by Mary McCoy
Sometimes you live in a place, and you can tell people are happy with things the way they are, even if no one is actually very happy. A lot of the South is like that. But I don’t think people in Memphis are happy with the way things are. People in Memphis know we all deserve better.
If that’s how you feel, why’d you spend the last two years in the closet? Did you think Memphis would love you back if you lied to it?
Or maybe I am just being naive and clueless.
We pull into the driveway, and when we get out of the car, I see that for the first time in days, no adults are sitting on the porch. I look at Max, then back at the porch, and we both make a beeline for the swing, like if we hesitated a second more, some forlorn grown-up would come out the front door and snatch it from us.
It’s a good front porch swing. I should know—I’ve been swinging in it for over a decade. We get into a nice summerevening rhythm on it, watching the fireflies, listening to the kids two houses down playing in the yard.
“What did you think about Harold’s interview?” I ask.
“The things he said about your family were sweet,” he says. “Or at least they were sweet if you can look past the sad parts.”
“It made me realize how lonely his life is,” I say.
Max nods. “It made me think, what if I end up like that? What if I’m this sad, lonely person who’s on the periphery of everyone else’s life?”
“That’s not fair,” I say. “That’s not who Harold is. He’s my family.”
Then I realize it doesn’t matter what Harold is because Max is talking about himself. This is what Max is scared of. I meet his eyes and when he tries to look away, I reach out, touch his chin until we are face-to-face. I look into the center of him, the way he did to me, the way that made me want to run out of the room. And this time, he lets me.
I see a person of tremendous goodness. A person who’d been pitched into my shitshow household and met us where we were.
I see a person who needs to be able to trust that the people in his life are going to stick around. That their love for him doesn’t hinge on him dating sweet, saintly gay boys. Or being one.
I see a person who moves through this world, this life, finding all of it endlessly captivating.
“I love every version of you I’ve ever met,” I say. “I love them all. You are too lovable to be on the periphery of anyone’s life.”
I’m still holding his chin when my phone buzzes. I glance down because I want to see if it’s Risa.
It isn’t.
Max pulls free from my distracted touch.
“Who’s that?” he asks.
“Vincent,” I say, and then I pick up the phone, and I read his messages, and all the air goes out of me.
Vincent, who knows me. Who knows how my heart works, and how to crack it wide open.
There are so many things he doesn’t know about me, but he knows what to say to make me put aside whatever it is I’m in the middle of doing and go to him.
He’s sent me a message that reads, My heart is a ruin.
And a Lee Miller photograph.
It’s one she took when she was living in England, during World War II. The Nazis were bombing London, and she was out in the thick of it with her camera. The photograph is called “Nonconformist Chapel”—it’s a bombed church, its doorway filled to the top with rubble, chunks of brick and plaster spilling out into the street.
I’ve always loved this photograph. I love that even in the middle of a war zone, Lee Miller could see art. And the title reminds me of Vincent. I know his faith is important to him, even though he doesn’t talk about it in the same way his parents do. He doesn’t agree with a lot of things his church stands for, doesn’t believe in their version of hell or sin or damnation. He’s his own tiny nonconformist chapel.
And right now, he is a ruin.
Beneath that he writes, Please come over as soon as you can. It’s important. I have something to show you.
I give Max a pleading look. I know I should stay here on the front porch swing with him; I should be a good friend.
“Go,” he says. “You’ll be miserable if you don’t.”
“Thank you for understanding.”
“I didn’t say I understood it. I just know better than to stop you.”
“You’re a good friend.”
“I know I am,” Max says. “I’m such a good friend that I won’t even tell you that you’re making a mistake.”
I’m about to be indignant, to remind Max that he’d just said I’d be miserable if I didn’t go. But then I remember what I told him on the drive to Harold’s: no matter what you choose, you end up regretting it.
I get my car keys and prepare to be miserable either way.
CHAPTER 25 Boyfriend Stuff
This is stupid, I think, looking at my phone and banging my head against the car headrest.
Fifteen minutes ago, I texted the following to Vincent: I’m outside.
And since then, nothing.
If I had any self-respect, I would have left by now. But instead, I’m manufacturing reasons he hasn’t replied. He was talking to his parents, he was in the shower.
When someone makes a dramatic post-breakup gesture like this, you’re not actually supposed to take them up on it. The whole point of those gestures is that you get to say a lot of over-the-top bullshit and nobody calls your bluff on it, and that’s how you get it out of your system.
And then I see him, framed in the porch light. He peers out into the darkness, and I see him lay eyes on my car, and I realize, oh shit, I didn’t take the hint, and now he has to come out here and let me down easy. He descends the steps, looks both ways before he crosses the street even though the only traffic on this block after six is generated by people going to church or bible study. Then he’s standing by my car. Sheepishly, I roll down the window and brace myself for whatever it is he’s about to say.
“You came.”
I clear my throat. “I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” he says, and then he looks over his shoulder like he’s afraid of being spotted. “Can you come around to the backyard? I want to show you something.”
