It’s a weird kiss, more high school than grad school. He has his mouth so wide open, I can’t even find his upper lip. And he’s tentative and soft, like he might actually like me one day, and want to go on a date and tell me about growing up different in rural Michigan. Oh, that’s why, I want to say when I pull away. But suddenly I remember how it feels to like somebody, and I feel sorry for this guy, teetering in this same rocky boat called love-at-first-sight, so I take a sip of my drink and kiss him again. In the background I hear Sean laughing into the microphone. “This is from this new thing I wrote.” The guy’s glasses push up against my face. I put my hand on the back of his head.
“She was good at beginnings. Good at the flirtation and the small talk and the straight talk and the glow. But after that, I saw her flinch and protect herself. Guy after guy became a first date, a second date, and then an ex. I waited for her to settle down, waited for her to want to settle down with me. ‘You can’t be pregnant at fifty,’ I told her. All she said was ‘Neither can you.’ ”
“That was great,” I tell Sean later, after the toothpick guy’s gone home with my number scrawled illegibly next to the Frank O’Hara on his right biceps. “But that character is nothing like me.”
“That’s the golden rule of fiction,” Sean says. “Give a girl big tits, and she’ll forgive all the awful stuff you write about her.”
“Oh.” I perk up. “I’ve got big tits in the story?”
“You weren’t even listening.” He shakes his head. “You were too busy making out with that guy to even clap at the end.”
“I was clicking my fingers under the bar,” I say. “Like in the olden days.”
The bar-back is leaning over, wiping down tables, and it’s only a matter of minutes before he gets to where we are. I stand up and sling my bag over my shoulder. “Hey, what do you know about that guy?”
“The pretty one?” Sean says. “His name’s Sylus. Or Sy, I guess.”
“Le sigh,” I say. “Is he single?”
“I think so.”
“How can that be?”
“He’s young. I think, like, nineteen or something.”
“How can he work at a bar, then?”
“He doesn’t drink,” Sean says. “You guys would be awful together.”
I take off. I don’t go to the party in the Bayview and I don’t even feel like riding my bike. I walk it next to me, whacking my ankle on the pedal every few steps, and carry it up the stairs when I get home. Sophie is listening to Lykke Li in her room, but I don’t feel like knocking and going in to chat. I close my door, kick off my shoes, and get into bed fully clothed. I don’t feel like a nightcap, don’t feel like brushing my teeth, getting undressed, falling asleep, or looking at porn. I just want to lie still and think about him all night and all day. I do that for about three minutes. Then I open my laptop and change my Facebook status to abstinent until further notice.
What’s going on? a few people write on my wall.
Holy shit, I think I’m waiting for someone, I write back.
No one responds. They probably have no idea what to say to that, or maybe they just all fell asleep.
—
I get a taste for ice cream. I go to the shop at all times of day, trying to get a sense of when his shifts are, tipping big, sitting on the bench out front because I’m too nervous to say more to him than just my order.
“I liked it better when you dated baristas,” Lars says one morning when I drag him there for a scoop of Secret Breakfast: ice cream, cornflakes, and bourbon. “You had all this energy back then, and you smoked more. Now you’re just gonna get all fat and American, and I’ll have to kick you out of the band ’cause you won’t be cute anymore.”
“But I’m getting it in a cup, not a cone,” I protest. On the other side of the window, Sy has his hand up his shirt. He’s scratching his chest and yawning. I turn back to Lars. “Do you think he’s too young for me?” (Last year, on our way to a gig in the East Bay, Lars pulled up at a petrol station to buy a birthday card for the girl he was dating, and came back to the car pissed that they only had a Happy 17th card on the stand. “She’ll just think it’s funny,” I said. “No, she won’t,” he said. “She’ll think I’m a forgetful dick.” Then he leaned on the steering wheel, crossed out the 7, and replaced it with a 6.)
“I think you’re too young for him,” he says now. “You revert to this weird preverbal state around him.”
