The Adults Part 30

"This is actually a burial ground," Jonathan said as he came up behind me. It was one in the morning. We were in Washington Square Park. The cold fountain glossed our faces. We were both overdressed for the park, but the formality was refreshing so late in the night.

"Don't tell me that you asked me here so you can kill me," I said. "Because that would be disappointing."

Jonathan reached out for my hand. He ran his fingertips against my knuckles. He sat down on the ground. A child's shoe was left wet on the stone wall, and neither of us mentioned it. We didn't speak and then we spoke.

"This is a potter's field," Jonathan said, patting the earth. "There are twenty thousand corpses underneath us right now."

We stared at each other like we were relearning how to see everything: You still have Jonathan's nose, I thought, you still have Mr. Basketball's eyes, but you have a completely new mouth. Whose mouth is that?

"Imagine," he said. "Imagine if they could still see us from so far below."

"Who?" I asked. His wife?

I walked around the field trying to decide what to do while Jonathan never answered me.

"Why don't you come over here, sweetheart," he finally said, and this was not a question. I walked over to him and stood over his body. He spread my legs and put his mouth in me, and I wondered if he could see any corner of the moon from inside my body.

35.

Kevin and I went to Central Park and took a rowboat into the center of the pond. We each had our own books, and we stretched our legs out over each other to make room for leisure. He was reading something fantastically grounded in the legal politics of contemporary America. I was reading up on the birth of the organic chair. I told Kevin that no matter how we treated something, at its roots, everything grows and then dies the same way. The ducks circled around us, the ducks quacked around us, and the ducks factored us into the reflection of their tiny retinas but never considered us in any real way. Weird.

Kevin didn't say anything until we were in one of those fusion places he sometimes admired so much. Something was wrong. They were serving Western macaroni and cheese with Vietnamese rice noodles. Smooth ceramic tiles on the floor, and gold-framed pictures of smiling women from distant lands, picking unidentifiable crops and putting them in their woven baskets. These were the happy women who lined the walls of Noodles N You. Kevin twirled the last of his rice noodles neatly around his fork just to be polite. Like what we needed was more polite.

"I think we should walk back home through the park after we're done here," he said.

"Okay," I said. "But I have to get back to Connecticut before it gets dark. I want to see my father before he goes to sleep."

When we walked through the park, Kevin wanted to know what was wrong. Kevin wanted to know who was calling at night. Kevin wanted to know how he could be dating a woman who was so unsubtle. We watched the tiny dogs chase after a ball in the dog park.

"This isn't just about your father," Kevin said.

Kevin leaned over the fence and asked a woman which dog was hers.

"That one," she said. "The schnauzer."

"I used to have a schnauzer," Kevin said. "But it didn't have hair like that."

"Well, then," the woman said, "you obviously don't know the breed."

Kevin and I looked at each other and when we didn't laugh, when he picked a piece of white lint off my shoulder and said, "I know the breed, lady," I knew I would never love him. I would never wake up in the middle of the night screaming for his touch, and I was stupid enough, watching a tiny terrier p.i.s.s against the fence, to still believe that terror was such a large part of love.

"Since when do you know breeds?" I asked him.

"Emily," he said, "what's going on?"

Jonathan and I had been having s.e.x in restaurant bathrooms where the toilet paper roll sat on the floor. "Men's or women's?" he always asked. "Men's," I would say. "Women are too judgmental."

"What do you mean?" I asked Kevin.

"Are you becoming someone else, Emily?" Kevin asked. "Someone I don't know?"

"You're the one who suddenly knows breeds. You don't even have a dog."

"Emily, whoever he is, I'd wish you'd say it."

"Say what?"

"You're cheating on me."

"I'm not."

"Yes you are."

"I'm not."

"Just say it, claim responsibility for it."

"It's not free will," I told him.

Jonathan had put me against the tiled wall and we had tried not to breathe out our noses. Sometimes we dangerously spoke like we had become the same careless person and said, "Let's go somewhere else?" and we were off to the bas.e.m.e.nt stacks of the public library, where s.e.x was a dark art and we were just students. Where I had to keep on my wool dress for decorum's sake and he just unzipped his pleated khakis and out he tumbled like a waterfall. We didn't even have to look down to feel what was happening to us. The History of Russia, the tiled wall, the bathroom door handle cut hard lines against my clothed back and it had all begun to hurt again.

"You're addicted," he said.

"I don't know what it is. Honestly."

"If I tell you to go be with him all you want, will you be done with it and then come back to me?"

"I can't. I can't stop."

"That's pathetic."

"He's killing me."

"Do you think about me?"

"Yes."

"Do you think about us?"

"Of course I think about us."

"Are you thinking about us always always like I am?"

"Yes," but I did not tell him the truth. Always always just sounded so exhausting.

"You don't need to sleep with another man to prove to me that you aren't ready for marriage. I wasn't going to propose yet."

"That's not what this is about."

"Of course it is."

On the subway home, Kevin asked me to explain in detail the s.e.x I had with Jonathan.

"How do you know it's Jonathan?" I asked.

"It's obvious."

He said he needed to know if it was the kind of s.e.x he could get over or the kind of s.e.x that would haunt him forever.

