Never Enough Time, page 16
Chapter 54
“Is Raj coming?” I say to Sara after I put on my horrible awful heinous yick corporate-looking-like black suit, which was already pressed—fuck you, you voice in my head—because it was in a dry cleaning bag, even though I would never ever go to or use a dry cleaner.
And even though I cannot believe in this age of voices in your head and no visible anything to haul around that they still have dry cleaning. Yet they do. The proof was in my hands moments ago.
“Ryan,” Sara says to her husband, who’s just as good-looking as he ever was. Maybe even more so, since he’s aged fabulously well, as has Sara. I hope Chloe appreciates her bilaterally extraordinary genetic inheritance.
“What, love?” Ryan says, looking at Sara the same way he’s been looking at her for thirty-five years or more. I mean, I wasn’t there at the beginning. Maybe they met in kindergarten.
“She’s started in on Raj.”
“Spare us, Del,” Ryan says in the casual and cutting way that only someone you were once married to would dare speak to you.
“Next she’s going to start asking if her father’s coming.” Sara folds her arms over her chest, then unfolds them when Chloe—who’s been rushing in and out of the living room—rushes back into the living room, her very chic black dress a battlefield of wrinkles.
Sara must fix this immediately, and she conjures an iron out of thin air—well, not really, but it seems like it to someone who’d never think of such an appliance—and sets to work, using the coffee table, covered with a towel, as an ironing board while Chloe flounces about in her cute white eyelet-covered slip.
“Is he?” I say. I hadn’t even thought about him, my own father. A person I haven’t seen in thirty-five years—or five days—but who, even when I did see him, we had nothing to talk to each other about. Ever.
“I told him he had to come,” Ryan says. “The fucked bastard.”
“Wait,” I say. “You”—I point at Ryan—“get to call my father a fucked bastard?” The logic of hearing my ex say this is lost on me.
“That’s what you call him,” says Chloe. Fuck me! Chloe knows too much for someone so young.
“That’s different,” I say. “That’s me. He’s my father.” Although I can’t imagine why I’d think he’s a fucked bastard. Aloof, disinterested, never present, uninvolved—yes. But fucked bastard?
“Whoever’s father he is, he ditched your mother during the worst moments of her life, shacked up with that intern, and acted like he was finally collecting on a bad debt—like this was all owed to him,” Sara says. “If that’s not a fucked bastard, I don’t what is.”
“You have a point,” I say, trying to picture my father shacked up with an intern—a medical intern? a work intern? a something-new-to-me intern? Actually, I can’t picture my father at all. Especially not the eightysomething version of him. Especially not the shacked-up version of him.
“And Raj is not coming,” Ryan says to me in the most self-satisfied, smug, lording-it-over-the-listener way possible.
“Of course not,” I say. “I just thought that maybe . . .”
“You think too much, Del,” Sara says. “When you finally wised up and ditched philosophy and got practical, I was sure all that let’s-examine-this-useless-idea-thoroughly shit would stop. But, if anything, it’s gotten worse.”
“That’s because I analyze investments all the time. If you did that, you’d be looking for something more interesting to think about as well.” Yet I have no direct evidence that I do analyze investments, having no mental images of an office, coworkers, or any actual analysis I’ve supposedly performed. But Sara and Ryan don’t contradict me.
“I do something I love every single day,” Sara says.
“Mom’s the best pediatrician in London!” says Chloe. She says this like she’s her mother’s PR agent.
“Bully for you,” I say to Sara. Not very nice of me, but my mother’s funeral is in an hour and I’m not feeling very nice. Even though it is nice that Sara’s a pediatrician. It seems like the right job for her. And a damn bloody fucking sight better than investment analyst.
“No one forced you to become an investment analyst,” Ryan says. “And no one forces you to make all that money either.”
“You mean I could just be a broke philosopher living under the Manhattan Bridge in a busted-up orange crate instead?”
“You could,” Ryan says. “Why not?” He’s sneering now.
