by Mary McCoy
“But then she picks one, and they get married,” Risa says, rolling her eyes like she’s annoyed this Bachelorette knowledge is taking up real estate in her brain.
“I hate that part,” I say. “I like to pretend that each season of The Bachelorette ends once she’s sent home all the shitty people and given roses to all the cool people. She picks everyone she likes, and then everyone cheers.”
And even though I don’t know what Risa will make of it, or whether it will freak her out, I tell her about my beautiful dream. I tell her about how I want to have adventures and travel, but also stay here. I want to learn how to run sound and make records, not just fooling around in my attic, but for real. I tell her how I want my life to be filled with love, with people I love.
And then I tell her the same words I said to Max on my front lawn, only when I say them to her, I’m not staring at the sky or covering my face with my hands.
“I don’t think being with one person works for me.” I look right at her.
When I finish, Risa doesn’t say anything. She’s looking straight ahead, her hands clamped on the steering wheel. She doesn’t say anything when she signals and turns into the parking lot of the Kwik Chek convenience store. She doesn’t say anything when she gets out of the car. I watch her walk through the front door and disappear behind the racks of chips, and I honestly don’t know if she’s planning to come back, or if she’s just going to hide out inside the store until I give up and go away.
This is what I’m about to do when Risa finally comes out of the Kwik Chek with two bags of chips and two fountain drinks, which she puts on the roof while she opens the car door.
“Do you like either of these kinds?” she asks, holding out the bags of chips.
I take the salt-and-vinegar ones from her hands and mutter a thank-you.
She hands me one of the fountain drinks. “They’re both Coke.”
“That’s fine,” I say. “That’s great.”
All I care about is that she’s back in the car and speaking to me.
“I’m sorry I stopped,” she says again as she starts the car and backs out of the parking lot. “I know we’re in a hurry.”
“Risa,” I say.
“We have to get Max.”
I say her name again. “Are you okay?”
Risa puffs out her cheeks and slowly blows out the air while she’s driving down Madison Avenue.
“The thing I like about you, Lee, is also the thing that scares the shit out of me.”
I’m clutching the chips in one hand and the soda in the other, relieved she’s talking to me again, worried I’m going to say something that screws it up.
“What’s the thing you like?” I ask.
“That you’re not sitting around waiting for anyone to give you permission to put your ideas out into the world. You just put them out there, and maybe people like them, maybe they don’t—you don’t let that stop you from being you.”
“Why does that scare the shit out of you?”
“Because you’re not who I expected to want.”
I flinch. Her words aren’t cruel, but they’re exactly the reason I couldn’t look Max in the eye when I told him. When you tell someone who you are, and they leave you sitting by yourself in the Kwik Chek parking lot, it’s hard not to feel like a disappointment.
When we stop at a red light, she finally turns and looks at me.
“My last girlfriend told me she wasn’t looking for anything serious. She told me that for six months. And every time I said anything romantic to her, or talked about the future, she’d remind me that she wasn’t looking for anything serious. Like she was keeping her options open. I don’t even know if it’s accurate to call her my ex-girlfriend.
“I didn’t really care if she dated other people. It wasn’t jealousy. It was being held at arm’s length like that that got to me, having someone set all the terms and conditions for what I was allowed to feel.”
I swallow. Except for her music, this is the most personal thing Risa’s ever shared with me.
As we pull into the parking garage, I want to convince her that I’m not the things she’s afraid I’ll be. I want to tell her that I’m not afraid of romance or seriousness, that she can be anyone she wants to be with me, that she can feel however she wants to feel.
And then, when I’m working up the nerve to say something impassioned, I notice the corners of her mouth twitching. Right in the middle of the garage, she puts the car in park and takes my hand, and looks at me with a seriousness that threatens to dissolve into giggles.
“And just when I get out of that, the next interesting person who comes along tells me she wants to configure her romantic life to look like a season of polyamorous queer Bachelorette.”
I’ve never been tremendously good at viewing myself in a comical light. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I have confessional-poet DNA running through my veins, and I made a podcast about art in my attic for two years. But I can’t help myself, and suddenly, I’m laughing too, to hear it put so simply, so bluntly. And part of me is laughing with relief because there’s no judgment in the way she says it.
“I don’t need to be put up in a mansion,” I argue. “Just my regular house is fine.”
“What about your various suitors?” Risa asks, still laughing. “What do they do while you’re off with some other person?”
“Whatever they want. With whomever they want.”
Risa’s smile fades and she goes quiet for a minute, then says, “Nobody’s going to cheer you on, you know that, right?”
“Not even you?” I ask.
We’ve been joking around, but I can tell she’s serious. The problem is, so am I. I’ve been serious about all of it, even though I knew there was a very strong chance that Risa would recoil from everything I’d said. I mean, there was nothing wrong with wanting a girlfriend who only wanted you. Lots of people wanted that. Probably most people who wanted girlfriends wanted a girlfriend like that.
“I’ll always cheer for you,” she says.
“And I’ll always cheer for you, too,” I say. “I want to be in the front row.”
