Jared drank down his beer. Ezra too fell silent. “Later I asked why she chose that poem,” he said. “Was it to torment me or to showcase her talents? She replied that it was neither. ‘It’s simply the saddest thing I could imagine,’ she said, ‘living a cardboard life, and I wanted to know if I could carry it off, not knowing what it means to actually live it.’ It was just an exercise in evocation of imagined emotion, nothing beyond that.” Ezra swallowed. “I told her she had carried it off beautifully.”
“Carried it off pretty far, Ez,” said Jared. “All the way to Jindabyne.”
They ordered another round. They chased it down with tequila. They wondered how they were going to get back home, without Maggie to drive them, and Jared said that Maria would come pick them up.
“We’re about to get embarrassingly plastered,” Ezra said.
“About to?”
Another round, more tequila, more lime, Jared’s head willfully foggy, everything gaseous, floating, nothing hurt. Ezra was becoming morose, sounding sadder. She’ll be all right, Ez. She’ll be fine. Maggie will get a new kidney, she’ll be as good as new. Lucky for her, her brother was a match, and was willing to give it.
“Do you know something?” Jared suddenly said. “Father Emilio came to the Philippines originally because he was a doctor. It’s fascinating. Apparently there’s a huge market in kidneys in the Philippines. It’s a booming business. The British doctors go there and marry the Filipino kidneys to desperate Westerners who can’t find a match in their own countries. That’s why Father Emilio had come to Manila. He had been a surgeon and wanted to help.”
“Jared,” said Ezra, “are you hallucinating? Who is Father Emilio?”
“Che’s priest. I read about him in her letters to Larissa.”
“Che’s priest was a renal specialist? Were you going to recommend him if Maggie’s brother didn’t work out?”
“Nah. I think the San Agustin parish is his only work nowadays.”
“I’m not saying that’s not helpful. But why are you telling me about him?”
“I find it interesting that he began life as one thing and ended up as another. Don’t you? I mean, to go to university, to medical school, through residency. That’s no small thing. He went to Manila to be one man, and became another. I wonder what made him do it.”
“Hmm. What about if we poured the tequila straight into the beer? Would
that
be interesting?”
“Fascinating,” said Jared.
And they did. And it was.
Ezra kept trying to open his mouth and tell Jared something. He was having trouble getting the words out.
“You don’t have to tell me anything, Ezra,” said Jared. “Nothing I don’t already know.”
“You know,” began Ezra, “I loved her.” He paused. “Once.”
Jared nodded. “Nothin’ I don’t already know.”
“Did you? You didn’t! About what?”
“Oh, I knew. About you and Larissa.”
“No!”
“Of course.”
“Since when did you know?”
“Since college.”
Ezra stammered. “It can’t be. Since then? No. But you said nothing!”
“What was there to say?”
“Some word perhaps…”
“What for?”
This stumped Ezra.
“Honestly, what for?” Jared repeated. “What was, was. It
was a long time ago, it was before she and I got together. It was over and done with. It was fine.”
“But how could you never have said anything?”
“It amused me. Had I felt threatened, I would’ve said something. But, see, I thought I knew her. I felt safe with her. And we were all friends. I thought you knowing that I knew might make you more awkward with me.”
“I had asked Larissa if she ever told you and she said no.”
Jared nodded. “That was true. She never told me. Now that I think about it, I find that peculiar, don’t you? Like another sign I missed. She knew how to keep secrets. But I knew anyway, Ezra. When you looked at her, it was so obvious. You used to look at her with a longing that I used to look at her with. Not easy to hide.”
“Wow, dude.”
“It’s okay. It’s all good.”
“We were such good friends.”
“Yes. I loved that. The four of us were always close.”
“I didn’t know, Jared. Believe me. If I knew I would’ve said something.”
Now it was Jared’s turn to pause. “Would you?” he said. “Like what? And to who? To me? To her?”
“She was always happy with you. You were the one she was meant to be with.” Ezra looked into his beer glass. “For a while this bummed me out, years ago. That you were the one she was meant to be with, not me.”
“Believe me when I say this, man, but how I wish to God I weren’t the one she was meant to be with.”
