All of Us and Everything (4 page)

Mrs. Kwok examined the photographs, bewildered but not exactly
awed,
as Liv thought she should be.

“This is genius, Mrs. Kwok. Do you understand how many years a woman can waste trying to wade through all the commitment-avoidant mama's boys of New York City—while sitting down week after week, flipping through the engagement announcements and never really seeing them for what they are? Gold!” Liv gestured like she was panning for gold. “See?”

Mrs. Kwok stared at Liv. “What?”

Liv felt the Adderall propelling her forward, her mind whirring decisively now, flitting above the Scotch like a clipper ship. “This is a directory of men who are capable of asking a woman to marry them. Period. A directory, Mrs. Kwok.”

“But they are getting married to someone already, right?”

Liv shook her heard. “This brings me to (B).” She walked Mrs. Kwok down the row. “These men are in a vulnerable position—dibs have been called but they aren't yet off the market.”

“Dibs?”

“Don't ask questions right now. Okay?” Liv paused and stared at one couple, the man's arms wrapped protectively around his fiancée's shoulders. “And (C). Look closely.”

Mrs. Kwok squinted at the photograph.

Liv pointed to the man's bright and yet terrified smile. “These are the faces of men under the most stress of their lives. They want out. Look at them.”

“He looks happy to me,” Mrs. Kwok said, pointing to the man's teeth.

“He isn't. None of them are. Their fiancées have changed on them almost overnight. Before the engagement, they were happy and content. These men are being forced to make decisions and no one cares about their opinions. They're being railroaded into buying things they don't want to buy, arrange people's seating in ways they don't want to arrange, pick from samples of food they don't want to eat, list their friends in a hierarchy, cut cousins off lists. They're spending more time with their in-laws. Look, Mrs. Kwok. They're dying inside. These are photographs of desperation.”

Mrs. Kwok shook her head.

“What? You don't believe in the quiet desperation of weddings?” Liv picked up
The New York Times.
It usually contained the best contenders, and she'd been saving it for last. She spread one of the pages open on the floor. “Do you see all of those eyes staring up at you? Might as well be looking at dogs in the animal shelter. They want to be saved, Mrs. Kwok. We all just want to be saved.” She thought of the conversation with Esme and felt guilty. Esme wanted to be saved too. From what? Who knew? She had a perfectly good life, constructed in a very purposeful way.

Liv stared down at the faces. She was dizzy—drunker than she'd thought. The faces swam around like fish trapped in an indoor pond. She put her bare toes on the edge of the newspaper, hoping to pin it down.

And there she saw a face she recognized—a woman with wide eyes, curly hair, a crooked smile.

Liv knelt down, spread her hands on the floor, and read the names aloud: “Clifford Wells and Ruby Rockwell.” She hadn't thought about her sister Ru in a long time. She was a novelist who also adapted her own work into screenplays, a hit cult-fave whimsical romantic comedy—and totally ripped from Liv's own life. Liv had never forgiven Ru for using Liv's life as material—thievery—a point Ru seemed oblivious about.

Liv and Ru hadn't seen each other in years. Ru had surrounded herself with creatives, and Liv didn't care for artsy types. They didn't appreciate the things that Liv appreciated. The last time she'd been at a party with Ru's friends, a German woman had gotten naked and let people write on her body—for free. Liv didn't understand it. Why not at least charge a nominal fee? That didn't make it stripping. And even stripping could be deemed art. Moreover Ru ignored the whole scene and was talking about an old children's book about a duck named Ping or some shit.

“You okay?” Mrs. Kwok asked.

Baby Ru was getting married? How was that possible?

The notice referred to her as
the acclaimed novelist and screenwriter whose hit film—
Trust Teddy Wilmer—
garnered comparisons to Charlie Kaufman and Nora Ephron.

“Fuck her,” Liv whispered. “
Trust Teddy Wilmer
was based on my life,” she said loudly. “Not Ru's!” The comparisons to Kaufman and Ephron were partially
Liv's
comparisons. But did anyone ever point that out? No.

