The Island (37 page)

Everyone had something in her life that put her strength to the test, and for India, it was Bill’s suicide. For Chess, it was Michael Morgan’s accident. Birdie had said that Chess “felt responsible,” and India certainly knew what that was like. She held herself accountable for Bill’s death as surely as if she’d pulled the trigger herself.

He’d left no note. But if he had left a note, what would it have said?
I asked you to come with me. I told you I couldn’t do this alone. You should have gotten me help. Wasn’t it clear I needed help? How could you forsake me? Why didn’t you care? You knew something like this would happen.

He could have written any one of those things and it would have been true.

India had eventually picked herself up and moved forward—and in rather spectacular fashion. She had, in some ways, made Bill’s suicide work for her. She built a career, a persona; she created a self. And goddamn it, she was proud of this.

But she hadn’t accounted for love. To love again was beyond her, right? She held Lula’s note in her hand.
What do I have to do?

India responded to this second letter immediately. She was no longer afraid of being caught by the officials at PAFA. She had already been caught by life’s circumstances; she had nothing left to fear.
It’s not what you have to do. It’s what I have to do.

Forgive herself.

Reconcile this and move on.

There was nothing harder.

CHESS

D
ay eighteen.

Nick stopped seeing Rhonda. I learned this, not from Nick, but from Rhonda, whom I saw on the elevator two weeks after the night I left Irving Plaza. She was coming home from Fairway, her arms laden with bags of groceries; I saw fennel fronds and artichokes. This was highly unusual for Rhonda: at home, she ate yogurt or Chinese take-out noodles.

I said, “Fennel?”

She said, “I’m cooking tonight for this new guy I’m seeing.”

I took a metered breath. “A new guy? You mean Nick?”

She looked at me as if she didn’t know who I was talking about.
Nick?
Then she said, “Oh! Nick was a flash in the pan. We were together at his show, and then I never heard from him again. He vanished.”

“Vanished?”

“Do you ever hear from him?” she said.

“No,” I said. “He and Michael aren’t that close.”

*   *   *

A few weeks passed. Michael got very sick with the flu, and I played nursemaid. I made him soup, I trekked to the pharmacy for his prescriptions, I did his laundry. I spent seven nights in a row in Michael’s apartment, I bought all the groceries, I decorated with flowers.

Michael said, “I want you to move in.”

I said, “The fever has made you delirious.”

He grabbed me. “I’m serious.”

I knew he was serious because that was the direction things were heading in: moving in together, marriage. If I was going to get out, I had to get out now. I studied Michael. He was a handsome man and he was a good man, and in so many ways, he was the
right
man. I liked the way he dressed, I liked the way he smelled, we thought the same way, we liked the same things, we were wired the same way. We never fought, and when we disagreed, we did so respectfully. He was the man I had been groomed for. He was my friend. But I was not madly, hopelessly in love with Michael Morgan.

I said, “Let’s talk about it when you feel better.”

The next day, I called Nick from work. I had never called Nick before for any reason; he sounded surprised, and wary.

I said, “Tell me to leave him.”

“Excuse me?”

“Tell me to leave him.”

“Who is this?”

I said, “If you tell me to leave him, I will leave him. Otherwise, I’m going to move in.”

There was a long pause. I tried to imagine where he was: on the street, at a bar, in a soundproof recording studio, in his apartment, which I had never seen. I couldn’t imagine. I didn’t know him the way I knew Michael, and he didn’t know me. There were so many parts of my life I feared he wouldn’t understand: my love of food, my love of reading and writing, my adoration of creature comforts—taxis instead of the subway, good restaurants, spa treatments, the fifth floor of Bergdorf’s. Michael fit in everywhere in my life. But Nick? They had been raised by the same parents, but Nick had been raised by wolves; he had a hunger, and a single-minded devotion to that which was pure and true. He loved music, he loved rock climbing, he loved the sweet high of gambling. There was no balance in his life, only flat-out passion. I wanted to live that way. Could I live that way? I considered myself to be in love with Nick, but was I in love with him or was he just the bad boy I lusted after? I didn’t know if what I claimed to want was even real.

