by Chris Lynch
The food came, and I could not believe how good her order looked and smelled. Caught me completely by surprise. They put hash browns there too, on the side, bumped up against the omelette, even though I did not hear her ask them to do that.
“You want to trade?” I asked her.
“No, I do not,” she said. “That’s why I ordered this”—she pointed at her food with her knife, in the most attractive way, the most, I mean, kill-me beautiful way of gesturing—“instead of that.” She pointed at my plate. A whole different gesture entirely.
I was wearing a smile then, must have been pretty goofy from the way it felt.
“I’m thinking that you’re a pretty friggin’ great girl, you know,” I said.
She cut a neat perfect wedge of egg, reached across the table with her fork, and used her knife to gently slide the bite onto my plate.
“That’s all you’re getting,” she said.
I ate it, still smiling, still watching her.
“That’s a pretty friggin’ great egg, too.”
She smiled, tucked another prim little wedge of that egg into the gentle upturned corner of her mouth. We ate, mostly silently, but altogether pleasantly, comfortably, for as long as it took me to finish off a small herd of blanketed pigs. Which wasn’t long. I was staring out the window, content and pleased and politely not watching Gigi Boudakian eat, seeing the parkway wake up with cars, sipping my coffee, when she asked.
“Are you okay, Keir? With what you did? To that boy?”
I swung my head around, the way a crane moves from one site to another. I looked, wide-eyed, forcing her further just to do it, just to make her meet me in the middle of where she wanted me to go.
“Huh?”
“You know, Keir. The whole ‘Killer’ thing. It must bother you. I know it must bother you.”
I looked back out the window. Not to be dramatic or anything, but just to look back out the window.
“You know,” I said, “it doesn’t. It doesn’t bother me, much. Bothered me before, bothered me at first. But really . . . really, it doesn’t bother me now. Like you would think it might. Like you, obviously, think it does.”
I finished my talking, and my looking out the window, and faced her directly, waiting.
“Okay,” said Gigi Boudakian, with a shrug. “I just wondered. If it hurt, you know?”
“No,” I said. “I hit him just right.”
“That’s not what I—”
I raised a hand. “I know what you meant. See, I heard from him, you know? Got a card and everything. We’re okay. He says it’s okay. Says I’m okay, okay? So it’s okay.”
I didn’t know there just what I was doing, but I was doing something, because a wave of trembly came up over Gigi Boudakian’s face and back down again, and she reached over the table and put a warm hand over my coffee-warm hand and tilted her head sadly.
I looked at her hand, I looked at her. I asked, “You want to meet him? I could take you to meet him, maybe. He’d like to see me sometime I think, and he’d love to see you anytime, who wouldn’t?”
She pulled her hand back and pulled herself back a bit, to her side of the table, but not so I felt like a creep.
“I couldn’t,” she said. “You mean, now? Anyway . . . whatever, no, I couldn’t. No. Thank you, Keir.”
I leaned way over now, over her plate, even, which was not very mannerly, but I wouldn’t stay long.
“Do you love me?” I asked.
“No,” she said matter-of-factly.
I leaned back, away from her plate.
“I knew that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“You like me, though?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I knew that.”
“You know what I think?” Gigi Boudakian said, pushing her plate out into the dangerous deep water of the middle of the table where I could get at her scraps of egg and hash brown and large corners of toast that were way more than crusts.
“Let me guess: You think you love me after all.”
“Well, no. What I think is, I think you weren’t so wild, you weren’t so . . . difficult, when you weren’t the Killer.”
For this I stopped eating. Stopped chewing, with food in my mouth.
“That’s what you think?”
She nodded sympathetically.
“Jeez, I wasn’t even close, was I?”
She shook her head.
“It’s just a name,” I said.
No response.
“He said it was okay. He said everything was okay, I was okay. You’ll see in the card he sent me, you’ll see.”
She nodded.
