Parts Unknown

Chapter 11





I had never forgotten our last day together. Monday, August 25, early, time tumbled backward. Josh’s room was completely tidy. Already, no one lived there anymore. My one duffel was packed and ready. Once again, I took the tube to Bloomsbury, this time exiting with Josh at Russell Square. It was tricky, carrying the enormous rubber plant and my bulging duffel up and down tube escalators, and dragging everything through the street on the way to the student residence hall. Just focusing on my arms hurting as I dragged that stupid duffel was a relief, instead of having to think, to be sad, to know Josh was leaving too, just a few hours from now. But at last, arms aching, we arrived at an imposing brownstone. Students were hurrying in and out, many with parents in tow, unloading suitcases and CD players. I had no interest in meeting any of them. I obtained my key from the mailroom on the ground floor, then climbed three winding flights of stairs with Josh. There appeared to be no elevator.

My room was palatial—an enormous space in a top floor annex, a space bigger than the entire downstairs area of Josh’s flat. And all mine—no roommate. The walls were painted flat white, though, and the carpet was an industrial puce color. The room featured a metal-frame single bed, a well-used wooden desk with knife-gouged initials in it, and a metal chair.

“Get out!” Josh admired. “Look at the view!”

I stared out the window. Spindly treetops, buildings, a bookstore far below. Far off, the spire of Big Ben. My life in this room flashing forward over a whole year. “I’m glad we brought the plant,” I said, managing a watery smile. “Brightens this room up a little—it’s so huge and empty.

“Well—let’s go,” I continued. “No point staying here. And we’ve got the whole rest of the day till your plane leaves.” Then turned to him. “Where do you want to go?”

“The Heath, of course.”

It was a beautiful August morning. The sun was bright, the sky a robin’s egg blue. We made out on the tube, all the way to Hampstead, not caring what anyone thought, offended newspapers rustling all around us. Like always, it was just us, in the world, as we walked down the gracious Hampstead roads laced with trees growing together over the sides of the street, meeting in the middle to become an utterly green, protective canopy. Past the shiny black sign at the Heath’s entrance, trying to force rules on London’s last wild place:



Corporation of London

Hampstead Heath

Horse Riders Keep to Designated Rides

No Litter or Dumping



We strolled by a strange zoo—flamingoes and deer behind chain-link fences. At last to an open area, empty but for us, a big green meadow surrounded by trees. There was too much green everywhere; I was overwhelmed. I lay with my head pillowed on Josh’s lap, and we stared into each others’ eyes for a long time, the way people do in romance novels. My green eyes into his hazel ones, each of us reflected in miniature, over and over. We lay down and kissed for a while, our bodies fitting together perfectly. I couldn’t imagine a future where he wasn’t right there, holding me. “How am I going to manage without you for a whole year?” I lamented. We’d planned: next summer I’d move wherever he was going to be after graduation. We’d be together for the summer, at least. I couldn’t bring myself to think of another whole year at Dawson College after that even, just waiting for my real future to begin.

He didn’t answer. We kissed some more. I dug in my backpack and retrieved bread, cheese, and soda, echoing our first meal at the Heath. And a present for him—I’d secretly painted a miniature portrait of myself, and framed it in a tiny frame. “Open this on the plane,” I instructed. But he tore the paper off anyhow, and his eyes teared up. “Well, since we’re giving presents . . .”

He fished around in his pockets, and came up with a crumpled piece of lined yellow paper. “This is for you.” It was a poem:



My love

Moments

Let me hold them always

Never slipping away

And yet, they move—I grasp,

Touching a dream.

Eyes closed against daylight

I whisper three words always through the dark.



I cried then, although I’d promised myself not to, remembering the two boys, and their blood oath. Remembering more. Remembering the things I hadn’t spoken about. I trusted Josh completely. If I was going to tell anyone, it had to be him. Soon. This afternoon. Not yet.

