The Wrong Heaven Page 12

Questions that ran through my mind as I approached “Tom’s” apartment: 1) Was “Tom” even his real name? 2) What if he was the latest incarnation of the Craigslist Killer? (The farther I walked from the G-train stop, the more I passed alleys and vacant lots that seemed specifically designed for the disposal of bodies.) 3) Did he even have a giant photograph of the Dalai Lama?

  Cat was obsessed with His Holiness. She’d twice paid upward of forty dollars just to be in a room with him, and both times she came back gushing about his “presence,” how he “radiated happiness” and “transcended physical space.” This, of course, made me jealous. She’d recently accused me of “depressiveness,” in a tone that said my dark moods, and my failure to apply to film school, were not only choices but also acts of aggression against her. I’d always seen emotions like the weather—regionally influenced yet cosmically mysterious—but Cat believed that emotions were a case of mind over mind. She was the kind of person who went running for five miles every day, even in the literal rain. She went alone to the talks; I stayed home, resentfully Googling the Dalai Lama. This gift, then, was a paradigm shift: for you, I renounce my worldview. I renounce my right to be right.

  “Tom” lived in a converted warehouse on the edge of Bushwick; I had to check the address several times to make sure I had it right, because this didn’t look like a place where a human would live. It was an empty-looking industrial building made of dun-colored bricks; a vacant lot bordered the building, separated from the street by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. I texted him: Here, I think?

  He emerged a couple of minutes later: scruffy beard, knit cap pulled over shaggy hair, faded flannel shirt. He smelled like Old Spice and pot. “Yo,” he said.

  Who still said “Yo”? I followed him through the lot, stepping over broken glass bottles, discarded car parts, and bits of fiberglass sculpture, and he pushed open another unmarked door.

  “Watch your step,” he said as we entered. I looked down, expecting a high curb or wobbly stair, but it turned out he was referring to a person. Directly in front of the door, a girl was sprawled out on the floor, sleeping. She lay on her back, her arms flung out at her sides, her green dress twisted up around her middle so that her cotton hot-pink panties were exposed. Tom stepped over her, casually.

  “Is she OK?” I asked.

  “Oh, her?” said Tom, turning back and looking at the girl. “To be honest, I’m not sure who she is. I think she’s my roommate’s.”

  “How long has she been here?”

  He shrugged. “Like a day or something.”

  “Are you sure she’s not dead?”

  “Oh yeah. She got up a little while ago and went to the bathroom and lay back down here. I think this is her way of waiting for him or something.” He shrugged. “Everyone’s got their thing.”

  “Okay,” I said, gingerly stepping over the girl’s body. “If you say so.” I looked back; she rolled over onto her side, without waking up.

  “Come on,” said Tom. “It’s in here.”

  We stepped into a large industrial space, converted into rooms for communal living by plywood partitions, decorated with everything from indie-band posters to a flaking papier-mâché sculpture of two breasts sticking out from the wall to a huge watercolor portrait of Tom Selleck.

  And then I saw him, leaning against one of the dividers: the Dalai Lama, or actually just his five-foot-tall face, staring down at me.

  I looked up, into his gentle twinkling pixilated eyes—and burst into tears.

  Not in any moderate, tentative sort of way, either; I went from zero to sobbing like the world was ending. What I’d seen was a compassion so sharp that it hurt, that it threatened to pry me open like an oyster.

  I struggled for breath through my sobs, as I pictured Cat’s face, just a few inches from mine, smiling at me with the radiant love of our first few months. You’re so beautiful, she’d said. No one had ever told me this before, at least not in a way that seemed sincere; now, I couldn’t remember the last time she’d said it. But in the Dalai Lama’s twinkling eyes I saw that it was true, as true as it ever had been. Somehow it was this that seemed sad.

  Slowly I came back to myself, back into the room. Tom didn’t seem taken aback by my outburst. He didn’t move—just pulled out a joint from his back pocket, lit it, and took a drag. Finally, when my convulsions subsided and I started to catch my breath, he extended it toward me.

