The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

A few more cars crept up the street, headlights on. I returned to the chair in the middle of the room, and sat down.

At his desk, Joseph visibly stiffened.

I’ll e-mail Mom, he said, how’s that? Right now.

I shook my head.

Sorry, I said. I guess I just feel like staying for a little while more.

How long is a little while? he said, almost shrill.

I don’t know.

He didn’t turn. We sat in a row, him in front of me, facing the wall, like passengers on a stationary train. His laptop was on screen saver, swirling fish in a bubbling tank, so I couldn’t see if he was really working on anything or not. On the rest of the desk/table, nothing. A couple pencils. Faint markings, in pencil, sketched out on the wall under the window. Just scribbles here and there about whatever, half an equation, or some numbers in a row.

His fingers dug into the table’s rim.

Sorry, I said again.

What was also strange to me was how he didn’t get back to work. Hadn’t while I’d stood at the window. Still didn’t now. In earlier days, when I just wanted to be in the same room as him, he would try his best to ignore me and then would bring the pad of paper or book in a huff into the next room, maybe swearing at me, or locking the door. But here he stayed put. On an impulse, I reached over and slapped down on a key, to wake the computer up, and he started-what!-and the screen cleared and it was just a news page, just the front page of the New York Times, talking about the economy and foreign policy. No open files, as far as I could tell.

That’s your work? I said. You’re reading the news?

And?

Darkness soaked into the room.

There was nothing upsetting, that I could see. It wasn’t like there was anything about sex in the air-no hastily covered blanket, or lurking shame or edge of pleasure. And it wasn’t emotional-it wasn’t like I’d just stumbled in on Joseph rocking himself in a corner in tears or stabbing himself or like I’d found his diary in a drawer and read it aloud over the high-school intercom. No bomb ingredients or drug baggies, no samurai sword or gun or syringe. Whatever was happening was different than all of that, was more private, more closed off: all that came through was that he just wanted to be as alone as possible, aloner than alone, alonest, and my presence in the room was as invasive as if I’d strapped electrodes to his skull and was reading the pulses of his mind.

I’d just like to stay for a little while longer, I said, as quietly as I could.

You’re such a fucking pain! he said. You’ve always been the worst pain in my fucking ass! and he slammed the laptop lid down, but he did not get out of that chair.

In any other instance, in those countless other examples, he would’ve stalked out, would’ve gone to the corner farthest from me, maybe off in the kitchen, or on the balcony, but he did not, which was notable, so I started to pay attention to the chair. Just to look closer at it. It was the same chair as mine, the third in that series of four card- table Morehead chairs, sent by Grandma, his personal choice of furnishings for the apartment.

He was sitting in the chair, the way a normal person sits in a chair, but when I looked very closely, it seemed like the chair leg vanished right into his shoe. That the chair legs went inside both legs of his pants, and when I looked even closer, I could see that he had actually cut holes of the correct size in his pants to place the chair legs through the pant legs, and then, ostensibly, the leg of the chair, a light rat-colored aluminum metal with a rubber bulb at the foot, went down to share space with his own foot, inside his shoe.

What’s the chair doing in your pant leg? I asked. I said it lightly, just trying to be friendly about it.

He said nothing. No more outbursts. He re-opened and clicked up his laptop and read the news. Just observing. Just looking at what was there. I peered closer to see where the chair foot entered his shoe, but the shoe was covered by the hem of his pants, and something, somehow basic, was off. A slightly sick feeling picked up in my throat then, a dizzy feeling, a feeling like I was not going to like this, that whatever I was about to come across wasn’t good. That I should leave, return to the evening, go knock on the door of the red-car woman across the way, ask for food, any kind, to hug her, to go find a man nearby, to call Eddie out of the blue and ask him to take off my clothes, please. Now. Go. The chair leg went wrong, somehow. How? Was he inserting furniture into his body?

Are you in pain? I asked.

I’m okay, he said. He turned around to look at me, with eyes big and gray, and his voice softened, turning almost gentle.

Just go, he said. Rosie.

The room stretched longer, between us. A ringing bell. Maybe once, in our entire childhood, had he called me Rosie. He never even called me Rose. His face, those gray eyes, so big and, for a moment, all kindness. My throat tightened. I did not understand why. I did not understand what was going on.

I went to sit on the floor, at his feet. It was easy, to go kneel at his feet, and he wanted to kick me off, I could tell, but there were chair legs near his legs, so he could not kick me. And he could’ve grabbed me with his hand, pushed me away, but he didn’t, and that gentleness was still in him: Rosie, he’d said, and I reached down, and when I lifted up the pant leg, there was no cut. I don’t even know how to describe it, what I saw. There was no blood at all, and how good it would’ve been, to see blood-to see it pouring out of his leg, and the surgery he would’ve needed, the painkillers, the beige rug soaking through.

All I could grasp was just that he had not inserted the chair leg into his own, but that somehow it was mostly just a chair leg there, dressed in a sock, going into his shoe. No flesh leg visible at all, or only some kind of faint shimmer of leg that I could hardly see clearly. Had he cut off his legs? No. Again: no blood there, none. Instead, there was only that shimmer of human leg around the leg of the chair, a soft fading halo of humanness around the sturdy metal of the chair, a shifting of textures that somehow made sense. It looked like a natural assertion of chair over him, like the chair was dispelling him, or absorbing him, as natural as if that was the way it was with everyone. And then the chair leg, with its rubber foot, went inside his shoe, which no longer seemed to hold a human foot at all.

I sat there. I did not say anything. I held on to his knee, the knobby bone of his fleshy knee.

In the silence, something big and wordless. Those Morehead chairs, scattered throughout his apartment. How I’d show up, one day, and all the other furniture would be out on the balcony with the bed, and only four Morehead chairs would be in his apartment. Plus some pens and shoes.

I love them, he’d told my mom, as each one came in the mail. They’re great, so functional.

How rarely we heard him use the word love. Or, for that matter, great. He was sitting on the floor of the living room, in high school, cross-legged in front of the red brick fireplace, folding and unfolding the latest. I didn’t really care about the chairs, good or bad, but Joseph loved them, seemed to truly value chairs that could fold so easily into a line. The mailman had started to hate us.

God, she loves them too, said Mom. I can’t stand them-no style. Cheapo.

She stood above Joseph with her hands on her hips. There’s a table, too, she said, and, sure enough, it arrived the following week.

Joseph called Grandma, that night of the fourth chair.

Thank you, he told her, sincerely.

I stood in the hall. He listened to something for a while.

You too, he said.

When he hung up, I was over at his side in a second. I could not give him a moment alone. What’d she say?

She’s not making much sense, he said, brushing at the air. She said something about playing cards, he said. Mah-jongg?

Well, they’re card-table chairs, said Mom.

Can I have them, in my room?

Sure? Mom said, tightening her lips. She eyed a chair, the knobby aluminum screw at its joint, the plastic brown-swirled cushion.

He pulled splinters from her hand, weekly. Even in college, even during finals week. On the couch, with tweezers, for hours.