Larissa didn’t speak. Kavanagh had been right. Nothing could stay. This especially.
“Kai, I’m still trying to work out a way we can live here,”
she said in a halting voice. “I leave him, and come to live with you, and then I can still see—”
“Larissa, don’t fucking lie to me. You have
not
been working it out! You have been coasting and floating. You haven’t been working out a single damn thing. Don’t bullshit me. You’ve been taking Ambien at night so you never have to think about it, and you’ve been filling your days with all kinds of bullshit filler so you never have to deal with it. You’re all about rehearsals and book projects for the kids, and driving around with the music on a hundred decibels! I know how loud you have it when you turn on your car to leave me every afternoon. To obliterate all thought, right? And every time in the last three months that I’ve tried to talk to you about this, you’ve refused! Plain refused. You’ve changed the subject, you’ve diverted me—oh, you’re very good at that. You’ve asked me to play more music, play your guitar, Kai, play the uke, Kai, sing to me, Kai. More noise so you don’t have to think for a single second about anything.”
“I
have
been thinking about it, I have…”
“Look, there are two choices here. Either we go and live with what’s left for you and me, or you go back to your old life.”
She couldn’t tell him the woman who lived that life was gone. “I don’t understand what the hurry is. Why do we have to go at all? We don’t have to stay in Madison. We can go to—”
“I’m leaving,” Kai interrupted. “I can’t stay because I’ve been here about fifteen months too long. I came to spend a month with Gil, have some fun. And look what happened. My time here is finished. I’m not staying. What about that don’t you understand?”
“Kai—”
“Larissa.” He was immovable. He would not be cajoled.
“If I tell you I cannot do what you ask of me,” she said in
a breaking whisper, “you wouldn’t stay then? You’d let me go?” She said it like she couldn’t believe it.
“No! If
you
cannot do what I ask of you,” Kai replied in his own breaking voice, “you will let
me
go.” He stood against the wall, silent for a few moments. “In the beginning, I was out of my depth. I was an outsider. I’d never felt about anyone the way I feel about you. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.” He took a breath. “But the longer we stayed together, the easier the dream became. Maybe for you it became harder, but for me, everything was so clear! It was as if there was suddenly daylight!
I
could see; how could you not?”
“I have more at stake than you.”
“Oh, you think so? Hitching my star to a married woman twice my age, with three kids to boot, you think I’ve got nothing at stake?”
“Kai, come on, you’re not being fair. I said not as much as me.”
“What is this, a competition for who’s got the greater price to pay?”
“Do you
have
a price to pay?” she snapped. Why was she being cruel to him whom she loved?
“I pay it every day, Larissa,” he retorted, growing ever colder, “when I allow you to come here for one hour, feeling about you as I do, and then let you go, knowing you’re going to sleep with another man. I know you think I’m okay with it, but for the record, I’m not okay with it, and I’m never going to be okay with it. But is this what we’re all about? Pride?”
“There’s nothing to be proud of here,” Larissa said.
“Oh, wonderful!” he yelled. “You think this is degrading? You think it’s cheap? You’re ashamed of me? But it’s
my
whole life! Just think about that for a second; for a second
think
about somebody else’s pain but your own! Your abasement is my entire existence!”
“I’m sorry, Kai…I didn’t mean it…”
“I’m tired of feeling like an outsider in my own life, which is how you make me feel when you tell me every single fucking day that you’ve got something more important than me. One of us is living a sham, and one a delusion. You don’t see a problem with this? That the most meaningful part of my life is the least meaningful of yours?” He ran his desperate hands through his hair, trying to understand, find a way out for himself. “Oh, my God,” he said. “Which one of us is really the fool here?” He laughed mirthlessly. “Sometimes when we’re together I think we’re the center of the universe, and I believe for a few stolen minutes that I’m the center of yours. And then you look at your watch, and it’s like a balloon of joy bursting. I’ve been watching you do this and slowly realizing how much I fucking hate it, because it’s not joy that’s whistling out of those pop-up balloons in spasms, it’s poison! Every time I see you glance at the time—like you’re doing
now
!—you tell me I’m least important to you.