I returned to eating. There wasn’t much left on either plate but crumbs, snail trails of grease and butter, jelly daubs.
“You think I’m wild?” I asked.
“Kind of.”
“But you still like me.”
She gave me something of a how-sad smile. You know, the one that comes with the sideways tilt of the head.
“Do you still remember, in kindergarten? My joke?”
Like it was yesterday.
“Not sure I do, actually,” I said.
“Sure you do.” She started giggling. “My mother was walking us to school like she did, and it was very cold. I had on my big parka. Oh, come on, you do.”
It was robin’s egg blue, the parka. With tawny flecked fake rabbit fur around the hood and cuffs.
I sighed, like I was bothered. “I think I recall some distant memory of you getting me to look into your sleeve because you said your hand had gone missing.”
Now she was laughing. She covered her mouth with both hands, but was pretty clearly audible anyway.
“I’m so sorry, Keir,” she said, pulling off the miracle of sounding truly sorry and delirious with laughter at the same time.
“What?” I said now, and had to laugh myself. “For punching me in the face? For taking advantage of my trusting nature?”
I was only making it worse. She could hardly form words. “Yes,” she said, nodding frantically. “You were so sweet.”
“No, I wasn’t, I was just stupid.”
“That is not true,” she said, calming down and grabbing both my hands in hers. “And you never even tried to get me back.”
“I think I was just afraid you would beat me up.”
She looked up close and all the way in at me. “No, you weren’t,” she said. “You just didn’t have it in you. And it was right then that I started almost loving you.”
It had to be possible for her to feel the thunder of my heartbeat through the contact of our hands. I pulled away, but she could probably still feel it through the floor.
“Like you do now,” I said.
“Now and always, as always,” she said warmly.
Almost loved. To be almost loved. To be almost loved by Gigi Boudakian.
What a wonder was that? What a horror was that? I was so proud ecstatic grateful angry I felt for that instant I knew what it was like to be fire.
“Ya,” I said, standing and very politely wiping the corners of my mouth with my yellow paper napkin, “well, I was very happy when your mother smacked you.”
“Who are you kidding?” she said, standing across the table from me like a gunslinger. “She only did that when you started crying.”
There was nothing left that the International House of Pancakes could do for us, so we left. The morning was still so beautiful, soft and dewy and warm, that we tried to finish what we started and walk all the way home. But that was just not practical, not possible, not a very good idea.
The world was waking up, the spell was lifting, and we were coming down. Things were starting not to feel the way they felt before. Every step was heavier than all the earlier steps. We carried our shoes again, but the pavement was getting hotter, harder, grittier. Sweat stains were blooming under the arms of my shirt and were even trying to fight their way all the way through the mighty polyester rented jacket. Worst, worst of all, sweat d
ared to appear under the arms of Gigi Boudakian where sweat should never ever be, creeping down her sides like poison ivy staining a lovely satin garden wall.
We were getting so, so tired. The sun, which a while ago was a sunrise, was now my evil nemesis.
“I’ll get a cab, huh?” I said.
“I thought you would never ask.”
What I would like right here is to tell you about how, in that cab, I didn’t try anything, not right in the closing moments of the greatest night, the finest memorable prom night, with the wondrous Gigi Boudakian. How I treated her with the respect and adoration she deserved. And I would like to tell you that she loved me beyond almost.
CLOUD
* * *
This is the problem. This is what Gigi does not understand. Things have conspired, to cloud her mind. She’s not a drinker, Gigi. Some people shouldn’t drink. It is understandable, but she has just got it wrong. Some of it is cloud, some of it is misunderstanding, but all of it is wrong, and all of it can be straightened out. It has to be straightened out.
“We just need to talk,” I say. “Please, can’t we talk?”
“No, we cannot.”
“It’s practically not even light out yet.”
“It’s light enough. Let me go. You have to let me go.”
