C
HAPTER
17
I couldn’t stand to think of him. Lying in his hospital bed, wondering where I’d gone. Each time the door opened, each time the phone rang:
Is that Carrie?
I imagined his face, the bars of the halo framing his hopefulness, and then the dashing of hope when he’d learned who it really was. Not me. Never me. I’d been gone two weeks, three, and he had no idea what had happened to me. No one did.
Finally I called my mother. I was sure she’d be upset, maybe angry, but when she heard my voice she just said “Hi” very evenly, as if we’d spoken only the day before.
“I’m in New York,” I said. “Staying with a high school friend. Remember Simon? Who you met that night? I just—I needed a change, I needed to get out of there.”
And she said, “I know.”
There’d been phone calls, trips to look up at my apartment windows, reports on my last visit with Mike, but she said she’d never been worried, not really: she figured I’d done just about exactly what I’d done.
“How are you doing?” she said. “Do you need any money?”
“I’m OK, thanks.” I had some savings at home, about fifteen hundred dollars, though I couldn’t quite see running through it just to dally in New York. What was I doing here, anyway? How long was I going to stay? The evening before, walking through the West Village with Kilroy, I’d seen a fortyish couple climbing the front steps of an immaculate brick
townhouse—both of them wrapped in expensive coats, their expensive leather shoes faintly gleaming. Watching them had felt like watching something not quite real, a demonstration of some kind:
This is how you go home when you own a piece of the world
. Their lives seemed impossibly distant from mine.
My mother was silent. I imagined she was weighing the wisdom of asking me about my plans, and I braced myself a little. When she spoke, though, she said, “You had such a hard summer,” and immediately tears pricked at my eyes and then spilled onto my cheeks. I was in the brownstone kitchen, and I squeezed the phone against my ear and used one hand to steady the paper towel roll while with the other I tore a piece off. I wanted to blow my nose but I didn’t want her to hear me. I blotted my face and tried not to sniff.
“How do you feel?” she said.
“I don’t even know.”
“Oh, honey.”
Across the room a Styrofoam takeout container sat open like a giant clamshell. I went over and looked inside: the remains of something in a tan sauce, plus a collapsed orange slice and a limp piece of lettuce.
“Guilty,” I said. “I feel guilty. What does it say about me that I’d leave? What kind of person does it make me?”
She didn’t reply for a moment, and I felt the long span between us, the miles and miles of wire. At last she spoke. “The kind of person you are.”
A rush of laughter escaped me. “What?”
“It makes you the kind of person you are. People have this idea that what they do changes who they are. A married man has an affair and he thinks, Now I’ve become a bad person. As if something had changed.”
“Meaning he already was a bad person?”
“Meaning bad isn’t the issue. Meaning you do what you do. Not without consequences for other people, of course, sometimes very grave ones. But it’s not very helpful to regard your choices as a series of right or wrong moves. They don’t define you as much as you define them.”
“You’re sounding very mystical,” I said. “Are you saying it was my destiny to leave?”
“Not at all—you could just as easily have stayed. But that wouldn’t make you a good person any more than leaving makes you a bad one. You’re already made, honey. That’s what I mean.”
“And whose fault is that?” I joked, surprisingly comforted.
“I take credit for everything except your big feet.”
We both laughed, and then suddenly I felt conscious of another presence, almost as if someone were listening on the extension. “I wonder what
he’d
say,” I said.
“Your father?” my mother said without missing a beat. “What do you think?”
We talked for a while more, and it wasn’t until later, until we’d hung up and I’d climbed the stairs to my dusty alcove, that the idea of my father came back to me, together with the words to an old Paul Simon song I’d heard on the radio somewhere in western Pennsylvania. What would my father say?
Jump on a ferry, Carrie. Just set yourself free
. It was almost funny, until it occurred to me that perhaps it had been his voice all along, since my earliest feeling that something between me and Mike was wrong; perhaps it had been his voice all along, saying:
Go. You don’t need this. Nothing’s making you stay. Just go
.
