MY BROTHER’S LONGTIME BOYFRIEND DECIDED TO leave him, once and for all. Enough, he said, was enough. If you can’t stop arguing after twenty years, when will you ever? Time for a new start for both of them. They would always be friends, of course. He would always care about Saul, but he did not think that waking up every day in the same apartment was good for either of them.
This speech might have made sense except that my brother had just been diagnosed with some stage or other of leukemia. (Lymphocytic leukemia, and it was hard to get a full story out of Saul.) And the apartment, in the upper reaches of Manhattan, belonged to Kirk, the boyfriend. My brother, a fifty-seven-year-old librarian with no personal savings, was going to have to find a new place to live. For however long he planned to do that.
I was stunned and outraged by the news, maybe more than my brother was. Why had I ever liked Kirk? I had, I always had. With his deep voice, his good haircuts, his quiet merciless jokes. He called me Sister Susie (my name is Rachel, the name was his kidding). Sister Susie was a perky lass, always getting into the gin on the sly. We had a whole set of stories about her and her unusual relations with her dog Spot. Some of his friends thought I was really called Susie.
How could you decide to break up with someone who had a mortal illness? Who could do such a thing? Kirk could.
“The man is a fuck-head,” I said to Saul. “And he has no honor.”
“We never got along that well,” Saul said. “Remember when he picked a fight with me in front of the entire Brooklyn Library staff? He was always a pain. And you know how full of himself he’s been. He thinks being a digital art director is like being Michelangelo—I always laughed at the way he used the word creative. Don’t make a big deal out of this. It’s not the end of the world.”
What is, then? I thought, but I didn’t say it.
Kirk had not given him any particular deadline for moving out, and everyone in New York knew couples who stayed together for years after breaking up, while prices rose and good deals slipped away. Meanwhile Kirk and my brother were sharing the same bed every night and were—I gleaned from my brother’s remarks—still having what could be called sexual contact. I didn’t blame Saul for mentioning it either, showing off a last bit of swagger.
And maybe the breakup was just an idea, a flash-in-the pan theory. Maybe Kirk didn’t mean it.
“He says I’m lazy about being sick,” Saul said. “I should do more, be proactive. Has anyone used that word since 1997?”
“What is it with him?” I said. “I don’t get it.”
“He’s seeing someone new,” Saul said.
“He’s what?” I said. I had to stop wailing in protest, because it was useless and only increased my brother’s suffering. He had his ties to Kirk; he didn’t want to hear what I had to say. No big deal was his mantra, and there was probably a way to say it in Sanskrit or Pali. “It’s someone named Ethan,” Saul said. “A lawyer.” Did I want to know his name? I did not.
I was his big sister, two years older, but we were both old now. I was the one with the more chaotic sexual history—I’d been with a long list of men and lived with some very poor choices—but time had passed since those days. The daughter of one of my boyfriends (I was never into marriage) still lived with me, after losing patience with both her parents, and she was already twenty-three. I loved Nadia, I was glad to have her with me, but my apartment wasn’t really one that could fit her and me and my brother too. An old bargain of a place in Hell’s Kitchen. Not that Saul had expressed any interest in moving in.
Was he looking at apartments? Not at the moment. At the moment he was busy going to a clinic where they inserted a needle into a port in his arm and dripped chemicals into his veins. I went with him for this—it was not an adorable procedure—and it took a while. Nadia went to pick him up once. And Kirk went the rest of the time. He did.
Saul would go home to sleep after the procedures—who wouldn’t?—and he’d lie around with headphones on watching Netflix for hours when sleep evaded him. The library was giving him time off with no trouble, and maybe he was never going back. He hadn’t shown any improvement after the first round of chemo, and the doctors wanted to start something else. He was still losing weight; his nose looked bigger, outgrowing his face. It hurt my heart to look at him. “He could try to eat,” Kirk said. “He doesn’t even try. I buy things he likes, that he always liked. You know he likes those pecan crunch things. It doesn’t matter.”
I had my own life, of course, my own work, my own loyalties. I had a decent-enough job in human resources for a hotel chain, overseeing stingy policies and crazy rate changes. I was the old girl who’d been there forever and knew the ropes. Nadia liked to ask if I could game the system—get billions paid out in insurance for someone who was healthy—but I had to tell her that was beyond me. Nadia had a youthful attitude about the possibilities of cheating. Anyway, one night I was buying us supper at her favorite Mexican place in the West Village when I heard someone at a nearby table say, “Just be patient. Okay?”
I knew the voice; it was Kirk’s. He was talking to a nice-looking dude in his forties, arguing in that weary, reasonable way of his. I knew that tone. It must be his new lover, this not-so-happy guy in a dark suit.
