The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories (6 page)

* * *

Sam stayed on his side of the room. He always did. After three weeks, Anna realized his pattern, and with it how easy it was to take off her scarf without notice. How easy it was to do the same with her sweater. Her blouse. Her beige cotton underwear. Three months later the routine had evolved. At around 6:30
P.M.
she’d excuse herself to the bathroom, bunch up her pile, and emerge fully clothed and fully satisfied. Even as she sat in her kitchen, Martin-less. More satisfied that she was Martin-less. Itching as she ate her dinner to ask how his arthritis was, how his hemorrhoids were doing, and how very exciting his day was.

One night, as she waited, Anna fantasized about choking to death. Martin would come home from work and find her dead on the kitchen floor, a giant slab of steak still warm in a puddle of watery blood, a single fatal bite missing from its side. Her funeral would probably have a slide show of pictures back from the opera house; perhaps her nephew would read one of his poems. Beef would be banned from all hors d’oeuvres. Didn’t you hear, people would whisper, that’s how she died. I just can’t imagine, they’d sob, died in her own kitchen. Anna wondered whether an article would run in the
Times
, or if she’d just get one of those one-liners in the
Westchester Daily
. Alone, in the evenings, when Martin was at the office and her daughter was living in London and her Portuguese cleaning lady was gone and her Chinese dry cleaner was gone and Sam was somewhere dark, Anna thought about such things. Thought and thought until she felt the satiating company of the guilt she’d inspire and the soothing comfort that surely she’d be missed. But then she’d think more. Think and think until she started cutting her steak into smaller and smaller pieces, overchewing each bite before she tentatively swallowed.

* * *

Anna read Sam a wedding invitation and peeled off her socks.

Anna read Sam a chapter from
The Tao of
Pooh
and unclasped her bra.

The heating vent chocked.

The tea percolated.

The clock hit 6:30, and Anna went to the bathroom.

* * *

And so it went. Twice a week, every week, for twelve weeks. Anna bought a book on Malaysian culture and another on Indian cooking and another on the faith of Tao. Martin came home, tired, old, proud. And Anna told him about the dry cleaner and the tuna salad and the similarities between Judeo-Christian monotheism and the singularity of Allah. But Anna was still sick, and she knew it. She told Martin, but he told her she was just bored. That she should just find more things to do with her day. That her knee was fine and the nausea was normal.

That night she went to bed earlier than early and forgot to leave a towel for his bath or water for his pills and lay propped up in bed beside her almanac. She had purposefully climbed in on Martin’s side of the bed, pretending to be asleep for a whole thirty minutes before she heard him sigh, walk around the bed, and lower his weight inside the cold half of the sheets. Anna pressed her face into her pillow and scrunched up her features. But Martin was snoring before he could feel the blankets shaking slightly up and down.

* * *

On Tuesday at 7:53
P.M.
, Anna was fantasizing about choking to death when her phone rang. No one called at this hour. Martin wasn’t home yet, so she hoped it wasn’t someone trying to sell her something; somehow she could never figure out how to hang up on those people. She let it ring a few times just in case it was Martin dialing in his delay—she never answered right away, never wanted to seem like she was waiting.

She picked up. It was the annoying woman who sat at the front desk of Martin’s firm. Occasionally she’d call to say he’d be running late—that there was some meeting or that his car wouldn’t start. Anna hated when she called. She had bad taste in Christmas cards and had let herself get fat.

“Anna, hi, is that you?” She paused. Her voice sounded funny.

“Yes it is. Is Martin running late?”

She didn’t answer.

“Hello? Sorry, can you hear me?” Anna hated the new phones Martin had installed last summer—she never knew quite where she should be talking into.

“Yes, yes, I can. Anna . . .” She paused again. “They told me I should call you . . . better than the police or something. I . . . I really don’t know how to say this. Anna—Martin had a heart attack.”

Anna swallowed.

“Where is he? Which hospital? Last time they took him to Pembrook and he had to stay the night. Is he on that machine yet? Let me—” But the woman interrupted her.

“Anna, I don’t think you understand. It’s not like that this time. He pressed the buzzer and we called 911, but when we got back in there he was . . . they tried . . . Anna, I . . . I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

Anna was silent.

