If You Knew Then What I Know Now (19 page)

 

If Rufus grew in his new jar, I didn't notice. Because as soon as we poured him in from his former bowl, he simply looked bigger—a trick of the water and the roundness of glass. Then
at certain points in his swimming along the curve of the jar, he could actually disappear. It was as if he could come and go as he wanted, and when I'd look across the room, and see the empty jar, I'd panic until he slowly emerged, like a ghost walking out of a wall. Geoffrey still let him kiss his fingers, and still called him “Pretty,” and I still fed him in the morning—a plop of flakes in the center of his air circle, now much larger, while I pulled open the curtains to watch his sheer tail ripple and wave in the sun.

Geoffrey and I kept buying things for the apartment, went on vacations, joined a gym with a “partner” discount, took a kickboxing class, and neatly printed each other's names in the Emergency Contact boxes of official forms. We bought a fireproof box for our birth certificates, social security cards and passports, and hid them under our bed. Kim called sometimes and I had to ask her to send checks for leftover bills, and she got angry. But everything felt as though it was out in the open now, there was no place or need anymore to hide because I didn't have to manage myself between her and Geoffrey. Everything felt easier.

A month or so later, I was in bed, pillows stuffed behind my back, and I turned a new page in my journal to find scribbles across the ruled lines. Geoffrey had written
She's in love with you, you know
in purposeful blue ink—I only ever wrote in black. He'd chosen a page at random months before and I was just reaching it. I glared at him, sleeping beside me, his shoulder
warm against my thigh. More than just the fact that he'd been snooping around my most private sentences, I hated that he'd written down what none of us had ever spoken. Here were the two biggest secrets I knew of—the one about how Kim really felt about me and the one about how I didn't know. But instead of waking him and calling him names like Passive-Aggressive, I just wrote around his words.

Soon after, one morning, I pulled open the curtains, looked at the line of sun cutting across Rufus's jar, and he was on the rocks, lying on his side. Between his fins and tail, there was now a crimp, and he was folded in half like a Christmas card. Pushing back my shirtsleeve, I reached through his water, my arm turning white, to nudge him. He flipped his tail, wobbled upside down and swam in weird directions as though he were caught in a current. He wasn't dead.

“What's wrong with him?” Geoffrey asked, standing at the jar in his underwear because I'd dragged him out of bed.

“He's probably got some disease contracted from dirty fingers,” I said.

“Yeah, that's it,” he said, sliding his feet back to our bed. “He'll be fine.”

I called the fish store anyway, listed symptoms, described the wobbling and weird drifting, the tail crimp. A teenage voice listened, then asked, “Do you feed the fish dry flake food?”

“Well, yes.”

“OK. So the fish is constipated.”

“But it's
fish
food. What do you feed fish if not fish food?” I said.

“That's easy.” From now on, every morning, or even better, every other morning, Rufus should be fed a single thawed, peeled, crushed green pea.

 

After all the bills were paid, and she returned to Chicago once more to pick up the rest of her stuff, I didn't talk to Kim for a long time. I ignored her e-mails. I didn't return her calls. I felt as though there wasn't enough space in my brain or heart to fit the trouble between us. There, in her own city, she lived a life and, at least for that time being, I liked how far away it was from Geoffrey's and mine.

With his new green pea diet, Rufus swam straight and upright again, but his crimp remained, as though he were made of pie dough and had been squished too tightly between fingers. I hated the slimy mess of pea-feeding, so Geoffrey took over. But every morning after I slid apart the curtains, I still watched Rufus turn in the yellow light while I drank my coffee.

More vacations, more new furniture. Geoffrey got a new job, I got promoted. We repainted the bathroom. The fish store was resided in dark blue vinyl, an aquatic reference certainly, but then it went out of business and became a mattress store—just a blue mattress store. Whole years went by. One evening Geoffrey and I met for dinner at the chicken kabob place; I'd been away from home all day, he'd just come from there. As he walked
through the glass door, I saw that he had something to tell me right there on his face.

“Rufus is sick again,” he said, sliding into our booth.

“What's wrong with him?”

“That same thing. He's swimming on his side like he can't get his balance. He was laying on the rocks when I got home.”

“Did you feed him this morning?”

“Yes,” he said, rolling his eyes.

I remembered that the pet store guy had said toxins could build up in the water if you didn't have a filter (we didn't) or didn't clean out the jar often enough (we hadn't). “What time is it?” I said, wrenching his wrist so I could read his watch.

“Rufus will be fine,” he said, pulling his arm from my hand. “I mean, he's not
fine
, but he'll be fine until we get home.”

“I wish they'd hurry up with the food.”

After we ate, in the parking lot, we got in our separate cars, and I started home. I ran a red light and swerved in front of an old woman trying to make a right turn. I couldn't wait for her. And even as I stormed through Chicago traffic, cursing every stoplight that snared me, I knew how ridiculous I'd sound to the cop I was convinced would eventually handcuff me for reckless driving. “I have to get home right way, Officer, it's an emergency—my goldfish is dying.” Something about keeping Rufus alive was more urgent than just the fact that he would be dead.

Goldfish have a reputation for dying. When I told people I'd had a goldfish four, then five, then six years and counting, they would be impressed—with Rufus or me, I wasn't sure. It seemed uncommon to have a goldfish so long, even if the possible lifespan is around twenty years. Goldfish also have a reputation for being disposable. If it dies, you get another one. The pet store tanks are full of hundreds and maybe even thousands of them, glittering and tightly packed together like sewn sequins. Drunk kids used to swallow them as a dare because presumably no one would miss a few dozen, so why not? It might be said that goldfish aren't usually important.

