“And you’re telling this to his only friend?”
“It’s crazy,” admitted Pete. “I guess I wonder if maybe you know him, really know him, in some way that Roberta and I don’t. Maybe you can tell me something.” He finished off his glass and poured himself another one. After a moment’s thought, he refilled mine. “I’m sorry. You must be uncomfortable.”
“No,” I said. “I appreciate that you talk to me like I’m a peer. You don’t talk down to me. You expect me to get things. And I do. I get a lot of things.”
“You seem very mature. For a ghoul.”
“Gotta respect the ghoul,” I said.
“Human flesh,” he said.
I smiled. “And disillusionment.”
“Tasty,” he said.
“You’d be surprised.” I met his gaze and held it until he looked away. Then I said, “So, we can be friends, right? We can hang out?”
“Come on.” He leaned away from the table, creating more space between us, not because that’s what he wanted to do, but because it was what he thought he ought to do. He liked the idea of being my friend. He liked the idea of hanging out with me. He hated that he liked the idea, but he liked it all the same.
“No,” I said. “You come on.”
“How exactly is that going to work? You’re in middle school, and you think we can just hang out? I’m forty-five years old,” he said, wanting, more than anything else, to hear that it didn’t matter.
“Forty-five,” I said. “Now that is an awkward age.”
* * *
I let the better part of a week go by, but on Thursday I called him on his cell phone, right after school, a good couple of hours before Roberta would be home. “Engineer any good software today?”
“How did you get this number?” he asked.
“I found it in Neil’s phone,” I told him. “I was snooping. I’m very curious.”
“Right,” he said. “I was about to run some errands. You’re lucky to catch me.”
“I am lucky to catch you,” I agreed.
“So, Mason,” he said. “Can I do something for you?”
“What do you have in mind?”
There was a pause. “I mean, are you calling for a reason?”
“Do I need a big reason? I thought we were going to be friends.”
“Mason, this is weird,” he said.
“I know. Right?”
Another pause. “I just don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Are you going to give me a lot of crap about age difference? Are you really that shallow? Because I don’t think you are. I enjoy your company and you enjoy mine, and there is no reason why we can’t be friends other than the fact that, on some abstract level, you think it can be interpreted as weird. And maybe that’s true. Maybe, in general, it is weird for a person as old and feeble and decayed as you to be friends with a bright young fountain of potential like me, but the question is, do you think it is always weird? Do you think it is weird in this particular instance?”
“Wow,” he said. “Have you been practicing that?”
“It just came out, but it sounded awesome, right? I know! I was totally on a roll!”
He laughed. “You make a convincing case.”
“Good, so I’m at home, my mom is not. Why don’t you come over. I’m about to watch this old movie, Showgirls? Have you ever seen it? It’s about strippers or something, and it’s supposed to be so terrible that it’s awesome.” I gave him a few seconds to consider all this. “Join me?”
He took a few seconds himself. “I can’t. I have, uh, errands.”
Is there a way to interpret an invitation to watch a semipornographic film in an empty house as anything other than a come-on? Pete worked hard to find another explanation, because the most obvious one seemed so improbable—and so very much what he wanted—that he found it impossible to accept. Mason did not understand what she was doing. Mason was naive. Mason was so incredibly not interested in Pete that she viewed him as essentially sexless, which meant there was no erotic component in watching a dirty movie with him. One of those things had to be true because the alternative, that sexy young Mason was into him, meant he would have to develop some kind of response. Of course he could not make a move. Any kind of sexual relationship with her was unthinkable—and a crime. If they were caught, it would mean scandal, prison, the destruction of his family. It was also adultery, and despite the chronological fatigue currently buckling the walls of his marriage, Pete loved Roberta, had never cheated on her, and didn’t relish the idea of doing so.
But there were those little nagging questions. Would cheating really be that big a deal? What was cheating—what was it really? Just body parts touching, when you thought about it. Like shaking hands. In the end, what did it really mean? And what if it turned out that he fell in love with Mason? Then shouldn’t he be with her? Statutory rape, as a law, made sense in most cases, but Mason was clearly no ordinary fourteen-year-old. She was a woman, and there was nothing perverted in desiring her since he desired her as a woman, not a child.
He desired her. Yes.
These thoughts ping-ponged through Pete’s mind as he ran his errands, through dinner, through after-dinner television. In the middle of a show he and Roberta always liked to watch together—though they watched it only because she had a crush on one of the actors—Pete got up and went to Neil’s room, knocking once, and then entering when Neil grunted his approval for entry.
Inside the room, Neil sat at his desk, using his mouse and keyboard to lead a knight on a horse across a hilly landscape.
“You have a minute?” Pete asked.
“Okay,” Neil said, not looking up. “I’m supposed to meet someone from my guild in like ten minutes.”
“Sure,” Pete said. He sat on Neil’s bed, which had been made with almost military precision. There was no junk on the floor. His books were put on their shelves in alphabetical order. There were no posters on the walls. It had never occurred to Neil that he might want to personalize his space.
“Are you still friends with Mason?” Pete asked.
“I guess,” Neil said, continuing to ride his horse across the landscape. “I mean, maybe. I don’t know.”
