Losing It (16 page)

He looked up, his eyes wet with admiration, and held out his hand. I moved toward him, a bit wobbly, as if walking a plank.

We eased down onto our backs. He leaned over and shoved his hand up my shirt and held my breast and started kneading it. I
mechanically lifted an arm and touched the side of his head. Even that felt too intimate, the surface of his hair, like I was touching someone's son.

I thought, There is someone out there for you, Gerald. Someone kind and wonderful who can get in step with your strange tempo of swagger and fragility, and that person is not me.

He traced the top of my underwear. To keep going, I had to keep so much at the front of my mind, had to keep so many plates suspended and spinning in the air. He eased my shirt off, and now my bare back was on the cold comforter. He reached around me to undo my bra. He was having trouble, and so he yanked at it, harder and harder. He had a rigid half smile on his face and his eyes were closed but now they opened and as I twisted my arm back to help him our heads bumped and he looked at me with utter helplessness. I tried to smile and finally got my bra undone. I wrestled myself down on that bed, to stay, to not spring up. He was at my side, holding one of my breasts; he pulled away and, having regained some composure, he traced a small scar on my shoulder and then he giggled. “Uh-oh,” he said, in a singsong way, and looked at me like I was a toddler. The air-conditioning clicked on, a low hum swept across the room. I focused on the bare wall. “What did you do?” he said, and I got a glimpse into the way he wanted this to go, the way he'd always thought it was going to go: fatherly sparring, I was to be a fragile, adorable thing. My eyes darted around frantically.

I sat bolt upright.

“I have to go,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Okay, okay,” he said quickly, guiltily, backing away like I was a
live grenade. He was looking at me in that way again. Expecting something more, helpless.

“I have, um”—I swiveled a foot into a shoe—“this thing I have to go to, with my aunt? I just completely forgot about it.”

“Okay,” he said, clapping his hands together, nodding.

“It's . . . She has a class? At the McGregor Art Center? And I have to bring her a cactus. So they can use it in a still life?”

“Okay,” said Gerald. He put up his hands. “Okay.”

A few minutes later, as he followed me down the stairs, as if by some instinct to adhere this experience to what it was originally supposed to be, to save us from some embarrassment, maybe just to prove that there was one all along, he asked if I wanted to see the collection.

“Oh, yeah, sure,” I said.

He took me into the kitchen and opened a drawer. And there they were. All strewn around. A few were on chains, a few weren't. One was hot pink. One had a zebra pattern. They were matted and straggly, about ten furry rabbit's feet. I don't think I'd ever felt so lonely, in my whole life, as I did right then.

We drove back to the coffee shop in silence. He put on the radio and left it on a station that was playing festive steel drum music. When we were there, I got out and we said businesslike goodbyes. Neither of us pretended we would see each other at the watercolor class again.

On my way home in my own car, as I drove farther out of town and everything got undulating and green, I decided—I was just going to ask her. That's all there was to it. I was going to ask Aunt
Viv why she was still a virgin and then it would no longer be a mystery to me, along with the origins of the universe, buried under the dunes of her face, swallowed to the very core of her.

I was going to find her and ask her and I didn't care if it was rude or none of my business or if it would tear something between us. I was going to exhume the inexhumable. I was going to shout it at her. Because I needed to know how the impossible became possible because the horrible truth is that I thought I did know—a series of stall-outs, of things not being quite right, an endless line of Gerald Campbells.

I wanted to find her and ask her because the whole time I'd thought there had to be a reason, and the thing I was realizing with dreadful clarity, the worst of all possible outcomes, was that there simply didn't have to be a reason.

I pulled into the driveway and got out and slammed the car door shut. I was prepared to look all over for her and I stomped up the porch stairs because I didn't want to lose my resolve. I opened the door and threw my bag to the side. It was quiet and cool in the house and there she was. To my left. In the lounge. She was sitting on the couch, her hand paused midair and holding a picture and she'd been crying. A lot. Her face was shucked and raw and red. Her mouth looked like something sawed off.

“Vivienne,” I said. “What is it?”

“It's Alice,” she said. “She died.”

—

After she told me about Alice, I hovered there, not knowing what to say. She seemed, for a moment, her face in complete disarray, to
look to me as if I were holding the key to everything and just wasn't giving it to her.

“Is there anything I can do?” I said. But then she turned her head to the side, and by subtle grades composed herself. It was as if I'd caught her in an angle of grief that surprised us both.

She walked slowly upstairs to her bedroom and didn't come out for the rest of the day. For the next seventy-two hours it seemed as if the whole house was suffused with fragility and grief. I tried to be very quiet, and to leave her alone.

