I Will Do Better, page 10
Another intricate joke. After considerable build-up, Z took a moment. Batting thick lashes, she snapped the whip on its punch line: “Lights go on. My friend’s like, Whoa, I’m sucking his arm!”
I was more than happy to laugh.
MEANWHILE, THE SCHOOL year limped into its denouement, and the courtyard mommies had fed on one other’s souls pretty thoroughly. Everyone was worn down, myself included. Having reached an unspoken understanding with most of them—You stay away from me and my kid, we’ll stay away from you—I willfully ignored the various mothers coordinating summer plans to visit one another’s second homes, and shouldered the crying jag that resulted after Lily was left out of one too many end-of-the-year pizza picnics.
I folded Lily’s summer clothes, underwear, and socks into her miniature suitcase. (Enough to last a month? I wondered, remembering there was such a thing as washing machines in Tennessee, stop worrying so much.) I loaded my backpack with snacks, printed out our boarding passes, and then made sure Lily held my hand—not just in the bus station, but while stepping onto the airport escalator. I double-checked that neither of us had left our rolling suitcases in Hudson News.
Among Diana’s final wishes was Lily annually spending time with Mom’s side of the family, becoming familiar with where her mother came from. Wish granted: the two of us soon touched down in the ailing queen city of Memphis. Lily would visit her grandma for a month. During this time I’d be back in Manhattan. Thirty days.
First, though, we walked around in the same riverside park where a teenaged Diana Joy Colbert had loved wasting time. Humidity thick as cake; calliope music drifting from an unseen, docked paddleboat; the mighty Mississippi placid and brown.
A special occasion was on tap for today. Peg wore a neat yellow summer dress and sensible shoes. In one hand she held the strings of a few colored helium balloons. Her other hand lightly clasped Lily’s wrist.
Lily bounced up and down. She was wearing the pretty blue frock from her third birthday party, the very same one she’d worn for Mary Poppins and for her Third Street school pictures. It still fit, though its hem no longer grazed the ground. Peg had done her hair in blossoming pigtails. Behind the two of them, Diana’s beloved aunt Margie and uncle Glenn were unloading, from a sport utility vehicle, what appeared to be a dozen more balloons, corralling them so they did not get away.
Lily could not hold still: she was entranced by the balloons, energized by the sight of the ships along the river, by the park, all the relatives Diana had grown up with—everyone with us, dressed in long dresses, in collared shirts and khakis, each family member with their own balloon.
I watched Lily point at the riverboats, twirl to the calliope melody. I was trailing a few feet behind, letting her and Peg be together. My free hand was rolling my suitcase. In my head, I was back in the exam room, the morning Diana had been diagnosed, watching my infant daughter play with the balloon made from that inflated glove.
Jeez. It really had been a different lifetime.
Peg led us all over rocks, toward the water. Diana, along with her cousins and their circle of friends, used to come out here. Lazy afternoons. Dimming evenings. Boats and port ships slowly going by. They listened to melodic synthesizer music by sad new romantics; they smoked menthols, once in a while tried harder stuff. At that point in her life Diana had won a county spelling bee for which she’d gotten her name into the local paper. She was dreaming about college, getting out of the state, becoming a filmmaker. This would have been before she turned down a scholarship from the local college and enrolled in New York University, well before she became weighed down with college loans and a shitty office job, before she started the wake-and-bake routine that, eventually, would coat the walls and ceiling of her shower in a sticky film of marijuana resin. Diana, her cousins, their friends—they’d been a bunch of teenagers in a park, looking out at the water, talking about music and love and dreams, not even knowing they were inching their way toward the people they’d become.
She and I used to joke that when she was eighty she’d try heroin, because why not? On her deathbed, she had meetings with her Narcotics Anonymous sponsee.
Cloud cover, if any, was faint. A hint of breeze couldn’t dent the humidity. I had this feeling that I could reach out and wring the water from the air as if dealing with a wet towel. I wore the same jacket and shirt I’d been married in, felt myself swimming in my own sweat.
