Читать книгу The Sadness - Benjamin Rybeck - Страница 11

The futon, where Mom stretched her legs, exhaled her poison breath after nights out, and closed her eyes—still here, as Max promised, along with so much else. Her brother has discarded little of what Mom used to have in this apartment; all her posters and bead curtains still hang where they hung a decade ago, the rooms preserved perfectly in her image, preserved as the place where Max, years ago, settled in to watch thousands of films, to write his screenplays, and to believe himself a genius, back before sadness gripped his throat and reality came to matter. And Kelly, now a part of this preservation again, only this time as some version of Mom, here on the futon, where she slept each night, leaving the two upstairs bedrooms to her children; after all, Miles Bennett bought this apartment for her when she thought she was pregnant with only one child, not twins.

When Max pulls the futon out, it vomits dust, likely having avoided any and all snoring bodies since Mom’s death. The cushion is torn, the fabric shredded and stuffing coming out like congealed orange goo. Evidence of cats, maybe—though when has Max ever shown any interest in cats? He disappears into the closet where Mom used to keep nothing much beyond an inexplicable pile of sleeping bags and produces, yes, a sleeping bag, which he tosses atop the futon, now yawning open in front of them. Kelly can’t say why exactly, but she knows that sleeping bags are not something an indoorsy man who lives alone should own. If this were a date, and she came back to the dude’s apartment to find sleeping bags? No way.

Still, it’s not a date, and it could be worse. She puts down her glass of murky tap water (handed to her automatically upon entrance), and she climbs inside the sleeping bag on the futon, wondering as she stretches out if it’ll feel funny, lying like this, if she’ll feel suddenly—even though she must’ve slept here once or twice while growing up—if she’ll feel suddenly, today, like Mom. But no, when her body goes horizontal and she feels the foam under her all misshapen and bent—no, she feels nothing like Mom and feels only homeless. Besides, she does something Mom never would’ve done: she looks at Max and chides him. “Aren’t you going to ask if I need anything else?” she sneers good-naturedly (or so she hopes). “Man, what kind of host are you?”

“You going to sleep already?” Max asks.

It’s not even nine yet, though the blanket of winter darkness makes it feel past midnight. “I’m exhausted,” Kelly says. “I just want to lie down for a minute.” Really, what she wants is to lie down on his bed upstairs, to—fuck it—just share her brother’s bed tonight, or, at least, she wants him to offer this as a possibility so if the futon becomes too backbreaking, she can make a move. But he hasn’t offered—hasn’t offered her anything, in fact, other than the glass of murky tap water, which she reaches toward the floor to fetch.

“Anything I should know about your roomie?” Kelly asks. “Heavy cougher? Allergic to women? Ax murderer who stands over your guests in the night?” She takes the water into her mouth, cringing at the taste, like breaking an ink pen open between your teeth.

“You won’t even see him,” Max says. “He’s out of town.”

The sip crams in her throat like salt water from the ocean, and she chokes on it before spitting it back into the glass, no less discolored now than it was straight out of the tap. “What, for how long?”

“Death in his family.”

“When’s the funeral?”

“Someone’s dying,” Max says, voice flat. “Don’t know how long it’ll be.”

“I’m not diseased, you know. I could sleep in his bed and just, I dun-no, wash the sheets?”

Max shakes his head. “He’s very private. Even has his door locked when he leaves so I can’t get in. It would concern my roommate greatly.”

“Your roommate,” Kelly says, “whose name again is …?”

Max’s eyes head toward the ceiling for a second and he mutters, “Tobias.” Then, stronger, “Tobias. I told you already.”

“Sure,” she says, then sets the glass down on the floor again. Looking down into it from this aerial view, she can see all kinds of scuzz around the top rim that she hadn’t noticed before; it looks almost like streaks of milk, dried. Kelly licks her lips, which taste suddenly bitter. “How often do you guys have visitors?” she asks, before changing her mind: “No, never mind, forget it.” The condition of the glass answers the question well enough.

