Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 28
“Were your neighbors mean?”
“I just meant, the rumor is, all Canadians are very nice,” I said.
“Oh, are we? And what are you?”
“Assholes. You haven’t heard?”
“Not all Canadians are as nice as you think, you know,” he said. He told me about his neighbor, a middle-aged man all the kids in the neighborhood were scared of because he used to pour hot oil down a rabbit hole in his yard.
Ray and I didn’t sleep together that night. We didn’t sleep together for weeks, something we both felt proud about.
“Anyway, I had a great time, not fucking you again,” Ray always said before he left, leaning at my door, and for the first six months we dated, we talked like this about ourselves, joked about all the things we did not share, did not have, and yet I felt we had something. We went to concerts, parties, shows, brunches; we took long walks up and down Manhattan, wearing sneakers and eating trail mix, like we were hiking. We walked and talked and by the time we got to the New York Public Library, my calves felt strong. I was outgrowing my sadness. I was becoming an entirely new person, all muscle and sunlight.
* * *
One year later, when Ray asked me to move in with him, I didn’t hesitate. But Mom was upset.
“Jesus doesn’t approve of your cohabitation,” she said.
Mom’s religion still confused me—it wasn’t serious enough to make her go to church every Sunday, but it wasn’t exactly a joke, either. She never laughed when I said things like, “Well, the Lord has never lived in New York City, has he?”
She lowered her voice.
“But what will you do if he leaves you?” she asked. “Will you be able to pay for the rent on your own?”
There was a space in my mind, like a small white room, where some of my conversations with Mom existed. A closet where I kept my big winter boots, and only pulled them out when it was snowing.
“Then he leaves me,” I said.
* * *
Ray didn’t leave me. A year later, Ray proposed to me. Then, he started making chicken every night because Ray didn’t like to eat red meat more than once a week, and I hated the smell of fish in the trash can. Chicken was the sensible choice, made by two people who are trying to live comfortably, forever.
Ray had many ideas for our future. Ray was always pushing me to do things I didn’t believe I could do—why don’t you just quit your job if you aren’t excited about it anymore?
“Because then I wouldn’t have a job,” I said.
“Good! You’re always complaining about your job,” he said.
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t quit my job.
But I did start trying to pitch my own articles. I started to freelance, picked up strange little side gigs writing for websites like eHow and About.com, and I made spreadsheets about how much money I was earning on the side to see what was possible. Because Ray was convincing. Ray was a very good lawyer.
The boat: It is very small. And the wind is a little too windy, something we all feel obliged to address right away. Yes, it is quite windy. Must be the hurricane? Yes, a hurricane is coming, but not for a few days. Someone argues that this wind has nothing to do with the wind of a hurricane.
“This is just like, regular wind,” a man named Kurt says, and people nod their heads, because Kurt is a partner at the firm. “Unrelated to anything.”
It’s difficult to stand, yet we clutch onto side tables and chairs and our slivers of white wine and figure out a way to remain upright.
“Okay, enough about the weather,” Kurt says. “For Christ’s sake.”
“Agreed,” Ray says.
Kurt is gruff with thick black hair. Ray hates him yet is always trying to impress him. Not quite a father figure, since he’s too young and too much of an asshole. When the husbands are introducing the wives, Ray tells them that I’m not his wife; I’m a writer.
“What do you mean, she’s your biographer or something?” Kurt asks. “She follows you around and scribbles notes?”
We all laugh. I feel queasy from the rocking of the boat.
“I’d say it’d be a fairly easy job,” another man says.
“A slim book, full of almost no achievement,” Ray says.
“Ray was born. Ray makes an argument. Ray sips wine. Shortly thereafter, Ray dies. Something like that.”
Ray has been at the company for five years now, and they have just started to make fun of Ray with ease, which Ray says is a good sign. It means they like him. Ray has enough confidence, enough success in life, enough hair, not to get offended very easily. The more they harass him, the more he beams.