I closed my eyes. We must have dozed for a while, arms holding each other tight, and then the sun was lower, a late-afternoon breeze stirring us awake. He fished in his backpack and retrieved his camera, holding it at arms’ length and pointing it back at us. “Smile!”

I couldn’t. It was now, or never. “Remember the first day we met? That night, at the Chinese restaurant? There was something I wanted to tell you then, and I didn’t,” I said.

He looked at me seriously. “I’m all ears.”

“It’s about my uncle,” I said. And I told him the whole story.

Uncle Paulie had been my portly, widowed great-uncle—a sad-faced jowly man. He lived alone in a house that smelled of cat pee, and wore polyester pants that almost reached the top of his sagging chest.

Mom and Dad would drive Alex and me there every Saturday when we were in elementary school, and we would visit for the whole afternoon with Uncle Paulie. My parents were nicer to him than they ever were to anyone. They made Alex and me talk with him for hours, long horrible conversations with lengthy pauses. He wanted to know everything: about what we did, every minute of the day, what our favorite soda was, our favorite TV shows, what clothes we’d worn that week, even what color underwear. He especially liked hearing about our friends. His fleshy lower lip would glisten as I described my few third-grade girlfriends. Sometimes he asked to see pictures of them, and I’d bring their school photos the next week. He’d always forget to give me the photos back, and when I’d ask for them weeks later, he’d exhume them, moist, from his nightstand drawer.

Mom and Dad would always discreetly be in another room, leaving us alone with him for the longest time, because really, he only seemed to want to talk to us. “Uncle Paulie just loves children,” Mom often said, but it was horrible, every week, Alex and me alone with him in that musty, dark room, he moving his armchair ever closer to where we were sitting on the sofa, until at last, when his thick knees were almost touching ours, Mom or Dad would breeze in and tell us it was time to leave.

So, he died when I was ten. And he had a lot of money, it turned out.

The week after the funeral, we’d see Mom in the kitchen in the mornings, her eyes red-rimmed, and she’d start drinking big glasses of Gallo wine when we got home from school. That week, whenever Dad got home from work, Mom would walk him downstairs to the office room on our house’s lower level, her jaw set, her face furious. We’d hear angry whispers and little shrieking sobs that Alex and I, our ears to the floor vent in the living room, could vaguely make out. We discovered, parsing the muffled sentences, that they had been angling for Uncle Paulie to leave them his money. That was why we visited him every week, and why every week Mom brought a homemade ham and cheese quiche and rocky road ice cream—his favorites. Why they made me and Alex sit with him, because he liked children so much. No one else ever went to see him. Just us.

And he had left us his money—all of it. But the funny thing was, Uncle Paulie had left his money to us. Not to our parents—to me and Alex.

Ultimately, that’s what got us away, all the way across the country to our respective colleges that our parents could never have afforded. And the worst thing was, whenever I saw the tuition bills I had to think of Uncle Paulie, and the drool on his lip, and the questions, all the questions. But actually that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was what my parents did. Forcing us to go. Making us pawns in their plan. Caring more about that filthy money than they cared for our well-being, maybe than they cared for us.

I finished my story, panting a little.

Josh placed his hand over mine. “But don’t you see? It’s got a happy ending,” he said comfortingly. “He gave you the freedom to leave, to try something new. If you remember anything, remember that.”

“Yeah, but of all people, I have to owe my freedom to him?” I asked. “I hate having to think about him. Because thinking about Uncle Paulie makes me hate my parents too.”

Josh held my hand tightly. “Do you feel you’re far enough away now?”

“From what?”

“From home. From your parents. From what happened with Uncle Paulie.”

“Oh! Yes, definitely.” I gave him a trembling smile. “You’re home. This is home. My family—they’re a million miles away. But it’s all over now. You’re leaving. And I waited so long to tell you—I shouldn’t have waited.”

“It’s okay. I’m honored, that you told me. I know it was hard.”

