by Nick Burd
“Sorry,” he said. “Go inside and go back to bed if it’s that goddamn big of a deal.”
“Fine,” I said, opening the door.
He grabbed my arm. “Wait.”
I saw a flash of something vulnerable in his face.
“What do you want?” I asked. “Seriously.”
“I just want to figure out if there’s maybe some way to make things work,” he said blankly. He stared out the windshield again. “I don’t see where there’s a problem.”
“Judy,” I said. “The fact that you have a girlfriend is a problem. The fact that you’ve never acknowledged the significance of all the things that have happened between us is a problem. You’re constantly acting like I don’t really exist and it makes me feel like the last two years have meant nothing to you. And they meant a lot to me, man.”
“I stuck up for you,” he said. “That day in the lunchroom. I fucking punched one of my best friends for you. What do you think that was?”
“And then you were hanging out with him again two weeks later,” I said. “And where was I?”
“You came over that one day. The day my mom made us enchiladas.”
“You mean the day you said you’d never love me?” I said. “Is that the day you’re talking about?”
He spoke with forced calm. “Like I said, I just want to see if there is maybe some way we could make it work. Things were fine junior year. There was Judy and there was you and we made it work and—”
“But that’s the problem,” I said. “There was Judy and there was me and there was all this complicated bullshit because of that. I let you have it both ways for a long time, but it can’t be like that anymore. You always say that I complicate things. Well, this is me simplifying them.”
He didn’t say anything. I wanted him to say that he’d never said anything bad about me and that he never would. I wanted him to say that he always stuck up for me, even during the little moments, the ones where the entire lunchroom wasn’t watching, the ones where people showed you what they were really made of.
“I’ve always been shit to you,” I went on. “I used to think that would change over time, but after that day I came over to your house and you slapped me, I started to realize I was wrong.”
My mind went to Alex. All I wanted was to talk to him again, to be close to him again. I thought of how it felt to sit next to him in his car and how different that was from sitting next to Pablo. I wondered if I was finally able to say all this to Pablo because I had somewhere else to go and that somewhere else was Alex.
“Are we done here?” I asked, my hand on the door handle “Do you have anything else to say?”
He stared at his lap and shook his head. I got out of the car and slammed the door behind me. I felt brave and in control of the situation for the first time. I didn’t let myself look back as I walked up to my house. I stood there in the coolness of our foyer with my back pressed against our front door as if I were keeping the whole world from breaking in. It was then that I heard his truck come to life, the engine noisy and sick like a broken toy. I stood there in the shadows and listened to the sound of him fading down the block.
Chapter 8
Almost two weeks passed and Alex hadn’t called. Hadn’t he said he wanted to hang out? He probably said that to everyone. My crush had made it impossible for me to picture what he looked like. His face only came clearly when I wasn’t expecting it. I’d be stocking the milk cooler at Food World or standing in the shower and he would suddenly appear in my mind. His long dark hair, his narrow and perfect face. Everything became clear for a few rounded moments and then I’d lose the image again and the frustration would return, familiar and physical, something quivering right under the skin on my arms.
I’d started hanging out with Lucy on a regular basis. We went downtown and watched fireworks from the top of a parking garage on the Fourth of July. We scoured every thrift store in town for the perfect pair of pants, T-shirt, or ashtray. Sometimes we met at the twenty-four-hour diner by the interstate to talk over coffee and French silk pie. I’d bring along a poem or story that I’d written and Lucy would read it right there and tell me what she thought. I never felt shy sharing my stuff with her. She was the least judgmental person I’d ever met.
She once said, “Sometimes it’s a bit too clear that the guy in the story is actually you.” She was sitting across from me in a booth at the diner, slowly flipping through the pages of a story of mine she’d read. “I think you need to not do that. Make it more universal.”
Even when she was talking about some line I’d written that was so personal it made me blush, she’d speak with the casual yet warm distance of a doctor. I was a year older than her, but I looked at her as the smarter, more worldly of the two of us, and because of this I valued her opinion of me, my writing, and my life more than almost anyone else I’d met before.
In the meantime, a strange calm had settled over our household. My mother started painting outside. Every day she woke up at six a.m. and spent the entire morning and a good part of the afternoon painting pictures of our backyard. She painted the pool and the garden, the sky and the clouds. Sometimes I would take a swim while she worked and she would insert me into her painting. I would be there, a blurry-edged outline of a boy swimming underwater.
“I’m trying to create sort of a visual diary of this summer,” I heard her say to her sister over the phone. “I feel like eventually these pictures will become important, like someday I’ll be able to look at them and find the answers that I can’t find now.”
My father was around more. I wasn’t sure if he’d stopped seeing Vicki or not, but after the night of the Savages’ barbeque, he was always home for dinner. He seemed to be taking a cue from my mother, moving through our house with a medicated sense of calm. His peace seemed organically psychological, the product of self-reflection and maybe even resignation. It was as if they were both operating under the understanding that as soon as I left for college, they could do whatever they wanted. They could get a divorce and sell the house or hurl insults like bricks and decorate the walls with each other’s blood. All they had to do was wait for me to leave.
