by Kaela Coble
“Her zipper was stuck, you asshole,” I hear Murphy say through the door after he slams it shut behind them.
Danny’s voice trails down the stairs as Murphy continues to guide him away from me. “Oh, well, maybe I should hang around up there, in case any of the other girls need help out of their dresses.”
A minute later, I hear one of Aaron’s signature burps, signifying the rest of the crew’s arrival. I never thought I’d be so grateful for Aaron’s gas. The girls come into Nicki’s room—Danny not daring to make the same joke that he did to Murphy in front of Aaron or Emmett, who wouldn’t find it funny—and we change into jeans and sweatshirts but leave our hair up and makeup on. There isn’t much choice in the matter. Removing the clips and bobby pins now would leave a Bride of Frankenstein mess of our hair, and none of us feels like completely showering off our fancy looks yet.
We drink and get a little high and smoke Nicki’s mother’s secret cigarette stash. We play Asshole and continue to dance, staying up most of the night. People start trickling off to various bedrooms, but Murphy and I stay up, continuing to play cards as if we have some unspoken agreement that we need more time for just the two of us. Finally, I declare I’m ready for my last cigarette. Even though Murphy never smokes and normally complains when I do, he comes outside to the porch with me. It’s cold, so Murphy takes off his coat—this time his trusty blue flannel in place of the tuxedo jacket—and drapes it over my shoulders.
Once again, the moment is too quiet, the crickets and my sporadic exhalations the only sounds. So I say, “What’s with all the chivalry tonight, Murph?” I mean it to be funny, and I expect him to overcompensate by giving me a brotherly cuff on the arm, breaking the tension. But he’s quiet. He opens his mouth, closes it. Opens it again. Closes it.
My heart starts to beat harder, because I think he’s trying to figure out a way to kiss me, and I don’t know what to do if he tries. I thought we were past this. No matter what I’ve been feeling tonight, Murphy has a girlfriend. After Hardy, I swore I would never be the other woman again, and I won’t let Murphy become a cheater either. Just because it’s too soon for Taylor to give it up, doesn’t mean I’m his automatic sexual consolation prize. Besides, all those feelings before, I was just swept up in the whole prom mania. Twinkly lights, overplayed love songs, all that chiffon. Murphy’s my best friend, and that’s all. Right now, he’s just trying to get into my pants. It’s bound to happen; he’s a dumb, horny boy.
Then he says, clearly but softly, “I love you, Ruby.”
Oh.
10
RUBY
NOW
I lie in Murphy’s bed, comfortable enough considering I’m naked and slipping around on satin sheets. Murphy Leblanc—little Murphy, who was chunky until the eleventh grade, whose proverbial cherry I am personally responsible for popping—now has satin sheets. It’s nauseating and hilarious at the same time. They positively reek of his cologne, or maybe my nose is just hyperaware. They say smell is the most powerful of the senses, the one most tightly connected to memory. I catch a whiff of this scent or something similar in the city from time to time—getting off the subway, in a crowded theater, at the bodega across the street from the office. It never ceases to make me simultaneously anxious, aroused, and headachy.
We both lie on our backs, staring at the ceiling, catching our breath and our thoughts. Outside, it has started to rain, as if nature itself is displeased with our reunion. Neither of us knows what to say. At least, I don’t know what to say, and I’m not sure if he cares enough to say anything. It’s silly that I’m surprised when he breaks the silence with a joke. “So…how you been for the last ten years?” he asks.
I laugh, clutching the smooth sheet in my hands. He laughs too, which sends me off into a fit of giggles, like we’re fourteen and on the phone until way too late.
He asks me about my life now, and I tell him about New York, how my job is fine but unfulfilling. I tell him I spend time in bookstores and cafés, hoping to be inspired by all the pretentious hipsters jabbing away at their MacBooks, but instead of inspiring me to write, the trips usually end with a return to my couch to eat potato chips in front of bad reality TV shows. I tell him something I haven’t yet said out loud, that I’m thinking of going back to school to get my MFA, if for no other reason than to force myself to write something other than apologetic emails to clients.
