Doubles (24 page)

I PULLED INTO
the farthest corner of the parking lot behind Nice Price Books, near the corner of Main and Franklin. In summer the gravel space was buried deep in shade, perfect for keeping the Dart’s black vinyl from searing flesh upon reentry. Now there was no sunlight to avoid and no Dart to guard. It was a gray February day, the kind that surprised new students who thought North Carolina had no winter at all. I pulled the Volvo into a space beside a small mound of ice-crusted leaves blown into the corner of a low retaining wall of railroad ties. Bare tree branches reached low around the roof. The car shuddered for several seconds after I turned it off, as if it still had places to go. I stepped out, and my breath thickened the air with steam. It had been a long time since I’d spent this much time in North Carolina during winter. It had snowed three days before. The streets were still white and chalky with the remnants of municipal salt. I tucked the back of my shirt into my jeans to keep out the cold air that kept creeping up my back. A wood fire burned somewhere, and I just stood there for a moment, breathing in that soft aroma on the back of the biting air.

They said that when the metal spring from the car seat finally dislodged itself from Anne’s spine, it floated up and into her heart. Everyone said that, like her body was just some tub of water in which things floated up to a surface where her heart waited like a vacuum. She had died while Manny and I had been in Sydney.
We slept almost the whole trip back, afraid to be awake. I selfishly wondered whom she had told about the brakes. For a brief span of waking night over the Pacific I worried that her family would sue me for her death. I threw up during the layover in Hawaii. Her funeral was a small affair held at the museum. People treated me like we were still married. I think many of them had no idea that we weren’t. Her father held my hand and told me I would always be a part of the family.

The night after her funeral, I drove to the BP by University Mall and bought a lottery ticket. I scratched off the pasty gold foil and found a jumble of unremarkable digits. For a brief moment I thought I’d hit the jackpot. It was the first lottery ticket I had ever bought. When I looked closer I saw that I had won $20.

Now there was an exhibition of Anne’s photography inside the Carrboro ArtsCenter, over the railroad ties to my left. I had seen each of her projects emerge piece by piece, bit by incremental bit, so even if I didn’t understand the aesthetics, I came to know the logic and the pace. This one had happened only blocks away, yet I had no idea what it was.

Familiar faces sucked on cigarettes along the sidewalk outside. A little girl waited for someone at the door, and for a second I thought that she too was smoking, but it was only the cold turning her breath into puffs of mist blossoming briefly from her lips. I waved to one of the smokers—Henry, who had gone to high school with Anne—who waved back without saying anything, his shoulders hunched under a heavy Army jacket. The entryway was crowded and hot. Inside I stripped off layers, piling them atop the disembodied jackets of others.

“Jim,” I said, as another one of Anne’s old classmates passed by. He was a tall, bearded PhD student who looked like he was straight out of central casting for tall, bearded PhD students. I had always liked
him. He seemed the most down-to-earth of that whole crowd, someone who probably watched football while reading Proust.

“Hey,” he said. He looked stunned and uncomfortable. “How you doing?”

Somehow that’s when I knew. I stepped into the exhibition space. Polaroids, evenly spaced, stretched around three walls like miniature windows. I could have guessed that much. But then I saw myself in one of those little frames. I stepped closer. In the photo my mouth was open, and I looked both scared and ecstatic. The white space said I JUST GOOGLED CLAIR HUXTABLE NAKED. Next to it was another. I looked almost exactly the same, in mid speech, animated and blurry. It said THE WRECK, IT WAS MY FAULT.

Hundreds of my secrets hung on the walls. The faces of Katie, Kaz, Manny, and Anne herself filled the other space. People stood in small packs, leaning in closely, reading and laughing. Saying, “Look at this.” There was a group of people by one wall all holding one arm into the air. I walked back into the entranceway, collected my layers, and returned to the cold. In the car I held them to my chest, watching my breath crystallize on the inside of the windshield until I realized I’d forgotten to put them back on.

 

Just after midnight I returned. I parked in the same spot and crunched back across the frozen gravel. I cut around the back of the ArtsCenter, ducking under a metal sculpture of acute abstract angles. I kicked it by accident, and it rang hollow and low in the night. The back door was locked, but I had been here with Anne so many times in the past that I knew about the key hidden inside a piece of fake dog poop. The owner called it the doo-key. I found it behind a concrete planter filled with a miniature dead pine. Before I grasped it, I halted with the momentary fear that this doo-key was the real thing. But no dog could have fit himself behind the planter, so I let my fingers touch it, and it
was hard and plastic, and it jingled. The loading dock was filled with dim red light from the EXIT. I flipped a switch, and one fluorescent tube flickered to life.

Almost all the photos looked the same. Just heads in midspeech, eyebrows raised, sometimes blurry. Closely cropped. I wasn’t the only one who had allowed Anne to shoot. There were probably a dozen of Manny. I PUT RAT POISON IN MRS. REAGUE’S DIET COKE IN FOURTH GRADE. I LOVE JAMES TAYLOR. I DID IT IN THE BUTT WITH TISDALE GORDY. He looked thrilled in each photo, joyous with the attention.

