Beware of Love in Technicolor

by Kirstie Collins Brote

  “Is she your girlfriend, or your ex-girlfriend, as you insist?”

  “Ex-girlfriend. I don’t think she’ll be coming back here anytime soon.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I told her I had no interest in an exclusive relationship, especially a long-distance one.”

  “Oh,” I said. I picked at my food. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but I had a new wardrobe to protect.

  “I told her about you.”

  “What? Why’d you do that? What did you tell her?” My heart began beating like a drum.

  “I told her I met someone I’d like to get to know better,” he said. Again, I felt like he was studying my face, my lips.

  I had absolutely no experience on which to draw to come up with a response. None. So I sat there, my fair skin aflame. The only thing I knew how to do was ruin the moment.

  “The French fries are cold,” I said.

  These French fries are cold?

  Yep. I really said that. The statement later became one of those private jokes we shared as a couple. But that came later.

  ***

  Though I have described myself as a punk rock chick, I grew up in a family of sports fanatics. There was no escaping their fanaticism. I remember fondly the heyday of the Boston Celtics in the eighties. We went to many games as a family when I was young, and I would paint giant green signs on white bed sheets to hang over the rails in the balcony. I loved getting my artwork on evening sports highlights, which I did twice.

  The night the ball went through Buckner’s legs, the year the Red Sox lost to the Mets in the World Series, my brother became a Yankees fan. A piece of my father died that night.

  During my tennis phase, I was a huge Stefan Edberg fan. I even stole his near-empty bottle of Evian water from a table top during an exhibition match at the Boston Garden. I kept it on my dresser in my bedroom for two years, until it was all nearly evaporated. I kept the bottle in a box in the basement until my parents moved out of their house when I was thirty-two years old.

  But my favorite sport to watch was hockey.

  My father still proudly displays the photo of me, at age nine, with Bobby Orr’s arm around my shoulder, in the photo collage in their family room. I remember Bruins parties at my parents’ house when I was a small child, when the neighbors would gather and get drunk, yelling at the TV in the rec room of the simple split-level home.

  So, when Brian Deneen, a starting player on the university’s hockey team and a fellow Intermediate French classmate, asked me to go with him to the foreign film we had to see for class that night, how could I say no? He was a starting player.

  I was standing in my closet, pulling on my boots when there was a knock at my door. I looked at my clock. It was a bit earlier than I was expecting Brian.

  “Come in!” I called. We hardly ever locked our door. But instead of Brian, it was John, toting a backpack full of biology books.

  “Hey,” he said, dropping his pack on my desk. He sat down on my bed and looked at me.

  “You going somewhere?” he asked.

  “I have to go see some French film for class,” I told him.

  “You want some company?”

  At that moment, Molly entered the room with a basket full of clean laundry. She dropped it with a thud in her closet and turned to us.

  “Howdy, John. What are you doin’ here?” she asked innocently.

  And then Brian knocked on the door.

  “Come in!” Moly called out.

  He opened the door and said, “Hi.”

  “Hi Brian,” I started. “This is my roommate, Molly.”

  He said hello and shook her hand.

  “And this is John,” I said.

  Brian stepped forward, hand extended. Despite being an imposing figure on the ice, he was still at least three inches shorter than John, and about twenty pounds lighter. He was plainly handsome in that clean cut, student athlete sort of way. John paused for a moment before shaking his hand. He looked at me.

  “Is this a date?” he asked, his right eyebrow raised, daring me to respond.

  “It’s a movie,” I hissed. I turned to Brian before John could say anything else. “Let’s go,” I said in my most chipper voice. “We’ll need seats close enough to read subtitles.”

  I ushered him out the door without looking back.

  ***

  The film was some dreadful piece of work out of Cameroon. As I recall, the story was about an aging man in a small village, attempting to take a virgin wife in an effort to hide his impotence. Hardly a romantic comedy.

  I was distracted the entire time. I had gotten my hopes up regarding Brian, and here I was, dwelling on John and what he must be thinking. I had to face it. I was a lost cause.

  I quickly discarded Brian after the film with some excuse about an early morning exam. I hurried back to Wyndham to extract a full account of what transpired once Brian and I left. I figured Molly would be chomping at the bit to tell me. I was not expecting John to still be sitting on my bed.

  He was the first thing I saw when I entered, which stopped me short at the door. He was flipping through my dog-eared copy of Wuthering Heights, the copy I’d had since eighth grade. Molly, sitting at the computer, turned and looked at me. Without saying a word, she conveyed a strong sense of confusion, and a small bit of worry.

  “How was the film?” he asked, placing the paperback down beside himself.

  “Coma-inducing,” I replied, gathering my composure and entering the room.

  “How was the date?”

  “Slightly better.”

  I threw my blazer over the back of my desk chair, opened my fridge, and popped a Diet Coke. I sat on the chair and looked at the boy sitting on my bed.

  “You like to write in books,” he said, fingering the yellowed pages of the classic.

  “It helps me remember how I feel about them,” I answered.

  “You like this one.”

