“Do you?” asked Larissa. “Do you really want to be with Stanley?”
“Yes! I’m completely enamored of him. I’m fascinated by him.”
“But Jonny loves you so much,” said Maggie.
“I think Stanley does, too,” Bo countered.
“The issue isn’t whether Jonny loves you,” said Larissa. “The issue is how
you
feel about Jonny.”
“Well, I love him, but I’m not
in
love with him. But my problem is…” and here Bo nearly banged the table in her frustration, her disbelief at the mystery of the workings of man, “is that Jonny didn’t do any of the things I wanted him to do, or the things I thought he would do. I thought I knew him. I wanted him to go nuts so I could go and tell Stanley, hey, my boyfriend found out about us and flipped out…”
“Good plan,” said Larissa.
“…And threw me out, which would allow Stanley to react with a ‘Thank God!’ or a ‘Now you’re free!’ or even a ‘How do you feel?’ Except Jonny didn’t do any of these things. He didn’t throw me out. He didn’t tell me I was trash. He didn’t even get mad,” Bo said with incredulity. “Jonny sat on the couch and started to cry.”
“Jonny started to cry?” said Maggie, incredulous and ready to cry herself.
“I
know
, Mags!” Bo made a gesture with her hands that made the wet straw from her Diet Coke glass fly out and hit a woman passing by. After apologizing she turned back to Maggie and Larissa.
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t expect him to…God!”
She shuddered. “Anyway, I became ridiculously upset with him, and after half an hour, it was Jonny who was apologizing to
me
for his inappropriate reaction toward my appalling affair.” Bo was breathing heavy. “I told him, I don’t want to be in a relationship with you anymore. I want out.”
“You said this to Jonny?”
“Sure did.”
“Where was your mother during all this?”
“Making my life a living hell,” Bo replied. “We put her in the bedroom, and she kept coming out every five minutes. Do you want tea? Do you need some water? Should I open the window? I’m like, Ma,
basta
! But she wouldn’t. She said, I think I’m getting a migraine, Bo, can you get me my pills, I can’t see so good. It could be the glaucoma. My blood pressure must be through the roof. My pills, Bo! Honest to God, I don’t know if I dreamed it or lived it, it was so surreal. It was like a Dali infidelity scene. Nothing in it made any sense.”
“And yet somehow remarkable sense. Bo,” Larissa said calmly, “let me ask you a question. You know how you just said that Jonny didn’t react or behave in the way you either wanted him to or expected him to…”
“Yeah?”
“Well, is it possible, just possible, that Stanley might also not react or behave in the way you want or expect when you tell him that you want to break up with your boyfriend and go out with him instead?”
“No.” Bo frowned. “Stanley and I have talked and talked about it and about us. We have a very strong connection.”
“I’m sure you do.” Larissa stood up, and placed her plates and bowls on the tray. “Nothing you can do now. You’ve embarked on a course you’ve got to see through. Talk to Stanley. You’ve left yourself few other options. Now, Mags, are you coming? Because I’ve got to start back.”
“I’m going to finish eating,” Maggie said, looking into her uneaten soup. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course not.” Larissa gladly left them, but instead of heading to the train, she went downstairs to the third floor and explored the “Art and Love in Renaissance Italy” exhibit, showing a passing interest in the Childbirth Bowls and Trays by Castel Durante and an intense fascination in Gustave Dore’s black and white drawings of Paolo and Francesca, Dante’s Fifth Circle desperate lovers, both married to other people, murdered by the cuckolded Giovanni before they were able to repent, clinging to each other for dear life while the hurricane of souls swirled around them.
Would Jared render her blameless, accept her Epicurean arguments? Could Larissa persuade him with her airtight logic? But Jared, she could say. I came home. I cooked you dinner. I spent the weekends with you. I still picked up your starched white shirts from the cleaners, on the way home from being soundly assaulted with love, someone else’s, not yours.
She knew: in no way would anything be made easier for Larissa by having her free will compromised by acts of fate. There had only been one act of fate—her going to Stop&Shop because King’s parking lot was full—and one act of free will: when she went back. After that, just like now, it all remained in Larissa’s clenched and sperm-drenched hands.
After a trance that lasted many minutes, Larissa startled herself out of it, ran downstairs out of the marble lobby and hailed a cab. To avoid accidentally running into Maggie, she took the cab all the way home to Summit.
