Dear Jon (9 page)

Killing time before heading off to the mall, I decide to read one of the two letters I got in the mail today. I check the postmarks to make sure I choose the earlier one, wanting to take in all that she writes in order.

I breeze past the first line, not wanting to read it. I don’t want to hear how she feels about me hours before I spend the night on a date with a different girl.

Then why am I reading this at all?

“Knock knock,” my mother says from outside my room.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Would you like to see your handsome little brother?”

“Yeah,” I say, putting my things aside and sitting up for a better view of Max with his new glasses. He’s sucking on a milkshake, and the left lens already has a smear of chocolate ice cream on it. “Max, they look great. What do you think?”

“I’m smart,” he says.

“He’s only supposed to wear them to read,” Mom reminds me. “He won’t take them off.”

“Buddy, that looks like a headache waiting to happen. Between the glasses and a brain freeze… come over here.” He stands beside my bed, allowing me to remove his new frames. He blinks his eyes a few times as they adjust to his normal vision. I clean the dirty lens with a t-shirt and a bit of water from a cup on my table. “Did you get a case with these?”

My mother digs into her purse and produces a small case with a Superman logo on it.

“Clever,” I laugh. “I bet Clark Kent had the same case.” I put the glasses inside and secure it shut. “If you wear these all the time, you’re gonna make yourself dizzy. Only wear them when you need them.”

“But they make things look weird,” he says. “It’s funny.”

“It’ll be funny until you trip walking down some stairs or straight into a wall… and they aren’t cheap, Max. You need to take good care of them. Okay?”

“Okay.” He immediately takes them back out of the case and puts them back on.

“What did your brother just tell you?” Mom asks.

“I’m gonna go read!” he argues, grabbing the unopened letter and running out of my room.

“Is that from Livvy?” My mother looks away as she asks.

“Yeah,” I say, getting up. I’m not afraid he’ll read something he’s not supposed to. He’s not used to cursive writing, and most of Livvy’s letters are written with such emotion that her penmanship seems rushed, and messy.

“I met Audrey,” she adds, moving aside to let me out of my room.

“Yeah?” I don’t really want to discuss any of the women in my life with her.

“I didn’t realize you had a date tonight.”

“I do.”

“She was so good with Max. Really sweet. And so pretty.”

“I’m glad you approve,” I say, not really caring one way or another. I find my brother hidden on the side of his bed in the next room. The slurping of his milkshake gives him away. When I hold my palm out, he returns the letter to me unopened. “Glasses?”

He hands me those, as well, after putting them in the case. “Are you gonna kiss Audrey?”

“Max, come on.” I turn around to see my mother sitting on Will’s bed. I blush, embarrassed by his question. I’d been wondering that myself all day. “Some things aren’t any of your business. Livvy’s letter? None of your business. What I do tonight? None of your business.”

“What are you doing tonight?” Will asks, joining us in the room but lingering in the doorway.

“Going out with Audrey from the glasses place. Remember?”

“You gonna have sex with her?”

“Will!” my mother tries to reprimand him, but he just rolls his eyes, ignoring her.

“You still mad at me for asking her out?” I challenge him.

“What’s sex?” Max asks.

Mom takes that as her queue to leave, but urges my youngest brother to go with her. “He didn’t say sex,” she lies. “Will said Chex… like the cereal. ‘You gonna have
Chex
with her?’ That’s what he said.”

“You can’t have Chex at night! It’s for breakfast,” he says before he’s yanked from the room.

“Actually, you can have Chex any time of the day, Max!” I yell after them, happy that my mother may actually need to step in and teach my brother something.
It’s about time.

“Whatever!” she calls back to me. “I would hope that you would wait to have Chex with this girl!”

“Whatever,” I whisper to myself, glaring at Will. “What was that about? If you have something to say to me, do it. Don’t try to make things uncomfortable in front of Mom… don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing when you take your long showers. I was your age once. I could point that out to her, if you really want to compete.”

“Shut up.” We both take a seat on opposite beds.

