Beware of Love in Technicolor

by Kirstie Collins Brote

  Jared was one of those guys I immediately had a strange feeling about. He was either going to end up as some kind of genius billionaire, like Larry Flint, or in prison for masterminding a grand-scale scandal. His dark hair was a mass of tight curls, worn close to his head. To this day, I cannot hear the Beastie Boys without thinking of Jared.

  Despite my feelings for John, Ben remained a pretty thing to look at. He was so damn good looking, sometimes it was hard to look directly at him. Like it had a power of its own. Girls were constantly flocking around him, tossing their hair and giggling. It was something to watch.

  With the door to their room open to the ebb and flow in the hallway, plans for the night started being made, parties were being discussed, and girls in baggie jeans and baggier sweatshirts were increasing in number. John checked in with me a couple of times, to be sure I wasn’t fading into the shadows. I spent a bit of time just watching him, pretending to be interested in hearing about this person’s major, or that person’s dining hall experience. He towered over everyone. I wondered what it would be like to kiss him.

  For the first time since arriving at the steps of Wyndham more than a month earlier, I was having fun. John, remembering that I didn’t drink, excused us from the group when talk of beer runs and “getting shitfaced” became the focus.

  “You could have stayed,” I told him as we stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor of Harrison.

  “Would you have stayed?” he asked.

  “Probably not. But I wouldn’t have been mad at you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  We were outside now, following the narrow paved path through the woods that would dump us out in the main part of campus, near the theater building.

  “What about smoking?” The chilly air gave our words weight; the billowy, steamy puffs wafted from our mouths as we strode across the street.

  “Cigarettes?” I asked. “I’ve never seen you smoke.”

  “Weed,” he stated.

  “Oh.”

  Now, I was not anti-drug in any kind of Nancy Reagan, just-say-no kind of way. I saw drugs as a weakness. They were a crutch. They were psychic suicide. It was all just theory. I had never so much as abused Nyquil.

  “How do you feel about that?” John pushed me for a response.

  “Are you not going to smoke if I tell you I don’t want you to?”

  “No,” he answered honestly.

  “Then why do need to know how I feel about it?” I was irritated that he had brought it up. I had been having a good time.

  “Because I care how you feel.”

  “You’re acting like a boyfriend or something,” I crossed my arms in front of myself. The night was cold, and I hadn’t prepared to be out this late. My teeth were chattering. My green sweater was made for style rather than warmth. Seeing this, John removed his leather jacket and placed it over my shoulders. It nearly swallowed me whole.

  “I like you Greer, and I want to be your friend.”

  “So be my friend, and stop asking me these questions,” I told him.

  “I don’t know what to make of you,” he said, shaking his head. We were back in the woods, following another narrow path beside a small, babbling brook. I paused on a wooden bridge, and looked down at the swirling water. He stood behind me, and placed his hands on my shoulders. We each stared at the water for a few moments. I turned around and looked up at him. The dappled light from an unseen lamp in the trees made strange, dancing patterns on our faces. Without much effort, he lifted me up and sat me down on the railing of the bridge. We were almost eye to eye. He stood between my knees.

  “I lied,” he said. “I don’t want to be your friend.”

  “What is it you want then?”

  Our first kiss was there on the bridge in the woods. How do you describe a first kiss? It is like trying to hold water in your hands.

  I forgot all about the cold. His lips were soft, as I had imagined, and he was certainly not a novice at the craft, as I was. I felt enveloped by him, and safe. He used his hands to cup my face, and took his time, which I have since learned does not come naturally to most men.

  There is an ancient Chinese proverb that compares kissing to drinking salted water. “You drink, and your thirst increases,” it says. Time, I’m sure, passed by, but we remained unavailable for comment.

  ***

  John walked me back to Wyndham. On the stairs outside we kissed some more.

  “Is this the part of the movie where I invite you inside?” I asked during a break in the kissing.

  “Only if you want to,” he laughed.

