“It’s not a date,” I said, “it’s lunch. Do you know what you’re getting?” I asked it without looking at him, my face buried in the laminated menu. The light from the lamp swaying above the table reflected us both in the plastic. We didn’t look bad together. But our shoulders were nearly touching, and face-to-face contact would’ve almost been literal. And anyway, what did it matter how we looked?
“A burger, I guess,” he said. “Maybe a shake too.”
“They make a good strawberry shake.”
“I like chocolate,” he said. “So you and Griff used to come here, huh?”
“When we got sick of the dining hall. Which was often.”
“So it’s a memory-lane day for you guys.” He ran his finger along the serrated edge of an aloe branch. White strings from a hole in the thigh of his jeans swayed in the air from a baseboard vent like the fronds of a sea anemone. My dick tingled. I wondered if those were the jeans he was wearing at Golden Age the other night...
Griff once more filled the empty seat across from us. “Did you order yet?” he said.
Maybe she’d been waiting for him to get back, but just then a waitress appeared at the end of our table. A waitress who looked enough like Melanie—had Melanie’s hair, her brown eyes—to make me do a full-on double-take. I felt my throat tighten. With the three of them here it was like I was surrounded, like I was being ganged-up on. My eyes spun like haywire compasses from the hole in Zane’s jeans to Griff’s blond hair to the Melanie’s hips back to Zane. Zane’s skin, Griff’s eyes, the Melanie’s hair. Zane’s lips, Griff’s hands, the Melanie’s chest.
“Vince?”
“Oh sorry— Uh.” I was amazed again at how much she looked like Melanie. “You guys can order first.”
“Uh, we did.”
“Oh. Ha.”
She took my order and then our menus, smiled. I unwrapped the napkin from around my silverware and draped it over my thigh. I wished Zane would do the same with his napkin and cover the anemone hole. It was too much.
Griff leaned forward. “Don’t you think she looks a little bit like—”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.” He shrugged. “So what are we going to do about sleeping?”
“I’ll hook us up with a hotel,” Griff said, shaking open his napkin. “No worries.”
In a minute the Melanie returned with two beers and a chocolate milkshake. Zane leaned forward to sip his shake from the flexible straw and when he did his foot nudged mine.
“Your food’ll be right out,” the Melanie said.
“Thanks.”
She even walked the same as Melanie. Did Griff notice that too? Why was he looking at me like that? Or was he looking at me and Zane? Was he looking at us? When Zane’s foot bumped mine a second time I clapped my hand over his leg, covering the anemone hole.
“For fuck’s sake,” I said, “can you stop doing that?”
The straw slipped from his lips, sunk lazily into the chocolate. He looked at me wide-eyed. Griff checked quick under the table as though something lurking down there had bitten me.
“Not do what?”
“You’re all over me!” I said. “Give me some space, will you?”
“Jeez, I didn’t realize I was so toxic.” He slid across the seat until his shoulder hit the wall.
I sighed, embarrassed, picked at the edge of the table with my thumbnail. Our food came and I ate my turkey club in small bites.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, breaking the silence, when half my sandwich was gone.
“OK,” Zane said.
“She looks like Melanie and I was freaking out.”
“OK,” he said again.
After observing me for a few minutes more Griff wiped his mouth and tucked the napkin under his plate. “This place has always made me feel the same sienna as a nice warm fire does,” he said. “I think that’s why I like it.” He dipped a fry in ketchup and folded it into his mouth.
Zane looked at me curiously, and then at Griff. “Sienna?” he said.
“Griffin feels in colors,” I said, opening the door for them to discuss synesthesia for the rest of the meal.
We stood for a minute in the entrance of the restaurant, not wanting to leave, not knowing exactly where to go when we did. It was seven o’clock now and had been dark for almost an hour. The streetlights and the glowing traffic gave the night a bustling immediacy.
“I guess now we find a place to sleep,” Griff announced, velcroing the cuffs of his jacket sleeves tight around his thin wrists.
