The Song Remains the Same Read online

  Tonight, with the long holiday weekend stretched out in front of us, Peter drops his messenger bag by the door, kisses me hello on the couch, then moves to the fridge where he is, no doubt, cracking open a beer. He has told me that in the Labor Days past, we’d retreat to the Hamptons—a gallery client would almost inevitably offer up a room in their weekend house. But this year, we’re trapped, stuck, as I’m not ready for a trek, even if that trek is to a well-appointed six-bedroom with a view of the Atlantic. Peter doesn’t seem to mind that we’re one of the last few remaining in the city, and tries to make our three-day respite, three days of forced togetherness, sound like fun, an adventure. “We can go through all of our CDs and make, like, our own personal concert,” he said last night. “Turn off the lights. Turn the living room into a Pink Floyd laser show.” I didn’t get the reference but I appreciated the effort all the same.

  “Hey, come join me on the couch,” I say to Peter tonight, pausing my iPod, slipping it onto the coffee table. I’ve been sitting here for I don’t know how long, lost in the music, living in the moment. And though this new tactic requires that I just be—just inhale and exhale and let life wash over me—the music, well, the music makes me itch, makes me once again try to wind my brain into the past, straddling the space between the past and memory. Discover the moments when I first heard these lyrics, first absorbed the melodies, and thought that something about them might change my life. That when Peter and I trucked out to Jones Beach to see the Counting Crows on a sticky July night for our fourth date, the night, he’s told me, he decided he was in love with me because I knew every word to “A Murder of One,” well, maybe I was already in love with him back. Maybe I was so heady in love with him that he was all I thought about—work and art and my dad and all the rest of it be damned. It was easy to imagine these things, after all, when who knows if they could have been true.

  Peter grabs a handful of Cookie Crisp cereal from the open box on the counter, pops a few pieces in his mouth, and sinks down next to me on the gilded, hideous sofa, still chewing. He plops the beer on top of a magazine on the coffee table.

  “What’s up?” he says. “How was your day?”

  “Boring. Went by too slowly. Went by too quickly. All of the above. Same story, different day. Next week, once I’ve been cleared to get out of here, really, like get out of here—back to the living world, my first stop is a new wardrobe. Second stop—new couch.”

  “I already know what’s wrong with the couch. But what’s wrong with your wardrobe?”

  “Too boring, too beige.” It’s all goddamn neutrals is what it is. Where is the red that the fabulous me should be wearing?

  “And you’ll go back to the gallery soon,” he says, eating the last of the cereal. “That will break up the monotony.”

  I nod, hopeful that he is right, doubtful that he is right all the same. But I resolve to live in the moment! and so I smile at him, stifling the urge to say that it’s not just the monotony, idiot! It’s the void that is the blank space and the monotony is just the effect, not the cause! No, I set that aside, and evaporate it from my mind, and there it goes, gone.

  Here on the couch, Peter still feels too big for me, just like he did the first time I saw him in the hospital room, but I’ve grown used to his meatiness now. Now, his oversize hands and biceps shaped like barrels, well, now they’re starting to provide comfort, a sign of safety. He’s my shelter in my storm, my near-literal shelter. If I tucked myself under him, yes—I’ve almost convinced myself—I might be able to survive all of this, weather whatever comes next on the horizon.

  I take one of his hulklike palms and press it against my cheek. He stops chewing, surprised, assessing the situation, and wipes his free hand, unconsciously, on his jeans.

  “Tell me something wonderful about us,” I say. I ask this of him every once in a while, use him to recount the past, and then I’ll roll it around in my brain and dish it back to Jamie, who sometimes aims the camera on me, sometimes just listens. Sometimes, I’ll add in tiny details upon regurgitation, slivers of information that come to me without warning, but most of the time I’m simply an echo of that which was fed to me. Though Rory has changed her mind thanks to the publicity bump for the gallery, my mom remains stalwartly against American Profiles, but she doesn’t get it—she doesn’t see that it’s cathartic for me to put this stuff down on record. If I don’t, what else might get lost or might evaporate with no warning at all, like it did the first time around? And she doesn’t know, of course, that Jamie is going to get me the answers that she refuses to. Besides, I stopped listening to my mom after I found the painting of the white house, the one we both remembered but the one that she pretended not to. His house for the other half of his life. Now, I’m living in the moment by ignoring her.

