“Where do you go next?” Riley asks me.
“Nebraska,” I reply.
She nods.
Lana comes out of the kitchen with some Pepperidge Farm cookies thrown on a plate and a glass of milk.
“Here you go,” she says.
I take a cookie. It’s a little stale.
“Best cookie I’ve had all night!” I proclaim for Riley’s benefit.
I can see Lana wants to cry bullshit. But she keeps it to herself.
“Well, then,” she says, “I guess it’s time for you to go.”
“To Nebraska!” Riley chimes in.
The weird thing is, I want to stay. Now that we’ve gotten here, now that at least one of them knows who I really am, I want to remain a part of this. I want Lana to offer to wake Connor up. I want the four of us to eat cookies until sunrise.
“C’mon.” Lana interrupts my thoughts. “Nebraska is waiting.”
“You’re so right,” I say, moving toward the door.
“Not that way!” Lana gestures to the chimney. “This is the only way up to the roof.”
I can feel Riley’s eyes on me. Although I’m sure there is one somewhere, I can’t think of a rational explanation for me to use the door.
So I head over to the fireplace. It looks like it’s never been used. I lean in and see the chimney isn’t very wide. I lean back out and make eye contact with Riley.
“Off you go to bed!” I cry.
Riley starts to wave. Lana mostly smirks.
“Safe travels,” she says.
I don’t know what else to do. I crawl into the fireplace. Then I pull myself up into the chimney and count to two hundred—which is roughly the number of cobwebs I’m surrounded by. For one scary moment, I think my stomach is going to keep me wedged inside, but there is a little room to maneuver—thankfully, Santa hasn’t been having cookies at all the stops. There is dust on my tongue, dust in my eyes. Surely there are better ways to enter and exit a house? Why doesn’t Santa just park the goddamn sleigh in the driveway like a normal guest?
I hear Lana wish Riley goodnight. I hear both doors close. Quietly, I pull myself out of the chimney and shake as much dust as possible from my suit, causing a hoarder’s snowfall on the carpet. Let Lana explain that one.
My work here is done, I think. But the thought feels hollow. I know I can’t leave without seeing him. That wasn’t the plan, but none of this was really the plan. I can’t be in his house without letting him know I was here. It will all be unfinished, otherwise.
The house has retreated into its nighttime breathing of whirs and clicks and groans. I step carefully for a moment, then stop: There is no way that Riley will have fallen asleep by now, and the path to Connor’s door leads right past hers. So I stand still, and realize how rarely I ever stand still. I have to quell any desire to be participant, and recline into the shape of a total observer. My phone, the weapon with which I usually kill time, is back in the car. Unarmed, I look around. The Christmas-lit room appears lonely in its pausing; something is missing, and I am not that something. There are books on the shelves, but I cannot read what they are. They are a row of shapes leaning. On one shelf, the books are guarded by pairs of small figurines. Salt and pepper shakers. Somebody’s collection.
I let the minutes pass, but by thinking about them, I make them pass slowly. This is not my house, and I am caught in the knowledge that it never will be. I half expect Lana to come back out, to tell me to go home. Why are you still here? she’d ask, and the only answer I could give would be her brother’s name.
I know he wanted me here, but why did it have to be like this? I want him to introduce me as his boyfriend. I want to be sitting at the dinner table, making jokes with Riley that Lana can’t help but laugh at, too. I want them to see me holding his hand. I want to be holding his hand. I want him to love me when I’m naughty and when I’m nice. I want. I want. I want.
I am worried about being in love, because it involves asking so much. I am worried that my life will never fit into his. That I will never know him. That he will never know me. That we get to hear the stories, but never get to hear the full truth.
“Enough,” I say to myself. I need to say it out loud, because I need to really hear it.
I listen for Riley. I listen for Lana. I hope they’re not listening for Santa, or for me.
I make it down the hall. I make it past their doors. Connor’s room is in sight.
It’s only when I am standing in front of it, only when I am about to let myself inside, that I sense there’s someone else in the hall with me. I turn around and see her standing in her doorway—Connor’s mother. Her eyes are nearly closed, her hair limp. She’s wearing a Tennessee Williams nightgown that makes me feel sad and awkward to see it. It hangs lifeless on her body, worn too often, too long. I should not be seeing her like this, the deep dark haze of it.
I want to be as much of a ghost to her as she is to me. But there can be no hiding. I am about to explain. I am about to tell her the whole thing. But she stops me by speaking first.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
I suddenly feel I could never explain enough. I could never give the right answer.
“I’m not here,” I say.
She nods, understanding this. I think there will be more, but there isn’t any more. She turns back to her room and closes the door behind her.
I know I should not have seen this. Even if she forgets, I will know. And for a moment, I find myself feeling sorry for Santa. I can only imagine what he sees in his trespasses. But, of course, those would all be people he doesn’t really know. I have to imagine it’s less sad with strangers.
