“He does that,” Hugo said.
“What?”
“Pushes people away when he needs them the most,” he said. “It’s why we barely spoke to each other for about five years.”
“When was that?”
“When he was younger. When he was using.” He searched for my eyes, then smiled warmly. “Before you.”
I must confess: I flushed under the attention of his gaze. Riding beside your brother in his truck reminded me so much of those first out-of-control moments between you and me, when sitting inches away from you in the Caddie on the way to Helga’s Diner made me dizzy with the push-pull-push-pull between blood-thumping attraction and heart-stopping terror.
I averted his familiar eyes by turning around to note the Princeton University sticker stuck to the rear window.
“Your parents must be beyond proud about Princeton.”
“Beyond,” Hugo said simply. “Talk about your lost causes. This was a kid who was left back in kindergarten!” He laughed bitterly at the memory. “Marcus was diagnosed with every letter in the alphabet. ADD. ADHD. OCD. And my favorite, ODD…”
“ODD?”
“Oppositional Defiance Disorder,” Hugo explained. “It basically means that Marcus wouldn’t take shit from authority figures. That’s the only label he agreed with. He’d just shrug and say, ‘That’s right. I’m odd.’”
I can totally hear you saying that.
“I was never into books,” Hugo continued, “I was always better with my hands.” He held up a dirty palm to prove his point. “But Marcus was always a thinker. He needed to know how everything worked and would drive us all crazy with questions.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like about anything,” he said. The truck came to a red light, and he pointed to a gas station. “Why can’t cars run on water?” He pointed to a flock of birds flying overhead. “How do birds know what way is south?” He pointed to a man rolling through the crosswalk in his wheel-chair. “How did he lose his legs?” The light turned green. “Just on and on and onnnnnnnnnnn.” He groaned with the memory. “I was constantly telling him to shut up. But my parents, especially my mom, deserve a lot of credit for answering his questions as patiently as they could.”
I thought about how tiresome Marin’s questions could be for two hours at a stretch. I could hardly imagine fielding them all day long.
“My parents saw potential, but the schools saw trouble. Marcus would interrupt the teachers to ask his questions, and they’d get on his ass for disobedience and all this bullshit when really he was just a kid who wasn’t getting satisfying answers to his questions. He’d go to the library and look things up on the Internet, then get books to back up what he had read. He never relied on just one source. Does a dumb kid do that? I don’t think so.”
I didn’t share a classroom with you until our junior year, but I can imagine what you must have been like in elementary school. I also asked my teachers a million questions, and when I got unsatisfactory answers, I took it upon myself to grill inanimate objects, clutching a pencil as a microphone to interview the American flag (“Are red, white, and blue your favorite colors?”) or a block tower (“Are you worried about being knocked down?”) or whatever. But for some reason—perhaps my passive, nonthreatening gender—my curiosity wasn’t interpreted as a sign of insubordination.
“For this troublemaker to get into Princeton is a pretty big deal for my parents,” he said. “The ultimate ‘I told you so.’”
He’s right. Has there ever been anyone more unlikely to attend Princeton than you?
I’m embarrassed to say this, but until that moment with your brother, I selfishly viewed your decision to attend Princeton as a twenty-three-year-old freshman as nothing more than an inconvenience to me and our relationship. Why Princeton when you could have just as easily chosen Columbia or NYU or any other school in New York City? So what if you hated the city? Couldn’t your love for me transcend that discomfort? It’s no wonder that you didn’t tell me that you had applied but only that you had gotten in.
Of course, I can’t blame you for wanting to attend one of the best universities in the world. I’m proud of you. (Have I ever told you that? I don’t think I have. I’m sorry. I should have said that before.) Hugo helped me realize how much this success means to your parents, and your mother in particular. You, fuckup of the first order from as far back as kindergarten. You, who spent more days stuck in the solitary confinement known as In-School Suspension than in actual school. You, who want to make up for all your family’s pain and suffering in the past, and want to make good on the promise you’ve had all along.
