Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (14 page)

During one of his father’s bedridden days, Max met Nadine up close again. She knocked on their door. Her face was stoically set, taut and smooth.

She wanted to speak to Rasheed. Max told her he was in bed. She considered this awhile before asking where Kelly and Rodney had gone.

“I don’t know exactly,” he said.

“You don’t know exactly, huh? When did it start? The affair.”

“I—don’t know.”

“Well, it must have happened over here a heck of a lot of the time, right?” She spoke with the cold detachment of a detective assembling information.

“I’m sorry. I really don’t know much about it.”

“You sure?”

“I believe so. Yes.” He stepped out of the way to invite her in. She walked into the kitchen like she’d been there a million times before, her fantastic hips rising up and down like a teeter-totter with every step. Their home would never be the same. It belonged to her now; she could do with it as she pleased. She’d gotten his father out of the car that day, and she could get him out of bed if she wanted. Max was eager for them to meet again. For her to save him.

She sat at the table, and Max joined her. She said, “How are you doing with all this?”

“I’m fine, but my dad’s not.”

“That probably means you’re not fine either.” Her stoicism lifted some, and she put her hand on his thigh. Her touch and light smell of perspiration proved that he’d never been filled with real physical longing until now. It differed from the sensation he got from admiring pretty girls in school, women on TV, thoughts he masturbated to (even if they were often of Nadine),
or when he’d rubbed up against Kelly. Here he felt a pull to disintegrate inside her.

“So, were you and Kelly friends?” he said. “I mean, did you think you were friends, before?”

She raised an eyebrow, unsure of whether to take it at face value or as underhandedness. “No. I guess you could say we weren’t really a match.”

“Oh. What about Rodney?” he said.

“Did he ever come in here? Inside your house?”

“Yeah.” It hurt her, and he wished to take it back. “You are a sunshine,” he said.

“Excuse me?” The right side of her mouth stretched out a confused smile. He leaned in and whispered, “I didn’t like Kelly much.”

“Why’s that?”

“It just felt all wrong from the beginning. She just kind of showed up one day. I never really knew why.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, it was always weird, even when I told myself it wasn’t. And then suddenly she was the boss.” It amazed him how gushingly he spoke to her, like he desperately wanted to tell her everything. “I mean, really, I can tell you’re worth like a thousand Kellys. Rodney’s loss, I guess, right?”

She looked both sad and appreciative of his efforts, then held the bridge of her nose and laughed down at her lap. It opened up Max’s breathing, and he sat up straighter.

“You don’t have to say those kinds of things. I’m not fragile as all that. Rodney and I weren’t much of a match either.”

“Okay.”

“How long has your dad been sick?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Three days.”

She looked around the kitchen awhile, maybe searching for clues about Max and Rasheed, about their unhappiness. Were
they unhappy? Did they seem unhappy? He hadn’t swept or dusted or mopped in a few days. She probably thought this kitchen was an unhappy place.

“How are you getting food and everything?” she asked. “Does he eat?”

“I get the groceries and do the cooking anyway. But when he’s like this he hardly touches anything. It’s the flu.”

“The flu. You do the cooking? Really? By yourself?”

“Yep.” Max got up and made some tea. For a few minutes the only sounds were of boiling water, the opening of drawers and cupboards, setting of mugs, tearing of tea bag wrappers, and the pouring of the water. He brought it all to the table.

She shifted her blank, remembering gaze from the ceiling to the refrigerator. He wondered about her father’s suicide, about his getting a haircut before jumping off that balcony. He pictured a man in a blue suit with tiny black hairs sprinkled on his shoulders, lying on the street, blood draining from his head; her as a young girl, leaning over the balcony and seeing her dad down there. Then he thought of his mother, dead in the tub. Who’d gone into that apartment and cleaned up? Who’d buried her? Who lived there now? Or was her skeleton still lying in that bath today with a pot on its head? He wanted to tell Nadine his mother had been killed. But she’d actually known her father, knew what she’d lost.

“The two of them disappeared like smoke or something,” she said.

“Who?” For a second he thought she’d read his mind. “Oh, yeah, Kelly and Rodney. I know what you mean.”

