If You Knew Then What I Know Now

by Ryan Van Meter

  “Have you talked to Lisa this week?” I ask.

  “Who?” he says, swiveling to face me. “Oh, I keep forgetting she’s Lisa to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that she’s Charlie too. To some people she’s Lisa and to some people she’s Charlie. Usually she’s Charlie to me.”

  I want to ask him what the difference is and how he knows which one he’s talking to. I’m also trying to understand how she’s able to hold two names and intriguing personalities inside herself simultaneously when I can barely manage to be interesting as one person. This must have something to do with the juxtaposition of her strange face and ordinary clothes—Lisa must wear the jeans and shirts, Charlie has the Cleopatra eyes. I envy her ability to decide. Actually my association with people like her and Justin is my own attempt at being somebody else. There seem to be ways that the people in glamorous leather jackets and ripped jeans conceal themselves and stand out from the crowd at the same time. My appearance is so ordinary in my oversized T-shirts—my mom buys all my clothes—jeans, and Converse sneakers, and I still look like the kind of boy I don’t want to be.

  When we arrive at the circus, I’m instantly aware we shouldn’t be here. All around are families, families, families. At this arena, I’ve previously seen soccer games, Sesame Street Live, and a monster truck rally, but each time legitimately, with my mom, dad, and brother. I can’t tell if Justin knows how clearly we don’t fit in. At the diner, the place where no one seemed to belong, it was fine to sit next to him. But at the circus, the sight of the two of us is as lurid and outlandish as the sequined lady will be dangling from her trapeze. Two of us at the circus is one too many. Despite the giant size of the arena, as we settle into our seats surrounded on all sides by parents and kids spilling popcorn and waving fiber optic wands, the place is somehow claustrophobic; I feel the grip of how much I don’t want to be here.

  The lights drop, the room swells in applause and screams, a spotlight cuts through the dark and explodes on the floor. The ringmaster steps into the beam, his voice booms over us, the circus begins. Sparkle, smoke, elephants, tigers, stilt-walkers and stuntmen—it’s actually reassuring that the show is so predictable.

  Justin claps easily at the acrobatic leaps, the man shot out of the cannon, the car crammed with clowns. If he’s uncomfortable, he doesn’t show it. The families pressing in against us don’t bother him. But I can barely watch what he’s doing or focus on the circus because I’m listening for that word—the word we’ve both been called, always singularly, but now I’ll hear it in plural with an incriminating and dangerous s. My neck is tense, I hold my spine absolutely still, thinking if I don’t move, no one will notice the spectacle of us. And as impossible as it would be to hear, I search the crowd noise for the word anyway: the quick rasp of the first syllable, then the snag of the middle, how my ear gets caught on the doubled g, and finally, the sudden twisting down of the last part like a barb on a hook, how all by itself the ending sounds like the place in my body where the whole word hits me when it’s called out like my name.

  After the circus, we make our way through the family crowd to Justin’s car and sit in the parking lot to decide what to do next. I wish he’d just take me home, but I play along with his suggestions. Besides, going home now is too early—my mom is certainly still playing Game Boy, listening to the news. I’d rather tiptoe in after she’s gone to bed. He suggests going to his place, and there’s little to do but agree.

  Justin lives in what’s called a boxcar apartment: a cramped rectangle where you walk through the living room to get to the bedroom and then through the bedroom to get to the kitchen. He pushes open his front door fortified with iron bars. In the living room are a sofa, several wooden chairs, a coffee table and Madeline Luff. When I see her smoking and talking to another girl in Justin’s boxcar, my puzzled eyes round out and I gawk at her like she’s a movie star. In fact, five years earlier when I was in junior high, Madeline Luff was the closest thing I knew to a movie star. She was the girl who dressed completely in black, every day only in rich, complicated black skirts, dresses, and coats. Her hair wasn’t naturally black, but dyed, the same opaque black of ink—so dark that light couldn’t reflect off it, like her head was a black hole. Then, she painted and powdered her face white. Our school newspaper featured her in our ongoing series about unique students. Whenever I passed her inky figure in the hallway clamor, I wanted to stop and stare. Now what’s stranger to me than her wearing only black every day of junior high school is that she doesn’t look that way anymore; she’s changed—her face is bare and her clothes are in color.

