I stared at him dumbly, my lips dry. ‘You don’t think I know?’ he said. ‘I’m not stupid. I know they awarded you that fellowship. They want you to go in September, right?’
‘I know you’re not stupid,’ was all I could think to say.
‘I think you should go,’ he said again. ‘Please, go.’
‘But I don’t want to go,’ I said after a while, but it was only for show, only because I felt I had to.
‘This is beautiful,’ I said as my father and I walked now through the Center’s lobby. It had a beamed ceiling like an old hunting lodge, and the air smelled like apple cider. ‘You were lucky to find this.’
‘They have a celebrity chef,’ my father boasted. ‘Can you believe it? Or, someone who studied with a celebrity chef, anyway. I don’t know which one. Someone on PBS.’
‘That’s wonderful.’
‘I bet I’ll be just like that guy in The Magic Mountain,’ my father joked when they showed him his room, which had a terrace. No one pointed out the bars on the terrace’s perimeter, which seemed to be the sole difference between this place and, say, a resort. ‘You ever read that book, Summer? This guy has tuberculosis, so he goes into a sanatorium, and there are the kookiest of characters, people you really wouldn’t want to be around for days at a time, but then, over the course of it, he begins to fall in love with the place. All the regular meals, all the blankets. He can’t imagine living in real society again. He stays there for seven years. And then he gets out because the war starts, and he goes to war, and he dies.’
I told him I hadn’t read it.
I had dinner with him, spaghetti eaten with plastic utensils, orange soda from a pitcher. The patients were all well-groomed and had a WASPy, wealthy look about them-as they should, considering that the Center didn’t accept any form of health insurance. My father was paying for it out of proceeds from several patents he’d helped develop, plus money saved, plus cashed-in stocks I’d never known about. He assured me that he could afford this, and that I shouldn’t worry.
As we ate, I stared out the window at the endless green lawn. The posters on the walls in the hallways were also of green lawns, except the lawns were in places like Scotland and Pebble Beach Golf Course. Extra dinner portions sat on a stainless-steel table in the corner, warmed by a long column of hot lights.
After dinner, we sat in the TV room-with its marble fireplace and built-in bookcases-and watched an episode of Friends. My father smiled at the funny parts, picking at a scab on his ankle bone. Another patient, a girl about my age, walked in and said, ‘I’ve seen this one’, and left. Someone crossed the room wearing a familiar t-shirt that said you are not what you own on the back. It took me a while to place it, but then I remembered Claire.
Not long ago, I found an old roll of film stuffed under my bed and had it developed. There were generic pictures of Paris: the Arc de Triomphe, quaint road signs in French, the Chanel storefront. Then, I came to the last photo on the roll: Claire Ryan and I were standing awkwardly together, neither of us smiling. Behind us was the same tile-and-mahogany console table that was still wedged into the corner in our Brooklyn apartment, and I was wearing my favorite purple polo shirt, the very last thing my mother had bought for me.
It was obvious when the photo was from-the pain was stark on both our faces. I’d forgotten about stealing the Fun Saver camera the day Claire came over for biology tutoring, but the emotions of that time suddenly snapped back to me, an old, unhealed wound. As I stared at the photo, I was startled to see that Claire wasn’t even fat. A bit pudgy, maybe, certainly larger than she had been, but not obese. She still had her beautiful blonde hair, her lovely round face.