The Law of Loving Others (17 page)

She exhaled heavily. “Oh sweetheart, it was all so long ago.”

“I know,” I said. “I know, but just whatever you can give me.”

“Well, I was still in high school,” Elaine said. “I was a senior, and was about to go off to George Washington in the fall, but your grandmother really babied me and so in a lot of ways, even though I was eighteen, I was so young, so naive, really. We got this call from your father, it was the spring, probably early April? And he just said that he was concerned, that your mom hadn't been acting like herself. I actually remember that I was sitting in the living room with my friend Laurel, and—this is a horrible story—she died the next summer, in this horrible freak accident at a summer camp, where she was a counselor. She and another counselor were sailing in one of those tiny little boats out on Lake George, and it just capsized.”

This was the sort of thing that my mother had done all the time while telling stories, veer off topic, talking about a million different things. It had always annoyed me but I found solace in it in that moment—this thread that connected my mother and her sister. I let my aunt continue for a while, let the conversation wind its way back to my parents.

“How long had they been together by then?” I asked. “Did you and Grandma already know him well?”

“Well, he'd come here for Thanksgiving, so we'd already met him several times. We were already really fond of him . . . I don't remember the specifics, but he and your mother had been together for a year or two by then?”

“Okay, sorry, continue,” I said. I turned the car off again and I saw my next-door neighbor bent over on his knees sorting through his recycling. I stared at the band of exposed flesh peeking out below his waistline.

“Look, it was terrifying,” Elaine said, getting my full attention. “But I don't remember all that much. Your grandmother and I went up to school. It was springtime and the campus was so beautiful—everything in full bloom, lots of kids all over the quads, smoking grass, protesting this thing or that. It just felt like the most exciting place in the world to me. And then we get to your mother and she looked so sick—I'll never forget this hollow look in her eyes. She was my big sister, you know, and she was just . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Gone?” I asked, thinking of my mother in the hospital that first day, how distant she had seemed, how far away.

“Yes,” Elaine said. “She was gone.”

We were quiet.

“Are you still there?” I asked her.

“Your mother,” Elaine continued, “was wearing layers and layers of clothing, that image I'll never forget, pajama pants over corduroy bell bottoms, and then this blanket wrapped around her waist. She looked terrified. As though putting on all that clothing could somehow protect her from whatever it was that was torturing her. I don't know . . .”

“And what about my dad? Where was he throughout all this?”

“He was just so good to her. He's a natural caretaker, he always has been. When bad things happen, he steps up. He took charge, but not in a domineering sort of way, not at all. You know, our father had died all those years ago; we hadn't had a man in our lives in so long, and so he just kind of naturally assumed the role of the man in our family.”

“Right.” I wondered why this hadn't occurred to me before. It seemed so obvious.

“I don't know that much about your father's parents, to be honest,” Elaine said. “But I do know that they were conservative and not totally pleased with him—they wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer, a banker, whatever, and he was too much of a bleeding heart for them. And your Grandma Ruth and I, we just loved him. We welcomed him into our family. We'd been wanting a man in our lives for so long, and there he was.”

I imagined then that my paternal grandparents must have resented my mother, must have wanted, as all parents did, a normal life for their son, and there he was, twenty-two years old with this difficult burden that had fallen so heavily upon his shoulders. Did everyone think my father was some saintly martyr who gave up the gift of a normal life for this troubled woman he loved? I had begun feeling so territorial about my mother. I didn't want my parents' whole marriage, our whole life together as a family, reduced to this single, unhappy narrative. It made me sick but I couldn't think of it any other way.

“Emma, I'm so sorry, but I have to go,” Elaine told me. “Uncle Jack and I are going into the city to have dinner with some friends and he's waiting for me. Can we talk later? Tomorrow?”

She and Jack had some tiny terrier that they dressed up in argyle sweater vests, and I could hear his high-pitched barking in the background, begging for my aunt's attention.

“Yes, of course, of course,” I said.

“Look, the whole thing was awful. It was a nightmare. But she got better, she just did.”

