Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (35 page)

“Nothing happened the way
you’re
probably imagining it, even if we did go on a date. I mean, I’d rather not call it that, but I guess that’s what it was. A few weeks after the funeral we went to a movie. Immediately afterward I made him take me home.”

I turned back to the window, struck by the same instinct to flee I’d felt earlier in the night when she kept shouting and biting as we screwed. (I’d spent half the session staring at the little red light on the phone in anticipation of a call from the motel manager.) It didn’t help that I was still stoned and that Emily was broaching the subject as though it didn’t mean a thing.

“What happened?” I asked, inadvertently revealing all the jealousy and distrust she’d preemptively accused me of.

“I told you what happened. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I was lonely and thought he was the sort of person I could go out with who wouldn’t try to give me any genius advice. I just couldn’t take any more advice, and I was tired of being alone.”

“
You
called
him
?” I asked, already tormenting myself with Peyton’s double-dealing condolences, Emily’s desperate grief, their violent kisses in the back of his car.

“I needed to get out of the house,” she said, wrapping the phone cord around her arm. “You can’t imagine what it was like eating dinner with my parents, having my mom hug me good night and thinking,
She’s faking it. She doesn’t love me at all. She thinks I lied to them, and she doesn’t even love me anymore.
”

“She knows you’re angry with her,” I said, crouching down next to her. “She probably just doesn’t know how to act while she and your dad are still sorting things out.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I don’t know either, but I think you made the right decision coming home. Even if they’re not talking much, it would be much worse if you weren’t there.”

Emily unwrapped the cord from around her arm and hung up the receiver. She started paging through a motel brochure she must’ve paged through fifty times before. I stepped into the bathroom, fully aware of her difficulty in meeting my eyes. “If you don’t want to talk about your date with Peyton,” I said, squeezing toothpaste onto my brush, “it’s all right. I’ll just forget it and trust that nothing happened.”

Emily slapped the desk and laughed. Her laugh said everything it needed to about my insecurities. The lighter sparked as she lit another cigarette. I was brushing my teeth, expecting another long, silent night, when she started delving into the details, more apologetically than I expected.

“He brought up the commercial idea after the movie. By then I already knew I’d made a mistake in going out with him. I knew I’d made a mistake before the movie even started. But when I told him to take me home, he kept fighting me about it. He kept talking about some college party on the South Side and trying to hook up with me. Eventually he gave up, but for a few weeks after that he kept calling the house late at night, usually drunk. He’d hang up whenever my parents answered.”

I spit and watched the toothpaste swirl down the drain, asking myself for the first time if I believed her. I stared into the bathroom mirror, questioning whether she’d dreamt that story about being a spy or simply made it up just to tease me. I wiped my mouth and stepped back into the doorway. Emily was leaning over the desk with her hands flat on the glass top, silhouetted in the low-wattage lamp, her head low and heavy like an old bull.

“I suppose your parents think it was me calling, huh? After my call from Colorado, it only makes sense.”

“I told them it wasn’t you,” she said, slowly turning her head so that her hair fell in and out of the lamplight. “But like I said, they don’t trust me. And to tell you the truth, I don’t even blame them anymore. I wouldn’t trust me, either.”

“So I shouldn’t trust you, either, I guess?”

“Whatever, George. I’m sick of arguing. Think whatever you want to think.”

“I wish I could,” I said, grabbing my T-shirt and pants from the back of the door handle. “Your parents must think I’m a real prankster.”

“Go ahead and go. I know you’re already sick of this place. I’m sorry I even called.”

I pulled my pants and shirt on as fast as I could, grabbing my shoes and preparing to storm out, still swinging my belt and kicking the walls. (I considered breaking the full-length mirror, but didn’t when I realized the action would prove far less poignant than it did in the Mexican drama I was recalling, involving a two-faced maid and her matron’s heirloom.) But I couldn’t find my socks and ended up scrambling on all fours, searching around the desk and nightstands, lying on the carpet reaching under the bed with my head pinned to the floor. Ten minutes later when I still couldn’t find them, I stepped into the bathroom and unthinkingly opened the faucet to fill the tub. Emily told me it was all her fault. I told her it was all mine.

