constant stops at the cash machine, taking out twenty bucks at a time, good God.
It was hopeless. There was simply no way in hell she could matter half as much to Mr. Music Library as she did to me. We belonged together; there was a dream rightness and magic to it, inarguable; the thought of her flooded every corner of my mind with light and poured brightness into miraculous lofts I hadn’t even known were there, vistas that seemed to exist not at all except in relationship to her. Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Pärt, as a way of being with her; and she had only to mention a recently read novel for me to grab it up hungrily, to be inside her thoughts, a sort of telepathy. Certain objects that passed through the shop—a Pleyel piano; a strange little scratched-up Russian cameo—seemed to be tangible artifacts of the life that she and I, by rights, ought to be living together. I wrote thirty-page emails to her that I erased without sending, opting instead for the mathematical formula I’d devised to keep from making too big a fool of myself: always three lines shorter than the email she’d sent, always one day longer than I’d waited for her reply. Sometimes in bed—adrift in my sighing, opiated, erotic reveries—I carried on long candid conversations with her: we are inseparable, I imagined us saying (cornily) to each other, each with a hand on the other’s cheek, we can never be apart. Like a stalker, I hoarded a snippet of autumn-leaf hair I’d retrieved from the trash after she’d trimmed her bangs in the bathroom—and, even more creepily, an unwashed shirt, still intoxicating with her hay-smelling, vegetarian sweat.
It was hopeless. More than hopeless: humiliating. Always leaving the door of my room partially open when she came to visit, a not-so-subtle invitation. Even the adorable drag in her step (like the little mermaid, too fragile to walk on land) drove me crazy. She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone. Twice I’d tried to kiss her: once drunk in a taxicab; once at the airport, desperate at the thought that I would not be seeing her again for months (or, who knew, years)—“I’m sorry,” I said, a beat too late—
“It’s okay.”
“No, really, I—”
“Listen—” sweet unfocused smile—“it’s fine. But they’re boarding my flight soon” (they weren’t, in fact). “I have to go. Take care of yourself, okay?”
Take care. What on earth did she see in this “Everett”? I could only think how boring she must find me if she preferred such a lukewarm gloop of a guy to me. Someday, when we have kids… though he’d said it half jokingly, my blood had gone cold. He was just the kind of loser you could see hauling around a diaper bag and loads of padded baby equipment.… I berated myself for not being more forceful with her, though in truth there was no way I could have pursued her any harder without at least a tiny bit of encouragement on her end. Already it was embarrassing enough: Hobie’s tact whenever her name came up, the careful flatness in his voice. Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment. Even a cow like Mrs. Vogel could see it. It wasn’t as if Pippa had led me on—quite the contrary; if she cared anything about me she would have come back to New York instead of staying in Europe after school; and still for whatever dumb reason I couldn’t let go of the way she’d looked at me the day when I first came to visit, sitting on the side of her bed. The memory of that childhood afternoon had sustained me for years; it was as if—sick with loneliness for my mother—I’d imprinted on her like some orphaned animal; when in fact, joke on me, she’d been doped up and knocked lamb-daffy from a head injury, ready to throw her arms around the first stranger who’d walked in.
My “opes” as Jerome called them were in an old tobacco tin. On the marble top of the dresser I crushed one of my hoarded old-style Oxycontins, cut it and drew it into lines with my Christie’s card and—rolling the crispest bill in my wallet—leaned to the table, eyes damp with anticipation: ground zero, bam, bitter taste in the back of the throat and then the gust of relief, falling backward on the bed as the sweet old punch hit me square in the heart: pure pleasure, aching and bright, far from the tin-can clatter of misery.
vii.
THE NIGHT OF MY dinner at the Barbours was rainwhipped and stormy, with blasting winds so strong I could scarcely get my umbrella up. On Sixth Avenue there were no cabs to be had, pedestrians head-down and shouldering into sideways rain; in the humid, bunker-like damp of the subway platform, drips plinked monotonously from the concrete ceiling.
When I emerged, Lexington Avenue was deserted, raindrops dancing and prickling on the sidewalks, a smashing rain that seemed to amplify all the noise on the streets. Taxis lashed by in loud sprays of water. A few doors from the station I ducked into a market to buy flowers—lilies, three bunches since one was too puny; in the tiny, overheated shop their fragrance hit me exactly the wrong way and only at the cash register did I realize why: their scent was the same sick, unwholesome sweetness of my mother’s memorial service. As I ducked out again and ran the flooded sidewalk to Park Avenue—socks squelching, cold rain pelting in my face—I regretted I’d bought them at all and came close to tossing them in a trash can, only the squalls of rain were so fierce I couldn’t bring myself to slow down, for even a moment, and ran on.