“I spent the last two years playing songs in my bedroom that nobody else ever heard,” she says. “Since I met you, something feels different.”
My breath catches in my throat.
“When I see the way you make art, the way you live your life—there’s this passion in everything you do, and I want to be close to it.”
I can’t believe my luck. I can’t believe my life, I think. We’re still idling in the middle of the parking garage, but I don’t care. I lean across the seat to kiss her. She draws her hand up to my shoulder, and I’m just about to close my eyes when I realize this touch isn’t to hold me closer.
I pull away, press my back tight to the car seat, press my palms together in my lap.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I thought…”
“That’s what I’m talking about when I say that wanting you scares the shit out of me.”
She puts her hands over her face, then smooths back her hair, tucks the strands behind her ears, like she’s pulling herself back into orbit, back to herself. She puts the car in gear and circles around the garage. She drives past three empty parking spots before she finally says,
“Lee, I’m a lesbian in the Bible Belt. I just want something in my life to be easy.”
She finally pulls into a parking spot and takes the key out of the ignition, but she doesn’t move, doesn’t look at me when she says, “If what you just told me is what you want, I don’t think I can do this.”
I feel like crying, like telling her, Forget I said any of it. Never mind. I can be someone else for you.
But then I remember that I gave Vincent a version of myself like that.
It didn’t matter how much we loved each other when the whole perfect story of us was just a story. I don’t want that again. I don’t want to do that to someone else again.
Memphis may not love you back.
&n
bsp; Max’s words ring differently in my ears this time.
I think about what Sage said at the dinner table the other night, about the stress they felt during every interaction, waiting to see if the person in front of them was going to be a dick or not. Sage already knew what it felt like when Memphis didn’t love you back. Risa already knew it. Vincent and Max must know it too.
It’s been so easy for me. I don’t know how it feels to move through certain spaces, bracing yourself for the things you know can happen. I hate that so many people I care about know what that feels like. I’d always been able to move through the world like a straight person because I kept my queerness a secret. I did it because it was easier that way. Easier on the surface, at least.
The life I saw in my beautiful dream is full of art and love, but more than that, it’s a life that’s out in the world, not hiding from it.
I can’t be out in the world ignoring the parts I don’t like, nodding my head like I already understand. I can’t be out in the world putting my own reality front and center every time.
I think about the lyrics to the gospel song my dad was singing in the hallway this morning: You’ve got to live the life you sing about in your song.
If I’m going to stay in Memphis, that’s the kind of person I need to be. If I want to be out in the world, I need to step outside myself, outside my tiny corner of experience, and be all the way out in the world.
If I’m asking Risa to crank up the difficulty setting on her life, to trust that having me in her life won’t just pile more stress on her shoulders, I need to be worth it.
“I understand,” I say.
“This is hard for me, Lee. I really like you.”
“Can we do that, then?” I ask. “Can we just like each other?”
Risa tilts her head to the side and considers me for a moment. Then she takes my hand again, laces her fingers through mine and gives them a squeeze.
It feels good, just to sit there with her and not try to figure out what any of it means.
We stay like that for a minute, and then she lets go of my hand and says,
“Let’s go find Max.”
CHAPTER 34 Rhymes with Stax
My first mistake is in thinking what we’ve planned will be easy. The Memphis train station is not big. There are only two tracks, one southbound to New Orleans, one northbound to Chicago. The train to Chicago leaves once a day, always at ten thirty at night. I know the schedule by heart because it’s how Maggie and Sage and Max have always come to Memphis. Max loves buying snacks from the club car; he loves staring out the window in the observation car; he loves staying up late in one city and waking up early in another one. He loved it when he was eight, and he still loves it. I’ve been dropping them off there for years, so I know we have plenty of time to find Max moping on the platform, convince him not to leave, and bring him back to Midtown with us before the train boards. It probably won’t even be crowded.
But when we arrive at the train station, there’s no sign of him. We check the lobby, the platform, up the stairs, but it’s deserted except for a few paranoid tourists, terrified of missing their train and being stranded overnight here.
A few buskers are setting up around the station. I see an Elvis impersonator and a blues guitarist, neither of them unusual sights around downtown Memphis. But on the northbound platform, there is a band setting up unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. There are seven of them, unpacking things from a refrigerator box: a saxophone, a harmonium, a leaf blower, an instrument I’ve never seen before that looks like a mandolin with a jack-in-the-box crank on the end.
“Where else could he have gone?” Risa asks.
I consider the possibility I was wrong, that Max went somewhere else with all his luggage. But no, Max doesn’t have money for a plane ticket. What he has is an open-ended round-trip ticket back to a city he misses. I know he’s around here somewhere.
“Maybe he went to the Arcade,” I say.
The Arcade is a diner, the oldest one in Memphis. Sometimes we came to the Amtrak station early so we had time to eat there before we put Maggie, Sage, and Max on the train home. They make a sandwich called the South Main, with ham and pear and Brie cheese and Creole mustard that Max loves. I have a strong suspicion we’ll find him parked at a stool at the counter, ordering one up so his trip here won’t have been a complete waste.
