“Don’t.” She swatted at me.
“But sweetheart,” I said, “you’d know if you were crazy.”
“But I probably wouldn’t. Don’t you see? That’s sort of the definition of crazy.” She fixed me with a hard, calculating stare. She had her own opinions, and I didn’t then know how to talk her out of them, or that I was supposed to simply listen to her; I was too young to know what to say or do, I had so little experience with things and with women in particular, and I believed a kind of frictionless amiability was what would serve my interests. So when she said things like this, I mostly just discounted them, thinking that would help. She said, finally, “We’re sort of a pathetic couple, when you think about it.”
“No, we’re not,” I said. “You’re great, and I’m great.”
“Not you and me, dummy,” she said, “me and George.”
What I did next was, I took up tennis as seriously as I could. I found I remembered the nice contact the ball made with the strings—a kind of exponential action, with the ball plus the strings multiplying to more force than I could have hoped to exert on my own. It was partly an aesthetic choice, looking back; I suppose I liked the way it felt when I hit a ball well, but I can further see that something else must also have been at work, some unkind fascination with the strangeness of George, with the fact that he had begun to fail in this very obvious fashion while I had, so far, not. With my summer ID card I could use the courts behind the recreation building. I signed up on the bulletin board and ended up playing with a set of people who were variously serious about the game—a doctor from Ghana who wore blinding whites; a janitor who owned the most expensive racket I had ever seen, a Mark-8 Wonder, which produced a faint supernatural whistling noise like a hunting owl; a homeschooled sixteen-year-old boy named Elliott who had no offensive instincts whatsoever but who could return nearly anything I sent his way, so he beat me consistently—and so on. I was not exactly serious about the tennis itself, but about the project of self-definition, as I see it now, because this was something very straightforward that I could be, or at least do. Nora’s lacrosse friends would not recognize me in the fall, and neither would Matt Grange—or better yet, they would recognize that they had never really seen the true me. And it was not just that I was not failing as George was. I think this summer was also the period when I first struck on the idea of ambition, that I could be something in particular, rather than just myself in general.
Nora went back and forth to Vancouver by herself a few times that summer and fall, but it wasn’t until Thanksgiving that I went north with her again. By this time George had been living at home for some months. Mrs. Vardon greeted us at the bus station, wearing a white sweater and a puffy white parka, her black eyes and round cheeks seeming, in the cold morning light, like something arctic, adapted for long darkness. “Orlando,” she said, taking my arm. “Now, you know about George. You know he’s a little different than when you last saw him.”
It was a Saturday, so Mr. Vardon was home too. He was in the dining room, reading a newspaper. “Hello, Orlando,” said Mr. Vardon. “Welcome again.”
“Hello. Thank you.”
Together Nora and I went upstairs. George’s white door was closed. No sound came from it. Nora knocked. “Come in,” he said.
In some ways her brother looked the same. A smoky, sweaty, outdoor odor had filled the room, not unpleasantly; a window was open, and the room was cool, almost cold. He wore a T-shirt and was skinnier than he was the last time I’d seen him. His expression was different, less fierce, more uncertain. “Hey,” he noted, “it’s the boyfriend.”
“Hi,” I said.
Nora said, “You look good, Georgie.”
“Yeah, bullshit,” he said.
“It’s cold in here,” said Nora.
“I still get hot,” he said. “It’s something to do with the pills.” Addressing me, he gestured languidly toward the dresser, where five brown plastic bottles stood. “Screws up your thermostat.”
She said, “You should comb your hair.”
“Sure, but if I started now it’d look suspicious.”
“Oh, it would not.”
“The other thing is,” said George, but only to me, “you know how I was hearing voices. Well, it’s still happening. But now it’s like in the background. Like the radio. But I can’t even listen to the radio anymore. It’s just too much blabber. Music’s okay. But even then, they talk through the music, it’s like annoying, it’s like they have a plan to talk during the good parts.” He shrugged. “Whatever. You know.”
Sensing that Nora and George wanted to be alone, I left them and went downstairs into the hallway. Mr. Vardon had gone off somewhere. I could hear Mrs. Vardon knocking around in the kitchen, making breakfast. I didn’t know what to do with myself. What could I say to anyone that wouldn’t sound hollow and ridiculous? I had had such a featureless life to that point, so free of pain, I thought, that I had no training in delivering sympathy. I didn’t know how to do it. And Nora did, or was quickly figuring it out. I stood alone in the front hall, feeling stupid and useless.
After a few minutes Nora came back down. “I got cold,” she said.
“Listen,” I said.
“He’s better than he was,” she said.
“Listen, when we were here in the spring,” I said, “George said something to me, and I know it maybe doesn’t matter, but I just wanted to tell you. He said he had malaria. After we played tennis. I feel like I should have told someone. Like maybe it was a warning sign.”
“Oh,” she said, distantly, “don’t worry about it.”
“But I do.” I took her in my new strong arms. “I worry about it.”