Over the next few days, with a kind of grim resolve, she threw herself into a number of household tasks: re-grouting the tiles in her bathroom, scrubbing the inside of all the kitchen drawers, stripping and painting the porch swing an adobe orange that didn't go with anything else. I'd come downstairs and find her on her knees in the kitchen, on some plastic sheeting, wiping her forehead with her shirtsleeve, and everything about her manner said she didn't want to be interrupted, go away.

“Your father and I are getting separated.”

“What?” I was on the phone with my mom, in the dim living room, staring out the window at Viv, who was in her sun hat, trying to dig something out of the earth with a spade.

I put a glass of water to my cheek. “What happened? What about all that stuff you said before?”

“That was bullshit. I don't know what got into me. We're not those kind of people.”

I shifted my weight, the floor creaked beneath. “I don't get it.”

“Look, another couple approached us, they asked if we wanted to participate in some kind of orgy. Your father wanted to. I did not. Let's just say it exposed some fault lines.”

“Dad said that?”

“I wanted to tell you first. I know it's not what you want to hear, but the truth is we've been having trouble for a while.” She sounded out of breath. I pictured her throwing stuff into a duffel bag in a frenzy. “Your father is an idiot. No, I take that back. I'm sorry I said that. But, hold on.” She muffled the phone. “It's on the hammock,” I heard her yell. “That hammock! Hold on, Julia. The
hammock
,” she screamed.

“I'm back. But, Julia, what I wanted to say is that we'll both be there for you, okay? This isn't going to affect anything between us and you.”

“But I mean. I just— Wait.”

I sat down. I bunched up my skirt in my hand, then let it go.

“What's going to happen?” I said. “Is one of you going to move?”

“Your father is going to spend some time with the Cargills.”

“He's going to Miami?”

“It's what we could arrange at the last minute.”

I pictured my dad standing at an outdoor bar, wearing a lime-green blazer and glancing around hopefully. I felt terribly, terribly sad.

“Are you there?”

“It's just— I'm really surprised. I'm shocked,” I said.

I got up and looked out the window again. Viv was digging up a flower bed. I watched her yank a plant out of the ground, inspect its
leaves, and toss it to the side. I turned and ran my finger along the lacquered top of a cabinet, making a line through the dust.

My mom sighed. “It's hard to explain.” There was a raggedy, tired edge to her voice now.

“Yeah,” I said.

“When you first get married, you have all these expectations. When I first met your father—and this isn't his fault, it's my fault.” She seemed unsure of how to go on. “I don't think I've ever told you this, but the first time I saw him was at a party at the Sedleckies'. Remember them? It was in their living room. They had this great fire going, and I'd never been to a place like that. Doug was standing there, with a drink, wearing his glasses. He looked so at home in that environment. He looked at me, and then maybe it was the alcohol, but he suggested everyone go outside and play horseshoes. And I thought—I'm not sure if this will make any sense—that that's how it was always going to
be.
”

“I'm not sure I understand.”

“You make these implicit promises,” she said. “You don't say them out loud.”

“But it's been thirty years, Mom.”

“I know,” she said. “And it hasn't necessarily been a bad thirty years.”

We were quiet for a few moments. I thought of our house in Texas. It had pink carpeting and there was a saddle on the wall and it was decorated with cow skulls and other Western things and had a sparse, warm feeling and I wondered about this unraveling between my parents. I wondered when it had started happening.

“Remember that trip we took, when you were little, to the Smoky Mountains?”

“Not really.”

“You must have been six or seven. You could see them in the distance, as we were driving there. We pointed them out to you and said, ‘That's where we're going,' and you got this look on your face—you were so excited.”

“Okay.”

“When we finally got there, you kept looking around like you were confused. You kept asking, ‘Are we in the mountains?' and we said, ‘Yes, honey, we're here.'”

“What are you saying?” I said, but I knew what she was talking about. I remembered—the misty blue layers in the distance, as we were driving. It was like something from a historical movie. Something that would go with sweeping music. But when we got there the ground felt as flat as it had been before. There were more trees, but the land around us, that I could see, felt more or less the same.

“Things are different sometimes, when you get there, than you expect them to be.”

I sat back down and smoothed my skirt. I looked at my feet. I looked at the ridges on my fingernails.

“How do you think he thought it was going to be with you?” I said.

“With me?” She seemed taken aback. She sighed. I stared at the light hitting a Chinese vase on a side table. “I think he thought I was going to be nurturing,” she said. “And the friends I had at the time—I tricked him, too—I think he thought I was going to be the life of the party.”

Eleven

It was the first day of August and the afternoon of Alice's funeral and reception, and the sky was a harsh, undifferentiated white. People stood around in clumps on the sloping front lawn, squinting and drinking lemonade from plastic cups and pulling at their shirts.

The service had been held at a stuffy Unitarian church in the middle of town, with a minister droning, and the sound of hammering wafting in from construction taking place across the street. A picture of Alice, blown up and on a pedestal, showed her in her younger days at a youth camp, standing in a muddy corral, her arms around a bunch of teenagers wearing bright-neon-green T-shirts, a horse in the background.

