In the city that prided itself, quite wrongly, on being the center of the universe, Walt Lawson moaned and carefully returned Vanessa's breakup letter to the drawer where she kept her theater tickets.
A letter. How like her: dramatic, elegant, and perfect. Slyly impersonal, too, another symptom of her actress' ability to make everyone and thus no one the full center of her attention. Worst of all, it was permanent. A decade from now, he'd still have to read the same words he'd read minutes ago. If she'd told him face to face, even a phone call, his self-defense systems could have gone to work, distorting his memory, convincing himself, day by day and month by month, that her words had been selfish, crazy, bitchy. Enough time, he might even have been able to make himself believe he'd left her. But a letter? That was a preemptive strike. He couldn't interrupt, he could only listen to a decision that couldn't be swayed. And her side was on record. His side, if she'd been able to deploy her handwritten sneak attack before he'd stumbled on it (quite innocently; he'd just wanted to check what she'd seen last night, catch up on the reviews), would be jangled, panicked, shameful. Every time he'd reread that letter, he'd be reminded of his own tongue-tied response, supporting evidence of the very inadequacies her carefully regretful sentences had cunningly accused him of.
Of course, she knew he wouldn't be able to throw it away.
Six stories below the window, cars and cabs raced and weaved, the perfect combination of mass and aggression to smash out his brains and lungs. Or should he go somewhere higher—the Empire State Building? Shouldn't his last action be a big one? His last seconds strange ones? There should be more to it than simply dying. He didn't want a neighbor recognizing his face. He wanted obliteration. The kind a gun couldn't provide (besides, he didn't have one) or he could count on from the currents and fish of the Upper Bay (nor would he trust himself not to kick for shore after the first salty gulp). The plain truth, a truth he'd faced several times a day for the four years they'd been together, was he'd rather not exist than be without her.
Traffic banged over the metal plates welded over the holes in the asphalt. He was six stories up, but the roar was such the cabs and delivery trucks may as well be driving straight through his bathroom. He crossed to the window and shoved it open, smelling exhaust, kebabs, and humidity. Did he feel small because he lived in New York? Or did he feel small because he was?
He hated those metal plates. He could sleep through horns, car alarms, drunks shouting from ground-floor bars, but each time a truck crashed over one of those plates, he woke with a heart-yanking jolt. Instead of laying a thunderous iron plate over the potholes, why didn't they just fix the fucking holes?
Walt withdrew his head from the window. So Vanessa thought she was leaving. She thought he was a pothole. What if he could create a plate for himself?
Not in the sense of something to be run over. In the sense of a temporary fix with the illusion of permanence. The letter had once more mentioned her gauzy desire to move to LA, implying it might not be so much that she wanted to leave him as that she wanted to leave New York. And she hadn't actually given him the letter yet; there existed the possibility she didn't intend to—straw-grasper!—or, less unlikely, that she was waiting for a particular time to hand it over. Assume the possibility he could alter the destiny she intended for him. How could he convince, trick, or strongarm her into staying?
He quickly rejected several alternatives. If he left this instant on a days-long trip, she would have no address to deliver his letter to, but that would only cement her perception of him as unreliable. Nor could he take her on a breathless tour of romance, hansom cab rides and dinners in Little Italy, a balloon ride from his parents' place in Long Island. Being such an expert herself, she had a nose for manipulation. He could make a visible display of renewed effort on the novel he'd been working on for months (and, counter to her epistolary claims, he had been working, even when it didn't look like work; at times he suspected the cliche of "the rudderless, irresponsible writer" had poisoned her opinion of his ambitions), but that could easily backfire. Much easier to dump a person who has something to keep them occupied through the upcoming period of mental anguish. Hell, great art came from pain, didn't it? To her, leaving might spur him to a literary success that would console his broken heart.
