Next Year, for Sure Page 16

  Which is a good way to leave it, even if it’s not entirely true.

  —

  Sharon hugs Kathryn there on the stage, is photographed hugging her. Kathryn will never see this photo, but it is lovely. The wedding photographer will use it in his portfolio for years, long after the hairstyles become noticeably dated. He’ll always be trying to take another photo like it.

  Sharon will see the photo once in a while, usually on anniversaries, and also when her daughter comes home engaged. And every time Sharon sees it, she will feel fonder and warmer toward Kathryn, and will wish the best for Kathryn, wherever she might be. And where is she? That’s the part Kathryn can’t see.

  —

  The plan all week was to flee as soon as the toasts were done. Have the engine running, Kathryn had said more than once on the ride up. The promise of it kept her going all day.

  Now, though, Kathryn feels liberated, like a country freed of occupiers, and she wants to drink, and dance to popular music.

  Of course, Moss does not dance. Chris either, but Kathryn knew that.

  I will always dance with you, Emily says.

  And it’s fun. They dance plainly and unironically. They take off their shoes. They request songs and sometimes sing along. Kathryn feels capable of great things.

  Chris and Moss watch them dance from the table. Kathryn glances over frequently to where they are sitting, just to see. Occasionally their lips move, but mostly not. What Kathryn wants is to look over and see the two of them laughing together or talking deeply about some unknown thing they both care about. That’s how Kathryn would like to remember this moment. She would really like to remember it that way.

  MARCH

  CHAPTER 19

  What Everybody Wants

  WHAT CHRIS WANTS

  What Chris wants sometimes is to be at home and just be there. What Chris wants is a good blizzard weekend. A blizzard weekend is when you stop by the grocery store on your way home from work on a Friday and stock up on everything you might need, and then you don’t leave the house until you have to go to work on Monday morning. You can do it any weekend; there doesn’t need to be a blizzard.

  The great thing about a blizzard weekend is there’s all this time and space yawning around you. The conversations you have on a blizzard weekend are hand-sewn and delicate. They would never survive the permanent-press cycle of a regular weekend.

  The other great thing is that all your books and things are there. So if there’s an idea you’re trying to surface, some half-glimpsed feeling you’re trying to find language for, and you think of an Annie Dillard line that gets at that feeling, you know where the book is on your shelf, you know where the line is on the page, it’s right there.

  WHAT KATHRYN WANTS

  What Kathryn wants is to hang out at Ahimsa. More and more often, Kathryn leaves the apartment to run a quick errand and ends up at Ahimsa making dinner. She calls Chris at work and says he should come, there’s pie.

  The conversations you have at Ahimsa are sprawling quilts with all hands stitching at once. When you think of an Annie Dillard line, someone says they think Naveed has some Annie Dillard, so you all troop to his room and he says he doesn’t think he does, but you can look, so you all tilt your heads to one side and read the spines, and he doesn’t have any, but he has some Rumi and there’s a line in there that someone loves, and then someone wants to read out the opening paragraphs of Written on the Body, and Zachary wants to hear Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too, and you never do find the Dillard line that gets at that feeling.

  WHAT EMILY WANTS

  What Emily wants is to live. Living tends to mean live theatre, not film. Living means live music, not lying on the living room floor listening to Bessie Smith records.

  Which is not to say that Emily will not lie beside Chris and listen to St. Louis Blues three times in a row and really let it get inside her, the way the trumpet and the vocals wrap themselves around each other, because Emily will do that, her eyes filling up with appreciation. But then she’ll want to go do something else. She’ll want to go see her friend Cesar who’s got a new band and she’ll ask him at the sound check if they know St. Louis Blues and Cesar will say maybe, and later they’ll play it as the encore with a musical saw and clarinet and it will be so transcendent that Chris will wish he had a recording of it.

  WHAT MOSS WANTS

  Chris has no idea what Moss wants.

  WHAT CHRIS WANTS

  What Chris wants is time alone with Kathryn when they are both awake. He has all these little things to tell her; they’re starting to pile up.

  Kathryn says why can’t he tell her at dinner? Or are these things Chris doesn’t want Emily to know about?

  It’s not that, Chris says. He wants to tell Emily, too. He wants to tell Kathryn and Emily everything. He just wants to tell them individually.

  Why is that? Kathryn asks.

  Chris doesn’t know. It feels different, telling them together.

  Kathryn wants to know why the whale story was always sad when Chris told it to Kathryn, and full of wonder when he told it to Emily.

  What? Chris says.

  Do you see me as a sad person? Kathryn says.

  But it’s not whales, the things Chris wants to tell her. It’s little fluffs, tiny flecks of life, so small and delicate they can only land on one ear at a time.

  WHAT KATHRYN WANTS

  What Kathryn wants is the four of them together. The four of them cooking elaborate meals together, the four of them standing together under a meteor shower. When any one person is absent, Kathryn gets noticeably less happy.

  I just like us, Kathryn says, when Chris presses her on it.

  Once, when Moss was out of town on a week-long contract and Emily flew down to see her brother, Kathryn appeared to be dragging herself through the days. It was hard to watch.

  Chris tried to love her enough for four.