Kaz’s wall was more subdued. I CRIED WHEN I WATCHED
THE LITTLE MERMAID
. I PEED MY BED ONE NIGHT IN DUBAI.

Katie looked beautiful in her blurry photos, most taken inside her own apartment. Her secrets were insane. PRETTY OFTEN I THINK ABOUT HOW I’M THE COOLEST PERSON IN THE ROOM. I CROSS MY TOES FOR LUCK. I MASTURBATE LIKE ALMOST EVERY DAY.

Still, no matter what any of them said, I knew it all already. Even if I hadn’t heard it before. Nothing was a surprise. Small square after small square, these lives had been lived together in a slow unpeeling of layers. I returned to my own photos. THE WRECK, IT WAS MY FAULT. I reached to the wall and took the photo into my hands.

A door on the loading dock slammed shut, and footsteps sounded light and slow across the floor. I took my cell phone out of my pocket and opened it, holding it in my other hand. The steps neared. I put the phone to my ear. I turned to the entryway and watched Kaz step into the gallery.

“One second,” I said into the phone, then held it from me like some unseen person in some other place were inconvenienced by his intrusion. “Hey.”

“What are you doing?” Kaz said, baffled. He had stopped only a few steps inside the gallery space.

“I’m on the phone. What are you doing?”

He breathed in deeply and sighed. “Um.” He held his hand out towards the photos.

“How’d you get in?”

“Doo-key.”

I nodded. I held the phone up, as if to say,
you know how it is
, then placed the dead machine back to my ear. “Listen,” I said. “That sounds great. I’d love to play. Let me call you back, though. Alright. Bye.”

I closed it and slid it into my pocket.

“Thanks for dinner the other night,” I said.

“I’m doing the
unagi
better now.”

“What
is unagi
?”

“You serious?” He said and walked farther into the gallery.

“I never ordered there.”

“But it’s not just served
there
. That’s a standard thing.”

I shrugged. Anywhere that it had ever been served, if I’d gone there, it had been with Kaz. He had always ordered.

“Eel,” he said, an afterthought as he read one of Katie’s secrets. “I meant to say congrats.”

“On what?”

“The job.”

“It’s not all that.”

He turned to the photos of himself on the wall.

“You know those were going to be here?” I said.

“She told me.”

“You see her much?” I said. I didn’t know if I wanted to know.

“Some,” Kaz said. “You?”

“Some,” I said, suddenly positive I’d seen less of her than Kaz. “She told me about charades.”

Kaz turned.

I said, “In New York last year.”

He waited for a second, as if trying to determine if it was yet safe to tell the truth. “Yeah.” He nodded. “We just went home.”

“So it was just us.”

“What was?”

“That won.”

His eyes lit up his thin, dark face, and for a moment I wished I was half Japanese and half black. He looked like the coolest guy in Chapel Hill. “Yeah,” he said. “We won.”

I laughed. One short puff.

Then he said, “You taking one?”

I looked at the photo in my hands. I held it out to him. He took it gingerly, looked down, nodded, and handed it back.

“You knew?” I said.

He nodded. “She told me.”

I glanced at a few more of myself. I THROW AWAY THE NEWSPAPER SOMETIMES, NOT IN THE RECYCLING. I TEXT WITH MY EX-GIRLFRIEND. I couldn’t imagine anything possibly making a difference anymore. I hung the photo back on the wall.

Kaz said, “See these?”

He stood in front of the photos of Anne. I expected them all to be taken by me. The dress in the clothes bin, the fliers for Winnie under the carpet. But those photos were missing. These were self-portraits taken in an unfamiliar room. Different days, I could tell, and different light, but in each Anne sat beside a window, the light falling halfway onto her. In her lap she held the camera remote, its cord reaching taut towards the frame like she might connect the viewer to the photo by reeling us in. Her mouth was moving and in every single one she looked confident and relaxed. The first one said, COUNT TO NINE. Then there were nine photos, a digit at the bottom of each. The next said, IMAGINE THROWING SOMETHING INTO THE AIR. The next said, WATCH IT RISE. KEEP THAT ARM RAISED. The next said, I’M GOING TO
TELL YOU A SECRET. I turned to look at Kaz. His arm was high above his head. So was mine. We had both thrown an invisible tennis ball into that vast silent room. And then each photo after that had the same caption written on it, like she was testing the secret for validity, day by day by day.

They said I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU.

NIC BROWN’S FIRST
book,
Floodmarkers
, was published in 2009 and selected as an Editor’s Choice by
The New York Times Book Review
. His short stories have appeared in the
Harvard Review
,
Glimmer Train
, and
Epoch
, among many other publications. A graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches at the University of Northern Colorado.

Copyright © 2010 by Nic Brown. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

An excerpt appeared in
Washington Square
.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Nic, 1977-

Doubles : a novel / by Nic Brown. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-582-43671-5

1. Tennis players—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.R72242D68 2010

813’.6—dc22

2010003259

 

 

 

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