J. Lennon - See You in Paradise

“Somebody made it for me.”

“I see.”

She put out her cigarette. “So where were you flying back from?” she asked. A car moved into traffic behind us, illuminating the interior, and our eyes met, reflected in the windshield.

“Newark. My mother was in the hospital. She’s better now.” I considered telling her the whole story, but she interrupted the pause to tell me that her sister, whom I’d totally forgotten had been sick for a long time with bone cancer, had finally died last month.

“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

She shrugged. “It was only a matter of time. There was a memorial service. Everybody read a little something they wrote. I know everybody says this, but she would have really loved it.”

“It sounds like—”

“In fact I suggested to her that we do something like it while she was still alive. It would be kind of a party, and her friends and all of us would be there, and we’d tell her how much we loved her and everything. But she would have none of it. She was too proud.”

We were silent for a little while. She clenched and unclenched her hands on the wheel. I tried to imagine what this would be like, hearing everyone telling you they love you, knowing that they can say nothing else, because you’re dying …

“That would have been very powerful,” I said.

“I don’t remember asking your opinion,” she came back.

Janine lived in the basement of some rich people. They had fixed things up pretty nicely down there — a terrific kitchen with a tile floor, a fold-down Murphy bed, and some built-in bookshelves — but none of it could dispel the gloom. The air was clammy. Shrill sounds emanated from a clock radio sitting on an upturned milk crate. Janine threw her coat on the bed. “I’ll get you a blanket,” she said, heading for a closet.

“So what have you been doing?” I asked. “For a living.”

“Computer shit,” came her muffled voice. “I commute half an hour.” She walked out into the room and threw two rough army blankets and a stained pillow on the floor at my feet. “Don’t you want to know what I’ve been doing with my free time?”

“If you want to talk about it, I …”

She waved a dismissive hand at me and walked off, down a little hallway. I saw a light go on and heard water running. I spread the blankets out in a neat rectangle, set the pillow at one end, took off my shoes, and collapsed. I rolled to one side and stared at the carpet a while. It seemed to be moving. Squinting, I could make out a shiny black millipede. I reached for it, but it burrowed down into the weave.

Janine came out wearing a pair of pajamas I gave her for Christmas one year. “Don’t get up,” she said. She sat on the bed with her legs crossed and watched me. “How long has it been? Since we last spoke?”

“I’ll bet it’s six months,” I said.

“More than two years. Do you know I’ve been married and divorced since we broke up?”

I didn’t think she wanted me to answer, so I didn’t.

“I married this guy practically on a whim, about five months after I moved here. He had a house in Queen Anne and bought and sold art for a living. He traveled a lot to Europe and didn’t invite me along. I went to work, you know, and would come home to this enormous house with all this art on the walls. Then one time he brought this painter home from Poland, this gigantic kid who did these stupid splatter things, and the kid moved into one of the upstairs rooms and did his thing in there, and Ernest, that’s the husband, sold his paintings. And then one night this Polish kid got drunk when Ernest was away and beat the shit out of me and tried to rape me, and when Ernest got back and I told him about it he kicked me out.”

“God,” I said.

From her breast pocket she produced another cigarette and a lighter. She smoked quietly and continued to look at me.

“I cannot believe you called me and asked me to come get you,” she said. “I absolutely cannot believe it.”

Obviously this had all been a mistake. Of course I’d been thinking, somewhere in the back of my mind, that one thing might lead to another and we’d end up having sex or at least sleeping in the same bed. I sat up. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Maybe I’ll just get a cab back to the airport, and—”

“Oh, chill out, please.” She leaned over and switched off the lamp, and I could see the cigarette’s tip gently rising and falling in the dark. “You can get your cab in the morning.”

The flight to Marshall took off without difficulty and with me on it, exhausted. I was eager to get home and go to bed, my own bed, and sleep for a great many hours, without regard for the time of day. I’d arranged to take several days off from my job — iworked for a telemarketing company, listening in on the conversations of the telemarketers, making sure they said the right things — and I figured I would just keep a low profile and pretend I was still with my mother.

I wondered if Janine remembered that I, too, had lost a sibling. His name was Richard and he’d lived to the age of twenty. I was eighteen and had graduated from high school about a week before he died. He was in the back seat of a car driven by a drunken friend that careened into an abandoned quarry filled with about thirty feet of murky water. The other two people in the car died too. It was an event of unequaled notoriety in our town, and one that cast upon me a tragic air that followed me all that summer, wrecking my relationships with the very friends who might have been able to make me feel better. In college I occasionally used Rich’s death to get girls to sleep with me.

Richard was a careful and serious person. It is inconceivable that he would have been in this car, with these people, drinking. All the same, there he was. Our father was never the same; he died in his sixties of a heart attack sustained while trimming the hedge. But Mom didn’t crack. She contained her grief, promptly screwing the lid on it and meting it out in private over a period of years. By tomorrow night she would be back in our old house, lying on the couch in her robe, telling her dog how happy she was to be home.

I carried the chair into her hospital room but never did sit down. “Hemorrhoids?” I asked her.

She smiled as if she thought I’d known. Her lips moved a little before she spoke, uttering the ghost words that haunted the things she really said. “Paulie, you can’t imagine the pain.”

“You told me you were dying.”

“I said no such thing.”

“Do you know how much it cost me to come out here? Do you know what it’s like trying to get off work with this kind of notice?” I conjured the image of my boss, mush-mouthed reprimands pouring from his face, to rally around. “You lied to me.”

“If it’s the money that bothers you, Paulie, I’ll pay for your ticket.”

“It’s not the money. I don’t care about the money.”

“I said I needed you.”

“You lied.”

“I wasn’t lying,” she made herself say. “I wasn’t lying.”

She lay back, spreading herself across the bed like a jelly. Tears welled in her eyes. But still I persisted, not yet sorry for what I was doing. “You could ask me. You could ask me to come, and I’d come.”

“Not true,” she whispered.

The crackle of an intercom brought me back to the plane. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the captain was saying, “welcome to flight 2195 to Marshall, Montana. I’m sorry to have to tell you that we’re not going there. There’s been some kind of incident at the Marshall airport, nothing for us to worry about, but it looks like they’re not going to clear us to land, so I’m taking us back to Seattle.” A groan went up around me.