The Theory of Opposites (9 page)

Sometimes bad news is actually good news. You just have to dig deeper. (Shout-out to my pops.) (
5 days)

Absorb what is being said to you. Listen, and you will hear.
(1 week)

—

“Well, he’s evidently in New York,” Vanessa says, clicking onto her home screen on her phone.

“And evidently, still as full of shit as before.”

“You should join Twitter,” she urges.

“Why?” I reply. “I never have anything interesting to say.”

—

Two hours and five miles later, I am back at my apartment, though no more ready to go inside. I know that it will likely make no difference, my entry, my refusal to say
Grape!.
That whatever will be, will be — we will fight (we never fight), we will say things (though we never say things), we will dance around this and then we’ll move on to wherever we’re supposed to move on to. The thing about half-believing in my father’s philosophies is that they lend themselves to passivity: why bother fighting, why bother speaking in truths when maybe those truths don’t matter. Can’t we just fast-forward to when we’re happy again? Because if we’re going to be happy again, none of that in-between stuff matters.

I insert my key and rotate the doorknob.
None of this in-between stuff matters. Apologize.

Shawn is on the couch, a sweat ring around his neck, his workout clothes soaked. He flips off the television when he hears the door open, then swing shut.

“Nicky went to a friend’s for a few hours,” he says, not turning around.

“You went running?” I linger in the foyer, unsure about stepping forward.

“I did go running, Willa. Is that okay with you?”

“What? I was just asking.”

Shawn sighs like this is the most exasperating statement in the world and finally looks toward me. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

“I don’t want to fight with you.” I feel the bubble of tension ebb from my body. My stomach unknots, my adrenaline slows.
None of this in-between stuff matters. We’ll go back to where we left off. Of course we can do that. I was silly to think that we couldn’t.

“But…” he starts, then stops. “But…” he starts again.

Shawn, for all of his strengths — and he has many — is no better at this than I am, and my resolve crumbles all over again. Something is wrong here, very, very wrong, and whether or not I should listen to my instincts (and my father has taught me not to), I can’t help but sense that we are about to make a very abrupt, very hard turn into the unknown.

He glances at his hands, shakes his head, and then, quickly, like he’s about to lose his nerve, says:

“Wired2Go wants me to come spend the summer at their corporate office in Palo Alto.”

I exhale. This isn’t devastating. This isn’t an abrupt, hard turn. I mean, it’s not in the diagram that we drew up three years ago, but I can manage Palo Alto for a summer.

“I’m sorry about before. I should have told you about my job.”

The apology bounces off him, barely registering, like he just needs to say what he has rehearsed, to get it out while he has the will to.

I continue: “Anyway, I guess that sort of sucks, but you can fly back for weekends. Or I could come visit. I don’t have a job or anything. I guess I could go with you.” I squint and try to imagine myself in Palo Alto.

“No, that’s not what I mean. I suspected you wouldn’t be excited.”

He sighs again. Then looks at me, really, really looks at me, like it’s the last time he might see me, might take me in. I take a step closer but then stop when he offers: “Willa, don’t you ever feel like…like…like you’re stuck?”

“Stuck? Not really. I mean, no.”

“Well, I guess I do.”

“You feel stuck?” I ask. “With…me?”

“Yes,” he answers, then covers himself with: “No. No. No, that’s not what I meant.”

The room spins, and I press a palm against the wall to steady myself.

“Is this about
Grape!
?” I whisper when I feel like I might not pass out.

“Grape?”

“
Grape!,
yes,
GRAPE!
. The club you went to when you were supposed to be at basketball with your brainiac squad who worship you because you happen to have been blessed with better cheekbones but are still a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” I pray that he doesn’t mock my stupid metaphors. Why did I choose such a stupid metaphor?

“How do you…” He doesn’t finish his sentence, and I realize that he thinks it doesn’t even matter.