I am not going to tell Connor any of this. I am just going to say hello and say goodnight. I sneak into his room and close the door with as little sound as possible. I want him to have been awake the whole time, wishing me well. I want him to greet me the moment the coast is clear. But all that welcomes me is the sound of his sleeping. There is enough light coming in from the window that the room is a blue-dark shadow. I can see him there in his bed. I can see the rise and fall of his breathing. His phone is on the floor, fallen from his hand. I know it was there in case I needed him.
I have never seen him sleeping before. I have never seen him like this, enfolded in an unthreatening somewhere else. My heart is drawn, almost involuntarily, toward him. I see him asleep and feel I could love him for a very long time.
But here I am, standing outside of it. Even as I love him, I feel self-conscious. I am the interruption. I am the piece that’s not a dream. I am here because I climbed through the chimney instead of knocking on the door.
I take off my hat and unstick my beard. I take off my boots and move them aside. I unfasten my stomach and let it fall to the floor. I pull the red curtain from around my body, pull it over my head. I shed the pants, feel the cold air on my legs. I do all of this quietly. It’s only as I am folding Santa’s clothes into a safe red square that I hear Connor say my name.
It should be enough as I step over to him and see the welcome in his eyes. It should be enough to see his hair pointing in all different directions, and the fact that there are cowboys on his pajama pants and he is telling me he can’t believe he fell asleep. It should be enough that he is beckoning me now—it should be enough to join him in the bed, blanket pulled aside. It should be enough to feel his hand on my shoulder, his lips lightly on my lips. But something is not right. I still feel that, in some way, I should not be here.
“I’m an imposter,” I whisper.
“Yes,” he whispers back. “But you’re the right imposter.”
Without my Santa suit, I am shivering. Without my Santa suit, I am just me, and I am in his house after midnight on Christmas Day. Without my Santa suit, I am real, and I want this to be reality. I want this to be the way things are, or at least how they wil
l be.
Connor feels me shiver. Without a word, he wraps the blanket around us. Our home within his home. Our world within this world.
Outside, there may be reindeer that fly across the moon. Outside, there may be questions with the wrong answers and lies that are better to tell. Outside, it may be cold. But I am here. I am here, and he is here, and everything I need to know is that I will hold him and he will hold me until I am warm again, until I know I belong.
TRACK SEVEN
Storytime
When I was little, my parents had a routine for putting me and my sister to bed. There would be the one-hour warning, then the half-hour warning, then the five-minute warning. My sister and I had no real grasp of time—the worth of a minute was as intangible then as it is now, albeit in a considerably different way. The rhythm of our evening was set to these warnings—when to head upstairs, when to get into our pajamas, when to brush our teeth. Eventually time would be up and we’d crawl into our respective beds in our respective rooms. There we’d find the most magical thing of all: that time had not, in fact, run out. There were still a few minutes left in the evening, and that was storytime.
Our parents would alternate. My mother with my sister and my father with me, then the reverse the next night. Wherever one left off, the other would pick up. I have no idea if they compared notes, or if they just assumed (rightfully) that my sister and I would only hold them to the loose demands of dream logic.
My stories would always start with a prince.
“What is the prince’s name?” my mother or father would ask.
I knew I could answer with my own name, but I never did. Instead I would pluck words from the air—words overheard, words not really understood.
“Halogen,” my answer might be.
“And what is the name of Prince Halogen’s kingdom?”
“Orchestra.”
My mother or father would nod, and the story would begin. The first night, Prince Halogen might be on a quest to find the Golden Volt of Arcadia. The next night, he might encounter a magical football field, and have to score a last-minute field goal that would cause all of the citizens in Orchestra to play their instruments in cheer. Then he would return to his quest for the Golden Volt, aided by an ogre with a soft spot for peanut butter, the color puce, and valiant boys named after light bulbs.
I couldn’t have been more pleased if my parents had taken two empty knitting needles and knitted a new blanket to wrap around my body each night, conjuring the yarn from the thickness of the night air, dressing me for sleep in the color of words.
“Did your parents read you to sleep?” I’m often asked now, because of what I’ve chosen to do with my life.
“Yes,” I always say. But there were no books involved. Just two people in the dark. One telling a story, the other listening raptly. This is what I remember of my childhood: each night a different chapter of a story that would never, ever end.
* * *
—
When it came to relationships, I had lost my imagination.
I had just broken up with Peck, after almost two years. The ending had been deeply grounded in reality, as endings often are—the intense attrition of falling apart while at the same time trying to remain together, the catalog of disappointment and regret that plays over every interaction, until finally the whole thing collapses or merely sinks. There is a certain awe afterwards, when you look at the rubble or the hole and you picture what used to be there. But that awe is not magic; it’s an aftershock of failure.
In the months-long postmortem—when I persistently dissected the past, trying to figure out what went wrong—there were no flights of fancy, no stories told that weren’t biased reportage of What (Might Have) Really Happened. And this didn’t just apply to Peck—I went back, to my relationships with John and Cameron and Kraig, each one put under the microscope, each one subject to the false and bitter science of laying blame. I pulled everyone I could into this examination—my friends, my family, my therapist. I became a creature of documentary earnestness, as pleasant to be with as a news channel.