The family’s procession reached the river’s edge. I unzipped my suitcase, removed the red velvet box. From its size it looked as if it might contain a football. I placed the box on the picnic table, undid its two small latches, and removed from it a speckled urn. A faded bluish gray, it looked like something from the time of the Roman Empire.
One of Diana’s last wishes had been to release some of her ashes into the Mississippi River, at this rocky bank. But, it turns out, ashes are actually heavy: you’re talking about the weight of a human body burned down. Sometimes bone and sinew remain, little chunks. The urn, constructed of a thick marble, felt weighty in my hands, more dense than I’d expected. Its lid took effort to unscrew, but suddenly came loose, click.
Lily was running around in circles, trying to climb up a nearby tree. Peg asked her to come over, gave Lily her own balloon to play with.
“Is this an up balloon or a down balloon,” Lily asked.
Peg looked confused.
“In Peppa Pig, George lets go of an up balloon,” Lily said. “Polly Parrot catched up so it did not get away.”
“An up balloon,” I told Lily.
Each family member read out loud a personal message to Diana, opening a window onto their Diana, the girl and woman they’d grown up with: who she’d been, what she’d meant to that person. Each message finished and you understood a little more about loss, how multifaceted it can be, its tones and hues and the many dimensions there can be to our world. And then that reader approached the opened urn; inside it, a plastic bag of industrial thickness contained all of the ashes. Each reader poured out a scoopful, carefully walked the plastic scooper over to the rocks, to the water’s lip.
When it was my turn, I mentioned that Diana had been the first person to read my early drafts—and brought that same willing eye to my ninety-eighth drafts. I brought up her good nature, her trying for that grant to give massages to homeless people with AIDS. I talked about the void I felt without her, but also how Diana’s love was eminently visible in her daughter, in all of us; we saw it here, in the kindness we showed each other. That was enough speaking for me. Today was for her Memphis family. I wanted to stay out of their way, wanted it all to go well for them.
One at a time, each of us poured some ashes of my late wife’s body into the murky water. First the soot piled, then it dissipated. When we were all finished, simultaneously, we released the balloons into the air.
Lily must have sensed this was important, that whatever was happening here somehow related to her. She stopped running, turned her head, watched. Then she took my balloon. Giggling, she let it go, then tried to follow the bunch. Only she could not. Their staggered procession moved horizontally with the slight wind. Single balloons began to separate from one another now, their small circles of color slowly shrinking, drifting over the gray water, toward the gray infinite.
DIANA WENT WITH me to see Slash’s solo band. It was early in our dating life, winter, a club on the border of the West Village and Tribeca, and when the venue took extra long to open its doors, Slash came out and walked the line and individually thanked people for waiting out in the cold. A year or so later—we were a couple but still before the marriage—we took a road trip up to Hartford, Connecticut. For that one, there was buzz that Axl’s oft-delayed new album might finally be coming out, and he’d gotten his band of talented replacements together, insistently calling them Guns N’ Roses. I managed to get us great seats at the Hartford Civic Center. That night, with Axl doing one of his legendary waiting sessions before going on, his camera crew focused on different women in the crowd, continuing a longstanding tradition where the audience encouraged them to flash their breasts, showing them on the arena’s Jumbotron. The camera focused on Diana. She sort of laughed. Good luck with that.
The following night, a long-running hard-rock radio show— infamous because its listeners never got stumped by the trivia question, no matter how obscure the metal factoid—was taking calls about Axl and his new band, wanting to know whether listeners would give the new album a chance. I called in and managed to get on the air and pontificate: the old band wasn’t getting back together; why not give the new bunch a chance, see what this new material sounds like? When I called Diana to ask what she’d thought, she answered, “I can’t talk. I’m on hold to go on the air with him,” and clicked on over. She told the host that she’d been at the show and enjoyed watching Guns N’ Roses, but she had a problem with how their roving cameras exploited women, and she said that if she paid to go to a rock show, she had the right not to be objectified and treated like a piece of meat. She wanted to know what the host thought of that.
