Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (6 page)

You have a nose bleed,
Mathilde noticed about Claudio, who'd taken almost three times her amount of 'shrooms,
poor thing,
holding his hand. With his other hand, Claudio opened a half-eaten bag of chips. Instead of eating the chips, he opened and closed the chip clip like jaws.

Do I?
Claudio's eyes welled. He slid the dimmer as they waddled into his bedroom.
Rest.
Mathilde closed her eyes, but Claudio distracted her. Then he oriented her, slipping a fun-size pill in her hand. Something to help her get to sleep. She wanted to take care of him, but instead he just kept taking care of her.

Who is more broken,
asked Mathilde,
me or you?

Claudio wiped Mathilde's nose, dusted with peppery freckles. Her eyelashes were like brooms. Every time he looked at her, Claudio noticed something different.
Both of us,
said Claudio.

C
laudio and Mathilde fell in love easily, and perhaps this was a result of keenness, greenness, a furious thirst. Naturally, their early, sweet-as-pie love was not the same kind they developed later in life. Within a year of dating, Claudio proposed, and Mathilde said
of course
. The fiancé and fiancée spent their evening cooking pasta, drinking Sancerre, and listening to a Ravi Shankar record. Mathilde asked what he was afraid of.

Vultures.

Mathilde said, in her therapist's voice,
they live in the desert.

Scavengers just creep me out. Even if there's an apocalypse sometime soon, even after you think every animal, plant, and germ in the world is obliterated, I guarantee you that there's a vulture hiding somewhere under some rock, waiting to get rich off the foulest circumstances. He'll be alive, watching the end of the world, and you know what he'll think? He'll think,
my lucky day
. He'll fly over the entire world and find who'd been the wealthiest guy and just pick at his Swiss watch. And he'll decide that he's not hungry anymore.

Mathilde looked at her husband. Mr. Simone. She would be his Mrs. (He'd decided she was wife material, and how could he know? Mathilde didn't even know yet!) She couldn't get her mind past the
everyone is obliterated
part. -
Everyone will die
.
Everyone,
already, is dying of something. -
But how could Mathilde be dying? She'd hardly had a life at all yet.

Vultures always think they need more.
Claudio fixated on his fear.
They don't even remember what they have.

Mathilde didn't want to make a big deal out of her wedding. So Claudio and Mathilde synchronized it to take place the afternoon of the last production of her play, a small production of
A Streetcar Named Desire,
set in a cramped, boggy theater in Hell's Kitchen. Mathilde played the female lead, Blanche DuBois. In the play, Blanche is raped by her sister Stella's husband, Stanley. The play's run lasted for thirty-two productions. The afternoon of the thirty-second, Claudio and Mathilde eloped at City Hall with Sawyer and Zane as witnesses. Mathilde wore a short brown Halston dress that she'd pulled out of her mother's closet the day before. It was June. The sun was stiff and saffron, pushing across the sky.

Mathilde and Claudio combined the cast party with their wedding ceremony. After, the new Mr. and Mrs. Simone went dancing until 4:00 a.m. at a burlesque-style nightclub and then to an after-hours nightclub, where they saw Patrick Swayze and where Mathilde accidentally tore her dress in half while doing lines out of the palm of her hand in the bathroom. Finally, they went to a diner facing the East River and ordered large plates of spaghetti and meatballs and talked about Cold War Soviet defectors. Mathilde kept calling Baryshnikov
Misha,
like she knew him. Cocoplum-eyed, she yawned, put her head on Claudio's shoulder. He twirled his tie and told her how soft her skin was.
Like oysters,
he said.

Is this our honeymoon?
Mathilde asked.

Are you kidding?
asked Claudio. He told her he'd been saving up in the past year for a trip to Europe as a surprise. They were going to see Paris, Amsterdam, and Vienna. They were going to see the opera and the Musée d'Orsay and the canals. They were going to eat snails and schnitzel and
hagelslag
.

Holy ghost,
Mathilde said.
I'm lucky.

The end of
A Streetcar Named Desire
arrives with cruel and tragic irony. In the last scene, authorities escort Blanche to a mental institution because she is unable to deal with reality. But her sister, Stella, is doing the exact same thing by not believing that her husband raped Blanche.

The morning after their wedding, Claudio called his parents to tell them the good news.

He asked if there was any way he could reach his sister, having tried earlier to call her at Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services in Grand Rapids. Pine Rest was where Jane had been living since she was fifteen—first with juveniles and then shifting among wards like a twentysomething yuppie bouncing between studio apartments. Jane had initially been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Then, borderline personality disorder. And finally, schizophrenia. None of the conditions replaced the other; they veined in her all at once. Melody, harmony, and cacophony.

The administrators had said that she wasn't in the system. They couldn't tell him any more information about her whereabouts, for legal reasons.
We have to be confidential
, they'd said.

Alas, Claudio's troubling sense of culpability. He had tried every year to go back and visit her, along with visiting his parents, but now had to start saving his money for Mathilde. She was his new family. -
My wife, -
Claudio thought. How sweet this nom de plume sounded. -
My little bride. My baguette. My bluet. My coquette. -

Your sister? She's free.
His mother let out a bloodcurdling giggle.
Where were you these past six months?

Huh?
Claudio couldn't picture Jane alone, with the daily choices of eating and sleeping. There was no way. For another moment, and for the countless time, he wished he had one of
those regular sisters who'd go to college, who'd love Chekhov and hang mistletoe in her room and take electives in modern dance or architecture or anatomy and physiology. Just a normal girl who'd learn how to do laundry at eighteen and who'd like to get her hair blown out at a salon. Who'd now be working in a city and go on bad dates and pay for her own electric bill. A girl who'd call her father Daddy and her mother her best friend and her brother (sometimes) kiddo.