One night I came home from work to find my father out by the pool. He was sitting on a chaise longue smoking a cigar and holding a tumbler of something, probably scotch. The glow coming up from the bottom of the pool cast him in a trembling blue light. I grabbed a can of ginger ale from the refrigerator and started to head upstairs, but I stopped on the first step. He knew I was home and I knew he was out there. I went back through the kitchen and into the backyard.
“Yo,” I said flatly as I approached.
“You’re home,” he said, not looking at me.
I took a seat on the chair beside him. “I am. Worked late.”
“And how’s work?”
“Good. Ready not to work there anymore, though.”
“That’s understandable,” he said. “I thought you may be out with the Savages’ niece, that Lucy girl. She seems nice. Pretty.”
I knew my father well enough to know he was trying to see if there was any possibility that Lucy and I were an item. As always, my mind raced for a way to switch the subject.
“We have a lot in common,” I said.
We fell into one of our awkward silences. Over our fence came the sound of the sprinkler system hissing in the yard of the house behind ours. Somewhere someone’s dog let out a series of barks.
“I saw your mother’s pool paintings,” my dad said. “They’re good. I like how you’re in some of them.”
“Yeah, I like them.”
“I do too. I told her that. I think she thought I was being a jerk. She misunderstands sometimes.”
I wanted to say something here, maybe mention the fact that he usually was a jerk.
“I wonder what she sees out here,” he said. “I wonder what any of us see when we’re in the same place for so long.”
He paused here like he was waiting for an answer. Every once
in a while my father would ask me these big questions. It was like he was testing me on some material or lecture he’d given me before, but as far as I could tell, he hadn’t bestowed any wisdom upon me that would help answer anything.
He went on. “Someday we’ll look at pictures of this house and think of this point in our lives and it will all feel like it happened to somebody else. It’s all history, isn’t it? All this stuff. You’ll be gone soon. College. So much change. You’ll love it. I promise. I love you, son.”
“Um . . . I love you too.”
He reached over and gave me a few fatherly slaps on the knee. He teetered a bit in his chair as he did this and I realized that he was tipsy. All of a sudden we’d fallen into some messed-up version of Leave It to Beaver.
“What if I don’t?” I said.
“What if you don’t what?”
“Love college,” I said. “I mean, what if I go there and it’s just as boring as here?”
“Cedarville’s not that boring,” he said.
“Yeah, it is, Dad,” I said. “For an eighteen-year-old it is. I mean, you can’t tell me that you don’t get bored with this place sometimes.”
“Getting older isn’t always about having fun,” he said. “In fact, in many ways it’s about being bored. It’s good if you can find a way to be entertained by your boredom. As for college, you’ll be fine. Just let go of everything and fall in. You’ll be fine.”
We went quiet again. I popped open my can of ginger ale and took a sip. He held out his cigar, but I waved it away. He put it back in his mouth and sucked. The orange tip flared.
“Have you ever been in love, Dade?”
“Why?”
“Because everyone should fall in love.” He took a gulp of his drink. “Don’t you think? Let’s talk about this like men. Answer only the questions that you want to answer. Have you ever been in love?”
The way he was gesturing with his hands made me think he was drunker than I thought.
“I don’t know if I’ve been in love,” I said.
“Have you been close to something like love?”
“Maybe. The general vicinity. Close would be too generous.”
My father inhaled the night air and let it out. He slapped my knee again.
“That makes me happy,” he said. “That’s good to hear. It’s better than nothing.”
I let out a little laugh. “Is it?”
“Yeah. It is.”
I suddenly had the urge to tell him everything. I wanted to dump it all over his head like a bucket of cold water. I wanted to tell him about meeting Alex. I wanted to tell him about Pablo. I wanted to tell him about the nights I stared up at the ceiling fan and told it I was gay. I wanted to do all this to test him, to see if he really loved me. But then the urge lifted as suddenly as it had appeared, and I pulled all these things away from the precipice of telling and hid them away again.
“You want to know what I’ve always want to do?” he said. “Here. Hold this.”
He handed me the cigar and slipped off his sandals. He pulled his cell phone, his wallet, and some loose change out of his pocket and tossed it all onto the chair he’d just been sitting on. He walked over to the edge of the pool. He was still wearing khaki shorts and one of his blue polos with “Hamilton Luxury Motors” embroidered on the breast pocket. He looked over his shoulder and gave me a weird grin and then fell face-first into the pool. The splash was a liquid explosion in the quiet suburban night. He swam underwater to the other side and came up for a quick gulp of air before going under again and heading back toward me. I stood by the edge, looking down at him as he came to a halt at my feet. I thought of all the times my mother had referred to my father as immature. Right then he reminded me of a child who broke rules simply for the sake of breaking them.
“Get in,” he said. It came out like a command.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“Come on,” he pressured. “Get in. Clothes and all.”
“I can’t, Dad.”
“Why not?”
“That won’t fix anything.”
He shook his head, disappointed, and at that moment I wanted to be anyone else but who I was. I wanted to be the boy who would’ve jumped in.