“I’ve been waiting a while,” the guy said.
Oh, were they waiting for my brother to die? Or just to disappear, to crawl offstage? I was choking with fury. Did I want to rush over and make a scene? Did I want to stay where I was to hear more?
“Hey!” Nadia said, solving the problem for me. “There’s Kirk! Hey, Kirk!”
He took in the sight of us, waved. What a fuck-head. “Look at you,” he called out to Nadia, across two tables in between. “You’re looking great. Hi, Rachel. This is my friend, Ethan.”
We all nodded at one another.
Even Nadia was taking things in. “Why does everybody all of a sudden know about this restaurant?” she said. “I hate the way it is now, all these people.”
“Everybody knows everything nowadays,” Kirk said.
“Not for the better either,” I said.
“We had a very nice meal,” Kirk said. “Didn’t you think so, Ethan? We’re almost done. Don’t mind us. Enjoy your drinks.”
And then he turned away from us and murmured something to Ethan. He could go ahead and pretend they were in another room; he could do what he wanted.
“They’ll leave soon,” I said to Nadia. Not that softly either.
Around us a speaker was playing, “Besame, besame mucho.” The singer was pleading in long notes. We stood our ground; we chewed and drank. Nadia said, “I can’t believe he had to bring him here.” I didn’t know they had left until, halfway through my second bottle of Dos Equis, I looked across and spotted other diners at that table.
“He thinks he’s so slick,” she said. “Mr. Not-Embarrassed.”
“He’s like Woody Allen—the heart wants what it wants. Remember when he said that when he ran off with his stepdaughter?” Nadia had probably not even been born then, but she’d heard about it. “People think if they’re honest about their cravings, it makes anything okay,” I said. “That’s a fallacy of modern life.”
I found out Nadia was doing what sounded like praying for my brother. She hadn’t been raised in any religion (not with those parents), but she was a great reader online, she taught herself things. In the middle of the night I was in the hallway on my way to pee, when I heard her voice in the living room. “May Saul be better,” I heard. “May he be well and happy. May he live with ease. May he live longer.”
And Who did she think was processing this request? I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to smudge the purity of whatever she was doing. I listened for her again as I walked down that hallway the night after, but no words vibrated in the air. The next morning, when I got up early, I saw that she slept (as always) flat on her back on the folded-out sofa, and the statue of the Buddha had been moved to a shelf in her line of sight. It was Saul’s Buddha—that is, he had brought it to me after a trip somewhere. Thailand? Cambodia? It was a gray stone figure, the size of a gallon of milk, sitting with one hand raised with a flat palm. Fear not, that hand gesture meant. Saul had been a fan of Buddhism—he read books, he went to meditation classes, he explained very well how ego-craving was the source of all suffering—but his interest had faded in the last few years. He hadn’t said anything about leaning on it now. But Nadia was?
“You don’t have to follow all the rules,” she said, when I asked. “People get so caught up in that. As if somebody twenty-five hundred years ago was the last one to know anything about spiritual matters. How could that be right?” What I’d heard as prayer were phrases from a Buddhist practice, but she had added flourishes, like setting out a green ribbon (I hadn’t noticed) because Saul’s favorite color was green.
At least she wasn’t kneeling. When I was a child, my mother caught me kneeling by my bed, intoning, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” (How did I even know that prayer?)
“Jews don’t kneel,” my mother said.
I got up right away. I sort of loved the urgency in my mother’s voice. She spoke rarely about religious matters and sometimes made fun of what I learned in Hebrew School. This was serious. I wanted serious; that was why I was praying.
Like Nadia. All over the world (I traveled much in my wayward youth), people go in for petitionary prayer; they ask for concrete and specific things, even when they’re not supposed to, according to their systems of belief. They set out flowers, fruit, candles, money. Tiny models of body parts they want fixed. Votive wishes on papers they pin on trees.
I looked at the green ribbon, a strip of satin left over from a Christmas package. Did she think a higher power could bring about what she wanted? “You never know,” she said.
“Can’t argue with that,” I said, though I could have.
Nadia was nine when I first met her. I was dating Nick, her dad, and he had her on weekends. She kept calling me by the wrong name on purpose—Rochelle, Raybelle, Michelle—and looking at me with fiendish eyes. But she got over all that, eventually, and then she was nuzzling and cuddling like a much younger kid and saying she liked my house. She pocketed a spoon when she left. (I saw, who cared?) I admired her resourcefulness, her range of attempts to be on top of the situation. She was working hard to watch out for herself. When her father later referred to her as a total pill—he liked that phrase—I said, “What kind of crap is that?”
