It was Dana who called to tell me.
“The funeral is next week,” she said. “And, of course, you’re welcome to stay with us or with Lorrie Ann. Your mama moved out to Fontana, didn’t she?”
I hesitated. I had only two more weeks in Rome. I didn’t particularly want to take a week and fly all the way back to California. More practically, such a last-minute international ticket would be insanely expensive, and I was a graduate student. I’d had to beg my father for the money to come to Rome in the first place.
“I don’t know if I can make it,” I said. “I’m in Rome.”
“I know you’re in Rome. How on earth do you think I called you?”
“Right,” I said. Just then a strip of wallpaper came unglued and peeled down in my living room, making a thick, wet unsticking sound. I watched it sway, dangling from the wall across from me. “I just, it was a really big deal that my professor set this up, and I don’t really know them well enough to explain, you know, and I don’t want him to think I’m jerking him around, and on top of that, you know, I actually don’t know if I’ll have the money for a ticket.”
“I’ll pay for your ticket,” Dana said.
That stumped me. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to return to California for Jim’s funeral—I somehow already knew I wasn’t going to.
“Okay,” I said. “But that feels like too much. That’s too generous.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ll have Bobby go online tonight.”
In what was the middle of the night my time, Dana called back to say that she’d had no idea what a flight from Rome to LA would run, and that she was sorry—she just couldn’t do it.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I kind of figured. Last-minute flights are crazy expensive.”
“I know you never liked him,” Dana said, “but he was a good boy.”
It was three in the morning and I hadn’t clicked on a light when I picked up the phone. I blinked in the darkness. “I know. He was a really good guy,” I said.
“He loved her,” Dana said, her voice trembling. “And he loved that little boy.”
“I know he did.”
“Well, good night,” she said. “It’d be nice if you called Lor.”
“Of course,” I said. “I didn’t know if she was … ready to talk, or—”
“She’s ready,” Dana said and hung up.
Once I was off the phone, my eyes adjusted slightly to the darkness and I felt less disoriented, able to make out the faint outline of my white curtains, the curling brass bed frame, the black ceramic lamp on the table. A wave of relief washed over me. I would not have to go. I would not have to eat tiny weenies swimming in barbecue sauce. I would not have to hug the other army wives who had been brainwashed to accept such happenings and who would whisper to me, “She’s got strong shoulders.” And most of all, I would not have to stand there like an idiot as Lor became more and more distant from me, sealed off behind the plate glass of grief. I knew that I should go, that I should find a way to go.
But instead, the following day I stayed in the apartment drinking two bottles of wine and then went out around dusk and ate so much gelato that I made myself sick.
I called Lor the next day, but I only got her voice mail. She didn’t call me back. I figured that she was busy, bereft, any number of things. I called again once I was back in the States, and again she didn’t return the call. I knew then that she was angry at me, cold, frozen angry with me, for not coming to the funeral. I wrote her a long, long e-mail, apologizing, trying to explain, and she wrote me back a clipped one. It was fine; she understood. But I knew it wasn’t fine and she didn’t understand. Who could understand? I had behaved terribly. Even I knew that.
So the following Christmas, I made it a point to visit her.
——
She was living in Costa Mesa. After Jim’s death, almost all the “death gratuity” (such a creepy phrase!) had gone to collections, and though she would receive another $400,000 over the coming years, she had already signed this money over to the collections agencies in a settlement that would leave her broke but finally debt-free. She was allowed to continue living on base for only six months after Jim’s death, and it was Zach’s social worker, Mr. Kawabata, who had come to their rescue and found them a place to stay, a complex with specially prorated rent for people on disability.
At first I had been amazed, because the location was really good, convenient and in a nice area, but as I parked and walked to her door, I began to understand that this was a sad place. There were plants on the porches, but they were dying plants. There were tiny hibachi barbecues moldering and filled with pools of rainwater. There were sun-bleached and dirty American flags hanging limply from mini flagpoles flaking with chipped paint. Several dogs barked at me as I made my way to her door.
