Robin and Ruby

by K. M. Soehnlein

  “What am I supposed to do?” Ruby yells. “Take them off? Right here?”

  Ruby sees Calvin stand taller, wanting to be taken seriously. He calls out to the bouncers again. “Excuse me, guys? Mister? I think we can handle it ourselves from here.”

  “Here’s how it’s gonna work, kid,” the bouncer says. “I want to see these girls leave separately. I want one to leave, then the other, and I don’t want them within ten feet of each other until all-a yous are far away from this establishment. Because I will call the cops, and trust me, they ain’t happy about drunk chicks disturbing the peace.”

  “I understand,” Calvin says. “Alice, take Dorian.”

  “I don’t want that virgin in my house,” Dorian says.

  “She’s coming with us,” Wendy calls out.

  “I don’t have my bag,” Ruby says.

  “It’s in my car, over there,” Calvin says. He steps closer to Ruby and lowers his voice. “Do you really know these two?”

  She nods, sucks wetness up her runny nose. Her tears have retreated back to their source. She tells him, “I’m not going back to Alice’s.”

  “Sure. We can drive home tonight. Or get a room somewhere.”

  “I’m not going with you.”

  Calvin stares at her, confusion on his face. She wants simply to tell him, it’s over. It was over before this weekend and it’s definitely over now. Say it kindly, and firmly. But it’s the wrong place, the wrong time, everyone is here, the bouncer is repeating his orders. Alice calls her brother’s name, waiting for instruction. He waves Alice away, and she files out with her entourage: a deflated Dorian, leaning on Cicely for balance, Benjamin fake-puffing on a cigarette, Nick and some other guys and girls from the party who have been audience to the entire spectacle. The last thing Ruby hears is Dorian telling Benjamin, “You’re a shit-stirrer. That’s what you are.” Benjamin just laughs.

  Then they’re gone. All but Calvin. “I’m waiting here with you.”

  “My purse is in the club.”

  Calvin looks at the bouncer, who says, “You can send one person back in. Not her—” pointing to Ruby, “or her—” Joanne.

  Wendy says, “I’ll go,” and scurries away, flashing a hand-stamp to the guy at the door, a new guy who must have taken over during the chaos. Ruby wonders if she can trust Wendy to come right back, to not get distracted. She realizes she has no choice.

  Everyone waiting in line has been watching. Between the street-lights and the full moon, the whole scene could be taking place in the bright middle of the day. She’s given them quite a show. She scans the gawking faces of strangers greedily lapping this up.

  And then she sees Chris.

  Chris Cleary, sitting on the hood of a parked car, not even half a block away, arms at his side, legs dangling. His eyes are on her.

  She has to look twice, because she might be mistaken. This might be some other boy in pegged black pants, an old pinstripe blazer, a red T-shirt, some other new-wave clubgoer. How long has he been there, watching?

  He lifts a finger to his lips. Shhh, he’s telling her.

  Calvin hasn’t seen him. He’s in the midst of a transaction with the bearded bouncer. Slipping him money. Sealing his man-of-the-moment status.

  Joanne—finally set free from the bouncer’s grip—shakes her hair, smoothes out her clothes, makes her way to Ruby. “Was that him?” she asks.

  “Who?”

  “The one you were dancing with. With the tie? Was that him?”

  “No.” Ruby has to smile, it’s so absurd. “That was so not him.”

  “Look, you can totally stay with us tonight.” Joanne’s voice, post-uproar, is startlingly composed.

  Calvin steps between them. “Rubes, you’re not thinking straight. You’re drunk, right? Where have you been?”

  “I’m not going anywhere near Dorian or your sister or any of those people.”

  “Okay, sure, I get it. But come on,” he pleads. “I can’t let you go with these girls. I’m responsible for you. Your overnight bag is in my car.” He touches her arm, pulls her toward him. He seems to want to hug her. She won’t, she can’t. It feels cruel to withhold this affection. He helped her out, he’s still her boyfriend. But he’s guilty by association: his manipulative sister, evil Dorian, Benjamin the shit-stirrer.

