“I took his keys.” I backed out of the driveway and pulled onto the street. “Whether I fired him depends on whether he shows up for his next shift, I guess.”
“Sounds a bit harsh.”
“Griff, he was in the store when he wasn’t supposed to be. Oh and lest I forget, he was having a fucking suckfest.”
“C’mon, it’s a comic shop. It’s all about fantasy.”
“It’s a business.”
“It’s a business to your boss, Vince. To you, it is a comic shop. Hell, it was almost appropriate. Do you know how many times I’ve spanked it to Wonder Woman comics?”
“Doesn’t matter.” But Griff had always had a knack for silencing me with his bizarre logic, the kind that took the wind out of my dramatic sails, and now there was nothing I could say back to him, nothing besides—
“You’ve spanked to Wonder Woman?”
He chuckled, remembering fondly the sweet secret fumblings of an intense affair. “When you were in class, I’d peruse your Justice League books.”
“You spanked to my comic books?”
“Once or twice.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Why not? She’s hot!”
“She’s Wonder Woman, for god’s sake. I can’t think about her that way. She’s like the mother-figure of the entire DC Universe.”
“So then she’s a MILF,” he said, darting his tongue in and out. “I’d let her tie me up with that magic lasso of hers.”
“You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
He leaned back against the headrest, smiling smugly at the huff he’d gotten me into. “What time is it anyway?” he said, flicking the broken clock on the dashboard with his thumb. A green eight lit up briefly.
I pushed up my sleeve and looked at my watch. “Almost midnight.”
“Late,” he said, resting his head against the window. And then he added, making me smile, “Bring me home, Vinny.”
Using all my weight I pulled the squeaky garage door down on its tracks. Above us the motion-detecting floodlight blinked off and then turned back on when Griff waved his arms.
“I should be tireder,” he said. “It was that nap.”
“I never nap.”
“So you’ve basically put me up for two days so far,” he said.
The last flakes of the storm had stopped falling and now the sky was opening up, showing its first stars in days. They reminded me that there was a wide world out there, one that would take Griff back.
“No problem,” I said, kicking my boots against the front steps. “So do you know how long you plan on, like, staying?” As soon as I asked I regretted it—I wasn’t sure I wanted to lose the mystery. “Or, if you don’t know, that’s cool.”
He pulled off his gloves and stuffed them in his pocket. His hair went up crazy when he pulled off his hat. “Is a few days OK? Definitely no longer than a week, max.”
“Sure, that’s fine. It’s not like there’s a lot going on here.”
It was exactly the amount of time I’d expected, even the same as I’d hoped at first, but hearing it out loud really cut down on my ability to imagine something more.
“Just until I can figure out the next stop on the Griff Express and stuff,“ he said.
“Any ideas?” I went to the thermostat and turned the heat up a few degrees. “You want some coffee or something? Tea?”
“Tea would be nice. Green?”
“Sure.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
I went to the kitchen to put the kettle on and he flopped into one of the corduroy armchairs. My kitchen was separated from the living room by a half-wall; above it I could only see the top of his head.
“I’ve been in touch with my cousin Dave,” he said. “He’s the one in Phoenix. Close to Phoenix.”
“I thought Dave lived in Florida?”
“Oh—he moved to Arizona like three years ago.”
“Three years ago. Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Does he like it? I wouldn’t mind visiting Arizona someday.”
“Yeah, me neither,” he said. “So you know, I figure... He’s putting in a pool. Or a hot-tub. Something—some kind of construction. Said I could crash at his place for a while if I give him a hand.”
“You’re going to fly across the continent to help put in a hot-tub? Doesn’t he have friends?”
He shrugged. “You don’t mind me staying until I can get things together, do you? I wouldn’t want to impose.”
“Nah. Once a roommate always a roommate, right? Stay as long as you like.”
Around us the house grew warmer as we sipped our tea.
“I like your house,” he said, gazing into the fireplace.
“Thanks.”
“How’s the whole being graduated thing working out for you?”
“I don’t know. Hard to say.”
“I actually looked into going back,” he said, “if you can believe that.”
“To Shuster?”
“Yeah.”
I laughed because I’d had that same idea many times. “To study what? Or does that even matter?”
He smiled. “Didn’t matter. I just wanted to— I don’t know. When I found out that grad students don’t live in the dorm...”
“It wouldn’t be the same,” I said.
“No.” He looked over again at the photos on the wall. “It’s just so weird, you know?”
“Life after college?”
“Yeah.”
“No shit, Griff. It’s really weird.”
“Nobody ever told us what it was going to feel like,” he said. “Nobody fucking warned us.”
“Warned?”
“About how much it was going to hurt. There was no preparation for that at all. All we got was the stuff about finding a career, blah blah blah. As if that’s all there is to it. The actual day-to-day feeling is a complete surprise no one even tries to prepare you for.”
“How do you mean?”
“Little huge things like measuring time.”
“No kidding. Yeah. Everything since graduation feels like one long month.”