  WHAT EMILY WANTS

  What Emily wants is to be Emily. Being Emily means pausing the movie to answer the phone and saying to the person on the other end, Hey you should come over and watch this movie with us, even though you’ve already started the movie and the person won’t understand anything that’s happening and you’ll have to keep stopping to explain things, because it’s Bergman and you can’t just drop into a Bergman, but Emily won’t mind doing it. And though it ruins the flow and the mood, you’ll see things you never saw in the movie, listening to Emily explain it.

  Being Emily means bringing home a fragrant backpacker she met on the bus and putting them in the guest room for a month and then when the backpacker leaves, getting postcards from Estonia and Mozambique and Tuscaloosa.

  There are a lot of good people, Emily says.

  Being Emily means finding the good people and bringing them in.

  WHAT MOSS WANTS

  Okay, one thing Moss clearly wants is for Kathryn to be happy. When Kathryn puts a silly hat on Moss’s head, he leaves it perched there all night. When Kathryn begs to see Moss’s supposedly award-winning moonwalk, a childhood secret lodged loose by tequila and tickling, Moss puts Billie Jean on the jukebox and busts a move right there in the bowling alley. Oh yeah, he takes her glo-bowling, which is a sight, the four of them in funny hats, bowling and moonwalking.

  For this, Chris is grateful to Moss.

  WHAT CHRIS WANTS

  What Chris wants, more and more, is to call in sick from life. When he got a sore throat last week, he started right away saying it might be strep, then eased into calling it strep, and said maybe everyone else should stay over at Ahimsa, just to be safe.

  He holed up in the apartment for days, said it hurt to talk on the phone. And he did have a sore throat. He wasn’t entirely making it up.

  WHAT KATHRYN WANTS

  What Kathryn wants is to play hooky from work. What Kathryn wants is to say fuck it and go snowshoeing on a Tuesday. What Kathryn wants is to fill a Thermos with mimosas and go to the library and make out.

  By Chr
is’s count, Kathryn has turned down the last five contracts she has been offered.

  I never wanted to be an indexer, she says.

  But what does she want to be? That is what Chris keeps asking.

  Sometimes Kathryn tags along when Emily cleans houses, the two of them returning radiant.

  I like cleaning houses, Kathryn says. It’s rejuvenating.

  And she’s really good at it, Emily says.

  WHAT EMILY WANTS

  What Emily wants is for Chris to meet the Other Chris. He’s coming to town, the Other Chris is, for a week of shows at some art festival. Emily is already on the guest list, plus one.

  It feels important, Emily says simply.

  This sways Chris, though he didn’t need swaying. Chris will always say yes to Emily.

  Which night are we on the list? Chris says.

  All the nights. She’s on the list for all the nights.

  WHAT CHRIS WANTS

  What Chris wants is what he had before. He wants to come home after work and make dinner with Kathryn and wash the dishes and hear about her day and tell her about his and watch a little TV and read a chapter in his book and fall asleep. He wants to come home and have nobody say, What should we do tonight?, Where should we do it?, Who should sleep where?

  Or he mostly wants that. He wants that maybe six nights a week. And then one night a week he wants to grow as a person.

  WHAT KATHRYN WANTS

  What Kathryn wants, it’s starting to feel like, is to move into Ahimsa.

  She asks these questions when they’re over there having dinner or hanging out, questions like, How much do you guys pay for rent again? And when they tell her how little it is, Kathryn says, Chris, can you imagine? She appears to be doing some sort of calculation in her head.

  She buys work gloves and writes her name on them with black marker and when Ahimsa has work parties she puts them on and goes over.

  Chris is waiting for Kathryn’s name to appear on their chore chart. He’s decided that’s when he’ll say something.

  WHAT CHRIS WANTS

  What Chris wants is for Kathryn to be happy. That’s what he’s always wanted, of course, but now that he’s seen what happiness looks like on Kathryn, the sadness of the last nine years terrifies him.

  So Chris will do whatever he has to. He will live in that overcrowded house of people. He will learn to tell his stories to two girlfriends at once. And he will wake up in the night to the sound of Kathryn’s happiness coming through the walls.

  All he wants is for Kathryn to be happy. And Emily, too. And now Moss, he supposes. Chris has nothing against Moss.

  APRIL

  CHAPTER 20

  The Mammoths

  Chris is a hard person to break up with.

  The first time, Kathryn tried to come at it sideways. They were brushing their teeth. They’d had a nice enough evening, just the two of them for a change, and Kathryn didn’t want to come out and say, I think we should break up. So she said, Maybe we should go back to using condoms.

  Go back was a misnomer. In reality, Chris and Kathryn had never used condoms. They’d purchased condoms once. They bought a box of twelve together the day they bought everything else for their apartment—towels, plates, salt shaker, toilet brush. It was a big project, starting over with nothing. There was a lot of nesting to do. By the time they got around to needing condoms, it seemed like they might as well go get tested. Kathryn was already on the pill, thanks to Geoffrey. So the twelve condoms had slowly petrified under the bathroom sink.

  Yeah, we can do that, Chris burbled from behind his toothbrush. Just like that, he was agreeing to the condom idea, to going back.

