Perfect Fifths Read online

  “Of course,” Marcus says, patting his pockets until he finds evidence of his flight from New Orleans, the only proof he has right now that he still has reason to be here. He hands over the halved boarding pass with no further explanation. Marcus knows better than to put up any protest, especially when the officers are harassing him for no reason. No reason can turn into a night in jail very quickly.

  The first officer takes a look at Marcus’s document, then hands it to his partner for appraisal.

  “This flight landed hours ago,” the pit bull says, his voice rising. “You have no reason to be here. Only valid ticket holders are permitted to remain in the airport. We can issue you a citation for loitering.”

  Marcus has been threatened with the same charge more times than he can count. He is a habitual loiterer. Though today it’s intentional, a consequence of watching Jessica from afar, his loitering is usually accidental , an unplanned ambulatory meditation during which he gets so caught up in his thoughts that he forgets what he’s doing (walking somewhere), where he is (leaning against a lamppost on Nassau Street), or how long he’s been there (a half hour). How many times has he been shaken back into consciousness by a man in uniform who assumes Marcus is under the influence of alcohol or another, more illicit mind-altering substance? How many times has he shown up late without an acceptable answer when asked where he’s been and why it took him so long to arrive?

  “I’m waiting for a friend whose flight is late.”

  Marcus immediately regrets this lie because he doesn’t like to lie. He doesn’t like to lie on principle: The truth should always suffice, and if it doesn’t, well, that’s his own fault for getting himself into such a morally questionable position to begin with. But he also doesn’t lie for practical reasons: He can never keep his lies straight.

  Now that he’s already lied, he sees no choice but to commit to it. “I’m supposed to stand here by this telephone bank until she arrives, but—” Marcus cuts himself off midsentence, unwilling and unable to embellish any more than that.

  “What flight is your friend on?”

  This is exactly why Marcus doesn’t like to lie. One lie always requires another, and another, and it’s all too much for him to handle. Marcus’s heart speeds up. He can feel a bead of sweat dropping from his armpit, trickling, tickling its way down his torso, slipping past his waistband.

  “Your friend must have provided her flight information, correct?”

  Even the first cop is tensing up, his fleshy cheeks popping in and out with the clenching and unclenching of his jaw as he looks Marcus over. The cop doesn’t know what this guy is up to, but there’s something not quite right about his story. He thinks the guy is under the influence of something, but he’s not sure what. Marcus wonders if it’s too late to backtrack from his first lie, or whether he’s skilled enough to compound that lie with another. He recalls Natty’s warning: Ten more seconds, and you’ve crossed the line between bittersweet reunion and restraining order. The second cop is ready to lunge.

  Marcus spots a movement out of the corner of his eye, a figure in all black exiting the Clear Sky customer service center. He points with his whole arm.

  “That’s her,” he blurts, unleashing a chestful of pent-up air. “That’s who I’m waiting for.” Marcus is at their mercy.

  It’s the first cop who makes the decision. “Then let’s go have a talk with your friend.”

  sixteen

  What a day, Jessica thinks as she heads to Hwy. 9 Bar & Grille. This day has been so … so … ?

  Jessica fumbles for the right word and, in failing to find it, wonders whether she should bother with the alcohol. She feels as if she’s functioning in a sort of dream state already, one comparable to early stages of drunkenness when the five senses are on the way to not making much sense at all. Jessica doesn’t drink much anymore—last night was an exception. Abstaining is easy because Jessica has a rule against drinking alone that goes all the way back to a video about PROBLEM DRINKING in seventh-grade health class. DRINKING ALONE was number two on the list of signs that you were a PROBLEM DRINKER (after DRINKING TO GET DRUNK). Jessica went on to ignore other warnings on that list (DRINKING TO GET DRUNK, DRINKING TO THE POINT OF VOMITING, DRINKING TO THE POINT OF PASSING OUT, etc.) but rarely broke the rule about drinking alone. Her sloppiest inebriations were always in the company of others. She was a social drunk, personable, not pathetic, and certainly not problematic, even on those collegiate morning-afters when she woke up without panties, the stench of fresh puke in her hair. When she travels by herself, there’s no company of others to drink with. So she doesn’t. Except on the one occasion she did bring company back to her hotel room in the form of Len Levy. That night she did drink. A little too much.

