The Careful Undressing of Love Page 13

  “You’ll love him,” Mom says, but I have no intention of feeling anything toward him at all.

  Owen’s here, too. He’s nervous—playing with his napkin and picking at my fries and looking at his watch like he, too, wants us to be home on time. He has a hand on my thigh and I try to remember how good that used to feel. On our first date we went to the movies, and halfway through his hand found its way to that same spot and I could swear my leg was burning from the thrill of it. Even after he took his palm away I could still feel it there, for hours after.

  But I’m already forgetting the way I thought I could feel about Owen on that dreamy Tuesday afternoon. That’s the difference, I guess, between love and wishing something was love: how long the remembering is.

  “Couldn’t we have gone somewhere else?” I ask. Mom shrugs like she can’t imagine why I’d want to be anywhere else, but the answer is obvious. Angelika has walked by Bistro once already, and it doesn’t feel coincidental.

  “This is our favorite place.” Mom says the words favorite place like she’s staking her claim.

  “I’m starving,” Owen says.

  “We’ll order the second Roger gets here,” Mom says.

  Last night she removed the key from around her neck and told me it was about time I met the man she loves. She threw out her hairspray. “My hair’s short, I don’t need this,” she said to me or to no one. Now she smells like soap and cotton. We didn’t turn on our outside light before we walked to Bistro.

  That is untrue: I turned on our outside light, like we do every evening as the sun starts to set—Angelika says lights help us find the right path. She says we have to combat the night. But on our way out Mom looked at the light—at the dusty glass of the fixture, at the row of lights all the way down the street, predictable, symmetrical, safe—and she flipped the switch to off.

  “Waste of energy,” she said.

  It’s dark now; everyone will notice.

  We have been home at ten the last two nights, since the meeting, but tonight will be different.

  Mom and I are about to be the first ones to break the curfew.

  Reporters are coming by next weekend to talk to me, Delilah, Isla, and Charlotte. It has been decided the way everything is decided now: swiftly and without our input.

  I haven’t told Owen about the photographers. His hand goes from resting on my thigh to gripping it. He needs to cut his nails; I can feel them digging into me.

  I love the moon and you and I don’t have a chicken, I think, and try again to remember what it felt like to hear the sleepy sweetness of those words. Now it sounds like gibberish. Maybe he wasn’t even saying those things to me. Maybe in his dream he was in a rowboat with a supermodel or on a rain cloud with his mother.

  “Your hand is sweaty,” I say, and move my thigh so that his palm slips right off. “I want to go home.”

  “You’re scared,” Mom says. It sounds like an accusation.

  “Delilah wants us to do the curfew thing. If you don’t want to do it, fine. But I want to do it for her.” A waiter comes by and fills our glasses, and we shut up for a minute.

  “Well, this is important to me,” Mom hisses when he’s gone. “Roger’s important to me.”

  “Lorna’s not scared,” Owen says. He turns to me and I see that he’s scared. It’s like a disease, a very contagious disease moving its way through the people on our street. “You said you’re not scared. That there’s no reason to be—right, Dr. Ryder? No one’s scared?”

  This is what it will be like now, trying to have boyfriends. There will be sweat and fast-talking and checking the obituaries. There won’t be easy, romantic nights; there won’t be passionate lapses in judgment like at Julia’s. There will be measured decisions and risk assessments and Jack’s ghost hovering around like a warning.

  Mom sighs, not exactly answering but proclaiming, “This is why we have to move to California. I’m not kidding. I can’t listen to this stuff anymore.”

  I ignore her and grab on to Owen’s hand. I need Owen to stay. I’m pushing him away but what I need is for him to stay firmly in place, to be a sort of brick wall between me and actually falling in love with anyone. I think about our first kiss and the first time we did it and the party we went to in the fall where we slow-danced to even the fastest songs, driving everyone crazy. I dig and dig, looking for those feelings.

  But.

  I keep thinking about Cruz’s lips and the shrug of his shoulders and the chalk monsters we drew on the sidewalk so many years ago.

  If I can forget Cruz and Mom can forget California and the whole world can forget about us, it will be okay. I try to see it—things working out. It’s hard to picture.

  Bistro’s door opens, and he’s here. Roger. He stands tall and skinny at the entrance and scans the place. He’s gray haired and droopy eyed and carrying a bouquet of pink tulips.

  The tulips are a mistake. It’s all a mistake. Angelika appears at the window with a scowl, peering in at Roger and my mom and the hug he gives her and the tulips he hands over to me and the slow, easy way he pulls out a chair and sits down in it—legs spread wide, smile growing, like he has all the time in the world.

  Angelika sees it all. I get the unsettling sensation of being in a movie of my life. That’s what being watched does to you.

  “The famous Lorna Ryder,” the man who is Roger says, extending his hand.

  It’s the worst possible thing he could have said.

  “Right.” I put the tulips on the table and some of the petals get dipped in whipped butter and I don’t care enough to move them. “And you’re Roger.”

