The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (31 page)

It’s not like I told Matt
everything
(see: Play-Doh, Barbie heads). But I did tell him what it had been like with Mom. And how I had spent my wishes on hoping she and Ben would get together. (Unlike Walter, Matt did not have issues with the unsanitary nature of pennies. But living in the country, his version of that was chucking stones in the Hudson River.) And about being dumped by Olivia and Sarah. And how, while I was happy that Maya had met Jade because they were totally in love, I sometimes hated Jade for taking her away from me. What I found was that every time I talked about this stuff—whether with him, or with Walter, or in a meeting (I had found an Alateen meeting over in Rhinebeck, where, although the kids may have looked different than at my meetings in L.A.—less diverse, more knowledgeable about chickens and how to dispose of mice in the most humane way—they thought the same way and had the same feelings)—it took away the power the stuff had to make me feel crappy.

When I kept regrets and secrets and shame inside me, each incident had a way of expanding, weighing me down more and more. But when I shared them, it was like popping a balloon with a pin and watching it deflate. Sometimes the relief was immediate; sometimes it came over time. In L.A., people were big on this thing called the Master Cleanse, where you drank this combination of lemonade and honey and cayenne pepper, and it was supposed to clean out your insides and you lost a few pounds before you gained them all back in a day by bingeing on Hostess Donettes (Olivia was a big fan). This was my version of a cleanse. An emotional one, where every day I let go of a little bit more of the weight of the world that had settled on my shoulders over the years.

And in return, I learned who Matt was. We went to the Blue Plate Restaurant in Chatham, which, in addition to being known for their meat loaf, was the place where his parents had told him and his sister they were getting a divorce. We drove past his old high school, where some pickup-driving, quality-time-with-their-dads-meant-going-hunting guys had accused him of being gay because he was into painting and had beat him up under the bleachers of the football field. He took me to the waterfall in Stuyvesant, to which he’d escape when his mother and sister would fight about the fact that his sister’s way of getting back at her father for leaving them for a twenty-year-old was to have sex with anyone who smiled at her.

But while Matt let me into his life, the one place he wouldn’t let me into was his house.

One afternoon, on the way home from the movies in Great Barrington (a double feature of Richard Linklater’s
Before Sunrise
and
Before Sunset
starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), he stopped at his house in Ghent because he said he had something for me.

Like most of the houses in the area it was an old farmhouse. It wasn’t super-fancy, and it could’ve used some fresh paint, but it had a down-to-earth charm. Even the unruly manner of the black-eyed Susans and hydrangea in front was sweet. I much preferred the upstate look to the perfectly manicured lawns of L.A., which were as anorexic and lacking in character as the people who owned them.

“Great,” he mumbled when he saw the cobalt-blue Subaru Forester in the driveway. As he pulled up behind it, I could see it was stuffed with magazines, clothes, a busted chair, and a lamp.

“Is that your mom’s car?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he sighed, putting it in park. “I’ll be right back.” He turned the radio on and punched some buttons until a country song filled the air. “You can listen to the radio.”

“Wait,” I called as he jumped out.

“What?” he asked impatiently.

Why was he acting so weird? “I . . . have to pee,” I said. I overdid it with the free refill Diet Cokes at lunch. Plus, I really wanted to see his house.

He glanced at the house and then back at me. “Can you just wait two minutes and then we’ll go to the Mobil station and you can go there?”

He wanted me to pee at a gas station?

“It’s just that my mom is weird about people coming over unannounced. It’s a Southern thing. She likes to be all formal and put out drinks and snacks and stuff.” While he was open about so much in his life, the subject of his mother was one that he reverted to one-word answers when I asked about her. I knew that she was from New Orleans, and that she was a book editor, and that after the divorce she had developed a bad habit of feeding stray cats and naming them, but that was about it. I knew what it was like to be badgered when you obviously didn’t want to talk about something, so I didn’t push, but I was dying to meet her.