At six o’clock the next morning, her phone rang. Why did the phone ringing frighten her so much? She couldn’t help it, she thought it was going to be bad news.
It was Maggie.
“Maggie, do you have any idea what time it is?”
“Yes, it’s lauds time. And I’m not going today. Oh my God, did she call you?”
“Call me? Who? What?”
“Bo!”
“No, she didn’t call me. I thought she was with Stanley.” It’s Maggie, Larissa mouthed to Jared in the bed, and got up to take the phone into the bathroom.
“She was! Listen to this, but pretend you know nothing if she calls you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“She went to Stanley, and she said to him, Jonny threw me out. And do you know what Stanley did?”
“No, what?”
“Stanley said, oh dear. Threw you out? What are you going to do now? Bo didn’t know how to respond to that. She hemmed and hawed for thirty minutes. And then he said to her, get this,
Bo, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were coming by tonight. I’m actually going out
.”
“He was going
out
?”
“Right! So Bo asked if she could come. And he said, not
that
kind of going out.”
“Not
that
kind of going out,” Larissa repeated. So what did she do? Did she turn around and run for her life?”
“Would
you
do that?”
“Um,
yeah
. Faster than you can say, see ya.”
“Yeah, me, too. But maybe once again, like you said, my Ezra is right. No one knows what anyone else is doing. We don’t even know why
we
do half the things we do. Bo did not leave, did not run. Larissa, Bo stayed on Stanley’s couch while Stanley went out.”
“She
what
?”
“I don’t think we gave her good advice, Lar.”
“No kidding. Well, I tried. I tried to tell her that perhaps a week of sleeping with another man was not enough time to determine such a definitive course of action. But did she seem to you like she was listening? She just wanted what she wanted. She was paying us lip service.”
So the evening ended with Bo sitting on Stanley’s couch while he went out and left her alone, and Jonny sitting on his own couch, while Bo went out and left him alone. Larissa pressed her forehead against the cold tile. Remarkable.
“She sat and waited for Stanley to come back,” Maggie continued. “He strolled in at two! Bo wanted them to redefine their relationship. He didn’t even ask her what
she
wanted from the relationship. She had to tell him! Stanley, Bo said, I’m in love with you. I want to stay with you. I want to be with you.”
“After sitting for three hours alone on his couch while he went out with God knows who, this is what she said to him?”
“Yes! And Stanley said nothing. It took him until four in the morning to cough up the ugly truth.”
“There’s a truth uglier than what you just told me?”
“He told her he wasn’t in love with her!” Maggie hissed into the phone.
“I don’t believe it,” said Larissa. “That lardball told our lovely Bo that
he
was not in love with
her
?”
“That’s like saying that the bell ringer of Notre Dame was not in love with Marilyn Monroe,” said Maggie. “I’m just sick for her. My God, I’ve forgotten my own troubles.”
Larissa wished she could say the same.
“Stanley said he thought they were just having fun,” Maggie went on slowly. “He was not interested in more. Not from her. I don’t feel about you
that
way, Stanley said to our Bo.”
“I cannot believe what you just told me,” said Larissa. “That blubbery fool.” And then she remembered Jonny.
“Bo left Stanley…and took a cab back home. Cost her a
hundred and fifty bucks. And on the couch back home she found Jonny waiting for her, still awake, eyes red from tears.”
“And she called you this morning?”
“I just got off the phone with her. She said she and Jonny were going to try to work it out.”
“
Really
?” Larissa tried to imagine Bo’s dull flat voice as she spoke those words to their friend Margaret.
We’re going to try to work it out
. Whole insubstantial dream faded. All the drama bubbled and burst in the span of one week.
Lucky Bo? Poor Bo?
“Obviously Jonny thinks she’s worth keeping.”
“I’m shocked,” said Larissa. “Worth keeping even though she regards him as second best? Possibly third?”
“Listen,” said Maggie, “she asked me, begged me not to say anything to Ezra. Can you please not say anything to Jared? She doesn’t want Jonny to be humiliated when we all get together. I know. The irony. But please. I know you don’t keep any secrets from Jared, but can you try with this one?”
“Mags,” said Larissa, “let me ask you a question. A tiny one. Did you already tell Ezra?”
“Oh, yeah. Everything.”
