The Careful Undressing of Love Page 3

  “It wasn’t my birthday Sunday, either,” I say, and I know I’m being impossible but it’s hard to explain the way things work to Owen. Devonairre Street is a whole universe packed into three brownstone blocks with a deli on every corner and trees planted into the sidewalk, wishing they were somewhere else.

  Owen waits for me to explain.

  “It’s a street thing,” I say at last. I find my underwear hiding under the pillow. “We all share a birthday.”

  “You share everything,” Owen says.

  “I don’t share this with anyone but you,” I say, and wiggle my shoulders at him. It’s not sexy, but it’s silly and that’s even better. He grabs my waist and climbs back on top of me, and I’m ready to slide his underwear off again, but instead we slow kiss and find our way onto our sides, our fronts pressing against each other until there’s no space between.

  “You could have invited me,” he says, like the kissing never happened or the conversation was always floating right above us, waiting for us to come back in.

  “You’re not allowed.”

  “Angelika likes me,” he says. I’m distracted by his boxers. They’re covered in tropical flowers, a fact that I’ve loved since the first time I started seeing his boxer collection. They’re never black or white or striped or serious. I pull at the waistband.

  “Angelika tolerates the idea that you exist,” I say.

  “She likes me!” he says, sitting up so that I know he’s not kidding. “She told me. Said I’m a good kid and good for you. Told me to stick around.”

  “That is literally impossible.”

  “I’m lovable,” Owen says, but I want him to get how strange that sentence is coming from her.

  “Exactly,” I say. “That’s why she’d hate you. She hates love.”

  Owen shrugs and pulls the quilt up to his chin despite how warm it is in my room. He gestures for me to slide underneath, too. My mom won’t be home for another hour. And I love taking naps with him.

  “You said things were changing,” Owen says. “Looks like Angelika’s chilling out, too.”

  He knows about the street. He knows about it in the way I “know about” the Vietnam War or the Super Bowl.

  I let it go.

  Not because I’m going to stop thinking about it, but because I’d be better off telling Delilah and Cruz about it than talking anymore with Owen. We’re okay at talking, but we’re better at getting undressed in the afternoons and breathing in sync while we catnap.

  Owen falls asleep first. He always falls asleep with his mouth open and his body curled like he’s waiting for me to fit into the negative space between his chin and his toes.

  I match my breathing to his and hope to find sleep in that rhythm but it doesn’t come. I move closer to him. Usually the warmth of his body tires me out, but today it’s too sweaty and my arm is at the wrong angle and the hairs on his arms tickle my skin. Sleep won’t come.

  I turn on my TV and mute it. My room is a lofted space above the kitchen. We have to climb a ladder to get up here and the ceilings are so low I have to hunch when I’m standing, but it’s my favorite place to be anyway. It used to be my great-grandmother’s sewing room. Mom says she used to make wedding dresses for the girls on the street, and I like picturing the room draped in white silk and lace.

  We could move into the lower unit in our building. It’s bigger— and no one has wanted to rent it since the Bombing. We’ve discovered that no one wants to live with the Affected. But I prefer my little loft, its history and its view. It’s weird, but it’s mine.

  • • •

  Owen talks in his sleep. It’s another part of him I love, and I lean in close to hear him better. He’s sleep-talking about the Mets.

  I can’t quite figure out the difference between loving someone and loving things about them, so I listen to him mumble half-familiar names of pitchers and catchers and something about sliding into third. Mostly, I’m happy to have someone around on Tuesdays. I wonder when enough time will have passed for us to give up the Minute of Silence, the constant worry about how and why and who. We got stuck on this one tragedy and we haven’t quite moved on—not me and Mom, not Devonairre Street, not New York City, and not the rest of the country, either.

  “It would be better if we knew why,” Mom always says, and I’m never sure if she means better for us or better for the country. “It would be better if we knew who.”

  Mom’s usually right about things like that.

