And Now You Can Go (7 page)

That night I meet the red-faced representative at the fish place. "I don't eat fish," I say.

"You should have told me," he says.

Why is his face always red? Is he on medication? "It's okay," I say. "I've always wanted to come here." "We can go somewhere else."

"Stop," I say. And then: "You look nice." His long hair is freshly washed and brushed.

"You always look nice," he says. He's Catholic and from Texas and everything he says comes out straight and with no sexual overtones. I like this about him. The cross above his bed makes me nervous, but I like him.

"In fact," he continues, "I think you're one of the nicest people I've ever met." I blush at my premature nostalgia for this moment.
Pre-stalgia
.

"Nicest person you've met
ever
?" I tease. "Well," he says, "let me think about that."

We end up in his apartment. He brushes his teeth. "Ready for bed," he says.

I get in, loosening the tight sheets. He gets up and lights the candle. He kisses me, I kiss him. The routineness of it all amuses and amazes me. I think,
Next he's going to suck on my finger
. He lifts my hand to his mouth.
Next, he's going to turn me over and bite my shoulder blade. My right one
. He does.
He's going to trace my navel, say it looks like a coin slot
. "Coin slot," he says.
He's going to ask me if I'm sure, if I'm comfortable, if I'm okay
. "Is this okay?" he says as he enters me.

Everything is precisely, excruciatingly the same as last night. Until: "Oh no," he says.

"What?" "It broke."

I lie on the bed, flat. I am so, so careful, have always been careful, and this has never happened.

"What bad TV show are we on?" I ask.

He moves down to the foot of the bed and turns so he's facing me.

"I think this is a sign," he says. He tilts his head up, making like the answers written on the wall behind me.

"Of what?"

"That I shouldn't be doing this to you," he says. "You're doing this to me?"

His eyes are still staring past me.

I turn around to see what he's looking at: the cross above his bed.

In the morning I go to get the pills. The campus health center is right next door to the mental health center. I have to pass the therapists office to get there. I don't want to run into her. I get a running start and leap past her door.

I wait for two hours to see a doctor. When I complain to the nurse at the desk, she shrugs and says, "Next time make an appointment in advance."

When I finally meet with the doctor, it's behind a curtain. Everyone else who's waiting can hear our conversation. I know because I could hear everyone's before me: "… coughing up phlegm for two weeks …" "… so depressed I can't sleep …" "… don't know if it's an ingrown pubic hair or …"

"Have you ever had an abortion?" says the doctor. He looks at me over, not through, his glasses.

"No," I say.

"Have you ever taken these pills before?" "No," I say.

"Well, it's not uncommon to experience nausea or to vomit," he says. "You might want to make sure someone's there with you."

I nod.

"How long have you been with your partner?" he says. "Twelve years," I say.

The phone rings and a man's voice says: "You sexy thing. You are the sexiest thing. Do you know how goddamn sexy you are?"

I hang up. I know that voice. I lie down on the kitchen floor, my stomach to the tiles. I close my eyes. When I open them I can see under the refrigerator. Underneath, there's dust a magnet, and some loose sheets of paper. And small wheels I should have gotten the police to trace all incoming calls. Then they would know who he was. Why didn't the police know to do this? They are the worst. They are Satan. They are Satan, but stupid.

The voice. I sit up. I know that voice. I press # and then 69 and get an answering machine. "You've reached the home of Wayne Gretzky," says the answering machine.

ROTC moron.

Thank God it was him. Thank God for him. I laugh. Into his answering machine, I laugh. "I should have known that was you, Mr. Gretzky," I say. "Fucking jerk."

I hang up and when I turn around I run into a fly strip. It falls from the hanging cord and sticks in my hair and on my sweater. I can't even throw it away, because it sticks to my hands. My sweater looks like a snail has traversed my body.

Nicholas, the boy I dated for three years of college, the one who taught me to fire guns, calls me.

"How'd you get my number?" I ask. "Your parents," he says.

"What do you want?"
I have to talk to them about giving out my number to him. To anyone
. "The money you owe me."