  “Miss!”

  Jessica hears the shout and assumes it’s directed at someone else because she’s a “ma’am” now.

  When she drinks in the company of others, it’s usually over a meal, in which case she orders the appropriate beverages to go with the food on the table: margaritas with burritos, sake with sushi, bold reds with pasta, sangria with tapas. Oh, how she wishes she were already on St. John, clinking cocktail glasses full of tropical fruity beverages with her best friends. She doesn’t regret visiting Sunny in the hospital, though she does regret the unfortunate consequence of her actions: the possibility that she might miss Bridget and Percy’s wedding altogether.

  Jessica might feel less guilty about her delinquency if she knew for sure that Sunny had benefited from the visit. Her mom and dad (whom Jessica had never met in person and who seemed more sympathetic than their daughter’s essays made them out to be, though in this situation, even the most cretinous parents would be transformed into good people worth rooting for) encouraged Jessica to talk to her as she always would. They believed that their daughter could still hear, if not respond to, visitors’ conversations, and that such interactions were crucial for stimulating her injured brain and could be the difference between a full recovery and a semivegetative state.

  “Hey, Sunny,” Jessica had whispered, looking at the blips on the heart-rate monitor instead of her. “You know, I rearranged my travel plans to be here, so the least you can do is wake up.”

  No one else was in the room, but Jessica shrank with shame all the same. The joke felt crass, forced. And worst of all, unfunny. Sunny definitely would have called her out on it. “With all due respect, Ms. Darling,” she would have said, “that lame joke is why the baby Jesus weeps.”

  Jessica had known going into the visit that Sunny wouldn’t be able to contribute to the conversation. Yet deep down, Jessica had hoped for a cinematic miracle that was not going to come, at least not while she was sitting beside Sunny. That delayed realization made the rest of the brief visit almost too much for Jessica to take. She stayed only until Sunny’s beleaguered parents returned from a quick dinner in the hospital cafeteria, a ten-minute respite from a round-the-clock vigil.

  She asked them to please call her cell phone at any time—night or day—if there was a change in Sunny’s status. They promised someone would call her, if not them. There were, after all, a lot of people who would need to be called. Jessica has been waiting for that call ever since.

  Sunny’s mom escorted her by the elbow to the elevator. As Jessica stepped inside, her mother said, “Thank you for coming by. Sunny thinks the world of you.”

  The doors closed before Jessica could return the sentiment.

  And it was that final fleeting glimpse of Mrs. Dae’s torment that had driven her to drink too much last night. The first time since the last time she drank too much, which is a time she also prefers not to think about but for entirely different reasons.

  “Miss! Miss!”

  Jessica knows Sunny was plugged in to her MP3 player when it happened. She just knows. But what song was she listening to? What was the last thing she heard before that driver blew through the stop sign, plowed into her in the crosswalk, and just kept going? It’s questions like these th
at drove Jessica to the bottle last night. Not the questions, per se, but her fear of never having an opportunity to hear them answered.

  So what’s her poison? Jessica has no idea. She drank her mother’s zin because that was all her parents had in the fridge. It’s been so long since she was in a bar that she can’t settle on what to order once she gets there. She recalls a time when she tried to impress or maybe intimidate the opposite sex with her masculine requests for brutal shots of whiskey. She’d tip her head back, down the shot in a single gulp, shake off the fire in her chest, place the shot glass mouth-down, then wait, never too long, for a male onlooker to order another round. Now, just a few years later, she’s embarrassed by the very idea of that lonely girl at the bar who wasn’t fooling anybody. Not even herself.

  “MISS!”

