Love in the Present Tense (20 page)

Then I hang up. I can still hear him ranting as the receiver touches down. A few minutes later, just as I'm getting settled back down, the phone rings again. And again I jump for it.

“Leonard?” I ask, more desperate than last time.

It's Barb.

“I know I shouldn't be calling,” she says, “and I know this could get you hurt, but I had to see if you were okay. I'm sorry I didn't call sooner, before he got to you. But he just didn't take his eyes off me for a minute. If you know what I mean. Don't even ask me how he found out, because I have no idea. He might've had us followed. It didn't even seem like a wise idea to ask.” A pause. I want to say that I never expected to hear from her again. But the words won't form. So the silence stretches out. “Is he gone? Are you there alone?”

“Yes.”

“I'm coming over for just a minute. Just to see with my own eyes that you're okay. He'll be furious. But I'm going to tell him the truth, and I'll tell him it was my idea, and he can be furious with me. Okay?” Before I can answer, she says, “I just need to see you one last time.”

I open my mouth to speak, but she's already hung up.

I sit for a while with the dial tone in my ear, the words “last time” ringing in my head. Not that I hadn't known in my gut it was over. Not that I even thought I'd be lucky enough to see her one last time.

Last time. One last time.

It's just something about the finality of those words.

I'm sitting up on the couch when she arrives. The door isn't locked, and she lets herself in. I wish I'd taken a shower. I've been up all night and I'm exhausted and bloody and I don't feel clean. My hair feels dirty. My face is unshaven. I hate the sense of this as her last look at me. It isn't the way I wanted to be remembered.

“Oh, Mitchell,” she says. “Oh, poor Mitchell. Look at you. Why didn't you fight him? Didn't you even try to defend yourself? My God, Mitchell, you're half his age. I can't believe you couldn't at least hold your own against him.”

I'm so at a loss to answer that I don't even try.

I'm sitting with my eyes closed, and I feel her hand brush lightly through the front of my hair.

“You have blood in your hair,” she says.

“I do?”

“Yes, right here.” A brush of her hand again. “Dried blood.”

“Oh.” I wonder how I got blood in my hair. Since it doesn't tend to flow uphill. I decide it must have come from my nose while my head was dropped back.

“Come here,” she says.

“Come here what? Come here and do what?”

“I'm going to wash your hair.”

I follow her into the kitchen. Sit in a straight-backed chair at the kitchen sink, my head dropped back. She gives me a dish towel to put over my face, so my nose won't get wet. Though I'm not entirely sure why that matters.

I feel warm water running over my scalp, and then her fingers in my hair. I try not to think of it as a potentially arousing experience.

“It just happened so fast,” I say. “There really wasn't time to fight him.” I have to move the towel slightly to get this out.

She washes my hair in silence for a moment or two. Then she says, “Is that it? Really? Or did you feel like you weren't entitled?”

“That is such a complex question,” I say. “It gives me a headache just to think about it. Don't make me think about that, okay? I already have a headache without that.”

“I just hate to see you get hurt,” she says.

“Harry got hurt.” I surprise myself, when I hear myself say it. “I hurt Harry plenty.”

She never answers. She rinses my hair carefully. Squeezes out the excess water and towels it dry. Then she dampens a paper towel and gently cleans the dried blood off my face.

“That's better,” she says. “I couldn't stand to see you with blood in your hair.”

“So this is it? I mean, you're just leaving?” As soon as I say it, I feel a measure of her warmth slip away.

“What choice do I have?”

“You have choices. You have at least two choices I can think of.”

“Please don't start with this, Mitchell,” she says, in that voice that used to back me down. But she'll be out the door in a minute, for the last time. What's the use of backing down now?

It strikes me that the last time I made love to her will always be the last time I made love to her. That doesn't seem fair. I feel like I should have known that at the time. Maybe I could have appreciated it more. If I'd only known.

“Thirteen years,” I say. “How can you just walk away from that?”

“I've been with him a lot longer than thirteen years,” she says. Soberly. The way a stranger might talk to me. “And we have two children together. How can I just walk away from
that
?”

She's moving for the door now, leaving me sitting stupidly with a towel on my wet head. I stand and follow her to the door, knowing something desperately needs saying, knowing I better find it fast. Knowing I'm almost out of time.

“Did you love me?” I ask.

She stops in the middle of my living room. Stops walking. Stops everything. “What?”

“I think you heard me. I'm asking if you ever loved me.” I wonder why I'm talking in the past tense. I guess it feels easier, less loaded that way, but I can't put my finger on why.