He said, “Meet me in the park in twenty minutes.”

“That’s not going to solve anything,” I said. I would kiss him and become intoxicated and stumble away high with desire, but I wouldn’t be any closer to an answer. “What are we going to do?” I asked him. “Meet in the park for the rest of our lives?”

“I am obsessed with you,” he said.

Hearing him say it, anytime, in any way, knocked the wind out of me.

“But it doesn’t matter,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Move in with him,” he said.

I decided
not
to move in with Michael for reasons that had little to do with Nick. I wanted to keep my own space. The thought of giving up my apartment terrified me. I didn’t want to compromise my sense of self. Michael said he understood. He
did
understand; he was emotionally mature and incredibly secure. If keeping my apartment made me happy, he said, then I should keep my apartment.

I kept my apartment. I tried not to think about Nick. It was pointless! Nick was obsessed with me and I with him, but what was that? It was stupid stuff, kid stuff; it was language borrowed from the movies. Nick was a coward and I was a coward, too. Otherwise I would have broken up with Michael for reasons that had nothing to do with Nick. But I didn’t break up with him.

In October, Michael asked me to marry him. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming, and if I had seen it coming, I would have been prepared. It was our one-year anniversary and we were going for dinner to Town with Cy and Evelyn. Dinner was lovely; Cy and Evelyn were charming and fun. I loved them both with an ardor that should have unsettled me, but I didn’t plan on losing them. After all, they were Nick’s parents, too. After dinner, Michael said he had a surprise and he piled the four of us into a cab. We drove downtown to the Knitting Factory.

He said, “Diplomatic Immunity is playing.”

Evelyn squealed with delight; she’d had some wine at dinner. She said, “Oh, goody!”

I was both thrilled and terrified, which was par for the course when we went to one of Nick’s shows. Both of these emotions were heightened by the presence of Cy and Evelyn. What would they think if they knew?

We got drinks and muscled our way to the front row, where all of the groupies—most of them not of age—had coagulated. Michael seemed nervous, and I construed this as concern for his parents—not many sixty-year-olds frequented the Knitting Factory—but Cy and Evelyn were as hip and happening as movie stars. They were fine.

When Diplomatic Immunity came out onstage, the crowd went bonkers. Nick had the microphone in one hand, and with his other hand, he motioned for quiet. This was highly unusual; normally, he would have launched into “Been There” or “Kill Me Slow.” He waited patiently while a hush came over the audience. Then he said, “This is kind of a special night, and before we get started, I’d like to call my brother, Michael, on stage.”

I looked at Nick, not Michael. Nick, for all his rock-star bravado, looked green around the gills, like he was going to vomit, and I wondered if he was on something. Michael, like the natural athlete he was, leaped onto the stage using only one hand, and he took the microphone. There were the two brothers side by side—Michael in his blazer and Robert Graham shirt and Ferragamo loafers, and Nick in the Bar Harbor T-shirt we had brought him back that summer, and jeans, and a pair of black Sambas. Michael was clean shaven and professional looking; he might have been a motivational speaker. Nick slouched. He hadn’t liked school the way Michael had, he hadn’t been a team player like Michael, he didn’t have a killer instinct for doing deals and making money, and his people skills were practically nonexistent. Who walked out on a family dinner? Who canceled on Christmas? Nick was brooding and sullen and gifted and the sexiest man I had ever, ever laid eyes on. The two of them side by side was a lesson for me, and if I had only had more time to study, I might have aced the exam, but everything was moving way too fast for me to catch up. I had no idea what was going on; I thought maybe Michael was going to sing, which would have been a bad idea. Michael couldn’t carry a tune.

