Chapter Two #2
A snapshot: Vin’s back at work, so a lot of the time it’s just me and Raffi.
Raffi’s still on leave. Four times a week we head to PT, where he spends time practicing how to pick up a pencil and squeezing stress balls for strength.
He gets so frustrated that sometimes he screams into our couch pillows when he gets home.
I’ve learned how to (metaphorically) tap-dance.
Anything and everything to keep Raff buoyant.
Movie marathons, online shopping, tea parties, at-home pedicures, literally anything he wants to eat.
When he goes to sleep, I go to sleep, utterly exhausted.
Most nights, I only know Vin’s finally home from work when the sheets tug against me as he’s crawling into bed.
Then two months ago…
A snapshot: We’re all back at work now. Raffi’s doing so much better.
Taking life by the horns again. Correspondingly (now that I’m not the one driving his ship) I’m starting to buckle.
I spend more and more time in my bed, Raff spends more and more time wheedling me out into the world with cronuts and trips to the Museum of Ice Cream.
We spend one weekend moving him into his new apartment.
When we get back home, Vin sits on the couch, completely wiped.
“Well,” he says with a shrug. And that about sums it up.
It’s just the two of us again. The silence from Raff’s recently vacated room is excruciating.
The silence in our bed that night is even more excruciating.
We barely sleep. Our house feels wrong without Raff.
Our house feels wrong with just the two of us.
It’s suddenly extremely clear that we have nothing to say to one another if Raff isn’t there, ricocheting our words back and forth.
I sleep on the farthest edge of the bed I possibly can and wake up with no covers.
Vin’s already gone to work. I don’t see him until dinnertime.
He asks me a question about our electricity bill and then goes to bed. This goes on for two days.
On the third day, I’m reading in bed and Vin is standing next to it. He picks up his pillow.
“I’m just gonna…” he says, and points behind him, toward the guest room.
He sleeps there that night. And he never comes back.
When Raff emerges from his bedroom, Vin is gone and I’m safely ensconced in the tiny kitchen. I’ve decided to hide the tremble in my heart by slicing the baguette laid out on the counter. I have the general idea to just do an impression of myself tonight. That should disguise the wreckage, right?
“Smells great!” Raff calls as he tosses his towel into the bathroom.
“Why do you sound surprised? Didn’t you make it? And go hang up your towel, you mongrel.”
He pops into the bathroom and back out. “You’re the one who made dinner.”
“Me?”
“Vin brought it over. I just boiled the pasta.”
I set down the bread knife and eye the stove. There’s pasta in a colander and…a pot of something that does, indeed, smell delicious. My blood’s gone cold.
Raffi’s voice fades out behind me and my steps echo. I approach the stove, reach out a hand, lift the lid, and—dammit! The lid is hot and I jostle the pot trying to get my hand free. A mini tsunami of Divorce Tomato Sauce douses me from boobs to hips.
“Are you all right?” Raff is at my side, eyes wide, handing me paper towels.
I close my eyes and let out a long breath. “Fine.”
When I open my eyes, my white T-shirt and jean shorts are still ruined. I look like I belong in an episode of CSI.
As I stand there, covered in sauce, my resolve wobbles.
I almost tell Raff everything. He’s my best friend and I need him.
But then those recent, injured months rear up within me again.
I’ve gotten it reversed. Really, I’m his best friend and he needs me.
My first instincts were right. If I tell him that Vin is moving out, he’s going to break.
“You have anything I can change into?” I ask.
“Sure. Go get cleaned up. I’ll grab it.” His eyes are still wide.
I don’t think I’m nailing this impression of myself.
I rinse my clothes in his bathroom sink and he passes in a folded-up pair of light green sweatpants and a sweatshirt. I freeze, arms halfway through sleeves and head buried in cloth. Because this sweatshirt smells like Vin. I would bet my life savings that he’s recently worn these clothes.
I finish getting dressed and then look at myself in the mirror. Cozy, mussed, swimming in cloth, smelling like my husband: I’ve been here before. Many times. But in happier circumstances.
“Did Vin wear these?” I ask Raff (in my normal voice, thank you very much) as I reemerge.
His brow comes down. “Those are his.”
I look down at the clothes again. Spring green, hope green, I bet his eyes sparkle like a fucking disaster in this color. I do not recognize these clothes.
“He brought them over to wear when he slept here last night,” Raff says, with the slight tang of duh in his voice.
“Right.” I eye the rest of the treacherous sauce on the stove. It bubbles in the pot like a potion.
