He turns to Alice. “Can I at least have a Klonopin?”
“You know I stopped taking that shit years ago,” she says. “Ever since that weekend in Carlsbad.”
“Sure you did.”
She rips her glasses off her face. “And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Here’s Mom.”
Donna stops a few feet from them. She looks at Paul, and then Alice, and then forcibly smiles, as if she’s paying due respect to her executioners.
“It’s going to be a gorgeous drive,” she says. “And before she left yesterday, Eloise gave me the names of a few places we can stop for a drink, or lunch. They’re all supposed to be positively charming.”
“Positively charming,” Alice parrots.
“What?”
“You’ve been spending too much time around Eloise.”
“I—”
Alice stops her. “We should go. There’s already going to be a ton of traffic.” She opens the passenger-side door, pushes down the shotgun seat, and motions grandly to the sliver of space in the back of the car. “Your chariot awaits, Paul.”
Contorting his way past seat belts, a roller suitcase, and Alice’s purse, Paul folds into the rear of the Peugeot. He loathes himself for giving in so easily to his sister’s demands. More than that, though, he loathes how quickly and seamlessly he slips into his old childhood role. He loathes how quickly and seamlessly they all slip into their old roles: Donna trying to be nice, despite the fact that nice became an impossibility years ago; Alice veiling her disdain as she makes peace by bossing people around; Paul allowing himself to be tossed around like a rag doll because it justifies his contempt. He pulls his knees up to his chest—there’s nowhere else to put them—and wonders what Mark would say.
“Here, Alice,” he hears his mother say outside the car. “Take the keys.”
“What do you mean take the keys? Why would I need the keys?”
From the backseat Paul watches as Donna walks around to the left side of the car, where Alice is standing.
“I’m not going to drive this thing,” Donna says. “The steering wheel’s on the wrong side.”
“What makes you think I’d be any better at it?” Alice removes her sunglasses again. Her cheeks are red, which makes the faint freckles that dust her nose burn like sunspots. She’s got her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she brushes a few loose strands out of her face.
“You’re from L.A.,” Donna says.
“What’s that have to do with anything?”
“You drive on the 405.”
She squeezes past Alice and claims the passenger seat. Reaching back, she pats Paul’s knee.
“I’ll navigate,” she says, pointing to the road atlas in her lap.
“Oh, no.” Alice slams the passenger door shut and shakes her head as she circles back around to the driver’s side. “No, no, no,” she says, opening her own door. “God knows when that atlas was made. I’ve got the map pulled up on my phone. Paul can navigate as we go.”
“I’m fine doing nothing. Really.” He shifts, trying to find a comfortable position for his legs, which now, in the backseat of the Peugeot, seem longer than they ever have before.
Alice tosses her phone at him, and it lands squarely in his lap.
“You literally just have to follow the blue dot,” she says. “No one’s asking you to blaze a trail, for Christ’s sake.”
*
The hole in his life that Mark left creates a hollow pit in Paul’s stomach, but strangely it’s all the small actions the breakup will eventually necessitate that cause a million pangs to prick his ribs. There are so many knots to untie as they work to separate their lives, and loosening each one will require a phone call, an e-mail, a text. Who will keep the apartment? Mark, likely, though maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. Paul’s tired of Philadelphia—of people overlooking the mediocrity of its restaurants; of its obsession with a whitewashed and mythical history. Yes, he could use a change, particularly now that he’s been (1) sacked from his job and (2) ceremoniously dumped by his boyfriend. What better time to hack away at the ties that bind? But where should he go? There are, of course, hundreds of places. Thousands, really. Picking up and leaving for any one, though, would require—will require—the same awful and impossible steps. The buying of cardboard boxes. The emptying of closets and cupboards. The division of goods and wares. The artifacts, so to speak, that must be salvaged from a fire. Stained pillowcases and half-burned candles; two coat racks and a love seat that’s not quite long enough to accommodate two grown bodies. A mail receptacle they never hung, a crafty little thing that had been given to them as a housewarming present: a box with two smaller containers, one for Paul’s letters and one for Mark’s.
“A his-and-his sort of thing,” their friend Audrey had said, when she’d presented them with it.
Now what would he call it? In the event that he got to keep the receptacle—and he hoped he would; like everything else, he wanted it—how would he explain those twin boxes to people? What’s more, what would it look like with only one of the boxes stuffed with letters? Lonely, Paul thinks, lonely and unbalanced.
They’re stopped in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the M3, a few miles north of Woking, and it dawns on Paul that he can’t feel his toes; his legs are hiked halfway up his nostrils, which has cut off circulation to everything below his kneecaps. He tries wiggling his toes, and when that doesn’t work he decides to let it go. Wincing through a wave of pins and needles, he fantasizes over what Mark might say if he called him up to tell him that he’d suddenly become a double amputee; that, thanks to a torturous few hours that he’d selflessly spent in the back of a Peugeot, surgeons had to saw off everything below his knees. He thinks of the look that would be on Mark’s face—a mix of horror and pity and sympathy—and for a moment he gets giddy. But then he tells himself that he’s better than that—or, if he isn’t, then he wants to be—and forces himself to look out the window, where a long scar of vehicles, minivans and caravans and coupes, gashes south toward the English Channel.
He counts how many heads he can see in the cars that surround him, and then he wonders about the thoughts festering and multiplying inside of them. He wants to know if he’s the only person on, say, this mile of the M3, who’s been dumped in the past seventy-two hours, or if there’s some other kindred, miserable asshole stuck in the backseat of a car. But even if there is, and even if they could sit on the curb and air their wounds, what good would it do?
Heartache, he’s come to realize, the devastation of being chewed up and spit out, is an individual and isolating experience. Why else would there be a million different idioms in just as many languages that tried, always unsuccessfully, to describe it? If there were some common, shared experience, language would have already accounted for that. It would have streamlined the feeling into something concise and translatable, like water, or food, or air.
*