Inexcusable

by Chris Lynch

  Here’s what can happen: You can look at a thing and at the time it will look funny, if conditions are right. In the mean light of day an event from the night before might look plain nasty, but that does not automatically render it nasty, in its context. Even if I might partway agree with you about the nastiness in the light, that still doesn’t mean that at its original time the thing itself couldn’t have been a very different, better thing.

  We thought of ourselves as crusaders for righteousness at the time, because we really did a job on Paul R. while leaving the other guy—who I still cannot quite remember—pretty much intact. We thought it was a statement somehow for the underdog, at the time. We saw ourselves as freedom fighters and rascals at the same time, the kind of guys people talk about for generations to come in that great, “lovable rogue” kind of way. Who would not love to be remembered as a lovable rogue? I could not imagine such a person.

  The locals could. The local townsfolk didn’t see our correction of history in quite the same light, so a big hoo-ha was made out of it, and the underclassmen, as dictated by our school’s fine tradition, stepped up and took all the blame. Several received quite a public paddling for all the high spirits, and two were even given a bit of community service.

  They couldn’t see the spirit of the thing, the locals. You can’t simply go by what you see, without seeing the spirit. That kind of attitude is inexcusable.

  I went back to the statues the next day. It was a goddamn mess. It was a pitiful, brainless mess. I stood there, mortified, trying to pull together the two planets, the one where we were just guys, just having fun saying good-bye to ourselves, our team, our younger and less responsible selves, and this putrid stinking planet here where everything was nothing because some animals brought everything down to nothing. I could not imagine being on both planets. I couldn’t be part of both worlds.

  Something went wrong. Something happened beyond what happened. Because I swear to you that the scene of the daylight was far beyond what I saw the night before. Somebody had to have come back and made it all worse. Because we didn’t mean to do this. I swear, I would remember if we toppled the whole statue over. Paul Revere was lying in bits, four, five big chunks as well as all the little ones, him and his horse all blended up into one hideous mythological beast of chaos. Who would do that?

  And the other guy. We were trying to make a statement. A small statement, maybe, a stupid statement, maybe, but a statement of some kind. Why would we go and mess up the other guy? Why the hell would we go and cut the head off the other guy? That ruined everything. That . . . emptied everything of any sense at all. We wouldn’t ever be lovable rogues after that because that was too far. Too goddamn far. Nobody would ever confess, either, you can bet on that. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if some other bunch got there after us and really did all the stuff after all. But we’ll never know, because nobody would ever admit it. There are some real jerks in this town, you know.

  Dawes. I went up in the mean light of day and read the base and found out that Revere’s pal was Dawes. I probably wouldn’t forget it anymore.

  * * *

  The other breakup party I went to was for the soccer team. I was there because I was made an honorary member, by virtue of my playing spring intramural soccer with some of the varsity and playing it pretty damn well, I must say, combined with the fact that most first-string football players wouldn’t give soccer the time of day. And I was the Killer. I brought them some badly needed cred and in return they provided me with a good workout and a surprisingly good time—though I never said that in mixed company.

  An altogether more subdued and dignified affair, the soccer team breakup. As long as it remained the soccer team. Until the football team, or some football-team-shaped figures wearing balaclavas, arrived on a not-so-anonymous tip. They showed up in the parking lot for another session of high-spirited hijinks, leading to the traditional temporary, all-in-fun kidnapping of a few neatly dressed soccer players for a few hours of late-night involuntary skinny-dipping for the video camera. And really, it was funny, funny, funny, even to the soccer players involved, who were great sports about the whole thing and had a great laugh about it.

  That was how I saw it. That was how I remembered it.

  Except that, later, days later, none of that, the good time good stuff, managed to get onto the tape. The tape, who knows, the tape missed most of the funny stuff, or got edited, or got too much water on it, but all the greatness of the event, the fun, the camaraderie of sportsmen having a laugh all together, all of that got wiped off somehow, and some grotesque, awful, dark, blurry horror film got on there instead. Who was doing the filming? I couldn’t remember. Whoever it was, they sucked. They ruined the tape, and ruined the time for everybody who was there. They pointed at all the wrong things and missed all the best. They were too blurry on what was great. They were too clear on one or two things that weren’t.

  I only even knew it was the right film because I thought I saw me. I thought. It was me. I thought. Looked like a soccer player. I was a soccer player. What was a soccer player doing there with the football players? Acting like a football player? Not a kicker, either, but a football player. Doing football player stuff. It wasn’t me. It looked like me, but like I said it was out of focus and very dark and jerky and all over the place. But whoever he was, this guy was a busy guy. He wasn’t content on the sidelines. He wasn’t content with naked embarrassed soccer players. He had to go down into the water and make sure they took long hard pulls off a bottle. You couldn’t see that the bottle was Jack Daniels, but if you knew Jack Daniels you could tell. You could tell from the squareness of the bottle and from the way the kid juddered like electroshock after he drank it. Soccer players can’t drink. Then, even in his suit, he had to make sure he herded them all like sheep back into the cold water while the football players whooped and whooped, and then for some God-knows reason he had to shove their heads under the water for a good long time.

