The Cranberry Hush: A Novel

by Monopoli, Ben

  Griff pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket, raised one to the keyhole of the door labeled 4F and left it floating there for a second. Then he put the keys back in his pocket and knocked instead, three thumps with his fist.

  I heard something touch the door—the sound of someone looking through the peephole—and then it opened and there was Beth. No longer the roommate of chubby Gia, Beth was a woman now, the Ex of Griff. Although she was a year younger than us she looked grown up in the similarly indescribable way that Griff and I still looked like kids. Her auburn hair was longer than she used to wear it; she had on jeans and an olive v-neck t-shirt. Her eyes remained her most striking feature—one was blue and the other was green. It suddenly made sense to me why Griff had fallen for Beth: blue and green must’ve been happy colors.

  She said hello to Griff, not much above a whisper, and gave him a weak smile that I found unexpectedly tender and kind. It knocked off-balance the casual contempt I was all ready to feel for her.

  When Griff responded his voice was stiff, as though he were speaking in block letters. “Hey,” he said. “We made it.”

  “I didn’t really have a chance to get your stuff together,” she said.

  “I’m surprised you came back in the snow.”

  “I have work.”

  He shrugged. Beth stepped aside, her arm hugging the door jamb, and he slid past her into the apartment. She opened the door wider and hugged me. She smelled like cucumber-melon.

  “Good to see you, Vince,” she said into my ear. It was the way people who haven’t seen each other in years greet at the funeral of a mutual friend.

  “You too, Beth. Long time no see.”

  “You look good.”

  “Thanks. Uh, this is my friend Zane.”

  “The moving crew,” she said, shaking his hand. He asked if she’d had any baseballs come through her window. “The park’s on that side.” She pointed in one direction and then corrected herself. “So no, but my neighbor might’ve. It’d be a hell of a hit, though. Come on in, guys.”

  The walls in the kitchen were painted the color of flower pots. The living room, visible through a doorway, was magenta. Lots of framed photos and a number of large black-and-white concert posters made the clashing colors work. On the wall opposite the sink was a wrought-iron shelf filled with cactuses.

  Beth said, smirking, “They’re the only green thing I can keep alive.”

  “I stopped bothering after my first three or four murders,” I said. “Planticides. Now I just worry about the lawn. Keeping that green and stuff.”

  Zane and I leaned against the cupboards. Beth stood in the middle of the floor with her arms folded across her chest.

  “No lawn for me luckily,” she said. “Although a yard to read in would be nice. ...Did you find a place to park?”

  “Kind of,” I said, looking out the window above the sink, expecting to see cars below, but it was an alley; we were on the other side of the building. “Resident-only. That’s not a problem, is it?”

  “People do it all the time.” She wore pink socks and tapped one foot on the linoleum floor. “Can I get you guys something to drink?” She was reaching for the refrigerator door before we answered. “Lemonade? Pepsi? Something hot? I could make coffee.”

  “Just some water would be good,” I said, peering into the fridge. I wasn’t thirsty but thought the action it provided and the time it would consume were reasons enough.

  “Zane?”

  “Yes please.”

  Beth took two glasses from the cupboard above the sink and filled them from a gurgling bottle of Poland Spring. The edge of the counter was digging into the small of my back now but I didn’t move. She held out a glass and I took it and sipped, barely stifling an awkward compliment of the water’s taste. We made small talk about jobs—Beth worked for some publishing company in Cambridge—and the snowstorm and Nosebag, the fat orange tomcat purring in circles around our legs.

  Meanwhile Griff walked silently back and forth through the kitchen, between the living room and the bedroom, packing cardboard boxes bearing the logos of various mail-order catalogues with books and things, and a black garbage bag with towels and shoes. The bag over his shoulder made him look like a thin, sad Santa. On his every trip through, conversation between the other three of us grew even more stilted and weird as we followed him with our eyes.

  “What do you do, Zane?” Beth said after Griff once again returned to the bedroom.