  Nothing’s on TV, so I let the news play quietly. A lady with dark hair and thin eyebrows goes over the day’s top stories. Crisis in Korea. Regulating predictive arts. Drought in California. New idea for what to do with the still-mostly-undone Times Square.

  Owen keeps babbling away. “Lorna,” he says, and I hold my breath. I want him to tell me sleepy secrets. I want to know what he really thinks about my thighs and the sounds I make when we’re doing it and the smell of my hair.

  “I love the moon and you and I don’t have a chicken,” he says, slurring and fuzzy and absolutely asleep.

  His toes curl and I watch his body curve deeper, too, the word love hitting him in the belly. We’ve never said I love you to each other. I haven’t exactly been waiting for the words. I’m not sure they’re something I want. I love my mom and Delilah and the rest of the Devonairre Street Kids. I loved my father. I loved being in the presence of my mom and dad loving each other.

  But I hate the way the world feels when love is gone. My mother changed after my father died. Not only in those first raw weeks, although I can’t stop myself from thinking about that awful time, poking at it like a bruise, making sure it still hurts.

  It does.

  At 10:11 every Tuesday, the moment we became Affected, it aches even more.

  I remember 10:11 the Tuesday morning of the Bombing. I was home sick from school. Mom screamed when she saw Times Square buildings exploding on the news. She knew he was inside one of them. She started throwing teacups at the wall. We had a set of eight. They were yellow and delicate and they made a deceptively sweet sound when they shattered. After four tiny crashes, I ran onto the street, looking for someone to fix her. Angelika was at our stoop already, like magic. She came in and held my mother under one arm and me under the other.

  “Why did she break those teacups?” I asked Angelika after my mother fell asleep.

  “Love.” Of all the not-true things Angelika had said over the years, that one seemed true.

  I don’t believe in the Curse. But when Angelika sat with me on our living room couch and we stared down the bits and pieces of the teacups and listened to hours and hours of sirens screaming down every street in every part of the city, I wondered whether maybe I should start believing.

  “You see what love does?” Angelika said.

  I couldn’t reply. I missed my father so much, so quickly, I wasn’t sure the sun would rise the next day.

  I nodded, because in the hours and days after my father died, I nodded at everything. Angelika rubbed my shoulder like my nod meant something, and an hour later we learned that Cruz and Isla’s father had died in the Bombing, too.

  “You see, you see?” Angelika said on her way out the door to check on the other destroyed families.

  I nodded again.

  I could see. If you love someone and they vanish, you are left nodding like a zombie and throwing teacups at a wall.

  I never want to be a person who throws teacups at the wall.

  • • •

  Basically, sex is great and Owen is fun but I’m not sure love is for me. I like wearing sunglasses indoors and forgetting to bring books to school. I like sneaking red wine into the garden and eating rare steak at Bistro with my mother. I like rolling my eyes at Angelika. I like Owen’s mouth on the back of my neck and being quiet in the after. I like being near love but not in it. I like having long Devonai
rre Street hair and a Shared Birthday and a red brick brownstone with a loft I can hide in and a shaky black fire escape out my window where I can sit and stare at the shapes the moon makes.

  Sleeping Owen repeats himself.

  “I love the moon and you and I don’t have a chicken.” It sticks to me this time, and I think it’s the closest to love I’ve ever felt. I look over to the mirror leaning against the wall. I look for love on me. Is it there? Is this it? Is this the moment?

  My face looks tired and my shoulders are so pale I wonder whether Owen can see right through them when I’m on top of him and the light from the window is coming in behind me.

  Do I ever turn into a ghost?

  I feel warm and tender. I want to kiss him awake. I want to let him sleep for a hundred years. That might be love, I guess. I try it out.

  “I love you, too,” I say in the softest whisper.

  I wait to feel the Yes. That’s what Delilah said love felt like. A big Yes blinking in your heart. An airplane touching down. Certain.

  It doesn’t come.

