With or Without You Read online

  Seventy-three minutes after takeoff, the space shuttle Challenger had flamed into the most beautiful stream of white smoke, and mission control shouted, “THERE’S OBVIOUSLY A MAJOR MALFUNCTION!!” and the town of Concord, New Hampshire, cried.

  Outside by the gym, people huddled smoking cigarettes in the shifting rays of sun, pretending it was a normal day, only we’d gotten out a little early. The steps were crowded. I found Edie high on top, sitting next to the Ayatollah. He held a ledger book in one hand and punched numbers into a calculator with the other. Every so often he stopped and blew into his bare hands. It was freezing out.

  I wedged myself in front of them and lit a cigarette. Edie rolled her eyes, stomped her purple boots on the cement. “You’re killing yourself,” she said.

  “This is smokers’ corner. Don’t tread on me.”

  “It’s a free country.”

  “Not really,” muttered the Ayatollah, still engrossed in his calculations.

  A jappy guy from my social studies class shoved his way through the crowd and stood over us, casting a shadow like a giant robot. He slipped a black leather wallet from the inside pocket of his ski jacket. It had a European name stitched into the arm. The Ayatollah looked up, shielding his eyes with his right hand. “The usual,” he said, and the guy nodded. He leaned closer to the Ayatollah, slipped him a few bills, then backed away.

  “You inside before?” the guy asked.

  “For a little while.”

  “It looked like a video game.”

  “More like skywriting,” Edie said.

  “Yes, skywriting,” the Ayatollah nodded. He scribbled into his book, then closed it and handed it to Edie. “A message from the CIA, no doubt.”

  The jappy guy burst out laughing. “You’re paranoid, dude.”

  “Oh, I am paranoid. You Americans are really something. You never see the connectedness of things, you don’t want to believe that your government can betray you. You think because you elect these people they will do exactly what you tell them and only what you tell them. That’s so naïve. Have you read the newspaper lately? Central America has been contaminated by the CIA.”

  “So they blew up the space shuttle?”

  “I have no conclusive evidence, but the timing is suspicious. This thing is so big. It’s a global disaster. Everyone is involved—Russia, the Middle East, everyone, and it’s all going down in these little countries where people are so poor they don’t know any better. Do you have any idea how many lives this country is responsible for? How much blood has been shed already?”

  The jappy guy backed up a step, nodded. He was either frightened or bored. “Hey, don’t look at me, dude. I’m antiwar.”

  “What war? There is no war. This is not Vietnam. We’re talking about global terrorism, about total U.S. domination. The information is there if you want it, but you don’t. You come to me, smack my hand, ‘Hey, dude, I’m antiwar.’ You don’t know the first thing about war. None of you do.”

  Edie put her hand on the Ayatollah’s thigh. “Relax, baby,” she said, “it’s not Nathan’s fault if the CIA blew up the space shuttle.”

  Baby! She called the Ayatollah baby, her fingers digging into his leg like it was her turf, she’d been there before … when? A couple of weeks ago, she’d said he was too girly; I was the one who told her he was cute. And he had tons of coke. My throat contracted. I took a deep pull of nicotine and exhaled close to Edie’s face.

  “Ugh—Lil!” she flagged her hand in front of me. “How many times do I have to tell you, keep that shit away from me!”

  She barely looked at me, concentrating on the Ayatollah and Nathan who were patching it up. “No, dude, you’ve actually given me something to think about,” Nathan said, holding out his hand to the Ayatollah who took it and clasped it in between his palms.

  “Don’t think, do,” said the dealer, as if he were a prophet and not just a foreigner with major connections and long eyelashes. He let go of Nathan’s hand. I took a final drag of my cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke so straight and white it hypnotized me.

  “Fuckin’ A!” Nathan said, and everyone stared at the smoke as it splintered into a big white Y across the baby-blue expanse as if the letter had been carved by a skywriter to follow the path of the space shuttle.

