Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (4 page)

Every so often,
said Sawyer, his stomach cramping as Neil asked him how often.

Like about once a week. You?
Sawyer asked people
you?
so regularly he sometimes forgot that he was the
I.

Oh, when I'm bored,
said Neil. Sawyer wanted to go back to their sort-of rapport, where he was comfortable, where they took turns talking, but then Neil took out his loose-leaf. He pointed at the blank page opposite their diagram on photosynthesis. The project was stellar, and Sawyer had done most of the work. They were probably going to get one hundred.
Draw what you think about.

Sawyer didn't draw anything vulgar or gratuitous, just a body. A man. A person. Everything that there was needed to be. He drew the hands in a bewildering way: palms up, as if waiting to accept low-fives.

Neil stared.
This is hot.

Thanks,
Sawyer whispered, focusing into Neil's drippy lips, his Dalmatian eyes (the left blue more royal than the right), wondering if it was going to be the moment of his first kiss. Instead, Neil rolled it up into a tight cylinder, then bopped Sawyer on the head with it.
Later,
he said.
See you mañana,
with an overflow of accent so phony it was delicate.

Sawyer went to bed thinking about the word
later.
No matter what, there would always be a
later.
This later could be a
mañana,
or a Sunday, or a Tuesday, or a never. His wrists trembled.

Neil didn't look at Sawyer the next day in class. Sawyer, inflicted with an obscure shame, looked down at his shirt. Maybe he had something on it. It was red with triangular pockets. His mother had bought it in France. -
Wrong,
- Sawyer thought to himself.

One week later Neil chased Sawyer after school with some boys who played lacrosse and got to third base, at least, with girls. Afterward, they left Sawyer with his drawing, the word
faggot
wedged in red ink over the pelvis. Earlier, their class had received their graded diagrams on photosynthesis. The carbon dioxide seeped into the plant, and the oxygen slid out. The sky was an alphabet of blue. And all energy came from light. They got one hundred. At least Sawyer passed something.

Mathilde put him to bed.
No,
she said.
Don't cry.
Before he closed his eyes, Sawyer apologized to her. She felt her Heart wobble clumsily through her chest. When he woke up after a few hours, she reaffirmed to him,
you didn't do anything wrong,
so they both could hear it.

Here's the thing with teenage boys,
Sawyer said to his sister
. They'll eat anyone's Heart if they're told it has protein.

Groups,
said Mathilde.
Someone's making a decision somewhere. Who knows who.

You're lucky you're a girl.

These were the words Mathilde repeated to Claudio, in his bed.
He told me I was lucky for being a girl,
she said,
and I knew I wanted girls for children
. Soft, mindful sisters—the kind she didn't have
. Boys would be too complicated,
she declared, having mercy. She didn't need more of that in her life.

M
athilde landed a role in a play,
Make a Living.
She was to be a twenty-one-year-old girl playing a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Frances. Frances wanted a child but didn't have a partner. Most of Frances's monologues involved a loneliness that Mathilde personally felt too immature to convey. That year, for the purpose of her art and for the sake of her challenging role, Mathilde sussed every day for something that would make her cry, making so much of her own emptiness.

Before rehearsal, she'd walk into her parents' room. (She would never be able to call it only her mother's room.) She'd stick her nose in her father's clothes. Crackers and coins and cigarettes. The searing, bewildering smells of his world. Her mother hadn't given them away, which was of use for Mathilde. She didn't need much to weep, just a snuffle or two.

Who is that boy you've been seeing?
asked her mother.
Someone special,
she guessed.

Just a boy,
Mathilde said and said it for a while, as though he was only one of a plethora of lazy loves.

As a twenty-three-year-old, Claudio couldn't help but enjoy things that were taboo but, in his estimation, harmless—jokes that violated protocol, tenuous words. Mathilde had the luxury of mollycoddling in moods for work, and he by association experienced these selfish tempers with her. Dating Mathilde felt
like going to an amusement park every day. Like somebody much larger than him was grabbing him by the shoulders and thrashing. She made him feel good in a devouring way, and this way frightened him when he thought about it.

This was partially due to his lack of experiencing anything directly catastrophic. He'd never had any misfortune too extreme to process. Never lost anyone unexpectedly (to death) or been in a war zone. His parents had been gullible, dissociative people—the type to get conned. But he had no reason to believe they weren't happy. The very worst thing that happened to Claudio was that he grew up poor. In a world where some people watched each other's heads blowing off, Claudio always described his life as
not bad.

(But he'd never lived a life other than his own, so who was he to judge the quality?)

His sister, Jane, always seemed to be more depressed, but she lived a different life. She was a girl, which Claudio speculated was harder. Boys had pressure to grow into men, but girls had contradicting types of pressure: sometimes to show themselves off, sometimes to hide. Sometimes to speak up, sometimes to collar their speech. Jane, who had become so hard to love—maybe she was having a bad life, but not Claudio. His life wasn't bad and would never be bad, if he could help it.

Mathilde didn't understand what
not bad
meant. Things were either wonderful or appalling. Feeling felt like exercising, the terrain of an actor. She cherished crying like tripping on a drug—adored the messy, thick sleepiness that came with it, the released toxins and proteins and hormones. She felt she had more substance when she embraced calamity, going out of her way to rent the movies that drove her to snivel for days. Especially the ones based on true stories, because a story wasn't really sad unless it was real.