Why not indeed. Maybe I’d be happier. Maybe the cycle of sevens wouldn’t seem so bad from a splintered citrus crate under an old blue bridge.
Would I be on the Brooklyn side or the Manhattan side? I’m going to choose the Manhattan side, so I could go through the garbage from all those Chinese restaurants. I’d probably eat pretty well. Or, well for a homeless fucking person.
“Why do they call them homeless people?” I say.
“Because they have no home,” Chloe says. Smart girl.
“But they don’t call us homed people,” I say.
“Do you want breakfast or not?” Sara says.
“No,” I say. “I don’t want to ever eat again. Ever. Are you sure Raj isn’t coming?”
“You haven’t seen Raj since graduate school!” Sara’s shouting. “Why the hell would he come to your mother’s funeral?”
Because I need him to be here. But I don’t say that. I say, “Maybe some toast.”
Chapter 55
Everything in this world has changed—no one carries anything around with them, there’re voices in your head that tell you things, little girls say fuck like it’s a perfectly fine thing for a child to utter—but one thing is no fucking different from the way it’s been for millennia: funerals.
Not that I’ve been to that many funerals. Well, maybe I have, but my reincarnated Jason Bourne enchanted parallel alien-abducted self doesn’t remember them.
This funeral looks like a regular funeral. Like the kind of funeral they’d have on television—which apparently no longer exists—or in a movie or even in a play, except in a play there wouldn’t be so much dirt, since it’d fuck up the stage.
Everyone stands up, sits down, reads stuff, and is forced to hear three hundred thousand clichés and listen to crap music in an uninspiring room with a coffin at its apex. You know, the focal point.
But this isn’t the worst part. We’re going to have to go to the cemetery next. How a world that has no room for televisions or backpacks has the space for cemeteries is a mystery to me. Nevertheless, that’s where everyone’s headed now.
On my way to the car—Ryan’s driving, although I’m not sure I trust him to stay on the right side of the road after all those years in England—an old man stops me.
“Delaney,” he says.
“That’s me,” I say. Is this some friend of my mother’s? I don’t remember him, if I ever met him. And, you know, he’s thirty-five years older than he was the last time I might’ve seen him. He could be anybody.
“I wanted to say how sorry I am,” he says.
“Thank you,” I say. What the fuck do you say to someone at a funeral? I’m sorry that everyone dies too or maybe Let’s do this again sometime?
The woman standing next to this old man—his daughter? granddaughter?—is nodding along with him.
“We haven’t talked in a long time,” he says. “And I’d like you to meet Marissa.”
“Hi, Delaney,” Marissa—the nodding woman—says. She holds out her hand and we shake.
Is this proper etiquette for a funeral? Maybe I should turn the voice in my head back on, if only I knew how to do that, because perhaps I can ask it questions and it’d help me out in situations like this one, where I don’t know what the fuck to do. Not that there’s any situation where I do know what to do.
“Nice to meet you,” I say even though I don’t feel like meeting anyone at all. I feel like puking.
Sara grabs my arm and says, “We have to go now,” and I follow her to the car, where I sit in the backseat with Sara. Ryan’s driving and Chloe’s riding shotgun.
“I cannot believe you sometimes, girl,” Sara says. Nice to be called girl when you’re in your fifties.
“Why’s that?” I say. I’m holding my breath and planning on continuing to hold it until the scene at the fucking gravesite is over. Maybe I can close my eyes, too, although do I really want to spend part of the only day I’ll have in seven years with my eyes closed?
“Shaking hands with her.”
“Well, it felt strange to me. But I don’t know what I’m doing today. I’m sure you understand.”
“At least the fucked bastard showed up,” says Ryan, who’s driving too close to the middle of the road for me. Maybe he’s trying to strike a balance between the left and right lanes. “But did he have to bring his wife?”
“That’s his wife?” I say. “Seriously?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know they got married,” Sara says.
“I didn’t,” I say. I mean, I don’t even know who they are, so I surely don’t know that they got married.
“Your dad is old, Auntie Del,” Chloe says.
