Love in Many Languages

by Jamie Bennett

  “Hey, Ione,” Cooper said as he came over. “I didn’t know you’d be here tonight.”

  “Digger invited me,” I said, and pointed at him. Then I just stood there, looking at Cooper, and his friend Digger pulled his head out of my car’s engine.

  “Coop!” he yelled. The two of them did a weird man hug and talked for a minute, slapping each other on the backs. Then they both went back to looking at my car.

  I wandered back through the house to the yard and found a seat on the deck. I hadn’t been expecting to see Cooper here, although it made total sense. I sat and looked at the stars, wishing that all those people hadn’t been clustered around my car so that I could have taken it and driven home.

  A man sat down next to me, the same one who had opened the door when I arrived, and handed me a beer. “Thanks.” I nodded at him.

  “I’m Ash,” he told me.

  “Ione.”

  He reached over and clinked his bottle to mine. “How do you know Dig?”

  “He fixed my car. He’s friends with an acquaintance of mine. Digger invited me tonight because he felt sorry for me, because I’m really interested in that acquaintance, but the acquaintance doesn’t feel the same way about me.”

  “Welcome to the club. I’m the current president of the board.”

  I turned to look at Ash. “What?”

  “See that woman over there? The little redhead?” He gestured with his beer bottle at a woman talking to Digger’s wife, Rebecca. “That’s Tracey. She won’t give me the time of day.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed heavily. “A lot of reasons. She got out of rehab a while ago and I was trying to let her have some space to figure things out for herself. But I gave her too much space, I think, so she started up with someone else. Also, I’m a cop.”

  “Yes? So?”

  “Well, Tracey seems to think it disqualifies me based on some of the things she’s done in her past. I don’t give a shit, because that’s over now, but she cares.” He sighed again. “And that’s the latest recap from the Lonely-Hearts Club. What about you?”

  “Are you asking why isn’t Cooper interested in me?” I had thought about it a lot. “He says that he doesn’t have time for a relationship. He broke up with someone, also, not too long ago. But I think that it has a lot to do with me not being smart enough.”

  “You don’t think you’re smart?”

  “I’m not school smart. I am in other ways, with art and with people, but not with school.”

  “If that’s his hang-up, he’s an asshole,” Ash told me.

  “He isn’t an asshole. He’s kind of awkward at first, but he’s not an asshole.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what it is, not totally. Sometimes people do it for you, but I don’t do it for him, I guess.”

  “I bet it has nothing to do with you and it’s all about him.”

  Now it was my turn to sigh.

  “Stay right here,” Ash said. “I’m going to get another beer.” When he came back, he told me a funny story about when he was a rookie police officer on what he had thought was a bust at an after-hours bar, but turned out to be a very elaborate prank on him by the other guys. He made me laugh pretty hard.

  “Someone is looking your way over at ten o’clock. White male, approximately six feet three inches tall, early thirties. Dark hair, kind of pissed off?”

  “That’s him. Cooper.” I looked up too, and indeed he was staring over at us. Then he was walking over to us, also.

  “Hi, Ione.”

  “Hi.” We just looked at each other.

  Ash stood up and rolled out his neck. “Ione and I were just leaving. See you later.” He took my hand and pulled me along with him as we walked toward the house.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Ash, glancing over my shoulder at Cooper.

  “Let him ponder that some. Let’s give Tracey something to think about, too.” So we hung out together for the rest of the night, and I had a lot of fun with him. Both of us tried to ignore the two people who were so much on our minds and it worked, in a way. By the end of the night I was glad that I had come. I said goodbye to Digger and his wife, and Ash walked me to my car, where he hugged me and told me he was pretty sure things were going to work out for me. I thought the same for him, because I had watched the woman’s, Tracey’s, eyes on him as he spent his evening with me.

  I hadn’t said goodbye to Cooper. His car wasn’t parked on the street anymore, but I hadn’t seen him leave.

