Lost, Almost Page 7

  We had a corner table. The wall behind me was turquoise, the one behind her bright pink. We hadn’t eaten in restaurants together as kids. We hadn’t done much of anything, outside of homework and endless hours together in one of our houses.

  “Is it good to be back?” I asked.

  “Mostly not.” She laughed. “You get out of here for a couple of years and you realize that humans don’t have to live in deserts. That there are real advantages to living in a city that wasn’t created with the goal of total isolation. Can we have a margarita with lunch? I mean, can we do that?”

  “Sure.” I signaled to the waitress. I wondered if she would’ve ordered a margarita at some other kind of restaurant, if she had grown into the sort of person who has a signature drink, if it could be something so elaborate.

  Melanie said, “Tell me how you got here.”

  “My father’s been involved in the genome stuff, you know, off and on, since it came out of the energy work. He knew they were expanding the team, and said he thought they could use me. There was no turning that down. Remember how we used to pretend we worked there? When we were kids?”

  “Well,” she said, “we did it. We’re in.” She laughed. Her fingernails were bitten down, her cuticles raw. “When did all this happen?”

  “About three months ago.”

  “I was already here,” she said. “I’d already been here for months.”

  “You don’t think he knew?

  “I doubt it.”

  “No,” I said, “you’re right, of course not.” My father would not have realized she was back; he wasn’t a man who paid attention to people who were not directly in his path. We’d had new neighbors two doors down when I was in third grade and they had been there nearly half a year when the daughter rang our bell selling girl scout cookies. He opened the door and barked, “Who are you?” My mother, embarrassed, had bought a whole case of thin mints, though neither of my parents was much for sweets, and we’d had them in the pantry for months. No, I didn’t suppose he would have known, although there was a part of me that could imagine him engineering this entire life for me, right down to the cast of characters, the way he had always imagined his son would live.

  “Tell me about your work,” I said to Melanie. “Were you doing a post-doc? What did they find for you here?”

  “I’d done a year in a lab, in North Carolina,” she said. “It wasn’t very productive.” Our drinks arrived; her eyes when straight into her glass, as if she’d been just waiting for something that could absorb the intensity of her gaze. “Coming here didn’t really disrupt anything.”

  “Is your work now interesting, at least?”

  “It’s getting there,” she said. “I can direct the course somewhat. I think, as I get more and more settled, it will be satisfying.”

  “That’s good news for the field,” I said. I meant it. She was fiercely intelligent; it was one of the first things I’d known about her, a quality without which I knew we never could have generated so much as a casual friendship.

  “Maybe I was always going to land here,” she said. “Any mental picture I ever made of the adult life of a researcher had to be based on this. Yours too, I suppose. Other labs I saw always felt like they somehow weren’t real. Like they were imitating this one, and failing.”

  There was, as there had always been, a real kindness in her that was never calculated, something that had seemed unfamiliar and wonderful to me in my youth, having grown up with the parents I had, with many virtues, simple kindness not among them. That, and she knew my family, knew my work; I had never, with her, had to explain or defend myself.

  “Anyway,” Melanie said, “I’m here now. And I imagine I’ll stay.”

  “Permanently?”

  “Well I’m not going back to North Carolina.” She laughed. “That was a disaster. This salsa is really spicy. I don’t remember it being like this.”

  “I think it changed owners,” I said. “The building’s the same but the menu’s all different.”

  “I was married,” she said, suddenly, quickly, softly, as though it were something embarrassing that she felt she had to say to me, a piece of spinach caught in my teeth, an obvious mistake in a paper already circulated. I looked at her, not knowing what to say. Somehow I felt I would have known, even across years of silence. “It was already falling apart,” she added. “Before my dad died.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to ask, but wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I felt something I couldn’t name. It wasn’t jealousy – it didn’t burn through me, and I knew she wasn’t mine to claim, and I’d been with Celine, not just with her but in love with her, Melanie a tiny figure on the distant horizon of my memory, and anyway, it was over, this marriage of hers, but still I felt, against all reason, that in some way, she was mine, that despite where we’d been since and what we’d done, that was not supposed to have happened.

  “I just thought you should know that,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.” I wondered if I should tell her about Celine, but I didn’t want to. It didn’t seem related to all this.

  “Who was he?” I asked. She was quiet a minute. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said.

  “Nobody. He was nobody.” She put her hand out, palm up, on the table, and I took it. Her hand was small and cold and familiar, and I felt it relax when I took it in mine.

  Celine had suggested that we find an apartment one morning in her kitchen, while she was making coffee, as I was rummaging in her pantry for a box of cereal. “Bit of a waste,” she said, “paying rent on two places when you sleep here five nights out of the week.”

  “Sure, I’ll think about it,” I said. Her face fell; she obviously hadn’t expected hesitation. But it felt, to me, like a big step, like it would make me into a different person.

  “We can forget it,” she said. She turned her back, filling the water reservoir on the coffee pot. “I thought—well. I didn’t think it was going to matter much. But if it’s a big deal, if it’s going to—”

  “Just give me a day or two,” I said. “Can you do that?”