They both sort of laughed, except Ezra less, and this amused an intoxicated Jared. Was Ezra thinking that perhaps Larissa might have stayed had she chosen differently back in college? “Funny, how our preconceptions become misconceptions,” Jared said. “Had you seen that I
wasn’t
the one she was meant to be with, you might’ve seen the other thing in her.”
“The thing we all missed?”
“Yes.” Jared looked away to the blue light shining down on the bright glass bottles of top-shelf liquor. Her mother hadn’t missed it. Which is why Larissa wanted nothing to do with her. “You missed it because you looked at an illusion. You saw the crystal glass from the outside. How were you to know that inside the flute was empty?”
They both agreed there was no way to know. “I can’t believe you knew about me and her.”
“You couldn’t hide yourself, Ezra. Not like she could hide herself. You loved her back then. It showed. Everybody knew.”
Ezra was quiet. “Not everybody. Not Maggie.”
“No.” Jared didn’t want to say that Maggie just didn’t want to look. Like he didn’t want to look. “Maggie is the greatest. I don’t need to remind you that
your
wife is still with you.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
It seemed like Ezra was crying dried-up tears, dry-heaving and moist of face, but it was hard to know because Jared couldn’t look at him. “Me, too, Ez. Hey, did you catch the Queen retrospective on MTV last weekend? It was quite good, but the whole two hours was worth a split second of Freddie Mercury’s face at one point toward the end. He was singing in his last ever video performance, and the song was ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives.’ And in this video, Mercury is like Skeletor. He can barely move, and when he does it’s in slow motion. He is heavily made up to disguise the unmistakable fact that he is
this close
to Death—and knows it. And so like this, gaunt, eaten away by illness, he stands, barely moving, and sings. ‘
You can’t turn back the tide
,’ and then he stares into the camera and whispers, ‘
Ain’t that a shame
.’ And in his eyes you see his life, and his regret and his imminent death, and how much he wishes he had lived differently then so he could live a little longer now. If you blink, the moment is gone—like many things, but that blink
is how I feel. I wish I could go back to the days before, when I thought I was happy. Just one roller-coaster ride, one more week in that walk-up in Hoboken, us broke, diluting milk, and yet…”
“Dude, it wasn’t one thing,” said Ezra. “There’s no one moment you can go back to and say, if only I did this differently. Besides, you’re looking at it all wrong.” Ezra turned to Jared on the bar stool, his liquid eyes animated. “It wasn’t up to you! Her leaving was not your choice and it’s the one thing you can’t undo, you can’t fix. But you can now look at your life in two ways. You can look at all that had been taken away from you—and that’s what you have been doing. Or you can look at the great many things you still have.”
“Ezra,” said Jared. “Haven’t you noticed? I vacillate wildly between both.”
“I know, man,” Ezra said, subsiding, putting his hands on Jared’s shoulders. “Me, too.”
Another hour went by. Or two. Was it closing time? What if Maria was asleep? A cab was in order. They’d never been out that late. They had moved to a corner of the bar, to a table.
“I picked her, Ez,” Jared said. “I was in love with another girl before her, a real wild child, but I never slept at night. Yvonne was not the girl to give anyone peace.”
“What about when she wasn’t with you?”
“Especially,” Jared replied, “when she wasn’t with me.”
“Ah.”
“Larissa, on the other hand, had everything except the thing that made me nuts inside, and I mean that in a good way. She was goofy, she was funny, she had interests, she was smart. She was beautiful.”
“Yes,” said Ezra, and the way he said it, Jared didn’t know if he was saying yes to the last thing or to everything.
“But the main thing was, I looked at her and saw a life with
her. I thought we could build something together that would stand.”
“And you did.”
Jared was contemplating.
“You wish you’d stuck it out with wild Yvonne?” said Ezra. “I knew Yvonne. She walked around campus with no underwear, and when she thought someone behind her might not know it, she would pitch forward to pickup something off the sidewalk. Just so that they would know it.”
Jared nudged Ezra. “This is spoken from experience?”
“The bitterest kind.”
Jared laughed drunkenly. “Wasn’t she swell? In hindsight, she seems so charming and adorable.”