“Are you cheating on me? Seriously?
Are you fucking having an affair with some girl from
Grape!
who has, like, a fertile uterus and better boobs?
”

“What? No!” He stands now, but doesn’t move nearer. “I’m just…what?”

I ask him again, more quietly now, because I have finally said it, and I need to hear the honest answer, not the first denial.

“Shawn. Just tell me. Are you cheating on me? Am I not enough?”

“No!” he snaps, too loudly, setting me off again. “I’m just…ugh. Listen, Willa, this is hard.”

“What’s so hard? Your affair? Your stupid leather jacket? Your discovery of golf…or…or running on Sundays without me? What?”

He sits back down.

“Shit. I don’t know.”

We stay on pause for a few minutes, him staring at his hands, me pressed against the foyer wall, unable to find a way to say whatever it is to mend this. His phone buzzes — I can hear it in his pants pocket — but he doesn’t pick it up. When I can no longer bear it, I say:

“So…what? I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“I guess what I’m saying…” He cracks his knuckles. “Is that I’m trying to make life more interesting. I’m not cheating.” His voice breaks here, and I can’t help but feel something splinter inside of me too. “I went to
Grape!
because it was different, because, well…it was fun. The guys wanted to, and
Jesus
, I wanted to. Go out, do something new,
try
something new. I mean, I love you. I do. But I kind of feel like my life is one fucking
Together To-Do!
app.” He sighs. “I’m in a rut.”

“So get out of it.”

“I’m trying! Don’t you think that’s what I’m doing?”

A rut. It’s only that he’s in a rut.

“So what does Palo Alto have to do with this?”

He doesn’t answer right away. His phone beeps twice again in the silence. Then he says:

“I was just thinking, you know, maybe I could go by myself. Or take Nicky for a while.”

“Maybe you could go by yourself?” Bile rises up from my stomach, my easy gag reflex announcing itself at the first sign of trouble. I swallow deeply, but the wave of nausea doesn’t pass.

“You know…like…a break or something?”

“Like…a break or something? From…me?”

“From us. Not, like, anything legal. I mean, I love you.”

“I don’t…where is this coming from?” I slide to the floor and cross my legs, tucking my head down so the room stops spinning. Xanax. That’s what I need. I remind myself to call Raina, to start seeing her more regularly. “I can learn to play golf! I can, like, go to a Yankees game!”

I hear his footsteps, and then he’s above me.

“Do you really want to be Shilla forever?”

I look up at him.

“You know about Shilla?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I?”

“I hate baseball, but I mean, I’d go with you,” I start to cry now. I remember that he bought me a gift certificate to golf lessons a few months ago, but I tucked it into a drawer at work and promptly lost it. “I’ll learn how to golf.”

“But you don’t need to go with me; you don’t have to learn if you don’t want to,” he says. “That’s kind of the point. That I need to go without you, but that you don’t want me to go.”

I feel the snot running down my upper lip. “What the hell is wrong with Shilla anyway?”

“Nothing’s wrong with Shilla.” He’s quiet. “But maybe we need a little distance to start being Shawn and Willa again. I kind of liked us from before.”

I don’t reply, so he says:

“I reread your dad’s book, and the tenets of it make a lot of sense.” He rattles off the table of contents. “
Embrace the Master Universe Way. Accept inertia. Close your eyes and follow the map. Be what you already are. Set yourself free
.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Those are words that wrap up his philosophies in neat little packages. They’re
words.
They don’t mean anything.” I’m surprised to give voice to this notion. “And you’re not, like, accepting inertia. You’re changing it! You’re screwing up our plan!”

“It’s like the epigraph in the book says,” Shawn continues as if he hasn’t even heard me. “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, it was never meant to be.’”

I say nothing, so he suggests:

“Maybe it’s something like that. Maybe you and I are something like that.”

“So you’re setting me free?”

“Maybe not for forever.”

“Forever doesn’t matter. Now is the only thing that does.”

“Well, then for now,” he says.

