And my umbrella, lost that day, where is it? I know I had it that morning. Give it back, Ed if you have it, I’m lost without it on rainy days, although it’s December now, so it’s they say snow, and an umbrella in a snowstorm is ridiculous, a seat belt if you’re not in a car, a helmet if you’re not on a bike, like a fish needs a bicycle or however they say it, like coffee needs to be black, like a virgin needs a boyfriend. So many things I’ll never get back.
By now I’m sure you are wondering, how long does it take to get to you? Is Al driving his father’s shop’s truck to Bolivia and then turning around and coming back, all these pages for a simple trip, even in traffic? And the answer, Ed, is Leopardi’s. I never took you to Leopardi’s, which is my first-favorite coffee place, the best one, a crumbling Italian palace with bright red walls unpeeling their paint and photographs hung crooked of dark-skinned men with their hair in great slick stylish curves and the kindhearted smirks they give to their mistresses and an espresso machine like a shiny mad-scientist castle, steaming and gleaming and spouts everywhere curving down and out in a writhing metallic nest underneath a stern brass eagle perched on top like it’s looking for prey. It takes that whole machine, dials and releases and a stack of square white towels the staff uses expertly, to make tiny, tiny cups of coffee as deep and dark as the first three Malero films that make the world angled and blinky. Goddamn I love that coffee. If I put in extra cream, three sugars, the eagle would fly down and talon my throat open before I had a sip, but you know what, Ed? That’s not the real magic of the place, the Leopardi’s enchantment from the first time Al showed it to me when his cousin worked there when we were in eighth grade. It’s the utter silence of the tall room, the thinky meditation uninterrupted by anything but great hissing clouds of steam and the jangling change on the counter. They leave you alone, they let you mutter or laugh or read or argue or whatnot in any corner where you’re sitting. They don’t clear your table, they don’t clear their throats, they don’t say a word to you except prego, you’re welcome, if you say thank you, grazie. They don’t notice or they pretend not to notice, even if you finish the last drips of your coffee and then slam down your cup at something your ex-boyfriend did, just the thought of it. You can crack the saucer in half, but they don’t say anything. They figure, at Leopardi’s, you have trouble enough. They should teach my mother, everybody’s mother, how to leave people alone. It was the perfect place Al could take me, when we were getting close to your house with this letter nowhere near done, lugging the box in here with no Leopardi’s man with their perfect mustaches and aprons saying a word about the thunk of the box at the neighboring table or how long I’ve been sitting here writing to you.
This is the bottle of Pensieri. I never told you about Leopardi’s, and I never told you about the night I had getting Pensieri, just this one bottle, you never asked, while you had—ha!—your family thing. I never told you. There’s a lot, Ed, I never told you. Let me tell you some of it.
It was late afternoon, enough tea enough Mom, when I finally showered Boris Vian Park off me and sat in my own room like I hadn’t been there in a hundred years, my backpack still unzipped from Friday, the pennant still curled up on my desk from the game. I picked up a few things, still in my towel, scrubbed at the coffee on my collar and left it to drip hopefully on the shower rod, put some music on and turned it off, it all sounded wrong, Hawk Davies was all I wanted and didn’t have. Then I did what I was embarrassed to do, which was pick up the phone and call Al, slumped back down on the bed while it rang, flipped open When the Lights Go Down: A Short Illustrated History of Film.
“Hello?”
“If there is a film that with more elegance and imagination strikes more deeply into the fierce and tender truths of the human heart,” I said, “it has yet to be unearthed by this humble critic.”
Al’s sigh crackled the receiver. “Hey, Min.”
“Two Pairs of Shoes, blandly ignored upon its release, belittled and dismissed even at times by the director, has gradually emerged like a volcanic island rising from the ocean to take its proper place as a powerful landmark on the horizon of film history.”
“Please tell me you’re reading out loud from something, because otherwise it’s overboard even for you.”
