“He’s in high school??”
“Relax,” he said, scrunching his eyebrows. “He’s a senior.”
It hit me that I was judging the appropriateness of the hook-up based on my own age. Zane was only twenty.
“Oh, yeah, I guess that’s not a big deal,” I said. “Couple years.” I felt old. Zane seemed young.
“I came across his profile on XY. He didn’t have a very descriptive pic, but there was a basketball jersey like my brother’s hanging on the chair behind him. Number nine. So I went to one of Ralph’s games and was like, Yo.”
“Did his number match his inches?”
“Not even close,” he said with a frown.
I laughed. “Well is he cool?”
“I guess—for a jock. I don’t know. He was skittish. Too eager. Bad kisser. Told me just before he went down on me that I was quote-unquote beautiful. —Funny how it’s always beautiful, isn’t it? Never cute or hot.”
“For newbies beautiful is the only word intense enough to express their feelings,” I said. “They need patience. You know how hard it can be to deal with.”
“Well, judging by the look on his face when you arrived last night, I don’t expect to get another shot.”
“Too bad,” I said. “He was cute.” I put my hands up over my head, shaped my lips into a surprised O. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
“So are we laughing about this now?”
“I don’t know.”
He looked at the clock. “OK, Vince,” he said, “I’m gonna go.”
He left the counter and pulled off his Golden Age t-shirt. His white undershirt rode up and revealed his stomach and a trail of dark hair that disappeared beneath a red Gap waistband. I looked then looked away. He went into the back room, came out wearing his coat and the blue hat.
“Have a good weekend,” he said.
“You too. Thanks for the company.”
“Sure.”
The bell jingled. Through the window I watched him go down the front walk, and when he was out of sight I felt like crying.
At 8:20 I noticed Griff standing outside the store, bent over with his eyes aligned with the hours on the glass door—the double zeros of 8:00 looked like white spectacles.
“Can’t you see the sign?” I mouthed from the other side. “We’re closed.”
He cupped his hand around his ear. I tapped the numbers on the alarm pad and went outside. Once again there was that urge to kiss him, this time a hi-honey-how-was-your-day kiss.
“Good day?” he said.
“Kind of slow.” I put the keys in my pocket. “Wow, it’s chilly out, huh?”
“Slow boring or slow relaxing?”
“Zane stayed a while after his shift and kept me company.”
“Dreamy.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I shushed. “I think he just wanted to inquire about you, actually—make sure we’re not fucking or anything.” I felt dizzy from saying that about Griff and me, even if it was meant to sound ridiculous.
“Ha, he was jealous,” Griff said. “I knew he liked you. So why haven’t you asked him out or whatever?”
“Why haven’t I asked him out? How about I’m his boss? How about he’s like five years younger than me?”
“How about he’s into you and even I can tell he’s cute? Here’s your keys.”
“Thanks.” They were warm from his pocket. “I don’t know. I’m not that into him. So what did you end up doing all day?”
“...” He arched an eyebrow. I wasn’t sure he was going to let me off the hook about Zane. But he relented. “Had myself a little shopping trip,” he said at last. We got into the car. It was warm and when I started it up the radio was playing Guster.
“Cool, you mean you spent some of your hard-inherited cash? What’d you buy?”
“A mattress, box-spring, frame.” He ticked the items off on his fingers. “Sheets. Pillows. One of those foam egg-crate things?” He paused. “What’s wrong?”
“Dude, you didn’t really have to get me all that stuff. I was only joking about furnishing the room.”
He waved dismissively. “Oh and don’t worry, I got a twin-size bed so as not to cramp your comic museum.”
I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that he wouldn’t need to share my bed anymore. “How’d you fit all that stuff in the Jeep?”
“I didn’t, they’re delivering the big stuff tomorrow.”
“On Sunday?”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday? Monday, I mean.” He paused. “You don’t mind me hogging your space for two more nights?”
“I slept OK last night. It’ll be fine.”