  “Hi, J,” she says. She’s the roommate. Her voice sounds ordinary and therefore disappointing. I stand next to Justin and pretend that seeing her is normal. She stubs out her cigarette and her friend nods, a serious blonde wearing dark red lipstick.

  “This is Ryan,” he says, and I lift my hand and wave, a gesture that immediately feels silly. Both sets of their eyes scan me from shoes to hair. Madeline doesn’t seem to recognize me though I look almost like I did in junior high, except I’m a few inches taller. Smoke shoots from her nostrils while she and her friend glance at each other. On a squat table between their knees sit two glasses of red wine.

  “Well, what are you boys up to this evening?” the blonde asks. She’s clutching her arms because it’s cold in here and her dress is missing its sleeves.

  “We went to the circus,” Justin answers then heads to the kitchen. I stand there in the center of the room like I just dropped through the ceiling from another apartment. Justin freezes in the doorway and turns around. “Oh, do you want something to drink? We have wine.”

  “Water, please!” I nearly sing it, projecting to the four bare walls closing in on me. Besides three fiery sips of champagne at a rural cousin’s wedding reception held in a school gym, I’ve never drunk alcohol. None of my friends have either. I’ve never even been to a party. In fact, my experience is so limited, when I think of people my age drinking, I envision watery, dramatic images from public service announcements of mangled cars and teen funerals. The idea that someone almost handed me a glass of wine unsteadies my legs. I’m suddenly aware I’m somewhere I probably shouldn’t be and something terrible is certain to happen.

  “Here you are,” Justin says, handing me my glass of water, which I drink down in gulps. He pops open a Diet Coke. I stop holding my breath and sit in a chair that squeals when I fall into it. I don’t know where to look—at Madeline, the serious friend, Justin, or at the features of the apartment. When I set down my glass, my eyes notice a book in the rubble of scattered papers on the table; on the cover is a man’s bare torso.

  I guess this book belongs to Justin because I guess he must be gay. I’ve recently discovered photographs of men like this inside my dad’s running catalogs—inflated muscles, tiny shorts, and wet forearms. Sometimes when I’m home alone, I take the catalogs to my bedroom, but when I look at the men behind my closed door, it must be different than the way Justin looks at them. I’ve fooled myself into believing that when I stare deeply at those bodies, I feel something other than desire, and I’m naive enough to believe the pictures appeal to me because I’m interested in how my own body might look one day, if I ever start looking like a man.

  I ask Justin about the bathroom and he points through the bedroom to the kitchen. “It’s all the way to the end,” he says, his thin hand waving me down. Walking through their bedroom, with its pair of unmade beds, an ironing board jutting out and clothes scattered all around, I think living here would be the opposite of my house. At home, we each have our own room and hide in our own favorite corners. Here in Justin’s apartment, everything is out for everyone. This must be how people live in the city—not enough walls and no place for secrets.

  Walking back to the front room, I notice an open shoebox full of syringes on the ironing board. There are bright orange tips snapped over the needles. Next to them, huddled in a corner of the box are glass bo
ttles full of clear liquid with typed words on their sides. This box can mean only one thing. I don’t want Justin or Madeline to see me gaping so I keep my pace and walk back to the living room, but my mind suddenly crowds with panicked thoughts, all of them melodramatic and illogical: someone in the room is a drug addict; I’m in the house of a drug addict; I just went to the circus with a drug addict.

  When I imagined the possibilities of the city, of befriending people at chaotic cafés and diners, I overlooked these unexpected dangers my mother predicted. This may as well be the drive-by shooting at the ice skating rink. The fact that she was right burns inside me; it heats up my legs, so I keep shifting my butt in the squeaky chair, barely able to sit. I nod or smile as the conversation moves on, putting forward the smallest effort while hinting that I don’t want to be there. I turn down offers for refills of water. I yawn dramatically several times. Justin finally asks if I’m ready to go. “Oh,” I say, hopping up. “Only if you are.”

