by Chris Lynch
I give her back her rose. “That, is a capital idea.”
“Yes,” she says on the way to get it started. “But if you get any capital ideas, say, involving that window between the bathroom and bedroom, you will have far worse rose-orifice troubles to come. Thorns and all. And your mouth will be the least of your worries.”
I am going to have to do a cost-benefit analysis of taking that risk.
Cripes, I’m thinking like my father’s shadow already.
One point of the multiple taps must be to jet the massive tub full of water with fire-hose efficiency, because well before I expected, I hear the taps off and Junie splashing around in there. Then I hear a major, theatrical “Ahhhhh.”
“Everything it’s cracked up to be?” I ask, sitting on the bed with my back up against the headboard. Basically sharing a communal wall with her as she bathes, while I stare out across at the sky through the window wall.
“Everything,” she says.
“I’m glad.”
“Listen, you can open the window.”
“Really?” I say excitedly.
“For communicating, O, not for ogling. If you peek, we’re back to the old arrangement with you pulling rose stems out of your ass.”
“Junie Blue,” I say, aghast.
“Yeah, yeah,” she says, giggling.
I turn around, reach up, and move the sliders apart. My head remains safely below the parapet, while my hands rejoice, like a puppet show. “Hi,” I say, waving at her with both of them.
“Hi,” she says.
I sit back down with my back to her and my eyes focused out over the harbor.
“I’m not sure if it’s coming across very well, but I truly appreciate all this. I mean, really, really,” she says.
“It’s coming across just fine. Anyway, you’re well aware I’m happy to do it. It’s kind of selfish on my part, if you really want to examine it closely, which I’m hoping you don’t.”
A spritz stream of water arcs over the dividing wall and lands in my lap.
“No, it’s not,” she says. “You care about me.”
“How did you do that? Did you bring a water pistol to a fancy hotel, and into the fancy bath? Because if you did that, then I have a whole new level of respect and devotion to you that I’m afraid you are going to find very hard to cope with.”
She laughs, and another spritz lands exactly on top of the first. I look very much like a guy who has just had an accident, making for great cover, since something like that is entirely possible right now.
“It’s that clam thing, where you cup your hands together and squirt the water out from between the heels of your thumbs.”
“I could never do that. How ’bout you show me?”
“You’re cute,” she says.
“I’m trying very hard not to be.”
We are both laughing now, the kind of easy bippity-boppity-boo we used to do all the time.
I am aching for her right now. Not just aching for the physical her—though, that is well represented too—but for her. For us, for this.
With almost no physical distance between us, I have never been so lonely.
“Is this what one might call an ominous silence?” she says.
It’s almost like a wheezing sensation, a constriction holding me from midchest to middiaphragm, making me a little nervous to talk because I fear it has a sound as well.
“Ominous sounds too big,” I say. To me it sounds like a wheeze. “How ’bout ‘awkward.’ ”
“Too late. The silence is already gone, so it’s neither.”
The mist from the bath is wafting out of there and into here. It settles over me like a fog, and I breathe it in. It’s the smell of steam, which I love anyway, mixed with the roses and the fancy bath elements the hotel provided and June applied. I close my eyes and have it, and commit to keep it, this olfactory memory, this essence of Junie.
“Why are we not together?” I blurt.
And I wait.
“Will we call this one ominous?” she says.
“I suppose,” I say.
“I’m leaving, sweetheart,” she says, using a term she has used three times ever on me, and brought me to my knees three times. “I have to go away.”
“No, you don’t.”
The water spritzes. She’s really expert at this.
“I do.”
“Is my crotch going to get even wetter if I ask why?”
“I guess that’s up to you, weirdo.”
“I didn’t mean . . . Right, why do you feel like you have to go?”
“Do you love me enough to listen to my clichés, then?”
“It is what it is.”
“That’s the spirit. Well, I have to leave, to find out who I want to be, what I want to be. All I know from being here is, I know what I don’t want to be, or maybe what I can’t be. I can’t be one of your people. I can’t. I’m sorry, O, but you folks are just like martians to me. And if I have to be one of my people, I’ll kill myself. I love my mother, love my sister, but I want my life to be as different from theirs as leopards are from frogs. I don’t even know what’s possible. I need to see what’s possible. It’s not even something I’ve worked out in my head, exactly. It’s just something I know. Like when you have to eat, you know, and that’s how I know this.”
Every manner of silence now floats like the Junie Blue mist in the room. I hear small swishes in the water.
“O? Oliver?”
“How come you never told me that before?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea. I guess I was never in this bathtub before. And you were never right on the other side of that wall under the sliding communal bedroom-bathroom Japanese frosted glass window thingy before.”
I decide to take the high road.
“Stupid room. I knew there was something I hated about this stupid room.”
“Ah. I expected you to take it graciously, and you didn’t let me down. And anyway, maybe I’ll come back. Maybe I’ll find out that every place and everybody is just as rotten as here, except worse because they don’t have you. Then I’ll come back for sure. But I can’t come back if I don’t leave first.”