  He shakes Owen’s hand, too, and that is another kind of injustice. I wonder what Dad would have done, meeting my boyfriends. He would have asked if they like the Mets, I think, and would have teased them if they were too formal. He would have asked me later, over homemade sundaes and big glasses of ice water, whether I was in love with them, because Dad liked to talk to me about things that fathers and daughters don’t always talk about.

  Roger is making small talk about subway delays with my mother and Owen is nodding like it matters, but it doesn’t.

  My dad liked to talk about love—how big it was and how small. How strong and how delicate. How I should be on the lookout for it. How I shouldn’t listen to anyone else’s opinions about it but his and e. e. cummings’s and Shakespeare’s.

  These are the details that they don’t write about in the papers. These are the facts that aren’t part of the History of the Affected. These are things that Angelika herself doesn’t care about. They’re mine, and I’m keeping them.

  “Your father and his talk of Love,” Betty said once when I asked her what she remembered about him most of all. I ask the widows that question on his birthday every year. Sometimes their answers change, and that fascinates me. Why do they remember him one way one year, and another way the next?

  “He loved love?” I asked. It’s what Mom always says about him, with a roll of her eyes and this faraway smile that I would like to capture in a bottle.

  “He was fascinated by it,” Betty said.

  “He loved it, too,” Dolly said, interrupting as always, to put her stamp on the conversation.

  “Well, sure. But he was . . . well. He was a little like Angelika. He wanted to put words to it. He liked trying to find the right way to describe it. That’s why they got along so well.”

  “My father and Angelika?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” Dolly said.

  “Oh yes, yes,” Betty said. “They had long conversations the rest of us couldn’t follow.”

  “Or we got bored!” Dolly said. “I would get so bored, once the two of them got going.”

  “But your father, he was never bored,” Betty said.

  “Not when it came to love,” Dolly said, and they both sighed the saddest, longest sighs.

>   “I don’t remember any of that,” I said. Sometimes I got nervous that they were inventing my father, that he was becoming part of the story of the street and not my father at all, anymore.

  “That’s okay,” Betty said. “We remember him for you.”

  “What’s good here?” Roger asks. Mom’s watching me meet him, this man she might love, and I think she’s looking for something but I’m not sure what. I haven’t been at a table with my mother and a man since my father was alive and I didn’t actually realize that until this exact moment.

  Seven years is an eternity and it is also an instant, and both things are true right now, looking at Roger’s ironed blue shirt and fading blue eyes.

  “The steak is delicious, but please don’t get it,” I say, thinking of my father and his love for Bistro’s rare steak.

  Roger nods like it makes sense, and maybe that’s why my mother might love him.

  I look to the window for Angelika, but Delilah has taken her place. It hurts, to see her watching me.

  “Mom,” I say, and jut my chin toward the window. Mom follows the gesture and takes a deep breath.

  “It’s okay, Lorna,” she says, playing with the ends of her hair like she holds a secret power there. “She’ll leave if we ignore her.”

  “I don’t want to ignore her.” Delilah crosses her arms and stares at me. “She’s my best friend.”

  “She’s also involved in something we don’t want to be involved with.” Mom is using her therapist voice. I know because it’s lower and slower and more formal. Owen shifts in his seat but Roger stays very still.

  “We could just make them happy and go home. For tonight. Give them tonight.” It feels simple in my head. We’ve always given a little, we’ve always surrendered bits and pieces of ourselves to Angelika and the street and I don’t know why tonight we have to take a stand. We could take a stand tomorrow or the next day. We could do the curfew for a week or a month. I’ll happily do the article, if it will keep Delilah calm, if it will give us all a chance to regroup and find one another again.

  I’ll do almost anything, I’m realizing, for the chance to stay LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla.

  “I think maybe I should go,” Owen says. I don’t know whether it’s the tension between me and Mom or the threat of Delilah and Angelika outside Bistro or whether the tiniest bit of belief has seeped into him, but he stands up and sticks his hand out for Roger to shake again and barely looks my way.

  “I’ll walk you out,” I say, but Owen only shrugs.

  I kiss him at the door in front of Delilah, in front of my mom and Angelika and Roger, who still has the slump and stillness of a person who isn’t scared. I kiss him like I might find something new and startling in his mouth. I kiss him and lean into him and scrunch my eyes and beg my body to get lost in the kissing.

  He kisses back, but lightly.

  All the while, Delilah watches and I feel her watching us.

  “I gotta go, Lorna,” he says.

  “Are we okay?” I ask.

  It’s almost ten. I’m at the door and could leave with Owen, could walk home with Delilah, could run away from my mother and Roger and the things we believe in.

  Except: the things we believe in—love and not being afraid and that Curses are silly—are the things my father believed in. I can’t run away from those things of his.

  Bistro is the place my father loved most. It’s an older building with crown moldings and tin ceilings and huge steaks. Some afternoons Dad and I would come here after school. He’d order steak frites and I’d eat the fries and do homework and he’d look over building plans and blueprints or architecture magazines and we’d spend hours like that in the dim lighting. We’d come home smelling like butter and beef.

  I don’t remember much, but I remember that. I don’t have to ask Betty and Dolly for those memories; I don’t have to hope their retelling of him is right. Bistro and cappuccinos and rare steak and blueprints are the things about my father that I know for sure, which means that they are the best things about him.