As I stood in the vestibule—my hair plastered to my head, my supposedly waterproof raincoat sopping like I’d soaked it in the bathtub—the door opened quite suddenly to a large, open-faced college kid that it took me a pulse or two to recognize as Toddy. Before I could apologize for the water streaming off me, he embraced me solidly with a clap on the back.
“Oh my God,” he was saying as he led me into the living room. “Let me take your coat—and these, Mum will love them. Awesome to see you! How long has it been?” He was larger and more robust than Platt, with un-Barbour like hair of a darker, cardboard-colored blond and a very un-Barbour like smile on him as well—eager and bright with no irony about it.
“Well—” His warmth, which seemed to presume upon some happy old intimacy we did not share, had thrown me into awkwardness. “It’s been a long time. You must be in college now, right?”
“Yes—Georgetown—up for the weekend. I’m studying political science but really I’m hoping to go into nonprofit management maybe, something to do with young people?” With his ready, student-government smile, he had clearly grown up to be the high achiever that, at one time, Platt had promised to be. “And, I mean, I hope it’s not too weird of me to say but I have you in part to thank for it.”
“Sorry?”
“Well, I mean. Wanting to work with disadvantaged young people. You made quite an impression on me, you know, back when you were staying with us all those years ago. It was a real eye-opener, your situation. Because, even back in third grade or whatever, you made me think—that this was what I wanted to do someday, you know, something to do with helping kids.”
“Wow,” I said, still stuck on the disadvantaged part. “Huh. That’s great.”
“And, I mean, it’s really exciting, because there are so many ways to give back to youth out there in need. I mean, I don’t know how familiar you are with DC, but there are lots of under-served neighborhoods, I’m involved in a service project tutoring at-risk kids in reading and math, and this summer, I’m going to Haiti with Habitat for Humanity—”
“Is that him?” Decorous click of shoes on the parquet, light fingertips on my sleeve, and the next thing I knew Kitsey had her arms around me and I was smiling down into her white-blonde hair.
“Oh, you’re completely soaked,” she was saying, holding me out at arm’s length. “Look at you. How on earth did you get here? Did you swim?” She had Mr. Barbour’s long fine nose and his bright, almost goofy clarity of gaze—much the same as when she was a straggle-haired nine year old in school uniform, flushed and struggling with her backpack—only now, when she looked at me, I went blank to see how coldly, impersonally beautiful she’d grown.
“I—” To hide my confusion, I looked back at Toddy, busy with raincoat and flowers. “Sorry, this is just so weird. I mean—you especially” (to Toddy). “How old were you the last time I saw you? Seven? Eight?”
“I know,” said Kitsey, “the little rat, he’s so exactly like a person now, isn’t he? Platt—” Platt had ambled into the living room, poorly shaven, in tweeds and rough Donegal sweater, like some gloomy fisherman in a Synge play—“where does she want us?”
“Mm—” he seemed embarrassed, rubbing his stubbled cheek—“in her quarters, actually. You don’t mind, do you?” he said to me. “Etta’s set up a table back there.”
Kitsey wrinkled her brow. “Oh, rats. Well, it’s okay, I guess. Why don’t you put the dogs in the kitchen? Come on—” seizing me by the hand and dragging me down the hall with a sort of madcap, fluttery, forward-leaning quality—“we have to get you a drink, you’ll need one.” There was something of Andy in her fixity of gaze, also her breathlessness—his asthmatic gape reconfigured, delightfully, into parted lips and a sort of whispery starlet quality. “I was hoping she’d have us in the dining room or at least the kitchen, it’s so gruesome back in her lair—what are you drinking?” she said, turning into the bar off the pantry where glasses and a bucket of ice were set out.
“Some of that Stolichnaya would be great. On the rocks please.”
“Really? Are you sure it’s all right? We none of us drink it—Daddy always ordered this kind”—hoisting Stoli bottle—“because he liked the label… very Cold War… how do you say it again.…”
“Stolichnaya.”
“Very authentic-sounding. Won’t even try. You know,” she said, turning the gooseberry-gray eyes to me, “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
“It’s not that bad out.”
“Yes but—” blink blink—“I thought you hated us.”
“Hated you? No.”
