by Jandy Nelson
Joe nods, mollified by that, but he’s still looking at me and Toby and back again with suspicion. It’s as if someone hit the dimmer switch and turned down his whole being.
Toby stands up. “I need to get home.” He crosses the room, his carriage slumped, his gait awkward, uncertain. “Good seeing you again,” he mumbles at Joe. “I’ll see you soon, Len.” He slips past us, sad as rain, and I feel terrible. My heart follows after him a few paces, but then it ricochets back to Joe, who stands before me without a trace of death anywhere on him.
“Lennie, is there—”
I have a pretty good idea what Joe is about to ask and so I do the only thing I can think of to stop the question from coming out of his mouth: I kiss him. I mean really kiss him, like I’ve wanted to do since that very first day in band. No sweet soft peck about it. With the same lips that just kissed someone else, I kiss away his question, his suspicion, and after a while, I kiss away the someone else too, the something else that almost just happened, until it is only the two of us, Joe and me, in the room, in the world, in my crazy swelling heart.
Holy horses.
I put aside for a moment the fact that I’ve turned into a total strumpet-harlot-trollop-wench-jezebel-tart-harridan-chippy-nymphet because I’ve just realized something incredible. This is it – what all the hoopla is about, what Wuthering Heights is about – it all boils down to this feeling rushing through me in this moment with Joe as our mouths refuse to part. Who knew all this time I was one kiss away from being Cathy and Juliet and Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Chatterley!?
Years ago, I was crashed in Gram’s garden and Big asked me what I was doing. I told him I was looking up at the sky. He said, “That’s a misconception, Lennie, the sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.”
Kissing Joe, I believe this, for the first time in my life.
I feel delirious, Joelirious, I think as I pull away for a moment, and open my eyes to see that the Joe Fontaine dimmer switch has been cranked back up again and that he is Joelirious too.
“That was—” I can hardly form words.
“Incredible,” he interrupts. “Totally incroyable.”
We’re staring at each other, stunned.
“Sure,” I say, suddenly remembering he invited me over tonight.
“Sure what?” He looks at me like I’m speaking Swahili, then smiles and puts his arms around me, says, “Ready?” He lifts me off my feet and spins me around and I am suddenly in the dorkiest movie ever, laughing and feeling a happiness so huge I am ashamed to be feeling it in a world without my sister.
“Sure, I’ll come over tonight,” I say as everything stops spinning and I land back on my own two feet.
What's wrong, Lennie?
Nothing.
Tell me.
No
C'mon, spill it.
Okay. It's just that you're different now.
How?
Like Zombieville.
I'm in love, Len — I've never felt like this before.
Like what?
Like forever.
Forever?
Yeah. This is it. He's it.
How do you know?
My toes told me. The toes knows
(Found on a napkin stuffed in a mug, Cecilia’s Bakery)
I’m going over to Joe’s,” I say to Gram and Big, who are both home now, camped out in the kitchen, listening to a baseball game on the radio, circa 1930.
“That sounds like a plan,” Gram says. She’s taken the still despairing Lennie houseplant out from under the pyramid and is sitting beside it at the table, singing to it softly, something about greener pastures. “I’ll just freshen up and get my bag, sweet pea.”
She can’t be serious.
“I’ll go too,” says Big, who is hunched over a crossword puzzle. He’s the fastest puzzler in all Christendom. I look over and note, however, that this time he’s putting numbers in the boxes instead of letters. “As soon as I finish this, we can all head up to the Fontaines’.”
“Uh, I don’t think so,” I say.
They both look up at me, incredulous.
Big says, “What do you mean, Len, he’s here every single morning, it’s only fair that—”
And then he can’t keep it up anymore and bursts out laughing, as does Gram. I’m relieved. I had actually started to imagine trucking up the hill with Gram and Big in tow: the Munsters follow Marilyn on a date.
“Why, Big, she’s all dressed up. And her hair’s down. Look at her.” This is a problem. I was going for the short flowery dress and heels and lipstick and wild hair look that no one would notice is any different from the jeans, ponytail, and no makeup look I’ve mastered every other day of my life. I know I’m blushing, also know I better get out of the house before I run back upstairs and challenge Bailey’s Guinness-Book-of-Changing-Clothes-Before-a-Date record of thirty-seven outfits. This was only my eighteenth, but clothes-changing is an exponential activity, the frenzy only builds, it’s a law of nature. Even St Anthony peering at me from the nightstand, reminding me of what I’d found in the drawer last night, couldn’t snap me out of it. I’d remembered something about him though. He was like Bailey, charismatic as anything. He had to give his sermons in marketplaces because he overflowed even the largest of churches. When he died all the church bells in Padua rang of their own accord. Everyone thought angels had come to earth.
“Goodbye, you guys,” I say to Gram and Big, and head for the door.
“Have fun, Len … and not too late, okay?”
I nod, and am off on the first real date of my life. The other nights I’ve had with boys don’t count, not the ones with Toby I’m actively trying not to think about, and definitely not the parties, after which I’d spent the next day, week, month, year thinking of ways to get my kisses back. Nothing has been like this, nothing has made me feel like I do right now walking up the hill to Joe’s, like I have a window in my chest where sunlight is pouring in.