“Okay, Gigi. What if, even if I didn’t, I said all right, you’re right, whatever. What if I did that and then I said it so you can feel all right, and we can just leave it there, leave it right here in this room behind us when we leave, and nobody, not Carl and not my father and not your father or anybody, has to be involved or upset about it? What about that, and then, like I said, we can leave it behind us, close the door on it, and you can feel all right and we can get on with stuff. What if I did that for you?
“Because I am sorry, Gigi. Whether I did something or I didn’t, I am sorry because of how you feel about it. How you feel and how you feel about me.”
She tries the doorknob again, and I grab her wrist with both hands.
I have both hands tight on Gigi Boudakian’s lovely soft long wrist. She looks up at me, almost as if she is afraid of me. Things are so wrong.
“Please, Keir,” she says, and her voice is a shaky whisper. She looks down at my hands holding her wrist, and Gigi Boudakian’s tears drop, right onto the back of my hand, and this is a nightmare now. I should be the one crying.
Things are so, so, so wrong.
WHAT HAVE WE HERE?
* * *
Something changed in those weeks and months heading out of my high school life. Things were different. I was different. Physically different.
After football and soccer seasons were behind me and party season was in full session, I became aware of myself and my appetites. Myself as appetite.
But like I said, something changed. During the last half of the last year of high school, my body started treating life differently. I kept up with my hunger, my thirst, my desires of all kinds, kept them all going at a fairly high level, but my bod shifted down a gear.
My boyishness, which I had come to rely on, started to desert me.
My waistline had the nerve to protrude. “What have we got here?” I said to myself out loud as I stood naked in front of my freestanding, full-length, oak-framed mirror, as I was wont to do. My father got me the mirror for my birthday. I had requested it.
I stared at it full-on. Turned sideways, then sideways the other way. Hell.
“Ray,” I called.
He came quickly down the hall, opened the door, found me there.
He stood with his hands on his hips, shaking his head at me, as I stared at me.
“You’ve got to get yourself a girlfriend, soon,” he said.
“I’m fat, Ray.”
He seemed a little surprised by this. We had been living alone, the pair of us, in bachelor conditions for a good while now. We were not shy or careful around each other. The house had its sights and sounds and smells, which we had gotten pretty good at not noticing, which the girls certainly would not have tolerated, but this here, me and the nakedness and the mirror and all, this was testing him.
“You are not fat. You’re not so fine I want to see you naked, however. Get dressed.”
He left me there, alone. Me and my body, alone. Me and my body and my gut, all squeezed into my room together, uncomfortably crowded. My lean frame, cornerback lean, kicker thin, soccer-player light and springy, suddenly mutated with this jiggly Jell-O mold grafted on around my beltline. I turned angrily away from the mirror, like it was the mirror’s fault. It certainly wasn’t mine.
But it was more than just that. I felt tired. And slow. And hurt. I had pulled a thigh muscle a couple of weeks before, just playing some casual basketball in gym class—nobody gets hurt in gym class—and it was refusing to heal.
I had to start training for real. I was going to get fit and stay fit. Something large, larger even than my belly, was coming over me.
It was over. This life, or this leg of it anyway, was over, and truth be told, I was not unhappy or unprepared for it. Except for living with my dad, there wasn’t really any part of my life that I was not now prepared to trade in, trade up, for bigger and better things. Faster things, stronger things, prettier things, harder things, newer things, unknown things, and scarier things.
So when I came downstairs, I told my dad I would be skipping breakfast. And that was just the beginning. “I’ve been thinking, Ray, that I don’t really want to have that open house here after graduation.”
He stopped washing up and looked at me as if I had stripped again and was looking at my naked reflection in the breakfast plates.
“You?”
“Right.”
“Keir MacTavish Sarafian?”
“Right.”
“You know that open house actually means party? You know you are saying you don’t want a party. Could that possibly be true?”