  “Oh, I work at the comic shop with Vince,” he said. “And I go to Cape Cod Comm—” There was a crash in the bedroom. “—Community.”

  It was the sound of a jumble of things hitting the floor. Plastic. Books. I heard Griff swear with more anger than the spill itself sounded like it deserved. I was taking a step forward when Beth excused herself and went in the bedroom. I tipped the glass to my lips, settled back against the counter.

  “Good water,” Zane said, his eyes shifting from me to the cat.

  A moment later Beth came out of the bedroom with her arms folded across her chest and said, “He wants you.”

  ***

  Something was wrong, I could tell. I put my Economics book in the plastic stacker under my desk and pulled my chair over alongside Griff’s bed, where he was sitting with his back against the wall, gazing out the window with a blank expression on his face. In the corner of the Public Gardens below, where the angel statute stood, bronze wings outstretched, the leaves on the trees were turning red and orange and yellow.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “Physically.” Two balled-up tissues sat beside him like tumbleweeds on the bed. “She called and I finally couldn’t hold it in and I was like, Look.”

  The weekend before, he had been chatting online with Ashley, his sweetheart from Roger Williams, and received a misdirected IM—one that obviously and devastatingly didn’t fit the conversation they were having. Ashley brushed it off at first, said it was Griff she wanted to model her new underwear for that weekend—but then, when she put up an away message a minute later, Griff knew. Ashley had made a mistake. Clicked the wrong window. Typed and sent in the heat of a moment. It happens. Funny how often secrets are revealed when people get careless with computers.

  “And what did she say?”

  “That she’s been seeing someone else. Just said it like that, fucking matter-of-factly.”

  “Oh.”

  “I feel so fucking pissed and orange and betrayed, man.” His teeth were clenched. He squeezed his pillow. “I was going to marry that girl.”

  “Griffin,” I said, leaning closer with my arms crossed over my knees, “you’re nineteen. You weren’t going to marry her.”

  “She was perfect. When we were going out she was perfect.”

  “She wasn’t perfect, though. She was a sneaky, lying bitch who clearly never deserved you. You know that now.” There was more I wanted to say but I held my tongue.

  He pulled his legs in front of him and curled his arms around his knees. He had a sock on one foot; the other was inexplicably bare. He looked small, vulnerable. I wanted to touch him, to put my hand on his bare foot, make it warm.

  “I’m sorry it hurts,” I said.

  “I just feel so alone. You know that feeling? Like you’ve got nobody?”

  “I’m still here,” I told him, and I felt the pang of having to remind him.

  “That’s why you’re my best friend,” he said, looking at me and then returning his eyes to the angel statue below, and the pang went away.

  *

  When I went in the bedroom he was stacking DVDs in a toaster-oven box. A few still lay scattered on the mustard-colored carpet.

  “How’s it going?” I said.

  He smiled with his eyes closed and gestured for me to close the door. “I don’t want her to see me packing.”

  I nodded and shut it behind me. On the floor beside him was a pile of clothes and a few cardboard tubes for, I assumed, blueprints. I sat down on the edge of the bed he’d
shared with Beth. The covers were rumpled—from sleep, obviously, but still it reminded me of what had happened so naturally here between Griff and Beth. The way he slept in this bed was so different from the way he slept in mine.

  I stood up.

  With the box under his arm he walked his fingers across the spines of the DVDs and books on the white Ikea bookcase, every so often sliding one out and dropping it in the box. I felt bad for him for having to extract himself, item by item, from Beth’s life and the home they’d shared. I’d expected Beth to have already done that.

  “This one’s hers, but fuck it.” He flung Independence Day into the box.

  “Anything I can help with?” I said, my hands in my pockets.

  “My blue duffel bag is on the shelf in the closet,” he said and pointed at the slatted folding doors. “Could you grab that?”

  “Sure.”

