Harder (Caroline and West)

by Robin York

  “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened at school?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t give a shit if you believe me.”

  “Franks, look, whatever’s going on, changing your wardrobe is probably not going to fix it. Think about it. You’re too smart for this.”

  “Yeah, well maybe I don’t want to be smart.”

  Hearing her say she doesn’t want to be smart – it lights a fuse.

  I want to shake her, tell her smart’s all we’ve got. Smart is what’s going to save her ass from Silt, keep her from turning into Mom, keep her from turning into me.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

  She huffs an exhale. “God. Never mind.”

  I grip her arm. “Don’t take that tone with me. I should be writing a paper right now, but I’m here with you, and I think you owe me —”

  “I don’t owe you anything!” She pulls away and shoves me hard enough to rock me back on my heels. “Buy them or don’t. I’ll be in the truck.”

  I stand between the racks of clothes in the aisle of the Salvation Army with no idea what I’m supposed to do next.

  Wishing I could ask Caroline.

  Monday morning, I stop at the student cafe in the Forum for some coffee and see Caroline alone at a table with a book in front of her and a doughnut on a napkin, untouched.

  Chocolate cake doughnut, glazed. Her favorite.

  I sit down across from her, pick it up, take a big bite.

  “Dick,” she says.

  Without looking up, she kicks me in the shin.

  Sitting there, I eat the whole doughnut. The sun’s shining in the windows across the front of the Forum, bathing her in light. She reads with her mouth slightly open, pushing her tongue into the gap between her teeth. She’s switching from her book to a stack of note cards covered in highlighter, and I recognize the format. She’s got a Latin quiz.

  “Want me to help with your verbs?”

  “No. Quit distracting me. I only have ten minutes.”

  I walk up to the counter and buy her a replacement doughnut.

  She doesn’t say another word to me, and it’s still the best fifteen minutes of my day.

  When I come home at two a.m. after my shift that night, I find her pecking away at her laptop in my kitchen.

  “You know the library’s open, right?” I ask.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  I open a bag of corn chips. Put some in a bowl so she can share if she wants.

  She plucks out a chip. “What’s your job like?”

  “Boring.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Whatever they tell me.”

  “What’d you do tonight?”

  “Measured stuff. They won’t let me cut yet.”

  “Is cutting more fun?”

  “It would be different. I’ve never used a miter saw, but you can do tricky cuts, like when you’ve got to cut 30 degrees on the X axis and 45 on the Y – I want to see how that works. Or I’d like to drive the forklift.”

  “When do you get to do that stuff?”

  “Not for fucking ages. What are you writing about?”

  “Victorian periodicals.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “No, it’s good. We had to pick a topic that there were lots of articles about and read a bunch of different journals. I picked the Irish problem.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Basically, they wanted independence.”

  “Such a fucking hassle, those Irish.”

  She smiles.

  “You want a beer?”

  I ask without thinking about it. I don’t want to think tonight. I’m sick of it – sick of everything being difficult all the time. I want to do something easy. Beer, couch, Caroline.

  “At two in the morning?”

  “I’m all jacked up. Probably won’t sleep for a while.”

  “Why are you jacked up if work was so boring?”

  “Those Monsters you bought me.”

  It’s only partly true. I’m jacked up on her being here, and I’m jacked up because Frankie still won’t talk to me.

  I stayed up all last night writing the last of my final projects to clear my incompletes. I’m so far behind on sleep, I don’t feel like I need it at all.

  “You want a beer or not?” I ask.

  “Sure. I’m about out of brilliant thoughts for the night anyway.” She rolls her shoulders.

  I snag two beers from the fridge and find a napkin to spit the gum I’ve been chewing into so I can eat. She’s raising an eyebrow at me when I turn around. “What’s with the gum?”

  “Helps with not smoking,” I admit.

  “You really quit?”

  “Trying.” I open the beers and hand her one. “I need to sit.” I grab the chips and head for the couch, where I turn the TV on to an infomercial for some kind of food chopper. She follows me in and takes a seat on the other end.

  We watch this skinny, hyped-up sales guy try to convince us we’ll fucking die if we don’t have his chopper.

  I can smell her, her hair and her skin, her detergent, the deodorant she wears that’s oranges and spices.

  “Do you think I’m fucking up?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “You want to wait a sec and find out what it is I’m asking about?”

  That makes her smile. “No.”

  “Because I was asking about Frankie.”

  “Hmm.” Her grin is self-satisfied. Knowing.

  I’ve seen her smile like that when she had my balls in her palm and she was trying to decide just how she wanted to suck my dick to most effectively drive me out of my mind.

  “You think I’m fucking up with Frankie, or you think I’m fucking up in general?” I ask.

  She just looks at me with her eyes big and round, like, Go on.

  “What else?” I ask. “I’m fucking up with you, too? Fucking up my whole future? Fucking up with school, and – and just more or less everything, huh?”

