Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (36 page)

“Remember what tonight is,” he said to her in the morning as he spit toothpaste into the sink and reached for a towel.

She put her hands to her face.

“Oh no!” she said. “The restaurant is reserved for a private party. The Turk’s birthday! I completely forgot about the anniversary. Another night, we’ll celebrate it. We’ll just do it another night. I promise.”

She went down to her hands and knees to look for a missing shoe. She kept huffing but it had nothing to do with what Joseph had just said. She was just trying to get dressed. Nothing else seemed to matter.

That night at the restaurant, she was a firefly, bustling and twinkling and flitting around. Joseph felt he had never seen her so light. So carefree. He sat at the bar and watched her, proud but abandoned. He had a drink. He had three.

An hour or so later a woman walked in. Her mouth was unmistakable. It was the shape of a heart. He clutched his chest. For a second, he was sure he’d stopped breathing. He had thought he’d never see her again. He’d counted on that. Mostly, he’d hoped.

It had been nearly fifteen years, but he would have recognized her anywhere. Seeing her now, he noticed how bland she was, an untoasted hamburger bun. American women no longer thrilled him, or even made him pause. That he recognized her, he thought, was more a reflection of him than her. He’d obsessed over the affair for the years that he and Victoria had been deeply happy, hated himself for what he’d done. In the more tenuous years, he hated himself too, but not for the normal reasons. Not because of his actions, exactly, but because of what they stood for. Victoria had deprived him of such joy, and by getting back at her, he’d deprived himself of his upper hand, of his righteousness, and, most important, of the opportunity to hold against her what she’d done to him. They were even, he thought, for all practical purposes. And, for a while, that changed everything. He’d never gone back to Dr. Espy’s. Or met Dottie on a street corner. Or for drinks. He’d never called. Never seen her. Partly because he hadn’t wanted to, exactly, but mostly because he’d been determined to regain Victoria’s love and maintain the even playing field. He didn’t consider himself a saint.

Now Joseph stood up. He held on to the bar. He started to make his way to the bathroom, sure that she hadn’t yet seen him. He could hide. Just then, Victoria called, “Dottie! Welcome!”

He stopped. He tried to sit back down but nearly fell off the stool.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. “Holy shit shit.”

Victoria hurried over to Dottie, all generosity and charm. She wrapped one arm around her and guided her from the entrance to Joseph. He swallowed hard. For a moment, he wondered if this was some sort of trap.

“This is Dottie,” Victoria said, stopping in front of him and pulling out a stool. “She’s our new neighbor.”

“Our what?” Joseph said.

“At the apartment,” Victoria said. “She moved in upstairs.”

Dottie’s face was getting redder by the moment, and yet her mouth was wholly still. It was stunned into a rectangle, no long-er a pretty heart. Her chin quivered.

“Pleasure,” Joseph said and went to kiss her on both cheeks, be normal, but she stepped back. He was left hovering.

“This is Joseph,” Victoria said, not missing a beat as she took Dottie’s coat. She gave Joseph a look like
Don’t mess with the customers.

“Please, Dottie,” she said. “Have a seat, a drink.”

Dottie sat down. Joseph couldn’t. He imagined he could hear the exhales, from the two of them, slam into each other, unmeshing, unalike.

Holy shit,
he said again, but this time only in his head.

“My word,” Dottie said, finally. She took a deep breath and looked past him. “This restaurant is simply beautiful.”

Victoria clapped her hands and turned around. “I have to get back to work,” she said. “Joseph will entertain you for a while. It’s a pleasure to have you as our guest.”

Dottie laughed to herself. It broke the makeup on her cheek.

Joseph was still attempting to reassemble himself onto his stool. He kept moving it back and forth, somehow unable to find solid ground.

“Holy shit,” he said finally, and kept standing.

He rubbed his eyes. The hysterical pulse in his throat was making it hard for him to focus. He touched his chest, to be sure of himself.

“Breathe,” he said out loud. In, out. Out, in.

Dottie wouldn’t look him in the face. She was making a production of noticing features of the room and nodding at them in approval. A painting, the gold-colored molding, the many glasses stacked into a pyramid behind the bar. Joseph nearly asked her if she’d become interested in interior design. He had the unfamiliar urge to be cruel.

