“But you’re supposed to say it, you idiot,” she says, shoving me. I fall back onto the carpet, taking her down with me.
“I love you, too,” I say again, quieter now, with my hands on either side of her face, and I kiss her, probably softer than I’ve ever kissed anyone before, and I feel so safe, because we love each other now, so this isn’t ending. Fuck it, I’m gonna just say the cheesiest thing I can think of: It’s not the end, it’s the beginning.
And we don’t stop kissing, and I know something else. I know we’re going to have sex. Right now, on her floor, the day after Thanksgiving. I’ve never wanted anything like I want Eden now. Nothing we’ve done has been like this. None of our kisses have ever felt like this. And her skin has never been so soft, and it’s never been so natural to slide her pants off, to kick my shoes off, to take her hair out of its ponytail and watch it fall around her face.
We stop for a second. I remember that I have condoms in my jeans pockets, left over from that day when Stevie shoved them in my backpack. After Eden and I became a real couple, I optimistically moved a few of them from my backpack to my jeans, just in case. And I haven’t even washed the jeans since. They’re months old, but condoms don’t expire after just a few months, right?
And when I’m almost inside her, suddenly that’s all I’m thinking about. They’re still good, right? They’re still working. Condoms don’t go bad in a matter of months. I should have looked at the expiration date first. I know better than that. I’m smarter than that.
Expiration date, expiration date. It’s all I can think. How is that what I’m thinking about now? Why is that what I’m thinking about now? But there it is again: Expiration date. Expiration date. When I close my eyes, all I see is the wrapper before I ripped it, but the date is too blurry to make out.
But then Eden’s arms squeeze my neck, and my body relaxes over hers, and then I can’t hold another thought in my head. The only thing I can feel is Eden. I can’t feel the end of the desk against which my foot is lodged and I can’t feel my belt discarded underneath my knee. I don’t feel the carpet scratching my hands and I will have to think, later, to remember why my hands are so red. The only thing I’m aware of is Eden and her arms around my neck and her legs touching mine and her skin under my hands. Nothing, I think, has ever felt this good. And maybe no one in the world has ever been so perfectly in love.
I won’t think about the expiration date again until much later. When I’m at home and I look at my dad, and I wonder what he was thinking about when he was with Sarah Booker.
Invitations
Eden and I didn’t really talk much after. Actually, she started laughing almost as soon as we finished, giggling—something she does so rarely—and in a few minutes I was laughing, too. Apparently, we both thought that having had sex with each other was hilarious. But then we heard her mother getting off the elevator, so we got dressed, and stopped laughing, and then I left, and now I’m almost home. I’ll call her in a little while; I already miss her. When Stevie finds out, he’ll joke that I’m like one of those guys who only say “I love you” to bed some girl. I start laughing again as I open our front door. But then I see my dad sitting on the couch, and I can’t remember what was ever so funny to me.
Now I remember that Sam is coming at Christmas. I never got around to telling Eden that.
“Hey, Buddy,” my dad says as I walk across the living room. My plan had been to go straight to my room, but now I can’t remember the last time he called me Buddy, even if it was a nickname I was trying to outgrow. I’m not sure if we’re angry at each other anymore.
I hesitate before answering. I have no idea how to hang out with my dad anymore. I honestly don’t remember how to do it.
“Hey, Buddy,” I say back, finally. I’ve stopped in the middle of the room. “Eating leftovers?” He’s got a Tupperware full of stuffing on his lap. He holds it out to me, and I know it’s really an invitation to sit down.
“Stuffing as peace offering,” I say, grabbing his fork and sitting down next to him.
I wonder whose idea it was. Like Sam probably said that he wanted to meet my dad. Or maybe he said that he wanted to see where he was born. But who suggested he come at Christmastime?
“Whose idea was it?”
“Which one?”
“Which one?” I repeat.
“That we give Sam up for adoption? That Mom use fennel instead of cloves in the stuffing this year? That Sam come for Christmas?”