“I wanted to. You’re right, it’s so hard, to talk about it. Alex and I never did, really. No one talks about it in my family, they just pretend it never happened. It’s been weighing me down, all these years.”

“Your silence gives it power. You can scatter those memories out in the world, now. They can’t hurt you anymore. And nothing happened—I was expecting something, you know, awful to happen, the way you built it up.”

“No,” I whispered. “I guess not. And it feels better, now that I’ve told you.”

“I’m glad, sweetheart. And I hate to say this”—he checked his watch—“But it’s time to go. But you’ll call me, and we’ll email, and if there’s more you want to say, we’ll work it out that way.”

“My own personal psychiatrist. Thanks.”

I breathed deeply as we walked hand in hand to the Finchley Road tube stop, even though it would take us a great deal out of our way—we had to change trains at Farringdon, and then go back north to Camden Town. Which was silly really, but each minute wasted kept us together. It was over. It was true: nothing had happened. It was all the possibility, the menace, the betrayal—that was what hurt the most. They wouldn’t have let anything happen, would they? I didn’t know. I never asked. They always came into that musty, dim room just in time. And after he died, no one spoke of it again, letting it all vanish—poof—as if it had never happened. But Alex and I never forgot.

I should have told Josh sooner. Now he was leaving, taking my secret with him, and to him it wasn’t so big, I could tell, when it had meant so much to me and Alex and for so long. It was huge to me, but it didn’t affect Josh in the least. My troubles, my horrible memories, they weren’t his, and he wasn’t interested in making them his. I shouldn’t have told him at all.

I needed to put it all away again, the memories, and Josh’s reaction—far away, because all that mattered was London, and right now, holding Josh’s hand. Nothing else, damn it.

My mind was in a quandary as we returned to Camden Town at last, extremely late by that point, and dashed toward Bonny Street. We were in such a rush, grabbing forgotten items—toothpaste, a mateless sock under the bed—then it was four o’clock, suddenly, and his flight was leaving at seven. I wanted to say goodbye to Dov and Trevor, but they were out, the only sound in the flat strange suction noises emerging from Boris’s room. On the kitchen table as we made a last sweep, I saw a brown paper bag with my name scribbled on it. Surprised, I pulled it open, to find three crocheted hacky sacks.

I whirled around, silently saying goodbye to everything, breathing for the last time the lingering smell of Trevor’s stew wafting from the stovetop. The back door was ajar, floating in aromas from the damp late-afternoon air—that persistent cloud of nicotine, mixed with the unmistakable scent of fresh-cut grass. Finally, the gardener had come by.

It was surprising, how quickly a whole life in London could be dismantled. Josh had boxed and shipped his books a few days ago, so we just needed to take the two big gray suitcases and a backpack, which we’d left under that black phone near the front door.

A lengthy wait in the Camden Town station, then changing trains at Leicester Square for the Victoria Line—my life the past three and a half weeks seeming a series of tube stops, each framing some precious memory in subway tile. As the train jolted toward the airport, it seemed impossible that less than a month ago I had emerged from the opposite direction.

Hammersmith, Turnham Green, Acton Town, South Ealing. Squeezing Josh’s hand in a death grip, counting in my head—in months, and then weeks, and then days—how long it would be till I saw him again. The number so impossibly huge I couldn’t fathom it.

Northfields, Boston Manor, Osterley. Outside, rushing through the green.



Hounslow West, Hatton Cross.



Heathrow Airport.



The British Airways check-in line at Terminal 1 moved too fast, the ticketing agents too efficient. Beyond us a large sign admonished, “Ticketed Passengers Only Past This Point.”

I reached toward Josh, trying to memorize his face with my fingers, my hands stroking it all over in an effort to remember its angles and planes, the way light caught on his cheekbones and the tip of his nose, how his eyebrows angled just so. If you mixed cadmium yellow medium, rose madder genuine, burnt sienna, and just a touch of cerulean blue—that would be the color of his face. His hair, yellow ochre and burnt umber; phthalocyanine green mixed with alizarin crimson for the lowlights, maybe. If I thought in color, maybe I wouldn’t be so sad.

