This Is Between Us (19 page)

I remember the first show we went to, at a small club where my friend’s band was headlining. It was a mellow show and we sat at a table near the stage, holding hands. We did not have to guard our drinks from people bumping into us. We could see and hear everything, and my friend even dedicated a song to us.

I loved that show but I loved this show too, in a different way. That one was intimate and this one was chaotic. When the bass player finally turned around, the crowd went crazy. The beautiful young women around me had the shyest white-blonde hairs on their arms. I could almost feel their softness as they all rose above me, swaying like flowers. You were pushed into me and I caught you. Your laugh smelled like good whiskey. We couldn’t see the stage anymore but we watched through all the camera phones in the air. The bass player was smiling, the bass player was smiling, and the bass player was smiling.

…

One night we went out to dinner with your father and he kept asking us if we were going to get married soon. He didn’t like it when we danced around topics of conversation so we tried to explain it clearly to him. “We’ve both been married before,” you said. “And it wasn’t that fun the first time.”

Your father sipped on his decaf coffee and shook his head slowly with a frown.

“You were lucky to have just one wife,” I said, realizing I was going into possibly unwelcome territory. “A good wife,” I added. “Now imagine getting married again. It would feel less exciting or something.”

I had to be careful not to say anything that would make you feel unappreciated. It was especially hard not to think about Cynthia, especially since we had gone to her funeral a month earlier. Maybe what I’d said about “getting married again” was wrong. Maybe your father would have married Cynthia in a hot second.

I was sitting between you and your father and I felt like I was suddenly juggling some delicate plates. No one spoke and I felt the silence mangling the message I was trying to get across. Was I really the best spokesman in this situation? I felt the ghost of Cynthia and the ghost of your mom also silently judging me from somewhere else in the room. I could almost hear plates shattering on the ground.

You raised your finger and jumped in before I could make another utterance. “Marriage is harder to navigate these days. It’s almost too comfortable.” You took a long drink of water, like you were stalling for time. “We like to grow and be challenged. When people are legally bound it creates a psychological obstacle.”

“Who’s
we
? What
people
?” your father asked. He cocked his head. He cocked his bushy eyebrow.

“It’s not the fifties anymore,” you said.

“Fifties?” your father almost shouted.

“Sixties, seventies. Whatever,” you said.

The conversation had officially puttered into a dead end. We ate our dinner, trying to be polite the rest of the night. There was no dessert. A small squabble over the bill provided some excitement but your father eventually wrestled it away from us. I held the door open for the two of you, holding hands. I trailed a little behind and watched your matching strides. You were the same height as your father. You looked up at something in the sky, and he looked there too.

…

Sometimes the kids were both a little moody at the same time. But thankfully that wasn’t usually the case. If one of them was off, then the other one was friendlier to us. It’s like they were always playing a game of good cop/bad cop. One night, Maxine stayed in her room with her lights off and sad music playing too loudly. Vince helped us with the after-dinner cleanup and even watched
TV
with us. A show we didn’t think he liked. He asked if I could show him how to shave for real. We had only pretended before.

I remembered learning to shave, but for a long time I used an electric razor. I was scared of real razors until I was almost thirty.

I told Vince that he had to be very careful, and then we lathered up. He had only the faintest wisp of fuzz around his lips and chin. We watched each other in the mirror, and when I dragged the razor down my cheek, Vince grimaced a little at the soft scraping sound.

When he brought the razor up to his face, I stood behind him and grabbed his arm and tried to help him angle it, like a tennis teacher trying to show a student how to swing a racket. “Push it against your skin, not into it,” I told him. His eyes lit up as he did it and his scrape was just slightly quieter than mine.

When we were done, I asked him what was wrong with Maxine and he shrugged, almost like he was too cool to care. “I don’t know,” he said. “Girl stuff, I bet.”

…

You got me a blank notebook one year for Christmas and I wanted to fill it with pictures and writing for you. But I had a hard time doing that for some reason, so I found an old cassette player and recorded some thoughts for you instead. I pretended like it was an oral diary, and every few days I would talk about things we’d done. Then I would record the sounds of our neighborhood—the announcements from the train stops, the birds taunting the cat in the yard, our kids riding their noisy skateboards and bikes. I would talk about holding your hand at the movies. I recorded the sound of our mailbox opening. One night, when you came home late, I captured the sound of the car crackling up the driveway and me whispering, “Welcome home. Now you’re home.”

Eventually, I cut a shallow space out of the meat of the notebook and put the finished cassette in there. I had Vince and Maxine decorate the outside of the notebook. Then I gave it to you on the morning of the next Christmas. We listened to it later that day, while the kids were in their rooms. They heard some of the tape, but there were parts that were meant only for you. We listened to all of it a few more times that week, and then, on New Year’s Day, we wrapped it in an old shirt of mine and buried it in the backyard.

…

We read in bed and I would hold my book firmly, sometimes reading forty or fifty pages before I was tired.

You would lie beside me, also trying to read, but I saw, out of the corner of my eye, your book drooping out of your hands and then your body jolting awake. You lost your place often and your eyes couldn’t stay open.

Sometimes I wanted to catch your book for you, so you wouldn’t lose your place. I was also afraid that you might, one night, break your nose and blacken your eye with a heavy book, slipped from your own fingers. That made it harder for me to concentrate on my own book.

I said, “Just put the book down and roll over before you hurt yourself.” You waved your hand at me like a mad old lady and said, “I’m awake, all right? I’m awake.”

