We Are Okay(20)

“Oh,” I said. “Then it’s a three bedroom. It doesn’t have a closet.”

“It’s probably a sitting room,” Eleanor offered. “Lots of the old houses have them off the master bedrooms.”

I nodded, but the truth is that I wasn’t sure at all. I’d only caught glimpses through his study a couple times, but that’s just how it was with us. I gave him his privacy and he gave me mine. Mabel would have loved that arrangement. Ana was always digging through her drawers.

But as the night got later, as people showed up and left, and the music got turned down because of the neighbors, and the alcohol flowed and then ran out, I kept seeing Courtney’s look. Her narrowed eyes. The tone of her voice. You haven’t been in the back of your house?

She was right. I hadn’t been there.

I’d only paused in the doorway some nights when he was in his study, sitting at his desk, smoking his cigarettes, tapping the ash in his crystal ashtray and writing his letters by the light of an old-fashioned desk lamp, green with a bronze chain. Most of the time the door was shut but once in a while it was left open a crack, by mistake, probably.

Sometimes I’d call, “Good night,” and he would say it back. But most of the time I walked quietly by, trying not to disturb him, until I got to our shared territory and then to my room, where nobody ever went besides Mabel and me.

“What’s wrong?” Mabel asked me when we were back on the sidewalk, waiting for the car under a streetlamp. I shook my head. “Courtney was being kind of aggressive.”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

I was still thinking about Gramps at his desk. I was still wondering why I tried to be quiet when I walked past his rooms.

I was only giving him privacy. He was old, and the whites of his eyes seemed to grow more yellow every week, and he coughed like something was ready to rattle loose inside of him. A week ago I saw a red spot on his handkerchief when he lowered it from his mouth. He needed rest and quiet. He needed to save his strength. I was only being considerate. It’s what anyone would do.

But still—doubts, doubts.

The car pulled up and we slid into the back. The driver eyed Mabel in the rearview mirror as she gave him her address.

He smiled, said something to her in Spanish, his tone so flirtatious I didn’t need a translation.

She rolled her eyes.

“México?” he asked her.

“Sí.”

“Colombia,” he said.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite books.” I was embarrassed before the sentence was even finished. Just because he was from Colombia didn’t mean that he’d care.

He adjusted the mirror and looked at me for the first time.

“You like García Márquez?”

“I love him. Do you?”

“Love? No. Admire? Yes.” He turned right onto Valencia. A burst of laughter reached us from the sidewalk, still teeming with people.

“Cien a?os de soledad,” he said. “Your favorite? Really?”

“Is it that hard to believe?”

“Many people love that book. But you are so young.”

Mabel said something in Spanish. I slapped her leg and she grabbed my hand. Held it tight.

“I just said you were too smart for your own good,” she said.

“Oh.” I smiled at her. “Thanks.”

“Inteligente, okay,” he said. “Yes. But that is not why I ask.”

“All the incest?” I asked.

“Ha! That, too. But no.”

He pulled up to Mabel’s house, and I wished he would circle the block. Mabel was pressed against me—she’d let go of my hand but we were still touching—and I didn’t know why it felt so good but I knew I didn’t want it to stop. And the driver was trying to tell me something about the book I’d read so many times. The one I kept discovering and trying to understand better. I wished he’d circle all night. Mabel’s body and mine would relax into each other’s. The car would fill with ideas about the passionate, tortured Buendía family, the once-grand city of Macondo, the way García Márquez wove magic into so many sentences.

But he put the car in park. He turned around to see me better.

“I do not mean the difficulty. I do not mean the sex. I mean there are too many failings. Not enough hope. Everything is despair. Everything is suffering. What I mean is don’t be a person who seeks out grief. There is enough of that in life.”

And then it was over—the car ride and the discussion, Mabel’s body against mine—and we were letting ourselves into her garden and I was trying to call it back. The night was suddenly colder, and Courtney’s voice was in my head again.

I wanted it out.

We climbed the stairs to Mabel’s room and she shut the door.

“So was he right?” she asked me. “Are you the kind of person who seeks out grief? Or do you just like that book?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t think I’m that kind of person.”

“I don’t either,” she said. “But it was an interesting thing to say.”

I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn’t a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to repeat the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.