"When did you first sleep with him?" he asked.

"Four days ago," I said. "Wednesday."

"That's where you went that night you left?"

"Yes," I said. "And then Thursday night."

On Thursday, Jonathan had picked me up in Stamford after I spent the day at the hospital, and we drove to his father's empty house in Greenwich (France for the winter), and this was where we finally had s.e.x with our clothes off, and I noticed that Jonathan sweated more than he used to, sweated more easily indoors, more easily in the winter, and he didn't understand why but that had always been the case. I didn't understand why anybody would hire a maid to work in an empty house, or why Jonathan didn't take me to his real house in Fairfield since he wasn't technically married anymore, or why he needed to pretend like he was, and if he didn't love me, then why did he stick his nose in my hair and say, "I wish I could describe what you smell like," my very particular scent, that he just couldn't put his finger on, "and your hair," he said, my hair, oh my hair, he loved to feel his fingers in my hair, he loved to grab my hair, and I wondered if this was similar to the joy I felt when I held on to his back, if this was all that this was, the joy of needing and wanting and holding on.

"I barely remember Thursday," Kevin said. "What was I doing on Thursday? I guess I barely remember so what does it matter that you were with someone else? Right? Is that what I should be telling myself?"

"Remember," I said, "when you were at the dinner with your family and you called me to say good night in case I was going to bed before you got home, and I said good night?"

"No," he said. "But that sounds like something that would happen."

I thanked him for being funny. He said at a moment like this he was trying to find ways to be funny. But he didn't think it was possible. He didn't think this was going to be the kind of thing we laughed about ever, not even in ten years when we probably wouldn't know each other anymore. I started to cry. Tell me more, he said.

"I was sleeping with Jonathan when you called."

"I couldn't even tell," he said. "I can't even remember the conversation we had."

"I can," I said. "You told me your mother was upset because a pearl popped off into her drink, and she was convinced she accidentally drank it. Since that moment, I've been thinking of how sad that is."

"I don't want to hear any more," he said. "Don't return to the apartment until I'm gone, please."

I spent the week at home. During the day, we visited with my father, and after, we went out to dinner, where Uncle Vito always asked Bill to pa.s.s the salt and p.e.c.k.e.r, and Uncle Vince winked at the cute waitresses, then announced that my father and he were conceived in the same hotel, one year apart (something that had always made them close), and then once we finally got back to the house, I turned around and took the train to Greenwich, where I spent the night at Jonathan's father's house.

"Your hair," he said when he opened the door to the house.

"Yes," I said. I had cut my hair the night before to hurry the arrival of spring.

"Susan's hair is three days unwashed," Jonathan said. I didn't know what to say but: Jsi lha. You liar.

So I said, "Kevin knows breeds."

"Susan speaks four languages, including functional Arabic, and she can't remember what street the grocery store is on. The psychiatrist says she has pseudodementia. Dementia brought on by depression. And we had to go to a group meeting today," he said. "Coping with Grief."

He said that they attended this group once a week, Sundays at seven thirty.

"The lecture tonight was 'Suicide and Grief,'" he said, running his fingers down my legs in the kitchen.

Jonathan pressed his back against the chair and held his breath. "Good, great, you're just going to give her ideas, I thought," he said, and looked over at me. I was fixing the hem of my short blue sweater dress.

"Did you ever fantasize about a way to kill yourself?" Jonathan asked me.

"Yeah," I said. "After Mark's father killed himself, I was afraid my mother might kill herself. For a while, I thought that maybe I'd kill myself first, that way, I couldn't be affected by her suicide."

"How would you do it?"

"I knew that I could never kill myself directly," I said. "I'd have to get someone else to do it. I'd set up a gun with a pulley system tied to my door. When someone would walk through my door, the gun would be in my mouth and it would go off."

"That's selfish."

"I know. But suicide is selfish in general."

"I used to dream that I could die in an airtight room," Jonathan said, "my body laid out on a gla.s.s table, and I'd be on heroin. And somehow, I'd be on fire."

Jonathan took a long sip of his beer.

"It's not that glamorous," I said.

Jonathan didn't turn to look at me. He didn't even put his hand on my thigh. He wasn't impressed.

"I don't think we can meet in Greenwich anymore," Jonathan said, staring at the maid, who'd just come into the room to dust the tops of the counters in the kitchen. "It's starting to make me feel uncomfortable. The maid knows my wife."

36.

Your father is really dying this time," my mother said on the other end of my cell phone. "Come to the hospital."

I hung up the phone with my mother. I was naked. I couldn't find my keys or my coat or my shoes or my hair elastic. I cried over his soccer trophies and Jonathan took my hand and said, "I'll drive you."

When we arrived at the hospital, Jonathan hung back. "Just come on," I said.

He followed me to my father's room but stayed outside on the chairs. After a while he said he had to get going. "I'll come see you later," he said.

In some ways it wasn't all that different from home: my father was so distant and thin in his bed, it gave me the same feeling that I got when he came back from a long trip in Europe and something about his face looked painfully unaffiliated with me. My father said, "Mhmm?" every time he thought somebody spoke, to which my mother said, "Emily, say h.e.l.lo to your father," to which my father said, "Gloria, I'm talking to Emily."