I Regret Everything (18 page)

“Portrait of the artist,” she said.

Immediately, I envisioned her father downloading the contents of her phone and his skull exploding when he saw my picture.

“You should ask someone before you do that,” I said.

“I baked you a pecan pie.” She reached down to the steps where an object covered in tin foil rested, picked it up, and presented it to me. “I hope I'm not being a pain.” Her fingers absently played with a set of car keys. The nail polish had shifted from purple to deep blue since we had last met. One of my female neighbors, the squat proprietor of a candle shop with a rainbow flag prominently tattooed on her bicep, strutted toward us on the sidewalk. We nodded hello. She looked at Spaulding, then at me, and rolled her eyes before she entered the building.

“I want to apologize for my crimes.” My expression must have conveyed that I had no idea what she was talking about. “For jumping out of the cab when you were doing me a favor. It was lame. And for harassing you on the Internet and making you read my emails and poems.” Spaulding seemed genuinely contrite.

“I really don't mind.” This was a considerable understatement since these interactions with Spaulding were my only source of joy, a commodity with which I had been extremely parsimonious. “I like it . . . Actually, I love it. And honestly, they were nothing compared to the email I sent you about my mother that I am now going to officially apologize for.”

“Was it true?”

“Every word. Never mind that I should have kept it to myself. It must have seemed like a naked play for sympathy. Believe me, that wasn't how it was meant.”

“I felt so close to you when I read it.”

For a moment I thought she might cry. Gone were the self-assurance, the confidence and command. She embraced me and the sensation of her body against mine was the clearest window into a heartbreaking future that would never exist. My arms remained inert. I couldn't reveal that the confessional rawness of the email, its unpleasantness and deep unease, was intended to push her away. That Spaulding was standing on my stoop was indicative of how effective the plan had been. She released me and collected herself.

“Totally pathetic of me,” I said.

“No, the opposite.”

When she told me she needed to use the bathroom I handed over the keys to my apartment. “You're not coming up?” I gave her the pie, said thank you, and told her to please leave it on the kitchen table. I was going to enjoy what remained of the dwindling light and would wait for her on the sidewalk. She gave me a bemused look then marched up the steps and disappeared into the building. Had she stuck her breasts out as she passed me or did I imagine that? She didn't dress to accentuate them; her clothing choice, other than her sandals, was the standard poetry-slam-drama-club-loose-fitting-thrift-shop uniform that on an older woman bordered on cloying but draped on someone like Spaulding was whimsical. That some kind of dalliance figured in her plans was not a great leap. Or was it? Had I, in my overwrought state of mind, completely misinterpreted? Perhaps she was simply a pseudo-sophisticated teenage girl who thought I was famous—I
had
published—and was here simply as a fan or a student or a friend.

Beth the Nurse had warned me that chemotherapy was unpredictable. There would be good days, she said, and less good ones. The weakness of the morning was gone and I felt fine, robust even. I allowed myself a sliver of optimism.

When five minutes elapsed and Spaulding hadn't returned I didn't even think about going up there. Never mind that she could have been doing anything: Rifling my medicine chest, photographing the rooms or my possessions, pictures that could find their way to some wretched blog along with captions and snarky comments. Preparing a video with her cell phone she could then upload to YouTube:
I'm standing here in the Brooklyn apartment of Jeremy Best aka Jinx Bell and if you're wondering why I'm not wearing a blouse . . .
She could have been making prank phone calls to Hong Kong. She could have a party; I wasn't going to move.

I texted:
What's taking so long?
 

She texted:
B rt dn.

Less than a minute later she was standing next to me with a copy of
The Dream Songs
by John Berryman. “I'm borrowing this,” she announced. Her hair was dry so at least she hadn't taken a shower.

“You can have it.”

“Really?”

I just wanted her to leave. “Yes, really. Now, Spaulding . . . ”

“
Now, Spaulding
,” she said, and twitched her hips, mocking what must have been the inadvertently officious tone of my voice.

