Chapter 20
20
Once, Max dated a therapist. The relationship was okay. Went on for a year. It ended with her screaming at him on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Bleecker. One day, you’re going to have to attach to someone, she said. It isn’t healthy, the way you behave. Childhood aside.
Will I? he said. He was really asking. And also, isn’t it? I feel fine.
Jaclyn’s left a bobby pin at his apartment, which his housekeeper has ceremoniously placed on the kitchen counter. It is the only item other than a politely folded dish towel she’ll allow. She is making a point. Is it that Jaclyn is special or just another hair to vacuum off the rug? He wants to ask, but her English isn’t great.
Max’s mother is on morphine. His father preps him though they’ve been through this before. The first time, his mother wouldn’t stop singing Hanukkah songs and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He remembers how his father kept retoasting them the whole week long, eating them in triangles, his mouth twisty and dried out. This time, on the phone, she launches into a dreamy meditation on the sky and the color blue. Max is reading emails as she does.
It is a feeling, she says. Do you feel it?
What? he says.
Connection, she says.
It is not that he doesn’t want to hear what she has to say. He is just not sure that she’ll remember it. He writes Love instead of Sincerely to a client by mistake and presses send and then it’s too late.
Where is Jaclyn?
Max calls his mother back. His father is elated to pass him through.
I do feel it, he says.
Feel what? she says.
They are both quiet for a good long time.
When Max wakes up, the phone is in his hand, dead.
Jaclyn calls on a Saturday. She apologizes in a voice that doesn’t seem to him like hers. His first instinct is not to take care of her but to ask her, What the fuck? He does not. Instead, he invites her over. She shows up an hour late. He had wanted them to catch LaToya Ruby Frazier’s opening at the Brooklyn Museum for an activity, some distraction from whatever’s eating Gilbert Grape—but that’s out of the question now. He’s had two bourbons and is hopped up. Hungry but also not in the mood to actually eat. She rings the doorbell. She’s in jeans and a worn white T-shirt, no bra. She sits down on the couch and pats the seat beside her. He starts to kiss her, not because he wants to, but in an attempt to change the mood. She shrugs him away.
He knows what’s coming. There is only one thing to do.
I have to tell you something, she says.
You’re pregnant, he says.
I’m pregnant, she says. Only just.
It is different with her here. It feels like blame thrown in his face like pie even though she hasn’t, at all. Max wants to open a window. Instead, he draws up into himself, a couple of inches taller, insides stretched like a rubber band. There is nothing to lean on even though he’s sitting down, so he holds on to a pillow.
You said, he begins to say.
I know, she says. I can’t keep it. Most likely, it won’t even be viable.
So you’re just telling me, he says.
Yes, she says.
Max’s mother would love a grandchild. He is surprised that the first thing he thinks of is that.
Max has another bourbon. Then, another. Jaclyn stares out the window, then at him, then out the window again. Is it possible, he thinks, that she looks extra beautiful tonight? Glowy? He cannot be sure that it is not context rather than fact—or if it even works like that. Eventually, Max orders in sushi because what does he know? Jaclyn just eats the rice, but she eats the rice. He asks her if she wants to stay over and she nods. They lie in bed, holding hands, looking at the ceiling. With his other hand, using his pointer, he writes PLEASE again and again in the sheets until he knows she’s asleep. He thinks of an artist he knows who makes videos of himself dancing the spelling of words. You have to follow his feet to make sense of the thing. Max remembers one: Never Finished, Only Abandoned . It’s da Vinci.
Once, when he was small, Max fell asleep on the floor next to his mother. He woke to her in the dead of night, whispering over him. Maybe she was singing. Either way, he’d never seen her face so full of love, compassion, need.
He’d make a horrible father, he thinks. He has so much to work through.
A few days later, Jaclyn texts, asking if he’ll go with her to the appointment. THE appointment. What is he supposed to say?
This is attachment, he thinks. Isn’t it?