  And Chris is here. Hiding in plain sight.

  “I’ll get my bag from you tomorrow,” she says. “I need some personal space.”

  Calvin swears, slams one fist into the other palm and spins around—he nearly bumps into Wendy, who has reappeared with Ruby’s purse—and then he starts to walk away, down the street. He takes no notice of Chris, still on the hood of that other car, observing Calvin with a serene detachment that she finds breathtaking.

  That’s when she knows without a doubt that he’s waiting for her. For the right moment. This thing she’s been looking for all night—it’s close at hand.

  Calvin turns suddenly and strides back toward her. He’s seething.

  “I said I’ll call you tomorrow,” she tells him.

  “I don’t get it, Rubes. I don’t fucking get it.”

  Joanne jockeys back into position. “Um, Alvin? Do you speak English? Because I think Ruby’s being pretty clear? She needs some space.”

  “Jesus Christ! Who is this tramp?”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Their raised voices have alerted the bouncers, who begin a new, snarling approach. “Just go, Calvin,” Ruby says.

  He turns and continues down the block, and this time he doesn’t turn back.

  She’s free now.

  She looks over at Chris, also watching Calvin disappear. After a moment, Chris hops off the hood, which is when she begins to make her way over to him.

  Joanne and Wendy call her name, their voices overlapping. Ruby gestures over her shoulder—Wait—and takes another step toward Chris. Then another.

  She can’t take her eyes off him. What she sees is the young man he is now—a wiry frame draped in outsider’s black, his hair jagged and mussed, his face worldly and strained—layered on top of the boy he was back then, the tender stranger who clasped her hand while they prayed aloud amid incense and votive light, who whispered to her over the phone from his bedroom beneath his model airplanes. Layered like transparencies are all the pictures she created from the stories he told her about his life: The time he wore a four-inch silver cross around his neck and endured the taunts of kids at the mall who called him Jesus Freak. The time he painted his nails in the bathroom, gulping up the fumes—as close as he let himself get to the stimulants that had been forbidden to him. The time he put his hand down his pants and rubbed until he had an orgasm, while she, on the other end of their phone call, pressed down on her clint and let him hear her earliest attempts at pleasure.

  Their conversations had grappled with the question of sex. They talked about being each other’s first, and only. Would God forgive them if they did it? The real sin was in sleeping around, wasn’t it? Treating your God-given body like something dispensable? (Though Jesus loved even the prostitutes seeking forgiveness.) Wouldn’t God understand sex done in the name of love?

  They made plans.

  But everything ended without warning, his phone disconnected.

  There were no more conversations. She’d been abandoned—the displacement that follows a catastrophe.

  She had always blamed him. He could have found her, if he’d tried.

  She had dammed up the memories. Maybe that’s why she didn’t recognize him at first. He’d been banished to some unreachable part of her mind. Until this deluge, tonight.

  He meets her with arms outstretched. Their hands touch. Cold fingers braid together.

  “You figured it out,” he says.

  “I didn’t recognize you at first.”

  “It’s unbelievable. On this weekend of all weekends.”

  “I’ve been walking around looking for you.”

  He shakes his head. “You can’t
imagine—”

  “What?”

  “I’d done all this blow. I needed to come down before I saw you.”

  “Meanwhile, I drank too much, and got into a bar fight. Did you see that?” She lets herself smile, now that this tumult is behind her. She wonders how it is that she no longer feels drunk. Adrenaline maybe. Her body seems to throb all over.

  He traces a finger along the scratch on her neck. “You should clean this. Come with me?”

  “You have a car? You’re all right to drive?” He nods. She says, “Okay.”

  She thinks, This is the bravest moment of my life.

  He holds her hand as he walks her back to Wendy and Joanne. She takes their phone numbers and gives them her mother’s in Manhattan. Walking away with Chris, she shivers again, this time not from the cold but from the prospect of all this unmarked space ahead of her, the emptiness she’s thrusting herself into. She might be anywhere in a few hours. She might be anyone.

