Hart & Boot & Other Stories (12 page)

“Me, too. I’d like to go out with you again.”

“I’m pretty sure I can free up my schedule.”

She leaned forward, close to me, and for the first time I saw the little lines around her eyes, and the word that came to mind was
careworn
. I thought her face was beautiful, just touched by laugh lines, crying lines, life lines. “But there’s something you should know. My relationship situation is a little unusual.”

How many times had I started this conversation, mostly with girls who were maybe sophomores in college, explaining to them that I hadn’t been in a monogamous relationship since I was seventeen, and had no intention of ever going back to the Land of Jealous Possession? I wondered if she was one of those hard-core polyamorous types, and if she’d start in about her co-primaries and her nested secondaries in an N-structure, and how we could at best have a tertiary relationship with bimonthly sex privileges. The jargon can get pretty extreme, though I don’t have much use for it, myself, preferring to say, “Yeah, we’re friends, and we sleep together sometimes,” rather than “I’m her tertiary with secondary tendencies” or some shit like that.

But Lily didn’t get into any of that. She said, “I have a boyfriend, named Martin, and we’ve been together for over ten years. He’s a musician, though, and he spends about six months a year traveling, playing with different groups. I went with him a couple of times, and it was fun, roaming all over Europe—he gets a lot of gigs in Europe—but it’s not the kind of life I’m built for. I’m too much of a homebody. So for the past eight years or so we’ve had a different arrangement. While he’s here in town, for four months, six months, whatever, we’re together, and it’s great. And when he leaves, I see whoever I want, until he gets back.” She shrugged. “It works pretty well. I don’t get bothered about the women he sleeps with on the road, and he doesn’t get bothered about the people I see when he’s gone.”

I mulled that over. “So he’s on the road now?”

“Yep. In Greece, last I heard.”

“When’s he going to be back?”

“It’s a little uncertain, but probably in October.”

It was early May. Five months sounded like... forever. How many dates had I been on that turned into relationships that lasted longer than five months, anyway? Not many. And I knew about this Martin guy, so I could keep that in my head, not get too attached even if things did go well with Lily. “Sounds good to me,” I said.

“And even if you and I really hit it off, that doesn’t mean I won’t see other—”

I held up my hand. “Say no more. It’s cool.” And I told her about Susie and Nick and the brief history of my love life, and we knew we understood each other.

That night was the beginning of something beautiful. In the short term, anyway. In the longer term, it was just a small part of something pretty monstrous.

***

The next five months were great. I could go on about it, tell you in detail about my summer of love with Lily. She was a freelance graphic designer, so her schedule was nearly as flexible as mine (though she got more work, and made more money, than I did). We did all-night film festivals, where we’d each pick out two movies and watch them on the DVD at her place. So she saw
The Brood
and
It Came from Outer Space
and
The Masque of the Red Death
for the first time, and I saw
The Lady Eve
and
Sullivan’s Travels
and
Queen of the Nile
. We had picnics in the park, fried chicken and big roast beef sandwiches—I’ve never known a more joyfully carnivorous woman—and went roller-skating, which I hadn’t done since junior high. We took a couple of weekend trips (her treat) to the country, which we spent in bed and on hiking trails in roughly equal proportion. And we went to dozens and dozens of shows, plays and concerts and poetry slams, and at every one she seemed to know a performer, or the guy working the door, or the woman working the lights, and half the time she got us in free, which is pretty much the epitome of cool in my book. She was so good for me, too. I mean, you know guys like me; I wear black, I smoke too much, I like obscure music, I talk shit, I’m the master of irony and sarcasm, I sleep all day and stay up all night, I’m cooler-than-thou; it’s been my thing for years. But with Lily, I loosened up, laughed more, and the world didn’t seem so painfully tedious and tawdry and stupid anymore. I was, to be as cliché as possible, stopping to smell the roses, and they smelled good.

And we had lots and lots of sex, occasionally great sex, but almost always really
good
sex. She was funny, and sweet, and she would sometimes have whole conversations with me in her sleep, her end of things matter-of-fact and surreal: “Have you seen my eyepatch?” she’d say, and laying awake I’d reply, “No, babe,” and she’d say, “The statues are breaking in the rain,” and I’d say, “That’s what happens when you use cheap cement,” and so forth. She never remembered those conversations the next morning, though she said she believed me; she’d always had the habit, she said, of narrating her dreams.

Neither of us dated anyone else, though we left the option open; we were together more nights than not, unless one of us had a deadline to finish. It was something. Something else. Something special.

I can’t decide if all this is boring or not, if you care about the good times, or if you’re just waiting for the monsters to start jumping out of the closet, if you’re waiting for the train wreck you know is coming. I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s hard for me, writing about those good months, remembering. The thing is: she loved me. I wasn’t just somebody to fuck while Martin was away, though maybe that’s what she expected me to be at first. We had something more. It was the best relationship I’d ever been in, the most honest, the most unselfconscious, the most gentle, and it was good for her, too; she told me so often enough. So I thought that when Martin got back, there’d be
room
for me, that we could still see each other, that it wouldn’t be the end, because I was
special
.

So in late September, when she said, “We should talk,” I got this heavy feeling in my gut, like I’d just eaten a pound of ball bearings.

But before I tell you about that, I should maybe tell you about the lion dreams.