  Later that afternoon, when she was teaching her seminar, I called my father from my own apartment and told him what Celine had proposed.

  “Well,” he said. “Well, well.”

  “She’s right about the money,” I told him.

  “And what about the rest of it? Honey, come home for dinner, honey, stay just a little bit longer, that report you’re writing can wait another hour or two.”

  “You live with Mom,” I said. “You’ve lived with her almost your whole career.”

  “Your mother,” he said, “is a scientist.” I had no answer for that. Celine certainly did nothing intentionally to interfere with my work, but even as it was there had been mornings where I’d had difficulty getting to the lab at the hour I’d intended. She had no lab. She had an office, but she also had piles of books and papers all about the apartment, and there seemed to be no particular boundary between the two.

  “Let me ask you this,” my father said. “Twenty years from now, will you be happy with a wife and kids and no serious contributions to the field?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “But who says I can’t have both?”

  “Why did you phone me, son?” I drew a breath and began, in my mind, to formulate an answer. But he spoke again before I had managed to pull it together. “Exactly,” he said. “You already know what you really want.”

  After her seminar we went for a twilight walk along the Charles. I explained to Celine what he had said.

  “You asked your father?” she said. “Why on Earth would you do that?”

  “Some of us talk to our families,” I said. “Keep them involved in big decisions in our lives.” It was unkind—I knew her family was not getting along—but my mood had gone off.

  “Well, he’s wrong,” she said. “I won’t do those things. I won’t make you come home. I won’t make you stay. I couldn’t make you even if I wanted
to, which I don’t, because I want you to do your work.”

  “You won’t mean to,” I said.

  “It won’t be any different from how it is now.”

  “It will be different because I won’t have anywhere to go if I need to.”

  “And in those cases we will have to work things out together, and that is a good thing.”

  “He’s not wrong,” I said. “He never is.”

  “Oh for the love of Christ.” She threw up her hands. “He’s just a man. He’s never even met me. You promised he would.”

  “I’m not sure that he, that you—I mean, the department you work in—”

  “Jesus,” she said. “You need help, Curt. You need professional help.” She stood to leave.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t go. Wait. Celine.” Seeing her back to me, I felt a kind of panic, a desperation I had only ever felt in a lab, opening a drawer of Petri dishes to see that nothing had grown.

  “Give me one reason,” she said.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  “Yeah?” she said, one eyebrow raised. “You mean it?”

  “I mean it.”

  “Daddy be damned?”

  “Damned,” I said, and it was the most thrilling feeling, free fall, where no one had ever brought me before.

  The house I bought, perhaps a ten-minute walk from the one where I’d grown up, was too large, really, for me to live in alone, and my mother, who had actually seen it herself first, must have known that when she put it on the list. It was 2,500 square feet; it had four bedrooms, though one of them, cramped with no closet, was really suited only for a study. And with my whole family right here in town—there was no one besides my parents and me—there was no conceivable use for a dedicated guest room. I suspect my mother had in mind my sharing it, and with whom, but we couldn’t discuss that while I was living under her roof, sleeping in my narrow child’s bed, where she’d sat when I was ill or devastated by a test score or some other childhood failing, and she had tried, never with much success, to rouse me from my despair.

  My parents loaned me the down payment. “It’s the way of things,” my father had said. “You can’t save on a stipend.” His first house—theirs, of course, but really it was his—had been provided to him by the government, the purchase of the big one I’d always known possible only later, after several years earning a decent salary and nowhere to spend it. Yes, they knew, they must have known, that they were buying something that would never be a bachelor pad. But if my mother had her hopes, had seen the reunion coming a mile away, my father wouldn’t have realized.

  I had thought of asking Melanie to come along when I took my second tour of the house, to sit by me while I signed the papers, but I sensed that it would look wrong from the outside, too hasty, even if we knew ourselves exactly where we were heading by then, if we could’ve gotten there instantly, having been there before, all the pieces lined up so neatly on the table, ready to snap into place.

  I had no furniture—what little I’d owned in Boston I’d sold or left with Celine, who had probably put it out on the curb as soon as she’d left me off, kindly, at the airport. Melanie came to the house the second day after closing and we walked around in our socks. She sat beside me on the painted concrete floor and looked over my shoulder as I paged through a catalog to order some furniture, a king-sized bed, a dining set, a pair of sofas and side tables. Lamps and rugs, dishes, pots and pans.

  “It won’t fit,” she said of a sofa I’d marked. “I mean, it will fit, physically, but it will overpower the room.”

  “Which do you think, then?” I asked, and she flipped a few pages ahead to a smaller, simpler one.

  “You’ll like this. It will work well for you.” I froze. I would like it, she said. Me. Not us. She knew, didn’t she? She must have known, with the big house, with the way things were, that it was for us. It was just part of the appearance, the caution we were affecting, the gentle brakes being applied, without changing direction, without any intention of coming to a stop.