He likes the idea, he says, because then the countless hours I spent reading my short stories to him over the phone will have been worth it. I tell him about how much I love the city—the MOMA, Central Park, the shops with fresh flowers on every corner. How I pass a million strangers, and none of them know anything about me. I tell him about the monthly (more like quarterly) dinners I have with my father. Away from my mother’s penny-pinching, he has his assistant book us at exclusive restaurants where I wouldn’t otherwise even be able to get a reservation, let alone afford half the check.
He asks me about my friends, and I tell him about some of my coworkers that I occasionally have drinks with. He tells me they don’t count. I tell him I see my sister when she blows through New York, but I admit that happens only three or four times a year since she’s a freelance nature photographer and I can hardly keep track of which continent she’s on at any given moment. I tell him about Greta, my roommate from the London years, who moves freely about the world as if things like working visas and health insurance are of no importance. I’ve gotten a free place to stay in Brazil, Vietnam, and (my favorite) Turkey as a result.
When I mention that my favorite thing about Greta was how she didn’t care what anyone else thought, that she slept with any and everyone and had no qualms about discussing the gory details, his interest is piqued. I tell him what I especially loved was when she talked about her conquests in front of Jamie. His princely manners disallowed him from any comment, so the best part was watching him squirm.
He doesn’t ask who Jamie is, and when I realize my story probably doesn’t make sense and start to explain, he tells me it’s not the first time he’s heard the name. Apparently, Nancy and Cecile swap stories when they run into each other at Martin’s, the grocery store. Nevertheless, he asks me more about him. Later, I will need to examine my reasoning for dropping Jamie’s name so casually into a conversation with a man I’ve just slept with. Nancy’s therapist would have a field day with that one.
“Is he good-looking?” Murphy prompts.
I purse my lips at him. “No, he’s a troll. Yes, of course he’s good-looking.”
He squints his eyes. “As good-looking as me?”
I laugh. “Yes. In a different way though.”
I know he wants me to say more, but how can I possibly explain that while Murphy is more rugged and brutish, Jamie’s appeal is more subtle, more intellectual, hidden behind glasses and amplified by the sexy English accent?
“He’s more nerdy cute,” I settle on, feeling guilty that I’m downplaying Jamie’s looks to boost Murphy’s ego.
It works though; Murphy looks pleased with my answer. For a foolish moment I hope that’s the end of it, but he wants to know more. “How did you meet him?”
I tell him the story: Jamie was the professor’s assistant in my Gothic literature class when I studied abroad. He resigned halfway through the semester, and as the dozens of other lovestruck girls fawned over him after his announcement, I suddenly had a surge of panic that I might never see him again. So I asked him out. We went to a coffee shop and talked about books for hours; he teased me when I tried to impress him by “casually” dropping in references to Chaucer and Hawthorne.
He told me he had resigned because he wanted to “give writing a go.” I found out later he comes from a pretty well-to-do family, which is how he could afford this luxury. I hasten to tell Murphy that, beyond Jamie’s impeccable table manners, you wouldn’t have suspected he came from money. Especially with that sloppy hair and the corduro
y blazer with the elbow patches, frayed at the edges, straight from the clearance bin at Professors R Us. It feels important Murphy doesn’t think I spent three years in a relationship with a snob.
“Sounds like the kind of guy we all thought you’d end up with,” he says, and I wonder if it hurts him to say it as much as it hurts me to hear. “Did you love him?”
I think a minute before responding and decide to tell him the truth. There’s enough that I’m hiding from him without adding to it. “I did. It took a while, but I did. Very much.” I glance at Murphy but don’t look into his eyes. I didn’t say this to hurt him, but at the same time, I’m terrified that I will see his indifference to it.