I’m
the outsider.”
“You’re not the outsider! Don’t you know how I love you…?”
“I don’t care! I don’t care what you feel. I care what you do.” Kai stepped away from his wall, took a stride across the entryway, where her back was up. “I don’t want you to go back to him, Larissa,” he said.
“Please don’t ask me to choose…” She started to cry. “You know it’s not between him and you, you know that.”
“I have to be worth something, too.”
“You are.”
“Then why are you still toying with me after all this time?” he said. “I want you to imagine what Jared might say if you told him this is what you’ve been doing with your afternoons. How would he react? Well,
I
know what you’ve been doing with your afternoons. And with your nights. I know everything. I’m always behind the door. You want to imagine how
Jared
might feel? Imagine how I
do
feel! Imagine how anyone might feel except yourself. Anyone else, Larissa!”
And Larissa saw by the menace in his body, by the panting mouth, by the fire in his eyes that Kavanagh was right. She heard her gravelly voice in her head.
I don’t know what took him so long, Larissa
, Kavanagh kept saying.
No one else could have waited this long
.
But he’s not like everyone else. He is like no one else. He gazes on blue and walks in waltz-time. He listens for Tai Chi, and stays warm. He brings nothing but calm and music to my life. Still his stance, his expression scared her. For a second, it felt like Tijuana at night, like the next thing could be blood in the streets. He could suffocate her. He could beat her. He could kill her. He could throw her down the stairs. He could drown her in the river. He could keep her and not let her go. As he was dying, she was living, and without her, he too had nothing. What if it was Kai, not Jared, who could not bear to part with her? Did he have a Howitzer to balance these scales?
She opened her shaking frightened hands to him. “Please let’s not fight.” Her voice trembled like her body. “We have behaved badly. This hasn’t been beautiful, this has been brutally wrong.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Kai said through his clenched teeth. “Because it’s been the only thing in my life. Happy to know it was all in grave error.”
“I’m not the ditzy receptionist who answers your calls, Kai! I’m somebody else’s wife!”
“Oh, do I not know this! Will there ever be a minute that goes by that you don’t inform me of this one way or another?” Kai took another stride to her. He was so upset. “But guess what? I don’t want you to be someone else’s wife.” He grabbed her with angry hands. “I don’t want anyone else sharing you with me anymore. Can’t you understand that?
I can’t believe I have to even say it! How come I’m a generation younger, yet so much smarter? How come I see this, and you don’t? How dense you are, how hopeless, how full of only yourself!”
She wanted to pull away, but couldn’t. She wanted to leave, but couldn’t. She wanted not to moan, not to cry out for him, not to cry for him, but couldn’t. And he so shamelessly abused his ruthless power over her, he discarded her clothes and took her body for himself, he took off her watch! And turned all the clocks with their faces to the wall, he turned her face down on the bed, and he whispered hot things in her ear, while she was splayed, body and soul in the glare of her abandon for him.
Just so you understand, Larissa
, Kai whispered as he took the thing from her he could take, the thing that looked like love and was love, and yet wasn’t; it was like a sonnet to a whore.
I am leaving next weekend. I’ve paid up my rent till the end of May, I’ve given my notice at work, and now I’m giving
you
notice. I think I may have misunderstood you. What you really have been hoping for, praying for in your own little secular prayerful way, was not that Jared would kick you out, but that I would. You’ve come to resent me because I’m not doing the thing the biker stud is supposed to do. I’m not becoming imaginary soon enough. It took me a while to figure this out. I’ve been such an idiot. You’ve been waiting for a
deus ex machina
exit from
me!
Well, in exactly one week, you’re going to get it
.
It was high tide. It was deluge. And afterward, as Larissa rummaged on the floor to find her clothes, pick up the buttons torn off her shirt, find the belt that had fallen, the watch he flung across the room (it was 2:50!), she said to him, “But Michelangelo is not Jared. He is not me. He is not you. When you make me this late, he suffers.”