“No?” When she laughed, it was fascinating to see Andy’s leukemic wanness—in her—remodeled and prettified, the candyfloss twinkle of a Disney princess. “But I was so awful!”
“I didn’t care.”
“Good.” After a too-long pause, she turned back to the drinks. “We were horrible to you,” she said flatly. “Todd and me.”
“Come on. You two were just little.”
“Yes but—” she bit her lower lip—“we knew better. Especially after what had happened to you. And now… I mean with Daddy and Andy…”
I waited, as it seemed she was trying to formulate a thought, but instead she only took a sip of her wine (white; Pippa drank red) then touched me on the back of the wrist. “Mum’s waiting to see you,” she said. “She’s been so excited all day. Shall we go in?”
“Certainly.” Lightly, lightly, I put my hand at her elbow, as I had seen Mr. Barbour do with guests “of the female persuasion,” and steered her into the hall.
viii.
THE NIGHT WAS A dreamlike mangle of past and present: a childhood world miraculously intact in some respects, grievously altered in others, as if the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had joined to host the evening. But despite the continual, ugly scrape of Andy’s absence (Andy and I…? remember when Andy…?) and everything else so strange and shrunken (pot pies at a folding table in Mrs. Barbour’s room?) the oddest part of the evening was my blood-deep, unreasoning sense of returning home. Even Etta, when I’d gone back to the kitchen to say hi, had untied her apron and rushed to hug me: I had the night off but I wanted to stay, I wanted to see you.
Toddy (“It’s Todd now, please”) had risen to his father’s position as Captain of the Table, guiding the conversation with a slightly automatic-seeming but evidently sincere charm, although Mrs. Barbour hadn’t really been interested in talking to anyone but me—about Andy, a little, but mostly about her family’s furniture, a few pieces of which had been purchased from Israel Sack in the 1940s but most of which had come down through her family from colonial times—rising from the table at one point mid-meal and leading me off by the hand to show me a set of chairs and a mahogany lowboy—Queen Anne, Salem Massachusetts—that had been in her mother’s family since the 1760s. (Salem? I thought. Were these Phipps ancestors of hers witch-burners? Or witches themselves? Apart from Andy—cryptic, isolated, self-sufficient, incapable of dishonesty and completely lacking in both malice and charisma—the other Barbours, even Todd, all had something slightly uncanny about them, a watchful, sly amalgam of decorum and mischief that made it all too easy to imagine their forebears gathering in the forest by night, casting off their Puritan garb to frolic by the pagan bonfire.) Kitsey and I hadn’t talked much—we hadn’t been able to, thanks to Mrs. Barbour; but almost every time I’d glanced in her direction I’d been aware of her eyes on me. Platt—voice thick after five (six?) large gin and limes, pulled me aside at the bar after dinner and said: “She’s on antidepressants.”
“Oh?” I said, taken aback.
“Kitsey, I mean. Mommy won’t touch them.”
“Well—” His lowered voice made me uncomfortable, as if he were seeking my opinion or wanting me to weigh in somehow. “I hope they work better for her than they did for me.”
Platt opened his mouth and then seemed to reconsider. “Oh—” reeling back slightly—“I suppose she’s bearing up. But it’s been rough for her. Kits was very close to both of them—closer to Andy I would say than any of us.”
“Oh really?” ‘Close’ would not have been my description of their relationship in childhood, though she more than Andy’s brothers had always been in the background, if only to whine or tease.
Platt sighed—a gin-crocked blast that almost knocked me over. “Yeah. She’s on a leave of absence from Wellesley—not sure if she’ll go back, maybe she’ll take some classes at the New School, maybe she’ll get a job—too hard for her being in Massachusetts, after, you know. They saw an awful lot of each other in Cambridge—she feels rotten, of course, that she didn’t go up to see after Daddy. She was better with Daddy than anyone else but there was a party, she phoned Andy and begged him to go up instead… well.”
“Shit.” I stood appalled at the bar, ice tongs in hand, feeling sick to think of another person ruined by the same poison of why did I and if only that had wrecked my own life.
“Yep,” said Platt, pouring himself another hefty slug of gin. “Rough stuff.”
“Well, she shouldn’t blame herself. She can’t. That’s crazy. I mean,” I said, unnerved by the watery, dead-eye look Platt was giving me over the top of his drink, “if she’d been on that boat she’d be the one dead now, not him.”
