“So what?” Manny replied. “I want a boyfriend, too. A cute white boy like you, Robby.” Robin downed the rest of his beer, unsure what to say, afraid of his own stiffening dick. And then, out of nowhere, the bartender, responding to a complaint from a customer about a minor in the room, ordered all three of them out. Juan got loud with the bartender, his arms spinning and gesturing as he lobbed out indignant, high-pitched fighting words, “You can’t tell me what to do, motherfucker, I’m a paying customer,” while Robin scurried out to the street and Manny followed, laughing.
Night had fallen, and the temperature had dropped, but Robin felt encircled by light from every direction, wrapped in it. The glistening, frosty air seemed to melt around him. The indignity of being kicked out of the bar was nothing compared to the thrill of having gotten away with something adult, and the heart-quickening attention from burly, thick-browed Manny, who maybe looked a little like a shorter, stockier Clark Gable. Gently buzzed, Robin walked with them down Seventh Avenue to the subway, feeling more like a New Yorker than ever before. Manny threw an arm over his shoulders for a while, and Robin felt how tightly he was being held.
He sat between Juan and Manny on the uptown IND train. “Come party with us in the Bronx,” Manny said. “Juan has cocaine at his apartment.”
Cocaine: the chemical sound of it was like a cold draft on his neck, and he felt himself flinch.
“I only smoke pot,” he said, in the most confident tone he could muster.
“Coca, mota, we got it all for you,” Manny purred.
Robin nodded as if eager to go along, but he knew better. Knew that this day had to end.
At Times Square, he waited for the last possible moment, and then darted from the train without warning. His final glimpse of them was Manny’s unhappy face as the doors slid shut, and Juan’s gleeful giggles at Manny’s expense. Robin mouthed, “Sorry,” and then dashed along the platform and up the stairs.
The clamor of Times Square thumped like something already inside of him, as if the very same honking and blinking of the streets was also pulsing in his own blood. Past the porn places, he saw the marquees of Broadway theaters, theaters his mother had taken him to, as if they were the lights of his own front porch. The varied and seedy strangers all around were his own neighbors. For a few moments he was immobile with an almost religious joy. Then he realized that a dirty guy with slobber at his mouth was staring at him, and was shuffling closer, and Robin ran with all his strength back to the bus terminal.
He didn’t use the words “gay bar” with Ruby that night, when he explained his day to her, because any bar at all was bad enough, especially with strangers. She was clearly upset that he’d wound up in the city, and he worried that he had revealed too much to her, that she would spill these secrets to his mother and father. But Ruby backed him up when he told his parents that he’d spent the day with Scott.
He learned then what has since proven to be solidly true: Ruby can keep a secret. Over the years, she has kept many, many secrets for him.
And yet: to explain to her about George seems like breaking some intimacy too delicate to sustain scrutiny. More time should pass. One night does not require a confession.
Robin goes back to bed. To his own bed, crisply made, the bedspread flat as paper, his two pillows placed symmetrically on either side of a corduroy covered backrest, a stuffed, squat thing with short arms, affectionately nicknamed “the husband.” I’ll sleep easier here, he tells himself, sleep filled with dreams. In fact he gets no rest at all. He wakes again and again, each time checking the clock, then instinctively looking toward the bedroom door, wondering if George, in his messy bed, has woken up and discovered Robin has left him alone.
Bright morning. Sudden noise: the clanging metallic ring of the phone.
Robin bolts upright with a where-am-I, what’s-happening bewilderment. And then, as the phone keeps ringing, it’s all there again, with the instant force of a slap on the head: What You Did Last Night.
The clock at the side of his bed reads 9:05. It’s Sunday, isn’t it? Who calls at nine on a Sunday?
He slides from bed without putting on clothes and trips his way through a glaringly bright living room. The machine picks up the call as he hoists the receiver from the cradle, which ignites a round of ugly high-pitched squeals, the answering-machine microphone shrieking feedback. “Hold on, wait,” he mumbles, fumbling for the off switch.
“Robin?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“It’s Calvin Kraft.”
“Oh. Hey.”
