“Wow.”
“Yeah, that was my reaction too. It was out of left field. We started hanging out as more than friends, and it was still nice. It just kind of worked. But then I graduated.”
“Then what?”
“I looked at apartments near Shuster but there was nothing I could afford by myself and I couldn’t stand the idea of having a roommate. So I moved back to Pittsfield. We did the long-distance thing for almost a year.”
“What did you do in Pittsfield?”
“I worked at this furniture store place. Then in the spring she lost her place in the dorm in the housing lottery, so she got an apartment and it wasn’t long before I moved in too.”
“That’s when you got the blueprint job.”
“Mm.”
It was so much to take in, years of back-story starring a character I knew so well, yet I couldn’t imagine him in any of these situations. With Beth? It seemed too weird. Beth was the little freshman who lived in our suite, two doors down, in the room with the chubby girl named Gia.
“I didn’t know any of that,” I said.
“Well there it is.” We were quiet for a moment, and then he cleared his voice and said, “Did you miss me?”
“Yeah, I missed you. Very much.” And I still missed him even though he was here, his shoulder almost touching mine. I missed him from those years that were gone and that I could never get back.
“Well,” he said, “this time we’ll keep in touch, OK? I’ll do my part. I was as much to blame as you were.”
“That’s bullshit, Griff.”
“No, I took the hint. Junior year, I’d call, you wouldn’t want to hang out, you’d be busy-tired-working, take your pick—and eventually I just took the hint. I shouldn’t have taken any hints. I should’ve been like, What the fuck is up? Maybe I would’ve figured out how you felt about that stupid email sooner.”
“I guess.”
“Better late than never, right?” He exhaled a punctuation and then asked to hear more about Melanie.
“What about her?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “how’d you meet her and stuff?” I didn’t respond right away and he added, “Did you haul her out of a snow-ditch or something? A WWSD?”
“It wouldn’t have been a WWSD with her. It’s only a WWSD if they’re ugly.”
“Haha!”
“It was nothing that dramatic. We were on the same coffee schedule at Dunkins in the morning. I saw her every day for about a week and then asked if I could buy her coffee. We started going out.”
“Nice.”
“She’s an insomniac,” I went on, “and she’d paint while I was asleep. This’ll sound cheesy but it’s true. She had a little painting board set up by the window, right over there, and I used to love listening to the brush move over the paper. Watercolors. You couldn’t hear it at any other time except at night, you know, when it was quiet enough. And the breeze would come through the window and blow her smell toward me; she had lilac perfume—still does. And sometimes she’d be naked while she was doing this; it would be after we’d, you know, had sex. She’d get up and paint.”
“Wow,” he said. “That’s like the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”
I felt a hollowness at the idea that those nights were in the past and not something I could still look forward to. “It was pretty nice. But now I wonder if she really had insomnia or if she was just lying awake worrying about Bernie.”
He was quiet a minute. “Did you love her?”
“I don’t know. I may have? If we’d had more time I may have. But you can potentially love everyone you’re in a new relationship with, right? Or else why would you bother?”
“That’s true.”
“Of course, my qualifications for love are super low.”
“They’re not low,” he said, “they’re just wide open. You have no Need Not Apply signs in your windows.”
“...”
“Really.”
“Well regardless, it was short and sweet, and I didn’t have time to notice any flaws before old Bernie came home shell-shocked. I think she felt bad, like us together was the last thing the guy needed. Maybe it was.”
“You’re a good man,” he said, reaching over the pillow to squeeze my arm. And then after a few minutes of quiet he said, “Sorry about that.”
“What?”
He kicked at the covers and warm reeking bed-air billowed over my face. “That.”
“Oh god, what the fuck did you eat!” I laughed even as I gagged. It was funny the way farts are always funny.
“That bologna was maybe partially fossilized.”
“You used that? I told you to use the new!”
“I didn’t want to waste the old.”
“Well now it’s wasting you.”
“Ba-dum-bum. Oh, oh another one. My poor ass.”
“Oh god, remember how we used to make fake farts at night? Remember that? And we’d wake up half the suite?”
“Beth would come pounding at our door. Guys, shut the hell up! And we’d be all snug in our beds, laughing like fucking mental patients.”
I put my forearm against my lips and blew. He laughed, a Pavlovian response. “See?” I said. “Still works.”
“What is it that makes farts so funny?” He made a noise with his cheek. It sounded like wet clay blasting from a fire hose.
“You used to laugh so hard you’d slam yourself against your mattress and the whole room would shake. I remember it made your posters flutter.”
I put the heels of my palms against my cheeks. It was thunderous. He was nearly in convulsions. He rocked back and forth, arm and leg bumping against me. Every touch of his skin against mine was like a warm spark. Everything inside me fell quiet, all my inner voices and worries and analyzations were silenced by this incredible feeling of home, of Griff beside me. It was a feeling that added up to, more than anything else, relief.
“Check this one out,” he said. He sat up and slammed back down into his pillow, making the sound of his body-weight in Jell-O smacking pavement as he hit. The blankets billowed around his legs. I was laughing so hard I made no sound at all.