“No, no, she’s an actual writer,” Ray says.
Ray likes to say this. He likes to think of himself as someone who is dating a writer, which I know because I like to think of myself as someone who is dating a lawyer. I like saying, My boyfriend, he’s a lawyer. I like watching him get dressed in the morning, the sound of his belt buckle, the way he holds his tie against his stomach as he leans over to kiss me goodbye. I am still in bed, of course, which he pretends to hate but actually likes. It makes him feel like a part of him gets to stay home and write and makes me feel I am headed out into the world to do something notable. And so I stay in bed, make coffee, and turn on my computer as I work. I think of Ray in his office, on the thirty-fourth floor, writing and speaking in a legal language that took him half a decade to master.
“A writer, huh?” Kurt says. “Have you written anything I’ve read?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “What do you read?”
In short, Kurt has read everything.
“Does that include eHow?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
Kurt reads everything, except shit on the internet. He hates the internet. “I don’t even know what you mean.”
“You know when you don’t know how to do something and so you go online and Google, how do I do … whatever that thing is … and random articles pop up?” I ask.
I give him examples of my recent pieces. “How to Knit a Scarf,” “How to Hang Christmas Lights,” “How to Keep Your Rugs from Slipping,” and “How to Brine a Chicken.”
“Do people not know how to do those things?” Kurt asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Millions of people.”
But apparently, none of those people were Kurt. Kurt is a lawyer, one of those men who lives in one state, works in another, and vacations in a third. These men read the Wall Street Journal and fold it into a neat rectangle when they are done. These men wear French collars and read mysteries that always get solved at the very last minute; they hate ambiguity. Their careers are all about pretending to know things they don’t really know that well.
Knowledge is power, including knowledge a person pretends to have.
Yet this is what the internet has taught me: No matter how inflated Kurt’s chest, he can’t store all of the world’s information inside of him. He must have wanted to know something over the years. He must have asked Google at least one question—“How to Tie a Windsor Knot,” “How to Get Rid of Bad Breath”—two of my articles that have accrued one million hits over time. I know by now that everyone is having an affair with the internet; everyone has shameful moments alone with websites they aren’t sure they can trust, yet trust anyway. Everyone wakes up at two in the morning and Googles the name of someone they once loved.
“That’s what’s wrong with the digital age,” Kurt says. “No Picassos. No Prousts. Just … all of us. And who are we? We’re fucking morons, that’s who we are.”
I smile at him.
I don’t say anything.
You are going too far lately, my editor wrote, taking the reader where he doesn’t need to be.
This editor is always crossing out the things I write. The editor is always modifying my thoughts. The editor sees holes, gaps in logic, missed steps, words I cannot think of. It is sort of like being coworkers with the wind, a force that is always pushing against me, though I can’t ever see it arrive or leave. After the editor edits my piece, I have no idea what happens to the editor. I close my computer and get on the train that will take me home, and where does the editor go? Does the editor have a home? What kind of table does the editor put keys on? Who calls out the editor’s name during the middle of the night? It’s hard to picture the editor as a person, but more of a substance, like water evaporating from the hot pavement. Sometimes, it feels like the editor is you, telling me to stop, calm down, cross out my lines:
HOW TO BUILD A PERFECT SANDCASTLE
You wait for perfect weather conditions, so your sandcastle does not get destroyed. Though be aware that your sandcastle will get destroyed. Be mindful of the fact that you are dabbling in an art form that cannot remain. Consider becoming Buddhist.
Kurt takes a sip of his wine. I can tell what he’s thinking. Fucking writer. Fucking hippie. Fucking feminist. But Kurt is polite. He has made millions off this poker face. It is a lawyer’s strength, as well as weakness.
“You sure you’re a writer? You sound like a public-school teacher,” he says.
“You sound like an asshole,” I say.
Kurt and his wife look shocked. Ray stiffens. Then Kurt laughs. Pats me on the back.
