Beautiful Lies

then it was gone. I thought it was disdain for my lack of faith, my willingness to hurt them.

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“That’s all right, dear. I understand how you could become confused. Especially with all the stress.” I heard in her tone that she didn’t understand and it wasn’t all right.

Later, on the train ride back to the city, I watched burbs roll by me as I sat with my feet up and my head pressed against the glass. I’d shared an awkward dessert of chocolate ice cream with my parents and then left after helping my mother clean the kitchen. My mother had turned cold on me and gave me only the briefest embrace as I left. She was like that. She demanded absolute loyalty; anything less and she would freeze me out until I had made penance.

A metacommunication had passed between us years ago and I had always accepted it on a cellular level. She could accept the loss of one child and blame it on him, blame it on his addiction. But the loss of two children, and she saw any digression on my part as a kind of loss, would cause her to look within herself. And this she was not willing to do. As a child, I feared her anger and disappointment. As an adult, I could accept them but I still didn’t like it. I felt bad about the evening, unsure how I’d allowed myself to be so rattled by an anonymous note and a photograph of strangers.

As the upper-middle-class burbs morphed into the urban ruin of Newark, I thought about my brother. I hated him. Hated him like a child hates a fallen hero. I hated him for his unlimited potential and his failure to realize it. I hated him because I could see everything that was wonderful about him, how brilliant, how beautiful he was, and how he had turned his back on everything he could have been, cast it off like a designer suit for which he’d paid an obscene sum and never wore. And I loved him for all those things as well. Pitied him, worried after him, adored him, and despised him. I remembered how it was to be pinched by him, chased by him, teased by him, hugged by him, comforted by him. There was an open wound in my heart for my brother. When I thought of him, a tsunami of emotion always welled and crashed within me.

After all the heartache Ace had caused my parents, the drugs, the petty crimes, the arrests for DUI, and finally his departure from our home at the age of eighteen, I was an absolute angel by comparison. I did the usual stuff, lied, did some minor drinking, once I drove the car with just my learner’s permit, got caught with cigarettes. But otherwise I got straight A’s, edited and wrote for the school paper, had nice friends whom my parents thought were okay. No major dramas. I felt I owed it to them to be good. Maybe even deeper, I believed that if I caused them any more pain it would destroy them. So I kept myself safe, in line, and out of trouble.

We never talked about Ace after he left. And I mean never. I couldn’t mention his name without my mother bursting into tears and running from the room. We all pretended he had never lived there. The silence allowed him to grow into this mythic figure in my mind. This beautiful rebel who was too bright, too sensitive for the normal life we lived. I imagined him a musician or a poet, hanging out in cafes, stoic in the pain of the misunderstood genius. A secret part of me harbored resentment toward my parents for driving him away.

After that horrible night when he left, I didn’t see him again until I was a freshman at NYU. I was living in the dorms on Third Avenue and Eleventh Street. I’m not sure how he found me, but when I left the building one morning heading to class, I saw him on the corner. His skin was pasty with raw red patches, and even from a few feet away I could smell the stench of his unwashed body. His face was gaunt. He’d shaved the long dark hair I’d always loved and his skull was a mess of black stubble and tiny scars. His blue eyes, my mother’s eyes, were bright and hungry.

“Hey, kid,” he said.

I must have just stood there gape-jawed for longer than it seemed because he cringed beneath my gaze and said, “Do I look that bad?”

“No…” I managed. I felt so awkward, torn between the urges to run away from this person who wasn’t even supposed to exist and to embrace the brother, the hero that I had lost and grieved so desperately.

A stuttering “How are you?” was all I could manage.

“Um…good,” he said, running his hand self-consciously over his head. As he did this, I saw track marks on his wrist. I took a step back. Remember that Batman episode where everyone thinks he’s turned into a criminal, given into the dark side after so many years as the Caped Crusader saving Gotham from the Penguin and the Riddler? That’s how I felt about Ace that day. There was disbelief; there was horror. But most of all there was this deep, wrenching sadness that my childhood hero had been brought low by the forces of evil.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you have any money? I’ve had the flu this week and haven’t been able to work. I need to get some breakfast.”

I gave him all the money I had in my wallet. I think it was twenty-five bucks. And that’s pretty much the way it was from that point on with Ace and me. My parents never knew it, but since that day, I usually saw him about once a month. We generally met at Veselka on Second Avenue. He always had a knish and I usually ordered the potato pancakes. We’d sit in the crowded East Village institution and no one paid any attention to the junkie and the hip (well, I am) student (later, urban professional) sitting across from each other. He talked shit about getting clean. I gave him money. I knew I shouldn’t. What can I say? I was the classic enabler. But I just loved him so damn much, and that was the only way he would let me show him. Besides, I couldn’t even imagine what he’d have done to get cash if I hadn’t given it to him. Actually, yes I could, and that was another reason.

Sometimes he would disappear for months and I wouldn’t hear from him, not even once. I rarely had a way to reach him. For a while he was squatting somewhere up in Spanish Harlem, or so he said; other times on the Lower East Side. I never knew for sure. When I didn’t hear from him I would be sick, absolutely haunted with fear. I took out an ad in the back of The Village Voice once, not even knowing if he ever read it. It was an act of desperation, one that yielded no results. But eventually he would run out of money or get lonely and he’d call me again. I never asked him where he’d been, what he’d done, why he hadn’t even tried to call. I didn’t ask because I was afraid to run him off again.

“When are you going to wise up?” Zachary had wanted to know. “He uses you. He doesn’t love you. People like that don’t even know what love is.”

That’s the thing about love that Zachary never seemed to understand. When you love someone, it doesn’t really matter if they love you back or not. Having love in your heart for someone is its own reward. Or punishment, depending on the circumstances.

The train screeched into Hoboken and I got out with the crush of people heading into the city. I had to push my way onto the PATH train and it took an eternity to groan its way into Manhattan. I walked from Christopher Street home. The cold air and long walk made me feel better, made the conversation with my parents seem farther away, helped me forget that I still had the photograph in my pocket and doubt in my heart. By the time I reached the building, I was feeling almost normal again. I walked right past my mailbox and didn’t even look at it. No mail tonight. I jogged up the stairs and stopped in front of my door. Sitting before me was a bottle of Merlot and two glasses. A note folded into one of the glasses read: Allow me to apologize properly? Jake, 4E.

six

I walked up the flight to Jake’s floor. But at the top of the stairs I hesitated. The fluorescent ceiling light hummed and flickered, casting the hallway in an eerie glow. I looked at the wine bottle and glasses in my hands and thought, Who is this guy? What am I doing? Before I could answer myself, the door opened and he was standing there in a black T-shirt and faded Levi’s button-flies. He reached out to take the wine and glasses from my hands and smiled. It was a tentative smile, shy.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

I’ll tell you something about myself. I can get my head turned by a good-looking guy as much as the next girl. But sexy doesn’t impress me. Smart impresses me; strength of character impresses me. But most of all, I’m impressed by kindness. Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks. When I see that in someone, it fills me with admiration. I saw it in him. His eyes, a deep brown, almost black, heavily lidded with dark lashes, made me want to confess all my sins and secrets and do penance in his arms.