  She’s inclined her head, like she wants to nod along with every question I’m asking. It’s patronizing, but I don’t mind. She’s got on jeans and this soft shirt with buttons partway down the front, and it looks like it’s been through the wash a thousand times, except I’ve never seen it before. I think she must have bought it that way. It’s unbuttoned so low that the way she’s sitting just now, I can see the middle part of her bra. There’s a useless little bow there, sewed onto that spot. Her jeans are tight and faded across her thighs, and everything about her clothes and her hair falling down out of the knot she tied it up in makes me want to rumple her.

  Makes me want to test the texture of those jeans, find out if her shirt is soft against my face, if it’s softer than her breasts, even though I know nothing is.

  It doesn’t help that her shirt is the exact color of her pussy.

  “Just say whatever you want,” I tell her. “You look like you’re gonna die if you don’t.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m not saying anything until you do.”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  She sips her beer. “Something about how you’re doing.”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  That gets me a huff of laughter. “Something true about how you’re doing.”

  “You say that like I’m lying all the time.”

  She considers this. “No, you’re not lying. You’re bullshitting me. Which is funny, since I know exactly how you feel about bullshit.”

  The first real conversation I had with her, I gave her a hard time for telling me she was fine when she wasn’t. It was bullshit, I told her. The way people went around all the time suffering and claiming to be fine – why couldn’t they just say what they felt? Why did everyone have to be so fucking polite when they were dying inside?

  That was the night she told me that every day she lived through si
nce her pictures turned up online was the worst day of her life.

  I understand what she meant better than I did a year ago.

  I drain my beer and set it on the coffee table. I’m tired, buzzing, confused about why she’s dressed so touchable, sitting relaxed on my couch, sipping her beer, watching me like she can see inside my head. Like she knows exactly how fucked-up it is in there, but she doesn’t mind it one bit.

  “You want me to tell you something true?” I ask.

  She nods.

  “I want to kiss you.”

  I watch the heat rise up her throat, turning her skin the same color as her shirt.

  “Then why don’t you?” she asks.

  I can’t remember.

  Swear to God, I can’t fucking remember. Maybe there’s no reason at all.

  Maybe I never had a good reason, and I’m just a moron. Maybe I’ve always been a moron. Which raises the question why she’d go to all this trouble to get me back in her life.

  She’s looking over my shoulder at the closed blinds. Her forehead’s wrinkled, her eyes out of focus the way they get when she’s thinking.

  “I had to read this story for class,” she says. “It was one I already knew – O. Henry, ‘The Gift of the Magi.’ Have you ever read it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I bet you know it – it’s that story about the couple, they’re really poor, and the woman wants to buy something nice for her husband for Christmas, so she cuts off her hair and sells it to buy him a chain for his watch. Only he wants to do something for her, too, and he sells his watch to buy her combs for her hair.” She glances at me. “What?”

  “I never liked that story.”

  “Me, neither. But tell me why you don’t.”

  “It’s supposed to be romantic, right? This big sacrifice they make, you go, ‘Aw, true spirit of Christmas.’ But it’s not.”

  “How so?”

  “You can tell me they’re happy under their Christmas tree because they’ve got their love, but they had love in the first place, right? Love was never the question. The question was what’s he got to give her other than love? He can’t keep the house warm. He can’t buy her a cruise to the Caribbean or whatever the fuck. All he’s got is a watch, and he decides, Okay, I’m gonna sell the watch and give her something that makes her feel beautiful. Only it doesn’t work, because now she’s bald, and that probably makes her even more miserable than she already was. It’s a depressing fucking story.”

  I run my hand over the back of my neck, self-conscious. I don’t know where all those words came from.

  She just watches me.

  It’s more than I can take. The way she looks on my couch. The way she engages with me like I’m important, like everything I say is interesting, like I deserve to be talking to her after what I did when I don’t.

  I fucking don’t.

  There’s my reason why I can’t kiss her. Whether it’s adequate – I haven’t got a clue.

  “I was just surprised,” she says, “by how much more complicated it was than I expected.”

  “How so?”

  She looks at the beer in her hands. Looks at my face.

  “It’s supposed to be about sacrifice,” she says. “The beauty of sacrifice, because he makes this sacrifice for her, and she makes it for him, and it’s a disaster, like you said. It’s depressing. But look what they were willing to do for each other.”

  “They already knew what they were willing to do, though – that’s my point. They were trying to feel different for one day, just one day, get away from being starving pathetic losers, and they ended up looking like assholes. You know who really made out? The guy who sold her the watch, and the guy who sold him the combs. I bet those two had a happy fucking Christmas. I bet those two think it’s a fantastic story.”

  She’s smiling at me. Drinking me up with her eyes.

  She’s eating away at me, making the black ache inside me bigger and louder.

  I wish I had a cigarette.

  I wish I could smack myself over the head with a bottle of booze, put an end to this pressure I feel around her, this longing I can’t get rid of.

  “It was just one Christmas,” she says. “I mean, you have to figure he could go out the next day, sell the watch chain to buy her a nice warm hat to cover her bald head. She could sell the combs and buy him a sweater. It’s not over.”