  I took it, inhaled gratefully. The drug’s effect was instant and powerful. I’d never felt so soothed in my life.

  “I’ve never felt so soothed in my life,” I said.

  “Do you still want the picture?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I passed the joint back to him. “Sorry about that.”

  “It happens,” he said. “Probably your tear ducts were cramped.”

  “That’s a thing?”

  “Yeah. If you don’t use them for a while, they get stiff. Like any other muscle. So then they get harder to control.”

  “Oh. That makes sense.” It occurred to me that I hadn’t actually cried since Cat had left.

  “I try to make myself cry every once in a while so my tear ducts stay in shape,” said Tom.

  “You can make yourself cry?”

  “Yeah. Watch.” He closed his eyes for a second, squeezing them really hard, and then opened them. They were full of water. One tear ran down his left cheek, and then another down the right.

  “Wow.”

  “People get really moved when they see this picture, though. Imagine if you saw the real dude. You’d probably pass out.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I might get to meet Barack Obama.”

  “I don’t really follow that stuff,” he said. “I’m a libertarian.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you want to wash your face?” he said. “You have like black streaks all down your cheeks. It looks kind of bleak.”

  “Sure, I guess so.”

  I went into Tom’s “bathroom”—a toilet and sink separated from the rest of the space by a few sheets of plywood—and splashed some water on my face. When I came out, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor with two open beers in front of him.

  “I once met Sting,” he said, as I sat down next to him on the floor. “He’s actually really short.”

  “How’d you meet him?”

  “My sister’s co-worker is his cousin. Or something. He came to her wedding.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. There was karaoke, but he didn’t want to sing. Everyone was kind of disappointed, but you have to give the guy a break. He does it like every day for his job.”

  “I guess you can’t force some things.”

  He shrugged.

  “How’d you get the picture, anyway?”

  “Oh, that one?” he said, gesturing toward the Dalai Lama, as if he’d just noticed it.

  “Yeah, the one I’m buying.”

  “I stole it,” he said. I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. Finally, though, he reached for his beer.

  I grabbed mine and took a long swig. It was delicious. Its effect was almost as powerful as the joint’s: I felt every pore of my body relaxing and loosening. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, Tom was staring at me. No one had stared at me like this in a long time. His stare was not only sexual, it was sexual in a way that was indisputably male: that easy, unaffected possessiveness. I want that. It was surprising, after two complicated years with Cat, to see that look again. It was even more surprising to realize that I wanted him, too.

  Before I could second-guess myself, I leaned over and kissed him. He responded hungrily, pulling my head toward him with one hand and wrapping the other around my waist. He lowered me down to the floor. Before I knew it, there was cool cement beneath me and a warm man on top. After we’d made out for a while—Tom’s hands ranging around inside my clothes but not removing any of them—he whispered, “Can we go to bed?”

  I thought about this for a moment.
“Yes,” I said, “but there are three conditions. One, you have to wear a condom. Two, I have to be on top. And three, you have to cry.”

  He frowned. “I think my tear ducts might be connected in some way to the ducts in my penis.”

  “Think of it as a triathlon for your tear-duct muscles.”

  At first he had a hard time getting started. He squinched his face up really tight and finally some tears started to come out. But it was like he couldn’t control it. Within seconds, he was not only crying, but crying incredibly hard, just like I had minutes earlier in front of his Dalai Lama picture. I found this extremely erotic, to be straddling this sobbing man, someone who was more emotional than I was, rather than the other way around.

  In ten minutes it was over. I didn’t waste any time: I pulled my pants back on and held out the sixty dollars Tom had asked for in his ad.

  “I feel weird taking this,” he said. “I feel like a prostitute.”

  “I’m paying you for the picture I’m taking,” I said. “If I didn’t give you the money, then I would be the prostitute.”

