Losing It (21 page)

The truth is I hadn't even come close. You had to be in the top two. I'd been eighth. It was incalculable, what that meant—the vast difference between your assessment of a situation and what's actually possible.

But maybe I hadn't tried as hard as I could have. Because now, pushing off the sand—the water was lukewarm, even in the night air—I felt I had tectonic strength in my shoulders. I started swimming toward the filtration tower I thought I could see in the distance, just like Jack said. The sound of the cracking plates replayed
in my mind. What I wanted was to reach that place where you've obliterated yourself with exercise, where a seam comes apart and it all goes blank, where I wasn't imagining Viv's face as she checked her phone, called me, tried to buy time. There was no fathoming the utter mess I'd made of the summer, the nuanced and majestic ways in which I'd ruined everything. I wanted to get away from all that thinking as fast as I could. To that place where you're only pushing because of some primordial, flickering electricity—whatever it is that makes humans go.

I swam probably faster than I'd ever swum in my life. Or maybe it just felt that way in the darkness and splashing, locking stroke onto stroke and getting farther away from the shore. I swam down, and the water closed above. I clawed toward the bottom, going deeper and deeper. I saw myself from the outside, making a diagonal line toward the center of the earth, going through all the sedimentary layers, putting leagues between me and civilization. Then I pictured my lungs, two straining, bright wings in the darkness. Then inside out, far away, inner-ear agony. I swam back up. At the surface, I looked around, gasping for breath. I was in the middle of the lake. There was no tower. It was completely quiet. I could have been suspended in space.

I pulled up to the shore, and coughed, and lay there. The water lapped against my feet. I closed my eyes, and eventually went to
sleep.

Fourteen

When I opened my eyes it was still dark, and I couldn't tell if it had been five minutes or five hours. I was freezing. The sand, which had been so inviting to sleep on before, was now cold and itchy. I sat up and pulled my knees to my chest, letting my eyes adjust. There was trash I hadn't noticed before, a plastic bag and a crumpled soda can, lolling at the shoreline. A bird gave a mournful call. Back in the car, I saw that it was five in the morning. I'd slept there for seven hours.

As I drove home, and approached the fields surrounding Viv's house, I realized I hadn't been up this early since my swimming days. Sometimes it had been torture to wake up at that hour, all wrong, like combing hair against the grain, but I now realized that I missed it—the pink sky, the secret, cathedral feel of the morning.

I parked and walked up the stairs to the house. I thought I'd just go up to my room, avoid Viv since she'd be asleep, shower, and fall into bed, but then I heard a sound, a chair scraping. I walked down the hallway, and there she was, awake, in the dim kitchen, sitting at the table. She was wearing a bathrobe. Her hands were clutched around a cup of tea. Her hair was bedraggled around her
shoulders, her eyes were red, and her lips were pushed to the side in an awful way.

“I'm glad you're okay,” she said, bringing the tea to her lips, without looking at me. “Although I wish you'd been in touch with me earlier in the night.”

“Viv,” I said.

“There was a good turnout. Everybody came, like they said they would. The catering was beautiful—did I tell you I decided to have it catered at the last minute?”

“No,” I said.

“It was expensive, but it was worth it to me. I said, ‘She'll be here,' when Pete kept looking at his watch.” She glanced at me. “Incidentally, we have three platters of deviled eggs, olive canapés, and chicken skewers with peanut sauce in the fridge in the basement.”

I couldn't move.

“When he showed up, I was so embarrassed, so anxious. I think he could tell. He was such a nice man. He stayed much longer than he had to, walked around and looked at some of the other art. Of course, I was still hoping. I was still thinking, here he was. I was still thinking, things could be different now.” She looked into the distance; her chin quivered. “If Julia would just arrive with the plates. In the end, he ended up talking to one of the other women. She does stained glass. And he liked her stained glass. He liked it very much . . .” She trailed off.

Outside, the sky was starting to turn purple. The room had a surreal, suspended quality, with the light beginning to shift. I felt sick. When the silence became unbearable, I said, “I had to run an errand, at the last minute, and I was just coming back, and I got hit
from behind, at a light.” My voice sounded high and false. “And my phone ran out of battery. I couldn't call anyone.”

“The plates?” she said quietly.

I shook my head.

Viv didn't react. Finally, she said, “Your mother called. You'll want to call her back. I think she got a little worried when I got in touch with her last night trying to figure out where you were.”

With that, she got up from the table and walked to the sink with a definitive air, as if ending the conversation. I watched as she rinsed her mug, put it in the dishwasher, and then started fiddling with the dial, which had always been a little wonky. She cursed at it under her breath. Not knowing what else to do, I turned and began walking away, and then it came—her voice, with a wild, guttural quality. “Why?” she bellowed.

I whipped around, half expecting her to be hurt, missing a finger. But she was fixed on me, rage hammering.

“Why?” I said.

“Why is this here?”

I couldn't see—she was looking at the side of the fridge. She reached for something and showed me, a
National Geographic
I'd put in a magazine holder attached there.

“I—”

“Why don't you put them back?” she said. Her voice climbed in a strangled way. “Why don't you put them back where they belong? You leave them on the coffee table in the lounge. You take them out of their place in the sunroom and leave them, and it's the same with other things, books; you want to read something of mine—
fine
—but why don't you put them away? You must have
noticed—who do you think puts them away? Do you think they walk themselves back to the right place? Every single time I pick up after you, and then you do it again. I find them on top of the fridge, on the stairs, you left a stack on the piano, not five steps away from the proper place, and on the porch swing in the rain. And how you dig your toenails into the coffee table in the sunroom? And chip at it?” She was yelling, her face in disarray. Her bathrobe had fallen open and gaped inelegantly at the chest. “I've
seen
you do it and now it's
ruined
.” At this, she slammed the magazine back into the holder, which broke off the fridge and clattered to the floor.