He stroked my hair, his hands like a benediction. “Have a happy year,” he whispered finally, kissing me for the last time. “I love you.” His lips would be tough to get right—transparent red oxide over aureolin yellow, ultramarine blue for the shadow at the center.

“I love you too.” I could barely hear my own voice. “I’ll always love you, Josh.”

“I know. Me too.”

And he was gone, loping with a slightly uncoordinated gait toward the escalators—titanium white, lamp black—and the glass world beyond. His head, then torso, then his long legs disappearing from view behind the partial wall near the escalator, so that when he turned at the top, perhaps to wave goodbye, I could only see the tops of his feet.

~ ~ ~

I stopped at Boots on the way back to the dormitory and picked up the film I’d left there for developing. Disastrous—blurred rainbow colors marred an entire roll of film, the only one I’d taken of Josh. His skin color was totally obscured behind coruscations of strange yellows and vermilions. But his eyes still stared back at me, promising.

I slowly climbed the steps to my room, glaring at the sign posted just inside my door. Mockingly, it read:



Room no. 325

This room is not to be used for sleeping purposes by more than one person(s).



I pushed the metal desk chair over to the window, pulled out my half-empty pack of Silk Cuts, and blew smoke out into the cold night, dragging it deep into my lungs in desperation, willing it to obliterate all feeling and thought.

I would wait. And Josh had given me a gift far more precious than that poem. I would paint, and paint, and allow myself to become the person I was meant to be.

~ ~ ~

Email wasn’t nearly the same. I was an artist, not a writer, and whatever I tried to say came out wrong. I couldn’t remember his face well after a couple of weeks; the colors in those drugstore photos were just dead wrong, and I couldn’t see him, his essence, through the mixed-up rainbow lens. I did my best, describing my classes and what I was painting in my free time, but writing about it wasn’t the same as living it.

Meanwhile, he’d send me these gorgeous long emails. He was a virtuoso with words—he could bend language to his will, completely, in a way I never could. Maybe I could harness art, just a bit—not writing. But the way he used colons—my god, it was almost sensual, his command of language. It burned straight to my heart:



I never thought it was possible—that love could be like this. Could mean this. And now that we’re apart, I feel, even more deeply, the amazement, and the wonder of it all—yet also, the abject fear, emanating not only from our distance but also from my intrinsic vulnerability. I’ve built a shell of sarcasm and incommunication around me, and you are the first to break it completely. You’ve freed me, but still: I’m left terribly exposed. Yearning. My heart unfurls desperate tendrils reaching toward you—can you feel them, twining about you? Holding you fast; making you mine, again and always. I’m here, but not-here, for part of me is always gone when you are gone.

Please, my love: be with me, tonight. Hold me. Make love to me.



Yet I wondered what had happened to all those photos that he had taken of us—he kept promising to send some and never did. So he slipped away, bit by bit, until the only thing left of him were those beautiful emails, only tenuously attached to their writer. By October I stopped seeing him in the backs of men that passed, stopped my wistful dreaming that he had suddenly returned for a surprise visit.

I kept telling myself that I should go back to Camden Town and see Trevor and Dov; I missed them terribly. But just thinking about that flat on Bonny Street, with Josh’s room occupied by someone else, made my heart ache. And worse—what if Trevor and Dov weren’t there anymore—what if Trevor had found a job someplace like Liverpool and was off cheerfully cooking stews elsewhere? What if Dov had already saved enough money to travel the world? If I didn’t return, the flat would remain in my mind, perpetually as it was in those perfect summer days. Dov would be always popping in, munching something sweet—chocolate-covered Digestives or Aero bars—wearing a heinously ancient t-shirt. Trevor would always engulf me in his warm smile, Dov’s sartorial opposite, always attired as if prepared for his properly employed British future to arrive momentarily. Upstairs, Josh and I would always be in his room, making love, holding each other tight, talking, talking, talking—we would never stop finding things to say, and would never be bored.