Forty-six

If my account of these bleak months feels hurried and disrespectful of its odd moments of tenderness and teary affection, it is only because my stomach still bears the thorns of our sharp-tongued exchanges (which often burrow deeper during the brief, so-called power naps that I’ve now forbidden myself). While the majority of our disturbances contained obvious links to the unfortunate chain of events that began at Saylorville Lake, Emily and I also found ourselves wading through a host of unrelated anxieties, as though Katie’s death had opened the floodgates for all our private horrors—past, present, and future—which our foolish bodies attempted to purge in one fell swoop. Instead of assuaging our respective fears we poked and prodded them, soon arriving at a bitter acknowledgment that there were simply no effective words to speed their course. It seemed our whole lives had been whittled down to our Days Inn motel room, where more than once Emily articulated her dreary future of anonymous back-alley auditions with seedy, second-rate agents whose nineteen-year-old product was already damaged goods. When she wasn’t practicing her lines in the bathroom mirror (or speechifying in an actor’s warm-up gibberish that I could never decode), she racked up pay-per-view charges for movies she barely watched, usually after ordering Italian and Greek restaurant deliveries for meals she hardly touched. At least once a week we’d accuse each other of being clueless or hopeless or insane, which might’ve easily been construed as true, especially considering the subjects of our quality-time debates, not the least of which involved wagering on when her mom would finally open one of her credit card bills and uncover our secret. But I played along with our little scam, typically encouraging Emily to order us the most expensive items on the delivery menus, pretending not to notice that she could hardly swallow two bites of a Caesar salad, that oftentimes we weren’t even kissing or using protection, that in sex she was like a rude dog with its ass in the air, jaw clamped shut and eyes clenched, masturbating herself while I gripped her hips and ankles like handlebars, pumping madly and all the while feeling like a snake oil salesman in a two-timing affair with the only girl I ever wanted to love. For better or worse we stuck together, likely as a result of the exchanges relegated to the hours of our separation when we’d lie in our childhood beds with the lights out, whispering by radio with such tenderness and understanding that I was able to set out each morning optimistically indulgent in hope—that cruel crutch known as much for its trickery and ravage as its splendor.

Forty-seven

I received my first speeding ticket on the night of the
Tinker
premiere—knocked down from the insurance-raising eighty-five miles per hour to seventy-five, which I accepted as a upbeat omen—while racing home from the fairgrounds in order to shower and shave, then sprint back east to the historic Sherman Hills district in my new pair of wool pants and herringbone blazer, forgoing the customary tie because I’d worn my only decent one to Katie’s funeral. The Garage Theater turned out to be housed in a converted mansion, which I entered by way of a long set of creaking wooden stairs ending at the front door, followed by an elegantly dusty foyer manned by a college student in a black turtleneck sitting at a card table with one hand limp over the cash lockbox like he was swearing himself in. (While he harbored obvious ambitions for the theater, any noticeable talent was supplanted by his priggish attitude in securing my eight dollars before allowing me to peruse the playbill.) In an area of the house where one would normally expect to enter a kitchen or living room, I parted my way through a velvet curtain to discover a long and narrow theater space with an unexpectedly high ceiling, though dark to the point of nearly total obscurity. While imagining that each patch of unseen audience represented a formal faction of the metropolitan arts community, I felt my way along the side aisle, choosing a folding chair in one of the mid-front rows in order to avoid unnerving Emily by sitting too close. My eyes adjusted to the darkness as a pair of Drake track runners still in their warm-ups sat down in the row behind me, swapping impersonations of faggoty theater types. A group of camera-toting family members crowded in next to me, the grandmother giving me the willies when she covered my right leg in the shawl she was wrapping over her cold knees and ankles.