“For as long as we can remember,” he said, “I mean literally our whole conscious lives, time has been neatly divided into semesters and years. Each year completely distinguishable and unique. First grade, third grade. We didn’t measure by age, we measured by grade. Like I know I broke my arm in sixth grade but I’d have to do the math to figure out what year that was, or how old I was. That was our world view.”
“And now it’s gone.”
“Now there’s just this huge, unlabeled expanse. It’s so empty and—I will admit this to you—it’s terrifying. You know?”
“It’s the void,” I said. “The post-college void.”
“That’s exactly what it is. Sometimes I feel like I’m just floundering in it, Vin.” He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. “Sometimes I wonder if the average person thinks about this stuff the way I do. Major life things like this. If they have words like post-college void or even know what one is.”
“No, I don’t think most people do,” I said. “I do.”
“I know you do.” He blew a wave of hair away from his mouth. “Is it good or bad, to be this way? So introspective.”
“I don’t know. Bad probably, but I wouldn’t want to be any other way.”
“My Vince,” he said, and the tone of his voice made me want to go to him. He thumped his head back against the chair and pushed the wave of hair behind his ear. “I feel like green with tiny flecks of brown.”
He had synesthesia, a mixing of senses. Some people with it taste shapes or hear music in letters or numbers. Griff experienced emotions as colors. I thought of it as a super power. In college I’d drawn and taped to our door a serial comic strip about Mood Ring, Griff’s secret superhero identity. The character wore a tie-dyed jumpsuit with a glistening stone on his chest. There wasn’t a lot we could do with Mood Ring because, admittedly, shooting emotions out of a rin
g was kind of lame.
“Is green with flecks of brown good?” I asked.
“It’s a quiet feeling,” he said. “Cozy. It means bed time.”
It was almost 2:00 a.m. now and I was falling asleep myself, but my feet were warm beneath me and I was reluctant to put them on the chilly floor, and equally as reluctant to tackle the upcoming hurdle of awkwardness: I had no couch. “OK,” I said finally, dragging myself off the warm corduroy. “I need to sleep too. I barely slept at all last night because of the storm.”
“I was just going to ask for a couple blankets or something,” he said, “but do you think it’d be OK if I stole half your bed? I mean just for tonight?”
“I guess that would—”
“I mean, tomorrow we can find a Wal-Mart and I’ll grab a camping mattress or something.”
“Oh. Yeah. Sure, no biggie.” I said it with as much confidence and nonchalance as I could muster, but in my head it still sounded rife with insinuation. I thought I might vomit from nerves. “Why not just furnish my spare bedroom for me? I know you can afford it.”
He laughed. “I’ve never bunked with a dude before but I’m too tired to pretend I’d be more comfortable sleeping sitting up.”
“It’s cool.” Oh my god. “Yeah, tomorrow we’ll go buy an air mattress,” I said, my mouth just running now. God forbid I give the impression that I think he would enjoy sleeping with me...
“Just so you know, though,” he said, “I sleep in the nude.”
I froze.
“Kidding!” he said with a smirk.
I went in the bathroom and brushed my teeth, and with every stroke of the brush my outlook seemed to change, bristling sudsily back and forth between this is a dream come true and this is a fucking nightmare.
In the bedroom the blankets were still askew from his afternoon nap. I started to straighten them but thought it would be better to already be in bed when he came in, so that symbolically he would be getting into bed with me, something that would make me feel less like I was trying to seduce him or something. But I’d have to hurry. I wondered what I should wear, considered sweatpants, a t-shirt. Finally I decided it was best to just wear my boxers. We’d lived together once upon a time, after all—he knew that’s what I wore to bed sure as I knew he didn’t sleep naked.
My pillow smelled like him and that made this all seem suddenly very real. What if I got a boner? What if I couldn’t stop myself, and kissed him?
He appeared at the door, silhouetted against the amber light from the hall.
“Is there a place I can hang my shit?” he asked, leaning in with his hands against the jambs.
“Closet in the other bedroom.”
“Thanks.”
He pulled the door almost all the way shut behind him. For a while I listened to him unzipping pockets in his backpack, jingling wire coat hangers, rinsing dishes, moving around the house with the familiarity of someone who belonged there. The sound of someone else in my house was new again and as comforting as a lullaby.
Something woke me a short time later. I squinted at the glowing green clock on the bedside table—3:12—and was startled by the man lying next to me. After a second I remembered it was Griff. Griff and not some random stranger. Griff and not Melanie. Griff—and not Zane.
I lay still, afraid of waking him, afraid of what fumbled conversation we might force into the six inches of space separating us. He was facing away from me, hugging his pillow against his chest. Between us he had placed another pillow, apparently to serve as a boundary line running down the middle of the bed and to prevent any direct contact, accidental or otherwise, during the night. His head lay on the mattress. The joshua tree tattoo on his shoulder was visible above the hem of the sheet. I stared at it, at his neck and the back of his head. Two coils of hair twisted together and formed an upside-down heart. I separated them gently with my finger.