I could almost taste the sweat on his neck, the alternate reality unfolding in my head so real and powerful. If I went back to the flat, the spell would break. I would be truly alone again, in my holding pattern: subsisting, existing, while waiting.

Meanwhile, large swathes of London had become off-limits. I couldn’t venture anywhere north of central London without being forcibly reminded of Josh. For the rest of that year, I didn’t go anywhere near Camden Town, Hampstead, or the Heath. I didn’t return to the National Gallery, and I walked quickly past Trafalgar Square, never stopping, whenever I was in that neighborhood. Each spot made too many memories whirl through my mind, my stomach plummeting, spinning in space as I trod in the present over the memories of the past. I wanted to be back there, to relive those moments, but they were gone, and my heart ached all the time.

So, I remained defiantly ensconced in my big, empty room at Butler College Student Residence. Until I let myself thaw a little, and chatted with a classmate named Padma in the small upstairs kitchen as I prepared my pitiful dinners of Heinz baked beans on toast with grated cheese on top, or mackerel (it was cheap, after all). There was a cafe downstairs at the student residence, and on campus as well, but most students thriftily cooked their own meals. Padma and I were both fans of “jacket potatoes,” as she called them. When we’d microwave our potatoes together some evenings, I wouldn’t feel so lonely.

The clichés all turned out to be true: life went on, regardless of circumstance. And the love that had changed everything for me didn’t alter the fact that reality had to happen, too. I had to eat. I had to go to class, write papers, shop at Tesco’s, buy new socks at Marks & Spencer. And all those quotidian responsibilities lessened the wonder and amazement a little each day, until I had to force myself to remember, and even then I wasn’t sure if what I remembered had actually happened, or if I’d embroidered it somehow to be more special than it really was.

And though Josh’s emails were beautiful, they never mentioned Uncle Paulie. I couldn’t bring it up again. Telling Josh had unburdened me a little, but now that Josh knew, and wasn’t talking about it, it was still my secret all over again. He’d left, and taken it with him, and giving him my secret hadn’t helped at all.

Meantime, Josh’s daily emails slowed, to two days, then three between messages. I’d rush to the computer lab after class, the Macs there several years behind the ones we had back at Dawson, and then leave, minutes later, dispirited, ignoring friendly missives from my high-school friends. What was the point, anyhow? I’d always answer Alex’s sporadic emails though, right away. They were the only connection I had with him, and via email, I could be more honest with Alex than I could with anyone.

I don’t think it’s going to work out, I’d email him, voicing words I barely dared think.

If that bastard doesn’t see how amazing you are, then forget him, Alex counseled. He’s not worth it.

Thanks, little bro, I smiled as I typed. You wanna beat him up for me? Reveling in my re-found closeness with Alex, the closeness I thought I’d lost. I didn’t want to ruin it by emailing Alex about Uncle Paulie. I could only hope that Alex had found his own way of dealing with those memories. Still, after everything, I couldn’t ask.

And I’d feel, for a while that everything might turn out okay, the way Josh had planned for us. Next summer, we would be together. I’d transfer to a different college my senior year. We wouldn’t have to be apart, ever again.

But eventually Josh stopped signing his emails “Love always.” By December, I couldn’t remember how he talked, his voice on the other end of the residence hall’s one phone, all the way downstairs, tinny and unreal—not like the Josh I remembered. Conversations were awkward, fits and starts, phone cards always running out before we could grasp the ease of speaking we had before. If only I could think in words instead of pictures—my mental images were fading so fast. Sentences, paragraphs, a story of our summer together—maybe that would have made the memories last longer.