“Oh . . . dear . . . I . . . is anyone else home?”

“No.”

“Anna . . . they did everything, really.”

Silence hung between them for a good ten seconds.

“You have a car, I presume, um, can you get to the hospital?” Anna could feel her throat tightening as the phone began to shake against her face.

“I . . .” Anna swallowed. “I’m not supposed to drive into the city at night.” She couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.

“All right, um . . .” She heard muffled voices in the background. “We’re sending someone. Sit tight, Anna, I . . . I’m so sorry.”

Anna hung up the phone and stared at her watery steak. Surely there was some mistake. The desk lady was crazy anyway. Martin would drive home in an hour or two, tired, hungry, and homesick. And Anna would make him eggs and lie next to him in bed and read him his papers or his letters or some entries from her almanac. And he would roll over to her side of the bed and stay there forever. Agree to retire for good this time. And then they’d play golf, and cook, and see a show in the city, and she’d read him the scorecard and recipes and the playbill.

Anna pushed her plate away, looking down then up then ahead, her features scrunched and paralyzed in silence. She lifted up her hands, clenching them slowly together. She stood up, walked into the living room, and then walked back to the kitchen. Martin wasn’t dead. He wouldn’t just die like that. People don’t just die like that. She pulled her steak in front of her, swallowing hunks whole, forcing down bites too large for her esophagus. Swallowed and swallowed and swallowed until it was gone. Until she hadn’t choked. Until she couldn’t swallow her throat’s other lump and let her wrinkled face sink to her hands.

Anna walked over to the phone, dialed Sam’s number, and hung up.

* * *

On Wednesday at 4:42
P.M.
, Anna knocked on Sam’s apartment door.

“Hi Anna,” said Sam.

Anna looked at him.

“How does your knee feel today?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is.”

Anna went inside and sat down.

Sam tilted his head slightly and chuckled.

“No tuberculosis or anemia or endometrial cancer?”

“No,” she said. “No, there isn’t.”

Sam put on some tea and handed her his pile.

“I’ve got a lot for you today. Two of those Saint Augustine chapters, and I want you to look at this pile of coupons.”

She read him an advertisement for car insurance.

She read him a sheet of coupons for Walgreens.

She read him a page of Saint Augustine’s philosophy.

Sam’s clicking stopped. He looked toward her as if listening for something, or smelling for something or tasting for something or feeling for something.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Sam stood up from his desk, went into the kitchen briefly, and walked over to her side of the room. Sam never left his side of the room.

“I found this on the chair and I presume it’s yours.” Sam leaned against her chair, handing her a thin beige cardigan. Anna took it from him, careful to avoid meeting his skin.

“Thank you, Sam. I must have left it here.”

Sam wasn’t certain if he was looking directly at Anna’s eyes. He was never certain with her. He could only guess, wonder, speculate until he told himself he was being silly, being egocentric, being sick.

“Anna,” he repeated, reaching out slowly, hesitantly, before placing a hand on her shoulder—exhaling into relaxation as he felt the smooth linen fabric beneath his fingers. “You sure you’re okay?”

Anna nodded, knowing he could somehow sense the motion of her head. Then picked up the book, dislodging his hand.

“I’m fine, Sam. Really.”

She listened to the sound of the tea percolating and thought about their mutual senses; it smells like cinnamon berries, it tastes like honey smoke, it feels warmer today. “Did I ever tell you I could do Black Swan’s thirty-two fouettés en tournant?”

“No.” Sam went back over to his desk and resumed his clicking. “You’ve never told me that, Anna. That’s impressive.”

Then Anna read to Sam. Read to him as he turned her words into a language of spots. A language that she now knew he could read in the steam and in the tea and in the books and in his body. In the painting and the shelves and the music and the air.

Anna brought her mug to the sink before excusing herself to the bathroom. She didn’t let him hear her turn the wrong way—but she knew when she clicked shut the front door that he’d know she’d never be back. Knew because her sagging breasts and varicose veins were covered in cotton. Knew because he could hear her tears spot his book like Braille.