“It’s what they pay me to be,” he says, and his wife looks at me and says, “We really just can’t believe the state of things in the public-school systems.”
Ray looks up at the sky, which we can’t see because it’s covered by boat.
“So what are you all doing for the hurricane?” Ray asks.
This is how adult conversations begin and end: with the weather. Like the weather is the only thing that binds us. The weather is the only great battle we have left. Something we are all preparing to fight until death. Everyone on the boat sounds excited about it, even though their language is that of complaint. They’re shutting down the subway. They won’t let us work. Even though we have that Hughner meeting. And I was supposed to be in court! They sound upset, but I know they are excited, because after years of nothing happening, something is happening. In wind and rain, even the lawyers get to be good guys, for a short while.
“Well, good luck to you and your writing,” Kurt says, as if we aren’t going to be on the boat together all day, as if I am just at the start of something, though I feel like I have reached the end of something. I am (finally) in a healthy relationship. I (finally) love all vegetables, especially the ones rich in vitamins. I (finally) have an office with a lock on the door and enough free time to go leaf-peeping on weekends with my fiancé. And last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I (finally) took one of those happiness quizzes online. Scored a 9 out of 10, which means that I am very happy.
* * *
Ray is quiet on the way home. He is having one of those moments where he wonders if he knows me at all. It makes me want to talk, show him who I am. Or at the very least, what I want to be.
“Well, that was interesting,” I say.
“Always is,” he says. “That’s what happens when you put a bunch of lawyers on a boat.”
Ray is on his phone the whole way home on the train. Judging by his body language, you’d think he was negotiating a crucial deal with Samsung or texting with the Russian president, but when I look over at the screen, I see he’s playing a game. He keeps throwing red circles at green circles to destroy them. When he’s killed all of the green circles, he leans back in his chair, puts his phone away, and smiles.
“You did it,” I say. “You won.”
“I did it,” Ray says. “I’m the fucking green circle champion of the world.”
“Congratulations.”
Then I check Facebook for three seconds, which is all it takes to feel like shit. Valerie is hiking in the Alps. Priscilla is drinking a virgin margarita in St. Barts with her wife. Peter is at a conference in Silicon Valley. And Will from the Thames River is now in America, living with his girlfriend in Virginia, and is very excited for his first hurricane. He has posted pictures of all the alcohol he’s going to consume when it arrives. Bring it on, bitch! he writes.
It makes me want to write something angry in response. But I don’t. Because suddenly, I see Lisa the Lifeguard post a picture of a beautiful rosebush. She has tagged Bill’s Tree and Garden. Thank you for the beautiful bush!
I click on her profile to find that Lisa has been tagging Bill’s Tree and Garden in almost all of her photos for six months now. Lisa and Bill’s Tree and Garden, at a B and B in front of a beautiful mountain. Lisa and Bill’s Tree and Garden, at a bakery somewhere in Maine. Lisa and Bill’s Tree and Garden, at a jazz concert on the Town Hall lawn. Lisa is featured in every photo, but Billy is not. He must be the photographer, doing his best to capture the beauty of the moment, of Lisa, who often stands on one leg in her photos, like a flamingo.
I click on Bill’s Tree and Garden and discover how little I know about Billy now: Billy lives in Aldan, Connecticut. Billy has a beard. Billy likes the Mountain Goats and has recently watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the third time and has 344 friends and a lot of photos, which are actually kind of boring, because he only posts photos of things he recently planted: rose of Sharon, a lemon tree, an English ivy.
The train stops and the doors open wide. We stand up.
“I think I am going to be sick,” I say.
“What’s wrong?” Ray asks.
But before I can explain, a woman behind us loses track of her dog. The dog circles around our legs and then rushes ahead of us out the door.
“Where’s my dog!” the woman shouts. “Frankieee!”
