Lightning People (2 page)

“It's going to be impossible to get a cab,” Joseph said, stepping out into the traffic with his arm raised. “We should have booked a car.”

“Why don't we take the subway? It's only six stops, and we can pick up some wine at Nico's—”

Joseph cut her off with an aggravated sigh.

“I'm not bringing you home on public transportation.”

Now that they had gotten married, they were suddenly talking to each other like strangers. Del watched Joseph try and fail to flag down an off-duty cab. Right then, he looked less familiar to her than he had in all the months that they had been living together. His blue eyes seemed lodged in deeper sockets, and the sunlight located hidden strands of red in his dark blond hair, which matched the color of his lips. His face was tired and more angular than it had been that morning, but his body jerked restlessly in his pinstripe suit. She noticed his skinny ankles peeking from under his pant cuffs. She stopped herself from telling him that he was being ridiculous to care about how they were getting home—what about the convenience of a ceremony at City Hall did he not understand?—but she knew that his pride was at stake. First the ring and now the likely prospect of no ten-dollar fare to see them back. Del followed him into the street and slid her arms underneath his suit coat. She rubbed her lips lightly against his neck, until an erection grew in the pants she had hung in the bathroom that morning to smooth the wrinkles with the shower steam.

“Come on, Joe. It doesn't make any difference to me.” She turned in her blue crepe de chine dress to start off for the entrance to the 6 train, leaving Joseph no choice but to stumble after her. As Del reached into her purse for her pouch of nicotine and rolling papers, she smiled, indulging an old habit for generalizations that she had worked to control over the years.
Americans
, she thought,
those consummate tourists even in their personal lives, always needed their photo
ops and rented limos with streamers icing the hood to ensure that an event was marked by happiness
. But as soon as this thought crowded her mind, she realized her own people were far worse when it came to weddings—perhaps the guiltiest on earth in celebrations of love.

“Fine. We'll do it your way,” Joseph grumbled as he searched his wallet for his MetroCard.

“Believe me, you're getting off easy. If we were married in Greece, you'd want an annulment after four days, and my family would still be parading around drunk, pelting you with rice every time you stood up to use the bathroom.”

“Please don't tell your parents I took you home like this,” Joseph pleaded, pausing at the steps leading down to the subway platform. The whole day was greasy with June light, and he pinched his eyes to acclimate them to the darkness underground.

“Only you couldn't get an annulment,” Del continued, lost in the imaginary picture of her relatives dressed in white linen to the backdrop of the Aegean Sea. “Because my grandfather is the only judge on the island. So at a certain point it would stop being rice thrown at you and start being stones.”

“Christ,” he laughed uneasily. “Exactly what kind of family have I married into? Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

Del shrugged, left her cigarette rolling for Gramercy Park, and passed through the teeth of the subway turnstile. Her muscles relaxed in the cool, dirty winds brought by a train coming through the uptown tunnel.

 

IN THE COMPARATIVELY modest month of wedding preparations in the Kousavos-Guiteau household, Joseph had suggested early on that they rent out a bar on the Bowery to celebrate. They could invite a hundred friends, serve crustless triangle sandwiches smeared with anchovies as a hat tip to tradition, and encourage everyone to speed dance and drink gallons of champagne for maximum elation—“until we're all just one pile of melted plastic by the end of the night,” he had said enthusiastically. “That's how you make it official.” Joseph had tried to sell this plan to Del in part to ensure that their post-wedding lives wouldn't be a descent into the particularly
agoraphobic form of hibernation new couples tended to take on. But Joseph also suspected that there was a reason for receptions. They provided the necessary distraction from realizing that you had just entered a binding legal contract with one of its chief clauses stipulating eternal unity. Too much time alone with the eternal leaves even the most dedicated wanting to jump through the nearest window, eyes on any escape route.

He remembered Del's response. “No,” she had said flatly. “That sounds so exhausting.”

“Well, how do you suggest we mark the occasion?”

