Among the Dead and Dreaming. Samuel Ligon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ breathing soft and even on the phone, I take Cash’s finger bone from its pouch, but the finger tells me nothing. Years after he died, I felt bad for Cash—sad and sorry—just because he was responsible for Alina. I’d look at that fingertip as it rotted and became nothing but a chip of bone, all that was left of him, and feel as though I’d taken something from her. I never forgave him for what he did, but I couldn’t forgive myself either. I couldn’t even tell what might be forgiven in me, exactly, and what pieces of my past would always be unforgivable.

      6

      Mark

      Cynthia’s answering machine blinked four messages, but I knew not to check them, because checking them would mean she was never coming back. I wandered her place, picking things up and putting them down, smelling everything, Any second, it seemed, she’d walk through the door. “You’re never going to believe what happened,” she’d say, and I’d make us breakfast while she told me. There was a picture of us on her bookshelf, slouched into her parents’ couch the night I met Kyle in his black leather pants, finally home from his years in Asia. They were old friends from country clubs and summer camp, Cynthia and Kyle, and I’d been changing the subject away from him for years.

      I went to her room and piled clothes on her bed, armfuls from her closet and dresser drawers, underwear, sweaters, dresses, skirts. I burrowed into all of it. Whether or not she’d been sleeping with him, or for how long, hardly mattered now. I turned off the light, wanting to see her more than I had in months, to touch her and taste the salt and sweetness of her skin. Things had been bad between us since spring, but to never see her again? We always came back to each other. I picked up a sweater, smelled it, and threw it on the floor. The cat people dropped something upstairs, what sounded like a sledge hammer. I unwound a ball of leather, thinking it would turn into her red leather pants, but the legs were too long for her red leather pants.

      I sat up and turned on the light. The pants were black—of course they were. I rifled the pockets, finding a box of Nat Sherman Classics, Kyle’s pretentious cigarettes. I could hardly breathe. The secret lovers were dead forever with their secret that wasn’t secret anymore. Or maybe it was more secret now. Or maybe his clothes in her room meant nothing at all. I grabbed his cigarettes and pants and ran out of there, expecting to see her every second—running up the stairs as I ran down, calling my name from across the street once I was outside, following me home from Brooklyn on the LIE. “You’re never going to believe what happened,” she’d say, and there would be comforting explanations for everything.

      Elizabeth

      It’s not that I didn’t like her, I hardly even knew her, had met her only twice, when Tom and I flew to Providence to visit Mark at school. She was attractive and polite, too polite, I might have said, and she was sick that second time, Mark’s senior year, so sick she could hardly drag herself out of bed. It all seemed a little showy to me, something about their obsessive, touchy behavior, their devotion to each other, that felt just a little uncouth. Tom and I had dated all kinds of people in college, discovering who we were and what we liked, but those two—attached at the hip from first semester on. And the jealousy! I was careful not to show disapproval, knowing I could push him deeper into her arms that way. I kept my own counsel, comforted myself knowing it wouldn’t last, couldn’t last, and when it was finally over between them, Mark came back to Chicago and started working in politics, but with good people and for real change. Those were happy years, before I got sick. He met a woman at work I thought he’d marry. Liz. She was bright and driven, a reader, a cook. She said she didn’t want children, but lots of women say that. When Mark left his job with the congressman, I didn’t understand why until I found out Cynthia was in New York. “What about Liz?” I asked. She was in Washington full time with the congressman then, while Mark ran the field office. Maybe the distance between them was too much. Maybe he didn’t like that she was his boss, though I hoped I’d raised him better than that. In the weeks before he left he’d visit the house and sit with me, read to me. He’d bring vanilla ice cream and I’d pretended to enjoy it, though nothing appealed to me anymore. Everything tasted like metal. I couldn’t beg him to stay away from her. It wouldn’t do any good. I didn’t believe in God, but I prayed He would help my son find the right woman to love.

      Mark

      I was forgetting her smell, the exact feel of her hands. The second I got home, I called her machine to study her voice. Maybe if she’d known she was going to be dead, she would have put more thought into her recorded greeting, singing or leaving instruction for the living: “Don’t ride on motorcycles,” she could have said, or, “Run up enormous credit card debt.” Until I’d moved from the city a few months before, my aunt’s place had been empty almost a year, and it still held phantom odors—old people smells mostly and decades of cigarettes. I imagined Cynthia at the table, pulling Nat Shermans from the pack and filling the kitchen with smoke.

      “Now you’re buying them?” I would have said.

      “Kyle left them.”

      “His pants, too?”

      “I’m not doing this,” she would have said, and I would have said, “Of course you’re not,” and we would have kept working that seam until we exhausted it.

      I lit one of Kyle’s cigarettes and noticed a picture of my mother hung by the basement door. There were pictures of her all over the house. Sometime during the long months of her illness, a shrink had told me the sick and dying live in a world the healthy can’t inhabit or comprehend. We can hardly even visit. Or, if we do, we’re merely tourists who need to get away fast as a matter of self-preservation. I’d just moved to New York from Chicago when my mother died, and was back with Cynthia after all those years since college. For a little while, we were able to bring something soft out in each other, a tenderness I hadn’t known in years.

      Then Kyle appeared, bringing our fighting and jealousy out of remission. We started arguing, like we’d argued through multiple break ups in college, the silences between our arguments growing and taking on weight. She talked about babies more as we drifted apart, an obsession I didn’t understand. Why would we have children now, when we seemed more unstable every day? And if it wasn’t babies, it was Kyle she talked about, until I couldn’t stand to hear any of it.

      “What do you think of the name Isabelle?” she asked one night. “For a little girl?”

      I didn’t think anything of the name Isabelle—because we weren’t going to have a little girl. Not then. Not ever. We were about done it felt like.

      “Kyle wants me to pose for him,” she said, and I said, “Pose,” and she said, “Nude,” and I didn’t say anything.

      “Are you moving to Long Island to get away from the city,” she said, “or to get away from me?”

      “My aunt’s house is empty,” I said. “And Garden City’s not far.”

      “You’re the only person I know,” she said, “who would move to the suburbs not to have children.”

      But there were good times too—plenty of them—although, toward the end, if we weren’t fighting, everything felt fragile between us, like we were just waiting for the glue to take hold and wondering if it ever would.

      I smoked another Nat Sherman at my aunt’s kitchen table. Cynthia was going to walk through the door any second and we’d argue about Kyle’s pants. We needed a catalyst, a last argument to determine if we were going to break up for good or start finding a way back to each other. It was just a matter of smoking and waiting. I hadn’t seen her in weeks, since before her family reunion up at Lake George. This night was no different than any other night she’d СКАЧАТЬ