Jason was aghast. “Thorns?” he whispered. “But that’s the most dangerous part of the rose.”
• • •
MOSTLY, THOUGH, WE TALKED about things we liked. All the things we liked and listened to and read fanned out behind us like peacock plumage—or the bursting milk of scared chickens, I guess. We were composed of conversation, so it didn’t matter where our hands and lips and heads were. The legs we walked on were the long and shifting lists of what we loved, what we had discovered, what we could not live without.
Writers like being bodiless. Two people who have collectively lived in twenty different cities across the world don’t consider their feet rooted to any particular ground. As we talked, the shape of a future gradually resolved. He would drive out to meet me in Ohio. I would return with him to Colorado. I had visited a place in Colorado once called Purgatory, and now I intended to see the rest. I am not sure why it was so fast, so extreme, so precipitate, but nothing less would have worked. A cliff had presented itself as we were walking along together, and it called for a leap.
Had I really thought it through? you ask. Ridiculous question. I had never really thought anything through, except perhaps Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar”—a poem about the landscape licking up to a portal, in love. Were we crazy? We were nineteen.
• • •
I KNEW IF I TOLD my parents I wanted to move to Colorado with someone I had never met, they would figure out a way to stop me, so I decided to begin by telling them only that I was meeting a boy from the internet. Even this was a delicate proposition. It was 2002, and back then, everyone believed the internet was a country where murderers lived. “He’s from the poetry internet,” I reassured them, “where everyone just argues about sonnets all the time, and whether endings are Earned,” but it didn’t seem to penetrate.
“Who knows what a freak might do,” my mother hissed, which sounded almost like a philosophical koan. Who DOES know what a freak might do. Could God make a freak so big even he didn’t know what it might do?
“Tricia, I’ve built computers,” my father said. “I’ve built computers with my bare hands. These guys get on the web . . .”
“What they want to do is cyber,” my mother broke in. “They’ll tell you anything, if it means they get to cyber.” I took a moment to wonder what constituted my mother’s understanding of “cybering.” Hackers in black leather gloves, giving each other handjobs in space, while glowing green numbers streamed through the air?
“They’ll tell you they live in Tucson when they live in Pittsburgh. He says his name is Jack, but actually it’s Dave.”
“And he’ll kill you,” my mother said, making what she considered to be a logical leap. “He’ll do it without a second thought, and we’ll read all about your body in the newspaper.”
“What a tangled web, bay-bee,” my father sighed, shaking his head. “What a tangled web we weave.”
• • •
WE WERE STANDING in a triangle in the living room of the St. Vincent de Paul rectory, which was so ancient, stony, and capacious it had actually been used as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The river waited a sprint away, ready to carry or be crossed, and the house itself was rumored to be full of secret passages, which my siblings and I were too stupid to find. The drama of the scene ought to have been tense and throbbing, but it was undercut somewhat by my mother’s decorating, which ran heavily to bowls of gold balls. Still, we played our parts: every once in a while my father would bang down his fist while looking patriarchal, and my mother would turn to stare out the window while looking powerless, which contributed to the overall impression that we were participating in a Tennessee Williams play where “the internet” was being used as code for “homosexuality.”
“Why should I trust the internet?” my mother asked. “It gets into my house and I don’t know how.”
“Well, so does electricity,” I pointed out.
“Which has fried many children in its day,” she said significantly. “Put your finger in the wrong hole and face the consequences.”
“What your mother is trying to say,” my father interrupted, “is that if you go through with this, anything could happen to you, anything at all.”
My heart caught the air like a parachute—if I looked up, I knew I might see Jesus, spiriting me away to another place. Why else would I be doing it?
• • •
ONLY MY LITTLE SISTER, MARY, dribbling a soccer ball in and out of the room as we talked, seemed unconcerned. “We are the ones who are not normal,” she said as she passed, her shin guards flashing. “How bad can a guy named Jason be?”
“I am so much more likely to murder him,” I said, trying to put their minds at ease. “He wouldn’t even see it coming. I would wait till he was asleep . . .”
“I did not raise you to murder,” said my mother. “Others, however . . .”
“He’s from Colorado, Mom. All people do in Colorado is get high, think about the mountains, and try to feel their white dreads growing.”
“If he has dreads I will put my foot down,” she declared. “You know how I feel. It’s not a mistake that it is called a Dread.”
“Disintegration of the family unit!” my father shouted, apropos of nothing—I suspected he hadn’t really been listening—and then disappeared upstairs to fondle his guns and drink cream liqueurs in secret, which was his way of dealing with grief. I fled back over to my room at the convent and began to bundle up my worldly possessions, which included eight androgynous sweaters; two pairs of cascading jeans; various immortal manuscripts, no longer extant; a selection of electronic music that sounded like robots making up their own religion from scratch; four hundred books I needed to live; and deodorant.