We let the door of the restaurant close with a thump, sealing in music and heat and the Melanie, and we stepped out onto the sidewalk. A few snowflakes were falling softly, without the coordination of a flurry.
“Do you have your phone?” I asked Griff.
He unzipped his jacket and pulled it from an inside pocket. It was small, like a silver tooth. I flipped it open.
“Do I remember Simon’s number?” I wondered aloud, running my thumb over the glowing keypad. I felt hyperaware of myself, careful that whatever I did or said was appropriate now in the context of my earlier outburst. A delicate balance had to be found between remaining reserved enough to convey my embarrassment but not be a total stick in the mud.
“Are you going to have him rescue us?” Zane asked.
“I’m just going to see if he’ll open the store for me tomorrow.”
“It’s 508 585,” Zane started. “Five-three-five? Here, let me.” He took the phone, poked the numbers, handed it back. “I think that’s right.”
“It’s ringing.”
“Let’s just start walking this way,” Griff said, pointing in the direction of the library.
Simon’s wife, Patti, answered on the third ring. Her voice had the gentle authority I would expect from someone guiding me through the purchase of a home. The phone was only big enough to reach from my ear to mid-cheek; I talked loud to make sure she would hear. “It’s Vince, from Golden Age—”
“Hi Vince!”
“Hi Patti. Is Simon around, by any chance?”
She told me he was working on his book and went off to find him.
“Dude,” Griff said, “you don’t have to yell. It picks up the sound from your jaw.” He tapped his right sideburn and then put his hands on his hips. “I’m not sure I want to shell out the money for a hotel,” he said. “Maybe we should just go back to Beth’s?”
Zane and I glanced at each other.
“Really? Is that a good idea?” I said, but then Simon was saying hello in my ear. “Simon, it’s Vince.”
“Hi,” he said. “What’s up? Enjoying the snow?”
“Is it snowing there?”
“Yeah. —Why, where are you?”
“Boston,” I said, following Griff and Zane down Boylston Street now. “I’m in Boston, and my car broke down, and it won’t be fixed until morning, and I’m supposed to open the store.”
“I can do that for you, man,” Simon said. “Not a problem.”
“Great, thank you Simon.”
Zane turned around and asked if I thought it would be a problem.
“I can take it all day if you want,” Simon continued. “Maybe we should plan on that. I’m sure you’ll be tired when you get back. What’s going on in the city?”
“Oh, I was helping my friend move. I’m sure I’ll be able to get there by the afternoon.”
“Well either way,” he said. “Don’t worry about it, and don’t hurry back. Do you have a place to stay? Hell, I could just come get you if you want?”
“Oh, thanks, but I have to pick up the Jeep tomorrow morning anyway. We’re just going to get a hotel or something.”
“So you’ve got company? That’s good.”
“I’m with my friend. And Zane is here too.”
“Ah, hey, put him on for a sec before you go, would you?”
“Sure. Thanks again, Simon.” I held the phone out to Zane. “Boss wants a word.”
He frowned. “You said you didn’t tell him.”
>
“About the—?” I filled my cheek with my tongue. “No.”
He slid the phone up under his hat. “Hey Simon. —I did, yeah, last Wednesday when it came out. —I know, it kicked ass. Kerschl is at the top of his game. —Seriously, huh?”
Comic chat.
I walked faster to catch up with Griff. “So are you sure about going back to Beth’s? Won’t that be—you know—a little weird?”
“It’ll only be for a little while,” he said. “We can just crash late and leave early.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to me, I just don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be fine.”
Zane said goodbye to Simon and, like a gunslinger, flipped the phone shut, handed it back to Griff. “He wanted to know if I’d read the new Matt Morrow.”
“So I’m covered tomorrow?”
“You’re covered,” Zane said. “I think he’s excited. A reason to have to go in.”
“I’ll give Beth a call,” Griff said. He wiggled his phone at us and walked under the awning of a Walgreens, sharing the space with a hobo sitting on a stacker and humming “I Am the Walrus” in a gravelly but not altogether terrible voice.
