And Michael had taken to pretending Paul didn't exist. All he talked about was how he and Vera were going to get a dog as soon as he got back from the tour, and how they couldn't decide what kind to get, as Michael wanted something small, conducive to apartment living, whereas Vera wanted a “real” dog.
“If it's less than twenty pounds, it's a rodent,” she said.
Vera talked about the weather in Brooklyn as if it were a continent away, and then spent the remainder of dinner telling me about a corporate law test she'd been studying for all week.
I asked the waitress for a box of crayons and tried to do the maze on the back of the children's menu, but I kept hitting dead ends.
Dinner ended without one mention of Paul or Loring.
Later that night, while I was trying to beat Walker's high score on Sonic the Hedgehog, Loring called from Vermont.
“The boys want to tell you something,” he said.
Walker got on first and sang a mangled version of “Happy Birthday” while Sean mumbled in the background, sounding just like his father. After Walker gave his brother the phone, Sean told me about the walkie-talkies he got for his last birthday. Then he said, “We're making popcorn. Here's my dad okay bye.”
“How did you know it was my birthday?”
“I have my ways,” Loring said. “Hey, would you mind looking up a phone number for me? My book is in the night-stand, left side of my bed.”
The nightstands on either side of Loring's bed were two square cubes made of burnished oak, with little mesh doors that opened in front.
I checked the first cube. “It's empty,” I said, staring at a bare shelf.
“Are you sure you're on the left side of the bed?”
“Well, it's the left side if you're in the bed. You know, facing the TV.”
He laughed. “Try the other left side.”
Instead of crawling across the mattress and messing it up, I walked around. There were a few books inside the cube, along with a pair of broken glasses, a toy car, and a notebook-sized box wrapped in white tissue paper.
“Happy Birthday,” he said.
I shook my head even though no one could see me. “Loring, I can't.”
“You have to. It took me hours to find it. You'll hurt my feelings if you don't at least open it.”
I sat down on the floor, turned the gift over a few times, and shook it. Nothing rattled. “What is it?”
“Open it.”
The extent to which I was touched by Loring's gesture surprised me. I tore the paper along the seam where it had been taped together. Underneath the wrapping I felt glass, and I could see the back of a frame on the other side. I lifted it up and turned it around. A tear fell down my cheek and splashed over the word sky.
In my hands, under the glass, was a piece of paper containing the handwritten words to “The Day I Became a Ghost.” The paper had been torn out of a spiral notebook and still had the frayed ends on the left side. Phrases had been crossed out here and there, new ones written on top of old ones, and there were thin lines drawn through a never-before-seen verse that hadn't made the final cut.
“I know that's your favorite song,” Loring said. “Those are the original lyrics.”
I sniffled.
“Eliza, are you crying?”
“No.”
“Yes, you are. Shit, I'm sorry. I was only trying to cheer you up.”
“You did. It's just that, well, sometimes happiness hurts.”
A little before midnight the doorman buzzed me. “There's a Mr. Hudson looking for you.”
“What?” I said. “He's here?”
“Should I send him up?”
“No! Tell him I'm not answering.”
But I heard Paul shout, “I'm not leaving until I see her!” Then, sounding like he'd set his lips right on top of the mouthpiece: “Tell your fucking boyfriend to call the goddamn police if he wants! They'll have to drag me out kicking and screaming!”
He was obviously drunk, and bordering on disorderly.
“I'll be right down.”
Paul was standing near the reception desk, examining the doorman's pen as if he'd never seen a writing instrument. As soon as he heard the elevator he turned around. He was glassy-eyed and off-balance, and all I wanted to do was put my hand on his heart, drag him upstairs, and show him that the original opening line to “The Day I Became a Ghost” wasn't I was only a child when I learned how to fly but the more applicable All I ever wanted was to be able to fly.
I led Paul out the door, and neither of us said a word while we crossed the street. Once we made it to the other side, Paul stopped to stare at the building. He was babbling incoherently. The only words I caught were “fucking uptown” and “pancreas.” He still had the doorman's pen in his hand.
“Are you in love with him?” he said, his head lifted to the sky, his pronunciation of the word love like a tennis ball he'd just lobbed into the air.
I bit the sides of my cheeks and kept walking until we were at the entrance to the park. Paul stopped when I did, landing under a street lamp that cast a heavenly yellow nimbus around his head. The pen was gone. He'd either put it in his pocket or dropped it.
“How long this has been going on?” he said. “Since the tour? The interview?” He tried to kick a garbage can but missed by a foot. “When did you start fucking him, Eliza?” I didn't reply, and he seized me, not roughly, but desperately. “How about showing a little remorse then, huh? How about pretending that at some point over the last year and a half you actually gave a damn about me?”
I could smell something hot and cinnamony on his breath. Big Red. He was chewing gum and I wanted to open his mouth and take the gum and keep it under my tongue until he got back from the tour.
He grabbed my hand and slammed it palm-down into his chest. “Can you feel that?”
I didn't know what he was alluding to, but I couldn't feel anything through his coat—it was as though his heart had stopped—and it threatened to break me down while I twisted out of his arms.