“You can’t be mad at me for this. She’s the one who made the suggestion to go out on a date, Will.”

“You didn’t have to ask her out.”

“I’m interested in her. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t take her out…”

“I liked her.”

“I promise you, Will, if she was some seventeen-year-old girl that you’d known for any reasonable amount of time, I would never have asked her out. Even though that’s an incredibly unrealistic expectation for you to think some senior in high school is going to want to go out with you, I know there are some lines you don’t cross. But face it, she showed you some sunglasses for five minutes.”

“But she said I was cute!”

“Her job is to sell glasses, Will. She gets paid to make people feel better about themselves.” I know by saying that, I’m not doing a lot of good for his self confidence. “The truth hurts,” I add. “But I’m sure she wasn’t lying… you favor me, and she’s interested in me, so… of course she thinks you’re cute.”

“You didn’t even let me have a chance.”

“You want to come with us tonight? We’ll fight it out. We’ll make her pick. I mean, is that what you want?”

“I just don’t want you to go with her.”

“What… if you can’t be happy, I shouldn’t be happy, either? That’s pretty selfish.”

“She can’t make you happy,” he says. “You can’t be happy without Livvy.”

“Livvy is not my girlfriend anymore.”

“But you’re still holding her letter in your hand.”

“That isn’t relevant to this conversation, Will. I can’t just
not read
what she writes to me. That would be rude…”

“Why do you care if it’s rude, after what she did?”

“Because that’s just who I am. I need closure, and I’m hoping one of these letters will give me that. It just hasn’t come yet.”

“Do you think Audrey can give you closure?”

“I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t hoped for her to provide something like that.”

We sit for a minute or two, letting the tension settle. He picks up his book and lies back on his bed, opening it up to the dog-eared page. I start to go back to my room.

“Don’t have Chex with her tonight, okay?”

I laugh to myself and turn around to answer sincerely. “That thought hadn’t even crossed my mind–”

“Good–”

“Until you brought it up,” I say, adding a mischievous grin. “Not a bad idea.”

“Jon!” he whines.

“I’m not like that, Will, and I hope you know that by now. I hardly know her.”

He nods, accepting of my response.

In my room, the other letter from Livvy sits where I left it on my bed. I skip the first line again.

I think I was the happiest I’d ever been at the beginning of last summer. You were exhilarated to be out of school. You were enjoying your internship. I was loving to be homework-free for a few months. I couldn’t wait to spend my free time creating some new pieces.

But you consumed me. When we weren’t together, we’d spend hours on the phone talking about hypotheticals. What would I do if you were always poor. (Stay by your side and give you anything you needed.) What would you do if I went blind? (Mix my paints and point me in the direction of my canvas.) We were invincible. It was bliss. I was high on you–on us–and I didn’t think anyone could ever bring me down.

And then Granna died.

We only had a few weeks together before everything changed.

Even as it was all happening, I kept thinking it was too good to be true. I kept waiting for something to happen.

I didn’t think Donna’s death would have the effect on us that it did. In the end, it was this moment that turned Livvy’s world upside down and sent her on a downward spiral of self-sabotage. She stopped painting. She put herself in difficult situations. She chose the wrong college. She kissed someone other than me–not once, but twice.

Now I go through my own hypotheticals. How would things have gone for us last year if Granna hadn’t died?

We’d made a physical commitment to each other, and it was wonderful. You loved me. I loved you.

I would have kept painting, and that evens me out, Jon. It’s my natural anti-depressant, but I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know it would be so easy to turn my mood around. I am whole when I paint. I’m a mere fraction of myself when I don’t.

I understand how I’d changed in your eyes. I couldn’t see it then, but I do now.

I am sorry, Jon.

My heartbeat pauses for a second. There’s the apology. I read over that sentence a few more times before allowing my eyes to wander back to the top of the page.

I love you, Jon.

After staring at the period for a few seconds, I return to the letter, wondering what she’s sorry for.

I am sorry for expecting you to treat me the same when I’d become someone else. After all, you hadn’t made that commitment to me, for better or worse.