It did take a while for me to love Jamie, or at least to realize that I loved him. Instead of coming home and attending NYU graduation, I skipped the ceremony (much to Nancy’s dismay), signed another lease with Greta, and took a job at the Sun in their sales department. I swore it wasn’t about Jamie, that I just loved London and my job and Greta and loathed commencement ceremonies (based solely on my high school experience), but of course it was about him. It wasn’t until about a year after that I knew for sure.
It was when I read the pages of his first book. I remember how nervous he was to hand them over. We had been in bed, just like Murphy and I are now, when he carefully placed them on my lap. Instead of watching for my reaction as I read, which would have been vain and obnoxious, he simply got up and left the room. His writing was so beautiful, yet simple, just like we were. With each turn of the page, I knew, finally, that I was in love.
“So why did you break up?” Murphy asks after a silence.
I sigh, my lips reverberating on the exhale. “Timing, I guess?”
“Explain.”
“I’d rather not.”
He holds up his hand, his fingers clenched like talons. “Tell me, or I’ll give you the Aaron claw.”
We both laugh. And then, because it’s Murphy, and because before we fucked everything up, we used to spend hours dissecting stuff like this, I tell him the truth. The only thing Jamie and I ever argued about was living together. He was approaching his thirties toward the end of our relationship, so all his friends were settling down and he was ready to take steps that I just wasn’t ready for in my midtwenties. He wanted me to move into his gorgeous flat, live off his family money, and start writing. (I know. What a prick, right? Not.)
I should have leapt at the chance, but I couldn’t make myself want it. I didn’t feel comfortable not paying my fair share (and I never could have on my salary, because even if I had kept my job, I could barely afford the crap shack Greta and I stayed in). Besides, I already had a good thing going with Greta. I liked living with her. She was entertaining and fun. She cooked things I still can’t pronounce, and I cleaned up after her. I got to hang out with Jamie when I wanted to and be on my own when I wanted to.
It worked for three years. But then Greta, the bitch, decided to follow this guy she’d been seeing for just four months to Ghana, of all places, and that decision held a giant magnifying glass up to Jamie’s and my relationship. He asked me one more time to move in with him, and when I refused, he ended it.
What I don’t tell Murphy is that my reasons for not moving in, although true and valid, were only branches on a whole tree of excuses. The root of the problem was that I was twenty-two, then twenty-three, twenty-four, and twenty-five, and I just wasn’t ready to move in with him. With anyone. It wasn’t Jamie. Jamie was practically perfect. It was that the closer we got, the more I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe. The better he treated me, the more I resented him for being overall better than me—a better writer, a better partner, a better person.
I hate myself for what I’ve done. For what I am.
Since Jamie, there’s been no one of significance. Sometimes I meet someone interesting, or my coworkers play matchmaker and I go on dates. We go see a movie or comedy show, or for dinner somewhere trendy, a walk through Central Park, or to a museum. It rarely goes past the second date. I’m not very interested in third dates, the famous one where you’re supposed to have sex with a person you barely know. The guys I’ve gone out with are attractive enough; it’s just that none of them have made me feel as safe and loved and adored as Jamie. And none has made me feel as alive and excited and crazy as the guy lying next to me. I definitely don’t tell him that. And I don’t tell him that, considering Jamie and Greta are still my best friends and neither even lives on this continent, I’m a little lonely.
“How about you?” I ask, purposely leaving the question open-ended. I don’t want to ask specifically about this Krystal person who, truth be told, I haven’t thought of until this moment. She can’t mean all that much to him considering what just happened, or at least I would hope not. He doesn’t bring her up though, or any other girl. Instead, he tells me more about his business, how happy he is to be building homes and running his own crews.
“There’s always a finished product, a good home for a family to be raised in, and it’ll be there at least as long as I’m alive, if not forever.” I picture him driving in his truck, a grandson in the passenger seat, pointing out the buildings he’s responsible for. It’s a nice picture, but it also makes me sad.
