Elegies for the Brokenhearted (20 page)

“Oh my God,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

“I was looking for you,” I said.

“Oh my God.” She jumped up and down, pulled me over to her table. “Everybody, this is Mary.” She introduced me to the waiters and waitresses, as if I hadn't already met them. “This is Pete, and Nick, and Jeff.”

“I know,” I said. “We've met.” It occurred to me then that the waiters might as well have been meeting me for the first time. After the initial curiosity on my arrival, they had entirely forgotten about my existence—they had failed to even mention me to Malinda.

“This is so great,” she said. “We're gonna have so much fun.”

She sat down and pulled me next to her. “Scotty,” she said, “this is my sister Mary.”

“What's up, man?” Scotty said. He raised his hand in the air. “Five me,” he said.

I fived him.

“That was halfhearted,” he said. “Five me again.”

I stared at him with hatred. I had a vivid image of punching him in the face. But I fived him again.

“Now that was hearty!” he said. “That was a five with some heart!”

Malinda kept her arm around me while she talked with everyone, and I felt myself sinking into the watchful silence I'd always lived in when we were growing up. On the surface it was no different from my usual silence, but the feeling was different. Instead of the detachment and anxiety I'd felt all through college, there was comfort. I felt relaxed for the first time in five years.

When your last customers left you came over to join us. Malinda made the same fuss over you that she'd made over everyone else. She threw her arms around you and kissed your face, your neck, your ears. You flushed under her attention.
Please,
you said,
get ahold of yourself
.

“You were so right about New York,” she told you, “it's the only place in the world worth living. Oh, my God. I had no idea.”

I told you,
you said, a wistful look in your eye.

“We've been there all summer,” she said. “I didn't want to leave. You should come back with us! This place is dead, it's over. You should come back to New York.”

A dark mood seemed to pass over you. Your eyes wandered about the room, and you were distracted in your conversation. You made it through a few pleasantries, asking about the places Malinda had been that winter. But when she asked you about yourself, you were vague.
I've been incredibly busy,
you said.
I couldn't possibly begin to describe it
. As soon as someone else—a waitress named Mitzi—claimed Malinda's attention you slipped off. You nodded to me on the way out. It seemed to me that you wore the pinched, bitter expression of a person who had been upstaged.

Malinda started talking about a party, and Scotty started rounding up people. He was the only person I'd ever met who carried a cell phone, and he kept punching numbers into it and shouting at the people who answered. “Scotty!” he said, as a salutation. And I wondered what kind of person would shout his own name, with such exuberance, into a phone. “Major party down at Moody,” he said. And though this was nothing more than an idea, a bit of whimsy that had just struck Malinda, word spread quickly and by the time we got to the beach there was, indeed, a party. Groups of people were standing around drinking beer, listening to music, talking and shouting and laughing. Someone had lit a fire in a trash can. Though it was the middle of summer it was still cold by the water at night, and people stood huddled in pairs. I watched Malinda as she approached them, and she seemed pleased by the gathering, like a queen surveying her subjects. She had thought of something, and Scotty had made it happen.

I stood on the edge of the party and watched Malinda drift around between the people she knew. They greeted her with great cries of affection and astonishment. It was a long time before she drifted over and sat down next to me. “Wow,” she said. “It's been, like, five years or something.”

“I know,” I said.

“So what's new? What you been up to?”

“There's nothing at all new with me,” I said. “Not a single thing has happened since you left.” At home I'd always affected a deadpan sarcasm, to balance out the hysterics of my mother and Malinda, and I'd slipped into it again. And yet on one level it seemed to me that what I'd said was perfectly true. Since Malinda had left nothing much had happened—I'd simply marked time until finding her again.

“I forgot,” she said, “what a bitch you can be.” She moved closer to me. She picked up a strand of my hair and let it fall. Again, and then again. “You look weird,” she said. “It's like you haven't changed since you were twelve.”

“Something's different about you,” I said, surveying her hair and tattoos—a red dragon rose up along each of her arms, their necks curling onto her shoulders, their heads turned sideways, extending onto her chest, bright flames emanating from their mouths, meeting over her heart. “But I can't quite put my finger on it.”

“So me and Scotty are gonna be here awhile,” she said. “Scotty has business all over the place up here. We can catch up. Maybe have lunch tomorrow or something.”

“What kind of business?” I said.

“Mostly weed,” she said. “And pills. But some other stuff too. He's real busy this time of year. He's really stressed out. He's got, you know, all these clients calling him all the time, and he can't always get what they want and he knocks himself out running all over the place.”

It pained me to hear her talk. It occurred to me that if I'd met her on a bus and she started talking to me, I'd take out a book and start reading. “I really want to spend some time together,” I said. “I really missed you.”

“Me too,” she said. “I was gonna call. But I've been bouncing all around and I haven't ever had, like, a single place to stay or a phone or anything like that. I keep meaning to stop home and see what's going on, I just haven't, you know, had much time, with work and everything.”

We sat for a moment looking at the water. I felt the topic of our mother hovering between us. And indeed the next thing Malinda said was, “So how's the bitch? Lemme guess. Married again.”

“For the fifth time,” I said.

She snorted. “Figures.”

Then I told her the latest, the most absurd of all the absurdities in our family history. “She had,” I said, “some kind of religious crisis.”

“Oh Christ,” said Malinda. She rolled her eyes, flopped dramatically back on the sand. “Please!” she cackled. “Give me a fucking break!”

“She moved to Atlanta,” I said.

“What?”

“She married a televangelist. She runs a day care center at her husband's church—she takes care of all these kids off the street. I think they send a van around and cart them in by the dozen.”

“What?” she said again. She sat up at attention. “Are you fucking kidding me?” She clutched her head. “That bitch!” she said.

