She sighs. “You can still come home,” she says. “You can always come home.”
But I don’t want to live in New York, not yet. I go back to Chicago instead. It’s May, and my MFA program would like to know what my intentions are. I show up at Matthew’s apartment one day and stay. I mention nothing about my life, my truth, my reality. He allows me to curl up into him, and he holds me steady while I breathe. Neither of us leaves for days. He can’t stop working, though, so he continues to paint at home. His apartment reeks of turpentine and I watch him one morning while he’s working and he has this very specific and peaceful look on his face and I feel extreme envy because this is not how I feel about my own work and at that exact moment I realize I don’t know what I’m doing with my life but I know I don’t want to paint any longer. The next morning I sneak out of Matthew’s house and get on another train and I take it all the way home to New York City. I stop painting entirely. I get a job in advertising. I get older. I grow up, I suppose. I never look back except in those moments when I can’t stop fucking thinking about it.
I can tell you something remarkable about that time, although it has only just occurred to me now. I never thought about death, like I do now. I never worried about dying. I only ever thought about being alive.
Betsy
My mother’s friend Betsy, the old radical, dies after a short illness. Pneumonia, sepsis, done. “I hope I go that fast,” says my mother. “Let’s not talk about you dying,” I say, although I agree with her, both for her sake and mine. There’s a small, vaguely illegal funeral, involving Betsy’s ashes and sneaking onto a dock under a full moon at midnight on Sheepshead Bay. My mother elects not to attend it. “I’m too old to jump fences,” she says. No one is arrested, she later reports. A few weeks after that, there is a public memorial service in the city, at which my mother has been asked to speak. She invites me to join her. The only other memorial service I have been to in my life is my father’s, twenty-five years ago. “When you get older you go to things like this all the time,” says my mother. “Something to really look forward to,” I say. “Well, at least you’re not the one who’s dead,” says my mother.
I skip work, which I have been doing a lot lately. A bereavement day, I say to my boss, who cannot, try as he might, argue with death. He has nearly given up on me, nearly, nearly, and yet the thought of hiring someone new to do a job I have done extremely well for a decade troubles him. How would he remove everything in my brain and put it in someone else’s? And my absences do not seem to affect my work, in part because I can do it blindfolded by now. Whatever thrill I had in perfecting my job is now dead, because perfection itself is boring; it’s only everything leading up to it that’s interesting.
“Did you finish . . .” my boss says.
Yes, everything is done. Everything is always done.
He taps a pen on his desk and then remembers how to behave in this particular scenario. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he says.
“It’s more for my mother,” I say. “She was her best friend. Her name was Betsy. She was kind of her hero.” “Hero” isn’t right exactly, but I can’t figure out a way to explain the nuances of their relationship. They were best friends, but Betsy was older. Betsy ran the show a little bit.
“I’m sorry for your mother’s loss, then,” he says.
“You know who the real loser here is?” I say. “Betsy.”
Our throats fill with laughter and then we both make weird, funny faces, like faux-disgusted, shocked at our mutual inappropriateness, but this brings us closer together, too. Six years is a long time to know someone, though I don’t know much more about him than when he started here, hired as a peer, now my boss. A wife framed in a picture, a boat, a house, a tennis racket in the summer, skis in the winter, Scotch at the holiday party. We’re the same age and he possesses much more than I ever will. But at least I don’t have to be the boss of someone like me.
“Off you go,” he says.
Betsy’s memorial service is being held at St. Mark’s Church. I haven’t been there since high school, when I used to go to the New Year’s Day marathon poetry readings, first with my family when my father was still alive, and later with a boy I’d met at the Empire State Building during a field trip. He went to a faraway magnet school in Brooklyn. We held hands in the pew while Patti Smith sang and played stridently, her long hair captured beneath her guitar strap. Then we got hot chocolate and wandered around Tompkins Square Park in the cold, huddled on a bench in the center of the park, and kissed a few times. After that day we disappeared from each other’s lives, no fault of his or mine; we just lived so far away from each other. His name was Carlos. Where is he now? I should look him up on Facebook. Never mind, he’s probably married anyway.
It’s hot in the church. There are enormous industrial fans blowing in the vestibule and in the rear of the sanctuary itself, on a row of platform seats. Rickety, stained-glass Jesuses all around. I spot my mother, who is surrounded by men. After my father died, she was always surrounded by men. She used to throw these drunken, druggy dinner parties. They swarmed her, I’ll never quite understand why. A penniless widow with two children, in her forties, what a catch. But there they were, and here they are, though everyone is much older now.
These men had swarmed me, too, and that part I understood. I was a depressed teenage girl, a sitting duck with brand-new tits. I had made the men hazy in my mind, and now, looking out at this room, I could not tell you who had done what exactly. It was nothing in particular, other than coming home on a Saturday night, just a girl, a teenager, to a smoky, jazzy apartment full of people. My mother somewhere in there, laughing, a vague wave hello. I remember being pulled onto a lap and tickled, the pressure of a grown man’s cock behind me, not on my skin, but on my clothes, and having to wiggle my way free. I never liked it, I never wanted it. I’d like to see them try the same thing now, I tell myself, a rush of aggression surging in me, suddenly prepared for physical violence. These frail old men. I’d bury them.