Christopher Hacker - The Morels

I sat down and put my hand on her knee, but she jerked it away. “No, don’t touch me.” She dug in her pocket for a tissue and blew her nose. “I thought I could get back at him — balance things between us. But all I did was make it worse.”

I respected Penelope’s wishes. In the days that followed, I avoided the Morels’ end of the hallway. A part of me was relieved. How could I face Will? He would take one look at me and know. I used the same stairwell, across from the garbage chute just past Dave’s apartment, that I’d ducked into earlier to avoid Arthur and Will. The long jog down led me to the side exit by the loading dock, which allowed me to steer clear of the revolving door.

Suriyaarachchi had begun sleeping at Dave’s, I noticed. I would come in to find him on the editing-room couch covered in a blanket or exiting the bathroom with a toothbrush in his mouth. At first I thought it had something to do with the long nights of drinking they were always inviting me to participate in and I was always sheepishly though firmly declining. To be their wingman —or I think it was used as an enticement, that they would be my wing- men . The bars they liked were all of a piece: the former beauty salon, the former pharmacy, the former grocery store. Rather than gut these places, the proprietors thought it better to polish the fixtures, dust off the wares, and restore the signage to simulate a heyday, circa 1957. The girls who got drunk here were pierced and tattooed and wore dresses carefully curated off the racks of the Goodwill. Like Penelope. They did their hair up in the styles of an era to match the décor.

“Don’t you have an apartment?” I asked.

“Can’t afford it anymore. Found a guy to sublet it for plenty, though. I pay half of Dave’s rent now and with enough left over to see this movie into the hands of a distributor. Crawling to the finish line, just barely.”

The twin betrayals in this statement left me winded. I want to say that my face went “dark.” You read writers using this word to describe a character’s expression, but I couldn’t see myself so I can only say it felt this way. The usual tension in my facial muscles that holds my social exterior together, that tries to project a certain friendliness to make me appear, as people have said about me, eager to please — these muscles went slack.

Suriyaarachchi must have sensed this change, too, because he was already backpedaling defensively. “There’s no way you could afford what I was asking for my place. It’s a prewar one bedroom on Park Avenue, dude. I have a doorman! Anyway, aren’t you shacking up with your boyfriend and his wife, down the hall?”

I glared at Dave, who was standing in the kitchen with a bowl of cereal. “You knew I was looking for a place,” I said. “Haven’t you noticed the desperation with which I’ve been using your fax machine?”

Through a crunching mouthful, Dave said, “I don’t know why you hang around that creep Arthur. Did you read what he wrote about his kid? What’s up with that?”

“It’s not what you think,” I said. “He’s trying to save literature.”

I gave my mother the pendant.

“She didn’t want it then?”

“She was married,” I said.

“Her loss, my gain, I suppose.”

I helped her with the clasp at the nape of her neck.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Mom.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Nobody does. The ones that say they do are just fooling themselves.”

“I meant about this clasp.”

“No, you didn’t.”

We were standing in the kitchen. My mother was tall, with a dancer’s graceful posture, though she had never been a dancer. She liked to boast of the casting directors who used to mistake her for one. I have a framed studio headshot of my mother in my room — a teenager from the fifties harboring dreams of becoming a starlet. She dismisses these childish ambitions when she talks about her past, of that time before she knew who she was , as though poetry were the inheritance to a kingdom and she were its heiress.

Mom checked herself out in the reflection of the toaster, letting her fingers play over the small jade teardrop against her chest. “It’s lovely, honey. Even if it is a hand-me-down.” She turned and kissed me on the forehead, patted my cheek. “I won’t tell you that it gets easier, because it doesn’t. It just seems to matter less, the older you get. It’s an improvisation. Think of it that way. And there are no wrong notes, because it’s your tune. You make it up. It’s not ideal, but what other choice do you have?”

In my room, sitting at the piano bench, silently sounding off notes on the keyboard, I thought of my An of the Byzantine frescoes and wondered how she was faring. The days when we were together seemed so far away now. Senior year we rented the parlor floor of an old Victorian town house not far from campus. It was rundown, the landlord a reclusive man who lived on the garden level among a maze of bound magazines and stacked newspapers. The rent was cheap. His only stipulation was that we leave our shoes at the door, something I was already used to, as An had this stipulation, too, when I would spend time in her dorm room. I turned that place into a home. An argued against it, as we were only renting — the supplies cost a great deal, more than we could afford — but I couldn’t help myself; as I said, the nesting instinct is strong in me. I ripped up the old threadbare wall-to-wall and waxed and buffed the hardwood planks beneath to a golden luster. There was a set of French pocket doors dividing the living room from the kitchen that were permanently stuck partway open and in total disrepair. I spent weeks restoring those doors, stripping the paint and replacing the plywood squares with matching panes of frosted glass from a local glazier, getting each to run properly along the track. I installed custom shelves in the kitchen, hung a thrift-store chandelier in the bedroom, and planted a garden in the dead patch of dirt out back. I loved my life then, coming home to An, stretched out and reading on the couch, or waking up next to her on a Saturday morning, the weekend wide open before us. It was a much simpler time, compared with the thorny brush I was hacking through now.

I went into the living room for the old rotary and brought it on its long extension back into my room and closed the door. After three foreign sounding rings, An picked up — much to my surprise. And, much to my surprise, within moments I was blubbering about how much I missed her, how terribly I missed our life together. I confessed everything. I told her about Arthur and his book, about what I had done with his wife.

“Get out,” she said. “Get out while you still can. This situation you’re in now is destructive. You can see that. Why don’t you move out of the city? Start over somewhere else. Baby, listen to me. Just get on a bus and go!”

She was kind. She let me reminisce, participated in the reminiscing herself. She did not tell me about the boyfriend she no doubt had. Or how wonderful the alpine air in Baden-Württemberg was this time of year.

Lying in bed, awake, I resolved to quit. An was right. The movie was done. There was no reason I should be spending my days there anymore. The time had come to move on. But what would I do? I had no marketable skills, other than those I had picked up as an usher — sweeping, counting change, making announcements over a loudspeaker. Skills that might have served me well in Communist Poland but that made me at the age of thirty in the entrepreneurial capital of the world an increasingly pathetic figure. My only option at this point was grad school. A doctorate in music composition. I could teach, get the occasional local symphony commission. It seemed almost glamorous now, after being confronted with the realities of moviemaking and the realities of being an iconoclastic novelist with a wife and a child.