Sam and Ilsa's Last Hurrah Page 15

  “Will do,” I tell him.

  “And thanks,” Caspian adds. “For including us both.”

  “It was my pleasure,” I say, looking Frederyk in the eye. Then I repeat it to Caspian, who nods.

  Johan has retrieved his case and is clearly making to leave with the other three.

  “You are an excellent recess from the humdrum,” I tell him.

  “And old flames can’t hold a candle to you,” he replies.

  I’m sad to see him go—to see all of them go, really. But I also know the time has come to give the party its grace note and send it on its way.

  When the door closes behind them, the apartment seems even emptier than it did before any of the guests arrived. I know there’s still one around, but Czarina’s bedroom is practically soundproofed. So I may as well be alone as I finish clearing the table, then push the coffee urn back into the kitchen to empty it in the sink. Everything I’ve done for the evening, I am now undoing. And the undoing, I find, is simply another form of doing.

  I’m thinking about the future, but I don’t want to think about it too much—not until I can talk to Ilsa about what we’re going to do.

  nineteen

  ILSA

  “Wake up, Ilsa.”

  I don’t want to wake up. I’m having the sweetest dream about taking a bath in a tub filled with chocolate. The chocolate is creamy and heavenly until I turn on the shower spout. The spray of chocolate is indeed delicious, but really messy dripping from my hair, and practically blinds me. Like many of my ideas, the chocolate bath had seemed like a good one at the beginning, but as I step out of the tub, I wobble, and get chocolate all over the sink, floor, and wall. The bathroom is starting to look like a crime scene, from what I can glimpse through my chocolate-covered eyelashes. Is this what death by chocolate means?

  I feel a hand running softly along my arm. No chocolate seems to be interfering with the hand’s path. My eyes pop open. The dream is over. Another one is beginning.

  “How long was I asleep?” I ask Li.

  She’s lying next to me, on her side, looking down at me. “Not long. Less than an hour.”

  I remember now. We came into Czarina’s room to have some private time. To explore whether our lips wanted to explore more.

  “Did I literally fall asleep on you?”

  She laughs. “Pretty much. You drank too much. And you were over-stimulated.”

  Classic Ilsa. The life of the party who crashes hard just when things get interesting.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “There’s nothing to apologize for. I had a little catnap, too. Snuggled against your cat dress.”

  “Are we already a lesbian stereotype? Should we just skip right to moving in together?”

  “Hah!” The room is dark, but there is plenty of city light coming in through the window. I see Li smiling at me. “Did you know you sing in your sleep?”

  “I do.” My parents and Sam have been telling me this for years. I don’t want to talk about this habit. I’m not embarrassed by it so much as worried that I reveal parts of myself I don’t want revealed while I sleep. So I ask Li Zhang what I’ve wanted to know since our kiss on the rooftop. “How long have you liked me, Li?”

  “I’ve always liked you.”

  “I mean, like like.”

  “I don’t know. It just evolved. Sitting next to you in chemistry every day, I noticed little things about you. Like how your backpack is always a mess but you have a plastic pencil case that you neatly put your pens and pencils into at the end of each class. That you quietly hum Beatles songs when you’re working out chem problems. Like how you were always so patient with Igor Dimitrovich’s stuttering when other kids teased, and always defended Jane Tomkins when the mean girls ganged up on her. How you called Mr. Abbott out on his patriarchal teaching methods and got the syllabus changed.”

  “Wow. I’m amazing,” I joke.

  Surprisingly, Li breaks out into song. “The way you’re singing in your sleep / The way you look before you leap / The strange illusions that you keep / You don’t know / But I’m noticing.”

  “That’s really nice. Where’d you hear that?”

  “I didn’t. I saw it written on a bathroom wall at some music club down on the Lower East Side. It’s kinda how I feel about you.”

  “I fear you might see a better version of me than I actually am,” I confess.

  “Then be that better version,” she suggests.

  Huh. There’s something to that idea.

