Modern Gods. Nick Laird

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       CHAPTER 4

      She was in no doubt at all; she could handle this. The embarrassment inside her had been turned way down—it still burned merrily and brightly like a gas ring left on, but it was bearable. She could bear it. It had not been a serious enterprise. She knew that. And there had been precedents. There were incidents pertaining, sure. The party in Brooklyn Heights where she had walked into the kitchen and “a good friend” had been hugging Joel from behind. Little folds of time. You can quicken memory and scatter it and thread the incidents together.

      She felt a bubble of new anger rising through her and reached for her phone, then put it down again, sat back against the plastic seat, and concentrated on the view as her train rattled through the industrial edgelands of Newark. Concrete grandeur, a thin scrim of light rain. Unaccomplished graffiti on abandoned railcars. She looked at the phone. She wanted very much to be able to hurt him, and she realized that one of the things bothering her about this was that she wasn’t sure she could. She decided to send the text: You broke my heart. Inadequate, self-harming, momentarily satisfying. Nor did it feel remotely true even as she typed it, but what with the renewed steady movement of the car, and the rain, and the dilapidated splendor of New Jersey’s manufacturing heritage, she tried to think herself into a space where it might be true, and stared out the window, and for a moment thought she might cry again, if she kept still and stared hard enough at the particulars of night coming on.

      Her phone vibrated, but once more it was her sister. Lovely weather here today. Izzy outside on bike all day! We looking forward to seeing you. You sort car hire OK?

      Liz’s family had downsized their role in her life since she left home, of course, but not in the way she’d expected. They were like a village she had once lived in that had been shrunk down to miniature. The relationships didn’t loosen to old friendships; they contracted over the years, but retained all the same angles and shapes, the same functions of shame and despair and joy. It was like a scale model she lived in—and it still functioned. The little train ran, the signs swung outside the little shops, tiny people went from room to room, turning on and off the lights. Interacting with her family was like entering the village as an adult—outsized, and trying to crawl under the arches and bridges and flyovers, trying not to put one’s size-fives in the miniscule flowerbeds.

      She spoke to her family every other day or so. Is this healthy? That was one of Joel’s lines. Is this healthy? Possibly, she’d reply. It’s possibly healthy.

      She texted Alison back: Didn’t hire car yet. Any chance of a lift? Why you still up?

      The reply came after a minute.

      Up when M’s up. He’s feeding, mostly screaming. I’m giving him a bottle and watching Downton Abbey with earphones. I’ll get Stephen to pick you up. I have a final dress fitting. They messed up the zip.

      Liz considered for a second, and replied:

      Awful show! Btw just came home to boyfriend in bed with someone. Not feeling too chipper tbh.

      She knew the phone would ring. She watched the display light up with ALLY HOME, and considered whether this conversation would make her feel better or worse. Liz always felt like the black sheep; her mother and father and brother and sister were their own club, and Liz was invariably outside the circle. But there was nothing more rewarding, in some lights, than a conversation with her sister. If Liz were a plaintiff in the court of some anecdote, Alison would quickly side with her and adopt on her behalf the prosecutor’s wrath. She was loyal as a pit bull, but then you don’t want a pit bull in the house, ideally. In phone conversations Alison would frequently crown a line offered by her elder sister with a stinging, cryptic, catchall phrase: Well, that’s typical of you. Or: You’re never going to grow up, are you? And once, astonishingly: That’s what you get for crying wolf your whole life.

      She pressed the TALK key.

      At once her sister’s tone, accelerated but contained, suggested she could somehow take control of this situation and fix it up nicely. She could see her three thousand miles away, drooly fat infant slumped across one shoulder, the phone wedged between the other and her ear, her blue eyes shining with the ecstatic confirmation of someone else’s pain.

      She said, “I can’t understand how he could do that to someone.”

      The beast Despair prowled behind the chemical stockade her two Xanax had erected. Liz’s real self could see it perfectly well in the distance, waiting for the barriers to come down, waiting to enter Lizville, ransack it, raze it to the ground.

      Liz replied and Alison said, “I mean do it to you, obviously. I don’t understand how anyone could do that to another person.”

      An inability to comprehend the bloody obvious—Alison often expressed this to Liz. Was it real or an act? It was the easiest thing in the world to understand how someone might have sex with someone else. It was the easiest thing because it was pretty much the only thing, the one reliable force in the world, universal human gravitation. Every scandal was confirmation of it. It made everyone act crazy, risk their jobs and lives and families … Oh, someone might pretend—or really have—an interest in, say, sailing or the opera or growing cabbages. But there, beneath it all, was the thing happening, every fleshy particle in the universe attracting every other one … Now and at all times, nearby, very close, people were being pulled towards each other. Bodies tending towards other bodies. Someone was entering, someone was getting entered. Liz loved and hated the sex hum of cities, manifested in a million tiny glances and gestures, in its streets, its cafés, its libraries. It kept everything electric. Alison, mother of two, had had sex presumably at least twice, though she always spoke of it as something distant or alien or beyond her. Or at least she always did to Liz. And now, as Liz, against her better judgment, tried to sketch the details—replacing Alison’s assumed gender pronoun with the correct one—she found herself cut off midsentence, like a student who has given the wrong answer.

      “No, no, no, I don’t want to hear all that. Bad enough he was ten years younger. And gay, as it turns out. Okay, whatever. Bi,” said Alison over her sister’s barks of protest. “Nine years younger. You want to split hairs? Sometimes I think you want to be unhappy.”

      There it came. The great expected wash of tiredness ran across her. She leaned forward and rested her head against the cool leather of the seat in front. Her body relaxed into sadness and she swallowed hard. She wasn’t going СКАЧАТЬ