  His car is parked in a lot down the street, another lot overseen by an old man in a lawn chair. They stop first at a 7-Eleven and buy bottles of water and potato chips—she wants to tame the effects of all that alcohol. What was she thinking, guzzling so much? He offers her aspirin from a huge bottle in the glove box, and then he stands outside his car—a vintage BMW—while she changes in the backseat. He gives her a T-shirt and she removes the yellow top, now soiled and clammy. She shimmies out of the madras shorts and into Chris’s extra pair of black jeans, her underwear sliding on the leather upholstery. The night is cooler than expected, and her legs have goose bumps. Wearing Chris’s jeans was his idea. As she slips from the back seat, she notices a Bible on the floor of the car. The paperback cover reads Good News for Modern Man.

  Chris is bent over the trunk. She sees him stash a notebook, the spiral-bound type she uses for school, covered in cartoonish doodles.

  They marvel at the fact that they have almost the same size waist. She cuffs the legs to keep from tripping. He offers to slice off the extra material—he has a Swiss Army knife in the car—but she says no, don’t ruin them on my account. “They’re just clothes,” he says, which makes her laugh, because there’s been so much fuss about clothes that taking off Dorian’s is like shedding a layer of skin. She considers for a moment how she’ll return them, and then, with a small, victorious smile, she drops the shorts and shirt onto the ground and leaves them there.

  “All done,” she says.

  They drive through the grid of streets, down the main boulevard where the clubs are, past the big waterslide, past motels and rental houses. Outside the window the glimmering town goes about its business. This place she’s been rescued from. Music plays from the tape deck, Depeche Mode, which is absolutely perfect, because she recently bought this album herself and has been listening to it over and over. She sings along to “Blasphemous Rumours,” with those twisted lyrics about God’s sick sense of humor. She asks Chris how this song squares with the Good News in the back seat, and he says that the way he sees it, Jesus was a healer and holy man, and that’s all that matters. God in the Bible is angry and vengeful, is too much of a mystery to make sense of. She tells him about the paper she wrote for her religion seminar where she posed the theory that Mary was a teenage girl who had been raped and who made up the story of virgin birth to save herself from being cast out, or worse. Her professor said that it was too speculative, not well-researched. Chris says people in authority are afraid of the truth. He says, “I’d like to read that paper.”

  Of every enthralling aspect of this reunion, none is better than the revelation that in the intervening years they’ve become the same type of nineteen-year-old. They’ve slid into the same pocket of style and taste. They’ve come to question the religion that once drew them together.

  “I can’t believe this,” she says.

  He lets go of the stick shift and takes her hand, his fingers warm now. As he maneuvers through traffic, he has to release his hold on her in order to shift gears, but each time he returns. The car fills with calmness. This is what happiness is, right? Not the intrusion of some wonderful new thing, but a confirmation of what was already there, lying in wait for recognition.

  They’ve passed through the touristy hubbub, the busy downtown, the streams of people moving from the boardwalk, now shutting down. They pass into a neighborhood that is a cleaner, quieter version of the one they’ve left. The rental properties here are larger and better taken care of. Lights are on in windows, but no parties are illuminated inside. A short while later the residential area thins out. A sign at the end of the road reads ISLAND BEACH STATE PARK. She sees a ranger’s booth guarding a long stretch of undeveloped shoreline—dunes, scrub grass, pale sand drifting out from the shoulder onto the paved road. A chain pulled across the entry gleams in the moonlight. A sign reads NO TRESPASSING.

  “You’re not worried,” he says.

  “Should I be?” She smiles as if he’s made a joke, but she sees that his face is serious.

  “You don’t know me,” he says. “I mean, in years.”

  A stab of panic: Maybe I’m a fool. This isn’t like me. Unless, of course, it is me, and everything else in my life has been false. She says, almost shyly, “You’re probably the only person I was ever really honest with.”

  “But why trust me now?”

  “Are you trying to spook me?”

  He shakes his head, clasps her hand tighter. “I just want you to be sure. I don’t have a plan, okay? Not anymore. I don’t have a plan for tonight, or tomorrow, or two days from now. We’re just making this up as we go. OK?”

  She nods. She’s never felt so awed by her own life.