I laugh. “It’s true because it’s funny.” I sit back and let the cornflakes go soggy on my tongue before I swallow them. The sun is out even though it’s San Francisco in June. There is a tree right in front of us, with all its leaves bristling on it like goosebumps: a little miracle on Harrison Street that I never noticed before because I was too busy worrying that the wind was messing up my hair on my way to the shop.
“Isn’t this gorgeous?” I say, leaning back against the glass. “Isn’t it just fucking gorgeous in this town? Aren’t we so lucky to live here?”
Lars shifts away and turns to stare at me. I smile and shrug and take a lick of my breakfast, and all he says is, “Ew.”
—
I tell everyone about my new crush. I call friends in England and wake them up to talk about it.
“Babe,” their boyfriends say, “who’s calling so late?”
“How long have you been seeing him?” they all want to know.
“Well.” I try to calculate. “If you add up all the interactions we’ve had, the time is probably equivalent to about half a date.”
I tell all my friends and people I meet at parties, and I find it a legitimate enough excuse to use on other guys who ask me out. I tell every pretty, skinny, younger, single, straight girl I know, and half of them seem to know who I’m talking about.
“That guy?” says a girl at the Bike Kitchen who comes over to borrow a pedal wrench. “That guy’s got hell of eyelashes.”
“He’s too young for you,” I say.
I tell my Cinema 101 summer-school students at the end of class one day, after I’ve switched off Annie Hall and turned on the lights. They stop packing away their books and sit there blinking at me.
“Any questions?” I ask. “About Woody Allen’s view of romantic love versus passionate love? Or about my new crush?”
They’re silent for a moment and then Chelsea raises her hand—Chelsea from Santa Fe, who said on the first day of class that her favorite movies are the classics, like Point Break.
“I’m just confused,” she says when I call on her. “I guess we all thought you were kind of, I don’t know, old and married and settled or something.” The other girls in the class nod. The boys sit there with their legs out straight, staring at their shoes.
“I’m not old,” I say. “I’m twenty-seven.” It takes a second of silence for me to realize that to them it’s the same thing.
I go to tell my ex-boyfriend at the Common Room. A girl stops me on the corner of Valencia and 21st to ask me if I want to save the world.
“I’m a member in England,” I say. That’s the line I use for everything.
“No, we’re a local group,” she says. “We’re lobbying the mayor to provide more community garden space in the city, so people can grow their own organic produce and eat locally.”
“I mainly eat ice cream,” I tell her.
“That can’t be good for you.”
“Well, I kind of like the guy who works at the ice cream place.”
“Oh, okay.” She looks up the street; waiting, I guess, for a more viable petition-signing candidate to come along.
“So I keep dropping in, you know. And I probably look like such an idiot.”
“Uh-huh,” she says.
“The guy’s probably scared of me by now.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I better get back to work, so—”
Inside the café Luke is steaming milk. “Hey,” I say. “Those street canvassers are so annoying.”
“Yeah,” he says, but he has other thing
s on his mind. “I can’t work out if I want to get rid of sugar altogether, or just charge people extra for it. Coffee’s a fruit. It should taste sweet enough on its own.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “Can I ask you the most inappropriate favor since the time I told you to make out with that French guy in front of me?”
“Did I do that?” he asks.
“No. You called him ‘freedom douche’ and you didn’t speak to me for three days. But can I talk to you about the boy I like?”
“Claire Claire Claire,” he says. But he listens as I describe the guy, as do Jackie at the register and Alex, who’s pulling the shots.
“Is it tall americano?” asks Jackie.
“I think it’s double macchiato,” Luke says. I tell them about the scar on his forearm, and they all agree he gets pour-overs to go.
“So what do I do?” I ask. “You hospitality people are so lucky. You stand here all day while a parade of cute people come in to flirt with you. The rest of us have to schlep around town just to get a little noticed.”
“Speaking of,” Luke says, looking over at a girl waiting in line, wearing leggings and a purple hoodie. “It’s yoga girl.”