We'd made plans to rent a house in upstate New York this past summer with some of his friends. When we broke up in March, I told him I'd pay him back my share of the rent when I'd earned it.

I'd known from the start he was troubled. Four years ago, he sent me a bouquet of red roses on Valentine's Day. I was dating someone else and he knew this, and the guy, quite well. I found the gift of the roses sweetly delusional. After that, I couldn't get him out of my mind.

We dated for three years and eventually there was a second clue and a third, a fourth and a fifth, and finally that weekend we spent at his family's third second home—this one in New Hampshire—a whole bouquet of evidence confirming what I feared was true.

That night in New Hampshire we'd made a nice dinner of Cornish hen and we both drank too much wine. I'd had the procedure where they'd taken my eggs, and I had just found out that the woman from the U.S.S.
Intrepid
was pregnant. My plans for the trip to Portugal were in the works. Nicholas didn't know about the eggs or the trip. Over dinner, I told him.

"Why didn't you ask me for money?" he said.

"I didn't want to. I don't want to ever borrow your money." "And so you just go and have sex with a total stranger?"

I fake-laughed because I didn't want to raise my voice. "It's not like that." "Why wouldn't you just take my money? I don't get it."

"It's not even your money. It's your fathers," I said. "And besides, I didn't want to owe you anything."

"Why didn't you tell me before?"

"I didn't want to tell you until it was definite," I said. "Until it worked. The chances of it not working were pretty high."

"But what if we want to have lads? You've ruined that. You've already done that with someone else."

"Nicholas," I said, and then didn't know what else to say.

We were silent through the rest of dinner, silent as we watched TV. Silent as he poured himself another drink, as we got into bed. The house was so quiet I could hear sounds from the neighbors' home a mile away. At some point, I fell asleep.

When I awoke, it was to something circling above my head. My first thought was that it was a bat. My second was that I must be mistaken—maybe it was a piece of fire-blackened paper swirling in the breeze.

"Nicholas" I said, shaking him. He was the heaviest sleeper. "Nick." Finally, he awoke. "I think there's a bat in the room."

"It probably got in through the fireplace," he said. "That used to happen a lot. They'd swoop down during dinners and we'd fend them off with tennis rackets."

"Tennis rackets?" I was whispering.

"Let's go into another room," Nicholas said. "You first."

I ran out into the hallway and he came out and closed the door behind him.

We went in another room, the bed already made with fresh sheets.
Damn these rich people with maids
. I pretended to be asleep but I could hear Nicholas getting up and doing various things—watching TV, taking a shower. It was 3 a.m.

In the morning I woke up and couldn't find him. The door to the room with the bat was still closed and I didn't want to open it. I looked outside the window to make sure he hadn't left, leaving me stranded. But the Saab was still there. Finally, Nicholas ascended the basement stairs.

"What're you doing down there? Were you up all night?" "Looking for something," he said.

"What?" I asked, and that's when I saw what was in his hand. "A gun."

"You're going to kill the bat with a gun?"

He didn't answer, but put the gun down. Then he went out to the front porch and grabbed a shovel. I followed him back into the bedroom.

"Nick," I said. "What about that there?" I pointed to a wall by the window where a strange black shape, narrow at the top and at the bottom, like a leaf, seemed to have fastened itself against the wall.

I looked closer—not too close—but couldn't tell. The shape was so small and still. The bat I had seen the night before had a wingspan of what had seemed to me a foot, at least. This surely was not a bat. I got closer and saw it pulsing. Afraid I would alarm it, I tried not to scream. Of course it was the bat—bats slept during the day—but it was so small and folded up.

Nicholas was standing with the shovel that he had found on the porch. He held the shovel like an ax above his head. He let out a grunting sound and brought the shovel blade down hard. Blood, there was a smattering of it, and it was over.

The bat slid down the wall a foot, leaving a trail of red, but so tenacious was its grasp that it didn't fall. Nicholas took the shovel and, now holding it properly, maneuvered the bat around. He walked toward the kitchen. I followed him and watched him slide the bat off the shovel and onto the chopping block in the kitchen's island.

"What are you doing?" I said.

He got out a knife and started cutting the bat into small, square-inch pieces. "What are you doing?" I screamed.

