Gemini

by Carol Cassella

  “No? So what do they call you back at Duke University in North Carolina, U.S.A., planet Earth?”

  “My middle name. Eric.”

  “Yeah?” Raney tilted her head, like seeing him from another angle might change how she interpreted him. “Eric’s nice. But I’ll still call you Bo.”

  —

  When he woke up, Raney was sitting up in bed with a paintbrush in her hand, shaping the hint of gold cast across Bo’s face in the morning sunlight. She hadn’t put her shirt on, and blushed when she realized he was awake. “You’re painting a person,” he said. “See? Not lonely at all.” Then he reached for the brush before she could pull away and drew a gold band over the scar on her right arm. “An Egyptian bracelet. For my Cleopatra.”

  They ate breakfast at Lowell’s, carrying trays of thick smoked bacon and fried eggs up the narrow stairs to sit by the window and watch the ferries and the orange-and-black freighters cut through the lead-colored sea. Bo had an old Fiat convertible, which stayed cold inside despite keeping the heat turned on full blast, and Raney rode with her hands tucked between her legs. They drove around Seattle like gaga tourists, him pretending interest in sights he’d seen a thousand times, and her pretending most of them weren’t surprises. He took her to a sculpture in Fremont of life-size stone people and a human-faced dog waiting for a bus, each dressed by the neighborhood in Santa hats and red scarves. Even the dog. He cut through blocks of small wood-framed houses and turned underneath the Aurora Bridge where the span of concrete and iron abutted the land and cars and trucks boomed overhead, and in that dark wedge of useless space someone had sculpted an enormous cement troll hulked over a snatched Volkswagen. They drove along the north shore of Lake Union and across the Montlake Bridge, castle-like turrets guarding either end as if the water it spanned were a defensive moat cutting the city into warring halves. They crossed the 520 Bridge and wove south through Bellevue, then west again across the I-90 Bridge and past the Kingdome back toward downtown. All of it was new to Raney, who still spent most of her weekends on the peninsula with her grandfather.

  She could tell Bo liked driving. He would rev the engine to the top of each gear before he shifted down, take the turns fast so the little car pulled against the pavement then shot into the straightaway with him holding her close. She had not seen this daring streak in Bo during those two summers in Quentin, and wondered if it had been fired by the life he’d lived between then and now, or by the scare that his life might be cut short. “How long do they make you wait after brain surgery to drive a car?” she asked him, but got no answer. A nineteen-year-old boy will take his revenge on the world wherever he can, she guessed.

  Bo wanted to buy her a Christmas present, “to top the glass marble,” he said. They parked in Pioneer Square and stood at a stoplight with other Christmas shoppers, dusk already falling and the weather turning to a stinging chill. When the light changed, Bo grabbed her hand and pulled her across the street into Magic Mouse, a toy store that could have come from Grandpa’s boyhood. It looked as if a hundred kids had stocked the maze of rooms and shelves. He tried to buy her a paint set, stuffed animals, a globe filled with pale-blue water and when you shook it your fortune popped into a little glass window. When she refused on all, he took her across the street to his “favorite store in all of Seattle,” an antique and rare books store that smelled like old paper and leather and paste bindings. Thousands of volumes rose up the high walls on packed shelves, random stripes of color and texture that collectively made a singular body of art. Breathing in their scent, Raney thought of all the readers who’d held these books, turned their pages, and considered their words, then sold and lost all but what could be contained in the space of a memory. She watched Bo roam, pulling out books at random and running his fingers along the titles, the publishers, the authors—most forgotten. He spent a long time looking through one oversize book and then carried it up to the counter and had it wrapped. He didn’t give it to her until they were back in his car.

  “Bo,” she started to protest.

  “Too late. Nonreturnable. Go on. Open it.” He watched her in silence, pleased and proud.