  I kiss Owen again but there’s nothing there. Even the spark of wanting is gone, because I don’t love him and I never will. Because I love someone else.

  I stand at the door, halfway in, halfway out, three minutes to curfew and watch Owen walk away.

  Delilah grabs my hand. She notices the way I pull back from her.

  “Lorna,” she says. Inside my name there’s disappointment and a plea and all the love in the world. I’ve missed my name in her mouth. I wish she’d say it again, but she is silent, waiting.

  “We don’t believe,” I say, taking care to look her right in the eyes.

  Delilah shakes her head hard, not hearing me. She grabs my wrist, looking for the bracelets, and when she finds none, she throws my arm back to me, harder than either of us expected. I open my palms and pull my shoulders up to my ears.

  She makes fists at her sides.

  On Devonairre Street, you’re either in it together or you’re not. We are girls without fathers and wives without husbands and people who have seen the worst of what life has to offer. And we stand in it—in the mud and grief and fury and rubble and ash and burning buildings. We stand in it together.

  That’s what we have always done, even when it seems silly or strange. Even when it is exhausting or annoying. We have stood in it together.

  Angelika and Betty are striding down the street now, too.

  “Curfew!” they call, Betty’s Brooklyn accent seeming to harmonize with Angelika’s Polish one. I want to do what they want me to do. But I can’t.

  “What about Jack?” Delilah says. She whispers his name. I think saying it too loudly would make it hurt even more.

  “What about us?” I ask.

  Angelika and Betty push into Bistro, Delilah and I stay on the street, ten o’clock happens, and it rips us apart.

  18.

  Roger isn’t living with us or anything but his socks are on the bathroom floor, and the living room smells like men’s deodorant and bacon, which he has made for us every morning.

  This morning is different.

  This morning I hear him before I smell bacon or see his socks.

  There is a groan. It is an awful, bass sound that travels from my toes to my throat where it stays. I close my eyes, and hope that somehow shuts out the sound, but it only makes it louder. I can hear my mother’s heartbeat, too, hard beats that speed up and skip around. She sighs.

  I turn over in bed and wish myself anywhere else in the world.

  Her sigh is high and airy. It is filled with all the things I don’t want to know about her.

  I curl into a ball and put my pillow over my head.

  Roger lets out another groan—a loud, crumbly, final one that I think I will spend the rest of my life trying to forget.

  I am stuck between weeping and laughing, between blushing and screaming.

  I consider staying in bed for the rest of the day or at least until Roger leaves, but it’s not an option today.

  • • •

  “A morning’s not a morning without bacon,” Roger says when I come downstairs ten minutes after the sounds that shook the apartment. It’s something my dad would have said.

  I think.

  I try to separate Roger’s voice from the sound I heard coming from my mother’s bedroom. I try to imagine them as coming from different beings.

  I blush at the bacon and at Roger’s bare forearms and at the way his thin hair is messy in the back.

  The deep discomfort is not eased by the extra batch of bacon and a whole pot of Mom’s new vanilla tea and a dozen slices of cinnamon toast, soppy with butter and dipping in the middle from the weight of his special cinnamon sugar mix.

  “Thanks,” I mumble.

  “It’s a good morning,” Roger says, and my head squeezes in an effort to unhear
the last hour of my life. “I know you’ve had a tough week. Wanted to make things a little better for you and your mom.”

  I can’t even fake a smile.

  He’s right, the week has been tense. Delilah isn’t speaking to me, Angelika is stopping by daily to have it out with my mother, and we’ve all grown quieter at school. We talk about pizza and Dickens and the sad state of the girls’ bathroom at lunch, but almost nothing else.

  Owen has still been sitting next to me and kisses me when I kiss him, but he hasn’t been over and he keeps looking at me with that Angelika look—searching for hints of love on me.

  I don’t think he finds anything.

  You ready for this? Cruz texts me when I’m polishing off the last of the bacon. We’ve texted every day this week, but I’ve been avoiding the garden. The smell of mint and basil and soil feels dangerous now. The bench itself feels like a warning—a bright white sign of the ways things have changed since Chicago exploded and Jack died.

  I don’t even know what this is, I write back. All I’ve ever been told about reporters is to avoid them, so meeting up with them on purpose feels all wrong.

  We are going to the bench today.

  The people in charge of the photographs and the article fell in love with the bench, I guess.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Mom says when the doorbell rings. She emerged from her room so rosy cheeked and chipper that I had to hide my face behind my hair.

  We peek outside. There are five women on our stoop ready to do my hair and makeup and talk to me about what it’s been like to be a Devonairre Street Girl.

  “It’s okay,” I say, but I don’t think it is.

  “This is the last thing we’re doing for her,” Mom says. Angelika is pacing the street, patrolling again. Not alone anymore, either. She is gaining followers. It makes Mom shiver. It makes my throat go dry. “This is why we can’t stay here,” Mom says.

  I pretend not to hear her. Roger hums the chorus of “California Dreaming.” He has on one of her old flowered aprons and a pair of flannel pajama pants.

  “I’m doing it for Delilah,” I say.