Getting the most out of Princeton will require your total focus. Good or bad, irrational or irresistible, can I be anything more than a distraction? (This is a convenient excuse for my indecision, isn’t it? Because it’s not about me at all. I’ve made it all about you. How selfless…)
We both shifted gears. Him literally. Me figuratively. There were a few laminated pictures stuck inside the sun visor. I pointed to them and asked if he minded.
“Go ahead,” he said. “You’ll like them.”
We lurched forward a few feet in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
The first photo was of a bald infant wearing one of those painful and ugly headbands. He glanced in my direction. “That’s Emily Rose,” he said. “My beautiful baby girl…”
“She is,” I replied, because there is no other acceptable response. I was not at all compelled to coo over her cuteness. I’m pretty sure that I was born without a biological clock, because babies just don’t make me tick. It was only after I realized that this was not just a picture of Hugo’s daughter but of your niece that I felt even the tiniest twinge of affection toward this creature. You have a niece, just like I have a niece. I considered the many hours I’ve spent with Marin ignoring The Fun Chart™, watching Grease 3, and I wondered what kind of relationship you would build with Emily Rose. You have built.
The second photo was taken at one of those mall “glamour” studios.
“That’s Charlotte,” Hugo said proudly though unnecessarily.
Her white-blond cumulonimbus perm was ornamented with a rhinestone comb. A red feather boa wrapped around her neck. Her round face had no discernible angles despite the best efforts of the cosmetics “artist” to create them through the liberal application of blush. Even in my in-expert estimation, her makeup job appeared to be flawed in every way. Rainbowed layers of eye shadow made her eyes appear crowded together, red liner and gloss only accentuated the very thinness of her lips. But thank God those lips were straining to smile, because if it hadn’t been for that tired, barely tolerant twist to her lips, I would have felt pity for Charlotte. However, her expression was an encouraging clue, one that hinted that she was well aware of how ridiculous she looked with these misguided approximations of glamour. Hugo confirmed these suspicions.
“Her boys bought her this photo shoot for her birthday a few years back,” he explained. “She hated every second of it.”
“That would explain her pained expression,” I said.
Hugo laughed. His laugh sounds a lot like yours, deep and low in the belly.
“I love that picture, even though it looks nothing like her,” he said. “I love that she got all dressed up like that just to please her boys. She’s much prettier without all that makeup. Forty-five now, but she looks thirty-five. Of course, she says it doesn’t matter how young she looks, because I’m twenty-five and look fifteen.”
It’s not true, of course. Your brother doesn’t look like a teenager at all. But I obliged with a chuckle.
I came to the third photo. It had suffered a bit of abuse before it was preserved by lamination. The color was bleached out, the corner was torn, but the image was clear.
“You and Marcus.”
“Yup,” he said.
Perhaps you know this photo. You’re about one, which would make Hugo three. It was taken by a cheap department-store photographer w
ith a blue-sky backdrop. You’re wearing a pair of seersucker overalls. Your hair is half wet, half dry, as if your mom had tried to calm your curls by weighing them down with water. But two fluffy patches spazz out around your ears, like a clown’s wig. Your mouth is wide in a crimson-cheeked howl, and you’re reaching out to the camera, desperately trying to scramble off your brother’s lap. The photo gave me a skin-tingling sense of déjà vu.
“It’s so weird,” I said. “This reminds me of another picture. One of my best friend and her older brother. He’s struggling to hold her up, just like you’re struggling with Marcus. And she’s screaming her head off, too.”
“Hope and Heath,” Hugo said.
“Oh, right,” I said dumbly. “You know them. I forgot.”
“I didn’t know him too well,” he said.
“And her?” I was curious to hear what he remembered.
“Well, Hope and Marcus were best friends as little kids.”
I tried to breathe normally, but gulped down more oxygen than any normally breathing person should.
“Something wrong?” Hugo asked.
I shook my head. “Go on,” I gurgled.
“I didn’t pay much attention to them, but they were cute together, you know.”
“Actually, I don’t know.”
