The Law of Loving Others (16 page)

DOWNSTAIRS, Maggie was sitting at the kitchen table rolling a blunt (that was so the kind of thing she would do, not smoke a joint, but a
blunt
).

“Hey guys,” she said, “how's it going?” Her voice was low, raspy. A guy was sitting next to her who I assumed was her boyfriend, with long dreads twisted up into a bun. He stared at his phone and barely looked up when we got there.

“MY parents aren't coming back for a while,” Maggie said, “so we can do whatever. Feel free to take a drink from the liquor cabinet.”

“Let's go to the carousel,” her boyfriend suggested.

“Sure,” Maggie said. “But we have to be careful.” We filled glasses with vodka and Diet Coke and walked down the hall. Daniel whispered to me that Maggie's stepdad collected carousel horses.

“I'm sorry, what?” I asked.

I followed them down the hallway, and into an otherwise empty den.

The horses were beautiful. Half a dozen wooden ones, mounted on posts, and like a carousel stopped in time, each horse was at a different height, their legs bent midair. Maggie gave Daniel her drink to hold and swung a leg over a glossy saddle.

“I mean, it's ridiculous,” she said. “So embarrassing. But whatever. I love them. They're my babies.”

“This is amazing,” I said.

Maggie brushed her hand along a fake mane—so polished and smooth. I stared at the horses' eyes, wide and watery. There was something so sad, so human about them.

I had an urge to text Phil. For some reason I assumed that he would appreciate the absurdity of this moment.
I'm at an apartment that literally has a carousel in it,
I typed. But then I copied and pasted it into a text for Annie instead. She wrote back immediately.
What does that even mean? Miss you.

AFTERWARD, I told Daniel that I thought it was so annoying when white kids had dreads.

“How do you know he's white?” Daniel asked.

“I mean, he obviously is.”

“Maybe he's not. Sometimes you're so judgmental.”

I sat with it. I was judgmental. He was right, he just was.

“But admit it's still annoying,” I said.

“What's annoying about it?” (Phil, I found myself thinking, would totally get why this was annoying.)

“It's like appropriating someone else's culture,” I explained.

“You wear those little suede shoes with the beads on them.”

“Moccasins? That's not the same thing.” But then I wondered if it was, if maybe Daniel was right.

I LAY in bed beside Daniel, but I couldn't sleep. I made a mental list of all the things that were wrong between us. And no matter how excited and swept up I had been at times, if I was paying close enough attention, there had always been something off—a tiny wire that hung loose, leaving us the slightest bit disconnected. I'd always worried that he thought I was too dark, too analytical, constantly picking at things.
I'm sorry that I don't, like, get the human condition
, he'd told me once, when I'd been complaining about this nagging feeling of emptiness, some longing that I didn't quite know how to fill. But since my mother had gotten sick, this was something that had begun to plague me even more; I couldn't be this effortlessly cool, carefree girl that I wanted to be for him. I was angry about the time he picked me up at the hospital with Jamie in the car. And I was still angry about that night at school when he told me he had a migraine and was going to sleep early but really did shrooms with his friends. Sometimes I did this thing where I imagined him talking about me to his next girlfriend.
She had a lot of problems, she just, like, wasn't a happy person. She was so critical, always complaining.
I didn't want to be whatever I thought Daniel thought I was—that flawed, unhappy person. I crawled over and pressed my lips to his neck, which was so warm, always, as he slept.
Baby
, I whispered. But he was sleeping, or at least pretending to.

THE storm had come and gone impossibly fast. The next morning was sunny, the temperature in the forties. Yesterday's clean stretches of snow were already gray and dirtied, etched with footprints. I wanted to understand how everything could change so quickly. How my feelings could ambush me. How my mother could be so fucked up, so gone. How I could love Daniel, feel sick with guilt, and then suddenly, desperately, want Phil.

I had been back in Westchester for a day when Phil texted and asked if I wanted to go to the hospital with him now that the bad weather had subsided. But I couldn't. Or maybe I just didn't want to. My last visit had left me feeling both anxious and suffocated, and the last thing I wanted was for Phil to witness my mother have a meltdown. Or perhaps equally as bad, for him to see me, the way I panicked, as I watched my mother have a meltdown.

Instead, we decided to get coffee the next day, to meet at a little café halfway between our houses. It was the type of place with exposed brick walls and Christmas lights and big leafy plants that hung from the ceiling.