  “I do.”

  We locked eyes for a moment. Neither of us said anything. The rhythmic punch of computer keys as Molly did her homework was the only sound in the room.

  “Well, take care, then,” he said, breaking our gaze. He stood, looked at me once more, and grabbing his backpack on the way, walked out the door. That fucker.

  I wish I could sit down on that Laura Ashley eyesore, across from that poor, confused girl, and tell her not to waste her time. Tell her to put him out of her head and out of her heart before it is too late. Tell her to give Brian Deneen another chance; he does go on to play professional hockey, after all.

  I wouldn’t have listened to my older self.

  Chapter Three

  I like having a best friend. I have never been one for large groups, preferring the closeness that develops when two or three people are allowed to drop the social jokeying and actually reveal their true selves. Or at least the ones closest to being true.

  I knew that Molly was not going to be a best friend. She was tolerable and funny in an Urkel kind of way; but we shared very little in common other than our first dorm room. In those early days, though, we used each other to ward off loneliness.

  She was taking an economics class, and had to do a project at the local grocery store. I was bored, and did not feel like conjugating French verbs. I decided to tag along. As we walked by Holt, I found myself counting the windows along the second floor to find John’s room. There was a light on. I wondered what he was doing, and who he might be with. At the entrance of the building, I heard someone call my name.

  “Hey, Greer!”

  I turned quickly, hoping.

  It was Topher. Even though I was disappointed, the sight of Topher made me happy. I could not help but like him, even though I did not know him. He was boy-next-door cute, with a hint of a young, smoldering Marlon Brando just barely, possibly, under the surface there somewhere. It may have been the long, dark lashes he had been gifted with. He always wore a beat-up baseball cap on backwards, and shorts even though the evening
was chilly. Being around Topher felt like summer vacation. Molly and I stopped, and I introduced the two. She lit up like a Christmas tree at the sight of him. She may as well have had little hearts floating around her head.

  “Is your name Chris, or Topher?” she asked him.

  He looked surprised, as if her accent had snuck up on him from behind.

  “Christopher, really,” he corrected, taking off his hat to smooth his hair with his left hand. He then placed his hat back on. “You can call me...,”

  “Topher,” I nodded to Molly.

  “Where are you headed?” he asked, dropping the name debate and shifting his weight from one beat up, black Chuck Taylor to the other.

  “Molly has some very important research to do over at the grocery store. I’m just along to provide moral support,” I told him.

  “Good friend,” he said.

  “Good roommate,” I corrected. I noticed he was holding a key in his right hand, and looked at the entrance of Holt behind him. “Do you live here?” I asked.

  “Yeah, second floor,” he answered. “Why?”

  I flashed my best smile at the boy.

  “Would you like to come with us, Topher?”

  ***

  Ok. So maybe my intentions were not pure, and maybe I started out using Topher more for his geographical coordinates than a desire to cultivate a new friendship. But I soon discovered that he and I shared the same quirky sense of humor that not many other people seemed to get about me.

  Standing in the snack aisle, after we had wandered away from Molly in the meat department, I spotted a jumbo sized bag of chips. Printed on the side of the red cellophane bag was the phrase “CHIPS FOR DIPS!” I picked up the bag and quickly tossed it to the unsuspecting Topher.

  “Hey look!” I teased as he fumbled around trying to make the catch without dropping

  the bag of Cool Ranch Doritos already in his hands. “They make a snack just for you!”

  And so we carried on, laughing and making corny jokes while Molly scribbled numbers in her notebook.

  From that night on, I could always count on a cute little message to greet me on my dorm room door white board when I returned from class each day. Everyone had a white board on their door back then. I wonder if they do now?

  Anyway, Topher became famous down in The Pit. Molly and I almost never had a working marker on our door, so he was known for stealing pens and not returning them to their proper owner. They all loved him for it. He was a friendly, non-threatening guy, the kind of guy every woman wants for a friend. By November he knew more girls on my floor than I did. And he always remembered to leave a little “hello!” for Molly.

  ***

  The Student Union Building is a hulking, brick monstrosity housing a number of auditoriums, conference rooms, student organizations including the newspaper and radio station, the computer cluster, and a cafeteria-style restaurant called the SUBPub, at least in my memory. I have since heard there is a Pizza Hut/ Taco Bell combo in place of the SUBPub now.

  At any rate, the SUB was the place where most off-campus students hung out in between classes, grabbed a bite to eat, and possibly took a nap on one of the many vinyl benches scattered throughout the building. There was also a student game room in the SUB, with a bowling alley and about a dozen pool tables, where you could play for a buck an hour.

  It was the last few days of September, a Saturday. I was at the SUB to drop off an advertisement I had designed for the Recycling Committee’s new campus-wide recycling program. I figured that if I was going to stick it out for a while, it would be best to get my sorry ass involved in some extracurricular activities. The Recycling Committee didn’t require too much of me, and only met sporadically. I did some art work for them, and wrote some copy for the student newspaper, The Granite.