Liv didn't read novels on the grounds that they weren't true. She made no exception for her sister's novel, even the thievery of Liv's own teen romance. Teddy Wilmer was an obvious knockoff of Teddy Whistler, Liv's first love—the rebellious (and possibly crazy) young man who ended up in a juvenile detention center and, later, a private mental institution, and a relationship that led directly to Liv's own stint in boarding school, a sentence of its own.

After she'd read the review of the novel in
The New York Times Book Review
three years earlier, Liv had left a message on Ru's voice mail. “Why don't you write about your own life, Ru? Or is that you've never really lived one? You've never grown up, Ru. You never will.”

Ru never responded. They never spoke of it.

Liv had watched
Trust Teddy Wilmer
while drunk, on the grounds that she didn't want to see something indecently private about herself while vulnerably sober.

She once confided to Esme that it was an awful thing to have a writer for a sister.

Esme said, “Oh, no. I wish she were a memoirist! Rip away the bullshit of fiction and really tell it. Memoirists are the only writers with any real guts.” Liv was relieved. At least Ru wasn't a
memoirist
! That was something to be happy about.

Liv quickly scanned Ru's fiancé's short biography. She sifted through her mental list. Check, check, check…She looked Clifford Wells in the eyes, and for a split second she thought,
He's ripe for the picking.

She stiffened. She was a monster. She'd actually considered stealing her sister's fiancé.

And then, worse, she rationalized it. Again, the processing was so fast she had no control over it.
If the marriage is going to work, he won't be so easily lured away. If he is, I'm doing Ru a favor. Some marriages are defunct on the molecular level.

And then she rationalized it personally
. Ru stole from me to turn a profit. I can steal from her.

“I don't know,” Liv said, in response to no specific question.

“You're worrying me, Ex Mrs. P.”

“I just don't know,” Liv said again.

She stood up and walked to the bank of windows. It was pouring outside. She thought for a second of the windows in her childhood home on Asbury Avenue, the third floor. Esme and Ru probably ignored what their mother had taught them during that one weird summer storm, but not Liv. In moments when she was completely alone, she'd spent hours at those windows, classical music in the background, conducting spinning seagulls, cars trolling for parking spaces, dogs bouncing on leashes, quick clouds against blue sky.

And when she got the chance to run her own life? She could make choices, set goals, and attain them. And now? What about now?

She opened one of the windows and stuck her upper body into the wind and rain. She then lifted one hand, as if holding one of the conductor's batons her mother had given them.

“Don't do this!” Mrs. Kwok shouted.

“What's the name of a Chinese monster?” she shouted over the storm, waving her imaginary baton. “Tell me the Chinese monster that scared the crap out of you as a child!” Liv was screaming. She could hear the shrill noise of her own voice in her ears but it seemed disconnected. It belonged to someone else who was screaming the things that Liv wanted her to scream.

Mrs. Kwok pulled on her arm. “Come back in!”

“A Chinese monster!” Liv shouted again, still trying to conduct. “Which one really scared you, Mrs. Kwok?”

Lightning streaked across the sky. Liv froze, and then her body shuddered.

“Don't jump!” Mrs. Kwok shouted.

Liv hadn't been planning on jumping, but then she looked down. A person would hit hard, die instantaneously. They'd likely feel the cold air rippling, mouth forcibly filled with wind, and then nothing. Not fear, not regret. No Owen, living with some woman he loved more than Liv, a woman whose belly was swelling with a baby who'd be born pink and fat and happy and grow up in Chappaqua where the public schools are fantastic and the children aren't afraid of monsters at all.

Nothing.

Mrs. Kwok didn't know what Liv knew. She wasn't the dying type. She was lucky. She'd once choked on a menthol drop on a subway platform and an old man, perfectly practiced in Heimlich—like he was on his way home from a CPR certification course—walked up, grabbed her around the ribs, and with a sharp tug saved her life. But her life had already been so charmed that she'd half expected the old man. She remembered that he asked if she was okay. She nodded and he left before she even thought to thank him. “I'm not going to die! Just tell me! Okay? Is that so hard?”