“Don't do this to me, Eliza. Please. I need you.”
I looked at Paul. He was crying.
“You don't need me,” I said, wondering whether or not I believed it.
He gripped my face and kissed me. But it was a hard, painful kiss. A severe and bitter kiss. A kiss that seemed so black, so final, it was like death.
“Happy fucking Birthday.”
He spit his Big Red into the trash and then disappeared into the park. As soon as he was out of sight I tried to find the gum but it was too dark, there were too many liquids spilling out over the garbage, and as usual I just gave up.
I convinced myself it was a victory. But Loring called it a pyrrhic victory, won at too great a cost.
“They teach you that word at Yale?” I said during what had become our nightly chess game.
“Whether or not your sacrifice is worth the price remains to be seen. And unless you tell him the truth now, you could be waiting a long time to find out.”
“You act like I have a choice.”
“Do you really think you don't?”
What I had was hope and denial, and sustaining just the right amount of these devices is what had enabled me to endure the days leading up to Bananafish's departure. “Once Paul is gone,” I said, “it'll get easier.”
Loring took one of my knights. “How long do you plan on keeping up this charade?”
“Just until July.”
“July,” he said. “July?”
Deciding whether to move my rook to take one of his pawns, or to sacrifice my knight to take his bishop, I explained my plan: I would wait until Paul returned in July, tell him everything then, and hope for the best. Although, according to Vera, there was talk of a European tour in the fall, which could complicate things all over again.
“Eliza,” Loring sighed, “don't you see how ridiculous this is?”
“You don't understand,” I said, choosing to eliminate the bishop. “Someday Paul will than
k me for saving him.”
“That's pathetic. Not to mention self-righteous.”
“There's nothing self-righteous about offering up my happiness so that Paul can realize his dreams.”
“That's even more pathetic,” he said. “Besides, are they his dreams or yours?”
“I like you better when you mumble inaudibly. But if you have an alternative idea, I'm listening.”
“Think about it,” Loring said. “They're leaving in three days—even Paul knows he can't back out of the tour now. Why not let him go knowing the truth? That way you can work it out before it's too late.”
“Why is it so important to you that Paul and I make up?”
His eyes were locked on the chessboard, and he might as well have been speaking to his queen when he said, “Surprise, I care about you, okay? I just think you'll be sorry if you don't tell him.”
“I plan on moving back to the apartment as soon as he's gone.”
“You can stay here as long as you want. That's not the point. July is four months away. A lot can happen in four months. A lot.”
Loring's words really hit me. I imagined myself old and gray and alone, staring out a window in a dank apartment on Delancey Street, a soft-rock station on the radio. The DJ would play “Wildfire,” “Seasons in the Sun,” and “Superstar,” and I would be haunted by lingering thoughts of Paul Hudson, wondering where he was and telling myself everything could have been different if only I hadn't been such a coward.
I moved one of my pawns forward two spaces, and Loring positioned his queen to trap my king.
“Checkmate,” he said.
The next morning I called the apartment at an hour Paul often termed “the butt crack of dawn.” His voice was groggy and hostile. “What do you want?”
“I need to talk to you. Can I stop by after work?”
“I'd rather you didn't.”
“It's important.”
I could hear him breathing. Finally he said, “Come by around seven” and then hung up.
As usual, the F train took forever. I decided F stood for fucking-slow-ass-crowded-fucking chug-a-lug train. I got to the apartment a little after seven and ran up the steps wondering if Paul could hear me coming the way I used to be able to hear him.
At the fourth floor landing I froze, struck by how strange and baleful the bleeding door looked.
Paul was standing in the kitchen when I walked in. He was shirtless, his hair looked greasy, and there was something gangrenous in his eyes as he picked up a pack of American Spirits off the counter—not his standard brand—and smacked the bottom until a few popped up.
He grabbed a cigarette with his teeth and lit it. As I approached him, he blew a mouthful of smoke in my face.
“Well?” he said. “What's so goddamn important you had to come all the way down from your penthouse to talk to me?”
His animosity was thicker than the smoke but I let it go. I deserved it. “Obviously you're upset, and I don't blame you.” I fanned the air. “Loring was right, I should have been honest with you right from the beginning and—”
“Don't utter that name in my house.”
But I never got the opportunity to utter Loring's name, or anything else after that. Time stopped, and the last year and a half of my life became a blur as I watched the topless figure of Amanda Strunk strut like a proud peacock out of
Paul's bedroom.
“As you can see, I have company,” Paul said. “Can you make this snappy?”
For a second I thought I saw something in Paul's eyes that said: This hurts me more than it hurts you. But when Amanda sidled up to him, ran her hands down his chest and drawled, “Where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?” he flashed his cocky-bastard grin and followed her to the bedroom without ever looking back.
When Loring came home I was on my bed, wrapped in a thick blanket, trying to picture what happiness might look like if it could be contained in a piece of matter. After careful consideration, I decided happiness would be an unwieldy, odd-shaped object, like a big lava rock or a chunk of ore. Undoubtedly, it would have to be an object that, because of its properties, because of its very essence, would sink in any substance whose molecules flowed freely. This I knew for sure: Happiness would never, ever, under any circumstance, have the ability to float.