“Hey, that’s not fair,” I tell him. “You can’t date anyone before I do. You have to stay obsessively in love with me until I move on and feel secure with somebody else.”
“You better ask this guy out, then,” Luke says, handing me the other half of a shot to taste. “They say it takes a week for every month you dated someone to get over them. According to that schedule, I’ll be done with you by August.”
—
I go to the Make Out Room before open. “Hey,” I say. He’s sweeping the floor behind the bar and I wonder what it says in that little notebook in his pocket. He never seems to carry a pen.
“Hey.” He leans the broom against the sink and comes over.
“My name’s Claire,” I say. “I’ve been taking a poll in the neighborhood and an overwhelming majority of respondents think you should ask me out.”
He looks down at his hands and I think he’s embarrassed, but then he looks right up at me and says, “Why don’t you just ask me out?”
“Because you’re the guy,” I say.
“But you’re older than me,” he says.
“But you’re the pretty one.” We’re at an impasse. He picks up the broom and starts sweeping again.
“Fine,” he says, when he gets to the end of the bar. “Would you, Claire, like to go on a date with me sometime, and not drink alcohol, and not go for ice cream, and maybe even get out of the neighborhood and go somewhere else?”
“Why, I’d love to,” I say. “Let’s meet at the bar across the street tomorrow at eight.”
So we go drinking. Well, I go drinking, and he sits next to me and watches. It turns out he does drink on occasion, but right now he’s on a cleansing diet. All he’s allowed to ingest is a mixture of lemon juice, water, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. He pulls a jar of it out of his messenger bag, twists the lid off, and takes a gulp. He hands it to me to try.
“This’d be better with tequila,” I say. “Should I get us some shots?”
“No,” he says, hugging the jar to his chest. “Don’t corrupt me.”
After I’ve had two whiskeys with beer backs he says he thinks I should stop drinking for the night.
“But we’re having fun,” I tell him.
“I know,” he says. “But we’re getting to know each other and I don’t want you to do anything you’d regret.” (This reminds me of the time I saw Beirut play at the Great American Music Hall. It was their first tour, they were all still teenagers, and afterward I saw the guitarist having a smoke out front. “That was amazing,” I said. “It made me wanna run away and join a gypsy band.” “Hey, man, be careful,” he said. “Don’t run away from your problems.”)
“Wow,” says Sy. “You saw Beirut on their first tour ever?”
We walk over to my place on Shotwell, and we sit on the front steps while I smoke a cigarette. “You shouldn’t smoke so much,” he says. I’m kind of annoyed by all the paternal advice, but then I get this horrid thought that maybe he’s thinking about the future, and our children, and how sad they’d all be if I got lung cancer and died. And then the second horrid thought comes: This idea of a future together pleases me. I butt the thing out and we sit there looking at each other. Then he puts his finger on my lips. “I really want to kiss you,” he says. I look at him. I can’t stop looking at him. “But I also wanna save it.”
—
A week later, his cleanse is over. I go to his house on Bryant and we sit out on the fire escape and drink vodka with homemade lemonade and mint. His roommates go in and out of the kitchen, I can see them through the window. When they finally turn the light off, I tilt over until my cheek touches his shoulder. I feel him tense up, and I wonder if he’s changed his mind about me, but then he reaches over and takes my hand.
He looks down into the darkness. “It’s hard to see it right now, but there’s a whole garden down there.”
“Really?” I lean forward, stick my face through the bars, and try to see something.
“Yeah, there are succulents and lavender and the most amazing bougainvillea. Plus a whole vegetable patch. Spinach, beets, cucumbers. All kinds of herbs.”
“Did you plant it?”
“A lot of it. My parents own a nursery in Amherst. When I moved out here, I drove across the country with a suitcase in the trunk, and a backseat full of cuttings and seeds and bulbs. I had to drive super fast so things wouldn’t wilt or die on the way. Then I had to search Craigslist for a place with a backyard.”