He smiled, cold as a Kubrick flick. He would pretend to be sick. It would take a person of intense cruelty to inflict breakup-level emotional pain on someone already suffering physically. Especially when she could be confident she'd have to wait no more than a few days, at most a couple weeks, before he cleared up. Once healthy, she could deliver her letter guilt-free.
Walt knew it wouldn't be enough to restore her love, but spooning someone chicken broth could hardly be more intimate, could it? He could call off work at the bodega, too. With all those free hours, he could plot out a more permanent plan, something to forestall the letter forever.
Vanessa came home on a breeze of lavender and fresh sweat. He sat up from his couchside nest, blinking, remembering to cough. What time was it? Ten? Midnight? She slung her coat on a hook and pulled the pencil from her swept-up hair, loosing her locks over her shoulders.
"How was your day?" he croaked.
"Don't ask," she laughed, splaying the fingers of one hand. "Don't even ask. By the time I finished someone will be dead."
"Preferably neither of us."
"So okay. Mark hardly knows any of his lines. No, that's being too kind—he doesn't know any. He's got fewer lines than a baby's ass. He thinks he'll be ready next week?"
He cleared his throat. "Is that where you were all this time? Mark's?"
She stopped teasing out her straight dark hair to give him a look of dying annoyance. He didn't like that look. It said: Calm down: he won't be here much longer. "What, we're going to rehearse in the park? Get stabbed mid-soliliquoy? I know, we could practice on the platforms at Union Square. Treat the commuters to a sneak preview."
"It was a question, not a snake. Don't get so wound up."
"It's not the question. It's the tone."
"Sorry." He cut himself short with a coughing fit. "Got the flu or something. Voice sounds funny."
She frowned. Disbelief? Concern? "You don't sound good. Need some water?"
"Tea?" he tested.
This time, her smile was as soft as her skin. She clicked to the kitchen while he watched from the couch. She ran the teapot under the faucet, leaning over the sink, breasts hanging against her shirt. He was already half hard. In ten or twenty years, Vanessa might be as fat as her mom, but at 25, her swollen tits and musical hips drove men's imaginations to feverish degradation. He'd possessed that body for four years now, touched it thousands of times, fucked it hundreds, but he still couldn't go swimming with her without wearing a jockstrap under his suit to bind his erection. She caught him staring and smiled over the stove. So what if she privately hated him? She lived to be looked at.
She handed him a steaming floral-print cup. "Maybe you should see a doctor."
"A doctor?"
"You know, one of those guys who pats you on the head until you feel better?"
"I'm familiar with the word. I didn't know you were."
She shrugged, breasts rising. "I don't want you to be sick."
He sipped. He didn't even like tea. "And normally you'd be pestling up some herbs right now. Doing the Dance of Good Humours."
She rolled her eyes. "Please."
"Thanks for the tea." He reached for her thigh, squeezing its springy muscles.
"De nada. I'm going to take a shower. I stink."
She rose, leaving him on the couch. The bathroom door snicked. He frowned over his tea. She didn't believe in doctors for anything short of cancer. Suddenly she was ready to ship him to the waiting room? Was he onto something with his ersatz illness? Would she strike as soon as he improved? And what about the Mark factor? She wouldn't leave him, Walt, unless she had someone else to go to. He knew better than that. That's how he'd gotten her himself, after all, pr
ying her away from a high school boyfriend she'd been looking to leave since getting to NYU, some sad-sack future electrician who'd eventually agreed to an open relationship rather than dumping her like he should have. That had been the dude's death-knell. She'd told her good friend Walt the news on a Friday; Saturday night, he'd talked her into bed.
Ten minutes into her shower, he stripped down and snugged into bed. The shower hissed and splattered, muffled by the door. He closed his eyes and imagined the soap slipping down her skin. He wanted to be the soap, clinging to her curves and folds, touching all of her at once—but he already was the suds, wasn't he? Slipping away from a body he could no longer hold onto. Rinsed down a drain into darkness and shit.
Twenty minutes later, she slid in beside him, kissed him once, and turned her back. A truck banged over a metal plate.