That night I dreamt of Alex. We were walking down a highway in the middle of the desert. It was warm and there were white flakes falling from the sky. Alex walked a few feet in front of me. I knew he was leading me somewhere, but I didn’t know where, and I hadn’t asked because I knew he wouldn’t tell me. The rule in the dream was that I could ask about anything except where we were going.
“How is it snowing in the desert?” I asked.
“It’s not snow, dude. It’s ash.”
I sensed that someone was behind me. I tried to turn around, but my neck went stiff and I could only move it a few degrees right or left, not enough to see who was there. The person starting humming the chorus of Debbie Loser’s “I Only Want You Because You’re Worthless.” I reached behind my back and wiggled my fingers.
“Touch me,” I said. “Touch my fingers and tell me who you are.”
I felt a hand on mine.
I snapped awake to the sound of my Debbie Loser ringtone. I grabbed it off the nightstand in a groggy panic and answered it without checking to see who was calling.
“Sleeping?” the voice asked.
Was it Alex? I blinked my eyes rapidly in an attempt to fully wake myself up. No, it wasn’t Alex. It was a girl’s voice. Lucy. Even in my muddled consciousness there was a pang of disappointment in my chest. The longing ran under everything.
“Yeah,” I said. “Dreaming.”
“Meet me on your porch in ten minutes. We’re going somewhere.”
“Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise. Wear your ratty red T-shirt and some hot jeans. And boots. Gotta wear your boots. No sneakers. Look hot.”
“Am I gonna like this?”
“Yes. I promise. See you in ten.”
I found the T-shirt Lucy had mentioned (red with a hole on the left shoulder, a thrift store purchase advertising a pizza joint in Lansing, Michigan) and put it on inside out. I put on one of the new pairs of jeans I had bought along with a pair of black boots that I hadn’t worn since my punk phase two winters ago, the one that ended two days before Christmas when my father told me to get my hair back to its normal color or I was going to spend Christmas wandering the streets of downtown Cedarville, a barefoot blue-haired boy in a Sex Pistols shirt asking strangers for change.
Lucy was already waiting for me on the porch when I went down. June bugs spun around the porch light like little manifestations of panic. Whenever we met again I was struck by how pretty she was. That night she was wearing pastel-colored barrettes that she’d bought at the drugstore and light blue eyeliner, both sarcastic nods to the institutions of femininity that she often declared pointless and disposable.
“We’re going to Cherry’s,” was the first thing she said.
“What’s Cherry’s?”
She bounced excitedly up and down on her toes. “It’s a gay bar.”
“You’re shitting me. Where?”
“Here in town,” she said.
“There aren’t any gay bars in Cedarville.”
“Yeah, there are,” she said. “And we’re going.”
The idea of going to a gay bar made me nervous. I pictured the bar as being filled with insanely attractive men, all taller and more muscular and more confident than me. Being rejected by people I had nothing in common with was bad enough, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be rejected by the very group to which I thought I belonged.
“How are we getting in?” I asked. “I’m assuming you took into consideration the fact that neither of us are twenty-one?”
“Of course. I’m not an idiot.”
She pulled two licenses from her back pocket. Both were California state. Hers was Esther Rodriguez and the other belonged to someone named Teddy Baron. The photo on Lucy’s ID was actu
ally her, but the picture on the other one was of a blank-faced skinhead with a constellation of zits on each cheek. His lips were slightly opened, as if he was about to ask a desperately moronic question, the kind of question you can only answer with baffled silence.
“Who is this tool?” I asked.
“That tool is you. Teddy’s the floater ID from my group of friends back in California. We all have our own, but there’s always that out-of-towner or random someone who needs one. I had a friend mail it out to me. It just arrived. I noticed the envelope on the kitchen counter and I called you immediately. I couldn’t wait. Your first visit to a gay bar is a major rite of passage, my friend. Maybe we’ll get lucky and you’ll get drunk and dance on a box with some hot go-go boy.”
“Um, I think your definition of lucky differs from mine.”
She laughed. “Well, see where the night takes us. Oh, and by the way, this one is boys only, so my chances of meeting anyone are pretty much nada, so expect a visit to the Kitty Klub over in Warwick County before the summer is done whether you like it or not.”
We drove there with the windows down, the AC on. She plugged her MP3 player into my stereo and put on some psychedelic pop by some Swedish band with a name I didn’t catch any of the four times she said it. I laughed as she attempted to sing along with the nonsense lyrics. I ran a red light and didn’t notice until Lucy pointed it out, but there were no other cars on First Avenue so it didn’t matter. We passed First Cedarville Bank on Trust with its scrolling that alternated between the time, temperature, and lame jokes.
. . . 12:41 a.m. . . . Why did the pair of suspenders get arrested? . . . 80˚ F . . . For holding up a pair of pants! . . . 12:41 a.m. . . . How do you kill a circus? . . . 79˚ F . . .
I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder as we drove by.
. . . Go for the juggler! . . .
“Eyes on the road, Teddy,” she said. “You’re going to get us both killed.”
A few minutes later we came around a bend in the road and the Hamilton Luxury Motors sign came into view.
“Hey, we’re coming up on my dad’s dealership.”