First Love

by Patterson, James

  I thought back to my physics class, which felt like it was about a million years ago (so what does that say about time?). “It’s only a matter of nanoseconds or something. Time moves slower the closer you are to the earth, too.”

  “That gives me an excellent reason not to go mountain climbing.”

  “As if you needed one,” I said.

  “True. Somehow the thought of plunging hundreds of feet to my death never appealed to me.” He toyed with the key chain, watching the snow sift down over the tiny roller coaster. “Do you ever think about what happens after?” he asked suddenly.

  “After what?” I asked, moving into the passing lane.

  “After we earn our wings,” he said. He looked at me, waiting for a reaction. I kept my eyes on the road. “Don’t joke,” I said.

  Robinson crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not joking. I’m asking.”

  “After we ‘earn our wings’…”

  “Don’t you remember? Nurse Sophie used to say that all the time. She was totally sincere.”

  I pressed harder on the gas pedal. I was actually going the speed limit now. “Because she believed that when you die, you become an angel,” I said. “Whereas you think we just take a dirt nap.”

  Robinson snickered. “Sorry. That dirt nap thing always gets me.”

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  But the truth was, we’d joked about death constantly back in the ward. All of us had, because somehow it made us less afraid. Oh, I’m sooo tired, someone would say, I think I’ll go sleep with the fishes. Someone else would pipe up: Lately I’ve been thinking about buying a pine condo. Or: Yeah, I’m planning on going into the fertilizer business.

  It was flipping Death the bird. And it made awful things like chemotherapy-induced nausea and hair loss just slightly less awful. But I thought—or hoped—that Robinson and I had left that sort of thing behind us. That such humor was no longer… medically relevant.

  “I don’t know, Robinson,” I said, gripping the steering wheel. “I want to think there’s something on the other side, but where’s the evidence? No one sends you a postcard from the afterlife.”

  “Which is totally rude of them,” he replied.

  “I know, right?” I raised my fist. “Do you hear that, Carole Ann? Rude.”

  Robinson reached over and put his hand on my knee. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll write you.”

  I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

  And I wanted to laugh, to show that I knew he was joking. But I wasn’t entirely sure he was.

  38

  WE CROSSED THE WIDE EXPANSE OF Pennsylvania while Robinson slept. In the dark it looked like any other state, and I shot through it at seventy-five.

  In East Orange, New Jersey, at midmorning, I sent Robinson into a Pathmark to buy groceries (“healthy stuff,” I’d said, fully expecting him to try to pass off Froot Loops as actual fruit) while I went across the street to a place called All That Glitters Is Gold.

  Thanks to my dad, I knew my way around a pawnshop. Which was how, for fifty bucks and the pearl-and-gold bracelet that had been my mother’s, I bought Robinson an acoustic guitar.

  “Where’d you go?” Robinson asked when I pulled up outside the Pathmark. He set the bag of groceries in the backseat, and I was shocked to see an actual banana in it.

  “Just a quick errand,” I said, trying not to smile at the thought of the guitar hidden under the tent behind the backseat. “Did you honestly buy fruit and vegetables?”

  He leaned over and kissed my neck. “Tell me where you went,” he said, his lips ticklish on my skin.

  I drew in my breath. “No.” Every time he touched me, I felt my whole body begin to hum and shiver.

  “Tell me,” he said again, moving from my neck to my earlobe, his mouth light and teasing.

  “Robinson,” I whispered. I’d tell him anything, I’d give up every secret I’d ever had, if he kept doing that.

  I pulled him toward me, my mouth finding his. Before I knew it, my fingers were on the buttons of his shirt. I managed to get the top two undone, but then suddenly he moved away from me. He backed up against the car door, rebuttoning his shirt quickly.

  I sat up straight, blinking. Confused. Didn’t he want it, too?

  “What?” I asked. “Why—”

  “Security guards,” Robinson said, nodding toward the burly guys walking up and down the rows of the parking lot.

