Crossroads (16 page)

“Would you like something to drink?”

“I think I'd like to talk to Jennie for a few minutes first.” Sean and I went into the kitchen and gave Tom and Jennie the living room to talk in. For some reason I had expected to hear shouting, but it was very quiet in the living room. I washed the dishes in the sink while Sean read a film magazine. It was almost an hour before Jennie came into the kitchen and said, “Tom's leaving. He wants to talk to you before he goes.”

I pointed to myself. “Me?” She nodded.

Tom sat alone on the sofa, a beer can in his hand, looking more thoughtful than I'd ever seen him look. He stood up as I walked in the room. Then he sat back down and motioned for me to sit beside him on the sofa. He reached across and squeezed my hand. “I know Zap went out to a movie, so I don't want to stay here much longer. Jennie told me what happened.
She told me . . . everything. But I already had decided that I'd forgive her no matter what. I've been impossible. I've been terrible all year. I mean, I guess I should be angry, but for some reason I'm not. We're going to try and work it out again. I told her to stay here tonight and talk to Zap.”

“Are you crazy?”

He shook his head. “She's not going to sleep with him again. I believe her. I have to believe her. I'll lose her if I don't believe her. God, I feel like hell.”

He called to Jennie that he was leaving, and she came into the living room. “Are you sure you'll be all right?”

He nodded. “I'll be home when you get there tomorrow.” They started to kiss, so I walked into the kitchen.

Sean sat alone at the table and looked up at me as I walked in. “That's the hardest thing Tom ever had to do,” Sean said.

To my surprise Zap wasn't very upset when Jennie announced that she was going back to the farm the next day. I was sitting with her when she told him that Tom had come over and she was going back. During the day she had registered for her class. “Hey, look,” Zap said, “I'm sure it's for the best. In fact, I know it is.” He offered to sleep on the couch, and Jennie accepted his offer. Later that evening, while Jennie was taking a bath, Zap sat on the sofa, strumming his guitar. I sat down beside him and asked how he felt.

Jennie, Zap told me as we sat on the sofa, was as cold as a freezer and dry as a desert and he'd waited twelve years for a thrill that had probably never existed in the first place. Now he could get on with his life^ Like a morphine addict going cold turkey, he shook as he told me that for all practical purposes nothing had happened between them. “It's funny,” he said, putting down the guitar. “I don't really want her anymore.” I rose to go to bed and asked if I could get him anything. He shook his head and put his hands on my waist, pulling me to him. “You were always my kind of woman,” he mumbled, “and I was always your kind of man.”

I stood there for a few moments, uneasy, uncertain of what to do next. Then I took my brother's hands off me and walked away.

 

When Jennie was leaving the next day, I handed her the little vase she'd admired in the window of the folk art store on Columbus Avenue. When she opened the box, she started to cry. “God, I feel like I've messed everything up. I never should have come here.”

I gave her a hug. “You haven't messed anything up.”

“Are you sure? I'm afraid that everything has changed.”

“Nothing has changed,” I assured her, pretty certain that everything had. “If you need me, you know I'm here.”

She said she knew and I watched as she got into her station wagon, which looked so incongruous on West Sixty-eighth Street in New York. She started the motor and disappeared back into the hinterlands of South Dakota, with Zap and me, who were hardly speaking, waving good-bye.

For the next three days Zap, Sean, and I lived together in a kind of somber melancholy. Sean read the real estate ads in the
Times
every morning, assuring me he'd take the first place he found. He left for work at nine. I went to the office at about ten. Zap wandered around Manhattan, trying to decide what he wanted to do with himself until the University of Illinois agreed to let him return to medical school in January. By the time we saw one another in the evenings, we were exhausted and no one really talked about anything.