I wasn't quite sure what to say to Aunt Viv that morning as we got into the car. She appeared to be holding it together pretty well, except for now and then she would seem, her eyes welling, momentarily helpless. “Here,” I said, as we sat down, and I took an old coffee cup out of the holder between the seats. I'd left it there when I borrowed Viv's car the other day. I dashed inside to throw it away. I felt like I needed to give her a minute and some sort of act of attention and small generosity to show what I couldn't say, and when I
got back, she had her hands on the steering wheel and was staring grimly ahead.

She was wearing a black dress with a too-small embroidered vest of the kind a mariachi singer might wear. It was boxy at the shoulders and the sleeves came to just below her elbows. I wanted to go back to earlier that morning and interfere with whatever reasoning had caused her to fish it out of whatever plastic storage bag it had been in. Especially because she was obviously too hot—little slicks of sweat appeared in the creases of her neck.

We were both sluggish from the torpor of the funeral when we pulled up to Karen's house. I looked out at all the people on the front lawn and the endless afternoon unrolled before me. I needed to find somewhere quiet where I could be by myself. Some kind of cool, dark study or attic room.

The house was large and old with a pretty, rambling garden. Two muscular dogs charged up the lawn and into the entrance, upsetting a few people's paper plates. At the door, Viv was stopped by someone. I decided to go find something to drink.

Inside the atmosphere bordered on festive, with people bustling down the hallways, grouped at the stairs, suppressing laughter as their conversation turned from Alice to regular, everyday things and then back again. A little untucked kid ran by. Big-band music was playing somewhere.

I went toward the sound of clatter, and it turned out to be the kitchen. I recognized one of the women from Alice's birthday party, the one with long gray hair, and managed to avoid her by turning toward a table with a large spread on it—meats and cheeses and crackers and a tower of fruit with cherries on the top tier. I picked
up a plastic cup of white wine from a tableful of poured glasses, took a few sips, shifted my weight from one leg to the other, and that's when I saw him.

He was blond and young, college-aged if that. A lock of his hair hung away from his forehead as he stuck a toothpick into a roll of turkey. He looked distracted and scornful, until he saw me. His face gave the impression of having been halved and then reaffixed in a slightly uneven way. Ugly and pretty at the same time, the kind of face everyone thinks only they, specifically, can see the merit in.

“The pineapple slices'll blow your mind,” he said to me, gesturing with a toothpick. He had a warm, drippy Southern drawl.

I walked to the table. “I'm allergic,” I said. “They do this thing to my lips.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But these are good,” I said, picking up an olive and slowly pushing it into my mouth.

“I like how you just did that,” he said.

I blushed. “This is a nice old house.”

He sighed, looking around. “Yeah.”

“You from here?” I sipped my wine.

“Just home from college.” He stepped a little closer to me.

“Where?”

“Chapel Hill.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Economics.”

“History.” He stepped even closer.

I felt a twinge of recognition. Had I seen him somewhere before? My mind was blunted by the heat and the wine, and at that point I was still aware of, a little distracted by, the people around us. A man
with a cane came up to the table and rummaged through some blocks of cheese, looked at us, and left.

The blond guy reached under the table and fished an empty wine bottle out of the cooler, tilted it toward himself, all business. “You want to help me find the rest of the booze?” he said. I nodded. He walked past me and took my hand.

We went out of the kitchen and down the hallway and out the front door and onto the lawn and he was yanking me through the grass. I didn't have much time to think about all this but I wasn't about to stop it. Then we did a U-turn and went back into the house through the front door, past the stairs and down another hallway and then we were going down rickety wooden stairs into a dimly lit basement. “Have you been here before?” I said when we got to the bottom. “When I was a kid,” he said. Then he kissed me.

As this happened, I experienced a kind of slow-release shock at two things: first was how unexpected this whole turn of events was. I'd barely been able to motivate myself to look for the correct shoes under my bed that morning and was picturing a whole day of draining, obligatory, and sad-tinged small talk. The second was how easy this was, how seamless, and how it now didn't seem that outlandish that you could just
meet someone
, at a funeral, for instance. I felt simultaneously exhilarated and frustrated—why couldn't this have just happened before?—by the randomness of fate, and about how some people must just operate on these meridians of luck, going from one precipitous hinge to the next and they didn't even know it, just thought
that was life
.

It was sturdy, by-the-numbers kissing, hot and without
adornment. I heard people walking around upstairs. Something crashed to the floor above us.

The rest of the afternoon was like an Impressionist painting—our colors swirling together as we glided out of the basement and out onto the wooden swing, sitting together next to the scattered pink of the azalea bush in the backyard. His smeared red lips and the blush on my chest. Our jazzy flirting with golden, poking saxophone laughter coming through. A mess, a jumble, a crashing, satisfyingly hot afternoon and later we were in a dim, cool living room with carved wooden figures and sheer white curtains and soft shapes of light on the ground.