As I waited on the stoop, having rung the doorbell, in that tense moment before the flurry of kisses and hugs and meaningless compliments, I realized for the first time that Jim was dead. His being dead became real to me. I had known, obviously; I had even cried about it, thinking those two bottles of wine and bucket of gelato were somehow my tribute to him. But he had never seemed deader than in that moment before that door was about to open. Dead the way Space had been dead. Really and truly dead. My heart began to race. My friend had been living here, all this time, with Jim dead, with a disabled child, with no money. How alone Lorrie Ann had been through all of this stunned me. My own selfishness in failing to be there for her was overwhelming and made me close my eyes the way one does to get through a passing wave of nausea.
When Lorrie Ann opened the door, her smile huge and open and absolutely the way I remembered it, I suddenly smelled pot smoke. We
hugged and she invited me in, gesturing to a couch that was already inhabited by a Middle Eastern–looking man crouched before a large bong. He was missing both his legs from the knee down and in their place were fascinating mechanical contraptions that looked as if they had been designed by NASA. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he could leap over cars and ponies, so impressive did they look. He had waist-length black hair hanging loose that shone like a dark mirror, and a thick silver chain around his neck, from which a miniature silver skeleton dangled. Zach’s wheelchair was in the corner, arranged as though it were an easy chair placed there to complement the sofa. I couldn’t take my eyes off him—Zach was beautiful. He had Lorrie Ann’s nose, upturned and elfin, her oceanic eyes, her skin, white and satiny as heavy whipping cream.
“This is Arman,” Lorrie Ann said, gesturing to the man on the couch. “He lives next door.”
“Hi,” I said, feeling suddenly more awkward than I had in years. Was Lorrie Ann sleeping with this man? She couldn’t be. Jim had been dead only six months. Was it all right to smoke pot in front of the child? Was I going to be offered some of the pot, and if I was offered some, did I want to get stoned here? I had not been this unable to read social cues or this unsure of my own desires since undergrad.
Uneasy about joining Arman on the couch, I slipped to my knees in front of the coffee table, clutching my purse. I kept looking and then trying not to look at Zach in his wheelchair in the corner. He was wearing a Christmas sweater with pompoms on it. He seemed so much smaller than six, and he was thin, skeletally thin. His lips were a little spitty and glistened, red and curly—a woman’s lips on a boy’s face.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Lorrie Ann asked. “Beer? Milk? I don’t think I have anything besides beer and milk.”
“Beer, please.”
And Lorrie Ann disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me alone with Zach, who was silent but kept opening and closing his mouth, and Arman, who said nothing and did not acknowledge me in any way. I
looked around. There was a small bookshelf positively weighted down with what I could already tell from across the room was an eccentric collection of books. I saw several popular science books, Stephen Hawking and that kind of thing, but I also saw
1001 Arabian Nights
, a few mystery novels, a copy of
Light in August
and a volume of poetry by Rumi, as well as several books on kabbalah. I noticed that the carpet was actually three different patterns of carpet, all thin and industrial, like the kind installed in elementary schools. They were joined at the seams by neat-looking lines of duct tape. I could also smell, distinctly, that somewhere in this house there was a cat. On the wall, a large cheaply framed Magritte print hung: the one of a man in a bowler with his face, if indeed he really has a face, obscured by a levitating apple.
Lorrie Ann returned with three cans of Bud Light.
She knelt easily beside me as she handed out the cans of beer, and then we both sat on the floor, facing Arman. “It’s so good to see you!” she said, in a kind of singsong, smiling at me, chipper as a little fucking Girl Scout. Was she still angry at me? Had she ever been angry at me?
“It’s good to see you too,” I said, “but it’s also really weird.”
“It’s weird?” Lorrie Ann asked.
I nodded. “Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t think I really understood how dead Jim was until I was ringing the doorbell, and then I was like, ‘Shit, he is dead-dead, like all the way dead.’ ” I was rapidly spiraling into some kind of perverse truth-telling mode as a highly ineffectual defense mechanism. “That came out awful, but what I mean is that when you are a half a world away, it seems more like something happening in a novel, you know, and we’ve lived apart for so many years now that you are kind of like that for me, except when I see you, then you are suddenly terribly real, and that made Jim’s death real and now I feel like I can’t catch my breath because everything is too real for words.”
