Everybody Has Everything (27 page)

Ana looked upon the boy and rooted around for some kind of feeling. It was there, but not the texture or the size she
sensed was required. Still, she could feed him if he was hungry. Not all women could do this. The apartments of Ana’s youth had empty refrigerators, still slimy from the previous tenants, burned-out bulbs. As a teenager, she was often a dinner guest in the homes of her friends. Ana loved these evenings, reveling in the overflowing plates of chicken and bowls of vegetables, quietly taking in the large families with their regular seats at the table, the mother and father like dollhouse figures that had been placed at either end. (Who were those friends? What were their names? Ana had lost all of them, like a bough shedding ripened fruit, as she moved from school to school.) And then, out of fairness, she remembered sitting next to her mother in their favorite restaurant, against the banquette, while the waiter flirted with them both. And Ana drinking her Coke, nestled against her mother’s arm, and the two of them content in their quiet.

There had always been food. A bagel wrapped in a paper towel stuffed in her backpack. The remains from the doughnut store, or later, the catering company where she had worked as a teenager. Sitting on the couch late at night, eating pasta salad from take-out containers with plastic forks, her mother telling her about her Ph.D. that she would never finish. Poetry.

“I’m not feeling too well,” said Ana, and Diana nodded, as if it were a given.

“Come, Finneas,” said Diana, extending a hand. Finn got up from the table and walked past her hand, toward Ana. A small strand of snot joined his ear to his nose, like a purse handle. Diana reached out with a Kleenex and wiped it away.

“Up,” said Finn, his arms extended to Ana, his face tired.

Ana nodded at him. Diana said softly: “Ana, he wants you to pick him up.”

“Oh, of course,” said Ana. She bent and pulled him up, his legs tightening around her waist like a spider trapping a fly, but his hands on her neck were loose and soft. Ana rubbed his back, felt the warmth of him bending into her, his sweetness drowned out by her sadness, her humming knowledge that hers was not the body he needed, that they were caught together in this web of compromise. A smell of orange cheese in her throat.

Ana lay in bed with the lights out, trying to still her head, which seemed to keep pushing away from her, as if trying to unscrew itself. The fever came quick and angry, leaving her drenched and shaking under the duvet.

James came in with aspirin in one hand and a tall glass of iced juice in the other.

“Turn out the light,” she said, but there was no light on.

Finn stood in the frame of the door, staring. James wondered if he could yet recognize other people’s pain. His friends at daycare broke skin and bled and it interested him. He informed James of these accidents, the stickiness, the hidden possibility that a body could just leak itself dry.

James tried to imagine what played over in Finn’s head from the twisted wreck of the car: the empty face of his father, with a small scar by his lower lip. Finn had woken up screaming only that one time. His nights were deep and long. He was not yet haunted, James thought, but it would come.

Ana moaned slightly in the dark and James straightened the duvet at her shoulders. He looked over to see Finn reaching out a hand in front of him, as if trying to touch something. His hand extended into space made James think of Sarah, reaching for the boy as he toddled across the room, the two of them
laughing, and Finn reaching her to place his own small palm between his mother’s clapping hands, which would still and hold him.

James took Finn gently by the shoulder, moving him out of the doorway, shutting the door behind them. Finn resisted.

“Ana,” he said. “Want Ana.” He slipped behind James, knocked on the door, loudly.

“Finn, she needs to sleep. She’s sick,” said James.

Finn banged on the door. “Ana! Ana! Come play!”

James picked him up, and he went soft in his arms, put his fingers in his mouth and began sucking.

James carried Finn downstairs and settled him on the couch. He sat beside him, stroking Finn’s forehead, the boy’s furrowed brow.

James was used to being a study in contrast to Ana: He didn’t mind mess, could sleep in knotted bed sheets until Ana, annoyed at the lumps, roused him in the dark, smoothing and tucking. But he was struck now by the sensation that he had turned into his wife, and knots were digging into his skin. Marcus. His lost job. And upcoming losses were queuing for him, too: Finn, who might be taken back or away, and his wife, who was always leaving, and now had good reason to do so. Soon his mother and father would corrode with illness and then he would be alone, a childless middle-aged man, bald and suspect.