He didn't answer. I wondered if he could hear me—he was so involved in chopping up the bat I feared he couldn't.

We drove back to campus in silence.

A few miles after we'd stopped for gas, at a junction where I knew I could catch a train if need be, I told him I thought we should take a break. "Hiatus," is what I called it. I said it like it was the name of a country we might want to explore. We'd buy a guidebook called
Let's Go Hiatus
.

"Have you thought this through?" he said. "Yes," I said.

The car swerved off the road and crashed into an apple tree. Turkeys ran; old, rotten apples fell onto the roof of his Saab, landing hard as hail.

I still have the small scar on my forehead. It's faded, but it still prongs out like a tuning fork. When I'm tan it turns white. When I try to conceal it, it looks orange. When the scar first started fading, I thought about painting it back in because it made me feel tough.

Maybe I should have done this, painted it in, I think now.

"I need your share of the money," Nicholas says over the phone.

He doesn't need the money, but each month since April I've put aside $125, so now I have the $1,000 for the house I never lived in. I don't want to owe him anything.

"Why don't you bring it over tomorrow?" he says.

I look at my calendar and I remember. "Tomorrow's your birthday," I say.

I get off the phone and water the plants. They look like they're dying so I breathe on them. Onto their leaves, I exhale
huhs
. Am I supposed to breathe onto the soil? I decide yes.

That night, when I come home from tutoring, the ROTC boy is sleeping outside my door. I step over him into the apartment. I come back out and give him a pillow and a blanket.

When the ROTC boy wakes up the next morning he rings the doorbell. I pretend to not be home.

I put the four one-hundred-dollar bills, five fifties, seventeen twenties, and one ten in an envelope and lick it shut. Outside my door, the pillow is wrapped inside the blanket. I take the subway and then the crosstowri bus and then walk. Nicholas is staying at his fathers place on East 72nd Street. His father made his fortune developing real estate in New York, and Nicholas has told me the apartment's been decorated by his father's various interior decorator mistresses. I enter the living room, where Nicholas is sitting in a chair, his back to me. I don't recognize the back of .the brown-haired head at first, but I remind myself that his dirty blond hair always darkened in the winter.

"Hi," I say. I've brought the pepper spray with me in my jacket pocket.

He doesn't turn around. I walk around so I'm facing him. His eyes are gray. He has one set of eyelashes that are blond; those in the other set are brown. I used to love this about him. Now the imbalance frightens me.

"Happy birthday," I say.

He looks at the radiator as it releases steam. On the stereo, a violin is playing scales.

"Here," I say, and hold out the envelope. He takes it from me with his left hand. His right wrist is still messed up from the car accident.

The heat's on much too high in the apartment and I feel like I'm choking. I tell myself what I always tell myself when confronted with him, or the rumors I hear about him:
It's not my fault
.

"How are you doing?" I ask. I wonder if he'd have been different, better off, if he weren't an only child.

He's not even looking at me, but at a miniature model his father has of his house on Lake Como, in Italy. His mother, a divorce lawyer, got everything else. "Oh, just great.

Everything's fucking great," he says. "What can I do?" I ask.

"What can I do?" he mimics. "Please give me a break," I say. "Why should I?"

I tell him that someone recently could have killed me, that someone came very close to killing me. I tell him that I almost died, that I almost had no choice.

He turns his mismatched eyelashes and pilled-up, dulled eyes in my direction. "Lucky you," he says.

"I'm going to go," I say. "But before I do, could you please count the money? While I'm here?"

"You think I'm going to lie?"

"I just want to be sure we both see the money and that we both agree that I don't owe you anything else."

On the stereo, the violin keeps playing scales. I know this tape. Nicholas's parents made him play violin from the time he was four. Toward the end of high school, he wanted to quit. His parents, who met with the high school's college admissions counselor on a regular basis, wouldn't let him.

Nicholas made five tapes of himself practicing and would rotate playing them on the stereo. Outside his bedroom door, his parents would think he was dedicating hours to the instrument, when in fact he was in Central Park with friends, smoking weed. Now he's started playing these tapes again.