by Sarah Miller
Nicholas is staring at the tops of his shoes and smiling. Gid is loving himself.
Gid notices Pilar working her way toward him. This is what it's all about, Gid thinks. Don't lose your nerve. If only his stare wasn't so blatant. Why does Pilar have to wear white all the time? As if she knows that it just makes
Gid lose his mind. She smiles her deeply shiny lip-glossed smile.
Gid, don't stop staring at girls. Some of them might not like it, but the ones who do, well, they'll make up for your trouble.
"He's telling us why Erica was stupid to have sex with Nicholas," Madison says.
"I didn't say stupid," Gid says. "I never said stupid. I am only saying that she shouldn't have been surprised by the outcome."
"I agree. I agree, and I'm impressed," Pilar says. Pilar presses into him. What is with her, this way of making it seem like she's in a tight space, like she just can't help but sidle up to you, when in fact there's plenty of room? Not that he minds. She smells like slightly sweet cucumbers. "Do you want another beer? I'm empty." She wags her glass in front of his face.
"Sure," Gideon says, pouring the rest of his beer down the back of his throat. She takes the bottle from him. "Let me get it for you," she says, with that slow-eye flutter Gid really likes.
He watches her walk away. Nicholas just sits back and watches it happen, a wondrous smile on his face. I watch too, a little more subdued.
Gid, though, of all the people watching this seduction unfold, has the best view and is the most amazed. He feels like someone programmed his body to know exactly what to do. He slips easily off his stool and guides her off of hers when she goes outside to smoke. When he lights her cigarette, even though the wind is blowing hard up the avenue, he cups the matches perfectly, and they never blow out. Inside, he raises his hand to the bartender, keeps his eyes on her even as he reaches into his pocket for money to pay for her drinks. She tells him a story about her uncle running for district president of some small district in the southern part of Argentina—Patagonia, the place that he had no idea was really a place. Gid doesn't really understand what's funny about the story—something to do with a blind dog, a roasted chicken, and a farmer—but he manages to laugh in all the right places. He feels—a feeling that increases with each drink—like there's a beam of light connecting their faces, even their bodies, a beam of light that lifts him up a bit, makes him feel weightless.
He tells her the story of Mrs. Frye and the ranunculus and how he was mean to Liam Wu and watching the bloodhound show on the Discovery Channel. He's careful with the parts about Molly McGarry. He says enough so that she knows other chicks dig him but not so much that she doubts his interest. She's leaning in closer and closer, hanging on his every word. She smells like warm flowers and cucumbers and sugar. He puts a tentative hand on her leg. She lets it sit there. She puts her hand on her neck, arranging and rearranging her fragrant dark hair.
When girls start playing with their hair, Cullen says it is fucking done, and I can't say I disagree.
Madison saunters over. She takes note of Gid's hand on Pilar's leg.
"Awfully cheeky for a new guy," she says.
"Madison," Gid says, reaching out with his free hand and chucking her under the chin. "I'm not the new guy anymore. I'm just.. .the guy you'll never have and dream of forever."
Madison actually laughs at this, genuine, friendly laughter. Most important, she turns on the heel of her Marc Jacobs wedges and leaves them alone. Gideon slides his hand farther up Pilar's leg until he's got underwear. Pilar pulls away. Gid is on the verge of saying sorry when he instead meets Pilars eye and just stares at her. It's a good move. Girls hate sorry. Like, unless you do something really bad that you didn't mean to do. But shit, thinks Gid, I can't apologize for trying to do the very thing in this world that I live for.
"I don't take my underwear off in bars," Pilar says. "But my parents are in Rome."
"Okay," says Gideon slowly, having no point of reference for such a thing, wondering, drunkenly, if Rome is a restaurant.
Then they're making out. He inches his hand down toward her breasts, which, in particular, is something he's been dreaming of doing for so long that it almost plays like deja vu.
She stops him, but only to say, "Seriously, my parents aren't flying in from Rome until tomorrow morning. Let's go back to my place."
