Playworld

by Adam Ross

“A man like that,” Mom countered, “treats his cars like women and his women like cars.”

“Something bad happens to everyone,” he said. “Except it’s not bad. It’s just something. That’s the trick. Recognizing it’s just something. That’s the difference between pain and suffering. Suffering’s the former and pain’s the latter.”

Griffin wants to speak Spanish and is always willing to speak Spanish in spite of the fact that he can barely speak Spanish. He has only a tenuous understanding of grammar, but his accent is perfecto! Average: 76

To which Mom said to me, as if I were both confidant and conspirator, “One girl, that’s all I wanted.”

And now, when I recall her tiny privacy with me, her bid for corroboration, an effort at a sort of education—woman to young man—I am reminded that someone is always eyeing someone eyeing someone who isn’t eyeing them.

A girl, here and there, standing alone. The noise they made was something louder than recess, a sound between laughter and slaughter, as if the school itself were shouting.

What I was certain of was that for the first time in my life, I wanted to get to know someone. Just the fact that I knew nothing about Amanda seemed a terrible deficit—one that I had to remedy as soon as possible. That I might address this lack organized my horizon, oriented me in every direction, like this view, and comforted me. Because I could now name this feeling I’d been suffering, one that had dogged me of late, during our vacation and afterward, but that I recognized from all the way back to the fire. It had been so omnipresent it was more like an atmosphere—one that, having been made aware of it, I could neither unsee nor unfeel, and its name was loneliness.

“Oh, these are lovely.” Miss West ashed her cigarette and took the flowers in her free hand. She briefly smiled after considering them. “No wonder you’re not her type,” she said, and then strode to the kitchen.

“Fuck’s your name?” Logan said. A southern twang—fux—and the diphthong tacked to “name” sounding vaguely Hebraic: nay-m.

Dad continued to watch the road, nodding several times to himself, and then he reached over to place his hand on my knee and patted it. He turned to smile at me, weakly this time, though I couldn’t help it: I looked at his teeth. “You never marry the great love of your life,” he said.

“In my experience—this was before your mother, of course—no girl’s ever going to spend that much time with you if she doesn’t like you.” I felt so flooded with hope I couldn’t speak.

The amount of magical thinking that by this point surrounded her had become so intense it bordered on a kind of madness.

She leaned over to kiss my cheek forcefully, gratefully, as if to confirm this had already been a lovely birthday, and then she waited. How many times have I time traveled back to that moment? Have I, on take after take, kissed her in return? Only to understand how ill-equipped I was then to accept a direct invitation, being so adept at seeing around people, at watching their true selves peek out from behind their masks, that I could not match such spontaneous ardor? Sing, Muse, of a boy’s lack of know-how. I’d been so trained in dissembling I didn’t simply distrust directness, I was paralyzed by it, no matter how blissed out I was, and did not dare turn to face her. At least not yet.

On Wednesday, Reagan fired eleven thousand air traffic controllers. Mom and I watched the news about it together. She was sitting on her side of the bed while I sat on Dad’s. She filed her nails with an emery board and disapprovingly shook her head. She turned to me and, in a state so close to rage it was scary, said, “You don’t fire striking workers!”

Al said, “My parents fought so much when I was a kid. They were like cats in a pillowcase getting carried to the fucking river. But back then I thought it was my fault and that I could maybe stop them by being good—which you can’t, for your information.” He blew smoke. The ocean sighed. “So be good for you first and foremost, Griffin. You weren’t put on the planet to make sure they love each other, okay?” “Okay.”

Claire approached us in silhouette, took the back seat, assessed the situation with something like wry shock, and then said to Amanda, “He can drive?” To which Amanda replied, “He’s learning.” Then she smiled at me proudly, and I loved her.

“She sounds like a girl who’s more afraid of losing you than having you. Does that make sense?”

“Maybe that’s how you deal with your fear,” he said. “Of what?” “Of someone liking you. If you’re always chasing someone unavailable, then you’re unavailable to everyone else.”