Now it was Saul’s turn to be a total pill. He talked too much about his different kinds of chemo; he talked too much about his white blood cells. Once he had been happy to argue about how detective novels were good for the brains of middle school kids and why online reading was a triumph against capitalism. Now he was like any patient, caught up in the drama of his own ordeals, his schedule of medications, the textures of his shrinking world. I wanted him to be better than that.
“Sister Susie says you should have a joint,” I said. “Your treatments are over. You can do what you want.” I lit up while I was spreading this doctrine.
“What do I fucking want?” he said. But he took a hit. “There’s nothing I want.”
“Isn’t that an ideal state in Buddhism?” I said.
“That’s a gross simplification,” Saul said. But he looked at least a little pleased. It was better news than he’d heard for a while.
“Did you know Nadia’s been chanting on your behalf?”
“She told me,” he said. “What a good girl she turned into.”
He really wanted nothing? He had to want to live, if he was going to last a little longer. Indifference would drag him under. What did nothing mean? Maybe I wasn’t paying attention properly.
Before my brother’s diagnosis, my life had been in what felt like a good phase. Two crucial areas had shown improvement. An ex-boyfriend—everyone called him Bud—who’d left New York eight years before had started sending me emails. He’d gone off to Cambodia to work for an NGO, defending workers’ rights, which clearly needed defending, there and here. We’d parted badly but we always remembered each other’s birthdays, which was mature of us. On my last birthday, he’d written, Hands across the water, hands across the sky, lines to a song that had been popular in middle school. Once Bud started writing, I was always humming it in my head. And finally, at long last, Nadia seemed to be out of the woods—she’d left behind her habits of moping and quitting and having fits of fury and bouts of despair and going a little nuts. She was back in school, taking computer design classes at FIT that she liked to talk about; she was sane. I walked around feeling secretly smug, as if I’d been right about everything all along.
Which at least made it easier to be nice to Saul when he uttered the same complaints over and over. “I’m nauseated all the time,” he said. “I hate it. I can’t even barf. I can’t do anything.”
“You can’t read?” I said. He was a librarian, for Christ’s sake. The original escapist reader. Thrilled by discoveries, an enthusiast of hidden corners of information. “You want some audiobooks? You could be nauseous and listen at the same time.”
“Never mind,” he said. “You don’t get it.”
We were having this conversation in the bedroom of his and Kirk’s apartment. He was sitting up in bed, wrapped in a blanket. He’d shaved his head, and it wasn’t a flattering look. The night table was a mess of pill bottles, old socks. Did he maybe want to smoke something? “It doesn’t help,” he said. “Why do people say it helps?”
Kirk was in the living room, tapping on his cell phone. He called out to Saul, “You know there’s some of that mango smoothie in the fridge. Easy to swallow. Don’t you think you would like that?”
“Why do you think I would like anything?” Saul said.
“Silly me,” Kirk said.
Meanwhile, in the midst of this, Bud the old boyfriend had decided it was time for us to Skype each other—Phnom Penh to NYC. Hands across the water. “Rachel!” he said, when we were on each other’s screens. I always loved his voice. It was Bud! His hair was shorter, grayer (so was mine but dyed). Had he always had that slight web under his chin? “Isn’t this weird, this teledating?” he said. Oh, we were dating? I could see the room behind him, a beaded curtain over a closet, an open window with green palm fronds outside.
“Is it hot there now?” I said. “It’s snowing here.”
“It’s in the eighties. You’d like it. You like summer.”
I’d been to parts of Southeast Asia when I was a restless young thing—Thailand and Malaysia—but people weren’t going to Cambodia then, a postwar mess even to backpackers. “It’s still a mess,” he said.
“It’s a mess here too,” I said. I had already told him my worst Trump jokes. “The rich get richer. You know.”
“What amazes me in my line of work,” he said, “is the strength of people to go on.” He had these moments of grandstanding but his points were good. “You see them come out of these factories where they work ten hours a day in suffocating heat, wages so low they can barely eat, and sometimes a girl is laughing at what her friend said. Too tired to move but something is still funny.”
I was wondering if Bud could kid around with them in whatever language they spoke. “Khmer,” he said. “Khmer is Cambodian. It can take them a while to see I’m being funny on purpose.”
He probably wasn’t as hilarious as he imagined. “You should come visit,” he said. “Come to Phnom Penh.”
“Sure,” I said, as if he really meant it, which I didn’t think he did. As if I could go anytime, just like that.
I was at my desk at work when my brother called with a piece of startling news. “Guess what I did?” he said. “I ate a huge bowl of mint chip ice cream. Two and a half scoops. I’m feeling better.”