The Ingenue

T
he biggest fight in my relationship with Danny regards his absurd claim that he invented the popular middle school phenomenon of saying “cha-cha-cha” after each phrase of the Happy Birthday song—an idea his ingenious sixth-grade brain allegedly spawned in a New Jersey Chuck E. Cheese and watched spread across 1993 America with an unprecedented rapidity.

“I started that! Are you kidding me!?” His face was serious now, indignant. “Literally, I started that, ask anyone from Montclair!”

“Danny, you did not start that, that’s ridiculous.” I was serious now, too. “I’m done talking about this.”

“No, no, no. Listen. I don’t know why this is so impossible to you. Someone had to start it; someone had to be the first kid to say it. I’m telling you, that was me. Eliot Grossman’s birthday party. Ask anyone.”

“This is really typical.”

“What!?” He put his wineglass down on the table.

“Nothing. Just . . . you
would
think you invented something like that. It’s just something you would think.” I was searching the cabinets for this bag of Goldfish.

“I can’t believe you don’t believe me about this. It’s really pissing me off.”

“I can tell.”

“Arrgh! This is
really
pissing me of
f
!” His eyes were frustrated and angry in a way I hadn’t seen before, and for some reason it satisfied me. I sat on the couch and opened my laptop.

In years to come he would whisper it at parties as the cake paraded by or mouth it across a restaurant table at a sibling’s birthday dinner. Cha-cha-cha, he would provoke. Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.

There was silence for a while and I knew he was brooding.

“Sometimes I hate you,” he said. He let the words hang for a moment and then came over and sat next to me, tousling my head into the pillow and kissing me lightly on each eye.

I only tell this story because it reflects why the Yahtzee was so essential.

* * *

There were six of us. Danny, the bearded Noah, the delicate Eric, the old artistic director, and Olivia, whom I hated. Cape Cod was abandoned but we were up in the artistic director’s Provincetown shack for a post-cast-party party. Danny was doing summer stock again and I’d driven up for the final performances. I actually ate a lobster by myself before I got to the theater—picking wet meat out of knuckles as I watched the summer’s final families appear from a dune drop-off and bang Boogie Boards against the sides of their cars.

The show was terrible for two reasons: one, that the show was terrible, and two, that it involved a lot of kissing. They giggled together, Danny smiling with his eyes inches from Olivia’s—pulling at her belt loop and touching her earlobe, which I’d taught him. I wasn’t usually so particular about the girls he kissed onstage but there was something about her I didn’t like. It started the moment I saw them enter together onstage—holding hands—something disgusting growing in the back of my stomach. She was masculine almost, like an attractive cross dresser, and her genuine tomboyishness unsettled me.

At the party, she wore an actual T-shirt, not fitted or branded, and a flat-brimmed hat with the name of a New Orleans bait shop in neon orange. She drank a beer from the bottle and teased the boys, who didn’t realize they stopped talking whenever she started to tell a story. I’d clicked through her pictures a few times that summer and imagined, on nights when Danny didn’t text back, rehearsals that ended in beers and joints on beaches.

“Show her the one with the square penis!” Olivia laughed, and we all lunged up a banisterless staircase. “Ricky’s partner is a painter,” she explained. “And he has this painting of a square penis.”

“It’s not that funny.” Ricky, the artistic director, was as drunk as the rest of us.

“It is, Rick,” said Noah. “It’s ingenious.”

“Fuck off.”

“It actually is!” The house was old and decorated with an enviable authenticity. We wove through rusted signs and relics from the Army-Navy store until we arrived at the painting, where everyone promptly knelt. I stood awkwardly, not sure whether or not I was involved.

“Get out of here.” Ricky whacked Eric on the back of the head. “You’re not worthy.”

“We know,” said Danny. “Trust me, we know.”

“You’re making yourself look stupid in front of your girlfriend, you know that?” It was a line from the play and everyone died. Olivia literally rolled onto her side and I felt an odd nostalgia for my high school friends and the days when everyone shared the same world of people. Noah pulled her up and I noticed the print on her T-shirt for the first time. There was a dinosaur that appeared to be riding a bike below a
REX’S FIX UPS AND MIX UPS
.
It looked familiar: I remembered someone somewhere making a joke about that dinosaur, laughing in some bar about its tiny hands leaning down toward the bike’s handles. Eventually, Noah and Eric went downstairs to pack a bowl and I slipped a hand into Danny’s pocket, holding him back as the rest tumbled down.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” He smiled. “I love you.”