Ezra laughed. “Does it make you feel better to think about her?”
“I dunno. Wonder what she’s doing now.”
“She’s a flight attendant.”
Jared stared at Ezra in surprise. “You speak from experience?”
Ezra nodded solemnly. “The bitterest kind.”
Now Jared gaped. “Don’t tell me she’s kept her wanton ways.”
“Okay, I won’t tell you.”
“God, Ezra! That could’ve been my wife! And Larissa could’ve been yours.”
“I’m not sure,” confessed a tearful Ezra, falling down, falling down, “that I would say no to that, even knowing what I know now.”
I had once hoped it was me you saw when you were alone in the daylight
, Jared had wanted to say to Larissa, but it was too late.
It wasn’t him she saw. The rest was moot.
It all went up like a dream, and suddenly living became like sleeping. Your heart is raw, and somewhere inside it still hurts
a little bit, but all the details have gone, all the memories banished in the plural from the singular of your soul, and sometimes you still reach, reach for her heart, your fingers stretch to remember what you dreamed about, the thing that’s forever gone. But you can’t. After grasping at the nebulous half-images, you rise, and you dress, and you go about your present day.
At the moment life no longer feels like ether. And it doesn’t feel like a dream either. Jared’s feet are firmly planted on the ground. His eyes are open. He is realistic, pragmatic, practical. He knows he is blessed with much. And if a part of him remains closed, that’s the price he pays for drinking his half-empty cup with grace.
Sometimes he wishes he could keep the memory of her alive, remember her better. Sometimes he wishes he hadn’t thrown out all her photos, in an act of Neanderthal fury, burned and cut and excised all photos of her from their life. Sometimes he wishes he had saved at least the wedding photo. She was a different person then. He was a different person then.
Sometimes he wishes he could feel that clarifying hate again—for anything. He has mellowed. Nothing fazes Jared nowadays. Nothing can.
He remembers often Kavanagh’s words to him, the ones that have stood the test of the merciless river called Time.
She cannot give you what she doesn’t have
.
That had been almost comforting. Almost as if the carefully wrought destruction was out of Larissa’s hands. Almost as if it was nothing more than a casual demolition of the things he believed to be true.
Except…
When Jared went through Larissa’s things, he found a poem she had written, buried thoughtfully underneath the sheath of careless papers, a poem undated, untyped, written in her long and flowing, precise and elegant hand, titled “Runaway Child.”
I’m a runaway child.
Jump for joy. Full moon. Summertime. Falling into snow.
Our song, our wedding song.
Marry me you sang
champagne on your lips.
Bon Voyage, a calm day.
It’s traveling day.
The shooting stars have popped the air
out of my hot balloon, and I floated, hair down.
Heart up.
Because it was Friday and on Fridays I loved you
I ironed your shirts and folded your troubadour ties.
Earthbound,
I went for a walk, left hot chocolate on the stove,
Papers neatly pulled away, put away,
Everything
Very neatly
Very very neatly
Put away.
Maybe someday
One day
Down the years some Sunday
You might think of me
Too as neatly put away
As if I never existed
As if I were just one more thing in your life
That had come
and gone.
Memories like flowers.
Love like lime blossoms
.
What fresh hell is this?
Dorothy Parker
1
The Walker
L
arissa dreamed she was dreaming, lying on her back staring at the ceiling and sash windows with white transparent curtains, hearing the subzero freezer humming downstairs, the pattering noise of the shower through the partly open door, and when she opened her eyes, she found herself under the cream yellow quilt with golden petunias, goose down and starched white sheets and four pillows under her head. She felt her well-washed silken sheets under her palms and jumped out of bed, seeing the bookshelves, not yet emptied of stories, and her dresser by the window that had a view of green sloping golfing hills and downstairs a boy’s voice instigating an eager dog to bark. “Speak, Riot, speak!” And she did. Larissa, still in her silk nightgown, ran downstairs, and found the three children around the granite island with Emily serving cold cereal in plastic bowls. “Plastic bowls for easy clean-up, Mommy,” she said, smiling a bright new morning. “So you won’t have as much to do when we leave for school.”