I shouldn’t care. It would be so much easier if I just didn’t care. But…
“Did—” I clear my throat. “Did he eat before he left?”
“Nah. He said he wasn’t hungry.”
I watch the sauce bubble. He couldn’t bring himself to eat it. But he eats literally anything I cook. I guess not anymore.
I stand here in his clothes from yesterday. Because he slept here. Clothes I don’t recognize.
I’ll go.
“I’m actually—” I clear my throat again. “I’m actually not very hungry either.”
“Are you sure? Big night ahead of us.” He’s serving himself an obscenely large bowl.
“Wait, really? Oh no. It’s not funtivities, is it?”
Raffi has recently become obsessed with Groupon.
Which sort of makes sense. He’s extremely excitable.
He’d be the one leading the standing ovation at the octogenarian choir concert, et cetera.
And now he’s become very excited about dragging me around New York to experience all our city has to offer (on a budget).
In the last two months we’ve already gotten dubious pedicures in the East Village ($14.50 apiece), fed the budgies at the Bronx Zoo (8 bucks apiece and patently terrifying), and gone to see bad stand-up (25 dollars apiece and Raff went home with one of the comics).
So why am I doing all of these terrible activities? Am I really just that supportive of a pal?
No.
I’m doing it because where else do I really have to be? Home? Obviously not.
At this point, if Raffi used a Groupon for us to get our leg hair tweezed off hair by hair, I’d go with him. Just to spend time with someone with a teaspoon of affection for me. Just to get the hell out of my silent apartment.
Which is why, an hour later, I have an enormous goblet of wine in one hand and a paintbrush in the other.
“Excuse me. Are we supposed to be painting what the instructor is painting? Or is this, like, free-form?”
Raffi and I turn to the woman who has just addressed us.
She’s looking worriedly between her painting and ours.
Hers looks very similar to the instructor’s, who is, in fact, providing a step-by-step of how to turn a white canvas into a non-ironic sunset over a titanium ocean.
“I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood,” the woman further prompts.
If she’s looking to our work for guidance, I can see why she’s worried.
I’ve decided that sunsets are a little too on the nose for me and, perhaps with that drawing class in mind, have embarked, instead, on an all-blue portrait of Raff’s profile. He looks like Cookie Monster.
Raff, to his credit, has done a sunset. He’s just added a sinking oil tanker. As I watch, he beaches a whale in the sand.
“You’re doing great,” I assure the woman. “We’re just absurd.”
“Speak for yourself!” Raffi insists, taking an enormous gulp of wine and then painting blue blobby tears dripping out of the whale’s eyes. “I’m painting for my life over here.”
It’s a joke, and the woman laughs. I, on the other hand, don’t laugh. Because also it’s not a joke.
He is painting for his life. Just like he jogs for his life every morning and showers for his life before work. Just like he got a pedicure for his life and let birds attack his hands at the Bronx Zoo, for his life.
Those tears Raff is painting onto the whale may look comically juvenile, but, look, it’s been an epically shit year for us. He does anything he can to keep moving forward.
Raff empties the rest of his bottle of wine into his glass, nearly overflowing it. “It’s missing something,” he muses about his painting. “It needs a touch more emotional impact.”
“More emotional impact? You’ve already harpooned a whale!”
“Oh!” He has an epiphany. “I know! The whale needs a buddy.” He quickly paints in another whale, tiny in the distance. Trapped in its own life in the water, unable to get to its loved one dying on the beach.
“This is supposed to be fun,” I gripe at him. Not humiliating. I’m not supposed to get misty in public over a whale painted so badly it looks like a wool sock.
“Is it?” he asks. He turns to me with a quizzical expression in place.
“Quit it!” I scold him. He’s convinced I’ve got an ocean of tears dammed up on the inside. A dying whale sinking to the bottom of my gut. He’s certain that I’m just one bad painting away from baring my soul and finally getting over this terrible year.
Well, he’s in for a surprise when he finds out Vin’s leaving me.
I turn my eye back to my own painting of Raff. Well, it’s not really a painting. It’s more like a drawing that happens to be with a paintbrush. But still…
“I’m building him, huh? Part by part…” I’m remembering what Daniel the drawing teacher said about my bad drawing of the model.
“What’d you say?” Raff asks.
“Nothing. Just this thing that someone said to me…” I almost don’t tell him. But I’m straining under the pressure of all the things I’m not saying to Raff. So, “I wandered into this figure drawing class yesterday.”