When
Joe
plays
his
horn
I
fall
out
of
my
chair
and
onto
my
knees
when
he
plays
all
the
flowers
swap
colors
and
years
and
decades
and
centuries
of
rain
pour
back
into
the
sky
(Found on the bathroom wall, music room, Clover High)
The feeling I had earlier today with Joe in The Sanctum overwhelms me the moment I see him sitting on the stoop of the big white house playing his guitar. He’s bent over it, singing softly, and the wind is carrying his words through the air like fluttering leaves.
“Hey, John Lennon,” he says, putting aside his guitar, standing up and jumping off the front step. “Uh-oh. You look vachement amazing. Too good to be alone with me all night long.”
He’s practically leaping over. His delight quotient mesmerizes me. At the human factory, someone must have messed up and just slipped him more than the rest of us. “I’ve been thinking about a duet we could do. I just need to rearrange—”
I’m not listening anymore. I hope he just keeps talking up a storm, because I can’t utter a word. I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.
“You okay?” he asks. His hands are on either side of my arms and he’s peering into my face.
“Yes.” I’m wondering how people breathe in these situations. “I’m fine.”
“You are fine,” he says, looking me over lik
e a major dork, which immediately snaps me out of my love spell.
“Ugh, quel dork,” I say, pushing him away.
He laughs and slips his arm around my shoulders. “C’mon, you enter Maison Fontaine at your own risk.”
The first thing I notice about Maison Fontaine is that the phone is ringing and Joe doesn’t seem to notice. I hear a girl’s voice on an answering machine far away in another room and think for a minute it sounds like Rachel before deciding it doesn’t. The second thing I notice is how opposite this house is to Maison Walker. Our house looks like Hobbits live there. The ceilings are low, the wood is dark and gnarly, colorful rag rugs line the floors, paintings, the walls, whereas Joe’s house floats high in the sky with the clouds. There are windows everywhere that reveal sunburned fields swimming in the wind, dark green woods that cloister the river and the river itself as it wends from town to town in the distance. There are no tables piled with weeks of mail, shoes kicked around under furniture, books open on every surface. Joe lives in a museum. Hanging all over the walls are gorgeous guitars of every color, shape and size. They look so animate, like they could make music all by themselves.
“Pretty cool, huh? My dad makes amazing instruments. Not just guitars either. Mandolins, lutes, dulcimers,” he says as I ogle one and then the next.
And now for something completely different: Joe’s room. The physical manifestation of chaos theory. It’s overflowing with instruments I’ve never seen before and can’t even imagine what kind of sound they’d make, CDs, music magazines, library books in French and English, concert posters of French bands I’ve never heard of, comic books, notebooks with tiny boxlike weirdo boy writing in them, sheets of music, stereo equipment unplugged and plugged, broken-open amps and other sound equipment I don’t recognize, odd rubber animals, bowls of blue marbles, decks of cards, piles of clothes as high as my knee, not to mention the dishes, bottles, glasses … and over his desk a small poster of John Lennon.
“Hmm,” I say, pointing to the poster. I look around, taking it all in. “I think your room is giving me new insight into Joe Fontaine aka freaking madman.”
“Yeah, thought it best to wait to show you the bombroom until…”
“Until what?”
“I don’t know, until you realized…”
“Realized what?”
“I don’t know, Lennie.” I can see he’s embarrassed. Somehow things have turned uncomfortable.
“Tell me,” I say. “Wait until I realized what?”
“Nothing, it’s stupid.” He looks down at his feet, then back up at me. Bat. Bat. Bat.
“I want to know,” I say.
“Okay, I’ll say it: wait until you realized that maybe you liked me too.”
The flower is blooming again in my chest, this time three seconds from bud to showstopper.
“I do,” I say, and then without thinking, add, “A lot.” What’s gotten into me? Now I really can’t breathe. A situation made worse by the lips that are suddenly pressing into mine.
Our tongues have fallen madly in love and gotten married and moved to Paris.
After I’m sure I’ve made up for all my former years of kisslessness, I say, “I think if we don’t stop kissing, the world is going to explode.”
“Seems like it,” he whispers. He’s staring dreamily into my eyes. Heathcliff and Cathy have nothing on us. “We can do something else for a while,” he says. “If you want…” He smiles. And then: Bat. Bat. Bat. I wonder if I am going to survive the night.
“Want to play?” he asks.
“I do,” I tell him, “but I didn’t bring my instrument.”
“I’ll get one.” He leaves the room, which gives me a chance to recover, and unfortunately, to think about what happened with Toby earlier. How scary and out of control it was today, like we were trying to break each other apart. But why? To find Bailey? To wrench her from the other’s heart? The other’s body? Or was it something worse? Were we trying to forget her, to wipe out her memory for one passionate moment? But no, it’s not that, it can’t be, can it? When we’re together, Bailey’s all around us like air we can breathe; that’s been the comfort until today, until it got so out of hand. I don’t know. The only thing I do know is that it’s all about her, because even now if I imagine Toby alone with his heartache while I am here with Joe obliterating my own, I feel guilty, like I’ve abandoned him, and with him, my grief, and with my grief, my sister.