The room in the doctor’s office is small and dark. Max leans against the wall near the door. Jaclyn’s socked feet are on the table. Her toes curled under like snails. On top, a cardigan unbuttoned, her bra white and lacy and demure. The technician turns off the light, presses a button. Jaclyn closes her eyes and breathes deeply. The screen lights up. There is a loud thump and then the room fills with bright dark swimming light. The technician runs the wand back and forth over Jaclyn’s taut belly. It’s like that film room at MoMA where everyone is hushed and not really sure why. Jaclyn holds up her head with one hand. She is silent but she moves her face this way and that, as if inspecting a tricky entrance.
What are we looking for? Max whispers.
The technician looks toward Jaclyn for the okay. Jaclyn nods.
We are looking for the diaphragm to move in and out, she says. That means the function of breath is developing.
I’m sorry, the technician says.
Same, Max says. And he is.
Jaclyn’s eyes are shut to him. Please, she whispers, repeatedly. Like someone keeps punching her in the gut.
Outside, Max and Jaclyn stand in the blinding sun. It feels as if they’ve just landed from outer space because of the light, but not only. There is a kebab cart and Max’s stomach growls. He looks at Jaclyn, who is wan, on a boat, headed downstream.
He should just tell her how he feels. The truth is exposing and soft. He does not tell her. He cannot.
After, Max goes for ice cream. As a child, he used to go with his father. Even in winter. It was better, always better, to be out.
In yoga, the teacher asks them to let their bodies respond to a wish. What does Max wish for? His right knee gives out. He spends the rest of the class wincing, but he will not give up.
In the hall in the home in Orient, there is a black-and-white photo of Max and his mother. It is large, often tilted, framed in silver with large sloppy watermarks. In it, Max and his mother are at a playground in Central Park. There is a large slide in the background and other children, though they’re blurry. Max’s mother’s face is square to the camera. Objectively, she is a beauty, though clearly exhausted. She is holding Max over her shoulder. All you can see is his small back, cloaked in a plaid wool coat, a bear hat, pulled down low. His mother’s eyes are glassy with cold or maybe fear or who knows. How could he know? He’s never been a parent.
Max sends Jaclyn flowers with a note: Anything you need. But what he means is not that. And they both know it.
Max asks Todd if they can have another dinner with the girls. They greet him at the door and say, Very nice to meet you, and then scurry off like twin princess mice. They watch the iPad during Chinese food. But then something switches like a light and they go nuts, crying, screaming, shrieking. A doll narrowly misses smacking Max in his skull and he excuses himself. And Todd says, If you’re smart, you’ll make your exit before it gets ugly.
Nothing feels better than night air.
Fuck.
That.
One day, during yoga, there is a couple behind him in their fifties maybe. Experts at the sport. During Savasana, as he leaves, he notices they are holding hands. Cute, he says out loud. But what he means is, Fuck that. His knee is tissue, cord, body, torched by flames.
He sends Jaclyn flowers again. He isn’t sure if he’s meant to ask if she’d like company. He is sure she has friends to help with everything. She has Margaux.
Max sleeps with his assistant, who then resigns. He hires a gay guy with whom he will not sleep. Simple.
He takes pills before yoga. His twists have gotten better. They shoot the endorphins right to the sky. One day, the teacher comes to Max, crouches down, all shiny dancer muscles and spandex. He pretzels Max’s back and arms in such a way that deepens the twist exponentially. Max sees the tears on the mat before he feels them on his face. Fuck, he whispers.
Good, the teacher says.
No, Max whispers.
Yes, the teacher says and pushes him deeper, harder, more.
His father calls. Max sends it to voicemail.
He sleeps with everyone. A waitress, an intern, a dentist. A redheaded yogi comes back to his apartment. They drink two bottles of wine. He’s over it but he keeps on. When he’s on top, she says no and he says yes and she says, Jesus. She leaves right after, her yoga mat unrolled and trailing like a broken tongue as she races out the door.
That was bad, he says out loud, but he’s very drunk and it sounds like, Yes, I bet.
Max looks different in the mirror.
He imagines conversations with Jaclyn.
I’m so sorry.
I have feelings for you.
Which? Jaclyn asks.
Max’s knee gives out on the street. He has to take a cab three blocks.