“No she wouldn’t,” Platt said flatly. “Kits is a crackerjack sailor. Good reflexes, good head on her shoulders ever since she was tiny. Andy—Andy was thinking about his orbit-orbit resonances or whatever computational shite he was doing back at home on his laptop and he spazzed out in the pinch. Completely fucking typical. Anyway,” he continued calmly—not appearing to notice my astonishment at this remark—“she’s a bit at loose ends right now, as I’m sure you’ll understand. You should ask her to dinner or something, it would thrill Mommy senseless.”
ix.
BY THE TIME I left, after eleven, the rain had stopped and the streets were glassy with water and Kenneth the night man (same heavy eyes and malt-liquor smell, bigger in the stomach but otherwise unchanged) was on the door. “Don’t be a stranger, eh?” he said, which was the same thing he’d always said when I was a little kid and my mother came to pick me up after sleepovers—same torpid voice, just a half beat too slow. Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographics for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat.
Though it had pervaded every aspect of the evening like a simmering toxin, Andy’s death was still too huge to grasp—though the strange thing too was how inevitable it seemed in hindsight, how weirdly predictable, almost as if he’d suffered from some fatal inborn defect. Even as a six year old—dreamy, stumbling, asthmatic, hopeless—the slur of misfortune and early demise had been perfectly visible about his rickety little person, marking him off like a cosmic kick me sign pinned to his back.
And yet it was remarkable too how his world limped on without him. Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything—or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed. Andy had been good to me when I had no one else. The least I could do was be kind to his mother and sister. It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I’d missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.
x.
AN EVERY-OTHER-DAY HABIT WAS still a habit, as Jerome had often reminded me, particularly when I didn’t stick too faithfully to the every-other-day part. New York was full of all kinds of daily subway-and-crowd horror; the suddenness of the explosion had never left me, I was always looking for something to happen, always expecting it just out of the corner of my eye, certain configurations of people in public places could trigger it, a wartime urgency, someone cutting in front of me the wrong way or walking too fast at a particular angle was enough to throw me into tachycardia and trip-hammer panic, the kind that made me stumble for the nearest park bench; and my dad’s painkillers, which had started as relief for my nigh-on uncontrollable anxiety, provided such a rapturous escape that soon I’d started taking them as a treat: first an only-on-weekends treat, then an after-school treat, then the purring aetherous bliss that welcomed me whenever I was unhappy or bored (which was, unfortunately, quite a lot); at which time I made the earth-shaking discovery that the tiny pills I’d ignored because they were so insignificant and weak-looking were literally ten times as strong as the Vicodins and Percocets I’d been downing by the handful—Oxycontins, 80s, strong enough to kill someone without a tolerance, which person by that point was definitely not me; and when at last my endless-seeming trove of oral narcotics ran out, shortly before my eighteenth birthday, I’d been forced to start buying on the street. Even dealers were censorious of the sums I spent, thousands of dollars every few weeks; Jack (Jerome’s predecessor) had scolded me about it repeatedly even as he sat in the filthy beanbag chair from which he conducted his business, counting my hundreds fresh from the teller’s window. “Might as well light it on fire, brah.” Heroin was cheaper—fifteen bucks a bag. Even if I didn’t bang it—Jack, laboriously, had done the math for me on the inside of a Quarter Pounder wrapper—I would be looking at a much more reasonable expenditure, something in the neighborhood of four hundred and fifty dollars a month.
But heroin I only did on offer—a bump here, a bump there. As much as I loved it, and craved it constantly, I never bought it. There would never be a reason to stop. With pharmaceuticals on the other hand, the expense was a helpful factor since it not only kept my habit in control but provided an excellent reason for me to go downstairs and sell furniture every day. It was a myth you couldn’t function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me—jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practically to the point of spasticity and cerebral palsy—pills were the key to being not only competent, but high-functioning. Booze made people sloppy and unfocused: all you had to do was look at Platt Barbour sitting around at J. G. Melon at three o’clock in the afternoon feeling sorry for himself. As for my dad: even after he’d sobered up he’d retained the faint clumsiness of a punch-drunk boxer, butterfingered with a phone or a kitchen timer, wet brain people called it, the mental damage from hard-core drinking, neurological stuff that never went away. He’d been seriously screwy in his reasoning, never able to hold down any kind of a long-term job. Me—well, maybe I didn’t have a girlfriend or even any non-drug friends to speak of but I worked twelve hours a day, nothing stressed me out, I wore Thom Browne suits, socialized smilingly with people I couldn’t stand, swam twice a week and played tennis on occasion, stayed away from sugar and processed foods. I was relaxed and personable, I was as thin as a rail, I did not indulge in self pity or negative thinking of any kind, I was an excellent salesman—everyone said so—and business was so good that what I spent on drugs, I scarcely missed.