“It’s not like they did us any good, but damn, was it sudden.”

“Yeah. Would you like some more tea?” he offered, though neither of them had touched their cups. He half stood up to look into hers and then said, “Oop, sorry, okay.” When he sat back down, his knees were between her open legs.

She stared vacantly over Max’s shoulder at something in the living room. “This writer I like once wrote in a story, ‘Absurdity is punishing me for not believing in it.’ You go on living like you’ve understood the pattern of your days, like everything makes sense, and that’s when you get hacked down and reminded you don’t really control any of this trip.”

He was embarrassed he didn’t know how to respond. He glanced up at her, then down at the table.

She looked at him intensely enough to make him blush. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure why I’m bringing any of this to you. Like you haven’t been through enough.” She laughed in a self-denigrating way. “I’m tired. Not thinking straight.”

Her face swirled into itself, like water going down a drain. She repeated, “Sorry, I’m just tired,” and that triggered the waterfall in him too. He didn’t know why or from where, but he had an endless stream of blubbering. Both of their faces soaked in it now. She brought her arms around his shoulders and pulled him near. Her sobs dampened the top of his head. After a moment, he readjusted and buried his face in her breasts, breathing in the wonderful humidity they made together.

He cried harder and harder, at one point actually squealing into her bosom. Nadine laughed and bawled at the same time. When he lifted his face, he saw wet marks in her shirt that looked like one of those drama masks, not quite the comedy or tragedy one, but something in between.

His father’s health came to mind. “You’re a nurse, right?”

Her voice was sweet and static. “No. I’m a doctor.”

And then Rasheed hovered over them. Seeing him on his feet was a miracle brought on by their holding and lamenting. Unshaven, dry-lipped—his skin as gritty and gray as the margins of a newspaper—he smelled of a damp cave. Max was about to introduce Nadine properly for the first time. He would have
tried to communicate,
Here she is, after all this, we’ve found her. This is the one who will know how to love us.

But before Max said anything, Rasheed looked down at her and spoke very evenly, “Get the hell out of my house.” The stillness those words created was like driving in the pounding rain, and abruptly passing under the quiet of a bridge. So ominously calm that they may as well have been floating in space.

She stood up, putting her face two inches from his. Someone who didn’t know any better would’ve thought they were about to kiss. They faced off for a long five seconds, and then Nadine moved her head up and down, as if registering all she needed to about this man. As if all the pieces had fallen into place now. Max wanted to know what pieces she saw.

He started to miss her the instant the front door clicked shut. He had no idea he feared his father until this moment alone in the kitchen with him. A new emotion arose that he’d never experienced, at least never so strongly. A heavy disappointment, maybe even a form of dislike. His father had cast out an obviously sacred woman. Rasheed sat in her seat and proceeded to look ugly.

“Why did you do that?” Max said.

“I don’t want those kinds of people in my home.”

“Those kinds of people?”

That was not his father sitting there. Max was not looking at his father right now. No. Rasheed had been fully taken over by the flu. It had consumed him, and now he was a host for its malevolence.

Max lay in Rocket’s bed, feeling inadequate, his fantasies bouncing back and forth between demanding that his father apologize to Nadine (then remembering there was no sense in that, because he’d only be talking to the flu), and the looping
sexual fantasies he’d succumbed to since her visit. He dreamed of going over there, and of her opening the door, covered in beads of sweat, wearing only her underwear. He concentrated on the way her bra hugged her heavy breasts. She unclipped it and let them fall. That fall happened in slow motion, like the greatest conceivable deliverance. One heavy breast and then the other. It replayed over and over again. He was shirtless too, and pressed up against her. He set his hands on top of the big curve at the small of her back, and she clinched and clawed at him, breathing hard, just a couple exhalations from breaking down.

The following morning, Rasheed showered, shaved, and got a job at a Polish pastry shop. The day after that, he got hired again at a gas station he’d worked at three or four jobs ago, presumably calling it quits with the volunteer position at the warehouse.

