I listened to his stories, and then I told him about my mother. Nothing planned. He spoke and then I did, back and forth, a game of catch. I told him about lying to everyone, making excuses for her thinness. That was her rule. She thought her publisher would cancel her contract if it got out that she was sick. I told him about Thanksgiving, how I kept pushing her to eat. She said politely she didn’t want any more, but I insisted. She couldn’t hold it down.
She covered her face and ran to the kitchen, my father and me hovering as she leaned over the sink. My God, I can’t do this. I just can’t do anything. She was so terribly sorry, she said, that she’d ruined our Thanksgiving. “It was the last time we ate a meal together, and I screwed it up,” I said.
“You’re lucky.” The caller had an even baritone and a slight Brooklyn accent. “You’re more than lucky she’s dead and buried. Dead and alive is what’s killing me. It’s breaking my heart.”
Jonas met me at the Dublin House on Seventy-Ninth and Broadway later that night. It was packed, and everyone was drinking as if the end of the world were coming; at least it felt that way to me. We settled down at a dark wood table in the back and made our way through two sizable pitchers. I described how my father appeared to have a steady girlfriend now, a school administrator named Linda.
“Women do great on their own,” he said. “But the men from our fathers’ generation are kind of clueless. For all their yelling at each other, my dad couldn’t go three days without my mother. Remember when my aunt Beth died? My uncle Ned remarried within five months. ..”
The buzzing in my head started in again, and then the music got incredibly loud. Jonas was saying something about the way we’re wired, which I couldn’t really hear. Then it felt like someone had shoved cotton in my ears.
“I’ve gone deaf,” I said.
He helped me to my feet and pushed me through a maze of beery faces out the door. In the freezing air, my hearing returned.
“Is it possible you’re working backward through the healing process?” he said.
“Fuck off.”
“I’m not knocking it. I think it’s admirable.”
I threw up on his shoes and felt somewhat better.
Over that weekend Jonas took me to a Rites of Spring party on Spring Street, endearingly enough. We rode the subway down, then walked there through a late-March blizzard. The cars moved soundlessly down the street. From somewhere in the heavens a snowball scraped the top of Jonas’s head.
“Took you fucking long enough,” a woman’s voice yelled. She was leaning out the window of a fourth-floor apartment.
“Took us forever to shovel out the driveway,” Jonas yelled back.
The party was packed with downtown hipsters, most about five years older than us, with something already to show for their lives. In what passed as a dining room, the snowball hurler, Sylvie, was arranging the hors d’oeuvre platters and mixing margaritas.
“You’re Andrew,” she said, when I walked by the food table.
The crier, I thought.
She handed me a margarita, then tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She was nearly my height, pale and possibly sleep deprived, with an oval face, soft features, and dark brown librarian glasses. When we shook hands, hers was damp from the snow, or from squeezing limes.
After a minute or two of introductory conversation, she said, “I’m really sorry about your mother.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Someone called her name, and she excused herself and went to hug a woman in a short skirt and knee-high boots, who introduced her to a white guy with thick dreadlocks.
When she returned, she said, “I don’t know if Jonas told you, but I went through something similar when I was in high school.”
I was starting to understand that having someone close to you die meant hearing everyone else’s saddest story.
“You lost your mother?” I said.
“Father. Listen, you probably don’t want to talk about this at a party.”
“Maybe not,” I said, and so we talked about where she went to school and my job at the radio station. She was studying art history at Columbia. She told me all about her roommate, Dana, whom Jonas had slept with once (“zero chemistry”), and then she asked me how my father was coping.
Sort of as an experiment, or because I had a buzz on, I decided to tell her the abridged saga of my winter, about the perfumed notes and late-night calls, how I felt sometimes like a dormitory R.A., how I’d bump into T-shirted women in the kitchen half asleep, how one of them made elaborate snacks in the middle of the night, and how another, the boutique owner, accidentally walked naked into my room, thinking it was my father’s.
“Oh, please. You think she went in there by accident?” Sylvie said.
“I guess I did.”
“Sweetheart. When my father died, my mother kept me away from the men she was dating.” We were side by side and our arms brushed. My body tensed. “I was sixteen, and I think she thought I’d try to seduce them. And I probably would have in my own insecure way. Not literally, but enough to ruin things for her. In any event, she stayed over at their apartments. At first it was only on the weekends, but then it was like four nights a week. She’d phone to tell me to order a pizza for me and my brother, or Chinese food, whatever we wanted, and to charge it to her American Express card.”
She poured me another margarita, then poured herself one. “I could have stayed out in clubs all night, or had huge-ass parties, and she would have never known. I tried it once, throwing a party, but I ended up getting too nervous about all the people there getting drunk and throwing up, so I kicked them all out.”
“Did she remarry?”
“Yes, to my stepfather.”
“Do you like him?”
“Better than her.”
“Seriously?”
“Let’s just say he’s a lot less complicated.”
“I find everything about my father’s dating depressing.”
“Depressing is when he dates a twenty-year-old.”
“He hasn’t done that yet.”
“Then count your blessings.”
I watched her after that. She was unabashed in a way that usually put me off, but in her there was something heartfelt that I latched onto. She disappeared for a half hour or so and then reappeared at my side.
“Feel like getting out of here?” she said.
“You mean the two of us?”
“You think you could do better?” she said.
I tilted my head in mock judgment. She was kind of gawky, I thought, with narrow hips and long skinny arms and an illegible word written on the back of her wrist. Her hair held the shape of a wool cap she must have worn to the party, but she didn’t seem to care.
“All right. Let’s go,” I said.
It was Sylvie’s idea to stop by our house. She wanted to meet my father “in the flesh” and see if he was as dashing as she imagined. When we reached home, Linda was camped in the kitchen, making a pot of coffee.
“Your dad went down to tell the doorman to turn up the heat,” she said. She wore a cashmere V-neck sweater of my father’s over a white camisole and looked like a late-career Jane Fonda. “It’s freezing in here, don’t you think?”
“I’m Sylvie,” Sylvie said. She took off her ski cap and shook out her hair, sprinkling melting snow into the room and onto her glasses, which she removed and placed in her coat pocket.
“And I’m Linda, Andrew’s dad’s girlfriend,” Linda said. She pulled out three mugs, one that I hadn’t seen before, with the Statue of Liberty drinking coffee. She poured us cups and told us about her evening, coaching a room of Bensonhurst kids about writing résumés.