"I asked her, I asked Vesla who my father was."
Sol looks at me carefully and wipes his black, inked hands on the napkin and pours himself a glass of wine. He is silent, waiting for my explosion of anger or tears but they don't come. Instead, I hold out the photo like a hardened cop on television enumerating mutilations on a murdered body.
"This is him, this is Misha."
Sol takes the photo and lights a cigarette nervously. He looks at the photo, then back at me, then back at the photo, comparing.
"Vesla told me he died swimming in the Danube after Thomas gave him some bad news about his health, but she swears I'm Thomas's."
"But you don't believe her?"
I shrug and take one of Sol's cigarettes. "She says she saw me and just knew I wasn't Misha's."
Sol bites the side of his cheek and pours himself more wine. The waiters begin singing a song in Portuguese, low and timbersome; their voices fill me with the sadness of crying too long and the sea.
I peer over at the photo.
"Have you looked at this picture yet, G.?"
I shake my head. "Can't. Not yet. Why?"
It seems to me that everything will be made clear by this new piece of evidence, but, judging by Sol's head-scratching and looks, suddenly I'm not sure at all.
—There is, of course, the possibility that you are not a bastard child.
And if, for all those years, Thomas hated me because he thought I was not his, what then? His love, precious and accounted for, could not be squandered on me because of questions neither he nor I could answer. Thomas couldn't ask the question of science that mattered, simply couldn't ask that of her, directly. Well, if you are roaming in your semi-ghost life tonight, Thomas, at all curious if your decision to dismiss me was warranted, stay tuned, because this is the moment wre can settle the matter.
"What is it, Sol?"
Sol bites his lip. "Well, just for the record, 1 have personally always thought that you look like Holly and your mom."
"What're you saying?"
He drops the photo under the table and, climbing for it, his voice rises from under the formica table-top. "Let's just say, your mother had a type."
For the condition called "high cardiac output failure" the problem is often not the failure of the pumping ability of the heart but instead the overloading of the organ with too much venous return.
When Sol sleeps, which isn't often, his dreams are a thousand running streams that never find each other. They never form a lake, or even a puddle. I know he is sometimes afraid to fall asleep, that he stays up and watches me for a long time, like tonight, when he's worried about something. Lately this something is me.
Tonight I take a sleeping pill and offer Sol one but he refuses: Sol, who'll ingest endless amounts of whisky, ibuprofen, and coffee, often in combination, despite my doctorly advice against this practice, is oddly purist about sleep: either it comes or it doesn't. After all the food and excitement, I can't handle being awake anymore, so we have long, slow, lingering sex, both of us committed to forgetting the events of the night or at least pushing ourselves to the limits of exhaustion to part with it. Afterwards, we finally fall asleep, or at least I do. I've never really seen him resting peacefully. I always fall asleep before him and wake up after him. Once or twice I've seen him with his head buried under his arm, but when I looked into his quiet little arm-place he peered out at me, eyes open, lashes fluttering. Mostly, like tonight, we stay up too late talking and making love to sleep.
Sol is also superstitious; he thinks of himself as powerful. Take, for example, his idea of streetlights going off when he walks by them. "Didja see that?" he'll say when a dim orange light pops off as we pass it. And I never have the heart to tell him that lights flare on and off when I walk down the street, too, that wild, staring animals come up to me bearing gifts of gnawed bones and other such mythic messages. Maybe his not sleeping does make him powerful, makes him see things, understand the logic of random power surges and wild animals. Maybe it's what allows him to write about accidents caused by slothful hands, murders committed in the deep swollen night. But then maybe he's just a teenage insomniac who needs a cup of warm milk.
Once I talked to him about how Holly sees Dad at track meets and stuff but it didn't seem to faze him.
"She sees him out and about in the world. Like he's a normal person?" he'd asked, more like he was confirming something than being purely concerned.
"Yeah, she says she does, I mean who knows?"
He shrugged and slid his eyes away.