“I hate coffee,” Phil said, smiling, when we walked inside.

“Oh great,” I said. “Glad we came here then.”

“Will you pick something else for me to drink?”

He sat down at the table and I ordered him an Earl Grey and poured in lots of honey. It was one of those plastic bottles shaped liked a bear, and I squeezed its belly, pinched the plastic flesh together. I noticed that Phil's beard was growing in. All of his features were so dark, but the tiny hairs that came in beneath his cheekbones, above his lips, had a reddish glow to them. That he had a beard seemed like some symbol of his manliness. I tried to control the impulse to compare Daniel and Phil, but it was difficult. Daniel's face was so smooth, and at times I loved to brush my lips against its surface, but there was also something so enticing about Phil's scruffiness. Suggestive of some acquired wisdom.

We picked at a cranberry scone together.

“I hope you're not upset about what happened the other night,” he said.

The other night
had felt so long ago already, like so much had transpired between now and then.

“I know you have a boyfriend and everything,” he said, “but I just want you to know that it's okay. We were just a little drunk and we're both going through a hard time and that's all.”

“Yeah, I agree. It's all right,” I said, and then I mumbled something about trying to be friends, if we could. But my nonchalance was feigned in both directions—I somehow felt simultaneously queasy with guilt, but also intensely, crazily attracted to him. I wished that things weren't so complicated. I didn't want him to say it was okay, to blame it on our drunkenness; I wanted him to want to rescue me from my perfectly good boyfriend, who loved me, who was more than adequate but somehow still wasn't enough. And I wondered why I always wanted more, why I wasn't ever really satisfied.

Phil's phone was face down on the table. It buzzed next to a slim, bent paperback copy of William Styron's
Darkness Visible
.

“Is it good?” I asked him. I hadn't read the memoir, but I knew about Styron's crippling depression.

“I'm not sure. I always do this when my brother's having a hard time,” Phil said, “try to just immerse myself in whatever other people have to say about it, if that makes any sense.”

I told him it did, but that for me, right then, I felt exactly the opposite—I'd barely been able to read, or to focus on anything at all, for more than a few minutes.

Phil's phone kept vibrating and he flipped it over for a moment, dragged his finger across the screen and groaned.

“It's my brother's girlfriend,” he said. “Or whatever she is. She keeps texting me. She always wants to come to the hospital to see Ted and I don't know what to tell her. She's stressing me out.”

“Well, what does your brother think?”

“He doesn't really care at the moment. They're hardly dating now anyway. They've been in this on-and-off-again thing forever, and I guess they're sort of off right now. Or they were, but then this happened and she just popped in. She's kind of a melodramatic mess. The kind of person where everything always becomes about her.”

“It's a weird thing,” I said, “how when somebody is sick, you start to feel really territorial about them. Like you start to feel the need to prove your love, your loyalty.”

“You think I'm doing that?” he asked, and he picked at the corners of the scone.

“Well, it sounds like your brother's girlfriend is doing it a little bit, no? Maybe we all do to a certain extent. Or I do, I know I do. I feel this pressure to prove that I love my mom more than my dad does. And I know it's bullshit, in a way, but I really do feel it, this urgency to show that love.”

At the table next to us, a baby was screaming. Her mother gently rolled the stroller back and forth, while the older sister sat on her knees picking at a black-and-white cookie, skimming the frosting off the top with her tiny fingernails. We made eye contact for a moment and then she got up, climbed off her chair and faced me.

“Do you have Fruit Ninja on your phone?” she asked.

I laughed. “Unfortunately I don't.”

“That's okay. Do you have Scramble?”

“I actually don't have that either. I have Boggle, though.”

“That's not the same.”

“Sweetie, leave her alone, please,” the girl's mother said. I smiled at her, told her it was all right.

“If I give you a dollar, will you buy an app for me?”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Six and three-quarters, how old are
you
?”

Phil seemed oblivious to this little creature beside me or maybe he just didn't care. “Somebody once told me that having a mental illness turns you into a narcissist,” he said. Hearing that, the little girl gave Phil an exasperated look and went back to her seat. “And in a way it turns
everybody
into a narcissist. Even when it's about the other person's affliction, everything becomes an issue. It's like this hyperawareness and heightened sensitivity, all the time.”

