I'll Give You the Sun (37 page)

The one with the least cross-outs:

I can no longer do this. I need
to know
an answer. I cannot live without you. I am half a man, with half a body, half a heart, half a mind, half a soul. There is only one answer, you know this. You must know this by now. How can you not know? Marry me, my love. Say yes.

I fall into my chair. She said no. Or maybe he never asked her. Either way, poor Guillermo. What did he say today?
What is bad for the heart is good for art.
Clearly, this was very bad for his heart and very good for his art. Well, I'm going to make him the most beautiful smock to make his art in. I sort through my bag of scraps for reds, oranges, purples, heart colors.

I start sewing the pieces together.

I have no idea how long the knocking's been going on when it dawns on me that the noise I'm hearing isn't coming from my sewing machine acting up but from someone at the window. Oscar? Did he take a risk on the only lit-up window in the house? It has to be him. A second later, I'm at the mirror, shaking my head a little to wake up my hair, then a lot to make it wild. I reach into the top drawer of my dresser and grab the reddest lipstick I have. Yes, I want to. I also want to take one of the prize dresses off the wall and put it on—The Gravity Dress maybe?—and then, that's exactly what I'm doing.

“One sec,” I holler at the window.

I hear Oscar say, “Rightio.”

Rightio!

I'm standing before the full-length mirror in The Gravity Dress, my response to The Floating Dress. It's a coral-colored, tight-fitting mermaid shape that flares and ruffles at the bottom. No one has ever seen me in it or in any of the dresses I've made over the last couple years. Including me. I make them all to fit my form but envision them for another girl, always thinking if someone opened my closet, they'd be certain there were two of us living in this room and they'd want to be friends with the other one.

There you are, I think, and it hits me. So she's the one I've been designing for all along without realizing it. If I ever have a line of dresses like Grandma, I'm calling it:
That Girl
.

I cross the room, part the curtains, and slide open the window.

He does a double take. “Oh my God,” he exclaims. “Look at you. Bloody look at you. You're stunning. And this is how you dress when you're all alone in the middle of the night? And in potato sacks when you're out in broad daylight?” He smiles his haywire smile. “I think you might very well be the most eccentric person I've ever met.” He puts his hands on the windowsill. “But that's not what I've come to say. I was halfway home and I remembered something very important I needed to tell you.”

He gestures with his index finger for me to come closer. I bend down and lean out the window into the night. I feel the soft breeze in my hair.

His face has grown serious.

“What is it?” I ask.

“This.” So quickly I don't see it coming he reaches both his hands around my head and kisses me.

I pull back for a moment, wondering if I can trust him, because I'd be crazy to. But what if I do? What if I just do? And you know, if he exhales me to kingdom come, so be it—

This is when it happens. Perhaps it's the moonlight spilling down, alighting his features from above that does it, or maybe it's the glow of my bedroom light on his face just so, or maybe it's that I'm finally ready to see it, what's been eluding me since the moment we first met.

He modeled for Noah.

Oscar's the guy in the portrait.

He's him.

And this is exactly like I always imagined it.

I lean back out again into the night. “I gave up practically the whole world for you,” I tell him, walking through the front door of my own love story. “The sun, stars, ocean, trees, everything, I gave it all up for you.”

Bafflement crosses his face, quickly followed by delight. Quickly followed by both of my hands reaching for him, pulling him to me, because
he's him,
and all the years of not noticing and not doing and not
living
are breaking through the dam of the moment until I'm kissing him hungrily, wanting my hands on his body, and I'm reaching for him, and he me, and his fingers are knotting in my hair and before I know it I'm all the way out the window and toppling him to the ground.

“Man overboard,” he murmurs, wrapping me up in his arms and we're laughing and then the laughing dies out because who knew kissing could be like this, could so alter the landscape within, tipping over oceans, sending rivers up mountains, unpouring the rain.