On the day we bought him, Kim and I stood in front of that crammed glittering tank at the fish store, and I kept my eye on Rufus as the guy dunked his green net in again and again, creating mayhem in the water, each time scooping up the wrong one. “No, that's not him.” I pointed to Rufus, and waited. I can't say what it was that Rufus had that the other fish didn't, though his throat was marked distinctively in silvery white. But I knew which one I wanted, the only one I wanted—fish love at first sight.

Once Rufus was sick, and he was staying sick, I realized that he stood for a lot—hope, my friendship with Kim, its failure, my love with Geoffrey, its growth. Because why else would I be so upset over the dying of this silent orange fish? And it didn't matter how silly it felt to be worried. Mornings changed: I approached his bowl carrying my cup of coffee as well as the
anxiety that I would find him dead. And it was all made worse by the idea that I didn't know what to do for him. Taking him to a veterinarian or a fish doctor was hopeless because I already knew what I'd hear.
Well, it is just a goldfish.

 

Kim and I didn't speak for almost two years. And then she came back to Chicago to visit some mutual friends, and she wanted to see me. At a small party, she and I sat on our friends' back porch, knees nearly touching. It was strange how easy it was to talk, and how smoothed out our history felt because it was history. She was doing well in her city, Geoffrey and I were too, in ours. After enough glasses of wine, we told each other we were sorry for what happened, for how she'd left. I wanted to tell her that I knew I hadn't been very fair, that for so many years I'd made her the stand-in for the companion I wouldn't let myself have, until that companion came along. And probably my needing her so transparently let Kim hope for something more than just friendship between us—even if it didn't make much sense for her to keep that hope around. But I would never ask if that were true. Because for all the things we said, we allowed each other not to say all the things we might have.

“Oh,” Kim asked, after so much serious talk. “How's Rufus?”

I smiled. “He's fine. He eats peas now, but he's still with us.”

“I can't believe that,” she said, shaking her head. “That's amazing he's still alive.”

A year later, she visited Chicago again, and that time, she stayed with Geoffrey and me in the apartment that she and I had once shared, sleeping in her former bedroom. After she flopped down her suitcases, I took her on a short tour of the rooms we'd repainted, the green kitchen where we'd stripped off the ugly floral wallpaper, the bathroom now a color named “stone.” “I'm sorry. I can't remember what it looked like before,” she said.

It was the reaction I'd anticipated. “How is that possible? You
lived
here,” I said, and she shrugged, and we laughed at how well we still knew each other.

She and Geoffrey and I stood in the dining room, in front of Rufus's new jar that wasn't new anymore with his smooth river stones, and she poked her fingertip in the water and drew ripples across the surface as Rufus fluttered. The dining room walls were now gorgeous deep orange that matched him—my favorite color; Geoffrey had painted the room by himself as a surprise for me. The next day was Friday, and I took the day off to go shopping with Kim. It was also my and Geoffrey's sixth anniversary.

He got home from work a little after five, and called my cell phone as Kim and I sat exhausted in rush-hour traffic, weakly singing songs in a fierce sunset. “I have bad news,” he said. “Rufus died.”

“Oh,” I said, in a sad enough note that Kim knew even without hearing his words.

“Did Rufus die?” she whispered as Geoffrey continued talking in my ear. I nodded.

By the time we returned to the apartment, Geoffrey had drained and scrubbed out Rufus's jar. The stones were piled in the sink, dark and glistening with soap bubbles. Rufus lay on a tiny white bed of folded paper towels. His mercurial eyes had already turned black.

“I think we should bury him,” one of us said.

As he dried in the air and the luster of his scales dulled, all the colors I'd always noticed in his body seemed to disappear, and I wondered if I had always imagined the green, blue, red and grey. Geoffrey bundled the paper towel around him, and I closed it with a strip of tape. We were going to bury him in the back yard.

“Make him a headstone,” Geoffrey said because he knew I would want to do it. He pulled a flat-sided stone from the heap in the sink.

I patted it dry and wrote Rufus's name across it in permanent marker. “Wait,” I said, and ran across the kitchen to the bedroom. On my knees, I dug under our bed for the journal I was writing in the year Kim and I bought Rufus. “I want to put his dates on the stone,” I called out. I knew it had been March, and I thought it was early in the month and almost certainly a weekend, probably Sunday. As I flipped through pages, passing all those old recorded days, I skimmed for his name. Kim and I buying a pet would have been a big enough event to write down. And I
remembered
writing it down, but it wasn't there. I checked February, turning page after page, searching for his name or any word that would signal the story of his coming. I checked January, though I knew it would have been too early; April was too late because in April we knew Geoffrey. “What are you doing?” he said, from the kitchen. They were waiting, so I just wrote down his lifespan in years, wondering what sense I could make of any of this if I couldn't get my memory to match the facts.

We stood in the back yard. Under unruly lilac branches showing off new blooms, I dug out a hole with a hand trowel. “What do we say?” Geoffrey asked, dropping the white packet in, covering it with dirt, and tamping down the stone on top.

“I don't know,” I said, and we all stared at the rock.

Kim sighed. “To Rufus. A great fish. We love you.”

For so long, even though we knew he was sick, it seemed as though Rufus might just go on living the way he was. He survived one day with his tail crimp, so he'd always survive the next. But there we were. I wanted to say something about how uncanny it was that he'd died
that
day, on my anniversary with Geoffrey, how our relationship had always been as old as he was, and how it was also the weekend that Kim was back in the apartment for the first time in years, several of which had passed in silence. And that I was sorry for what I had hoped for the three of us back then—for everybody to contain their feelings, for nothing to ever change.