“I know what you mean, it's like we all just isolate ourselves further and further,” I said, “spending so much time in our heads, analyzing whatever happened, and grieving alone.”

“Well,” Phil said, “at least we're not really doing that.” And there was something in his voice that I couldn't quite figure out. Maybe he was flirting with me, or maybe it was just the simplest kind of relief, a respite from loneliness.

I told Phil that one of the biggest problems I was having right then was my habit of continually questioning everything, going over things in my mind, incidents that had happened with my mother years and years ago, looking at everything through this lens of her illness.

“Like after you have a really bad breakup and then you go back and undermine your entire relationship, wondering if it all ever really happened?” Phil asked.

“Yes, exactly.”

I told him about the time in seventh grade when, for women's history month, I'd planned to do an oral presentation on Stevie Nicks. I'd read my mother some of the facts I was planning to tell my classmates, among them that the cartilage in Stevie Nicks's nose had atrophied because of all her cocaine use. My mother was horrified, and an hour later had provided me with a list of female authors for me to consider instead of Stevie Nicks. There were probably others, but the ones I remembered were Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. And now, in retrospect, it seemed impossible to ignore what bound those three together.

“I see what you're saying,” he said. “Things become tainted.”

“Exactly.”

“But it's complicated. Those women were all such talented writers, maybe your mother just loved their work. And also, all those women were depressed. Your mother isn't, right?”

I shook my head. “No, she's not, I mean I didn't think she was, but obviously I don't have the best judgment in regard to her mental health, so who knows.”

I rested my hands around the ceramic mug of coffee and for a moment he leaned over and touched my face.

“You're so cold,” he said.

AFTERWARD, we lingered in the parking lot. I stared down at the gravel and made a square in the dirt with my right foot. I felt him looking at me and then felt my face flushing.

“What!” I said, smiling. “What are you looking at me like that for?”

“I know we aren't allowed to do anything,” he said, “but can we just hang out again? Just a little? Really, just to talk and do whatever?”

He grasped me playfully, and I wondered if he was going to kiss me or hug me but then he just rubbed his knuckles into the mess of my hair, a sloppy bun that rested on the top of my head.

“Maybe a little,” I said and I twisted myself out from his grip, did a clumsy twirl. “Maybe we can hang a little.”

THERE was something about being with Phil that made me feel so at peace with myself, like in that very moment things weren't such a fucking mess, as if my thoughts were actually linear and rational. But the instant I got into my car, I felt the weight of everything—my guilt, my self-doubt, my anxiety. It was as if I were driving on the highway during a bad storm, and then just for a moment I was beneath an underpass and everything was suddenly normal—the weather was calm, the rain gone. But within seconds I'd driven through the underpass, and water was slapping across the windshield again, loud and unrelenting.

AFTER the conversation with Phil about his brother's girlfriend, I started to wonder about my parents; what had it been like when my mother had her first psychotic break all those years ago? Why had my father stayed with her, and was he ever plagued by his decision? It seemed almost impossible to imagine—they were barely older than I was and had been forced to deal with really serious issues (it wasn't as though my mother had some chronic sinus infection that my father would be aware of every so often).

It occurred to me that I knew so little about my parents' relationship, particularly about that time in their lives. All I'd seen were a handful of artifacts: dried lilies from their wedding pressed into a cellophane sheath; an old Tufts spiral notebook of my mother's, in which she had doodled my father's name in small, tightly wound script all over the back cover (this had been kept for decades, in the attic of my grandmother's house in Queens); a photograph of my parents from their junior year that was paper-clipped to a program of a recital that she was in. She was dressed in a short paisley dress and her hair was straight—apparently she'd ironed it on an actual ironing board—parted down the center; my father was in perfectly round wire-rimmed glasses and sporting something resembling an afro.

I parked the car outside my parents' house and put the heat way up and let it idle, which I knew my father would've yelled at me about. I thought of my mother's friend Andrea, whom I imagined had been present for so much in my mother's life—my parents' courtship, her first breakdown, who knew what else. But I didn't have her number and instead texted my aunt Elaine. 

Are you busy, can we talk?

I have a million questions for you.

I waited for her to respond and turned the car on and off every few minutes, waited for the cold to seep back in and then put the heat back on. Elaine called a little while later and I said, “Can you just tell me everything about that time? From when my mother first got sick and went to the hospital? And what had my father been like then?”