by Ann Packer
“Don’t you mean ‘end of century’? What happened to your rule about foreign phrases?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Fin de siècle has to be fin de siècle because it connotes the depravity of eighteen-nineties Paris, the disgust.”
I turned the water off and started washing the mugs.
“I was a history major,” he added. “At Princeton. Have I ever told you before that I went to Princeton? I graduated magna, not to brag. I had a different roommate each year, but the one thing they had in common was they were all Southerners with drinking problems. There was a lot of throwing up, and I spent my weekends elsewhere. Oh, and many years later I happened to run into one of them at a movie theater, and he said to me, ‘Kilroy, you son of a bitch, are you still alive?’ ” Kilroy stared at me. “What do you think of that?”
My heart pounded. He set his cup on the counter, reached for me, and pulled me close. “You know me better than that kind of information,” he said very softly, his mouth at my ear. “You may not think so, but you do.” He kissed me and I turned my face away, angry and then suddenly wanting to kiss him, and then angry that I wanted to kiss him. I pushed away from him and went and sat at the table.
“I called Jamie last night,” I said. “For the first time. She didn’t know I’d sublet my apartment. When I mentioned it, she did something weird—instead of hanging up on me she just put the phone down and walked away.” I stared at him, no idea why I’d said this rather than something else: What do you want? What the fuck are you doing in my life?
“She froze,” he said.
“Froze?” I was surprised he’d responded.
He shrugged. “Sure. She couldn’t do anything else. She couldn’t say anything, she couldn’t hang up on you, it was all she could do.”
“Why couldn’t she hang up on me?”
“Because she loves you,” he said. “As do I, though in a somewhat different way.”
A light sweat gathered on my forehead and upper lip. “You love me?”
He nodded solemnly. “Of course I love you.” His face was bland, his voice matter-of-fact. “Don’t you know? I’m head over heels. I’m knocked for a loop.”
He loved me, and it seemed that was all I had been wanting to know, all I’d been needing to hear to take the next step. I asked for a key to his apartment, and I took to being there when he returned from work, flipping through a magazine, drinking a beer, eager for a fuck. Very eager for a fuck—the more I had, the more I wanted. Sex was our medium, as enlightening as a long exchange of information.
Because what, really, did I need to know? I could know names and places and dates, or I could know that he liked to have his nipples teased by my tongue, that he read the newspaper from back to front, that there was a place on the outside of his left calf with no hair, as if someone had taken a finger and wiped it away.
My days were full of free time, but this didn’t change me so much as it changed time itself: mornings were busy with the walk back to the brownstone, a long shower and the decision over what to wear. I had breakfast at noon, coffee that I made in the empty brownstone kitchen along with, every single day, a soft-boiled egg on buttered toast, the egg yolk hot and runny, salt-enhanced, the white cooked just enough to hold a shape in my mouth. In the afternoons I barely had long enough for the little tasks and projects I assigned myself: move my car, do laundry, take a walk or even a subway ride to a part of the city I had yet to see. For company I had my thoughts, my fascination with how it felt to be loved so cryptically, to let love stand in for so much. After all, love with Mike had been completely different: a fast plunge, the two of us falling together. We were in love with each other, in love with love. We waited for each other outside of classrooms, walked with our sides pressed together, sat as close as we could, his arm around me and his fingertips just inside the waistband of my pants. We talked on the phone for hours every night, fell asleep with pictures of each other under our pillows. We were fourteen, granted, but it was more than that: it was that Mike was wide open, without corners, while Kilroy was a maze I was wandering through, a place full of dead-ends that I occasionally stumbled into and then had to find my way out of.
I knew they were there. I knew it was just a matter of time before I encountered one again.
Thanksgiving morning. Wrapped in a terrycloth bathrobe, Kilroy dumped flour directly onto the kitchen counter and began pinching small cubes of cold butter into it, his hands snapping open and closed like someone showing how someone else did nothing but talk talk talk. We were taking a dessert and a vegetable to the brownstone later that day; though he’d lobbied for turkey sandwiches at his place, I’d argued that Thanksgiving wasn’t just about turkey, it was also about a big crowd of people, and eventually he’d given in.