I walked over and leaned against a row of newspaper boxes near the curb. To my right and across the street, stretching high into the evening sky, was the Prudential Building, and to my left, the towering, all-glass Hancock. There was a new building between them now, shorter than both but still tall. It had a domed roof, looked like R2-D2. Zane came and stood near me.
“Is that homeless guy a man or a woman?” he asked.
The singer was saying goo goo g’joob in big clouds of white breath.
“Beats me,” I said. The singer wasn’t particularly androgynous but he looked so used and abused by life that all distinguishing features had been worn flat and characterless. “I guess since you called him a guy, you have some sense that he’s male.”
“Good point.”
“He’s not bad,” I said.
“The voice? No.”
I pointed up at the skyscrapers. “This used to be my view,” I told him. “These buildings. When the sunset hit them it looked like they were glowing or something.”
“You miss it.”
“Yeah.”
“The city—or college?”
A row of windows on one of the top floors of the Hancock went dark. “Both, I guess. They’re sort of the same thing to me.”
“I’m jealous of your college experience,” he said. He set the aloe on top of a snow-covered Phoenix box. “I just drive to West Barnstable twice a week for classes. There’s nothing life-changing about that.”
“College doesn’t have to be exactly like Shuster to be good.”
“You seem like you were happy here though.”
“It’s not that I was so happy. It was just so me or something,” I said. “Especially the people. Having a whole building be your living room and having all the people in it belong there, but at the same time be strangers. Comfortable strangers.” I paused. Sometimes I wondered whether I thought too much about this stuff, whether I made too much of memories, put too much stock in the past at the expense of the present and the future. “Yeah, I miss it.”
For a moment we stood watching snowflakes zip over the windshields of taxis speeding by.
“So he wants to stay at Beth’s, huh?” Zane said. He picked up the aloe and wiped snow off the pot.
“I know, it’s weird. I guess we’ll humor him. I don’t want to pay for a hotel either.”
Griff was walking toward us now. The homeless guy glanced up at him but kept humming. “We have shelter,” Griff said.
“Cool.”
“It’s pretty early, though,” he said. “I just want to get there and sleep.” He looked at the time on his phone. “Anybody want to catch a movie?”
We walked in on a movie fifteen minutes late at the Copley Mall cinemas. They showed art films ever since the new multiplex opened beside the Common my junior year. I’d always preferred the run-down Copley cinemas, with its shoebox-size theaters, over the glossy state-of-the-art multiplex.
We sat for two hours reading subtitles, enjoying the warmth like the homeless men who buy tickets in the morning and then sneak from movie to movie, avoiding for the whole day the snow or rain outside. We sat three in a row, Griff, me, Zane, all of our boots off, our feet hanging over the backs of the chairs in front of us. We sat through the closing credits, and when the lights came up we put on our boots and walked squinty-eyed out of the theater.
We left the mall and crossed Copley Square in front of the library, walked down the steps into the T station, were greeted with a blast of warm air. We bought tokens and pushed through turnstiles. A student with shaggy brown hair sat on the floor with his back against a huge subway map, strumming a guitar. Zane dropped a dollar into his guitar case. The musician nodded a thank-you.
“Supporting the arts?” Griff said.
“Supporting sexy artists,” Zane said, shrugging his shoulders.
“Yeah he’s not bad looking,” said Griff.
The three of us stood at the edge of the platform, staring down at the third rail. A Starbucks cup rolled back and forth along the track, but when it touched the third rail it did not burst into flames, as I had expected and hoped. Finally a train rumbled to a stop. We took it to the Fenway.
“I thought I’d gotten rid of you guys,” Beth said when she opened the door on our cold red faces. Her terra cotta walls glowed warmly and I seemed to float into the apartment like a cartoon character on the scent of a chocolate cake. It was just after ten o’clock. The day stretched behind me, had begun in bed with Griff eons ago. I could barely remember it.