  The insistence of this voice, and the impression that it’s gaining on her, is what compels her to slow down. Maybe I’ve got the face of a “ma’am” but the ass of a “miss,” she muses. In retribution for the compliment she’s just paid her ass, she’s now half expecting a kind stranger to tell her that she’s tucked the toilet seat cover into her jeans and it’s trailing behind her like an unhygienic peplum. This is what she’s thinking when she turns to see two Port Authority police officers flanking … Marcus Flutie.

  The earth rumbles.

  Collapses beneath her feet.

  The stable foundation she has painstakingly constructed since their breakup (and hastily reassembled after their earlier run-in) has been instantly and powerfully unmoored.

  She wobbles in her sneakers.

  She wants to shout, “Don’t panic, everyone! It’s just my world being pulled out from under me!”

  She searches through the rubble for a rational explanation that will explain this second run-in with Marcus Flutie in as many hours, digging for a grounding bit of evidence that will help her recalibrate and retain a semblance of control.

  “Excuse me, miss,” the first officer says. “This man claims to know you. He says he’s waiting for you.”

  Marcus is still here. And so is she.

  “Do you know this man? Or do we have a security issue here?” barks the pit bull.

  “No,” Jessica croaks, still reeling. The answer isn’t the right one, and alarm careens across Marcus’s face. She zeroes in on that split seam in Marcus’s sweater, the tiny thread. Jessica thinks of a song she hasn’t heard in years by a band she was never that into, though she did think the lead singer was tortured and adorable in a geek-cute kind of way, a way, it is worth noting, that Marcus Flutie himself is flaunting these days. What were the lyrics? If you want to destroy my sweater … Hold this thread as I walk away …

  That tiny thread from a cashmere sweater she suspects—no, knows for certain—was purchased by an ex or current lover becomes the metaphorical tether to which Jessica decides to grab.

  “No, this is not a security issue.” Jessica clutches a hand to her throat, clears it. “Yes, I know him,” she says more firmly. “His name is Marcus Armstrong Flutie.” She then turns to the first officer, switches on a smile. “And he’s with me.” She pivots toward Marcus, puts her hands on her hips, and says in perfect exasperation, “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you forever.”

  “I was waiting for you,” Marcus says. “The whole time.”

  Marcus holds up his palms in apology. Jessica can feel in her cheeks that her grin takes the risk of going a little too far, a little too eager to please, as if she’s a tuneless naïf desperate for fame who has just auditioned for a community theater production of The Sound of Music and knows Maria is out of the question, and Liesl is a long shot, but maybe, just maybe, she could be one of the nuns in the abbey, and oh, if the directors just give her this shot, they won’t regret it, she will wrest every bit of emotion out of her one line …

  Jessica’s imagination takes off on this nonsensical flight of fancy if only to escape where she is right now. She returns to the tiny thread, clings to it, holds on.

  “Okay,” the first officer says. “You’ve found each other. Now get on with it.”

  The cops stand their ground, clearly waiting for Jessica and Marcus to make the next move.

  “Riiiiight,” Marcus says slowly. “Let’s get going.”

  “Yes,” Jessica says in a stilted voice. “Let’s.”

  After a moment of hesitation, Marcus steps toward Jessica and takes his place beside her. She shifts, turns in the direction she was originally headed, and puts one foot in front of the other.

  “Thank you,” Marcus says under his breath. “I’d be headed for a holding cell if it weren’t for you and your innocent face. They didn’t even ask to look at your documents.”

  “What did you do?” Jessica asks, eyes straight ahead.

  “I was loitering.”

  Jessica’s eyes flicker in his direction. “Loitering?”

  “Loitering.”

  “Loitering?” Jessica asks again, this time with a hint of a laugh. “There are thousands of people passing through this airport, and they stop you for loitering.”

  “Apparently, I’m a conspicuous loiterer,” Marcus answers. “Though less so since I shaved the beard.”

  Jessica’s mouth twists. She had hated The Beard, and not just because of its regrettable jihadist insinuations. She had resented that Marcus chose to keep the wild, shamanic beard after his return from the desert, especially when she told him that it scrubbed her skin raw when he ravenously descended on her mouth or parts southward. She wondered at the time if it was intentional, if he was making her wear him like a hair shirt, yet another form of penance for her careless infidelity at Columbia, a betrayal that had already resulted in two years of silence between them. The fact that she even entertained such ideas about this person she was supposed to love proved just how dysfunctional that relationship had become, which, in her mind, was all the justification she needed for saying no and letting him go.

