“Hey loverboy,” she murmured. She tossed onto the counter an army-green messenger bag bedecked in buttons, went to the back and returned a minute later wearing her Golden Age shirt. Underneath it was a black long-sleeve t-shirt that went down to her knuckles. Her thumbs came through holes in the sleeves.
“I heard your electricity finally came back on,” I said.
She nodded, peering at me first through a curtain of dark square bangs that hung against her eyes, and then through purple horn-rimmed glasses. The lenses were plain glass—she didn’t have or need a prescription. “You get in a fight?” she said. She leaned with her arms folded across the counter, her long sleeves ending handless.
“Oh, this.” I touched my chin. “Just a little accident. We were tracking deer in the woods. Although yes, I guess I did.”
“Stitches?” She raised the purple glasses and looked more closely.
“It’s just a good scrape.” I’d experimented with Band-Aids of various sizes but decided that even the smallest looked creepier than the wound itself. “I’ll probably have a scar though.”
“Scars are memories made of flesh,” she said. “What about the fight?”
“Eh.”
“Sore subject? —Haha.”
I smiled. “Sore subject.”
She shrugged.
“Did you write your column yet?” I said.
She shook her head. “I still need to choose the letters.” Marissa dispensed relationship advice in her college lit club’s weekly zine, The Salty Marlin. (I’d never known her to be in a relationship herself, beyond the fake one she was in with Zane when his parents’ attention needed deflecting.) She pulled a stack of printed emails from the main pocket of her bag. “Here we go. You can help me pick out a sob story worse than yours.”
I laughed. I had a little crush on Marissa for the way she was both warm and off-putting, a combination that seemed unique to her. It was just a playground crush, the kind that might induce me to throw a snowball at her, make sure she knew it was me, then run away. When Simon introduced us, out in the parking lot where she was sitting on the guard-rail smoking a cigarette, she asked me how old Siegel and Shuster both were when they first published Superman. I was off by two years but that had been enough to impress her.
“I have to do two columns this week, actually,” she said, “since I’ll be away for WonderCon in a few weeks.”
“I’m still jealous you’re going to that. I keep saying next year. —What kind of letters do you have?”
“Let’s find out.” She skimmed one of the emails. “Blah, blah, blah—three-way.” She crumpled it up and dropped it in the wastebasket behind the counter.
“You get a lot of three-way letters?”
“Oh jeez yeah. From straight guys who want to know how to get their girlfriends to agree to it. From straight girls who want to know if they should do it for their man. From homos who want to know if it’ll wreck their relationships.” She rolled her eyes. “Apparently it’s the ultimate I-need-advice question. Should I do it, should I not. They can check the back issues. It’s been covered.”
“My sob story involves something like that, actually,” I said.
“A three-way?”
“Not in the traditional sense.”
“Zane told me you’ve got a houseboy.” She said it matter-of-factly. It was pretty hard to shock Marissa.
“A roommate,” I corrected. “There’s no nude vacuuming involved. Griff is straight.”
Now she raised her eyebrows. “A straightboy. Must be some three-way then. Who’s the third?”
“Actually it’s more like a four-way,” I said. “There’s the ex-girlfriend I don’t think I was done being with yet when she dumped me. I saw her the other day for the first time since, and that was—” I sighed and continued. “There’s the straight best friend, who in college I was crazy in love with, who was and seemingly still is my fucking ideal everything, who has come waltzing not only back into my life but into my bed. And then there’s the spiky-haired guy I’ve been smitten with since the first time I laid eyes on him, when he was standing behind this very register selling me a new copy of Crisis on Infinite Earths, who is now my employee and four-fifths my age to boot.”
She stopped shuffling the letters. “Predicament much?”
“It’s like they just keep piling on. I had this dream last night where I’m in the tub, right? And suddenly Griff is in there with me, just sitting there bare-ass, talking, the water running. And then Melanie is getting in too, and it’s the three of us. And then Zane’s there and he’s like, Can I get in too?”
“That’s bizarre.” She scrunched her eyebrows, turning this over in her advice columnist’s brain. A customer came in and began pawing through the new arrivals. Marissa reached under the counter and boosted the volume on the store’s audio system. The Ramones started singing a little louder, loud enough to cover us. “So you had an orgy dream?”
“No, that’s the thing. It wasn’t sexual. Well, not really.”
“Did it freak you out?”
“In the dream?”
She nodded.
“No, in the dream it all seemed natural enough. The conflict was just that not everyone could fit in the tub.”
“And Zane was there too...” It was a statement, not question; like a fortune teller, she was ruminating.
I sighed. “Yes.”
“That’s kind of a surprise. I assumed you didn’t like him like that.”
“Because of the Halloween thing?” The customer came up to the counter with a few comics and a credit card. When he left I asked again, “Because I said no when he asked me out?”
“He told me you did,” she said, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “He was pretty disappointed. I told him it was for the best, though.”
“You think it was?” I felt kind of vindicated that the relationship guru agreed with me.
“Well it’s like you said. What if things didn’t work out? You both love the store. It would get messy.”
“It could.”
