The Vanishing Year(59)
We take the subway to Queens and walk to his mother’s house from the station. His childhood home is a square clapboard, smooshed in on the sides like someone had taken it between their palms. The street is lined with similar structures, variations of dinginess, and yet there are flowers in the window boxes (some are plastic) and well-worn but not tattered American flags hanging from the flagpoles—the kind that stand tall, not the suburban idea of a flagpole that hangs jauntily from the porch post, usually draped with a nylon slip of fabric silk-screened with a smiling cat, Have a Mawr-velous Day! The lawns are shorn, bare in some spots, but maintained.
His mother’s house is empty. She’s working, he says, a doctor’s office receptionist, and I nod. Cash waves his hand around and mutters something about the neighborhood, how it used to be better. It’s the way the middle class always feel around the rich: apologetic. I’m used to the excuses, the explanations. Truthfully, there’s no appropriate response. My money is not mine. We are the same, Cash and I. But to say that denies the privilege that comes with Henry’s influence. Instead, I nod and smile. We climb in Cash’s late-model Honda and head onto I-87 North.
The city recedes and Cash turns on the radio to a Top 40 station that plays music I’ve never heard. I think about how that’s possible, that I’m thirty years old and I’m not familiar with contemporary pop music. Lydia would be appalled. Our apartment in Hoboken was never quiet, always bursting with underground punk, hard-core rock, and then sometimes just blasting the latest Pink song. Lydia lived her life in music. Loud, harsh, thrumming beats for Saturdays and soft jazz for Sunday hangovers. The past year of my life has been outlined in shades of silence.
“What will you say?” Cash turns the volume down on the radio.
“I have no idea.” I shrug.
“What do you want from her? A mother?” He avoids my gaze and taps the steering wheel to a softly thumping beat.
“No,” I’m quick to reply. Maybe. “Do you know what it’s like to have no one?”
“You have Henry.”
“Henry’s not around. He’s in Japan. I didn’t even know he was going.”
“You were the model couple at the benefit.”
The benefit seems like ages ago. We were the model couple then, what was that—two and a half weeks ago? I remember his hands flitting across my shoulders, fastening the solitaire diamond, and then hovering there, reluctant to let go. Everything has gone downhill since the benefit. Molly McKay and Gunther Rowe. Henry’s erratic behavior, his violence and mood swings. I can’t reconcile this man with the Henry in my memory. But now, removed from Henry and Lydia without the pressure to be one person or the other, the transformation is a bit clearer. The day Henry gently suggested that a nose stud was juvenile. You’re too beautiful for these teenager endeavors. Like you’re thirteen and trying to piss off your mother. I took it out because I was twenty-seven and felt immediately silly. It was impulsive anyway, Lydia’s influence, my newly short hair spiked magenta. Piercings. Attempts to hide, but at the same time discover who I would become, with Lydia’s help whether she knew why or not. That night, I popped it out, tucking it under the sapphire necklace he’d given me as a replacement in my jewelry box.
Or maybe it was how he’d taken my short, spiky lock of hair between his thumb and forefinger: This is such a beautiful color, is it natural? I bet it would be knockout if you let it grow. Subtle comments here and there about my clothing, how they reflected my spirit but not my intelligence.
And then came the waves of gifts, cashmere, silk, Versace, and Donna Karan. Thick, draping fabrics. I’d stand in the closet and hold the softest silk to my cheek, like a child’s security blanket. Fabrics I didn’t even know existed, much less thought I could own, their colors vibrant and buttery rich. Suddenly, my thrift store plaid skirts and lace tops felt pop-bubblegum. Cheap. Evelyn used to say that it takes a lifetime to grow into the person you’ll become. As I stood in the closet, facing all this glorious elegance, she all but whispered in my ear.
Then, gradually, I started wearing Henry’s clothes to the flower shop. Then I wore them all the time. Eventually I bagged up all my old stuff and gave it to Penny to donate to Goodwill until the last of me was gone. At the time, I didn’t feel sad; the parts of me that were old, torn, ratted, and worn were being shucked away in plastic bags. The best parts of my life were yet to come. Hemingway once said that bankruptcy happens “Gradually and then suddenly.” Maybe that’s how I became Henry’s wife.
“You’re not the same person,” Lydia scoffed one day as we processed, sliding the stems through our fingers, slicing the bottoms on a bias with our knives, shearing off leaves.
“No one is ever the same person. Stagnant people are boring.” I was defensive.
“So you’re saying I’m stagnant? I’m boring?” She stopped cutting and stared at me, her nostrils flared, an angry horse about to charge.
“No. I’m saying I was bored. With me.” I plunked a gangly zinnia into the nearest stainless water bucket.
“But what you’re really saying is that you’re bored with us.” Javi stood behind Lydia, his hands resting on his hips. “Will you come to Paula’s show later?” Javi asked the question with a sarcastic sneer. Paula, Javi’s partner, played bass in a punk band in the basement of a bar on Tuesday nights. Except that night, Henry had opera tickets. I raised my eyebrows and opened my mouth, unable to verbalize the rejection. “Yeah. We didn’t think so.” He turned and stomped off.