“Yeah, it’s me. So, um, listen, I, uh…”
As Calvin hesitates, Robin tries to remember the message that Ruby left last night. She was on the boardwalk, she’d been at a party, she sounded drunk. “Is my sister with you?”
“No. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“She called me last night. From the boardwalk.”
“What time? Did you talk to her? Do you know where she is?” Calvin’s eruption is plaintive, needy, so unlike him.
“You don’t know where she is?”
“I tried to stop her, but she went off with those girls—”
“What girls?”
“—and she never came back and, fuck, man, I haven’t heard from her. I thought, she probably called you—”
“I wasn’t home when she called.”
“Fuck. Robin, I’m sorry, but, man, it’s really not my fault. You know me, you know I wouldn’t do anything to her…” His voice trails away, and Robin finds himself remembering the scene in Calvin’s screenplay where one of the guys gets rough with one of the girls, a repulsive little exchange rank with “bitch” and “cunt,” and Carter, the guy Robin would play, honorably steps in to defend. Punches fly, solving the argument swiftly and unconvincingly.
Robin stretches the already stretched-out phone cord to the kitchen, fishes a scrap of paper and a ballpoint pen from the junk drawer, and writes down the phone number at the house where Calvin is staying, a place rented by Calvin’s sister, Alice, and some of her friends. He takes down the name of the bar where Ruby was last seen, Club XS, which sounds dreadful. Apparently there was an altercation: Ruby in a slap fight with another girl, a bunch of shouting on the sidewalk. It hardly seems possible. Ruby’s message mentioned some guy she was looking for; maybe that’s where Ruby is now, with him, whoever he is. This also seems unlikely, Ruby abandoning her boyfriend for another guy, not telling anyone where she was going. Robin decides not to mention this guy to Calvin. Ruby will call, of course she will call, and when she does, she’ll have an explanation. “Don’t worry, she’ll turn up,” Robin assures Calvin, trying to sound unworried.
“Yeah, you’re right. Of course.” Calvin’s voice is nearly a hush. Then he brightens: “How are you liking Entering and Breaking?”
“What?”
“The script I sent you. My feature.”
It takes a certain amount of willpower not to just say, Fuck you and your script, go find my sister! “I haven’t gotten that far into it.”
“It’s a good part for you, right?”
“Sure,” he exhales heavily, trying to gain some balance in the midst of this news. “Look, call me when you hear from her, OK?”
From over his shoulder, he hears George. Robin turns and sees him, standing there in his underwear. He has long legs but a short torso, which gives him the look of someone taller than five-seven. He has a firmer midsection than Robin. Last night, while he brought himself off, George rubbed the flat, lower part of his abdomen, like a lamp from which he was coaxing a genie.
Robin lowers the piece of paper in his hand to cover his cock, now half-mast and growing.
“Did you just get up?” George asks.
“Yeah, the phone,” Robin mutters, wondering if he should pretend he never left George’s bed, or on the contrary, make it plainly clear.
Robin steps toward the hallway, which George is more or less blocking, and has to jockey around him to get back to his bedro
om, to his clothes. George reaches out and makes a playful grab for Robin’s cock, swiping the head, which pulls from Robin an involuntary gasp, the sensation so electric it might have been George’s tongue instead of his fingers.
“We might have a situation,” he calls out from his room, as he pulls shorts and a T-shirt from his black steamer trunk, the same one that he lives out of in his dorm room. “My sister is missing.”
George comes to the doorway, and Robin summarizes Calvin’s call. “Do you think I should call my mother?”
George seems to be staring past Robin, toward the bed. “I’m not really awake yet,” he says. “Why don’t I get us some breakfast and coffee?”
“Caffeine. Yes.” Sending George from the apartment is a good idea; he’ll probably go to the bagel place near campus, which will give Robin at least a half hour alone, time to get his bearings. And yet: they never “get breakfast” for each other. The gesture feels loosely romantic, the kind of thing Peter would do for him on lazy Sunday mornings.
