In the Middle of Somewhere (3 page)

I can’t let myself think any more about this shit show of a day—much less the fact that I’m in the shower of a total stranger who may or may not be about to axe murder me and wrap me up in this shower curtain—or I’m going to lose it. Instead, I pretend like Ginger is giving me a stern talking-to because, unlike mine, Ginger’s talking-tos sometimes work. Well, first Ginger would tell me to have a fucking drink, so I’m good on that count. Then it would probably go something like this:

Me: I’m having a nervous breakdown. I have no clue what I should be doing with my life. What if my dad is right and academia is for assholes who think they’re better than everyone else but never do a day’s work in their lives?

Ginger: Your dad is a fucking idiot. We know this. First of all, you don’t have to know what you’re doing with your whole life. Just what you’re doing right now. And right now, you’re being a professor. Second, you don’t think you’re better than everyone. Third, you’ve worked hard your entire life.

Me: Okay, but what if Richard’s right and I’m not really smart enough to do this? I mean, I wasn’t smart enough to realize that he was having sex with approximately 10 percent of Philadelphia, even though everyone else knew.

Ginger: Richard is a fucking idiot. Also, he looks like a boring version of an Abercrombie and Fitch model. You hate that all-American shit. You only went out with him because you were insecure about being the only one at Penn whose parents weren’t professor-types. You were flattered when he wanted to go out with you because you thought it meant you were smart. Well, you are smart, but that was stupid. You’re smart enough to be a professor; that’s why you’re going to get this job.

Me: Fuck me, Ginge—this place is ridiculous. I’m probably the only queer within a hundred miles. There’s a park near here called Gaylord, and I bet no one even thinks it’s funny. Seriously, if I get this job I’ll have to be celibate. Until some cute little gay undergrad catches me in a weak moment, after I haven’t had sex in seventeen years, and then I’ll get fired for inappropriate conduct, or put in jail for sexual harassment.

Ginger: Look, kid, you’re flipping out over maybes and you’re overthinking, as usual. Just see what this job is before you’re so positive it has nothing to offer you. Ride the wave. Besides, you know the stats. I don’t care if it’s the lunch lady, your accountant, or the butch lumberjack; there have got to be homosexuals, even in that godforsaken little slice of Minnesota.

Me: Michigan.

Ginger: Whatever, pumpkin.

She’s right, as usual. And, of course, her mention of butch lumberjacks brings me right back to… shit, I don’t even know his name.

I
MAKE
my way back into the living room, holding up my borrowed sweatpants in an attempt not to trip and kill myself. The T-shirt sleeves reach past my elbows. It’s like when I used to have to wear my older brothers’ stuff, only worse because I wasn’t concerned about looking attractive in front of my brothers, who would’ve told me I looked like an idiot no matter what I was wearing. Of course, it makes no sense to worry about how I look in front of this man either, since it’s not like some super masculine straight guy is going to care. These clothes do have one advantage over my brothers’, though: whereas my brothers’ hand-me-downs smelled like stale sweat beneath industrial-strength bleach, these smell like fabric softener and cedar.

As I walk past the fire, the dog lifts her eyelids and regards me sleepily, but doesn’t stir. I can hear noise coming from the kitchen.

“What’s your name?” I ask the man’s broad back, where he’s bent over the sink, washing a plate.

The muscles in his back and shoulders tense, as if I startled him. He turns around and his eyes immediately go to my hips.

“Those things are gonna fall off you,” he says. “Come here.” He rummages around in a drawer next to the sink.

Be still, my fantasies, I insist as I step toward him. The last thing I need is to pop a boner in this guy’s sweatpants and have him kick my ass. Not that it’d be the first time.

He squats down, gathers the excess fabric around my hips, and folds it over, then holds it together with a binder clip. I must look confused because he shrugs and mutters, “I use them for chip clips.”

“Thanks,” I say, and roll the T-shirt sleeves up a little so I don’t look like a child.

“What’s yours?”

“Huh? Oh, I’m Daniel.” I stick out a hand to him in a weirdly professional gesture, as if we haven’t been together for an hour, as if he didn’t just binder-clip the waist of my borrowed sweatpants. But he just takes my hand in his large palm and shakes it firmly. God, his hands are so warm.

