And Again (16 page)

“Okay, let’s do this,” Connor says, raising his glass and nearly catching his sleeve on fire when his hand drifts too close to one of the tapers.

“To Hannah being sprung from the hospital,” Penny says, her voice a soft humming, like warm honey. We raise our glasses high to escape the fire.

“Here, here,” Sam says. And we drink and dig into our dinners, and laugh and drink some more. I can hear someone walking around in the apartment overhead and wonder if that person is lonely. It’s hard to imagine loneliness, surrounded as I am by those who love me most.

“So what are the others in your group like?” Connor asks, as he gets up to change the record. Billie Holiday begins, and I feel the moment when all of us sink a bit lower into our seats, lulled into a near stupor by this combination of song and food and partial inebriation. I try a sip of Sam’s wine when Connor cracks the second bottle, but I can only think of the smell of mineral spirits when I taste it and resort back to the sugary fizz of the drink I’ve been nursing all night.

“There’s one, she’s probably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen up close. And she’s sort of funny, a little brash, not what you’d think. Easy to get along with, you know? It was sort of surprising. I always assumed that the really beautiful people didn’t need anyone else.”

Connor reaches over, tracing his fingers over the back of Penny’s neck, and I feel a hot little stone of jealousy settle within my stomach.

“And there’s a woman who spent eight years as a quadriplegic, totally paralyzed from the nose down. She’s a little strange. But sweet in a sad sort of way. And then there’s the asshole.”

“The asshole?” Penny asks.

“My pet name for him,” I say, running my palm over my forehead, trying to dispel some of the fuzziness that has collected on the other side of the hard bone beneath my skin. Trying to find the scar that isn’t there anymore. My vision is blurring a bit. I have to pay attention to keep my eyes in focus. “David ‘asshole’ Jenkins.”

There’s a beat of silence. Everyone seems to sit back up in unison, drawn to attention by the common realization that I’m probably not allowed to say that particular name out loud. And yet, there it is.

“The congressman?” Penny asks, her eyes wide. “Like, that David Jenkins?”

“The Randian neoconservative Antichrist?” Sam asks, his lips drawing thin. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” I say, my head a flurry of alcohol and revelation. I clap a palm over my mouth, as if I can retrieve the words from the air and stuff them back into me.

“Shit. You’d think there would be some sort of litmus test for getting your life saved,” Sam says. “Like how many times you’ve voted to cut Medicaid, that sort of thing.”

“Sam.” He doesn’t meet my eyes.

“I’m kidding, you know I’m kidding,” he replies.

“Sort of,” Connor says, raising his glass.

“Yeah. Sort of,” Sam replies, clinking glasses with him.

“So what almost did him in?” Penny asks.

“Baby.” Connor’s tone is a bit admonishing, though she’s unfazed by it. “She isn’t supposed to be telling us any of this.”

“She already opened the door,” Penny says, both hands raised, as if she’s in front of a gun, feigning innocence. “What’s the harm in taking a couple of steps through?” She looks at me, her expression daring me to spill. And I can never say no to Penny.

“Brain tumor,” I reply.

“Nice,” Penny says, nodding in mock approval. “That’s respectable.”

“But Con’s right, I probably shouldn’t be telling you all this. God, I signed like sixteen confidentiality agreements.”

“Relax, Hannah, no one here is going to the papers,” Penny says, reaching over and squeezing my wrist, shooting a pointed look at Sam. “All of this is off the record, of course.”

“I’m not working, Penny.”

“You’re always working,” she replies.

“Anyway, I would have thought cirrhosis would have gotten to him first,” Sam says. “A buddy of mine went to Yale with him. Supposedly he liked to drink his weight in Kentucky bourbon to prove
to all the rich kids he was a good ol’ boy. Word out of Washington was he never really slowed down after he graduated.”

“Maybe they should make drinking off-limits for SUBs too,” Penny says. “You know, since we’re throwing stones.”

