Ask Again Later Page 15

  “What are you thinking?” Paul asks.

  “Ask again later,” I say.

  He waits a beat. “What are you thinking?” Paul asks again.

  “I’d tell you, but you’d mock me,” I say.

  “Mocking people can be very entertaining,” Paul says.

  I consider it. I’ve had this question ricocheting around my brain for a few weeks now; when I was close to asking it, I’d wise up. It’s a test: I want to see if he’ll lie or tell the truth. Testing people is a terrible thing, and it’s my compulsion.

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay. Okay…yeah. Um, would you ever…hit on me? Like at a party or something?” I ask.

  He smiles. “Patient-doctor relationships aren’t ethical,” Paul says.

  “If it were ethical, it’d hardly be exciting,” I say. Nitwit! “What I’m saying is, what if I wasn’t your patient? Pretend we’re total strangers and we meet at a party—then, would you hit on me?”

  “Meeting you at a cocktail party—I’d be thinking that I’m twenty years older than you,” Paul says.

  “And to your thinking that’s a good thing or a bad thing?” I say.

  He smiles.

  “Okay, we’re at a party, and I’m offering sex, no strings attached?” I say.

  “It would be rude to say no to that,” Paul says.

  I’m satisfied with this. I’ve begged the guy to hypothetically consider sleeping with me. And I’m satisfied? But he’s not.

  “The truth is, I’d be more likely to ‘hit on you’ in real life. I know you. At a party, you’d just be one more person,” Paul says.

  “You’d really hit on me?” I say incredulously. “You might want to investigate that self-destructive streak before the inquest. I like you. I really do. But I will not lie under oath.”

  My conversations with him are always directed at the wrong person. I need to transfer this longing back where it belongs. To Sam. As safe as it is, I can’t keep hitting on my shrink.

  “I just realized what I’ve been doing,” I say. “I need to call Sam.”

  “Good,” Paul says. “Are you going to?”

  “Eventually,” I say. “We both know I like to put off the things that are good for me.”

  “I’ve noticed. I wasn’t sure you had,” Paul says.

  “Yeah. Mammogram…Sam…” I say.

  Finding Religion

  IT’S EIGHT-THIRTY on Sunday morning. I’m running out of the park, and walk over to Madison to pick up a post-jog latte to simulate that runner’s high I’ve heard so much about. I see Marjorie. She looks great. If this were a year ago, I’d assume she was dressed from the night before, and picking up a bagel on her way home to sleep it off. In the way that my mother is a morning person, my sister is the polar opposite.

  “Hey!” I call.

  “Hey, sweetie,” Marjorie says.

  “You look great,” I say.

  “It’s the microdermabrasion. My cheeks feel like a baby’s ass. And the spa offers child care!” Marjorie says, smiling. “Well, off to church!”

  “Right,” I say, wink-wink, “off to church.”

  “Seriously,” Marjorie says.

  “No,” I say. “No. I thought ‘church’ was code for ‘sleep off hangover.’ I’m surprised to see you awake and dressed.”

  “That’s what happens when you have a baby. Besides, we’ve found the Lord,” Marjorie says. “Who knew he’d be attending the city’s hottest nursery school? We have to be model citizens for two years ’til he’s in. We’re greeters today.”

  “Doesn’t Little Malcolm have legacy status at at least two nursery schools?” I ask.

  “Oh, honey, the world has changed. We need a safety school,” Marjorie says.

  Marjorie has a baby, someone else to consider, and I don’t. I do, of course—my mother. She is my emotional seat-filler. She gets to be the most important person in my life until I get more courage and put an end to this procrastination.

  Marjorie doesn’t know where her child will be admitted to nursery school to play with blocks, meet tiny friends, and nap on linoleum. And she’s apparently so consumed by it she’s willing to greet people on the steps of the church on Sunday morning. Not bad for someone who would fail the simplest of drug tests.