  “I want to.”

  Once inside, we crept quietly past the door to the study lounge where I was supposed to be watching Steel Magnolias or some such piece of melodramatic crap, with Molly and the other girls from The Pit who had yet to find a life on campus. I opened the door to my room, and we slipped inside, unnoticed.

  I slid his coat off my shoulders and draped it over my desk chair. He put a Kate Bush CD in my stereo, and we sat down on the bed. My heart was beating like a hummingbird’s, and I was thankful for Kate’s soaring soprano as camouflage for my nervousness.

  “We don’t have to do anything you don’t feel comfortable with,” he said to me. He tucked my hair behind my right ear, and looked in my eyes. His hands were soft. As he leaned in and began kissing me again, the song Wuthering Heights came on, which I am sure he planned, but made an impression nonetheless.

  A minute may have passed. Maybe an hour. I knew when he turned off the light and locked the door that I was going to have to come clean. I just wanted the moment to stay as it was. Just keep kissing me, and don’t stop, and don’t ask any questions, and please don’t expect too much of me.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I lied.

  “You’re lying,” he said. He took hold of both my hands and looked in my eyes. The light coming in from the street lit us up in strips seeping in through the blinds. The whoosh of water raced through the pipes that ran down the wall behind my bed.

  “I’m pretty new to all this,” I finally said. I dropped my eyes and looked down at how tiny my hands looked in his. They looked like a child’s hands.

  “How new?” he asked gently.

  “My last ‘boyfriend’ was Greg Cohen, and I let him kiss me after a night of mini golf in the summer of ‘88,” I replied lamely.

  “Wow,” he said, almost under his breath. I noticed his shoulders drop.

  “I’m sorry, I should have said something.”

  “No, no,” he said, cutting me off. He squeezed my hands, and bent his head down so that I had to look him in the eyes. “I’m just a little stunned is all. How did you go through high school without a real boyfriend?”

  “Nobody ever asked me out.”

  “What a bunch of idiots,” he said. It made me laugh.

  “To be fair to the idiots, I didn’t really look like this in high school,” I admitted.

  “And I’ve spent all this time being intimidated by you,” he said. He looked at me intently, his slate blue eyes moving downward over my nose, and resting on my lips. He traced their outline with his index finger, then leaned in and kissed me again.

  He kissed my lips, my nose, my chin. I wanted to push the curls out of his face, but I was afraid to move. I closed my eyes and did my best to relax. I prayed that biology would kick in and I would suddenly have a clue what to do next. With one hand on the back of my head, and one around my waist, he guided me down on the bed so we were lying down, facing each other. He propped himself up on his right elbow, leaned in, and continued kissing me. His left hand wandered from my shoulder, down my side to my waist, and over my right hip. He pulled me closer, and kissed me harder. I felt my body turn to liquid, and my right hand find its way to the small of his back. At that moment I think I would have let him do anything.

  Anything, that is, if the doorknob hadn’t started twitching and turning, and Molly’s voice hadn’t squeezed in
under the door, shredding the moment with her twang as sharp as a wet cat’s claws.

  “What the hay? Now I know I didn’t lock this dang door!”

  We heard the clicks of the combination door lock being punched outside the room, but before we could sit up and straighten ourselves out, Molly was standing in the door, backlit by the fluorescent hallway lights. She flicked on our overhead light, and jumped when she saw us.

  “Good Lord! Ya’ll scared me nearly half to death!” she laughed and walked into the room. “Hi John,” she continued, seemingly oblivious to the scene she had just interrupted.

  “Hi Molly,” he replied, rolling onto his back and grinning at me. I rolled my eyes and mouthed an apology to him. He took my right hand in his and kissed it.

  “Where were you?” she asked me while she switched on her computer. “I thought you were going to watch the movie with us.” She kicked off her sneakers; they landed in the pile of clean and dirty clothes growing in her closet.

  “Something suddenly came up,” I told her.