Robin slumps on the couch, smoking his last cigarette, wishing he had asked George to buy another pack. He sips at a glass of water, wanting an aspirin. He draws his knees to his chest and squints like a cat. The sun streams through the windows; the green leaves on a single visible tree have a damp sheen on them, like oiled flesh. The early-morning storm came and went, as if something he dreamed up. Calvin’s call has had the effect of snapping him into heightened alertness, but he is also aware of the dull thump of blood in his head, the effect of last night’s high, still lingering in his system. The beer, the pot, the scramble from the cops. The orgasm. George.
George places the various pieces of the puzzle alongside each other, looking for clues to Ruby’s whereabouts. “Calvin last saw her with a couple of girls. But Ruby’s message said she was looking for this boy—”
“Someone she used to know.”
“So maybe,” George continues, “the girls have something to do with him. Maybe they’re friends of his.”
“It’s just not like her.”
George shrugs coolly. “She’s changing. Dressing like an undertaker’s daughter. Going out with a creep like Calvin, who your mother doesn’t approve of. This is just one more thing.”
“Why doesn’t she fucking call me?” Robin hears the edge of anger in his voice, anger at Ruby’s behavior, anger at Calvin for foisting this problem on him. There’s even perhaps a touch of annoyance at George, at his calm detachment.
“She wouldn’t necessarily call you if she’s in the middle of some party weekend.”
“But, come on, George. This is Ruby. We tell each other everything.”
He finds himself staring into the empty coffee cup, fixating on the grounds left at the bottom, a dark constellation. He connects the dots, drawing a six-pointed star, a sailboat, a little house with the roof blown half off. He says, “In Greenlawn, my mother worked at the library with this Irish lady, Josephine, who claimed she could read tea leaves. She’d make you a cup of loose tea, then swirl the dregs around, and then she’d look into the cup with this very weird expression on her face, in a kind of trance, and she’d tell your future.”
“That doesn’t sound very reliable.”
“Josephine supposedly predicted my parents’ divorce, plus us moving to Manhattan. Maybe she saw the skyline in the tea leaves.”
George reaches across the table for Robin’s cup. Looking into it, he snorts, “You seem to have a pretty vague future.”
“Do you see the sailboat? Maybe it means I’m going to travel.”
“Well, you are. To London.”
“Not by sailboat, I hope.”
George takes a final swig from his own cup. He fiddles the cup clockwise, then counterclockwise, and then pronounces, “I definitely see the outline of two men engaged in sexual activity.”
Robin feels his face warm up. OK, you have to clear the air, he thinks, though he doesn’t have any idea what he might say, doesn’t know how to proceed, and so instead he puts on a campy voice and says, “I feel like a cheap slut.”
George manages a smile, but he seems to be waiting for something more.
Robin says, “We probably shouldn’t get in the habit of that.”
George nods slowly, and then pushes his chair back from the table. “Yeah, you just needed a good rebound fuck. And I needed to shake Matthias.”
“You’re my best friend,” Robin says earnestly.
“And coworker. Speaking of which, I better get going, if I’m going to shower before work.” He lifts an arm and sniffs a pit, fanning away a stench that Robin remembers burrowing into last night on the couch, licking him there.
They both laugh at the gesture, a bit too hard.
George throws away his coffee cup.
Robin watches him leave the room. He makes himself stay put, even as he imagines following George into the bathroom, stripping off his clothes, standing close to him in the shower. Letting the water cover them both.
The next couple hours, alone in the apartment, seem to lengthen eternally. Except for a run to a corner store on Baltimore Ave., where he allows himself a minute of small talk with the old-timer at the register, who seems to be getting used to Robin showing up a couple times a week for Parliaments and Diet Coke, he remains mostly on the couch, expecting a call from Ruby that doesn’t come.