I get out of the car and follow him around the side of his house. I notice how he tiptoes across the gravel. It’s almost nine, which means his parents are getting ready for bed. Vincent’s parents sleep like they’re hosting a middle school lock-in at all times. I’ve never been inside their house this late at night. I’ve never been in Vincent’s bedroom. I’ve never been in his backyard before.
It’s so dark I can’t see much of it now, but I suspect that someone in the family is a gardener. I can smell jasmine and rosemary, roses and lavender. He leads me toward the back corner of the yard, where I can just make out a tent, hidden from view by the low-hanging limbs of an oak tree draped with Spanish moss.
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” he whispers, unzipping the tent and gesturing for me to go inside. “I was waiting for my parents to go to bed. I didn’t think you’d get here so fast. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if you’d come at all.”
“Well, here I am.”
“And I’m glad you are.”
Once we’re inside, he turns on the flashlights he’s positioned in each corner of the tent, aimed up at the domed ceiling, and I can see pictures taped to the walls. When I lean in close and squint, I see a picture of a red Victorian house with turrets and bay windows and a front porch.
“That’s the house I’m renting this summer,” Vincent says, and as I’m wondering how much money NPR is going to pay him exactly, he adds, “Well, one bedroom of it.”
We’re on our knees in the tent so our heads don’t bump the ceiling. I pivot and see photographs of a coffee shop, a park with a fountain in it, the pandas at the National Zoo.
“All of this is in my neighborhood,” he says.
I turn to the third wall, which Vincent has covered with prints of art by Elaine de Kooning, Diego Rivera, Georgia O’Keefe, Jasper Johns
—there were over a dozen of them, all artists we’d talked about on Artists in Love.
“Those are in the National Portrait Gallery. That one’s at the National Gallery. The Museum of American Art. The Hirshhorn.”
I can tell how excited he is, like if he could, he’d leap straight out of the tent and into that life. And I understand it too. It seems so much bigger than his life here.
“Are you trying to make me jealous?” I say, joking.
“I wanted to show you this could be your life,” Vincent says. “I know you love Memphis, but I wondered if you could see yourself in D.C.”
“With you,” I say.
“With me.”
“Vincent,” I start to say, but he cuts me off before I can continue.
“I know what you’re worried about. That’s the other reason I wanted to see you.”
He puts his arms around my waist and pulls me close to him. No matter what happened the night before with no-texting Risa, it’s hard to fight the allure of someone who’s spent two years learning how to hold you in ways that make you melt, who has compensated for hardline abstinence by giving you transcendent cuddles and otherworldly snuggles and back rubs that make you levitate with pleasure.
“Is this okay?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, folding myself into his arms.
After an indeterminate amount of time, he pulls away. His lips are parted, and I can feel his heart thumping against my chest when he says, “I’ve thought about it a lot, Lee. I want to feel ready to do… boyfriend stuff with you.”
Even with Vincent’s soft caresses, his strong arms, the solidness of his shoulders, a tremendous amount of sexiness contained within a single human being, it is decidedly unsexy to hear the person you’re kissing refer to sex as “boyfriend stuff.”
I think about all the times early on in our relationship when we’d been kissing and I’d let my hand drift up his thigh. How he’d always pick it up and set it down off to the side, like it was a pet turtle that had gotten out of its terrarium. I remember one night, he invited me over for dinner because his parents had insisted that they had to meet me if he was going to be spending time over at my house to work on the podcast. Afterward, his parents sat us down on the couch in the living room—the nice room where nobody ever sat—and talked to us about the importance of remaining pure. Vincent’s mom told me that giving your virtue away was like a piece of bubble gum that everybody in the school had chewed.
“If someone handed you that piece of gum at the end, would you want to put it in your mouth?” she asked me, cocking her head to the side as she awaited my answer. And there was only one acceptable answer.
“No, ma’am.”
If she wasn’t my boyfriend’s mom, I might have laughed, but I was too shaken to laugh. I knew she thought of me as that piece of chewed-up gum. I wasn’t what they wanted for their son. They wanted a good girl for him. A church girl. A modest girl.
After that night, I only ever dropped him off or picked him up. He never invited me inside. I’m not even sure if he told them I was his girlfriend.
“What changed?” I ask. “Why do you want it now when you didn’t before?”
“Because I want to be with you,” he says.
And then, to show me how serious he is, Vincent strips off his T-shirt and tosses it to the side. He’s never done this before. I’ve never even seen him in a bathing suit.
He looks down at the shirt, like he’s rethinking the whole thing, and then he looks back up at me and gives me a grin that’s sheepish and silly and entirely endearing.
We can fix this, I think. We love each other. We respect each other.
I take off my shirt and unhook my bra so we’re equally naked. It’s almost like Lee Miller’s topless picnic, I think, and stifle a giggle. Vincent looks like he’s about to pass out. His eyes get big, and then he whispers “Wow” like I’ve presented him with Disneyland and fireworks and the keys to a new car.
Which reminds me that girls can put me at ease and make me feel pretty under fluorescent light, but there’s also something powerful-feeling about rendering a boy semi-verbal and awestruck with nothing but yourself.