Yawning and still muddled with sleep, I watched from the doorway while he worked. I took a sip of the coffee he’d made before waking me and said, “Some people would use a bowl.”
He looked over his shoulder and smiled. “Ah, but they’d be missing out. This is far superior.”
“It looks far messier.”
“It’s the French way,” he said. “The French have a genius for mess.” With the back of his floury hand he brushed some hair away from his face. “Can you get me some ice water?”
I set my mug on the counter and got a glass. I filled it with ice, added water, and then stirred the cubes around until my finger was cold. Setting the glass down next to him, I said, “How do you know the French way?” I half pictured him in some farmhouse kitchen with a dark-eyed mademoiselle showing him what to do, but I couldn’t really believe it.
“I took a class,” he said. “In Paris, at the Cordon Bleu. When we go I’ll take you by there, it’s pretty great.”
We exchanged a smile that meant, on his part, Because we are going, you know; and on mine, Yeah, right. He mentioned France a lot, said, You’ll love Aix or Wait’ll you see how much better the Metro is than the subway here.
With his fingers he sprinkled some water onto the flour. He said, “I was thinking we could boil the carrots and sweet potatoes and then do them in a gratin dish with butter and a little Calvados.”
“No miniature marshmallows?” I said.
He looked up at me and smiled. “That would be the Wisconsin way?”
“The Mayer way.”
“You had Thanksgiving with the Mayers?”
“For the last eight years. It would be like twenty Mayers and Mayer cousins, and my mother and me. But really, it would be twenty-one Mayers and Mayer cousins and my mother, because I was one of them.”
Kilroy had worked the flour mixture into a loose dough, and now he washed his hands and wrapped the dough in plastic, then put it in the refrigerator. “We’ll give that an hour,” he said. “Did your mother mind?”
I thought about it. How before dinner she always stood in the kitchen while Mrs. Mayer and her sister, Aunt Peg, bustled around the stove and oven; how they gave her small tasks like putting out the butter, but more as a favor to her than so she could do one for them. Mike and I would be talking to his cousin Steve, or down in the basement with the younger kids organizing a darts competition, and whenever I passed the kitchen my mother gave me one of those mouth-only smiles. She usually went home right after we ate, left me to get a ride with Mike later. A couple of times she skipped it altogether, accepted another invitation but said to me, No, go ahead—it’s fine.
“I guess she went along with it,” I told Kilroy, and he nodded gravely.
“The famous line of least resistance, a real trap.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think, Well, I’ll go along to get along—and next thing you know you’re somewhere you never wanted to be without a ticket back.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was just Thanksgiving.”
He laughed. “Just Thanksgiving. That may well be an oxymoron.”
When the dough was ready, I peeled the apples, removing their green, lemony skins in long spira
ls. I cut the flesh into crisp, white slices, which I tossed with sugar and cinnamon and then arranged in the pie pan Kilroy had lined with thinly rolled pastry.
A little later, the pie in the oven and the vegetables cooked and arrayed in a casserole, he went to take a shower. I poured myself some more coffee, thinking how much I liked his domesticity, the fact that he’d woken me to start cooking. I loved watching him in the kitchen, how he never used a cookbook but moved surely from step to step, as if he understood the ingredients so well that he knew just how much of each would yield the right combination of flavors.
I finished my coffee and then set about cleaning, sliding the peels into the garbage, washing the bowls and knives we’d used, wiping down the counters with a sponge that had been sprinkled with vinegar, one of his tricks.
I heard his shower shut off, and a moment later the phone rang. I stared at it. Somehow this was a first, the question of whether or not to answer his phone: it rang that rarely.
It rang a second time, and I crossed the room and picked it up, thinking it could be Simon asking us to stop for something on the way over. “Hello,” I said, and there was a long silence before a woman’s voice came over the line and said, very tentatively, hello back.
