Circle of Three

by Patricia Gaffney

  “Maybe I gave you the wrong impression,” I conceded with reluctance. “I’m not interested in a romantic relationship.”

  “It’s too soon.” He nodded understandingly.

  “No—ever. I’m just not interested. Sorry.” I’d have added more, softened the blow, blamed myself—the art of breaking up was coming back to me fast—but I was still so angry. Even “Sorry” came out through my teeth.

  Something passed over his face too quickly to read. Anger? Hurt? But he said, “Okay,” and grinned some more, buttoning his sport coat, poise regained. “I’ve got it. You don’t have to hit me over the head twice.”

  I wanted to hit him over the head once. “It’s late. Sorry for the misunderstanding.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he said, forgiving me. “Dating’s a tricky business nowadays, huh? You know what we should do? A course on the war between the sexes. Heh?” I froze when he seized my upper arm and gave it a tight, cordial squeeze, passing me in the doorway. On the porch, he turned back. “Well, Care—”

  “’Night,” I said, and closed the door in his friendly face.

  In bed, I went over it again, egged on by insomnia from the two cups of coffee I’d stupidly drunk after dinner. The only good thing about the way the evening ended was that Ruth hadn’t witnessed it. I hoped. I’d tiptoed upstairs as soon as Brian left and peeked into her dark, silent room—silent except for soft snoring. Which she could’ve been faking. But I didn’t think so. I prayed not. Literally: God, please, please let her be really asleep, bent low over the messy, cluttered bed, scrutinizing the slow rise and fall of the blanket on her shoulder. “Are you awake?” I whispered. Her delicate eyelids may have fluttered, but it was hard to tell in the dark. I put a soft kiss on her cheekbone. “Love you,” I murmured, and slipped out.

  Anyway, I consoled myself, the very worst that could’ve happened was that she was feigning sleep and she’d seen everything—why would that be so terrible? Embarrassing and undignified, yucky, all that, yes, but if she had seen it, then she’d know once and for all that I wasn’t interested in Brian Wright. That should be a relief, not a trauma. In fact, maybe (looking on the brightest possible side) it had all happened for the best. A minor humiliation for Ruth’s peace of mind—a good mother would gladly make that trade.

  Small consolation at 2 A.M., when I was still tossing and turning. Where exactly had the evening gone wrong? Brian was a jerk, I made no excuses for him, but I must’ve done something, unconscious or not, to make him think behaving like a jerk might pay off. What, though? I’d never invited him in, so it wasn’t that. Some body language maneuver, maybe, around the time he helped me take off my coat. Nothing came to mind, though, no accidental flash of skin or inadvertent intimate contact. No, it had to be that I was just irresistible. I drove men insane.

  That moment of hesitation with Brian, that second when I couldn’t answer his “Why not?” question—at least I knew what that was about. Curiosity. I’d wanted to experiment, find out what I was like with a man who wasn’t Jess and wasn’t Stephen. That was why it was so hard to make Brian the villain, even though he deserved to be—because off and on tonight, I’d been comparing him to the other men in my life. My two passions. What if Brian had taken my breath away? It might’ve changed everything. So my reasoning had gone.

  Well, now I had the answer. Imagine making love with Brian—no, no, I didn’t want to, it would be like sleeping with a Saint Bernard, a Great Dane, one of those breeds that slobbered on you. Sleeping with Stephen had been like…like sleeping with a computer. A very solicitous, efficient computer, though, one that was programmed to satisfy. Physically. I’d had no legitimate complaints—as he’d often assured me. But somehow our sex life had become detached from our regular life. At the end it wasn’t an extension of anything, not an expression of closeness or love, it was just itself. It bored me to tears. Literally.

  I got up and took a sleeping pill. I still had a few left—the doctor prescribed them after Stephen died. I’d been hoarding them.

  Settling in bed again, I finally thought of something funny. On the drive out to Cactus Flats, I’d come to a decision. Assuming the evening went well, I’d decided to screw up my nerve and do something I’d been putting off for too long. Ask Brian for a raise.