  “What do you want to hear?” Peter says, keeping his palm in place. He seems nervous now, senses that this might lead somewhere different than the prior conversations have.

  “Anything,” I say, then lean back against the velvet and gingerly swing my legs up into his lap. “Tell me anything wonderful about who we used to be.”

  He hesitates, waiting to home in on the perfect answer to my loaded invitation.

  “Two months after we started dating, we—on a whim—flew to Paris for the weekend,” he says, his face morphing into a smile. “I’d never been. You insisted on taking me, showing me the town.”

  “Why haven’t you told me this before?” I ask, then close my eyes to see if I could recall any of it. The Eiffel Tower, the Seine, the sidewalk cafés with their fresh brie and their gluttonous, lingering lunches.

  “To be honest, I just remembered. It was early on, and”—he shrugs—“I don’t know. You forget things.” I nod because you sure as hell do, and he continues.

  “Anyway, I was nervous to fly there—there was a terrorism scare going on, so we splurged and went first class. Oh my god, we drank so much wine on the plane—and got these little toiletry sets that I think might still be stuffed in the bathroom cabinet—and by the time we got there, we were both hungover. But happy and on a high while hungover all the same—the good sort of drunk, you know? So we go there, and you insisted on blowing our budget by staying at the George V.”

  “What’s the George V?”

  “The nicest hotel in the city—like, super, super nice.”

  “How’d we afford that?”

  “Er, you have money. Your mom didn’t tell you this? I told her to tell you.”

  I shake my head no. God knows what else my mom hasn’t told me.

  “Well, yeah, you have a trust your dad set up for you before he, um, left. You never, ever touch it—the only exception was when you started the gallery. But for this trip, you said it was worth it. That you never do anything for yourself, and you wanted to go all out.” He shrugs. “You were so excited about it that I wasn’t going to stop you. If I’d been paying, we would have been at some fifty-buck-a-night fleabag, so…yeah.”

  “So this place was decadent?” I try to picture it: maid service, six-hundred-thread-count sheets, late-night deliveries of chocolates and champagne. The new me very much approves.

  “For some perspective, we were on the same floor as Hugh Grant.” He laughs, so I do, too. We’d watched Notting Hill last weekend, so I at least get the reference. “You kept trying to pretend that you weren’t stalking him, but you were totally stalking him, until we were in the same elevator with him, and you finally introduced yourself, and he was very polite and kind considering that we could see the hives that had broken out on your neck from nerves.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I say, though I’m smiling and I do kind of believe him.

  “Don’t believe it all you want,” he says. “My hand is to God.”

  “I don’t seem like the freak-out-upon-celebrity-sighting type.”

  “You were a big Four Weddings and a Funeral fan.”

  “I’ll have to watch it,” I say, distracted from the story for a moment, remembering just
how little I indeed remember. “Okay, keep going.”

  “So we spent all three days trekking from one museum to the next—the Louvre, the D’Orsay, the Orange Museum.”

  “The Orange Museum?”

  “That’s what I called it—I don’t speak French, so I did the best I could.” He laughs. “And you just couldn’t get enough of the city—the art, the architecture. And that’s when you told me that you used to paint but that you stopped when you were thirteen, and when I asked if you’d ever start again, and, you said, ‘Never.’ That it was really your dad’s thing anyway. And you seemed so vulnerable and regretful over it, that I didn’t say another word.” He stops now and blinks his lashes too quickly, and I can tell, because he’s been an emotional Ping-Pong ball since the second I woke up from my coma, that he’s teetering too close to the line again.

  “Please don’t cry,” I say, hoping this is enough to stop him. “Please, just tell me more about Paris. It sounds like heaven.”