  I thought back over the last weeks, searching for a moment, any moment that, when examined closely, lacked ambiguity. We’d gone on hikes. We’d sat across from one another in restaurants. We held hands. Our knees could touch under the table and I’d remember some long-ago afternoon. Sometimes when we parted we kissed, gently, with dry lips. And then I went back to my parents’ house and she to hers, and I imagined our life, our fingers intertwined, our work a success. There were phone calls. We had talked about our days, our plans. I was sick with it all, the thought that I could have misread it so badly, the thought that she wouldn’t want this, that I would be here, in this big house, alone.

  The days that followed did nothing to allay my fears. She was harder to get ahold of. I felt, listening to the phone ring endlessly, that she was avoiding me, and when we did meet, she didn’t meet my eyes. “Goodnight,” she’d say, jumping out of the car and slamming the door without looking back. Had she sensed my misunderstanding, and engaged in a campaign to make herself clear? Had I said something to upset her? It didn’t seem possible, but could it be that she hadn’t changed at all, and I had removed the filter of wishful thinking that had taken over all of my senses? I lay awake nights. I focused on my work as best I could.

  Ten miserable days later, the house was finally ready; my mother had come over during the day to receive the last furniture delivery. Mel and I hadn’t seen each other that day, her building on the other side of the campus from mine. After work, I drove to the supermarket, then home, where I let myself in without ceremony. I fried myself two eggs for dinner, thinking how stupid I’d been to buy a big house like this, to order a king-sized bed, to believe, with no real evidence, that she would come.

  It was getting late, nearly ten. I was sitting on the small sofa, all the lights off in the house except for a reading lamp beside me. I’d changed into shorts, and had one bare foot up on the cushion beside me, a green cardboard folder in my lap; the adjustment period to the new lab, its policies, its people, its tasks, was finally subsiding and I had real work to do. It reminded me of my childhood; I had seen my father slide just such a folder from a briefcase. (I had no briefcase; I set the folder loose beside me on the seat of my car, and carried it under my arm). I’d brought a quart of orange juice over and was swigging from the carton.

  The headlights swept briefly through my front window. I thought it was a car passing on the street; I was immersed in my report, and didn’t think much about the world off those pages. But as I reached the end of a section several minutes later, it occurred to me that my big front window, through which those lights had shone, was parallel to the road; the lights had come straight in, not oblique beams striking the wall behind me. If I had been there more than a week, of course I would have known this. It would have been obvious and familiar: there was a car in my driveway. It had pulled in and switched off its lights.

  I set down the folder and went to the window. In the faint faded glow of the day, still lingering at that hour, desert in June, I could see her light blue Honda sitting there. She was in the driver’s seat, her hands in her lap. She sat completely still.

  I went out through the front door, leaving it open behind me. She looked up at the noise, and turned her face away a moment. Then she cranked the window down a few inches. “I wasn’t sure you were home,” she said. “The house is dark.”

  “Come in,” I said. “I can make tea. Do you want tea? I don’t think I have any wine, or—”

  “You were going to bed,” she said. “I never should have come. It’s just, I went back to the lab, I was sure I’d left something on, and then I was driving by.”

  “Come in,” I said again. I stepped back from the car so she could open the door. I tried to open it myself, but it was locked. I vividly remembered bringing her inside in a hurry, desperate not to waste any precious minutes, the evening in our junior year when my parents had gone out to dinner in Santa Fe for their anniversary. She
was watching for their car to turn right at the end of the road, to disappear; we’d agreed to wait four minutes.

  She followed my eyes to the front door, standing open. “Just for a few minutes,” she said. She got out of the car. There was a floral smell, perhaps her shampoo, an after-work shower.

  I closed the door behind us and flicked on a light. The entranceway was bare; the simple list I’d drawn up had not included a coat rack or a little table to stand in the hall, collecting keys and mail, nor lamps or rugs enough to fill a space of this size, and it still had a temporary feeling, like a furnished apartment on the market.

  “Do you want that tea?” She shook her head. She led me by the hand to the couch where I’d been reading, the one she’d picked out. I sat with my feet on the floor and she sat cross-legged, her left knee falling into my lap, just lightly enough that it might have been accidental; if we were seated that way in a crowded room, no one might have noticed anything at all between us. I looked up at the bare wall, then over at her. Without planning, without thought, I did the next thing, and the next: I leaned over and kissed her lightly, just beside her mouth. I wrapped my arms gently around her and allowed her to kiss me back, not so lightly, and I was flooded with relief: I had not imagined it after all.

  After a minute she pulled away. “I didn’t come here for this,” she said. “I mean, I really did have to go by the lab, and I—”

  “It’s all right,” I said. It was so quiet that I could hear water running in my next-door neighbor’s pipes. We kissed some more, and she slipped a hand under the back of my shirt, and I worked my fingers through the hair at the back of her neck.

  She pulled away. “I have to tell you something,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “I knew you were coming,” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Coming where?”

  “Here. Los Alamos. I was only going to stay here three months, and right as I was getting ready to find someplace for Mom to live, to get everything packed up, your mother came to my office.”