Losing It (12 page)

Once when I came home from work she was in the garden and called me over and she took my wrist and pressed something into my hand. It was an arrowhead. “See,” she said. It was black and pointed and hard as all get-out.

I knew that in bed she would be frank and jubilant, if she ever had the chance. She would let her hair down next to a campfire. She would squat in the mornings, outside the tent, to make coffee. She would look at a lover across a campfire with all kinds of mischievous understanding. She would be playful, with a wolf-mother protectiveness, and also a lot of fun.

I could see all these things about her, or so it seemed, and yet none of them told me anything; said anything about why she was in the state she was in, why she hadn't ever been with a man—a more womanly woman seemed to have never existed, and you
would agree if you saw her in one of her freshly laundered linen shirts, her chest heaving as she dug for something in the garden, looking up and wiping the sweat from her brow with a gloved wrist, tying her hair up with all this elegant authority. I could picture her waving to someone, a person she loved, in the distance, her alloy of grit and hope shining and shining.

One day in late June, about a month into my stay, I had to pick her up from work. Her car was in the shop and her offices, in a Victorian house a block from downtown, were more or less on my way home. I parked a couple of streets away and walked there and up the steps and through the creaking front door, into a parlor with boxes stacked up everywhere and packing peanuts on the floor. A sweeping staircase led to the second level, where I could see doors with plaques on them.

“Julia?” called Aunt Viv.

I poked my head into a room and there she was, surrounded by drifts of paper and files stacked up around her. Silvery light came through the windows. Her hair streamed down, tenting her shoulders. She was wearing a long green skirt with a pattern of small flowers and a matching blazer, and her cheeks and the rolls on her neck were dappled with red and she looked too healthy and pulsing to be in this half-lit, paper-logged place.

She saw me looking around. She sighed. “It's not usually like this,” she said. “We're changing offices around; everything has to be rearranged.”

“Oh, okay,” I said.

“I'll just be a second.”

I wandered across the hall into a golden-lit waiting room. There were fresh flowers on a claw-foot coffee table. A woman at the front desk looked at me irritably. Her hair was scraped back into a hard, shiny bun and she was shoving a folder into her bag. “Can I help you?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I'm just waiting for Vivienne.”

“Okay,” she said, relieved.

“That was Melayna,” said Vivienne, as we were walking to my car. A woman with large shopping bags bustled past us.

“What?” I said.

“Melayna,” said Viv. “She's our new front-desk person. I'm not sure if it's going to work out.”

“Who?” I said. A car blared techno and zoomed by.

“Melayna,”
she said.

And then there was a man standing in front of us, blocking our way. Even though he was about the same height as Viv, maybe an inch shorter, he appeared to be looking up at her from a great distance. He had gray hair, wispy on the top, and was wearing paint-stained jeans and a faded T-shirt. He looked to be around Viv's age and was smiling a smile that melted his whole face.

“Gordon!” said Viv, surprised.

“I was just coming to find you,” he said.

“You were?”

He glanced at me.

“This is my niece, Julia,” said Viv.

We shook hands.

“Gordon owns a used- and rare-book shop,” she said to me. “Around the corner. On Green Street.”

“Cool,” I said.

“Just around there,” he said, and pointed. I nodded.

There was a pause. Someone down the street opened a jingly door.

“You left your sweater.” He held it up.

“Oh, of course,” said Viv. “Thank you.”

“I did a little more research,” he said. “It turns out a friend of mine in San Francisco has the book you're talking about. He's going to send it tomorrow.”

“Great! Thank you, Gordon,” said Viv.

“Remember”—he drummed his fingers together in a cartoonishly nefarious manner—“I have my ways.”

Viv burst out laughing.

“Yes,” she said, “when it comes to out-of-print biographies of long-dead opera singers, you're the man to see.” She had brightened and was animated in a way I'd never seen before. She reached up and touched her hair.

“I'll stop at nothing,” he said. “I'm a ruthless man.”

She laughed through her nose, smiled. “You have to be, in your business,” she said.

“All too true,” he said.

I looked back and forth quickly between them.

“Do you want to— I just made a fresh pot of coffee.” He motioned back toward his store. “You two could join me for a few minutes? I just got some new Audubon prints.” But he didn't glance over at me.

“Oh, no,” said Viv, laughing, waving her hand. “We have to get home.”

“Sure,” he said, a little crestfallen.

“Thank you,” she said, and held up the sweater. “I'll be in again soon.”

And we turned and left him standing there.

In the car, on the way home, I glanced over at Viv. She was looking for something in her purse, taking out receipts and arranging them in her hand.

“He seemed nice,” I said.

“I've known him for years,” she said, rummaging around. There was still a hint of a smile on her lips.

