All Our Wrong Todays(63)
“I won’t let any of this affect things at work,” I say.
“I can’t tell if you’re screwing with me,” Beth says. “Like you’re pretending to be nice so I don’t tell anyone what an asshole you were. Or if you’re just kind of screwed up. Like whatever it is that makes your brain spit out the most incredible buildings I’ve ever seen also makes you a total mess in every other way.”
“You have no idea just how much of a mess I really am,” I say.
“And I don’t want to know,” Beth says. “But just so we’re clear, this is never happening again.”
“I know,” I say.
“Okay,” she says, “I guess I’ll see you at the office. I mean, you are coming back, right? Because people are saying you maybe quit.”
“Beth, I don’t know what I’m doing. But if you change your mind about any of this, you do whatever you need to do. I’ll understand.”
Beth walks to the door, her hand on the knob. She looks back at me.
“You’re a very hard person to make your mind up about,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say, “I feel that way about me too.”
96
It’s common to talk about time as variable. How it can feel radically accelerated or yawningly drawn-out depending on what you’re doing. But we don’t tend to talk about space that way. Maybe because we gauge it with our eyes, space feels more rigid and fixed. Even though we know inches and feet are just as arbitrary as seconds and minutes, they feel more concrete. But sitting on Penny’s couch, telling her everything, everything I remember, space feels a lot more liquid. We’re less than a foot apart but the few inches it would take for my skin to touch her skin seem impossibly vast.
After Beth leaves, I race over to Penny’s apartment. She opens the door, and when she sees me, we both start crying.
“He said you were gone forever,” Penny says.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll never be able to say sorry enough times. Even if it’s the only word I say to you till the day we die.”
She tenses at that. I’m right next to her on the couch, but she won’t look at me.
“It was like a horror movie,” she says. “I woke up next to an alien wearing your face. It was bad. It was very bad.”
“I’m sorry, Penny, but it gets worse.”
After the torrent of confessions and apologies, there’s a long, quiet, kind of achingly domestic moment where we pick up our regular morning routine, minus the unself-conscious physical contact. We make coffee and slice up some fruit and it feels like maybe, not yet, but one day, this could fade into an almost imperceptible stain, like a drop of red wine that’s been imperfectly bleached from a tablecloth.
“I get what you’re saying,” Penny says, “that you never understood your influence on John. How his whole life you were both his imagination and his conscience. But I can’t help feel that’s a self-serving analysis. It makes you the hero and him the monster.”
“I think maybe he is a monster,” I say.
“But maybe it’s not that John lacked any compassionate human qualities. Maybe he was a fine and good and generally functional person until you took over.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I say.
“Maybe it’s not that you gave him those things, like a gift,” Penny says. “Maybe it’s that you stole all that from him. Because you needed it. And when you receded, for whatever reason, you carried off some important pieces of him with you. And left him without them.”
“That’s not . . . no, that doesn’t make sense,” I say.
“Right,” she says, “because the rest of this makes complete sense. You said to me last week that you wondered if you were more sexist than you realized because you never grew up with a sister, the way he did. The thing is, Greta doesn’t strike me as someone who’d take a milligram of shit from a brother like the man in my bed yesterday morning. I don’t have any siblings, so I don’t know how blind you can be to their damage. I know everyone thinks he’s a bit detached and distant. But that’s not the same as what I saw in his, in your, eyes. It was angry and cold. Like your evil twin showed up looking just like you in every way except the light in his eyes and the cadence of his speech.”
“It wasn’t me,” I say. “You understand that, right?”
“I understand you believe you didn’t do any of the things he did,” she says. “To me or to that girl. But it was your body. Your body handled me the way he handled me. Your body was with her, doing who knows what, things she apparently didn’t like very much but that you conveniently can’t remember.”
“I’m not trying to minimize what it felt like for you or for her,” I say, “but this whole thing feels like a horror movie to me too.”
“Well,” she says, “that sounds really tough for you, Tom.”
“Penny . . .”
“No, that’s great,” she says, “congratulations, you managed to screw your intern, so original, and then convince her you’re actually a super-nice and thoughtful guy who just has a bit of a twisty dark side when it suits him. And here you are to convince me of the same thing, right? That it wasn’t you. It was him. You’re not responsible. You’re pure and innocent and sweet and you say just the right thing and you really listen and you would never treat me like that. It’s funny because people say the perfect guy doesn’t exist. And yet I found him. Except of course he literally doesn’t exist.”