Twenty-Eight
It’s not like Jack and I have had an actual fight. Was it shitty for her to say what she did and then leave me alone with Paul? Absolutely. But her dad got re-diagnosed with cancer, the extent of which I don’t even know, and I’ve no doubt if I were in Jack’s worn-down Chuck Taylors, I would be just as shitty. Probably shittier.
I call her in the morning, and she answers. She tells me her dad is going in for his first round of chemo next week. According to the doctors, the cancer has made an aggressive return and spread to the liver, so the treatment will have to be even more intense than what Mr. Harlow endured the first time around. They’re skipping the hormone treatment they used last time and are going straight to chemo. Jack tells me all this with a steady voice, no signs of emotional disturbance.
It’s what I expect. Jack might break apart later, but right now this is how she’s coping. That’s why I don’t launch into an elaborate apology over the phone, why I don’t cry and tell Jack she was right, that I do take her and Paul for granted, and I’m going to be better. Jack doesn’t do those kinds of apologies. Emotionally vomiting on her, all for the sake of obtaining her forgiveness, would be just another form of selfishness on my part. I already know Jack’s forgiven me, and she knows I’m sorry, and we can leave it at that. And if, down the road, she needs me to beg for her pardon, I will do it. I know now, I would do anything to keep us okay. Even more than what I’d do for a good take of Unhappy Families .
• • •
Prostate cancer has to be the most awkward cancer ever. Especially when you are a girl, and you and your best girl friend are talking about it in relation to her dad. Back when Mr. Harlow was first diagnosed, I had no idea what “prostate” meant, and I kept mixing it up with the word “prostrate,” including the time I looked the word up online, which led me to think for a full week that Mr. Harlow had a cancer that only affected him when he was lying down and therefore he would never again be able to sleep like a normal person.
It’s an awkward, awful cancer, and its reappearance in our lives feels like an insidious inevitability. Cancer always seems to come back. It does, anyway, in all the sad cancer movies and books. It comes back like Mr. Harlow’s—with a malignant vengeance. And in the books and movies, it’s always the second wave that’s fatal. I tell myself not to think these thoughts, but it’s as good as telling myself not to think of the number 42. According to Jack, the doctors actually think Mr. Harlow has a good chance of pulling through. They’ve given him 60/40 odds. Glass more full than empty.
Mom is in all-out Angel of Mercy and Ministrations mode. Later in the afternoon, I hear her in the kitchen, marathon-calling friends and neighbors to set up a meal delivery schedule. Mrs. Harlow still has to travel for work and can’t be home most of the week to cook. But with my mom’s help, the Harlows will soon have more baked lasagna and chicken pot pies than they know what to do with. This is one social custom I can totally get behind. Flowers at funerals? Pointless. Everyone’s too sad to notice. Cigars at a birth? Here’s a brand-new life, let’s celebrate by pumping our lungs with toxins! But food during illness—that I get. Food is always appropriate.
A week later, I’m walking up to the Harlows’ when I notice a familiar black Jeep in the driveway. Jay Prasad is walking down the front steps, an empty wicker basket in hand.
He smiles and waves, quickening his steps to meet me in the middle of the yard.
“I misssss youuu,” he sings in soft falsetto, bopping the tip of my nose. “How’ve you been?”
There’s sympathy in his voice, which I know is partially due to the Golden Tuba disappointment.
I try to dispel it with an enthusiastic “Great!” before taking note that we are standing in the yard of a man who has cancer. “Um. Well, you know.”
Jay says, “Cancer fucking sucks.”
“Mmm-hmm.” I feel like I’m going to cry. In an attempt to stave off a sob, I say, “How’re you? How’s Tony?”
Jay smiles in his cannot-be-repressed, heart-on-sleeve way. “Um. Good. Everything is very, very good.”
I waggle my eyebrows.
“So,” says Jay, “I dunno if you heard they’re making this new web series in Louisville? I sent an audition tape and a link to that episode where Tony and I are ripping out each other’s throats as Alex and Vronsky. And . . . I got a part.”
