Cleopatra and Frankenstein(75)

“You’ve still got a pretty good leg for an old guy,” called Jonah.

“Thanks,” Anders called back. “But I’m not old.”

“You’re like fifty,” Jonah said, moving closer.

“I’m forty-fucking-five,” Anders said.

Jonah laughed. “Language!”

“Don’t tell your mother.”

“But you don’t have kids,” Jonah said suddenly.

“I have you.”

“Yeah, I know, but real kids that live with you and shit.”

“Language,” Anders said, less convincingly.

“Look—” Jonah held the ball still with his foot. “I just think my mom worries about you. I heard her on the phone to Aunt Vicky, talking about you.”

“Is Auntie Vicky the one with the kid in Model UN?”

“Ned? That kid’s an ass.”

“Total ass,” said Anders and felt Jonah’s smile warm him from the inside. “No one needs to worry about me. Now, show me your kick-ups.”

Anders watched Jonah bounce the ball from his toe to his knee and back again. He counted along with him, nine, ten, eleven, twelve … He was forty-five. He didn’t have real kids that lived with him and shit. He wasn’t married, never had been. His longest relationship had been the six years with Christine. But he was still healthy, still had his looks. If he had a baby next year, he’d only be sixty-six when the kid was twenty. That wasn’t so old. People ran marathons at sixty-six. He just needed to meet someone. Someone without all the baggage. Jonah lost control of the ball, and Anders ran to retrieve it.

“Hey Jonah,” he said, tossing the ball back to him. “I’m thinking of moving to LA. How would you feel about that?”

“Like to the beach?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Yes, actually. I could look around Venice Beach.”

“Where the Z-Boys are from?” said Jonah.

“Exactly,” said Anders. “And you would come visit, of course. We could go surfing. And I’ll buy a car, a convertible, so we can drive out to the desert.”

“Sweet,” said Jonah. “Chelsea’s playing at LA Galaxy soon.”

“I’ll get us tickets,” said Anders and squeezed his shoulder. “You’d really be okay with that?”

Jonah looked at the ground and shrugged.

“I don’t care.”

He lunged for the ball and began bouncing it on his head. Anders intercepted it and called for him to go long. Jonah raced away across the lawn, the West Side silhouetted behind him. The sun was still setting early, but there was a good hour of light left. Anders took a few steps back, ran forward, and let the ball go. It was a perfect pass.





CHAPTER ELEVEN


Early March


Frank had left a note on the kitchen counter for Cleo to find, but it wasn’t written by him. It was from their next-door neighbor. He was complaining about their “late-night soap opera histrionics,” as he put it. The neighbor was a theater critic with impeccable hair, so he could say a thing like that. Cleo read the note once more, folded it neatly into a square, then set fire to it over the kitchen sink. It was noon.

Frank had left early that morning for a shoot that wouldn’t wrap until long after sundown. She had not heard him leave; he had taken to sleeping on the sofa, ostensibly to avoid disturbing Cleo when he came home late, but mostly so he could return drunk with impunity. It went without saying that this arrangement meant they were no longer having sex. Cleo had spent the morning lying in bed, watching the sunlight creep accusatorily across the ceiling, until thirst drove her to the kitchen, where she’d found the note waiting. Frank had not messaged her or appended any note of his own to the neighbor’s. He’d left it for her to discover alone.

She placed the matches back in the cutlery drawer. There were the hand-painted chopsticks she had made for him when they first met over a year ago. She was always making things back then, carrying them to Frank like a cat proudly dropping a sparrow at his feet. Not anymore. The note was a new kind of humiliation. Someone had witnessed them. Worse, someone had confirmed what she already feared: they were not normal. It was not normal to fight like they did. Not normal for Frank to return drunk so many nights in a row. Not normal for her to react with such savagery when he did. In the past month, she had shattered a vase and an ashtray, she had hit his face and chest and arms, and last night she had hurled the blue orchid he’d bought her as a wedding present at him, snapping the stem in half.

“No one else is like this,” she’d said the night before. They were sitting on the living room floor, the orchid’s black soil scattered around them. “Are they?”

She looked at him.

“I don’t know, Cley,” he said.

“Well, what do you think?”

“I’m sure there are couples that are worse.” He shrugged. “And better.”

“You thought we would be better?”

He shrugged again. “I didn’t expect it to be so hard.”

“Being married?”

“Living together, everything. I didn’t think you’d be so … so affected by me.”

“What am I meant to be affected by, if not you?”