But on Saturday morning, several days after Jennie had gone back to the farm, I woke up early and went into the kitchen, thinking I'd make a nice breakfast and surprise Zap and Sean. I opened the vegetable crisper and found a rotten tomato. It had been sliced the week before and left unwrapped in the refrigerator. It was smushy, with a black and white mold growing around its top, and it seemed at the moment, that rotten, vile thing, to encompass the cosmos as I held it in my
hand. I knew it was my brother's tomato. I knew he'd used it to make sandwiches the week before, used it as part of his seduction, his havoc, that red tomato. An awful, diseased tomato.

He can't do anything right. He wastes his life. He sleeps with married women he can't have and who don't really want him. He obsesses about things he doesn't even care about and neglects the things he should care about. He can't finish anything he's started. He can't wrap a goddamn tomato in Saran Wrap. It was at that instant that Zap had the misfortune of walking into the kitchen, smiling. “Hi,” he said. “Want me to make us some breakfast?”

His smile evaporated when I held the tomato, shaking it at him, as if I'd just found heroin or a copy of
Screw
in the vegetable crisper. “Sure, why don't you make omelettes with this. Look at it, look what you've done. What's the matter with you anyway?”

He squinted, as if the light were very bright. I was shouting at him. “Couldn't you cover it up? Do you know how these things can smell?” So this is what it is to grow old, I thought. You get angry at all the things that don't matter because you can't get angry at the things that do. You scream about tomatoes. “You're just wasting your whole goddamn life. Well, I'm sick of it.”

He was furious and I watched as his face turned red and rotten before my eyes. “Yeah, and what're you doing? Years with some uptight attorney who dumps you for some skinny drip. Nobody ever liked him in the first place, except maybe Mom. And now you're with a real man and you don't even notice him, but you notice some crappy tomato. So what if I tried to have a little fling and get Jennie out of my system? At least I'm trying to get on with my life.”

“At least I'm honest. At least I don't go around messing up other people's lives. At least I finish the things I start.”

“Do you know who you remind me of . . .”

I knew I reminded him of our father. I shut up.

Zap closed his lips tight, pursed them together as I'd seen him do with only one other person in our lives. He closed himself off to me, the way I'd seen him close himself off to our father when he screamed at him. Then he opened his eyes and I saw a strange and distant look, one that was oddly familiar to me, and I saw my brother as I'd seen him in my first childhood memory, staring at me from across our playpen, trying to put words together, and I was sure at that moment in that kitchen, holding a rotten tomato, that he was thinking now the same thing he'd been thinking back then and that if I could translate that infantile expression from across a rubber padded playpen or a grownup's kitchen into words, I'd come up with something that resembled, “What the hell am I doing here with her?”

By noon he'd packed his things and said he was ready to leave. He was going to take a Greyhound back to Chicago, back to Illinois Med, where he'd return for the last time to medical school and would emerge a few years later a pediatrician engaged to a physical therapist. Before he left, I made him some sandwiches. Tomatoes were significantly missing. I insisted on going with him to the Port Authority, but before he walked out the door, he tossed the set of keys he'd had made at the Home Safe Locksmith to Sean. “Here,” he said, “you keep them. You might need them. Take care of my sister for me.”

Sean shook his hand. “She really doesn't need much taking care of.” He clutched the keys in his hand.

We stood in line at the Port Authority and Zap shifted uneasily on his feet. It was clear he wanted to get away from me. I felt as if we were going off to school together for the first time. He wanted to buy some doughnuts, so I told him I'd hold his place in line and waited while he bought a bag of whole wheat and coconut-covered doughnuts. While he was gone, they opened the door and the bus driver began checking tickets. Maybe I should go and let him stay, I thought. I put his knapsack on my back and made my way to the door. Who would I sit next to? The thin priest ahead of me? The thick
black woman with too many bags behind me? As I reached the gate, he arrived. Zap took his knapsack off my back and handed the driver his ticket. He climbed on board, flung his pack onto the overhead rack, then slipped off the bus to say good-bye.

“Well, I'm off now.” People pushed past us to get on the bus.

“You should have flown. I would have paid for it.”