“Jay, that’s great! What’s the series about?”
“Uuuh.” Jay looks embarrassed. “It’s, like, a slasher thing? Lots of fake blood.”
“Oh. Wow. Diversifying your résumé.”
“Yeah, I guess. Anyway, they called me up and said I didn’t even have to come audition in person. They were all big fans of Unhappy Families .”
“O-oh. Wow.”
“Basically, what I’m saying is you’re famous and everyone loves you.”
“Oh, Jay. You know how to make a gal feel real special.”
He shrugs happily, and we fall into a hug. He’s the kind of person I feel like I’ve never hugged enough.
“I’d better get going,” he tells me. “Tony’s started this new band, and I’m supposed to be fanboying all over him at rehearsal.”
I store this away as information to share with Jack only when she’s in an excellent mood. Then I wave as Jay pulls out of the driveway, and for some reason I’m sadder about seeing him go now than I was at the wrap party. Maybe because it’s since become clear that we don’t have any overlapping activities in the coming school year—nothing to keep us together. We do live in the Modern Age, though, so there are at least a few little things I can do. I can keep track of what shows he and Serena will be in this year. I’ll go. I’ll bring flowers. I’ll text them every year on their birthdays, and they will be my Alex and Anna until the end of time.
• • •
On Saturday, we drive Klaudie to Vanderbilt. Our SUV is so packed that both Klaudie and I have to rest our feet atop Bankers Boxes crammed on the floorboard like Tetris pieces. There’s a body pillow and a giant down comforter in the aisle between our seats, which makes for a nice sleep space, at least. We’re not even to Bowling Green and I swear Dad has already made a dozen jokes about how much Klaudie has packed. She won’t let it go, either. She keeps arguing back, with increasing irritation, “It’s my entire life , Dad! I had to pack my life in this car!”
Somehow, Mom is able to sleep through the familial discord. Dad starts playing a Malcolm Gladwell audiobook, and Klaudie and I settle into silent scenery-gazing mode. When I attempt a by and large unsuccessful leg stretch, I notice Klaudie staring at me.
“Ugh,” I say. “Creep, much?”
She doesn’t reply, and she doesn’t stop looking, which makes it even creepier.
“Ergh, stop it.” I grab the edge of the body pillow and attempt to hide my face. When I peer back up she’s still staring.
She says, “Is it my fault? I want you to tell me if it’s my fault.”
I abandon my body pillow barricade. “Is what your fault?”
“You not getting the Golden Tuba. Because I bailed for the last part of the show, and you had to change the script, and it made it less good of a show than it should’ve been.”
It’s so wholly unexpected, this line of conversation. I honestly haven’t thought about Klaudie’s departure from the show in weeks, let alone considered the role it might’ve played in Golden Tuba voting.
“Klaudie,” I say, “I don’t think that had anything to do with it. Like you said, you didn’t leave until near the end, and some of those episodes haven’t even posted yet.”
Klaudie does not look at all convinced. There is guilt puddling in her deep brown eyes.
“I’m serious,” I say, more forceful. “I’m sure it had nothing to do with us losing. The other series were really, really good. It was tough competition.”
“I think maybe . . .” Klaudie looks out on the highway flashing past. “I don’t know, maybe I made a mistake. I’m not even talking to Jenna now.”
A couple months ago, I might have relished this moment. Now, not so much. Now, I’m just hung up on the fact that Klaudie won’t be in this vehicle on our way home. I won’t see her again until Thanksgiving.
“It’s over now,” I say. “It’s over, it’s fine.”
I don’t say it dismissively. I say it reassuringly. Like I mean it.
• • •
When we arrive on campus, I get a distinct summer camp vibe. Summer camp, but with a much better manicured landscape. Chipper students wearing goldenrod-colored T-shirts carry clipboards and tell us where to go. All four of us work up a sweat lugging Klaudie’s things to her third-floor dorm room. Then, famished, we go to El Palenque, our favorite Mexican restaurant in town.
“You’re going to know all the good places to eat once we come back,” I tell Klaudie through a mouthful of refried beans.