  “Yes, okay.” I see him fighting against himself. “I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m such a fucking pansy these days.”

  “It’s fine.” It’s not fine! This is not living in the moment!

  “I just…oh god, this sounds so lame, but what the hell. It’s just that Paris was when I decided that I had to marry you, that you looked so goddamn sad over your confession, and well, your dad, and I just wanted to protect you from everything that had already happened. Even though I don’t think I even knew the bulk of what had happened, still, that’s what I wanted. We were standing in Notre Dame, staring up at the stained-glass windows, and I know it sounds cheesy, like one of those asinine commercials that I’d score, but I looked at you, and the light was bouncing every which way, and I just thought: This is it. She is it. I’m with her until the day I die.”

  “Until you weren’t,” I say, and instantly regret it. Because now we are officially not living in the moment. Now we are dragging the whole mess of our shit into this moment with us.

  “Until I wasn’t,” he concedes. “Like there are any other ways that I can say I’m sorry for that. If there were, I’d say them, too.”

  “No, don’t. I’m sorry. I’m the one who shouldn’t have said that. I was out of bounds.”

  I fall silent, and since there’s nothing more to say about that, and the Paris story has run out of steam, I lean over and kiss him. Not because it’s my first instinct but because maybe my doctors and therapists and—god help me—my mother, who e-mailed me three days ago to urge me to share my body again with my husband, are right: maybe it’s time to reconnect, and the only way to find out is to jump in feet first. So I jump; I leap before I look, run before I can walk, as Liv might say, though she’s already implored me not to.

  I kiss him hard, and he kisses me back, then pushes me away. I can still taste the Cookie Crisp and the Molson on his tongue.

  “Are you sure?” he asks. “Are we past the other stuff? I mean, is it in the past?”

  Everything is in the past! Everything and nothing and god knows what else all at once! I want to scream.

  “I am. We should be. It is,” I answer, though what I should really say is that I might be, we’ll try, who knows? But I am wearing my guts on my sleeve now, and I can’t stop the momentum of where Peter and I need to go. My mom was right. It’s only sex, dear! she’d said in her e-mail, to which I hadn’t replied.

  He leans over and kisses me again slowly, softly, almost barely there, and I wonder if I’m kissing the way that I’ve always kissed, and if he’s doing the same.

  “I can’t believe you initiated,” he murmurs. “You never used to.” He kisses me more forcefully now, and I try to keep up, but he’s almost frantic, bearing down too hard. My lips feel puffy, my face braised from his two-day-old stubble.

  “Slow down,” I remind him. “Slow down or you’ll hurt me.”

  He stops and checks himself, then smiles a smile both sad and joyful.

  He starts to unbutton my top. “Never.”

  Our doorman buzzes two hours later. “Sending up your sister,” he says, then clicks good-bye.

  Peter is asleep in the bedroom and has been for the duration of our post-sex window. Afterward, he oohed and aahed over what we had managed to do to each other—despite my formerly fractured body, despite my formerly (and possibly still current) fractured trust in him, despite, well, everything. But afterward, I could tell it was a losing battle with his sinking eyelids, and soon enough, his breath grew patterned and his chest rose and fell, and I wobbled back to the couch and flipped on the TV. The sex itself was good, though again: no reference point. But it seemed good enough. I might not have remembered having slept with him before, but well, I seemed to remember how to sleep with him at least, and we laughed—both of us relieved—that I hadn’t forgotten everything.

  “What’s with the bedhead?” Rory says as way of greeting when I swing open the door, and then lock it behind her. I shrug and look at the floor. “Oh no, you didn’t!” she says.

  “He’s my husband. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with it!”

  “I’m just…surprised. Knowing what you now know. I wouldn’t have pegged you for this type of reaction.” She stares at me for a bit, chewing on a thought she opts not to share. “You really are more like Mom than I realized.” She steps into the kitchen and emerges with a Diet Coke.

  “I wouldn’t say that. Why would you say that? Ugh, god, please don’t say that.”

