“But you never got married after that? To anybody?” Susan asked, clearly shocked.
“Nope,” I said, and tried to smile as though I were unaware that this might be raising some kind of red flag for her.
“How old are you?” she asked, still staring at me like I didn’t make sense.
“Thirty-five.”
She made a noise in her throat, a kind of skeptical groan, before nodding her head. It was as though she had been told the number of jelly beans in a jar and was having trouble reconciling it with her own estimation. “Well,” she said, “I loved my husband very much. And I still do. We’re friends now. Which has its own challenges. Anyway, he’s an alcoholic, he’s in recovery. But I spent a long time going to Al-Anon meetings, which are for, like, friends and family of alcoholics, and all the stories I heard there — they were all the same. It was all different, but it was all the same. And I started to think that really the thing none of us could ever say, because it was so unique, so personal that it was almost unspeakable, was what happiness had been like. When it was good. That was the thing that I started to get interested in when other people were talking: I would try to imagine what it had been like when they were happy. Had there been mornings of NPR and coffee and burned toast, just quietly sitting together and feeling safe? Or had it been torrid? That was the thing about my parents, they were always fucking each other’s brains out!”
We had wound up near Vera and Daniel and I tried to eavesdrop enough to make sure everything was all right.
“Is that her?” Susan asked. “Your daughter?”
“Yes. Vera.”
“She certainly doesn’t look seventeen! I thought she was in her twenties.”
“I know. It terrifies me.” The day was hot and Susan was sweating slightly. I had a flash image of myself licking the dew from her breastbone.
“Well, I think having a teenager is all about being terrified,” Susan said.
Of course, there was no way she was talking about the kind of terror I experienced loving Vera. “You learn self-control in a mental hospital,” Vera had said to me once. “If you have a freak-out, they get you with the booty juice.” Booty juice was what the kids in her ward called being held down and injected with a sedative in the buttocks. That wasn’t the kind of story one told a stranger though, and so I nodded and agreed that teenagers were very difficult.
“Would you like to go out to dinner?” Susan asked.
I did want to go out to dinner with her. I imagined laughing with her, drinking wine as the sun finally set, hearing her husky voice in my ear telling me things, things about her life, about her ex-husband, things about being a writer, things about why she had wound up on this odd tour in Vilnius. But I couldn’t imagine abandoning Vera, nor could I imagine letting Vera tag along, although surely Susan was aware that I was Vera’s guardian and any dinner with me would involve Vera as well. I wasn’t able to read her intentions quickly enough to answer, and I was interrupted by Darius. “This will be all for today, my ducklings. Oh, but I must tell you one more thing. There is a legend that upon once visiting Vilnius, you are destined, or perhaps cursed, to return. So I am afraid all of you are already committed to this journey much more seriously than you might have imagined.”
Darius gave a queer little laugh. Vera came out of nowhere and grabbed my hand.
“Let’s get out of here,” she whispered, and my daughter and I slipped away without saying goodbye and set out alone in the city.
—
At twelve, I had confessed to my mother that I worried I would never have a girlfriend. “Is that possible,” I asked, “that it could just never happen?”
“Oh,” my mother said, drawing air into her deep lungs and then giving one of her low, beautiful chuckles, “you will have so, so many girlfriends, Lucas. I promise you.”
My mother, Rose, was an actress and it hadn’t been a sure thing that she would make the dangerous crossing from ingenue to leading lady to character actress. She was so blond and pretty and short that for a time she had despaired completely. These traits had made finding work easy when she was twenty but miserable when she was nearing forty. I remember her wailing about it when I was little. I would hold her hand as she sat at the kitchen table sobbing, telling me about this or that evil casting director, tossing her long curly hair. I was my mother’s confidant, always. I suppose you could say I was a mama’s boy, except that having no father, no brothers or sisters, it didn’t seem I had much of a choice.
After my father, who was also an actor, turned out to have no interest in fatherhood, I became my mother’s little companion, some cross between child, toy, and friend, and she took me everywhere with her: to plays and bookstores, on long car trips to Santa Barbara and back for no reason other than to drive in the rain and listen to the radio. She told me everything, allowing me full access not only to the adult world but to her world, which was not entirely the same thing as the real world, stuffed as it was with Shakespeare and odd bits of remembered novels and family mythology. When I was five, I found her diaphragm on the lip of the bathtub and she explained explicitly what it was for and how it worked. When I was ten, she liked to joke that Gushers candy lunch snacks had been invented to get girls used to the idea of swallowing surprising liquids. She dated throughout my childhood, but she was never with one man for long and I rarely met any of them. She never remarried. “Why would I remarry when I have you?” she would say. “I’m never going to love anyone the way I love you, Lucas, so what’s the point?”
She had perfect pitch and an unbelievable mental recall for song lyrics, and so she would often burst into song in public places to embarrass me. She would sing “Danny Boy” through the door when I was on the toilet. Once, she kept up an Irish brogue for four days, though I begged her to stop and even started crying at one point. And yet, she was everything to me. Once Grandma Sylvia was dead, she was literally my only family in the world.
That day, as she smoothed aloe on my back — I was badly, chronically sunburned as a child — she told me all about the many girlfriends I would have. The first one, she said, would just be sort of awkward and painful. We would go to a school dance together and we would slow dance and I would smell her shampoo in her hair and neither of us would know what to talk about. But then, my mother went on, things would get better. The next girl, she promised, would have a great big wonderful laugh, and would snort when she was surprised, and would love Star Wars and skateboarding. Our love would be familiar and real and wonderfully normal. A sane love.
But I was not sure I wanted a sane love. “Tell me about the next one,” I said.
“Oh, the next one?” my mother asked. “The next one will break your heart.”
“How will she do it?” I asked, excited.
“Even I can’t predict that,” my mother said, clicking the cap of the aloe vera bottle closed and patting my shoulder to let me know she was done. “But everyone gets their heart broken at least once. The secret is to try to enjoy it.”
I was positive I would enjoy it. I wanted to get my heart broken more than anything.
—
Still, it had been a surprise to fall in love with Kat.
We attended Phillips Exeter Academy together, a New England boarding school so old and prestigious that every other New England boarding school was a kind of copy of it. She was in my biology class. When I first met her, I was more a dreaming embryo than a person. Something about the harsh winters had scared my California soul into deep hibernation, or else it was simply that having escaped the suffocating and yet intoxicating intimacy with my mother, I was haunted and lonely. That is the thing about living at schooclass="underline" No one touches you. The teachers are not allowed to. You have no parents. Occasionally, your friends punch you. And that is about it. Eventually your whole body starts to ache.