I got out of the car and walked slowly around the neighborhood. I saw swimming pools that were covered by charcoal-colored tarps that were littered with twigs and leaves, lit-up living room windows, televisions broadcasting the six o'clock news. I walked forward and back, pressed my feet against the overgrown roots of a tree I used to climb as a child. It was freezing cold but I was sweating beneath my down jacket and I kept unzipping it every so often, needing to feel the cold air against my exposed skin.

I thought then that I understood why my parents had been so reluctant to discuss the details of this unhappily complicated part of their past. It was simply too hard for them to say the words out loud. It was like families who just couldn't bear to walk into the bedroom of a deceased child or sibling. The rug on the floor, the bedspread, the posters on the walls, all of it left untouched for years. How hard it would be just to open that door. The rush of grief that would spill out from the tiniest crack.

I was on the plane to Florida, struggling to get my bag up top, and I felt myself beginning to sweat, felt the pressure of the string of passengers who were waiting behind me. A man across the aisle held a bag from Taco Bell, the paper damp with grease. The smell, something sour and peppery, made me queasy. But then a stewardess came over and in one graceful motion lifted my suitcase into the air, packed it neatly into the overhead compartment.

Once I settled, breathing in the stale air, the faint smell of antiseptic, I started to relax, to sink into the comfort of flying. There was something about that literal suspension, about being held in the air for three-and-a-half hours, that I found so liberating; there was nothing to do but read or listen to music, no one to report to, nothing expected of me.

I picked up
Anna Karenina
; I was still only a couple hundred pages in, couldn't seem to get any further. I kept getting distracted, and now I was drifting into thought, replaying scenes from the night before in my head. My father and I had gone to dinner at a kitschy Chinese restaurant in White Plains. (I tried to think of all the times we'd gone out together without my mother, but all I could think of was when we saw
Finding Nemo
at a big multiplex on the Upper West Side and when I took him to see Neil Young at the Meadowlands for Father's Day last year.) The Chinese restaurant was elaborately decorated—the exterior was tiled with those faux Asian-styled roofs and ornamented with clusters of red paper lanterns. We shared chicken with cashews and an order of vegetable dumplings, a big pot of tea. Our interactions felt stilted, as if some kind of sticky web had grown between us. I asked what would happen when he went back to school this week, who would visit my mother while he was busy and I was in Florida? “It's just a few days,” he said, pausing with his chopsticks midair, a piece of dark-meat chicken caught between them. “I'll go after work one of those nights. Aunt Elaine will visit too. Don't worry so much.”

I stared at a nearly empty bowl of white rice, picked up each remaining grain with my fingers. The fortune cookie was stale, and it had crumbled into my hand when I tried to open it. On the way home from dinner, Phil had texted me,
Can I come see you before you leave?

I called Daniel, promised myself that if he picked up I wouldn't see Phil. But Daniel didn't answer, and I texted Phil back right away.
Yes
, I wrote.
Just for a little
. And that was when I returned to that mental list, all the things that were wrong between Daniel and me—so I could justify my longing for Phil.

When I got home after dinner, I didn't even bother going into the bathroom or closing my bedroom door. I took a lighter out of my bag, rolled up my jeans, pressed the flame to my calf and counted to ten. There. It was over and done with. All my feelings swept up in one simple gesture.

Phil came over shortly after my father went to sleep. We sat on my bed and talked. He made fun of all the things in my room that rooted me so plainly in adolescence; the magazine cutouts pasted on my walls, the old ottoman made out of inflated plastic (this had once been such a fad), photographs of Annie and my cousin Molly tucked into the corners of my bulletin board. But then he kissed me and what followed all seemed to happen inexplicably fast. He was on top of me and moving and his mouth was so close to my ear, I could feel the heat and moisture of his breath against my skin. “Are you coming, are you coming?”
he asked.

But I didn't answer, couldn't explain to him how that wasn't what this was about, not tonight, and I just held his sweaty hair in my hands, pulled him closer to me. He moaned as he came, let out a cry so sharp it seemed he might almost be in pain. I pressed my hands against his back, my legs still wrapped around him. “Stay,” I said as I could feel him starting to pull out. “Don't go, not yet.”