"What, Sol?"
"Nothing... I just don't think you should get your undies in a bunch worrying about it too much. I don't think it's a problem, that's all. People see stuff."
—You'll never keep him, he'll leave, just like all the others, he'll. ..
—Shut it, just shut it today, all right?
In the morning, I curl my fingers up under the hot blasts of water in the shower, and then dress, gulp down a cup of instant that Sol calls coffee, and find that I feel better, all cried out and dried out. At least, I can begin to figure out how to rid myself of the troublesome hum of her off-key voice, even if everything's just become more confusing than clear. That's it, I feel like I'm beginning, that I can finally learn to be
——Happy!? You tear your family apart and you 're happy!?
—Since when have you cared about my family?
This shuts her up. I run outside, pull on my sunglasses through my still-wet hair. Sol's waiting for me in the car. When I get in, he slips his hand between my crossed legs and drags on a cigarette, filling the already balloon-warm air with smoke, and adjusts the rearview At the light, he leans over and kisses me. "You look like . . ."
"What? Who do I look like?"
"You look like your sister today."
"Impossible. Could we not talk about her right now?"
"All right, sorry, it's just, I've never seen you in that sweatshirt before."
"This is my goddamn sweatshirt, see." I pull up my shirt, flashing Sol. He laughs, relieved that I'm making a joke of it.
The city is stiff, still rising from a long summer night of heat, emerging from its exhausted air-conditioned gloom. The street sweepers leave a mist of condensation that we follow.
He parks the car and we walk across the wide field between the parking lot and the hospital. Sol tries to do cartwheels on the wide lawns, but he's not nearly as good a gymnast as Holly and always ends up on his ass. As we enter the grim, green geriatric ward hallway through a side door, a fat man, wearing an unbuttoned shirt and heel-worn slippers, shuffles down the corridor and gives us a crooked, delirious grin. Sol grins back. I think about how strange it is that I am on the inside, the sane side, of the hospital doors. I've spent my short adult life now on both sides, as med student and patient; a safety to others but a danger to myself.
We stand outside the thick, steel institution doors of Agnes's unit. I see Agnes through the small circular window, waiting for me. She is clutching a little gold purse and wearing her usual suspicious frown and wild-blue eye makeup.
—She'11 make him. Make him love her.
"You OK?"
I nod.
He pulls me to him and I smell his singular, neutral, dusty-boy-wood smell, and wave to Agnes over his shoulder.
"Goodbye, Gizzy, watch out for those crazy ladies." Turning on his heel, he walks down the hall, whistling quietly, raising his elbows against the early-morning mental-hospital sun. He says something but it gets lost in the crash of meal trays down the hall.
"What?" I turn towards him.
"Later," he says, pointing towards the future. Then, walking quickly, he makes his escape.
That afternoon, after work, I read in the library for a couple of hours, then I walk by the cafe where Sol and I are supposed to meet. I see him through the window, smoking a cigarette and doing a crossword puzzle, waiting for me, but I don't go in. Instead, I go home, return the car. N o one's home so I take out Mom's scale and w
eigh myself, note that I've gained four pounds since the fight and the chicken-breakfast extravaganza. Promising to starve myself tomorrow, I go out again and walk through the low orange-lit streets, where only skater-punks and people turning off their sprinklers are about. I sit down on a wide curb and watch the end of the summer-night sky fade into that odd bruised-purple colour, and suddenly I feel completely paralyzed. I'm not used to this, having someone waiting for me, having someone (could it be?) love me. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't remember the touch-and-go terror of love Eve inspired in me. That's another terrible thing about love; once you've had it, you cannot go back to not having it. The only way I knew to live without love was to not eat, study, and try to push Eve, and all she meant, back to the farthest quarter of my mind and it had been that way ever since, ever since—
—Abandon or be abandoned. The rules of engagement are simple.
A sweat breaks out all over my body, the uncontrollable wash of perspiration you get right before you throw up.