“When the Lights Go Down: A Short Illustrated History of Film. Let’s see it tonight.”
“What?”
“Two Pairs of Shoes. Come on, I’ll stop at Limelight and find it. All you’ll have to do is popcorn and put some pants on.”
Al told me once late at night that usually when we’re talking on the phone, he’s pacing around his room in his boxers. We made a deal one morning early when he couldn’t pay attention that I’d never tell anyone if I could tease him mercilessly about it forever. “Min, do you know what time it is?”
“Four thirty.”
“Quarter of five,” he said, “Saturday. You’re calling to make plans Saturday night when Saturday night’s already started.”
“Don’t be cranky like you are sometimes.”
“I don’t like you when you assume that I don’t have anything to do. I don’t mope around while you go out boyfriending.”
Al gets like this sometimes. Another word from our vocab flash cards, petulant. I can handle it, though. “Al, I’m the one with no plans. Let’s watch a movie or please please let me tag along with whatever you’ve got.”
“What did Ed do?”
“What?”
“What did he do to you?”
My body flushed a little remembering the weeping willow. I never tell Al that I’m often in a towel talking to him. “Nothing, he just has a family thing.”
“You told me you had a busy weekend.”
“Al, please. I have nothing. Whatever you’re doing, bring me along. Monster truck show, inventory at your dad’s, make-out session with Christine Edelman, anything.”
That made him laugh. You’ve probably never noticed Christine Edelman, she’s in our lit class and looks like a professional wrestler.
“I’m free,” Al admitted. “I have nothing, I’m the usual loser.”
“You just wanted to make me suffer.”
“What’s the use of friendship?” he said, our version of What are friends for?
“Great, I’ll bring the movie.”
“I’ll sneak Christine out the back.”
“Ew.”
“Why do you think I’m in my boxers?”
“Ew!”
I never told you any of this, Ed. You never asked me what I did that night or how I managed to get Pensieri. I never told you that Al had not just popcorn but polenta with lamb chops and asparagus ready to broil in case I hadn’t eaten, which I hadn’t, and a spot, just a spot near his ear, of cream, like he’d just shaved minutes before. I had the movie and bad clothes on.
“Hey,” I said walking in. “What’s this on?”
“Mark Clime,” he said. “Live at the Blue Room. It’s my mom’s.”
“I like it,” I said. “It has the same kind of feel—did I tell you about this guy I’ve been listening to, Hawk Davies? I really like him.”
Al gave me a funny smile. “Yeah, you told me, Min.”
“Oh, right. Ed’s sister—”
“Joan.”
“Joan, she told me. She’ll lend it to me she says, soon. I’ll copy it for you too.”
“OK. So, how was his game?”
“What?”
“Basketball. Your boyfriend plays.”
“Oh, I know, I know. OK, actually.”
“Really?” Al was making this thing we like, mashing up mint and this Italian lemon syrup that comes in a round glass lemon bottle at the bottom of a tall glass, then ice and imported fizzy Italian water his parents have in the house like most people have milk.
“Well, no,” I said. God, that drink is good. We can never decide what to call it. “It was boring and loud. I can tell you that, right?”
“You can tell me anything.”
“Well, i
t was boring. But Ed was nice, and even the bonfire, and after, was nice.”
“After?”
“Um,” I said, and took a long sip, the ice slapping around my nose a little. I had a sudden question in my head there wasn’t room for, a question about you, Ed. Al had just said it, You can tell me anything, and was waiting for me to say something, opening the oven to peek on the food for no reason, the lamb and asparagus waiting in their beds with the lights on. But I couldn’t ask it. I couldn’t live the life of those Japanese directors who can take a long, long time to show a flower on the screen, a drop of water on a smooth black table going nowhere, a spiderweb lit by the moon that’s nothing to do with the plot, the image there for no reason except they liked it, and liked it not fitting. My question didn’t belong in Al’s loyal kitchen with my friend wiping his hand on the towel tucked into his belt like always, so I just looked down at his shoes with my eyes closed like I just loved the music, until Al asked me if I was OK, and I opened my eyes brightly, brightly, brightly and said yes, of course I was OK. We got plates and sat to watch.