  Raney pulled the book out of the taped brown paper. It was plates of Monet’s paintings from Giverny, a cumbersome and sumptuous book bound in faded green cloth worn bare at the corners. She opened it to the center folio where one of his early water lilies paintings spread across both pages with a thread-stitched seam up the middle. Even in this ancient book she could see the saturated greens and blues of Monet’s best years, before his eyes began to go bad. She started to thank Bo for it, but he broke in, “It’s Claude Monet. French impressionist. You know his work?”

  There were many ways she might have taken that question: a conversation opener, spontaneous words that popped out with no thought. But when she looked at Bo she knew he was being serious. She closed the book and ran her hand over the cover, choosing to rush by the small wound his question caused. “It’s beautiful, Bo. Thank you.”

  He kissed her and started the car. “I have to run by my house for something. I know a place we can eat near there.”

  —

  It was dark by the time Bo pulled into his driveway. He walked around to Raney’s door to let her out, as if assuming she’d stayed in her seat expecting that. “I’ll wait here,” she said, pulling her coat tighter.

  “It’s cold.” After a minute he leaned into the car and added, “No one’s home. There aren’t even any lights on.”

  He led her through a maze of shrubs to a side door and into a huge kitchen. Banks of drawers surrounded a marble-topped center island bigger than the whole of Raney’s bedroom, and she counted two double sinks, two dishwashers (verified as such by the Clean and Dirty signs stuck to their fronts), and two separate ovens on different walls. He pushed open a sliding door into a butler’s pantry between the kitchen and dining room and she followed him through. Heavy, dark beams crisscrossed the ceiling, and one entire wall was a built-in sideboard, glassing in silver platters and pitchers, stacks of plates and bowls ten-high and three-deep. The house was so empty it was hard to imagine this table filled with enough people to make a dent in all that china. In the living room dried-up roses in a crystal vase sat moldering in brown water underneath a giant oil painting of a copse and a meadow. The painting looked old and expensive and lifeless to Raney. Like the roses, she thought. Like the house. She heard a clock ticking somewhere. Bo had disappeared into the entry hall and called to her from halfway up the stairs. “Come up.”

  “What if your mom comes home?”

  “She won’t. They went to Lopez Island—her boyfriend has a house out there.”

  The stairs curved up to a long balcony that was lined with bedrooms and by the time Raney reached the top, all the doors were closed and Bo was nowhere in sight. A strip of light shone beneath one door, and she knocked, waited a moment, and turned the knob. It was plainly Bo’s room—a wreck of disorganization compared with the rest of the house. The shelves had books in rows and books stacked on top of the rows and books stacked in front of the rows. His suitcase lay open on the floor and clothes were piled on the unmade bed and draped over the edges of open, empty drawers, as if putting them inside would have taken inordinate effort. Along the windowsill was a line of model sailboats, but otherwise the only iconic vestige of his younger years was a poster of Farrah Fawcett.

  She heard him call to her from somewhere down the hall and went in search. She found him in the bathroom off the third bedroom she opened, clearly the master suite.

  “Wow. Your mom likes pink.”

  “Yeah. I think it was her life tragedy not to have a daughter.” He turned off the bathroom light, and she saw him put an orange prescription bottle in his pocket. He stood quite still, watching her with a quiet focus that sent an exciting flutter down her spine.

  “Get what you need?” she asked.

  “Hmm? Not all of it. Not yet.” He turned off the bedroom light. She was blind in the sudden darkness. She hea
rd him take a step toward her and she laughed, nervous, uncertain. She heard nothing more but knew he was closer, and then his arms were around her shoulders, moving down her back, pulling the length of her against him and holding her there, so utterly encircled she felt slender and small for the first time in her life, and for the first time in her life she enjoyed the awareness of her lesser size, her lesser strength. His breath was at her temple, then her ear and then on her mouth and he pressed deeply into her, walking them as one backward to the bed so as one they lay across it. He was confident now, more sure of his hands, his lips, his tongue than even half a day ago. Raney felt every nerve concentrated in her mouth, an impelling force determining what her body would do. She had started this kiss six years ago and let it linger half-completed but calling. She felt terrifyingly thrilled, willingly out of control, and understood that this precipice comes only once in an entire life, and so was holy in its own way. She broke away for a moment to catch her breath, to relish this, and even in the darkness she could see Bo smile and had to laugh in wonder that one human being could make another feel this way. She ran her hand up the length of his arm until their fingers enmeshed and she rolled against him and then over him, and this time she was the one to slip her hand beneath his shirt and ease it over his head, sitting astride his waist, marveling at the smoothness of his naked chest. She pulled her sweater off, and when he undid her bra it could have been the first or the hundredth time. She was utterly unafraid of him, of this, of whatever was coming.