“Please don’t,” she insisted.
“Maybe I should have said something earlier.”
“But sweetheart,” she said, looking up at me, “you realize we couldn’t have done anything.”
“But I just thought maybe we could have.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” she sighed, sinking against me in quiet disappointment, “this has nothing to do with you.” George had left his door open, and it was becoming cold in the downstairs hallway, and then we were shivering there next to the banister, in our light traveling clothes.
Poor George lived on, and lives on still, as far as I know, sick and probably messed up in the predictable ways. He was important to me in the way such people can be, surprisingly, really out of proportion to their actual size in your life. I remember, for example, thinking about him some years later, one Seattle winter, a long time after Nora and I had gone our separate ways. I had come down with the flu and was deep under the covers at home, my wife off at work and me alone in the bedroom in the strange empty middle of the day. The peculiar quiet that entered my sickroom—the heated stillness—the dense damp packing of my chest—the fluid limpness that had overtaken me—and the individual details of the wallpaper, which my wife and I had newly hung, with its tiny red strawberries, and the imagined vastness of my old city beyond the windows—all the city’s long streets and silent windowed towers, and above it a complex geography of clouds and sky—all of it combined in some alchemy of illness so that I seemed, momentarily, to be inhabiting a continent of wildness, of strangeness. In the manner of men getting older I sometimes ended up thinking sort of longingly about the past whenever my current life was slow, or whenever I felt I deserved better, which meant that over the years I had on and off thought of Nora and her air of restrained tragedy, and her poor brother George. But this new fevered condition felt like a different world, one that I occupied for only a few hours, where love meant nothing and where you could see, delirious, through walls—where you knew everything, and where no one would ever ask anything of you. That’s not quite it, but it was something like that. I was pretty sick, and it was a terrible afternoon, during which I felt a hideous estrangement from the plain objects of everyday life. The trees and empty cars I could see from my pillow seemed filled with a brooding, unaccommodating presence—a malin
gering spirit—and a peculiar half-light, like that of an eclipse, seemed to enter the room through the venetian blinds. I shivered because I felt, as I had never felt in my life, alone in the world—not only alone but as though I were the only human left around. But then after a while I returned to my senses. I was only sick, after all, and it was only a passing feeling, and slowly things resolved themselves into their familiar places, and I went on, after a day or so, pretty much the way I had before.
I don’t want to say that I ever really gave poor George Vardon a whole lot of serious thought. It’s just that once in a while his story, his terrible fate, would secretly animate a day for me as I walked around, and I would wonder what I was supposed to do with what I knew about him—with the whole fact of his sad life as I understood it. It was not the saddest life ever lived, of course, but it was enough so I would wonder: What are we supposed to do with what we know? What is George Vardon to me?
And these days it strikes me that possibly these aren’t exactly the questions. Maybe we’re not supposed to do anything. Maybe this is just a story of something that happened to me, and not even really to me at all. It’s really George’s story, that is, but naturally he can’t tell it, and neither can I.
JUNOT DÍAZ
Miss Lora
FROM The New Yorker
YEARS LATER, YOU would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother, would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her.
You’d fuck anything, someone jeered.
And he had given that someone the eye. You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.
Your brother. Dead from the cancer, and sometimes you still felt a fulgurating sadness over it, even though he really was a super asshole at the end. He didn’t die easy at all. Those last months, he just steady kept trying to run away. He’d be caught trying to hail a cab outside Beth Israel or walking down some Newark street in his greens. Once he conned an ex-girlfriend into driving him to California, but outside of Camden he started having convulsions and she called you in a panic. Was it some atavistic impulse to die alone, out of sight? Or was he just trying to fulfill something that had always been inside him? Why do you keep doing that? you asked, but he just laughed. Doing what?
In those last weeks, when he finally became too feeble to run away, he refused to talk to you or your mother. Didn’t utter a single word until he died. Your mother didn’t care. She loved him and prayed over him and talked to him like he was still okay. But it wounded you, that stubborn silence. His last fucking days and he wouldn’t say a word. You’d ask him something straight up, How are you feeling today, and Rafa would turn his head. Like you all didn’t deserve an answer. Like no one did.
You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, a gesture. That’s what happened with your girlfriend Paloma—she stooped to pick up her purse, and your heart flew out of you.
That’s what happened with Miss Lora too.
It was 1985. You were sixteen years old and you were messed up and alone like a motherfucker. You were also convinced—like totally, utterly convinced—that the world was going to blow itself to pieces. Almost every night you had dreams that made the ones the president was having in Dreamscape look like pussy play. In your dreams the bombs were always going off, evaporating you while you walked, while you ate a chicken wing, while you rode the bus to school, while you fucked Paloma. You would wake up biting your own tongue in terror, the blood dribbling down your chin.
Someone should have medicated you.
