Cleopatra and Frankenstein(130)

“Do you remember Halloween?” she asked suddenly.

They had gone with friends to a party at Anders’s, everyone crammed into a cab, fighting over which radio station to play, the first baggie being passed around the back seat like a lover’s note.

“Of course,” said Frank. “What made you think of that?”

Cleo shrugged. Her mind still had a habit of tossing up painful memories, a reminder, she supposed, to keep moving forward. Unlike Frank, she was not prone to nostalgia.

“When I think about drinking, I have a habit of remembering the best part of every night,” said Frank, as if reading her mind. “My sponsor says this thing to me, ‘Play the tape forward.’ I have to keep remembering until I reach the point where it stopped being fun.”

“Okay,” said Cleo. “So, play it forward. You know how that night ended.”

Frank fast-forwarded to being at the Halloween party, where he had been uncomfortable in his costume, which consisted of a monster mask that smelled like chlorine. Anders was dressed, to devastating effect, as some kind of sexy murderer. Fast-forward to feeling ugly and forgotten, like an actual monster, to drinking too much, to fighting with Cleo on the way home, to the sound of her crying into the pillow as he lay beside her, watching the ceiling turn. Yes, there were the pillowcases in the morning, all tarred with black makeup that wouldn’t wash out; he’d stuffed them into the bottom of the trash, just as he used to as a child with his piss-soaked sheets, so his mother wouldn’t find them. That was why he hated to remember. Fast-forward and he always got to the dark current running beneath each seemingly happy night, to the secret sadness at the heart of Cleo that he couldn’t heal, to the black scars on the white sheets he couldn’t get out.

“I’m ashamed to remember it,” he said. “How I hurt you.”

Cleo nodded. “You did,” she said. “But there was one upside to that night.” She gave him one of her mysterious, knowing looks. “You were so hungover the next day, I finally won Pinch Punch.”

Frank began to laugh. Cleo had once mentioned offhandedly that it was a tradition in England on the first day of the month to say “Pinch, punch, first of the month!” As long as the victor declared “And no returns!” afterward, they were free to enact these pinches and punches without retaliation. The loser then had to wait a whole month before having the chance to say it first again. Frank, who had a taste for the nonsensical, had sprung upon this game with a fanatical competitiveness, waking up early on the first of every month and hovering over Cleo’s sleeping figure until, at the slightest sign of awakening, he would launch his attack, screaming the singsong rhyme with the kind of zeal that, Cleo was sure, caused middle-aged men to have heart attacks.

“I forgot about that.” He chuckled. “You sucked at Pinch Punch.”

“Because I didn’t want to set my alarm for the crack of dawn on the first of every month like a maniac!”

Frank looked at her seriously. “That’s what it takes to be a Pinch Punch champion, Cleo.”

He tried to maintain a straight face, but they were both quickly reduced to laughter.

“Well, now you can play with Eleanor,” said Cleo, as their amusement subsided.

Frank shook his head, serious again. “I wouldn’t do that. It’s our game. Anyway, she’s not British.”

Cleo looked at him tenderly. “Okay,” she said. “It stays ours.”

“Is it weird for you?” he asked. “That I’m with someone else? You can be honest.”

“It is a little,” she said slowly. “But in some strange way, you and Eleanor give me hope. It makes me feel like I can find what you have one day too.”

“That won’t be a problem for you. You’ll have men lining up.”

Frank finished his lemonade with a satisfied slurp.

“I’d like to be married again,” she said. “For a little longer next time.”

“You will. Just don’t pick someone like me.”

Cleo raised an eyebrow. “You mean an active alcoholic almost twenty years my senior?”

“Pah!” Frank fell back against his chair as if shot. “But yes, that’s exactly what I mean,” he said, coming back to life.

“You didn’t pick someone like me.”

“No. Eleanor’s not like either of us.”

“How is she different?”

“You really don’t mind talking about her?”

“I’m curious.”

“Okay, well, Eleanor has this mother. She intimidated me at first actually because she just—she’s fierce. Fiercely loving. And Eleanor grew up in a house in the suburbs with a garden and something called a visitor’s couch and, you know, three different types of bird feeder.”

Cleo nodded. “The height of domesticity.”

“Exactly. And it wasn’t perfect—her parents divorced when she was young, and she had this weird relationship as a teenager with an older guy—but I could tell she felt safe in that house. She grew up feeling safe and fiercely loved.”

When he looked up, he was surprised to see that Cleo’s eyes had glazed with a thin film of tears. “That sounds nice,” she said quietly.

“And you and I didn’t get that, not because we didn’t deserve it, we just got dealt something else. But the people who did get that love, they grew up to be different from us. More secure. Maybe they’re not as shiny or successful as you and I feel we have to be. But it’s not because they’re not interesting. They just don’t feel they have to do the tap dance, you know? They don’t have to prove themselves all the time to be loved. Because they always were.”