“What are you going to say when you find him?” Risa asks as we race down the steps to the station lobby.
This is a very good question, one I haven’t thought about at all. I suppose I thought it would be self-explanatory. We’d show up, and he’d see us and realize that everything was fine now, because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have shown up, right? But that was assuming he wanted to see us, that he was inclined to go back with us at all.
I remember the way he told me my life was a fairy tale, the way he muttered Well, whose fault is that? when I yelled at him for ruining my life. It was my fault, and we both knew it. Maybe the message he posted was just a way to make a clean break before he left town, pretended the last week had never happened, and wrote me off forever.
“This is a mistake,” I say as we open the door to the Arcade and go under a sign that reads, THROUGH THESE DOORS PASS THE GREATEST PEOPLE ON EARTH: OUR CUSTOMERS.
“Why?”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to see me,” I say. “That’s why he left.”
Risa and I scan the restaurant, but there’s no sign of Max at the counter or in the booths.
“He left because he was ashamed, Lee.”
“Ashamed of what? I’m the one who should be ashamed.”
“He fucked up something that was important to you.”
“So what.” I say it like a fact, not a question.
“So what?”
“Seriously, so what. I’ll make another one. The work has already been done,” I say, quoting Man Ray, though I don’t stop to clarify that point, not after I’ve already subjected Risa to my treatise on The Bachelorette. “What I mean is, he means more.”
“Tell him that,” Risa says.
I take out my phone for the fifth time in ten minutes, but there’s still no reply to the text I sent Max an hour ago: Where did you go? I’m worried.
“Can you try texting him?” I ask. “Maybe he’ll write back to you.”
Risa snorts. “I already did, half an hour ago. Nothing.”
We look around the Arcade one last time, then go back to the train station, where the scene has changed dramatically. Fifteen minutes ago, the station was deserted, but now the train has arrived, and all kinds of specifically Memphis pilgrims have come off it. The Beale Street blues fans, the Elvis nuts, the people in Redbirds jerseys in town for tomorrow’s baseball game against New Orleans. The retired couples with their knee socks and khaki shorts and reservations on a Mississippi River steamboat cruise.
The buskers strike up B.B. King–style blues and Elvis ballads as a bridal party streams across the platform, all the bridesmaids carrying their high heels by the ankle straps. The groomsmen have their ties undone and shirts untucked, and the bride and groom are sharing a beer concealed in a paper bag.
Risa and I fight our way through the crowd to the platform and see that the train has started boarding. For all we know, Max is already on the train.
I turn around and see an older white woman wearing a wig that’s a waterfall of auburn curls and a red hat with a wide brim. She’s leaning against one of the pillars, posing dramatically with a cigarette holder between her fingers, though there is no cigarette in it. She seems like a person who’d notice Max.
“Excuse me,” I say, “we’re looking for somebody.”
“What does he look like, baby?” she asks in that Southern way, where people call you sweetie, baby, and darling all the time, and sometimes it’s awful, and sometimes it’s nice. When this lady says it, it’s nice.
“Like a postapocalyptic rogue I picked up at the club,” I say.
She adjusts her wig under
the red hat, points down toward the end of the platform, and says, “I saw a young man in black patent leather boots board over there. Does that sound like him?”
Before I can hug her, she strikes a film-noir pose and pretends to take a drag off her cigarette holder with no cigarette in it, so instead I thank her, and Risa and I run over to the train car where Max allegedly boarded.
When we get to the front of the line, the attendant asks for our tickets.
“We don’t have tickets,” Risa explains. “We just need to get on for a second.”
“I can’t let you on without a ticket,” she says.
“We’re looking for our friend,” I say.
The attendant looks at us like she’s shocked we don’t understand how the world works.
“And I can’t let you on without a ticket.”
We fall back from the line. I start to pace up and down the platform. I look up to the train’s upper-level passenger cars, where I know Max likes to sit, cup my hand around my mouth, and call his name.
Risa joins me, and together we pace up and down the platform calling out his name. Over all the noise on the platform and the sound of the train, I’m not even sure he can hear us. He probably has his earbuds in. Maybe he’s seen our texts and ignored them. Maybe he has no interest in being rescued by two people who care about him.
Because this is what it’s about, I realize. I’m chasing Max to the train station because I love him, because I want him around, because I don’t care if he posted our podcast. Max Lozada is too lovable to be on the periphery of anyone’s life, and I’m chasing him to a train station because he’s worth chasing to a train station.
Suddenly, our voices are drowned out by a burst of feedback followed by the squawk of a saxophone. I turn around to see that the seven-piece band with the leaf blower is tuning up. They are curved in a semicircle around the refrigerator box, a woman on the saxophone and two more on drums and bass. There’s a man blowing into the harmonium, and another fiddling with the knobs on his portable amplifier, strumming chords on the guitar until it sounds how he wants it to sound. I see someone else holding the instrument that looks like a steampunk mandolin with a crank on the end. He gives the crank a furious twist, and it makes a sound like a violin mixed with an accordion. I don’t know what the seventh member of the band is going to do. Maybe he’s supposed to play the leaf blower.