Claudio knew he was in love with Mathilde by their second date, which took all night. They stayed up until 7:00 a.m.
talking about their favorites: animals, days of their lives, stories, songs. Mathilde told Claudio how Willy Loman's failures taught her that good luck can get a person only so far. Claudio believed that the song “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison almost made him believe in a god. And then Claudio thought, -
I can fall in love with her. -

There'd been other girls, sure. But none of those relationships had to do with love. The closest he'd come had maybe been Viola or his high school girlfriend, a ballerina named Sylvie, whose dance company sweatshirts Claudio would wear. But nobody he'd ever slept with had been as open as Mathilde. Claudio was a sucker for people with Hearts on their sleeves, who honored him with life details he hadn't provided conversational momentum for. Being with them felt like eating clams with wobbly shells, or having a cashier honor an expired coupon. Mathilde made him feel like he could save her from harm. It would be easy to. Not like Jane, whom Claudio had been unable to save.

His favorite thing about Mathilde, though, was that she was the best damn listener he had ever met. Most people he knew just pantomimed listening when really they were counting seconds until it was their turn to speak. Mathilde wasn't like anybody else: she really listened.

Claudio and Mathilde spent every day together those first months of dating. Then came the weekend Mathilde traveled out of town to visit her brother, Sawyer, who was starting his freshman year at Cornell. Claudio had the weekend to himself. -
What did I do for fun a few months ago? -
He couldn't remember.

Claudio's roommate, Zane, brought a stray dog back to their apartment that Friday night. Claudio was listening to records and eating strawberry jam from the jar with a spoon. He had little willpower around sweets and was mildly addicted to sugar. He made sure there was never anyone around to witness his pornographic ingestion habits. Claudio guessed he could've had
a kind of eating disorder, but how could he be certain? Eating disorders were a relatively recent phenomenon, like cellular phones or camcorders, and they were popularly diagnosed with white middle-to-upper-class girls. Claudio even liked stomach viruses when they paid off in a real way, and thought Karen Carpenter looked good until she was dead. He wasn't just into the thin-as-wineskin look, though—there were a lot of kinds of pretty, he believed.

Hey guy,
said Zane.
How cute is this guy?
There were two guys: Claudio and the dog. The dog was large and silver, with pointy wolf-ears. It reminded Claudio of winter. Snowshoeing. Some sylvan place that wasn't New York City.

Where'd you find it?

He followed me home from the bar.
Zane bit his lip like a tarty showgirl, just missing the cold sore on his philtrum.

How do you know it's a he? Did you check?

Nah. He looks masculine,
said Zane.
I can tell.

Come on,
said Claudio.

You think I'm kidding. It's my instincts.

How do you know it doesn't belong to one of your homeless buddies?
asked Claudio. Zane was one of those people who talked to everybody. He had extroversion down pat, didn't even call for a crutch, like when smokers make friends through sharing cigarettes outside.

I don't,
said Zane.
I'll call the pound tomorrow, but can he stay with us tonight? And why are you eating jam with nothing else?

Because I do this thing,
said Claudio,
called whatever the fuck I want.

It's bizarre that you're eating just jam.

Does it bother you that much?
The dog sniffed the jelly jar.

Dogs don't eat sweets,
said Zane.

Mathilde's cat, Penelope? She eats macaroni and cheese. You can't make stuff like this up,
said Claudio.

Mathilde again,
said Zane.
Don't you ever talk about anybody else?

That night, Claudio fell asleep on the couch as Zane watched a Leslie Nielsen movie on TV. The dog charged the couch, nuzzling Claudio on the shoulder. The record player played “Walk on the Wild Side.” Claudio couldn't sleep without music, though he could sleep through anything—storms, apocalypses, neighbors.
Hi, buddy,
whispered Claudio from his sleep, rubbing the dog's back with his palms.

Think we should call her Mathilde?
joked Zane.

What the fuck, brother?
snapped Claudio.

A hustle here and a hustle there,
said Lou Reed.

But they have so much in common,
said Zane.

New York City is the place where,
Lou Reed said.

Both breathe air. They can both eat and sleep. The missus is a carbon-based organism too, right, Claudio? What a coincidence.

Claudio smiled back thriftily.
You've never been in love.

You've known her a couple of months,
Zane pressed.
Your feelings for her, you know what they are? They're just chemicals,
Claudio's friend said.
You fucked her. Now you think you love her.

Zane had had an unhappy childhood. His parents didn't love each other anymore but still lived together. Claudio had heard so many stories about Zane's dad that when he finally visited the parents at their apartment he thought, -
wow, that's
the
father. -
Zane's father looked ordinary, with wooly knuckles and a pleasant handshake. Bald in the middle of his head, a strip of skin poking out almost obscenely. He seemed like a nice guy.

He took them out to dinner at a fancy restaurant where the French fries came in a paper cone on a metal holding tray, and told them to get anything they wanted. Claudio got the rib eye steak doused in béarnaise sauce and ate until he felt like he was consuming too much of a good thing. He'd been having that
kind of luck. At the end of the night, after they all said good night, Zane turned to Claudio and said,
see what I mean?

Not really,
said Claudio.
I liked him.

You're not very observant,
remarked Zane.
Did you see how he was being? He thought that he could buy our happiness. Buy back the time he hadn't spent with me.

If you want my honest opinion, I have no idea,
said Claudio.

A man with a neat beard clasped a collar over the dog and collected him in a truck the following morning.
Will you guys give him up for adoption?
asked Zane.
I know sometimes if there are too many dogs they'll put some to sleep.

Beats me,
said the worker. The truck left.

Zane said, as though Claudio had been wondering,
we couldn't keep him. Our landlord would have killed us. It said no pets in the lease.

How would they know?

They'd know. Plus, we can't afford it.

A dog is a lot of responsibility,
agreed Claudio.

Later that day, Mathilde called Claudio on the phone, crying.

Something my brother did today reminded me of Daddy.