“If it makes any difference,” I said, “she says she prays for you all the time.”

“Oh please,” she said, “I think I'm going to puke.” She stood up and staggered toward the water. I watched her stand at its edge, playing in the water with one of her feet in a distracted, rueful way. It occurred to me that all of the problems that had grown up between us, all the distance, were connected with my mother. Somehow Malinda saw me as my mother's agent, her emissary, and she'd turned against me, too. I stood up and started walking toward her, but before I got to the water she was off again, squealing, throwing her arms around someone else she hadn't seen in a year. “Oh my God!” she cried. “I missed you so much!”

When I returned to my spot on the beach a boy was sitting there. He had a mess of curly blond hair, already receding at the temples—he looked like a young Art Garfunkel. “Mind if I sit here?” he asked.

“Fine with me,” I said. I sat down next to him.

“I live over there,” he said. He pointed to a house behind us. “That one. With the hexagonal windows.” The house was three stories tall, lit up against the night sky, brilliant.

“Oh,” I said. I tried to sound unimpressed.

“I heard everybody and came out to see what was happening. None of my friends are up for the summer and I've been kind of lonely.”

“That's a sad story,” I said.

“I just graduated from Yale,” he said. “And everybody I know is, you know, scattered all over the place, starting new jobs and stuff.”

“I feel really bad for you,” I said, “all alone in your beachfront property. With nothing but a Yale degree.”

“You're a pain in the ass, I can tell,” he said. “I'll just have to ply you with wine.” He had a picnic basket settled beside him, and he opened it up and produced a bottle and two glasses. The whole scene struck me as suspicious, and I looked around for a camera crew.

We drank a bottle of wine, talking about college and what it felt like to be out, what we were going to do with ourselves in the future. The boy was about to embark on a trip around the world. Mauritania, he said. Indonesia, the Seychelles. He'd spent the whole summer taking sailing lessons. “It's just gonna be me,” he said. “And my dad's boat. All around the whole fucking world.” As he talked about the ports he planned to visit, I kept an eye on Malinda, who was flitting about, smoking and laughing and dancing. I heard snatches of her conversation. “We were so wasted,” she said. “Remember that random guy, with the cowboy hat?”

“So what do you think?” the boy asked.

I looked at him. His face was round and plump, and he wore an expression of hopefulness. It was a face that appeared to be unfamiliar with hardship and disappointment of any kind. “I wouldn't want to say,” I told him.

“Come on,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I think you'll probably get blown over in a storm, or captured by pirates, or robbed and stranded somewhere. I hope you don't. But that's what I think.”

“I meant,” he said, “what do you think, as in, do you wanna come with me?” I looked him in the eye, expecting an expression of sarcasm, or irony, but he was serious. “Put off grad school for a year,” he said. “Have an adventure.”

I was quiet for a minute and watched the party playing out in front of us. It had reached its last phase, wherein people made reckless and impulsive stabs at entertaining themselves. Couples chased each other around the beach. The boys caught the girls and heaved them onto their shoulders and ran with them into the water. Everyone collapsed in the surf, screaming.

“Give me one reason,” he said, “you can't go.”

I didn't answer him. I watched as Scotty threw Malinda into the water. She got to her knees and pulled him down by the ankle. “Scotty's down!” he cried out. “He's hurt!” They laughed and laughed.

“I can't think of a single reason,” I said.

This is the last clear memory I have of the evening. The boy and I split another bottle of wine. We hatched plans. We started talking about practical things, like passports and vaccinations, and I began to believe that I was actually going. “There's a guy in town who can get you all the shots you need,” the boy said. “And we can expedite your passport. I know a guy who does that. I can't believe you're a French major and you don't even have a passport.”

“We'll have to stop there too,” I said. “France.”

“Of course,” he said. “You're gonna need all your personal documents. Your birth certificate and all that. Who knows,” he said, “we might even get married.” We were lying on our backs now, looking up at the stars, and in such a position, at that time of night, everything seemed possible, glimmering right in front of us, ready for the taking.

Then I passed out.

I woke at the first purplish light breaking over the horizon. My head was still spinning, my skin was sticky with salt and sand, there was a film in my mouth. Art Garfunkel was passed out next to me, with his mouth open. In a flash all of his plans came back to me. I remembered how I'd been swept up in them. But in the light of day they seemed absurd, as beautiful and weightless as dreams. He looked very young, and I felt quite certain then that whatever he set out to do, wherever he went, he was doomed, that he'd be eaten alive. “Good luck,” I said, and left him to his fate. I went around looking at the bodies passed out on the beach. People lay about in tortured positions, flung on their backs with their limbs spread wide, like the crew of
The Raft of the Medusa
. I was looking for Malinda, but of course she was gone.

I dragged myself back to the Bavarian, playing out the evening's events in my mind. I knew that Malinda had arrived in town at last, that we had gone to the beach, that I'd had too much to drink and fallen asleep there, and yet the whole evening struck me as a hallucination. I'd spent the summer on pills, and part of me wondered if it had at last caught up with me—if I'd finally lost my mind. It was only when I climbed the porch steps of the Bavarian, and collapsed into the rocking chair next to yours (by then it was fully light, and you were sitting out with your newspaper), that the question was settled.

And where's Malinda?
you said, without looking up from your paper.

“I don't know,” I said.

You scoffed.
Let me guess. You woke up alone in a strange place.

“Pretty much. I guess she took off with that fetus of a boyfriend.”

That fetus,
you said,
has a very impressive stock portfolio
.
He owns several properties in the area.

“You know him?”

I've known him for years,
you said.
You might say we've had a bit of a professional relationship. I should have known Malinda had hitched herself up to him. He could make life very easy for her.