“I love you too. Come here.” I pulled him into a corner of the upstairs space and we leaned against a bookcase, pressing our foreheads together. I hadn’t seen him since July and being together in groups never felt like being together.

“I miss you,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I love you.” We kissed but I could tell he wanted to go downstairs.

“You were good tonight, you know that? That part with the father, your physicality was really spot-on.”

“Thanks.” We looked at each other. It was a genuine compliment moment and we were on the same team. “I mean, the play is shit, but thank you.”

“It’s not.”

“It is.” We looked at each other again and grinned at the same time. Danny rarely admitted this type of thing and I was overcome with affection. I wanted to crawl into something and lie with our faces touching for as long as it took to feel like I didn’t miss him anymore. I wanted to do this, to tell him this, to say I wanted to get out of the house and into the car and onto the freeway where we could zoom away from all the attractive people I didn’t know, but Danny was looking at me, almost studying me, and took my shoulders in his hands as if surprised.

“Argh, man,” he said. “I missed you. I really did miss you.” His eyes were sad and he kissed me on the nose. It was as if he’d just realized it. Just actualized the refrain of our phone calls.

“Good,” I said. Worried, rather than hurt, that I might have to pull him back in. That he was sad to be heading home to our TV shows and late-night snacks and unmade cave of a bed.

We were so compatible, really. Really just so compatible in a number of ways. We had the same favorite band, the same exact one, and I used to act too, in college. We bonded over this at the party where we first met—some mutual friend of a friend and I had walked into an unlocked bathroom to reveal him rinsing with the apartment owner’s Listerine. We’d found this remarkably hilarious and I liked the way he made fun of me while holding eye contact. When we walked back to his place, I told him I had quit theater because it was never my primary focus to begin with and, besides, I was never that good. He said I was probably being modest (Danny always flirted with flattery) and for the first and only time in my life, I made out a good deal on the subway.

“You know the Books are playing in Prospect Park next weekend,” I said, my hands still in his pockets. “We should go.”

“Yeah, for sure.”

“Go to that Vietnamese place before.”

“Yeah, totally.” We could hear the wind rattling the deck umbrella in its metal holder and I thought for a minute about the vast stretch of beach we couldn’t see in the dark—about how the tide could be dead low or dead high and we wouldn’t even know. But the thought of Brooklyn had popped the image of Rex’s Fix Ups back into my head and I almost said something but decided not to. The shop was on Dean Street. The shirt belonged to Danny.

I heard shouting from the kitchen and it sounded like Olivia was laughing at Eric for spilling some kind of drink.

“I’ll kill you!” she shouted. “Hom-o, hom-o!” Chairs seemed to be sliding and we heard something drop. “Hom-o, I’ll eat you!” Danny tried not to smile but his face broke and he stifled a laugh.

“I’m sorry,” he said, still grinning. “I’m sorry, it’s just . . . I’m sorry.” He couldn’t keep a straight face.

“It’s fine,” I said, smiling back at him. “It’s fine. Let’s go.”

I kissed him on the cheek and we turned to leave, the umbrella still rattling from outside the glass.

It wasn’t until we were walking back down the stairs toward the maze of antiques and squealing actors that I truly realized I despised Olivia and her flat-brimmed hat with an unbearable and irrational intensity.

The next day, I watched the play again. It was a matinee, so the cast scraped out of Ricky’s house at eleven o’clock with the pouty camaraderie of a communal hangover. Too tired and confused the night before, Danny and I had had sex that morning—emerging last into the kitchen, secretly superior. I ordered another to-go lobster on the way to the theater and it came with its claws flopping over the sides of a fast food container, which I liked. I sat in the back again but felt a strange sinking when the lights dimmed. Danny looked handsome in his costume: styled, slightly, and forced to wear jeans that fit him.