“Icy cold? Is that okay?”
“Went down fine. I might have more.”
I laughed. “You were hungry.”
“Maybe those needle jabs are working. Maybe I’m getting better. I feel better.”
“You do?”
“I don’t get that tired when I walk around either. I just wanted to tell you.”
“I’m so glad.”
“Two and a half scoops. I might have more.”
I couldn’t believe it—I was too happy to stay still, so I was strolling around the room with the phone. Maybe he had more time than we thought. He hadn’t done well at first but maybe he was on an upswing. He could be.
Later that night, Nadia said, “Well, it was supposed to work. That’s why he did it.”
“Supposed to doesn’t usually mean shit,” I said, and then I was sorry I had spoken like that to a young person.
“If he’s better,” my friend Amy at work said, “then you can run off to Cambodia. Have sex with your ex, see Angkor Wat.”
“It’s too far. You know how far away it is? Twenty hours by plane. At the very least.”
“I guess you looked online,” she said.
And the airfare wasn’t nothing either. Or did Bud think he was paying? We hadn’t gotten anywhere near that question.
“Everyone’s leaving my brother,” I said. “I don’t have to join them.”
“So I found this nice little apartment,” my brother said. “Small, but small isn’t bad. Decent light.”
“You were looking?” I said. “I didn’t know you were looking.” This made me worry what else I had missed.
“Well, it fell into my lap,” he said.
“It’s affordable? Really?” Was it over a sewage plant? In nearby Nevada?
“It’s in our building,” Saul said. “Our neighbor has this studio he wants to sublet.”
It was just three floors down.
“This guy wants a big deposit,” Saul said. “People do now. Two months’ security, one month in advance. I don’t know where he thinks I’d be skipping away to. Kirk is lending me the money.”
Lend, my ass. My brother’s lover was paying him to leave. And they’d be greeting each other in the elevator forever. And everybody was acting cheerful about it.
“I’m looking forward to having my own place,” Saul said. “It’s been years since I had that.”
“Did you want to be alone?”
“No,” he said. “But it’s fine.”
Nadia thought her meditating had brought about this improvement for Saul, her focusing on the words with all her strength. Something had gotten him better, against all odds. “I did more than you know. Most of it not out loud,” she said. “Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“What’s the other reason? There isn’t any.”
I wasn’t offering any details of science. She looked so happy. She was still an awkward girl, and happiness made her face rounder and bolder.
“Saul thanked me,” she said. “He said I was amazing.”
My brother’s character was improving, now that he was on an upward swing. Sick people had crappy dispositions. “He wants me to design something for the windows of his new place,” Nadia said. “I can do that.”
Was he going back to work? He’d always had a ridiculously long commute, from Inwood at the top of Manhattan all the way south to Brooklyn, an hour and fifteen minutes, but he used to say he liked reading on the subway. He had an unimpressive salary, decent insurance (I had checked it over), and not that bad a pension. Did he want to be in the library again?
He wasn’t saying. He didn’t even like it when we asked. When he was little, he loved to announce, “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” and he seemed to want to say that now. “Later for that,” he muttered. To me, he said this.
My mother always claimed everyone thought Saul was less stubborn than he really was. I got along better with my mother than he did, and I had trouble too. We lost both our parents, within months of each other, a decade ago. Kirk had actually been very good through all that. That was when I still liked Kirk.
All of us helped with Saul’s move. Nadia got someone at school to sew the curtains for her—pale green-tinted cream, very nice, with misty gray panels in the center. I scrubbed the place down and bought him a microwave. He was taking a sofa bed and a bookcase out of the apartment, which Kirk and the new boyfriend loaded into the elevator, along with the cartons of Saul’s clothes. Ethan, the boyfriend, said, “Good light!” when he entered the room, bowed under the weight of the sofa. He looked different in jeans and a T-shirt, a little stockier.
“I love the light,” my brother said. “A new day is dawning here.”
He was sitting in a corner while we all worked, and he said, “You know, I really don’t need any place bigger.”
The new boyfriend looked properly embarrassed. Kirk said, “The couch looks totally great here.”
I worried about all this compliance from Saul, this no-problems adaptation to his new situation. Was it sincere? Was it admirable? In my own life, I prided myself on being on good terms with my exes, but I had fought some bitter fights along the way. Nick, Nadia’s father, had been so infuriated by what I once said about his personality that he threatened to kidnap Nadia back. Arrive in the night and spirit her away. He didn’t mean it—Nadia didn’t think so either—but he was hot with anger; he was, as they say, seeing red. What was Saul seeing now? All that talk of light. I wondered if he was seeing a muted glare, if he had a vision of his long days bathed in peaceful beams, streams of brightness in the air all around him. Blessing and bleaching his months in that room, however many months. All that talk of light. He knew more than we did.