A smile seeped onto my face. I wiped it off. “As much as I'd like to spend the evening chatting on the stoop . . .”

“Mr. Best, I have a problem and you need to help me.”

“What with?”

“Do you have plans tonight?” In the moment it took me to formulate a lie, she said, “You don't, do you?”

“What is it you want?”

“Have you ever driven a Tesla?” I hadn't. Nor did the prospect hold the slightest interest and I said so. “I know, right? They're so look-at-me. But here's the thing, my father and Hurricane Katrina are at some kind of college sailing team reunion so I liberated his. He never lets me get behind the wheel.” She paused to gauge my reaction. I peered up and down the street. No Tesla in sight. Spaulding was entertaining, though, and there was no harm in playing her game for another second or two. Then, with mock innocence, “Never ever.”

“I don't blame him.”

“Just because I don't have a license?”

It was difficult to tell if Spaulding was telling the truth. Who knows if she was even staying with her father this weekend? She could have arrived by subway.

“You drove your father's Tesla here without a driver's license?”

“I'm a city kid. None of us have one.” That part was probably accurate. I didn't get a driver's license until I was out of college. “Hey, the good news is I got a parking space on the street.”

I wondered if she was a virgin and then upbraided myself for sexualizing her in even the most casual way (as if I hadn't already done it hundreds of times). But how was that to be avoided after she had arrived unbidden in my office, invited me to address her writing workshop, sent me her poems, kissed me in the back of a taxi, then turned up in front of my apartment in a summer dress armed with a pie and her libido primed for interstate adventure.
Interstate.
That hadn't even occurred to me. Was she really nineteen? Someone in my uncomfortable position could in a fugue of good intentions drive Spaulding home to Connecticut and conceivably be prosecuted for violating the Mann Act.

“Good luck,” I said and began walking up the steps.

“Don't you at least want to see the car?” It would have been rude to not answer so I told her no, not really. “It's got a stick shift and I'm afraid to drive it back at night.”

“It isn't dark yet. And honestly, I'm not even sure you have a car here, much less Ed's Tesla, if Ed even has a Tesla.”

“I
swear
I do, okay? On my eyes. I heard that in a movie once.
On my eyes.
It's good, right?” There was no point in responding, but I told her yes, it was good. “Okay, look, I double swear his car is around the corner and it's getting dark and it's going to be totally dark in like half an hour.” She was right about that. The sky had slid from cerulean to indigo since the time I'd been home. “Would you drive it back to Connecticut with me, please?”

“That's probably not a good idea.”

“If you do I'll stop stalking you, okay?” Was this
stalking
? That hadn't occurred to me. Is it even possible to be stalked by someone to whom one has an entirely inappropriate erotic attraction? If she
was
actually stalking and not employing the verb with ironic intent it might have mitigated some of what churned in my viscera. “I swear I'll stop.”

“What would we say to your father if he saw us pulling into the driveway?” I had already made the imaginative leap of getting into the car, the existence of which was still not real to me, and driving to Connecticut. How had she engineered that?

“I told you. They're not home.” She managed to convey an extraordinary combination of pique and helplessness. “Please.”

“Your best bet is to come clean, tell Ed you drove down here not to see me but to hang out in Brooklyn, and take the train back. Now, really, I have to go upstairs.” I pivoted, fully intending to walk into the building.

“Are you all depressed because you have cancer?” This sentence arrived like a locomotive and pulped me. Not on the surface, however, where the skin remained intact. My entire body contracted as if in retreat from itself but I remained placid. “I totally don't blame you.”

Telling someone you have cancer is the bad version of announcing a move to another city or a divorce. The message is that life will be different from this point and the person who is receiving the information, for better or worse, will never look at you the way they did before. I asked her to please not mention it to Ed.