I listened to Loring putter around the kitchen and put the water on for tea. Then he must have noticed the light in my room. He shut it off as he walked by, but a second later he reappeared in the doorway and flicked it back on.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn't think you'd be here.”
I tried to hide my face. Loring knew I'd arranged to see Paul. He'd be able to take one look at me and guess something had gone awry.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and cocked his head so that our eyes were on the same plane. “Did you tell him?”
“I didn't get a chance,” I said, picking at the ratty tissue in my hand.
“Why not?”
“Let's just say he's moved on.”
Loring reached down and lifted a piece of lint from my pillow. Then he dropped it and it sailed to the floor. “Is that what he said, that he's moved on?”
“He didn't really say anything. He didn't have to. The half-naked woman who came out of his bedroom kind of tipped me off.”
Loring scratched his temple and said, “Shit.”
“Wait, it gets better. It was Amanda Strunk.”
“Amanda Strunk?” Loring shook his head and mumbled something about Paul being an idiot, but after gauging my reaction to that, he said, “Sorry. It's just that Amanda Strunk is the bottom of the barrel.”
The clamor of a harmonica began blaring through the apartment. Loring had the silliest teakettle I'd ever heard—when the water reached its boiling point, it didn't whistle, instead it sounded like Bob Dylan warming up in the next room.
“Hold on,” Loring said, and when he got to the kitchen he must have turned Bob off because he was back, tea-less, within seconds.
“You should've seen the way he looked at me, Loring. He hates me.”
Loring sat on the floor next to the bed. “He doesn't hate you. He knew you were coming over, right? He was just trying to hurt you.”
I shook my head. There was so much more to it. I likened it to the intimate version of Doug's Tell me what you listen to and I'll tell you what you are theory. This was: Tell me who you fuck and I'll tell you what you are.
Spiritual duplicity.
“Choice betrays character,” I said.
“That's not true.” Loring moved his finger along the sheet as if writing his name in cursive. “Eliza, you can't judge a man solely on his actions. Sometimes actions are nothing more than reactions.”
What Loring meant, but was too nice to say, was that he thought I had no one to blame but myself.
And I couldn't get the images of Amanda out of my head: The way her surgically perfected breasts defied gravity as she strutted across the room, the way her dark pink lipstick looked permanently smeared around her mouth, the way she stood behind Paul and made nail marks in his chest.
I blinked hard to make it all disappear. When that didn't do the trick I tried to create a diversion, focusing at length on Loring's warm, sympathetic eyes. I wished I could curl up inside one of Loring's eyes and hide. And I thought maybe, just maybe, Loring's eyes could make Amanda go away.
Loring swallowed, noticeably uncomfortable, but he didn't look away, and I leaned toward his face like a baby bird reaching for food from its mother's beak. The tip of my nose brushed his and I turned my head a fraction, but when our lips were about to touch, Loring flinched and made a face like he'd just smashed his finger with a hammer.
“What's wrong?” I said. “I thought it's what you wanted.”
His body twisted. “Eliza, I like you. A lot. But I can't be the puppet in some two-can-play-at-that game between you and Paul.” He got up and kissed my forehead. “Try and get some sleep.”
I closed my eyes and li
stened to the carpet crunch and flex below Loring's feet as he left the room. And he never did finish making tea.
He went across the hall and took an eight-minute-long shower.
Paul was gone. And not just physically. What he'd personified, the potential that his life, talent, and love held for me was now as far away as he was.
Making matters worse, without consultation, Paul had decided to sublet the apartment on Ludlow until he returned in July. For all intents and purposes, I was not only heartbroken, I was also homeless.
Vera and I saw each other often after the band left, and she was quick to offer me ebullient accounts of Michael's news from the road: what his days were like, the cities, the weather, the people, the shows. But never a word of Paul.
According to Vera, Michael was living his life's dream. In my mind this meant Paul was too, and with pitiful profundity, this made my pain worth the consequences it was yielding.
Michael kept me updated via the occasional email. He was happy to report that the audiences were responding well to Bananafish. The problem, he explained, was that only ten percent of the ticket holders showed up for an opening act they'd never heard of.
Michael also let it slip that Ian Lessing, the Drones's singer, was an alcoholic egomaniac and “dumb as a doornail.” I knew this must have disappointed Paul. Ian was one of his heroes. But when I asked Michael how Paul was doing, he ignored me.
I couldn't take it anymore. I needed answers. Closure. Proof that Paul had indeed moved on. And finally, before the band left Portland, I broke down and called his cell phone.
He didn't answer, and I left a message asking him to call me, but it was Michael who I heard from that night. At first all he talked about was Oregon, and about how he and “some of the guys” had driven to Hood River and gone windsurfing on their day off.
“Did your lead singer go?” I said. In a million years I couldn't imagine Paul windsurfing.
“Yeah. And Eliza, the reason I'm calling…” Michael's voice was dull and careful. “Paul's really trying to get on with his life, and you calling up, leaving him messages isn't going to help him do that.”