I sat on the futon and leaned against the wall. I could see the railing along the open stairwell, its two missing posts like gaps in a row of teeth. Halfway down the stairs, one tread had a foot-sized hole that Simon had covered with a plank on which he’d painted a huge, wide-open mouth. I heard the front door open and close, then footsteps moving along the hallway to the kitchen. Please, I thought. Stay downstairs. I wished I had a room of my own, or at least a curtain to pull across the opening of the alcove.
Just go. Just go
. I didn’t want to be anything like my father. Had he had the possibility of leaving in him from the beginning? Was that how my mother explained it to herself? That was certainly the story told by the few pictures she’d kept: they showed a tall, skinny guy with dark hair and an upturned, ski-jump nose, a guy in the process of realizing he’d made a big mistake. You could see it progress from picture to picture: in their wedding photo he was serious in a suit and tie, clearly the type who wasn’t going to smile just because a photographer said to; by the final picture, taken two years later, he was sitting on the back stoop of the house we lived in then, in a close-fitting shirt with a splayed collar, and his eyes were absolutely vacant.
Where was he now? I hadn’t given it any thought in years. He was a Midwesterner, born and bred: he’d grown up in a small town in Minnesota, lived for a while with relatives in Iowa after his parents died, then gone to Madison for college. I’d always figured he was somewhere in the Midwest, but what if he’d wound up in New York? What if I happened to pass him on the street one day—would he look familiar? If I had one of those photographs in front of me now, could my mind perform its own
computerized aging process on it to learn what he’d come to look like? Would he be gray-haired? Balding, fat, thin? Would he recognize me?
Could you pass a relative on the street and feel nothing?
In high school biology we did a project on genetics—hair and eye color, size, that kind of thing. Mike was in the class, too. We worked on the assignment one afternoon in the Mayers’ kitchen, and when it came time to fill in my father’s side of the family, all I could do was put my pencil down and sit there. Realizing what was going on, Mike got riled up—pissed off at my father for walking out on me when over a decade later I might need to ask him questions so I could do my homework.
Asshole
, Mike said. He didn’t have abandonment in his DNA.
It was a few more days before I called him, and by then word had reached him, as I’d known it would. I could almost see it, word: flying across Madison, burning the phone wires.
“Hey, it’s Carrie the city slicker,” he said when he heard my voice. “New Yawk.”
I pictured him in his hospital bed, the head raised, his face winter pale. I said, “I’m sorry I haven’t called. I’m sorry I just disappeared.”
“No problem,” he said cheerfully. “New York sounds like fun, you must be having a great time.”
My throat felt full, and I forced myself to swallow. “It’s pretty amazing.”
“So you’re hanging out with that Simon guy?”
I thought of Kilroy, with whom I’d woken up that morning: who’d woken me up, pressing his erection against my bare thigh, his hand on my side. “Yeah,” I said to Mike. “Simon and his housemates.”
“Well, just promise you won’t get weird, OK?”
“What do you mean, weird?”
“Oh, you know—pretentious, jaded.”
“OK,” I said with a laugh. “But don’t you—I mean, I’m sorry about not saying goodbye or anything.”
“It’s cool,” he said. “Hang on, I’ve got this new thing for talking on the phone and it’s kind of slipping.” His voice got fainter for a moment: “Oh, wait wait, thanks—” Then clear again: “Carrie?”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry.”
“No problem.” I licked my lips. “So what’s been going on?”
“I’m on the computer now in occupational. It’s pretty cool, really—you’d be surprised what a feeb like me can accomplish.”
“Mike.”
“OK, a gimp.”
There was a crash in the background, then voices, laughter.
“What was that?” I said.
“Rooster decking my bedside lamp.”
We talked for a little longer, about nothing—certainly not about how long I’d stay away, nor about what, if anything, we still meant to each other. He sounded so happy—better than he had in ages.
“Well, have fun,” he said as we were about to hang up. “Send me a postcard of the Empire State Building, OK? And shit—hockey season starts in a couple weeks. Go see a Rangers game for me, all right? I mean, if you’re still there.”
We said goodbye. Simon was in his room, but I grabbed a jacket and headed for Kilroy’s, hurrying on the darker cross streets. In the vestibule of his building I ran my finger down the row of tiny steel buttons until I found his.