“When you leave me, you make
me
suffer,” Kai said. “And I want to make
you
suffer.”
“You think I don’t suffer?”
“I don’t think you suffer enough.” His back was to her. He didn’t turn to watch her go.
Dear Larissa,
Lorenzo has cooked up a plan. He says I need to leave our house and go live in sanctuary with Father Emilio and have my baby there, and when we can get him sprung, we’ll run, and leave the baby with Father Emilio until we get ourselves settled, and then we will return to get it. He said the nuns would take care of it for a few weeks while we hide out in Mindanao.
I said, Lorenzo, where are we going to get the money for bail?
He asked me to talk to Father Emilio. So I put away my shame, thrust my belly forward, and talked to Father Emilio. He stared at me silently a long time before he answered. He said, Do you want me to trade my good name and the name of this church to vouch for a man who plans to flee as soon as he is out and you, knowing that, are asking me to do this?
I cried. I said I didn’t know what else to do.
He told me he would take care of me, the mission would take care of me and the baby, but his conscience would not allow him to lie for Lorenzo, and his parish did not have two and a half million pesos to lose to post bail for a man who would flee. He said the church would defrock him. He couldn’t do it. His word in the neighborhood was law. Do you want me to ruin my reputation and the reputation of our San Agustin so that the man who will not marry you can persuade you to leave behind your desperately wanted child and run into the mountains with him?
I could barely get myself to walk upright out of the rectory.
Do you know, Larissa, sometimes, to my great discredit—God will never forgive me, though I pray He is merciful and does—but sometimes I wish Lorenzo had died in that clash with the cops. Because then I could grieve, and it would be horrible but it wouldn’t be intolerable, like now. I wouldn’t have to make an impossible choice between my baby and my Lorenzo! Because I don’t want to abandon my baby to run to Mindanao. I’m terrified we won’t be able to find our way back.
On your end of the world, do you even hear me?
This isn’t the beginning of sorrow—this is simply the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I cannot bear to make this choice.
Painting her nails with Fran Finklestein on Friday morning, the shattered edges of Larissa’s glassy numbness couldn’t help but skid over into the classical hums of a peaceful manicure.
“You’re
so
agitated,” Fran said, her long-fingered hands stretched out for Sherry. “I haven’t seen you in months. Why are you like this?”
“I
am
agitated,” concurred Larissa, her long-fingered hands stretched out for Jessica. She clenched to get herself together. “I’ve been going to this psychologist and—”
Fran chuckled. “What do
you
have to go to a shrink for? You don’t have any problems.”
“No? Jessica, no, I
do
want the cuticles done today. Look at them. Thanks. Oh, I got some stuff. Nothing is perfect, Finklestein.”
“So what’s he doing for you?”
“
She
. Just making me agitated, that’s what. I’d fire her, but then I’d have no one to talk to.” And other things, too, she
wouldn’t be able to do at night with guitars on beds and short tumblers of raw poetry. Memorial Day was next weekend. One week. Seven days.
“Talk to
me
,” Fran grinned. She was bubbly and gum-chewy. She was twenty-four. She could afford to be bubbly and gum-chewy. Larissa too had been bubbly and gum-chewy at twenty-four. “I know stuff,” Fran said. “I’m people-smart. And I won’t charge you a penny.”
Larissa steadied her gaze on the beautifully unclumpy black lashes framing Fran’s dancing brown eyes. She was delightful. Why hadn’t Larissa spent more time with her? They could’ve been friends. They could have gone shopping, had lunch. Fran had been unconnected to any other part of her life. It had never occurred to Larissa that she could’ve talked to Fran. Once Fran had seemed too young to be friends with!
The wood life was chipping, and Larissa was sliding in prickles of pain in the splinters of it. How could Fran have noticed her suffering before Jared?
Yet…the girl seemed so happening and with it. She hadn’t been around the world three times, like Kavanagh’s weathered face suggested she had been. Fran liked Larissa. Maybe…
“Wanna go have lunch after?” Fran asked.
“I’d love to, doll. But I can’t. I’ve got…”
“Things?”