The phone rings again and it mercifully ejects me from these thoughts, and crash-lands me back into the bombroom – this room where Joe sleeps in this unmade bed and reads these books strewn everywhere and drinks out of these five hundred half-full glasses seemingly at once. I feel giddy with the intimacy of being where he thinks and dreams, where he changes his clothes and flings them absolutely all over the place, where he’s naked. Joe, naked. The thought of it, him, all of him – guh. I’ve never even seen a real live guy totally naked, ever. Only some Internet porn Sarah and I devoured for a while. That’s it. I’ve always been scared of seeing all, seeing it. The first time Sarah saw one hard, she said more animal names came flying out of her mouth in that one moment than all other moments in her life combined. Not animals you’d think either. No pythons and eels. According to her it was a full-on menagerie: hippos, elephants, orangutans, tapirs, gazelles, etc.
All of a sudden I’m walloped with missing her. How could I be in Joe Fontaine’s freaking bedroom without her knowing? How could I have blown her off like this? I take out my phone, text: Call back the search party. Please. Forgive.
I look around again, curbing all impulses to go through drawers, peek under the bed, read the notebook lying open at my feet. Okay, I curb two out of three of those impulses. It’s been a bad day for morality. And it’s not really reading someone’s journal if it’s open and you can glance down and make out your name, well, your name to him, in a sentence that says…
I bend my knees, and without touching the notebook in any way, read just the bit around the initials JL. I’ve never met anyone as heartbroken as JL, I want to make her feel better, want to be around her all the time, it’s crazy, it’s like she’s on full blast, and everyone else is just on mute, and she’s honest, so honest, nothing like Genevieve, nothing at all like Genevieve… I hear his steps in the hall, stand up. The phone is ringing yet again.
He comes back with two clarinets, a B flat and a bass, holds them up. I go for the soprano like I’m used to.
“What’s the deal with the phone?” I say, instead of saying Who’s Genevieve? Instead of falling to my knees and confessing that I’m anything but honest, that I’m probably just exactly like Genevieve, whoever she is, but without the exotic French part.
He shrugs. “We get a lot of calls,” he says, then begins his tuning ritual that makes everything in the world but him and a handful of chords disappear.
The untapped duet of guitar and clarinet is awkward at first. We stumble around in sound, fall over each other, look up embarrassed, try again. But after a while, we begin to click and when we don’t know where the other is going, we lock eyes and listen so intently that for fleeting moments it’s like our souls are talking. One time after I improvise alone for a while, he exclaims, “Your tone is awesome, so, so lonely, like, I don’t know, a day without birds or something,” but I don’t feel lonely at all. I feel like Bailey is listening.
“Well, you’re no different late at night, exactly the same John Lennon.” We’re sitting on the grass, drinking some wine Joe swiped from his father. The front door is open and a French chanteuse is blasting out of it into the warm night. We’re swigging out of the bottle and eating cheese and a baguette. I’m finally in France with Joe, I think, and it makes me smile.
“What?” he asks.
“I don’t know. This is nice. I’ve never drunk wine before.”
“I have my whole life. My dad mixed it with water for us when we were little.”
“Really? Drunken little Fontaine boys running into walls?”
<
br /> He laughs. “Yup, exactly. That’s my theory of why French children are so well behaved. They’re drunk off their petits mignons asses most of the time.” He tips the bottle and takes a sip, passes it to me.
“Are both your parents French?”
“Dad is, born and raised in Paris. My mom’s from around here originally. But Dad makes up for it, he’s Central Casting French.” There’s a bitterness in his voice, but I don’t pursue it. I’ve only just recovered from the consequences of my snooping, have almost forgotten about Genevieve and the importance of honesty to Joe, when he says, “Ever been in love?” He’s lying on his back, looking up at a sky reeling with stars.
I don’t holler, Yes, right now, with you, stupid, like I suddenly want to, but say, “No. I’ve never been anything.”
He gets up on one elbow, looks over at me. “What do you mean?”
I sit, hugging my knees, looking out at the spattering of lights down in the valley.
“It’s like I was sleeping or something, happy, but sleeping, for seventeen years, and then Bailey died…” The wine has made it easier to talk but I don’t know if I’m making any sense. I look over at Joe. He’s listening to me so carefully, like he wants to catch my words in his hands as they fall from my lips.
“And now?”
“Well, now I don’t know. I feel so different.” I pick up a pebble and toss it into the darkness. I think how things used to be: predictable, sensible. How I used to be the same. I think how there is no inevitability, how there never was, I just didn’t know it then. “I’m awake, I guess, and maybe that’s good, but it’s more complicated than that because now I’m someone who knows the worst thing can happen at any time.”
Joe’s nodding like I’m making sense, which is good, because I have no idea what I just said. I know what I meant though. I meant that I know now how close death is. How it lurks. And who wants to know that? Who wants to know we are just one carefree breath away from the end? Who wants to know that the person you love and need the most can just vanish forever?