He rolls us over so his body is pressing into mine, the weight of him, the weight of that other day, and Zephyr begins elbowing his way between us. My muscles tense. I open my eyes, afraid of the unseeing stranger I'll find this time, but I don't find a stranger. It's Oscar, present, so present, with love in his face. That's how come I trust him. You can see love. It looks like this face. To me, it has always looked like this crazy mismatched face.

He touches my cheek with his thumb, says, “It's okay.” Like he somehow knows what happened.

“You sure?”

Around us the trees rustle softly.

“One hundred percent sure.” He gently tugs at the seashell. “Promise.”

The night's warm, shy, barely touching our skin. It envelops us, entwines us. He kisses me slowly, tenderly, so that my heart creaks open, so that all those moments on the beach from that horrid, horrid day wash away, so that, just like that, the boycott comes to an end.

• • •

I
t's extremely difficult to concentrate on Oscar in my bedroom because: Oscar is in my bedroom! Oscar, who's the guy in the portrait!

He's flipped out that the dresses on the walls and the one on my body were made by me and has now picked up a framed photograph of me surfing. He's excavating me, just without hammer and chisel. “Pornography for an English bloke,” he says, waving the picture at me.

“Haven't surfed in years,” I tell him.

“Shame.” He taps the
Physician's Desk Reference.
“Now this I expected.” He picks up another photo. A jump off Devil's. He studies it. “So you used to be a daredevil?”

“Guess so. I didn't think about it. I just loved doing that kind of stuff then.” He looks up like he's expecting me to say more. “When my mom died . . . I don't know, I got scared. Of pretty much everything.”

He nods like he gets it, says, “It's like a hand at your throat all the time, isn't it? Nothing's inevitable anymore. Not the next heartbeat, not anything.” More than gets it. He sits down on my sewing chair, regards the photo again. “Though I went the other way. Started using all that fear as a punching bag. Nearly got myself killed on a daily basis.” He frowns, puts down the picture. “That's partly what the row with G. was about. He thinks I take ridiculous risks on the bike or in the past with drugs but won't—” He stops when he sees my face. “What is it?”

“Oscar, I overheard some of that fight this morning. As soon as I realized you guys were arguing, I left, but—” I stifle the confession because I'm thinking his organs may have caught fire.

Not sure what's happening, except that he's on his feet and bounding toward me at a breakneck un-Oscar-like pace. “Then you know,” he says. “You must, CJ.”

“Know what?”

He takes me by the arms. “That I'm fucking terrified of you. That I can't seem to keep you out like I can everyone else. That I think you could devastate me.”

Our breathing's loud, fast, in synch. “I didn't know,” I whisper, barely getting the words out before his mouth lands hard and urgent on mine. I feel the unrestrained emotion in his lips, feel it unburying, unleashing something in me, something daring and fearless and winged.

Ka-effing-pow.

“I'm so dead,” he says into my hair, “so dead,” into my neck, then pulls back, his eyes shining. “You're going to obliterate me, aren't you? I know it.” He laughs in an even more tumbling, cascading way than usual and there's something new in his face, an openness, a freedom maybe. “You already have. Look at me. Who is this guy? I assure you no one's ever met this tempest before.
I
haven't met him before. And none of what I just told you was really even part of the fight with G., for Christ's sake! I just had to tell you. You have to know I've never”—he waves his hand in the air—“flipped the lid before. Not even close. Not a lid flipper.” He's saying he's never been in love? I remember Guillermo telling him how he hurts before he can be hurt, how he lets no one in. But he can't keep me out?

“Oscar,” I say.

He puts his palms on my cheeks. “Nothing happened with Brooke after you left. Nothing. After I told you that stuff about my mother and me, I totally freaked out and was this total wanker. A coward—you probably heard that fine praise this morning on G.'s lips. I think I tried to ruin this before . . .” I follow his gaze to the window, to the black world outside this room. “I kept thinking now that you had a glimpse of the underbelly, of who I really was, you'd—”

“No,” I say, understanding. “It was the opposite. It made me feel closer to you. But I get it, I think the same way, like if people really knew me, they could never—”

“
I
could,” he says.