  But the condoms were not an actual proposal. The condoms were meant to start a conversation about where things stood, and how they’d shifted. The condoms were a signal flare, shot high overhead to illuminate the wreckage and survivors.

  —

  There’s this thought Kathryn keeps having about space aliens. If space aliens were to come down and look at the evidence, they would conclude that Moss is Kathryn’s main person, the one they should abduct along with her.

  Certainly if the aliens’ objective was breeding humans for some purpose, Moss is the person they would put on board with her. The aliens would simply look at the data.

  But even if the aliens measured other things, non-sexual things, if they computed the number of times Kathryn smiled or made jokes, or if they had a machine that measured hope, Moss is still probably the person they’d take.

  And the aliens won’t care when Kathryn explains that Chris is her life partner and Moss is a guy she’s seeing, a great guy, but just a guy. The aliens don’t care about nine years together. The aliens will say, We have to go by the evidence. And Kathryn is trying to think of other evidence she might offer, but what?

  Does it matter what space aliens think? Emily asks when Kathryn lays out this scenario.

  But it does matter. The space aliens want Kathryn to be happy on their planet.

  —

  It’s not that Moss is better than Chris. No one is better than Chris.

  But here’s one thing about Moss. Moss plays this game with Kathryn. Probably Moss doesn’t even think of it as a game, but it goes like this: Kathryn will say, What if I went to veterinary school? She’ll come out with some random thing like that.

  And Moss will say, What if?

  So Kathryn says, I’m probably too old. It must be like ten years of school.

  And Moss says nothing.

  But I was good at science, Kathryn says. She had, after all, taught herself four years of high school science in one summer, and loved doing it.

  Moss keeps chopping onions or sanding down some furniture or whatever it is he’s doing.

  And Kathryn says, I think I could definitely do it.

  And then Moss will say—and this is the best part—Moss will say, What then?

  And Kathryn gets to describe what her life would be like. She’d love the animals, of course. But she’d get frustrated with their owners, and would frequently complain to friends that the worst thing about her job is that she can’t sit down privately with the animal and agree on the best way to proceed, what the animal wants, its concerns and expectations. But Kathryn will be fond of her co-workers, some of whom are younger than her and some older. They will respect and challenge each other and will once a week go out for drinks together at this one place they all like and Kathryn will get very good at darts.

  This can go on for hours, Kathryn spinning out the thread and Moss occasionally strumming it with a well-timed what-then.

  It all feels so possible. Kathryn can believe in herself as the basically happy, occasionally indignant veterinarian who drinks socially and lives within walking distance of her clinic and has a series of rescued greyhounds named Edith and Gretchen and Tough Guy. That could be her life.

  —

  When Kathryn tries playing this game with Chris, they end up on the computer all night looking at course requirements and tuition fees. They research where the best vet schools are and the livability ratings of their respective metropolitan areas.

  Chris is unflaggingly supportive. He says, We could definitely make this work, K.

  But when Kathryn projects herself into that future, she isn’t a different person at all. She’s the same miserable person she is now, except surrounded by sick dogs and hissing cats.

  We can make it happen, Chris says, and Kathryn tries hard to change the subject.

  That’s the other good thing about playing with Moss—you can leave off whenever you want. And you don’t feel stupid when you wake up the next morning and don’t want to go to vet school anymore. You don’t even have to say you’ve decided not to go. You just say, What if I took a graphic design class? What if I got really into beekeeping? And Moss says, What if?

  —

  That’s how the breaking up started, with a what-if. Kathryn was lolling in bed with Moss and feeling unconscionably happy. She’d been
on a roll that night, cracking Moss up with scenarios. What if she became a jewel thief, a flimflam artist, a person of interest. It was dark and fun and then it fell out of her mouth: What if she broke up with Chris.

  Hm, Moss said.

  Kathryn nudged him with her foot. You’re supposed to say, What if.

  No, he said, I don’t think I am.

  Moss was soon asleep, but Kathryn stayed up late with the idea. She was still in love with Chris, she was pretty sure, but did not like herself the way she was with him, so sad and stuck. If only she could break up with herself and leave Chris out of it.

  —

  It’s better with the four of them together. When Moss and Emily are there, Kathryn can move around inside all the possible versions of herself. She can decide how she wants to respond to stimuli. She is a complex organism.

  When she’s like this, Kathryn doesn’t want to break up with Chris. They work like this. They surprise and delight each other, yet still recognize themselves across the years.

  Sometimes Chris will want to head home for the night, just the two of them, and Kathryn will try to carry this complexity home, sloshing around inside her. She always believes she can, but by the time they walk in the door, she’s shrunken down to a unicellular spore, thick and tough.

  —

  The second time she tries to break up with Chris, Kathryn says, Do you ever feel like we’re basically best friends?

  Of course, Chris says.

  No, Kathryn says, I mean more like friends and less like a couple. A romantic couple. A sexual couple. (The more she says the word couple, the less certain she is of anything.)

  I suppose, Chris says, yeah.

  Kathryn feels a flood of relief and gratitude, to have it out there and agreed upon.

  So should we decide that? Kathryn says.