At the Bottom of Everything(25)

But no matter how mad I got (and I did, in that conversation or another one, tell Thomas I hated him and that I was so sick of his fucking face that I never wanted to see him again), we were stuck together, closer, in a way, than we’d ever been before. My interactions with every other person in the world—the bizarrely sweet head counselor Carlotta at work; my mom, who would find me staring on the couch and ask if she could make me a sandwich; the homeless man who shivered all summer in his trench coat on the steps at the Friendship Heights Metro station—all of them took place on a stage, under lights, according to a script that couldn’t have had any less to do with what I actually felt than if I’d been playing Mary Poppins. The only backstage I had was with Thomas. Only with him could I say, “This whole thing is really the fucking baddy,” and feel that the pipeline between my brain and my mouth was finally, for a minute at least, open.

CLEVELAND PARK WOMAN, 22, DIES AFTER BEING HIT BY CAR ON CONNECTICUT.

When Thomas handed me the newspaper (we were sitting side by side on his bed, where we’d looked at New Yorker cartoons in seventh grade, where he’d shown me his drawings of Michelle Koller), I thought, for what turned out to be a last breath before going underwater, that this was about a different person. Connecticut was seriously dangerous for pedestrians, was the point, and it could always have been worse.

A Cleveland Park woman, Mira Batra, 22, has died after being struck by a car early on August 7. The cause, according to a spokesman for Sibley Memorial Hospital, was internal injuries sustained in the accident. The driver who struck her, Charles Lowe of Fairfax, has cited a second car as the cause of the accident. Police continue to investigate. Ms. Batra is survived by her parents, Manish and Amita Batra, also of Cleveland Park, and her brother, Ajay Batra, 29, of Baltimore. A memorial service is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. Saturday at the Hindu Temple of Greater Washington, D.C.

“What do we do?” I said. I meant it on every scale: How do we live our lives? How do we go back downstairs? How do we survive the next minute?

Thomas shook his head, making a face I didn’t recognize right away that meant that he was crying; it was the kind of crying, silent and painful looking, that can turn, with no warning, into wailing. But instead of wailing he managed to say, “See? Happy now? Better if I fall apart?”

I shook my head like a dog shaking water from its ears.

I wasn’t, and I’m still not, the kind of person who knows what to do when people cry (I’ve had more than one girlfriend interrupt her tears to ask me why the hell I’m just sitting there like a mannequin), but just then I didn’t wonder at all: I put a hand on Thomas’s back and kept it there as he lay down, kept it there as I lay down next to him, didn’t say a word as his breathing slowed down and as he finally, after what felt like half an hour, started shuddering less and less. The newspaper had fallen somewhere between the mattress and the wall. I found myself staring at a birthmark on the back of his neck, just above where my hand was, and every time I started to panic I made myself notice one new thing about it (a whitish hair, a pinprick red dot), and like that, vaguely comforted by the thought that at least whatever was going to happen would have to happen to both of us, I got through the hour.

“Thomas?” I said at one point, as if he might have somehow managed to die. “Thomas?” But he was, like a baby after a bottle or a criminal after being caught, asleep.





At some point in the spider-hole weeks after the Anna fiasco, I decided I couldn’t live anymore with Joel. The darkness of my bedroom, the cereal bowls soaking in the sink, the mildewy towels hanging on the bathroom door—they weren’t the cause of what had gone wrong in my life, but they were tangled up in it. So I called my mom one night (“I’d almost forgotten what you sound like!”) and asked her to talk to Frank about whether any of his new apartments happened to be empty.

My stepdad, who’d made (and was continuing to make) more money as a lawyer than he had any idea what to do with, had bought a few apartments in a new condo in downtown Bethesda. He had the vague idea that he’d sell all but one, which he and my mom would move into when they retired, but I think he mostly just wanted something to talk about, to ask his secretary to make phone calls about, to keep track of now that they’d renovated every renovatable room in their current house. It’s in the nature of empires to expand.

Adam, Mom tells me you’re interested in apartment possibility. Give a call so we can discuss. Thanks. —F

As a stepfather Frank was uncomfortable (I remember once, when we were at the grocery store without my mom, that I reached up to tap his arm, and for a second, before he caught himself, he recoiled as if a stray dog had nosed him), but as a landlord he was a natural.