My mouth fell open. She put a hand on the counter to steady herself.

“You're loud,” she said grimly. “Do you have any idea how loud you are? You slam every door, and you leave your things everywhere. It's not appropriate, when doing laundry in someone else's house, to leave your underwear hanging on every surface.” Her voice was climbing again. “The way you slam up the stairs without even saying hello, and you've been in my studio, I know you have—looking through my things, and that ambush with Gordon, and the way you acted at the funeral.” Her voice cracked and she put her face in her hands. Her back shuddered a little bit. A few moments passed. When she looked up, something had deflated.

“The way you carried on with Jack,” she said, wiping her nose. “None of us could believe it.”

“I didn't,” I said; my face was hot, my throat was thick. “You don't understand.”

“I'd seen you flirting, but I didn't think you would ever— He's
practically a
teenager
. His mother had just
died
.” She looked directly at me. “You were ridiculous. You were drunk.”

I wanted to run away.

“It wasn't just me, okay?” I said. The words erupted. I wanted her to know that, I wanted to get that point across.

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “You were my guest, you should have known better.”

“I know.”

“You're twenty-six years old.”

“I know that.” It came out more petulant than I meant.

“What were you doing in my room?”

“What?” I said, stricken.

“There are things— I mean, were you just snooping?”

“No.” Yes. “I was looking for cotton swabs.” I was trying to find out about you. I was trying to understand how you became the way you are. And the more and more I've found out, the less it adds up. You make no sense at all. You're water flowing in all directions. You're a different person every day. Sometimes you even look different to me. There'll be a masculine slant to your nose and chin, or you'll be guilelessly pretty. I've tried to find out about your whole life and I haven't found out anything, and we haven't become friends, and this summer is a frayed cord hanging in the air, and the mystery of you, the great mystery that I have not been able to figure out and probably never will—why have you never had sex on this earth?—is still hanging in the air. And nothing is guaranteed. And why haven't you been able to be happy? Why haven't you had this thing? When does the scale tip the other way for you, and
what are we supposed to do with this kind of unfairness? And could it happen—that your life could go off, in subtle increments, and end up bombastically wrong—to anyone? And what if you
want more
? What about what you
want
?

“Cotton swabs.”

For half a second, I thought about telling her everything. Why I'd acted the way I had that summer, what was behind my spastic behavior. Maybe she'd understand. Maybe all our misconceptions about each other would collapse into a shared heap.

Instead, I said, “Yeah.” My voice cracked. I pushed down a sob. “Cotton swabs.”

Aunt Viv squinted, and for a brief moment she looked sorry for me. She steadied herself against the counter again, and then walked back to the kitchen table and sank into one of the chairs.

We were both quiet. The clock chimed. Six o'clock.

“I had to meet someone. An old friend was in town,” I said, absurdly, my voice high-pitched and warped. “And I really thought I'd make it back in time with the plates, for the show. And then this car hit me. I ran a light.”

Aunt Viv was nodding, short little efficient nods as if I was confirming something she already knew, as if I was confirming something that had long been confirmed about her life. She put her face in her hands again. When she looked up, her eyes were wet, and she started talking without recrimination, just, it seemed, explaining.

“Ellen was the history buff,” she said, “not me. She was the one who became interested in legend, the Knights of the Round Table and all of that. I only became interested in it later. I think I wanted . . . I only wanted to carry it on for her. She had a teacher.
Mr. White. And she was going to study history. It was just an exercise, to be close to her again. The King Arthur plates, I wanted to do something she would have liked.”

I slowly nodded my head.

“She always used to read me the same part of
The Once and Future King . . .
”

After a moment I said, “They were beautiful. I could tell.”

Her eyes were shining. “You think so?”

I nodded. And we were quiet like that, for a while, suspended, it seemed, in a ragged silence. I slowly sat down across from her. I said quietly, “I thought you liked him.”

She looked up.

“Gordon,” I said. “I thought, maybe, if I could just set you up . . .”

“With just
anybody
?” She shook her head and went back to her own thoughts, a palm against one of her eyes.

We continued to sit there. My fingers pressed themselves into a beaded coaster that was on the table. I knew if I got up, and looked out the kitchen window, there would be a layer of mist. Soon, the trees in the distance would start to cast long shadows over the field.

“Aunt Viv,” I said. She turned toward me. I swallowed. “Why are you a virgin?”

She stared at me for a moment. She took a deep breath. I saw something flicker in her face, and then she exhaled and said—and I found it extraordinary not just because of what she said but because of the way she said it: “I don't know.” She said it mournfully, with a deep well of helplessness.
I don't know
, as if it was a question that had plagued her her whole life, still did, a deep wound. A
question that was indeed in the air, I could tell by the way she didn't question my questioning; worth asking, worth answering, that she had asked it of herself her whole life because it was confounding and
didn't
make any sense.

She looked at me. “I tried,” she said. She nodded to herself and dabbed an eye with the collar of her robe. She turned her head the other way, and dabbed the other eye, and then stared out the window above the sink. A minute passed. I didn't think she was going to continue, but then she said, “There was a man. Richard. He was my boss at the hospice, where I worked for such a long time.” She pulled her robe tight, wiped away her tears again as they came, smoothed down her lap. “We were really good friends. We worked together beautifully and, in a way, became really close. We had lunch together, just the two of us, three days a week for eight years. He was unhappy in his marriage and I guess I always thought . . . I don't know what I thought.” She looked around the room. “I saw him recently,” she said, glancing at me. “At the grocery store. He was there with his wife and his son. It was as if there had been nothing between us. Maybe there never was.”