On her back again, she looks up at Max, who has his hands in his pockets. It would seem polite, or at least normal, to comment on the condition of this place. An apology would be too much to hope for from Max, of course—sorry for the mess, that sort of thing—but wouldn’t most people acknowledge that the place had gone to hell? In her adult life, Kelly has found herself in the apartments of countless young men, often way past midnight, often when the beer waterlogging her brain made acknowledgment of uncleanliness mostly unnecessary, but even in those cases, the majority of young men would at least look a little ashamed for a second—ashamed at having someone else see the pile of unwashed dishes in the sink, or at having to brush the dirty boxers off the bed and onto the floor—and vaguely apologize: Sorry I didn’t clean, didn’t know anyone was coming over tonight, etc. This crass duplex was bad before, with its drooping eyes of windows; its sun-paled blue skin, the worn-away patches of paint looking like bruises; its roof, the entire thing at a forty-five-degree angle, some odd sloping haircut that was maybe trendy decades ago. But inside? Dishes clog the sink, packages of opened and partially eaten ramen tower on the kitchen counters, bananas blacken on various surfaces, grime makes jam on the unmopped floors, the living room looks torn apart and in the midst of a deep reorganization—well, shouldn’t Max shrug and apologize, however meekly, for not taking care of the place? Shouldn’t he at least look ashamed? And what does all this trash—both the garbage in the kitchen and the retro Mom-junk on the walls—say about Max’s supposed roommate?

But before she can ask anything else, she spots something dark moving on the floor—something scurrying then darting between some piles of DVDs. “Christ,” Kelly says, sitting up, “was that a Satan bug?”

Max nods solemnly—the saddest he has looked over this whole mess. House centipedes, which the siblings used to call Satan bugs, have always been a problem here. After Mom died, Kelly had to go into the basement to get her stuff out of storage in preparation for her westward move, and when she flicked on the exposed bulb, she watched the centipedes, with their thousands of legs and their slithery bodies, scatter from all over her boxes of clothes. Most of that stuff she left behind.

“Wanna know what I hate in Tucson?” she says.

“What?”

“Palo Verde beetles. Google them; they’re disgusting. I can’t even stand to look at pictures.” She shudders, though mostly for dramatic effect, since she actually got used to the beetles fairly quickly, accepting them as one of the many unpleasant realities of a Sonoran summer. “They hang out in the trees. Sometimes, during sunset, you see them flying around. They look like birds, until they hit you in the face. Just like big, nasty cockroaches—ones with wings.”

“Huh.” Max scratches at the stubble on his face. “That’s unfair.”

“What’s unfair?”

“I don’t know.” Her brother stares at her. “Okay, well, good night.” He turns and starts toward the stairs.

“Is that it? You don’t want to talk a bit?”

“You look like you want to sleep.”

She does—that’s clear enough to her. Even now, she feels the world around her strobe a bit, going black then back to light again as her eyes flutter shut and snap open. She presses her fingers to her eyelids. Truth is, she should talk to Max, should tell him about their father, about the phone call, about the actual reason she’s here. She’ll have to tell him, she knows—and what’s more, she sort of wants to. They may not be terribly close, Max and Kelly, but that doesn’t mean they don’t share a father, and just that little bit makes her feel like the two of them are tethered at the ankles by the world’s longest rubber band, and no matter how far away from each other they drift, they will eventually snap back into place. She wants to talk to him, yes, even if it scares her a bit, even if she’s unsure how he will react. And really, she suspects he wants to talk to her too; why else would he have told her so much about Evelyn with so little prompting?

“I have tomorrow off,” he says, half under his breath. “Early in the morning. Penelope. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“Early.”

She rolls her eyes and nods. Yes, yes, she knows.

“Okay,” he says, then stands there for a minute.

She squints. “Good night?” she says with hesitation, as though an acting coach feeding him his next line.

“Okay,” he says again. “Sleep well.”

It sounds like a friendly wish, sure—so why, when Max turns to look at his sister one last time, do his eyes narrow like two coins lying flat, viewed from the side? And then he leaves her, heading upstairs to his room, the stairs sounding so creaky that she worries his footsteps will one day bring them down.

She turns off the light—rather, a desk lamp Max put on the floor next to her—and tries to get comfortable on the futon. First, she tries her back. Then she tries her side. How the fuck did Mom sleep on this thing? Of course, booze, yes—but what would Max have to drink around here? Probably nothing. Besides, it’ll be fine, she knows; if she can stay still for a minute or so, she’ll fall asleep. It’ll be easy. Yes, easy.

In the darkness, she pulls the sleeping bag over her ears but can’t avoid the sound—Jesus, she hears it right now, she swears she does—of another house centipede, or maybe the same one, or maybe something else, scurrying on the floor across the room. She feels like a kid at some dreadful (that word again), forced sleepover—one to make an unloved youngster happy for an evening. But then, what the hell is this exactly, a sleepover poised to last God knows how many nights? And which of them, Max or Kelly, is the unloved youngster?