Lorrie Ann looked at me critically for a moment, as though I were a gem she were assessing through one of those tiny eyepieces. Then she said, “I know exactly what you mean. For most of the year you are just a character in a book I’m reading. And then when you do show up,
I think: Oh, God, it’s
her
! It’s
her
! The girl I knew when I was a kid. My friend.” She nodded then, smiling, her eyes damp, and I thought: She forgives me. She understands me. Perhaps that was what I loved most in Lor, nothing in her, but the very fact that she seemed to always understand me.
“And I’m sorry,” I said, “but this housing complex is depressing. I don’t like you living here. I know I should lie and say it’s cute, but it just makes me sad. If you have to live without Jim, I wish it was in a house with a white picket fence somewhere.”
Lorrie Ann laughed. “It is depressing here. It is. And I’m really fucking poor,” she said. “I thought I was poor growing up, but this! Jesus. But, no debt! I can’t even tell you what a relief it is to not be getting calls three times a day from twelve different hospitals. I will take poor any day over that.”
Arman raised his can of Bud Light, and he and Lorrie Ann clinked. “Who, being loved, is poor?” he asked, and dimly I registered that he was quoting Oscar Wilde. Who was this guy?
“You know, Mia,” Lorrie Ann said, “I actually really like my job waiting tables. If that makes you feel any better.”
“Shut up, you fucking liar, waiting tables is awful and you know it. It’s a horrible, killing job that makes you want to hit people in the face. I’ve waited tables before. You can’t fool me.”
Lorrie Ann guffawed. “You really weren’t suited to it, were you?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, I like it. I’m like a plow horse or something. What I do is so physical. All I do is move things through space, but just for really short distances. It’s odd. People think it’s so important too. I can make them happy or sad just by the precise way I move an object, like a plate or a cup, through time and space.”
Personally I thought she was deluding herself, trying to find metaphysical grandeur in work that was truly unspeakably boring and difficult.
Arman grunted, packing a new bowl on the bong.
“Mostly,” she said, “I like it because it’s so impersonal. Nobody
knows what I’m thinking. I don’t have to tell anybody. And so the inside of my head has become this sort of wonderful, private garden almost.”
Her eyes filled with something then. It was so obvious that she was thinking something, and whatever it was that she was thinking about seemed to be immense and magical and important. It just made you wish you could climb inside her head. As though the inside of Lorrie Ann must be the most interesting place in the world, a veritable Shangri-la. How did she do that? And did she know she was doing it?
“I don’t really fucking buy it,” I said finally.
“Good call,” Arman said, and raised his beer to clink with me.
“Thanks, man. Yeah, I call bullshit, Lorrie Ann. All that just sounds to me like shit you made up to feel better about how awful your job is.”
Lorrie Ann laughed, wild and loud. “Maybe you’re right.”
Just then Zach began to make horrible sounds, choking, asphyxiating sounds, and Lorrie Ann scooted over to him on her butt, reached up, and stuck her fingers in his mouth to feel around for anything in there as she kept talking to us. “Still, I don’t have any regrets. I don’t. It’s not worth it to regret any of it.”
“Eh,” I said, “maybe.”
“I regret everything,” Arman said. “Almost every single thing I’ve ever done, I regret.”
“That’s really shitty,” I said.
Arman nodded. “Well,” he said, “I make really shitty decisions. So they’re worth regretting.”
“I’m too selfish to make poor decisions,” I offered.
“So it’s not actually a virtue?” Lorrie Ann asked, having apparently reassured herself that Zach was not choking on anything and now wiping his mouth with a burp cloth. “Your good decision-making power is actually a function of your little, black heart?”
“Yep, pretty much.”
“I don’t know, your life sounds so exciting,” Lorrie Ann went on in a gush “I picture you walking around campus, your mind alive with all these ideas and texts and, I mean—I know I don’t really know what you
do, I can’t even imagine it, so you must think I’m so stupid even saying this—but I picture you in, like, this big library, like some library from a Borges story or something, an infinite library of all of human knowledge. It makes me happy thinking that.”