The woman is struggling to grab all her luggage. The dog is out the door on the subway platform, not waiting for his owner. The woman shouts louder and louder, and I can hear in her voice that she knows she is losing her dog. Frankieeeee! That is how these things happen. One footstep at a time, one wrong glance left instead of right, and soon it’s not her dog. One swerve right, one deer in the road, and soon you are not my sister.
I run out of the train and grab the dog for her.
When the woman sees me, she kneels down with all of her bags, and she laughs as the dog licks her face. I don’t know why, but reunions like this always make me want to cry.
* * *
Inside the apartment, Ray drops an Alka-Seltzer tablet into the water, and I feel calm as I watch the water foam.
We pack for home. Ray packs all his fancy shirts, which are the only shirts he has. I hate Ray’s shirts. They are too formal, too shiny to wear with cargo shorts. Brooks Brothers shirts, the kind that promise never to wrinkle, and under the kitchen lights, I can see the slick coating that makes them wrinkle-free. He wears them everywhere. To the bowling alley with our friends; to brunch in his flip-flops; to his nephew’s birthday party and into the moon bounce. It never looks right. But I never tell Ray this. I can’t bear the look on his face when he realizes his entire adult life, he has spent all of his weekends wearing the wrong shirt.
“What you need to say is, Ray, just because you’re used to the shirts, doesn’t mean they are as casual as you think they are,” my therapist said.
My therapist believes that being honest is easy. She says that you just open your mouth and that the truth comes out. And perhaps this is so, but this assumes that we all know what is the truth.
“Ray,” I say. “Why don’t I go home myself?”
“You don’t want me to come?”
“I don’t need you to come.”
“It’s not about need,” he says. “It’s about having company.”
“I’ll be fine,” I say. “I’ll be in and out. Back by tomorrow night. Just stay here. It’ll be fine. There’s never any place for you to sleep anyway.”
Ray always has to sleep on the couch, because Dad got rid of your bed. But it isn’t just that—our house is musty. The pillows are old. And the white couch—it’s not that white anymore. Mom just sits there and watches TV, while the house goes into ruin. Dad stopped fixing things years ago because he thought it might inspire Mom to do something or maybe move to Florida. Dad was still ready to go to Florida. He was cold. He didn’t understand how they were going to take care of the house in their old age. “It’s too big for us,” he always said. “You want to take care of it?”
Mom never answered him, so Dad started leaving Post-it notes on the counter, detailing all the things that needed to be fixed one day, as if Mom might fix them herself. DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE BAT IN THE MORNING, one of them said once.
“Ray, I’ll be fine, really,” I say. “I’ll be back by tomorrow.”
And he believed me. He knew about my two-day limit.
“Okay,” he said. “If you insist. But be back before the storm.”
We get into bed. Ray falls right to sleep, but I can’t. So I go out onto the balcony, and I look down at the city, and I understand why our cat always liked to sit atop the bookshelf. From this high up, everything looks more beautiful. The traffic is a long ribbon of white and red.
I sit and I smoke one cigarette—all I will allow myself these days—and search Lisa’s profile for more information. Lisa is a vet, apparently. She has a lot of photos of herself, being a vet. There is Lisa, resetting a mouse femur. Lisa, holding the kitten by the scruff of the neck, inserting a long needle, and the kitten doesn’t even seem to mind. Somehow, the animal can feel her goodness. Must be something about her smooth skin or the straight edge of her neatly cropped bob. Lisa has grown up to be clean and trustworthy and to the point, like a perfect paragraph. She posts articles about animals and what we can learn about love by looking at animals. I click on all the links—I want to learn from these animals. From Lisa.
When the cigarette turns to ash, I go back inside, where Ray is still asleep. Ray is a good sleeper. So good that he sometimes looks dead. And as soon as I think this, I worry he is dead. I put my phone on the nightstand. I press my ear to his heart. It’s so steady, exactly as you would imagine a lawyer’s heart to be.