  The shock of the overhead light, the guttural shriek of Eric’s name, the strike of car keys thrown at her back made Raney leap to the other side of the bed.

  “Mom!”

  “In my house? My bed?”

  “I thought you were on Lopez.”

  “Up.” Raney’s sweater hit her in the face. “Get your clothes on. I’ll be downstairs.”

  Bo was whiter than Raney thought a person could get and still be breathing. She put her sweater on and saw the tag hanging out under her chin but could not think through the steps required to turn it right. Bo was still immobilized, staring at the door his mother had slammed shut. “Lopez??”

  “She told me . . . It’ll be okay. She’s just surprised.”

  “Surprised? Try livid! Is there a back way out?”

  “No. You have to talk to her. She’s not usually . . .”

  “Usually what? What’s usual about finding you in her bed with a half-naked stranger?”

  Raney’s purse was still downstairs. She raked her hair straight and licked her fingers to rub off any mascara smears, but a glance in the mirror showed a street urchin—streetwalker, she figured Bo’s mother would assume. Bo took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a minute before he started down the stairs. Raney heard his mother harping, shrill and incessant, and Bo’s voice getting louder as he tried to cut in. Then his mother was calling, “Raney. Please join us. Now.”

  Raney stood at the top of the grand spiral staircase for a moment before slowly marching down to meet them; Bo watched her entrance with a mix of adoration and wariness, like a nervous groom. They sat next to each other on the sofa, too far apart to touch. Bo’s mother stood in front of the fireplace with one arm clasped tight across her waist as if she’d eaten something rancid, the other at her forehead holding a lit, gold-papered cigarette angled between two long fingers. Raney had a flash image of a unicorn puffing smoke through its golden horn and choked on a laugh.

  “This is funny to you?” Eric’s mother pinned Raney with her eyes. “You listen to me now. I am not a prude. I understand that Eric’s sexuality is”—she drew a design in the air with the cigarette, conjuring her next word—“emerging. That’s natural. Most boys experiment. But Eric is not—” She broke off for a minute. “He’ll be leaving for college again in a matter of weeks, and . . .”

  “Mother . . .”

  “You’re going back. You have enough in your way as it is, agreed?” She turned back to Raney and now Raney noticed the heavy lag when his mother blinked, a faint slur when she asked, “I don’t suppose you know Melissa?”

  Raney looked at Bo, certain he was about to leap off the sofa and make it clear that Melissa, undoubtedly blond and peachy and still twinkle-eyed about some sweet joke shared over a trinket box, was history. Instead she saw Bo blush. Before he could muster any words, Raney stood up. “Very nice to meet you, Mrs. Bryson, I appreciate all your hospitality. And I’d like to compliment you on your bed. Mattress is nice and broke in. Just how I like ’em.” She walked through the dining room and kitchen, picking up her coat and purse and getting to the car before she exhaled, furious that it was too far to walk back to her apartment. Bo didn’t come out for a long time, and Raney could see lights flashing on in other rooms upstairs; once she heard two hard surfaces slam together. She looked at the gables and wings of his house, the equally imposing houses beyond the hedges and across the pointlessly wide street. A whole family could be at home together and never be in the same room.

  It was cold and she started to shiver. Finally Bo came out the kitchen door. He turned to say something to his mother and Raney heard her scream, “Go ahead, check her pockets.”

  He seemed scarily calm once he got into the car, adjusting his mirrors and seat belt and backing out of the driveway with a deliberate silence. When they were blocks away he said, “I’m sorry. It’s not about you. She’s been like this since the operation.”