“That one. The last one.”
Dad leans back now, sinking into the couch. I’m still perched on the edge with the stuffing and the fork.
“I don’t remember.”
“You’re lying.”
Even though he’s behind me, I can tell he’s shaking his head.
“I don’t remember whose idea it was that we meet. But yes, I invited him.”
“Don’t you think you should have asked us first—your parents, or Mom, or me?”
“Your mother thought I should have. She was pretty angry I didn’t talk to you about it first, actually.”
Good for Mom, I think.
“But it didn’t happen like that,” Dad continues. “It just seemed so natural to invite him. I couldn’t help it.”
“I see.”
“Do you?” he says, and I turn to face him. He looks tired but I don’t feel sorry for him.
“Didn’t his parents care that he’d miss Christmas?”
Dad shakes his head. “No—they’re Jewish.”
“So am I, technically.”
“Well, they’re the kind of Jews who don’t do Christmas. His fiancée’s Catholic, I think, so he usually spends Christmas with them. But I guess they said it was okay that he miss it this year.”
I kind of wish Sam didn’t have such an understanding fiancée.
“When’s he getting married?” I ask.
“In the spring—April.”
“Are you invited to his wedding?”
Dad looks surprised. “Of course not.”
“Why not?”
“We hardly know each other yet.”
They hardly know each other. Yet.
“Do the people who adopted him know he’s been talking to you?”
“He hasn’t told me whether he’s said anything to his parents.”
“You sure are a fount of information.”
Dad grins. I think he’s proud of me for using the word “fount.”
“Well, it seems to me you should be invited to his wedding. You invited him to Christmas.”
“I’m not sure that’s a fair exchange of invitations.”
“What are you going to tell people about him?”
Dad shrugs. “I don’t know. The truth, I guess. I’m not ashamed of it anymore.”
“You’re not?”
Dad sits up, puts his face close to mine.
“I can’t be ashamed to be attached to Sam, now that I know him.”
“You said you hardly knew him.”
“You’re right, that’s true.”
“You sure have a fuzzy idea of truth right now. You don’t remember whose idea it was for him to come at Christmas, but you invited him. You hardly know him, but you know that he’s so great that you’re proud to know him, too.”
“Sometimes the truth is like that, I guess.”
“I thought that truth was an absolute.”
“In theory, maybe. In practice, I’m finding that it’s much more … I don’t know. It’s shifting.”
Now I lean back, too, next to him. “Like a few months ago it was true that I was your only son.” It’s the first time I’ve ever called Sam his son. The word leaves a heavy taste in my mouth after I’ve said it. “That’s some shift,” I say.
“Sam is really someone else’s son.”
“But he’s yours, too.”
“Only sort of.”
“You sure have become a lot more vague since Sam came into our lives.”
“Nick, he was always in my l
ife.”
Does he realize how creepy that sounds? Like Sam was some kind of specter, haunting us for the past thirty years. Just because he and Sarah Booker couldn’t keep their pants on. Or didn’t use birth control. Or used an expired condom.
Dad gets up now. “You want me to put the stuffing back in the fridge, or are you still working on it?”
“No, you can take it,” I say.
“Nick?” he says, like my name itself is a question.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I say sullenly. I feel like a bratty little kid; it wasn’t that long ago I felt like a grown-up in love.
“Okay,” he says, and I get up to go to my room.
“Hey, Dad.” I look toward the kitchen. His back is to me; he’s leaning over into the fridge. I ask quickly, before he turns around: “Did you love Sarah—was she your first love?”
Dad turns and he doesn’t answer until his eyes are looking straight at me.
“She was my first everything,” he says earnestly. His face looks like something from the movies, or from those shows on channel eleven about teenagers in love.
I can only imagine mine looks like that when I think about Eden.
The True Meaning of Christmas
I’ve been home for two hours and I haven’t called Eden yet. But I will call her. I plan to call her.