—He's going to mess everything up.
And I realize she's right. Sol won't mess things up, literally, like with me and him, but with me and her. If I let him in, I let her out. Her scrupulous control of my food intake, of what I do and say, will have to disappear, eventually. That's what relationships are, aren't they? The compromise of self for another. I realize that what I have perceived as safe is dangerous. Hadn't it been that way with Eve? The slight curve of Eve's belly, the warmth of her nipple, the perfect rhythm of our steps on asphalt, the way our bodies fit so well in sleep, was all so deceptively harmonious because, in reality, we were hellbent and raw, and even our quiet moments together seemed dangerous and transient.
—Love fades, doesn't it?
I pull a floppy cigarette out of my pocket and think: isn't this what I've worked for all these long weeks at the clinic, to break up the tedium of controlled days, to free myself from her simpering cruelty, her flat slaps across my face? But how can I open myself to Sol when something in me clings to the comfort of regimentation, to being marked and checked by an impossible taskmaster who is bent on diminishing me to a tiny shred of marrow; when I was at my thinnest, no one could hurt me.
And yet there's the heart-shaped twist of his mouth when he tells a joke, his curly hair, his slim delicate brows that make him look actorish, dramatic. There's the way he looks at me sometimes when he thinks I don't notice, like he's making a promise or praying.
Sol is different. He's not Eve, he's not Thomas, he's himself. And what is it in the unique Solness of his being that has me believing in the possibility that love might make us all better people? Perhaps Sol will quit drinking so much, start sleeping more, I'll gain a few pounds, we'll look less marked by life, less haggard. Or perhaps we won't change at all, I don't know.
—That's it! You don't know. People's feelings change. Daily.
But it's impossible to explain anything; everything with her has to be concrete. We have to rely on our ability to pounce and leap and survive on the lean picked-over hunt of others. Still, she has grown oddly quiet, listening for once.
I walk back to the house through the grey streets. Inside houses, TVs are being turned on. They cast a blue light in living rooms. The day is cooling off, the sidewalks smell like bubble gum and fresh-cut grass, and I feel safe in this weird suburban world, surrounded by shiny foreign cars and ridiculous dwarf lawn ornaments; if I wanted to, I'd never have to leave here.
But she just can't let me enjoy it, she just can't let me ride this delusion up the cracked tar driveway that Thomas had paved the last time in the 1970s, instructing the whole operation in a pair of lilac jogging pants.
Then the words jut out the side of her mouth, involuntarily, like a badly hidden smoker's cough.
—Just remember, love is always betrayal for you.
chapter 22
I sit by the sprinkler, peeling the skin off my feet before putting my socks on. Sol drives up. I scratch at my aching ribs, but it's the pleasurable pain of healing. I tie my shoes tightly. Sol gets out of the car and stands over me.
"Going for a run?"
"Yup."
"Where's your sister?"
"Dunno."
He takes off his sunglasses and looks down the street as if he expects Giselle to materialize from the quiet suburban lawns. His dishevelled profile leans into his own long summer shadow and he looks doubtful for a second, lost.
"Do you mind if I join you?"
"You need shoes, you can't run in those." He looks down at his dusty boots.
"Wait."
I go into the house and find Dad's favourite tennis shoes buried under a heap of boots, newspapers, and umbrellas. Stan Smiths.
When I come out of the house, Sol is spraying some kids with the sprinkler. I hold out the shoes. He smells like sandalwood oil.
"No arch support, but it's better than nothing."
"Thanks, Holly. Listen, she didn't call or anything? We were supposed to meet after work . . ."
I shake my head and, watching him bending over to tie his shoelaces, I want to touch his hair.
"Shouldn't you be at school?" Sol's eyebrows pull together.
I shrug, "Last day."
"Oh." Sol frowns mildly as he stretches his legs.