Her head cocked and her face turned slightly sideways so she appeared to regard me skeptically. “You really have cancer?” I nodded. “Spaulding, you are such a tool.” Her use of the third person imbued what was otherwise an uncomfortable moment with a certain loopy charm.

“If you didn't think so why did you ask?”

“The books?” Oh, the books. Those literary pom-poms, execrable cheerleaders to the afflicted. “They were on your kitchen table and I figured they were for research or something and so I wanted to make you laugh.” She made a pistol with her hand, held it to her temple, and said, “Bang.”

“Lay off the suicide gags.”

“Sorry. Shit!”

“Those books
are
for research.”

The querying look again. She smiled like I was the one joking. “So you're not sick?”

“No, I am.”

Again, her face went full fathom five. “I'm a complete jack-hole,” she announced. “Forgive me, please? I'll stop bothering you since whenever we're together I'm apologizing for something. You don't have to drive me back to Connecticut or anything. I'm so sorry. That's a total suck-fest.” Her pose had dissolved with such alacrity it caught me by surprise. There was no reason for me to do anything but say goodnight and disappear into my building.

The Tesla—it was red, the red of red flags, of warnings—was parked obliquely in the space on Union Street where it had attracted the attention of several neighborhood kids. In the front fender was a small dent. Spaulding noticed me clocking it.

“I grazed a light post.”

She tossed me the keys. I snatched them out of the air with the sportiness that comes from bad decisions rashly made. I slid into the high-tech womb. My left hand gripped the leather-trimmed steering wheel while my right palm found its way to the smooth head of the stick shift. From the passenger seat she beamed at me as if I was Cancer Boy and she the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Was that pity? Sudden-onset resentment, while nowhere in the
Physicians' Desk Reference
, was not a pleasant sensation. For a moment I thought about getting out of the car and leaving her to navigate back to Connecticut solo. But the previous weeks had been so fraught that Spaulding and her father's Tesla here in Brooklyn suddenly took on the quality of a lark. Offense inexplicably gave way to exhilaration. Incoherence and contradiction were afoot and these were the bane of any trusts and estates attorney intent on keeping his job. But how much longer would my world be woven from tangible assets, probate courts, and disgruntled family members? This was a new country and its customs mysterious.

The Tesla darted through nervous traffic as we merged onto I-95. While I concentrated on not exceeding the speed limit Spaulding asked about my prognosis. I told her everything was going to be fine. Why did I lie? Because this was too much to hand someone who had more than enough problems of her own.

“Have you ever been married?”

“Spaulding, please don't take this the wrong way, but I've already shared too much about my personal life.”

It was not my intention but Spaulding seemed offended. That couldn't be helped. Eighteen-wheelers eclipsed the Tesla. Cars careened past like pinballs. I drove like I drafted a will: with great circumspection. Although the Tesla handled nimbly, I wasn't going to open the engine up and be stopped by the police only to find Spaulding didn't know where the registration was. While it is an axiom that materialism is the ruin of Western civilization, the sense of sheer power rumbling beneath what I prayed were still healthy testicles sent sparks of kundalini shooting skyward where they fired in my brain.

As we passed Pelham, she rested her hand on my shoulder and said, “If you have cancer, Mr. Best, why not quit being a lawyer? You're an amazing poet. Everyone in the class wanted to marry you including the teacher. When you're done with the treatment you should hit the road, suck the marrow from the bone.”

“Good image.”

In Connecticut we glided beneath a blooming canopy of old-growth trees, their leafy branches offering a gently swaying benediction to the well-heeled wheeling below, and past large Colonials and mock-Tudors framed by meticulously maintained hedges and lawns.

“If you could do one thing before you die, what would it be?”

“I'd go back to Rome.”

“Then go.”

“Spaulding, I'm having chemotherapy.”

“Stop acting like you're going to die. Never give in. Your words.”

The force of her delivery stilled me. To be hectored by this sprite was disorienting. Her message, though, was essential. For the moment it was all she had to say. Together we brooded.