Chapter 1 #2
“Let’s do lunch sometime. At the club. I’ve got a China trip coming up, but we’ll work around it.
” Dan is always going to China. And now he waves goodbye in the way he has always waved goodbye, pressing his lips tight together as if there is something more he wants to say.
He closes the door, taking with him the linger of Al’s school days, pressed collared shirts and sharp graphite, the safety of a time before.
Al squeezes the Tupperware into the refrigerator with the others.
The house is full of strangers now. So many people who saw his wife from other angles, transformed her into different things.
Friends from Salem, from Burbank. Bohemian like her, dramatic.
Their intimacies frighten him, the way they look at each other with such feeling, and erupt in sobs and warbling anecdotes, as if it is all too much to be contained.
As he is closing the refrigerator door, one of them places her hand on his arm and just looks at him, sincere and intense, as though she can communicate with her eyes alone.
He doesn’t know her. Who is she to have all this sadness roaring just beneath the skin?
Someone his wife brushed up against for a moment?
He nods and looks away, willing her to leave, hostage to her feeling.
His own pain is certain and deep. Susan’s absence is already a horrible fact of himself, a motionless mark.
“You just hope it isn’t hereditary, don’t you,” one of them is saying.
“Poor sweetheart.”
Why do they have to drag his daughter into it? Isn’t it enough to mourn one person today? It occurs to him that he hasn’t seen his children in at least an hour. Is that an instinct he should have, to check on them? How am I going to do it?
It’s not like he hasn’t been alone with them.
Susan was often gone for long stretches when she was filming Life and Times, the second most popular soap in the country.
Merrily, Sadie reminded him of the fact just a few hours ago, arriving at the beach with a large box of home recordings.
No official videos were available, and she’d offered him her collection like a box of rare gemstones.
I’ll need them back, she said. But watch them, it’ll be good for you.
As if he could bear to play back all the hours she spent pretending to be someone else. Choosing a different life.
No, Al is no stranger to early weekday wake-ups, packing lunches, getting them showered and dressed and onto a bus. But he always had one eye on Friday night, when she would arrive home heroic and exhausted and scoop them up into her arms. She was a natural parent.
If he had known, then, how little time there was, he’d like to think he would have handled it differently.
Convinced her, earlier and more forcefully, to spend every one of her precious hours with them.
The idea of the family moving out there, though discussed, had been inconceivable.
His work, his everything was here. Don’t feel guilty, not now.
She would have grown out of it, with time, settled into the gentle currents of motherhood.
He’s convinced of that, isn’t he? Now she’d never prove him wrong.
She would have hated that.
He has been staring at the microwave for an indeterminate period of time when a hand connects with the area between his shoulder blades and a man is asking him a question.
“What?”
“I said, have you got a lighter, pal?”
“No. I mean, I have matches.”
“No. No, it’s fine, actually, I’m trying to quit. I’ve already quit actually. If anyone asks, this conversation never happened.”
The man is familiar but unplaceable, and Al watches him cast around the kitchen like he’s lost something.
“Looking for something?”
“Me? No, no. Just looking.”
He’s handsome, the man, angular, young, speaks with an unexpected brogue. What is a Scottish man doing in my house? His shoes are nice, polished. Completely inappropriate for the weather. The man is peering at the outside of the refrigerator, the magnets, the abundance of photographs.
“Ah,” the man says. “It’s you.”
“Sorry?”
“You’re the husband.”
Al looks at him blankly. The man sets his whiskey on the table and opens the refrigerator, begins to root around through the many homemade meals that ooze and chill in plastic prisons.
“Hope you have an appetite.”
It’s the smile that jogs his memory, roguish but genuine.
He’d been on the show with Susan, played one of her boyfriends or something like that.
Maybe his voice was different. Al can’t remember.
He has only watched a few episodes anyway—how was he supposed to stand watching his wife with other men?
How was he supposed to congratulate her?
Everyone always told him, you have to separate the character from the actor.
But it was her, wasn’t it? Doing those things?
They had never had a successful conversation about it, the things she needed to do.
Ignoring it made the relationship work. It allowed him to forget.
“It’ll go quickly. The food, that is. Well, maybe everything will go quickly.”