  • • •

  I can’t sleep so I turn up the news. Something is happening.

  “. . . another attack,” the reporter says, and I turn it right back down. Smoke and covered mouths and panicked eyes flash on the screen. They look so much like the images from the day of the Bombing that my heart stops beating and I think I die for a moment.

  I must gasp or shake or scream because Owen wakes up in a start. He throws his arms around me before he even knows what’s happening. Automatic, reflexive kindness. There’s something to that. Not love, I guess, but something. I grab on to whatever it is.

  “It’s happening again,” I say, and he knows what I mean without further explanation.

  “Another Bombing,” he says, which is what we have all been waiting for since the first one. Without a reason for the first one, Another Bombing has always seemed imminent.

  Owen puts a hand on my cheek and turns up the volume. I close my eyes and cover my ears. My heart worms around inside me, looking for a safe space and finding none. It’s stuck in my chest.

  “It’s Chicago,” Owen says, lifting one of my hands from my ear. He uses a whisper I didn’t know he had.

  I wait for the phone to ring.

  I don’t know anyone in Chicago, but I have been to seventeen funerals in my life, and the first Bombing took my father, so it feels like the phone is going to ring.

  “It’s far away,” Owen says, but it feels like it’s here in the room with us. Times Square felt far away from Brooklyn, almost seven years ago. Death always feels far away from life, until it isn’t. If I wanted to love Owen, these are the sorts of things I would explain to him.

  “What if we know someone there?” I say, because once the worst thing has happened, anything could happen.

  “I’ve never even been to Chicago,” Owen says. He hugs me but I don’t think he fully understands why he needs to.

  It’s been two years since anyone I know has died, so I’d need a new black dress. It would have to be wool, for Angelika. She likes us to wear wool. It protects your heart.

  5.

  “I feel like I’m supposed to do something,” I say to Delilah and Jack the next afternoon after a long day off from school in honor of Chicago.

  It’s hard to see Delilah without Jack lately, but I don’t mind. He knows when to be quiet and when to talk. I wonder whether Angelika would be able to see the love on him, too. I’m pretty sure I can see it—around his mouth and in the way he flips hair out of his eyes to get a better look at my best friend.

  It calms me down, watching the way they love each other. It’s like a patch of sunlight coming in through the windows. A perfect place for me to stay and warm up. He touches her shoulder and she covers his hand with her hand, to keep it there.

  “Like, you want to send money to Chicago?” Delilah says. “It wasn’t anywhere near as big an attack as Times Square. So, that’s good.”

  “People died,” I say. It’s not an adequate statement.

  “People are going to die,” Delilah says. Her own father’s been dead since before she could have known him. She misses him, but she doesn’t know what exactly to miss. I miss my father’s stash of cigarettes and when he swore under his breath. I miss how he talked about buildings like they were people with histories.

  “They don’t matter less because we didn’t know them,” I say.

  “Well, they matter less to me,” Delilah says. She isn’t a cruel person, but Another Bombing has brought out a different side of her.

  I guess that’s what Bombings do: flip us around and shake us up so that hidden parts of us are exposed. I swear my elbows got pointier and my laugh got quieter after the first one. I look at my fingers and toes to see if I’m any different today.

  “We deserve a break from funerals,” Delilah goes on. “And, shit, I’ll be honest, Angelika freaked me out the other day. I almost forgot that she’s a total kook.”

  Jack blends into the wall.

  He shouldn’t be able to. He has a neon T-shirt and a battered blazer and somewhere beneath it, I’m sure, a flask. He has sloppy tattoos on his knuckles. They look painful and regrettable. I’d like to ask him about how he came to have them, and he’s the kind of guy who would answer. But none of that matters. Delilah is big and Jack is small, in ways more meaningful than her little waist and his broad shoulders.

  “How are you doing with it, Lorna? Dr. Ryder?” Jack says, finding his voice at last. “This must be especially—this must remind you of—this must be hard.”