Our cat sighed from the corner of the room. When I turned a page in my book, it sounded like a shovel picking up sand. There was a soft ticking that came from outside our window. Maybe a tree branch. Maybe the moonlight.

…

You were cleaning the apartment one day while I tried to relax on the couch. You vacuumed and dusted near me, bustling around and making a big show of your work. You noticed a mark on the back of the couch—a dark skid on the soft cream fabric. “What is that?” you said. I looked and said I didn’t know. “We’ve had this couch for less than a year,” you said, like it was some twisted form of accusation.

The mark was in a place that people probably wouldn’t see. You said that didn’t matter. “Whenever I look at the couch now, my eyes will always go to that mark.”

I knew that was the unfortunate truth of the matter. When something clean and perfect got tarnished, it was the main thing you saw after that. It was the beginning of something getting old.

…

Maxine said she had something to tell me, so we walked to the park down the street. “We need to talk,” she said. For some reason, even coming from a fourteen-year-old, those words sounded ominous and terrifying. She was bouncing a basketball, dodging the sidewalk cracks. It helped to alleviate some tension.

“It’s about Vince,” she said. “I’ve been watching him.”

“And how is he?” I asked.

She stopped bouncing the ball and handed it to me. She took out her cell phone. “He doesn’t eat lunch with Roberto,” she said. She showed me a blurry photo on her phone: Vince sitting by himself, eating lunch on a bench outside the school library.

“Does he eat lunch with anyone?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Maxine said. “Not just that, though. I don’t think there
is
a Roberto.”

…

I remember when Vince started going to movies in theaters with me, but the previews for other movies frightened him. Maybe they were too loud, or just too unfamiliar to him, so we would wait outside the door until they ended.

You told me about a time when Maxine was scared of your grandfather’s teeth, the way he left them out in a glass of denture cleaner in the bathroom. Maxine couldn’t go to the bathroom in the morning until your grandfather put his teeth back in.

I told you about how I was scared of grasshoppers when I was a kid. All the neighborhood kids would catch them, but I ran away from them and hated the sound they made, like broken sprinklers.

You told me that you had criktaphobia, a word I’m sure you made up. It was a condition that involved a fear of ticking clocks. When you heard one in a quiet room, you’d have to make a louder sound to cover it—a clucking or a humming. You got dizzy doing this, the air tightening up around you until you felt yourself spin away.

I thought these were the kinds of fears that love could cure. I waited to see.

…

Sometimes I have vague memories of going down twisty slides with Vince in my lap. Getting snow cones at the public pool. Playing “horsie” with him. Reading to him at bedtime. I wish you could have seen me back then.

…

Vince and I used to go to this really cool retro arcade and play video games every few months. I realized that we hadn’t gone in about two years and asked him if he wanted to go with me on a Saturday. We used to play this funny two-player game where we competed against each other, guiding our characters through an obstacle course where we’d dodge fireballs, lightning, and other damaging things. At the end of the game, the loser would fall through a hole into a dungeon and get eaten by a giant creature. I usually let Vince win, so he wouldn’t have to see the creature spit out his skull.

When I asked him if he wanted to go, though, he hesitantly said that he couldn’t. “I’m meeting Roberto for lunch,” he said.

I thought it was strange that he would say they were meeting for lunch. It sounded so grown-up, so not fun. At least not as fun as going to the park or the mall or the arcade.

“Want me to give you a ride somewhere?” I asked.

“No.”

“Need some money?”

“No.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, I guess I’ll see you later then.”

I felt left out. I started to wonder if I’d ever go to that arcade again.

After Vince left, I went for a drive by myself. I cruised slowly by the arcade and thought of stopping. But I pictured myself going in there, by myself, and it made me feel nervous for some reason. I circled around again and started to feel sick. I pulled over and shut off the car. I got out and started walking toward the door, then changed my mind. Back in the driver’s seat of the car, I was indecisive and confused. I felt like I was missing something. I felt useless.

…

“Should we try to have our own?” you asked me. We were at the neighborhood park, watching other people with their young children.
It might be what we need
, I thought. It would give us a shared experience, our own child that nobody else could interfere with.

“It seems like if it were going to happen, it would have by now,” I said. We hadn’t really been careful with our birth control for at least a year. I could feel you thinking about that and didn’t want you to misunderstand what I meant. “Maybe I can’t do it,” I said. “Maybe I don’t have good swimmers.”

You looked at me and squeezed my arm. “It’s probably me,” you said. “I put too much shit in my body.”

“We don’t really want to be those old parents at the elementary school anyway,” I said. “Everyone thinking that we’re the grandparents, or worse—not cool.”

I got you to laugh at that, but for a moment I thought you were crying. “Look at these kids though,” you said. “We could do so much better.”

…

When I left my wife, Sheryl, she was sad for only a couple of days before she was ready to move on. She called me and asked if it would bother me if she slept with a sixty-eight-year-old man. A man down the hall from her named Pablo.

“That’s as old as your grandfather,” I said.

“But I have feelings for him,” she told me.

“Why don’t you take it slow?” I said. “Maybe form a relationship first.”

“I kind of just want to see what it would be like,” she said. “He said he hasn’t had sex in fifteen years.”

There were a few seconds of silence while I tried to think of a way to get off the phone.

“Are you jealous?” she asked.

For some reason, I became emotional and started weeping. I wasn’t jealous, but something else about the conversation jabbed me uncomfortably. I put myself in Pablo’s worn-out shoes, facing those last gray years with saggy flesh, cracked bifocals, and garlicky breath.