And sometimes he slipped into being his former disgruntled self. New York was having a very cold and rainy spring, and when I tried to get him out for a meal of any kind—brunch or dinner or anything—he said, “Who wants to go out in that?” Even when the weather had nothing wrong with it, he was annoyed at the prospect of going outside. The bother of it, the inconvenience. And the food. Did I know how greasy the food was in all brunch places? Did I know anything about what he couldn’t eat?
Kirk’s new boyfriend had not moved in upstairs—he apparently had his own very good apartment on a tree-lined street in the far West Village. I happened to see Kirk in the elevator, and he did not look pleased about anything, but who knew what that meant? “Hey there,” I said to him, and he mumbled, “Oh, hello.” Not that he could be expected to be overjoyed to see me.
So what did Saul do all day? He looked things up on his computer, he loved antiquarian book sales and knew which prices were rising, he binge-watched TV, he reread some Dickens, he did a little meditating. He kept the place neat and relatively clean, a sign of his fondness for it. And did anyone visit but me?
“Friends come. And people from work. And you know who comes a lot?” he said. “Kirk.”
I chuckled bitterly. “Does he help?”
“He brings food. We had strawberries the other day. He says he misses me.”
I was fucking tired of the fucking caprices of fucking Kirk. “What do you say?”
“I tell him he has to get used to being alone.”
How calm my brother was choosing to be. I hoped it bothered Kirk.
And Saul wasn’t rushing to go back to work, was he? He wasn’t going back. How had I thought that he would?
“Were you ever in Cambodia?” I asked Saul. “Or was it just Thailand?” I was making tea in his kitchen, the one thing he’d let me do. It was a nice kitchen, blue tiles on the wall.
“Just Thailand. Before I knew Kirk. We went up to the Northeast, not very visited then. Ever go to that part?”
“Not me.”
“Great people,” Saul said. “Dirt poor. I felt like a jerk as a tourist, with my jangling change. They deserved better.”
“Freedom from want,” I said. “That was one of the four freedoms in FDR’s speech. Nobody thinks of that now as a human right.”
“So you want to go to Cambodia?” Saul said. “This is new.”
“Remember that guy Bud I used to go with? He lives there.”
“I think he treated you not very well,” Saul said. “As I remember.”
“That was then, this is now,” I said.
“Famous last words,” Saul said.
Nadia said, “So how did people decide who to marry in the old days when they didn’t even sleep together? How did people understand what kind of deal they were getting?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said. “I didn’t come in under that system. But you can’t go just by sex, you know. Do I have to tell you that?”
“You so do not,” Nadia said, rolling her eyes. “But how do people make these colossal bargains about what they decide to put up with?”
I knew this wasn’t about her own dating life (which was quiet at the moment) but about her friend Kit, set to marry a person whose merits were entirely invisible to Nadia. How to support her friend but not lie too much: that was the problem.
“Lie,” I said. I wasn’t her parent; I could talk that way to her.
“She thinks he’s smart, and he’s really stupid. It depresses me what people do.”
“You don’t know how it will turn out. No one can tell.”
“She thinks she’s won the lottery,” Nadia said. “She feels sorry for the rest of us.”
“People are like that,” I said. “I used to be like that.”
Saul told me he was thinking more about finances lately. He had made a list of how much he spent on rent, how much on food and utilities, what income he had coming in, how much wiggle room he had. He had a little. “I get benefits,” he said. “I’m not destitute. I hope you know that.”
And, by the way, he’d made a will, and it was in the bookcase by the big book of Audubon drawings, if I wanted to know.
I thought he’d always had a will.
“Well, no. And this one is good. I had someone, a lawyer, make sure everything was all right.”
“You found a lawyer without ever leaving the apartment?”
Ethan was a lawyer.
“Estate law isn’t his specialty,” Saul said, “but I knew he could get the forms for something simple. He made it easy. I just told him what I wanted. Easy as pie.”
“How nice.”
“Don’t forget. By the Audubon book. I stash crucial things there.”
I was tearful when Nadia came home. “Saul decided to have a little conversation about his will,” I said. “What kind of nineteenth-century novel are we in?”
“I hope he doesn’t leave all his money to Kirk or anything,” she said, after I’d calmed down and she’d poured us a little wine.
I secretly hoped he was leaving whatever he had to Nadia, a person not legally related to either of us.
