“She’s got her own life.”
“And so do you. But that does not mean you shouldn’t find her, Caden. You never will know what will be possible if you do not give it a try.” She stood up, circled the table and took my hands, pulled me to my feet. “Come. Ride with me, one more time. As we so often do. I will be leaving for Mexico City next week, I think. So this will be our last time together.”
We rode far, out into the rolling wilds where we’d spent so many long afternoons and starlit nights together. It was slow and delicate, and neither of us cried, although we knew it was goodbye, a forever farewell.
a breath of time
“Hey. You must be Cade.”
This was punctuated by the metallic scraping of a transparent yellow plastic Bic lighter, flame spurting, lighting something in a colorful glass pipe, the lit contents crackling as the speaker inhaled deeply. A long moment passed as I watched him hold the smoke in his lungs, and then spew it out in a tiny, controlled stream. He coughed, acrid, sickly sweet smoke billowing from his nose and mouth, and then set the pipe down on the scratched wooden coffee table.
“I’m Alex.” He was tall and thin, with just enough muscle to not quite qualify as gangly. He had long brown hair tied back at the nape of his neck, the ponytail thick and bushy and falling between his shoulder blades, and the kind of scruff on his chin, upper lip, and cheeks that comes from someone who can’t really grow a beard.
I shook his hand, trying to unobtrusively lean away from the stench of pot smoke, which was a futile endeavor since the whole open-plan living room and kitchen were hazed with smoke. “Yeah, I’m Caden. Nice to meet you.”
“You too, bro. Have a seat. That all you brought with you?” He gestured at the duffel bag I’d dropped at my feet when I closed the door behind me.
I shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much. I’ve got some other shit in the truck, but this is it, basically.” I sat down uneasily on the edge of the couch, at the opposite end from Alex.
“Cool.” He took another long, hard hit from the pipe, then handed it along with the lighter to me. I took it, held it, stared at it. “You cool?”
“Am I cool?” I knew I was missing something, some subtext or meaning in the way he asked the question.
He jerked his chin at me. “The bowl. You cool? You smoke?”
“Do I smoke?”
Alex laughed. “Yeah, bro. Do you partake in the sweet embrace of lady Mary Jane? Do you, in a word, get high?”
“That’s more of phrase than a word, actually.”
Alex laughed again, pulling his hair free from the ponytail, smoothing it back, and retying it. “Shit, yeah, you’re right. But whatever, man. So. Are you cool? I mean, it’s kinda late now, if you’re not, since you’ve already like, moved in and shit.”
I’d rented a room sight-unseen in a high-rise apartment in downtown Detroit. The ad on the board in the registration office of the College for Creative Studies had merely read, “Looking for a roommate. Pay your half of the bills and don’t steal my stuff. For more information call 313-555-2468.” I’d called, spoken to Alex for about ten minutes, agreed to take the room, and that was that. Of course, he wouldn’t mention the pot smoking over the phone, I supposed, but still, it would have been nice to know.
I held the blue-red-orange-purple glass pipe, which Alex had called a bowl, in my hand, thinking. I’d never known anyone who did pot. It was an unknown variable. It was illegal, but so was underage drinking, and I’d done my share of that, usually under the watchful tutelage of the other ranch hands, late at night around a campfire, passing around a bottle of whiskey. Did I have a problem with the pot? The smell, now that I was getting used to it, wasn’t so bad. I was catching a bit of a contact high, I was pretty sure, and it wasn’t unpleasant. Loose, floating. Worry and sadness eased their grip. Missing Luisa faded. Missing Grams and Gramps and Wyoming seemed a bit further away.
I stared down at the bowl, at the charred bits and clumps of green. “I guess I’m cool. Never tried it before.”
“Well, then give it a hit. See what you think.”
I toyed with the wheel of the lighter. “Will I get addicted? Like cocaine or whatever?”
Alex laughed, shaking his head. “No, man. Technically, realistically, honestly speaking, you can get, like, psychologically addicted. Emotionally addicted too, in a way. Your body won’t need it, not like you get with coke or meth. It’s…it’s hard to explain. I’ve been smoking for a long time, since I was thirteen, and I suppose I probably am mentally addicted to the lifestyle, but I’m okay with that. I accept it as a part of who I am. I’m Alex Hines, charcoal artist extraordinaire, professional bassist, and stoner. Will you turn into a stoner from one hit? No, man. You won’t. Guaranteed.”