  There were three of them—two only a stone’s throw away. But they could have been sitting in the backseat and I wouldn’t have noticed while Robinson was filling up all my senses.

  “We should probably go,” he said. “We can, um, do some more of that later.”

  My cheeks were pink with embarrassment. “Okay,” I said. As if I didn’t want to shout, Hell yes, we will!

  Robinson smiled. “But you know what? I think I want to drive.”

  I was so relieved that he was feeling good, so thrilled at the way I could kiss him now whenever I wanted—security guards notwithstanding—that I, small-town girl Axi Moore, didn’t freak out at all when the New York skyline became visible along the turnpike, with its hills and valleys of silvery skyscrapers. I didn’t care that we sat in traffic outside the Holland Tunnel for forty-five minutes, or that Robinson got lost on the way across town to the East Village.

  He was driving. He was happy and strong. That made everything okay.

  39

  TOGETHER, ALONG WITH A CRUSH OF tourists, we walked down St. Marks Place, trying on cheap sunglasses at the outdoor booths and browsing a two-story store called Trash and Vaudeville, where Robinson posed for a picture in a silver pleather biker jacket and I tried on a bright blue wig. We stopped in to St. Mark’s Bookshop, and I got a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and a book of Dylan Thomas poems.

  “Poetry?” Robinson said, looking aghast.

  “Just read one,” I said.

  Robinson opened the Whitman to a random page and cleared his throat. “ ‘A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child?… I do not know what it is any more than he. / I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.’ ” He looked at me, intrigued. “Okay,” he said, “I like that well enough. ‘Hopeful green stuff woven.’ ”

  I laughed. “I’ve got something you’ll like better, though.” I took his hand and led him down the street to the car.

  “Is it my surprise?” he asked excitedly.

  “Look under the tent,” I said.

  When Robinson pulled out the guitar, his whole face lit up. He hefted the weight of it in his hands and plucked a string experimentally.

  “Axi, how—”

  “Let’s go play it,” I said. I didn’t want to have to tell him that I’d given up my mother’s bracelet—the last thing I had of hers—to buy it. And that I wasn’t the least bit sorry.

  Hand in hand, we walked over to Tompkins Square Park and found a bench beneath a ring of ginkgo trees. Robinson strummed for a moment, finding the chords. They seemed familiar to me, but I didn’t recognize the tune until he began to sing.

  “Moving forward using all my breath,” Robinson sang. The song was “I Melt with You.”

  I haven’t talked about Robinson’s voice, and this is partly because I can’t explain it. It’s clear and rough at the same time; it’s intimate but also demands an audience. It’s usually soft, but somehow you hear it not just with your ears but with your whole body. And with your heart most of all.

  People who were walking by began to stop to listen as he sang. Robinson didn’t seem to notice them gradually gathering around him, though. His eyes were on his boot, tapping on the cobblestones. Every once in a while, he looked at me, right into my eyes, singing: “I’ll stop the world and melt with you…”

  Soon there was a big circle of people, young, old, and in between. Most of them were parents, with kids carrying stuffed bunnies or pockmarked Nerf footballs or—the older
ones—iPhones. And these parents all knew the song, because it was the one they’d danced to twenty years earlier, when they were in high school and in love for the first time.

  At first a few of them just mouthed the words, but then, quietly, they began to sing. Then others joined in, too, and they lost their hard, blank city faces and smiled, and in another minute it was a damn sing-along. I swear to God, there were people with tears in their eyes, because that’s how beautiful Robinson is when he plays.

  When the song ended, there was silence. For a moment I felt like the entire city went quiet and took one long, sweet breath. Like everyone, everywhere, was thinking about life, and how it is the happiest and saddest thing, the most wonderful and the most terrible and the most precious.

  Then the silence broke. A woman in a bright yellow dress began to clap, and then, just the way the singing had grown, so did the clapping, until the applause was really loud. There was another woman blowing her nose, and a man staring up at the sky and blinking really hard and fast—but most people were just smiling.