“He’s not rich anyway,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
That was the question about money, wasn’t it? How much it mattered. I used to argue with Bud about that, in the old days, when we liked to talk about which friends had good lives. I was always claiming that high incomes soured people and made them stingy and anxious.
“I don’t think you should go to Cambodia,” Nadia said.
“Who said I was going?”
“Do you know they arrest factory workers if they try to have strikes? It’s very unfair.”
“I’m not going anywhere anytime soon,” I said. I wanted to hop into bed with Bud—that was true, however old we were—but it had nothing to do with the heart of the matter at the moment, which was my brother.
Nadia said, “You mention Bud more than you did.”
“Saul knows him. He’s not a big fan.”
“Excuse me, but Saul is not a proven expert. I wouldn’t listen to his opinions about boyfriends if I had any.”
“Who would you listen to?”
“Not you either,” she said.
What I liked in this was her hopefulness. She was twenty-three, and she was never going to make the mistakes we’d made.
Ethan went with Saul for one of his doctor’s visits, on the theory that it was always good to have another person paying attention and writing things down. What kind of world was it, where you needed a lawyer to listen to your doctor? “He asked good questions,” my brother said. “We all had a nice chat. But I don’t think I’m going again.”
How good could those questions have been? In my opinion, Ethan had been no help at all.
“How can you just not go?” I said.
“A question that answers itself,” he said.
I believed in liberty—it was my brother’s right not to go anywhere—and it would’ve done no good if I’d bossed or begged or reasoned. It seemed that the doctor was no longer offering anything he wanted. Saul had more than one doctor, and they were united in their lack of appealing offers.
“It’ll be very relaxing,” my brother said. “To stay home.”
What home? The new place had a good kitchen (better than the old place really), and I believed that if we could keep him eating, he’d have more time. I got this from our mother, always indignant if we didn’t finish what was on our plates—“People in other parts of the world would be very happy to eat what you’re leaving behind.” We were born too late to hear about starving Armenians, but she brought up the people in China (was this about famines under Mao?), and adults were always letting us know that ingratitude about food was dangerous. Did parents in places like Cambodia say this to their children now? Or did the children always eat?
Saul would eat a few things—I could make a very nice corn chowder that he didn’t mind and also a Middle Eastern version of fried eggs, with mint, oregano, and scallions. Sometimes he ate pad Thai from a place nearby. On good days he could be tempted by ice cream in certain flavors. He was a slow eater, like a fidgety five-year-old.
On weekends Nadia came with me to deal with the housecleaning. We brought the vacuum cleaner down from Kirk’s; in the elevator Nadia wore the hose around her shoulders like a boa. Even with all the dust bunnies collecting under the furniture, the place was so small the work didn’t take long, and Saul got to make a joke. “How come,” he said, “the Buddhist didn’t vacuum in the corners of the room?”
“I know this one,” Nadia said.
I didn’t. “Because,” my brother said, “he had no attachments.”
“Oh, my God, she’s laughing,” Nadia said.
“The woman’s been inhaling the floor polish,” Saul said.
What did that mean, no attachments? Saul used to tell me it meant Don’t worry, it won’t last, nothing does. And he said all that was more uplifting than it sounded.
“Don’t go to Cambodia,” Nadia said, when we were eating dinner that night. I was sure I had made it clear to her I wasn’t getting on any planes. “How can I deal with stuff that happens with Saul when you’re not here? I’m young, you know.”
Bud had stopped issuing invitations to Phnom Penh, for lack of an enthusiastic response on my part. Maybe he had found someone else. NGOs were full of intelligent single women. We still had our conversations on Skype. I combed my hair, I put on lipstick; I got excited before he called. We flickered on the screen at each other. That was the way it was.
“I asked Saul,” Nadia said, “where he’d want to go if he could get his wish, like they do with kids, that wish foundation. I told him he should go to Jamaica. It’s where Kit is going on her ridiculous honeymoon. I’d take him. It’s not that far.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he liked it fine where he was.”
I snorted.
Adults usually didn’t act out their wildest wishes before they died, despite all the movies that used that plot. They had other ideas by then. They left the old ones behind.
Nadia started wearing a green ribbon as a choker, in honor of Saul (it looked good on her, she looked good in everything). As a charm, it didn’t work. He had a really bad week; he said the bones in his arms and his legs were becoming tunnels of pain. Rats were digging tunnels in his bones all night. By phone I pestered the doctor until he prescribed more painkillers. Maybe not enough—scripts were stingy because of the opioid crisis—but welcome for now. “I’m turning on, tuning in, and dropping out,” Saul said. “There’s a lot to be said for it.”
