Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 20
“I’m sorry your love for me embarrasses you.”
“It’s only embarrassing if you don’t love me.”
Did I love Peter? I didn’t know. Because what was love? Was it what you had felt for Billy? Was it what I had felt for Billy? Or was that just obsession? Was that just wanting something I could never have? A desire too easily confused for love, Jillian Williams said to her guests one night—a man who only wanted to fuck his wife’s sister, a woman who stalked her married boss, and a girl from Idaho who had sex with her boyfriend only once, with a condom, while she was on the pill, and somehow ended up having a baby, which she was holding for the first time on national television. I love it very much, she told Jillian Williams, but kept calling the baby it, which Mom said did not sound like love at all. And I remember feeling very sad for this girl who could not love the beautiful thing sitting in her arms.
“I love you, too,” I finally said to Peter.
Until that point it had all been hand stuff. Under the table stuff. But that night, he laid out a blanket his mother had stitched, cloth napkins from all their old vacations. He went down on me first (that was the deal), and then I went down on him, and he let out a grunt that embarrassed me, which I knew meant he was close, too close. Please, not inside my mouth, and so I pulled away; Peter was a good boy, he put his toys back in the chest without his mother having to ask, Plays well with others, his first-grade teacher wrote on his report card. He went on a little red square that said NIAGARA FALLS STATE PARK and then looked up to the ceiling and sighed a big relief.
“That was really great,” he said, like we had just done a workout class together.
“Yeah,” I said.
Though to be honest, I thought it would feel a little better than it did; it felt good, but I had expected more. I always expected more. Maybe this was because of how you used to describe these things to me at night or maybe I had become desensitized by all those years I spent touching myself in bed with the back of a hairbrush (a tip from one of Mom’s magazines); maybe I hadn’t counted on the breeze through the trees that left us both a little colder. Maybe I had expected it to make me actually fall in love with Peter, that I’d look over at him and there’d be something to say, something that was absolute and necessary, something other than, Wow, I can’t believe I just sucked on your penis, but there wasn’t. It was the only thing I could think of to say, the only true conclusion to be made about the event.
“Gee,” Peter said. “You really are so romantic.”
We laughed, because I knew he liked this about me, how unromantic I insisted on being. Not like his sister at all, who pasted pictures of handsome movie stars from magazines in her bedroom. Peter was like, She’s so boy crazy. But you’re different.
“Different how?” I asked.
“Sometimes I just feel like you’re the guy,” he always said. Then he pulled me into him. “I’ve been thinking.”
Peter was always thinking. Always making a plan.
“Maybe we should have sex on prom night,” he said.
“Now who sounds like the guy?” I said.
* * *
When I got home, I thought Mom would be mad at me for being late, but she was in a good mood. She was always in a good mood a few days after going to Jan’s, like Jan was some kind of a drug.
“Jan thinks there might be something off with your thyroid,” Mom said.
“How would Jan know things about my thyroid?”
“She has a gift,” Mom said.
Have you checked your daughter’s thyroid? Jan asked Mom. Maybe that’s why she’s been so sleepy? Jan said my sudden sluggishness, my unwillingness to do anything, is a reason to see the doctor. She said that sometimes grief manifests itself on the body, that a lot of doctors see underactive thyroids after a trauma.
“That’s a very specific thing for Jan to say,” I said.
“Jan is very thorough.”
The next morning, Mom went to the phone and scheduled an appointment for me with a doctor. I watched her write it down on the Big Calendar.
The day of prom, everybody at school acted like they were on drugs. And maybe they were. Maybe they started early in the parking lot like Peter said people might. But I was sober and felt sick all day and maybe it was because of a thyroid problem, or maybe it was because Peter kept giving me weird smiles during Latin.
“I need to go to the nurse,” I finally said.
“Latine!” Mr. Prim said.
“Guttur mihi dolet,” I said. My throat hurts.
But Mr. Prim wanted to use this moment as a teaching lesson.
“Interesting. You could say that. But you could also say, Fauces mihi dolent,” he said to the class. “Fauces is strictly the back of the mouth. More commonly used for ‘throat’ in ancient medical writings. Guttur is lower down, the esophagus proper.”
He looked at me.
“So what is it?”
“Fauces,” I said.
I went to the nurse. The nurse said she had been seeing a lot of sore throats lately. She said, “Have you ever given oral sex, Sally?”
“Huh?”
“Sometimes, we see a lot of girls with gonorrhea in their throats.”
“I’m feeling much better, thanks,” I said to the nurse.
* * *
Instead of going back to Latin, I went to the mall. I cut school for the second time in my life because it felt good to break through the double doors at the end of the hallway. To hit sunlight. Besides, I still didn’t have a dress. Mom forgot about special ordering me one, and I didn’t remind her. I didn’t want to go anywhere with Mom that I didn’t have to. So I drove to the mall and walked into Macy’s and there, standing by a rack of men’s shirts, was your boyfriend.
“Sally,” he said.
“Billy,” I said.