  After dropping off the assignment, I planned on heading back to my room to work on an essay for my freshman writing class. Then I was going to join Molly and some of the other girls from The Pit for a pizza and a rental movie in the lounge.

  Life was taking on a routine, and I was feeling more comfortable in my new surroundings. I was starting to notice that if you looked closely, there was usually something to do somewhere on campus. I am a person who values my alone time, so aside from not wanting to eat at the dining hall by myself, I didn’t feel too lonely.

  It turned out that Topher and I had many of our classes in the same building, so we often ate lunch together. In order to avoid having to invite Molly, I usually steered us to a different dining hall. Though I felt bad that she was having an even harder time making friends than I, I did not want to be held down by her. She had a way of turning people off. Her eager eyes and wide-open demeanor was something of a shock to the system for most of the east coast natives at the school.

  The college experience was still falling far short of what I had expected. Instead of questioning the world and our place in it, the biggest questions on most students’ minds were, “Where are we going to get some beer?” and “Is Sigma Chi having a party on Saturday night?” It turned out that nobody really grew up over the summer, and college was just a more complicated version of high school, with more freedom, fewer rules, and even more partying.

  Walking up the floating stairs leading from the basement level to the main floor of the SUB, I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder as I reached the top step.

  I turned to find John, who I hadn’t seen since the night of the French film. He was standing two steps below the top, and for the first time, we stood face to face. He smiled sheepishly.

  “You hate me?” he asked.

  “Hate you?” I returned. “I don’t even know you.”

  Being ice-cold is one of a Scorpio’s many gifts. I am a November baby, and fit the description of my birth sign to a tee. Plus, what I didn’t get from the stars, I learned from my mother.

  “I guess I deserve that,” he said. His blond curls were falling in his eyes, but I could see he was genuine. I wanted to reach out and push the hair out of his face, but I kept a tight grip on my copy of The Granite and bottle of Diet Coke. He must have sensed me soften.

  “You play pool?” he asked. He was grinning mischievously now, which I found utterly appealing.

  “Ben and I are down there,” he motioned to the game room at the bottom of the stairs. “Why don’t you come join us?”

  I know. From what I have told you so far, you are assuming I came up with some lame excuse to weasel my way out of embarrassing myself. I probably thought pool was a game for dirt bags and bikers, right?

  I grew up in a house with parents who liked to throw parties. Our basement rec room was a seventies relic featuring white, birch-like paneling and a variety of beer signs and lights declaring the “High LIfe” or other such advertising slogan from the times. There was a real Wurlitzer, and a finished bar with four stools in front, a full-size fridge, working sink, and small dishwasher behind. There were two yellow, naugahyde sofas flanking the outside walls, and a faux fireplace with a cheesy plastic log that glowed red when you plugged it in. But my father’s pride and joy was his antique, 1920 Brunswick pool table, set in the middle of the floor like a prom queen alone on the stage.

  Yeah, I played pool. But I didn’t tell John this.

  Instead, I shrugged my shoulders, and said, “I’m a fast learner.”

  ***

  Downstairs in the game room, I said “hi” to Ben and was introduced to his roommate, Jared. He was from New York, skinny, and moved fast. Ben stepped up to me. Even in a faded Dartmouth t-shirt and khakis with a hole in the knee, Ben looked good.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to me with a smile. He was a close-talker, and I needed to take a step back from him to maintain my personal space. “We’ll take it easy on you.”

  I walked away with $67 of their money that night.

  I assuaged their egos by buying them dinner from Carl’s, a university institution that consisted of a silver lunch truck, and one crusty old New Englander named Carl. Every
evening, his silver truck would round the traffic circle at the center of town, and glide into position in the parking lot just outside the SUB. He would crank out his tattered, red and white striped awning, get the fryolators sizzling, and open for business. But there was a special way of ordering your food that made Carl’s what it was.

  “Whaddya want?” he asked hurriedly, eyes darting in a million directions as he managed the surges of students that circled his truck.

  “Three big guys, abused, and three brown cows,” John ordered for the guys. Translation: three cheeseburger subs with everything and three chocolate shakes.

  “Snotties, on the rag!” I called out to him, finishing our group’s order. It was Carl-speak for French fries with melted cheese and ketchup. “And a Diet Coke!”

  I know. It was pretty gross. But he did a great business. I feel bad for the students there today, now that Carl’s is but a piece of history. What a drag to have only Pizza Hut and Taco Bell to choose from.

  ***

  We walked back to Ben’s dorm, on the other side of campus from where John and I were housed. Area 3 consisted of two near-identical brick towers, built in the eighties. Each had eight floors. They were modern, compared to Wyndham or Holt, and I immediately wished I lived out here in the woods, with the safe elevators and quiet, hidden pipes.

  The guys had obviously been getting to know each other over the moth, but I think that sort of thing comes easier for guys, anyway. Women need so many more details to feel close. Men are just looking for someone to shoot pool and eat greasy food with. I ate about half my fries, and then gave them up to the group. They descended like vultures, leaving an empty box behind in about four seconds flat.