The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

Now Noni explained her own early life and marriage as a cautionary tale, the period of her paralyzing grief the price we all paid for her foolishness. In these stories our father emerged as a dashing but hapless prince, one who lulled the good princess into a life of fat complacency deep within a castle of tricks and mirrors. When the prince disappeared, the castle was revealed to be only a cardboard shell; there was no coach, no footmen, only the pumpkin and the simpering mice. The shock of it all sent the princess into a deep sleep, until a good fairy godmother—not another prince, please, anything but that—roused her. And what did the princess see when she first awoke? What greeted her and stirred her fully from the glass chamber? Why, it was the mice, of course. They clambered atop the wreckage of the castle and reminded her that she could build it herself again.

Beautiful

one silver stick of dusty Juicy Fruit, a silky brown horse chestnut big as a child’s fist, a lone pink carnation frilly as a tutu.

Delicious

My chronic hunger was a residue from the Pause. It didn’t matter how much I ate during the day; always at night I’d feel an empty rumbling.

vowed then never to be like them, frivolous and weak-willed, with their glossy lips and padded bras, speaking for hours to a boy who only pretended to listen.

That summer I was fifteen years old, alarmingly pudgy from puberty and Coke and frosted doughnuts and a general aversion to physical effort.

Same

I thought she might yell or begin to cry, and for a moment all four of us stood poised to receive that, ready in that far-off, distant way we would always be ready to lose our mother again to turbulent, unbearable emotion.

“The love of your life is always the one you have betrayed the most. The love that defines you is the one upon whom you once turned your back.”

WOAH

I felt an ache not of nostalgia or grief but something in between the two.

wearing unwieldy yellow gloves and those small paper masks I associated with Asian flus and hypochondriacs.

At that moment, deep within her, the baby moved, an elbow or a knee just below her left ribs, and Caroline was transported. There existed nothing so momentous as this feeling of intimacy and distance, the strangeness of it and the atavistic understanding. The TA had no idea. Caroline felt a surge of pity for him. Pity and impatience. Caroline picked up her notebook and pen and returned them to her bag. She stood and moved toward the door. “Um, Ms. Duffy,” the TA called. “You just got here.” Someone in the class snickered. “I’m leaving,” Caroline said, and she did. Caroline went directly to the registrar’s office and withdrew from the University of Kentucky.

dozen newborn kittens, each one no bigger than an infant’s fist and just as soft, round, and useless.

But sometimes it looked simply crushing. A straitjacket of her own making. Every morning she packed three school lunches, each one requiring a different sandwich. Every night three different bedtime stories.

“Joe said that Dad told him to stop playing baseball,” she stated without emotion. “Dad said that Joe’s throwing arm wasn’t what it used to be. Dad told him this.” “Dad?” All at once I remembered that long-gone afternoon from the Pause when Joe took me to the yellow house and we stood in our parents’ old bedroom and waited for our father. I had never told anyone about that day, and I did not tell Caroline now. The memory felt like a small, terrible bomb I was holding in my hands.

How could she possibly fit in among a bunch of adolescents who partied all weekend and believed a seventeenth-century bee worthy of discussion? People who thought only of themselves? Caroline was beyond all that; already she existed beyond herself.

Had Noni ever chosen her life the way Caroline has chosen hers? Absolutely not. Noni’s life had been poured over her head like a bucket of milk.

They would protect Noni. Isn’t this what they’d always done?

“Ace gets him the drugs,” Caroline said. “That’s what Renee says.”

Joe had described Ace to me as a different person since our summers at the pond. No longer aggressive and lost, no longer trying to impress with bravado and risk taking. I had believed my brother.

Surrendered, I thought. Abandoned, adrift, lost.

The Last Romantic.

That child wouldn’t necessarily remember the Halloween costumes you made from hand six years running. Or maybe she did, but she resented you for it because she’d wanted store-bought costumes just like all her friends.

Men, thought Renee. How many hours had she spent tolerating the ridiculous behavior of disappointed men?

She ran and turned, and the car turned with her, tires squealing. It was like a movie, unreal, absurd.

In a way Renee thanked Joe every day for the next sixteen years. But not once did she worry about what the man in the car had done to Joe. She never wondered what those kicks required of him. What that bloodied face told our brother about himself.

He had a social obligation, it seemed, to spread himself around.