“The hunger thing.”
“Yeah, that.”
“So, are you ready to go out for food yet?”
“Ha. Would you like that?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Close them damn sliders and let a girl get ready already.”
• • •
Once again I am pushing with all my might in a direction I know is not going to get us anywhere.
“The seafood place just a couple of wharves up from here is just incredible.” I am being more provocative than serious. “The chowder is famous, but I tell you, the lobster roll—”
“Lobster?” She laughs right in my face.
“Yeah. And I’ll get a whole lobster myself, so they’ll make me wear one of those plastic bibs with a lobster picture on it, and you’ll laugh at me the whole meal. It’ll be fantastic.”
She is shaking her head, shaking her head. We have just stepped out of the water-side entrance to our hotel. It is that time of day when the sun’s just beginning to give up, the light angling lower and skipping gold across the top of the water. The same gold glints off every shiny bit of every shiny boat decorating the harbor just for us. I have our reservations in my back pocket.
“I have to tell ya, O, I am really exhausted. Not only would I never bite into a lobster even if it bit me first—”
“Mostly they pinch, more than bite. I don’t think they even have teeth—”
“I don’t want to go two wharves down. I don’t want to go to that next wharf right there either if I can help it. What’s wrong with here?”
The answer to that is, there is nothing in the world wrong with here. In front of us, like a glorious patio opening out from the hotel all the way down to the water’s edge, is a fine-looking outdoor establishment that is actually just another outlet of the hotel’s own endl
ess provision of goods and services. Small circular white tables are dotted all around, waitstaff gliding back and forth between the inside kitchen and the island bar set right in the middle of it all. Parasols protect each intimate little group from the elements, which right now amount to a sea breeze you would pay a thousand dollars for if they would bottle it, and the first bits of red hinting at the coming sunset.
“Classic, isn’t it?” I say as the waitress leads us down to a nice spot not twenty feet from the water. “We’re always looking for paradise two wharves away when we have our own lovely pier right under our nose.”
We sit across from each other with the hotel to one side of us and the ocean to the other.
“Wharf wisdom?” she says to me.
“I’m thinking of writing a book.”
“Good. That’ll keep you busy.”
The waitress is back with us, bearing glasses of ice water.
“Any chance of a beer?” I ask with a smile.
“Any chance of an ID?” she responds with a better smile.
“Ha,” Junie laughs. “The water’s fine with me. And can I have the nachos, please?”
“Nachos? I brought you all the way from Omaha for nachos?”
She smiles at the waitress, and they look at each other with something like complete understanding. Like they have known each other for ages and I just butted in.
“I’ve never been to Omaha,” Junie says to her, “but I bet they have perfectly fine nachos. Ah, what the hell. I’ll have the chicken nachos.”
“And I’ll have the lobster roll,” I say.
The waitress leaves, and Junie starts, like an incantation, “Omaha. O. Ma. Ha. Omaha. O—”
“You won’t like it there,” I say.
“You’ve been to Omaha?”
“No.”
Awkward silence.
The nachos and lobster roll arrive quickly, and they are probably the finest in their respective fields. June refuses to even look at my food but kindly offers me samplings of hers. Excellent stuff, and I’m glad she got what she wanted rather than what I wanted her to want. A stunning sleek boat comes gliding in to dock close to where we are eating, and this, I realize, is our harbor cruise. It goes through the channel, a little way up the river into the city, then back out and around the harbor islands before coming back to dock in a couple of hours. I figure the views alone are going to be worth it. I get all excited, bursting to tell her.
“Isn’t it stunning,” I say about the boat, hoping I’m not overselling.
“Isn’t it, though,” she says dreamily, or sleepily.
It’s getting near time. The scores of extremely happy-looking customers start to disembark. Then there’s a crew already on the dock with cases of goodies for immediate restocking. We have hit things just right, as it seems like half the boaters are unloading straight into our cozy bar restaurant. We would never have gotten this table if we’d been just a little later.
“I ran into a friend of yours this afternoon,” I say, full of confidence and pride at the way things are working out. Today, anyway, but today is what I have.
“Who’s that?”
“One Who Knows,” I say, big grin, big joke.
All expression slides right down her face, onto the floor, down the pier, into the Atlantic.
“You ran into him.”
“Yeah, when I was running around, doing stuff, while you were working.”
Her nostrils go wide, like a seal breaking the surface of the water.
“He’s no fan of Ronny, apparently.”
“Everyone hates my father. He’s the great unifier. Brings all peoples together. Juan likes to pay him for the disgusting flunky jobs, and give him just enough to make sure he remains forever a disgusting flunky. Pays the bills. Pays no respect.”
“Yeah. Well, anyway, I have to say I didn’t find Juan as loathsome as I expected to. Almost likeable, really, in a face-of-evil way.”