  The guy with the camera—who I could kill if I could ever figure out who it was—while he couldn’t quite manage to get hardly any of the good fun parts, then had the presence of mind to swing around in time to catch a bunch of football guys pissing on each of the little tidy mounds of the soccer players’ dressing-up, going-out clothes. That they’d worn. For their big dinner.

  One of the few true things that useless tape did show was that I was not one of those pissing football players.

  Now I think I didn’t make it onto the tape at all. Probably I was too boring, too out of the way, or not bad enough for the filmmaker’s taste. And anyway, I was a soccer player too, honorary or not. How could I do stuff like that to members of the soccer team if I was a member of the soccer team? That’s why I couldn’t have.

  I was there because they invited me. I was there because they liked me. So I couldn’t have.

  I remembered, earlier that evening, being a soccer player, at a soccer dinner, eating soccer player food with soccer players on either side of me, finishing somebody’s broccoli while he finished my roast potato.

  Broccoli, even. The evidence was right there on the plate. Bad guys don’t eat broccoli, and they certainly don’t help another guy finish his. I saw a good guy there. The film saw other things, entirely.

  Did I mention that I watched the tape with a room full of guys and beer and noise, laughing and clapping? We watched the same way we had watched scores of tapes of other football teams, trying to work out what made them tick. Maybe I didn’t mention it because I forgot. Maybe I forgot because the whole time, the sound of the volume of the room was off for me. Dead silent. And because I was feeling kind of sick.

  BECAUSE OF GIGI BOUDAKIAN

  * * *

  Here is another reason why I could not have done what she says I did. I was always my best when I was with her. I went to the prom with her. How ’bout that. Even after it happened I couldn’t fully believe it happened. I would be happy to one day have my headstone read, BORN . . . DIED . . . WENT TO THE
PROM WITH GIGI BOUDAKIAN.

  I could have taken the limo driven by my dad’s cousin Rollo, but there were problems with that. Rollo, being a professional limousine driver, had most likely seen everything a human can possibly get up to, and would hardly notice me, and if he did notice probably wouldn’t tell. But then he might. And if there happened to be any damage to his car . . .

  Which is not to say that I had any intention of getting involved in unseemly behavior that would get me in hot water, even with my very forbearing dad during the night of my once-in-a-lifetime senior prom.

  But I could hope.

  And hope’s name was Gigi Boudakian, and we were not in love at the time. Or, rather, she was, but it was with an air force man named Carl stationed a short but inconvenient plane ride away who could not get back to enjoy the festivities, and so sent word that anybody else who attempted to would have their nuts blown off with a U.S. government-issue rifle. I was safe from that, however, because Carl and I had been friends for exactly as long as Gigi and I had been friends, which was a trustworthy long time. Gigi’s father, who was a well-known, well-connected, major money carpet dealer in town was understood to have pretty much the same feelings on the matter, only substitute ceremonial sword for rifle, while the nuts part remained unchanged. And me and Mr. Boudakian also lacked that critical several years’ friendship.

  I got the okay to take Gigi because of Quarterback Ken, with whom we would be double-dating in his father’s Lexus. Ken was out of the Gigi running as a potential boyfriend from the beginning, as a result of his being a blood relation of the Boudakians in some distant way that would not have prompted Ken to remove himself from the running, but there you go. And now he had a kind of a bombshell girlfriend of his own. I was deemed suitable because Mr. Boudakian felt the Sarafian-ness of my father’s surname cancelled out the MacTavish-ness of my mother’s, and because he didn’t know about the O’Brian half of my dad that made things 3-1 against my Armenian-ness, but since it was a wholly unfair system anyway I felt justified in shutting up about it. And because Gigi and I had been on friendly and honorable terms during the whole time of her serious relationship with her true love Carl, I could be counted on not to try anything.

  I tried everything.

  Within reason. I am a gentleman. But I did find myself, throughout what was all in all a really lovely evening, making a minor nuisance of myself. I couldn’t help it, hadn’t planned it, did not approve of it, but carried on with it. We danced, and that was fine. Ate, and that was fine. When they came around with the traditional beef-or-turkey question, the staff didn’t even flinch when I told them, both. And they took me seriously, gave me both. In food terms, this was the greatest date I ever had. I nearly called Ray to tell him about it right there on the spot and have him come see.

  The music was not good but not a problem, conversation was consistently light, funny, rude within reason. Everybody I knew was there, everybody dressed to the moon. Everybody was everybody’s best buddy, everybody was exuberant, and everybody wanted everybody else’s date.

  Except me. I couldn’t even imagine wanting any other date on this night. And I have a pretty buzzy imagination.

  The problem was, she couldn’t keep her hands off me.

  Couldn’t keep her hands off my hands, actually. When we danced, her hands did most of the dancing, flittering up and down her back, sides, hips, pursuing my hands like squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree. Somehow, it seemed every place I put them was an inappropriate place, so I had to keep moving them, and then the way I was moving them became the problem, so you can appreciate that Gigi Boudakian was being a little difficult to deal with.