“Everything?”
“Maybe not. Sorry, I shouldn’t presume. I shouldn’t make presumptions about your appetite. Or your sense of time, really.”
“Life and time.”
“Quite.” The man removes something from the refrigerator, closes the door, points at him. “You’re funny. She never said you were funny.”
Al is unsteadied by the asymmetry of the conversation. He had never heard Susan mention this man, and now he is slipping out of the room, taking with him memories that Al will never unlock.
“I hope it goes at your preferred pace.”
“What?”
“All of it. Life.”
He wants to shout after him, but doesn’t know what to say. He feels the sudden crushing sensation of his wife’s inaccessibility. That perhaps he never knew her at all.
The halls are swinging back and forth. Sebastian’s face is red with the blood and the laughter rushing into it, as Sadie flies him into the living room and onto his mother’s chair, which—perhaps instinctively—no one has sat in, wide arms and faded florals.
A few people are sitting in the other chairs, though, older peaked faces, looking openly at him and his aunt. His silvery birdlike grandmother cranes toward the fireplace, where a few crusty logs are giving up their forms.
This is the old people room, he thinks. He can smell their oldness on their clothes, their breath. It feels unfair that they should be warming themselves in here, so almost dead, when his mother had been—until recently—so very alive.
“Where is your father?” his grandmother asks him. He shrugs, without looking at her face. He hates when his grandmother is in charge, which is a lot recently. She shouted at him earlier for throwing his wet coat on the floor. The room takes on the stillness of a waiting room.
“We’re going to play a little music, all right?” Sadie announces, though it isn’t really a question, she is already thumbing through the reams of plastic CD cases that clutter the stereo alcove. “Jazz, jazz, jazz,” she grumbles dismissively. “Where is your mom’s stuff?”
Sebastian points to a basket on the floor, and Sadie crouches and plucks out a case with a blond woman’s face on it, lasers shooting out of the sides of her head.
“ ‘Faster Than the Speed of Night,’ ” she grins. “There she is.”
The old people look uncertain. Their quiet has been disrupted. Sebastian watches his aunt with a new reverence. She doesn’t care—she really doesn’t care.
“Honey, will you dim the lights?”
A few piano notes crinkle out of the speakers.
“I’m not sure—” his grandmother begins.
“It was her favorite,” Sadie says with sisterly authority. She holds out her hand to Sebastian and he goes to her and spins into her arms as the ballad begins, and Bonnie Tyler begins to sing: searching, ascendant, eclipsing.
Sadie is lifting and swinging him, commanding as she skids him through her legs and sings, TURN AROUND, brIGHT EYES, her own eyes shining with the woman who isn’t there, happy-sad, pulling joy out of a desperate vortex, and yes—he feels for the first time since she left—magic might still be possible.
Without Sebastian, the underside of the table is no longer of interest, but Viola has no desire to follow her aunt.
Something about Sadie is not put together properly, a part of her brain probably or something inside her that makes her weird.
Bodies are full of insides—it’s gross when you think about it.
Her father is not in the kitchen, amid the throng of her mother’s friends from work, tattooed and emotive, their faces smudged with makeup, even some of the men. Where is her dad? If he isn’t careful, they might take over the house.
She ignores the dark-painted nails that claw at her hair as she pushes through them, as though she is a dog or a cat, passive.
The conversation that she had with her mother—not their last, but their last alone—is tumbling through her mind.
Love is the most important thing, she was saying, pressing hard into the back of her palm with a finger that was surprisingly strong and urgent.
Love, love, was coming out of her horrible mouth, dry around the edges, and she had felt ashamed of this alien creature, hairless and wrinkling prematurely, her beautiful face naked of eyebrows and eyelashes.
Ashamed also of her own fear, her inability to feel love toward the thing her mother had become.
She hates thinking about her now—even the happiest memories are painted in the nauseous colors of sickness.
You can’t catch it, her father had said, not in that way.
Sebastian had been braver. He had kissed the strange soft skin of her skull. It didn’t matter to him; boys are made differently, out of tougher things. Even if they look the same, if they have the same flushed and fleshy cheeks, the same downy hair on their arms, their insides are different.