  “We’re just fine, Jack, how are you?” Mom says. Her back is straight and she looks like she’s okay, but I know she isn’t. Her hair is shiny and stiff, like she was trying to spray her whole self into place.

  Like me, she must be thinking of the way the Times Square Bombing smelled like a campfire and fried hair and dust and the end of the world. It was a smell that carried. The smoke carried, too.

  My eyes burn now, like they did then, and I wonder if the smoke traveled from Chicago to here.

  But no. It’s tears. They burn, too, sometimes.

  In a few weeks, we’ll be honoring the seventh anniversary of the Bombing. I’m already dreading the way I’ll feel and how poorly it will match up to the way the world will want me to feel.

  “It’s hard,” I say. Mom startles. It’s not like me to say exactly what I’m feeling, but the way Jack asked seemed like he wanted a real answer. There’s something solid and focused about him that I like. It makes Delilah more solid and focused, and I like that, too.

  Jack moves closer to me. I think of how certain Delilah seemed that they’d get married in a couple years. If I squint I can see Delilah’s long white dress and Jack’s neon tie and Angelika wringing her hands, ordering us to shower them with dried rosemary instead of confetti, begging us to wear wool instead of silk.

  I can see them moving into the bottom floor of our building, me living on top of them. I’d like to know love is right beneath me, so that I can be near it but never have to have it for myself.

  I’ll be too busy taking off my sunglasses before diving into bed with someone new every few months, inviting my in-love best friends over for steaks afterward. I’ll love the way Jack makes sure Delilah gets the best steak, with the least fat and the pinkest center.

  I get a little lost in the wonder of the future, but Jack brings me back to the terrible now.

  “I can’t imagine what it’s like,” Jack says. I think more words want to come out of him, but he leaves it at that, punctuating the sentence with a nod and a long blink of his kind eyes.

  “Aren’t you sweet,” Mom says, but she busies herself with packing her purse, then walks to the door. “Everyone be kind to yourselves today, okay? These things can be traumatic even when they’re in another state. Lorna, you should take a bath later.
”

  Baths are my mother’s solution to everything.

  I wonder if that’s what she tells her patients, too.

  Jack heads into our kitchen, which is the same room as the living room except there’s a paisley couch creating an imaginary wall between the two areas and a change in flooring. In the kitchen there are black and white tiles and a fridge that looks fancy but sometimes leaks and glass canisters all over the counter—PASTA, FLOUR, SUGAR—with smaller canisters containing herbs from the garden and three kinds of cereal. In the living room there are creaky hardwood floors and a red-and-brown rug that Mom’s grandmother hooked. It doesn’t fit the rest of our apartment—which is all light and bright and patterned. It itches my feet. But it’s nice, to have something from my mother’s past. I don’t know much else about her family or my father’s. There’s this rug and a black-and-white photograph of Dad’s grandparents’ wedding and my mother’s mother’s engagement ring, which Mom wears on her right hand, with her rings from Dad on the left. And my great-grandmother’s sewing machine, which allegedly stitched hundreds of wedding gowns back when Devonairre Street was Blessed, not Cursed.

  Delilah and I try to avoid the creaks in the floor on our way to the couch. It’s a game we’ve played for years but have never actually mastered.

  Jack watches us from the kitchen with a smile and makes me a mug of lavender tea. I didn’t know Jack knew where anything was in my apartment, but I like that he feels comfortable taking over.

  “He does that,” Delilah says. “He sees a need and he fills it.” She shrugs and grins. I catch her looking at herself in the large mirror we’ve hung in the place where the TV should be. We have a small TV in the corner, but the couch directly faces a mirror framed in delicate gold flowers and birds—the kind of thing that looks like it is either really expensive or was ten dollars at a flea market. Our mirror is the latter. I’ve noticed Delilah looking into it more and more lately, like she wants to see the love on herself, too.

  “You like milk, Lorna? Or honey?”