After a trance that lasted many minutes, Larissa startled herself out of it, ran downstairs out of the marble lobby and hailed a cab. To avoid accidentally running into Maggie, she took the cab all the way home to Summit.
At six o’clock the next morning, her phone rang. Why did the phone ringing frighten her so much? She couldn’t help it, she thought it was going to be bad news.
It was Maggie.
“Maggie, do you have any idea what time it is?”
“Yes, it’s lauds time. And I’m not going today. Oh my God, did she call you?”
“Call me? Who? What?”
“Bo!”
“No, she didn’t call me. I thought she was with Stanley.” It’s Maggie, Larissa mouthed to Jared in the bed, and got up to take the phone into the bathroom.
“She was! Listen to this, but pretend you know nothing if she calls you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“She went to Stanley, and she said to him, Jonny threw me out. And do you know what Stanley did?”
“No, what?”
“Stanley said, oh dear. Threw you out? What are you going to do now? Bo didn’t know how to respond to that. She hemmed and hawed for thirty minutes. And then he said to her, get this, Bo, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were coming by tonight. I’m actually going out.”
“He was going out?”
“Right! So Bo asked if she could come. And he said, not that kind of going out.”
“Not that kind of going out,” Larissa repeated. So what did she do? Did she turn around and run for her life?”
“Would you do that?”
“Um, yeah. Faster than you can say, see ya.”
“Yeah, me, too. But maybe once again, like you said, my Ezra is right. No one knows what anyone else is doing. We don’t even know why we do half the things we do. Bo did not leave, did not run. Larissa, Bo stayed on Stanley’s couch while Stanley went out.”
“She what?”
“I don’t think we gave her good advice, Lar.”
“No kidding. Well, I tried. I tried to tell her that perhaps a week of sleeping with another man was not enough time to determine such a definitive course of action. But did she seem to you like she was listening? She just wanted what she wanted. She was paying us lip service.”
So the evening ended with Bo sitting on Stanley’s couch while he went out and left her alone, and Jonny sitting on his own couch, while Bo went out and left him alone. Larissa pressed her forehead against the cold tile. Remarkable.
“She sat and waited for Stanley to come back,” Maggie continued. “He strolled in at two! Bo wanted them to redefine their relationship. He didn’t even ask her what she wanted from the relationship. She had to tell him! Stanley, Bo said, I’m in love with you. I want to stay with you. I want to be with you.”
“After sitting for three hours alone on his couch while he went out with God knows who, this is what she said to him?”
“Yes! And Stanley said nothing. It took him until four in the morning to cough up the ugly truth.”
“There’s a truth uglier than what you just told me?”
“He told her he wasn’t in love with her!” Maggie hissed into the phone.
“I don’t believe it,” said Larissa. “That lardball told our lovely Bo that he was not in love with her?”
“That’s like saying that the bell ringer of Notre Dame was not in love with Marilyn Monroe,” said Maggie. “I’m just sick for her. My God, I’ve forgotten my own troubles.”
Larissa wished she could say the same.
“Stanley said he thought they were just having fun,” Maggie went on slowly. “He was not interested in more. Not from her. I don’t feel about you that way, Stanley said to our Bo.”
“I cannot believe what you just told me,” said Larissa. “That blubbery fool.” And then she remembered Jonny.
“Bo left Stanley…and took a cab back home. Cost her a hundred and fifty bucks. And on the couch back home she found Jonny waiting for her, still awake, eyes red from tears.”
“And she called you this morning?”
“I just got off the phone with her. She said she and Jonny were going to try to work it out.”
“Really?” Larissa tried to imagine Bo’s dull flat voice as she spoke those words to their friend Margaret. We’re going to try to work it out. Whole insubstantial dream faded. All the drama bubbled and burst in the span of one week.
Lucky Bo? Poor Bo?
“Obviously Jonny thinks she’s worth keeping.”
“I’m shocked,” said Larissa. “Worth keeping even though she regards him as second best? Possibly third?”
“Listen,” said Maggie, “she asked me, begged me not to say anything to Ezra. Can you please not say anything to Jared? She doesn’t want Jonny to be humiliated when we all get together. I know. The irony. But please. I know you don’t keep any secrets from Jared, but can you try with this one?”