And he sets me free.

8

The Rules of Shawn and Willa’s Pseudo-Separation

*as agreed to on June 12 and to dissolve on agreed-upon date in August

1. Shawn and Willa will have no contact — barring an emergency such as death — during the designated time period.

2. If one party does contact the other, the contactee is under no obligation to return the engaging party’s email/phone call/text/Facebook message, etc.

3. Within the designated time period, the named parties can behave as if they are single.

3a. This means that should anything physical happen with a new party, there will be no repercussions in the union should the named parties decide to remain married.

3b. It is also understood that should sexual relations occur, the sexually active party
must
use protection.

4. While neither party can be prevented from googling/Facebook-ing the other party, this is highly discouraged.

4a. However, both parties agree not to change their Facebook status to “it’s complicated” without consulting the other party.

5. Should the need for communication arise but is non-urgent, for example, about Nicky’s whereabouts, each party can check a mutually agreed upon email account:
[email protected]
.

6. Have fun!

9

Shawn leaves on a Wednesday. An average Wednesday by anyone else’s standard but anything but average for me. We said our awkward goodbyes (“
Speak to you in August
!” “
Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do
—
ha ha ha
!”), and then he goes to kiss me, but I turn my head, so we sort of bump noses while our lips pass over each other.

Nicky stands in the living room and makes an explosion noise with his cheeks, then his hands follow — his fingers mimicking a grenade, and Shawn says:

“Come on, dude, don’t be like that. I’ll see you next week in Palo Alto. Wired2Go has the coolest office ever. You can zipline from one floor to the next. You’ll love it.”

“Sounds cool,” Nicky says, then heads to the guest room and locks himself inside.

“They also have Pac-Man and Donkey Kong in the common room!” Shawn calls after him. He rubs his forehead and says, “Shit. Like this is one more thing he needs.”

“Another child of divorce,” I say flatly.

“We’re not getting divorced, Willa. And I feel terrible for him.” He pauses and I wonder if maybe he won’t change his mind, if maybe Nicky is the one he’ll stay for, but I can be the one he discovers he needs. I should say this — I should scream
please don’t go!!
but my old habits get the best of me: why fight it when whatever will happen will happen? In this moment, I hate myself for my passivity, so I offer:

“Nicky might hate you for doing this.”

And he looks like I’ve pierced his heart, which is exactly what I hoped for.

“I’ve done everything in my life for him.” And this isn’t untrue: though we hadn’t yet met, I know that Shawn moved in with Amanda after Kyle was killed. He was in the delivery room; he took Nicky to his first day of preschool; he trekked out to the suburbs for Little League games on Saturday.

“Well, he still might hate you.” I’m pretty sure that’s not fair, but it’s easier to talk about Nicky’s feelings than mine.

“This has to be about me,” he says simply, zipping his heart back up.

I open the door for him, hurriedly trying to get him out now before he (or the universe) can inflict more anguish.

“Have a safe flight.” As if anyone can actually determine whether or not their flight will be safe, and if it isn’t, as if anyone can do anything about it anyway. United 93. How many of their spouses said, “Have a safe flight,” or “Safe travels,” or “Be careful.” Like that amounted to anything.

But Shawn just wheels his roller suitcase out the door and says:

“I will.”

Not giving destiny a second thought.

—

Raina’s two older kids were at day camp for the summer, but her younger two, the identical twins, Bobby and Greyson, were left in the care of Gloria, the super-nanny, during the long summer days. To everyone who knew them, they were known as “the twins,” and Raina sometimes worried to me (when she had time to worry about such things) that they’d never form identities outside their twindom. From a distance, and even mostly up close, you honest to God couldn’t tell them apart: tow-headed, impish, both with a splash of freckles across their cheeks, exactly the same height, exactly the same weight…it was as if your mind were playing tricks on you. That you were seeing double (you were), but not in a literal sense, only as an illusion. Raina insisted on dressing them differently, so if I ever got confused, I just remembered that Bobby wore the graphic tees and Grey went for preppy chic. Also, Bobby fell off the jungle gym four months ago and knocked out his top right tooth, so when he smiles, I always have a second of clarity: “Ah, that’s Bobby.”

