The Half-Life of Planets (19 page)

Eventually the day has to end.
Al, Mike, and Stan have to go back to their families, and I have to go…where? Espresso Love? Tainted. Forever tainted. Perhaps there is a lesson here about whether one should take one's girlfriend to one's favorite places. Then when said girlfriend reveals herself to be perfidious, you've lost your favorite places and your girlfriend.

The dream of having a girlfriend is dead, and so is my backup dream. If it hadn't been for Liana, I would have been able to purchase the Jazzmaster by the end of the summer. As it is, I now have a cell phone and no one I have any desire to talk to. And the Jazzmaster mocks me silently from the wall, reminding me of playing it for a girl I thought cared about me. Even if I could afford it now, I wouldn't want it. It would only remind me of dashed hopes, of betrayal. I walk out of Planet Guitar and onto the sidewalk.

The sun is still shining, but beach time is over. Bikini-clad girls with pierced navels walk down the sidewalk, their flip-flops slapping the concrete. They giggle and point at shirtless knuckle-dragging troglodytes, and I remember Joe Jackson singing about pretty women out walking with gorillas.

I have no place to go and no one to go there with. So I walk.

Eventually I take my phone from my pocket to see what time it is. This is not really important information except that Chase is usually out of the house by eight, and I do not want to be in the house before then. “Six New Voice Messages,” my phone announces.

I do not want to listen to the messages, but I call the voice mail number anyway. I occasionally get zits in my ear. Perhaps because the skin there is not very elastic, these particular zits are very painful. And it's especially painful to pop them. And yet I always do it, knowing it's going to be painful, because it is satisfying, in a disgusting way, and when the zit is in your ear, you can actually hear it pop, which is interesting. I suspect I'm listening to my voice mails now for a similar reason.

First new message. “Hey, it's Stan. Sorry to call so late, but I just got off the phone with Mike—”
DELETE
.

Second new message. “Hank. It's Liana. I—”
DELETE
.

Third new message. “Hey. Me again. I really need to talk to you. There's a lot of—”
DELETE
.

Fourth new message. “Hank. Stan again. Sorry to call so early. I'm just wondering—”
DELETE
.

Fifth new message. “Hank? Come on…it's Liana.” She sighs for a long time. “I'm back at the hospital with my dad.” I feel it would be wrong to hang up with that news. “He's okay. I think it's all okay. But I need to…It's just that I…Maybe this won't even make sense to you, but I just—I was really scared, okay?” Another sigh and a kind of laugh. “Did you know when an astronaut goes into space their body changes? Like everything up there causes the astronaut to feel different…even look kind of different. This is probably really boring to you, but I'm just gonna keep talking because you're probably not even listening anyway. I mean, you deleted me already, right?” I swallow and shake my head at my phone. She goes on. “So, the human body's like this integrated system, you know? All the parts talk to the other parts. And they depend on the parts to communicate. You probably know that already. Anyway, on Earth, bodies have an
Earth-normal
condition. The usual way of being. But in space, the system changes. That's
space-normal
.” I look at the phone. She's lost me in the astronomy. “The thing is, Hank, you're my space-normal condition. Or, I mean, you're how I want to be. Or how I am now. Maybe I was scared of how I feel about you, afraid about changing. But the kissing part—that was the old me, and it's not like I'll ever get rid of that person, because they're always in you. Like we see stars but we're not seeing them for real, just the outline of what they were. So I just fell into my old pattern, kissing somebody—that'd be Chase, who's kind of, how to say, a douche? I kissed someone I don't really like and don't care about when I should have been telling you all this instead.” She takes a big breath. “That's all.”

Sixth new message. “Hey. Stan. Forgot to tell you to come in early again tomorrow. Bye.”
DELETE
.

I replay Liana's message several times as I walk. I try to understand the astronaut stuff. I wonder briefly if this is how other people feel when I go on at length about some topic, such as the instrumentation of Love's “Forever Changes,” that is endlessly interesting to me but perhaps less so to them. I understand that Liana is talking in metaphors, though. And what she is telling me is that she prefers me and regrets kissing Chase. Liana does not care about Chase and doesn't like him. She believes him to be a douche. Insofar as a douche is something that is useless at best but that some women put into their bodies anyway, I believe her description of Chase to be wholly accurate.

I no longer know how to feel. My anger was pure and powerful. My sadness was deep and dark. I don't know if there's a name for what I feel now, except perhaps for confused. Was this something that was to be expected? It is only seven thirty, but I am hungry and tired of walking. I stop at White's Market and buy peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff and whole wheat bread. I am going to make myself a sandwich that happens to have been my father's favorite. I miss him very powerfully tonight. This is a situation that calls for a father, or so movies and television shows would have me believe. “Dad,” the teen son says, “I just don't understand girls.”

And the dad looks around guiltily, making sure the mom is not within earshot, and says, “Nobody does, son. Nobody does.”

I don't have a father. I have only his sandwich. It'll have to do.

I walk into the house and find Mother seated at the kitchen table. “Hey,” she says.

“Hello, Mother,” I say, and I unpack my bag of food on the table in front of her. She looks at it for a moment and then says, “I miss him too. God, I miss him so much today.”

I grab a knife and a plate and make myself a sandwich. “Would you like one?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says.

I make the sandwich, and we sit and chew in silence for a moment. “So you may have noticed that Chase isn't here,” Mother says. I don't say anything. “He's at Nana's.” I still don't say anything, but I suppose the shock is evident on my face. “Well, not really. I thought you guys could use a break from each other, and Papa is actually going on a three-day sail, so Chase is currently crewing Papa's boat.”