After a few more moments I got up the nerve to say—even though this wasn't exactly in the vein of our relationship—“I think he likes you.”

She went still, and I felt complicated wheels turning inside her.

Then she said, in an amused, taken-aback manner, “Gordon? No.”

She went back to looking through her purse.

The way she'd turned down his offer, it was like she hadn't thought it was a real proposition. Her reaction made it seem like he was joking. I thought of the way Gordon's eyes had darted all over her face when they were talking, as if he was trying to map it. What if it had gotten to the point where Viv couldn't see a real possibility when it was in front of her? He was too hesitant to make an actual move because he received all these evasive signals from Viv. And then Viv discounted him because it was never clear if his feelings were real. I drove along feeling disoriented and thinking about
what kind of impressions you can give off without knowing, and if it was possible that whole quadrants of your life could be thrown off by this kind of simple misunderstanding.

Here was someone. They rattled like noisemakers when they were next to each other. If they were both too afraid to make a move, someone else was going to have to do it for them.

She was still going through her bag. She collapsed her hands on it and sighed, irritated, it seemed, at having lost something. Then she powered the window down and closed her eyes in the breeze, the way any normal person
would.

Eight

The days shot up, wilted, and dispersed. I discovered a creek, just beyond the line of trees that bordered the back field. It had mossy banks and dank pockets of wet leaves and mosquitoes. It was there that I found a lace glove, sodden and dirty, as if from a tea party a hundred years ago, and a toy dinosaur.

One day I walked along a fence on the west side of the property that bordered a plot of land called Seven Oaks, and I found an overgrown metal bench in a copse of apple trees. On the east side of the property, if you pushed down and walked over some barbed wire, the land tipped just enough so you could see into the neighbor's farm, where a single horse and donkey stood listlessly in the heat most days, which I knew because I went to spy on them a lot, but they never did anything.

One morning there was a dead possum on the stone steps in the back. “Probably ate some poison and waddled there,” said Aunt Viv. She got a shovel under it and then dropped it into a trash bag, and the next day someone from the county came to pick it up. Once I saw a hawk dive into the ground and then fly away with a mouse.
Once, walking down the stepping-stones, I startled a green snake, turning it into a puddle of kinks and curves. I watched as it straightened itself and weaved through the grass.

I watched a lot of porn. One Saturday, with Viv out of town on some antiquing trip, I masturbated for three straight hours. I went through a time warp, lost hours, watching all the bending women and vacant men, tan, slick, violent, inside out. It was like an itchy toxin entered my brain, and everything, even the walls, seemed to be vibrating with a sex ache. I went at it with all the jumbled, smeared, neon images in my mind. I shoved myself to some end I never got to except in small, scalding increments. It was like I was trying to push a door open, a heavy wooden one with just enough bend to make me think I could do it; I shoved and slammed my shoulder against it trying to make a big enough opening to let the sun pour through, but it just wouldn't give. Fifteen tiny orgasms and one upended afternoon later I lay there with a wet back, cramped fingers, slick and depthless as a lake, displaced, deranged, and run ragged.

One night I went to an art reception at the university. I thought it wouldn't be out of the question to meet someone at an event like that. But it was really cold. There was cold white wine, and cold strawberries, and mostly only women wearing lots of colorful scarves and who knew one another, waving their arms around and wrapped up in their own concerns.

Another night I went to a hotel bar. I picked it simply because I'd driven by it a few times and it looked like the kind of place where a traveling businessman might linger for a lonely drink. It was a big chain hotel on Main Street that was trying to ingratiate itself by
displaying some local color, and so called itself an old tavern, the only manifestation of which were menus printed on treasure-map-looking paper. I ordered a cocktail and sat there for half an hour by myself, reading a North Carolina travel brochure for seniors, and the only other people there were the bartender and a trio of women at a small round table next to a blue-lit aquarium. Why were there so many women everywhere?

I couldn't get the summer to work. I couldn't crank it right. There were dark, split, bloated days where I simmered with frustration. One afternoon I stared at a lady at a craft store when I was picking up some paints for Viv on the way home from work. She had jiggly arms and was wearing a stupid wooden necklace and I hated her for the pliant way she was nodding at the clerk. For being so middle-aged and obsolete and
accommodating
.

I went on another Internet date. This one was with a guy named Chance, who was a landscape architect and an altogether way more well-adjusted person than Bill had been. We met at a historic home and walked around the grounds. He pointed out stuff about the flowers and the design of the garden and seemed like a nice guy.