“Zane is delicious, though.” A dreamy rouge rose in her cheeks and she suddenly looked more girly than usual.
“Oh boy. Not you too. I should’ve seen it before.”
She shrugged. “Why do you think I agree to be his beard? It lets me pretend. He’s the only guy I’ve ever seen who’ll come out of a tattoo parlor after getting inked and pierced and then help an old lady cross the street. But like sincerely.”
That made Zane seem like something I didn’t want to lose. If she was trying to convince me to leave the Zane situation alone, she wasn’t doing a very good job. Was it supposed to be reverse psychology or something, or did she really just suck at relationship advice?
“Don’t worry, you did the right thing.” She patted my hand, her rings thumping my knuckles. “I read letters about heartbreak every day. It’s better to avoid the situations where it seems destined, you know?” She picked up the letters, stacked them into a neat pile against the counter. “Plus,” she said, “there’s plenty of spiky-haired, quarter-Japanese, comic book–loving, do-gooder gay boys on Cape Cod, right?”
“...”
“Right?”
I drove home trying to decide whether Marissa had meant that last part sarcastically. When I got there I found Zane’s car in my driveway, parked behind Griff’s. I parked beside the Jetta, annoyed that they were hanging out without me. I tried to remember whether I’d told Zane anything about Griff that he might be telling Griff now.
The garage door was open and the mattress was not inside. I pulled the door shut and went in the house. Habit made my hand reach for the switch even though the lights were already on.
“I’m home,” I called, suspicious, getting out of my coat.
Zane’s peacoat was hanging over the back of the blue chair; his boots stood side by side by the door. Griff jogged into the living room. In his hand was a wrench.
“Hey dude,” he said. “We’re doing some constructio
n.”
“Zane’s here?” I mouthed.
He nodded. He came closer; he smelled of apple Dum Dums pop. “Son of a bitch from the high school fucking outed him. He came here looking for you. I told him he could chill.”
“The high school? Who?”
He raised his hands over his head. “Stick ‘em up.”
“That guy? Awh, fuck.” I wondered how much of this was my fault for stumbling in on Zane and Jeremy, for scaring the kid off. There were ways I could’ve handled that situation better, I was sure.
I followed Griff into the spare bedroom. The new mattress and box-spring were leaning against the wall by the window. Zane was sitting on the floor in the middle of the bed frame, twisting a nut onto a bolt.
“What happened?” I said.
He looked up at me. His spikey hair seemed drooped like the hair on a sad cartoon character. I knew he had been dreading this day. His parents were hard to feel out, were old-school, conservative. He’d always feared the worst.
“Can I give you the NC-17 version?”
“By all means.”
“Well, the little motherfucking cocksucker apparently decided to do some preemptive-strike public relations,” he said in a tone of forced calm. “Blabbed around to the basketball team that Ralph the water boy’s brother tried to blow him. Which is especially ironic given that he was the one who was fucking desperate to get his mouth around my dick.”
“Do your parents know?”
He nodded. “My mom, at least. Fucker blabs it at school, brother comes home pissed that he’s now associated with a rumored fag, tells mother, mother asks homo son if it’s true.”
“What did homo son say?”
“I said yes.”
“What did she say?”
“Ready for this? You might want to sit down.” He patted the desk. “She said, No you’re not, with the same fucking matter-of-factness she would if I was insisting I was from Pluto or something. No you’re not. And then she started to cry and said I was just confused and that they would get me help, that there are people I can talk to.” He put a wrench around the nut and turned it. “This is the twenty-first century, you know? This is fucking Massachusetts. We have gay marriage. We live an hour from Provincetown, and she’s this fucking clueless? Well bullshit. I take it from the governor, from the president, from the pope. I will not,” he said, with a weary emphasis on not that broke my heart, “take it from my family too.” He noticed his teeth were clenched and he rubbed his jaw. “You look like shit,” he said, pointing at my face with the wrench.
Because there was really nothing to say about anything, the three of us finished assembling Griff’s bed in a weary silence that grew more comfortable as we built this thing. We connected the headboard and footboard to the sides and laid the box-spring on the frame and the mattress on top of that. And when it was done, it was a bed. Zane kicked a leg of it the way Griff had kicked the tires of the Jetta.
“Not bad, huh?” Griff said. He laid down and crossed his arms behind his head, kicked his heels against the mattress. “Yeah, this’ll do me a couple nights. Then I’ll have a place for when I visit.” He began gathering up the tools. “Thanks guys.”
“Sure.”
“No problem.”
“Anyone hungry now?” he said, his arms full of tools and plastic wrap as he left the room. “I could boil up some spaghetti?”
Griff called all pasta spaghetti. He cooked a pound of rigatoni and the three of us balanced plates on our laps and watched Evil Dead in the living room. They sat in the two chairs and I turned the ottoman on its side and sat on the floor against the cushion. When the movie was over Zane brought his plate to the sink and went in the bathroom. Griff stood up with his plate and picked mine up off the floor.
I told him thanks and pressed the stop button on the VCR with my toe. The television turned to static.