Everything is arranged so quickly. Nicholas is going to tell his mother Gideon went out for a run before they got up, and he's going to leave jogging clothes for him at the tenth-floor landing on the service stairs. Pilar stands there smiling and almost blushing. When did she become so girlish?
Nicholas slips him a single apartment key. "You realize now," he says, "that my mother is going to be petting me all alone tomorrow. She pets harder without an audience. Get back by nine. She won't suspect a thing." He stands back and regards Gideon with much respect. "You have become the creature I believed you could become."
Gid breathes in the moment like it's mountain air.
And then he's outside, walking the streets of Manhattan at three o'clock in the morning, with not just a girl but literally the girl of his dreams. She's holding his hand. She's glassy-eyed. She's wearing high-heeled boots and a short skirt. Oh my God, Gid thinks. I've never had sex before. This is a terrible idea. But he can't think that. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. Try not to think so much like you usually think, he instructs himself.
They're in her apartment now. Her parents' apartment, which is a vast expanse of glass, leather, and right angles. They make out against giant walls of mirrors. His natural abilities return, his sense that he knows how to behave, what to do. They make out all the way down a hallway, first her up against the wall, with one of Gid's hands under her shirt and the other one on the inside of her thigh. She pushes him away, and he thinks he's gone too far, but no, now he's against the wall, and Pilar's unbuttoning his shirt and pushing it off of him. He touches the top of her warm head as she kisses his chest, and she looks up and stares at him.
"Are you okay?" she says.
He nods.
She leads him into a room with a giant white bed, which she falls onto, giggling, her legs, bare above the boots, bouncing provocatively up in the air. Jesus, Gid thinks. This is it. This isn't just it, this is the end and the beginning of everything. He feels like he should say something before it starts, and after some thought he settles on "You look so good in white."
"Thanks," she says. "I got the idea from J. Lo."
"You got the idea from J. Lo? I don't understand. Did J. Lo invent white?"
Pilar smacks the bed, instructing him to get on it. "She didn't invent white, but she kind of made it popular," she says as she runs her fingers down the front of his chest. She has nails! Adult nails. It's almost.. .well, it's sexy, but it's also scary. Like anything could happen. "Anyway, don't tell anyone."
Gid frowns. "I think a lot of people know who J. Lo is," he says.
"No," Pilar says, now straddling him. "Don't tell anyone I got my idea about always wearing white from J. Lo. Or if you do, make sure they don't tell anyone."
He doesn't know whether to be happy that she's straddling him or to burst out laughing at the idea of himself actually saying the following sentence to a fellow human being; "Pilar wears white because of J. Lo. But don't tell anyone." God, Molly would think that was funny. Molly. But there's no time for that. Pilar is bearing down on him, kissing him, her movie-star hands undoing his pants, taking off his shirt. Gid's mind feels like it's going to fall out of his head. It feels like it might fall out of my head too.
Then Madison Sprague comes tumbling out of the closet. Holding a video camera. "Oh, shit," Madison says.
Gideon's first impulse is to feel incredibly, overwhelmingly grateful that he's still wearing his underwear. Once he's processed that, all he can think of to say is "I didn't even know you two liked each other."
Pilar sits up in bed. Gideon looks at her breasts and thinks, with a surprising sense of removal, Tho
se were just in my hands. "I thought we called this off!" Pilar shouts.
Called this off? Pilar's stepping back into her pants, turning to the wall, suddenly modest, to slip back into bra and shirt, a sexy film in reverse. That means that Pilar has talked about Gid when he's not around. That...God, that was all he wanted. He has been imagining her thinking of him since she met him.
"Gideon," she pleads. "I really do like you. We planned this, like, a little while ago, and I thought I told her not to come over. I really don't want you to be mad at me. I really like you."
Gid thinks. He wasn't mad when he saw the video camera. He wasn't mad when he saw Madison. You could do worse than lose your virginity to a really hot girl while another hot girl taped it. Even if the girl taping it isn't as hot as you used to think she was. Does that make it even hotter?