Nuns pass their time in a hopeful way, waiting for the man who might be good. On the morning Jason was due to arrive, I woke early, showered, dressed, sat cross-legged on my uncomfortable futon, and joined in their tradition. Above the ambient sound of the tank farm came the crunch of a car rolling up the steep entrance of the parking lot. I took a moment to compose myself and then walked out to meet him. He emerged from his seafoam-green Mercury Mystique—the car NO woman can resist—and waved a shy hello. There was something in the composition of his face that meant he could never look angry; the proportions didn’t allow for it. He had the small, neat, unjudgmental ears of a teddy bear. He unfolded his long arms and legs as he walked, until he stood as straight and easy as a set of chimes, and when he reached the bottom step he took my hand. “The woman in my dream!” he gasped, before he said anything else. He had dreamed of me the year before, when he lived by himself in an apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida, overlooking the water. “You were a witch or something, very beautiful but also very evil, and I never forgot your face.” The romance could not have begun any other way.
My father, who has a sixth sense for other cars driving onto his property, exploded in slow motion out the door of the rectory and toddled over to us with as much speed as he could muster. “Gimme your license!” he yelled to Jason. “I got cop friends!” Jason obligingly handed over his license, and my father took it away to have it checked, or just to stand with it inside for a threatening period of time while watching us from behind the gold drapes.
“Do you have a criminal record?” I asked him. It had never occurred to me to wonder. I had never even run a stop sign, or stolen a lipstick, or torn one of those tags off a mattress. I realized for the first time that I knew very few facts about him, only feelings.
He cocked his head to one side. “No, but the FBI once barged through my front door when I was fifteen years old because they thought I was a genius hacker.”
I remembered the leather gloves and the streaming green numbers, and the sound of the word “cyber” in my mother’s mouth. “WERE you a genius hacker?”
“No, but one of my friends was. He had been stealing people’s credit
card information and using it to buy climbing gear. When they caught him, he gave them my name.”
“That’s the most Colorado crime I’ve ever heard of.”
“He works at MIT now. Anyway, they took my computer away and searched it and found nothing but hundreds of guitar tab websites.”
“Your secret shame!”
“When they burst in shouting, ‘WE KNOW WHAT YOU’VE BEEN DOING!’ I thought, ‘Oh my god, the feds know I’ve been trying to learn the chord progression to “American Pie” for months now.’”
My father strode back across the blacktop twenty minutes later and returned the license to him with the news that he was all clear. We stood there looking at each other for a minute. I asked my father if we were allowed to go for a drive and he said guardedly that we were, but that we had to return to the rectory in an hour so we could hold a family council. If we had been a truly rebellious teen couple, we would have fled the city limits right then, but our “family councils” were such breathtaking spectacles that I thought it would be better to let Jason witness one before he was tied to me for eternity. Dad turned on his heel—the Achilles had been bothering him for a long time—and left us alone together.
• • •
“HERE, I’LL SHOW YOU around the convent,” I said, not shy exactly, but feeling new.
The appearance of it seemed to confuse him. “I thought it would be like the one in Sister Act,” he said, squinting, “where the nuns sang all day and were girlfriends at night. This is just a regular house.” Perhaps it was the mental image of that towering and gargoyled place that had led him to suspect I was locked up in here, somehow, that I could not leave whenever I wanted, though I had never told him anything of the kind.
We tiptoed upstairs to my spartan little room. When we kissed, perhaps because we had so many teeth, it was exactly like two birdcages touching together. We laughed quietly, almost into each other’s mouths, and slipped out again to explore the neighborhood. Conspiracy had arrived to us, whole, intact, and just large enough for two people.
• • •
AN HOUR LATER, we convened again in the living room. My father sat in a brocade chair, as richly embroidered as the Sun King’s underwear. He adopted his most lordly and intimidating position, with his thighs spread so wide it seemed like there might be a gateway to another dimension between them. Jason unconsciously adopted this position also. A person looking down from space might have thought they were having a squat contest.
My mother and I sat next to each other on the couch, leaning into the softness of each other’s shoulders, and watched the interrogation. She has ultimate trust in tall men, and Jason was six-two with two additional inches of millennial hair, so she no longer suspected he might be a murderer. “He seems so . . . calm,” she told me in an undertone. “Maybe too calm.” Indeed, his eyes looked like lotto balls floating on currents of air, and he exuded the trippy peacefulness of a psychoactive toad. He never wasted a movement, and exhaled quiet wafts of new age music. He seemed to actually soothe all people within a six-foot radius of him. I had never been so intrigued.
“Do you think he’s sick?” she asked. We contemplated him in unison. My father was asking him what he was going to do with his life, and Jason appeared to be answering that he was the lizard king, who slept in a pyramid every night and meditated by counting all the grains of sand in the universe.
“He probably just needs some iced tea,” I said.
“We should get some dinner,” said my mother, who believed if you stuffed people’s faces full enough, they would stop arguing with each other. “Let’s go out to Don Pablo’s and talk. We can continue the family council there.” Don Pablo’s was a fake Mexican restaurant that prided itself on the sizzlingness of its food. Why would you want food that sizzled only a little bit, when you could have food that sizzled so loud it sounded like the screaming of souls in hell? “Greg? Do you want to go to Don Pablo’s?”