  ∞

  Fox had told me that he was having people over, and there was in fact a giant crowd at my house when I got back from Digger’s. Music was pouring out of the open windows and I could hear people yelling. Sania would be over shortly, if I was any judge. As I went up the steps, a woman ran out the front door and threw up into the bushes.

  “Fox!” I yelled when I went in. He was nowhere to be found, but there were so many people there, it was hard to spot him.

  “Fox!” I pounded up the stairs. The door to the green bedroom was closed and I knocked on it. “Corrie? I’m looking for Fox. Have you seen him?”

  Fox himself opened the door. He didn’t have a shirt on, his shorts were undone and gaping open, and he was breathing hard. I stared at him for a moment.

  “What are you doing in here?” I pushed the door and it swung open wider. Corrie sat up in the bed, staring back at me. “Fox, what in the hell are you doing?”

  “She invited me in,” he said, smirking.

  “You know she’s underage!”

  “She says she’s eighteen.”

  “You know that’s a lie. Fox! She was in an abusive relationship. We talked about this.” I shook my head. I couldn’t understand.

  “Ione, it’s ok,” Corrie said from the bed. It was hard to hear her over the screaming downstairs.

  “Get everybody out of the house,” I told him. “You and I have to talk.”

  “No, I don’t have to do that. I’m not making anyone leave and I don’t have anything to say to you,” Fox informed me. Corrie got out of bed and started pulling on clothes.

  My mouth dropped open. “Why are you acting like this?” I asked him. “I thought we were friends!”

  “Friends? We’re not friends.” Corrie pushed past me and ran down the stairs as he spoke. “I’ve been living here for years, years, and you never noticed. You never goddamn notice!” he seethed.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, dumfounded. “Notice what?”

  “How I feel about you, Ione!”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been in love with you all this time, but you’re too blind to see it. You don’t see me, you don’t see the people using you for a party house, you don’t see them stealing your fucking furniture! You’re so busy not looking at the ‘external’ that you don’t notice what’s happening in front of your face.” His chest heaved but his voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Your beautiful, perfect face.”

  “Fox—”

  He stepped back into the bedroom and shut the door, leaving me standing alone in the hallway.

  Chapter 7

  “Ione, kikoemasuka?”

  I looked up at Gin.

  “Can you hear me?” he repeated.

  “Hai. Yes,” I answered.

  The class laughed softly. “I’m asking you to repeat after me,” Gin prompted.

  “Kikoemasuka?” I said, and then he moved on to someone else.

  A piece of paper appeared on my desk, with Cooper’s square handwriting on it. “Are you all right?”

  I looked up at him and nodded. Then I swallowed hard, and nodded even harder.

  Corrie hadn’t been back since Fox and I had argued on Friday night. Her belongings had been scattered around the green bedroom so I had picked them all up and stored everything in my studio. I thought she might come back to get her stuff like she had from the house off Seven Mile Road, and I hoped I was there when she did.

  Another note slid over. “What’s wrong?”

&nb
sp; “Nothing,” I wrote back. “I’m fine.” I saw Cooper looking at the paper for a while, trying to read what I had written. I hadn’t bothered to try to be neat.

  Fox and I had made up. We had to—he had been there for so long, so many years. I had gone and knocked on his door on Saturday evening and asked him to come down for dinner, which I had cooked in the new pots and pans I bought. We talked for a long, long time.

  I could feel Cooper’s eyes on me. I ignored them and tried to write down what Gin was saying. I realized I was writing on my birthday. I couldn’t find my notebook, the one that I had gotten to use just for this class. I rubbed my forehead angrily. Why did I do that? Now it was gone, all the notes I had carefully copied from Cooper, all the homework I had done with Gin’s praise written in the margins. He really thought I had done a good job, it wasn’t just because he wanted to—

  Never mind. I looked at the board and wrote down more questions across the calendar lines that I had left open to plan fun things for my birthday. Gin didn’t call on me again, but he did come back to Cooper a few times. At the end of class, Gin tried to signal to me to come to talk to him but I hurried out, going back to my car as fast as I could.