We took the tour, which didn't allow us to talk much. We kept stealing glances at each other and I had no idea what they meant. Afterward he told me he'd hated the tour. I, in fact, had found it really interesting. When I told him this he laughed like I was making a joke, and then looked troubled when he realized I wasn't. There were a couple more conversational misfires as we walked down the cobblestone path to the parking area. We said a quick goodbye, giving each other a light hug and getting our name tags stuck together in the process, which caused us to be in a prolonged embrace as we
both frantically tried to undo them. When we finally pulled away from each other, his face was burning red. We turned and practically ran to our respective cars.

I joined the gym. I wanted to swim, to get the peace of mind that comes with exercise, but also I went in there with the unwieldy expectation that I might meet someone. It was an expensive place in town with flat-screen televisions everywhere and hard, compact employees walking around with walkie-talkies. Every bit of eye contact with a man vaguely in my age range seemed charged with possibility. But I didn't know how to pry them open, those looks, make anything out of them. There was someone—an older, lithe man, a swimmer with close-cropped gray hair—who would watch me in the lanes now and then. But when I maneuvered to pick up his towel, and then apologized, he looked at me with the kind of indifference that made me realize I'd misinterpreted the whole thing.

Every afternoon I still shoehorned myself into my business clothes and went to the office. I hardly ever saw Elliot. He used a different entrance than the others, and I did everything I could to avoid his end of the building. Once or twice he stopped by the front desk and tried to make conversation, but there was something apologetic and almost peevish about his manner now and I responded with professional, dismissive courtesy. It was too hard to deal with or acknowledge it—the sapling of possibility that had shot up in our previous interactions and that now lay inertly between us.

In desperation I signed up for a watercolor class at the
university. It was on my list. It's not as if I thought it would be the kind of thing that was teeming with single, available men. But then when I thought about it I could picture some older guy, scanning the room, itchy with divorce. Plus, it was the only class that still had slots available.

—

My mother's voice had a self-satisfied throatiness to it I'd never heard before.

“It's
wonderful
here,” she growled.

I was standing on the hot stepping-stones in the back garden, staring at a vine that had started to crawl up one side of the French doors. It was mid-July.

“Really?” I said.

“Wow, Jay,” she sighed. “Yes. It is.” She never called me that.

“Please don't call me that.”

“It's just . . .” I felt her searching for the words. “I've never . . . Let's just say your father and I have really reconnected.”

“Well, so, what's it like? What have you guys been up to?”

“What have we been up to?” She laughed. “We're like teenagers!”

I tried sitting on the stone bench, but it burned the backs of my legs, so I got up.

“When we first got here,” she continued, “the place was, well, it was fine, it just wasn't what we expected.” I pictured my mom making this gesture with her hand she always did, her bracelets tinkling down her wrist. “But then we met this other couple, and they told us about a different place. I said, you know, ‘Doug, they're smug,
they're hippies . . .' But then we said, ‘Why not?' and we packed our stuff, and we moved over there. They had one little cabana sort of thing left and, long story short, we ended up going to this seminar the couple suggested, and, wow, Jay. I had no idea how much I was missing out.”

“Missing out?”

“Well, I don't think I'd ever really had an orgasm before.”

“I gotta go.”

“Not a
real
one. Your father. He really moved me. He. Moved. Me.”

“That's interesting but—”

“And it's all because we said, ‘Let's get out of our comfort zone. We're here, aren't we? For something new? Well,
let's try something new
.' Our teacher, Mr. Prince, he had the most capable hands. It was in a room with a fountain in the middle. We sat on these really fun reed mats.”

“Mr. Prince?”

“He was honest, and straightforward, and the whole thing was really about healing. That's what it was about.”

“So this was some kind of like sex class?”

“Don't be such a prude, Jay.”

“I'm not!”

“I know that you young people today have all sorts of tools and know-how, but for my generation, well, at least for my
self
—little Miss Star of Collin County—I never really knew how to let go.”

“I'm glad you've figured it out.”

“I'm just happy for you. I'm picturing you out there, having all sorts of affairs, getting all of this experience. I'm just happy—happy
you've been able to explore your sexuality, happy that our society has
allowed
you to try different things, to try different men. Julia? Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“And that you didn't have to wait until the ripe old age of twenty-two to finally . . . Well, you probably didn't know this. I think I was always a bit embarrassed to tell you. But I was a virgin when I got married.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “I didn't know that.”

“Can you imagine?” she said. “A virgin at twenty-two.”

“Wow.”

“Yep,” said my mom, and she went on. They were eating cubed fruit every morning. Her skin looked amazing. I stared at the sagging trees in the distance and pictured a bunch of massive, synchronized explosions—whipping white light and people's skin melting off and vending machines collapsing like gooey plastic bubbles and windows blasting out and forests and buildings going up like tinder until everything is smoldering gristle and ash. And then, from the outside, the whole earth, there's a laser from another universe and it all gets blown up, just fucking
pulverized.