On the fabric next to her ear, she hears something like a finger dragging across the surface; then something hits her face, her forehead, wobbling there for a second before dismounting. She sits up and reaches for the lamp, her hand walloping it, knocking it to the floor, where the overturned light casts grotesque shadows on all the walls. Off the futon, she picks up the lamp and uses it as a flashlight, pointing it at the floor, trying to find what crawled on her. She felt something—no doubt about it. But she finds nothing.

So she sets the lamp back down and untangles herself from the sleeping bag. Earlier, she saw the centipede hustle toward the corner, right? It rustled something there—the stack of papers, probably. She looks down at this stack, at the top page: The Glazen Shelves, Draft 61. Then a date, just from this past summer. She picks it up. Held together by a paper fastener, the document feels thick. She flips to the last page, number eighty-nine. He’s still working on this, all these years later? She opens to a spot at random:

INT. COFFEE SHOP - EVENING

Max and Evelyn sit across from each other. Max looks tired, his eye blackened, bulging. He has his hand out on the table, begging Evelyn to take it. But she doesn’t—not yet. Instead, she stares at him, hair fallen in front of her eyes. Still wearing her scarf and her summer dress from the event, she looks beautiful. Under the table, her legs are slightly exposed—pale, hairless, and lovely.

EVELYN

So you were coming here all this time?

MAX

Yes.

EVELYN

Why?

MAX

I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t know where to find you.

BEAT. Evelyn stares at him, sniffs slightly.

EVELYN

Well, hear I am.

It seems to be a big moment in the film, but Kelly struggles to forgive the typo. Say what you will about Max’s artistic drive, but he was never too careful—he never paid attention in school. Kelly knew little about The Glazen Shelves, but she knew it well enough to know that it was never explicitly about Max himself. But now, after a decade of working on it, it almost seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy: Max has turned into the central character, a man romantically battered and pursuing his love.

Stacked here, there are probably ten more drafts of The Glazen Shelves, judging from the height of the pile. She bends to return the copy she holds to its place—and then, snakelike, the house centipede reemerges, slithering out from behind the pages, its body a mess of legs and fur. Kelly drops the screenplay on the floor and jumps back. Fuck this. She’s not sleeping down here. No way to treat your sister.

Darkness crowds the peak of the staircase, but Kelly knows Max isn’t asleep yet; she can hear noises up there, the sound of him muttering. So she climbs and, at the top, looks to her right: her old room, the door shut. As a teenager, she never hung anything on this surface, but seeing it now, she kind of wishes she had. This face, blank, that her brother and her mom saw each day when coming up here for whatever reason: Shouldn’t she have found a little something more to tell them about herself? She can’t resist squeaking the floor and getting closer to her old door, against which she presses her ear, listening. When Mom or Max used to do this—assuming they did this from time to time—what did they hear? Dinosaur Jr.? Snickering phone conversations with Penelope? Muffled tears into a pillow because, with Mom always drunk or away, and Max’s eyes on a screen all day, Kelly so often felt alone? (On these occasions, she has to confess, she always hoped somebody was listening in; she always sort of loved the feeling of misery, but only when she imagined somebody being right there, ready to stop it.) Despite Max’s warning, she wraps her hand around the doorknob and tries to turn it—but as her brother said, locked.

To her left, Max’s bedroom door rests open a crack. She peeks inside. Nothing on the walls and no furniture, except for a nightstand, a bed—upon which Max lies—and a bureau in the corner, holding the same boxy television with a built-in VHS player that he had as a teenager. More books and paper stacks clutter the corners on the floor—additional screenplays, maybe. In bed, Max stares ahead at the screen, the light flickering on his face. But the television is muted; instead, Max fills the room with his own voice, which sounds formal, a few decibels lower than usual: “Now, Mr. Enright, The Glazen Shelves premiered at Cannes in May to amazing reviews. Now you’re only thirty, so—”

“I’m actually twenty-nine,” Max says back to himself, in his normal tone.

“Even more impressive!” Max responds, formal and deep-voiced again.

In high school, Max often used to talk to himself: one of his favorite things to do was to “give interviews”—Mom always used to say, “Leave the guy alone, he’s giving an interview”—in which he would play Maxwell Enright, the great filmmaker, sitting down with an interviewer, whom he also played, and answering questions about his latest film. Kelly would lurk outside his bedroom door and listen—sometimes with Penelope, the two of them tittering, hands over mouths. But today, she feels creepy standing here, eavesdropping. As soon as she puts her palm against his door, planning to push it open the rest of the way and take the plunge into Max’s space, she hears him say, in the deeper voice, “So tell me about your relationship with Evelyn.”

Okay—maybe Kelly can listen for just another second or two.