He buzzed me up and met me at the door to his apartment, a book closed around his index finger. He pulled me in and then backed me against the closed door. His face was warm and scratchy. We stood there kissing for a while, and then I pulled away and told him about the call, about how Mike had sounded, as if he’d meant what he’d said in his hospital room the night I left: that he
was
glad he didn’t have to wonder about us anymore.
“Do you wish he’d sounded more upset?” Kilroy said. We were in the living room now, standing near his couch—we didn’t quite know how to sit together yet. His thumbs were in his belt loops, hands splayed over his front pockets.
“Not more upset,” I said, but then I broke off talking.
Kilroy tilted his head to the side. “Tell me.”
I breathed in deeply and looked at him, his sharp features and shaggy hair.
Tell me
. They meant something, those words—they meant he wanted to know. He stood there looking at me, a watchful, interested expression on his face.
I didn’t know what to say, how to put it when I wasn’t quite sure what “it” was. “I hope I don’t want him to be upset,” I began. “I mean, all summer—” Suddenly tears surged from my eyes. “I didn’t want to hurt him,” I cried. “But sometimes sitting there with him I felt like I was watching myself sitting there with him. Like:
Look at her, she’s doing the right thing
. I felt so
distant.”
Kilroy nodded thoughtfully.
“And now I’ve left. And I mean, what does it
mean
to him?”
He rubbed his chin and considered. “You don’t want him to be upset,” he said, “but you want him to be thinking about it.”
That was it. I wanted him to be thinking about it, just as I was thinking about it. But I had this, too: I had talking about it, with someone I’d be in bed with before long. It was too much, the overlappingness of it all: Mike’s feelings and my feelings and Kilroy taking my hand and pulling it toward his mouth.
C
HAPTER
18
Simon lived a busy life. Drinks after work, dinners, movies. If he didn’t have plans, he generally stayed late at the law firm, which meant free Chinese delivered to the office and a Dial-a-Cab home when he was tired, not to mention overtime for the extra hours he worked. Proofreading paid surprisingly well, and given his low rent he had a lot of expendable income. It wasn’t unusual for him to see a couple of plays in one week, then go to a concert on Friday night and out dancing on Saturday. I was always welcome but I was afraid to spend the money—and I was generally with Kilroy, anyway. One evening, when I hadn’t seen Simon in about a week, he sought me out on the third floor and asked me to go to a gallery opening with him. “There’ll be free food,” he said. “I won’t take no for an answer.”
“It’s not that you want to do something with me,” I teased him, “you just want to make sure I don’t starve to death.”
He shook his head adamantly. “I want to make sure
I
don’t starve to death.” He reached for my hand. “And I
do
want to do something with you, which hasn’t been that easy, you know. You’re not exactly around a lot, my dear.”
We got ready and then made our way down the street. It was early evening, the colorless sky just graying. We crossed Ninth Avenue and then strolled down a block of neatly kept townhouses until we came abreast of my dirty, unused car. There it sat, parked under a ginkgo tree. I
never drove it except to move it from one parking place to another—I was constantly racing out of the brownstone in order to obey the system of rules controlling when you could park where.
“Poor car,” I said, giving it a pat as we passed by.
“It does look a little sad.”
“I guess I should’ve taken the train.”
Simon shook his head vehemently. “That wouldn’t have been nearly so satisfying.” He loved the story of my flight. He loved how long it had taken me to let anyone know where I was. “Driving was perfect,” he added. “You needed to see Madison in your rearview mirror.”
“It was dark.”
“Metaphorically speaking.” He reached up and scratched the back of his head. “Maybe you should sell it,” he said casually—too casually, I thought, as if he’d been waiting for the opportunity.
But I couldn’t sell it—no way. It wasn’t much of a car, and I certainly didn’t need it right now, but I couldn’t possibly sell it without telling Mike, and telling Mike I’d sold it would be like telling him I’d decided to have a dog we’d adopted together put to sleep. “It’s a good little car,” he’d said the day I bought it. “It’ll last, or it’ll have me to answer to.”