After four years of waiting to see him again, of hoping to see him around every corner, I was somehow surprised to see him. I hadn’t expected it to be like this, the two of us standing there in the brightly lit world of Macy’s. Me, with a glittery dress on my arm, and him, with a huge tattoo on his neck. A series of green vines crawling up to his ear. I couldn’t stop looking at it.
“I know,” he said. “I have a neck tattoo.”
“Did it hurt?” I asked.
“That’s why I got it.”
“Interesting,” I said, as if I understood.
“What are you doing here?” Billy asked. “Shouldn’t you be at school?”
“I’m looking for a dress.”
“For what?”
“Prom,” I said.
“Prom,” he said. “Wow.”
The other changes in Billy came slowly. Like when we were little and you’d pull the prickers out of my legs and the cuts were so deep, the blood wouldn’t come out right away. His face was smoother. The accident, not so visible anymore. Still there in some places, by his ear, where there was a deep, pink scar. But the rest was covered by the tattoo.
“I know, I know,” I said. “I know your feelings on prom.”
“I have feelings on prom?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Well. What are they?”
“You said, and I quote, prom is just a place where people go to dress up really nicely and then rub their genitals together.”
“That does sound like something I would have said,” he said. “But now that I’ve lived longer, I can confidently say, I’m sure there’s more to it than that.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m skeptical.”
“Well, I shouldn’t keep you,” Billy said. “You look like you’re in the middle of something important.”
But it wasn’t important. Not anymore. Prom seemed so stupid, standing in front of Billy. It felt as if Billy were the only thing that was real, and everything else was a fake. The mall just an elaborate set. The dress on my arm, a prop. These breasts and this long hair—part of the costume. And Billy, somehow, was the truth about my life.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Looking for a nice shirt,” he said.
“What do you need a nice shirt for?”
“What do I need a nice shirt for? she says. Like why would this dirtbag ever need a nice shirt.”
I laughed. He did look like a dirtbag though. Between the neck tattoo and the snap-up pants and the stubble on his chin.
“I’ve got a job interview in a few weeks,” he said. “Got to present myself as a respectable human being. Psychologically healthy, the application said.”
“Hmm,” I said. “I’ve seen my dad wear that shirt before. It’s blue.”
He looked around, as if somebody might be watching us.
“A good tip,” he said. “I’ll be on the lookout for blue.”
“Do you want some help?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. He looked at my shirt. “You look like you know what you’re doing. That’s a pretty nice shirt.”
Of course, it was. It was actually one of yours. Found it after I put the green dress back in your closet. It was too tight across the chest, according to Mom, but I didn’t care. I liked it too much to ever throw it away.
* * *
Billy and I looked for nice shirts in Macy’s. JCPenney. Express for men. He said, “What do you think, Sally?”
Do the sleeves fit right?
Does the collar look too tight?
Does this shirt make me look psychologically healthy or what?
Yes, that shirt is so psychologically healthy.
“I would never know,” I said, “that you are secretly in love with all the Disney princesses.”
He laughed. He looked at himself in the mirror. And it was all so fun. I loved the feeling of deciding these things for Billy. Of passing judgment. I felt like his mother. His sister. His lover.
“Yes,” I said. “The sleeves are a little short.”
“Fuck,” he said. “The sleeves are always so fucking short.”
Billy was bigger now.
“Still growing,” he said. “Everybody at holidays, they’re always like, Billy, are you getting taller? And I’m like, Ha ha ha, good one, Aunt Barbara. But now I’m like, Maybe I do have a gland disorder or something?”
“Maybe you should go to the doctor.”
Finally, a lady in the store came up to him and said, “Well that’s a nice shirt,” and we both looked at each other and laughed.
“It’s settled then,” he said.
I watched him turn and look at himself in the mirror. The woman got him a tie, too, just to try on. I felt the floor open up beneath me. Your boyfriend was going to leave the mall soon. He was going to leave the mall and put on his nice shirt and get a job. And I would have to actually go to prom with Peter and live the rest of my life without either of you.
“What do you mean, you got the tattoo just because it hurt?” I asked.
“That’s just what I was like in college,” he said.
Billy told me that he did all kinds of fucked-up things in college to hurt himself. Drugs. Alcohol. Even lit his hand on fire once. But his body healed. His body always healed. And he didn’t want it to. He couldn’t stand the thought that he got to heal and you did not, so one night, he went out and marked it permanently with this tattoo.
“My mother cried for about a month,” Billy said. “She said, You’ll never get a real job now. And I said, Good. I don’t want a real job. But you know. Time passes. And here I am, trying to get a real job.”
I stared at a single red tulip growing out of a vine on his jugular.
“Well, good thing you have this nice shirt,” I said.
“Good thing.” He bought the shirt. We stepped into the glow of the mall hallway.
“What next?” he asked.
“What next?”
It was three in the afternoon. I was supposed to go home. I was supposed to be at Valerie’s for pictures at five, because her mother had already bought the carrot snacks and the onion dip. We were going to stand on her giant stairwell and take photographs with our handsome boyfriends in tuxedos. Peter bought a flask, and we were going to drink out of it in the limo and then maybe in the bathroom and dance all night and then, after, go to Rick Stevenson’s house, where he was throwing a giant party. And there, in some dark corner of Rick’s house, Peter and I were supposed to have sex.