“I expect so,” I say. I’m old.
“But his wife isn’t my age,” Chloe says. “No matter what you say, Mom. She’s pretty old too.”
“I never said that, Chloe,” Sara says.
“Yeah, you did,” Chloe says. “Like five minutes ago.”
“She’s right,” Ryan says as we pull up to the gate of the spooky eerie deathy creepy cemetery. Although I don’t suppose there’re any cute adorable pastel happy lifey cemeteries. Yet that would be the cemetery I’d like most to go to, if, you know, I had to go to a cemetery at all.
“I can’t believe he brought her to the funeral and now they’re coming to the grave too,” Sara says.
“I told him he had to come,” Ryan says. “At least he’s got that much decency. If you could call that decency.”
Okay. I’m oblivious. Because up until that second I didn’t realize that the old man I didn’t recognize and the Marissa I shook hands with were my father and his wife.
Ryan parks the car near the eerier spookier horribler-than-horrible open grave with a fucking tent over it, and he and Chloe get out.
Sara opens her door and looks at me. Because, fuck it, I’m still sitting here, thinking about the closest thing I can get to that’s nothing. Anything from nothing on down would be what I’d most like to think about.
“Come on, Del. It’ll be over soon.”
“I’m not going to get out of the car,” I say.
Chapter 56
But of course, yeah, I get out of the car and go over to the grave, where my mother’s grandiose coffin—if it’s not a cardboard box, which is the only coffin that makes sense to me, then it’s grandiose—is suspended over the open grave. Her grave.
When I got on the train last night I thought I’d have a chance to chat with her, catch up—and I’ve got a ton of catching up to do, with my now-dead mother and with everyone. With myself.
But it’s hard to talk with an inert corpse in a coffin that’s hanging over its eventual resting place. Impossible, I’d say, except that what’s happening to me is impossible, so maybe it is possible—to talk with an inert corpse, I mean—only I don’t know how to do it.
I look around at the funeral workers hanging back, a respectable distance from the mourners at the ceremony. Funerals are so much a part of the culture that none of this has much of an effect on me. It’s what I expect, if I expected something.
Dad and Marissa are standing on the other side of the grave. Is this like a wedding? The bride’s family on one side of the aisle and the groom’s on the other? Except here, we have the opposing factions on opposite sides of a deep hole in the ground.
Now that I know the old man’s my father, I kinda recognize him. He looks like a very hugely incredibly older version of the man I used to see occasionally if I got up in the middle of the night to have something to eat. He’d be in the kitchen too, usually drinking.
Which memory makes me want a drink. Maybe Dad’s sporting a flask and he’ll share some with me.
Some religious-seeming fellow is holding a book with a black cover and reciting nonsense about life, death, cycles, and rebirth. Blah blah blah.
What cycle was my mother on? What if this seven thing is hereditary and I got it from her and when she died she’d been here, present, for only like twelve days? Did she feel gypped? Pissed? Furious? Or maybe she was just glad to have it all over with, especially the part when her husband became the fucked bastard.
The same husband, ex-husband, who’s standing across the great expanse of grave from me, and he’s crying. Marissa is holding on to his arm. She’s crying too. As is nearly everyone at the grave.
The reader of homilies must’ve just read something especially touching, but I didn’t hear him. I haven’t heard anything.
I’m not crying. Chloe and I are the only two people at this very very sad funeral who aren’t crying. My mother’s dead, my father is so old I didn’t recognize him, his wife is younger than I am, Raj isn’t here and wouldn’t be, I’m a fucking sellout horrid investment analyst, and I’m fifty-one years old. Tomorrow I’ll be fifty-eight years old.
But even these thoughts don’t make me cry. I’m not in a crying mood. I’m in a get-me-the-fuck-out-of-here mood.
I start backing away from the grave. I think the universe has asked too much of me, forcing me to attend a funeral on the only day I’ll have for seven years. Yesterday was much better—sex, the beach, delicious french fries, the shaman, Bennet. I’d like to be back in yesterday. Or much farther back. Much much much.