  We were all transfixed, even the Ayatollah. Here was something the CIA couldn’t have planted. A natural phenomenon. We watched the smoke fizzle into a grayish haze, and I wondered if it had been that way with the shuttle, whether it simply withered away or the people standing at the base of Cape Canaveral had to run for cover under pieces of scrap metal and spaceship debris. It didn’t seem right how some things shot up into the sky and came crashing down while others arched as perfectly as a flipped cigarette.

  I was overrun by a chill so deep I thought I had pneumonia. Nathan bounced off the steps, his robotic arms slipping out into the afternoon, everything preprogrammed. The Ayatollah put his arm around Edie’s shoulder, this time like he’d been there before, and I could have kicked myself for not seeing it coming. They all became her boyfriends after a while. She barely said goodbye before they walked off arm in arm, and a few minutes later I saw the Ayatollah’s Jaguar take off down the street. I smoked a couple more cigarettes in the brutal cold, listening to the bells ringing at the junior high as the younger kids flocked outside, screaming and laughing and bouncing up and down like they hadn’t heard about the national disaster. Or didn’t care.

  Finally, I stood up and balanced myself against the cement wall. I was about to leave when Belgrave found me and asked for a cigarette. Eyeing him curiously—he was a teacher and all—I flipped open my box of Marlboros and we shared my last two cigarettes, the sky wisping into its deep-winter palette—azure, cyan, indigo, Air Force blue, space shuttle silver. Like names on pastel crayons. Gray-blue smoke rose above our heads. It was weird smoking with a teacher; if anyone saw me I would have been laughed out of smokers’ corner, and even weirder, Belgrave wasn’t saying anything. I kept expecting him to nail me for not reading “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” but he just smoked and tipped his head toward the spiraling blues above us. “My brother is a physicist,” he said, after he’d taken his last drag and crushed the butt with his penny loafer. “I have no idea what he does, really. Something about splitting molecules. He’s always telling me he’s on to something revolutionary about negative space. Do you have any idea what that means? Negative space?”

  I nodded no. In chemistry, we’d learned that negative ions were attracted to positive electrodes. In algebra, negative numbers plotted less than zero but they didn’t really exist. You couldn’t have negative two cigarettes. When they were gone they were gone. I looked down at the crumpled-up Marlboro box in my hand, thinking, I have no cigarettes. A negative statement. What was the equivalent for space? In painting, it was the part you left blank. I said this to Belgrave, and he borrowed my curious eye.

  “And if you cover the whole canvas,” he said, “what then?”

  I shrugged. “It’s all positive?”

  A full pack of cigarettes.

  “Hmmm …” He nestled his chin with his thumb and forefinger, then summoned the sky once more. “And up there? Is that positive or negative?”

  “I guess it depends where you’re looking from,” I said, thinking of Edie and her claims to be from the planet Andromeda. She liked looking down on the stars.

  Belgrave turned to me, nodding his head up and down, affirmative. I was almost sorry when he thanked me for the cigarette and told me I’d been good therapy for him before wandering back through the gym. I rushed to the late bus. It was full of kids from the basketball and swim teams. Nobody would let me share a seat. They laughed, whispering to each other, and occasionally I saw a spitball loop overhead. They’d be sorry one day when I was a famous painter. I was going to draw negative space. It would be a major development in the world of art, explosive in a good way. I would be interviewed by People magazine. You always thanked your first dr
ama teacher at the Blue Bell Recreation Center. I would thank Belgrave. He wasn’t an art teacher, but he had this theory of negative space …

  The bus pulled in to the last stop, and the few of us still remaining walked off into the clear, dark night—hyacinthine, purple-ebony, shiny-combat-boot black with glowing white stars. Like Blair’s fake diamond earrings. A longing to go by the swimming pool passed quickly this time. I took a final look at the night sky, shook a few spitballs from my hair, and headed inside, where I knew I’d find you waiting at my window.