“Okay,” I said, disappointed. Why
would
he bother to introduce me to his mom? I was leaving soon enough. Sure, we had been hanging out every day; our make-out sessions were getting longer and heavier to the point where, had we lived in the same place, and had this had a future, I probably would have started Googling which forms of birth control were least messy/had the fewest number of side effects. But I still wasn’t sure how he felt. Maybe it was just a way to pass the time and avoid having to go to his studio because he was having painter’s block. (“Look, I may not have experience, strength, and hope to share when it comes to dating,” Walter had said as we had FaceTimed the night before, “but I know enough to know that the chance of that not being true is ninety-nine point nine percent.” I then went on to ask what made him feel there was a point one percent chance that it was true, upon which he threatened to hang up.)

Stop getting so attached. You’re leaving in a few weeks
, I said to myself. I had decided that needed to be my mantra:
Attachment = trouble
.

He looked relieved. “Thanks. I’ll be right back.” As he ran toward the house, I saw a curtain open and a head peek out. I couldn’t see her face, but she stared at me for a bit before slowly letting it fall closed again. When he came back out and got back in the car, there was no trace of the gap-toothed smile that I had gotten so used to; the one that I felt a surge of victory about every time I said something that made it appear. His mouth was set in a straight line, and before I could even get my seat belt buckled again, he was backing out the driveway and we were out of there.

“You want me to pull in?” he asked as we neared the Mobil station.

“It’s okay. I can wait until I get home,” I replied.

He nodded and kept going.

I wasn’t particularly musical, or athletic, but the one talent I had developed over the years was the ability to read a room. Or, in this case, a car. And while Matt may have been only two feet away from me, it felt like a thick wall of glass had somehow materialized in the last few minutes. He was still there, but he—everything that made him Matt—had been boiled away. It was like what used to happen with Mom. So I did what I usually did in those situations: I tried to fix things, and went into overdrive. I began to babble on about everything, which, because of the sheer volume of it all, was really about nothing, and then, once I realized I was babbling about nothing, I kept going, in hopes of making it about something. During this car crash of a car ride, Matt would occasionally throw out an “Oh, yeah?” or a “Really?” or an “Interesting,” even though none of what I was saying was interesting. If anything, it was all very
un
interesting.

About twenty minutes into the ride—after I shared my thoughts on such topics as the lack of ethnic restaurants in the upstate area (prompted by a restaurant called Park Falafel & Pizza that we passed as we drove through Hudson); how weird it would be to have your house become a historical landmark after you died and know that people were going to traipse through it on a daily basis (when we passed Olana, where the painter Frederic Church had lived); and the difference between fables, folk tales, and fairy tales (as we passed a sign for the Rip Van Winkle bridge, which I decided was a folk tale)—I had exhausted myself. I shut up, in hopes that he’d pick up the slack, but he remained quiet.

“Is anything wrong?” I asked as we passed into Germantown.

“Nope,” he replied without looking at me. “Why would you ask that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

We went back to not talking. Until I couldn’t help myself. “Did I . . . do something?” I asked quietly.

At least I got a quick glance out of that one. “Of course not. Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know,” I repeated.

“Well, you didn’t.”

I nodded and stared out the window.

“I just remembered that I need to pick up something from the framer over in Kingston,” he said as we crossed over into Clermont.

“Okay.” I liked Kingston. There was a Target there.

“So I’m going to drop you off and get going, if that’s okay.”

“That’s fine,” I said tightly. I had been thinking of showing him the series of photos that I had been doing of Mom when we got inside—the ones I had shown Billy—but now it seemed like a bad idea.

Needless to say, there was no making out when he dropped me off. Not even a kiss on the cheek. Instead, I pasted on a fake smile and said “Well, see you later!” as I reached for the door.

“Wait—this is what I needed to stop at my house for,” he said, holding out a CD case. “I know the CD thing is kind of old school,” he said, handing it to me, “but it felt more personal than just e-mailing you a playlist.” Inside the jewel case was a CD, and a liner with a painting of black and white and gray shapes.

“Did you paint this?”

He nodded. “It’s an abstract version of the Overlook Hotel. In Woodstock.”