“Thanks for letting us stay,” Griff told her. Zane and I chimed in our gratitude.
“It’s OK,” she said, but her eyes showed that it wasn’t, not totally. And of course she was right—even Zane and I knew this was weird. “I’m just getting some work done,” she added. She gestured to the bedroom, where the bed was piled with short stacks of white paper. Nosebag circled on some pages and laid down. “I put some blankets on the couch, and there are pillows.” She closed the door behind us, set the chain. “Make yourselves at home. I leave for work at 7:50, though, so I just need you on your way by then.”
She was being awfully generous opening her home like this, and yet it seemed cold to treat Griff like a guest no different from Zane and me—as if he wouldn’t know where the pillows were or what time she left for work. My opinion of her seemed to change by the minute.
“Thanks Beth,” Griff said again and she replied, “It’s OK.” She went into her bedroom and closed the door.
We hung our coats on the hooks by the door and ventured into the kitchen. It felt like being home alone in someone else’s place, and I wondered if, for Griff, it just felt like being home. Zane put the aloe on the counter beside the sink. The set of keys was still there; it seemed odd she hadn’t moved them yet.
I excused myself and went into the little bathroom off the kitchen. The walls were painted green and a trio of cactuses the same color sat in a row on the window sill. I stared up at the ceiling and peed for what seemed like forever. Since I already had my dick in my hand, I thought about relieving some of the tension that threatened to make the night impossibly long. For once I didn’t think too much, and just went for it.
I came quick but it felt less utilitarian than I expected. Instead my thoughts of Zane, and that anemone hole in his jeans, had made it almost romantic. But in my post-orgasm rush the small details of things stood out—sloppy painting around the baseboards, spatters of toothpaste on the mirror and on the tile backsplash. I found these things depressing. In the same way that some people are sad drunks, I tended to have sad orgasms. The idea of sleeping with both Griff and Zane, and the fact that for various reasons nothing could come of that with either of them, made me want to cry. I flushed the toilet and turned on the sink, splash
ed water on my face and swished some in my mouth.
When I opened the door Zane was standing there. I said “Oh!” and felt caught. We maneuvered around each other to exchange places in the bathroom.
“You took a long time,” he said before shutting the door.
There were three blankets folded on the couch, which Griff explained was a pullout. He took off the cushions, stacked them on the floor and slid his hands into the bowels of the couch. It was old and the springs were heavy and stiff, and he looked like he could use some help, but Zane and I remained side by side in the doorway, watching uncomfortably as Griff navigated this home that was his and not his. Finally the mattress yawned out. Before unfolding it completely Griff stopped, let the nylon strap fall from his hand. He exhaled; it wasn’t a sigh, exactly, but rather the sound of someone making peace, or trying to. When the mattress was all the way open he sat down. Along the edges ran bare metal bars.
“I’m just going to get to sleep, guys,” he said. “I’m beat.”
He reached for one of the throw pillows on a rocking chair beside the television and put it at the top of the mattress. He stood up enough to pull down and off his jeans and then he laid down on the bed. He unfurled a blue and white knitted afghan over himself. The metal bar ran through his fist, and he said nothing more.
“So, uh,” Zane said, looking at me. We were still standing in the doorway as though we were awaiting an earthquake.
“Take the bed,” I told him. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“You don’t have to. There’s room.”
“I’d rather not go there, Zane.” Quietly I lined the couch cushions up on the floor at the foot of the bed.
Zane laid down on the bed and rolled onto his side, facing away from Griff.
I folded the blanket—a throw made of sweatshirt fabric bearing an embroidered Shuster shield—in half lengthwise across the cushions like a sleeping bag and crawled in. The cushions shifted uncomfortably and the spaces between them grew more cavernous with my every attempt to get settled. My feet hung off the end. I could see Zane’s feet, too, tenting his fleece blanket at the foot of the bed. I spent about fifteen terrible minutes psyching myself up and finally I told him to make room on the bed.
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 13