My father’s face lit up at the suggestion, but then he turned wary. Was my mother trying to use food to trick him into accepting a chat-room bastard into his family? Don’t even try it, woman. “Let me just . . . get ready . . . for the meal,” he said craftily, and then came downstairs with a gun tucked into his priest pants.
• • •
WE CLIMBED INTO THE CAR and began to drive down River Road. “Put on your seat belt, Greg,” my mother said automatically—the latest sally in a war that had lasted the whole duration of their marriage.
My father has never willingly put on a seat belt in his life. He has always found the very idea of “safety” to be ridiculous. Why would he ever want to be safe? What was he, a little girl? A miniature woman? A babylady? John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, huge hairy Samson from the Bible—those men didn’t wear seat belts. If they needed a seat belt, they tore off a man’s arm and laid it across their lap.
“No!” he shouted. Like all men of enormous personal appetites, he loved to shout the word “no” at other people.
“If we get in an accident, you will go headfirst through the window and your children will wake up tomorrow morning without a father.”
“Sounds like a personal problem,” he said, and chuckled quietly to himself. “Sounds like a personal problem” was one of his stock responses, along with “What’s this ‘we’ business, white man?” He used each of them about a dozen times a day; they never lost their freshness or their wide applicability.
He took a moment to savor the seat belt victory, then turned back to Jason and glared. “If you try anything at the Don Pablo’s, you’ll have to answer to me,” he told him, and tapped the gun.
I’m not sure why I chose this moment to inform him of our actual intentions. Perhaps it was the same instinct that had once caused me to throw a lit firecracker directly at the face of my sister Mary while yelling, “GET OUT OF THE WAY!” It wasn’t the imp of the perverse, exactly. It was just knee-jerk panic.
I asked my body whether it was brave. It said no, but I forged on anyway, filling my lungs and straightening up in my seat. “Mom, Dad, I have to tell you something. I’m going back to Colorado with Jason.”
“NAW!” my father erupted, louder than I had ever heard him. The problems with me going to Colorado were too many to name. For starters, that was where all the hippies lived. My mother said nothing, but she closed her eyes briefly, having a blood-red vision of Colorado legalizing marijuana ten years in the future.
“Colorado?” she repeated. “But where will you live?”
“Oh, we’ll live with my roommates,” Jason said. “We have a house in Fort Collins.” The only thing I knew about these boys was that they ate steak every day and were in a terrible band called Flush. They had tried out a lot of names, Jason told me, but when they hit on Flush, they knew it was the one. Since we had just emerged from the great golden age of toilet bands, this didn’t faze me a bit. And if my dad had known about them eating steak every day, he would have been won over to their side instantly, recognizing them as essentially honorable fellow cavemen. He didn’t give me a chance to tell him that part, however.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he said. “Where I come from, people get married instead of driving across the country to go live with each other.”
“Ah!” said Jason, seeing an opening. “Don’t worry, Mister . . . Father.” I worried for a second he might lose his head and call him Your Holiness. “If that’s what you’re concerned about, then I want you to know that I proposed to your daughter earlier, in the parking lot of the grocery store.”
“The Kroger’s,” I added, as if that were the most matrimonial of all grocery stores.
We were telling the truth. When we were cruising around the neighborhood on our own that afternoon, in the single hour allotted to us, Jason had been overcome by a sense of destiny and pulled into the nearest parking lot. He contorted his body down onto the floor of the driver’s seat, gazed up at me l
ike a hunchback in love, and proposed. This additional information should have made my announcement more acceptable, but somehow it didn’t.
“Turn this car around,” my father told my mother, spitting the words like bullets. “If I have to go into a Don Pablo’s right now, I don’t know what I’ll do.” Murder Don Pablo himself, perhaps, just to relieve his feelings. My mother turned the car around.
• • •
THE REMAINING THREE OF US weren’t particularly hungry after that, but we went on to the restaurant anyway. The Don Pablo’s in Cincinnati was a large converted factory, so it looked vaguely like a nightclub where people went to have wrong ideas about Mexico. In the corner, a fake cactus threw up its helpless arms, as if my father were holding it at gunpoint. My mother had not yet reached the stage of her journey where she realized margaritas were a medicine that could relax you, and drank so much iced tea that by the time our food arrived, mariachi music was coming out of her eyes. Jason stared down at his dead fajita, horrified. It had once, in the West, been a majestic animal.
• • •
WHEN WE CAME HOME LATER, my father was wearing his most transparent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Baileys Irish Cream liqueur out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken.
I cannot overstate how tiny the sips he was taking were. He looked like a gigantic brownie drinking drops of dew. He would screw up his mouth into a rosebud, and siiiiip, inhale the smallest amount of Baileys possible. Greg Lockwood, thank goodness, was never much of a drinker—though he did get so drunk at his own bachelor party that he was still drunk the day of the wedding and almost fell asleep standing up in his sailor suit in the middle of the ceremony. Perhaps that experience taught him a lesson.
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