  The bar that ran across the closet was filled half with Beth’s clothes and half with empty wire coat-hangers. I retrieved the duffel bag and held it in front of me for a moment, and then put it down and began stuffing it willy-nilly with the pile of clothes that lay on the floor.

  When I emerged from the bedroom with the bloated duffel bag over my shoulder I found Zane and Beth where I’d left them. Zane was on the floor rubbing Nosebag’s cream-white belly.

  “Help me carry some stuff down?” I said to him.

  “Yeah.” He patted Nosebag on the head—“Sorry cat”—and stood up, leaving the cat with a scowl that seemed to say, Where do you think you’re going, bitch?

  We carried down the first load of Griff’s stuff—his laptop bag, the box of DVDs, the duffel of clothes.

  “What’s in the tubes?” Zane asked.

  “Blueprints.”

  “He an architect?”

  “Yeah. He draws a good house.”

  “I feel bad,” Zane said. We pushed through the heavy wood-and-glass doors. “It’s like he’s getting a divorce.”

  “I guess.”

  “How long were they together?”

  “About three years, I think.”

  I set the box on the hood of the Jeep and dug out my keys. We stacked the stuff on the back seat.

  “Do you know why they broke up?” he said. “She seems really nice.”

  “She is nice,” I said, wondering if Zane was again probing at Griff’s sexuality. “Sometimes people need more to hold them together than just both being nice.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said, and he gave me a loaded glance that made me look away.

  When we got back to the apartment there were more boxes stacked by the door, and we brought those down too. Some of the items sticking out of the open ones were familiar—a pair of marble horse-head bookends, a framed snapshot of Adam Clayton Griff had taken at a U2 concert. These things had been in our room, had felt partly mine once upon a time.

  “I hope there isn’t much more than this,” I told Zane as I stacked these boxes in the Jeep with the others. “Otherwise you’ll have to ride on the roof.”

  On our last trip up we met Griff on the stairs of the third floor. He held one box—balancing on top was an aloe plant in a plastic pot the size of a big coffee mug. His vest was slung over his shoulder. His hair had been pushed back behind his ears and his cheeks were wet.

  “Fucking cat,” he said, sniffling faux-allergically and nodding up the stairs. He rested the box on his knee and wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand.

  “This the last of it?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  Zane, a couple steps below Griff, held out his hands. “I can take that one,” he said.

  As Griff was passing the box the plant slid across the cardboard and tumbled over the banister. Zane reached out and caught the rim of the pot between his pinky and ring fingers. Dirt spilled into the stairwell abyss. He grabbed the pot with his other hand and drew it safely against his chest.

  “Nice save,” Griff said. “That’s good luck now.” He adjusted the weight of the box in his arms and started to go down the steps.

  “I’m going to run up and say goodbye to Beth,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

  Griff went down with Zane, who watched Griff’s feet carefully, protectively, as though afraid he would stumble. I watched them both for a moment, going down together, Zane saying “Step, step,” and then I went back upstairs.

  I knocked on Beth’s door and went in. On the counter by the sink was a ring of anonymous keys that hadn’t been there before. Beth was standing in front of a big window in the living room, looking out at the fire escape where a lawn chair was buried in snow. Circles of colored glass hung from suction cups on the window and cast purple and green shadows on the floor. She held the cat, stroked it. Orange hairs wisped from its body and looked huge and throat-clogging in the sunbeam.

  “Hey Beth,” I said. She turned around. Her eyes were dry but sad. Griff was my hero, it was true, but he was way too complicated to have a neat and tidy villain, if Beth could even be considered a villain at all. “Car’s all loaded. I just wanted to come say goodbye.”

  She bent over and dropped the cat to the hardwood floor.

  “It was good to see you after all this time,” she said. “Would’ve been nicer under better circumstances.”

  “I know.”

  “We should keep in touch better,” she said. “I thought we were friends. I guess I don’t know what happened.”

  “I had some issues and stuff,” I said, not knowing quite what I meant.

