At the Bottom of Everything(7)

This was in January, a day or two after one of the blizzards we had that winter. I was happy to put off the half-block expedition to my car.

I couldn’t tell if she was slightly drunk or just unguarded in the way that people sometimes get late at night; for some reason she made me think of an exhausted little girl playing house. We sat across from each other at the wooden table in their kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. Outside, the wind on the snow sounded like something trying to take off.

“How were they tonight? Were they OK?”

“They were good. Teddy didn’t want to take a bath, but they were good.”

“I’m sorry the house is like this. Half our stuff is still at Peter’s mother’s place.” She rolled her eyes as if I’d know what she was talking about.

“I’m sorry if I freaked you out,” she said, when she stood up to turn off the stove. “Asking you about losing someone?”

“You didn’t freak me out. It’s just girlfriend stuff. Or non-girlfriend stuff, I guess.”

“That’s kind of what I figured. It totally sucks, doesn’t it? I feel like no one ever tells you. Or maybe you just can’t believe it until it’s you. My friends used to talk about getting separated and I’d be like, Oh, OK, sorry. But now just—boom. Like having some disease. Do you want milk?”

We both held our mugs with two hands and I kept looking down into the steam so I wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. She asked me how long I’d been dating Claire, whether we’d been living together. She told me that she couldn’t look at Nicholas sometimes now; he reminded her so much of Peter, just his face when he laughed, the way he held his chin when he read.

“Thanks so much for the tea,” I kept saying, when I finally left, as if she’d brewed it from gold flakes.

She stood in the front doorway watching me make my way down the stairs (the snow on the ground had turned into what felt like hardened brown sugar), and I almost wanted to turn around and offer to spend the night: the thought of her alone with Nicholas and Teddy in that enormous dark house was too much. (Why was the thought of me alone in my crypt of a bedroom not too much? I don’t know. For those few minutes, under the influence of the conversation or the snow or the ice pick–sharp stars, I felt like I didn’t need anyone’s pity.)

At home I stayed up in our apartment’s only comfortable chair reading Chekhov’s “The Black Monk” (having time to read was another of the benefits of my unhappiness), but before I’d gotten more than a couple of pages in, before I’d even met the black monk, I was falling asleep. I woke up, with the lamp blazing in my face, from a sex dream about Anna in which she was hovering over me and telling me, in a voice that somehow felt like clean sheets, to calm down, stop worrying, that she knew me, she knew everything about me, and all of it, believe her, was OK.





Thomas and I took the bus to his house that first afternoon, which already put me off balance. I’d ridden on city buses only a couple of times (in fact I’d gone around D.C. without an adult only a couple of times), so I felt, as I spilled what seemed to me like every coin in my backpack into the bus driver’s silver trough, that I was doing something obviously wrong.

“Do you ride this every day?”

“More or less.”

“Is it always this crowded?”

“Usually it is.”

I felt, irritatingly, a desire to impress him, and on his terms. I wished I’d prepared by reading a book about World War II, or by coming up with some intriguing questions about my stepdad’s new computer.

His house turned out to be on one of the steep streets in Cleveland Park near the zoo. The sidewalks were broken up by huge gray roots and instead of lawns these houses had ivy and terraces. These were the kinds of neighborhoods, I learned later, in which adults were always bragging about running into old secretaries of defense and directors of the OMB at the hardware store or the Chinese place.

Thomas let us in (using a key that hung on a nail under the porch, which seemed to me another adult touch) and I was struck almost at once by a feeling I hadn’t had in years. There are certain places, certain objects, that seem in some hard-to-explain way alive, and that give a weird charmed quality to everything you do in them or with them. When I was little I seemed to get this feeling more regularly; it would come over me when I was holding a glass, or wearing a particular sweater, or sitting in the unpainted corner of the kitchen in one of the first apartments I remember. Warmth? Happiness? Home? What comes to mind is the way wood sometimes looks in sunlight; there’s a Vermeer-ish quality to what I’m talking about. Anyway, the Pells’ house had it.