  An old man stepped forward and placed his cap on the ground. “You forgot to pass the hat,” he said.

  Robinson looked up, startled. “Pardon?” he said. He was still in the world of the song. He didn’t realize there was anyone but him and me.

  The old man looked a little like Ernie. He turned back to the crowd and called, “Cough it up for the young performer, all right?”

  Robinson and I watched as almost every person stepped forward with quarters and dollars. I saw a woman give her daughter some money, and the girl tiptoed up and put a twenty into the hat. She was about Carole Ann’s age when she died, the age she’d be forever. Her hair was even red, like my sister’s.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  Then it was all over, and the people left. Robinson and I were alone again. The hat was full of money.

  Robinson was smiling at me. “We’re rich,” he said, and he pulled me onto his lap.

  And truly, then, it felt like we were.

  40

  WE DECIDED TO SPLURGE ON A HOSTEL that night. It sounded like a better idea than sleeping on a park bench, though we would’ve had plenty of interesting company had we gone that route.

  The Grand Street Hostel was on the edge of Little Italy, where it bleeds into Chinatown, and it looked decent enough from the outside. There were a couple of backpacker types smoking out front, and the guy at the desk was friendly in a stoned sort of way.

  But Robinson and I quickly learned that the difference between a hostel and a hotel goes way, way beyond the minor distinction in spelling. When the s is added, you subtract things like privacy, comfort, and in this case, ceilings. The hostel was a maze of tiny, thin-walled cells, sloppily constructed inside an enormous hangarlike room.

  “It’s a bit more prison-y than I might have expected,” Robinson said.

  “No kidding,” I agreed, stepping over a lone boot in the hall. “I feel like we should have gotten fingerprinted.”

  Luckily, we had our own room, with two single beds pushed right up against each other, and about six inches of floor space on either side.

  “Well, the sheets look clean, at least,” Robinson said brightly. Then he gave me a quick kiss and headed down the hall to the bathroom.

  I sat on the corner of the bed and looked up at the non-ceiling. I could hear one end of an unpleasant cell phone conversation from a nearby room. It’s not my fault you got kicked out, someone said. Everyone’s hated you for years.

  I hummed a little, trying to give this person some privacy. The song was “Tangled Up in Blue,” but you wouldn’t know it, since I can’t carry a tune. I can’t play an instrument, either. “It’s okay,” Robinson used to assure me. “You’ll make me a great roadie someday.”

  I hummed faster and plucked at the corner of the sheet. I realized I was nervous, but also excited. Robinson and I hadn’t been alone in a room together since LA, when we ever-so-chastely watched Puss in Boots. What would happen tonight, I wondered. How unchaste would we be?

  This was another thing I definitely hadn’t planned for. It was a road I’d just have to feel my way along.

  No pun intended.

  When Robinson came in from the bathroom, his hair was wet and he smelled like Ivory. His shirt hung loosely on his shoulders, and he was wearing blue plaid boxers.

  He placed his folded jeans on top of his backpack. The bed sighed as he sat down.

  “Hi,” I half-whispered.

  “Hi back,” he said softly. “Well. What do you want to do now?”

  I knew the answer to that question, even if it kind of… scared me a little. I took a deep breath, willing myself to be brave.

  I slipped my shirt over my head.

  Robinson sucked in his breath. And then he gently swept the long waves of my hair away from the back of my neck and kissed me there. I shivered, goose bumps rising on my arms.

  I could feel his breath, the impossible softness of his lips. I tilted my head back, and he ran a finger down my neck, stopping in the hollow of my clavicle for a moment before tracing each of my collarbones. He kissed along my shoulders, tickling me with the tiniest scratches of his unshaven chin.

  We fell back against the bed, and above me, Robinson shrugged off his flannel. Then he bent his dark head down, and we were nothing but lips and tongues and teeth until we had to stop to catch our breath.