I’d been in Detroit for two days. The first day I’d spent at the college, sorting out my schedule and getting a map and all that. I’d stayed at a hotel, spent $14.99 on an in-room viewing of Man of Steel. I’d met three people aside from the office staff. A girl with purple dreadlocks smoking a cigarette in the parking garage, who had asked me if I had any cigarettes, since clearly the one she was smoking wasn’t going to be enough. Then I’d met a homeless man after eating dinner at Lafeyette Coney Island. His name was Jimmy, and he was a Vietnam vet, disabled, homeless for twenty years, and he stank of equal parts cheap beer and body odor. Now there was Alex, and he was offering me marijuana.
I put the mouthpiece to my lips, flicked the lighter so the flame cracked into life, turn the yellow plastic sideways until the flame touched the pot, and inhaled. Acidic heat blasted my throat, hit my lungs, and I doubled over, hacking until I was lightheaded. Alex laughed until he was crying, wiping his eyes.
“Classic, man! Classic!” Alex took the pipe from me. “You’re doing it like a newb, dude. Don’t inhale directly into your lungs. You gotta pull it into your mouth, and then inhale it slowly.” He put the bowl to his mouth, lit it, and pulled so his cheeks hollowed, and then lowered the bowl and inhaled deeply. “See? Like this. Then you hold it in. Get a better buzz that way.” He said this last part in a strange voice, strained from talking while still holding the smoke in.
I took the pipe from him, feeling a voice ask me if I was sure I wanted to do this. I wasn’t, but I did it anyway. Just trying it, I reasoned. New life, new experiences. And what did I have to lose? I did it like Alex had demonstrated, and this time managed to get a lungful without coughing my head off. And when I did blow out the smoke, coughing slightly, I felt…away. I couldn’t find the word. I was up, but lodged in the couch. I sat back, feeling the tattered fabric take hold of me, gather me in. My eyes were heavy, but I wasn’t sleepy. Not at all. Just…loose. Not happy, just disconnected in a pleasant way. I watched Alex take a hit, and then I took another without sitting forward. This time, I didn’t cough at all. I felt like a pro at it, now.
There was nothing, suddenly. Nothing to the world, just me, and the coffee table, and Alex, my new friend, and the sketchpad open to a blank page with a charcoal pencil. I hadn’t noticed those until just then. I picked up the pad and pencil, and let my right hand do what it wanted. It drew a circle, first. I watched with interest as my hand drew without consulting my brain. The circle became ovular, taking up most of the page. Then the line down the center and the slightly curved cross-line near the top of the oval. I was drawing a face, then. Hmm. I felt like maybe Alex was watching, which was fine. Everything was fine.
Or no, it wasn’t, really; I knew that, but I simply didn’t care. I was drawing, and it was really great. I hadn’t drawn in forever. Since…since before Luisa and I had our break-up sex.
Eyes, a delicate nose. Not Luisa’s nose, and not her mouth. Who was I drawing?
It was when the hair appeared, curving across her eye and left cheekbone that I knew. Ever. I was drawing Ever. But…it wasn’t Ever from my memories of camp. It was the Ever from the dream, that crazy dream she and I had shared. The differences were subtle, but I saw them. A sharpening of the gaze, sadness in the
eyes. A tilt to her mouth that spoke of laughter and a willing smile and something else in her eyes, something kind of dark and hot and needy. It was all there in the sketch, and I couldn’t take it. I had to look away, but my hand had other ideas so I continued to draw her, the lovely features becoming more and more detailed and more and more haunting with every line.
I was done, suddenly. My hand stopped moving, and there was Ever, staring up at me from the page.
“Dude. You’re…fucking amazing. That’s fucking photorealistic shit there, man. Who is she? And why the fuck is she so sad?”
“She’s…someone I met a long time ago, and she’s…important. To me. She’s sad because…well, that’s not my story to tell. And I’m also not entirely sure why.”
“Enlightening,” Alex deadpanned.