  I’m a lawyer. I can mount a defense for my procrastination. I mailed a postcard to Sam. I left a message for him just before my pizza date with Will. In each case, he didn’t respond. I saw him having lunch with, gasp, a woman. When I called from the hospital, he was entertaining. These are all great reasons never to contact him again. Except they’re actually not a defense at all but a string of pathetic excuses. Why would he respond to a postcard? All that postcard told him was that I haven’t learned anything. I reach out from a distance. I keep myself planted safely far away. No risk. No return.

  The Things We Do for Love

  I’M IN THE KITCHEN at the office. I am opening the fridge to put some milk away when I notice how out of order the whole inside is. I’ve seen the same yogurt in there for at least two weeks. I start tossing things out quickly, as if they are bombs about to explode. It’s very satisfying. The riddance of things we don’t need.

  My father walks in. He puts a coffee cup in the sink. He looks inside the cabinet where we keep the trash bags. Then he looks over his shoulder, then back at the cabinet. He grabs several handfuls of small wastebasket-sized trash bags and shuffles them into the box of tall kitchen bags. There is some obvious muscle memory happening here—it’s all very slick and practiced.

  “Why do you do that?” I ask.

  “What?” Dad says.

  “Mess up all the trash bags and mix the different sizes together,” I say.

  He considers whether he should tell the truth or pretend I am mistaken about what I just saw.

  “So she knows I’m thinking about her,” Dad says.

  “Why not just tell Wendy you’re thinking about her?” I say.

  “It’s not how we do things,” Dad says.

  I always thought my parents communicated on the indirect plane because they didn’t know how else to communicate. I was half right. My mother never knew how to communicate, and my father was willing to live in her world and learn her strange language. The language rooted in strange acts of intimacy and no direct conversations whatsoever. They’d live happily if the world was an impressionist painting, not a realist painting. The same language he’s using to seduce the fair Wendy.

  Sharp Right Turn

  WE’RE SEATED AT his table at the Club. It’s been several months since our first lunch here. There is a comfort in our routine. Every Friday: lunch, drinks, chat.

  “This is nice, isn’t it?” Dad says.

  He reaches for my hand and squeezes it.

  “Yes,” I say.

  It is nice. No wonder I felt like a stranger growing up in my mother’s house. My emotional compass more closely resembles my father’s than my mother’s.

  He is eating a Cobb salad. He takes a sip of his martini.

  He waves Martin the waiter over to the table.

  “Marty, this doesn’t taste good to me today. I’ll have a wine spritzer,” Dad says.

  “Right away, Mr. Rhode,” Martin says. He dashes off with the subpar beverage in hand. He moves swiftly, as if handing off a baton in a relay race.

  “A spritzer? Kind of a girl drink, don’t you think?” I say.

  “Maybe so,” my father says, disconnected. Not playing along. “Maybe so.”

  He takes a prescription bottle out of his jacket pocket. He puts a pill in his mouth and taps his fingers on the table. Because he’s discovered that tapping his fingers ushers the medication into his bloodstream more quickly? The color drains out of his face.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure,” Dad says.

  “Have some more water,” I say. “Do you want me to get you to a doctor?”

  He taps his fingers on the table again.

  “Emily, don’t…” Dad says
.

  “Don’t what?” I ask.

  He slumps forward in slow motion, and I am frozen in my chair. Then I stand up just as his head and shoulders land on the table.

  “Dad!? Help!” I say loudly, or yell, I’m not quite sure. Is there anyone else in the room? Are they all still eating? I don’t know. Because I can’t take my eyes off of my father. His body resting heavily in front of me.

  Within seconds Martin and another waiter have him laid out on the floor. They perform CPR. Paramedics arrive.

  An adrenaline shot is given. He seems to revive and sit almost upright for a few seconds, only to collapse again. At the Club and in the ambulance, they spend close to an hour trying to convince his heart to restart.

  Don’t save the grand gestures for the end, I keep thinking. Just don’t do it. You might die tomorrow; you might not. But avoid your family and then try to catch up at the very end, and life just won’t allow it.