“This is all right. I need the time to clear my head.” In his jeans and army jacket he looked as much like Zapata as he ever had. “Look,” he said, “no hard feelings, O.K.? I'm sorry about all of this. I can be so damn impulsive.”

“Will you let me know where to find you?”

He kissed me on the forehead. “I'm always just around the corner.” Then Zap climbed back on the bus, wedged into a window seat beside the large black woman, who'd talk to him about Jehovah all the way across the Midwest, and headed toward some destiny he thought awaited him, leaving me to fend for myself in this foreign land.

That night I walked through the apartment while Sean slept, searching, it seemed, for Zap. I thought to myself how if he were here, I'd crawl into his bed, the way I'd done before our parents separated us. I'd say I couldn't sleep because there was a wolf in the room and he'd make a space, move his leg over slightly.

But we were grownups and I knew it could never be the same. I could never again crawl into his bed and say, “Move over; there's a wolf in my room.” And I knew that Zap was right now somewhere in the middle of the state of Pennsylvania, wide-eyed, nose pressed to the cold glass, seeing nothing outside, and thinking the same thing.

T
HE DEJECTED
or enraged lover can't slam the door in Manhattan anymore and say, “I'm leaving.” It takes months to find a place to go to. Mark never would have left me as easily as he did if he hadn't had Lila's apartment to go to. And I knew Sean had spoken with much bravado when he said he'd find a place for himself in twenty-four hours after I told him Mark was still on my mind. He'd have been lucky to find even a sublet in that many weeks.

I agreed to let Sean use the keys my brother had turned over to him, as long as he kept looking for his own place and paid half the rent for the time he stayed with me. He had begun working full time on the set in Astoria and could easily pay me half. What I liked about having Sean in my apartment was that he felt temporary. Mark had always felt permanent and for seven years I had liked the sense of permanency, the way I liked carved marble. But Sean sat around in the morning, sipping coffee and reading the real estate section of the
Times
or follow
ing up leads on sublets from the
Voice
before he'd take off for the set. And I knew that anyone who sat around reading the real estate ads had to be temporary.

When I told my mother that Sean was going to live with me until he found a place of his own, she said it was fine with her, but I could never tell my father. “He's seventy-five,” she said. “He couldn't take it.” I think it was my mother who couldn't take it, but there was something to fear in my father's wrath. In his office, for example, I'd seen him yelling many times at whoever made the latest error. He was an exacting and precise man and never yelled at an employee if an error cost less than a thousand dollars. But at home he didn't exercise economic constraints and his temper could be sudden, irrational, and volcanic.

On the phone my mother concocted elaborate strategies in order to protect my father from the fact that Sean was going to live with me for a while. “Why can't we just tell him?” I asked. She had just told me what hours of the day Sean should not answer the phone.

“No, no, he wouldn't understand at his age. It would kill him.” My mother gasped as I pondered whether or not I was going to kill my father.

“How do you know he couldn't take it?”

“He was an old man before you were born. Nice women didn't do that sort of thing, especially not women who are still married!”

“Mark's living with someone . . .”

“He's a man.”

“Mother, that's a double standard. I refuse to accept that.”

“Darling, I just want to protect him, that's all.”

I knew I had fallen into the wastebin of lost children. I was suddenly no better than Renee, who went wild in the streets of San Francisco, not to mention suburban Chicago. I was no better than my brother, who had managed to keep himself one step above being a juvenile delinquent. “What am I doing
wrong?” I asked my mother, knowing that I was doing everything wrong.

She spoke soothingly. “You and I know you aren't doing anything wrong, but he won't. And you know we're planning to visit you in a few weeks. It would be such a blow. He had such high expectations.”

“He hasn't done so badly on paper. Renee is married to a dentist and does have three legitimate children, and Zap is on his way back to medical school.”

“We all know that, dear, but just don't tell him, O.K.?”

A few weeks later Sean, forgetting he wasn't supposed to answer the phone late at night, picked it up. “Oh, excuse me,” my father said, “I must have the wrong number.”