I suddenly become aware, probably should have done so before this, of Junie tensing up and wearing down simultaneously. It was a mistake. I stretched it too far, this feeling, this whatever. I should have kept it to myself, at least for now. She doesn’t want to hear about this man, and I don’t want her to hear about this man. Because of all that comes with it. Because of all that goes away with it.
“Anyway,” I say too sharply as I receive the check, “I don’t think you need to worry about him anymore.”
She freezes me. I am looking down at the check, and I feel her glare, like a fishhook in my nose pulling me up to look at her.
“I didn’t need to worry about him before,” she says coldly.
“Right,” I say, hurrying to sort out the bill and get away. “Well, okay. I guess I don’t have to worry about him, then. After talking to him I feel less nervous, even if you never—”
“Did you do something you shouldn’t have done, O?”
That feels, as soon as it lands, like the most profound question anyone has ever asked me.
“Nope,” I say.
I have placed the bill on the table, and as we stare intensely at each other over it, it must look to other diners like a battle is about to commence over money.
“Good,” she says.
My heart starts again, which is also good.
• • •
“Can we walk a little, up the pier?” I say, maneuvering things like I do it all the time. “Get a little stroll in and a good look at the boat at the same time?”
She shrugs, which I choose to take as enthusiasm.
We are walking alongside the big, gorgeous gleaming watercraft for which we have tickets, which she still does not know. We are holding hands. Junie is leaning on my shoulder heavily, even though she is not a leaner at all.
“I have another confession,” she says softly.
“I love these,” I say.
“I’ve never been on one of those things either.” She is looking up at the boat with what looks like curiosity.
I don’t know what the hotel charges for the total cosmic manipulation they are engineering on my behalf, but it’s not enough.
“Would you like to?”
“No,” she says without the malice of the lobster refusal. “I’m really tired.”
“Come on. How tired could you be?”
“Well, I work really hard. And to be brutally frank, you do not.”
And then sometimes the word “brutal” seems woefully insufficient.
“Game, set, and match,” I say, bowing to her.
“See, you even speak tennis.”
She makes me laugh even as she eviscerates me, which is itself impressive. “But you know it would be so—”
“It absolutely would,” she says. “And I wouldn’t enjoy one minute, O. I’m exhausted, beat, flat, and distracted. You know what I would really like? What would make this memorable, crazy little vacation end on a perfect note?”
“I’m all ears.” Well, not all . . .
“I’d like to go up to our incredible room, smelling of flowers, fall down with you in our big crazy bed, and just lie there together, in front of the TV, in front of the gigantic window with the view, and just fall asleep together.”
We stop just short of where the white-uniformed crewman is taking people’s tickets and ushering them up the little gangway onto the boat.
Without hesitation or regret I steer to starboard, heading us back to port, to hotel, to all that Junie Blue just laid out.
On the way we skirt right past our table, where an older couple, maybe in their thirties, are sharing a pitcher of red beer. I take the cruise ticket out of my back pocket and slyly slap it onto the table between them.
Just as we are entering the hotel, I turn back to see them standing, draining beers, and scrambling seaward.
The night, I am thrilled to observe, goes the way Junie presented it, to the letter.
Except we do not fall asleep together. I linger for at least three more hours, leaning into her, breathing her, holding
her, absorbing her, keeping her.
Ten
When I wake up, she is already gone.
There is a note, on hotel stationery, right next to me in the empty Junie space.
You looked so sweet. So serene.
Had to work very early. Took the train.
Lots to say, O. About all this.
But there are no words.
Love,
J
That is a word. Love. “Love” is definitely a word, and I’m hanging on to it.
I gather up my small bag of belongings. Then I go to the bath and collect all those ingredients that went into creating that once-in-a-lifetime Junie Blue mist in here last night. I have them now, for keeps.
Several of the roses are gone, and I throw several more into my bag before backing out of the room, looking it over and over, every inch, until the door shuts in front of me.
A short time later my good friends of the hotel have sorted me out, brought me my car, and sent me on my way, when my phone makes the new-message noise. I stop the car, having gotten only ten yards from the hotel front door.
Goddamn you, O, get down to the shop right now.
It is from my one true love. Her notes have a frightening mood swing quality to them today. Ominous, even.
When I enter—with great trepidation—the shop, Junie is behind the counter. One Who Knows/Juan Junose/Harry is standing just this side of the counter, with his horrible little dog panting away at his side.
“What does he mean, my obligation is cleared?” she yells at me. “Huh? What does he mean by that?”
There is very little room for me to maneuver here. So I don’t.
“I’d say it means your obligation is cleared, June.”
“Except that I never had an obligation to this man.” She walks around the counter and stomps in my direction. “And if I did have an obligation, that obligation would be mine to deal with.” When she reaches me, she starts punctuating every word with a sharp poke very high up in the middle of my chest. “I do not need to be taken care of by anybody. Do you understand me, you arrogant posh prick.”
“That hurts, Junie,” I say.
