Writers & Lovers(21)

Silence.

‘And if we took away Brian’s salary at Schwab and your dad’s little allowance, how much money would you have working part-time at that nonprofit? Would you be able to afford Bermuda or your two-bedroom in SoHo? Are you more of an adult because two men are giving you the illusion of self-sufficiency?’

She hangs up on me.

I am hemorrhaging friends with these weddings. Muriel and Harry are nearly all I have left.

On the last day of August I go to work in the morning and the waiters are all gathered around the bar. I think I’ve missed a meeting but it’s just Mia reading something out loud: ‘The Mercedes limo slammed into a wall in the Alma tunnel, on the right bank of the Seine under the Place de l’Alma, the police said.’ I wedge my way in-between Mary Hand and Victor Silva to see what she’s reading from. ‘Shocked eyewitnesses reported that the car was full of blood.’

The front page of the Boston Globe is spread out on the counter with an enormous photo of a mangled black car. The headline above: DIANA IS DEAD.





The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane. The second-hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up too fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless. The whole world feels moist and pliable. When I get up from the desk I straighten the edges of everything. The rug needs to be perfectly aligned with the floorboards. My toothbrush needs to be perpendicular to the edge of the shelf. Clothing cannot be left inside out. My mother’s sapphire needs to be centered on my finger.

When I was fifteen, my father’s girlfriend, Ann, had my sweaters dry-cleaned. My mother used to wash them in Woolite and lay them on a towel to dry, but she was in Phoenix with Javi by then, and my father and I were living at Ann’s and she would gather up my sweaters while I was at school. They’d come back a few days later on hangers covered in paper, sheathed in long plastic bags, which she hung on my closet door. I didn’t like the shape of these bags, the swollen tops with the sweaters beneath and then the empty length of sheer plastic, dangling like the lower region of a jellyfish. I was scared of those bags. I’d get the sweaters out of them and tie tight knots along the length of each one and shove them to the bottom of my wastebasket. I was scared I’d try to suffocate myself in my sleep.

I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t happy, living in Ann’s big house without Caleb, who was in college and never called, but I wasn’t sad. I barely had any emotions at all. But at night I terrified myself with this fear that somewhere inside me someone wanted to die.

When my mother came back from Arizona, she asked if I wanted to talk to someone, a professional, she said. I don’t know why she said this, what precipitated it, but it scared me, the idea that this professional might go in and find that other person inside me, the person who was feeling all the things I did not let myself feel. My mother had returned brokenhearted and in the middle of divorce litigation with my father. I heard terrible noises through her bathroom door, sounds I couldn’t connect to my mother. She was grieving, but I didn’t understand what that felt like then. I told her she was the one who should see a shrink, not me.

In college one of my best friends was a psych major and practiced on me with the Minnesota personality test. She showed me the bar graph of my results. All the bars were in the medium size, normal range except two, which were much taller. One was for a category called Defensiveness to the Test. The other was for schizophrenia. I wondered if that tall schizophrenia bar had anything to do with why I tied those dry-cleaning bags in knots before bed that year my mother was gone, my suspicion that there was someone else inside me. I hadn’t had that fear again, and I don’t think I’ve ever exhibited any signs of that illness, but I did start writing fiction the year my mother was gone and maybe that’s where I channeled my schizophrenic potential.

During the time my mother was out West, I did some of the same sort of rearranging of objects that I do now after writing sometimes. I always had to put on my right shoe, then the left. I could never leave a shirt inside out. If I followed the rules, my mother would definitely come back from Phoenix. And here I am, making rules again, even though nothing I do now will ever, ever bring her back.

When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, ‘Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.’

And now she’s dead and I have that feeling all the time, no matter where I stand.





Adam comes by with my mail. He sees me at my desk in the window, so I have to open the door. He hands me a postcard and four envelopes from debt collectors, stamped with bright red threats.

‘I feel like I’m harboring a fugitive in here,’ he says. ‘How do you sleep at night?’

‘I don’t much.’

I can tell he doesn’t believe me. He thinks of me as young and somehow protected by my youth.

Adam points to the EdFund envelope. ‘Those guys are awful. They get sued left and right for unlawful practices.’

I need to get back to my desk.

‘Didn’t you get a full ride at Duke? Weren’t you ranked one or two in the country at some point?’

‘When I was fourteen,’ I say.

‘But isn’t golf one of those sports where if you’re good you only get better?’