His father doesn’t usually ask, but then one day, he does.
Come be with your mother, he says. The firmness is freeing.
Max cancels all his meetings, his brunch. He gets his car out of the lot. The new convertible smell never gets old. He takes some calls as he speeds past Ronkonkoma, Medford, Manorville. He listens to Radiohead with the windows down. He makes great time. He stops at Starbucks only to pee and get a flat white. He gets to Orient in time for lunch. He planned that accordingly. Lunch takes time.
Max brings Balthazar—lentil salad, goat cheese sandwiches, serrano ham, orange croissants. His mother loves a sticky bun, so he’s brought three. He doesn’t know whether or not she’s eating, but there are days when his father eats triple when she’s not doing well—taking on the calories as if it is possible to pass them along through devotion. His father is standing at the front door, waiting. He hugs Max tight.
Good to see you, Maxie.
You too, Pop. And Max means it. For a moment, he wants to tell his father about Jaclyn.
Wash your hands first, his father says.
It strikes Max as odd that this is where his parents chose to end up. So removed from everything: culture, art, spice stores. They were such New Yorkers: their shoes and bags and memberships and ability to walk great distances in all weather reflected that. They knew every stop on the subway, the best place to get Pakistani food. They gave out fifty holiday presents every year to people within a ten-block radius. They shopped for groceries in small batches and carried their wallets in inside pockets. They only bought coats with inside pockets.
To Max, this place always felt like a summer house. He’s never spent more than a night. His room isn’t exactly his room. It’s a guest room to which his mother added finishing touches that she thought he’d like: lime-wash walls she did herself, the whale vertebrae they found on the beach a decade ago, a large-scale photograph Max took of a wave. His mother painted driftwood and assembled a frame for it. Max could sell it now. Not as his—that wouldn’t matter—but as a piece unto itself. It would sell if he was selling it.
As Max walks up the stairs, the fucking knee, he thinks of Jaclyn. Appointment aside, lately, he’s been wondering about the distinction between love and habit. She’s been in his life for quite some time now. More than most. A constant despite work and weather. It’s only natural, he thinks. Right? Perhaps he is not endeared to her so much as hung up on the disappointment of the thing. Burrs, stuck in. Not her but it. He wants to call the therapist and go, See? Right? But the therapist would know immediately. She’d say something like, Okay, Max. And how does it feel? And Max would have to be honest. It hurts.
Max opens the door to his mother’s room, which was once a reading room with a blue velvet sofa, cabinets, and heavy stacks of books teetering like tall, clothbound sculptures. Now the sofa is gone. So are the stacks. The room has the largest windows in the house, views of water on three sides. One window is cracked open. The curtains sway. He has seen his mother prone many times over the years, but it would be impossible for anyone to call her weak. Sometimes, he thinks her cancer is the only way she can recover from her day-to-day. She has so much force, most of the time, although not in relation to him. She swims in the dead of winter. As a child, he would wake to her working with clay. Later, he’d come home at four a.m., drunk, disoriented, and there she’d be, braiding wool. The most oriented of all: her.
There is a Vogue article in which they call her fearless. She is known to the world as an artistic octopus, capable of any medium. Her silver hair has been written about. And her jewelry—which she’s promised to donate to whichever second-grade class at PS 84 is around when she passes. She’s been volunteering there since forever.
Max’s mother slurs her words in her sleep—something about purple and beads and birds. Her face is puffed as if she’s underwater or upside down. There is a bergamot candle, lit, meant to harmonize the smells of sickness: medicine, detergent, sweat. It does not. Max doesn’t like to touch her when she’s unwell. As a child, he never liked his feet sandy—even worse wet and covered in sand. All he can say is that it is akin to that.
Max leans against the wall, knocks the light on by mistake, sees too much of her, and quickly recovers it. She has knit all the blankets on her bed. He wonders if it’s a disappointment to be under them, in this way. It would be, for him. He watches her breathe.
Jane? he says, but his mother doesn’t flinch.
I came to see you.
