Recursion(5)

“It’s nice to talk about her,” Julia says.

“I’m glad I finally can.”

The waiter comes to take their food orders, and the butterfly returns, alighting on the surface of the table next to Barry’s still-folded napkin. Stretching its wings. Preening. He tries to push the idea out of his mind that it’s Meghan, somehow haunting him on today of all days. It’s a stupid notion, of course, but the thought persists. Like the time a robin followed him for eight blocks in NoHo. Or on a recent walk with his dog in Fort Washington Park, when a ladybug kept landing on his wrist.

As the food arrives, Barry imagines Meghan sitting at the table with them. The rough edges of adolescence sanded down. Her entire life ahead of her. He can’t see her face, no matter how hard he tries, only her hands, in constant motion as she talks, the same way her mother moves when she’s confident and excited about something.

He isn’t hungry, but he makes himself eat. It seems like there’s something on Julia’s mind, but she just picks at the remains of her frittata, and he takes a drink of water and another bite of his sandwich and stares at the river in the distance.

The Hudson comes from a pond in the Adirondacks called Lake Tear of the Clouds. They went there one summer when Meghan was eight or nine. Camped in the spruce trees. Watched the stars fall. Tried to wrap their minds around the notion that this tiny mountain lake was the source of the Hudson. It’s a memory he returns to almost obsessively.

“You look thoughtful,” Julia says.

“I was thinking of that trip we took to Lake Tear of the Clouds. Remember?”

“Of course. It took us two hours to get the tent up in a rainstorm.”

“I thought it was clear.”

She shakes her head. “No, we shivered in the tent all night and none of us slept.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes. That trip was the foundation of my never-again wilderness policy.”

“Right.”

“How could you forget that?”

“I don’t know.” The truth is he does it constantly. He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol. He says finally, “Maybe watching shooting stars with my girls felt like a better memory.”

She tosses her napkin on her plate and leans back in her chair. “I went by our old house recently. Wow, it’s changed. You ever do that?”

“Every now and then.”

In actuality, he still drives past their old house anytime he has business in Jersey. He and Julia lost it in a foreclosure the year after Meghan died, and today it barely resembles the place they lived in. The trees are taller, fuller, greener. There’s an addition above the garage, and a young family lives there now. The entire fa?ade has been redone in stone, new windows added. The driveway widened and repaved. The rope swing that used to hang from the oak tree was taken down years ago, but the initials he and Meghan once carved at the base of the trunk remain. He touched them last summer—having somehow decided that a cab ride to Jersey at two in the morning after a night out with Gwen and the rest of Central Robbery Division was a good idea. A Jersey City cop had arrived after the new owners called 911 to report a vagrant in their front yard. Though stumbling drunk, he wasn’t arrested. The cop knew of Barry, of what had happened to him. He called another taxi and helped Barry into the backseat. Paid the fare back to Manhattan in advance and sent him on his way.

The breeze coming off the water carries a cool bite, and the sun is warm on his shoulders—a pleasing contrast. Tourist boats go up and down the river. The noise of traffic is ceaseless on the highway above. The sky crisscrossed with the fading contrails of a thousand jets. It is late autumn in the city, one of the last good days of the year.

He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.

The check comes and Julia tries to pay, but he snatches it away and throws down his card.

“Thank you, Barry.”

“Thank you for inviting me.”

“Let’s not go a year again without seeing each other.” She raises her glass of ice water. “To our birthday girl.”

“To our birthday girl.” He can feel the cloud of grief coalescing in his chest, but he breathes through it, and when he speaks again his voice is almost normal. “Twenty-six years old.”



* * *





After brunch, he walks to Central Park. The silence of his apartment feels like a threat on Meghan’s birthday, the last five of which have not gone well.

Seeing Julia always upends him. For a long time after their marriage ended, he thought he missed his ex. Thought he would never get over her. He would often dream of her and wake to the ache of her absence eating him alive. The dreams cut him deeply—half memory, half fantasy—because in them, she felt like the Julia of old. The smile. The unhesitating laugh. The lightness of being. She was the person who stole his heart again. All through the following morning, she’d be on his mind, the totality of that loss staring him down, unblinking, until the emotional hangover of the dream finally released its hold on him like a slowly lifting fog. He saw Julia once, in the wake of one such dream—an unexpected bump-in at the party of an old friend. To his surprise, he felt nothing as they chatted stiffly on the veranda. Being in her presence slashed through the dream-withdrawal; he didn’t want her. It was a liberating revelation, even as it devastated him. Liberating because it meant he didn’t love this Julia—he loved the person she used to be. Devastating because the woman who haunted his dreams was truly gone. As unreachable as the dead.