“They were like little playmates in the sandbox,” he said. He shook his head with amusement. “But you know, Marcus has always been a lover….”
I tried to sound casual. “Really?”
“I can remember him running home from school one day—he must have been about ten years old. He was all excited because he had kissed Hope behind the backstop on the playground. It was his first kiss and he was shouting so loud that the whole neighborhood could hear. ‘On the lips! On the lips!’ Like it was the most amazing thing in the world. Like he had invented kissing on the lips.”
(“Sometimes it did feel as if we have invented it and all intimacies. Our bodies surging and retreating in innumerable positions and countless combinations for us and us alone…”)
Hugo was still chuckling. I was choking on too much air.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You’re not jealous?”
The truck hit a smooth stretch of recently paved road, and the rumble of the tires shushed themselves.
“Of course not!” I insisted in a voice that was too loud for the sudden drop in noise.
We pulled up to the small station house, and Hugo shifted into park. My bus idled at the curb, scheduled to pull away in five minutes. He turned his whole body to look at me, and I caught another whiff of winter-fresh smoke.
“Well.” I chewed on my bottom lip for a second, then gestured toward the bus. “The Port Authority Express waits for no one, so…”
It was the sorriest of made-up excuses. I didn’t have to take that particular bus back to New York. I could have taken the next one, or the one after that. Or I could have accepted Hugo’s offer to drive me all the way back home. I could have tried, over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour ride home, with his help, to unravel the messy tangles of our relationship.
But I didn’t. I thanked your brother for the ride, told him I was glad to have finally met him, and wished him a safe drive back to Maine. He responded in kind, thanking me for the company and conversation, assuring me that the pleasure was all his.
My hand rested on the door handle.
“I love your brother,” I said.
“I know you do,” he said.
I tugged the handle, he tugged my sleeve.
“I also know that he’s not an easy person to love.”
I was off-balance, one foot on the ground, the other still inside the truck. “I’ve got the opposite problem.”
“What’s that?”
I planted my other foot on the pavement.
“I love him too easily.”
I always have. And probably still will, and still do wherever you’re reading this right now.
sixty
I’m back at the empty apartment. I headed straight for the Cupcake, belly-flopped onto the bottom bunk, then glanced up out of habit. I was eager to see a new Tiger Beat centerfold signifying that everything was going to be just fine with me and Hope, but it’s still Marty McFly, as it had been when I had left:
YOU CAN TAKE ME “BACK TO THE FUTURE” ANYTIME.
I’m feeling really out of my body right now, as if I really had time-warped back to the future in a pimped-out DeLorean instead of returning to the city in a no-frills Greyhound.
There’s no sign that Hope had even been here while I was in Pineville. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she’d pulled an all-nighter at the studio. I have no idea whether Wynn is coming to Sammy for her opening tomorrow night, or whether I need to prepare for a third-wheeler or, perhaps, find alternative accommodations for the weekend.
I don’t know because I didn’t ask.
And I can’t ask now because the battery is still dead on my cell phone, and the Sammy has no landline. And I just tried checking my e-mail for the first time in thirty-six hours, but my laptop is inexplicably frozen, surely infiltrated by an al-Qaedan script kiddie who has deftly hacked through my firewall and is now using my system, and a bizillion others, to bust up Wall Street’s technological infrastructure, shut down the world’s economy, and take out Western civilization once and for all.
Oh, well.
I’ve got about six (or seven because she’s always late) hours before Dexy is supposed to meet me here for the Care. Okay? party. Six (or seven) unfilled hours. And after everything that’s happened this week, I’m taking this opportunity to do nothing at all.
sixty-one
I was having a dream about you and me. About you and me, together, in the bottom bunk. We weren’t having sex, but we were pressing the lengths of our naked bodies up against each other. It was a very vivid dream; I could feel the heat passing between our bodies…the heaviness of your weight on top of me…the hot-wet warmth of your breath on my face…Too vivid…This wasn’t a dream at all…I was…I was being molested in my sleep!