She’s fine, he tells himself. Just because she doesn’t want to phone in her whereabouts to Calvin doesn’t mean she’s in trouble. Maybe she’s just sick of him, needs some space. George called Calvin a creep, which doesn’t seem exactly fair. Yes, Calvin can be hard to deal with, but Robin knows the type well. There have been so many boys like Calvin in Robin’s high school and college art classes. They’re introverted and socially awkward, and they overcompensate with brash pronouncements about the only thing they know well: cult movies or comic books or the esoteric details of a science fiction writer’s invented world. These boys channel their excitable and off-putting temperaments into creativity, and when their creative projects don’t quite succeed, they become more defensive, more opinionated, more sure of their superiority. Robin has endured hot crushes on more than one boy like this. Alton was like that, full of facts about obscure rock bands and musicians you’d never heard of, but never actually starting that post-punk band he claimed was going to be huge.
There on the couch, Robin goes back to Calvin’s script. He reads aloud the lines he would be saying, were he to take the part of Carter: “I’m excited by your tits…. Every guy who stares at your tits is like apunch in my face…. That top you’re wearing makes your tits look great.” He laughs. He’s never spoken to a girl this way, crudely, about her breasts. Then his laughter catches in his throat: Does Calvin think about Ruby this way? Does he say things to her like this? Maybe that’s why she’s not so eager to call him back. Maybe he’s a pig.
But Carter also says, “I’ve seen his world-famous dick,” and “Do you think I’m jealous of his dick?” and “You think you can intimidate me because my cock is smaller. Think again.”
Robin skips ahead to the last scene. Carter is standing in front of the bathroom mirror, holding a “straight razor” in one hand and “staring at the soft exposed flesh of his wrist.” Suicide is the implication, and then the film ends. He sets the script aside, as confused by the character as Calvin seems to be about himself.
Where is Ruby? Has she gotten herself into some dodgy situation with a strange guy, or with girls who hang out at boardwalk nightclubs getting into bar brawls? He finds himself imagining a call from a hospital, “Your sister was found…”
A sense of menace takes hold. What if she is simply…gone? Disappeared. Vanished. He hears his mother scream, sees her collapse, like last time, when the news came that Jackson had flatlined, when he himself was so young and still had to find the strength to hold her up, support the weight of her grief. He sees his father weeping, his reserve breaking apart, anger melting into tears. He remembers that day all too clearly. It was his own fourteen
th birthday, and they had just eaten cake and opened presents when the hospital called. It would be a perfectly cruel twist of fate if Ruby came into harm’s way on Jackson’s birthday, Jackson like a curse hanging over the two of them, something they can’t shake, because they were there, they saw him fall. And he feels it again, that sensation: the air is being forced from his throat. Reflexively, he starts prodding at his neck, investigating his glands as if they’ve started to swell up. He makes himself stop. Don’t start spiraling.
Ruby isn’t dead. She hasn’t disappeared, not for good. It would be too much for any of them to bear. He exhales from deep within, steadying himself, extinguishing unwelcome memories the way you snuff out a candle before leaving a room, so you don’t risk burning the place down.
When someone goes missing, you either search for her, or you wait it out.
The idea of a “search” is hard to pull into focus.
But the waiting is unbearable.
At one o’clock, right on time, Dorothy calls. She sounds surprised that he’s picked up. “I thought you were working today.”
“No, I don’t work on Sundays.”
“Hmm. Your sister said something about…” Dorothy cuts off her sentence with a cluck. He can’t quite glean the subtext, though there’s something she’s not saying. He hears her clattering in the kitchen: utensils scraping metal, water running, the shutting of a cupboard door. More and more, Dorothy cooks. She’s come a long way from her unhappy kitchen experiments in Greenlawn, when she was forever boiling vegetables into mush or burning lasagna in the oven. Now she concocts elaborate dishes, recipes clipped from the New York Times Magazine and saved in three-ring binders. What does she do with all this food, when she’s so often alone? It’s true that she’s grown plump, curvy in a way she never was, but she must be throwing food away all the time. Or giving it away. For years, an elderly couple upstairs, the Finkels, accepted Dorothy’s creations, thanking her profusely with “You shouldn’t have” and then inviting her in for a litany of medical complaints and grievances against their own faraway children. Then Mr. Finkel died and Mrs. Finkel was put in a home by one of those children, so Dorothy, Robin guesses, is making extra food for no one.
Robin and Ruby Page 9