  LUCKY LITTLE LADY IN THE CITY OF LIGHT

  MILDRED HARRISON FLEW TO LOS ANGELES. Despite the smooth skies and half-empty rows of seats, she spent much of the flight gnawing her fingernails and nursing the straw of the one Bloody Mary she allowed herself, habits she hadn’t been able to shake since Brooke had gone Hollywood. It was her most difficult trip yet. The next day she and Brooke would return together to Blue Bell; that night she envisioned herself helping her daughter pack and settle up a few loose ends, although she had no idea what Brooke had been through in the last forty-eight hours. She told Mildred she’d practically had to beg the producers for a two-week hiatus to “get her shit together,” not to mention the shame she must have suffered being hauled before an L.A. County judge looking like she’d just emerged from an opium den. The sight of her daughter on that entertainment program had kindled in Mildred a maternal call to arms, the kind that could turn any ordinary woman into an action hero.

  At first Brooke had told her not to come. She’d been commuting between Blue Bell and her L.A. flat since she was seventeen and didn’t need an escort on account of one silly drunk-driving violation. But after speaking to Kenny Zeller who’d coughed up a few details about the arrest that Brooke had conveniently bowdlerized, namely the eighth of Bolivian pearl her little champion of world peace and drug-free schools had quickly stashed beneath the seat of her red Porsche, Mildred knew she had to make the trip.

  “Bolivian what?”

  “Not to worry, Mil, it wasn’t even hers. You know how things go out there. When in Rome … Anyway, get this—she managed to talk the cops out of searching her car. One of them wanted an autograph for his daughter.”

  “But wait, I don’t understand. What did you say she was hiding?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. She was holding a little coke. Nothing to worry about, though. She barely touches the stuff. She’s a good girl, Mil. A very good girl.”

  As Kenny spoke, Mildred felt the hands of guilt coil around her neck. Cocaine? She couldn’t imagine Brooke involved in anything like that. A little too much liquor was one thing, but cocaine! Mildred booked a flight and within hours was California bound.

  At the airport car rental, she upgraded from economy to a full-sized sedan and took one of the company’s maps to ensure an easy departure. Whenever she made the trip without Tom, that stretch around the car rentals always unnerved her. Navigating the boulevards and highways of Los Angeles had been much easier than friends back home said it would be, what with the special map Brooke had given her. Mildred had a better chance of being stopped by the LAPD for slow driving than floating too far off track, and still those few blocks near the airport, where the scenery resembled a nuclear test site, teased her mercilessly. There were too many lots and too few signs, anxieties complemented by the pressure of her impending visit. Such nervousness always carried Mildred back to the first road test she’d failed almost twenty-five years earlier, running Tom’s Dodge through not one but two stop signs and rimming the curb on her parallel park. Vehicles were so weighty back then, Mildred couldn’t imagine how anyone passed the first time, yet the thought of telling Tom she’d failed had soured her stomach so badly she couldn’t keep down anything but chicken broth and toasted Wonder Bread.

  It was Tom who’d given her driving lessons just a couple of months after they’d met, and if she hadn’t been in love with him already, it was fair to say she’d left their first class swooning over his wide eyes and angular jaw, a man as sensible as he was handsome, ten years her senior with a degree in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and steady work at Paxton Pharmaceuticals. That first day, Tom kept them sitting in front of the house more than an hour discussing every knob, button, and gauge on the dashboard. Mildred, however, was more interested in their thighs bumping up against each other, the soft cotton of Tom’s shirtsleeves against her forearms as he guided her hands in position on the steering wheel. She was close enough to smell the starch in his clean white shirt, a scent conjuring houses with built-in garages, morning kisses before work, all the little tidbits of security. She’d practically had them rearing a happy and healthy brood when Tom pulled her outside for a look underneath the hood. “Most people don’t have the first idea how a car works,” Tom had said. “But I believe it’s important.”