“Don’t count on it. I will subsist primarily on V8s. And dream of Dad’s cooking.”
She looks mournfully at Dad, and he looks mournfully back at her. Then, just as the whole table is reaching the point of utterly bleak, there’s an eruption of claps and cheers from the other side of the room. The servers are singing a spirited “Feliz Cumpleaños ” to a little girl with braces on her four front teeth. They place a bowl of fried ice cream before her and drop a hot-pink sombrero on her head. It hangs comically low, past her eyes, and her family busily snaps photos on their cameras. Seeing this little girl so happy makes our table cheerful again. Dad tosses a wadded-up straw wrapper into the striped pocket of Klaudie’s T-shirt dress, and we cry out at the masterful precision of it all.
It’s dark when we return Klaudie to her dorm. We pull into the only free visitor space and open the doors to an onslaught of humid air and cricket chirps.
Around this time last year, when we brought Klaudie to campus for a school visit, I thought I’d be moving here too. Now I’m not looking at the towering stone and brick buildings like they’ll be my future home. They’re just the place where my sister Klaudie lives. I’m not sure I’m entirely okay with that yet, but I think I will be. Eventually.
“I know they say you’re not supposed to call the first week,” says Mom, “but . . . call ?”
We’re all crying—Dad most of all.
“I’ll call.”
“And if your roomie turns out to be a psycho sorority girl,” I say, “you can always come back home. Though I may have taken over your room by then.”
Klaudie rolls her eyes and says, “I’ll take my chances.”
Her voice is shaking, though.
We form a sweaty group hug. Then Klaudie heads for the dormitory, waving off Dad’s offer to walk her to the door, and she’s gone.
The drive back is dark and quiet. Mom cries for the first half, and Dad keeps saying, “She seems so happy there,” and Mom keeps saying, “I know, Jan, I know.”
It gets me thinking that my parents will have this same conversation a year from now, and also eighteen years from now, about some Zelenka whose face I haven’t even seen yet.
I still don’t understand all the reasons behind why they’re having this baby. I don’t think I ever will. If I were their age and had already dealt with the early development of two girls, I would say no way in hell, give me early retirement. But I’m not them, and they’re happy. I see it in the way they squeeze their hands over the gearshift, after Dad merges onto I-65. Like they’re still head-over-heels-in-love teenagers out for a night drive.
I think about what Klaudie said on our own night drive—about how Zelenka Jr. is an addition to Mom and Dad’s very small family. How that’s true, accident or not. How it’s a good thing. And that doesn’t make leaving Klaudie in Nashville any easier, but it does make tomorrow look a little better.
• • •
In the morning, I walk to Holly Park. It’s still early, just past dawn. I couldn’t sleep again, and I decided that sitting in a creaky swing is better than sweating one minute longer under the covers of my bed.
I’ve only been swinging for a minute, listlessly pushing my heels into the gravel, swaying from side to side, when a pair of sneakers comes into view. I look up.
Paul is saying something, but I can’t hear. I tug my earphones out and say, “What?”
He shakes his head, amused. “I called out when you passed by the house, but you didn’t hear me.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Do you want to be alone?”
I seriously consider this. If I wanted to be alone, Paul would leave, no problem. He’d understand.
“No,” I say at length. “I don’t.”
Paul takes a seat on the swing next to me. It judders under his weight.
“How’s your dad?” I ask.
“Stuffed with pasta and cheese, so as happy as he can be under the circumstances. Some lady brought us a chocolate cake last night. With a caramel center. Who does that?”
My smile drops. “We didn’t make you cake. Do you want more cake?”
Paul laughs. “God, no, Tash. You guys are doing more than enough.”
“Are we? I don’t really feel like we’re doing anything. Anything that actually helps.”
“You know,” he says, “people always say if they could take their loved one’s pain away, they would. But think about if you actually could. It’d be such a nightmare. You would take someone’s pain, but then they would love you , so they’d just take it back, or someone else you love would take it from you, and someone they love would take it from them , and it would go on like that until the pain ended up with some person who loved but wasn’t loved back. Some sad, unloved person. And they would get stuck with the pain.”