I’ve never really been into animals. I live in a city, and I don’t see anything other than birds and squirrels, cats, dogs on leashes. I’ve been to the zoo a couple of times, but the monkeys interested me the most, probably because they’re the closest thing to people. I hardly paid attention to the lions at all. But after I started seeing Lily regularly, I began dreaming about lions all the time, dreaming I
was
a lion, a big cat, slinking through the long grasses on the savanna, chasing down antelope, lazing in the sun, climbing over rocks. I loved the sun on my fur, the strength in my legs, the way dead animals smelled as good as hot brownies or espresso. I had that dream two, three times a week. I read about lions, even wrote an article about them, mostly about how badass they are, that I sold to a kid’s magazine. Most of the dreams were set in the savanna, or in a rocky place, but there were other settings, to0. The one I remember most clearly was an island, with a weird building like a Greek temple on a hill. The beaches were white sand, and the water was blue as the lips of an asphyxiation victim. There were gray stone statues standing in the sand in front of the building, like it was the most white-trash front yard in the history of the world. Statues of people, birds, and all kinds of weird creatures from mythology. Roosters with lizard tails and multifaceted eyes. A pegasus with one wing broken off. A hydra, tipped over, with half its heads buried in the sand. A griffin, a centaur, a unicorn, and a cyclops—
that
one was as tall as a building itself. I padded through the statues, toward the building, but then I heard this
hissing
, like the air being let out of a hundred tires at once, coming from the dark behind the pillars. I looked around, and saw some lion statues, their faces frozen in snarls. I slunk back to the water, which churned, and seemed filled with monsters, and I was trapped, and desperate, and also
sad
. I woke from that dream with a sense of choking despair, and I clung to Lily like she was the only thing keeping me from sinking.

That was the last night I spent with Lily. The next morning she said, “We should talk,” and here we are again.

We were in her white-and-yellow kitchen, having breakfast. I was having toast and coffee because my stomach doesn’t appreciate much more early in the morning, but she had bacon and eggs and chicken-apple sausage and a big glass of milk. Lily ate neatly, without shoveling, but she could make mountains of food disappear.

“I thought we
were
talking?” I said, trying to keep it light.

She sighed. “I should’ve said something earlier, but things’ve been so good... I heard from Martin a few days ago. He’s going to be back next week. Monday. I’m picking him up from the airport.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, cool. I know you’ll be glad to see him.” Lily didn’t talk about Martin much, though he naturally showed up in lots of her stories and anecdotes. The impression I got was that he was talented, moody, and capricious; the sort of guy who’s a lot of fun to hang out with, but maybe a little exhausting, who decides to go to Vegas on a whim and convinces you to go with him, or who jumps in the car to go to the coast for a week and sleeps on the beach when he gets there. He played lots of instruments, but his best were trumpet and flute, and he’d played with just about every jazz and swing band on the planet at one time or another. He did well enough to tour like hell for several months and then take a few months off.

Lily nodded. “I’ve missed him, yeah. But what I really want to say is... I’m going to miss you. These past few months have been fabulous.”

I put my coffee cup down; my hand was shaking. “Are you breaking up with me?”

She looked annoyed. Lily had precious little patience for bullshit, and I realized that’s how I sounded to her. For a second her eyes looked black, just like they had in the mirror that first night in Black Glass. I’d seen that before, when she got angry, which wasn’t often; just a flash of black, and then back to green. I’d convinced myself it was a little consistent hallucination on my part, that I sensed her mood and translated it into a creepy visual effect. “Ray, you knew all along there was a limit on the far side of this, that once Martin came back I was going to be with him again. I never lied to you.”

“You haven’t exactly brought it up lately,” I said, bitter, not trying to hold back.

“I didn’t think you needed to be reminded every half an hour, no. Was I mistaken?”

“So this is it, then? I’m out the door? You can’t even see me on weekends, or—”

“No. I’m sorry. When Martin’s here, he’s for me, and I’m for him. He... it’s an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing for him. He doesn’t care what I do when he’s not around, but when he’s back, he wants me all to himself.” She shrugged. “That’s the way it’s always been.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way, if you don’t want it to be.”

She looked at me, totally cool, she might have been something carved from stone, and said, “No, it doesn’t. If I don’t want it to be.”

And that was all. I knew how it was, then. She didn’t want to be with me.

Though I hated myself for it, I said, “Don’t you love me, Lily?”

She softened, and put her hand over mine. “Sweet Ray. Yes, I love you. But that’s not what this is about. I love Martin, too, and I have for a long time. You’ve been my summertime, but Martin is my man for every season.”

I nodded miserably. “When he goes away again...”

“Maybe,” she said, but she wouldn’t look me in the eyes. “It’s hard to say. People change. I don’t know how long he’ll be here. He’s even talked about retiring, these past couple of years, though I can’t imagine him staying in one place for so long.” She finally met my eyes. “I’ll call you.” I knew she meant it. I also knew she might not call for months. “I’m not asking you to wait for me. You know I’m not the one-and-only woman for you. We know that’s just a bunch of dumb Hollywood crap.”

“Yeah,” I said hollowly, but for the first time I realized that the movies she liked most were those old romantic comedies, the ones where there really
is
just one person meant for you, one true love in a world of wrong choices. And I think that’s a dangerous bullshit idea, I always have, and Lily said she did, too... but I wondered. I wondered if she didn’t see Martin as her one-and-only, and everyone else as mere recreation.

“Take care,” she said.

I mumbled something, pushed back from the table, got my stuff, and went to the door. She didn’t follow. She didn’t kiss me goodbye. I couldn’t decide if that was cruelty or a kindness.

***

I got home and found an invitation to Nick and Susie’s wedding. I pitched it in the trash. I’d been thinking about calling Nick, trying to convince him there were no hard feelings (and there really weren’t; losing Susie was how I met Lily, and I wouldn’t have traded that for anything), seeing if we could talk, but there was no way I could do that now. Too bitter. Why the hell should that idiot and that bitch be getting married, when I’d just been given the boot in favor of Martin?