“So?” I ask again.

“Rex,” he says, and ducks his head a bit shyly. Rex. King. It suits him.

“I guess I should go,” I say, making a vague gesture toward the door. “Oh shit, my car—I have to call someone—and I didn’t even check in to my hotel yet, so I need—” God, I’m tired.

“I took care of it,” Rex says, turning back to the sink. “Here, do you want another drink? You look like you could use it.” He pours another whiskey and holds it out to me.

“Thanks. What do you mean, you took care of it?” I sip this whiskey a bit slower. My head feels like it’s full of cotton.

“I called someone and had your car towed. It was a rental, right?” I nod. “So, you can just pick one up at the airport. It’s right near here.” Relief floods me that I won’t have to handle that. I can’t even remember the last time someone took care of anything for me.

“Thank you,” I say, and I can hear the relief in my voice. I finish the whiskey in my glass and hold it out for a refill without thinking about it. Rex gives me an amused nod and refills my glass, pours one for himself, and then gestures me into the living room.

I sink down onto Rex’s green plaid couch and pull the blue flannel blanket over me. The couch dips with Rex’s weight as he sits beside me and I open my eyes. In the firelight, he is a god. The flames flicker over the planes of his face and the straight lines of his eyebrows, create a shadow under his full lower lip, turn his stubble to velvet and his eyes to molten gold. I slug back the rest of my drink and put the glass down. I can’t look away from him. He’s regarding me calmly and I can smell him on the blanket I’m wrapped up in.

Something is happening to me. It’s like there is a magnet drawing me toward him and I am in actual danger of making an idiotic move on a stranger who is, as far as I know, straight, in a cabin in the woods, when no one knows where I am. Okay,
now
is when I need to remind myself of all those stereotypes of rural cannibalistic serial killers. Remember
The Hills Have Eyes
, Daniel!
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
! Or, more realistically, I just need to focus on how much it actually hurts to get hit in the face, which is what’s likely to happen if I get any closer to Rex than the other side of the couch.

I clear my throat and shake my head, trying to banish the fog that’s taken over.

“Is everything you have made of plaid?”

“No,” Rex says. “Some of it’s just plain flannel.”

I start to laugh and can’t stop, even though it’s not particularly funny. All of a sudden I realize what should’ve been obvious: I’m drunk. I’ve had three whiskeys after being in a car accident and I haven’t eaten since breakfast. Can Rex tell?

“When was the last time you ate?” he says. Yep, I think he can tell. And I almost don’t care. It’s so nice and warm here, so cozy. No one I know is here to witness me potentially losing my shit in Holiday, Michigan. No one ever has to know that I hit a dog. And no one here knows that in approximately one month I will be evicted if I can’t grab a whole lot of extra hours at the bar so I can afford my rent. None of it matters while I’m warm and tipsy here, in the land of flannel and wood.

Suddenly, the middle of nowhere seems like the best possible place I could be.

I
MUST
’
VE
fallen asleep for a minute, because when I wake up, Rex is standing over me holding a sandwich.

“Daniel.”

I sit up a little and take the plate from him.

“Uh, yeah.”

“What are you doing here?”

I look around the room, my head still spacey. No, Daniel, he means in town. Get it together.

“I had a job interview. At Sleeping Bear College.” I take a bite of the sandwich and feel a little sick, the way I sometimes do if I wait too long to eat. But the second bite is heaven.

“What kind of jam is this?” I ask.

“Mixed berry.”

“It’s good.”

“What was your interview for?”

“To teach in the English department.” The words make my stomach clench with anxiety. Or maybe that’s just the peanut butter.

“You’re an English professor? You seem so young.”

“Yeah. Well, technically, I’m still a grad student, but if I get the job, it’ll start in the fall, and I’ll defend my dissertation in the summer, so then I’ll be a professor. It’s funny you think I’m younger than usual. Most people, when they hear I’m in grad school, they’re like, ‘Oh, so that’ll take you, what, two or three years?’ And I’ll say, ‘No, more like seven or eight,’ and they think it’s crazy because they’ve seen TV shows where all the characters have three PhDs by the time they’re twenty-three. It’s unrealistic and propagates total misinformation about higher education. Drives me crazy.”