He sprints out in front of me, leaping over ditches, confident in dead man's shoes. I move behind him, counting the steps between us, planning on catching up but pacing myself because 1 want to run long, until time is measured by pavement, empty streets, and identical houses, learned by rote. And I am thinking Today is the Last Day of School and I am, as usual, not there. And I am thinking, I am sending her a secret telegraph to plug up her ears.
. . .
We move like moonlight on waves. We trip through the tennis court, Sol tangling himself in the net on purpose.
"Jesus, stop! I need a break!"
I cartwheel on the doubles lines as moths fly up into the pink fluorescent light and a middle-aged couple on the adjacent court can't decide whether to laugh or be annoyed with us. Moths explode into dusty puffs, the dust on their wings floats into the white air as the couple tries to figure out the score:
"Thirty-love or forty?"
Sol's flushed and sweaty He jumps over the net and runs out of the court.
"Race you to the DQ. Loser pays."
"You're on." And I'm off, an easy stretch ahead of him, the length of a sleeping whale, dreaming of soft-serve and yellow out-of-bound balls.
. . .
When we get home it's dark in the house. Sol opens all the kitchen windows and starts going through the cupboards searching for dinner.
"Hey, your mom ever go shopping? How does canned clam chowder with crackers sound, Hoi?"
"Great." He turns on the radio, which is playing jazz.
"So, how you feeling these days? Get into any scraps lately?" He watches my face to see if he can smile. I let him.
"Yeah, well, they're used to sending us Vasco girls home. When Gizzy was seven they sent her home with a note that said Mom should comb her hair. I got sent home once for not wearing underwear." I shrug, Sol stirs the soup, and the kitchen becomes filled with the sound of his light laughter. He is a man, I think. There is a man here with me. Then I feel weird about saying "underwear" out loud.
I empty a vase of foul-smelling flowers into the sink. We reach for the tap at the same time. Our hands collide for a moment before his fingers make a small bracelet around my wrist.
I drop the half-filled vase, which he catches, then he pours water over my head, still laughing. I turn the tap up and, with my one free hand, splash him with water. He is laughing and shrieking, letting me, but he is not releasing my hand, he is not releasing it. Then he slips his wrist into my palm as if we are playing a private game of shadowing. The other hand flutters like a dim, quiet bird on my hip and scales the length of my wet shirt, uncertainly, as if it doesn't know whether to fly away or land. He lets go so my arms can wind themselves over his shoulders, where I feel how strong
he is; how little it would take for me to buckle under him and open.
I am a clean fine bow and Sol a slim, fine arrow, diving. In my throat, the dry echo of unthinking; where we have run, and who has left us behind while we were racing. And the salt that runs from our eyes is not sweat that he is lapping up with his hair but, like blood, it's me and my name that he says, over and over, in our kitchen, me that he is touching with his mouth, on my forehead and my cheek and my neck. Just then, the sound of the front door closing rips us apart. And our moments get broken apart by our leaping, my fleeing into the wooden chair on the other side of the kitchen and the sudden panic in his face as he leans his hips into the counter.
Giselle walks into the kitchen and tosses her bag into the corner. This is what she sees when she turns to look at us: me, panting and soaked in the corner, and Sol, gazing above her head, clumsily arranging bowls and spoons with his hands that were birds and now only guilty weapons.
"Hey, beautiful." He flicks water at her and she looks straight into his eyes, which are slippery coals now.
"This is cozy. Water sports?"
"Where you been?"
"Oh, you know. Out and about. Actually, I went to the library to study."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, I'm sure."
"I thought we had a date."
"Sorry." Giselle's mouth twists into a wicked grimace.
"You hungry?"
"No."
She darts a look my way that is so practiced I turn away from her and concentrate, instead, on my shedding feet. There is a moment, just one, of peaceful silence, of believing that Giselle has not caught us at anything at all. But then it passes.
Giselle looks at the water on the floor and at the two of us, her face wrinkling, knowing, not guessing, but knowing.
"So, where were you?" Sol presses.