“Mags,” said Larissa, “let me ask you a question. A tiny one. Did you already tell Ezra?”
“Oh, yeah. Everything.”
Larissa laughed. “Well, I am going to try to keep it from Jared,” she said. “It won’t be easy. But I will try.”
Jared came into the bathroom and turned on the shower. “Keep what from me?”
Larissa told him the whole tale before they were finished brushing their teeth. “And there I was, thinking Jonny had the upper hand in that relationship,” she finished. “Who knew, right?”
Jared rinsed his razor under the warm water. “What a chump Jonny is.”
“What?” Larissa smiled, glancing coquettishly at him. “You don’t think you’d be on the couch waiting for me with red-rimmed eyes?”
“Oh, I’d be on the couch, all right. But instead of a box of tissues, I’d be holding a Howitzer.”
Larissa wanted to study Jared extra carefully to see if he was joking, but wouldn’t even allow herself even a glance at his reflection in the fogged-up mirror.
2
Stories on the Ceiling
And Kai? She watched him and her heart slammed against itself like a swallow not seeing glass and shattering. “Who do you need to talk to, baby?” he said. “I’m right here. Talk to me. I’m all you need.”
“What’s there to talk about, right?” she said, leaning over him to cradle his face in the crook of her arm. He allowed himself to be smothered, and then wrested free to continue playing his harmonica. The singing answer to everything was apparently in the jungles wet with rain.
She told Kai about Stanley and Jonny. He said nothing. He listened, but inscrutably, and after she was done, he clucked his lips, opened his hands with an oh well, what are ya gonna do gesture and shrugged. “What are you looking at me like that for?” he said. “It’s not us.”
“Well, yes. First of all, you’re not three hundred pounds.”
“Not yet. But—more important—you’re not coming to tell me your husband threw you out, and you’re here to stay.” Steadily he gazed at her. “Exactly. So why have a hypothetical conversation about bullshit? Come closer instead. I want to play you a new song I learned.”
“You had me at play you,” said Larissa, crawling over, unable to gaze at him steadily or any other wayily.
He played the verses on the ukulele and the wordless chorus on the harmonica. It sounded in a washed-out way like an old standard, sadness about the pyramids along the Nile, and photographs and souvenirs, except nothing like it. Taking the harmonica away from his lips he sang the last of it to her a cappella. When you’re home again, he lamented in a whisper croon, just remember who you belong to…
“Please,” Larissa whispered. “Don’t do that…”
“I’m just singing, babydoll,” he said. “I’m not crying.”
“Am I Francesca, Kai?” She struggled close, her face at his face. “Are you Paolo?”
“Ah,” he said, one hand on her, the other on his ukulele, strumming it with one hand, strumming her with the other. “What’s your qu
estion? In what way are we like Dante’s lovers?”
She said nothing. He put his ukulele down. His arms went around her.
“We’re clinging together like doves. We are surrounded by a storm of souls. We have not repented.” He paused. “Is your husband Giovanni? My answer is, no one knows. Not even him. Most men aren’t until the moment they are.”
He was unchanging. He was like the moontides. Every day with a smile, a poem, a nod of the head, his naked body, he touched her, he kissed her, he brought her food in a paper bag and he opened champagne and poured it into plastic flutes, and played acoustic guitar and the electric ukulele, he wailed through the harmonica, soft and bluesy, perfect, perfect. All music, like life, was of two types: either moving toward God or away from God. Blues was moving away from God. Moving away from God, but toward Kai.
He didn’t help her or not help her. He just was. She couldn’t talk to him about this. About other things, but she couldn’t sit and say, Kai, oh my God, what do I do? He didn’t know the answer; it wasn’t blowing outside in the snowy blizzard wind; it wasn’t heard in the whisper of the willows. There was no answer.
He had told her. Larissa, all I want is you.
All I want is you.
All I want is you.
Was that helpful?
No.
But yet…all he wanted was her.
That was helpful.