  “Oh, she and Dad patched things up more times than I can remember. You got that gene, I guess, though I wouldn’t have pegged you for it before all of this. You know your nickname in high school was Ice Queen.”

  “That’s original,” I say.

  “Well, don’t blame me,” she answers. “I didn’t give it to you. It started when you slipped on a patch of ice your sophomore year and broke your wrist. You went to a party anyway, ignoring the pain, until your arm swelled up like an elephant limb, and Aaron Sacks, the senior who had invited you there, drove you to the ER. Mom was stuck at home with me, and Aaron stayed with you all night, through the X-rays, the cast, all of that, and then—the way you told it from the way he told it—you refused to kiss him good night. The Ice Queen was born.”

  “I had standards.” The new me tries not to betray her disappointment in the old me, that I couldn’t have made out with him just a little. Just a fraction of a French kiss! Would that have killed the old me?

  “Then explain this,” she says, gesturing toward the bedroom. She pales. “Shit, that was too mean. No, you did have standards…I just…well, like I said, you were different before. This isn’t what I was expecting, that’s all. I guess I just didn’t get the same gene.”

  The soda hisses as she opens it, and then, out of nowhere, she drops onto a dining chair, emitting some sort of animal sob, her shoulders heaving and shaking. It takes me a moment to realize that she’s crying.

  “Jesus, Rory, what? What’s wrong? Is it Peter and me?”

  She looks up at me, batting her hands in front of her face, her mascara gruesome under her eyes, her nose already pink and running amok.

  “It’s Hugh. We broke up.”

  “What? Why?” I help her—we help each other really—to the couch. That goddamn unsightly disgusting gold couch. Despite my mess of a sister in front of me, I resolve to get to a furniture store like, this week. Like, yesterday. I cannot take another second of this monstrosity in my home. My former me’s home.

  “Oh, I don’t know! No, I do know, but I don’t really know!” She moans. “We’ve been fighting…I wanted to get married, he wasn’t ready…I gave him…oh shit, Nell, I gave him an ultimatum. I mean, it’s not like I’m getting any goddamn younger here! It’s not like my ovaries are going to wait around forever!”

  “You’re only twenty-seven, Rory,” I say kindly, trying to erase a mental image of my own ovaries, bruised, marred, expunged. I live in the moment and instead focus on the couch. Maybe I’ll get something in a burnished red or a surpri
sing shade of sea blue.

  “Well, it’s too late now!” She stands and starts pacing frantically, and I pull myself back to her, sensing her desperation. “It’s too fucking late now! I gave him a time frame, and he blew past it, and now it’s just too little, too late! I screamed at him, and he screamed at me, and we said things we shouldn’t have said—he actually called me a demanding bitch and I might have called him a noncommittal prick, and now it’s just all one giant effing mess!” She flings her hands in the air for extra drama and then flops back on the couch.

  “People say things they shouldn’t all the time,” I say. “That’s the easy fix, that’s why we have apologies.”

  “No, it’s more than that,” she says quietly, her voice cracking. “I see how precious life can be. I see you, and that you almost died, and I see what’s been taken away from you, and I just can’t settle for his noncommittalness for one more second.”

  “Noncommittalness?”

  “I probably just made that word up.” She snorts, half grief, half gallows humor. “But like I said, I think I just don’t have that gene…to settle.” She shakes her head. “Not that you’re settling. Jesus. I’m sorry. You know what I mean.”

  I don’t, but it seems easier to ignore the comment than make something more of it than it needs to be. Rory doesn’t know crap about forgiveness and isolation and despair, so why even bother?

  “Things seemed perfect with you two last weekend.”

  “Don’t judge what you can’t see. Closed doors and all of that. If you could remember Mom and Dad, you’d know as much.” She hesitates. “Actually, on second thought, maybe you wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, Ror, you’ll figure it out.” I pull her head onto my shoulder and let her rest there, until the phone rings, jolting us both.

  The nerves snap in my hip from moving too quickly and my earlier romp with Peter, a quick reminder that I’m not what I used to be.