  The car ride out of the city seems longer than the one in and that’s usually the opposite. There are whole sections of the highway I don’t recognize, strange billboards popping up one after the other making the deserted road stretch out. A few cars speed by, but mainly it’s Justin and me puttering through alternating patches of light and dark along the highway. I’ve stopped trying to fill the quiet with conversation and now our silence sits between us like a third passenger.

  And though the plain truth of the evening is beginning to emerge, it won’t fully form while I’m waiting for the bridge that will mean we’ve finally crossed over to the safer side of things. What does become clear is I put myself here by pretending to be somebody I’m not. By letting Lisa believe Justin and I were better friends than we were. By saying I enjoy music that confuses me. By pretending I yearn for the experience of cities when actually I’d rather sit in my boredom where everything is familiar, unbarred, and well lit. Clusters of trees huddle like black clouds near the highway, and the dead fish smell of the river slides into the car. I know that after a mile, we’ll cross the water back into St. Charles.

  Justin begins talking as we enter the mouth of the bridge. “I had a nice time tonight. I hope you did too.” His voice is almost too soft to hear over the rhythmic bumping of the tires along the segments of the bridge. The water is black, heavy barges with winking lights drift slowly below. I say that I had a nice time too. The green sign posted at the end of the bridge begins to glow at the margin of Justin’s headlights. The words aren’t yet visible but I know them anyway: Now Entering St. Charles.

  “I think finding nice guys to date around here is really hard, you know?”

  I don’t know how it happened, but I forgot to hold my breath the one time it feels possible that the bridge will collapse. My heart starts beating so hard I can hear my hot blood thumping through my ears. Suddenly all the air and saliva that make my mouth work disappear and so do all the words that I need to say to Justin because he’s got this whole thing so wrong. And he must have gotten it wrong from Lisa. The effeminate kid who doesn’t do normal boy things was the identity I was trying to obscure with this cooler one. I tried to create a new version of myself by hanging out with people like Lisa and Justin, but now I know I just look like the kid I was trying to erase.

  “I’m not gay,” I say.

  Justin sits there, staring, and I try to look at him, pushing my eyeballs as far left as they will strain so it won’t look like I’m looking at him, but I can only make out his white wrists and the light blur of his shirt.

  “Oh,” he says, once we drive on and pass two more exits. “I’m sorry.”

  In his pause, I uncover the reason for Justin’s anxiety tonight, and probably also my mother’s, though for a much different reason. Everyone knew I was on a date but me.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. “That kind of thing actually happens a lot.”

  My curfew is midnight, and as I walk into the kitchen, the clock on the stove lets me know I’m ten minutes early. The family room is still lit up, so my mom must not be in bed though I don’t hear any TV sounds. Our German shepherd naps on his rug. He raises his heavy head, recognizes me, and flops back to sleep. I step over him into the family room. My mother and brother sit side by side on the sofa and in Garrett’s Indian-style lap is my high school yearbook from last year.

  “We need to talk to you,” my mother says. She points to the cushion on the love seat where I always sit anyway. The TV is on but muted. Garrett opens the yearbook to a particular page and holds it to his chest. She’s wearing her glasses and her nightgown. He’s wearing a stretched-out T-shirt of my dad’s and a pair of boxer shorts, his orange hair is damp but parted straight and combed. My father would have gone to bed hours ago.

  “Your brother found this,” she says, taking the yearbook and turning it around to me.

  I know what’s on the page even before it’s turned. There’s a grid of headshots of the senior class and she points to Justin. It’s a picture I saw last year when we got our yearbooks during the final week of school, and at that time, I laughed at his picture, so strange and so funny. But now, after the circus and the shoebox, looking at the photograph in front of her actually makes me queasy. In his square, Justin stares at the camera with a kind of contempt though it’s hard to see because his hair is a black mess hanging over his face. I can see his lips, his open panting mouth, the way he is so obviously not smiling as if he doesn’t have to. This is a mug shot of a criminal, and now I’m guilty of something by association.