  “Ione!”

  At first, I didn’t stop for Cooper either, but then I told myself that it was silly. We were school acquaintances, after all.

  “Hey.” He caught up and slowly I turned back to face him. “Are you not feeling well or something?” he asked. “Despite what I think your note said, you don’t seem fine. And you know, it’s scientifically proven that it’s better for a person to have an open heart.” He gave me a half-smile. “I wish you would tell me what’s bothering you.”

  I sighed. He was right, of course. “Well, there are a few things. For one, I’m worried about my friend Corrie, the girl who’s staying with me,” I said. “I haven’t seen her since Friday night. I think she’s a runaway and she’s on her own somewhere, and she has a bad boyfriend.”

  “Oh. Have you called her?”

  “Yes. Her number isn’t working. No, I don’t even think she gave me a real number. I’m very concerned that she went back to this guy and he’s going to hurt her.”

  Cooper shook his head. “Can I help you look?”

  “What?” I threw up my hands. “This is a big city! She could be anywhere.” But that was a better idea than sitting, fretting, in my house and suddenly I wanted to try. “You know, you’re right, I better go try to find her. Bye.”

  “Hang on, wait a second.” He reached out and took my arm. “Where are you going?”

  “I know she was staying with her boyfriend off Seven Mile, so I’m going to look there. And she mentioned hanging out in an abandoned house near Chandler Park. I’ll go there, too.” I started to hurry off toward my car but Cooper kept his hold on my arm.

  “I don’t think you should go to either of those places, especially not in the dark. I’ll look with you tomorrow if you want, but I don’t want you to go alone.”

  “Tomorrow you’ll be at work,” I reminded him, and then remembered that so would I, for that matter.

  “We can go at lunch. Seriously, can you wait until then?”

  I nodded slowly. “You really want to go with me?”

  “Yes. What else? You said there were a few things. Where’s your car?”

  I pointed and he started down the block, pulling me gently along with him. “Why, Cooper? Why are you asking? Why are you walking with me? Why would you go with me to find Corrie?”

  “Because you did me a very good turn, and the least I can do is walk you to your car. And stop you from doing things that I don’t think are safe, like going to abandoned houses at night. Right? So what else?”

  “Fox.”

  “Your roommate? What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s not just my roommate now. We’re trying out dating.”

  Cooper was silent. “Oh,” he said finally. “That’s probably very convenient, since he’s already living in your house.”

  “It turns out that all along he’s had these feelings for me, and I really didn’t know. I mean, I thought he loved me, but like, as a sister?”

  “Yeah. Even I, who can’t read people, could have told you that it wasn’t familial love that he felt for you. Remember how I thought he was your boyfriend?”

  “Well, now he is,” I said resolutely. Why not? It was quite convenient, as Cooper had pointed out. I knew that Fox and I got along; we had been living together for years. Other women found him to be very attractive, as I could tell by the endless stream of companionship he’d had ever since he had moved in. Over the dinner I had cooked that weekend, he had presented a long string of arguments why we should be together, and they made a lot of sense. So why not?

  “I thought maybe you’d be going out with that friend of Digger’s,” Cooper remarked. “The guy you hung out with at the party.”

  “Ash? Yeah, I liked him a lot.” I stopped, looking for my keys. I had definitely come with them because my car was right in front of us, so I knew that they had to be somewhere. Finally I fished them out of where I had tied them in a pouch I’d made in the back of my skirt and unlocked the car door.

  “Digger told me that he made this safe for you,” Cooper said, patting the top of the car. “He also told me how you happened to buy it, that you were knocking on strangers’ doors in a rainstorm?”

  “Wasn’t it a lucky day for me?”

  He nodded. “Lucky someone didn’t…yes, very lucky.”

  I got into the car. “See you.”

  “Wait a minute, tell me the address of your office.” I did, and he said, “I’ll come by tomorrow at noon. Don’t go out looking tonight, all right?”

