You (Plural)
by Jennifer Egan

It's all still there: the pool with its blue and yellow tiles from Portugal, water laughing softly down a black stone wall. The house is the same, except quiet. The quiet makes no sense. Nerve gas? Overdoses? Mass arrests? I wonder, as we follow a maid through a curve of carpeted rooms, the pool blinking at us past every window. What else could have stopped the unstoppable parties?

But it's nothing like that. Fifteen years have passed.

He's in the bedroom, in a hospital bed, tubes up his nose. The second stroke really knocked him out—the first one wasn't so bad, just one of his legs was a little shaky. That's what Johnny told me, Lou's old partner in crime. Silver-haired Johnny, the record producer. Anna's ex. He tracked me down at my mother's number, trying to round up people from the old days to say goodbye to Lou. Johnny knew how to find us. He found Anna all the way in Seattle, with a different last name.

Anna and I stand by Lou's bed, unsure what to do. We know him from a time when death didn't exist.

There were clues, hints about some bad alternative to living (we remembered them together over coffee, Anna and I, before coming to see him—staring at each other's new faces across the plastic table, our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood). There was the time Anna's friend Medra jumped out a sixth-floor window in the Hollywood Hills and got paralyzed from the waist down. Or when Johnny's nephew, Sammy D., was arrested in Angkor Wat and came out of prison different, always mumbling to himself. But those were catastrophes. Not like this: pills by the bed, a leaden smell of medicine and vacuumed carpet. It reminds me of being in the hospital. Not the smell, exactly (the hospital doesn't have carpets), but the dead air, the feeling of being far away from everything.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

Instead I say, "Hi Lou," and at the very same time, Anna says, "Wow, everything is just the same!" and we both laugh.

Lou smiles, and the shape of that smile, even with the yellow shocked teeth inside it, is familiar, a warm finger poking at my gut. His smile, coming open in this strange place.

"You girls. Still look gorgeous," he gasps.

He's lying. I'm thirty-eight and Anna is forty, married with three children in Seattle. I can't get over that: three. I'm back at my mother's again, trying to finish my B.A. at UCLA Extension after some long, confusing detours. "Your desultory twenties," my mother calls my lost time, trying to make it sound reasonable and fun, but it started before I was twenty and lasted longer. I'm praying it's over. Some mornings, the sun looks wrong outside my window. I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: It's finished. Everything went past, without you. Those days I know not to close my eyes for too long, or the fun will really start.

"Oh Lou, we're two old bags—admit it," Anna says, swatting at his frail shoulder.

She shows him the pictures of her kids, holding them close to his face.

"She's cute," he says about the oldest, Chassie, who is fourteen. I think he winks, or maybe it's his eye twitching.

"Cut it out, you," Anna says.

I don't say anything. I feel it—the finger—again. In my stomach.

"What about your kids?" Anna asks Lou. "You see them much?"

"Not too much," he says, in his strangled new voice.

He had seven, from one very long marriage he bored through and then threw away. Rolph, the youngest, was his favorite. Rolph lived here, in this house, a tortured-looking boy with blue eyes that broke a little whenever he stared down his father. Rolph and I were the same age, exactly. Same birthday, same year. I used to imagine us, tiny babies in different hospitals, crying at the same time. We stood naked once, side by side in a full-length mirror, trying to see if being born the same day had left a clue on us. Some mark we could find.

By the end, Rolph wouldn't speak to me, would walk out of a room when I came in it.

Lou's big bed with the crushed purple spread is gone—thank God. The TV is new, flat and long, one of those high definition TVs, I think, because its basketball game has a nervous sharpness that makes the room and even us look smudged. A guy comes in dressed in black, a diamond in his ear, and he fiddles with Lou's tubes and takes his blood pressure. From under the covers, tubes twirl from other parts of Lou into clear plastic bags I try not to look at.

A dog barks. Lou's eyes are shut, and he snores. The stylish nurse/butler checks his wristwatch and leaves.

So this is it—what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty. I can't help it, I start to cry. Anna puts her arms around me. Even after all the years, she doesn't hesitate. Her skin hangs loose—redheads age prematurely, Lou told me once. "Our friend Anna," he said, "she's doomed."

"You have three children," I sob into her hair.

"Shhh."

"What do I have?"

Kids I remember from high school are making movies, making computers. Making movies on computers.

A revolution, I keep hearing people say. I'm trying to learn Spanish. At night, my mother tests me with flash cards.

Three children. The oldest, Chassie, is almost my age when I met Lou. Sixteen, hitchhiking. He was driving a red Porsche. In the late seventies, that could be the beginning of an exciting story, a story where anything might happen. Now it just sounds stupid. "It was all for no reason," I say.

"That's never true," Anna says. "You just haven't found the reason yet."

Anna knows. The whole time, she knew what she was doing. Even dancing, even sobbing. Even with a needle in her vein.

"I got lost," I say.

It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth. Tonight, when my mother comes home from work and sees me, she'll say, "Forget the Spanish," and fix us Virgin Marys with little umbrellas.

With Dave Brubeck on the stereo, we'll play dominoes or gin rummy. When I look at my mother she gives me a smile, every time. But exhaustion has carved up her face.

The silence takes on a kind of intelligence, and we see Lou watching us. His eyes are so vacant, I think he might be dead. "Haven't been outside in weeks," he says, coughing a little. "Haven't wanted to."