“That’s nothing,” I said when I could breathe again, doing my best to sound unimpressed. I filled my cheeks and ripped a fart through my teeth. His individual laughs merged together into a steady eeeeee. His eyes were squeezed shut.
“I can top that,” he said. He elbowed me in the side, in the ribs. “Listen to this.” He performed the sound of a sumo wrestler suffering from the diarrhea Griff usually got from tacos.
What if, when he wasn’t looking, I folded my arms around his waist, laid my head on his shoulder? Would he care? Would he push me away?
“Dude,” I said, “that’s fucking child’s play. Let me show you how a master does it.”
“Where are you gonna find a master this late?”
“Ooooh. Harsh!”
On a cold night when we were teenagers Griff had told me I was a step ahead—that I was more advanced, more evolved, or just plain more in touch with love than he was just because I could love guys and girls equally. But it occurred to me here in clouds of mock gas—me so focused on the rough smoothness of his skin, he so unconcerned and comfortable with mine—that if one of us was a step ahead, if one of us was really a social revolutionary, it wasn’t me at all.
S U N D A Y
From the kitchen I could hear him still in bed, mumbling something at a volume that made me think he wanted me to understand. I’d gotten up when he was still breathing nasally and sprawled mostly on my side, feet protruding from untucked edges of blankets. I sat down at the kitchen table with a coffee and the Sunday funnies.
“Can’t hear you,” I said.
He came out of the bedroom with his phone against his ear. He pointed to it.
“Oh.”
His tongue fell out and he grappled with what looked like an invisible noose. Then he was dragged back into the bedroom by an unseen foe. With his free hand
he clutched the door jamb, clawed at it with desperate fingernails, was yanked inside.
A few minutes later he came out and opened the fridge.
“Beth?” I said.
“She can be such a bitch, but she’s so damn sweet about it.” He took out a loaf of oatmeal bread and dropped four slices into the toaster. “And she’s got that smoky voice,” he said. “You remember it. Like Katharine Hepburn in her youth.”
He took a mug out of the cupboard, put it on the table and poured all that remained of the coffee. It went right to the brim. He sat down and lapped it with his tongue to get rid of some before picking it up.
“She cool with us coming today?”
He nodded. “I told her mid-afternoon sometime.”
“Cool. I’m looking forward to a little road trip.”
“Yeah.” His toast popped up and with quick fingers he plucked it out. He buttered it and dumped on a heavy layer of cinnamon sugar. “I was thinking you should ask Zane to come with us,” he said.
I laughed but saw he was serious. “Zane? Why would I do that?”
“He seems fun.”
“No.”
“We don’t have to, I just thought it might be interesting.”
“For you.”
He chomped into his toast and got his face poofed with a cloud of cinnamon sugar. “Gah. Not for you?”
“We’ll need the space for your stuff.”
“There’s not that much,” he said, wiping his cheeks with the back of his hand. “And Zane’s skinny.”
He went into the living room with his breakfast.
I squinted against the late-morning sunlight that reflected off hundreds of millions of crash-landed snowflakes, wondering how the fuck he talked me into this.
“Here, hold this up while I go under,” Griff said, letting go of a springy branch. He dropped to his knees and then to his stomach and began dragging himself through the snow with his elbows.
“Couldn’t we just call him?” I said. My toes were cold.
“I thought you were all anti-phone,” he said. His boots were the last of him to cross through the hedge that surrounded Zane’s family’s yard.
“I think I could’ve made an exception.” I followed him under, the branch scraping the back of my peacoat like an admonishing finger. Thirty feet away was the driveway, neatly plowed down to shiny black pavement. Griff thought it would be more fun to sneak in.
I stood up, wiped snow off my chest and knees.
“Which one’s his?” he asked, looking up at the windows and shielding his eyes from the sun.
“Those.” I pointed up at the two on the left side of the second floor. As we traipsed across the yard the breeze wisped powdery snow from the branches of a tall thick oak tree beside the house.
“All right, let’s see here.” He bent down and gathered a handful of snow, pressed it together. It wouldn’t stick. “Dammit.” I reminded him that this kind of snow doesn’t make good snowballs. He looked at me blankly—“Well what else can we throw up there?” he said—as though our inability to find anything else would persuade the snow to just give up and turn sticky. Any other projectiles we might’ve found lying around the yard were buried. The whole expanse, aside from our tracks, was pristine white.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Your shoe?”
“Cute.” He looked up. “I don’t suppose you want to try climbing that tree.”
“Not particularly.”
“All right—looks like we resort to the old-fashioned doorbell technique, then.” He sighed.
We did our best not to collapse the neat snow piles that lined the shoveled front path. I rang the doorbell; it was that kind that plays a tune instead of just ding-donging but I could never figure out what it was. After a minute Zane’s brother opened the door. He was round-faced and pudgy—a freshman, he had become the basketball team’s water boy for the exercise, and, according to Zane, for the social benefits that came from hanging around with upperclassman jocks. Namely, as Zane related it, first-class pussy.
“Hey Ralph,” I said. “Zane home?”
“I guess. Hold on.” He closed the door. I heard him yell.