It kicks the breath out of me, kicks bright light into me.

At the same time, we reach for each other and then we're in each other's arms, joined together, pressed together, but this time not kissing, not moving, just holding each other so tightly. Moments pass, lots and lots of them, with us holding on, it feels like for dear life, or maybe holding on
to
dear life. So dear.

“Now that you have the seashell,” he says, “I'm thinking this is about as much distance I can safely be away from you at all times.”

“
That's
why you gave it to me, then!”

“My entirely sinister plan.”

I didn't think it possible, but he draws me even closer into him. “We're Brancusi's
The Kiss,
” I whisper. One of the most romantic sculptures ever made: a man and a woman pressed together into one.

“Yes!” he says. “Just like it.” He steps back, brushes a strand of hair out of my face.

“A perfect fit like we're split-aparts.”

“Split-aparts?”

His face brightens. “So Plato talked about these beings that used to exist that had four legs and four arms and two heads. They were totally self-contained and ecstatic and powerful. Too powerful, so Zeus cut them all in half and scattered all the halves around the world so that humans were doomed to forever look for their other half, the one who shared their very soul. Only the luckiest humans find their split-apart, you see.”

I think about the latest note to Dearest. How Guillermo said he was half a man with half a soul, half a mind . . . “I found another note Guillermo wrote. It was in one of those notepads he has everywhere, a marriage proposal—”

“Yeah, I'm going to have to take the Fifth, isn't that what you Americans say? He'll tell you all about it one day, I'm sure. I've promised him—”

I nod. “I understand.”

“Those two were split-aparts, though, that's certain,” he says. His hands find my waist. “I have a brilliant idea,” he says, his face whirring with emotion. Not any percent of him seems full of it anymore. “Let's do it. Let's flip our bloody lids together. Here it is, the rest of it: I was a mess at The Spot because I thought I blew it with you. I don't care that G. has added a beheading to the list of barbaric punishments for my coming near you. I think my mother's prophecy is real. I look everywhere. I search crowds. I take so many pictures. But I recognized you, only you. In all these years.” The most cockamamie grin has taken over his face. “So how about it? We'll pop around on Hippity Hops. And talk to ghosts. And think we have the Ebola virus and not the common cold. And carry onions in our pockets until they sprout. And miss our mums. And make beautiful things—”

Completely swept up, I say, “And ride around on motorcycles. And go to abandoned buildings and take off our clothes. And maybe even teach an English bloke how to surf. Except I don't know who just said all that.”

“I do,” he says.

“I feel so happy,” I say, overwhelmed. “I have to show you something.” I unclasp myself from him and reach under the bed for the plastic bag.

“So, Noah drew you. Not sure how—”

“You don't know? He used to camp outside the window at that arts high school and draw the models.”

I cover my mouth with my hand.

“What?” Oscar says. “Did I say something wrong?”

I shake my head, try to make this image of Noah peering into a CSA classroom go away. He would have done anything. But then I take a deep breath, tell myself, it's all right, because by next week he'll be at CSA and that calms me enough to rummage around for the plastic bag. A moment later, I sit back down next to Oscar with it on my lap. “Okay. So once upon a time, I saw this cubist portrait my brother did of you and had to have it.” I look at him. “
Had
to have it. It was love at first sight.” He smiles. “He and I were always playing this game where we'd swap parts of the world for others in a quest for universe domination. He was winning. We're . . . competitive, that's the nice way of putting it. Anyway, he didn't want me to have you. I had to give up almost everything. But it was worth it. I kept you here.” I show him the spot where the picture hung by my bed. “I would stare and stare at you and wish you were real and imagine you coming to that window, just like you did tonight.”

He bursts out laughing. “That's incredible! We're absolutely split-aparts.”

“I don't know if I want a split-apart,” I say honestly. “I think I need my own soul.”