“You have a big house,” Maisie observed, as if it had occurred to her for the first time. “Don’t you get lonely when it’s just you?”
“Sometimes,” Patrick responded. “I think that’s part of being an adult.”
“I’m not going to be lonely. When I’m an adult.”
“No?” He wondered how she could be so sure in the face of a loss like the one she was enduring.
“No. I’m going to have a smaller house. With three Siberian huskies.”
“That seems wise.” Patrick surveyed his spacious living room. It was too big for one person. “Will there be anyone else in this house? Any people?”
“How do you mean?”
Patrick shrugged. “I don’t know. A husband—or maybe a wife?”
Maisie lifted another photo frame, the one Patrick had gifted her with a photo of her mom. A Christmas miracle—the glass remained intact.
“A husband maybe. I don’t have to decide right now.” She traced her mom’s face with her finger.
Since either answer would be fine with Patrick, he agreed. “There’s plenty of time to decide. The huskies, however, are an excellent start.”
When they began on the shelves, Maisie cradled his Golden Globe—the globe part dented and bent—and quietly broke down in tears. “Hey, it’s okay,” Patrick said to comfort her. “It’s the Hollywood Foreign Press. They give them out to anyone. Twiggy, for god’s sake, has two.” Patrick stroked her hair, mimicking the way Clara had carefully brushed it; he remembered how calming it had been for Maisie. This wasn’t about some cherished possession. This was something else. Her growing fear that attaching herself to anything will only cause those things to break, wither, fall away—that maybe she would be lonely after all. “Things can be replaced,” Patrick whispered, pulling her in for a hug. “Things can always be replaced.”
Eventually Maisie retired to bed, choosing to stay the night with Grant—at least to start. Alone at last, Patrick surveyed their efforts. The house seemed more modest, elegant. It was like the earthquake unleashed Coco Chanel, dictating to the living room her old adage: Look in the mirror and take one thing off. Patrick kind of liked the new look, the simplicity. It was spare.
He set to work on his bedroom, wanting to thin it out to match his new aesthetic. The TV was busted, but he didn’t mind; he had little use for it at night other than as background noise when he felt most alone. The books were easy to restack, but he pulled a few titles to donate, anyhow. Books should be an experience, he thought, not a trophy for having read them. The Slim Aarons photo on the wall outside his en suite was askew, but he easily slid it back on its hook, and everything, for a moment, felt level again.
Patrick found the letter in his bedside table, folded in thirds, beneath an old stack of People magazines in which he’d appeared. He’d stashed it there who knows when, years earlier, with a bottle of pills—enough to end things if they ever got that bad. He remembered taping the nightstand drawer closed for the movers when he left LA for Palm Springs; he didn’t want to empty the drawer of its contents, be faced with any of it—the prescription bottle, its long expired expiration date, the letter. Patrick swore he’d never read it again, but also he never threw it away knowing that impossible promises made to oneself in youth are always going to be broken.
He climbed into his bed and pressed the letter to his heart. When he could bear it, he glanced at the first few lines.
I was a ghost for four days and then I wasn’t. That’s how I think of it now.
He was struck by how little his handwriting had changed in the intervening years. How could he be a fundamentally different person, but something as basic as penmanship, the way he formed words, remain the same? His scar, the other lines on his face. The salt in his beard. His arms were thicker after years of working out, lifting things in a vain effort to transform himself into someone strong enough never to hurt. Even his worldview had changed, the things he had to say. So how could his writing not reflect that? How could it possibly remain unchanged?
It was a long time before he could read on.
Joe.
I was a ghost for four days and then I wasn’t. That’s how I think of it now. How I prefer to think of it, for it means that for those four days we were together, neither of us present, neither of us gone. In the bardo, as you might say, never having shut up about East Asia. Maybe you’re there now. Wouldn’t that be something. Maybe at the end of those four days someone asked, “Where to next?” and you said, “Well, I read a lot of books about Bhutan, I rather think I’d like it there,” and, poof, you’re in some hut, or yurt, or whatever the fuck, hanging colorful prayer flags on the wall.
Of course you’re not in Bhutan, just as I’m not at the Plaza Athénée or anywhere I would want to be. Were you even bathed in white light in your purgatory? I was drenched in hospital fluorescents in mine. I still can’t open my eyes wide to this new reality, the world seems too ugly now, phosphorous, awash in a rotting, greenish hue. I keep them closed a lot. My eyes. Not wanting to sleep, exactly. But not wanting to be awake. (Sleep comes with the screeching of tires and that deafening crunch of collision. Remember how I would flinch in that last moment before falling asleep and kick you?