“Is this—” she said. “Do I have—” She started again: “Is Paul there?”
I nearly said she had the wrong number, but then I realized: Paul, his real name. “Just a minute,” I said, and I carried the cordless handset into his bedroom, my palm over the mouthpiece, and knocked on the partly closed bathroom door.
He pulled it open with his foot, naked, a smile about to alight on his face. The room was full of steam, the cedary smell of his soap heavy in the damp air. He held a drift of shaving cream in his palm, stiff like beaten egg whites.
“Phone,” I said, and I handed it to him and walked away.
I thought of closing the bedroom door on my way out, but I didn’t, and then it was too late. I heard his hello, and then a long silence. In the kitchen I turned on the water, then quickly turned it off again. The woman’s voice had sounded—there was no other word for it—cultured. Older. Although older than myself or older than Kilroy, I didn’t know.
“No,” he said, and then there was another silence. “Because I don’t,” he said, and then, “As a matter of fact I do,” and then I turned on the water and let it run until something caught at my peripheral vision and I looked into the bedroom in time to see the handset land with a small bounce in the center of the bed.
Dressed in his usual jeans but also a pressed white shirt, Kilroy came into the kitchen a little later and clamped the handset to the wall unit. He bent and cracked the oven door. “Ten more minutes,” he said, and he let the door fall back so hard that through the window I saw the pie jump a little.
“Who was that?” I said.
He licked his lips. “My mother.” He stood still for a moment, then picked up the sponge and began wiping the counters I’d already wiped, with sharp, jerky strokes.
“I did that,” I said, and he tossed the sponge into the sink from across the room. He looked at me, but in a strange way—at my mouth rather than my eyes, his face too blank. He turned and walked into the bedroom, and I followed, watched him stand for a moment at the window and then kick off his shoes and settle on the bed with a pillow behind him. From his bedside table he took up the book he was reading.
“Are you OK?”
He nodded.
I went and sat on the edge of the bed, down near his feet. He wore black socks, and I cupped his toes, then released them. “What’s she doing today? Or they. What are they doing?”
“They,” he said from behind his book, “are having a goose, although at this point, they are also probably having a cow.”
I waited for him to look up and smile at me, or at the very least receive my smile, but he didn’t—he just sat there, one knee crossed over the other, his face obscured by the book.
Outside it was cold and quiet—businesses closed, few cars on the streets. The sky was thick with dusk, pulling darkness down onto the city. Wrapped in my coat and warmest wool scarf, I held the casserole while Kilroy carried the pie, extended in front of him like a folded flag at a military funeral. For the sixth or seventh time in the last few hours, I went over his part of the phone conversation I’d overheard. No. Because I don’t. As a matter of fact I do. It was easy to imagine what his mother had said: Do you want to come for dinner? Why not? Do you have plans? What I didn’t understand was how curt he’d been, and then how bothered. That was the only word for it: bothered. Her hello had sounded sophisticated, worldly. Like someone who’d have a friend who said “veecheesoizzz”—or who’d say it herself. Like someone who’d eat at the restaurants Kilroy disdained, who’d have the patina of entitlement he abhorred. If he’d been a trust-fund baby, what had happened? When had he fallen off track? Or climbed off—I didn’t think he did much accidentally.
We turned onto Simon’s street and walked past my car, the windshield so filthy I’d have to bring paper towels and Windex the next time I needed to move it.
At the brownstone, we deposited our food on the kitchen table. Kilroy got himself a glass of wine and joined Lane and a few others in the living room while I stayed with Simon, who was standing over a saucepan at the stove.
“Making gravy?” I said.
“No one else knew how. I told them you had to get the fat out of the roasting pan, and they were all, like, ‘Gross.’ ” With a wire whisk he stirred quickly, running the loops all over the bottom of the pan. “Being from the Midwest has its uses,” he added.
“Speaking of which, did you talk to your parents this morning?”
He grinned. “My mother’s all business on the major holidays. The first thing out of her mouth was ‘Now don’t forget about the rice for your soup.’ I was like, ‘Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.’ Oh, and it’s snowing there, they got three inches last night.”
