The Other Side of the World. Jay Neugeboren

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СКАЧАТЬ that I’d known Seana for more than twenty years—for most of my life!—what had happened and what was happening seemed very natural somehow—as least as inevitable and familiar as it was wonderful…

      “And oh—wait a minute,” Trish said. She was propped up on an elbow, facing me. “Before I go, I have to tell you something—a secret I’ve been saving. Is that okay?”

      “Sure,” Seana said.

      “Okay. Here it is: Before you came, I took a chance and went off my meds—my anti-depressants.”

      “Me too,” Seana said.

      “You went off your meds?” Trish said.

      “Yes, and a good thing too, to judge from the results.”

      “I mean, are you really on meds?” Trish said.

      “Many of our finest writers are on meds,” Seana said. “Mine’s Celexa—twenty milligrams, once or twice a day, depending. RPN, as they say. And you?”

      “Cymbalta—sixty milligrams a day, and it’s a killer—wreaks havoc with my sexuality and my digestive system.”

      “Sixty is too much,” Seana said. “Try going down to forty.”

      “I’m not on any anti-depressants,” I said.

      “Poor Charlie,” Trish said, kissing me on the nose. “So forlorn. But we love him anyway, don’t we?”

      Seana nuzzled the nape of my neck. “Mmmmm,” she said.

      Trish got out of bed, dropped an orange muu-muu over her head, then kissed each of us, me on the forehead, Seana on the back of her neck, and, stepping over toys and around baskets of laundry, called out to Anna that she was on her way.

      “Did Max ever tell you about his Uncle Ben?” I asked when Trish was gone.

      “No,” Seana said. “Max never told me about his Uncle Ben.”

      “Ben was his favorite—his father’s younger brother, who died at sea while in with the merchant marines—but that’s another story—and he was cremated. The ashes wound up with Max, who kept them in a small covered Japanese bowl on our fireplace mantle. This was when I was a little boy, and whenever I pointed to the bowl, he’d say, ‘The way I look at it, a Benny saved is a Benny urned.’”

      Seana groaned and, both arms around my waist, pulled me tight against her. “I like you a lot, you know,” she said, “even though you’re a much younger man, and more like Max than is good for me.”

      When we woke the next time, I said I’d been thinking about Max—worrying about leaving him alone in our big house. I was feeling nostalgic about him—lonesome really, though perhaps not for him so much as for things we’d done together we wouldn’t ever do again.

      “Lonesome’s okay,” Seana said. “But nostalgia’s a bitch, a veil for rage most of the time.”

      “‘A veil for rage,’” I said. “I like that—Wallace Stevens?”

      “No.”

      “Seana Shulamith McGee O’Sullivan?”

      “No.”

      “A veil for rage because remembering stuff that way, especially childhood, masks how miserable it really was?”

      “You’re smarter than you look,” she said.

      “But I am definitely feeling lonesome for the guy,” I said, “and I’m wondering why I’m feeling this way now and if you’re feeling the same…”

      “You know it,” she said.

      Earlier, I’d been remembering something that happened on one of our first trips to New York. Max had given me a tour of his old neighborhood—shown me the famous places: the Brooklyn Museum, the Botanic Gardens, Prospect Park, where Ebbets Field used to be—but what I’d been remembering about the trip wasn’t anything we did or saw, I told Seana, but what happened on the subway.

      “Going into Brooklyn we’d stayed in the front car so I could watch the train rocketing through tunnels and switching tracks, and I remember being excited—and frightened—by the possibility we might crash into an oncoming train, or that I might see somebody fall from the platform onto the tracks as our train entered a station,” I said. “Then, on the way back to Manhattan, our subway car was crowded, lots of people standing. It must have been rush hour, and there was one huge black man taking up three seats and, with a glowering expression, daring anyone to question his right to do so. He wore a red bandana on his head, pirate-style, and a sleeveless T-shirt—the kind my father said Italians called wife-beater shirts—that showed off how buff he was.

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