Del hadn't answered him. She had let the plan drop and for weeks had avoided the issue. Now, alone in the silence of their apartment two hours after the ceremony, Joseph felt justified in the wisdom of his instincts. He slowly took off his coat and hung it in the closet off the bedroom. He walked back into the living room and leaned against the windowsill to pull his shoes from his feet. He rubbed the indentations that the leather left on his ankles and looked out the window, where a crew of undernourished skateboarders sped under the fire escape. Del was locked in the bathroom, removing her dress and makeup, as she had been for the last forty minutes. He occasionally heard the click of a lighter followed by the smell of smoke to indicate that she was in no hurry to return to him. He sat on the sofa to stare at the afternoon light slanting across the floor and then stood up to find the bottle of wine that they had bought on their walk home. He unpeeled the foil but didn't open it.

Joseph didn't know what he was supposed to do to fill the hours after the wedding. The nervousness of the morning continued to hang over them. As soon as they unlocked the front door, he felt like they were moving awkwardly around each other, touching only by accident as they passed down the hall. As a professional actor who earned his money by the amount of repeated airings of his commercials rather than by the hours it took to film them in the first place, Joseph was accustomed to filling up free time. Hell, it was an art form the way he could transform an unaccounted day into a nonstop rush of errands, phone calls, Internet searches, masturbation, and previously uncharted routes through side streets in the East Village to discover
novelty bookshops and second-hand stores whose only purpose was to distract the armies of artists and drifters who made up much of the city's rudderless population. Even before they had agreed to get married, Del took on the tone of a disgruntled wife a few weeks into their cohabitation. “What the fuck do you do all day?” she'd ask him with her arms crossed over her chest in judgment. He'd always provide the same answer: “I've been thinking.” Del seemed to regard “thinking” as an activity equivalent to playing the lottery—lots of irrational hope with no net results—but it was true that in the last year Joseph consumed whole hours lost in thought. He thought on a bench in Madison Square Park about his family, about the people who had lived and died before him in Ohio, about the coincidences that ran through his bloodline. Sometimes, to waste an hour, he even attended certain meetings filled with paranoid cases who thought out loud about government plots and impossible cover-ups. Those voices made his own thoughts seem less crazed, almost normal by comparison. Joseph never shared what he was thinking with Del. He guarded those secrets the same way that he protected his most personal possessions when Del first moved into the apartment: in small closed boxes as if to say,
some items are just mine. Even though we live together, you aren't allowed in.

He stood as still as he could in the middle of the living room. He heard the shower run in the bathroom and Del's voice humming along to a song stuck in her head. For a second, as his fingers began to undo the top button of his shirt, he wondered if it was fair to marry a woman whom he couldn't let in completely. Jitters too late infected his mind:
You, Joseph Guiteau, wearing a pinstripe suit, are only an actor playing the part of a happy groom.
What right did he have marrying a woman whom he blocked and shielded from his worst secrets, who had only learned scattered pieces of his life edited and scoured of their grimmest details? He often went silent when Del threw her hands on her head in exasperation and said, “Doesn't anyone in this city have a nine-to-five job anymore? Am I the only person who has to wake up in the morning?” Work had been her signal complaint since they met. He knew she hated her job at the zoo, stuck giving tours and cleaning snake cages to stay in the country on her visa. But
as of today she wouldn't have to worry about that anymore. She could be free now. Joseph loved her enough to give her that.

“It's just jitters,” he said out loud to drive them away. He inhaled deeply and walked to the bathroom door. “Del, you almost ready?”

“A minute,” she yelled.

He returned to the sofa, unbuttoning his shirt and wiping the sweat from his chest. A bleating car alarm in the street mixed with the muffled motor of a garbage truck, all the ordinary echoes of the city telling him that it was still a normal day, and soon the nerves would pass and he and Del could go on, living like they had, in their rented apartment five flights above the sidewalk behind the matted branches of the elm trees.

It occurred to him to call someone with the news. Isn't that what someone was supposed to do when they married, tell the ones they loved? Joseph reached for the cell phone in his pocket, unsure of whom to call. He hadn't spoken to his only relative in nearly fifteen years. He was amazed that he still remembered the ten-digit number of the house in Cincinnati and was so taken with his immediate recall that he only regretted dialing when he heard the first ring. After three more rings a voice answered tiredly, distrustfully, like the vocal chords were out of practice.