In the night, Max stalked across the yard. The lawn was moist and bristly at once. It sounded like he was walking on a field of fish skeletons. His adrenaline thudding, the grass grew louder. Light trails slithered past. He climbed up into the tree house and let claustrophobia envelope him, practicing his idea of absolute aloneness.

The evening before his first day of the eighth grade, Max slopped down an unusually strong vodka cranberry. Fortified, he crossed the street and knocked on Nadine’s door with two Tupperware containers in hand: one filled with Maryland crab cakes and the other with two cold pepper-crusted skirt steaks in a bordelaise sauce. When she opened the door, he hugged her as if she was all that’d ever been absent from his life. The Tupperware containers overlapped and rested on top of her bottom. She tensed up initially, surprised at this contact. He didn’t expect it either, and flushed a little.

She gently pushed him away by the shoulders. “Well, hey. How you been?” She smiled, her teeth burgundied with wine. He could smell such sweet and warm things coming out of her home—like her and like tomatoes and salted pork and caramelized onions—and it felt ten degrees hotter than Max’s house. She kept him standing there, her eyes sprung wide, waiting to
see what had brought him over, like he might have news to announce. Stopped up in the same way as with the little woman at the Yangs’, he was silenced. What was it about beauty that cleaned out his head, paused his lungs, froze him in a state of idiotic panic? He was like one of those movie characters who stare dumbly at an oncoming train that is five whole seconds away from pummeling through him, its horn blaring for him to get off the tracks:
You have plenty of time! What are you doing? Move out of the way!

He had no good reason to be here. Maybe he’d hoped they would cry on each other again, the heat of her mouth and tears on his head, but she wasn’t anywhere near tears. She appeared fresh, young, even prettier than the day before.

Seeing he had nothing in particular to report, she invited him in, poured him some juice, and refilled the wineglass sitting on the countertop next to the stove. One bottle had already been emptied, and the other still had three-quarters left. There was a brightness to her house, and when he opened the Tupperware on the red-oilclothed kitchen table, his food looked grim and flaccid. The vodka in his system allowed him to find this a little funny, and they laughed at it without stating why exactly.

“No really, it looks lovely,” she said.

“Just some dinner I thought we could have.”

“Well, let’s join forces.”

He jumped when she plopped both pepper-crusted skirt steaks into the pot on the stove, bubbling with sauce and meat and greens, but then he found this funny too.

She wore sweatpants and a baggy white V-necked T-shirt. While humming a tune, she put the crab cakes on two yellow plates. She took a big swig of wine and asked him to go turn on the record player. Her visible tipsiness put him at ease. He went into the adjoining living room and dropped the needle on a Joe Cocker album already on the turntable.

So much of her home was plastic. Nothing like he’d have imagined. The couches and chairs all had clear plastic coverings. When Nadine and Rodney had moved in, he assumed these coverings were temporary protection for inside the truck. And then there were the plastic figurines on plastic surfaces, either nativity scenes or unfamiliar little mythical creatures or medieval soldiers. She had blue plastic lawn chairs, and plastic cups and plates too. The kitchen floor was a honeydew-and-brown speckled linoleum, and even the light had a glinting-plastic quality. There were three floor-to-ceiling plastic bookshelves, swollen with books and papers. Massive kitsch family portraits hung on the walls, a dozen or so people in each, huddled together on some studio stage, all dressed up in what looked like church clothes—toddlers with sweater-vests and khakis, and some of the women in colorful African boubous and head wraps.

Max learned that Nadine’s mother had gone back to Cameroon, where her two brothers lived also, to retire. She had grown up bilingual, French and English, and went to the American School of Paris for high school before coming back to the States to do pre-med. She was ahead a year and earned her MD at twenty-five, getting a residency at the hospital she worked at now. All the stuff in the apartment was furniture her family had left behind, the same furniture, plates, and trinkets she’d grown up with. She recognized the tawdriness but couldn’t bring herself to replace any of it. “None of it’s my style,” she said, “but it comforts me somehow.”

“Maybe that means it is your style.”

She cocked her head and gave the wrinkled expression of someone receiving wisdom from an unlikely source. “Okay.” She smiled. “That could be partially true.”