It’s dark out already. People are brushing their teeth, changing into their pajamas, watching Christmas specials, because now that it’s Thanksgiving, Christmas is just around the corner.
Oh Christ, Christmas is coming.
There must be some kind of metaphor to be made here, something about the son from a mysterious conception appearing at Christmastime. Someone would say something about Troy being the name of an ancient city. Although it’s the wrong city, in the wrong part of the world for this story.
Actually, I guess Christmas has plenty of meaning for me. I mean, we have traditions. We do the tree thing and presents and stockings and go shopping like Americans should. We have traditions, and none of them have to do with this mysterious son showing up and changing everything.
Jesus, when did my life turn into some after-school Christmas movie-of-the-week special? With B-list former-child-star actors. I wonder who’d play me. I wonder who’d play Sam, since I have no idea what the eff he looks like.
And then what he looks like is all I can think about. Having no idea what Sarah Booker looked like, I can only imagine what features he may have gotten from my dad. Gray eyes, maybe, or a dimple in his chin. I have my dad’s mouth; maybe Sam has it, too.
And now I’m really fucking pissed off that some guy is walking around Texas wearing my fucking mouth. I purse my lips. I actually go over to the mirror on the back of my door and take stock. What features could I have in common with Sam Roth: I have my dad’s mouth. I have my dad’s hair. I have my dad’s hands and his small feet, even though I’m tall like my mom. See, Sam couldn’t have that, he couldn’t have my small feet/height combination because that is unique to my parents’ coupling.
But what if Sarah Booker was tall, too? What if—and I can’t believe I’m considering this—that’s my dad’s type? Maybe Sarah Booker looked like my mother.
And then I remember something. My dad’s high school yearbooks are in the living room, on a shelf next to the TV. He brought them from my grandparents’ house a few years ago, when they decided it was time to move to a smaller place. But my dad is in the living room, and he’ll know exactly what I’m up to if he sees me looking at his yearbook. I have to wait until they’re asleep.
And so I wait. I wait until my mom peeks her head in the door to tell me good night, until I hear the clicks of lights being switched off, toilets being flushed; I imagine I can even hear their breathing getting slower, even though they’re all the way down the hall. I wait until I can’t even hear the people on the floor above us moving around anymore, as though if they were awake to hear me, they could somehow alert my parents.
It’s near midnight when I walk into the living room. I turn on only my dad’s small desk lamp. The yearbooks are on a high shelf, as though my dad never intended to look at them. And certainly never intended for me to look at them.
It’s easy to find my dad’s yearbook page. I used to look through his yearbooks when I was little, at my grandparents’ house. It’s been years, but I remember the picture right away. He really doesn’t look much different now than he did in high school. He’s thinner now, maybe; his jaw juts out more. Maybe he still had baby fat then, which I guess means that maybe I still have baby fat, since I’m a year younger now than he was when he took his senior yearbook picture. I’m looking so closely at my dad that it takes me a second to notice that the name on the picture directly to the left of his is Sarah Booker.
Of course. I should have expected that. Brandt coming right after Booker. I bet they liked that; I’d want my picture next to Eden’s in something official like a yearbook. I give myself a minute before I look up at the picture above the name. It’s funny because no doubt I’ve actually seen it before, when I was little, looking over all the pictures. Maybe I even asked my dad which girl was his girlfriend. Maybe he even pointed her out to me.
She’s blond. The picture’s in black and white, but you can still tell. Blond, and there are freckles across her nose, and her face is very round. Her mouth is open wide in a smile and there is a gap between her two front teeth, which are very straight and very white. She almost looks like she’s laughing.
She looks nothing like my mother, whose hair is dark and whose skin is very white, and who usually smiles with her mouth only slightly open. Either my dad doesn’t have a type or his type changed when he met my mother.