I had painted, furiously and passionately, for months after Josh left. His encouragement sustained me; in his emails he constantly reminded me of the beauty of my work. Everything I painted, I silently dedicated to him. I was into portraits now, my old obsession with toys long forgotten. People, real people—their gestures and movements—if I could paint them, I could hold, perhaps, a small piece of the universe, and make it mine. I went to Cass Art and bought another D’Arches watercolor block, but by the time I got most of the way through it, Josh’s emails had been reduced from a torrential downpour to a mere spatter. A few lines, here and there. Who was I painting for, then?

I kept trying. But all of a sudden, the vision in my head of what I wanted to paint, and the muddied imitation that crept onto paper, didn’t match up. I couldn’t paint what I saw in my head, no matter how hard I tried. My imagination literally failed me.

If I stopped, it would be admitting defeat. But my paintings were never the same after that. Some essential spark of life went missing.

By December 12, he had quit writing altogether. Of course—I had been waiting for this, ever since August. He was back in Los Angeles, with his family. In his emails, his closeness his family was clear—happiness at being back home for Friday night Shabbat dinners with his parents; clear affection when describing visiting his sister and her new baby, or helping his mom paint the living room one Sunday.

In the end, I knew who he would choose.

~ ~ ~

I didn’t want to call him, because I knew what he would say. But I couldn’t manage another day of this constant nervousness, stomach aching, nauseous dread vibrating through my body all the time. I purchased a phone card for ten pounds. That meant ten minutes. As if we could possibly say what needed to be said in ten minutes.

“Hi, Josh.”

“Hi.”

“I miss you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So . . . You haven’t written lately. I just wanted to make sure everything’s okay.”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.”

This was a stranger’s voice. Where was Josh?

“So, then?”

“Listen, Vivian, I need to take a little break, okay? It’s got nothing to do with you. It’s just, I have a lot of stuff going on this semester.”

“What do you mean, take a break? How hard is it to write an email?”

He cleared his throat, then was silent.

“Josh.” I hated the pleading sound in my voice. “You still love me, right?”

“Vivian, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“So, you don’t love me anymore? How is it possible that you could just stop loving me?”

“That’s not it,” he said slowly. “You don’t understand.”

“Don’t play games with me! Love isn’t some sort of game, where you can give it, then take it back, and then pretend you didn’t take it back. So what’s the answer?”

“Fine then—I don’t love you anymore. No, wait, Vivian—” His voice was so strained, I could hardly hear it.

I slowly hung up the phone, listening to the quiet click, his next words lost forever. I ran up the three flights of stairs to my room and collapsed on the bed, sobbing as if I would never stop. But inside, I wasn’t sure who I was crying for. What color, exactly, was his face?

I never heard from him again.

~ ~ ~

Butler College turned out to be like anyplace else. You get there, and you expect things to be different, but they aren’t really. You just fall into a routine, drowning in papers and meal preparation and busywork, and before you know it the year’s almost up, the only souvenirs some theater programs, a perpetual tic of saying “cheers” and “bloody hell,” and a stolen pint glass from a night at the pub with Padma. I didn’t go to the computer labs unless I had a paper to write, and I didn’t want to talk or write, to Alex, to anyone. I wanted to close myself up, live snug and protected like a snail in its shell, buffered from the outside world. I was poised as always between the possibility of change and change itself. All I wanted was to relive that August, the August when all the doors opened.

Every night when I went to sleep, I would wrap myself in memories of that month, and for a moment I could almost taste that delirious joy again.

There we were, kissing like there was no tomorrow, just us, in the universe. We were forever in that moment of pure love, needing only each other, the world spread before us, filled with endless possibilities.

I’d wake up alone, my heart broken, again.

I was determined: I would never be vulnerable in that way. From now on, I would be the one who was loved most, not the other way around. My heart was so fragile. Protecting it was paramount.

But he’d opened something up inside me, and now it wouldn’t close, and I had no one to give it to.