When we were growing up, there was still some rhetoric left about drugs as a source of enlightenment. When I was in Thailand in my twenties, we could buy anything (or my then-boyfriend could), and we sat around stoned on who knows what. Waiting for moments of strange clarity, which sometimes came. Opiated hash, did people still smoke that? Who came up with that combo?
“Do you remember anything?” Saul said.
“I remember my boyfriend,” I said. “Except I’ve forgotten his name.”
Saul laughed. He could still laugh. “Sister Susie,” he said.
What did I long for? “Are you discouraged,” Bud asked on the screen from Phnom Penh, “because of Trump?”
Yes, but I hadn’t remembered to think about it lately. We all had different levels of grief, didn’t we, a whole hierarchy.
“In NGOs,” Bud said, “the aid workers who see the worst are always going out on the town to get stupidly cheered up. Like those Oxfam Brits who hired prostitutes.”
He was my cheering up, a very hygienic form.
“What do you do in Phnom Penh?” I said.
He smirked a little. “Well, there’s not much to do. Actually, there is, but I don’t do it. There’s a bar I like. The girls know me, they don’t bother me.”
I was glad he wasn’t bothered.
“You’d love the river, we have three rivers. And the temples.”
“What do Cambodians do for luck?” I was thinking of Nadia and her ribbon.
“Some people get protective tattoos. Angelina Jolie got a Cambodian tattoo.”
How far away he was. What did it mean to have a romance that was never going to be acted out? It didn’t seem so bad to me anymore. In fact it had certain superiorities over contact in person. And it was as real as the outlines of Angelina Jolie’s tattoo (which I’d seen online), with its guardian blessings inked out in Pali. Bud had become a wish of mine with no trouble in it.
Kirk was upset. I could tell by the sight of him, rumpled and frowning, when I ran into him by the recycling bins in the basement of the building. I was throwing out a bag of empty cans of ginger ale. It was the one thing Saul liked now that he was back to not liking again. The cans were clanging as I dumped them.
“He’s not doing well, is he?” Kirk said. “I didn’t know how it would be.”
“I guess you didn’t,” I said.
“Don’t be against me,” Kirk said.
He wanted me to like him too? I might’ve pushed him into the recyclables, if I’d been a different sort of person. “What’s the matter with you?” I said. We seemed to be connected forever, but so what?
“Did he tell you?” Kirk said. “I asked him to move back.”
I gasped out loud, a wheeze of amazement. I had just been thinking of getting someone to come in a few hours a day to help, as much as his insurance would cover. Someone good. Not needed now? No longer my business?
“He said no,” Kirk said.
“Fuck,” I said.
Of course, I was proud of my brother (we don’t kneel) and quite surprised. Kirk had been even more surprised.
“I could help. I’m his friend! He doesn’t care,” Kirk said. “He insists that he’s happier without me.”
Kirk sounded devastated by this bit of news. Which was probably not even true, though maybe it was. Who knew what my brother really wanted? He acted now as if he were in a kingdom whose language was too much work to translate for us.
Kirk was gazing at me, waiting for something he was hoping I could give. “Everybody thinks he’s so mild, but he’s the stubbornest person on the planet,” I said. “No is no.”
Kirk said, “Maybe he’ll change his mind.”
I loved my brother’s stubbornness. He didn’t have to run around anymore, did he, rushing to get what he thought he should have. Fine where he was. Of course, I envied his freedom, who wouldn’t?
Only a few days ago I’d gone into a little fit because I’d lost my favorite earrings; they had been a gift from Nadia’s father, whom I didn’t even like, but I’d had them for years and they looked good on me. “What are you hanging on to?” Saul said. “You had them and they’re gone.” This bit of philosophy did stop my wailing. Saul could do that—he could utter a tautology in a way that made it sound beautifully plain and right. “Goodbye to all that,” I said to my earrings. Saul was speaking from a spot further on, a better view, speaking with expertise.
Not that he always abided by this. He had spells of being very irritated at me for spending his dollars on overpriced takeout meals or organic detergent—“I’m not made of money.” Little pissy amounts of cash. He was afraid of his resources running out. A metaphor there.
Kirk said, “Who knew you would turn into a cheapskate?”
How poorly Kirk understood him; what a mess Kirk had made of everything. Yearning and grabbing. Kirk the now-repentant lummox who dreamed my clearheaded brother would change his mind.
Which he did. Five weeks later, Kirk called to give me the news. “We’ve got him all settled in.” Saul was already in his old bedroom watching TV in a newly rented hospital bed by the time they told me. Kirk paid to rent a bed? Who knew he wanted to be a caretaker? “I’m very comfortable,” Saul said. “I have this new kind of pillow under my neck. Ethan got it for me.”