“A dissertation. That’s the book you write to get your degree, right?” Rex seems to actually be listening, even though I’ve gone off on a grad school tirade.

“Yeah. I’ve been working on it for five years.” Alongside teaching every semester, bartending on the weekends, applying for fellowships, and, recently, applying for fifty-six jobs across the country, that is.

“What’s it about?”

“Oh, it’s boring; you don’t want to hear about that,” I tell him.

“Well, if you think I won’t understand,” Rex says, and his jaw tightens.

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. I just—no one who isn’t writing a dissertation ever actually wants to hear about them. Hell, even the people who are writing them don’t really want to hear about them; they only ask so that you’ll ask about theirs in return. Do you seriously want to know?”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

“Um, yeah. Well, I study nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. Basically, I’m writing about authors from that time period who use social realism to explore the different models of economic theory available. So, some of them were critiquing capitalism, but didn’t offer anything in its place; some were radically anarchist; some were staunch Marxists; etc. But all of them used their writing to explore the effects of those different models.”

Rex is looking into the fire.

“Sorry. I’m boring you. That was so geeky. This stuff isn’t really interesting to anyone except me. I shouldn’t—”

“You aren’t boring me,” Rex says. “Go on.”

He has this low, authoritative voice that makes me forget that there’s any possibility except to do what he says. So I go on. I tell him about the books, about the authors’ lives; before I know it, I’m talking about literary naturalism and Marxist materialist criticism, and ranting about the job market. I never talk this much—not to anyone but Ginger.

And Rex seems interested. He doesn’t seem to think I’m a total geek or a pretentious asshole. Or maybe he just feels sorry for the idiotic city boy who got himself marooned in Northern Michigan, almost killed a dog, and is currently drunk in a stranger’s sweatpants in a cabin made of plaid and flannel. I trail off.

“So, do you think you’ll get the job?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say, and sigh.

“What, you don’t want it?”

“Well, I need
a
job,” I tell him. “I need the money, for sure. And, no matter what, I can use this position as a springboard for another job if a better one comes along. And it’s actually a pretty good fit for me, you know. Like, I don’t want to be lecturing to three hundred unfamiliar faces at a huge university. I like how small the school is, how they’re excited about building up the English department. They even want to have a creative writing graduate program eventually. They think the—how did they put it?—’natural isolation’ will be a draw for writers.”

“But,” Rex prompts, looking at me intently.

“But…. No offense, man, but there’s, like,
nothing
here. I’ve lived in Philly my whole life. I don’t know shit about trees or animals or nature. I mean, I just never saw myself someplace so… isolated.” My stomach is a knot of fear. Every word I speak hammers home how totally and completely screwed I would be living here.

I spent the last eight years in graduate school, all of it leading up to this moment—a moment, I must add, that most grad students would kill for in this crazy economy and terrible job market. But now… shit. I’m just so unsure.

“And, anyway, I don’t even know if I want to
be
an English professor. Like, what good would that actually do, you know? Really? It’s not useful. It’s like, what, teaching a bunch of overprivileged, sheltered kids with their parents’ credit cards how to construct a thesis statement or, if I’m lucky, getting to teach one senior seminar a year in the stuff I’m actually interested in, which no one will care about anyway.”

I can hear my voice, but it sounds like it’s coming from a million miles away. I think maybe I did hit my head. My ears are ringing and I feel like someone poured cement into my stomach. God, the idea of sitting at a desk for the rest of my life, teaching kids who don’t care, talking to other professors in their fifties and sixties about the decline of the written word with the advent of texting, totally alone in this godforsaken place. My hands are fists and I shake my head to try and clear it.

“Besides, I’m probably the only gay guy in a hundred-mile radius,” I blurt out, forgetting that I’m not talking to Ginger, like I was in the shower. Fuck. I can’t believe I just said that. “And, uh, there’s, like, no music scene here?” I look around the room, everywhere but at Rex. The dog is still snoozing in front of the fire, her front paw twitching as she dreams. I wish I were her. I wish I were asleep, in front of a fire, cozy and warm, and not having to worry about anything except whether I’ll get breakfast soon.