I reach out and put one hand on his chest, and one on his waist, touching his bare skin in a way I never have before. He shudders, and his eyes close halfway. We kiss, and it’s good like it always is, but better because I can feel his skin against mine. I climb into his lap, straddling his legs.
“Is this okay?” I ask.
He takes a deep breath and nods, and I try to relax. I think about the things that feel good to me, the way I touch myself when I’m alone.
We love each other. We’re meant to be together. We can fix this, I think.
The thought doesn’t hold because almost immediately I’m thinking about Risa.
What is wrong with me? Why can’t I feel how I’m supposed to feel?
Vincent wants to be with me, wants me to leave town with him—that’s supposed to change things. I’m supposed take whatever feelings I had for Risa and cancel them out with Vincent’s kisses. Because he’s the one I’m here with now, in this minute, not her, which means I must have chosen him.
But that’s not how I feel about it.
The last time Claire and I hooked up, she was buttoning her shirt after and I heard her mutter, “Ugh, why do I keep doing this?”
At the time it hurt my feelings, but now I think I understand what she meant.
Every time, I feel like I’m fumbling toward something I can’t quite describe. I feel like there’s a way to ask for what I want. But I can’t figure out how to ask it, so instead I make the same mistakes over and over again. I’m so tired of making those mistakes. I’m so tired of myself.
Why did he just shut down, why did I just cheat? We were two people who could talk about art, love, and the universe, so why could we never talk about this?
I pull away from Vincent, slide off his lap, onto the hard ground, my hands splayed out behind me.
“I can’t do this,” I say. “This isn’t right.”
Vincent looks confused.
“I thought this was what you wanted.”
“I thought so too.”
Tell him everything, I think. Tell him the truth.
“This is happening too fast,” I say. I’m talking about all the Washington, DC, things Vincent has promised me. They glitter and draw me, but I don’t quite believe in them. They seem too close to the other future Vincent promised me, the one that turned out to be a figment of our imaginations.
Vincent still thinks I’m talking about sex, though, because he lets out an exasperated sigh.
“First I move too slow, then I move too fast. I don’t know what you want, Lee.”
“I don’t want to go back to being us,” I say. “I don’t want things to be the way they used to be. I don’t want sex to be something you get talked into because you’re afraid of losing me.”
Vincent sighs again and puts his T-shirt back on, which makes me realize I’m sitting on the ground in a tent in my ex-boyfriend’s backyard with my tits out.
“I’m sorry I didn’t say it in exactly the way you wanted me to say it. I’m working some stuff out, Lee. I’m trying here.”
“You’re leaving,” I say.
He gestures to the pictures on the wall, the Victorian house, the park with the fountain.
“I. Just. Said. I. Want. You. There.”
I throw my shirt back on. I don’t even bother with my bra, just crumple it up in my hand and stand up in the tent as far as I can. I’m hunched over, my neck craning down at an awkward angle.
“Then why’d you break up with me?” I ask, and before he can answer, I unzip the tent and step outside.
It wasn’t the truth that I’d intended to tell him, but it wasn’t not true either. When you put it off long enough, the truth gets too big and unwieldy to say all at once.
CHAPTER 26 Italian Luggage
Before I drive home, I check my phone again. Still no word from
Risa.
It only takes me a minute to find her on social media, where I see she’s posted a picture of the mic stand and guitar amp set up in the corner of Java Cabana for the open mic night, and the pile of shoes by her front door along with a post that says, I’m taking a poll: Is this a shoe problem?
I don’t know if she’s posted them for me or in spite of me, if she expected me to follow her, to comment on them. I almost log in to one of my dusty old accounts so I can, until I realize how embarrassing it would be if she saw me liking her two-day-old posts from an account with practically zero followers that hasn’t been updated in a year. I can’t let her see me like that.
Instead I put on my bravest face and send her a text that I hope sounds really low-key and upbeat and laid-back: Heeeey, just thinking about you! Hope you’re having a good night!
I loathe myself the second I hit send. I might as well have texted, Write to me so I don’t panic! The desperation is palpable.
When I pull into the driveway, I see Greg standing on the front porch with his suitcase. He has his phone out and is texting furiously but stops and puts his phone away once he sees me.
“Hey there,” he says when I get out of the car.
“Where’s everybody else?” I ask.
“They rented a truck and took some stuff over to your dad’s new apartment.”
“Even Max?”
“I think he said he was meeting someone named Risa. You can probably still catch them if you want to.”
So she’ll talk to him, I think. She’ll make plans with him. I imagine the two of them sitting together at Java Cabana, talking about me. In my head, Risa asks, “What’s her deal, anyway?” and imaginary Max shakes his head sadly and replies, She’s kind of a mess right now.
It’s too mortifying to consider further, so I turn my attention back to Greg.
“Are you going back to California?” I ask.
“Yeah, looks like it. I’m sorry I didn’t get to see more of you this trip, Lee.”
I cock my head to the side. “Are you?”
He’s apparently not offended by this because he laughs and says, “I was about to call a Lyft, but maybe you could drive me to the airport instead. We can have a chance to catch up.”