  “Yeah, but how’s he gonna feel next time he goes to buy her a present? Not good. He’ll remember that fuckup with the combs and say to himself, Shit, I’ll just buy her a gift certificate, and she can get what she wants with it. They blew all the romance on that one big gesture, and they’re not getting it back.”

  “None of that is in the story.”

  “No?”

  “No. It’s in your head.”

  She puts her beer down and pulls her feet up to tuck them underneath herself. Rests her arm on the back of the couch, her cheek on her arm, and looks at me with her eyes all gentle.

  I just wish she’d quit fucking looking at me that way, like I’m the baby Moses in a basket, some precious discovery she can’t ever get enough of.

  “I wouldn’t cut off my hair to buy you a watch chain,” she says.

  I break out in a sweat.

  “I really wouldn’t. I think my dad thinks I would, and Bridget and Krishna, too. They think I’m like that woman in the story but worse, because I wouldn’t stop at my hair. I’d sell the furniture, my clothes, my dignity, all to have something to give you. But it’s not true. I mean, it’s just hair, and I’d probably give you my hair if you wanted it, because whatever. But her hair in the story is her pride. It’s the thing that makes her feel beautiful and worthy, and you can’t have that. I won’t give it to you. I would never give it to you.”

  I try to say, I know that, but the words come out raspy and impossible.

  “I think what you don’t know,” she says, “is that you can’t take it from me, either. Even if you sell your watch.”

  I can’t ruin her. That’s what she means.

  I can fuck up, but I can’t ruin her.

  My hands are trembling. I forgot that she does this. Sees right into me and picks me right the fuck apart.

  Maybe this is what I’ve been afraid of. That she’d pick me into pieces, and there won’t be anything left of me when she does.

  “And you know,” she says, “the other thing about the story is that her hair will grow back, and she can keep the combs. He can get another watch. They’re really good gifts. Like, if you gave me some pearl combs, I’d probably think, ‘Wow, these are gorgeous. West must have saved up for a long time to pay for them.’ I wouldn’t even think about my hair – not right away.”

  “Jesus, I would.”

  “I know you would.” She rises to her knees and moves to my side. Takes my chin in her fingers until we’re so close together, closer than we’ve been since that moment by the grave when I shut myself off from her and told myself it needed to end. That I would have to be the one to end it.

  “You’d sell your watch for me, West,” she says. “You’d give me those combs and see my bald head and it would break your heart. But what I’m trying to tell you is that it doesn’t have to be like that. The world isn’t like that.”

  “Like what?”

  I’m staring at her lips. Drinking in her face. It all feels so important, but I can’t get a grip on it. I’m too tired, my eyes stinging like I could fucking cry.

  I wish I could. What a relief that would be.

  I’m not someone who can do that, but I can’t remember why. If I was made like this, or if I chose it.

  “The world’s not black and white,” she tells me. “Life doesn’t have good guys and bad guys or a beginning, middle, and end. Not while you’re living it. It’s just people doing stuff that’s beautiful or stupid or somewhere in the middle.”

  She cups my face in her hands. Strokes her thumbs over my eyebrows, making me close my eyes and listen hard to what
she’s saying.

  “So anytime you catch yourself writing a story over top of us – anytime you tell yourself you’re the bad guy, or you destroyed us, the end, it’s over – think about that.”

  She leans in and touches her lips to my forehead.

  It hurts not to take her mouth. To stop myself from pressing her down into the couch, into the soft cushions, touching her and kissing her because I need her and I want her, and because she could make me forget.

  It wouldn’t be fair to use her like that.

  God, I want to, though.

  When she moves back and touches her fingers to my lips, I can see that she knows it.

  “Just think about it,” she says.

  I don’t have words to give her, so I say, “All right.”

  After she leaves, I stay up thinking half the night.

  Friday morning. Art class. A hundred bucks.

  The stack of colored paper on the table in front of me cost a hundred bucks, and I’m supposed to “experiment” with it.

  Try things, Rikki told the class.

  Rikki’s my studio art professor. She’s dressed today like the world’s tiniest pirate – boots that go up to her thighs and then flare out and fold over at the top, a glittery sash across one shoulder. She’s from the Netherlands, married to Laurie, which means she’s my landlady in addition to my art teacher.

  She’s also an art therapist, whatever the fuck that is.

  “The idea,” Rikki is telling the student sitting in front of me, “is to play with how the colors are in a relationship. Work with large and small fields of color to create illusions of difference where there is similarity, illusions of similarity where there is difference.”

  The package of paper contains a hundred and fifty sheets, none of them the same. Sixty-six cents a color. The girl at the next table is going crazy with her scissors, snipping chunks out of one sheet after another. Turning money into confetti.

  I can’t bring myself to take scissors to a sixty-six-cent piece of paper unless I’ve got some reason to think it’s going to amount to something, so I just push the papers around, laying one on top of another, until Rikki chucks me on the shoulder as she walks past and says, “Play.”