I ask about his mother, realizing she is another person once a part of my life and now all but forgotten. “She gets tougher with every sunrise,” he says, as he’s always said of her. Cecile is one of the toughest ladies around, but not many people have seen the soft side I’ve seen. After I got Blue but before Murphy got his first truck (a gap of about a year that felt like ten for him), I used to shuttle him back and forth from baseball practice, smoking and doing my homework in Blue in between. The first time I came to pick him up, Murphy had read his schedule wrong and we hung out at his house for an hour to kill the time.
Cecile’s small but solid frame thundered in after dealing with a rat situation at one of their apartments, and she was in no mood to have deadweight hanging around the house. (She actually used that term.) She put me to work chopping onions for the dinner she would heat up when I brought Murphy back from practice. Nancy was going through a black period at the time, which meant a frozen dinner on a TV tray on a good day, so the experience of chopping and chatting with Cecile—once I proved I wasn’t totally useless in the kitchen—felt blissfully normal and domestic.
After that first day, I started showing up early on purpose, and without any discussion, Cecile would put me to work, instructing me in her gravelly, accented voice and occasionally guiding my hands to show me the proper technique for a stir or a whisk. Her hands were always pleasantly cool, even when working over her enormous gas stove, and I secretly treasured the intimacy of it. Murphy, meanwhile, would pore over his schoolbooks, struggling to complete his homework and biting his tongue in concentration. Perhaps this is why we, and our friends, bought into our insistence we were “like family” for so long. The picture of the boy doing his homework while the womenfolk busy themselves making dinner is like a goddamn Rockwell painting.
I gradually became less and less afraid of Cecile, and she came to display a sort of muted approval of my presence in her son’s life, despite her skepticism as to the need for young boys to have female friends. I wonder now if she knew about Nancy’s disorder and was doing her part to make me feel like I still had a mother when things at my house were bleak. I was always invited to dine with the Leblancs when I brought Murphy home from practice, and many times, I took her up on it. Except for when I was dating someone—then I would just tell Nancy I was at the Leblancs’ and would go off with the guy instead.
Murphy tells me that Cecile was diagnosed with Lyme disease, which I take harder than he seems to think is appropriate. It doesn’t bother her much as far as he knows. I point out that she wouldn’t tell him if it did. He says he would know anyway, and I know that’s true. One of the many things I know about Murphy that most people don’t is what a mama’
s boy he is.
He tells me his father retired around the same time Murphy started his company with Aaron, but he still consults on some of Murphy’s larger projects, and Mr. Leblanc and Cecile still run all their properties with the help of Murphy’s older brother. His brother had “a few bad years” when he dated Jenny Albrecht, Danny’s on-again, off-again girlfriend from high school, but they’ve been broken up for over a year. The only residual effect from the relationship is his need to smoke pot at the beginning of each day. Considering the stuff Danny was into at the end, both of us agree this is no cause for concern.
“And?” I finally ask. “Are you dating anyone? Has there been anyone special…recently?”
“No,” he says. He doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t press. I don’t think I can remain as stoic as Murphy if I have to listen to him talk about his love life.
We listen to the rain against the windowpane for a moment, our eyes drooping in the peaceful postcoital haze. Everything is different, and yet it’s as if no time has passed. Later, the hurt will come, but I choose not to think about it.
After a while, a question floats into my head, and I ask it despite the risk of it making us both sad. “Where do you think he is?”
“Who? Dan?”
I nod.
“I don’t know. Heaven, I guess.”
Try to be happy I’m finally at peace.
“Heaven,” I repeat. It’s a concept I haven’t really contemplated in a long time, even when I first heard Danny was gone.
“You don’t think so?” Murphy asks, rolling over to face me, his head propped in his hand. I roll to mirror his posture, which is a mistake, because from this angle I can see the sparkle in his eyes. The thrill of it is like a stab through my heart.
“I don’t know,” I say, looking away. “It’s always seemed like such a nice idea, that we all go to this big, pillowy cloud place after we die. But then what?”