  I Need Order

  WHAT ARE YOU supposed to do when someone dies? First order of business, I’m guessing, is to forget all about “supposed to.” Perhaps forget about “supposed to” for forever, in fact. These are the lessons you learn in those pivotal moments.

  I’m sitting at my desk in my apartment. I took a cab home but I don’t remember the ride. I notice some smudges on the phone, and can’t help but clean it. Wendy taught me this. Always clean the phone, and you’ll almost never get the cold that’s going around. When I lift the receiver to use the phone, I smell Aqua Velva. He must have used this phone that night he got keyed into my apartment.

  I call my mom to tell her the news.

  “Dad is dead,” I say.

  “Jim is dead?” Mom asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I’ll come right over,” Mom says. “You make some tea.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  That stupid jerk, I keep thinking. He’s dead. Popsicles for breakfast. “I’m a bachelor.” Childish jerk.

  I don’t make tea. I don’t move from where I’m seated at my desk. He’s gone again.

  My mom arrives. She has a shopping bag. She’s always prepared, always looking for reasons to shop.

  “You haven’t been home much in the past few months,” Mom says. “I thought you might need some things.”

  “You’re right. Thanks,” I say.

  “What happened?” Mom says.

  “We were having lunch. He had a heart attack,” I say.

  “You were there?” Mom asks.

  I nod. I can’t say the word yes without crying.

  My mother starts crying. I start crying.

  “I’m just so…mad. I’m so mad at him,” I say. “I can’t help it. I’m just furious. What the hell was he waiting for these past twenty years? You wouldn’t believe the way people treat him at work. They adore him. I was starting to adore him. They have no idea we’ve barely seen each other for the last twenty years.”

  My mother hugs me. She doesn’t know what to say.

  “I’m really going to miss him,” I say. “I’ve always missed him.”

  Divine Bar Snacks

  I’M SUPPOSED TO MEET Perry for dinner. I can’t bear the thought of having to talk tonight. I can’t bear the thought of staying home alone. Marjorie is skiing, so she’s not an option.

  “Phil’s coming over tonight to watch a movie. Join us,” Mom says.

  Really? Phil can’t take a rain check for one night? My father is dead!

  “I had plans to meet Perry,” I say. “I guess I’ll just keep them.”

  “I’ll tell you what, you can choose the movie,” Mom says.

  “It’s not about the movie,” I say.

  Perry and I meet at the Carlyle in the Café. The waiter comes to the table and places snacks and drink menus on the table.

  “We’ll have two glasses of the same smack that couple is having,” Perry says.

  “Red wine?” the waiter asks.

  “Yes,” Perry says. The waiter walks away.

  “This place has got the most divine bar snacks,” Perry says. “This silver snack caddy makes me feel good about eating salted nuts. Not the cheap nuts, either. Not peanuts. The good nuts. Macadamias, pistachios. They wouldn’t think of serving something we had to shell ourselves. P.S. What the hell happened to you? You look like your dog died.”

  “My father,” I say.

  “Yeah? What about Jim? What crazy life lesson are you extrapolating from being his receptionist this week?” Perry asks, throwing back a handful of nuts.

  “My father died,” I say.

  There is an audible gasp.

  It gets more real each minute. He’s dead.

  “I am just so humiliated. I can’t believe that you let me go on and on about salted snacks,” Perry says.

  How often do you get a second chance? Every day. How often do you take the second chance? Almost never. Things were kind of odd and extraordinary while they lasted.

  Eulogy

  IT’S A MISTAKE to wait until someone dies to eulogize him. It’s too late.

  I sit at my desk not knowing what to write. This letter is for me, not him. I don’t want to leave things left unsaid. I don’t want to forget how I feel this time.

  Dear Dad,

  Most of my life when I’ve thought about you, I’ve felt some vague pity for you and for what you’ve missed—seeing Marjorie and me grow up.