  “She might have even come back home already. If she’s there, I’ll text you, so you don’t have to come see me.”

  Cooper didn’t answer as I started the car, which happened immediately now without any work at all on my part, and pulled away from the curb.

  My house was oddly quiet, no one hanging out in any of the rooms. “Hi,” Fox called from the kitchen. He came out and kissed me, right on the mouth.

  I jerked my head away in shock. “Sorry, you just surprised me,” I explained. “Hi.” I leaned and kissed him back, a quick peck.

  “I made dinner. I thought you probably hadn’t eaten before class.”

  “Wow, you did? Thanks.” I hadn’t had dinner, or maybe lunch, now that I thought about it. Maybe that was why I was feeling so down, so sad. I followed Fox into the kitchen. “Did you kick everyone out of here again?”

  “I did. I thought it would be nice to be just the two of us.”

  It was. We had a lot of fun eating and talking, just like we used to do. Fox told me about his latest work assignment, rewriting the webpage content for an advertising company. “I sent an email to all the executives and board members,” he explained, “asking for basic information about their education and interests so I could do little write-ups for the website. Not one of them sent back anything less than a page. One included a fifteen-sentence paragraph on how his major interest is ‘mindfulness.’ I have to figure out how to get it all down to a tiny blurb without pissing everyone off.”

  He made me laugh, and made me remember why we had been friends to start with. Maybe he would be a good boyfriend. I already felt totally comfortable and at ease with him. I tried to listen to what my heart was telling me but I still had so much sadness in there, it was hard to hear it.

  I cleaned up while Fox smoked on the back porch. I washed the new pots and pans I had bought and also the silverware that we had accumulated when people left it at the house. That made me think of Corrie’s belongings, stored away in my room.

  “Fox?” I called, and he stuck his head in the back door and smiled at me. “Have you heard from Corrie?”

  He lost the smile. “No. She’s probably gone for good.”

  “Why did you mess around with her again?” I asked him.

  “I don’t want to talk about her, Io
ne.” He was staring hard at his cigarette.

  “But you and I had discussed how she was off-limits. Then you were back in the bedroom with her. Why?” I had asked him before, but he just changed the subject. “Why won’t you tell me?”

  “Can we not?” He blew out a mouthful of smoke. “She was there, I was there, we were both interested. What was the big deal?” That was what he had said to me before, too, that it wasn’t a big deal.

  “The big deal was that I told you to leave her alone. And you didn’t.”

  “Well, it got your attention, didn’t it?” His smile came back. “It made you see that you were into me, too.”

  “That was why you were with her?” I stared at him. “Fox, that’s terrible!”

  “No, of course that’s not why I was with her. I’m just saying, it worked out for us in the end. Right? Hang on.” He stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray he kept on the porch and came in, closing the door behind himself. “Let’s go upstairs to bed.”

  “Oh. I’m still not going to have sex with you,” I told him.

  “Why not?” He maneuvered closer to me, bumping his hips with mine.

  “I still need a little more time to work this out between us, ok?”

  Fox nodded. “I get it. You want the courting first. Sure.” He had brought me flowers. More endearingly, he had cleaned the bathroom again.

  “Yeah, I guess I do need more courting. More like I need to change my mindset. I’ve been thinking of you just as a friend, like, a brother or something, for a long time.”

  He made a horrible face. “No, I’m not like your brother. Not at all. But I get it.” He leaned forward to kiss me.

  I pulled back. “Cigarettes!” I hated the smell on him even when I wasn’t supposed to put my mouth on his.

  “Ok, sorry.” Fox smiled at me again. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Good night.”

  I took a while longer to clean up downstairs, carefully wiping the countertops, washing the windows. One of the panes in the living room had a large new crack running across it, and when I touched it with the pad of my finger, I cut myself. Damn! I stuck my finger in my mouth and as I did, I heard the roar of a motorcycle. I watched through the cracked window as it came down my street and began to slow as it approached my house.