  Imagine all those hours of lecturing, not to mention the flashcards Tom had designed to test her on the rules of the road, and still she’d failed that menace of a test. The funny thing was, when she finally broke down and told Tom, he simply smiled. Apparently, on his first test he’d mistakenly hit reverse as they were pulling away from the curb and slammed into a motorcycle. The inspector had failed him on the spot. “Practically everyone fails the first time,” he’d said, “but not everyone knows how a fan belt works.” Mildred was so relieved she actually spit up laughing, a faux pas that knocked them both into long silly giggles. Later, Tom cooked a T-bone steak and string beans, heavenly victuals for a girl who’d spent the past five days on sick food, and eating had never felt so immediate, so pleasurable, so intoxicating, her entire emotional canvas reified in this man feeding her string beans with his fingers.

  Thoughts of young love were indeed comforting to a woman pushing fifty in a forest-green rental car, the L.A. freeway spread out in runnels of red and white lights in front of her. And leaving the airport had been a snap. A left turn out of the lot, then a right onto the boulevard, and a few yards later, the freeway. The sheer ease of it, even in the dark, had Mildred chuckling to herself as she pressed the gas pedal closer to the floor, almost delirious with her own success, although that elation soon tumbled into a touch of sadness, as too much of anything eventually bred its opposite. Often the pleasure Mildred took in her solitary victories left her wondering what she might have accomplished had she not jumped straight into marriage.

  She turned on the radio and tuned it to the swing jazz station she and Tom loved, bursting in on a Rogers & Hart tune. The name would come to her, though the slash of trombone and snare ushered in thoughts of her husband. Three hours ahead, he was probably flicking the small light in the downstairs bathroom for his father’s midnight run before plodding up to an empty bed. The poor man—Tom, that is, not Grampy Harry. If Mildred sometimes found herself wondering where she might have been without him, she was comforted by the fact that he never knew quite what to do with himself at home without her. Once, a few years ago, when she’d returned from a weekend in Milltown visiting her parents, Tom said her absence had thrown him into the kind of fog that accompanied most antihistamines. A romantic notion. To think after all their years together she could still affect her husband as if she were a drug, and that was high praise coming from a man who developed pharmaceuticals for a living. Yet for all her it’s-only-fair equations, it still upset her to imagine Tom at home. Alone in a head cloud.

  If Cynthia wasn’t working she might have kept him company after dinner, then again she wasn’t the type to watch TV or play Boggle with them the way Brooke did whenever she was home. Brooke was always more traditional in that way, which is why it was utterly incongruous to imagine her sniffing drugs. Of her two daughters, Cynthia was the one she’d been watching, worrying about the hours she spent alone in her dark room, leaving only for school or the public library, where she volunteered in the adult-literacy program and kept her library card active. Every day she’d come home with another corpulent hardcover Mildred couldn’t see behind the shiny Unive
rsity of Pennsylvania book cover Cynthia’d affixed. Mildred had once made the mistake of asking what she was reading. “Just stuff,” Cynthia had said.

  “What kind of stuff?” Mildred pried.

  “History, mostly.”

  “But why do you hide them?”

  “In the public transit system everyone’s a social critic,” she said, as if her statement were common knowledge, and although it had perplexed Mildred, her daughter’s demeanor curtailed further inquiry. Cynthia had a way of making Mildred feel downright invasive at times, an air Mildred couldn’t help thinking she and Tom had exacerbated, no matter how determined they’d been not to favor Brooke.

  Mildred eased up on the accelerator, lightly tapping the break in tune with Benny Goodman as she exited the highway. At the first red light, she checked memory to map and had no trouble matching the few boulevard blocks and smaller streets that led to Brooke’s hacienda. Pulling into the driveway, she saw a few lights behind those blinds like crinkled white construction paper. When Brooke had first moved in Mildred assumed the blinds were temporary. There was no point to transparent blinds, especially for a young woman on television. But Brooke had tossed off Mildred’s concerns, saying the blinds were handcrafted in Mexico, as if the aesthetics would ensure her safety. Then she took Mildred’s hand and marched her out front to display a network of electronically censored strips, which triggered sirens and dispatched messages to the police station, taped over milky white windows. The closer you got the more opaque the glass. Blinds were irrelevant, Brooke had said, and Mildred could see her point.