“Are you surprised he came here?” Griff said. He sat down again with the plates in his hand.
“Sort of.”
“He probably figured you could relate?”
“I guess. What I can’t relate to is how his mother could say all that bullshit, though.”
“Yeah. Incredible.”
“And that’s not even close to the worst of what I’ve heard. Sometimes I honestly feel like I want to line up every single person who’s ever made life difficult for a gay kid and shoot them one by one in the face.”
Griff laughed.
“I’m serious, Griff. And it scares the shit out of me, you know? Because I really feel like I could do it. That’s how angry it makes me. It makes me a monster.”
“Vince, you’re no monster. You’re just angry. And yeah, you have good reason. People fucking suck a lot of the time. The people who don’t sort of have to clean it up. So get out your mop. WWSD?”
He brought the dishes to the sink. Zane came out of the bathroom drying his hands on his pants and pulled his coat from the back of the chair.
“I guess I’ll get going,” he said. “Thanks for the food and the solace and stuff.”
From the kitchen Griff shot me a look.
“Um—” I stood up. “You can—stay here tonight if you want to give your parents some space. If you need more solace. You’re welcome to stay.”
He hesitated. “I should probably go,” he said at last, doing up the first button of his coat.
“Stay,” Griff said. “Vince buys solace in bulk. It fills his garage, his closets, his cupboards. Do the guy a favor and take some off his hands, huh? Have the new bed. I’m gonna go hit the sack myself.”
Zane looked at me, shrugged, nodded.
Griff switched off the kitchen light and shuffled away down the hall like an old man. “Vin, I think the sheets for it are still in the dryer.”
“Thanks for the company, Griffin,” Zane said after him.
Griff replied without turning around, “Don’t let the heteros keep you down. We’re not all bad.”
He went into our bedroom and closed the door.
I smirked, as though I was just now getting a joke. For some reason I’d expected that Griff meant for Zane to share my bed, given that he’d just put together his own. I relaxed a little.
“You sure it’s cool for me to stay?” Zane said.
“Sure. It’s probably better to let things cool down at home before you go back.”
“Probably.” He put his coat down on the chair.
“So are you just heading to bed, or do you want to chill for a while?”
“I can chill,” he said. “Do you have any hot cocoa?”
I smirked. “I think I can scrounge some up, yeah.”
In the kitchen I filled the kettle, put it on the stove, got a pair of mugs out of the cupboard. It was, in a way, what I anticipated doing last Friday when I woke up to find all that snow. I was only getting around to it now.
“Do you still have that Mogwai record I gave you for your birthday?” Zane said. He was standing in the living room with his arms folded on the half-wall.
“Of course, yeah. It’s in the bin. Put it on.”
I watched the kettle simmer, blasting it with imaginary heat vision to speed up the process. I wanted the hot chocolate done ASAP—something to do with my hands. Zane found the record and now was fumbling with the turntable.
“How come it’s not playing?” he said.
“Did you turn the power on?”
“The green light is on. I don’t know. Come look.”
I spotted the problem immediately. “Dude, you need to put the needle down!”
“Oops. I’m not going to have to rub sticks together or chant or anything too, am I?”
“No, ass-face,” I smirked. I lowered the needle—it sketched against the vinyl.
“Good, cheese-cock. Now how do I pick a song?”
“You don’t pick one. You’re supposed to listen straight through.” He looked perplexed. “Here,” I told him, “this is a good one.” I lifted the needle and moved it into the record, let it
fall into one of the middle grooves.
“You have the grooves memorized?”
I shrugged. He smiled.
The kettle began to whistle just as the first ambient notes of music wafted from the speakers, as though the appliances in my house were part of an orchestra. I took it off the burner, filled the mugs and mixed in some packets of Swiss Miss.
“Wish I had some marshmallows,” I said.
“Give me a dollop of Fluff, if you have it,” he said.
“Good idea.” I plopped in a spoonful, and as it began to melt I remembered back to when I’d worried about marshmallows making it seem too much like a date, and felt that fear renewed. “So she said you’re not gay, huh?” I handed him a mug and sat down in the blue chair.
“Yeah. Can you believe that?” He held his mug close to his lips but didn’t drink. “As if I was mistaken or only doing this for shits and giggles. Because wheee! this is all so fucking fun I can barely stand it.”
There was a worn-out anger in his eyes that scared me. He must’ve had it so much more difficult than I did. There was no life for him to escape into; the best he could do was lie. Whenever I felt different, it was only until the next pretty girl walked down the street. Then I was just an average guy like everyone else.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry at someone I loved,” he said. “Man. But I don’t know what I was expecting. I guess I just hoped that like despite the clues to the contrary I’d be lucky, you know? That I would be the kid whose dad comes to him and says, I love you and I’ll love anyone you bring home, boy or girl.”
“I doubt many people have it that easy.”
“How long did it take your parents to deal?” He crossed his legs on the ottoman. His skinny jeans ended in red socks.
“A while. Although the way I came out didn’t help.”
“Didn’t they catch you making out with a guy or something?”
“My first boyfriend, just after sophomore year of college. In the pool.”
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 18
