Elegies for the Brokenhearted (3 page)

But as the night wore on your mood would turn. After a while the television had the effect of a hypnotist, and you'd come to face the truth, you'd start to talk in a droning voice.
She doesn't want me,
you said,
and I don't want any other girl.
It was a problem, it was a pickle, it was a bitch. If there was some solution to the whole mess, you didn't know what it was.
Fuck,
you sometimes said, and clutched your head. You pressed shut your eyes, rubbed them with the heels of your palms, hot tears ran down your wrists.
Fuck,
you said.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I listened without answering, nodded but nothing more.
If it wasn't for you,
you told me once,
I don't know what I'd fucking do. It's like if I talk about it I feel better, it's like talking about it is the only time I can stand it, if I don't talk about it, I swear to fucking God I'll explode.

As you talked you'd stroke my hair and in your mind, I could tell, you were stroking hers.

The thing is,
you said,
the weirdest thing is that sometimes I think all this has nothing to do with her. It's like I was going along fine and then I got stuck, like I'm a car that broke down or something, and I just happened to have gotten stuck at a time and place where Sam was. It's not like she's that great, it's not like she's anything at all. To tell you the truth she bored the crap out of me. Something's wrong with me,
you said.
What I wanna do sometimes, if you really wanna know the truth, what I wanna do sometimes is die
. Often I fell asleep as you talked and woke the next morning in my own bed, with no memory of being carried there.

This went on for weeks, and all that time there was the feeling that things were strange, out of order, that the life we were living was temporary, that things couldn't possibly go on this way for much longer. And as with us, so too the world. It was a strange season, violent and foreboding. The upstairs neighbors fought so often it was like a feature of the house, like the heat coming on. They had long, screaming battles that started with obscenity—“Fuck you, you fucking motherfucker!”—and escalated beyond, into a place where words failed and there was only screaming and crashing and the stomping of feet. You, or my mother, or both of you, would call up to them—
Shut the fuck up or we're calling the fucking cops! There's kids down here!
—and they'd quiet for a bit, but never for long. From the looks of the pregnant woman it seemed she couldn't carry the baby another day, it seemed she would burst at any moment. Meanwhile American hostages languished in Iran, and Reagan was elected president. There was something about all of this—even an eight-year-old could tell—that was out of order, something about all of this that begged to be explained. The world had gone crazy.

 

I
n December the first snow fell and for a brief day everything was beautiful, for a brief day it seemed the world had released to us one of its bright secrets. Everyone was walking around pink-faced and happy, waving to one another, filled with something—hope or nostalgia or joy. When you dropped us off at school that morning you seemed happy. You honked Michelle's horn twice as you drove away and when we turned you gave us an enthusiastic wave. That afternoon you picked us up from school and drove us to Friendly's, where we sat at the counter watching the fry cooks flip burgers. We drank cup after cup of hot chocolate. One of the cooks, a skinny guy with a patch over his left eye, said to you, “Cute kids,” and you said,
They're my pride and joy, I'll tell you,
as though we were, as though we were yours.

That night, while we watched from the car, you walked through Sam Keller's checkout lane with a bouquet of flowers. After she rang you up you gave them to her and tried to explain yourself, your suffering, but she only stared at you with a bewildered expression. As you spoke her eyes darted, she stood with her body turned away from yours, she chewed her gum. She said something, and then you left, walked out of the store with your head down and your hands in your pockets. At home you got drunk and talked about her, on and on, going over and over what was said to whom, and how, then launching the numerous rebuttals which you'd been unable to conjure in the heat of the moment.
She thinks I'm too old, but I'm not, if she got to know me she'd realize we're made for each other.
You went on and on. When my mother came home, and we all sat down to leftovers, you repeated the whole story, then started it again when you'd finished, on and on until my mother reached across the table and slapped your face. “How goddamned pathetic,” she said, “are you going to get?” She was tired, she said, tired of this. Tired of you lying around scratching your crotch, bitching about Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam. “Jesus fucking Christ!” she said. She walked to the living room, to the couch, and yanked off its white sheet. She brought the sheet into the kitchen and held it up to your face. “This sheet is like fucking sandpaper!” she said. “Look at this! This is pathetic! This is disgusting!” She balled up the sheet and shoved it in your face.

You pushed it away.
Gimme a break, okay?
you said, and hung your head in your hands.
Christ,
you said.
In front of the kids.

“The kids are fine,” she said. “The kids aren't the ones with problems here.”

They're not?
you said.
They're not? You think the kids don't got any problems? You think the kids are fine? Have you even met them? Do you even remember their fucking names?

And then you were both standing, screaming at each other, your faces red and an inch apart and Malinda and I were looking at each other, staring right into each other, it was one of those moments, searing hot and trembling around the edges, as in the moments just before a migraine. Everything was difficult to hear, nothing was difficult to hear, all at once something was said about your debts and your drinking, your lost charm, something was said about a girl you'd gotten pregnant last year, something was said about your heart being bullshit, an invented ailment, something you claimed for profit, something you used to get out of anything and everything you didn't wish to endure, something was said about your changing unrecognizably from the fun-loving rebel you'd once been, about how the only reason anyone was willing to tolerate you was long gone. Concerning Malinda and me something was said about our poor diet, our lack of discipline, our staying up till midnight, the circles underneath our eyes, the deadening amount of violence we took in from the television, something was said about our clothes and knotted hair, the trouble we'd gotten into at school, something was said about Michael Collins, about our drunk father.

You think I'm sick?
you said.
I'm the one who's sick here? You never even see your own kids. Your own flesh and blood and you never see them.