  At the table it was more of the same. She was holding my wrist with one hand while holding her idle fork with the other. Then she was elbowing me. Then she was whipping out her cell phone and dialing . . .

  “What, what, what?” I said pleadingly, folding my hands prayerlike and earning a reprieve.

  “You are drunk, Keir,” she said.

  “No,” I said seriously.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Yes, really,” she said.

  “A little.”

  “A lot.”

  Hmm.

  “Well, everybody is drunk.”

  “Not everybody.”

  “Everybody.”

  “Not me.”

  “Well, whose fault is that?”

  “Listen, Keir . . .” she said, and there wasn’t a tremendous amount of suspense about where this was headed, since she had her phone out and buttons beeping as she spoke.

  “I’m sorry,” I said into her free ear.

  She looked up at me with a hard, penetrating, not unkind or unfair look.

  She was so decent. She was lovely and sharp and she was smart and classic. I suddenly felt like I had been wiping my hand on my sleeve, shouting obscenities, fighting, pissing in the punch bowl. She was great. She was lovely and decent, and so, so deserving of all the best things, and would surely wind up with them later on, in college, in love, in the carpet business or on Broadway, in life, if she could get through the degradation of this.

  “Please, please don’t leave,” I said. “Please. Please.”

  She looked at me harder still.

  “Please.”

  Damn, she could look at you a long, cold minute.

  “Get it together,” she said firmly.

  I felt like the luckiest guy there. I got it together, while Gigi Boudakian and I never did. Though I never stopped thinking about it.

  All the sweeter. All the sweeter it was, then, when we danced, for as long as they’d let us, and we went up to the Blue Hills Reservation with everybody else, and had a couple of drinks, silly drinks, harmless drinks, sloe gin fizzy drinks, we made a fire, even, and told stories, even, and our mighty tuxedoes and shiny gowns took on ever more dramatic and unnatural forms in the dancing firelight, and Gigi Boudakian stayed there right next to me and listened along with me as we all told stupid and heroic stories about one another, about four years of one another, and other couples, real couples who were supposed to be together and knew they would be together and had their plans planned for months and their pockets stuffed with condoms and pills and whatever, slipped off, two by two and even four by four and I, of course, started getting hungry all over again, and hunger making me bold, I asked Gigi Boudakian if she would go with me to the International House of Pancakes.

  And you know what? Do you know what?

  No, actually, she did.

  We dismissed Quarterback Ken and his Lexus and his date, who was an older lady who had actually had her own senior prom two years before, but that’s quarterback life for you. Well, actually, they dismissed themselves, but we didn’t mind, not at all, because it was a wonderful thin-air breezy walk, down out of the hills and two miles toward town to get to the IHOP, and when Gigi Boudakian took off her shoes because no way no how were those heels making that trek, I took mine off too because it seemed to be the thing to do and when finally you snap out of it and realize you are with a person like Gigi Boudakian, you do the thing to do.

  She appreciated that, Gigi did, and I believe it helped her to relax more, and to forget some of the things I might have been trying earlier in the night, and remember some of what it was that made us cool and easy friends all that time before and led us directly to this point, to this moment, this now of our lives.

  Things were clear when we came within sight of the pancake house. My head was clear, the air was clear, it was early morning in that unspeakable great gap in between the night people giving it up and the day people taking it over, in that luscious pink-orange spring morning light that you worry, if you’re like me, that maybe you don’t deserve, that maybe you are stealing, spoiling for everyone, by being out at this hour.

  It was in that light that Gigi Boudakian took my hand.

  She didn’t slap my hand. She didn’t seize my wrist. She slipped her hand into mine,
mine into hers, so softly, so easily, that my reaction was to pull away and apologize.

  “Ah, sorry about that,” I said.

  She laughed. My sweet lord, such a sound. Made me wonder, momentarily, why I ever wanted to get a girl to do anything else but laugh.

  They had to ask us to put our shoes back on when we entered the pancake house because we forgot and stood there stupidly by the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign with our shoes in one hand and each other in the other. But they asked us politely, even sweetly. Like there was something charmed and charming at work, and we were all of us in it together.

  That’s the way people all over the restaurant looked at us, very nice, very soft, very tilt-the-head-and-smile because, I guess, we had prom written all over us and we reminded them of other stuff, good stuff, their stuff maybe and their friends’ stuff, way old stuff, and more recently their kids’ own stuff, if it went well and didn’t wind up all smutty and slutty and bloody and dead like a lot of prom nights seem to, and like this one obviously did not.

  It was, too, all the good stuff of prom legend. This is what was supposed to happen, the barefoot sweetness and pancake house at dawn and nobody getting hurt or dirty, but instead giving off an unmistakable whiff of finer love things.

  I lied to you earlier. I lied earlier because I loved Gigi Boudakian when I said I didn’t. I just didn’t know it before the International House of Pancakes sat us by the window, by the parking lot, by the parkway, by ourselves.

  I ordered pigs in blankets. Side of bacon. Coffee. Cranberry juice. Didn’t order toast, but they brought some, and little packets of jelly. Gigi Boudakian had an omelette with cheese and green peppers.