A girl meets a boy, Ed, and everything changes, or so she says. She walks down the street and the storefronts look the same, even as we linger on their flickering reflections. The cars move quickly, slowly, quickly down the block. She gets coffee and says it tastes different, quietly, to herself. The sky looks sad, she says, but she’s not sad. It rains and she sees the boy again. The phone rings—it’s another day, or the same day, who can tell, the girl thinks with her coffee, when the whole world has changed? She gets coffee again, the cars go by, reflected in the window. The world, she thinks, has changed.
“Min, I don’t get this at all. What’s with the store window they keep showing? When is something going to happen?”
“You don’t like it,” I said. “We can turn it off if you want.”
“I have no opinion of it.”
“Al.”
“I don’t! I just don’t get it is all.”
“Cinéma du moment, they call it. Cinema of the moment. You don’t like it.”
“Don’t put this on me, Min. You don’t like it and want to turn it off, but you feel weird about it because of some book, When the Dark—”
“When the Lights Go Down. That’s not why I feel weird about it.”
“Then you feel weird about it for the same reason I do, because for forty minutes we’ve watched this French girl wandering around thinking things. Look, the cars are going by again. Are you sure this is the right movie?”
“Two Pairs of Shoes.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You don’t like it.”
“I have no opinion.”
I turned it off, the crappy movie. This is how we were, Ed, me and Al. You never got it and I never really told you how it was, old married couple, Al’s mom called it once and just laughed when Al said, “Well, Mamma, you should know.” I looked at him, I never told you this Ed, him stacking the plates, the music back on, making me another lemon whatever-it-is. It crackled in the air again, my question, electric around us even if Al didn’t know it. I don’t know where it came from. They tell you, in the pamphlets they throw at us, they say talk to your parents or a clergyman or a trusted teacher or friend. But there is nobody acceptable on that list, parents part of the problem, a teacher who will say There are some conversations I’m not really allowed to have with you, and most friends squealing to their other friends just like a clergyman will tattle to God. So you’re left alone, or with the only person, my friend Al, to lay it on. And so you lay it on him, unfair awkward, for no reason except the reason you have to ask the question, so I asked my friend Al, foolish I know, if I could ask him something.
“Sure,” clattering the dishes.
“It’s kind of personal.”
He turned off the water and watched me in the doorway with the towel on his shoulder. “OK.”
“I mean, not like my period or my parents beating me, but personal.”
“Yeah, it’s rough when your parents beat you and you have your period.”
“Al.”
“Min.”
“It’s about sex.”
His house got quiet the way every room does with the word sex, even the jazz musicians leaning forward in the hopes of hearing it through the speakers even as they kept playing.
“Beer,” Al said, a decision that surprised him. “I need, do you want a beer? My parents have a few Scarpia’s, they’ll never know.”
“Al, you know me and beer.”
“I know you, I know you.” He leaned into the open fridge and took out a bottle, opened it with the towel, tossed the cap—so unlike him—into the kitchen sink. Took a long sip.
“If you don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
“It’s OK,” he said, and sat next to me on the sofa. The Scarpia’s fizzed, the band played on.
“I can’t ask anyone else.”
“OK.”
“I really can’t. And we’re friends.”
“Yes,” he said, with another sip.
“So don’t freak out.”
“OK.”
“Don’t.”
“OK I said.”
“Because I need to ask someone.”
“Min, this is turning into that movie with you saying it over and over. Just ask what you—”
“Am I,” I asked, “is it OK to not be a virgin?”
Al sat up straight and put the beer on the coffee table. “So, you’re telling me—?”
“No,” I said. “I am, still.”
“Because that would be quick.”
“OK,” I said. “Maybe you’ve answered it, I guess.”
