The Last Romantics(37)
“What? Why?” said Joe, but he did it, he held out his arms.
Before he could pull them away, Renee grabbed his left arm, pushed up the shirt cuff and examined the interior forearm. She saw a smattering of small purple bruises, each no bigger than a dime, with a vicious point of red in the center. Renee inhaled sharply. “Joe,” she said.
“Renee. Relax. It’s not heroin. Coke is so much better when you inject it. I’ve only done it a few times. It’s okay. Really.” And then, suddenly contrite, “I’m sorry you saw that. Listen, I’ll stop. Okay? I will. I promise. I can stop the coke. It’s not a big deal.”
Joe’s phone had started to buzz then, and he’d angled away from her to answer it, mouthed a good-bye, and turned down Lexington Avenue.
Afterward Renee had been so agitated she’d walked and walked, from New York-Presbyterian on East Sixty-Eighth all the way downtown. What could she do? Stage an intervention? He was working, he was in love, he was getting married, he was living a responsible, productive life. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe she was being hysterical. But no autopsy had ever been conducted on their father; they never knew why he suffered the sudden cardiac arrest that killed him. Cardiomyopathy was one possibility, or ventricular fibrillation. Renee made sure that Joe had routine physicals; the tests had all been normal. Still, she worried.
From behind the blue curtain came another moan from the pregnant woman. Her husband wept softly.
“She’s going to be okay, right?” the man asked. No one answered.
Jaypa spoke low into the phone on the wall and caught Renee’s eye but did not smile. And then a tall, formidable nurse sheathed in the peach scrubs of the delivery room arrived and took charge. The curtain swiped open, and the whole enterprise, woman and man, doctors and nurses, gurney and IV, moved swiftly down the hall toward the elevators like an urgent traveling circus. The massive swinging doors that separated the ER from the hospital proper shut behind them with the slightest sucking noise—Renee always thought of a submarine pulling closed its portal—and they disappeared.
The ER returned to calm. The electronic blip of a blood-pressure monitor. The soft chatter of the triage nurses.
*
Renee never considered herself a prude. She liked to think about sex. She masturbated, each orgasm a small, perfect miracle, and found herself aroused equally by the sight of Mr. Quigley’s firm, round buttocks in math class and the kissing scenes in Top Gun. And yet by the age of eighteen she had never had a boyfriend, never dated, had kissed only one person—a pimply high jumper at a postseason track conference—and found it pleasant but not pleasant enough that she wished to repeat the exchange. She didn’t blame the man in the car for her ambivalence, not exactly. The line of causation was not so straight. But an unease rose up in her throat, the slightest taste of disgust, whenever she felt herself the subject of male sexual attention. Plus, she was busy. So busy! Track meets, academic decathlon, four AP classes, part-time work at the lab in New Haven, tutoring on Saturday afternoons, volunteering at the soup kitchen on Sunday nights. This was the reason she didn’t date, Renee told Noni, who offered her wholehearted approval.
“There’s plenty of time for dating,” Noni said. “High-school boys are Neanderthals anyhow.”
But then, toward the end of Renee’s senior year, Brett Swenson asked her to prom.
At eighteen years old and 205 pounds of pure muscle, Brett had been the star of the high school’s championship wrestling team. Thick, dark brows, a full, sensitive mouth, ears flat to his square head. Brett was cute, at least that’s what her friends said, and Renee appreciated certain aspects of his physique: the wide shoulders, the hard, flat stomach that he displayed often—in the lunchroom, in biology class, passing in the hall—by lifting the hem of his shirt to wipe his face or lips as though the simple task of carrying his prodigious muscles was enough to raise a sweat.
Yes, Renee liked the flash of that stomach. But she did not particularly like Brett. He laughed too loudly and too often and strode the halls as though the high school were his home and all the other students and teachers merely guests enjoying the whims of his hospitality. Stories circulated about Brett: the college girl he’d dated, the night he slept with two girls at the same time. Jennifer Garrit had slept with him, Renee heard, and Sarah Cooper and even a freshman, coltish Julie Farley, with her long legs and braces. All of these girls became marked by him, carrying with them through the halls a badge of experience and allure and tawdry knowledge. Brett never had a girlfriend. Such official couplings generally happened within the school band or the chess club, involving people without the wealth of opportunities that presented themselves to young men like Brett. He had a social obligation, it seemed, to spread himself around.
It was a distinct surprise when Brett asked Renee to the senior prom—a shocking event, thrilling to her friends but nausea-inducing for Renee. Weeks of back-and-forth communications ensued: his friends talking to her friends, handwritten notes, chats beside her locker. He called her once at home to detail the limousine his parents had rented, its long sunroof, its television and white leather seats. Renee had been swayed, almost, by these shows of consideration, but in the end she said no—Renee always said no—and spent prom night at the movies with her friend Gabby watching Pretty Woman and eating sticky Raisinets.
Two weeks later she passed Brett in the hall on her way to class, her arms full of books, hair unwashed and pulled up in a ponytail. He said, looking straight at her, his voice an undertone but the words distinct, “What a fucking waste.” He shook his head. Gone were the affection and attraction that he’d put on display during those fervent weeks before prom. The look he gave her was dismissive, with a whiff of disgust.