  He parks on a side street. They get out and step over the chain, past the sign. It’s a long walk down the paved road before they find a passage through the dune scrub and onto the beach. She holds on to him, feeling the lingering unsteadiness of the booze. She doesn’t feel drunk at all, just worn down. Needing to rest. On the sand, they take off their boots and sit on a blanket that Chris has carried from his car. She asks him why he stopped calling, all those years ago. He tells her that his parents divorced, he moved to San Diego for a while with his mother when she took a different teaching position. He got into trouble with drugs again, almost dropped out of high school, but pulled himself back together. His mother is teaching now at Princeton, that’s how he managed to get in. If he wasn’t trying to please her he wouldn’t stay, because it’s a place full of conformists and snobs.

  She shivers, and he looks at her with alarm. “Am I saying too much?” he asks. “Am I freaking you out?”

  “No, I’m just cold.” She curls into him and closes her eyes.

  She opens them with a start. “Was I asleep?”

  “A few minutes. I kept my eyes on you.”

  The ocean roars. Waves crash in a mighty whoosh, then sizzle as the current pulls back to the depths.

  The moon has shifted from its earlier zenith and has begun its descent over their shoulders, behind them.

  “Did you see it rise?” she asks. “It was so big it looked fake.”

  He breaks into a big smile. “You saw it, too?”

  She nods.

  “Yes!” he exclaims, like a game show contestant who’s guessed the correct answer. “I watched it rise, thinking of you, hoping you were watching, too.”

  “You’re so corny.”

  “Don’t say that.” He shakes his head adamantly, speaks quickly. “Don’t be cynical. You have no idea. Really.”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  They fall silent. She feels the altered mood, feels it in her chest, heartbeat increasing. She’s done something wrong, she’s spoiled the perfect moment, she’s going to ruin everything.

  On the towel, he shifts his weight away from her. It scares her to think she’s offended him so easily. She lifts her leg and drops it over his. The brush of denim on denim is like a compressed echo of the crashing surf. She rests there until she hears him exhale, until she’s sure he
hasn’t totally closed up.

  “Say something,” she tells him.

  “Like what?” There’s a sulkiness in his voice.

  “I want to get to know you,” she says.

  He clears his throat. “You can ask me whatever you want.”

  She hears this as an offering, a willingness to bare himself to her. Calvin has never said anything remotely like this. The sum of Calvin’s entire bearing seems to be, don’t ask. If I don’t offer, I don’t want to talk about it.

  “How well do you know Calvin?” she asks him.

  He snickers, a bitter little sound. “That’s what you want to ask me about? Calvin?”

  “I’m trying to put all these pieces together.”

  “Yeah, it’s strange.” He grabs a fistful of sand and sprinkles it across their feet. “I dated Alice for a little while. And then she tried to pass me off on her friends. They do that, work their way through guys.”

  Ruby steadies her breath, working to banish the image of Chris with these girls. She doesn’t want to think of him entangled in their awful world.

  He says, “I think I was supposed to be on Dorian’s menu this weekend.”

  “She’s a nightmare.”

  “Everyone knows she’s a fucking alkie. Who knows what she’d be like if she stopped?”

  “I thought she was with Benjamin.”

  He snorts. “Trisexual Benjamin. Give him enough coke, he’ll try to fuck anything.”

  “Really? He said the most evil things to me about gay people.”

  “You have to be a code-breaker with that one. We were roommates last semester. I’ve heard his farts, I’ve heard him jerk off at night.” He glances at her. “Sorry. That’s gross. I just—like, I’ve seen him crying on the phone to his father, you know?”

  She pictures Benjamin crying—it isn’t actually hard to imagine. All that bluster covers a core of softness. Weakness, even.

  Chris speaks about Benjamin and Dorian, the drugs and drinking, their moods that swing depending on what they’ve imbibed. As he talks, Ruby can’t help but think about Calvin. Where is he? He must be worried about her. She knows that he does care about her, even if he’s rarely careful with her. It was wrong to walk away from him, but how could she go back to that party? How could she not follow Chris?