“Your soup?” I said.
“Turkey soup, babe. Gotta make it. It’ll be good, we’ll eat it for weeks. You’ll see, or you would if you were ever here.” He gave me a pointed look, then dipped a spoon into the gravy and handed it to me. “Here, taste this.”
From the deep, rising smell I could tell how hot it was, and I blew on it first. I sipped and it was like drinking pure sin, salty and fat enough that my lips felt coated. I finished it off and returned the spoon to the saucepan for some more.
“Double dipping?” he said. “From Carrie Bell? I can hardly believe my eyes.”
“Shut up.” I sipped again, then put the spoon into the crowded sink.
“Did you talk to your mother?” he said.
“Last night.” Hearing her voice had made me miss her, then made me realize I’d been missing her, without really knowing it.
“How about Mike?” Simon said.
I shook my head. I hadn’t talked to him in a month, hadn’t written to thank him for the tape, had somehow never even sent him the damned postcard of the Empire State Building. Three inches of snow. I wondered if Mike had gotten home. I imagined Mr. Mayer wheeling him up their shoveled walk to the front door, the lawn iced with white on both sides, but then the image broke down: I had no way to get him up the brick steps.
I headed back to the brownstone living room, which was hardly ever used. They’d worked hard to make it festive: there were tiny white votive candles everywhere, clustered in the dark corners of the room, lined up on the broken mantel. Simon had even begun a mural on one wall, a picture of a real dining room: a table laden with napkins and silverware and glasses of wine. He’d evidently run out of time, though; the entire thing was sketched, but only one edge was painted.
Kilroy was talking to Lane and her girlfriend, Maura, who was tall and broad-shouldered, with thick auburn hair and dark brown eyes, the darkest eyes I’d ever seen on a redhead. She wore a gauzy rust-colored dress and was beautiful in exactly the opposite way Lane was beautiful—tall and strong and colorful versus tiny and delicat
e and pale. I joined them, and she turned to me and said, “I was just telling Kilroy that he looks incredibly familiar to me.”
He raised his glass for a sip of wine. He shrugged and said, “I have one of those faces.”
She wrinkled her brow. “What faces?”
“You know, one of those dominant facial types some people have. You have one, too. Carrie and Lane are more recessive.”
Lane grinned. “I’m not sure I like the idea of being recessive.”
“You should,” he said. “It means the more unusual in you has power over the more usual. In your face it’s your chin and your eyebrows.”
Her pointed chin and her narrow, arched eyebrows. I remembered the photograph she’d shown me, in which her child self sat on her grandmother’s lap. Even then her chin and eyebrows had been distinctive.
“Is Kilroy your first or last name?” Maura asked.
“Neither, it’s just a nickname.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Paul Fraser.”
“Fraser,” she said thoughtfully. “Fraser.”
He pressed his elbow into me. “Shall I tell them how I got my nickname?”
“I don’t know how you got your nickname.”
He gave me a blank look. “You don’t?”
I thought of our first evening together, in Washington Square Park:
Is Kilroy your first or last name?
It’s neither.
It’s your middle name?
My name is Paul Eliot Fraser. There’s no Kilroy in there at all, it’s just what I’m called.
Why?
Because it’s not in there at all.
What was he up to? Lane looked at me curiously, then looked away.
“Well,” he said. “I’ll tell you too, then. You know that Second World War thing ‘Kilroy Was Here’? That American soldiers drew all over the place, with that little face?” He shifted his wine to his left hand and drew something in the air with his right forefinger. “It was this big deal, a kind of graffiti—they drew these little faces and wrote ‘Kilroy Was Here’ next to them. Well, I was a big Second World War buff in high school, I read everything I could about it, and after a while I started writing ‘Kilroy Was Here’ on my friends’ notebooks and stuff, their lockers, just for the hell of it, Kilroy Was Here, Kilroy Was Here. Before long they started calling me Kilroy, and it stuck.”