Then she does something strange. Or, anyway, it seems strange to me. She walks around behind me and picks up the towel, which I've dropped, and begins cleaning up the blood on the living room floor. But there's a dried edge to it that won't come up, and it seems to bother her.

She stops trying. Looks up and sees the blood on the couch. Everything is too much for her. Too much is out of order. I see her give up inside.

“Maybe club soda on that,” she says.

And it strikes me how utterly ridiculous this is. I look at her and realize that she looks older now, and that I want to use that as an out but it isn't working. She still looks great to me. She'd still look great to anybody. But the really ridiculous part is that we're talking about club soda.

She stands up and drops the towel. “I was hoping that my actions would speak to that,” she says. “I was hoping you might guess.”

“It's not something anyone should ever be required to guess about,” I say. “It helps to be told.”

“It's hard for me to say things like that.”

“I realize that.”

“I'm sorry for the way things turned out, Mitchell. I'm really sorry about all this. I know you're hurting. But I don't know what you want from me.”

“Forget it,” I say. “Forget it. Never mind. Thanks for coming by. Thanks for checking in.”

She walks out the door. For the last time ever.

It was over yesterday. I just didn't know it.

And now it's already today.

I swallow five aspirin all at once. Drink half a glass of water.

I look at myself in the mirror and it's worse than I thought. I have blood on my shirt and neck and hands, lots of it, and both my eyes are going purplish black.

I sit down on the couch and make a terrible mistake. I tempt fate by thinking I've just sunk as low as I can possibly go. I should have known better. For a split second I wasn't even thinking about Leonard.

A minute later there's a knock on the door.

I start to say “come in” but then I think better of it.

I walk unsteadily to the door. Look out through the peephole. Make sure it's not some large professional breaker of knees.

It's Jake.

My whole body, my brain, my bloodstream turn to ice. It's like a bad dream, a moment you've long anticipated, and all your mental preparation doesn't count for a thing when it finally knocks.

I open the door.

“Mitch,” he says. He looks spooked. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Jake. Where's Leonard?”

“They found his glider,” he says. “The glider got washed up on the beach.”

“And…”

My ears are ringing waiting for the answer.

“We don't know,” he says. “He wasn't with it.”

LEONARD,
age
18:
love story with ocean

For my fourth birthday, Pearl took me to the Santa Monica Pier. That way, she said, we could have an amusement park and my first look at the ocean, all in one day. Pearl took birthdays very seriously.

It was to be my day, all day, from sunrise to the time she sang me to sleep. A regular present can be unwrapped in just a minute, and then right away it can lose its shine. Pearl liked presents that just kept going.

“What's an ocean like?” I asked on the bus ride out.

“Sort of like a lake,” she said. “Only much bigger.”

“What's a lake like?”

“Sort of like Silver Lake, only nicer. No concrete and no fence.”

“Because Silver Lake isn't really a lake, right?”

“Right.”

“It's a resivore.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“So what keeps people from falling right in?”

“What do you mean?” She was looking out the window. I think she was thinking about something else.

“If it doesn't have a fence like Silver Lake. What keeps people from falling in?”

“Well, it doesn't have slanty sides, the ocean. So you don't fall in. You have to walk in.”

“Do people ever walk into the ocean?”

“Sure,” she said. “All the time.”

“Can I walk in?”

“Sure.”

“Cool.”

I walked in. And I think I screamed. I'm pretty sure I screamed. Because it was so cold and so wonderful.

I wanted her to pick me up so I could see where it ended. And she did. But of course I never saw where it ended. It was like infinity. I didn't know that word at the time. Infinity. But I knew that feeling. And later, when I learned the word, that feeling came back.

If Pearl had taken my hand and walked out into the ocean with me—just walked out forever, never to return—I would have followed her. I think I would have been relieved. Because I'd always had a desperate sense that Pearl was about to let go of my hand and walk off into infinity without me.

And, of course, I was right.

Maybe I knew.

Or maybe all kids think that. Maybe all kids have that fear and I was just unlucky enough to be right.

Anyway. It was an absolutely perfect day.

It was a rare time when we could spend the whole day doing nothing but loving each other. I spent the whole day being her son and she spent the whole day being my mother. It was my special day, so everything was just for me. I could not have been happier.

We drank orange soda and ate corn dogs and candy bars. We looked through the cracks in the boardwalk so we could see that the ocean was down there. And how far down it was. So we could get that crazy feeling, like falling.