I had been on the ball and taped the entire exchange. We ended up including it—all of it, including the deejay’s sputters and hems—as a secret track that we burned onto a CD and included in the goodie bags at our wedding.
One more balloon, shrinking out over the water.
LILY WAS STRAPPED in the booster seat in the rear of the Dodge, watching the scenery outside her window. This passing world was not hers: strip malls, tract housing, shrubbery, the suburbs, unknown for her, exotic, and she was totally into them, her jaw open.
Peg was driving, bringing us into a leafy, pleasant neighborhood of modest single-level homes. Built after the Second World War, each house sat a distance from the curb. In recent years, I knew, limited tax revenues from this zip code had meant cuts to sanitation and essential services. Stories circulated of robbery gangs making the rounds from out of landscaping trucks, seniors holding their wallets close in grocery stores.
The Dodge completed its turn, started down the street. Peg honked, a way to alert the friend who lived a few houses down: I’m around, just in case.
“Miss Samantha is so precious.” Peggy pointed to her left. “I can’t wait for you to meet her.”
Lily followed Peg’s prompt, peering over.
“My big girl.” Peg looked into the rearview mirror. “It’s such a blessing to have you here.” She smiled at Lily. “We’re going to have so much fun.” To me she added, “It’s a shame Daddy can only stay one day.”
I returned her sentiments in kind. Through my front pocket, along my thigh, I could feel my phone’s muted pulse: texts. They’d been arriving, on and off, for a while now, likely asking about the ceremony, maybe proposing plans for when I got back to the city. Their possibilities vibrated, pulling at me; I let the phone stay where it was, didn’t want to be rude.
Rising out of the front seat, I helped to corral the luggage from the trunk. Peg guided Lily by the hand, led us all toward her home, a neat and cozy little number, brick and clapboard trimmed with blue paint bright and thick as cake icing. She guided us into a living room, where the lights had been left on, a deterrent to anyone who might be casing the place.
Before I could set down any suitcases, well before I could even take in the polite and spotless décor, I was waylaid.
Pictures and portraits lined the walls, filled the bookshelves. It would have been physically impossible to see all of them at once. However, in these moments, I took in more of them than you might think: Diana at fifteen sitting for a profile portrait; Diana in cap and gown, graduating from her high school; a shot of Diana, her mother, and her beloved grandmother, all smiling on a roller coaster; Diana beaming along with me as we entered the reception on our wedding day; Diana embracing Lily seconds after giving birth to her; a thin, post-transplant Diana and baby Lily, smiling, standing together in a garden …
I planted my feet, tried to stay solid.
Of course, Lily was mesmerized. After all this time, here was her mother, and from so many angles: Yes, the photos she knew from our home, but new ones, too, everywhere she looked, the experience complete, immersive. Her wide eyes took it all in.
The apparent question is: What must that have been like for her? The obvious answer is: It was too much. Lily couldn’t stand still, couldn’t take in any single image. Instead, she romped through the house, looking for the desired room she’d been hearing so much about: the office that, specifically for this visit, Peg had converted into a playroom. The room contained Diana’s old collection of Archie comics; it contained her Nancy Drew paperbacks. Lily ran into that room, jumped up and down on the rubber play mat, dove into the chest of toys, squealed.
I shook off my daze, was about to order Lily to take it down a notch.
“We don’t need to run.” Peg already was in the hallway, her voice full of patience. “You have a whole month to play with everything. If you are calm, we can get to it all.”
Lily lowered her head, wrapped her arms around her grandma’s leg. Peg hugged her back, called Lily her love bug, and, with Lily still enveloping her, carried Lily’s suitcase into the master bedroom, and showed Lily the special bottom drawer, cleared out just for her. Like conspiring girlfriends, they giggled about how cozy it would be, sleeping in the same bed. (“Two bugs in a rug,” Lily repeated.) Lily helped Peg set the table for dinner. After dinner she followed directions and cleared the table.