“Damn, Paul. You go to dark places.”
Paul pushes into a swing. The chains cough up rust and grumble in irritation. “All I mean is you’re doing everything you can to help, and I’m kind of glad you can’t do more.”
The sky is pink. The sun is in my eyes. There’s a congregation of birds chirruping in nearby trees. I squint at Paul and the haircut I’ll never get used to.
This is when I should apologize. So I open my mouth and ruin the moment.
“I’m sorry. For how I treated you before Orlando. I—I don’t even know what I was doing.”
Paul stops the swing in a pullback. He looks dubious. “Don’t you?”
“I . . . Well.”
“Because it seemed to me like it was a striptease meant to convince me that loving you without sex would be torture and therefore impossible. Correct me if I’m wrong.”
I don’t correct him. Also, he said a form of the word “love,” and I am having trouble breathing.
“Which was very ineffective, by the way, because I have seen you in less. You know, because we have been constantly around each other for more than fifteen years.”
“Yeah, I know. Bad move on my part.”
For so, so many reasons.
“Okay, I forgive you,” says Paul. “The end.”
He says it like he’s finished telling a sleeping child a bedtime story—soft and final and relieved.
“God,” I whisper. “I cannot take you seriously with that buzz cut. I just cannot .”
Paul bursts into a laugh. I smile and drop my gaze back to the gravel.
“I really didn’t know you felt like that,” I say. “You’ve always treated me and Jack the exact same way.”
“That’s not true.”
“For me, it’s true. I never saw you treat us differently.”
“I felt differently about you.”
“Yeah, sorry, I can’t see your feelings.”
Paul sighs. “I said ‘the end.’ We don’t have to draw it out.”
I am burrowing a hole into the gravel with the tip of my sneaker. The earth grows darker and darker the deeper I dig.
“Paul,” I say, “I like you a lot.”
“Yes, well, word on the street is I’m the second-best person you know.”
The canvas of my sneaker is stained and damp. “No, I like you. The way I like guys. I like you like that.”
Nothing but the creak-crick-moan-creak of the swings.
“You know me,” I say. “I don’t have to explain things to you or impress you, because you know me, and you’ve seen me at my absolute shittiest. So it’d be really easy for me to say, ‘Okay sure, date me.’ But that’d be so selfish. Even if you don’t think so now, you’ll end up resenting me, and I can’t let that happen.”
“Don’t you—”
“No, wait, I’m not finished. I’ve done a lot of research about this. About asexuals dating sexual people, and it’s just . . . really hard. It takes a ton of communication and compromise, and you are a guy who wants to have sex, and that’s totally fine, but why the hell you would want to date me is beyond the realms of logic.”
Paul is staring hard at me. He says, “That was a really long sentence.”
“Urmph,” I reply.
“So you’re saying I am an unhinged animal controlled by my libido.”
“No. I’m being realistic.”
“Actually, I think you’re being kind of sexist, and also , you never asked my opinion on this subject.”
“Paul—”
“Okay, this is going to sound crass, but here’s the thing: I like you more than I like sex. I mean, I like sex. Like, a lot. But . . . call me crazy, but something about having a dad with prostate cancer makes you reconsider how important your dick is.”
It’s so unexpected, I have to laugh.
“Whyyy are we talking about your dad’s penis?”
“I said nothing about my dad’s penis. You did.”
“Oh my God, Paul, uuugh.” I’m embarrassed, but there’s nowhere to hide, so I shut my eyes.
“I’m just being honest,” says Paul.
Then, when I don’t respond, he starts singing that line from Outkast’s “Hey Ya!”: “I’m—I’m—I’m just being honest.”
“Stop it.” I kick at his swing, which results in a rusty cacophony of screeches.
When we settle down again I look at him, my cheek mushed against the chain of my swing. “Paul,” I say.