  “Do you think I’m a bitch?” I ask.

  “I think you have a bitchy sense of humor. That doesn’t make you a bitch. But I like bitches, for the record. They get shit done.” She reaches over to caress my hair. Then she presses her body closer to mine, leans down, and places her mouth on mine. This kiss is longer, and also a surprise—not for its sweetness (which is definitely there), but for its intensity.

  It feels right.

  I thought I wanted wild affairs. Really, what I want right now from Li is not the promise of a tempestuous dalliance. I want to share in Li’s focus. And decency. The strength of her kiss that makes me want to be better than I am.

  “I have to go home,” Li says after our lips disengage.

  “Stay over.”

  “My parents won’t like that. My curfew is two a.m. If I take a ride service home now, I’ll get there just in time.”

  “Were you serious about me coming to Taiwan with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would that be weird? At your grandma’s house, if we’re…a couple?”

  “We’re not a couple. We’re potential.”

  I’m not wounded at all by her statement. (If Parker had said it, I would have taken it as a failure on my part.) “Are you out to your family?”

  “I’m neither in nor out even to myself. I don’t believe in labels. Just in what feels right in my heart. I’m not positive that makes me gay. All I know is I’m not traditionally straight.” She pauses, then says, “If you came with me to Taiwan, you’d sleep in the guest room, which is also my grandma’s sewing room.”

  “No shenanigans,” I tease.

  “There might be shenanigans…eventually. I’m not in any rush. Are you?”

  I don’t even know what this is between us, other than I want to spend more time with her. Lots more. “No.”

  I’ve known Parker since he was in the same karate class with me and Sam when we were all eight years old. The moment I realized I liked him, when I was sixteen, was also the night we went all the way. I loved it. I loved him. But I wanted too much, too soon. I wasn’t ready.

  Next time, I want to be ready.

  Li says, “I’ve never gone that far with anyone.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For not judging me about that. The few people I’ve told that to in the past made me feel like there was something wrong with me for being inexperienced in that way.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with waiting.”

  I wish I’d waited.

  Li says, “I agree! Whenever it happens, whoever it happens with, I want it to feel right.”

  “Kiss me?” I ask her. “As if it were the last time.”

  “I hope it won’t be the last time!”

  “The last time…tonight.”

  She complies.

  It definitely won’t be the last time.

  I’m singing a tune as I find Sam in the kitchen cleaning up, after I return from downstairs and seeing Li get into her service car. I don’t want to leave her now / You know I believe and how.

  Sam, washing dishes in the sink, hands me a drying towel. I sit up on the counter next to him and start drying the pots in the rack. We always end parties here.

  Sam says, “When you said you wanted a recess from the humdrum, I never imagined you meant Li Zhang!”

  “I didn’t, either. You know what, Sam?”

  “What?”

  “I want to b
e humdrum. Not boring, I guess—but consistent. You know?”

  “A little bit of reckless is healthy. Please don’t trade it all in for complete humdrum.”

  “Doubt that’s possible.” To prove it, I get off the counter and reach up to the cabinet with the last of Czarina’s precious champagne flutes, retrieve one, and then take aim for the wall behind Sam. “Duck!” I warn him.

  He begs, “No, Ilsa! Please don’t do it! Czarina’ll kill me if we lose one more of her glasses.”

  I put my hand down and return the flute safely to the cabinet. “Kidding.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Totally funny. What were you so worried about, anyway? You know she’ll blame me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That she’ll blame me?”

  “Yes. And for being the favorite.”

  It’s taken eighteen years for him to specifically acknowledge this truth rather than deny it or pretend it’s a joke.

  The acknowledgment helps.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “You’d be my favorite, too, if I was the grandma.”

  Sam waits, like I have more to say. I don’t. Finally, he says, “Now’s the time you’re supposed to apologize for being Dad’s favorite.”