Should it be like this? Should I feel intimidated by a nineteen-year-old? Shouldn’t I be thinking about what’s going to happen next: whether or not we’re going to kiss this time, whether he likes me as much as I like him, whether or not the fog is doing crimpy things to my hair? Right now I don’t care about any of that. I close my eyes and push my nose into his neck and he doesn’t complain about it being cold. He squeezes my fingers between his and says, “I have no idea why you’re in California and not in England, but I’m really glad you’re here.”
We stay out there for a while. We must get pretty drunk because by the time we go to his room, we both fall into his bed in our clothes and pass out. When I wake up later, we’re kissing. He puts his hand on my lower back and pulls me against him. We kiss some more. I roll on top of him, then he rolls on top of me. Then I take off all my clothes and he pulls off his T-shirt. His body is long and skinny with no hair on his chest. There’s a tattoo over his heart but it’s too dark in the room to make out what it is. When I go to put my hand inside his jeans, he pulls it away and puts it, palm flat, over his face.
“Let me guess,” I whisper, “you want to save it.”
“No,” he whispers back. “I just have my period.” He laughs and scrapes his teeth against my palm.
I roll away, onto my back, and try to slow my breath. After a few minutes he asks if I’m okay.
“I’m fine,” I say. “My body’s just going crazy right now. I’m trying to calm it. Maybe I should think about something else. The new Arsenal away uniform? Or my nanna?”
“Just pretend you’re a little kid and you don’t know about physical things yet,” he suggests.
“Wait a second.” I sit straight up and look at him. “Are you that kid? Are you still—a virgin?”
He props himself up on his elbows. “No,” he says. “I’m nineteen.”
“You kids today,” I say. “Starting so young. Was it at a rainbow party? Or were you just sexting at recess?”
“Where did you meet your first boyfriend?” he asks. “In an IRC chat room? What was his A/S/L?”
The boy can hustle.
“Come on,” he says now, tugging my arm.
“Where are we going?”
“To brush our teeth.”
“No way.” I flop down and push my face into the pillow. “I’m too tired.”
“Come on. You’ll be happy in the morning that you did it.”
“Don’t you know you get a free pass on brushing your teeth when you’re drunk? Same as washing off your makeup. And, anyway, I don’t have my toothbrush here.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he says. “You can use mine.”
He leans over and kisses me on the mouth, and I slowly get to my feet.
—
We’re hanging out. Which comes before dating, which comes before seeing each other, which comes before being in a relationship. But I’m pretty sure it’s happening. Every few nights we meet up and talk about going to see a band or catching a movie downtown or cooking something at one of our houses or introducing each other to our friends. Then we go drinking. And because he’s pretty and I actually like him, I drink to get drunk.
“Don’t you want to remember this beginning bit clearly?” my friend James asks me one day on campus, when I meet him for lunch wearing big hangover sunglasses to block out the Berkeley light. “You’re getting to know him, you’re learning about each other. Don’t you want to have the memory of that later on?”
“He makes me too nervous,” I say. “The only way I can talk to him at all is by getting totally drunkified.”
We are getting to know each other, sort of. Some nights I’ll ask him a question and he’ll swear I’ve asked it before.
“An older sister and a younger brother,” he says. “Remember? You said you have a cousin whose name is Harriet, too.”
“Oh yeah,” I say. “I wonder what she’s up to.”
I apply too many layers of lipstick in smudgy bathroom mirrors between rounds, and I feel like I’m being super sharp and funny because he laughs at most things I say. When we leave a place at two, he holds my hand on the walk home, steadying me as I jump between cracks in the sidewalk.
Sleepovers happen at his place because I’m embarrassed about how messy my room is. His bed is always neatly made with its white blanket and gray pillows, and it seems like he does laundry three times a week.
“I hope you can meet my mom sometime,” he says one night when we’re looking at photos on his computer. “You guys would get along.”
Hot Little Hands Page 11