  “Like what?” she pressed.

  “Like I had to fleece John’s friends out of a bunch of money.”

  “Nice work, by the way,” John said to me. “I haven’t yet told you how damn sexy that was.” He grinned and gently pinched my butt. I swatted his hand away.

  “Oh good Lord,” Molly said dramatically. “Why don’t you two go get a room?”

  But the moment was lost, and instead, we got a pizza.

  ***

  There is a rule in writing that goes something like this: Don’t introduce a gun in Act One if you don’t plan on using it in Act Two. The gun, in this case, was John’s affinity for illegal narcotics.

  Like I said before, I was not a fan of drug users. I found it hard to respect people who would deliberately trash their body and their mind for some cheap high, only to come crashing back down in the end anyway. Many of my group of friends in high school had been “straight edge.” Some even wore black X’s on their hands to symbolize they were clean.

  The problem was not new to me, though it had never been this personal. Many of my heroes had been terrible drunks and/ or junkies. Bukowski and Kerouac to name two. Hemingway, Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison. The list is too long to go into.

  I always felt so disappointed in them, when I came to the end of their stories. But it was all theoretical. Dealing in reality, and with matters of the heart, is always a much messier affair. John and I forged a deal. He could do all the drinking and smoking and whatever else he wanted to do, but not when he was with me. When he was with me, I wanted him sober.

  “I just don’t want to see you like that,” I told him as I removed the cheese from my slice of pizza.

  “No problem,” he said. “Anything for you.” And he kissed the tip of my nose.

  I’ll wait for you to stop laughing and thinking things like, “What an idiot!” before I continue.

  ***

  I spent the next week trying to figure out what John and I had started. We had dinner together twice, but he made claims to being busy with labs and study groups afterward. He held my hand to walk to the SUB to see a movie, and then spent twenty minutes flirting with a loud, mannish girl he knew from his dorm. He walked me back to Wyndham, but declined to come inside. As I watched him walk away, I noticed him head in the opposite direction from Holt Hall.

  On Friday afternoon, Molly and I went to the mall to blow some money and calories. She had decided to join the crew team, as coxswain, and needed a new alarm clock to be sure she awoke each morning at the crack of dawn. I was glad she had found something to do, but was not so excited about the looming 4:45 am wake-up calls.

  “What do you see in him, anyway?” she asked between bites of frozen yogurt. I had been complaining of the mixed signals I had been receiving from John.

  “I don’t know,” I sighed. “He makes me crazy. He seems to get me, though, like he’s reading my mind sometimes.” I continued to think about the question.

  “He’s a good kisser,” I said, thinking about his lips.

  Walking home from the bus stop, I saw the light on in his room. Since my shopping trip had been bust, and I had no bags to drop in my room, I made the rash decision to drop by unannounced. It was eight o’clock on a Friday night. I knew I would never get my hands on one of the hall phones in The Pit, so I might as well take my chances where I found them.

  Molly continued on her way up the hill as I ran to catch the side door of Holt behind a group of guys. I didn’t want to have to go around and deal with the Friday night security desk setup at the front door each weekend evening, looking for booze and joints and anything else on “the list.” I trotted up two flights of stairs, and stopped to check my hair in the reflection off the darkened window. Satisfied, I opened the door and proceeded to John’s room.

  Second-long Holt was a different world from The Pit. It smelled of wet gym socks and salami. The posters on the walls warning the boys of binge drinking and date rape were scribbled on and ripped, barely hanging to the walls by one or two corners. Almost every door was flung wide open, with boys wandering aimlessly from room to room, the sounds of Pink Floyd and The Allman Brothers tangled in a strange and surreal symphony.

  John’s was the first room on the left after the study lounge. He had a single, which meant he had no roommate, and no room. Only about fifteen feet deep, about seven or eight feet wide where the bed was built into a loft to make room for a desk underneath. In the back, the room narrowed to about four feet wide, and contained one small window.