Identical twins freaked me out a bit, not just because they were really strange to look at but also because they felt like official confirmation of my father’s prophesies. If Raina’s egg hadn’t split, only one of them would be here. They wouldn’t have these tangled identities, they wouldn’t have the other half who could occasionally read the other’s mind or know what the other wanted before he even knew himself. There would just be one. Bobby. Or Grey. Which one would it have been?

Today on the subway, Bobby swats Grey across the face for no particular reason. Grey was annoying him, I suppose, just for being there. Grey starts shrieking, his pale cheeks now a shade of brighter pink, and Bobby grins up at me, half-toothless, like I’m in on the joke. Like he’s saying, “Yeah, bitch, so what? I’d have been the twin who would have survived.”

Though Nicky is eight years older than the twins, it was his idea to invite them to the
Bodies
exhibit down at South Street Seaport. I asked him twice if he were sure that he wanted two sweaty four-year olds along because frankly, I wasn’t even sure that I wanted two sweaty four-year-olds along, but he looked at me like I had three heads and said, “Yeah, of course. They’re cute. Don’t you like kids or something?”

I didn’t have a response quite prepared because who the hell knew if I really did like kids? I barely liked myself. And while Nicky had grown on me in the four days since my husband had opted to zipline from office to office rather than honor ’til death do us part, I wasn’t exactly about to pledge undying maternalism to the twelve-year-old either. For one, puberty was doing really strange things to his sweat glands, and for two, his 9/11 status aside, he really was a little disturbingly consumed with death. Which is how we ended up at the
Bodies
exhibit in the first place.

“Can’t you just ask if they can come?” he whined.

“I really don’t think this is appropriate for four-year-olds.”

“Everyone dies, Willa,” he said. “Facts are facts. Even four-year-olds need to know that.”

I was going to argue, but I found myself too tired to, so I texted Raina to inquire. And she immediately texted me back and said:

GRT!!!! Gloria will have boys rdy in 30.

On the subway now, Grey finally stops crying and turns his sad face into a furious one. He stares at the grimy floor, biting his lip, and flaring his nostrils.

“He’s a little touchy because his fish died this morning.” Gloria kisses his head.

“Frank died,” Bobby echoes matter-of-factly.

“Everyone dies,” Nicky says. Then to me: “See, I told you.”

“We woke up and he was floating in his bowl,” Bobby clarifies, his little reedy voice carrying all throughout the subway car. He pronounces “floating” like
fwoating
, and a small part of me wishes in that instant that he were mine. Raina has told me motherhood is like this: a series of tiny moments that add up to an enormous love, with lots of other moments of frustration and misunderstanding and complexity woven in between.

“That must have been sad. Did that make you sad?” I crouch down to his level.

Bobby shrugs. Grey says nothing, though his nostrils still flare, his lips still purse. He holds a grudge, I can see, just like his grandfather.
Punjab Sharma!

“Grey, your Aunt Willa asked you a question,” Gloria says.

“It’s okay, he doesn’t have to answer. I get it.” I right myself upward.

The subway jolts and on instinct (
ignore your instincts!),
we all reach for a pole, a shoulder. Grey reaches for Gloria. Then he looks at me.

“Frank didn’t die. Bobby killed him.”

“Did not!” Bobby yells.

“Did too!” Grey shouts back. He curls up his tiny fist, anger churning through him.

“
Did not!
”

Before Gloria can even stop him, Grey’s arm is in the air, his knuckles aimed squarely at Bobby’s remaining upper tooth. But then fate intervenes — or the train conductor just hits the brakes too quickly — and we all heave forward unexpectedly. Bobby falls atop Gloria’s knees, and Grey, poor Grey, trips backward and lands squarely, firmly, on his bottom.