“You haven't even told me your name,” I said, pivoting next to a tall purple vase. This is when I was starting, even though I was drunk, to net the glances people were giving us as they walked by, had, as a matter of fact, been giving us all afternoon, and decided not to care.

“Jack,” he said. “Picknell.”

It took me a second. That's where I had seen him, in the face of Alice. The resemblance was now striking. He watched as whatever registered on my face registered on my face.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You're sorry for my loss.”

“I am,” I said. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“I'm not one of those people,” he said, sitting on a footstool, his knees bent in front of him, he took the hem of my dress, “that cares what you say.”

I'm still not sure what he meant by this—if he meant that he didn't care whatever awkward construction people attempting to
console him used, or me, specifically, that he didn't care what I had to say.

I just stared at him.

“She made it past my twenty-first birthday,” he said, “like she said she would.” He turned his head and looked out the window at a dry pine tree.

“I—”

“Let's go upstairs,” he said, and he got up and took my hand.

It was serene up there. We found ourselves in a bright, renovated room that smelled like paint and polish. There was a red Persian carpet on the floor and a large telescope pointing out the window. I stared at a strange, expensive-looking painting of several bears crowded around a gaslight.

First we pretended to be interested in the telescope. It had felt forbidden to ascend the stairs—that weird feeling of exploring someone else's house. There was no one else up there.

I sat on the windowsill and we made out. We had gotten the knack of each other and it was better, so much better, I thought, than I'd ever had. I flashed to kissing Gerald for a second and became aware of the range of these things, the terrible variegated scale, which means, doesn't it, that it can always be a little better? Or a little worse. But I was having a good time. Not thinking, suspended in a roly-poly dark place, a liquid feeling in my limbs.

He was touching my neck and his other hand was on my belly, then it was under my skirt and in my underwear.

It all felt great—his hand between my legs, the hazy afternoon, the chattering of people downstairs, my chin lifting to kiss him from a better angle.

I'm thinking, It's going to happen. It's going to happen. It's going to happen now, like this, and this is how it was always going to happen. I'm looking over his shoulder for places we could lie down. My mind is racing with logistics: Will I just bend over the computer table? Should we slowly start sliding to the floor? Yes, I've showered today, in case he wants to go down on me. For once, in a stroke of luck, I'm not wearing period-stained underwear. Condoms? Maybe he has one. But who cares? At this point, I'm willing to risk it. Pubic hair? Wild, but there's nothing I can do about it right now. Plus he doesn't seem like the type of weirdly fastidious guy who would care about that.

I wondered in an instant how it was going to be. Was it going to hurt? Would I bleed? Was it going to feel like I would imagine, or be completely different? What was my responsibility physically? How was I supposed to move my body? Were we going to look at each other the whole time, or would our eyes be closed? Were we going to be kissing the whole time, or would he just be surging on top of me? Or should I be on top? What if I gave myself away and he could tell I was a virgin and then wanted to stop? Luckily, something about the way we were together was inspiring enough authority in me that I wasn't actually too afraid of this.

It was all going so fast and it seemed like such a rare window that this would actually happen. He was doing something with his legs, spreading them, with his other hand he was unzipping his pants and then Karen was in the doorway. In a purple dress. Her head was tilted up and her mouth was open.

I went stiff. I said, “Oh.” Jack looked over his shoulder and said, “Shit.” Karen averted her eyes and said with a forced lightness,
“Your aunt is looking for you.” And then there was a deafening pause as we all just stood there. A second went by. A general scramble started. Jack crouched over and zipped up his pants. Karen slammed the door. I yanked my dress down and pulled up my shoulder strap and combed my hands through my hair.

“Sorry,” he said under his breath. We continued to straighten ourselves out, to recalibrate. I looked around. The air had gone out and now we were just two unkempt strangers in a room. “No, no,” I said.

It's funny how the atmosphere between two people can change so quickly, how ground gets covered that can never be re-traversed. I tried to think of something to say, but the climate had changed. He looked worn out and sad.

What happened next is that we slowly walked out of the room together, in a daze, and down the stairs. We were lightly holding hands, but I couldn't tell if we were
holding hands
, or if it was a leftover remnant of what was happening before. At the foot of the stairs I squeezed his, and he gave me an unsure smile. Then someone called to him, and the doorbell rang, and a woman with red wine spilled on her blouse hurried by, and that was enough to sort of wind us away from each other.

I wandered through the house, trying to find Aunt Viv, who ended up being in the kitchen, and it wasn't long before I was about to leave, closing the car door, scanning the yard for Jack, and we were down the driveway and heading home.