I make eye contact with Connor across the table, a silent plea to keep this dinner from becoming nothing but a pissing match between Sam and Penny. He takes my cue.

“So have you been back to your studio?” Connor asks.

“Not yet. But any day now, I think.”

“Well, Penny’s spending enough time in hers for the both of you. And now with the Daley Center thing . . .” Connor trails off as Penny shakes her head, a tiny movement, her lips pursed. Connor looks from her to me. I try to make my expression impassive, optimistic even, while everything is curdling with sour envy.

“You got it,” I say and even manage a smile.

“I did,” Penny replies, nodding.

“That’s great, Pen. Really,” I say, as Sam echoes my sentiment. Penny gives a little shrug, as if winning an emerging artist commission at the Daley Center is nothing significant. Yet everyone at the table knows what it will mean. It will mean a review in the
Tribune
, city-wide exposure, and introductions with the heavyweights in Chicago’s art scene. I think of my studio, of the canvases laying against one wall, how many times I imagined them hanging in the lobby of the Daley Center. I scull the rest of my drink, hoping to smother my jealousy with it, like water poured onto hot coals. The room seems to shudder a bit around me, as if it’s trying to shake itself loose of its foundation.

Later, when the boys are huddled in the corner, fiddling with Connor’s stereo system, Penny pulls me into the kitchen.

“Is David Jenkins the one you told me about? From the roof?” she asks, her hand encircling my upper arm, her grip not hard, but firm enough for me to know she means business. I purse my lips, and it’s enough of an answer. She releases me, pressing her palm to her forehead, then brushing back the braided strands of hair that have fallen loose on her face.

“Jesus, Hannah.”

“You know, I really don’t need a lecture right now Pen.” I mean the words to be sharp, but they come out so weary I’m shocked at how piteous I must appear. She nods, then turns away.

“I meant to tell you,” she says, picking up the wine glasses and rinsing them out in the sink. “I just didn’t want . . . I mean, it’s no mystery to me what people in the program are probably saying right now. If the committee had the chance to see your work . . .”

“That’s not true,” I reply, grabbing a dish towel and fishing the dripping glasses out of the dish rack, desperate for something to do with my hands.

“Of course it is,” Penny says. And it is, we both know it. Silence descends, and with it, a possibility I hadn’t yet considered. The possibility that I might become the sort of person I’ve always secretly pitied, the office workers and day-to-day errand runners and stay-at-home mothers. People who go to Florida on vacation, people who have children because they don’t know what else to do, people who will never have an article written about them. Ever since I was little, I was convinced my destiny belonged to something extraordinary, and I would be one of those privileged, shining few who would escape the commute and the monthly bills and the midlife crisis. My talent had only reinforced that idea. I never considered that I could fail just enough to slip into the most ordinary sort of life. The thought shudders through me, the thought that this moment might be the genesis of my ordinariness.

My hands slip, and the thin stem of one of Penny’s wine glasses cracks against my palm.

I’m sensationally drunk by the time we leave, and Sam catches my arm, leading me down the endless stairs and out into the street. Cold air hits me, pelted with the first snow of the season, and I realize it’s November, and that most of autumn has passed away without my notice. For some reason I think of an astronomy class I
took where the professor described how the ozone layer would fall around us in white flakes if the sun ever went out. I imagine it, that the snow is really frozen molecules of ozone, that we’re all going to perish, that it won’t be just me who knows what it’s like to be dying. I’m scared in an exhilarating way and I catch hold of Sam’s coat as we walk. The warm, damp wool is scratchy on my cold hands. I try and catch a few snowflakes in my mouth, breathing them in, and they have a metallic tinge to them as they melt on my tongue.