My heart—which over the course of the ride had been returned to where it usually stayed, behind bulletproof glass—stretched open a bit. Back in L.A, in a box in my closet in the apartment on Darlington marked ANNABELLE—PERSONAL, was a notebook full of lists that included one titled “My Ideal Guy,” which I had made one night when I couldn’t sleep. Somewhere around number 12 was
Someone who makes me CD mixes
. “Thanks,” I said.

“You’re welcome. Talk to you later.”

I
hated
the “later” thing. As Mom said, men, like dogs, had no sense of time, which meant that fifteen minutes and fifteen days were the same thing to them.

Once inside I went straight to my room and starting rummaging through the different compartments of my suitcase, praying that somehow one mini Play-Doh can had managed to stay hidden during my periodic sweeps to rid myself from my addiction to noxious fumes. If the car had been there, I would have driven across the river to Target, but it wasn’t, so I was stuck.

I turned on my laptop and slid in the CD. Stretching out on my bed, I closed my eyes. Maybe the songs he had chosen would shed some light on things.

SONGS ON MIX CD AND POSSIBLE MEANINGS

• Billy Bragg/”Must I Paint You a Picture?”—The “little black cloud in a dress” line was genius, but was that what he thought I was?
  
• The Clash/“Should I Stay or Should I Go”—Granted, this was probably on here because we had heard it in Swallow one afternoon and had to leave because we were laughing so hard while watching the barista move his chin in a robotlike manner. Or maybe it was because he thought I was putting out mixed signals?
  
• Pixies/”Where Is My Mind?”—The song was about questioning your sanity. Enough said.
  
• Radiohead/”Give Up the Ghost”—Granted, I had mentioned to him that it was my favorite Radiohead song, but it was also about letting go of things.
  
• The Strokes/”You Only Live Once”—While the tempo was upbeat, upon the second listen I discovered the lyrics were pretty negative (“Some people think they’re always right/Others are quiet and uptight”).
  

I was on my third listen of the song, realizing it was also positive (“Sit me down/Shut me up/I’ll calm down/And I’ll get along with you”) while trying to figure out if I was supposed to sit down and calm down, or if he was, when I heard Mom’s car turn into the driveway, followed seconds later by Billy’s truck.

A few moments later the door opened and I heard Mom
click-clack
(she was pretty much the only woman in the entire Hudson Valley who wore heels) her way to the kitchen.

“You can’t just run away like that, Janie, when someone tries to talk to you about something you don’t want to talk about,” Billy yelled as he came through the front door.

“I did not run away! I
drove
away. There’s a difference!” she yelled back. I heard the opening and slamming of cabinets. “All right, if I can’t drink over this, there sure as hell better be some baked goods lying around,” she grumbled. I cringed as I heard the fridge open. “Ha. Jackpot,” she said.

I walked out of my room to find her standing over the sink shoveling in the last slice of the peach pie I had made two nights before. The slice that I had been planning to have once I read Matt’s mind via the CD. “What’s going on?” I asked nervously. It must have been really bad because Mom never ate carbs during shooting.

“So they got some photos of us—big deal,” he said. “It’s not like we were
doing
anything.”

“But they’ll spin it like we were!” she cried. “Are you so naive that you don’t know how the tabloids work?!” She smacked the side of her head. “Wait a minute—you’re only
twenty-six
. You’re
supposed
to be naive.”

“Oh, so this is what it’s about?” he asked. “The age thing?”

Because I was getting more and more nervous, I walked over to the drawer and got a fork and joined Mom at the pie. At first I wasn’t sure she even knew I was there, until we got into a fencing match with our forks.

“You say that like it doesn’t matter!” she said, pushing my fork way out of the way to get the last bite.

“Because it doesn’t!” he yelled back. “It’s just a number!” He glanced at me. “And it’s not like there’s anything going on between us anyway.”

“But everyone will
think
there is,” Mom replied. She shook her head. “I can see the headlines now—
The Cougar and the Cub
!”

“What if there was?” Billy asked.

“What if there were posts all over the Internet?” Mom asked. “Then I guess my publicist wouldn’t feel bad about the fact that, other than my arrest, he wasn’t able to get me any press in the last year,” she said wryly.