Larissa lay on her back next to him. Thirty more minutes. They were on the bed, swamped with the toils of their labors, he was on his stomach, pretending to snooze, while she stared at the ceiling, imagining the paths open to her. She wasn’t Bo, she didn’t want a cataclysm, a shallow confession without remorse, she didn’t want the hand of fate to intervene. Or did she? This was more real than her own two feet on which she traveled the earth, and yet she lived alone with it inside her heart, like a misty vapor, a muted haunting. The only true Larissa was nude on her back in an attic room in a yellow house in Madison.
Snatches of time, dammed, damned with the shackles of time. Was it easy to live this way? Was it easy for him not to see her at night, to be alone Friday nights, Saturdays, weekends? To wake up alone. To go to sleep alone. They couldn’t have pancakes together out, couldn’t go shopping at the mall, couldn’t go for a ride on his bike except up and down Glenside in an infinite spin of a dead-end loop. Couldn’t spend a night together at the Madison Hotel! Couldn’t go on vacation, couldn’t go swimming, couldn’t fly.
They could go on like this, but Larissa felt that this was beginning to sully the very soul Epicurus swore she didn’t possess. Is this how she wanted to live, is this how he wanted to live, like outlaws? She didn’t dare ask him in the dread that he would say no.
She was sure Dominick the UPS man saw her car parked in driveways not her own, because every time he gave her a package and said, “Have a nice day,” what she heard was, “You trollop. You lying slut. You heartbreaker.”
She felt, one way or another, this couldn’t continue. Jared would soon find a speck of a price tag off a silk Cotton Club camisole bought for six hundred dollars, gorgeous like black diamonds, draped around her afternoon body. She left it with Kai, in the drawer he emptied for her in the dresser of his life. She bought slinky things, brought them here, left them here. But every once in a while in her purse, she’d find a tag from another flimsy fandango chemise bought in haste, used in haste, repented not at all, dreamed of in leisure. One of these days even Jared would stumble upon it. Even a broken clock was right twice a day. Even a blind man would eventually trip upon the one obscure door in his life that opened onto another world.
Larissa had.
And then what? There’d be railing and false apologies and even falser remorse, and she’d have to grit every nerve ending in her body, but the chasm between synapses would open too wide for speech, and to keep the outer shell of her existence, she would have to let Kai go, and repent repent repent. And go on.
Without him.
She would have to turn her back on the impossible vivid dream next to her naked heart and go back to what she left behind. The ceiling couldn’t help her here: after it all crashed to a hideous end, the exposed rafters could not beam sugarplum visions of her looking out of her Georgian sash windows onto the golf course and the mall in the distance and the sunshine, planning another vacation and camp for the kids, and maybe some summer school for Asher since he was doing so bad in math. She’d figure out when best to exercise. Maybe in the mornings she could swim in her pool for weight loss. Surely she’d need to do something. In the afternoons she could cook. Bake from scratch maybe.
The girls could come over and she could show them how to make rubbed-down jerk chicken with cracked pepper sauce. On the weekends, they could ride in Doug’s Jaguar to South Mountain.
There was no exit. There was no way out.
Oh my God, Kai, what do we do? she whispered helplessly.
“It’s 2:30, Larissa. Your son is up on a hill at Woodland.”
Dear Larissa,
We are in so much trouble, Lorenzo and I. All that protesting meant nothing until it meant something, and as soon as it meant something, everything else went ruined and run down.
When we did it for money, we protested anything. But as you know, you cannot serve two masters.
But suddenly our life came down to one thing: Catholics against MILF. After what happened to his parents, it was the only thing Lorenzo cared about. Suddenly he was going to protests and meetings, and then he needed to buy a typewriter, and even Father Emilio complained about how often he was using the rectory copy machine. He was out of the house all the time too, but the money stopped coming in. Like one minute there was money, and the next there wasn’t. I don’t know if you know what that’s like, Larissa.
I asked him what he thought he was doing. He said he had never cared about nothing before, except drinking and having a good time. But MILF was taking over Mindanao. And we had to stop them. I wanted to ask who “we” was but was too afraid. Mindanao cannot be MILF island. This country is ninety-five percent Catholic. For forty years they lived side by side with us, but not peacefully. The government wanted to end once and for all the Christians being killed daily on Manila streets, and also to stimulate the tourist trade in Mindanao, which had vanished because of the unrelenting attacks and burnings and deaths. So the government agreed to something called the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain, a long-standing MILF demand. Lorenzo said the government simply surrendered the island of Mindanao to the MILF in return for peace. “But they don’t understand that they’ll have neither,” Lorenzo said. This meant war.