Oh, he missed them all, even Emma, young Emma and that fleeting moment of debauchery that might be his last. In a few years, she would lose her glimmer, and her love of risk, and become a mother to somebody. Getting older was infuriating. He needed the steady footing of his youth, the certainty of opinion, and it was gone. James took a deep, quivering breath.

On this note of self-pity, James turned to the window and saw Chuckles pulling in with his other car, not the SUV but a white van, planks of wood sticking out the back, dangerously untethered. He was taking up two spaces again, leaving a huge gap on either side. His silver SUV was parked up the street.

James placed a throw pillow under Finn’s sleeping head and stood up. He strode toward the door.

Chuckles had not moved from his van. He sat shuffling papers and smoking when James appeared at the window. In his anger, James had failed to put on shoes and stood now on the road in a pair of dark blue cashmere argyle socks. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles. As Chuckles rolled down the window, he seemed to take in James from the top of his head—the thinning hair slightly shining with wax, the ironic beard, the expensive untucked button-down shirt in a grayish pink—and then stopped at his feet. James, too, looked down then at the dumb, dog-snouted, shoeless appendages and thought:
Disadvantage
.

But oh well, he was in it now, hot with rage. Up close, James was surprised by Chuckles’s face. He had pcitured him as a kid, a know-nothing just out of trade school. Yet up close, the face was lined and browned, as if from some stain, like the hands of a leather dyer. And the guy was bigger, too, than James had supposed, as often seemed to be the case at moments like this, he noted to himself. And also, Chuckles looked angry. This anger, located mostly in the sneer of Chuckles’s lips, snuffed any small hope in James that this might go a different way (A surprise friendship from across the divide? A human interest story on the local news?). No, Chuckles did not like to have his paper shuffling interrupted, or his cigarette. This much was clear.

But what else? What next? James was now upon his enemy empty-handed, without a plan. His entire body tingled. He would, then, improvise.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said, a phrase that he knew did not match the previous furious shoeless strut across the street, the door slamming and knuckle rapping. James’s voice, too, wasn’t quite as loud or manly as he’d anticipated, but instead sounded, even to his own blood-rushed ears, like a little French schoolgirl buying a croissant from a friendly baker. It was in this dulcet tone that James delivered his kicker: “You’re taking up two parking spots. Do you think you could move up?”

Now James waited. The truck leaked a prickly odor of cigarette and rust. Chuckles took one final drag and James waited for the Bazooka Joe finale, the stream of smoke blown in his face. Instead, Chuckles turned and exhaled on the passenger seat.

Then he turned back to James and said: “You the guy who left the note?” His voice was firm, with a vaguely Godfatherish tinge.

Did he? Did he leave it? James hurried through his thoughts. If he answered yes, then that door might open and James might get picked up by his belt loop and hung from the branches of the nearby oak tree. If no, then James had officially slapped down his admission to an amusement park only for pussies, where the rides were slow and low to the ground and the seatbelts thick and castrating. He made a quick decision.

“Yeah, that was me,” said James.

Chuckles’s eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you sign it?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you sign it?”

James considered this question and how it firmly located
him on the wrong side of reason. If he had signed the note, he would not be here now. The whole thing could have been resolved at the kitchen island over one of Ana’s perfect espressos. But no, he had not put his name on it, had, in fact hidden, once again, behind his little pen and his paper, his tiny ideas, his life of distant reportage.

James elected not to answer the question.

“The point is, you have a garage, and we don’t. Why don’t you use it?” His squeak grew fuller, if not deeper, and the little French girl in him whined: “Show some respect for your neighbors! Show it! Show it!” The last words sputtered and landed on a face, one that was suddenly up against James’s, a large hamburger face attached to a larger neck and a body that had exited the car so swiftly, James had barely seen it happen. Chuckles was wearing steel-toed work boots as tall as downhill ski boots, and one of them was on James’s right argyle foot, grinding down.

“Respect this, cocksucker,” said Chuckles, not living up to his nickname, grinding James’s right foot like it was an un-snuffable cigarette butt. James closed his eyes and let the heat pour over his toes, smelling Chuckles’s meaty breath, waiting it out.