  “Why? You said it’s all fine.”

  “It is. There’s follow-up stuff, but . . . No. It’s fine. I’m just not sure I want to go straight back to school. And she has plans for me. Or thinks the universe has plans.” He shrugged, looking out the window for a moment like whatever he was trying to clarify might be found there. “She’s a mother. What can I say?”

  “Plans from the universe!” Raney said half under her breath. “I thought she was the Free Spirit, Find Your Inner Being type.”

  “She is. Was. Until I . . .” He faltered, like he didn’t know the answer himself.

  Raney only then realized how close she had been to tears again—twice in twenty-four hours. She would not have thought it possible. She moved her hand across the seat and slipped it under his thigh, an apology, though she knew if one was owed it was not by her. He wrapped her hand in his own and they rode the rest of the way to Raney’s apartment with no talk at all. He stood close behind her while she fit the key into her lock, and as soon as the door swung closed, he pushed her gently against it, flicking off the light switch. She turned it back on and he turned it off again, trapped her hands behind her, kissing her fully, becoming playful again as if the last hour was easily forgotten. She laughed and wrestled free, crossed her arms between them.

  “So who is Melissa?”

  “She’s a girl I knew in boarding school—she grew up near me.”

  “And?”

  “And she thinks she wants to be my girlfriend.”

  “Thinks? So you don’t think she really wants to be your girlfriend.”

  “I don’t think she really knows anything about me. Who I am.”

  “Bet she’s giving you more than a marble for Christmas.”

  “I’m happier with my marble.”

  Raney thought about the book of Monet folios then, and remembered it was still underneath the seat of Bo’s car. At that moment, for some reason, she knew that book would never belong to her. Knew it was a beautiful, rare thing she’d been lucky to hold for a few moments and should content herself with the memory. “Is Melissa who your mom thinks the universe has picked out for you?”

  He got more serious with that question, sensing the change in her mood. “I think the universe wants me to be with someone I love. No matter where she comes from.” He kissed her again and nothing made sense to her anymore except the kiss; they slid down the door until they were on the carpet, his arm a pillow underneath her head, the room lit by the slice of light from the hall. He was looking at her so seriously, so intently, like he wanted to pull her though
ts out of her mind and absorb them into his own experience. And for an insane moment she wondered if he could, and what he would discover there—what paucity of etiquette and education he would absorb and try to replace with his own.

  “I want you, Raney. I love you,” he said.

  She waited a long time before she asked him, “Do you know the difference yet, Bo?” He pulled back, baffled and guarded. “What did your mother mean, ‘check her pockets’?” Bo didn’t answer and she pressed him further. “Bo? Check for what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.” Raney gently pushed his arms away and sat up. “If you care about me, you’ll tell me.”

  She could see him wanting to lie, then push deeper to tell her the truth, and for that she felt a terrible, overwhelming loss even before he answered, “She lost a pair of earrings. She thinks they were in her bathroom.”

  “And she thinks I took them.”

  He looked so sad Raney almost wanted to drop it, tell him not to answer her because there was no answer to this that would not punish him for the life he was born to. No matter how fast and far you walk you will always be shaking your boot with one last clinging, stinking vestige of the place you are trying to leave behind—it was true for both of them. She held his sweet, shadowed face in her hands and said, “You know what I think the universe plans for me? I think the universe, this world, rolls over people like me without a backward glance, so I’d better be watching out for myself.” The hurt in Bo’s face made Raney’s chest twist with something spoiled and hard but she kept going, pulling him out of her heart like a thorn. “Where do I fit in your world, Bo? Where would I possibly ever fit?”

  • 9 •

  charlotte

  Charlotte discovered the nearly invisible scar hidden beneath Eric’s hair, a smooth arc of tissue she traced with her fingertips, the first time they made love. He’d brought his hand up to cover hers, at first halting its exploration and then gingerly guiding her forefinger along the course of the healed incision. “No secrets from a doctor, are there?”