  12

  Actively Growing Before Your Eyes

  “WANNA GO SOMEWHERE?” Raven slid to the floor with his back against the locker next to mine and crouched there, dangling his hands between his knees. He had on skin-tight black pants, a white poet shirt, and black leather lace-up boots. He looked depressed. What else is new.

  “You mean, like, the cafeteria?” It was eleven-thirty, lunchtime. I rummaged around in my locker, exchanging my math book for my English book, getting out a new notebook.

  “Someplace that’s not here.”

  “Oh.” I looked down at the top of his head. The whole left side was dyed sparkly metallic red today. I liked it better than last week’s yellowish green. He had new piercings, too; his left ear looked like the side of a spiral notebook. “Okay,” I said, “I guess so. You driving?”

  He nodded slowly, staring at his fingers.

  “I’ve got an algebra test fifth period,” I felt silly mentioning.

  He lifted his head slowly, slowly, until it banged on the locker behind him. Slowly his heavy-lidded eyes met mine. “An…algebra…test?”

  “But it’s no big deal, I don’t mind cutting. So where do you want to go?”

  * * *

  In the graveyard with Raven. It sounded like a song. Or a Clue game—Raven, in the graveyard, with a joint. We were smoking the joint before we ate lunch because Raven said that was the only way to make the food we’d snuck out of the cafeteria for our picnic edible. But it was Friday, hamburgers and french fries day, my fave before I became a vegetarian, so I didn’t really have to smoke to be hungry. I took a few hits to be sociable, though, and so Raven wouldn’t have to toke alone. And so I wouldn’t look like a dork.

  “This is so totally weird.”

  He took a long time to stop staring at the clouds, roll his head sideways, and look at me. “What’s weird?”

  “Getting stoned here. Right next to his grave. I mean, what do you think he’d say?”

  “He wouldn’t say anything. He’s dead.”

  “Yeah.” I lay down on my back beside Raven and put my hands behind my head. “Yeah. He’s dead.”

  You could look at the piece of sky in your vision, just that section, and block out everything except your mind and it. Like meditating. So there was nothing in the universe except your eyes and the blank blue and the white clouds. You could even take away the space between, you could be in the sky. “Are you being the sky?” I asked Raven, who didn’t answer. “Are you, like, up there? I can’t even feel the ground under me.”

  After a long time, he said in a croaky, marijuana voice, “I’m not doing that. I’m doing the clouds. That one.” He pointed. “It’s a guy with no head. He’s been executed. He was a mass murderer, he killed…all the algebra teachers.”

  I snorted. “No, it’s a wheelbarrow. And that one’s a horse. See the head? See there, the mane?”

  “It’s not a horse, it’s a hatchet. An ax. The one that cut off the murderer’s head.”

  “No, it’s a horse. It’s coming to save the murderer, who’s not dead. He’s innocent, it was a frame-up.”

  “He’s got no head.”

  “No, he’s in cahoots with the executioner, it just looks like there’s no head, it’s a trick.”

  Raven sighed and shut his eyes. He hardly ever smiles. I used to try to make him, but it was like trying to crack up the guard at Buckingham Palace. “I read this thing in the paper,” he said with his eyes closed. “A family, mother, father, two little boys, they were driving home from a trip in an old junky van, the two little boys asleep in the back. They get home, it’s late at night, and the parents start carrying the kids into the house. And then they realize the kids aren’t
asleep, they’re dead. They both asphyxiated from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “There isn’t any God. That proves it.”

  “Oh, God. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t want to see. Nobody does.”

  I sat up and wrapped my arms around my calves. The dead grass was still damp from yesterday’s rain; I could feel it through the coat I was sitting on. It wasn’t cold here, the hill behind us blocked the wind. “My mom’s never had anyone die on her before, as old as she is. You can get to be forty, even fifty, and if you’re lucky no one dies.”

  “My aunt died.”

  “But that can never happen to me. For the rest of my life, I’ll be a person whose father died when she was young.”

