Losing It (18 page)

“What happened to the dog?”

“He was saved. A little girl claimed him, I heard. I never met her.”

“Sheesh,” I said, after a moment.

Later I tried to picture it: a bright day, her skirt billowing around her in the water. I could feel how it would be, with the waves and world wheeling around you, your clothes and shoes dragging you down as you fought the sea. Would most people have done that? Was she insane? I couldn't decide. It had sounded so logical, the way she put it. But who would go fully dressed into the ocean after a stranger's dog? It occurred to me that Viv might be one of those slightly unhinged people who, if she'd been born in a different era, or was present at a certain joint of history, might have distinguished herself as a warrior queen, someone capable of displaying unwieldy bouts of bravery at the right time. The light flickered against her face. For a moment, outside of everything, I felt a belt of affection for her, and for her strong, crazy stripe of honor. She played with the edge of her shirt, lost in thought.

We got up and put away the walking sticks, then went back downstairs and made dinner out of leftovers in the fridge. The lights came on, but only much later, in our sleep.

The next morning I e-mailed Jack. I tried not to get too hung up on the wording or the tone, because I knew I would never send it if I did. I composed what I told myself was a breezy message and pressed Send.

I looked out at the bright trees. The sun was beating down on the back garden, the hydrangeas already hanging their puffy heads.

Jack. Jack Picknell. It didn't seem like the right last name for him. Picknell implied something sterile to me, pettily bureaucratic and tucked in. And he was all craggy warmth, blades of light slicing out.

Here was my opportunity to lose my virginity in a situation where I actually wanted to, where I wasn't forcing it, the noose of time tightening around my neck. Here was something where the normal wheels of attraction, so ever present with other people, were there for me, turning the proper way. It could be a simple, unassailable, all-American summer fling. Maybe that's what I would say to my daughter fifteen years from now. “It was a summer fling.” I'd leave out the part about us meeting at a funeral and me being twenty-six. But the whole situation with Jack had the possibility of reframing my plight—I just lost my virginity to some guy I met one summer, like the kind of person for whom things fell into place like that, one fortuitous event hooking onto another until I was wearing a big floppy sweater and staring out at the waves before having understanding sex with my husband and reflecting on our lives that were ladled with the perfect amount of happiness and well-proportioned, surmountable problems.

If he would just write me back.

I tried to get on with the rest of my morning. That afternoon I sat in the arctic cool of the office, in my swivel chair, waiting and checking my e-mail, and the day continued like a can being slowly wrenched open.

Jeannette came by at one point, swishing up to my desk in one of her beachy, floral numbers, her gray hair blow-dried into its usual
apotheosis, and told me a story about how she'd contracted her son-in-law to repaint their kitchen, but he'd made a real cock-up of it, her words, and spilled paint all over the marble countertops. “A little dab'll do ya!” she said, cracking herself up.

This was just the kind of conversation I would normally try to draw out with her to prevent me from having to work on whatever assignment I'd been given. Jeannette had been there for decades, and so her seniority, in combination with her salty personality, made her pretty much unassailable in that office and no one ever messed with her or, by extension, the person she was talking to.

But I was so distracted by waiting to hear back from Jack that all I could do was offer the necessary nods of agreement and incredulity when required. She finally floated away.

At a certain point, to route myself from staring at the screen, I actually took the initiative of dusting off the crystal clocks. That took all of twenty minutes. I sat back down and checked my e-mail and my heart fell. Nothing yet.

I swiveled to the minifridge and got a minibottle of water and savagely twisted the top off and was about to start tearing off a bunch of warrant-in-debt sheets from a thick pad when Elliot appeared at my desk.

Sometimes it's as if we're all operating together in a collective consciousness where we just know, implicitly, some things about another person without being told. Or maybe this thing with Jack happened to coincide with whatever sea change in my favor was already happening between me and Elliot, in our dynamic. But he was nervous, solicitous, in a slight posture of rejection even before we'd said anything to each other.

“Hi, Julia,” he said. He was holding something in a brown paper bag. His hair was tied back in its daily ponytail and looked greasier than usual. His smile was overeager.

“Hi,” I said.

“I brought you this.” He started carefully trying to withdraw something from the bag he was holding. I had a feeling of dread about what I knew was now going to happen, and wished terribly that I could go back and prevent this series of events from being set in motion—that I would never have given him a gift and compelled him to return the favor. That I could have just trusted the summer to bear up an appropriate suitor, as it had with Jack, who eclipsed Elliot in every way, and showed him for what he was all along: a stranger, a middle-aged fluorescent-lit guy at a law firm with whom I was now and then forced to interact. He was having a lot of trouble withdrawing this object from the paper bag. He was stooping over it a little, trying, it seemed, to reach his hand down and scoop something from the bottom without upsetting the packet at all.

It was a little cactus. A little office cactus. The kind with old-lady hair coming out of it, surrounded by pebbles in a small red pot.

It was way off base, and I now had an inkling of the feeling Elliot must have had when I gave him the sandscape and he must have wondered just who the hell I thought he was that he would possibly be appreciative of such a thing. But then the more I thought about it the more I realized that this cactus actually fell pretty squarely into the persona I'd endeavored to project about myself—someone vaguely interested in Southwestern shit.

I smiled and said, “This is really cool,” with what I hoped was the
appropriate amount of warmth and authenticity, which was really hard, like putting on a wet bathing suit.