“Did they bring up all your stuff? Tell me what you need.”
“I think I have everything pretty much.”
The one who sounded really, really happy was Kirk. “He looks better already. He does. You can tell by looking at him this is the right move. I never thought he’d say yes. I gave up, I had no clue this would happen. And we got everything done so fast! We did.” His voice had gotten giddy and young; he was burbling away.
When I dropped over to see Saul in his new-old lodgings that evening, Kirk was glowing in the doorway. “Ethan made this great little supper that was some kind of mussel stew. And Saul gobbled it up. Well, not all of it, but he ate it. He liked it.”
“I ate it in Iceland,” Ethan said. “I went there with my mother last year.”
Ethan had a mother? I never thought about him outside these rooms. “It’s gorgeous,” Ethan said about Iceland. “Expensive but worth it.” What did a lawyer with a fat paycheck care about expensive?
Kirk said, “Ethan can cook, I can cook. We’ll keep trying different food.”
“We have a whole bucket of empty mussel shells now,” my brother said. My brother with his pinched face, his elbows turned into knobs of bone.
“Ethan’s good in the kitchen,” Kirk said.
“Now and then I can do something,” Ethan said. “But you know how late I work.”
“I can’t eat late,” Saul said. “Don’t expect me to stay up. I get tired.”
“He ate ice cream too,” Kirk had to tell me.
Whatever the report of his chef’s skills, Ethan slipped out soon after I arrived. There was murmuring with Kirk by the door, and he was gone.
“Hey,” my brother said, when Kirk walked back in, “I don’t have to do the dishes now, do I?”
Kirk acted as if that were the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “We just throw them out when they’re dirty,” he said. Did I actually laugh too?
Soon after, the two of us walked my brother to his old room. Saul showed me the way a person could crank the bed down to make it easy to climb into. “A miracle of science,” he said. “It’s costing a fortune, I think.”
“Good night, sweet prince,” Kirk said.
On the way back, I saw from the hallway that Kirk’s usually pristine computer studio was a mess, with piles of clothes littering it. It had become the room where he slept. (Alone, it seemed. Not with Ethan at the moment.)
“He’s crazy about that bed,” Kirk said. “Did you see that? He is.”
When the sunlight, which my brother used to love, bothered his eyes, even in this dimmer apartment, Ethan set up curtains around the bed. He had someone construct posts at the bed’s four corners, and then he hung the elegant drapes that Nadia had designed—they became bed curtains, like the ones Scrooge had around his bed when the ghosts frightened him.
Nadia still thought the curtains looked good, the pale green on the sides and misty gray on the top and bottom. She was not a fan of Kirk (“why do I have to like him?”), but she made an effort when I took her to visit. We were all sitting around the living room, and Ethan brought in tea and a plate of pastel meringue kisses from a bakery, a light delicacy for Saul. “How pretty they are,” Nadia said.
Kirk said, “The tea looks too strong. Saul needs it weaker. Can you bring in the hot water?”
“You know nothing about tea,” Ethan said, but he was back with the kettle in a jiffy. “Taste it,” he said to my brother.
“Just right,” Saul said.
“You’re sure?” What attention Saul was getting, what tender fuss. I could see him basking in it.
He was chomping and sipping, king of the table. Between bites he said, “We watched this thing on TV that was really hilarious.”
“We were totally into it,” Ethan said.
“I couldn’t stop laughing in one part,” Kirk said.
Nadia got all the details (a Tig Notaro appearance), and my brother imitated her deadpan style. Kirk cracked up watching him. “You missed your calling in stand-up,” he said.
“He went for the big bucks in library science,” Ethan said.
Saul couldn’t resist telling how he’d once spilled an entire cartload of books on a library trustee, a story I’d heard many times before. As had Kirk. My brother told it well this time. Nadia laughed at the oafish amazement of the fallen trustee, Saul’s version of his own loony apologies, but the one who loved the tale the most was Kirk. He gazed and nodded at my brother; he clapped and hooted. I’d rarely seen him so happy.
Saul, for his part, had the sly look people get when they’ve told a joke that’s gone over. How pleased my brother was, on that pinched face of his.
When we left, Nadia muttered to me in the elevator, “So I guess he’s okay there.” Her face was still tinted pink from laughing, but now her voice was flat. The whole thing had confused her about the nature of love. I wasn’t saying a word either. What did I know? I was thinking that this would become an elemental part of what she’d remember, for who knew how long, that she’d have what she’d just seen. The way they were, just like that—I wanted her to have that.