“Evelyn plays my colead and helped develop the screenplay,” Max says. “Also, she’s my best friend. I wouldn’t have made this film without her. And it’s one of those crazy stories, right? We worked on it, on and off, for ten years. Life intervened for both of us in a number of ways, and sometimes, the feeling was bleak, like we would never finish the film. But we had to, you know? After a while, what can you say, other than that obsession takes over?”

“And now,” the interviewer says, “all this acclaim. What does that feel like?”

“Marvelous,” the great filmmaker responds. “But even if the film had never been finished, it would’ve been worth it to spend so much time with somebody I love so—”

Kelly, palm to the door, misjudges her force, and the door squeaks open a bit, hinges crying out. Max goes quiet, rustles the sheets, pretending he’d been asleep the whole time.

“Max?” she says. “Who you talking to?”

He grabs the television remote and hits a button, killing the light. “Nothing,” he says after a hiccup. “I was asleep.”

“Can I come in?” Kelly asks. Max doesn’t answer. She opens the door. He lies on the bed on his back. “Scoot over.”

“Why?”

“Now.”

He presses himself against the wall. The bed opens its arms wide enough for them both, and she lies down next to her brother. He faces the wall and lies there, stiff. She can see his bare shoulder; he’s probably naked under the covers.

“I need to tell you something,” she says, figuring now’s as good a time as any. She feels more or less awake—or at least unlikely to sleep any time soon.

“What?”

“It’s about Dad.”

“What,” he says, though the question mark at the word’s end has vanished.

She takes a deep breath, then tells him—tells him about the surprise call a week ago, tells him about the woman with the sonorous voice of a high school music teacher who had found Kelly’s phone number in her husband’s things, who said, “Stay the fuck away from Miles.” Before Kelly could say anything, the woman hung up. Kelly looked at the caller ID on her cell phone: the number began with 207—the Maine area code. Kelly kept trying it back, wanting to tell the woman that she had no idea what she was talking about, that she wasn’t—what, the mistress to a Mainer? Kelly had never bothered to discard her own 207 number, had not been able to bring herself to do it, in fact; so it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that, simply going by her phone number, she could be confused for someone still living (and cheating) in Maine.

“And so you think it was Dad’s wife, or girlfriend, or whatever? Because the guy’s name happened to be Miles?”

“Come on, It’s got to be him.” But Max remains silent. Staring at his back, she asks: “I mean, does she even know about us, that her new husband has twin adult kids living in the same town?”

“Well,” Max grumbles, “one adult twin living in town.”

“If he’s still here, don’t you want to find him? Don’t you want to meet him?”

“It’s a mistake to do that. It won’t help anyone.”

Eyes still on her brother’s back, she wonders: Was his skin always so scaly, giving off this easy-to-peel vibe? She saw skin like this in the desert, but rarely in Maine. “You can come with me, you know, to see him,” she says. “He owes us.”

“Owes us what? Money? Is that what you want?”

“I want—”

“Why don’t you try working? Mom worked.”

“Oh my God,” she says, “don’t start this Mom-was-a-fucking-saint bullshit with me right now. I really, really can’t handle it.”

“It’s a mistake,” Max says. He clears his throat and stirs, but he still faces away from her. The blanket falls a bit, revealing more of Max’s shoulder. Kelly focuses on it—focuses on one long hair that reaches out from his skin.

“I met him,” Max says.

Kelly notices for the first time a tower fan in the corner, making a low hum, rattling. For a moment this sound confuses her and almost puts her in a trance. But then it hits: “You met him?”

“He knocked on the door here one afternoon,” Max says, “and handed me a business card. He had scribbled his address on the back. Told me to stop by.”

Her face heats up. “You never told me?”

Max shakes his head against the pillow.

Kelly exhales and realizes that her anger toward her brother is already fading—if it existed at all. Frankly, she understands: their line of communication has always—or at least since Mom’s death—been a clogged artery.

“Okay,” she says after a moment. “So where does he live?”

“Now? I don’t know. When I got to his house, I saw boxes everywhere. He told me he was in the middle of moving. I don’t know to where. He asked me if I wanted anything to eat. I said no. So he made me a drink instead. Something red, I remember. We sat across from each other in the living room. It felt like we were waiting for someone else to show up. He started to ask me questions about myself. He asked me if I went to school and where I worked. He kept saying, ‘I want to know about my son,’ like we were talking about someone who wasn’t there. I didn’t ask him anything. I didn’t want to know anything. I answered his questions until it got dark. He kept giving me drinks. I never drink. I don’t know why I drank there. ‘Do you have any of your mother’s things?’ he asked me finally. It was the first time we talked about her. First time he said anything about her. I told him that I had some of Mom’s things in boxes. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m looking for something in particular. Something I gave her.’ So he described it to me: the gold necklace with the locket and the engraving.”