Finally, after many moments of aching silence, Joseph forced the words from his throat.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

She looked like she’d been smacked.

“Find you?” she said and then lowered her voice. “You said you lived on MacDougal Street. I didn’t know you moved. This is as much of a shock to me as it is to you. You’re despicable.”

It was obvious she didn’t mean it. Tears mobbed her eyes. And it was because of that, the fact that she seemed as horrified as he did, that Joseph believed her when she said that she’d just moved in. She’d had no idea he lived beneath her. She’d gotten a deal on old Mr. Pinalta’s apartment. His walls were streaked with cigarette smoke. A suitcase full of Mexican dresses had been left in his closet.

Joseph went silent. He found himself counting the seconds. With each, he imagined a raindrop pinning him between the eyes. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.

“I’ll move out,” she said. “I’d be happy to. Believe me. I’ve hardly unpacked.”

He almost said yes but then Victoria caught his eye. She was presenting a whole snapper to a table of German tourists. There were lemon slices all around the fish, and they didn’t budge, nothing did, in her careful, capable hands. She put it down, full of grace, slipped her hand from beneath, rested it on a customer’s shoulder. The customer looked at her, all trust. She pointed to the best piece and he nodded.

Joseph touched his own shoulder. He had missed Victoria. Now he remembered those times he’d lain with Dottie, years ago, and how sometimes he’d missed Victoria to the point of tears. He’d seen her just hours before, but still, lying there, he found himself missing her woman smell, like something fresh from the ground, and the odd shininess of her fingers, delicate, like a just-watered plant. Sometimes, he didn’t miss her until later, when he was with her at their apartment on MacDougal Street. Really, that was when he missed her the most.

He felt sick.

Dottie kicked Joseph lightly in his shin.

“Well?” she said. And then, angrily, “Pearls before swine.”

“Move?” Joseph said. “No. Of course not.”

“It isn’t so bad,” Dottie said, clearly relieved. “Just pretend I don’t live there. Pretend we never met. Pretend we were never anything.”

Joseph closed his eyes and tried to imagine it, the life of pretending. Instead, he couldn’t help wondering what he’d have to do to make her, his Victoria, touch his shoulder. Reach out to her, hold her hand there until she stopped trying to budge. Sometimes, even now that things were better, great even, he felt it would be like suffocating a fish.

Soon, Dottie was drinking whiskey sours. She had opened up. Her sass was entirely restored. Victoria was immune to it, Joseph noticed. She was the opposite of sass. Sass didn’t agree with her, which might have been why, after his sixth gin cocktail, Joseph put his finger on Dottie’s pinkie fingernail. It was painted a light tan color and was a perfect oval. It reminded him of something on a poster, the sheen and shape of it. And smooth, it was smooth. It didn’t move. It didn’t even flinch. But he did. His whole being flinched. After a moment, he took his finger back. Away.

I’
D FELT HOPEFUL.
Then I’d felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. And then the wind knocked out of me again.

I’d believed that I might actually be Victoria’s granddaughter. And she thought that too; she believed it too. I wasn’t being ridiculous. Not by myself, anyway. And I let her, even after my mother told me about her real parents, because I didn’t want to be disowned. Not so quickly. I wanted Victoria to be mine. I wanted to be Victoria’s. But then, of course, she wasn’t. I wasn’t either. And not only that, but she wanted nothing to do with me. I reminded her of something that wasn’t, I guess, of something that never was. I didn’t want to cause her pain. Her face, when Dottie told her about her baby, stillborn, had turned a color I’d never seen before. White with red on top. Not pink, but like a foot in the snow, nothing blending, nothing right.

After that, she couldn’t look me in the eye.
Please,
I’d said in my head but I couldn’t put it into real words.

That night, after I left Victoria’s, it started snowing. I tried to just stay in bed and keep my sheets warm, except there was an expectant feeling in my chest that refused to quit, and so I peeled the skin off my elbows. I burned my tongue with a match. I pulled out some hair. Usually, that little white stamp of scalp would fill up what was lost. But now after I did it, I still felt all wrong. I still felt responsible. It occurred to me that it had nothing to do with loss. My whole life, I’d been trying to fill an empty space, to feel full, complete—but I could only ever feel less empty. And even then, only for a moment—because, though the pain filled the emptiness, it
was
the emptiness too. It was where all good things got stuck.

