‘Yes,’ you said. ‘No. I don’t know.’
We kept things a secret for a while. When we met to play tennis, we were both very businesslike. If it seemed like I talked to you a lot during meals or spent more time with you when we drove upstate into Rhinebeck, no one said anything. So we got bolder. You would slip into Merewether while the others were watching TV. I would pull you up to my bedroom and we would hide under the covers of the twin bed and listen to Coltrane on my Discman, one earbud in your left ear, the other earbud in my right. It was exciting, knowing that Paula, who watched over us, might walk in at any time. What can I say? That I felt alive? That I felt understood? Sometimes you said you still felt crazy. I told you I had a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and that I wanted you to come home with me. You were hesitant-you’d had difficult relationships in the past. ‘Life’s not as easy as that,’ you said. ‘You should know that by now.’
I told you I did know that. But even if things got hard, I wanted to deal with that, too. I’ve run from a lot of people when things got too hard, I told you. I ran from my mother, I ran from Kay, I ran from my cousin and my aunt and my friends and my daughter. I’m tired of running. I don’t want to do that anymore.
‘Your daughter?’ You stopped me. ‘You didn’t run from Summer. She’s in Brooklyn.’
I looked away. I hadn’t been clear. But there was time to explain all that later. There was time for everything.
I want to be idealistic about you. I want to be hopeful, as hopeful as I’d been with Kay. I am still me. We are the worst of ourselves and also the best. They can try and shock it out of us but it doesn’t really go away, not entirely. And that’s okay. It made me feel great to realize that. It made me feel almost whole again.
PART FIVE
Brooklyn, New York,
February, 2003
blizzard
25
The family met for dinner in Park Slope, at an Italian restaurant on Fifth Avenue. The restaurant didn’t have a bar, so we had to stand in the alcove by the door to wait while they cleared a table for us.
The alcove’s heavy plastic walls kept buckling in from the wind. Rosemary stood next to me, wearing a long, sweeping skirt, pointy boots with a bunch of tiny eyelet buttons, and an oversized plaid coat. Her dirty blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but many strands had broken free, spiraling around her face. Philip was talking to my father about the apartment. Structurally, it seemed very sound, he said. However, there were ways to maximize the space that might appeal to buyers. He could knock down the wall that separated the kitchen and the living room to make it one large room. The kitchen would get more light that way.
My father ran his hand over his chin. ‘I wonder how long that would take…’
‘Not long, once you get the permit and a contractor,’ Philip said. He knew a contractor who owed him a favor, actually, from when he lived in New York. He could call him, if my father wanted.
‘Richard,’ Rosemary warned, ‘we can’t knock down a wall. People are coming to see the place in two days.’
‘True.’ My father nodded slowly.
‘But, for the record, I was always telling him that we should open up the space between the kitchen and the living room,’ Rosemary added, snaking her arm around my father’s elbow.
‘You have been,’ my father said, leaning into her. ‘I should have listened to you.’
I looked away.
I left your bedroom untouched, my father had written in the email that announced he had decided to sell the old Brooklyn apartment. Logically, selling it made sense-it wasn’t as if anyone were living there, as my father and Rosemary were in Vermont, and Philip and I were living in Annapolis, Maryland. He’d probably make a killing on it, too, the way the apartment values in Brooklyn Heights had gone up since he’d bought the place.
The realtor had scheduled an open house for this Monday and Tuesday, which was why everyone had to come into town this weekend and get their stuff out. It was also an excuse for us to come back to Brooklyn and hang out together; a ‘family gathering’, as my father called it.