  So, yes, you might say The Beard is a loaded subject. She resists the urge to ask him when he shaved it off. “The dreads are gone, too.” This is what she says instead.

  Marcus rubs the short tufts of hair on his head. “Hm,” he murmurs, then nods soberly as if verifying this truth—the loss of his foot-long dreadlocks—for the very first time. They are marching forward in tandem, him right behind her, matching step for step, when he asks, “Where are we headed?”

  She slows down just enough for him to catch up. She glances behind and waves at the policemen who are still watching them from a distance. “I don’t know, but let’s keep moving.”

  And that answer, for now, is just fine with him.

  seventeen

  Jessica doesn’t say anything as she leads Marcus across Concourse C. She can’t resume talking until she’s found a place to sit, somewhere away from the swarms of travelers, somewhere she can settle down and focus on upholding her half of the dialogue.

  The content of this conversation with Marcus is difficult for Jessica to fathom. Where to begin? The conversation will require her total concentration, which won’t be easy, since her mental competence has already been compromised by emotional trauma, pink wine, insomnia, and monounsaturated oils. She is grateful to have somewhere to go—back to Gate C-88—in two hours because it means their reunion will be finite. She can give her side of the narrative (whatever it may be) a beginning, a middle, and yes, an end. The fateful hypothetical—what if you see Marcus again?—has at last presented itself. And now it’s up to Jessica to give their story a resolution that she hopes will satisfy both Marcus and herself.

  Jessica spots the neon sign for the Hwy. 9 Bar & Grille, pauses, almost turns toward it, then reconsiders. She doesn’t want to drink in front of Marcus. She doesn’t want alcohol to lower her defenses, loosen her tongue, lull her into saying things she doesn’t want to say. She’s not sure what she wants to say to Marcus. She wonders how long she could get away with not saying anything at all. Marcus has already tested his own mettle in this regard
, having famously embarked on a silent meditation that lasted his twenty-second year. She doesn’t doubt that he could outlast her in a silent battle of wits by disarming her with a quarter-smile.

  Jessica isn’t moving, so Marcus stops, too. He takes this moment of stillness to look at her, to confirm yet again that it really is her. She really is here. He contemplates her profile and notes that there is a sprinkle clinging to her jaw, a tiny pink speck desperately holding on for dear life. The sight of it makes him grin, but it’s his own laughable personification of and identification with the sprinkle that makes him snort out loud.

  “What’s so funny?” Jessica asks. Her tone is more cautious than caustic.

  All of this, thinks Marcus. Not ha-ha funny but strange funny. The Queens warning, hearing your name, getting run over, stalking you from afar, almost getting hauled off for loitering, being rescued by you, Jessica Darling, standing inches away from me with a pink sprinkle dangling from your pale cheek, an innocent patch of skin that I’m not allowed to reach out and touch …

  “What?!”

  He is standing there, staring at the sprinkle, forgetting to speak. “There’s a sprinkle stuck to your face,” he finally says.

  “There is?” she says, frantically wiping all around her face with her hand, yet still missing the spot. “Where?”

  He wants to free the sprinkle with his fingertip but thinks better of it. He points to the same spot on his own jaw and rubs. She mimics the gesture, and the sprinkle falls to the floor.

  “There also appears to be a smudge of frosting in the corner of your mouth.”

  “What?” she yelps, licking all around her mouth like a slobbery pup. “I can’t believe Sylvia didn’t tell me!”

  “Who’s Sylvia?”

  “The Clear Sky customer service representative,” Jessica quickly answers. “I was talking to her for, like, ten minutes, and she didn’t bother to tell me I had food all over my face.”

  “And,” Marcus says, directing her attention downward to the rubber tip of her Converse sneaker, “on your shoe.”