“Let me get this straight,” Griff said. “They named one of their kids Zane and the other one Ralph?”
“Zane’s real name is Peter,” I said. “Peter Perkins. He re-named himself in middle school, so the legend goes.” Griff raised his eyebrows and nodded in approval. “Kind of like you, Ariel.”
“Can you blame me? That fucking mermaid movie ruined my life.”
The door opened again in a breath of warmth. Zane’s black hair was flat on one side and sticking up on the other. “Hey guys.”
“Hey.”
“Get dressed,” Griff said cheerfully, “we’re springing you.”
“You’re what?”
“We’re going to Boston to get Griff’s stuff from his ex-girlfriend’s place,” I said. “We were wondering if you wanted to come for the ride or whatever.”
Zane’s dark eyes drifted behind me to the front yard and registered a tiny surprise, as if he was noticing the snow for the first time. There was a grain of sleep-sand in the corner of his left eye and an eyelash clung to the tip of his nose. “Now?”
I looked at Griff. “Well, yeah, you know, whenever you can be ready.” I was suddenly, strangely, afraid he’d say no.
“Do I have time to jump in the shower?”
“Please do,” said Griff.
“OK.” Zane started to close the door but before the latch caught he yanked it back open. “Did you want to come in, or...?”
“We’ll be in the car,” I said. “We’re parked down the street a little ways, down there.”
He asked why we didn’t just park in the driveway.
“We were trying to be covert and stuff,” said Griff.
Griff stuck his iPod’s cassette adapter into the dashboard tape deck.
“I can’t believe you have one of those,” I said.
“An iPod?”
“Digital music,” I said, turning to look out the window, “is so impersonal. I like to hold something when I’m listening to music. A record sleeve, at least a CD case. Something more tangible than ones and zeros.”
“You’re tactile like that,” he said. The little white machine made clicking noises as he swirled his thumb around the button.
“When I play someone a song on the record player, it’s intimate. It’s romantic. If you want me to hear a song, what do you do, toss me the earbuds? And I won’t even get into the issue of album art and liner notes.”
“Well,” he said, “you can’t take your record player on a road trip, now can you?”
“...”
“I rest my case.”
“That’s the only thing they’re good for,” I conceded. “I just feel like the personality has gone out of things. Email instead of letters. Words on a screen. You can’t say I’m nostalgic for the good old days, because in my good old days I learned my letters on a Speak & Spell. Something’s just missing now.”
“I was thinking yesterday when I was at your house by myself,” he said, “that you live in kind of a quiet. A hush. With your records and your old comic books and your fireplace and your corduroy furniture. There’s no pop in your house—it’s all sort of like candle-light and black-and-white movies.”
“A hush, huh?”
“Sort of a whisper,” he said. “It feels maroon.”
“Maroon to me suggests areolas.”
“It’s not a visual thing,” he said impatiently. “But fine.” He thought for a moment. “It isn’t exactly right, but how about cranberry?”
“That’s a little fruity,” I said.
“You’re a little fruity.”
Zane knocked on my window. He had on a peacoat like mine over a yellow hooded sweatshirt. I got out and let him in.
“Hope I didn’t take too long,” he said, squeezing into the back seat.
I pushed my seat back and got in. “Griff was jus
t explaining to me that I live in a hush.”
Zane laughed. “That’s not the word I would’ve used, but yeah, I totally know what you mean.”
“What do you mean, you know what he means? Is everyone going around putting my lifestyle into catchphrases? What word would you have used, anyway?”
“I don’t know. RetroLand?”
“RetroLand. Isn’t that a ride at Disney World?”
“I still say it’s more like a cranberry hush,” said Griff, crossing his arms.
We stopped for gas and then for coffee and hot chocolate at the Dunkin’ Donuts, and then we hit the road to the city—me piloting, Griff deejaying, Zane keeping the beat on the armrest.
Bostonians after a snowstorm reminded me of kids trying to make brussels sprouts disappear by spreading them around on the plate. Snow was pushed into huge piles in intersections, in tiny front yards and along sidewalks. Already it was turning a dismal gray.
The view while we sat in traffic stirred that strange-familiar feeling of seeing a long-lost friend—a feeling I’d been feeling a lot the past few days. I’d been back to the city a bunch of times since graduation and it had that same feeling every time—nothing major, just the feeling that I’d once called this city home and now no longer did. New buildings had been built since I’d left, old ones refaced; the skyline had changed a bit but for the most part it looked the same. A memory-lane kind of place.
Beth lived in the Fenway, down near the ballpark, on the top floor of a brownstone on Peterborough Street. Buildings like hers had a tendency to be let go on the outside and maintained only on the inside; their decrepitude was part of their charm or something. But Beth’s place was old all around. The narrow staircase slanted from the wall at a vertigo-inducing angle, sagging and swaying like a rope bridge, threatening to send you over the railing into the abyss.
“Should, uh— Should we all be on these stairs at the same time?” Zane said, clutching the thick mahogany rail.
“Probably not,” Griff said—but we kept walking anyway.
By the time we arrived on the fourth floor Zane and I were breathing heavy—Griff was fine, was home. Two doors faced one another on either side of the landing.
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 10