by Mary McCoy
“I can’t ask Vincent for what I want. I had two years to tell him the truth, but every time, I got scared. It wasn’t just telling him I liked girls too, or that I’d cheated on him with Claire, or that I’d met Risa and had feelings for her, too. If I wanted to be all the way honest with him, I’d have to say…”
I roll over onto my back and look up at the sky while I say it.
“… that I don’t think being with one person works for me.”
Max doesn’t say anything. I wait as long as I can stand it, and then I let my head roll to the side, trying to catch a quick glimpse of Max’s expression.
“You can look at me,” he says.
I cover my face with my hands.
“It’s easier like this,” I say. “If I can just say it into the air like this and pretend nobody’s listening, just long enough to get it all out.”
“Okay,” Max says. “Then get it all out.”
I take a deep breath. “I’m queer, and I don’t think I want to be with just one person. And I wish I could find some way to tell Vincent the truth before he leaves. I don’t want him wondering whether he was enough, or if there was something else he could have done. He deserves to know this wasn’t his fault.”
“Why can’t you just tell him?”
“Because it’s entirely possible that this just makes everything worse.”
“Telling the truth doesn’t make things worse.”
“It does make them more complicated.”
Next to me, I hear Max get up, and I spread my fingers to see him standing over me, holding out his hand.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go up to the attic. We can probably finish putting the first episode together tonight.”
I take his hand and let him help me to my feet. It sounds nice, thinking about my parents and their friends and their problems instead of my own.
We work until two in the morning. The episode isn’t finished, but the things left to be done are too difficult to do well with middle-of-the-night brains. I realize the only reason I’m still working is because I want to be here in the attic with Max.
He must feel the same way, because at two thirty, he goes downstairs and comes back up in his pajamas with extra sheets and pillows and a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth.
“I don’t feel like being alone,” he says.
“You aren’t,” I say. A few minutes later, I come back up the steps in my pajamas too. We turn off the lights and snuggle up on the air mattress like sleepover buddies. The only thing we’re missing are the old matching Star Wars sleeping bags we used to have.
“I love you, Max,” I say.
“I love you, too, Lee.”
I close my eyes and drift off to sleep, and for a moment, I’m happy, and there’s nothing complicated about it.
CHAPTER 28 The Family Scab
I’m in that gauzy stupor that exists in the morning when my mind is awake but my body isn’t. I’m aware of being on the air mattress, where I fell asleep with Max last night. I’m aware of light coming in through the window, but I’m not ready to get up yet.
In that peaceful, still place, my mind begins to unfold a thought. It begins with me, alone in the center of my brain, suspended in midair, and then a world begins to fill in behind me.
I see myself running the soundboard at a real Memphis club. I see myself at one of the famous local recording studios like Ardent, engineering Risa’s record, and then that image fades and is replaced by something even better—a recording studio of my own. Not in an attic or a corner of my apartment, but a whole building with soundproofed booths and all the gear I’ve ever tinkered around with yet never known how to use: Moog synthesizers and Hammond organs and Leslie speaker cabinets. I see Risa in the booth with headphones on, recording a vocal track while I sit behind the mixing board.
Next, I see Risa and me walking in the front door of my apartment. It pops into my head fully formed. There’s a couch in the living room that I’ve never seen before, and it’s my couch. There’s a television mounted on the wall, and it’s my television. There’s art on the walls that I picked. There’s a whole room for my sound equipment. In the kitchen there’s a dish rack and a coffee maker, and I say, “Hey, can I get you anything?” to Risa as she puts down her guitar case, and she asks, “What do you feel like doing tonight?”
Before I can answer her, suddenly, I see myself at an airport pulling an iridescent blue hard-shell suitcase, and then I’m getting into a cab. It lets me out in front of Vincent’s Victorian house near the park, and then I see Vincent taking my bag, kissing me hello. I see us walking together through museums and galleries, talking about art. And as we do, I can tell things are different between us, that the versions of ourselves that we show each other are bigger and truer than the ones who told stories in my attic.
And then I realize that I haven’t had to choose between these lives, that both of them are mine.
There’s an ache in my throat when I open my eyes, the kind you get when you’re trying not to cry. I’m trying not to cry because they’re so good, these scenes in my head. And I’m trying not to cry because I know it’s too much to want, and nobody is ever going to let me have a life where I get to have all of it. It’s a dream. It’s a fantasy.
Max was right. I’m living in a fairy tale.
When I sit up on the air mattress, all the way awake now, I’m alone. My skin is sticking to the sheets; my mouth is dry. There’s no sign of Max.
This is what you get in the real world, I tell myself. You wake up alone on an air mattress. Remember that next time you start wanting things.
When I get downstairs, I can tell that I’ve slept late. The house is bright and already warm, and the kitchen smells like a pot of coffee that someone made hours ago and forgot to turn off. It’s quiet, too, except for the sound of water running in the bathroom.