He said, “I’m going to be quick so that we can get to the real reason you’re all here, which is not to see me propose to my girlfriend, but to see Diplomatic Immunity…”

The crowd cheered. I thought,
What?
I’d heard him, but I didn’t get it.

Michael said, “I am in love with a woman named Chess Cousins.” Here, he pulled a velvet box out of his blazer pocket, opened it up, and showed the audience a whopper of a diamond ring. He said, “Chess, will you marry me?”

The crowd roared. I wanted to look at Nick, but how could I? It would have given it all away. Cy and Evelyn were in my peripheral vision, and I could see Evelyn beaming with happy confidence. Of course she was. Had there ever been a woman who had been proposed to in public who had said no? Maybe there had been, somewhere, but that woman wasn’t me. I nodded like an automaton and Michael smiled at me with incredible joy.
Yes?
He said, “She said yes!” And he pumped his fist in the air. Nick gave Michael a hug; Nick’s eyes were closed. The crowd was cheering. Michael dropped back down into the audience and Nick launched the band into “Okay, Baby, Okay,” which he knew was my favorite song and which they usually saved for an encore.

But it was not okay.

*   *   *

But it was as everyone expected it to be—Michael and I were getting married. That Michael had proposed in such a spectacularly out-of-character fashion baffled me. To put me on the spot in front of all those strangers? He said he wanted to surprise me. I always complained that he was predictable, that I could tell you the next words out of his mouth. He had thought of taking me to Per Se or Blue Hill alone and proposing with dessert, but that would have been what I expected, right?

Right.

Would my answer have been any different if we had been alone, if it had been just him and me and the truth floating somewhere around our heads? Would I have summoned the courage to tell the truth?

I didn’t see Nick for six months. Something had been brewing the night of the Strokes concert: Diplomatic Immunity had found a legitimate agent with the same company that represented the Strokes, Death Cab for Cutie, Kings of Leon, and the Fray. They were going to sign a record deal—the agent loved “Okay, Baby, Okay,” my song—but before they cut the album, they were going on tour for six months, opening in various B venues across the country for the Strokes and Kings of Leon.

Michael had been the one to accompany Nick to Port Authority. Nick had one duffel bag, Michael said, containing jeans, T-shirts, and his climbing gear. Michael had given Nick cash, five hundred dollars, and Nick said, “What are you, my father?” But he took it anyway.

Michael had said, “You’d better not fuck it up.”

Nick responded,
“You’d
better not fuck it up.”

I said, “What do you think Nick meant?”

Michael said, “Hell if I know.”

Michael stayed at the station until the bus pulled away; this image haunted me.

I said, “Was it sad?”

Michael said, “Sad?”

It was over. Nick was gone; I was getting married. I couldn’t seem to deal with the reality of getting married, however, so I asked Birdie to handle the details of the wedding. I was a little embarrassed about how honored she was to be asked to plan my wedding. I felt like all I had ever presented her with before were crumbs.

While Birdie planned the wedding, I worked hard and I played hard. I began to realize that my days of freedom were coming to an end. I spent more nights than ever in my own apartment; I couldn’t bear the thought of letting it go. I asked Michael if it was okay if we kept my apartment after we were married. He laughed at me. I rekindled my friendship with Rhonda, who was, conveniently, between boyfriends. We went out once a week, sometimes twice, sometimes on the weekends. We drank a lot; we barhopped and skipped dinner; we went to clubs and hailed taxis in the breaking dawn. Rhonda was impressed by my endurance and my fire. She said, “You party like a woman who just got divorced, not like one who’s about to get married.”

I received postcards in the mail. Sometimes they came to my apartment, sometimes to my office. They were from Vancouver, Minneapolis, Boulder. Most of the time the postcards were left blank except for my name and address, but one had a smiley face sticker on it (Santa Fe) and another a drawing of a stick person with a gold foil star where the heart should be (Daytona Beach). The final postcard (Athens, Georgia) said,
Yes, I do,
in what I knew to be Nick’s handwriting.