“Min, I’m just saying.”
“No, no, you’re right.”
“Just a couple weeks, right?”
“Yes. But I didn’t. I haven’t. But you would think—”
“I would have no opinion, Min.”
“Don’t say that. You said quick.”
“Well, it would be.”
“Quick is an opinion.”
“No, Min.” Al finished the beer but kept looking at it. “Quick is an adjective.”
We smiled at each other a little bit. “I guess what I’m asking—”
“I think I know what you’re asking. I don’t know, Min.”
“Is it OK, is what I mean.”
“Is it OK not to be a virgin, yes. Most people aren’t virgins, Min. That’s why there’s people to begin with.”
“Yeah, but—” I jiggled my leg on the sofa. I didn’t care about those people, I thought. I just cared about you. “What do you think,” I asked, “is what I’m asking. You’re a guy.”
“Yes.”
“So you know how you think about it. If a girl, you know, if you fool around in a car let’s say, or a park.”
“Jesus, Min. What park?”
“No, no, just if. For example.”
“OK, then what kind of car? Because if it was the new M-3—”
I pillow-swatted him. “What do people think about that?”
“People?” Al said.
“Al. Different people. You know!”
“Different people think different things.”
“I know, but, like, a guy.”
“Some guys like it, I guess. I mean, of course. Sexy, right? Some would think worse things. And then, some people would think something else I guess, I don’t know, this is ridiculous Min, I have no opinion.”
“It’s not ridiculous,” I said, “not to me. Al, what I’m trying to ask is, what about you?”
Al stood up, so careful and quiet, like he had shattered glass all over him, or was holding a baby. I was stupid, yes, a fool and an idiot. I am an idiot, Ed, it’s another reason we broke up. “What about me what?” he said.
“What do you think,” I said, “and don’t say you have no opinion.”
Al looked around the room. The music waited. “I guess I think, Min, that when I think about sex, you know, I want it to feel good. Not feel
good, shut up, but right. Happy, not just banging away somewhere. You know, you should not just do it to do it. You should love the guy.”
“I do,” I said quietly, “love the guy.”
Al stood still for a sec. Quietly, quietly he sighed to me, like the way the cookie crumbles. “Not to sound like that movie they made us watch,” he said, “but Min, how do you know you’re not just—”
“I know what you think he’s like,” I said, “but he’s not like that.”
Al shook his head, very hard. “I have no opinion of him. It’s just, tell me something, Min, if you’re going to tell me. You love him.”
“Yes.”
“And you told him?”
“I think he knows.”
“So you haven’t. And has he said anything?”
“Al, no.”
“Then how can you—how do you know he’s—”
I told him. I never told you this, but I told Al our plans, the things we were planning for the star we followed. I didn’t have the cookbook with me, or the lobby card—but he listened to the sugar we stole, the coat I bought you, the recipes perfect for the party. Al didn’t want to like it, he didn’t want to be excited, but he couldn’t help it.
“I know where we could get those egg things, I bet,” he said.
“I know, Vintage Kitchen,” I said. “I thought that. How many would we need, you think, to make the igloo?”
“It might be expensive,” he said. “If you show me the recipe you found—I can’t believe you took Ed Slaterton to Tip Top Goods. Is nothing sacred?”
“If you liked getting up early,” I said.
“Don’t put this on me. And when again is this party?”
“December fifth, because Al, can I tell you what it also is? It’s our, Ed and I’s, two-month anniversary.”
Al looked at me again. “That’s another thing you didn’t tell him, right? Please tell me that. Because definitely a guy thing I can tell you, they—we don’t want to hear that kind of thing, too early, too quick. Don’t tell a guy two-month anniversary.”
“I told him,” I said, “and he loves it.” An idiot.
Al gave me a long, slow blink. “I guess it’s love,” he said.
“I guess so,” I said. “But Al, what do you think?”
Why We Broke Up Page 10
