I can’t offer anyone a real goodbye at the end of the night. When people hug me, I insist I’ll see them soon, I’ll see them around. Julie squeezes me hard. This is the end of our life together. I took all my things out of our apartment this morning and crammed them into my car. There is only a little hole for me to squeeze into tomorrow and drive to California.
“I hate this,” she says. “I hate that I’m not going to find all your dirty dishes in the sink tomorrow night.”
“Please don’t make me cry. If I start, I won’t stop.” But I feel numb, nowhere close to tears.
She kisses me on both cheeks and leaves them wet. She promises to visit in the fall. It doesn’t feel real, my future, all that I have worked so hard to make happen. But the future always sits uneasily with me. I’ve never been able to really trust it. I’ve trained myself not to look forward to things very often. And I’m tired. I’m bone tired. Part of me just wants to curl up on a couch and sleep for a few years.
Dan is the last to leave. From his car he asks, “Can I use that bit about your father not going to the funeral?” He means in a story. “Please? I’ve already wrung my own childhood dry.”
“Go ahead,” I say, and then he is gone, just a hand out the car window, and then that is gone, too. He was my very first friend here.
Jonathan and I stack the dishes in the kitchen and lie on his bed in our clothes. It’s how we’ve always done it, like teenagers, as if each night we spend together is our first. My old boyfriend David used to have to brush his teeth and change into a clean T-shirt and fresh underwear before he got near the bed, and liked me to do the same. I couldn’t stand the sterile marriedness of it. I make sure I don’t always sleep on the same side of Jonathan’s bed when I stay over. I don’t want ritual or routine in a relationship. Ever.
Jonathan traces a finger along my temple and around my ear. When he takes off his glasses you can see that he has little stripes of tawny gold in his dark brown eyes. “You were so funny when people were toasting you. You looked like they were giving you an enema.”
“I hate watching people have to come up with nice things to say.” I kiss his finger, the tender pink pad of it. “Thank you for the party.”
“You’re so welcome, my Daley bread.”
We kiss hard, our hands reaching for bare skin. He lifts a breast out of my bra and into his mouth and my groin starts to ache. I wonder how long our desire will last. We’ve signed a year’s lease in California. Will we still touch each other so hungrily after a year of living together?
He pulls me on top of him. I feel him hard beneath me under his jeans. I push against him lightly, then harder, feeling the rush, the swell, the want. “Everything on earth should be just this simple,” I say. I take his earlobe in my teeth and feel him moan. “Tell me what it’s like again,” I whisper, still grinding against him, feeling the exact shape of him through our clothes.
It takes him a second to find his voice. “You know it’s Paloma Street when you see the big fence covered in bright red flowers. And then five houses down you see a tree out in front. Enormous. Maybe a eucalyptus. Please take off your clothes.”
“Tell me about the front door.” He flew out to California last month and found the cottage for us.
“Yellow. It’s yellow.”
“And the little window in the door?”
“The color of pale green sea glass. Please.”
I pull off my jeans, clumsily. I’m like a drunk when I’m horny, completely without fine motor skills. Jonathan scoots himself down and pushes my legs apart. He grins up at me, then slides a finger up inside me. I’m wet and swollen and it goes in easily. He pushes it in and slides it out and pushes it in again. Unable to wait, I press myself to his mouth, feel the warmth of his tongue on my clit and the finger drawing back and forth inside me. I can feel the orgasm now, assembling in the distance then moving swiftly in, opening up, opening me up, coming, coming closer, coming to split me down the middle.
But the sudden ring startles me. “Just the phone, tweety,” he says without lifting his head.
Three and a half rings, then the machine catches it. The orgasm veers off. My brother comes on. “Jesus Christ, Daley. Where the fuck are you?” There’s a panic in his voice I’ve never heard before.
“Don’t,” Jonathan says as I pull away from him. “Please don’t.”
But I’m already across the room, reaching for the receiver. “Garvey, what’s wrong?”
“Oh fucking Christ. There you are.”
“What’s going on?”
“Oh my God. Dad. Dad is what’s going on.”
“Is he okay?” I feel that cool whiteness that happens just before you hear someone is dead.
Garvey starts laughing or crying, I’m not sure which. “No, he is not okay or I wouldn’t have been leaving you so many goddamn messages.”
I look at the machine. A red 5 flashes. “Please calm down and tell me—”
“You haven’t been here. You have no idea what I’ve seen in the past—”
“Garvey, you are scaring the shit out of me. What’s going on?”
“Catherine left him.”
He’s alive. That’s all I care about. “When?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a week ago.”
I wait for the rest.
“He is a fucking mess.”
I snort. “Tell me about it.”
“No, Daley. He’s totally lost his shit. He’s threatening to kill all his dogs. And Hugh fired him. It was Hugh’s wife who called me. He’s drunk ‘round the clock. He’s unrecognizable.”
“Unrecognizable would be Dad sober. Dad drunk is not at all foreign to me.” All those years that I had to go up to Myrtle Street every weekend, every vacation, while Garvey showed up for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.
“Daley.” His voice cracks. I haven’t heard him like this since Mom died. “You gotta come here and help me out.”
“What? No, Garvey. I’m driving to California tomorrow.” He knows all about Berkeley. He calls us Malibu Smart Barbie and Black Marxist Ken.
“He’s talked about offing himself.”
“Oh, come on. He’d destroy every living thing on this planet before he’d kill himself.”
“No, Daley, you have to believe me. I think he might hurt himself. I need some backup here.”
“I’m not coming. Not right now. I have a job that’s about to start in California.”
“Stop saying California like it’s so important. I’m in Massachusetts and I need your help with our father. Two, three days, that’s all I’m asking. Just to kind of settle him down. You’re good with him.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You are.”
“I couldn’t even get there tomorrow. I’ve got to send out this article I just finished and have lunch with my advisor and—”
“I know. You’ve very busy. Get here when you can. Just for a day or two.”
“Goddammit, Garvey.”
“Thank you,” he says. “Jesus Christ, Daley, thank you.”
Jonathan is sitting on the side of the bed, his head in his hands. I sit beside him. I have no clothes on.
“I have to, Jon. I have to. Garvey sounds really freaked out.”
“He always sounds freaked out.”
“Not like this. My stepmother has taken off and my father is falling apart.”
“What can you do in two days to fix that? Nothing.”