I hate that she thinks I wouldn’t have stood by her as she tried to get better just because we weren’t married. She was all there was to me, and I was returning to her that day of her graduation with a compromise. I knew leaving her wasn’t the answer. She drove me away.

She doesn’t know this, though. She knows nothing about my willingness to cancel my plans this summer with my family and to sacrifice my time with my brothers for her. She’ll never know that now.

But I don’t want her to think I’m capricious like that. I never was. It wasn’t her inability to be herself that made me leave. It was because she so easily and readily shared such an intimate moment with someone other than me.

It was bad, Jon, I know it. I’m feeling more like myself these days than I have in a long time. When I’m painting, it’s as invigorating as any time I spent with you.

Reading between the lines, she’s telling me she doesn’t need me now.

As much as I want that for her, it’s hard to accept.

Need. Want.

“What do you need?”
I remember her asking me that night in the hotel. I’d answered her with loving actions, but few words.

“What do you want?”
I’d asked her.

“I want you to take off your shirt,”
she’d answered softly, placing my fingers on the buttons of my shirt that she had asked to wear before we made love the first time that night. It was cool to the touch, moistened with the sweat of our bodies. She propped herself up, putting her weight on each arm as I removed the sleeves. Her breasts beckoned to be touched, fondled and kissed, but she told me she wanted me to kiss them anyway.

I’d wanted her to tell me in words what she wanted. I wanted her to be okay with her desires. This night was a breakthrough for us.

“I want you to go down on me,”
she had said in a voice that was coated in need. It was the sexiest thing she’d ever said to me: the words, the voice, the panting breaths that lingered.
“I want you to make me come again.”

“Like that?”
I’d asked as I traced my tongue down her nude body.

“Please,”
she begged me.

“Then I need to come with you, baby,”
I’d told her.
“I need you to tell me when you’re close, because I already am, and I need you, Olivia.”

When I break free from the memory, I’m fanning myself with her letter. Had I finished reading it?

But I still want you.

I’m not surprised that those were the next words.

We aren’t finished.

Commencement

Beginning? And here I thought we were at the end.

All I know is that I’m
very
worked up now, and ready to get
something
started. I look at the alarm clock on the desk. Five-thirty. Time to go pick up Audrey.

I tell Will goodbye on my way past his room, but get no response from him.

“Where are the keys, Mom?” I ask when I get to the kitchen. We’ve been sharing an old car of my aunt’s this summer. Since the bus runs to her restaurant, she rarely needs it, but had been driving my brother around all day.

As she hands them to me, she says, “Look what you’ve started.”

I look at Max, who’s sitting at the dinner table eating a bowl of cereal.

“I was actually thinking Chex sounded pretty good tonight, too.” I only glance briefly to see her expression, and she looks a little shocked. “With a little sugar. Don’t wait up.”

She doesn’t respond.

I wear the glasses I’d picked up at Audrey’s shop on our date. Everything looks sharper, clearer, more beautiful–including my companion. She, too, is wearing glasses tonight, and the lenses make her eyes appear even larger. Looking into them is like looking at a whole other species of human being. I’ve just never seen anything like them.

The restaurant is very casual with a rustic feel. The ceiling has exposed pipes, and an entire wall looks like a string of garage doors made of windows. Half of them are open to expose us to the warm, dry air. We sit down in a booth by the exposed area. I breathe in deeply, filling my lungs with unfamiliar smells of nature.

“What does New York City smell like?” Audrey asks.

“It depends,” I tell her. “Car exhaust. The sweat of other cultures. Garbage on hot summer mornings. Beer-soaked partiers.”

“None of that’s going to get me to vacation there…”

“Hot dogs?” I continue, trying to be stereotypical before I get serious, thinking of the smells that I love about my city. “Hundreds of flowers lined up outside a local market. Italian food. Cuban food. Indian food. Every kind of food you ever imagined. Brisk winter, sometimes with the scent of burning wood mixed in. Rain. The smell of rain lingers, and there’s something soothing, cleansing about it. A woman’s perfume that produces nostalgia for memories you never even had.”