Who knows why it plays out this way, with Frank dead and Bobby triumphant and sad little Grey on the disgusting floor of the train where various forms of bacteria could be infesting him even as we speak.

I look down at him, the defeat on his face, and I offer him a hand, pulling him up.

“I’m okay,” he says, though his full eyes and trembling chin betray him.

“I am too,” I reply. Though I have my own laundry list of betrayals too.

—

Vanessa meets us at the exhibit, her exuberance dialed up to ten, which I find a little disrespectful in light of my current life situation, not to mention the countless dead bodies on display.

“I have an idea,” she says to me, as we stop to stare at some poor guy’s muscle tissue. “And it’s an awesome fricking idea.”

“Do you think that when this guy died, that he knew his insides would be on display for thousands of people? Like, do you think that’s what he’d want?” I ask, ignoring her, moving closer, my nose close enough to the glass that mostly I can just see my own reflection.

“He’s dead,” Nicky says behind me. “It’s not like he knows.”

“You’re a real downer,” Vanessa retorts. “Are you like this all the time?”

“My mom blames puberty,” he shrugs. “I think the terrorists could have something to do with it.”

He walks off to the next encasement.

“Wow,” she says.

“Tell me about it. Though actually, he’s got a point.” The kid is really growing on me.

We pass under a sign that reads, “The History of Anatomy,” and Bobby scrambles over to the next body.

“
Penis!”
He screams, then starts giggling wildly.

Grey stands on his tippy-toes and points to another body.

“Boobies!”
He matches Bobby’s laughter.

“Boys!” Gloria reprimands.

A woman turns to Gloria and affirms:

“Oh, boys will be boys. It’s always the same.”

And Gloria nods her head and offers a smile because she knows that to be true. That running around shouting
penis
or
boobies
really isn’t the end of the world. She needs only to look at Nicky to understand what the end of the world really is. Gloria nudges the boys away from the glass, and they gleefully run in front of her, chasing their discontented second cousin (by marriage) down the hallway.

I watch them for a hopeful beat.

Stay four,
I think.
Don’t grow up into twelve.
I think again.
Don’t keep going to thirty-two. It’s all so much more complicated.

“Before we get to my grand idea, I want to talk about Shawn,” Vanessa starts. “You’ve been ignoring the subject since Wednesday.”

“I’m not ignoring the subject. It is what it is. A break. An intermission. He’s in Palo Alto, and I’m here. What can I say about that?”

“A lot. There’s a lot to say about that.”

“Telling me that he’s an asshole doesn’t help. Up until this moment, Shawn has never been an asshole. I love him, you know.”

“I’m sorry, Willa. But in this moment, he’s a real asshole.”

We wander toward the children who have rushed far ahead, but we stop, start, stop again, stare some more at each piece of flesh, each part of the human body that is tucked somewhere inside of us but seems completely foreign all the same. The kidney. The liver. The pancreas. The lungs. I have these things?

“Okay,” Vanessa begins again. “Let’s not talk about Shawn. Let’s talk about you.” She touches my elbow, slowing me.

“I’m fine. If this is what’s meant to happen, this is what’s meant to happen.”

“Willa, that’s ridiculous.”

“What should I say? That I’m heartbroken? What’s the point of being brokenhearted? It will all work out. I really believe that in August, it will all work out.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t be heartbroken.” She pauses. “Besides, that’s what you want? For it all to just work out in August?”

“Of course that’s what I want.”

“He just unceremoniously took a break from you.”

“I know what he did!”

“Then why not reconsider what it is that you want?”

I drop my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to say.”

“Why don’t you though?” She turns to look at me, to really meet my eyes.

There’s nothing to answer in reply, so we start back toward Gloria and the boys, but find ourselves thwarted behind a tour group of French Canadians. So rather than push forward, we study the display in front of us.