Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

This was my first Thanksgiving back in America, and part of me would have preferred to be only with family, taking Meredith and Peter up to my mother’s house, or even going to Peter’s parents’ place in East Hampton (like my mother they were expected later in the day), instead of feeling like a grouch and a paranoiac in a room full of people as interested in mingling with potential business contacts as in watching the parade outside and enjoying the champagne and cinnamon rolls that circulated as if there were a limitless supply of both. I did not want to live in a world of fanciful abundance, of abundance predicated on a belief that nothing should ever run out for as long as there was someone ripe with desire. My own parents, children of the Great Depression, grew up with a sense of scarcity that made them frugal and practical, sometimes so much so it drove me nuts, but they also savored what was good, and enjoyed the large and small treats of life with a pleasure that was genuine. Looking around Meredith and Peter’s living room, there was without question a sense of pleasure, but of a kind born in the expectation of such luxuries always being available. And there was Michael Ramsey, helping himself to more food, more drink, chatting to Peter, laughing as if they were old, close friends, although most of these people were already in high-gear party mode and everyone they met was potentially an old friend, someone they would have known forever if only they had been given the chance, provided of course that the person was worth knowing, could offer something in exchange for the friendship.

I was on the verge of explaining to my daughter why I was feeling so paranoid when Susan arrived. Meredith stood to greet her mother and I could see in the slight tremble of my daughter’s hand how she was nervous about her parents meeting again for the first time since the wedding, though our divorce has been largely amicable. At the wedding itself we had become almost — I liked to think at the time — quite warm with each other, as if my ex-wife and I were both imagining a more serious rapprochement might be possible, such that one day we could even contemplate reuniting. I had to remind myself I had come for Meredith more than anyone else, the world did not revolve around me, and at twenty-five it can still feel as though you are the center of the universe and every event and relationship in your life is ultimately about you . Meredith wanted me there, I was certain, to support her in the face of her mother, and so I attached myself to my daughter in the partial belief that I was supporting her with my presence, even as I knew, at a more distant remove, that I could not quite bear to circulate on my own, to risk spending another moment alone with the strange Mr. Ramsey. Then, by one of those flukes of social gatherings, I found myself separated from Meredith and standing next to Susan, who has hardly aged in the years since we last lived together, looking to my eyes as though she might still be in her early forties.

‘Where’s your wonderful mother, Jeremy?’

‘They’ve sent a car to fetch her from Rhinebeck. She won’t be here until after noon.’

‘What a shame. She’ll miss the balloon animals.’

‘You know my mother hates parades.’

‘Still cultivating her misanthropy?’

‘As attentively as her African violets.’

‘She’d be much happier if she could just decide to like people.’

‘She always liked you.’

‘But I was such a bitch to her.’

‘She thought that meant you respected her.’

‘You know I’ve always been mean to people who scare the shit out of me.’

As we smiled at each other I felt for a moment that the previous decade had never happened and when we left the party we would go home to the same apartment at the top of a converted brownstone on 75th Street and when I went to bed that night, overstuffed and satiated, I would be going to bed with Susan, and there would be nothing strange about this, no resumption of what once had been but a continuation of what had always been, as if my decade in Oxford were only some transient series of hallucinations, one vision piled on another, all unfolding over the course of a single New York night.

I knew, however, that Susan was content with her life and had no interest in returning to me. Paranoid I might have been, but delusional I was not. She was drinking a cup of coffee and I watched her lips curl in to take the hot liquid, careful not to drip, and a light smear of coppery lipstick adhered to the white china as though the cup were a soft and susceptible skin. Her gaze turned away from the room and we looked at each other as we had not really looked for more than fifteen years, since in the final months of our living together she averted her eyes whenever I stared too closely, as though she feared my scrutiny, or as if the experience of being observed by her husband caused pain instead of pleasure. Now, however, she smiled and warmed under my gaze and it was that response, her evident enjoyment of my company, that allowed my mind to wander off and imagine what it would be like to live with her once again, to make all our lives so much less complicated than they had become since my departure.

‘Nice to have you back, Jeremy.’

‘Do you really mean that?’

‘Yes, it’s good to have you here. I’ve missed you.’ She punched my arm in the way she always had, with more force than she realized, and the slight pain of impact was as familiar and welcome as her ageless face. This, I thought, this is someone I can trust, no matter how much time passes, I will always be able to come back to her, even if we are no longer living together she will listen to my panics and hallucinations and paranoia and know exactly what to say to calm me because there were so many years spent together and so many hours learning the habits of the other person’s mind that so little now needs to be said to find our way back into the territory we shared, and which — it seemed then, in our daughter’s apartment — began to expand once again the parameters of my own sanity, to make that boundary recede into a remote and nearly unreachable distance, because Susan has always, since we first met as graduate students at Princeton, given the impression of being among the sanest people I know, despite her choosing to bring our marriage to an end, which felt at the time like an act of insanity, or at the very least a bout of passionate violence. I had believed up until the time when she began to avert her eyes every time I looked at her that we shared a perfect life, because there was so little hidden between us, or because I believed, wrongly as it turned out, that she knew everything of substance about me and that I knew everything of substance about her.

‘Is there anyone now?’ I asked.

‘No, not now. Not since before the wedding. You know me.’

‘Choosey.’

‘ So choosey.’ She shook her head and looked down into the lipstick-rimmed china cup, swirled the dregs, and finished the coffee. ‘And you? Found anyone?’

‘Not now, not anymore.’

‘But there was someone?’

‘At Oxford. A few flings, and one that lasted longer. More serious.’

‘But came to an end.’

‘Yes, I think, although there may still be fallout, of a kind, I don’t know. I’d rather not—’

‘I’m sorry. That must have been—’

‘It’s not your fault. It wasn’t anything.’

‘That sounds like a lie.’

‘Yes, it is. It was something. And I was foolish.’

‘God, you sound so British now.’

‘Don’t say that. I haven’t changed, not fundamentally.’

‘Poor Jer.’

‘Please, Susan, no pity.’

‘What’s wrong? You look—’

‘I—’ At that moment I was about to tell Susan what had happened in the previous few days, believing she might have some insight into the matter, or at least be able to share in my worry, but then I saw Michael Ramsey come across the room towards us and I felt as though I could say nothing for as long as we were that close to each other. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and black sweater so that from behind he might have been mistaken for a particularly hip class of priest. ‘Do you know that man?’ I whispered to Susan, nodding in Ramsey’s direction, hoping she would offer some reassurance that he was a harmless asshole friend of Peter’s, another trust-fund frat kid with too much time on his hands but nothing really out of the ordinary. Instead she shook her head and scowled as if the very look of Mr. Ramsey left a bad taste.