“I will tell you a Chinese monster if you come inside!” Mrs. Kwok said.

“Tell me first!” Liv said, gripping the window ledge.

Mrs. Kwok spoke quickly, like the confession was being ripped from her. “As a young child, I was afraid of Gong Gong!”

“What did Gong Gong do?”

Mrs. Kwok lowered her voice. “Gong Gong was a monster of the sea. I grew up along the Yangzte River.”

For one split second, Liv felt like she was a maiden carved onto the prow of an old ship, but then the image flipped and she was the Gong Gong looking up at the maiden carved into the ship, wanting to destroy her. “I'm a monster,” she whispered, her lips wet with rain. She blinked up at the sky. “I am Gong Gong.”

“You promised to come inside!” Mrs. Kwok shouted, and then she pulled on Liv's shirt so hard that it ripped.

Liv fell back into the room and looked at the rip and then at Mrs. Kwok.

“Remember,” Mrs. Kwok said. “I came here in a hurricane for your session! In a
hurricane
!”

“I'm sorry I scared you,” Liv said, and she sat down on the floor.

Mrs. Kwok walked to her collapsible massage table and started to put her supplies back in her satchel. Liv watched as she folded the table and walked to the front door. “You need help, Ex Mrs. P. Your liver and your spleen. We can try next week, right?”

“Right, right,” Liv said. How long before she got kicked out? Would she be here next week? What would become of her? “But we could all be savages in a week's time. Savages and monsters.”

Mrs. Kwok left.

The lights flickered and died.

“Right,” Liv said.

The third floor of the house on Asbury Avenue was lit by flashlights propped up on duct-taped boxes marked
ESME, LIV, RU,
or the initials of Augusta's various defunct movements. In addition to all the boxes, there were dollhouses, bicycles, oversized lamp shades, an aged fake Christmas tree, stacks of books and record albums, eight-track and cassette tapes, an air hockey table, a full-sized loom, a pottery wheel and kiln, banjos, violins, saxophones, hatboxes, crutches, and deep down, in the bottom of a steamer trunk in a long white box sealed in plastic—a wedding dress from 1974. Pearly with a long row of buttons down the back and on its sleeves, it was a dress that Augusta had worn once and then had professionally packaged so that it wouldn't yellow with age.

Still, she was no one's wife.

The torrents of rain and wind made the house shiver. The thunder was so loud it shook the panes.

Augusta and Jessamine were sitting in old beach chairs, side by side. Each wore a cheap headlamp secured by an elastic band around her head, vaguely reminiscent of coal miners.

“They wanted us to leave!” Augusta shouted over the storm. “You know we don't like to be ordered around, Jessamine!” By
we,
Jessamine knew she wasn't talking about the two of them. She was talking about the Rockwell family—dating back generations.

“We'll have to tough it out!” Jessamine said.

Jessamine's aged face was brightly lit by a bolt of lightning. Augusta barely noticed her own white hair, sagging neck, and puckered dimples, but she knew time was wearing on because of Jessamine, her lids droopy and creased, her face sagging to a handful of draped skin tucked under her jaw, and arms and legs dotted with liver spots and white spots and pink spots. What were all of these spots? And Jessamine had gotten shorter and more frail—so much so that, instead of dying, Augusta sometimes worried that Jessamine might disappear. Everything seemed to have changed incrementally while Augusta wasn't paying attention.

“I wonder where my girls are!” Earlier, Augusta had pulled out a stack of records, filmy with dust, in the hope of doing a little conducting. She'd even found an old Hector Berlioz record that had stood out to her for reasons she couldn't name.

“Esme has called many times,” Jessamine said.

