wanting to die. Wanting to live, but not sure why. Looking up at the nighttime sky, at the black eternity of outer space, amazed. Hating the parents. Wanting their love. Already an anxious sense of time passing, the staggered bathroom howls of grief for a deceased Pomeranian, young Joshie’s stalwart and only best friend, felled by doggie cancer on a Chevy Chase lawn.
Eunice stood there, in the middle of the living room, blushing intensely, the blood coming in waves. I did something I hadn’t quite expected of myself. I breached decorum, came over and kissed her on the ear. For some reason I wanted Joshie to understand just how much I loved her and how that love was not just predicated on her youth, probably the only thing he appreciated about her. The two people who formed my universe looked away from me, embarrassed. “I’m so glad,” Joshie muttered. “I’m so glad to finally meet you. Jeez. Lenny talks so much about you.”
“Lenny just talks a
I put my hand around her shoulders and felt her breathe. Joshie straightened up and I could see the muscle tone, the deep-veined reality of what he was becoming, the little machines burrowing inside him, clearing up what had gone wrong, rewiring, rededicating, resetting the odometer on every cell, making him shine with a child’s precocious glow. Among the three of us in the room, I was the one who was proactively dying.
“Okay, let’s get some of that yummy good wine,” Joshie said. He laughed with uncharacteristic fakeness, then ran off into the well-stocked galley kitchen.
“I’ve never seen him like this,” I said to Eunice.
“He reminds me of you,” Eunice said. “A big nerd.” I smiled at that, pleased that she could conceive of our commonalities. The idea occurred to me that we could form a family, although I was unsure of what role I would play. Eunice picked a few hairs from my face, her face warm with attention, then glossed my lips with chap. She pulled down on my short-sleeved shirt so that it aligned better with my light cashmere V-neck sweater. “Go like this with your arms,” she said, shaking her own. “Now pull on the sleeves.”
Joshie returned to hand Eunice a glass of wine; I got a mug’s worth of purple aroma. “Hope you don’t mind the mug, Lenny,” he said. “My cleaning woman got stopped at the ARA checkpoint on the WB.”
“The
“Williamsburg Bridge,” Eunice clarified. Both she and Joshie rolled their eyes and laughed at my slow ways with abbreviations. “You have such a pretty apartment,” Eunice said. “Those posters must be worth a billion. Everything’s so old.”
“Including the owner,” Joshie said.
“No,” Eunice said. “You look great.”
“You look great too.”
I pulled on the sleeves of my shirt an extra time. “Let me show you around,” Joshie said. “Two-minute house tours my specialty.”
We went into his cluttered “creative study.” I noticed Eunice had finished most of her Pinot and was already improvising a way to remove the purple from her lips with her finger and a translucent green jelly she squeezed out of a tube. “These are stills from my one-man show,” Joshie said, as he pointed out a framed Image of himself dressed in prison stripes with a giant stuffed albatross hanging from his neck. Standing before me, he looked thirty years younger today than in the Image, which was at least ten years old. He had lost forty years. A half-life gone.
“The play was called
“Was it on Broadway?” Eunice asked.
Joshie laughed. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Didn’t make it past this sucky supper club in the Village. But I didn’t give a damn about success. Creative thinking, working with your mind, that’s my number-one prescription for longevity. If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die. That simple.” He looked down at his feet, perhaps realizing he sounded more like a salesman than a leader. Eunice made him nervous, I could tell. We had no shortage of attractive women at Post-Human Services, but their self-assuredness made them bleed into one personality. Anyway, Joshie had always said that he had no time for romance until immortality was “a done deal.”
“Did you draw this yourself?” Eunice asked, pointing to a watercolor of an old, naked woman shattered into three by an unnamed force, her empty breasts flying in all directions, a dark pubic mound holding the thirds together.
“Very beautiful,” I said. “Very Egon Schiele.”
“This one’s called
“She kind of resembles you,” Eunice said. “I like the shading around her eyes.”
“Yes, well…” Joshie said, and made a shy croaking sound. I always felt embarrassed when looking at Joshie’s paintings of his mother, as if I had walked into a bathroom and caught my own mother lifting her tired hindquarters off the toilet seat. “You paint yourself?”
Eunice coughed. The Great Discomfort Smile came on, the shame bringing her freckles into strong relief. “I took a class,” she barely breathed out. “At Elderbird. A drawing class. It was nothing. I sucked.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “That you took a drawing class.”
“That’s because you never listen to me, jerk-face,” she whispered.
“I’d love to see something you’ve drawn,” Joshie said. “I miss painting. It really calmed me down. Maybe we can get together one day and practice a little.”
“Or you could take some classes at Parsons,” I suggested to Eunice. The idea of the two of them-alive and deathless-creating something together, an Image, a “work of art,” as they used to say, made me feel sorry for myself. If only I had had a proclivity to draw or paint. Why did I have to suffer that ancient Jewish affliction for words?
“Maybe we can
“But who has the time?” I ventured.
We returned to the living room, with Joshie and Eunice landing on one cozy, curvaceous sofa, while I hunched over an opposing leather ottoman. “Cheers,” Joshie said, clinking his mug with Eunice’s long-stemmed glass. They smiled at each other, and then Eunice turned to me. I had to abandon the ottoman and walk over to them to complete the ritual. Then I had to sit back down again. Alone.
“Cheers,” I said, nearly demolishing Joshie’s mug. “To the people I love the most.”
“To being fresh and young,” Joshie said.
They started talking. Joshie asked her about her life, and she replied in her usual inconsequential manner-“Yeah,” “I guess so,” “Sort of,” “Maybe,” “I tried,” “I’m not good,” “I suck.” But she was pleased to be engaged, as attentive as I had ever seen her, one open palm buffering a clump of hair spilling down her shoulder. She didn’t know how to conduct a conversation with a man properly, without anger or flirtation, but she was trying, filtering, giving away as little as possible, but wanting to please. She would look at me worriedly, her eyes crinkling with the pain of having to think and respond, but the worry receded as Joshie kept pouring wine-we were all above the two-glasses-of-resveratrol maximum-and fed her a plate of blueberries and carrots. He volunteered to boil some pot in a kettle of green tea, something I hadn’t seen him do in years, but Eunice politely told him that she didn’t smoke marijuana, that, perversely enough, it made her sad.
“I wouldn’t mind some,” I said, but the offer had clearly floated off the table.
“Why do you call Lenny ‘Rhesus Monkey’?” Eunice asked.
“He looks like one,” Joshie said.
Eunice gave her apparat a spin, and when the animal in question appeared, she actually threw her head back and laughed the way I had only seen her laugh with her best Elderbird friends, with honesty as well as mirth. “Totally,” she said. “Those long arms and that, like, bunched-up middle. It’s so hard to shop for him. I always have to teach him how to…” She couldn’t describe it, but made some stretching motions with her arms.
“Dress,” I concluded for her.
“He’s a quick learner,” Joshie said, looking at her, one arm reaching absently for a second bottle of wine sitting obediently by his legs. I presented my mug for a refill. We continued to drink heavily. I pushed myself down into the moist leather ottoman, marveling at how little Joshie cared about his surroundings. He hadn’t bought a new piece of