  When I arrived, I was surprised to see Topher sitting at the desk. A boy I didn’t know was standing in the doorway. John was in the back of the room, pouring ginger ale into a Thermos. His face lit up when he saw me.

  “Greer!” he called out loudly.

  “Hi,” I smiled at him. “Hey, Topher.”

  “You guys know each other?” John asked as he replaced the bottle of ginger-ale in his mini fridge.

  “We rob banks,” I said, with a wink thrown Topher’s way. I had recently learned that my new friend was as much of a film buff as me, but instead of appreciating the Bonny & Clyde quote that I thought for sure he would catch, he gave a nervous laugh.

  “She lent me a pencil at orientation,” he explained.

  “C’mon,” I said, poking his knee with the pointy toe of my boot. “What about the grocery store, all the dining hall lunches, the cute little stick figures on my door?”

  “Uh-oh, sounds like you’re in trouble, brother,” the unknown boy said to him.

  More nervous laughter.

  “This is my friend Brett, from home,” Topher said to me, successfully changing the subject. John stared at me from the back of the room while we guests made our own introductions.

  “To what do we owe this pleasure, Greer?” John asked me, the tone of his voice different now. I felt like I had made a huge mistake by stopping by, but I could not turn and run now.

  “I was just coming back from the mall. I saw your light on,” I replied.

  “Ah, the mall,” he said, and took a sip from the Thermos. “We were just about to leave.”

  “You are coming with us, right?” Brett asked me.

  “Uh, I don’t know,” I started. I looked to John. He met my gaze, and had the same look about him as the night I went to the French film with Brian Deneen.

  “Of course she’s coming with us,” John said, a bit too loudly. “There’s nothing Greer likes more than a party.” He pulled his leather jacket on and looked me straight in the eyes as we all exited his room. He walked in front, his long legs outpacing us. I searched my mind for some excuse to flee, but I came up empty.

  We walked quickly to another dorm in Area 1. Once inside, Topher found the room we were looking for, and we were let in by a small, freckle-faced girl with a blue Mohawk. Her name was Prim, and it was obvious that it was the connection between the two that brought us all here that night. There was another girl inside, Prim’s roommate, who was
a tall, skinny girl named Julie. She had a bottle of tequila in one hand, a cordless phone in the other. I envied them their private room phone.

  The tequila, though, was a different story. I at least understood part of what was making John act like such a jerk. I wondered what exactly he had in that Thermos.

  We hung out in the room for about an hour. They passed around the tequila, taking swigs and grimacing and chasing it with shared bottles of orange soda and Sprite. John kept his Thermos to himself. I was thirsty and dying for a Diet Coke, but did not dare ask for something to drink. I noticed that Brett was abstaining, as I was, though he was laughing and keeping up with the silliness despite his sobriety. I sat quietly in the corner. I think John even forgot I was there for a little while. At one point, I met Topher’s eyes and he smiled one of his summer day smiles at me. Then he jumped up out of the desk chair he was sitting in, threw one of Julie’s hot pink scarves around his neck, and stood in the middle of the room.

  “I am big!” he exclaimed with dramatic flair. “It’s the pictures that got small!”

  Prim grabbed the scarf by the ends and yanked Topher down onto the bed, landing next to me. She sat on top of him. He looked at me, waiting, ignoring the girl tightening the scarf around his neck.

  “Really? Do I win this one?” he asked, his face lighting up. Prim stopped her advances. Julie looked up from her long-distance phone conversation. John remembered I was in the room. I stood up to excuse myself to the soda machine down the hall.

  “Sunset Boulevard,” I stated, glaring at John on my way out the door. He had a faraway, glazed look in his eyes. It was exactly how I did not want to see him.

  “Argh,” I heard Topher growl and laugh on my way out.

  I was seething under the surface. I had specifically told John I wanted nothing to do with this part of his life. How dare he lead me into this situation instead of taking me aside and suggesting I go home?