"I really like you," Pilar repeats. "I don't want you to think that I don't like you."
Yes, this is definitely the part of this whole experience that's annoying. Because she was just all over him, and she didn't seem to be acting, so it's like she's apologizing because she thinks he could never believe she would actually be hot for him. That he would be worthy of it. But in fact, he totally believes it.
It's not the bet Molly wrote him.
He didn't understand, but now it is so incredibly obvious. Both what she meant and what he has to do.
He starts to dress himself, checking his wallet for his emergency credit card.
"What's going on?" Pilar asks, chasing him to the door wearing a white comforter like a toga. Gid tells himself not to look back, but he can't help it. "Damn, you're hot," he says, shaking his head.
"Why are you leaving? Where are you going?" Pilar supports herself against the mirror with one hand.
"Buffalo," he says, putting on his coat. He takes a final look at Pilar. He can't tell if she's angry, desperate, or just wasted. He decides he'll never know and steps out the door into the foyer. It's one of those apartments where the elevator comes right to your entrance. He can hear what's going on inside.
"Buffalo?" Madison says. "Who lives in Buffalo?"
"I don't know," Pilar says. "That girl Molly McGarry lives there, I think."
"I don't know if I know her," Madison says.
"You might not," Pilar says. "She's not really all that pretty."
This would have stung Gid before. He would have thought better of his judgment, but all he thinks now, and what I think too, is Don't hate Pilar and Madison. They just live in their world, under its terms.
the queen city
At five-thirty in the morning on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Gideon's one of eight people in line to buy an Amtrak ticket at Penn Station. There's only one window open, and the man behind it has the longest face Gid's ever seen. Even on the happiest day of his life, the man must look about ready to pack it in. The alcohol's slowly leaving Gid's system, and his skin feels prickly, his brain jumpy. If he weren't so nervous, he would be happier than he's ever been in his life.
Seven people come and go from the window pretty quickly. The last, an old lady, has a problem. She smacks the counter repeatedly with her wallet. The man with the long face doesn't look like he's having a good time, but he doesn't appear to be getting riled up. Finally, Gid sees her credit card come out. She signs her ticket, still glaring. "Have a safe trip," says the man. "Next."
Gid steps up. "I want to go to Buffalo," he says.
The man's face lights up. Gid's startled by the transformation. He looks like a different person. He says, Tm from Buffalo."
"No shit," says Gideon. He hands the guy the credit card. He's hoping the fact that he hasn't used it at all yet will make up for any debates about what constitutes an emergency.
The man is shaking his head, all smiles and reverie. "I like New York," he says, "but Buffalo's my town. Why are you going there?"
Gid doesn't want to say "To lose my virginity," so, inexplicably, he says, "I'm going ice fishing."
The man's delight collapses and disappears. "Have a safe trip," he says.
As Gid walks away, he realizes that it's barely winter and that the lakes aren't frozen yet. The guy probably thought he was making fun of him. He'd like to go back and tell him the real reason. Man to man. But his train leaves at six A.M., in five minutes.
He settles himself in for the ride, taking from his bag a bottle of water and a newspaper, because he's always thought it looked fun to read a newspaper on a train and he never has. His train won't get in until early afternoon. He has a long time on the train to think about what he's going to say to Molly. He even starts to write it out, but almost three hours later, he finds himself in Albany staring at fourteen Amtrak napkins covered in adolescent meanderings. He realizes he can't think of how to explain his presence in Buffalo to Molly when he himself doesn't exactly understand it.
Start at the beginning. Start with Cullen and Nicholas.
Okay. Gid draws their pictures on a napkin, representing Nicholas mostly by his keen eyes and pretty mouth and Cullen with a big head and perfectly messy hair. He smiles fondly at his flawed but evocative representations. Before he met them, he thought he was forever fated to that present level of confidence, that he was going to have to go through life like Jim Rayburn. He no longer believes this.