I knew now that I would’ve been disappointed. With some things it was hard to know how I felt until it was out of my hands, when pros and cons were irrelevant and all I could do was react.
On the way home we stopped at the supermarket. In the glossy, fluorescent entrance—which always felt to me like the seventh circle of hell—I grabbed a basket.
“Grab a wagon, dude,” Griff said. “You’re here, you might as well do it up so you don’t have to come back for a while. In fact, I’ll buy a wagon’s worth.”
“Come on. You’ve spent enough on me. It’s going to start getting uncomfortable.”
“We’re sharing a bed, Vince. I’d say we’re a skooch past uncomfortable already, knowi’msayin?”
“...”
“Consider it my room and board.”
He took the basket from me and flung it clanking back into the stack. I begrudgingly pulled a cart from the accordioned line. Griff walked a couple steps ahead and tossed items in with seemingly no more rhyme or reason than a whimsical appreciation for the labels. Pickles, donuts, macaroni and cheese. No wonder his stomach was a wreck.
In the breakfast aisle he was saying something about pancake mix—we need more pancake mix, what kind of pancake mix—but I was barely paying attention. My focus was squarely on the woman at the other end of the aisle. Her back was to us; she was kneeling, reaching for peanut butter on the bottom shelf, but when she stood up and turned around—
“Oh god. It’s her.”
“Her who?”
“Melanie.”
“Oh.” His eyes scanned her from her knit hat to her green pleather boots. “Ooh. Not bad.” He dropped a box of pancake mix on the powdered donuts. “Not-bad-at-all.”
She was walking toward us now, looking for something on the shelves. I hadn’t been seen yet but it was inevitable. She stopped and grabbed a thing of Grape-Nuts, dropped it in the basket bumping against her corduroy thigh. I was usually good at avoiding exes, had avoided her since the October night she dumped my ass in the drive-thru.
“She’s coming. Fuck. Fuck.” It was too late to turn around. I clenched the cart’s plastic handlebar. She raised her eyes from her basket and met mine—a fluid, magnetic motion followed by a twitch of recognition.
“Vince!” Her lips parted into a smile. “Hi! How are you? I thought you’d fallen off the face of the earth or something!” She glanced at Griff, who was standing beside the cart with his fingers entwined in the plastic grid of its side.
She set her basket down on the glossy-tiled floor and opened her arms. I obliged. Her smell was familiar, like lilac—her hair whispered against the backs of my hands. Immediately I felt horny.
“I’m good,” I said. I had seen this woman naked, had had my tongue on parts of her body she’d never even seen. I was a medieval conquistador returning to an exotic land whose soil still held my flying flag—or something. “How are you—doing?”
“I feel like I’m here all the time. Bernie is such a big eater,” she said. “High metabolism.” Then she lifted her finger as if to connect the plot-points of her life, and added, “He and I moved in together right after Christmas.”
Without missing a beat I said, “That’s great!” but I felt as though she’d pulled out my waving flag and was driving the pole through my gut. “I’m happy for you.” I realized I was frowning and f
orced a smile. “How’s he doing?”
“Oh, he’s getting there, thanks,” she said. “Still has a chunk of shrapnel in his thigh, but he’s better. The nightmares are tapering off too, finally.”
“Wow, that’s, um— Oh—sorry.” Her eyes were darting to Griff again. “Melanie, this is Griffin. Griff, this is Melanie, my old...”
“Ball and chain,” she said, weirdly. They shook. When I saw Griff’s eyes drop toward her boobs I wanted to shove him into the Froot Loops.
“You boys doing a little shopping?” Melanie said.
“Yeah. Uh.” Was that a hint of coyness in her voice? Did she think we were together? I was about to say we were just friends when Griff put his arm around me.
“Vince is a big eater too,” he said.
He flashed Melanie a toothy smile and rubbed the back of my hair. Melanie looked at me with you-devil-you eyes.