“Anyone?” I call out. No one answers, so I make a fresh pot of coffee. While I’m waiting for it to finish brewing, I peek out the kitchen window and walk around to all the rooms just to make sure no one else is here.
“Max?” I call into the bathroom. There’s music playing along with the running water, so maybe he can’t hear me.
Then I stick my head in my parents’ office, and what I see there stops me cold.
Everything on my dad’s side of the office is gone—the books, the papers, the desk and chair.
Panicked, I walk down the hall to my parents’ bedroom. It’s full of boxes. The lamp by the side of the bed that used to be my dad’s side of the bed is gone. The closet is empty. This must be what Sage and my dad were doing last night, what they’re doing now.
Signing the lease on a cursed fourplex feels abstract, but this is real. My dad is moving out of our house. My life, and everything in it, is about to change. I can’t stop it; I can’t put it back how it was.
I hear the front door open and then my dad’s voice, belting out one of his favorite gospel songs. The refrain goes, You’ve got to live the life you sing about in your song, and it’s about how you can’t go to church and sing hymns on Sundays, then act like a jerk the rest of the week. He’s been singing this song since I was little even though we’ve never really gone to church. I think a Memphis punk band covered it once, and that’s probably why he likes it.
He’s still singing when he finds me in the hall, tears streaming down my cheeks.
“Oh, honey, what’s wrong?” he asks, giving me a hug.
“You’re really leaving,” I say, and he squeezes me tighter.
“I’m not going far.”
“I wish you weren’t going at all.”
“I thought I’d get halfway moved in today, and tonight, we can have a housewarming party over there. See if we can’t make it feel festive.”
He looks upset, and I can tell he thought he was moving out in a way that would make things easier on me, less disruptive. I can also see how much he wants me to like the idea of having a housewarming party at his new apartment, and even t
hough I don’t, I manage a weak smile.
“That sounds like fun,” I say.
“Does going to Target with me sound like fun as well?”
It does not, and we both know it, but I also know he’s asking me because it will suck less if I’m there. And he hasn’t asked me to help him pack or carry his boxes out of the house. This seems like the least I can do.
“What do you need?”
“A colander. A spatula. Garbage cans. Bathmat. Shower curtain. We might as well get two of everything. It’ll save us a trip when you move out.”
Suddenly, the fantasy I’d been having seems even more ridiculous. The thought of my mom, my dad, and me all living in different places seems so wasteful and lonely. We didn’t hate each other’s guts—why did we need to live in different places?
“I’m not moving,” I say, more forcefully than necessary.
“Well, you don’t have to get anything,” my dad says. “It was just an idea.”
Max emerges from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. Before he can say good morning, or rush down the hall to get dressed, my dad has detained him. My dad sees his houseguest, half-naked in the hallway, and decides this is an appropriate moment to ask, “Max, what do you appreciate most in a bathmat?”
Max gathers the towel around his waist more securely and considers this for a moment before replying.
“Something plush but not fluffy, with good grip. A neutral shade that won’t look dingy. Maybe dark gray.”
“See, I knew you were the person to ask.”
* * *
I help my dad pick out a colander, a spatula, some garbage cans, and a bathmat. He’s indecisive about everything, especially for a man who signed a lease on a cursed fourplex without a second thought. He ponders each item like a wrong choice might haunt him for years. Metal or plastic? Round or square? I start pointing to the ones I like best, to speed things up. He seems to appreciate this, nods as he puts the items I suggest into his cart. But then two aisles later, he doubles back and switches them out. The bathmat, however, I notice that he selects precisely according to Max’s specifications.
I think about the kind of apartment he’ll have. Will it be neglected like Harold’s? Cluttered like ours? Will it have style, or will it look temporary and sad? Will he keep it clean, or will the toilet be disgusting and the fridge stuffed with moldy takeout? With my dad, it’s hard to say. He’s a surprising person, for all his routine.
“Have you called your mom yet?” he asks as we wheel our cart out of the bed and bath section.
“No.”
“Lee, call her,” he says. “If you’re trying to make her feel terrible, congratulations, you’ve succeeded.”
We walk past the luggage aisle, and I think about Greg’s blue hard-shell suitcase. How would I even get to Washington, DC? I’ve never been on a plane. I’ve never gone anywhere by myself.
“I’m not trying to make her feel terrible,” I say.
“Then why are you avoiding her?” he asks.
“Because I feel guilty,” I say. “I started off feeling like I had a right to know what happened between you two, like it was my job to find it out. Now I’m starting to wonder if I’m just picking a scab. Someone else’s scab, actually, so it’s extra disgusting.”
“It’s the family scab,” he says. “It’s ours. You can pick it all you want.”
“Please stop.”
“It’s a good metaphor. You should tell your mom about it. Maybe she’ll call her next collection of poems The Family Scab.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Do you need a suitcase?” he asks me.
“No, why?”
“You keep looking at them.”
“Where would I go, Dad?”
“Maybe you’d want to stay at my place sometimes. There’s a room for you. At some point I’ll put a bed in it.”