Clearly, these guys know a lot about girls that's worth knowing. And Gid is grateful for having been taught most of it. But it's not like he actually wants to be like them. Cullen, well, he's happy the way he is; girls are like prizes to him, and he likes that. And maybe, Gid thinks, if I were as handsome as he is, I would be like that too. But I'm not. And when you don't have that handsomeness to protect you, don't you need a girl to be your friend?
As for Nicholas, well, half the reason he's even going to see Molly McGarry—well, he thinks, a third of the reason, maybe—is to tell her what he's figured out. Nicholas punishes Erica, delights in it, because he can't yell at his own mother. And the sad thing is that if he did yell at his mother, she'd certainly recover.
Will Erica? Probably, and probably all of Cullen's girls along with her. And Pilar Benitez-Jones is probably the damn finest piece of ass he'll ever see in his life. But at the end of the day, Gid knows that he's too much like Erica, really, to let Pilar have sex with him. He would hate waiting for Pilar to call. He would hate himself for hating to wait.
They say girls are the only ones who care about virginity. That we're the only ones who care about anything. It's not true.
He throws the napkins out in the Buffalo train station men's room, still unsure of what to say. It's six in the evening, grimy, wintry, and dark. The train station is just a hideous shack, like a beach snack bar, beneath an underpass. Snow is coming.
He gives Molly's address to a cabbie outside. "I thought Buffalo had a nice train station," he says, trying to strike up a conversation. He actually knows the truth, that they used to, and he's hoping the cabbie will discuss this with him.
But the cabbie just runs his finger along the inside of his gums and, depositing something in his ashtray, says, "Nope."
Molly's house is a modest two-story brick thing on Highland Avenue, built sixty or so years ago by someone careful but without passion. He knocks on the plain wooden door, set to the left side of a painted white porch. A little
boy answers, clearly Molly's brother. This is good. He's small and dark-haired, and looks annoyed.
"My parents aren't here," he says.
"I'm looking for your sister," Gid says.
"Molly or Jasmine?"
Jasmine? She has a sister named Jasmine? Gid smiles. No wonder she wrote about hurricanes and vaginas.
"Molly," he says.
The kid runs off without saying anything.
In a minute or so, Molly pads down the hall, dressed in jeans, mismatching socks, and a T-shirt with no bra. "Gideon?" she says, with the surprise of someone waking up in a different room than the one where they fell asleep. "What are you doing here?"
"What do you mean, what a
m I doing here?" he asks. "What reason would I possibly have for coming to Buffalo, other than to see the famous antifreeze pond?"
He thinks maybe she's smiling? Or about to smile?
"If you are happy to see me, 111 tell you the real reason."
Now she's smiling.
"I came here to lose the other half of my virginity," he says.
No one would ever recommend that you say this to a girl, but somehow, it's exactly the right thing.
Molly doesn't smile, but she doesn't not smile. "How did you get here?" she asks.
He tells her about Amtrak, and the old lady, and the man with the long face. "I feel bad about the ice-fishing comment," he says.
"Don't feel bad," she says. She pulls him into the hallway. The little kid lurks in the background, behind a metal radiator. "Get out of here," she barks at him. He takes off. "I think he's gay," she whispers. "All he does is read biographies of ballet dancers. He's either gay or an aesthete, I guess, both of which are not good matches for this town." She takes Gideon's coat and hangs it on a tree, on top of a lot of other coats. It falls to the ground. "Do you mind?" she asks, leaving it.
"Not at all," Gid says.
"My parents aren't home," she says. She indicates he should follow her upstairs. She takes his hand, as she did walking across the quad a few weeks ago. He kisses it. Molly winces.
"That was kind of gay. Not gay like my brother gay. I didn't say anything last time, but I'm feeling a little more confident this time."
"I get it," Gid says. They've paused on the landing. The stairs are lined with family photographs. Molly has looked the same since she was about four. He touches the silver frame on one of them, showing Molly at nine or ten, standing on her ice skates on a pond, in the middle of a park. "Is this the pond?"