“I’m glad you’re doing well, Vince,” she said, and she seemed to mean it—I wasn’t sure whether that made it easier or harder to see her go. “Stop by the gallery sometime.” She put her open hand against her cheek, blocking her lips from Griff’s view, and whispered to me, “I want to hear all about him.” She smiled at Griff and in her normal voice she continued, “We’re having a pop art show in June. There’ll probably be some comic book–type pieces.”
“That sounds interesting. Maybe I’ll do that. Um. Say hi to Bernie?”
She nodded. “Nice meeting you,” she said to Griff.
When she turned the corner and disappeared into the next aisle, I asked Griff why he’d done that.
“Do what?”
“Put your arm around me like that,” I said. “Made her think we’re a couple.”
“Eh, she’s got enough on her mind with Bernie’s war stuff. Let her know you’re taken care of.”
“Oh.”
“Will you really go to her art thing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You should. She’s fucking gorgeous.” He glanced back at the corner around which she’d disappeared. “How about in the sack-a-roo?”
It was a memory I’d conjured in the shower more than once. I told him how her hair used to whip around like she was on a roller coaster.
“Nice.”
“Yeah. Yeah it was.”
He started walking down the aisle again, pulling the cart behind him.
“Hey, where are you going?” I said.
“Uh, we need more than pancake mix and donuts.”
“Wait, we have to wait here a minute.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to pass her again in every other aisle. Let her get ahead.”
“Ah...” He let go of the cart, let it roll away by itself. “Then help me look for the Pantie-O’s.”
***
“Tell me you’re kidding,” I said as Griff slid his tray across the dining hall table. “Tell me those are just for decoration, for ambiance.”
“Taco Tuesday, baby,” he said with an impish grin. His hair was tied back in a short pony-tail. This was a brief experiment.
He took a seat beside me in the red vinyl booth. Beth was sitting across from us. She had burgundy hair and picked at a salad, discarding pieces of lettuce and spinach by flinging them with her fork off the plate onto the tray.
It was rush-hour in the dining hall. I liked how it looked full of students, friendly swarms of young adults I could watch from my own booth with my own friends. That was as close as I wanted to get to most of them. I preferred them as decoration to set the scene.
“What’s wrong with tacos?” Beth asked. She twirled a forkful of bean sprouts smothered with enough ranch dressing to pretty well negate any nutritional value.
“They wreak havoc on his legendary delicate stomach,” I told her. I turned to Griff. “Last time, last Tuesday, I think, what did you say when you were slamming yourself face-down on your mattress to alleviate the gas that was quote-unquote tearing you apart from the inside?”
He rubbed his face with his hands and growled. “I said, Vince, don’t let me eat tacos again.”
“What else?”
“Ever in the history of the universe,” he said. “But it’ll be fine this time. I brought Tums.” He plucked a roll from his shirt pocket.
“All right,” I said, “but it’s going to be me pounding your back to burp you and it’s going to be me carrying you to the toilet to barf/shit your brains out.”
He puffed on the end of his straw and shot its wrapper at me. It bounced off my face and landed in my pasta. I fished it out and laid it across his wrist like a soggy red bracelet.
“What is this, exactly?” Beth said with a grin. Her hands were opened toward us like we belonged on display.
We looked at each other and then at Beth.
“What’s what?”
“Is there, in the Year 2000, a name for this? What would you call this? Are you some new breed of life partners? Are you lifebuddies? Nonsexual husbands?”
“I don’t remember being proposed to,” Griff said.
“...”
“Oh Vince my prince, you are so perfect, so spectacular in every way,” Griff said in spoken-word rhythm and bit a mouthful of taco. The shell cracked and meat slathered in thick sauce plopped onto his plate. “You are my life Vince. You make me forget how much I love tacos. Oh, tacos are so yummy in my tummy yummy yummy—but not like Vince. Oh Vince my prince, you make me forget about tacos.”
When I thought I could speak without laughing I asked if he was finished.
“Not yet,” he said. He pressed his greasy lips to my cheek. “Taco-flavored kisses for my Vince.”