Kelly remembers this necklace, of course—remembers that Mom kept it stowed in a drawer. Sometimes she took it out and fastened it around her neck. One morning, she told Kelly, “This was the first thing Miles ever gave me. This was from his family. See the engraving?” Kelly peered at the locket and saw the initials, K.B. “Those are his grandmother’s initials,” Mom said, “Katherine Bennett.” But they weren’t Mom’s initials—not even close. So why did he give it to her? “Sentimental value,” she said. “He gave it to me so I could give it to you.” “But those aren’t my initials either,” Kelly Enright said. “Sure,” Mom said, “but they were supposed to be. And then after he left, he asked for it back. Can you believe that?” Mom stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. “I told him I threw it out with all his other bullshit. But I didn’t. No.” Mom looked at herself in the mirror and caressed the gold locket with the blue-polished nail of her index finger. “No, this necklace the Bennett family is never getting back.” Mom clasped it—K.B.—around Kelly’s neck, and she caught sight of herself in the mirror; the gold seemed to make her entire face shimmer. She felt her father hanging around her neck. It was a lovely, glinting piece of work; Kelly missed this necklace once Mom had laid it back in the drawer. Years later, when Mom died, Kelly rummaged through the dresser, hunting for this piece of jewelry: I’ll take this one thing, she thought, just this one thing. But she couldn’t find K.B.

Max continues his story: “He wanted the necklace back, but I told him I didn’t know where it was. Some of Mom’s stuff just vanished, and I don’t know to where. So he told me to spend the night. I was in no condition to go anywhere. So I agreed. In the morning, I went downstairs, and I heard voices in the kitchen. So I peeked around the corner. I saw them, heard them there, Dad and a woman, much younger than him, probably in her twenties. Dad was telling her something about me. He was telling her that I was there, but you know what he called me? He called me his nephew. I watched them for a minute—I watched the way she watched him as he talked, with her eyes big, with her whole face orange like he was a light shining on her, with her smile so fast and easy it seemed almost elastic. So what then? What then, what then—” Max takes a breath here. “She stood up, crossed the table, kissed him on the cheek, her stomach huge. Another one. ‘Go wake your nephew up,’ she said, ‘I want to meet him,’ and then off she walked, carrying inside her—what? Another nephew for him to introduce to some future wife?” Max sighs. “So I left. That’s it. I left. All he wanted was that heirloom, that necklace, for his new family. Sentimentality afflicts even the nastiest among us, I suppose.”

Kelly doesn’t quite know where to start, but one thing is obvious: “When his wife called me, she said she found my number in his things.”

“If his wife called you.”

“He must have looked at your phone. While you were passed out. Must’ve scribbled down my number.”

“Sure,” Max says, “but he probably saved you in his phone as niece.”

“So all that time,” Kelly says, “he never called me. He talked to you, but he never talked to me.”

“He’s a monster, leaving Mom, reappearing in my life, just for a necklace.”

“And you definitely don’t know where he is? I mean, like, zero idea?” For a moment, the fan in the corner fills in for Max’s voice as her brother goes silent. “Why aren’t you answering?” Kelly asks after a pause.

“I don’t know where he is.” And in his voice, what does she hear? The same goddamn tone from earlier, when he told Kelly he works at Hugo’s, or about his roommate Tobias—a little too clear, a little too forceful, coming from a guy who has never been clear or forceful in his life.

“If you know,” Kelly says, “then you need to tell—”

“I never want to hear about him again,” Max sniffs, and shivers. “You have no idea how it felt to be treated that way.”

And here, the crying? Finally, the crying? Christ. Kelly hears her mother’s voice reminding her: Take care of your brother. She almost sees her mother hovering there, whispering urgently: Take care of your brother. It was quite possibly the only expectation her mother ever had of her—and how unfair was that shit? Still, Kelly knows she should do something comforting; yes, she knows she should—but what? She decides to put her fingers in his hair. Yeah, that ought to work. But as soon as she touches her brother, he flinches. That’s okay, Kelly didn’t want to touch him anyway. She snaps her hand away and feels the grime from his unwashed hair on her fingertips. Max doesn’t move, doesn’t answer. She wipes the grime onto his pillowcase.

“Hey,” she says. “Can I stay here tonight? Do I have to go back downstairs?”

“I’m asleep,” Max says, then makes a ridiculous snoring sound.

So she decides to sleep here too—not downstairs with the house centipedes.