“With any luck, he'll drown,” I say.

“You know…well, I can't say I blame you for feeling that way. But we…Does it make an impression on you that I called them for help?”

“It is uncharacteristic behavior on your part,” I offer.

“Damn right it is. But we're…we're broken, Hank. Our family. We're all we have, and we're broken, and I couldn't fix it by myself.”

I have nothing to say to this.

“So I'm hoping that three days at sea with no booze will help your brother come to terms with what he's becoming. He's not really—he's a sweet boy under it all, he really is. He's just got a problem. Possibly a couple of problems. Hell, we all do.”

“I, for example, have a douche for a brother and a perfidious girlfriend.”

Mother looks at me for a moment. Then she continues. “And I can't understand why I can't keep living a life that ended five years ago.”

I don't fully understand what this means, only that it has something to do with my father, and, apart from eating the sandwich, that's a subject I do not wish to pursue any further. I decide to change the subject before Mother goes too far down that road. “Mother. I wonder if you can help me understand something.”

“I can certainly try.”

“I received voice mails from Liana.”

“I'm sure she feels terrible.”

“As well she should. But I have…she said, if I understand her lengthy astronaut metaphor correctly, which I suppose is a big if, that she was afraid of becoming someone new and so she fell back on the pattern of who she was. Does this make any sense to you?”

“Oh God, does it ever.”

“Can you explain it?”

“I don't know, Hank. I mean, it's just…I mean, your father was…well, I hadn't dated anyone like him, and then, you know, I found myself pregnant with your brother, and there I was, this punk rock chick who was pretty much defining herself by being young and irresponsible, and I had to face the prospect of growing up and being responsible. I mean, I wasn't happy being young and irresponsible, not really, but it was an unhappiness I understood and was familiar with, and it was terrifying to think of letting it go.”

“I don't think I can understand that.”

“I think you probably can. But, listen. I'm going to tell you a secret. I need you to never tell another soul—not Nana, not Chase, not Liana, not Stan, not anyone. Ever. Can you agree to that condition?”

Mother is familiar enough with the way I am that she understands the need for total clarity in situations like this. “I agree.”

“If you ever break this promise, Hank, it will cause a rift between us that will never be fully repaired.”

“I understand.”

“I went and scheduled—your father and I had a huge screaming fight about it because he was determined to have the baby, but I scheduled an abortion anyway and went to the clinic alone and sat in the waiting room. And then I went running back to your father in tears, telling him how I couldn't go through with it, and I wanted to have the baby and raise it with him. And I told him…I told him how sorry I was, and how scared I'd been. And do you know what he did?”

“He forgave you.”

“Yes. And if he hadn't, you would never have existed. I would have raised Chase on my own, and possibly found someone else or not, but
you
might not ever have walked the earth. That's how powerful it is to forgive someone, Hank. Your whole existence hung on that one act of forgiveness.”

“I will chew on that, Mother, metaphorically speaking. Literally speaking, I will chew on another sandwich. Will you join me?”

“Nah. One's my limit. Do you want to watch some TV or something?”

“I don't think so. But thank you. I barely slept last night, and I'm feeling quite exhausted.”

“You'll probably sleep better in your bed than on the basement floor. I'm just saying.”

I decide Mother is right. I go to my room and lie in my bed. And despite my fatigue, I do not fall asleep. An hour and a half later, I wander downstairs for a drink of water and find Mother in front of the computer. She snaps it shut, but not before I see that the site she is on is widowdate.com. I get my glass of water and return to my room without comment. I cannot imagine what about the scene she witnessed last night made Mother think it was time for her to start dating again, but I've become reconciled to the fact that there are many things I will simply never understand.

Another day without Liana. Another day immersed in the work of KISS. Al is excited because he has a line on some costumes, and Mike's wife can do very credible KISS makeup, to judge by the Peter Criss cat face she painted on Mike this morning.

We practice all day, and I don't think about Chase or Liana or really anything except for the pyrotechnics issue: Al is keen to attach Roman candles to the back of the necks of the guitars and bass, and shower the crowd with sparks during our finale performance of “Rock and Roll All Nite,” while Stan is understandably reluctant to subject his merchandise to the whims of amateur pyrotechnics.

I find their argument amusing, and without thinking, I find myself wanting to call Liana to tell her about it.

This, I realize as I'm walking home (sure of Chase's absence, I'm content to walk home directly from work), means that I've already made the decision to forgive her. I miss her. As far as she is from understanding me (and, it must be said, I'm at least that far from understanding her), Liana is one of the few people who seems even remotely close to understanding me, and certainly one of very few who like me because of the way I am rather than in spite of it.

I don't know if it will be torturous to hang around with her if she doesn't consider me boyfriend material. How will I react when she tells me she's dating the greatest guy? That will be horrible, but missing her all the time is horrible too.

Here is the problem: I don't know how to have a delicate conversation. And I suspect that “I forgive you for kissing my brother, and I would like to be your boyfriend, but I'll settle for being just your friend even though that would be torture to me, because I don't want to live without you anymore, and oh yeah, how is your hospitalized father” probably qualifies as a delicate conversation. And I'm sure I will screw it up somehow and lose her again.

Distracted, I microwave something from the freezer, and after two minutes, I have to check to make sure I've been eating the entree and not the box.