“Ya, Dad. I just feel like . . . I’ve had enough. Not that I don’t still love a party, Just that . . . I think I’ve done it now. Like I have had the breakup parties and the going away parties, and most of all the good-bye stuff and, honestly, I just don’t feel like doing it again.”
I was briefly worried that Ray was going to be hurt. That he was going to feel bad that I had turned down his nice offer to throw me a do, that I had cut the legs off his big chance to send me off in style like he did for Mary and then Fran and that, I must say, he did spectacularly well. We were still pushing people out of the house two days later both times.
But he was okay. Which I should have known he would be.
“What do I want?” he said, lightly butting my head with his.
“You want what I want, Dad.”
“That’s right, goofus, and don’t you forget it. So, what do you want? A trip to Bermuda or someplace, I suppose.”
“No. All I want is Rollo.”
He dried off his hands. “Rollo?”
“Ya, just Rollo.”
“Really? Just Rollo, not his limousine?”
“Duh, Dad.”
Ray’s cousin, Rollo, owned what was by some distance the finest, gaudiest, most hysterically decked-out stretch limo in this area. You normally had to book him months in advance for a weekend. He was expensive, and only slightly moved by family considerations.
“And what exactly do you want with Rollo?”
“All I want is just to ride around. For a few hours. Tooling around. Seeing places, seeing people. Picking up a friend here and there, having a laugh, dropping them off again. Showing off. Doing only what I feel like doing, when the mood hits me. Taking a stretch limo through the KFC drive-through. Seeing who I want, when I want, skipping all the rest of it, then when I’m done with it, being done.
“And not getting up out of my seat the whole time.”
He looked at me with great intensity, leaning up close. Like one of those pictures of the Kennedy brothers conferring over the Cuban Missile Crisis or Marilyn Monroe.
“Damn,” he sai
d with pride. “That’s a plan.”
* * *
As graduation approached I felt lighter and righter about it. While a lot of people at school were preparing for parties—mostly by partying all the time—I was pulling back, slowing down, stepping away. And it felt good.
I found a new and brilliant method for getting in condition: I ate and drank less and exercised more. I found that—miracle—if I stretched regularly and correctly, my thigh muscle didn’t hurt anymore. I started going out for long runs for the first time ever and discovered that I liked it. Not just the running, the thump-thump-thump of it, which could be boring as hell sometimes, and painful, and sick-inducing, but the touring element. Nearly every time I went out running in the weeks leading up to graduation, I felt like I was making my victory lap. I even began to have some kind of hazy fantasy, in which I had achieved something heroic and monumentally physical and was running around acknowledging the love and respect of the townspeople. I caught myself, on occasions, returning somebody’s normal greeting wave with a big all-hail-Caesar wave of my own.
I hadn’t done anything. I knew I hadn’t done anything. All that was going on was the same thing that was going on for hundreds of other kids in town at the same time, that had gone on for thousands and thousands of other kids before us over the generations. I was finishing school, respectably but unspectacularly, and moving on away to college. I had done my time, had my times, and made my mark, although some might say my mark would have been better left unmade.
But that was past, and it was okay now.
I was starting to feel what was maybe an appropriate level of nostalgia for the old town. Passing my old ugly 1960s-style grammar school, I didn’t feel the same cold and disagreeable urge to cross the street and pretend I never knew the place. I felt more like a benign, warming, safe appreciation for it, a feeling stoked by the completely unexpected return of a few good memories there. Same for the church I no longer attended. Same for the Hi-Lo supermarket, which had changed to the A & P, which had changed to Stop & Shop, all of which I worked for, however briefly.
Maybe, I thought—because I realized that I could have thoughts when I was running that I couldn’t seem to have at any other time—this was all a sign that I was getting old. Getting old really, really fast, like Robin Williams in that movie Jack. I was having to watch my weight, I was getting nagging little old-man injuries (my arches were now hurting), and I was getting all wishy-washy about a place that I really would have told you just a few weeks ago didn’t mean much more to me than hot meals, a nice house, and Ray.