  Raven lifted his arms and made a square frame with his hands to look at the sky through. The sleeves of his shirt fell back, showing how white and skinny his arms were. “She had one of those aluminum caskets. Like a space capsule. They guaranteed it for twenty years, but who’s checking? It’s been three years now, the lining’s bound to be shot. Dark blue velvet. It’s gotta be wet and moldy and rotten. Anyway, nothing’s left but her dress, so what’s the difference?”

  “Bones. She’d still have bones.”

  “They put her in a red suit, put a lot of makeup on her face. Like she was going to a party.” He sat up to relight what was left of the joint. He sucked in a lungful and passed me the roach. “Want the rest?” he said in a strangled voice.

  I shook my head. “I put a note in my dad’s casket. At the wake. I just slipped it in next to his shoulder.”

  “What’d it say?”

  “Oh, you know. Good-bye and all that.” How much I loved him, how much I would miss him. Stuff I couldn’t say to him when he was living.

  Raven took a few more little puffs on the joint, which was about a millimeter long, and stabbed it out in the grass. “That fence reminds me,” he said, lying back down. I glanced over at the spiky wrought iron fence that ran down to the lane separating this high, hilly part of the cemetery from the lower part. “There was this guy who was drunk and slid off a roof and landed on a fence post. It went right through him. Vertically. It went from his groin up through his whole body, it stopped an inch from his heart. He was standing on his feet with a stake inside him.”

  “Did he die?”

  “No, he just stood there, moaning and crying. People thought he was drunk, as usual, so nobody helped him. A couple of hours went by. Then he died.”

  I rested my cheek on my knees. “Is that really true?”

  “Sure.”

  “How do you hear things like that?”

  “How do you not?” He rolled to his side. “So do you want to eat now?”

  Everything was cold and greasy and nothing had enough salt. He ate all the french fries and most of my hamburger. I nibbled on an apple while I weeded my father’s grave, pulling back the grass from around his bronze plaque. This wasn’t the kind of graveyard that had headstones, just plaques, flush to the ground to make it easier to mow the grass, I guessed. In the car, Raven said, “Let’s go to the graveyard,” but he’d meant the old one, the nice one on Hickory Street. I said, “Let’s go to Hill Haven—that’s the one on the way to Culpeper.” He hadn’t wanted to come here and I didn’t blame him, it wasn’t spooky or atmospheric or anything, it was more like a golf course, but when I told him it was where my father was buried, he said okay.

  “It’s not like I care about my algebra test,” I said, kneeling on my coat, wiping my hands on my jeans. “I don’t care if I flunk algebra.”

  “Al-ge-bra. What is it for? What does it mean?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s nothing.” Raven smoked clove cigarettes, which are like ten times worse for you than tobacco. He took one out of his pocket and lit it, blowing smoke rings at the sky. “Everything is nothing.”

  “So you’re really flunking English this semester?”

  “Sadly.”

  “But you’re so good at it. You could get A’s without doing anything.”

  He opened one eye to look up at me. “Fuck all,” he said softly. “Fuck all, Ruth. Fuck it all.”

  “Oh, well,” I said quickly, trying to erase that. No one knows what happens to you, anything is possible, so it was possible my father could hear us. That’s stupid, I know, but still. You shouldn’t say “fuck” while you’re sitting by your father’s grave, maybe sitting right on top of him for all you know, depending on which direction his coffin faced in relation to his plaque. For the same reason, I wasn’t telling Raven about Mom’s date with Brian Wright. Because if Dad heard that, it would kill him.

  “You know how much meaning there is in getting an A in English?” Raven said. He made slow designs in the air with the smoke from his cigarette. His black-painted fingernails were chewed so short, it looked like his fingers were bleeding.

  “None?” I guessed.

  “There’s no meaning in anything. It’s all nothing. This is how we end up. I’m lying here now. In a little while I’ll belying here six feet deeper. That’s the extent of the significance of our precious lives. For a few years we breathe, then we don’t.”

  “What about reincarnation?” Krystal was heavily into that, channeling and past lives and regression therapy.

  He looked at me pityingly. “That’s the most obvious example of wishful thinking I know of. Even more than ‘God.’”

  “But don’t you think there’s something, some being or some outside force that’s like a consciousness, like energy or electricity or something?”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because you want there to be.”