There’d been days upon days when all I wanted out of my life was to share a bed with Griff. Sometimes I thought about sleeping with him, about making love, about what that would feel like, but more often, when I was loneliest, I thought about sleeping beside him, exactly as was happening now: him drooling beside me, me trying to make sense of the things he sleep-mumbled into his pillow and being enveloped in the nighttime smell of his skin. Now here he was. Out of the blue. Out of the white. And I didn’t know what to make of it. Tears filled my eyes but I wasn’t crying, not exactly.
He’d come to my room in the dark, quietly undressed, placed the pillow between us, and got into bed beside me, all without waking me up.
He tossed and made a snorting noise and his foot—bare—grazed my shin. It was too much. My disbelief at his presence suddenly fell aside when I wondered if he’d not really been kidding about sleeping naked now. Was he naked? Griffin naked. Griffin naked. Even as my eyes were wet my underwear got tight.
I had to know, and felt gross for having to know. I lifted the blankets but it was too dark to see under there. I reached under the covers and moved my hand slowly across the mattress and allowed my fingers to graze his hip. They touched cotton.
I felt silly for expecting anything else. Vince, I told myself, he’s not trying to seduce you, he’s only looking for a place to sleep. All he wants is sleep. A simple thing and you have not, after all these fucking years, gotten through your head that he wants nothing more than a comfortable place to sleep. I hated myself for touching his underwear, for violating him that way.
I felt sick, and I had to get up.
Slowly I rolled over and dropped out of the bed. I grabbed a sweatshirt off my dresser and slipped out of my room, carefully closing the door behind me.
The fire was low so I dropped on a few pieces of wood and pushed everything around with the poker. The corduroy chair felt warm and I pulled a polar-fleece throw around me and sat Indian-style with the blanket tucked under my bare legs.
I watched the fire thinking I should go into the bathroom and jerk off, to help me not care so much that Griff was in my bed, but that wouldn’t be right—I wouldn’t feel any better doing that right after touching his underwear.
So I just sat and watched the fire—fire and ocean are two things I can watch for millions of years without getting bored. I don’t know how long I sat that way before I heard the bed creak and then I heard him call out, very clearly, “Beth?” A moment later: “Vince?”
A few minutes after that he came down the hall. He was in his underwear, his arms wrapped around his thin chest, hugging himself.
“Oh,” he said when he saw me.
“I’m out here.”
“Sorry, did I keep you up? Was I hogging the bed?”
“No, it was fine. I just couldn’t sleep.”
“Oh. Want some company?”
“OK.”
He started to walk into the living room but then he turned and went into the spare room. I heard some zippers and he emerged a minute later in sweatpants and a hoodie. He sat down in the other chair.
Reaching out for the poker he said, “Can I see the thingy?” I grabbed it and handed it to him. He leaned over and stuck it into the embers, not doing much of anything except making sparks that drifted up into the chimney. “I’m all thrown off,” he said, “time-wise.”
“Yeah.”
Settling back in the chair, the yearbook on the ottoman caught his eye and he picked it up, began to page through it.
“Hey,” he said, “what was that thing you wrote about drinking and flying or whatever? What did that mean?”
“It’s a line from Superman. I really don’t know why I put it in there.”
“All mine are stupid too,” he said. “People are so cryptic with these things, I bet most people look back and have no idea what they mean. I don’t understand half the things I wrote. Like what the heck are Pantie-O’s?”
It hurt that I had to remind him; it hurt that he didn’t remember whether he’d written it just for me.
As he turned the pages the supplement fell out, slipped dow
n between the cushion and the arm. He plucked it out.
“So it was in here,” he said.
“Yeah. There’s a picture of us on graduation day.”
“I remember that picture,” he said, nodding. His voice was croaky, a nighttime voice. “We’re all blurry.”
“Blurry, yeah.” I looked into the fire. “It’s like the camera somehow saw what we really were, you know? Like a mirror does to vampires. I remember the look on your face when I came up to you at graduation. You looked like I was back from the dead. You wanted to know what happened.”
“Yeah, I did,” he said. “I was confused. But all that stuff was a long time ago.”
“Not to me.” I gestured at the wall, at the photos. I could feel my throat tighten up and I laid my head back against the cushion.
He nodded. He zipped his hoodie higher, slowly, obviously taking care not to snag any chest hairs, and resumed hugging himself. I almost offered to go get him a blanket, but didn’t.
“So I guess at some point we should probably talk about why you stopped acknowledging my existence,” he said. “I kind of feel like it’s the elephant in the room. Maybe it’s the elephant in the decade.”
I didn’t say anything.
“We don’t have to,” he added. “I came here to hang out with you, not interrogate you.”
“I don’t know, Griff, it happened because I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed.” The word came out one biley green syllable at a time, each one burning my throat on its way up. “I was never really able to get past that fucking email. It was easier just to stop talking to you.”
“What email? Wait—you mean the Truman email?” He sat up straight. “You’re kidding. Is that what this has always been about? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Um. Embarrassed?”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “So asking me out on a date when we were teenagers is an unforgivable sin in your book? Is that in Leviticus or something?” He looked at me and I rolled my eyes and felt just like the teenager I’d been. “No,” he said, reading my face, “just embarrassing. Huh.”
“I was afraid that you were always wondering about my motives.”
“Motives for what?”
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 5