“You don't know what you're talking about,” she said. “Here I am busting my ass to keep a roof over their heads.”

Bullshit,
you said.
You're out all the time with Rabbi whatsisname who's so important.

“The kids are fine,” she said.

No they're not,
you said.
They look like shit. They got no friends at school. Alls they eat is spaghetti from a fucking can and they look like shit.

“Malinda could give a shit less,” my mother said, “where I am or what I do. And Mary,” she said, “is tough. Mary never cries.”

You have no fucking clue! You don't know what the fuck you're talking about! Your own kids!

Until the neighbors started banging on their floor and calling down to us, “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up or we're calling the cops! There's a baby trying to sleep!”

And the irony got to both of you, you started laughing and couldn't stop, you were bent over with it, and while you were laughing Malinda and I slipped off to the living room and sat on the couch holding hands watching
Tom and Jerry
. In that world, which we loved, characters suffered one fatal blow after another and yet sprang up, every time, unharmed.

When you recovered my mother said, “I think pretty soon you better find somewhere else to live.”

Fine with me,
you said.
My fucking pleasure.

 

A
few nights later we were up together as usual watching TV, a football game, when Howard Cosell cut in with a voice that said something was happening.
This had better be big,
you said.
Middle of the goddamned game.
And it was. It was big. John Lennon had been shot.

Holy shit!
you said. Then, eyeing me,
Sorry. 'Scuse me. Holy smokes. Holy fucking smokes.
You got up and changed the channel, as if this would change the news. On another channel a blond woman stood on a street corner and behind her was gathered a throng of people, some moving about and talking excitedly, some crying, some standing facing the camera with blank expressions, behind her sirens wailed and cars slipped past in the night, behind her was New York. We lay in bed as if in prison, stunned to think that somewhere else people were awake and walking around, driving, reporting, somewhere else someone had been shot and here we were on a foldout couch, missing everything.

I gotta go there,
you said, as though something important had been taken away from you, that an injustice had been done to you personally. This man, this John Lennon, suddenly he was a friend of yours: someone who understood you, who stood for the same things you did, someone who had gone crazy for a girl and lost his mind just like you had, someone who had been one thing and then turned into another to the horror of previous fans. Already news had spread and people were standing in front of the hospital in which he'd died.
I gotta go there
, you said.
I gotta get there.

I said the thing I always said, the only phrase I knew. In those days I was a joiner, a follower, a disciple. I said, “Me too.”

You looked at me and raised an eyebrow. The next day was a school day. “We'll pretend you're sick,” you said. “We'll say you were up puking all night. First thing tomorrow, we'll drop Malinda off and then we'll go.”

What I remember best from that trip isn't the long drive, how John Lennon was playing on every radio station and how this made us feel like a part of something; it isn't the thrill of the city approaching, approaching, and finally appearing, tall and glimmering; it isn't the sight, from Michelle's window, of so many things I'd never seen before—a car entirely covered with bumper stickers, a man with a Mohawk so spiked it looked like weaponry, cars without tires abandoned in the street, dogs in sweaters, two men holding hands, taxicabs by the dozens, and the people, people, people, so many people everywhere it didn't seem possible to me that they could all have been born. It isn't even the Dakota, grand and towering and spooky, or the adjacent crowd in Central Park, the hundreds of people standing together in a massive huddle, most of them motionless in reverence but some wandering about, one red-haired woman sobbing and sobbing, talking to everyone and no one in particular, saying: “He's not dead, he's not dead, it isn't true, they're just saying that.” It isn't the way people were singing his songs, wobbly and slow, in a rueful key. It isn't even the stupefying notion that a person, one single person, had mattered so much to so many.

What I remember best isn't any of these things, but a small moment that took place in Harlem, a world away from John Lennon and those who mourned him. We'd started for home and the driving was hard for you at first, so many cars, so many pedestrians, so many one-way streets, so many flashing lights, so many signs with symbols and names unfamiliar to us, so much peripheral noise and motion (the air was alive with horns and sirens and shouts), but then you seemed to give in to it, you seemed to stop looking for whatever it was you meant to find, and you were just driving, looking, wandering, going from street to street and neighborhood to neighborhood, each different from the last, each suggesting a million different lives. This was what we were doing when we wandered into Harlem, and suddenly it seemed we'd wandered into the shadowy remnants of a lost city. In this place there had once been businesses but many of them—most of them, it seemed—had failed. In this place people had bought and sold all manner of goods, the signs were still hanging above the doorways but the doors themselves, the windows through which one might have looked, intent on some treasure, the glass to which one might have pressed one's nose, which one might have fogged with one's lusty breathing, now these windows were boarded up, gone, so many purveyors of secondhand clothing, big-and-tall formal wear, hardware, used books and records, toys, typewriters, electronics, all of them gone. In these falling-down brownstones people had been born and had died, had been married, had made love, had slept and worked and eaten, had lived and breathed, but now these buildings were boarded up, abandoned, many of them were doorless and looked like dead men with their mouths hanging open.

We took the first nervous breaths of people who find themselves outnumbered for the first time in their lives. We saw that everyone, everyone, everyone was black. We saw two girls with their hair in pigtails and between them, holding their hands, a woman with a red mouth, a full-length fur coat, a fur hat slanted on her head. We saw clusters of people imprisoned in puffy coats, hooded, their faces completely obscured. We saw a man dressed up in a colorful suit and shiny shoes, a long camel-colored coat, a wide-brimmed hat, high-heeled boots.
Look!
you said, as he walked past.
Look how he walks!
It was like no walk I'd ever seen. The way we walked at home was all business but this, this was expansive, exuberant, this was like a barely contained dance.