Sam folds me into the car, gently, as if I’m something very delicate, an origami flower made of gauzy tissue paper, likely to tear and be ruined. I watch the quick, rhythmic clouds of my breath in the car as he gets in next to me. I reach across and brush my fingers over the light curl of the hair above his neck. He doesn’t seem to notice, starting the car and turning on the heat. But as I persist, tracing my fingers onto the skin at the back of his neck, he twitches away, less a flinch than the way someone responds to a fly buzzing at his ear. There is annoyance in the movement, and it stings as I pull my hand back.

“Did you mean what you said at dinner?” I ask. “About there being a litmus test for getting your life saved?”

“It was a joke, Hannah.”

“It wasn’t very funny. Not to me.”

He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t say anything, he just cranks the wheel and pulls out onto the street.

“After all, what makes me so deserving, huh? My parents are out there bringing clean water to people in the desert, and what do I do?” I ask. “Nothing. Paint pictures. Lucky a computer picked my number, huh? If they thought like you, I might not be sitting here.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Well it was a fucking shitty thing to say.” I’m drunk, and my eloquence is gone.

“Fine, Hannah. If you want to sit there and try to pick a fight, go ahead. You’re just angry because . . .”

“Because what?”

He pauses.

“You could at least try and be happy for her.”

I know he means Penny. I bristle at the accusation. “I
am
happy for her.”

“But not more than you are sad for yourself. You should have seen your face when you found out.”

“That’s not why I’m angry,” I say, feeling wretched and small, a spoiled child who hasn’t gotten her way. I think of his arms around Lucy, the way he avoids touching me, waking up to find him gone.

“No one said you couldn’t have finished your pieces. I could have brought you your stuff at the hospital.”

“That’s not why I’m angry, Sam,” I repeat, feeling him drag me away from what I want to talk about.

“Of course you are, you’re a terrible loser because you’ve never had any practice at it. You didn’t have to stop painting when you got sick. You could have kept going.”

“Jesus Christ, you don’t get it at all,” I say, my voice suddenly too loud for the little interior of our car. “You’ve never understood how it works.”

“So explain it to me,” he says. He’s angry; all of his consonants are sharp.

“I can’t just pick up a brush and paint. I have to be alone and be able to think. Do you have any idea the effort that goes in to it? On a good day, a really good day, it takes everything in me. You think I could do that in the hospital with nurses walking in and out and machines beeping and people around all the time? You’re absolutely fucking clueless.”

“You always have excuses,” he says. “What about now? You’re not sick anymore, Hannah. Everything can’t be focused on you all the time anymore.”

“I’ll stop acting like I’m sick when you stop treating me that way,” I say, forgetting to temper my desire to hurt him. It doesn’t outweigh my desire to have everything go back to the way it was. I know, even drunk, that I can’t have both.

He pulls the car to the side of the street, under the L tracks, a fast move that makes me jerk so much my seat belt locks up. He kills the engine. I think he’s going to yell at me, but when he speaks his voice is so controlled it’s almost shocking.

“I used to have nightmares about you,” he says, shutting his eyes, letting his head fall back onto the headrest. His neck is exposed, like prey, offering itself. “Nightmares about finding you dead when I woke up in the morning, or when I got home from work. I would stay up at night to make sure you were still breathing. You cannot possibly expect it not to have an impact. It didn’t just happen to you, Hannah. It’s not fair.”

“None of this is fair,” I say. I want to tell him that I was the one in that hospital bed. I was the one being invaded by tubes and torn by pain, suffocating on dry land. I was the one who knew what it felt like to be dying, slowly. But these seem like horrible victories to claim over someone I have loved for so long.

“You can never forgive weakness in anyone, can you?” he says. “If I faltered, even just for a moment . . .” He trails off. My heart picks up speed.
Say it,
I think.
Just say it, once, tell me the truth. Don’t make me ask.
But he shakes his head, running a hand over his face, his exhaustion showing. “But you never forgive anything, do you?”

I think of Lucy. Of watching Lucy cry into his shirt, of the depth of their secrecy, which I am only beginning to understand. I have loved Sam so long for his goodness, and he has loved me just as long despite my lack of it. He should know my answer already.