We lay in bed and I told him about the conversation I'd had with my aunt, how it made me admire my father in certain ways, but how I also resented the idea of him as some sort of hero or martyr who had given up so much to be with my mother.

“Maybe it's less complicated than that,” Phil said.

“How so?”

“Maybe he was just really in love with her, despite her illness, and wanted to be with her.”

“You're such a little romantic,” I said, and I planted a kiss sweetly beside his temple (an oddly intimate gesture, I realized afterward, and I moved one of my legs so that it was no longer intertwined with his).

“I'm serious! I mean, it just seems like a pretty un-nuanced view of their relationship.”

“It is, of course it is, that's what made me frustrated, seeing it in this one-dimensional way. My mother has contributed so much to their marriage, obviously. She's the backbone of our family in so many ways.”

“Right, so just make sure you keep seeing all that stuff, the full picture,” he said.

“You mean stop fixating on little things—stop obsessing over the idea that my father's parents probably think that he ruined his life by marrying some young, crazy girl?”

“Ha, yes, precisely.”

Grandpa had been sitting silently, coiled up like a snail, beneath my desk chair. He leapt up onto the bed and nestled himself right in the space between our heads. Phil reached out and brushed the fur beneath his neck. I loved watching him do this, felt oddly moved at the simple, tender gesture.

“But even if your grandparents did see it that way, so what?” Phil said. “Your parents have been married for what, like twenty-five years? They obviously grew to know her as more than that.”

“You're right.”

“I know this isn't the same thing,” he said, “at all, but my mother is really adamant that I marry someone Catholic. And she just doesn't understand how hard it is to meet
anyone
you like at all, let alone enough to marry. And it's like, if you're lucky enough to find someone you love that much—”

“Exactly!”

“Then even if they're not Catholic, or if they end up going crazy . . .”

He rolled over and faced me and I brushed my hand over his prickly facial hair.

“Oh, so you mean, you want to marry me even though I'm Jewish and I might be genetically inclined to have a nervous breakdown soon?”

I was kidding, obviously, but part of me wanted to tell him how frightened I was of becoming my mother, of losing my grip on reality, slipping into dangerous delusions, feeling paranoid and completely overcome by some kind of malignant spirit. But I worried that admitting this fear was only further evidence that it could easily happen to me, that maybe it already
was
happening to me. I wanted to know how much Phil feared turning into his brother—they shared an identical genetic makeup. How could he not be terrified?

He traced his fingers along my stomach and then down my thigh. I wondered if he would see the three burns on my legs, and if he would say anything. There was a part of me that wanted to tell him about this, the only relief I could find. Did he ever feel so overcome with guilt about his brother's suffering that harming himself seemed like such an obvious, easy way to even the score? But I didn't want him to know, not really, didn't want Phil
or
Daniel to see how much I'd been unraveling. How unhinged I felt. Though it felt obvious that if anyone would get it, it would have been Phil.

“Oh yeah,” he said then. “I'd stay with you forever and ever, even once you lost it. Even if you were shuffling around in a Seroquel-induced haze, with those little paper slippers they give you . . .”

“Okay, okay, enough!” I slapped him lightly. The conversation had taken a dangerously loving tone, and I knew it was mostly a joke but I felt uncomfortable nonetheless.

I had only slept with two other people before Phil, and the fact that we had somehow stumbled into this
thing
, whatever it was, made me feel simultaneously so sophisticated but mostly incredibly young, ill-suited for juggling two relationships when really I could barely handle one.

Before he left, Phil put an old issue of the
New Yorker
on top of my dresser, next to all the bottles of nail polish and dusty candles. He told me to read the Jonathan Franzen essay about David Foster Wallace, about what it was like to love someone so sick, how difficult and complicated their friendship was.

On the plane, I opened up the magazine, read more about Wallace's battle with mental illness, his subsequent suicide. Phil had underlined this one paragraph:
How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult—what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be—if you are not!

I kept thinking about that line, but I didn't know who was well and who was not. It felt so easy to love,
that
I could not control, but so hard to know what to do with that love, so hard to love
well
. I rested my head against the tiny oval window, and I stared out at the fields, the mazes of swampy greenery, thousands of feet beneath me.