I shrugged. “I didn’t mean to draw it. My hand just…took over. She’s kind of a private thing, I guess.”
“I can’t honestly say I have any people in my life that qualify as ‘private things,’” Alex made air quotes around the phrase, “but I guess I can respect that. She’s got a lot going on in her eyes, though, that’s for fucking sure.”
“You say ‘fuck’ a lot.”
“Happens when I’m high, which is most of the time, so yeah, I guess I do. That bug you?”
“Nah.” I tore the page free, carefully, and set it facedown on my thigh. I couldn’t handle Ever’s charcoal gaze, not while this sky-wheeling, earth-spinning feeling was coursing through me.
“The closest thing to a person who’s a private thing would probably be Amy. She’s my fuck-buddy.”
“Can’t be that private, if you’re telling me about her,” I said, leaning my head back against the couch cushion, staring at the ceiling and feeling the rotation of the earth around the sun and the tilt of the streets and the glint of the stars.
“Well, you’re my roommate. You’ve smoked my pot. That makes us bros. It’s not really anything crazy, though. We just meet a couple times a week and fuck.”
“Just sex? You don’t talk or anything? Or hang out?”
“We usually smoke a bowl, fuck, eat some snacks, and then go home. Here, or her place, just across town. She goes to Wayne. Lit major. Crazy hot, but also just crazy. I mean, just loony. Talks in these metaphors that don’t make any sense and goes on and one about how she’s gonna write this book someday. Has it all planned out and does research and writes notes, but never actually writes it. But she’s obsessed with it. I get her stoned so she’ll shut the fuck up about it.” Alex shot to his feet and lurched into the kitchen, came back with two cans of Bud Light, tossed me one. “It’s actually annoying as fuck. Like, write the damn book or shut up. Jesus. Character this and plot point that and subplots and arcs and motivations, but I’ve never seen her writing it or heard her say she made any progress. Nothing. Just talk. But she knows books, that’s for damn sure. Read more books than I’ve ever heard of. Fucks like a goddess, though, and that’s all I care about. She knows it, I know it, we talked about it.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around that, for some reason. I mean, sure, I wasn’t in love with Luisa, and I never had been, but I cared about her. She meant something to me. We’d shared almost two years of our lives together. But it was never just sex. It was companionship. It was never fucking, even if it wasn’t exactly making love. There wasn’t a word for it, I decided.
“If it’s not making love, ‘cause you’re not in love, but it’s more than fucking, what would it be called, do you think?” I asked Alex.
He didn’t blink an eye at the randomness. “Shit. Not sure. That’s a damn good question. Fucking is…it’s hot. It’s hard. It’s dirty. It’s about the act, the feeling. That’s it. Making love…that’s about your heart. It’s about sharing shit. Y’know? I had that. Before Amy. She broke my goddamned heart, that bitch. Lisa. Lisa Eileen Miller. I loved the shit out of that bitch. Five years. Tenth grade until a year ago, and then she went and fucked my my best friend. Had his baby, married him. Left me without a backward glance. Fuck him, fuck her, and fuck the both of ’em.” He glanced at me, seemed surprised. “Shit. Sorry, kinda vented there, huh? I’m a chronic over-sharer. Pot kinda severs the filter inside me, you know? So yeah, I don’t know what that would be. Emotionally relevant sex? Meaningful fucking? I don’t know.”
“How do you do it? Have sex without getting attached at all?”
Alex picked up the pipe from where it had been sitting unattended on the coffee table, hit it, passed it to me. “It’s all about picking the right chick, I think. I got lucky, you could say. I met Amy at a bar. We talked about our exes, talked about how we both wanted sex without the emotional strings, and that was that. We both agreed that’s all it was, and if it ever started to be more for one of us, we’d say so. I guess you just don’t think about it too much. Don’t make it personal.”
“I don’t know if I could do that.”
“You had a girl you loved?” Alex took the sketchpad and pencil and made a haphazard line across the page. Then another, and then an arc, and then a series of jagged angles, and suddenly there was aesthetic meaning taking shape.
I shrugged. “That’s why I asked. She wasn’t…we both agreed it had never been love. But it wasn’t nothing, either. Somewhere in between. Filling a need, but in our life. We were together for almost two years.”
“The girl in the picture?”