  Ten minutes later, I was in the back of a cab, His Holiness stretched out diagonally—his head in the back seat with me, his body dividing me from the driver. I looked again into his twinkling eyes. I felt like he was smiling directly at me, across time and space, but I didn’t feel like crying anymore.

  Because what I realized now—what I’d cried about before, without knowing it—was this: not only was Cat not coming back, but I didn’t need her to. My trip to Ikea, my Craigslisting—these were not about making a home for the two of us. They were about making a home for me. This was what I’d been truly afraid of, and what I was now willing to accept: I was preparing to be alone.

  But when I got home, Cat was there, sitting at the kitchen table.

  She was wearing a green-and-black-checked plaid shirt that I’d never seen before. Maybe she’d borrowed it, maybe she’d bought it. The latter was a surprisingly painful thought: for so long I’d intimately known every piece of cloth she put on her body. Already I knew her less, already her life had taken a small turn away from me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “The bedroom looks nice.” She folded her arms, like she begrudged the improvement.

  “Thanks. I tried.”

  “What’s that?” She nodded toward the giant package in my arms.

  “I got you a present?” I’m not sure why I said this like a question. I turned the picture toward her, so that she could see His Holiness in full effect.

  She stared for a long moment, during which something happened to her: she didn’t cry like I had, but the tension seemed to drain from her body. Her mouth fell open a little bit. Slowly, she unfolded her arms and raised her hands to her face.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “You got that for me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Holy shit, Andie. That’s incredible.”

  She stood up, came over, and embraced me. She nestled her face into my shoulder. She’s a few inches shorter than me; I had never dated anyone shorter before, and so no one had used this as a nestling spot before her. And now that this sweet spot was once again occupied by her face, was once again made sweet, I realized that she was prepared to forgive me for my sulking and inaction, that a small window had opened, that we might still reconcile.

  And despite my resolution in the car, I knew now that I wanted her again. I wanted her warm body’s companionship, her tender prodding encouragements, her gruff little snort of a laugh. I wanted to watch her screw up her small freckled face in amusement when I did something clumsy. I wanted her more than I’d ever wanted anything.

  And why not? Isn’t it possible to want two things at once? Couldn’t I have myself and still have her?

  I kissed her on the face and ears. I smelled her scalp. I wrapped my arms around her neat, narrow back. “I missed you,” I whispered.

  “I missed you too,” she said. “It was really hard to stay away.”

  Then she started sniffing me. “What do you smell like?” she asked suspiciously. “Have you been with someone?” She stepped back and looked at me, folded her arms. “Have you been with a man?”

  Now it was my turn to take a step back. I wanted to see her, see her whole body, because it struck me that this would probably be the last time I saw it in this apartment.

  “I did it for you?” I said. This was true on some sort of technical level, but I realized how unconvincing it would sound.

  It turned out, after all, that some decisions were irrevocable. That I had already made my choice. My body, or the Dalai Lama, had made it for me.

  Jeremy Spoon turned out to be a tiny, energetic gay man with a shock of white-blond hair; a hummingbird of a person. He bounced around my apartment, proclaiming many things special. “This quilt is so special. This view of the F train is so special!” It felt like a kind of blessing. Some priests scatter holy water or sage around a room; Jeremy Spoon scattered specialness. He was especially taken with the Dalai Lama picture. “I love him,” he kept saying, clutching his chest. “This picture is just so special.”

  But a few days later, he called back to regretfully inform me of the limits of my specialness. The dinner was tomorrow, and the original four people remained in perfect health; I’d forever remain an alternate. “I’m sure this is disappointing,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m glad nobody died or got hit by lightning.”

  “That’s the spirit!” he chirped.

  A week later, at a prearranged time, I got a call from a “Private Number.” “Is this Andrea Green?” asked a nasal female voice.

  “Yes, it is.”

  I heard the muffled click of a switched line, and then a deep, familiar voice said, “Andrea. This is President Obama.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. “It is you. Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said ‘holy shit.’”