I’ve been saying his name a lot, I realize. Just his name. Because it’s so familiar, so comfortable. It’s a better crutch than “uh” or “eh” or even “um.”
“If you like me,” he says, “why won’t you let us try it out? It could be a flaming disaster, but we could try. You know, I’ve been doing a lot of research too, and I think we’re pretty decent at communication and compromise. I’ve thought of how to deal. I think I can do it.”
“You say that now . . .”
“Yeah, you know what? I do say that now. Now’s all we’ve got. So maybe you should say ‘yes.’ Say ‘yes’ now, and you can always reevaluate in ten minutes, or ten hours, or ten months. Whatever. Maybe it will be too hard for me, or maybe it will be too hard for you, but at least we can try.”
“You like the idea of it now, because it makes me different from other girls, but—”
Paul stamps his feet down hard into the gravel. He drops to his knees and grabs on to the right chain of my swing. There is so much light in his dark eyes.
“Tash. Listen. We have known each other for ages. I have kissed and dated and slept with other girls. You know that, because you were hanging around for all of it. Now, listen . I would. Rather. Hug you. Than be with. Anyone else. Just. Hug you. Do you. Want to. Hug me. Back.”
He sounds like a robot who’s recently developed the capacity for human emotion, and if this weren’t the conversation it is, I would giggle. Instead, I want to cry. My voice is gone. Missing. I go on a hunt for it and find it curled up in the lowest part of my esophagus. I drag it back to its proper place. By the time I do, the light is fading in Paul’s eyes.
I say, “Yes.”
Paul says, “Tash.”
I figure it out then. He feels about my name the same way I do about his: comfortable, at ease. It’s on the tip of his tongue more than “um.”
I slide off my swing and Paul scoots closer, and he fits his arms around me. We’ve hugged so many times before. I wonder the exact number. Is it in the hundreds? Thousands? Hundred thousands? We’ve hugged all those times, and this hug is exactly and nothing like all the ones before it. My cheek rests against his chest, and his blood pumps near my ear, and I feel warm and safe and known.
Because here is another thing I figure out, as we sit there in the gravel, hugging for minutes, chains creaking a chorus around us: Paul knows a little of my why . He’s looked into some of the darkest parts of me, and he hasn’t fled the scene. I would be an idiot to not try this out. At least for now, and however many nows that follow.
• • •
That night, Leo and I have a chat. I sit on the edge of my bed, and for once I scowl right back at him.
“Leo,” I say. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes you’re a real disappointment.”
Scowl, says twenty-year-old Leo Tolstoy.
“I’m breaking up with you,” I say. “I think you’ve seen this coming for a while.”
Scowl.
“But I’m very much enjoying The Death of Ivan Ilyich , and I hope you know I will always be a lifelong fan of your work.”
Scowl.
Conversation over. At least I’ve done Leo the courtesy of telling him I’m leaving, which is more than he did for poor Sophia.
I take down the poster, gingerly roll it up, and stow it away on the top shelf in my closet. As this is not an acrimonious split, I leave his quotes on the wall. I even smile a little at my favorite one: “If you want to be happy, be.”
There are two ways to take that quote, and if I were a scholar in Slavic languages, I guess I could translate the original Russian text and remove all doubt. But I kind of like that there are two possible interpretations in English. The first, more obvious one is such an oversimplification. You can’t make yourself happy. Happiness isn’t a matter of will but of feelings and biology and circumstances and a dozen other factors. So that’s not how I read the quote at all.
This is my interpretation: If you want a chance at being happy, exist . Because yes, life can suck, but as long as you’re alive, there’s a chance you can be happy. And maybe that’s a dismal way to look at life, but I think there’s hope there. Like how the end of Unhappy Families leaves me feeling like a chunk of my chest has been carved out and will never again be filled. But then there’s that hope for the next project, the newest venture. There’s the hope of moving forward and making something even better.
Here’s one thing I know has made me happier: honesty. Like George said, it’s a decent policy to live by. Tonight, I’m being more honest with myself than I ever have before. And I like that feeling a lot—the feeling of being known by myself, and by someone else, too.