Still he didn’t smile, though he did raise one dark eyebrow and gazed at Renee with something that suggested a wryness, an ability to see humor in this situation. Or maybe he was just flirting with her; it was always difficult for Renee to tell.

It was at this point in the meeting that Renee mentally left the room. She opened the heavy door and floated out over the polished oak floorboards and down the wide, curving staircase to that brilliant emerald quad where she’d seen the students.

Jonathan Frank didn’t know anything about her, didn’t know about her father’s death, didn’t know she had a younger brother whom she felt sometimes she’d done more to raise than their mother had.

How easy it would be for Joe to stop what he was doing. He wasn’t an addict, not the strung-out, desperate kind. Maybe he was addicted now, but it was pure laziness. Pure stupid indulgence and privilege. He could get high when and how he wanted, and so he did. It felt good, Joe had told her, like excitement, like sex, almost like falling in love.

“You walk very fast.” “How do you—” Renee looked around her. Directly across the street stood Jonathan Frank,

Crying

The screen created a small shadowed space, inside of which Joe was talking to a woman. I saw them only because of my position beside the elevator; from all other points in the room, the screen would have shielded them from view. I did not appreciate this at the time. Only later.

Our friends’ mothers were irritated carpoolers, bleary-eyed pancake makers.

Sad

People invited him to parties not because they liked him but because he was glamorous and useful.

Over the next year, I flirted and slept with every type of man I’d lusted after in high school and college—the

How a person behaved on a one-night stand spoke volumes.

Joe raised his arm and yelled “Kyyyyy-le!” in a loud, gravelly voice. He broke the name into two distinct sounds—Ky-ULL—and repeated it again and again in a kind of chant. Kyle laughed and raised his arm in return, and soon all the other fraternity brothers—thirty at least—in the room followed. As the sound persisted, it warped and changed and became not a man’s name but something else. Something animal and of the moment. A sound distorted by the element in which it was issued.

The entire episode lasted no longer than five minutes, but it changed the tenor of the room. The party now felt unsettled, on edge, as though the chanting had contained a message that everyone but Joe had understood.

This was a new Joe regarding me. A starkly serious Joe with a cold calculation in his eyes. He was judging me, assessing me. And suddenly my brother became a stranger. I recognized in Joe the kind of man about whom I wrote most viciously on the blog, the kind who carried himself with an entitlement that masqueraded as confidence.

Love

I remember writing in my book, Muscle, tooth, solid, sex, skin, languish, stubble, power.

Once I would have said that I knew my brother better than any other person. At the pond we would play gin rummy for hours, barely speaking, and then rise together at the exact moment when the heat became unbearable, run into the water, and then return, dripping and cool, to the game. Now I didn’t know what to say, how to comfort him, or if comfort was what he deserved.

Sandrine left Joe. She began a relationship with Ace McAllister, moving from Joe’s apartment on the Upper East Side into Ace’s on the Upper West.

“She’ll be happy to get rid of me. One less thing to worry about.” “No,” I said. “She’ll miss you. We’ll all miss you.” Even to me my words sounded false.

It took a madman to believe that individual involvement might change a system. It required a miracle, it required magic. Or maybe not. Maybe all it required was the alchemy of individuals who believe first that they can change themselves.

Yesterday Joe had played baseball, and his body hurt in the most satisfying way.

now, thirty-two years old and slack in every single way,

It was a sprig of blooming thyme she’d cut from her herb box. She’d dropped it into her purse because she liked the smell and because it gave her comfort to carry something she had cared for and grown, though it had become mashed and bent in the jumble of her bag.

and he is drinking beer after beer in solidarity with his boys getting lashed by the Celtics and with all men everywhere in love with their absent women, wondering who they might be fucking, wondering why love isn’t as soothing and life-affirming as they had always thought it would be.

“Joe, I just don’t want to do this!” and Sandrine’s voice is suddenly raised, as though he has said something to dispute her, convince her. “I don’t want to have your children. I don’t want to go on vacation with you. I don’t want to have dinner with you. I don’t want to watch you brush your teeth. I don’t want us to get all old and stupid and jiggly together.”

Before you can lie down, you first must stand up. Didn’t someone say that once?

Donny inhabited a dark place that was familiar to her, and she knew how familiarity could sometimes feel like comfort.