Not that I hadn’t had a few lapses—unpredictable glides where things flashed out of control for a few eerie blinks like an ice-skid on a bridge and I saw just how badly things could go, how quick. It wasn’t a matter of money—more a matter of escalating doses, forgetting I’d sold pieces or forgetting to send bills, Hobie looking at me funny when I’d overdone things and come downstairs a bit too glassy and out-of-it. Dinner parties, clients… sorry, were you talking to me, did you just say something? no, just a little tired, coming down with something, maybe I’ll go to bed a little early, folks. I’d inherited my mother’s light-colored eyes, which short of sunglasses at gallery openings made it pretty much impossible to hide pinned pupils—not that anybody in Hobie’s crowd seemed to notice, except (sometimes) a few of the younger, more with-it gay guys—“You’re a bad boy,” the bodybuilder boyfriend of a client had whispered into my ear at a formal dinner, freaking me out thoroughly. And I dreaded going up to the Accounts department at one of the auction houses because one of the guys there—older, British, an addict himself—was always hitting on me. Of course it happened with women too: one of the girls I slept with—the fashion intern—I’d met in the small-dog run in Washington Square with Popchik, it being rapidly apparent to both of us after thirty seconds on the park bench that we shared the same condition. Whenever things started getting out of hand I’d dialed it back and I’d even quit altogether a number of times—the longest, for a six-week stretch. Not everyone was able to do that, I told myself. It was simply a matter of discipline. But at this point, in the spring of my twenty-sixth year, I had not been more than three days clean in a row in over three years.
I’d worked out how to quit for good, if I wanted to: steep taper, seven day timetable, plenty of loperamide; magnesium supplements and free form amino acids to replenish my burnt-out neurotransmitters; protein powder, electrolyte powder, melatonin (and weed) for sleep as well as various herbal tinctures and potions my fashion intern swore by, licorice root and milk thistle, nettles and hops and black cumin seed oil, valerian root and skullcap extract. I had a shopping bag from the health food store with all the stuff I needed, which had been sitting on the floor at the back of my closet for a year and a half. All of it was mostly untouched except the weed, which was long gone. The problem (as I’d learned, repeatedly) was that thirty-six hours in, with your body in full revolt, and the remainder of your un-opiated life stretching out bleakly ahead of you like a prison corridor, you needed some fairly compelling reason to keep moving forward into darkness, rather than falling straight back into the gorgeous feather mattress you’d so foolishly abandoned.
That night when I got back from the Barbours’ I swallowed a long-acting morphine tablet, as was my habit whenever I happened to come home in a remorseful mood and feeling I needed to straighten up: low dose, less than half of what I needed to feel anything, just enough on top of the booze to keep me from being too agitated to sleep. The next morning, losing heart (for, usually, waking up sick at this phase of the kick plan, I very quickly lost my nerve), I crushed thirty and then sixty milligrams of Roxicodone on the marble top of the nightstand, inhaled it through a cut straw, then unwilling to flush the rest of the pills (well over two thousand dollars’ worth) got up, dressed, flushed my nose with saline spray, and, after squirrelling away a few more of the long-acting morphs in case the “withdraws” as Jerome called them got too uncomfortable, slipped the Redbreast Flake tin in my pocket and—at six a.m., before Hobie awoke—took a cab up to the storage facility.
The storage facility—open twenty-four hours—was like a Mayan burial complex, save for an empty-eyed clerk watching TV at the front desk. Nervously I walked to the elevators. I had set foot on the premises only three times in seven years—always with dread, and then never venturing upstairs to the locker itself but only executing a quick duck in the lobby to pay the rent, in cash: two years’ rent at a time, the maximum allowed by state law.
The freight elevator required a key card, which fortunately I’d remembered to bring. Unfortunately, it failed to engage properly; and—for several minutes, hoping that the desk clerk was too out-of-it to notice—I stood in the open elevator trying to finesse the card-slide until the steel doors hissed and slid shut. Feeling jittery and observed, doing my best to avert my face from my fuzzed-out shadow on the monitor, I rode to the eighth floor, 8D 8E 8F 8G, cinderblock walls and rows of faceless doors like some pre-fab Eternity where there was no color but beige and no dust would settle for the rest of time.