“AHHHHHHHHHH!” I bolted upright, using all my adrenaline to push the rapist off me.
“AHHHHHHHHHH!” Dexy screamed back as she tumbled out of the bottom bunk and onto the ?oor.
Dexy. It was Dexy. In my bed with me.
“Dexy! Christ! I thought you were a rapist!”
“You looked so snuggly!” she said, straightening her platinum-blond feathered wig, which had gone askew in the fall. This was as close as she would get to an apology. Dexy doesn’t believe in apologies. “I’m so happy to see you!” she said, scrambling to her feet. “Aren’t you proud of me? I’m on time! Which means I’m early!”
“How did you get in?” I said, still groggy.
“Manda let me in!” She leaned back and appraised my cutoff jean shorts and the DONUT HO’ T-shirt I had put on out of utter necessity because I still hadn’t done my laundry. “I love that T-shirt! Donut Ho’!” She tipped back her head and laughed: HAW HAW HAW. “But you’re not wearing it out tonight. Oh! I love donuts with sprinkles! I’m starving. Seriously, where did you get that shirt? Do you have anything to eat?” Dexy’s conversation ping-ponged more than Marin’s. And even more so than usual. “I brought you a fabulous outfit!” She held up a plastic shopping bag, and then, as always, she broke out into a horribly off-key song. This time, Madonna.
“Gonna dress you up with my love! All over! All over!”
She pulled me up out of the bunk by the shoulders and steered me into our kitchenette. Then she opened up the refrigerator door and started foraging for food.
“Speaking of fabulous outfits…,” Manda spoke up from her favorite spot on the couch. Dexy had poured her curves into a liquid gold asymmetrical minidress, looking every bit the Studio 54 coke whore. “You’d totally fit in at Fuckyomomma in that. I could get you in, if you’d like….”
I couldn’t tell if Manda was being friendly or, uh, flirtatious. Manda had said that she was drawn
to Shea’s liberated id. Well, Dexy has been celebrating the emancipation of me! me! for as long as I’ve known her. And since first finding out about Manda’s own robust sexuality, Dexy has been competing against her in a one-sided HOlympics. (“You’ve only got room for one token slut in your life…and that’s me!”) If they ever got together—oh, sweet baby Jesus—it would be a most unholy alliance: The Axis of Skeevil.
“Oh, this old thing,” Dexy demurred, still half inside our refrigerator. She picked up one of Manda’s organic yogurts, frowned at the expiration date, then put it back. Then to me: “I was just telling Manda about my sugar daddy!” She finally helped herself to a stick of Shea’s left-behind string cheese before shutting the door. “J is the plucky innocent trying to make a name for herself in the big city. She’s scandalized by my behavior….”
“I’m not that innocent.”
“I’m not that in-no-cent,” sang-shouted Dexy. She bit open the tip of the plastic wrapper, spit it across the kitchenette, and blithely ignored my look of disgust. “Fifty-one point two.”
I sighed.
“What’s that?” Manda asked.
Dexy pulled at a thread of white processed-cheese product. “J’s score on the MIT-created, Yale-perfected Unisex Ominsexual Five-Hundred-Question Purity Test, version 4.0.”
One slow night in the dorm during our sophomore year, a bunch of us sat around doing shots and answering this most comprehensive survey of sexual experiences, with yes-or-no questions that ranged from “Have you ever kissed a friend or stranger on their hands or their head/neck region as a friendly gesture?” to “Have you ever engaged in sexual congress with a corpse?” What is most stunning to me now, in retrospect, is not the salacious nature of the questions, or our willingness to answer them in front of mixed company, but the fact that we had so much free time to devote to such inanities.
“Oh, I took that,” Manda said, yawning. “I’m a ninety-two point eight.”
“I’m ninety-three point one! With a plus/minus of point five percent, that makes us even!” Dexy and Manda high-fived. “Fifty-one point two,” Dexy repeated, just in case Manda didn’t get it the first time around. “That’s ten points below the average. You are…that…innocent!” Dexy bleated before giving me a playful squeeze.