Paul was not surprised when he answered the door. He smiled weakly and pointed his index finger at the cleft of his chin like, Go ahead, I deserve it. Instead I fell into him and he raised me like his new bride, placed me on the smaller of the two couches. On the coffee table was half a fifth of fine whiskey and on the other couch was Caroline, covered in a beige fleece throw blanket, her mouth open, one arm hanging off the couch, one sock on, all elegance and confidence and mystery gone. I reached for the bottle and drank deeply; Paul nodded in encouragement and gestured for me to pass it. We didn’t speak, just drank and sighed, and I don’t remember falling asleep, only gaining consciousness with the sounds of the park below Paul’s window, the shrieks of children playing games. He and Caroline were both gone, and a note under the empty bottle detailed that there were strawberries and eggs in the refrigerator and that we should most certainly talk later if I felt strong enough.
~ ~ ~
Sundays in our neighborhood: brash, bright, infectious. Whole generations of Mexican families in their church best, the smallest children fussing with their shellacked hair, mariachi bands, orchid plants of every size and color at special prices, street sales, vendors pushing their jingling carts of coconut ice cream bars or churros or bacon-wrapped hot dogs. The smells and sounds Jackson and I delighted in waking up to, an alarm clock of life if there ever was one. I waded through them unnoticed and saw, upon reaching our building, that our bedroom window was open and the curtains in their simple ritual of floating in and out of it.
Jackson had removed whatever had been blocking the door, just as he’d removed himself. He had taken the things that he considered definitively his; some of them I hadn’t even realized he recognized as clearly his until they were missing, and felt both guilty for not knowing and foolish for thinking they’d also been mine.
Our yellow cotton bedspread, on which I’d sewed a large patch of Jackson’s childhood cowboy sheets, was now just yellow with a large interior rectangle of brighter yellow, some of the thread of the stitches still clinging. It would have been less of an insult if he’d just taken the whole thing, would have left me cold more physically.
What had he done with the fish? How could he possibly have taken all of them? Pictures formed in my head of Jackson distraught and carrying our fish in plastic bags, clutching them to his heart, asking then insisting people on the street move out of his way.
Some of the missing items seemed arbitrary. The bleach-stained bath mat, the antlers I’d found at a flea market and hung on our closet door as a coatrack. I wondered about where he’d gone but more so how. Had he stayed up all night frantically assembling what he considered his until the U-Haul office opened? It was possible, but the image in my head was that of a one-man band, limbs bent in odd ways to accommodate the various objects, already vestiges of our life together. How quickly other parties decide which is past.
~ ~ ~
What about the fish?” I demanded, like the answer might reverse the past week. Like surely if I could locate the fish and bring them home, Jackson would follow out of default.
“Alive. Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“Right. Mostly,” James said, already bored by the subject.
Eight days after the morning after, James called me on his graveyard shift at the hotel in the city where he’d worked for nearly half a decade, the place he’d graduated to given the glowing recommendations from the seedy franchise motel in our hometown. It was three thirty in the morning, and though I was awake, I feigned a hypnagogic calm that indicated I was still a normal, nondistraught human being who crawled into bed at a regular hour and woke eager for the day. Of course he probably didn’t believe me, but pretended for my sake. A large part of loving someone is knowing when to pretend and when not to; “make-believe” is a game children play but adults wrote the rules to. Pretend, Jackson would say while we whispered in the postbedtime dark, pretend we’re in the ocean and have to live our lives here. Pretend we’ve got to convince the sharks we’re good. Pretend … pretend I’ve got a sword the king of the fishes gave me. Pretend you’re scared.
“How you doin’?” he said, and I regretted his dropping of the “g”; this was not a time for casual speech. I wanted hard consonants, harsh pronunciation. I wanted every word.
“I am … that’s a good question.” And I thought about it. “I’m just as you’d expect?”
James snorted. While what I wanted was a sigh or a cluck of the tongue or other subtle mark of sympathy, the snort required an honesty I appreciated.
“How are you?” I retorted meanly, but he didn’t take the bait. I could tell by his breath that he was outside smoking, the cordless phone straining to connect the two of us, the cars on Lombard passing over the speed limit, still reeling from their stint on the freeway.
“Look, kiddo, I don’t even want to tell you this, not supposed to … but … listen. He’s fine, all right? He’s, you know, respirating. And eating, sometimes. He’s fine. But Ida, he doesn’t want to talk to you, and I mean doesn’t. He had me take his phone away on account of all your calls and—”
(On the other end, across the city, I was silent. The phone call, the mention of him, made all of it real, made the past week where I’d sat in our haunted apartment barely eating or showering and wearing exclusively a shirt and pair of boxer briefs he’d left behind, the result of an actual event and not just some error in communications.)
“And honestly, I wish you’d stop. Think you should. Look, it’s not my place, or maybe it is — I’ve known both of you my whole life but Ida? What did you expect? How did you think he’d react?”
I interrupted him there although I knew I didn’t, hadn’t, wouldn’t have any authority over the conversation. I had, in the last week, lost any power, and in a strange way it was freeing, in a sense it allowed for behavior previously barred. I was permitted icy single-word answers, listlessness, the inability to listen.
“You know, it’s funny,” I lashed, “how you’re suddenly a big piece of our common history again. After for years I had to tiptoe around mentioning our past. And kiddo? Don’t call me kiddo. I was writing in cursive while you were still accidentally pissing yourself, pretty much.” Which was a lie, and both of us knew that.
“Ida, just listen. It’s the same. He’s never appreciated having decisions made for him and I know … I know you guys have been together forever. I know it must feel like you’re an extension of him and that you can, but you’re not. And you can’t.”
“He’s at your apartment, then.”
“Right. Yes. But not for long, and I promised I wouldn’t … don’t come here, okay? I’m sorry for how you must be feeling. But I think he’s probably right. What you did was—”
• • •
I didn’t go there. Didn’t much go anywhere. Conducted experiments in starvation and isolation. Paul called nonstop and baked and cooked and left feasts outside my door, which I stubbornly refused with the exception of the corn bread he dropped off on day three. He had wrapped it in a red-and-white-checkered linen cloth and tied a blue ribbon around it. It was a portion large enough for three, and still warm: I held it to my chest as if it were a child and lay on the couch with it and wished Jackson could see. It tasted perfect and made the whole room smell like fresh butter, but I’d waited too long to eat and attacked it like a savage; he hadn’t used enough flour and it fell to pieces. Eating off the floor is oddly satisfying. Honest.