“Air mattresses are fine.”
“What I’m saying is, you might want to pack a bag for a weekend. Or a week, even.”
“I have a duffel bag,” I say.
“Suit yourself,” he says. “But on the topic of the family scab, I will say this. If you’re sitting around waiting for someone to give you permission to tell your own story, don’t.”
I try to figure out what my dad means by this. He doesn’t want to talk to me about the past. He doesn’t like being written about, so why’s he telling me this? And that’s when it hits me that he’s called it my story. Not his. Not theirs. Mine.
It’s not mine because I’m in it. It’s mine because it’s a love story, and nobody’s ever told it before, and that’s what I do.
I tell love stories all the time.
People talk about love like it’s secondary, sex like it’s business. They act like romance novels are fluffy and the way people feel about each other is nice, but less important than wars or court cases or old men battling marlins at sea.
Boil the whole of human existence down to its essence, and what you have is how we feel about each other and what we decide to do about it. Even if it ends. Even if we end up regretting it.
“What on earth are you thinking about?” my dad asks in the checkout line at Target. “You look like you’re about to climb on top of a mountain and sing.”
“My story,” I say.
It’s a love story about confessional poets and thwarted playwrights, about sad rock stars and tattoo artists who are fighting with their kids, about messy bisexuals and untidy queers and evangelical Christians who make podcasts about art and girls who write beautiful songs in their bedrooms. About old lovers, new lovers, friends.
I think it’s a story worth telling.
Because it’s true.
CHAPTER 29 A Funny Way of Showing It
On the way home from Target, I check my phone and see that I have texts from Risa and Vincent. I open Risa’s first. It’s the first I’ve heard from her since we said good night at her house the night before last. She makes no mention of my five previous, increasingly desperate texts, and doesn’t say why she didn’t write back until now. Instead she’s written, I had no idea we would sound so great together—we’re geniuses! Hang out soon?
I’m so excited to finally hear from her and to hear that she wants to hang out with me again that I don’t dwell on the fact that I don’t totally understand the rest of what she says.
I text back, I would love that.
Then I go to the text from Vincent, which I’m more nervous to read. Part of me is stunned to hear from him after what happened in his backyard last night, but part of me isn’t surprised at all. It’s like we can’t seem to let go, can’t seem to get out of each other’s systems.
I know it would be easier if I just ended things once and for all, but I don’t want easy. I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him what happened with Risa. I want to tell him about my beautiful dream with the recording studio and the suitcase and the apartment. The funny thing is, of all the people I know, I feel like he’s the one who would understand it the most. Vincent was always someone you could talk to about your dreams.
He might not share them, or like them, but he always got them.
When someone gets you, you keep that person around, I think as I open his text.
I don’t expect it to be easy.
I know that I have to face him and tell him the truth. I’ll lay everything out on the table, and trust that Max is right, that the truth will make everything better.
I still have a chance to fix this, I think.
But then I open Vincent’s text, and it just says:
I could have forgiven you for anything except this.
Oh god, I think. Oh no. There’s so much I’ve done, I’m not even sure which part he’s talking about: my sexuality, the way I stormed out of the tent during our fight, what happened with Claire, or Ian, or Risa.
I text back, I wanted to tell you everything, but I didn’t know how. I’m sorry I hurt you, Vincent.
He replies almost immediately.
You have a funny way of showing it.
Then he texts me a screenshot, an image of Man Ray’s metronome and Lee Miller’s eye, an image I do not have any legal right to use, and over it I see printed in a bold-stamped font the title OBJECTS OF DESTRUCTION: A podcast by Lee Swan and Max Lozada, with original music by Risa Bryant.
No, I think. This is a mistake.
It only takes me a minute to find the first episode of Objects of Destruction, uploaded two hours ago to the same platform where Vincent and I put every new episode of Artists in Love. I don’t know how it got there, but I know that every one of Vincent’s and my subscribers got a notification about it. The same subscribers who went to school with us, who loved Vincent, who only tolerated me because Vincent loved me.
It’s already been downloaded a few dozen times, and there are already comments.
Not even a week since they broke up…
She was cheating on him the whole time, and now this. Poor Vincent.
The whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It leaves a bad taste in my mouth too. It looks like I’m trying to cash in on what little popularity Vincent and I had, to spin it into something for myself in the tackiest, least respectful possible way.
It’s too late to fix things now. I’d waited and made excuses, and I’d been a coward, and what was I even afraid of? Because anything, anything in the entire world, would have been better than him finding out like this.
Never mind the fact that it wasn’t finished. I’m not even sure which version of it has been uploaded, but from the sounds of it, it was a version full of things that I’d only said out loud for myself, things I’d never intended anyone else to hear. The parts about Claire must be in there. I feel exposed, knowing that something I made was released into the world raw and unfinished like that.
When my dad pulls into the driveway, I jump out of the car the moment he puts the car in park.
“Lee, is something the matter?” he asks, but I slam the car door without answering, run up the front porch steps and into the house.