  “I’m Dad’s favorite?” It honestly never occurred to me. Parents of twins notoriously prioritize equality between siblings, so I never noticed a preference. “But you’re the one who loves to cook and learned it from him.”

  “Dad loved cooking until he became a professional chef. Now it’s a chore to him. You’re the one who likes the stuff Dad likes. College basketball. Sudoku. Seinfeld reruns. Foot-long subs.” Sam shudders. “He appreciates you more because he gets you. I’m a mystery to him.”

  The only mystery to Dad about Sam, I think, is why Dad’s own mother preferred her grandson to her son. Czarina appreciates Dad, most of the time. But she adores Sam, all of the time. Families are just like that, I guess. Maybe it doesn’t have to mean they love each member any less.

  “Do you really think Czarina has a secret lover?” I ask Sam.

  “I honestly do. She wouldn’t give up this apartment just for retirement.”

  “Maybe it’s our grandfather she never acknowledges!” In Czarina’s trail of broken hearts, the man who fathered our dad has always been the biggest mystery of all. She raised Dad on her own, and whatever happened between her and his father, no one knows, other than she went to work in Paris for a summer, had a mad love affair, and returned home pregnant—and single.

  “I know you want to be like Czarina,” Sam says, sounding serious. “But in that way, please don’t.”

  “I’ll try. But you know I’m mean like her. How can I avoid it?”

  “You’re actually much nicer than her, when you’re not trying to prove what a badass you think you have to be.”

  “You think I’m a badass?”

  “Not at all. At heart, you’re the biggest square of all of us.”

  I should be offended, but instead I laugh. “Does that make you the reckless one? Mister Going Off to California on a Whim?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Good. It’s the best thing that could ever happen to you.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t believe I was capable of going.”

  “I was wrong.” I was right that Sam needed a shock to his system to help him find his way. I was wrong that anybody but him could, or should, provide it. Is now the time to bring it up? Have Sam and I ever actually talked like this? For real, and not just for fun or show? “Wherever you go, I hope you find a place where you don’t feel anxious and can just work on whatever you feel passionately about. Music. Cooking. Sock puppetry.”

  “Wherever you go, I hope it’s not the Stanwyck. I think we all need to let go finally.”

  “I’m not going to live at the Stanwyck.”

  I don’t know where I’m going to go. But I know I’m not going to stay here. Maybe that college thing my parents are so into is not a terrible idea. If I’m Dad’s favorite, maybe he’ll give me frequent-flyer miles to go to Taiwan this summer if I promise to go to Quinnipiac in the fall. And if I act like I really want to go to college. Maybe not even act. Maybe I’ll legitimately be looking forward to it. The change of scenery. The new experience. The humdrum of Connecticut, within easy commute of Li Zhang, who starts at Queens College in the fall.

  Sam says, “Czarina once told me she felt trapped by the Stanwyck. She wanted to go other places in her life but knew she’d never have a nicer place to live. What I think she wanted, secretly, was a simpler place to live. Where she didn’t have to go to court against the building in order to stay in her own home. Or where she didn’t have to hold on to the legend of her holding court over grand parties here.”

  “Sam?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you love me more than Czarina?” I’m his twin. He should.

  “I love you differently. No more, no less.”

  I go to the foyer to find my phone and return to the kitchen with it. I take the white chef’s hat hanging on a hook and place it on Sam’s head, and then I hold up the empty bottle of Czarina’s best champagne. I hold out the phone to take a selfie to always remember our last dinner party at the Stanwyck. “Say, ‘We’ll always have Czarina’s.’ ”

  Sam smiles into the camera as I click the picture. “We’ll always have Czarina’s.”

  Then he takes the bottle from my hand and pours the last remaining drops over my head, like a most excellent baptism into our unknown future, where anything can happen and hopefully it won’t suck but will involve great food, good times, the occasional sock puppet, and the people we love the most.

  “Cheers,” I tell my brother.

  Sam picks up a Dolly figurine from the counter. Johan must have left it behind. I wonder why.