I blew out a stream of smoke as I shook my head. “No. She’s…something else.”
I was feeling like the inside of my mind had expanded, like the walls of my brain were rocketing away on all sides, like my body was losing reality, losing meaning, losing relevance. Like my soul was a point of light in the universe and I could simply float wherever I wished and simply see, not interact. I felt at once heavy as a planet and light as mote of dust. I felt, without feeling.
I could see the appeal of being high.
Alex stood up. “I got an assignment to finish, man. Your room’s in there. You can help yourself to whatever if you get the munchies.” He went into a room, his bedroom, I figured, and shut the door, leaving the bowl on the coffee table.
I couldn’t understand how he could stand up or talk or think about an assignment. I was nothing, no one, only a mote of dust. Just dust in the wind. I hated that song.
My eyes seemed too heavy to hold up, so I closed them, staring at the inside of my eyelids, discovering fascinating whorls of light upon them.
Darkness woke me. I’d been dreaming of Ever. Of her face, drawn in charcoal, speaking to me. Her words were lost when I woke, but her expression, heated need and sadness, haunted me.
I tried to fall back asleep, even went into the bedroom, but discovered that I had no bed, and the room was completely empty. I found a blanket in a closet by the bathroom, lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling, wishing I could find the reason for dreaming of Ever, wishing I could write her but realizing I wasn’t sure what to say.
Ever
* * *
I watched Will sleep. His hair was long, brushing his shoulders. He’d let it grow the past year and a half, and he’d been cultivating a carefully trimmed goatee. I didn’t like it, but didn’t hate it. He was still hot as hell, just in a different way. We were in my room, in my one-room apartment in Birmingham. He was attending U of M on a music scholarship, double majoring in music and business. He came to see me on the weekends, and we filled Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday with dinner at expensive restaurants, concerts, long walks through downtown Birmingham, and sex. It was…idyllic, on those days.
Then, when he left to go back to Ann Arbor, I wondered. About everything. About Will. About our relationship. About myself. About the secret stash of paintings I had in my closet, hidden from Will and from myself.
He’d found my letters from Cade a few months ago. He’d freaked the hell out, said it wasn’t fair. Yelled, shouted, scared me pale as snow. He hadn’t listened to a word I’d said, hadn’t given me an opportunity to even speak. He had no secrets
, he said. He hadn’t come down the next weekend, hadn’t responded to texts or calls, but he’d shown up the following Tuesday with a bouquet of silver roses and a bottle of champagne that I’d imagined was insanely expensive. He’d spent an hour apologizing, then got me drunk and cooked me an effortlessly perfect chicken cordon bleu and made love to me on the sofa, slow and sorrowfully apologetic, whispering that it was fine, he forgave me, we were fine.
I’d never apologized. I’d also never forgiven him.
I’d held on to his shoulders as he moved above me and watched the way his hair fell across his face and wondered if I really dared call it making love, if I loved him, if he loved me. I’d come quietly, shallowly, slowly. Drunkenly. Sloppily.
Now, I watched Will sleep and wondered what he would do if I showed him the packet of letters, now thicker by three (only three in the last six months, how sad, how strange, how remote my dear Caden was, and I wondered but didn’t dare ask him why so he seemed far away) and I wondered what Will would do if I got up right then, still nude, and pulled the twenty-six paintings from the walk-in closet where they hid beneath my pile of old coats and a ragged Harvard stadium blanket that had belonged to my great-grandfather.
Twenty-six paintings, ranging in size from four inches by six to six-feet-by-six-feet. All of them were of the same thing. Various takes, colors, poses, lights, stages of realism. Caden. All faces of Caden. Serious, thoughtful, sad, laughing, looking away, looking directly at me. In one of them, he was gazing at me in a soulful and seductive way, as if he was beside me in bed staring at me with afterglow eyes.
I couldn’t seem to help painting Caden’s face. When I was stuck on a particular piece, or stressed out by a paper or a deadline for an assignment or by Will’s increasingly jealous and possessive behavior, I would find myself painting Caden. It would start out with his eyes, always. The expression in his eyes and eyebrows and then his mouth, and the rest would fall into place. It helped me stabilize, emotionally.
The Nice Boxset Page 46