They didn't have the funding to keep her in. They tried to put her in a halfway house, but she left.

Where is she?

Not here. I begged her to come back, but she wanted nothing to do with us. Neither of my children want anything to do with me.

Mom, I go back and visit you and Dad whenever I can.
He went back during off-seasons, never during times like Christmas. It was selfish but for his own sake—and for Mathilde's. They'd spent the autumn and winter holidays with Mathilde's brother, Sawyer, exchanging earmuffs and cuff links and frames and eating at boutique restaurants with menu fonts in Garamond and the quaintest matchbooks.

If you really loved us, you'd live here.

Do you know anything about where to reach her? Do you know if she's okay?

His mother gave a number.
But I never call her. All she asks for is money.

Claudio said good-bye, jittered, dialed his sister. Jane answered on the fourth ring.
What?
She sounded winded, as though she'd been sprinting.

Jane? It's your brother. How are you?
Claudio spoke kindly. He had to be chary with his phrasing or else Jane would hang up on him. He considered the necessities of the situation. Basically, he had to get her into his sight as soon as possible. Jane wasn't safe. She was free, and he had to save her from being free.

I'm okay. I'm with my boyfriend.
There was something so tragic about the likelihood of Jane having a boyfriend.

Who's the boyfriend?
Claudio felt his muscles smoggy and syncopated, his liminal impulses hating this man before he would know his name.

I've had a lot out here. But this one's the last one. He's the real deal. A grand slam! His name is Otis. Sit on a potato pan, Otis,
she sang.

Where are you now?
Claudio asked. He thought, but didn't say, -
I'll come and get you. -

America. The beautiful.

Can you be a little more specific?

New Orleans.
Jane pronounced it with a phony Creole accent,
Narlins,
a counterfeit native.

That's quite a ways.

You feel closer through the phone,
she said, metaphorically or crazily.

I was thinking, do you want to come visit me in New York?
Claudio thought about telling her that he had just gotten married but didn't want to overwhelm her. Besides, he didn't really feel married yet. Things were more or less the same.
We just set up our apartment. You'd like it. It's charming.

Charming
means small, my dear,
said Jane.

- Where does she have it in her to be snobby? -
Claudio wondered. -
What entitled her? -

We have a guest room. We'll stock it with wooden hangers and flowers,
said Claudio.
Magazines. A good reading light.

I don't know,
Jane's voice ricocheted.
Maybe.
She sounded like she had a cloud in her throat. Maybe she was eating yogurt, Claudio hoped.

Well, I already bought you a ticket, and I don't want it to have to go to waste.

I can't fly,
said Jane.

Why not?

I need my boyfriend's permission.

Why's that?

Stop asking me questions, you crazy poo poo,
said Jane.
Take a hike.

Blanche DuBois's last line in
A Streetcar Named Desire
is
I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.

W
hen Claudio was eleven, he snooped through his sister's drawers. He had nothing in mind he was looking for, was only curious about the person his sister was turning into.

What are you doing? Leave right now,
said Jane, whose face and head smelled like anointed pomade, who'd recently gained about twenty pounds in her chest and hips. On the school bus that year, some guys made slurping noises to her, like faucets, and Claudio pretended not to hear them. It was the same deal for the nights when Jane would sound like she had a runny nose—there was no way she could've had a cold every night and be cured the next morning. With all the tulip-shaped Kleenex in her wastebasket. With her eyelids like pudding.

For some reason Jane didn't talk to him anymore; Claudio felt like he had made a mistake by growing up. Maybe he'd grown in a wicked direction or matured in a brusque way that convinced her not to like him. They were no longer a team, which both troubled and thrilled Claudio. It was only exciting because now a stranger (at best, an acquaintance) lived in his house. He knew a woman restricted and always a few feet away. The body shouldn't have belonged to Jane. She didn't know what to do with it anyway.

Two weeks before, Claudio's family went on vacation for the first and only time, to Las Vegas. They drove across the country
in their father's Chevy Chevette hatchback, all of them fretting over the car's probability to crumple like crepe paper.

Eight dollars a night for their motel and they were greeted upon their arrival by two used towels in the bathroom, a drain clogged with ruffled hairs, and a muggy lock that wouldn't open for eight minutes. On the penultimate night, Claudio's father found dried bloodstains on the bottom of his pillow.
Some luck,
he said.
You get what you pay for, I guess.
He spoke out loud to nobody, but his son listened. His son decided they were a family who would never have the money to pay for more than disappointing things, that they were a helpless kind of family, and that helpless kinds of families must do whatever they could do not to get help but to also not need help.

Something had happened on their last day of vacation. It was hard to remember everything. Claudio and Jane were swimming in the motel pool; their parents were at the casino. Claudio and Jane were playing Marco Polo. The lifeguard, a teenage girl looking somehow
off,
was talking to a teenage boy on vacation with blanched blond hair and a contoured chest.

Marco,
said Jane, splashing frequently, as though since she couldn't see, nobody could see her either. Pealing and untranquil. Her skin raw and creamy.

Polo,
said Claudio. He'd never learned to swim the official way, with the backstroke and the butterfly and lifeguards who handed out the cards with the Red Cross on them when you moved up a level. The fastest way he moved about the water was a kind of side-scissor stroke, with his hands pushing very close to his body, like flippers.
The Claudio stroke,
he called it.

Who was that in the shallow end? Older than the lifeguards, but younger than, say, Claudio's father. Claudio remembered his beer gut and tiny square sunglasses and a tattoo on his arm of what looked like a swing.