“No, no,” Augusta muttered. She didn't mean where her grown daughters were at this moment in time. She'd meant it figuratively. Where were the little girls who'd once been her daughters, the girls who—once upon a time—had taken so naturally to conducting storms? She missed her girls, and her daughters would never be able to fulfill
that
longing. The thought scared her, as did the lightning. A bolt cracked so loudly that she felt it in her ribs. This was dangerous. They could die. The governor might be right after all. “Jessamine,” she said, “maybe you should go home to your husband.”

Jessamine shook her head. “He's dead.”

“What?” Augusta said. “When did he pass?” She almost wondered if he'd died in the storm, just now, as if Augusta had missed an urgent call.

“It's been six months.”

Augusta was startled by the news. “Jessamine, I'm so sorry. Why didn't you—” She was going to ask her why she didn't share the news but, of course, she knew why. They had boundaries. It was how they'd lasted so long together.

Jessamine answered the question anyway, letting Augusta off the hook. “There wasn't a good moment. Plus, this became the place where I didn't have to deal with it.”

“He was a good man,” Augusta said, but then realized she had no idea if this was true. She'd never met Jessamine's husband. “Wasn't he?”

Jessamine nodded. “He was a very good man.”

“I'm so sorry,” Augusta said, and then she felt a twinge of jealousy. Jessamine's loss in love could be public, could be addressed. Augusta's own losses had to be kept quiet all these years. Maybe this was why she hadn't known that Jessamine's husband was dead; Jessamine couldn't be honest with Augusta because Augusta could never really share anything with her. It's strange how the decision to be private affects things you'd never expect.

And now Augusta felt disoriented. Once upon a time, this room had been nearly empty. Time had filled it up. The accumulation of life and its stuff, but sometimes she wondered if she'd ever really lived.

“This storm could take us,” Augusta said.

Jessamine nodded. “Yes, it could. The waves have crested the houses just there,” she said, pointing across the street. “These waves will reach us too, most likely.”

The two women had no idea how bad things were—that escalators would start pooling, subways flooding, that taxis would soon bob and knock together in newly formed rivers in Lower Manhattan. Block after block had already gone dark. Ground Zero would turn into a series of waterfalls. Ambulances were lining up for evacuations. Oxygen supplies were going dead, knocked out with the power. Sudden tidal pools would soon blast people into glass-front stores.

A seven-hundred-ton tanker, unmoored, unstaffed, floated toward Staten Island.

Waves from the East River crashed against the acrylic walls that encased Jane's Carousel, which from afar looked like a dimly glowing box of hand-painted wooden horses. Finally the lights flickered and dimmed. It was swallowed by darkness.

People were being washed out to sea, drowning in basements, killed by fallen trees.

And the fires of Breezy Point were about to spark and catch and burn.

Houses were being battered and splintered. A roller coaster was being shoved out into the ocean itself, its rickety body thrusted by waves, which were heaving sand onto the shore—eventually into people's living rooms, including their own.

Homeless, lost, searching, stricken…and temperatures primed to drop…

Augusta thought of someone she'd loved and lost and wondered if he would get word of her death. She assumed she would get word if he'd died—how exactly, she wasn't sure. She was very scared but she didn't feel it the way she should. “I'm not as scared as I ought to be.”

“We can't leave now.” This was a practical consideration. It would be more dangerous to wade out than to stay put, on higher ground.

“Do you mind if I hum something?” Music for Hurricanes, she thought.

“I don't mind, Ms. Rockwell. Not at all.”

“You can call me Augusta.”

“After all these years,” Jessamine said, “I don't think I can.”

“Fair enough.”

But then a strange thing happened. Augusta lifted her hand to conduct the storm, and the hand was shaking. Her body was betraying her will; she was more afraid than she realized. “Will you look at this?” she said, holding the hand in the air.

Jessamine saw the trembling and immediately she took Augusta's hand and held it tight.

Augusta didn't hum any music. She didn't try to conduct this hurricane. The two women sat together, holding hands as the storm lashed and raged.

Change, Augusta thought. Storms churn things up and they set things in disarray and one is forced to right them. What change would come? Would she be here to see it?

Maybe she was no longer interested in keeping things as they were.

Change, she thought to herself. So be it.