  Apparently it’s because Dolly has something to say.

  twenty

  SAM

  I’m guessing the message is this:

  If diminutive, spirited Dolly can arm-wrestle a big bro like Sylvester Stallone into submission, then I can take control of my own life.

  twenty-one

  SAM & ILSA

  Ten Years Later

  They don’t recognize the girl who answers the door, and she doesn’t recognize them, either. Not at first.

  It takes Ilsa a second. Then she figures it out: This young woman in front of them has to be—

  “Maddy?”

  The girl—she must be eighteen now, Ilsa realizes—doesn’t look any less confused.

  “Maddy, it’s me, Ilsa. And this is Sam. We were up at KK’s and decided to come down here. To see the apartment again.”

  “Ilsa! Wow!” Maddy wraps her in a hug. Then she stands back and takes in what Ilsa and Sam are wearing. “Of course—your grandmother! I was so sorry to hear the news. Did you just come from…?”

  “The funeral. Yes,” Sam says. He is trying very hard to reconcile the teenager in front of him with the little girl who used to live next door. Even though they’ve visited KK a few times in the intervening years, this is the first time they’ve been on this floor since Czarina moved out.

  “Can we come in?” Ilsa asks. “Just to see it.”

  “Of course!” Maddy says. “Mom and Dad aren’t home, just me. They’ll be so sad they missed you. Come in!”

  Maddy opens the door, heads back inside, and has no idea how strange it is for them to be beckoned through their own doorway. Ilsa follows, then notices Sam’s hesitation, recognizes his fear and his sadness. They are walking into the past, and it’s not going to be the same as it was.

  Without a word, she takes his hand. Without a word, he lets her. Together, they step inside.

  Sam doesn’t want to look around, but he can’t help it. It’s like seeing a familiar person in completely different clothes. Or maybe it’s like seeing familiar clothes on a completely different person. Some of Czarina’s furniture remains—there was no point, she said, in carrying a sofa all the way to Paris, and
it chilled her to think of anything she loved in a storage unit. Maddy’s family was happy to accept the leftovers, and as a result, Sam feels both at home and completely out of context.

  Ilsa isn’t looking at the apartment as much as she’s looking at Maddy. She can’t believe how old Maddy is. And at the same time, she can’t believe how young Maddy is, because isn’t she the same age Ilsa and Sam were when they were throwing dinner parties here? Hadn’t being a senior in high school seemed so old at the time? And wasn’t eighteen, really, when you got into the wider, later world, so much younger than you once thought it was?

  “I’m sorry it’s such a mess,” Maddy is saying now. “If I’d known you were coming by, I would have cleaned up a little bit. I mean, it must be weird, right? To see it like this?” She gathers a magazine from the couch, as if that is enough to mark an improvement. “God, I remember coming in here when I was little—you guys were so loud. And my bedroom was right there.” She points to one of the living room walls. “Before we connected everything, my bed was right up against that wall. I remember lying there and listening to you. It was loud, but it always sounded…happy. I tried to find any excuse to come over. Just to see what you were doing.”

  “You brought us cookies,” Sam says, a vague memory returning to him.

  “I think I did! Wow. And your grandmother—she was something else.”

  Sam smiles. “Yeah, she really was.”

  She hadn’t wanted to be buried in Paris. She’d loved it there, but this was home.

  Ilsa can see the slipping of her brother’s smile, the effort to hold it all together when really some of it had to be let go. It had been her idea to come here, and now she wonders whether it was a good idea. Well, good or bad, it needed to happen. Sam had spent the past few months in Paris, had been with Czarina to the end, just as she’d wanted. He had been so strong for their grandmother, for all of them. But now, Ilsa saw, he had no idea what to do with the rest of that strength. She didn’t want him converting it into sadness. She wanted to remind him of what he had set out to do.

  “Would you mind giving us a few minutes?” Ilsa asks Maddy now. “Then the three of us can catch up—it’s been so long!”