I don’t think I’d ever had a truly violent impulse before that afternoon, sitting in a velvet chair in a dark theater as old people laughed. I had a boyfriend in high school who got into a fight at a party in someone’s basement and I remember driving him home in silence, fully incapable of understanding why he felt compelled to punch Joey Carlton in the face for the shit he said about Mike and AJ. But I understood now. Danny and Olivia were just so charming! The part where they first kissed, his hand on the small of her back and her fingers running through his hair. The part where they giggled and eye-smiled and confessed things and fought and made up and cried and kissed again. I wanted to take Olivia’s face and hit it as hard as I could. Shove her to the ground and kick her in the side. Smash her against the wall, pull at her hair, punch her again right between the eyes. I imagined doing these things as the audience laughed. Imagined getting up on stage and beating her up. Just literally beating her up. Fuck you, I would say. Fuck you and your stupid clothing and your stupid attitude and the way you talk to everyone like they fucking love you. Stay the fuck away from Danny and if you ever fucking talk to him again I will kill you, I would say. I will literally kill you.

During intermission I went outside to sit in the car because I didn’t feel like talking to the lobby and its circles. Part of me probably knew it was coming because as soon as I shut the door, I started crying. I let my head hang forward and press against the steering wheel but after a few sobs I sat up and stopped. I texted five or six friends from the city. Small things like “hey how’s work?” or “ugh I want to kill this girl in Dan’s play.” I do that sometimes when I’m feeling lonely; it’s a strange and compulsive habit, but it usually works. I waited for a minute before anyone responded. Flipped down the mirror and rubbed my knuckle under my eyes, exhaling. My sister and my friend Tara texted me back and I responded to both immediately. I spent the second half of the play reminding myself of particular ways in which I was better than Olivia: I was thinner, I had nicer eyes, I went to a better school.

I didn’t know what my problem was. Danny had been a (struggling) actor since the day we met and I’d seen him kiss girls onstage before. I guess the summer had been hard; the cell service in northern Cape Cod wasn’t great and I’d wonder about him all day as I sat in my office. The envy was twofold: jealousy of the girl he was spending time with and jealousy of how he was spending his time. Playing around all day doing stretches and dumb acting games, getting wasted at night at the Beachcomber, the local bar he raved about whenever we talked on the phone. “It’s so fun,” he’d say. “There’s this group of local alcoholics who are too freaking funny. But they have these bands that come and everyone just sort of goes with it, you know? None of that too-cool bullshit.” “Yeah,” I’d say, in bed with my salad. “It sounds amazing, you’ll have to take me when I come up in August.” “For sure,” he’d reply. “I can’t wait.”

We got dinner together between shows and had sex again on these inland dunes. Danny parked the car on the side of Route 6 next to a beach pine marked with an orange plastic flag.

“This way,” he said, leading me up a path through scratchy trunks growing sideways out of sand. “I’m telling you, this place is unreal.”

It was. We emerged from the cropped forest into an expanse of craters, dune grass waving from the tops of their peaked edges. The sun hadn’t quite set but the crickets were pulsing—chirping from the green patches with astonishing volume. It was windy, and strips of hair blew out of my ponytail and across my face. Danny stretched his arms up and leaned forward into the wind.

“Isn’t it amazing?”

“Yeah,” I said, pulling on a sweatshirt.

“We come here a lot at night.” He jumped forward and down in massive leaps, sand sliding in chutes behind him. I leapt after, shrieking, and landed in a heap at the bottom, rolling next to him.

We had the idea at the same moment and kept our clothes on the whole time. When we were done, I lay down beside him and looked up at the thin clouds. I thought about how funny we must look from above—lying in the center of a bowl-shaped hole in the world. I imagined what it would be like if every crater had a couple at its center, looking up.

“Do you ever come here with Olivia?” I asked. Cupping sand in my hands and letting it sift into a pile.

“Sure,” he said. “We all come here.” I knew my jealousy was unattractive, that Danny would think I was insecure, but I couldn’t stop.

“Yeah, but do you come here with just her?”

He rolled over to face me.

“Olivia and I are friends,” he said. “We do shit together.”

“Like kiss every night.”