  “Yeah! But also, how else could the world have been created, I mean, what makes it keep going?”

  “Chemistry. Oxygen, hydrogen, carbon di—”

  “But don’t you just feel there’s something that’s more than us, a divine something or other, I don’t know what, but—”

  “There was this woman in New Jersey, she kept her daughter in a cabinet under the sink.”

  “No, but—”

  “From the time she was one year old, this little kid had to live in a cupboard with a padlock on it. When they finally found her, she was like fourteen, and her bones had atrophied and her body was bent over double permanently, her backbone had grown into a curve, she could never stand up.”

  “Oh, stop.”

  “Tell me about the divine force who thought that one up. This is the God for me.”

  “I’m not saying there’s not—”

  “You know how many people have been slaughtered in the Balkans so far?”

  “No, I know, I just—”

  “Or Algeria? Or Rwanda, or Ireland, or Cambodia? How many women raped, how many children murdered? Usually in the name of religion?”

  I hid my head between my knees and pressed in hard against my temples.

  “This is not the Garden of Eden. We’re worse than beasts, animals would never do what we do. We’re monsters. There was this guy in northern California, he kidnapped a woman and chained her up in his basement. First he cut off one of her arms, and then after that healed, he cut off…Ruth? Hey. What’s up, what are you doing? Are you crying?”

  I couldn’t talk.

  “Hey, come on, it’s okay.” He gave my arm a soft, unsure pat. “Don’t do that, okay? Everything’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not, everything blows, everything’s horrible.” I dug a wadded-up Kleenex out of my jeans and wiped my nose, keeping my head down. So totally embarrassing.

  “Everything’s not horrible. Come on, it’s almost spring, we’ll be out of school in three months. That doesn’t blow.”

  “Everybody just dies, you’re right, so what’s the point? It’s all so stupid.” And that wasn’t even why I was crying. “My dad, he—he—” I started hiccuping, crying in those short, gaspy inhales like a baby.

  Raven put his arm around me. I got my breath ba
ck and rested my head on his shoulder. He felt bony and tough through his shirt, like a boy, not a man. The white powder on his face was streaky where I’d wet his cheek with tears. He wore an ankh on a black velvet ribbon around his neck. I touched it with my fingertips, instead of touching him.

  “There could be reincarnation,” he said after a while. “Nobody knows, I mean, knows. Anything is possible.”

  I nodded gratefully.

  “There could even be a God. Shit. There could be a heaven.”

  He was so sweet, I started crying again—just tears, no sobbing. “No, I don’t think there is. But I don’t even care. It’s not that I want him to be in heaven, I just want him not to be dead. I can’t believe I’ll never see him again. He was alive—and now he’s dead?”

  Raven held me and rocked me, and then—it was just like in a movie—he kissed me. Except he missed my mouth and got me on the side, mostly cheek. I turned my head, thinking, Okay, let’s do this, I’ll freak out later, and our lips met. His were still black from his lipstick. I opened my eyes to see what he was doing. His eyes were open, too, but when he saw me looking at him he closed them. He had his hands on my shoulders and he was moving them down, pretty soon he would be touching my breasts. I decided to let him. Once Barry Levine touched the side of the right one while we were dancing. I pretended not to notice, and never danced with him again. This would be the first time I really let anybody. That the person was Raven—no, I’d figure that out later, if I thought about it now it would ruin it.

  So then we kissed using our tongues, which I’d done once before, but this was better. I worried that I might have bad breath, because Raven did, because of the pot and the clove cigarette, but I didn’t mind. At first I didn’t even know he was touching me, he did it so lightly. I felt dizzy with my eyes closed; I didn’t realize I was slowly falling over backward until my shoulder blades hit the ground. It was scary and exciting, lying on my back with Raven practically on top of me. Except for where he’d sprayed it red, his hair was much softer and cleaner than it looked, and on the other side, where he’d shaved it almost bald, it was nice to run my fingers over the soft, short bristles and hear the whiskery sound. Shouldn’t we talk, say something to each other? I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t sound stupid, but the silence, except for our hard breathing, was weird.