  It’s only after spending time with you that I’ve realized it was easier to imagine what you were missing out on, because it was too painful to imagine what I was missing. I was just getting to know you. Things were just starting to become more clear to me.

  I’ll miss the formality in your voice when we shared a cab in the morning, and the way you called the cabdriver “sir.” I’ll miss listening in on your phone calls and eavesdropping on your relationship with Wendy.

  Your desertion was part of you, but it wasn’t all of you. And what I’ve learned about you, I’ve really liked.

  When we had lunch at the Club that first day, you told me you never knew your father. I guess we had a lot in common. There have been surprises every day that I’ve known you, but what surprised me the most was that you were knowable. A few months ago, you were a mystery.

  I can’t help wonder if the past six months will slip away and turn into a mirage. Your return, my job as the receptionist, our lunches at the Club, your taste in wacky socks, and your polite lack of interest in my love life…When I was five and you left, I forgot what it was like to have a father. I grew up making myself forget. I don’t want to forget this time.

  Funeral Food

  MY MOTHER HAS always loved parties. She can control what people eat, what they see, what they drink…and at the same time transform her dining room into a circus tent or planetarium.

  “I think it’s a good idea to have people come back here after the service,” Mom says. She is remarkably calm.

  “Yes,” I say. “I think so, too. Do we have this catered? What do we do?” I ask.

  “Oh, you let me take care of that,” Mom says.

  What wasn’t in the form of a casserole was in the form of a ball. This being the only way to describe the food served after my father’s funeral.

  Within a week of my mother’s diagnosis, she started interviewing caterers for her own postfuneral luncheon. She wanted the theme to be “whimsy” and for people to feel “happy” that she had lived. Out of guilt for making a full recovery, she hired the same caterers for my father’s funeral—but slashed the budget in half.

  “It only seems fair to hire them,” Mom says. “After that show they put on with canapé tasting and wine pairings. That was positively embarrassing. I had to hire them after that.”

  The caterers seemed more than a little relieved that someone had died.

  Marjorie opted to boycott this gathering in my father’s honor. Most of my life I’ve resented that the rules were different for her than for me. I guess I never considered how much you might miss if you’re always given the opt
ion to opt out.

  I considered borrowing some Xanax from my mother’s medicine cabinet to get through the day. I decided against it because it seems a lot like sweeping dirt from one part of a room to another. You can make it disappear from your line of vision temporarily, but at some point you just have to deal with it. Now is that time.

  Will puts his arm around me. He kisses my cheek.

  “I’m going to miss him,” Will says. “He was a good man.”

  “Yes,” I say. “He was.”

  “And a maniac on the squash court,” Will says.

  Wendy walks into the living room. We should have let her plan this. She’s an excellent coordinator. Den mother. She’s holding what looks like a piña colada. There is an umbrella in it.

  “Is that a piña colada?” I ask.

  “I’ve been here twenty minutes, and it’s my second one,” Wendy says. “Jim would have loved this.”

  Wendy is wearing black. Her eyes are teary and puffy, and she’s obviously been crying off and on since Friday. She will miss my father more than most other people in this room today. That’s the tricky part about life. Where is Wendy going to meet my father’s replacement? The man she can love but stay distantly safe from? She’s cultivated her ideal relationship for fifteen years, and she’s only forty. Where will she meet another man she’s tempted to confess her love to on a daily basis because if he dies tomorrow, she’d wish she had? Does she wake up every morning wishing she’d confessed her love for him? Wondering what might have happened? Will she have to break form and find a new kind of love? Am I talking about Wendy or myself? Or a combination of the two?

  “Especially the umbrellas. It’s a cute idea,” Wendy says.

  “Seems oddly festive, doesn’t it?” I say.

  “Why shouldn’t it be? He was a really happy guy,” Wendy says.

  She’s right. He was. I’m relieved she remembers him as a “happy guy.”

  “I know that you meant a lot to him,” I say.