After I’d left the message telling my father to stop calling, he vanished as quickly as he’d appeared.
Work for Philip and Nicola moved at a steady clip of mistakes and solutions (fresh currants when they wanted dry ones, pleats pressed into pants they weren’t intended for). But I got to be friendly with their tailor and accountant and the clerks at the package store. I learned what a private bank was, the difference between a half dozen cheeses they had opinions about.
Janice forgave me my gaffes. I bought us new plates to replace her mismatched ones and blackout shades for her bedroom. We went to the beach on our days off, Meredith in jeans and a T-shirt the whole time so we joked she was our security detail. I briefly slept with a friend of Janice’s who did drag, coming home and unwittingly infecting every surface in our apartment with glitter. For weeks, we found it in our hair, our food. When I had to stay at Philip and Nicola’s while they were at an art fair or visiting a collector, Janice grew to accept those absences, especially now that I used my better salary to buy us a living room rug and good coffee, bottles of fancy, ink-dark wine.
I was smoking on the fire escape with Janice, telling her about a book Philip had lent me, when the phone rang. August’s soupy heat reduced us to sloths, so we let the machine handle it. In one of the dirt-lot yards below, people were hosting a barbecue. A charcoal fire glowed. The air above it wobbled. I kept trying to convince Janice to shout down to them to throw us up some meat.
Back inside, Janice played the message. It was my father’s wife, June. I was so thrown by her old-lady voice that I didn’t take in what she was saying. But seeing Janice’s face, I rewound the tape and heard June describe the heart attack my father had just had. “He’s stable, but not out of the woods,” June said. “We’re all praying for him.”
Janice pulled me in for a hug, her sweaty breasts pressed to my sweaty shoulder. I told her I wasn’t sad, that he and I hadn’t been close in forever. Not wanting pity or advice, I added, “Guess I should call, make sure he’s not dead.”
Janice went into her room.
I stared at the phone, worried I’d have to go to Milwaukee, helping Dad to the bathroom and into his clothes for days then weeks while Janice and Philip and Pavel continued on without me. I took our cordless phone onto the fire escape so I could smoke and talk to June at the same time. At the barbecue below, people sat on any available surface, plates of food balanced on their laps. The phone rang before I got around to dialing. It was Philip, his voice a salve.
“Young man,” he said.
“That’s me,” I answered.
He asked if I had a passport. I’d gotten one a few years before. “In case of emergencies,” I’d told Alan, though really, I wanted to be the type of person who needed one.
“I do,” I said.
“Excellent. Make yourself free next week,” Philip said. “I’ll give you the details in the morning.”
I smoked and knew I should call my father, wondering if he was awake or not, if his breathing and peeing had been farmed out to machines. I took a drag, pictured his hand on his chest at the attack’s start, eyes bulging with fear. Dad strapped to a gurney as he was hoisted into an ambulance. I dialed the first few numbers, stopped. The second time I made it beyond the area code, but lit another cigarette rather than finish. At the barbecue below, people talked and laughed and ate. Charcoal was added to the grill. Its flames—greedy and reaching—painted nearby walls and faces. As I waited for worry for my father to reach me, it was my life as it had recently developed that I grew scared might vanish, Janice and me losing touch, as happened with most of my friends. She might move to a commune with Meredith, or to Portland, as she talked about doing from time to time. I climbed back inside and knocked on her bedroom door, not knowing then that in a handful of years Janice would end up in Massachusetts with a wife, that they’d live near a beach and have two daughters. One of those daughters would turn out to be mean and complicated and, as a teenager, call Janice a stupid bitch, saying it louder when Janice told her, “It doesn’t feel good when you say things like that to me.” That daughter would be in and out of institutions, would die in a car crash before her seventeenth birthday, ruled an accident though there were no skid marks suggesting she’d tried to stop. Janice would call to tell me. We’d stayed in touch after all. When I’d answer the phone with a dumb nickname I had for her, she’d whisper, “Meredith died,” and for a second I’d think she was talking about her former lover, forgetting she’d named her oldest child after her ex who no longer uses that name or gender and lives in Nashville now, regularly posting their poetry on Instagram.
I crumpled up the slip of paper I’d written June’s number on.
Janice opened her door and said, “Sugar pie. Tell me what happened,” and I understood that I’d use my passport however Philip asked, him a path forward, Dad a swamp to get stuck in.
“I guess the heart attack was minor,” I lied.
I picked up clothes strewn across Janice’s floor and began to fold them. I handed her a T-shirt and dress, a pile of crudely folded bras.
“So you’re not going to see him?” she asked.
There was an answer I was meant to give, all concern and large gestures, my own wants moved aside for a while. But each time I tried to consider my father’s plight, I felt as if something was being taken from me. And when I chided myself for such entrenched selfishness, I thought of the selfishness I’d grown up around and learned to see as necessary, a tool to keep intact the small corner that was my own.
I shook my head, handed Janice another folded shirt.
“You know, Gordon,” Janice said. I sensed her gearing up to tell me something hard and true. But then keys jangled in our door and Meredith appeared with Chinese food.
“We’re in here with your girlfriend’s underwear,” I said.
“Of course you are,” Meredith answered.
We ate in our tiny living room, the two of them tucked on the love seat, me on the floor. From time to time, Meredith talked about the terrible TV show she was working on, or commented on how I was eating with the speed and focus of the starved. Mostly, though, the three of us looked at our food, chewing noises for company. And as I cleaned my plate and filled it again, I tried to imagine where Philip might take me.