Larissa laughed. “Well, I am going to try to keep it from Jared,” she said. “It won’t be easy. But I will try.”
Jared came into the bathroom and turned on the shower. “Keep what from me?”
Larissa told him the whole tale before they were finished brushing their teeth. “And there I was, thinking Jonny had the upper hand in that relationship,” she finished. “Who knew, right?”
Jared rinsed his razor under the warm water. “What a chump Jonny is.”
“What?” Larissa smiled, glancing coquettishly at him. “You don’t think you’d be on the couch waiting for
me
with red-rimmed eyes?”
“Oh, I’d be on the couch, all right. But instead of a box of tissues, I’d be holding a Howitzer.”
Larissa wanted to study Jared extra carefully to see if he was joking, but wouldn’t even allow herself even a glance at his reflection in the fogged-up mirror.
2
Stories on the Ceiling
A
nd Kai? She watched him and her heart slammed against itself like a swallow not seeing glass and shattering. “Who do you need to talk to, baby?” he said. “I’m right here. Talk to me. I’m all you need.”
“What’s there to talk about, right?” she said, leaning over him to cradle his face in the crook of her arm. He allowed himself to be smothered, and then wrested free to continue playing his harmonica. The singing answer to everything was apparently in the jungles wet with rain.
She told Kai about Stanley and Jonny. He said nothing. He listened, but inscrutably, and after she was done, he clucked his lips, opened his hands with an
oh well, what are ya gonna do
gesture and shrugged. “What are you looking at me like that for?” he said. “It’s not us.”
“Well, yes. First of all, you’re not three hundred pounds.”
“Not yet. But—more important—
you’re
not coming to tell me your husband threw you out, and you’re here to stay.” Steadily he gazed at her. “Exactly. So why have a hypothetical conversation about bullshit? Come closer instead. I want to play you a new song I learned.”
“You had me at play you,” said Larissa, crawling over, unable to gaze at him steadily or any other wayily.
He played the verses on the ukulele and the wordless chorus on the harmonica. It sounded in a washed-out way like an old standard, sadness about the pyramids along the Nile, and photographs and souvenirs, except nothing like it. Taking the harmonica away from his lips he sang the last of it to her a cappella. When you’re home again, he lamented in a whisper croon, just remember who you belong to…
“Please,” Larissa whispered. “Don’t do that…”
“I’m just singing, babydoll,” he said. “I’m not crying.”
“Am I
Francesca
, Kai?” She struggled close, her face at his face. “Are you
Paolo
?”
“Ah,” he said, one hand on her, the other on his ukulele, strumming it with one hand, strumming her with the other. “What’s your question? In what way are we like Dante’s lovers?”
She said nothing. He put his ukulele down. His arms went around her.
“We’re clinging together like doves. We are surrounded by a storm of souls. We have not repented.” He paused. “Is your husband Giovanni? My answer is, no one knows. Not even him. Most men aren’t until the moment they are.”
He was unchanging. He was like the moontides. Every day with a smile, a poem, a nod of the head, his naked body, he touched her, he kissed her, he brought her food in a paper bag and he opened champagne and poured it into plastic flutes, and played acoustic guitar and the electric ukulele, he wailed through the harmonica, soft and bluesy, perfect, perfect. All music, like life, was of two types: either moving toward God or away from God. Blues was moving away from God. Moving away from God, but toward Kai.
He didn’t help her or not help her. He just was. She couldn’t talk to him about this. About other things, but she couldn’t sit and say, Kai, oh my God, what do I do? He didn’t know the
answer; it wasn’t blowing outside in the snowy blizzard wind; it wasn’t heard in the whisper of the willows. There was no answer.
He had told her. Larissa, all I want is you.
All I want is you.
All I want is you.
Was that helpful?
No.
But yet…all he wanted was her.
That
was
helpful.
Larissa lay on her back next to him. Thirty more minutes. They were on the bed, swamped with the toils of their labors, he was on his stomach, pretending to snooze, while she stared at the ceiling, imagining the paths open to her. She wasn’t Bo, she didn’t want a cataclysm, a shallow confession without remorse, she didn’t want the hand of fate to intervene. Or did she? This was more real than her own two feet on which she traveled the earth, and yet she lived alone with it inside her heart, like a misty vapor, a muted haunting. The only true Larissa was nude on her back in an attic room in a yellow house in Madison.