I close the yearbook. What had I expected—that I’d look at the picture and suddenly know exactly what Sam looks like? You could hardly look at a picture of my parents—of anyone’s parents—and be able to know what their child looked like.
Sarah Booker is very pretty, I think as I stand on my toes to put the book back on its shelf, careful to put it back in between the same two books I’d taken it out from. She’s very pretty; my dad was probably very proud to have had such a pretty girlfriend. I bet he stood up a little straighter when they walked down the street. I know, because I do that when I walk with Eden.
I try to picture my father as a teenager in love; it surprises me that it’s difficult. I never knew I was the type of son who sees his father as nothing other than a father. I never considered that he’d been young and loved someone before my mother. Come to think of it, I never much considered his love for my mother beyond its making a marriage and making me. But every father has had a past, not just mine; and so I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find out about it, even if it is manifesting itself in a living, breathing thirty-year-old man instead of maybe some black-and-white photos in an attic or an old joint in his childhood bedroom. I think of how quickly I dismissed it, after Simon Natherton’s party, when my dad told me that he’d gotten drunk on a rooftop, just like I had. It’s like how you never imagine your teachers outside of school, and of course, they have other lives.
I switch off the light on my father’s desk and head back to my room. I nearly shout when I stub my toe on the coffee table. I know this room so well, but I’m still such a klutz. Just like my dad, actually. My mom always says I would have been luckier to inherit her coordination.
I didn’t even leave any of the lights on in my room. I was pretending that I’d gone to sleep, too. I limp toward my bed, cursing my toe for having the gall to walk into the coffee table. Or maybe I should be cursing the coffee table. I slide beneath the covers, pulling them up all the way over my head, trying not to see Sarah Booker’s blond-girl face when I close my eyes. I’m suddenly very, very tired, and very, very happy to be in my bed.
Oh shit, I never called Eden.
The Morning After
I wake up early. I wish I were a runner. I’ve never gone running, but this morning I wish I were the kind of
person who’d go out in the brisk November air and run this early, the time of day that only cab drivers and doormen and runners know well. But I’m not the kind of person who goes for a run when he wakes up early. I’m the kind of person who stays in bed and stares at the ceiling.
It’s too early to do anything. It’s too early to watch TV; nothing’s on at this hour. It’s too early to eat Thanksgiving leftovers. And it’s too early to call Eden.
I forgot to call Eden. And I’m surprised by it, surprised that I barely thought about her last night; for the last few months, every time I was doing something else, I was thinking about being with Eden instead. But I don’t remember thinking about anything except for whether or not Sam was walking around Texas with a face that looked like mine.
It’s even too early for my parents to be awake, for my mom to be walking Pilot, so I’m surprised when I hear someone moving around outside my room. It’s not Mom and Pilot, because I don’t hear Pilot’s paws clicking on the hardwood. It’s shuffling, like someone who’s trying to keep his slippers from falling off. I know it’s my dad, and I get out of bed.
When I walk into the living room, I get an idea of what I must have looked like last night. He’s only turned on his desk lamp, and he’s standing on his toes reaching for his high school yearbook.
“Hey, Dad,” I say softly. He looks so small that I’m worried he’ll fall if I startle him.
Once he’s grabbed his yearbook, he turns around and sees me.
“Hey, Buddy,” he says, “you’re up early.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Couldn’t sleep?”
“Just couldn’t sleep late.”
He smiles. “Me too, I guess.”
I wonder why he’s getting the yearbook down now. I wonder if he can tell that I looked through it last night. I look at it in his hands, trying to figure out what could give me away. He notices me staring.
“Oh, this,” he says. “Just feeling a little nostalgic, I guess.”
I don’t know what to say. Nostalgia seems like a strange emotion to be having when the child you gave up for adoption resurfaces. I mean, I can understand it might make you think about the past, but nostalgia doesn’t seem like the right word. Maybe I’ll look it up later. Maybe it has other meanings I don’t know about.
The Lucky Kind Page 9
