Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World (Aristotle and Dante #2)(34)

Eight


WHEN I WALKED INTO THE house, my mother smiled at me. She was holding the phone and pointing it toward me. I took the phone. I knew it was Dante. “Hi,” I said.

“I just wanted to say—I just wanted to say that I love you.” And neither one of us said anything, we just listened to the silence on the other end of the phone. And then he said, “And I know you love me too. And even though I’m not in such a good mood, that doesn’t matter very much because a mood is just a mood.” Then he hung up the phone.

I felt my mother’s eyes on me.

“What?” I said.

“You look so handsome just right now.”

I shook my head. “What I need is a shower.”

“That too.”

I noticed my mom looked a little pensive, almost sad. “Is there something wrong, Mom?”

“No, nothing.”

“Mom?”

“I’m just a little sad.”

“What happened?”

“Your sisters are moving.”

“What? Why?”

“Ricardo and Roberto have been working on some project. And they got transferred to Tucson.”

“Isn’t it weird that my sisters married men that work together?”

“It’s not weird. I suppose it’s unusual in that something like that doesn’t happen very often. But they’re good friends, and that works for your sisters. They’re inseparable. And this job is a big opportunity. And they’re chemists, and what they do isn’t just a job for them.”

I nodded. “So they’re like you.”

She looked at me.

“I mean, teaching’s not just a job for you.”

“Of course not. Teaching is a profession—but there are some people who don’t happen to agree. That’s why we’re so well paid.”

I liked my mother’s sarcasm. Well, I didn’t like it so much when it was pointed in my direction. “When are they leaving?”

“They’re leaving in three days.”

“Three days? That’s kind of fast.”

“Things happen fast sometimes. Too fast. I guess I just wasn’t expecting this. I’ll miss them. I’ll miss the kids. You know, life throws you some curve balls. I guess I’m not much of a batter. Never quite learned how to hit a curve.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say anything stupid like They won’t be that far away. Besides, there wasn’t anything wrong with being sad. It was okay to be sad about some things. And sometimes there wasn’t anything to say—but I hated to see her so sad. Being sad wasn’t something my mother did very often. I thought of the poem that she had framed in her bathroom. And I found myself repeating the poem to her. “Some children leave, some children stay. Some children never find their way.”

She looked at me, almost smiling, almost on the verge of tears. “You’re something special, Ari.”

“My sisters, they’re the ones who are leaving. My brother, he’s the one who never found his way. And, Mom, I guess I’m the one who stays.”

I saw my mother’s tears falling down her face. She put her hand on my cheek. “Ari,” she whispered, “I have never loved you more than I do right now.”



* * *



I took a long hot shower, and when I washed my body, I thought of Dante. I didn’t think of him on purpose. He was just there, in my head. Legs was lying at the foot of my bed. She couldn’t jump anymore. So I picked her up and put her on my bed. She put her head on my stomach and I told her, “You’re the best dog in the world, Legs. The best dog ever.” She licked my hand. And we both went to sleep.

I had a dream about my brother—and my sisters—and me. And we were all sitting around the kitchen table and we were talking and laughing, and we all looked so happy. When I woke up, I was smiling. But I knew it was just a dream, and I knew that dream would never happen. Life wasn’t a nightmare—but it wasn’t a good dream either. Life wasn’t a dream at all—it was something we all had to live. How was I going to live my life? And Dante, what would my life look like without him in it?



* * *



I woke up early and Legs walked into the kitchen, following me. I put on some coffee, drank some orange juice, and took out my journal:

Dear Dante,

I don’t know why I didn’t want to talk about this with you—even though we both understood that Emma’s son had died of AIDS. I don’t know much about that disease, but I know it’s how gay men are dying, and I do watch the news at night with my parents and none of us ever talk. Your mom probably knows a lot about it. I don’t know if you saw the headline in the New York Times that Emma was reading that said: “Facing the Emotional Anguish of AIDS.” And I heard my dad tell my mom that four thousand men had died from the disease. And my mother said it was more than that. Forty thousand gay men, Dante. I think Emma’s sadness and the graceful way she dealt with her grief really moved me. And yesterday, when we got back, we got lost in our little dramas and we forgot about the painting she’d given us. I think we should put it up in your room today.

The world is not a safe place for us. There are cartographers who came and made a map of the world as they saw it. They did not leave a place for us to write our names on that map. But here we are, we’re in it, this world that does not want us, a world that will never love us, a world that would choose to destroy us rather than make a space for us even though there is more than enough room. There is no room for us because it has already been decided that exile is our only choice. I have been reading the definition for that world and I don’t want that word to live inside me. We came into the world because our parents wanted us. And I have thought about this and I know in my heart that our parents brought us into this world for the purest of reasons. But no matter how much they love us, their love will never move the world one inch closer to welcoming us. The world is full of people who are stupid and mean and cruel and violent and ugly. I think that there is such a thing as truth in the world that we live in, but I sure as hell don’t know what it is. And there’s a shitload of assholes who think it’s okay to hate anybody they want to hate.