On a small table is a string sculpture she’s done of a man balancing on the roof of a tall building. The thread is so white it’s nearly incandescent. Max walks over to it, strums it like a guitar. He has never valued her work—though some of it he has liked. He has never sold it, though he could have. Why didn’t he? When people make the connection between the two of them, he always says the same thing: those who can’t make art sell. It isn’t how he feels precisely, but it works. They always say how lucky he is, to have her.
Max takes two of her pain pills, good stuff, sits on a stool until the light goes down. He doesn’t say anything. The pain in his knee gets swallowed by the stream. He is not sure what he’s thinking about or if he is actually thinking. Is it possible that conversations happen subconsciously in moments like this? Or that thoughts happen outside your head? Like tea being poured onto a table? It is not that he can’t imagine his life without his mother. It is that he can’t imagine the world without her. She has interns and mentees, donates to everything. There is a reliance on her but also a light from her. If a person dies every second, even if a new one is born at the same time, how does the world not go dark? It isn’t a one-to-one. At least not with her.
Max gets close enough to hear her breath. He puts his hand to her head. He has to steer himself away from thoughts of her in the bath. He has to steer himself toward her in galleries, pointing and laughing loudly and being followed by a throng of minions. The golden dazzling light beam that she was. If only he could have known her from the outside in first.
You came, she says, but her mouth is a broken jar. She looks Fauvist. It occurs to Max that his father is overmedicating her. He should say something or maybe not. Max takes a bottle for himself. The whole thing. He is not sure whether or not she’s asleep or aware when he backs out of the room, closes the door behind him, says, Night, Jane.
He knows that he should do something else. He cannot.
Max would like to drive home with someone. Instead, he turns up the music so loud that the convertible top trembles. At home, he realizes he has killed the money plant. How long has it been? The man at the store told him that demise was impossible. See?
The next morning, Max shows up at Jaclyn’s apartment. There isn’t really another way. She is an early riser, like him. And it’s just dawn, light coming up behind the buildings like a wide eye. He opens the door. She is standing at a bird cage, eye level, her fingers inside, twiddling. There are two canaries, layers of white feathers like wedding dresses on their backs and downy heads. Jaclyn resembles them in her billowy nightgown, hair loose and wavy, feet socked. She looks at Max as if he’s just come back from a trip down the block for bagels and juice. Which he hasn’t. He’s brought nothing but an art book that was dropped by his office in yellow ribbon.
Hi, she says.
Before he can ask her if she needs anything, she says, What is it that you need?
Max puts the book on the counter. He wants to ask her how she is but he knows better than to ask a question he will loathe the answer to. He wants to ask her if she’s forgiven him too. That’s really what he needs: a pass on all things. He wants to say something about his mother—not to prove anything but just to talk. Instead, they stand and watch the birds. She does not yell or look at him. The kettle whistles. She does not make him tea.
After a while of silence, standing apart, Jaclyn goes to the bathroom. One of the birds sings to Max in a high trill. How does he know that she is female even before the sound? He does. Without thinking, he opens the cage. The singer hops onto his shoulder, and Max picks her up, holds her in his fist, not suffocating her but tightly. She feels like a cloud or maybe a bomb. Something awful is about to happen. He puts the bird back and leaves.
Max has a dream about the color purple. He can’t explain it exactly, but purple is the color of his heart. It pours out like ribbons onto dark, glistening pavement. What about red? he thinks. What about black? What color is the inside of his mother’s mouth?
The next week, he sees Jaclyn at a show— Clocks and Watches at the Frick. She waves to him with two fingers. There is a crowd of people. Max goes up to her, kisses her on both cheeks. How are the birds? he asks. She nods, looking at someone else. There is an invisible moat around her, which she’s made with her chest and mouth.
Jaclyn, he whispers in her ear, though he’s not sure what he’s going to say.
Yes? she asks, whipping around, as if surprised to see him.
He has been here all along, hasn’t he? He tells her she looks great.
She looks at him like he’s said something in another language.
What? he says, teasing out a laugh.
I think I thought, she says. That because of your parents…
She trails off. She shrugs. She moves her hands in front of him, up and down, up and down. There is a tick tick ticking that sounds like half clock, half heart. It does not stop for anything.