The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank

Author:Melissa Bank
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US

DENA BLUMENTHAL +

BOBBY ORR FORREVER

MYMOTHER is at her bereavement group, and I am on the phone with a distant relative I don’t know, an ancient guiltress, who says she’s sorry about my father but turns out to be a lot sorrier that no one bothered to let her know at the time, so she could’ve come to his funeral. She keeps saying things like, “Is it so hard to pick up the phone and dial?”

I am saved by the beep of Call Waiting and ask her to hold on a minute, please. She says, “This is long distance.”

A second beep. “Well, nice talking to you,” I say, and, “I’ll give my mother your message,” though I don’t think I will. “Good-bye.”

The other call is Dena, and I launch into an instant replay of the guilt festival I’ve just attended, which fascinates me now that it’s over, but not Dena. I hear indulgence in her, “Uh-huh.”

I say, “She didn’t even know my name. It was like the guilt equivalent of anonymous sex—”

Dena says, “How are you?”

She is asking big, but I answer little: “Fine,” I say. “How are you?”

This she treats as a digression, as though I am a patient inquiring after my doctor’s health. She allows only a few questions about her life before switching back to mine. “Have you talked to Demetri?”

I haven’t.

“Good,” she says. “When are you coming back to New York?”

I make my voice casual: “I don’t know.”

I expect her to laugh when I tell her that I have an interview at Shalom, the newsletter we grew up not reading.

She doesn’t say anything.

I wait and then say, “I should get ready,” even though my interview isn’t for another three hours.

She says, “Bob,” her nickname for me and mine for her since high school, “you’re living in Surrey,” and she says these words with the sympathetic authority of one familiar with Surrey’s social opportunities—the kids smoking cigarettes outside the skating rink; the housewife returning a nylon nightie at Strawbridge & Clothier; the mustached neighbor walking a miniature schnauzer named Pepper.

I say, “The good thing about being nowhere in your career is that you can do it anywhere.”

She says, “Bob.”

“Yeah?”

She hesitates. “Good luck.”

. . . . .

I’d only been with Demetri for a few months when he asked me to go to Los Angeles with him.

“Come with me,” he said, and my heart stopped hurting for the first time since my father’s death.

I was thrilled quitting my job, thrilled giving up my apartment. It seemed like the first real risk I’d ever taken. I felt like I was kissing life right on the lips.

I started to panic the week before we were supposed to leave. Suddenly I heard everything everybody had been saying and not saying about Demetri: Dena had called him a pathological narcissist; my older brother had said, “There’s no there there”; my younger brother had sighed.

But it was the idea of my father that I couldn’t shake. I knew what he would’ve thought of Demetri—not that he would’ve said so.

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