“Do you like her? I mean, like for a girlfriend?”
“Nah.”
Pete needed a moment here. There was no awkwardness in this. No embarrassment. Pete had the distinct feeling that Neil had never considered Mason as an object of desire—that now that the topic had been raised, he still didn’t.
“Does she still want to hang out?” he managed.
“Not really.”
“Since when?”
“Sleepover, I guess.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
Neil shrugged. “I don’t feel anything about it.”
Pete stood up. “You don’t feel anything about it? You don’t have any friends, Neil. Don’t you care that you don’t have friends? Don’t you care that this beautiful girl wants to spend time with you, that she’s been—I don’t know—chasing you? Haven’t you noticed? Are you just going to let her get away from you without even noticing that she’s there?”
Neil stared at his father with a surprise that bordered on a kind of confused alarm. “She’s okay, but you know.”
“Okay,” Pete said. He walked toward the door, now afraid he’d raised his voice, that Roberta had heard him. He put his hand on the doorknob, turned back to Neil, and said, “Okay,” again. And that was it. Neil was already back at his keyboard, piloting his horse toward another figure on a horse. He tried not to think about the impossible, nonsensical, fantastical possibility that Mason had used his son to get to him. Why would she do that? Who was Pete that a fourteen-year-old girl would give a crap? Maybe Mason liked Neil for his own sake. Maybe she saw something in him that his own father simply could not, and while Pete found that thought as comforting as he did shameful, he could not make himself believe it. Even if it was the most logical explanation, it did not f
eel true.
Pete walked back to the TV room and sat next to Roberta, who hadn’t noticed he’d been gone, let alone heard him raise his voice. Roberta watched her show, and Pete thought about what might have happened if he had watched Showgirls with Mason.
Wasting no time, I texted Pete just before noon the next day.
ME: what r you up2
HIM: Hi Mason. I’m working. Shouldn’t you be furthering your education?
ME: take me 2 lunch
HIM: Wouldn’t you have to miss school?
ME: So not ur problem 12:15 at gas station, 1 block north of school
HIM: I don’t know.
ME: Yes u do I’ll b there
He came. Of course he came. How could he not? I’d made it so easy to say yes, so hard to say no. He picked me up in his Accord and smiled politely and did not touch me or leer at me, despite my wearing a very tight black T-shirt and short skirt in which I looked entirely like a woman and nothing like a child. I had my hair back in a ponytail, and he liked the way it looked. He liked being able to see my white neck. He liked my profile. He liked it all.
Pete had decided he would do everything he could to act as though meeting me for lunch, helping me to skip school, were the most natural thing in the world. He wore khakis and a button-down shirt, and he felt certain he looked handsome and competent, and he felt muscular and trim and ten years younger than he was, and he kept trying to forget what he was doing, how crazy and strange and dangerous it was. He wanted to enjoy the sensation of being near me, of being so close to my youth and vitality and freshness, and my near total absence of world-weariness. He didn’t want to think about what any of it meant or where it would lead or how insanely and foolishly self-destructive this single act was, how it could ruin his marriage and his life and everything. He wanted to inhabit the experience, and he could not remember the last time his life offered up a moment sweet enough to deserve that kind of attention.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
“Someplace I can get a beer,” I said.
He paused for a moment, and then decided not to be shocked or surprised or concerned. He decided to go with it. In some sense, he decided I was in charge, and he knew he was deciding that, and it was possible he even liked it. Pete was not accustomed to drinking beer in the afternoon. He might do so at a weekend party, but on a weekday, when he ought to be working—that was something that had quite literally never happened before. When you are self-employed, working entirely without supervision, it is healthiest to view midday drinking as strictly for drunks and losers, the pathetically unproductive. He knew that, and yet now that I had suggested it, Pete could not help but find the idea appealing. More than appealing. Seductive. It was a doorway to an entirely different life, and he was surprised how easy it was to decide to step through it. “What time do you have to be back?” he asked.
I pressed myself into the seat. “I don’t. I don’t ever have to be anywhere.”
He took me to a Korean place off Walzem where we ordered barbecue and drank Japanese beer while we snatched up spicy pickles and potatoes and little tiny fish with our chopsticks. Pete hadn’t known what to expect when I ordered the first round of beer, but the waiter had only nodded, not so much concealing his reaction as never having one. Maybe he was used to parents ordering drinks for their underaged children. Maybe he never doubted that I was of age. Maybe I simply had that effect on people. Certainly, Pete reflected, he’d already done things with me and for me that he never would have imagined doing, so he simply assumed the waiter was no different.
The beer turned out to be just what he needed. It didn’t make the situation any less strange, but it helped him to settle in, to work up the nerve to say what needed to be said. “What exactly is up with you and Neil?”
I let the bottle of beer dangle between my thumb and index finger, swinging like a pendulum. “What do you mean?”
“Give me a break, Mason,” he said, loving the feel of my name in his mouth. “You know what I mean.”
“Nothing is up with me and your son,” I said. “He is my friend. I like Neil. I’m not dating him. We are not having any kind of sexual relations, if that’s what you want to know. Anyhow, I have a boyfriend.”