Anna pushes the bed. I come a step behind, pulling the IV drip on its wheels. As we move him through the house, I feel dread, as if the combination of sunlight and hospital beds could cause an explosion. I'm afraid the younger Lou will be outside by the pool where he lived with a red Princess phone on a long cord, and the younger Lou and this old Lou will have a fight. How dare you? I've never had an old person in my house and I'm not going to start now. Age, ugliness, they had no place. They would never get in from outside.

"There," he says, meaning by the pool, like always.

There's still a phone: a black remote on a small glass table, a Palm Pilot and a fruit shake next to it. The nurse/butler or some other employee, spreading his wings on the empty grounds.

Or Rolph? Could Rolph be here still, taking care of his dad? Rolph in the house? And I feel him, then, exactly like before, when I could tell if he'd walked in a room without having to look. Just by how the air moved. Once, we hid behind the poolhouse during a party, Lou yelling for me, "Joc-elyn! Joc-elyn!" Rolph and I giggling while the generator droned in our chests. Later I thought: my first kiss. Which was crazy. Everything I would ever do, I'd done by then.

In the mirror, Rolph's chest was smooth. There was no mark. The mark was everywhere. The mark was youth.

And when it happened, in Rolph's tiny bedroom, sun sneaking through the shades in stripes, I pretended it was new. He looked inside my eyes and I felt how normal I could still be. It shocked me. We were smooth, both of us.

"Where's that thing?" Lou asks, meaning the button pad to tilt the bed. He wants to sit up and look out like he used to do, in his red bathing suit, his tanned legs smelling of chlorine. The phone in his hand and me between his legs, his palm on my head. The birds must have chirped then, too, but we didn't hear them over the music. Or are there more birds now?

The bed whines as it hoists him up. He looks out, eyes reaching. "I got old," he says.

The dog is barking again. The water sways in the pool, as if someone has just gotten in, or out.

"What about Rolph?" I ask, my first words to him since "Hi."

"Rolph," Lou says, and blinks.

"Your son? Rolph?"

Anna glances at me, my voice is too loud. I feel mad, a kind of anger that comes along sometimes and wipes me out like chalk. Who is this old man dying in front of me? I want the other one, the selfish, devouring man, the one who turned me around between his legs out here in the wide open, pushing the back of my head with his free hand while he laughed into the phone. Not caring that every room in the house faced this pool—his son's, for example. I have a thing or two to say to that one.

Lou is trying to speak. Anna and I lean close, listening. Habit, I guess.

"Rolph didn't make it," he says.

"What are you talking about?" I object.

Now the old man is crying. Tears leak down his face.

"Oh my God," Anna says.

"Car," Lou says. "Twenty-eight."

I shut my eyes.

"Long time ago," he says, the words splitting in his wheezy chest. "But."

Yes it was. Twenty-eight was a long time ago. The sun hurts my eyes, so I keep them shut.

"Losing a child," Anna says. "I can't imagine it."

The anger squeezes, it mashes me from inside. My arms ache. I reach underneath Lou's hospital bed, I heave it up and over so he slides into the turquoise pool and the IV needle tears out of his arm, blood spinning after it, feathering in the water and turning a kind of yellow. I'm that strong, even after so much. I jump in after him, Anna shrieking now, I jump in and I hold him down, lock his head between my kneecaps and hold him there until everything goes soft and we're just waiting, Lou and I are waiting, and then he shakes, flailing between my legs, jerking as the life goes out of him. When he's absolutely still, I let him float to the top.

I open my eyes. No one has moved. Lou is still crying, searching the pool with his blank eyes. Through the sheet, Anna is touching his chest.

It's a bad day. The sun hurts my head.

"I should kill you," I say, looking at him straight. "You deserve to die."

"Jocelyn," Anna says, with her sharp mother's voice.

Lou looks up at me. It feels like the first time all day. Finally I can see him, the man who said, "You're the best thing that ever happened to me," and "We'll see the whole goddamn world," and "How come I need you so much?" And "Looking for a ride, kiddo?" Grinning in the hard sun, puddles of it on his bright red car. "Anywhere you want."

He looks scared, now, but he smiles. The old smile, back again. "Too late," he says.

Too late. I tilt my head at the roof. Rolph and I sat up there a whole night once, spying down on Lou's party. Even after the noise stopped, we stayed, our backs on the cool tiles. We were waiting for the sun. It came up fast, small and bright and round. "Like a baby," Rolph said, and I started to cry. This fragile new sun in our arms.

At night, my mother says, "Jocelyn, you've got so much life in front of you." And when I believe her, for a minute, there's a lifting over my eyes. Like walking out of a room.

Lou is speaking again. Trying to speak. "Stand on each side. Of me. Would you, girls?"

Anna holds his hand, and I take the other one. It is not the same hand as before, it is bulbous and dry and heavy. Anna and I look at each other across him. We're there, the three of us, like before. We're back to the beginning.

He's stopped crying. He's looking at his world. The pool, the tiles. We never did get to Portugal, or anywhere. We barely left this house.

"Nice to be. With you girls," he says, fighting to breathe.

Clutching our hands, as if we might flee. But we don't. We look at the pool and we listen to the birds.

"Another minute," he says. "Thank you, girls. One more. Like this."

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