ballistic urge to make noise. Instead, she glimpsed out at the dorm room window in the adjacent building. It was already decorated for Christmas. A plastic pine bathed in twinkly lights. She thought, -
everything will be fine. -

It doesn't make it go away but it makes it better,
repeated Sawyer.

Some things don't get better,
said Mathilde.
But you can make yourself better. You know?

- You don't make yourself better by acting worse
, - thought Sawyer, but this time, he didn't say anything.

A
fter six months of dating, Mathilde and Claudio took psychedelic mushrooms with Zane. Mathilde hallucinated a dodo egg cracked from the inside, mangled feathers pushing through. Even out of her right mind, Mathilde accounted for the dodo having to be dead. Dodos were famous for being extinct. She wouldn't let this opening happen, running down six flights of stairs to a tree outside Zane's apartment and beginning to dig up Manhattan.

You have to be dead. You can't exist. Maybe back then, but not anymore.

She felt Claudio's hands on her, clammy.
Your highness,
he said, alluvial-smelling, his smile like a good-looking teacher's at a boarding school somewhere in the countryside. Girls would've tried to get him fired—that was his kind of handsome.

Help me. Please. Help me bury what shouldn't be here.
Mathilde grazed her belly, embracing a Fitzgeraldian sense of sulkiness.

You're burying air. Come inside,
he said.
Closer.
She was all he had, and he was all she had, and that was enough.
You're going to be okay, baby,
rubbing her ass.

Zane buzzed them back in. Claudio held Mathilde, both breathing in puny flutters. An Otis Redding record played. Zane was in the kitchen by himself, sitting on a stool, peeling figs and popping them in his mouth. He had a sunburn on his t-zone.

Every time I see you, you're eating,
said Claudio.

I could easily say the same about you, amigo.

That's not true.
Claudio could repudiate in an elegant way, since to his knowledge Zane had never personally seen him eat eighteen Chinatown pork buns for lunch, then starve himself for three days, etching down an estimated calorie count in his journal. Or had he? Did Claudio have a spy tracing him? He pondered, filling and offering a glass of water for Mathilde.
Drink, kid.

Why do you guys only hang out with each other? Go mix and mingle.

Not too interested,
said Claudio. When he first moved to New York, he had the feeling that he was always missing out on something. After he met Mathilde, none of that mattered. He felt bad for the old Claudio to whom it mattered—the Claudio who didn't share this pure and nesting love, who took up too much of his own time.