He had not heard that voice since he left Ohio, and he remembered it now, how it had deepened in pitch after his father's death. He struggled to return the simple greeting, but his tongue shut down against his teeth. His mother was the last person who would celebrate the news of his wedding. She had already given up all belief in the value of such eternal commitments. That low Midwestern voice had been the one to tell him all through his childhood that there was only one thing he could count on with certainty: ending up like his father, and the father before him. Maybe she had changed, he thought, as he tried again to say hello. But he waited through the silence of the receiver.

The bathroom door opened, and Del walked out with a towel knotted over her breasts. A wet rolled cigarette hung clumsily from her mouth. She smiled and then squinted her eyes when she noticed the phone at his ear.

“Who are you calling?” she asked as she tapped her cigarette into the ashtray on the dresser.

There was no reason to tell his mother the news. There was no reason after so many years to tell her anything. Maybe he just wanted to know that she was still there in the house in Cincinnati, with power lines connected to the utility poles along the street as if keeping the whole house moored to a world that his mother had long given up. Joseph closed the phone and dropped it on the coffee table.

“No one,” he said with a smile. Del picked up the wine bottle and rammed the corkscrew into the bottle. Her hands were wet, and the handle slipped from her grip. He grabbed the bottle to open it for her, and she walked past him into the bedroom. She returned a minute later pushing a pair of faded gray jeans over her hips. A black bra hung over her shoulders, unfastened in the middle, and her breasts slapped her thin freckled arms as she fought the unwilling zipper.

“Hey,” he said, “We're married.” Del looked up at him with her eyebrows lifted, and in that moment Joseph no longer felt waylaid by the anxiety of the morning. Yes, they really were married. The day had happened. He just needed to say it out loud to someone. Del laughed and pointed to the stereo on the dresser.

“Put on some music then,” she said. She patted his left cheek as she made her way toward the kitchen. “I'm sorry I didn't agree to a party. I guess you're just going to have to forgive me.”

He was relieved to see her easy, ungraceful walk in the shadows of the hallway. Maybe love was the closest thing to feeling safe in the world. As safe as two people can be anymore.

“You love me, right?” he yelled to her. He didn't want to stop talking now that they had found their foothold in each other again. He knew it was stupid to ask that question on the day of their wedding, but the sound of his mother's voice had brought too many doubts to circle in his mind. “You're happy. About today, I mean.”

As he put one of Del's favorite records on the stereo—an erratic'70s rock ballad that reminded him of drilled cavities and reminded her always of molten romance—she stepped back into the hallway.

“Of course I love you. More than anyone ever. Christ, what a fucking question.”

 

BUT WAS THAT the absolute truth? The day had been filled with questions, but they only asked for answers in the present tense: I do. Not I will. Not I did. Del made moussaka for dinner from the recipe her mother had given her, a list of ingredients and baking directions typed on a piece of paper that proved its merit in its thick wax of ancient, corroded grease stains. They ate the meal at the table under candlelight, where Del made excuses to return to the kitchen to splash cold water on her face and take sips of whiskey from a glass on the counter. At the table she drank wine and reached her hand out to stroke Joseph's arm with her knuckles. When there was nothing left of the moussaka in the pan, nothing left of the day but the last hour to midnight, she followed Joseph into the bedroom. They kissed on the bed as her fingers dug below the waist of his pants, tracking the scant hairs of his stomach until they flowered around his penis. Enough light from the street shone through the diamond grates of the window for Del to see Joseph clearly. His straight white teeth and the solid architecture of his face always managed to astound her. She appreciated how handsome, how disturbingly and un-menacingly
Midwestern
those features were, how they matched some old idea of what American men looked like when she had imagined them at night on her bed as a child. She pulled herself away with a final kiss and told him she needed a glass of water. The temperature was nearing a hundred degrees in their apartment tonight.