Sometimes All the Time

"I’m
sorry this keeps happening. It’s the anti-depressants – they make
me nervous." Becky put a sarcastic emphasis on ‘anti-depressants’,
to make the words unimportant. "It totally sucks. I can’t come when
I’m depressed like I am this month. Like I am this lifetime. Oh, woe.
Oh, sour grapes. Oh, my soul, my soul, my soul. Et cetera."

"Maybe
it’s the other way around," Jonah said. "Maybe you’re depressed
because you can’t come."

"No,"
she said. "It’s not that."

They
were both woozy from Percocets and sex. His hand was pressed between
her legs beneath the queen-sized sheets on the full-size bed.

"Maybe
it’s your birth control."

"Babies,"
said Becky. "Birth control makes me not have babies, not not have
orgasms. Hold on, though. I feel something." She squeezed her thighs
tighter around his hand. "No I don’t."

"I
wish you did."

"It
could be allergies, from your dog. I forgot my Claritin again. It’s
this closed-in, congested feeling. But my whole body."

"Maybe
you’re catching what I have. The sore throat thing."

"No,"
Becky said. "I’m not."

Jonah
liked their relationship for its candidness. They were able to speak
truths to each other that he and Jenna couldn’t achieve, maybe because
he and Jenna had known each other too long, cared too much. There was
an irrevocable destructive quality about truth Jonah had never known
before, and he enjoyed watching its effect, as he enjoyed undressing
Becky -just to see her moles. After a quiet moment Jonah said, "I
invited Jenna to move back in. Not out loud, really. But she knew what
I meant. Are you angry?"

Becky
rolled out of bed. "I’m hungry," she said. "Not hungry, but
I need to eat something." All she had on now were his soccer socks,
navy blue and covering her legs like shadows. He watched her silhouette
against the hallway light – another eclipse – and then followed
her as she walked to the kitchen, where she rinsed out a pot and poured
in a can of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars.

Jonah
stood at the window behind her, imagining a constellation onto the lighted
panes in the apartment building across the way. He hadn’t put up the
curtains Jenna brought back last week, and he stood to the side, away
from the light; Becky moved as if without self-consciousness, as if
in Eden.

She
put her leg up on the chair across from her. And this seemed important
to Jonah, maybe because there was a lot of her unspoken personality
in the gesture, that part of her that was relaxed and unguarded, even
though she was folding her arms. Or maybe it was because it was late
and he was over-tired, and every movement took on mystical gravity,
different from regular gravity, heavier, with a separate system of mass
and meaning. But probably the painkillers just made Jonah’s mind sink.

"Did
your tattoo hurt?" he asked. He was jealous of the man who’d gotten
to stand behind her with a needle.

"Everyone
always asks that." Becky pulled back her hair so the sparrow showed
through for a second, and then let her ponytail drop again over her
ears.

"Come
on," Jonah said. "Aren’t you angry with me? Even at all?"

Becky
went to the stove and stirred the soup with a ladle she’d found in
a drawer Jonah couldn’t remember ever opening. It was as if somehow
she could go into any kitchen and know where the utensils were.

"Do
you want me to be?" she asked.

"Answer
me. You never answer me."

"My
question’s more important," said Becky. She poured the soup into
two bowls and then turned the flame underneath the pot to low.

"Yes,"
said Jonah. "You should be a little hurt. It would make me feel better.
Like I had any sort of impact whatsoever."

She
carried the bowls to the table and sat down again and put her foot on
the adjacent chair again. "You couldn’t hurt me in a million years,"
she said. "This is me at my most vulnerable, actually, admitting to
you that you can’t hurt me."

"What’s
that like?"

"The
anti-depressants? They’re like any drug," she said. "You know
you’re high, or whatever – affected – and it changes you, and
you know that if you stop then its effects will stop. And it’s addictive,
too, depending on who you are. If you’re me, it’s addictive."
She lifted her bowl and began to drink, letting the gummy stars rest
against her lip. "But sometimes I miss not taking them, too," she
said after a moment. "Know what it is? It’s not that they make you
not sad, it’s that they make you not care that you are."

Right
then, Jonah couldn’t ignore the thought that there were probably millions
of people in the world lonelier than he was, and that therefore his
personal loneliness really didn’t matter that much. He wished, then,
that he were lonely in an interesting way: lonely to a point of significance.