  “I guess what we’d like to know is why you’d want to hang out with a person like this?”

  The longer I stare at Justin’s photo, the sillier he looks. With his black hair and empty face, he’s a parody of danger instead of seeming capable of any true harm. But the fact that he wanted to look this way gets to me. I think of that awful word again and realize that Justin really is one—he’s actually trying to be.

  My brother leans over the book to look at the picture again; he turns from the photo and he and my mother grimace on cue. “We just think he’s really creepy,” she says.

  There’s nothing to do but nod and stay quiet. I reach to take my yearbook but Garrett won’t hand it over. I turn and watch the TV for a few seconds even though I can’t hear what the people are saying.

  “Why is he still up?” I say, not facing them. “He shouldn’t be involved in my business.”

  “What did you do tonight?” she asks.

  I want to ask her what she imagined, what was the worst possibility she pictured during their long evening of scrambling through my bedroom, riffling through yearbooks. What dangers did she think I found myself in—me, the kid with the squeakiest clean of reputations, the boy who’s never smoked a cigarette or been drunk or kissed anyone, who has never had a detention or even a tardy. I’m a little thrilled by the acts they imagine me capable of. They believe in the new identity I tried on tonight even if no one else does.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Where did you go?” she presses me.

  “You know, we drove around. It’s not a big deal.”

  “Then why can’t you tell us what you did with this person?”

  “Well, first we drove out of the driveway, then we turned left. At the stop sign, we turned left again.” I stand up, signaling I’m ready to go to my room. “Is that what you want?”

  Garrett shakes his head as my mother’s lips twist into a smirk. I’ve become the smart mouth, the one who says things that make other people wish they could see me fall. Garrett slams shut the yearbook and lets it slide off the sofa onto the floor. He’s disappointed; he’d hoped for more of a punishment, something to make his investigation worth his effort. None of us knows what to say. The slick book falls and balances against the sofa on one of its corners, looking like it should topple but it doesn’t.

  “Well, you can’t hang out with him again, I hope you know that,” my mother says.

  “I didn’t know you were telling me who I
could be friends with now,” I say, leaning down to pick up my book. As I straighten myself up, eye level with Garrett, I say, “Stay out of my room.”

  My mother says, “Leave your brother alone.”

  I leave them standing there and walk down the long hallway to my end of the house. They watch me as I go and though I’m performing a confident hot-shit strut, I feel as if I’m inching along a tightrope and I’ve made the mistake of looking down.

  In my dark room, I lie across the bed and start talking to God. Please make Justin go away. Through my closed door, I hear my mother and brother talking about what to do with me. I don’t know if my prayer will work because I’ve been asking Him for years to take away the part of me that’s like Justin, and it looks like He hasn’t come through. And though Justin won’t ever call my house again, I will see him once more, in a gas station parking lot, two years from this evening. By that time I’ll know from another mutual friend that he’s in fact not a heroin addict but a diabetic, and he shoots insulin into his own white arm every day.

  But because it will be another four years before I’m able to admit the truth about myself, as I see him striding across the pavement, I turn off my car beside the gas pump and feel the same fear as at the circus. Carefully, I unlatch the lever that adjusts my seat and lie down slowly, all the way back. I stare at the ceiling of my car, wait for him to go somewhere—anywhere—and trust again that a held breath is enough to keep me safe.

  The Men from Town

  My brother Garrett owns three cell phones, and he’s talking on two of them as he speeds down a rural highway in the middle of winter. I’m older than him by four years and sitting beside him with a plastic container of cookies balanced on my lap. I’ve been telling him to slow down his giant truck because he’s not really paying attention to the road. He hangs up both phones and tosses them across his dashboard, and in the first moment of silence we’ve had in about thirty miles, I ask if he’s sure he remembered to pack the new shoes we bought him the night before. He remembered the new coat, I’m certain, I can see it hanging back there, but the shoebox isn’t visible. “Fuck yes, I already told you!” he shouts. It’s the fourth time I’ve asked. Reaching across the cab, I tuck the peeking tag of his sweatshirt back under his collar.