“You could put it on this prime real estate,” said Elliot, pointing at a gap at the front of the desk between Jeannette's calendar and a jar of pens. I think he meant for what he said to be inflected with a little bit of self-deprecating humor, but then somehow the moment became very grave.

“Yes, I could,” I said, and we both watched with great seriousness as I slowly pushed the cactus, a few paper clips caught in its wake, into the gap on the desk.

I stared at it for a second too long, and then looked up at him and smiled what must have not been the right smile—“Did you get it at the ol' cactus emporium?” I said—because he now seemed a little resentful, as if this had not gone at all like he planned and he was sick of the whole thing and wanted to minimize any fallout by just getting on with it and going up to his office.

“No. Nope,” he said. “The nursery. On Ivy Road.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, nodding deeply, as if this was filled with really interesting texture and shading. “Well,” I said. “Thank you. I really like it a lot. It gives this desk a more laid-back feel.”

He laughed, and then nodded, and then turned around to walk up the stairs, only to bump into Allison, who was on her way down, spilling some papers she was holding. He bent down to help her pick them up.

None of this really mattered to me, though, because when I turned back to my computer I saw that Jack still hadn't written back.

It was three o'clock. I had two and a half endless hours to go. I
rummaged around for some candy I might not have found before. I opened and shut the desk drawer to see how much force it would take for the paper clips in a little compartment to slush over. I practiced making a suction cup sound on the desk with my hand. I sighed, got something caught in my eye, and the truth was I really just wanted to start my
life
over.

—

After work I stood in my bedroom, in my underwear, in an unshowered, humid torpor. I'd come home in a black mood and lain facedown on my bed for an hour. Then I'd called Grace.

“It feels so rare, you know? That that would ever happen.” I'd told her about him, the reception, everything. “That you would ever actually just meet someone. It's like, oh, okay, this is possible.”

“But just because you meet someone— I know it's kind of thrilling that you hooked up so fast—”

“Think about it. Think about all the people you meet, the guys. I know you're with Chad, but, most of them. Talking to them, it's like, this immobile, fluorescent-lit conversation, and it does not pave the way for— Nothing would ever happen. So, to have it happen so fast like that, it means something. It means it works. There was some mechanism there.”

“We are talking about a twenty-one-year-old, remember?”

“If that.”

“Just because you guys kissed in a shed—”

“A basement. And then an office.”

“Doesn't mean there's some inherent special thing there. He's
a college guy. He was attracted to you. You were drinking and he was emotionally distraught and you hooked up. Simple as that.”

“But it's not that simple.”

“I'm not saying he won't write you back.”

If it didn't work when two people crashed together like cymbals on a summer afternoon, and then couldn't stop talking to each other, then when would it? I had a vision of the bright grass underneath the swing Jack and I were gliding on. My hands were sticky from wine I'd spilled. He'd separated a lock of my hair and placed it in his mouth.

“You have to remember,” she said, “his mom just died.”

“I know,” I said.

I was trying not to let my voice tremble with emotion. Everything was hanging by a thread. I'd been yanking the pull cord on the summer and this was the only thing that had caught and I couldn't imagine going back to, where?—Arlington? Texas?—without having accomplished my goal, and what was I going to do? I thought of myself sitting in another office. Get a job showing people houses? Make my own jewelry?

I pawed at a rug on the floor with my foot, trying to get a wrinkle out.

“Did I tell you about my mom and dad?”

“No, what?”

“They're getting separated.”

“What?”

“I know.”

“Hilary and Doug?”

“Yup.”

“Why?”

I sighed. “I can't really tell. I think they're just— The way my mom puts it, I think they've just grown apart.”

My parents used to entertain a lot. My mom wore these blue button earrings. I had the clearest picture of my dad pouring a boozy drink from a pitcher into her glass, she's laughing, her hair soft and curly and graying around her face, he's looking at her with admiration, as if she's just said the most perceptive thing in the whole world.

“Jeez,” said Grace.

We were quiet for a few moments.

“How are you doing about it?” she said. “I mean, how do you feel?”

“I spoke to my dad,” I said. I put my hand in my wet armpit and looked out the window. “He sounded, I don't know, it's hard to explain. Different. Like there was this slant to his voice I'd never heard before. It's like I could finally see him, the way anyone else would. He's a charming, slightly wayward man.”

“It is weird when you can see your parents from the outside like that.”

“Yeah.”

“What about your mom?”

“I don't know,” I said. I walked over to the bureau and looked in the decorative pitcher. There was dust and a dead bug. “She's rewriting the story,” I said. “She says now they were never content, but I remember, they
were
happy.”

“But you can never know.”

“No.”

My whole childhood—me playing in the backyard, my parents hard at work on their computers in their messy office, the supplies closet I'd open sometimes, because I liked the smell of new plastic folders and erasers, and I'd waver there, sucking it in. I saw us all from the outside—our house in our flat neighborhood, but I saw it on an incline, a slant, so that we were sliding, ever so slightly, so that we couldn't even tell until we were flying off the edge of the earth.

“What are they going to do?” said Grace.

“My dad's going to stay with some friends in Miami for a while, and my mom is going to take care of things with their business. They're thinking of selling it now. She's in a different mood every time I talk to her. I can't tell if this breakup is a new thing, or if there was something there from the beginning. A thread.”