His work done, Chuckles stepped back and slammed his door shut. He leaned against the car, crossing his arms as James limped slowly into the road, backing away.

“It’s”—he squeaked—“about … courtesy!”

Chuckles barked a laugh and shouted: “This is what you have to worry about? Don’t you have a fucking family, cocksucker? Go worry about your family!”

“The social contract!” called James, limping toward the island of his porch, where he leaned on a post to straighten up,
trying to keep his crippled foot tucked beneath him. Something moved in the picture window, a blur of blond hair. Finn had not been sleeping, then. James shut his eyes against that reality.

“Have a nice day, cocksucker!” yelled Chuckles as James opened his door, suggesting that he, James, had earned his own nickname. Cocksucker and Chuckles: the sitcom no one wanted to see.

The orange tin bird that Ana had hung in the center of the door swung on its discreet nail.

Inside, James turned the lock and inserted the chain. He hobbled to the living room and immediately saw Finn, rigid and upright on the couch, staring at him.

“Who that guy?” said Finn, pointing out the window, a look of grave concern on his face. “Who?”

James sank down next to Finn, his foot throbbing. “It’s no one. It’s a guy. A neighbor,” he said. Finn looked down at James’s foot and made a sound like a lion tearing meat. “Grrr!” he said. James tried to smile, but pain shot through his leg. At his wince, Finn returned to his look of fear.

“It’s okay, Finn,” he said. And he tried to conjure up some of the anger that had taken him over there in the first place, but he couldn’t touch it. “I did a stupid thing.”

Finn looked at him. “Why?”

In lieu of answering that particular question, James echoed something he’d seen a large purple puppet utter during a children’s show on the same public television station that had fired him: “ ‘It’s not right to fight. It’s better to use your words.’ ” Finn had a look of incredulousness on his face that struck James as extremely mature.

James picked up the remote control and found an attractive
young Asian woman in a cape and bodysuit singing a song about recycling. The effect was instant; Finn turned to stone, mouth slack in the television’s glow.

Grasping the handrail, James pulled himself to the bedroom, opening the door to the strange midday darkness of the ill. Ana rattled in her chest as she slept. The room smelled of sick breath and orange juice.

James clumped past the bed to the bathroom. He turned on the light and shut the door, perching on the edge of the bathtub. He pulled his sock from his foot. The sole of the sock was thick with dirt, specks of mysterious gelatin and baby stones. His toes, as they emerged, were grotesque, red and swelling before his eyes like sea anemones. Only the little one looked undamaged and pale up against its expanding siblings.

“Ana,” he whimpered. She would know what to do: ice and peroxide and bandages. But she remained in her bed, burdened by her own illness. She was dreaming of the Max Klinger painting on Mike’s coffee table; she could hear the crunching of the grass as the man stole away, baby in arms. She could feel the mother breathing, but not waking. She tried to rouse her, to step into the painting from the outside and shake the mother awake:
Tend to your disaster!
she wanted to scream, but she could not make a sound, and she could not wake herself, either. She was trapped in the four borders of the gray and white idyll.

“Ana,” called James, but softly, too, wanting her to sleep and wanting her to wake and care for him, wanting it both ways, always, again.

O
N HALLOWEEN MORNING
, Ana left for an early meeting while the house still slept.

James awoke to Finn next to him in bed, wide-eyed.

“Hey, man,” said James, reaching for him. “How long have you been there?”

“Long.”

After breakfast, James wedged Finn into his panda suit, slipping black rain boots over the paws. The suit was too fluffy and the boots too small, and Finn looked like an inflated toy from the knees up.

“Too tight!” said Finn.

James went to the kitchen for scissors. He removed Finn’s boots, and the boy sat on his bottom with his legs in James’s lap expectantly.

“This will be better. You can just put the legs on the outside of the boots.…” James strained as he cut open the bottom of the panda suit, aware of the blades slicing close to the small toes in their bright red socks.

James put a ski jacket over the top of Finn’s panda suit. At every house, the boy stopped, running up strangers’ staircases to examine pumpkins on stoops. James dragged his injured foot, trying to keep up.