  Then we lay there, our eyes locked in the half-light. Robinson was looking at me the way you’d look at something you’d lost a million years ago and never thought you’d find.

  I gazed back at him in wonder, realizing how much of him there was still to discover: the scar on the inside of his palm, the blue veins in his wrist, the triangle of freckles on his chest, just to the left of his breastbone. These small, secret places. I wanted to know all of them.

  But I didn’t know how far things would go tonight. I wanted to be slow—and I wanted to go fast.

  Robinson cleared his throat. “Do you—?” he began.

  “I don’t have any protection, if that’s what you were going to ask.” My voice came out too loud, and I shrank back against him in embarrassment.

  He made a noise—a grunt? A half-laugh?

  “I don’t want to have kids,” I blurted.

  Then he really did laugh. “Whoa, Axi. Moving a little fast, are we?”

  I pulled the blanket up over my face. This was all so new to me. Could I help it if I was doing it wrong?

  But still, there was something I wanted him to know. I forced myself to keep talking, though part of me was ready to die of humiliation. “I didn’t think we were about to make a baby, Robinson. I meant it as a philosophical thing. Between the Moore family cancer genes and, like, global warming, any kid of mine would be doomed. She’d be born with blue eyes and a ticking time bomb inside her, just like the rest of my family. Talk about getting dealt a shitty hand of cards.” I tried not to sound as bitter as I felt.

  Robinson was slowly stroking my fingers. “The blue eyes are so nice, though,” he said quietly.

  I smiled and placed my hand on his smooth chest. His arm was tucked under my neck, and as we lay there, it felt like we were extensions of each other. Like our bodies and our hearts had to be together to make one whole, perfect person.

  41

  THE NEXT MORNING WE WOKE UP IN that same position—through some miracle, Robinson’s arm hadn’t fallen asleep during the night. We got coffee and big, pillowy bagels from the corner deli. We asked for them toasted and dripping with butter—Robinson’s favorite. Then we took the subway up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  When a panhandler made his way through the subway car, dressed as if it were winter instead of June, Robinson reached into his pocket and produced a crumpled five.

  The panhandler bowed as he accepted it. “Money and a beautiful woman. You have everything, sir.”

  “Well, actually, now you have my money,” Robinson pointed out.

  The panhandler con
sidered this fact for a moment. “But who needs money when you have her?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Robinson said. He put his arm around me like I belonged to him.

  When we got to the Met, we wandered among the huge, high-ceilinged rooms, ogling famous works we’d only seen in tiny reproductions: Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, Van Gogh’s Cypresses, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Black Iris, and Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm.

  And although I was staring at masterpieces, what I kept seeing was Robinson the night before, shirtless, lying next to me. It made it hard to concentrate. Sometimes, when he looked at me in a certain way, I wondered if he was having the same experience. “A pretty girl who naked is / is worth a million statues.” The poet e. e. cummings wrote that. (Not that I’d been totally naked. Just… partially.)

  Robinson stopped in front of Madame X, a portrait of a beautiful woman by John Singer Sargent, and shook his head in wonder. “We sure don’t have art like this in Klamath Falls,” he said.

  “We don’t even have falls in Klamath Falls,” I replied.

  I’d thought that maybe a part of me would miss my hometown. Crappy as it was, it was still mine. But I missed nothing—because everything that truly mattered to me was either already gone or right here next to me in the museum, holding my hand.

  When we ended up in front of the Egyptian tomb—the one where Holden Caulfield almost has a breakdown in The Catcher in the Rye—Robinson bent to wipe a scuff from the toe of his boot.

  “I’ll try not to take this as a sign,” he said.

  “A sign of what?” I asked sharply.

  “Doom,” Robinson answered. “Isn’t stumbling across a pharaoh’s tomb worse than, like, a black cat crossing your path? You know, King Tut’s curse and all those stories…”

  I slid my hand into the back pocket of his jeans. “No, Scalawag, don’t be silly. We were randomly walking. We could have just as easily ended up in the café or something.”