I pulled the coating off my corn dog in chunks and threw it off the edge of the pier for the seagulls. Mostly the pieces floated down and hit the water and gulls would dive and scoop them up. But once or twice a gull actually caught one in the air. I couldn't believe it.

Hey. This is big stuff for a four-year-old.

We went on the bumper cars, and then Pearl let me play Skee-Ball. I think I was pretty good. Better than I'd expected I would be, anyway. I remember being pleased with how I did. And I know Pearl was good because she made the flashing “you win” lights come on once, and a ticket popped out of our machine.

That must have been how we got the giraffe.

Everybody we saw smiled and was nice to us. This guy we'd never even met drove us all the way back to Silver Lake, so we wouldn't have to ride the bus.

I miss her most when I think about that perfect day. She was happy then. We both were.

The part I remember best—because it was that memorable blend of terrifying and wonderful—was that time we spent under the pier. In the dark. I thought we were going to be down there all night, but I'm not really sure why. I can't remember if she'd said that to me or not. It was all so long ago. But for the night to catch us outside in the first place was quite an event. Pearl didn't believe in going out after dark. Especially not with me along.

Not safe.

So here we were doing something certified not safe.

It was great.

When you're a kid, and your parents don't keep you safe enough, all you want is to be safe. If you're overprotected, the way Pearl overprotected me, you want danger. Thrive on danger.

Or at least you're pretty sure you would. If you ever saw any.

So there we were under the pier, with the night all around us. Every time I took a breath, I could tell that was The Night coming into my lungs. I could hear the waves come in, a sort of hissing rush of sound. I could hear people clomping around over our heads, having fun, not realizing the sheer excitement of danger we all faced.

It's like the feeling I was searching for earlier that day, when I first saw the ocean. And I saw it as infinity, though I didn't have the word to put to it. And I wanted Pearl to hold my hand and take me there so I wouldn't be left here alone.

And now here we were in a night that was so risky and exciting it was like death. And I got to go there with her.

And then just that quickly she scooped me out of there and we were gone. On our way home.

And yet the whole day was perfect.

I was also partly relieved to go home.

Pearl got me two real presents while we were there. One of them I still have. She got me a stuffed giraffe. And she got me a strip of pictures of us together. I think she won the giraffe playing Skee-Ball. My memory is a little hazy about that. Because I remember some guy running after us and catching up with us in the merry-go-round place, and he had that stuffed giraffe with him. So I figured she won it and then forgot to take it along. It's the only explanation that makes any sense.

So when I woke the following morning my head was full of a day so perfect, so full of a world I'd never even seen before—never knew existed—that I felt it couldn't possibly have happened. It could only have been a vivid dream.

But then I woke up all wrapped around this stuffed giraffe that Pearl had won for me, and the pictures were on my pillow, waiting.

So it was one of those dreams that happened for real.

I still have the giraffe. Mitch went over to Mrs. Morales's house and got it for me, pretty early on. But Pearl had taken those pictures, at my request, and put them someplace safe. And I never knew where that was.

Twice when I got a little older I went over to Mrs. Morales's house and asked was there anything else Pearl had left behind. She said no, she'd boxed everything up and taken it to Mitch's house when she re-rented the apartment.

When you know you'll never see somebody again, and you lose the only remaining pictures, it feels huge. It feels like you've lost everything.

Maybe the pictures were with her. Maybe she had lost them, but I doubt it. Because she knew how important they were. Maybe I dreamed up the photos and they never existed. But I don't think so. I remember them pretty well.

So, now, when I finally see them again, this is how I know that I'm dead.

Because I have this dream where I open my eyes, and the first things I see are those pictures. I guess
dream
is the wrong word, but that's how it feels. They're on something like a metal bar, and I can vaguely see a white wall behind. Then I have to close my eyes again. Because there's pain.

So then I think maybe I'm not dead after all. Because if I'm dead, there wouldn't be pain. Then again, if I'm alive, there wouldn't be those pictures. Because they're long gone.

It makes sense. It makes good sense to think that the other side is a place where you can open your eyes—figuratively speaking, of course—and see the one thing you lost that you want back the most.

Like when you play chess, and you get a pawn all the way to the far end of the board and you can ask to get a piece back. A fallen man, restored to the battlefield, just like that. So of course you take the most important one.

Maybe I'm alive and I'm dreaming.

I feel somebody take my hand, and I'm hoping it's Pearl, but I'm spinning back down now and there's just no way to tell for sure.

I try to open my eyes again, but they feel heavy, and there's pain, and I feel like I'm dipping down again, back into the dream.

And that's all I know for a really long time.