I was in no mood to date, but I went on dates anyway, just to prove that I could still be appealing, still desired. This was a mistake. The interactions—over coffee, over drinks, over dinner—had all the romantic current of a job interview, the tenderness of a transcript. When asked a question, I gave an answer, but it was all information, no storytelling. I thought the other guy would call me out on it, might shake me up, but the truth was that most of the guys I went on dates with were as deadened by the process as I was.
I gave up. Instead of retreating to somewhere fantastical, somewhere inspired, I settled into the pall of the day-to-day. I ceded my attention to blogs and unreal housewives on TV. I stopped writing, stopped making things up.
I was no fun to be around, even for me.
* * *
—
I didn’t even want to go to the party. Brent was Lisa’s friend, not mine.
“It’s bowling,” she said. “How can bowling not be fun?”
I didn’t really feel I needed to answer that question.
Lisa resorted to the classic it’s-Saturday-night-and-if-you-stay-home-you’re-pathetic argument, which worked wonders.
So there I was, bowling. I was not a disastrous bowler, nor was I good enough to take any pride in it. We were split into teams, and that’s how I met Callum. There was no machination involved here—it was entirely random, which we would later appreciate.
The first words he said to me were: “My bowling performance depends entirely on the song that’s playing. I really hope they play good music here.”
A Lady Gaga song was being piped in. To my gay discredit, I didn’t know which one.
“How’s this?” I asked.
“I prefer the Breeders,” he told me. “If they play ‘Cannonball,’ I’m guaranteed a strike.”
I smiled as if I knew who the Breeders were. We went our separate ways to select our bowling balls.
When we returned, we discovered that we’d both chosen green.
“Luck of the Irish,” Callum said, tipping an imaginary hat.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t like him right away.
* * *
—
There were four of us for each lane. Callum and Rinna were both co-workers of Brent’s. (I tried to remember what Brent did, and couldn’t.) I made much of my inability to bowl well, and secretly wanted to wipe the floor with everyone else at the party. I was not thinking of us as a team, per se, but Callum was relentless in treating us like one. He cheered for me, he cheered for Lisa, he cheered for Rinna, and when it was his turn, he cheered for the ball. When Rinna faltered, he gave her pointers. When I faltered, he knew to keep his distance.
“I’m telling you,” he said, “it’s the music.”
Humbled by two gutter shots in a row, I offered to get another round of drinks. As I did, I asked the guy behind the counter if it was possible to make a musical request. He pointed me in the direction of the girl disinfecting shoes.
“Do you have the Breeders?” I asked her.
She shook her head and gave me a look that made me feel old.
I tried again. “If I gave you my phone, could you hook it up? It’s for the birthday boy.”
“I guess,” she said.
I downloaded the song and handed my phone over. When I returned to my lane with the drinks, Callum was busy bowling and Rinna and Lisa both gave me a look, having seen me give away my phone. I told them it would all make sense in the next frame.
I didn’t know why I was doing it. Maybe it had been too long since I’d made anybody happy, and this seemed like a really simple way to make someone happy. It wasn’t meant as flirtation, or even kindness. It was just something to do.
I told the shoe girl to start playing it when Callum next got up to bowl.
She didn’t want to end the previous song early, so when he picked up his Irish-lucky ball, there was still the outro of a Rihanna bondage ballad playing. But as he weighed the ball in his hand and prepared to throw, the air was filled with a very distinctive guitar riff. He nearly dropped the ball in surprise, then turned to the rest of us and beamed.
“Holy shit!” he cried, and then proceeded to bowl an eight.
The score didn’t matter, though. When he came back to the seats, he was in a full serendipity buzz.
“This is so cool! I never in a million years thought they’d play this song. It’s so random.”
I wasn’t going to tell him, but Lisa had other ideas.
“It’s not completely random,” she said. “I believe you had a little help.”
And I found myself actually blushing.
* * *
—
He thanked me. I said it was nothing, and went to retrieve my phone. He knew well enough not to thank me again, not to stick our conversation into that loop. Instead, when the party was wrapping up, he took my phone out of my pocket and put in his number. Then he called it, so he’d have my number in his own phone.
“That way I can call you first,” he said with a smile. “Otherwise, putting my number in your phone is a completely passive-aggressive move.”
He called me fifteen minutes later, and I said sure.
* * *
—
I didn’t write autobiography. I wrote to leave autobiography behind.
When I was in kindergarten and asked to draw my family, I’d conjure Spider-Man, a blue elephant, the sun (wearing pants), a banana, and something I called a ninja tree. Even then, I knew that reality wasn’t nearly as interesting as the reality my mind could create. I could tell bedtime stories during the day. Sometimes this got me branded as a liar. Then I got older, and was called creative.
19 Love Songs Page 9