I said, (I may have yelled) Lorenzo, what are you talking about? What war? We are going to have a baby.
He said our baby will not be safe. Like his parents, apolitical fishermen in tiny Zamboanga, were not safe. No one is safe anymore, he said.
Two weeks ago he joined the Peace Brigade, which is another name for street fighters, and he’s taken to the streets in full riot gear—a flak jacket, a helmet and weapons! Of course, the MILF rebels are raising even more trouble than the Peace Brigade, to make the government ratify the agreement faster.
I don’t know what to do. I have no one but Lorenzo, and he’s gone mad. He won’t even go to Father Emilio to be helped. All the work he does now he does pro bono for the Catholic League, and they feed him in return, and Father Emilio feeds me, but we live in a shack that costs three thousand pesos a month, and Lorenzo no longer makes any money. This is my pregnancy. He’s insane with grief and rage, he talks like I’ve never heard him talk, of nationalism, of separatist insurgencies, of continued clashes and protests on Manila streets until the government stops negotiating with terrorists, of what’s right, of revenge.
And the worst is, Father Emilio is not on my side! He thinks Lorenzo may have a point! He says, how can the rebels consider themselves autonomous when ninety-eight percent of their operating revenue comes from the Philippine government? After fifteen years of having an autonom
ous region, they haven’t created any other significant source of sustainable revenue, and yet they want more autonomy? And they’re killing Filipino civilians every day as if it’s their right. “Lorenzo is fighting for justice,” says Father Emilio.
Larissa, help me. I’m lost. What do I do?
3
Chris Chase
Attempting to forge an occasional evening for her and Kai, Larissa found a new colorist in the city on 21st and Ninth. She scheduled an appointment for the evening and told Jared that was all they had. He looked miffed, and when she pressed him, he said, “Yeah, I’m ticked off because hair color for you is once every six weeks, and I don’t want to get into a crazy habit where you’re going into the city every month at night when you can get color at Kim’s until 2:30 every day.”
“Kim, Kim,” said Larissa. “Paul at Chris Chase is the best.”
“Okay, where did you read that?”
“Allure.”
“Allure. Swell. You’ve been going to Kim for seven years, and now suddenly you’re going to the city for hair color? Honestly, Larissa. If you were meeting Bo for dinner, if you and Maggie were going to see a show, if you were doing something fun, I’d say, absolutely, by all means.”
“Would you?” she said quietly. “Well, what’s the difference?”
“To go in at night to get your hair done? It’s odd. It’s not normal.”
Gritting her teeth, turning away, Larissa said with her back to him, “I already made the appointment.” It was obvious this was not going to be the success she’d hoped for. She was trying to work it out so that once a month she and Kai could go have dinner together. The colorist really was supposed to be great. She scheduled him for Wednesday, which was Kai’s early day; he finished at six and agreed to meet her in the city by seven.
She was done with her hair a few minutes before seven and waited for him, ridiculously excited on the corner of 23rd and Ninth, decked out in a sea-green clingy cashmere tunic over black leggings and high patent leather boots. She wore her shearling coat open, her jewelry sparkling, her breasts rising and falling with anticipation. She stood on the sidewalk near a short fence, looking at her watch, flinging around her beautifully done head of hair, long, silk straight and smooth, with red lowlights and blonde highlights on a base of light brown; it looked fantastic; Allure was right, Paul was a magician. She licked her lip gloss, eagerly impatient in the cold, fluttering like she was seventeen going on her first date, and bitter-sweetly realizing that aside from sitting in the car or being in his apartment, this was indeed their first time out anywhere, and even through her excitement feeling a pang of sadness for Kai that he spent his weeks and days, his months and hours waiting for her to grace him with an hour of her presence, and she was still standing, tapping her heels on the pavement when she heard a female voice say, “Larissa?”