  She apparently didn’t either. She shrugged. “So he just showed up at your house? You weren’t in touch at all beforehand?”

  I shook my head. “He just showed up. In the morning a couple days ago.”

  “Well. That’s a surprise.”

  “It was for me.”

  She hugged me and I put my arms around her. Griff had been the wedge that grew between us—it was probably only because she lived in his dorm, that small dorm where it was impossible to avoid anyone, that I had cut her off too.

  “It’s your turn with him now,” she said with a level of familiarity and camaraderie that made me uncomfortable, as though we were parents talking about a child. “See if you can knock him into shape.”

  “He’s only staying the week,” I said.

  “Oh—a week? He’s not...?” She raised her eyebrows and closed her eyes, a knowing—and almost smarmy, I thought—enjoyment of his lack of plans. A why-am-I-not-surprised look. “Sorry, I was under the impression he was moving in with you.”

  “He’s going to Phoenix,” I said. “To help put in a hot tub.” I meant it as a defense but it sounded weak, even to me. “For his cousin.”

  “Ah, a hot tub. Well that’s great. That’s ambitious. And that’s assuming he goes, which he won’t. Do you know what he’ll do? He’ll go from your house to his mother’s couch.” She paused. “Did he tell you why I asked him to leave?”

  “Just that it was mutual.”

  “Vince,” she said, “come on. Break-ups are never mutual. What happened was he made it pretty clear he wanted to go and finally I just told him to get off his ass and do it, do something.” She pursed her lips. “That money—the inheritance?—did he tell you about that?—that’s really the worst thing that’s ever happened to him. He’s got it in his head that he can just live off it and not have to do anything else, but it’s not enough money to get through your life with. So he’s in stasis. He does nothing. I had to even help him find the initiative to dump me.” Nosebag started clawing the sofa and Beth looked for a moment like she was going to stop him, but instead she turned to me again. “That’s not what I want, Vince. Now that I’m graduated I can start my life, and now that he’s graduated he acts like his is over. In fact, the only point in the past year where he’s had any enthusiasm for anything was during the brief fling he had with the idea of going back.”

  “The post-college void doesn’t scare you, Beth?”

  “The what?”

  I shook my head. �
��Well did you tell him all that?”

  She sighed. “A million times. Two million.”

  “I don’t know what I can do to help him.”

  “Well, I know you’ll try.” She shrugged. “And I think somewhere deep down he knows too. There are a lot of places he could’ve gone when he left here.”

  We walked through the kitchen to the door. The cat followed us halfway and then darted into the bedroom.

  “Beth,” I said, “did he ever, like, talk about me? Over the years, I mean?”

  “He missed you, Vince, if that’s what you’re wondering.” She gave me a little smile. “Take care,” she said. “Write me a letter some time.” She smiled again and closed the door behind me. When I heard the lock click I started back down the stairs.

  Zane was nestled between boxes like a Christmas ornament in the back of the Jeep. He held the aloe plant in his lap.

  “All set?” I said, examining Griff. He nodded; his cheeks were dry now.

  “I was thinking,” he said, “that we should drive by the old dorm. Since we’re in town. I haven’t been through the Back Bay way in a while.”

  That was something I hadn’t thought about doing. I looked straight ahead for a moment thinking and didn’t respond.

  “Unless you don’t want to,” he said. “We don’t have to.”

  “No,” I said, “let’s go.”

  We looked up at our dorm, up through the bare branches of trees that in April explode into pink and white blossoms. It was a ten-story red brick building, rectangular and almost featureless save for a strip of white granite that highlighted the windows of the fourth floor with shallow carvings of gargoyles. Our room had been almost at the top. Room 907.

  “Looks the same, huh?” Griff said. He wrapped his fingers around the bars of the tall wrought-iron fence that, by decree of the Historic District Commission, could never be removed. On the front steps a boy in a knee-length green army coat sat smoking a cigarette. A boy who wasn’t us.

  “Seems like a long time ago,” I said.