*
Griff and I put away the groceries and then we made breakfast for supper—French toast with ham and bologna fried on the griddle. He had a Rolling Stone open on the counter and read between rounds of dipping and flipping. A few times he read me parts of articles.
Later, when the dishes were clean and the record player’s needle had crawled across two Athlete albums, he padded into my bedroom and got into bed beside me. After socking his pillow a few times with his fist he laid his head carefully in the dent. There was no pillow between us tonight and he must’ve noticed that at the same moment I did: as though he could read my mind, he reached to the floor for the extra one and placed it in the middle of bed. I wondered whether it was something he wanted or something he thought I wanted.
“You’ll never guess who called me today,” he said in the dark, a touch of annoyance in his voice. He rubbed his feet together under the covers. Zwoop zwoop zwoop.
“Who?”
“Beth. This afternoon.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“Oh.”
“... What’d she say?”
“She wants me to come back to Boston.”
I laughed or snorted or something but in fact I suddenly felt very silly. I felt ridiculous in bed with him here, playing house with a straight guy, a straight and taken guy; living a sad, pitiful fantasy. He didn’t belong here and I was a fool for thinking he did. He belonged with Beth. Of course he belonged with Beth. “Oh,” I said.
“Yeah, she’s back from her parents’ and wants me to come get the rest of my shit.”
“Oh, to— to get your shit.” With a jolt I felt the opposite of the moment before: relieved and confident we would be together forever. That’s how it had always been for me. I lived in tones and inflections, in glances and winks and stupid little taps. I analyzed and sought meaning from meaningless things. It was a constant tug-of-war between what I wanted and what was reality. It had made me, among other things, fickle. “Do you think she’s just using that as a reason to see you?”
“I doubt it. When I told you she was final I wasn’t kidding.”
We lay quiet for a while. He pulled the sateen hem of the spinach-colored blanket back and forth between his fingers.
“How much stuff do you have there?” I said. “We could take my Jeep.”
“And do wh
at with it, bring it all here?”
“You could keep it in my junk room until you decide what to do with it.”
“Hm. There’s not a lot that’s full-on mine,” he said after a moment. “Computer, some DVDs and CDs, clothes. It would fit in the Jeep. All the stuff we bought together she can just have.”
“You don’t still have that huge-ass monitor, do you?”
“That one from college?”
“Yeah.”
“Haha. No, that took a spill down some stairs senior year. It’s just a laptop.”
“Well then how about tomorrow? Store’s closed Sundays.”
“Sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”
He took off his t-shirt, dropped it to the floor, rolled over and faced the dark window. The nakedness of his shoulders made him seem even nearer than he was, and I felt the same sad and dizzy lightness of last night. Would it really be so terrible if I touched him? How could that be bad?
“I don’t even know how you guys got together,” I said, barely aware I’d said it out loud until he responded.
“Me and Beth?” Rolling onto his back again, he inspected me, as though I were once again unfamiliar, a stranger. “How out of the loop were you, dude?”
It made me feel sad and ashamed in equal measure. I hadn’t been left out of the loop, of course. I had closed myself outside it.
“Did you like her our year?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a little. Probably not yet. It was really the next year that we got closer.”
“She lived in your dorm, right?”
“The little dorm, yeah. She was on the floor above me. I was sort of lacking in the best friend department at that point.” He didn’t say it to make me feel guilty, I could tell that by his voice. He said it, maybe, to make me feel better. Beth, as close as they’d been, was initially a substitute; she filled a gap—the gap of me. “But we didn’t actually get together until my senior year, her junior. Beginning of the year. We were at a party, and when it was over we went back to her room. She had a single. We weren’t drunk or anything, but I just didn’t leave. I think it started as one of those casual things—”
“A friend-love-is-better-than-no-love thing?”
“Yeah, exactly. But it was just really nice, you know? I didn’t expect it. I don’t think she did either, but there it was.”
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 9