“Want a coffee?” Billy asked.
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“That’s impressive. The only reason I’m standing up right now is coffee.”
“Billy Barnes, brought to us by Folgers.”
He laughed.
“Something like that,” he said. “How about ice cream?”
He pointed to the Dippin’ Dots.
“Sure,” I said. “If you call that ice cream.”
“It’s ice cream of the future,” he said, reading from the sign.
“Ice cream of the future,” I said, holding up my cup. “But it doesn’t make any sense. It’s ice cream now. It’s in my hand.”
“Yeah, it’s fucking stupid,” he said, digging into his.
“I wonder what these dots from the future know,” I said. “If only they could tell us.”
“Maybe in the future, ice cream can talk,” he said.
“Probably.”
“What do you think the ice cream would say?”
“Hello, I am ice cream,” I said, and we laughed harder than I expected.
“That’s a bit disappointing, I got to be honest. I expected more from ice cream.”
“What does the future hold?” I asked, stupidly, to the dots. I tried not to laugh again; I didn’t want to be the one who was always finding things too funny, but I was. “Nobody knows! Except for maybe Jan.”
“Jan?”
“Oh,” I said. “My mom. She’s been seeing a psychic. Well, I guess she’s not really a psychic.”
“What is she then?”
“My question exactly. She’s a woman,” I said. “With a gift.”
“A gift of what?”
“Seeing dead people.”
“Like the kid from The Sixth Sense?”
“Yes. Exactly. Except she’s not a kid. She’s a rich woman who lives in Watch Hill.”
“So not at all like The Sixth Sense.”
“No. She’s a lawyer.”
“I thought she was a psychic?”
“Not a real one,” I said.
“This is confusing.”
We laughed again.
“I think it’s just a hobby,” I said. “I don’t know. Apparently, she only sees a few dead people. She’s very selective. And one of them happens to be Kathy.”
“She sees Kathy?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean. It’s crazy, of course. It’s total bullshit.”
But Billy looked more intrigued than skeptical. He leaned back, ate a spoonful of his ice cream from the future.
“Maybe,” Billy said. “Maybe.”
“You believe that stuff?”
“All I know is that I don’t know what I know.”
It was a nice thought.
“That’s what college taught me,” he said. “That I know absolutely fucking nothing.”
I looked down at my cup. My ice cream of the future was gone.
“We should go see her,” Billy said.
“Go see who?”
“Jan,” he said.
“Jan?” I asked. “Right.”
“I’m serious.”
“Well, I don’t know which house is hers. Her address is at home.”
“Maybe we’ll know,” Billy said. “Maybe we’re psychics, too. Maybe we’ll just be driving around, and we’ll feel it.”
So we left the mall, walked to the parking lot, where Billy looked at me. “You drive,” he said. “I insist.”
* * *
I could feel the ocean before I saw it. That’s always how it worked with the ocean—I could taste it as soon as I opened the car door.
It had been so long since I had been here, yet the ocean looked exactly the same. We walked up the familiar staircase and over the weathered deck and on to the sand. I looked out at the water and then at the sky beyond it. I looked as if I might see you somewhere in the distance, but the truth was, I couldn’t feel you there. You seemed so small in comparison to the ocean, to the history of water.
“So, where to?” Billy asked.
“All I know is that Jan lives in a mansion along the beach,” I said.
We walked along the beach for hours, pointing at different houses, trying to imagine if any of them was Jan’s.
“The castle?” I said. “Nah. That doesn’t seem like Jan. She’s a lawyer, remember?”
He laughed. “Are lawyers not allowed to live in castles?”
“No,” I said. “Not their style.”
We kept walking. We kept talking. Eventually, I found myself saying things I didn’t know I believed, like, “Honestly, I would never want to live in a castle.”
“Why not?”
“I’d get too scared at night.”
“Even with the guards that you order to stand at your door?”
“They’d be the worst part,” I said. “Who are they? What are their motives? Why so many swords? I like small houses. Grapefruit spoons. Where all you need is one good dog.”
I didn’t really expect to find Jan’s house. There were miles of beach houses, and besides, I thought we were just joking about finding Jan. I thought we were just trying to get out of the mall. And I’m glad we did, because it was nice, being back at the ocean, along the edge of the country. It felt like I was being returned to something. To an old, ancient version of myself. But then Billy stopped.
“You smell that?” he asked.
“I do.”
“It smells like something dead,” he said.
An awful, rotting smell. But we ignored it. Kept walking along the beach and I told Billy about our old vacations here, how Dad used to bring us to the lighthouse because it was one of the oldest lighthouses in New England. He asked us to imagine how dark it must have been before electricity, how terrifying the ocean must have seemed.
“The Ancient Greeks were sort of terrified by it,” Billy said.
“You know things about the Ancient Greeks?”
“I was a philosophy major,” he said. “Studied a shit ton about them. And I remember that in Greek mythology, at least, there’s usually nothing on the other side of the ocean. It’s usually portrayed as an uncrossable, eternal river.”