  He laughed. “That’s all right. So, Andrea, I’m sorry we couldn’t share dinner in Washington. But I want to thank you personally for your service. Without the commitment of people like you, we certainly couldn’t have won.”

  When he said that word, “commitment,” something twisted up inside of me, a knot of panicked remorse. Commitment, of course, was exactly where I’d failed. Just the night before, Cat and I had shared a final breakup dinner at Applebee’s. We’d both ordered Fiesta dishes—Fiesta Chicken Salad for me, Fiesta Lime Shrimp for her—and then wept into our Fiestas and discussed the terms of the lease. I came home to an empty apartment, a short film I was too depressed to touch, a floor plant that was already dying because I’d forgotten to water it. The Dalai Lama’s gaze twinkled down at me. His smile now seemed blinding and oppressive; I could hardly bear to look at him. I wanted to turn him around to face the wall.

  “Andrea?” said the president. “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sorry. I just—” I took in a sharp breath, then said, “Can I ask you something? Didn’t you think everything would—change more than it did? Or change faster?”

  “Well—” He paused. I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line. I couldn’t tell whether he was discerning how to distill the calculus of change into comprehensible language, or simply figuring out how to placate me, to get me off the phone. Maybe he thought I was crazy. Or maybe he took my question seriously; maybe he understood that he was the only person on earth who could.

  I made myself utterly silent, waiting. The president’s pause began to pulse, to take on a life of its own. The pause grew longer and longer. The pause grew until it took up the whole room.

  Little Sister

  I.

  This story starts when my parents drop me off at my uncle Jim’s house, on the way to the hospital where my little sister is about to be born. I am six years old.

  Uncle Jim is married to a woman named Rhonda, whose hobby is crochet. No, not “hobby,” exactly: her crocheting is a compulsion, perhaps some kind of illness. Rhonda crochets cozies
not only for the extra toilet paper rolls, as I’ve seen in some of my friends’ bathrooms, but also for the phone and the phone book and the dog and my uncle’s guns and both of their toothbrushes. This cozying does not make the objects look cozier; it makes them look ashamed.

  I sit all day on the sofa, the crochet pattern imprinting itself onto my sweaty legs, watching an I Dream of Jeannie marathon and waiting for my parents to show up and take me home. I expect this to happen quickly—within, say, an hour. No one has explained to me how long babies take to come; I have the vague idea that they just spring out, like a Pop-Tart from the toaster. Also no one has explained to me that it’s way too early, that the baby is not supposed to come for two more months.

  When my parents have not shown up or called by late afternoon, I begin to suspect that they are not coming back at all. When eight o’clock—my bedtime—arrives, I know with certainty that they have taken the new baby home to replace me and that I will remain with Jim and Rhonda forever. I see myself sitting here on the lumpy loveseat, becoming another permanent fixture of the house. Rhonda will crochet a cozy to encase me from head to toe, so that you can barely make out the lumpy shape of my body; I’ll breathe through a woolly woven web, and will only be able to see the world in pieces, through the constellation of small apertures between the yarn.

  That night in the cramped guest bedroom, fearful and unable to sleep, I create the Little Sister. I have invented characters in my mind before, fairies and pirates and things like that. This is different. I do not intend to create anything. I only try to picture the shape of this sister I have desired and already lost, this soft human curve of abandonment, and the pressure of my need turns her real, and suddenly there she is, lying beside me on the crochet-blanket-covered bed, looking up at me with blue eyes and kicking her fat little legs. She looks like a normal baby in every way except the color of her skin—a warm, translucent gold. She smells sweet and powdery. I take her onto my lap and look down at her. She has real softness, real weight. She is a beautiful baby but I know that this is not how babies are supposed to come into the world, and her presence gives me a dark feeling. I carry her over to my My Little Pony backpack and zip her up inside. She just barely fits. Then I return to the bed and instantly fall asleep.