RESTAURANTS WITH HIDDEN entrances and low lighting and tables that did not include squirt bottles of ketchup. Walks over the High Line, immediately followed by a few afternoon delights inside that wonderfully filthy hourly motel. Movie nights at that historic, newly remodeled theater in the Lower East Side, where Whichever Letter and I ordered curated yummies from plush seats, then, in the darkness, fondled one another. Renegade walks with the oversized pug. Sudden mad excursions to Queens. Drop-ins during the wee small hours after some press engagement had run long. Quiet decadent lingering on the couch; flirting emails that had sly memes attached to them, but also sometimes got deep; emojis both euphoric and perverse; being on the phone with one and getting a call from the other and nearly shitting myself; telling slightly varied versions of the same story in consecutive conversations; changing plans, both on the fly and out of necessity. What amounted to middling amounts of duplicity, all done to make sure that neither of these wondrous women found out about the other. God, the balancing act. The rush.
Could anyone—any fair judge—blame me? A single man blowing off some steam, while fleeing his grief, and making up for his extended, indentured servitude? It wasn’t like I had a game plan, or knew what I was doing. What I had was a bunch of simultaneous ideas. Hand one: a month without Lily; of course I was eager to romp around the lush fields of Manhattan. Another part of me figured: construct a protective bubble around myself, type like hell, once in a while leave the bubble for air. Time would make things more clear, in the larger sense of what I did or did not want with each woman, what they wanted or could not handle from me. Really, that had been all I understood: writing would allow me to live, living would allow me to write, we’d see from there.
Who would have guessed: bouncing around the city on the pogo stick of my cock left my body perpetually half drained, but also had my mind continually racing and lucid. I rescheduled hanging out with my sister and her new baby multiple times; I whiffed on an appointment with a fancy foreign editor because I fell asleep upright on the couch after being up for two days straight, engaged in this twenty-four seven steel-cage death match: abandon versus introspection, adrenaline against enervation.
A’s legs were tangled in my threadbare sheets. She was sitting up, leaning back against the headboard, her attention occupied by the laptop on her knees, the series of questions she had to answer, in her client’s voice, for an email interview. She was munching on crackers, and was topless, and every time I looked over at her, I could not help but stare at her areola closest to me, just there, plain and everyday. I glanced away, returning my attention to the lowest bureau drawer, the long-ignored task: stuffing clothes Lily had outgrown into a trash bag. But staring at a onesie also was too much: I couldn’t let myself be blinded by memories, the cuteness, how recently I’d purchased this now-obsolete little jumper.
I glanced back at A, then away from her, and explained that one of Diana’s final wishes was for Lily to know her mother’s side of the family.
This segued into how well Peg dealt with Lily’s tantrums and, by contrast, how impossible it was to get the kid to listen to me.
“Doesn’t sound so unique,” A said, editing her email. “I mean, isn’t it that way with all kids?”
Her eyes rose from the screen, caught me in full ogle. She gave that goofy smile. All I wanted to do with my life was keep that look on her face.
Only now here was Z. Bringing over a big gray pot. Standing in the kitchenette over my ancient stove, chopping celery, boiling water.
My summer cold was beyond gross, my nose stuffed through the back of my ears, wadded tissues all over the couch. Z swore on the first name of a deceased ancestor, this soup was the cure. A woman hadn’t taken care of me like this since Diana before she got ill, before she became pregnant. I let Z fuss over me, listened as she related my frustration with Lily’s tantrums to tantrums from her own childhood, which she then connected with disagreements she’d had with her parents while growing up. Z gave examples, shared ideas. She was in her mid-thirties. During cynical moments, I thought she might have looked at this widower dad as a long-sought answer, a no-assembly-required domestic partner. Did I mind?