Sara puts her hand on my arm and gives me a bunch of violets. They’re so fragile-looking, so very pretty and delicate. I touch them to my cheek. My mother’s favorite. I grip them tight, tighter. Maybe I will cry.
And when Sara points to the coffin, which is being lowered—right in fucking front of us—into the ground and indicates that I should toss this small handful of tiny purple blossoms into the grave as well, I do cry.
Because I don’t want to let go. This small clutch of violets seems to be all I have, all I’ve ever wanted, and maybe the entire universe and the entire universe of universes is contained in not just these flowers but in the synergy of their collected force and my hands, which don’t want to release them.
They’re part of me now I want to say to Sara, but instead I toss the violets into the grave and pray that they don’t lower the coffin any more, since I’ve seen enough.
Sara’s got her arms around me now and I’m sobbing into her shoulder. A few minutes ago I didn’t think I’d cry and now I can’t stop.
“Auntie Del!” Chloe says, and she throws her arms around me too while she rubs at her eyes. Even Chloe’s crying.
Chapter 57
Now we’re all—by that I mean the funeral party—in a restaurant. A lovely, sedate, tableclothed, clinking glasses, refined-people, Westchester restaurant.
Chloe is running between the tables, talking to everyone, like she’s the master of ceremonies of the after-grave set. I half expect her to produce a microphone, stand at the front of the glass-walled room, and start telling death jokes. Two coffins went into a bar . . .
I’m sitting at a table with Ryan and Sara and Chloe, when she’s sitting, and two people I don’t know at all. My father and Marissa are safely across the room.
“I wish you’d eat something,” Sara says to me.
“I am,” I say, and pick up my fork and put a piece of vinaigrette-infused lettuce into my mouth, making a great show of it. In contrast, I’m on my third or fourth glass of wine, which I’m making an effort to draw attention away from.
You love drinking too much, Del. I can hear Raj’s voice in my imagination. It’s different from the scary voice that was in my head this morning, the voice I was so fucking relieved to turn off. This voice is a beautiful voice, one I’d like to hear more often, no matter what he’s saying.
I have another glass of not-bad wine. I guess they brought out the not-too-bad stuff for the death crowd. I keep thinking about Raj. Wishing he were here. Just to see him. Even to see him and his arranged bride. I’m sure she’s very nice. She’d have to be. Raj wouldn’t marry someone not nice. Whatever nice is.
Would I shake her hand and be polite the way I was with Marissa? Probably. I can be very fucking polite for someone whose entire life is going by seven years at a clip.
“Maybe we should go outside for a bit?” Sara says.
“Because I’m upsetting all the other mourners?” I say. “Because I can’t stop crying?”
“I don’t give a damn about them,” Sara says. “But I think you might feel better. Your mother just died. You can cry all you want today.”
“And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow you’ll have to stop crying,” she says, smiling. “But it’s not tomorrow yet.”
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and the next day,” I say. “I hate Shakespeare.” And I can’t stop crying.
“I’m sure he feels the same way about you,” Ryan says. He’s on his second plate of whatever horrible food they feed mourners here in Westchester, yet he still has a nice physique. As does Sara. More great inheritances for the energetic, happy-as-hell Chloe to be grateful for.
Sara pulls me out of my chair, disengages the wineglass from my fingers, and drags me—well, okay, it’s not really dragging—out to the terrace behind the restaurant. It’s the kind of place where a wedding reception might be held, but we’re a funeral reception, so we don’t get to sit outside. And, besides that, it’s a bit too cold for al fresco dining.
When we’re out on the terrace, alone, I think that it’d be nice to have a cigarette, even though I’ve never had a cigarette. It just seems like the kind of thing that goes with funerals and too much wine.
“Can we smoke out here?” I say.
“You really are out of it, Del,” Sara says. “No one’s smoked in twenty years. More.”
“No one?”
“Cigarettes anyway. Other stuff, maybe.”