About five minutes before the play began, when the theater was only a third full and the ticket prig was ordering us all closer to the front, somewhere in the lurching darkness I spied a familiar voice arguing the threat posed by such hazardously poor lighting. (When it came to family and friends, Emily always pushed for their attendance at mid-run performances, particularly in the case of her mother, who was also her harshest critic; apparently Mrs. Schell couldn’t wait.) I turned my attention to the details of the set design, dominated by a canvas backdrop of a crummy city comprised of pointy tenements overshadowed by a Gothic church. The stage was extremely tight with much evidence of fire safety irregularity, highlighted by cheap yellow bulbs poking through the canvas, posing as lampposts, and nests of electrical wires at each end of the stage feeding stage lights with unprotected bulbs. I tried not to care if Mrs. Schell noticed me or not.

The lights went up and Emily was the first actor to appear, though it took me a few seconds to recognize her. While I’d imagined her gypsy character bold and vivacious, costumed in variegated skirts and scarves that would launch her forth from the set like a Technicolor Dorothy after ages of black-and-white, instead the costume designers had obscured her with a tangle-haired wig, filthy sneakers, and a bra that slung one breast high and the other low. She wandered to the center of the stage, then plopped down cross-legged to hawk change on an imaginary street corner, her eyes twitching in hungry suffering as formally dressed pedestrians crossed left and right, unnoticing of the tinker, who was apparently meant to blend chameleon-like into the sooty set. (These “pedestrians” made no more than eight to ten strides before being forced to stop and portend window-gazing reflection while waiting for their fellow extras coming
up
the steps.) Emily’s accent was like nothing we’d ever heard.

“Born na more then tree kicks from this carb,” she called out to the audience. “Come oot backward, spaykin’ Frinch.”

Hearty laughter sounded throughout the space. A few gypsy sentences later it stopped. A morose confusion spread the theater as we all realized the accent wasn’t meant as a parody. A mother and daughter next to me started squabbling over their differing translations. I could barely understand a word and couldn’t relax until the following sequence, which was mostly silent and allowed gesture to do the majority of the telling. A canvas representing a rail-yard slum scrolled down as the tinker returned to her boxcar home, laying to rest her sprightly gypsy daughter.

The play gathered some momentum in the second panhandling scene when the tinker reaped the attention of a gangly police officer who for the previous few minutes had been looking lost on the other side of the stage. He stepped wide-legged in front of her and wagged his nightstick. Framed neatly between his knees, the tinker peered hopelessly into the darkness of the theater.

“Now I’ve warned yeh, tinker garl,” he said. “Warned yeh fer the last time.”

The tinker was inured to the routine. Her pale gaze panned the audience, shifting from one audience member to another until it stopped at me. As Emily stared directly into my eyes I stared back, smiling without moving my mouth, encouraging her by way of a wink and a slight emotive nod that she pretended not to notice. The scene ended with the tinker walking off with the policeman. He threw his arm over her shoulder, promising to protect her from the dank street and the night before suddenly stopping, turning both of them toward the audience for his ten-minute soliloquy on the subject of Great (
great
inflected to mean
shit
) Britain’s historic use of Irish debtors’ prisons, which often doubled as insane asylums and quarantines for drunks and gypsies. The audience groaned, in unison, practically on cue. Scene by scene the plot grew more fandangled, the tinker more inebriate and incomprehensible. As far as the rest of the audience was concerned, the only saving grace seemed to come from the tinker’s daughter, a curly-headed girl with oval glasses who looked much less a street urchin than a lackadaisical magician. The second act was mostly melodrama of the following sort:

Where the narrative began as a young woman’s struggle to forge a better condition for her daughter, it evolved into a political drama in which the prime minister of Ireland, played by a nasal and self-aware blonde, was discovered to be the underground leader of an anti-British terrorist organization. This revelation inspired a litany of squawking seat backs: the track runners walked out, the families of the actors started speaking in plain barroom voices about their desire for an intermission (that would never be granted), a sarcastic older man in a group of professors a few rows back (I’d previously overheard them dubbing the venue the “Garbage Theater”) offered his interpretation of the tinker as an “antifeminist twat.” While I hadn’t exactly forgotten about Mrs. Schell, my concerns about her attendance disrupting my suspension of disbelief were so overwhelmed by a sudden urge to drink and smoke as to render her presence a moot point.