I took the surgical tweezers to my gums. Images of Blot broke in only briefly. Then I thought of how he was avoiding me and how I would be a disappointment to him too. He’d think I’d failed. Or worse, he’d think I’d made the whole thing up for attention, for his attention. And I had nothing to show for myself. There was nothing else to look forward to. I imagined going to the bookstore and telling him, and that once he knew I’d failed, if he didn’t vanish immediately or say something awful right off the bat, I wouldn’t be able to muster any enthusiasm, wouldn’t be able to say anything nice—and he would realize he was tired of me. Soon, just to have something to talk about, he’d point to my bloody gums, and he wouldn’t be kind about it. He must be fed up. And it made me so angry, just thinking of him like that. And the anger told me to go ahead, go hurt. Blot could never understand, I told myself. He wouldn’t understand me. So what was the point?

That Sunday night, my mother came home late. She sat down on my bed, where I’d been pretending to sleep. Snow twinkled on her hair and eyebrows. She took off her gloves and balled them in her lap.

“Tomorrow evening I talk with the dean at the boarding school,” she said out of nowhere. “I just have to give him the okay. He’s holding your spot. I’m going to do what they suggest, Lorca. What else can I do?”

It didn’t surprise me that someone was holding a spot. He was doing a favor for my mother. Another favor for my mother.

I pulled down my sleeves over my wrists. I tucked my feet into my pajama pants. I had a cut below my chin and I sat halfway up, just to get it out of the light. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about boarding school; I hadn’t. Everything had felt very slow lately.

I didn’t want to be sent away and yet, when I watched my mother now, I didn’t miss her, wasn’t waiting for her to face me, take me in. My whole life, I’d wandered the earth looking for her, roaming between the trees like a lost cat—even when she was right next to me. But something was different.

Still, if I wanted to stay, I had no choice. This was my only option. I took a deep breath.

“Will you be home for lunch?” I asked her, praying that there was still hope in the masgouf. That even if I couldn’t bring her family to her, perfect and proud, or my father, perfect and strong, there could still be magic in the masgouf. I could bring her magic. I could remind her how family felt when it was what you were looking for, even when it wasn’t your own.

The good news was that she looked more surprised than disappointed. She shrugged. She said she guessed so.

The next morning, the snow hadn’t let up. I raced around getting the ingredients on the recipe Victoria had given me. I started making the dough for the Iraqi pita, which Violet on YouTube said would need two hours to rise. I used whole-wheat flour, though I’d never seen my mother touch anything but all-purpose or cake; I wasn’t taking any chances. I’d do it right. I went to three different bodegas before I finally found mangoes for pickling. They were small and as hard as rocks, but I’d try leaving them in a paper bag with a dozen apples to hurry up the ripening. If that didn’t work, I’d read something about microwaving them until they were soft, but I was a little worried about ending up with mango mousse. I bought Meyer lemons, thinking the sweetness could be nice, but as soon as I got home, I thought of my mother, her mouth shrinking into a knot:
You used Meyer lemons?
Like she’d never understand why I did the things I did. I went back out, got snowed on again, bought real lemons on the corner, and then went home and pickled them with ginger, paprika, garlic, and salt. I hoped they’d taste like they’d been marinating for months but I was starting to have a bad feeling. Things weren’t exactly working out.

I cut myself twice, accidentally, trying to use the mandoline to slice the onions “as thin as a breath.” I made a bed of them that looked like a lattice. I sprinkled thyme on top. The whole thing looked like the side of a house in Scotland where roses grew like weeds. I hoped my mother liked Scotland, but I’d never asked her. I minced garlic until my hand was shaking.

When I’d cut things with Victoria, I realized then, I hadn’t thought about the cutting exactly. I’d been normal, relaxed, for a little while. Distraction can give you a new life. But it was different now. I felt like I was back to where I’d started. My hands were trembling, itching for the soft pet of the knife. Twice I went into the bathroom just to take a few deep breaths, avoid myself.