Paloma thought you were being ridiculous. She didn’t want to hear about mutual assured destruction, The Late Great Planet Earth, “We begin bombing in five minutes,” SALT II, The Day After, Threads, Red Dawn, WarGames, Gamma World—any of it. She called you Mr. Depressing. And she didn’t need any more depressing than she had already. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment with four younger siblings and a disabled mom, and she was taking care of all of them. That and honors classes. She didn’t have time for anything and mostly stayed with you, you suspected, because she felt bad about what had happened with your brother. It’s not like you ever spent much time together or had sex or anything. Only Puerto Rican girl on the earth who wouldn’t give up the ass for any reason. I can’t, she said. I can’t make any mistakes. Why is sex with me a mistake, you demanded, but she just shook her head, pulled your hand out of her pants. Paloma was convinced that if she made any mistakes in the next two years, any mistakes at all, she would be stuck in that family of hers forever. That was her nightmare. Imagine if I don’t get in anywhere, she said. You’d still have me, you tried to reassure her, but Paloma looked at you like the apocalypse would be preferable.
So you talked about the coming apocalypse to whoever would listen—to your history teacher, who claimed he was building a survival cabin in the Poconos, to your boy who was stationed in Panama (in those days you still wrote letters), to your around-the-corner neighbor, Miss Lora. That was what connected you two at first. She listened. Better still, she had read Alas, Babylon and had seen part of The Day After, and both had scared her monga.
The Day After wasn’t scary, you complained. It was crap. You can’t survive an air burst by ducking under a dashboard.
Maybe it was a miracle, she said, playing.
A miracle? That was just dumbness. What you need to see is Threads. Now, that is some real shit.
I probably wouldn’t be able to stand it, she said. And then she put her hand on your shoulder.
People always touched you. You were used to it. You were an amateur weight lifter, something else you did to keep your mind off the shit of your life. You must have had a mutant gene somewhere in the DNA, because all the lifting had turned you into a goddamn circus freak. Most of the time it didn’t bother you, the way girls and sometimes guys felt you up. But with Miss Lora you could tell something was different.
Miss Lora touched you, and you suddenly looked up and noticed how large her eyes were in her thin face, how long her lashes were, how one iris had more bronze in it than the other.
Of course you knew her; she lived in the building behind, taught over at Sayreville H.S. But it was only in the past months that she’d snapped into focus. There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn’t have children, who lived alone, who was still kinda young. Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind, a woman with no child could be explained only by vast untrammeled calamity.
Maybe she just doesn’t like children.
Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn’t mean you don’t have them.
Miss Lora wasn’t anything exciting. There were about a thousand viejas in the neighborhood who were way hotter, like Mrs. del Orbe, whom your brother had fucked silly until her husband found out and moved the whole family away. Miss Lora was too skinny. Had no hips whatsoever. No breasts, either, no ass, even her hair failed to make the grade. She had her eyes, sure, but what she was most famous for in the neighborhood was her muscles. Not that she had huge ones like you—chick was just wiry like a motherfucker, every single fiber standing out in outlandish definition. Bitch made Iggy Pop look chub, and every summer she caused a serious commotion at the pool. Always in a bikini despite her curvelessness, the top stretching over these corded pectorals and the bottom cupping a rippling fan of haunch muscles. Always swimming underwater, the black waves of her hair flowing behind her like a school of eels. Always tanning herself (which none of the other women did) into the deep lacquered walnut of an old shoe. That woman needs to keep her clothes on, the mothers complained. She’s like a plastic bag full of worms. But who could take their eyes off her? Not you or your brother. The kids would ask her, Are you a bodybuilder, Miss Lora? and she would shake her head behind her paperback. Sorry, guys, I was just born this way.
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After your brother died, she came over to the apartment a couple of times. She and your mother shared a common place, La Vega, where Miss Lora was born and where your mother had recuperated after the Guerra Civil. One full year living just behind the Casa Amarilla had made a vegana out of your mother. I still hear the Río Camú in my dreams, your mother said. Miss Lora nodded. I saw Juan Bosch once on our street when I was very young. They sat and talked about it to death. Every now and then she stopped you in the parking lot. How are you doing? How is your mother? And you never knew what to say. Your tongue was always swollen, raw, from being blown to atoms in your sleep.
Today you come back from a run to find her on the stoop, talking to la doña. Your mother calls you. Say hello to la profesora.
I’m sweaty, you protest.
Your mother flares. Who in carajo do you think you’re talking to? Say hello, coño, to la profesora.
Hello, profesora.
Hello, student.
She laughs and turns back to your mother’s conversation.
You don’t know why you’re so furious all of a sudden.
I could curl you, you say to her, flexing your arm.
And Miss Lora looks at you with a ridiculous grin. What in the world are you talking about? I’m the one who could pick you up.
She puts her hands on your waist and pretends to make the effort.
Your mother laughs thinly. But you can feel her watching the both of you.
When your mother confronted your brother about Mrs. del Orbe, he didn’t deny it. What do you want, Ma? Se metío por mis ojos.