“You do?” Disappointment, followed by chastising himself for that disappointment. What possible concern of his could it be if I had a boyfriend or not? I had a boyfriend and had no interest in Pete in that way, just as he had supposed, just as he had always known. He felt utterly deflated and utterly relieved. He felt like the world was righting itself and, in the process, he was sliding off the surface and into the void.
“You don’t think I could have a boyfriend? You think ghouls don’t deserve love?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” he said. “Of course it isn’t. I’m just making conversation, I guess. Acknowledging that I heard you.”
“He’s older than I am,” I said. “I like older guys.”
This got his attention. “How much older?”
“Tenth grade.”
I could see the emotions swirl across his face like the time-lapse image of a hurricane. Never had Pete felt quite so many of his forty-five years all at once, all so bitterly. He ordered us another round of beer.
“His name is Ryan,” I said. “And he is so hot. God, I love him. He plays JV football, but he’s not the jock type. He’s really cool. You would love him. I can’t wait for you guys to meet.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know how feasible that is,” he said.
“And he is so good in bed. Fuck. I know I shouldn’t say things like that. I know. I’m sorry. Cindy always says I need to censor myself better, and I swear I’m working on it.”
So now Pete knew. I wasn’t hitting on him, he concluded. He was an absurd, self-deluding, middle-aged clown. That much was now clear, wasn’t it? But then how to explain the flagrant flirting, the inviting him over to watch Showgirls? Could he have been so wrong about all that? How could he have misunderstood so many signals? He couldn’t have, but then how could he make sense of this new development?
It would have been so easy for him to escape. He could have done it right then, and to do it he only would have had to say precisely what was on his mind. He could have asked me what I thought I was doing with him. He could have asked me why I was flirting with him and then talking about my hot boyfriend. He could have said that he found this situation very confusing and strange, and maybe the strange part he could live with, maybe he liked the strangeness. He could have said how much he enjoyed me and being near me and talking with me and drinking three or four or five beers with me in the afternoon and blowing off that work he swore he would get done that afternoon because being with me was so much better than any of that, but he could not deal with how confusing it was. He could have said that he didn’t know if it was because of my youth or the generation gap or just the peculiarities of my personality or the fact that maybe I ought to be on meds, but clearly I did not understand the mixed signals I was sending, and he needed me to explain. That’s all it would have taken. Web snapped, snare broken. It would have been so simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy, and for Pete the hardest thing would have been to say the words that banished the illusion that a beautiful, impossible, unobtainable girl desired him. So he said something else. He said, “You know what? You should feel free to be entirely yourself around me.” “I will,” I lied as I took a piece of kim chi.
There were more texts. I sent him a message every day. Then two or three and then four or five times a day. I would sometimes wait an hour or two before responding to his. He always responded right away. There were more lunches with more drinks. We would sneak away, he from his home office and me from school, and we would eat and linger around the table at some obscure Asian eatery with stained linoleum floors and peeling wallpaper and delicious food—restaurants in forgotten corners of the city where no one he knew would ever go. We would get pleasantly, and never excessively, drunk. I put my hand on his arm whil
e we talked. I hugged him hard both hello and goodbye. I pressed myself against him, and let him catch me breathing in the scent of him as though these hugs could sustain me. Those moments, he was sure, were the happiest of his life, so true and so hopeful and so full of sweetness.
Sometimes he would think that if he considered Mason, really considered her, who she was and what she said and did, then he knew he didn’t really want her. Even in some fantasy world in which they could be together, the relationship could never last, and it wasn’t because of the age difference either. It was because the things that made Mason so tantalizingly desirable were not the things on which real love was built. He knew it, and knowing it did not matter.
Roberta noticed nothing. That was the crazy thing. He kept waiting for her to say something, to discover the e-mails or the texts or smell the beer on his breath or my scent on his clothes, but she never did. He sat across from her at the dinner table, still half buzzed from lunch with his secret fourteen-year-old friend, and waited for the other shoe to drop. He cooked up explanations and excuses and narratives that would attempt to make sense of his relationship with me. But Roberta never asked or noticed, which only left Pete feeling emboldened.
And work. That was the crazy thing. Pete felt like he was in some kind of moralistic novel from the fifties, one in which his halfhearted efforts to escape from his life of quiet desperation would lead to his loud and chaotic destruction. His productivity fell off. He was sure of it, but no one at the company noticed. His superiors still sent him enthusiastic e-mails about his work. If he missed a deadline by an hour or two, no one seemed to mind, and it occurred to him that for years he’d been making himself crazy to hit deadlines no one but he cared about. Pete was crashing and burning, but no one troubled to take note. His work, his attention, his daytime sobriety weren’t missed.
Pete wrote his code during the day, and then in the evening he would sit through his quiet dinners with Roberta and Neil, and then Neil would slink off to his room and he and Roberta would watch some television in which neither of them was particularly invested. They would go to the bedroom and read for a little while, and now and again they’d have satisfactory if familiar sex. That was it. That was his life. That was the sum of his existence without me, and I outweighed all of it. He would have let it all go for me if he could.
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