Inexcusable (6 page)

“Please, please don't leave,” I said. “Please. Please.”

She looked at me harder still.

“Please.”

Damn, she could look at you a long, cold minute.

“Get it together,” she said firmly.

I felt like the luckiest guy there. I got it together, while Gigi Boudakian and I never did. Though I never stopped thinking about it.

All the sweeter. All the sweeter it was, then, when we danced, for as long as they'd let us, and we went up to the
Blue Hills Reservation with everybody else, and had a couple of drinks, silly drinks, harmless drinks, sloe gin fizzy drinks, we made a fire, even, and told stories, even, and our mighty tuxedoes and shiny gowns took on ever more dramatic and unnatural forms in the dancing firelight, and Gigi Boudakian stayed there right next to me and listened along with me as we all told stupid and heroic stories about one another, about four years of one another, and other couples, real couples who were supposed to be together and knew they would be together and had their plans planned for months and their pockets stuffed with condoms and pills and whatever, slipped off, two by two and even four by four and I, of course, started getting hungry all over again, and hunger making me bold, I asked Gigi Boudakian if she would go with me to the International House of Pancakes.

And you know what? Do you know what?

No, actually, she did.

We dismissed Quarterback Ken and his Lexus and his date, who was an older lady who had actually had her own senior prom two years before, but that's quarterback life for you. Well, actually, they dismissed themselves, but we didn't mind, not at all, because it was a wonderful thin-air breezy walk, down out of the hills and two miles toward town to get to the IHOP, and when Gigi Boudakian took off her shoes because no way no how were those heels making that trek, I took mine off too because it seemed to
be the thing to do and when finally you snap out of it and realize you are with a person like Gigi Boudakian, you
do
the thing to do.

She appreciated that, Gigi did, and I believe it helped her to relax more, and to forget some of the things I might have been trying earlier in the night, and remember some of what it was that made us cool and easy friends all that time before and led us directly to this point, to this moment, this
now
of our lives.

Things were clear when we came within sight of the pancake house. My head was clear, the air was clear, it was early morning in that unspeakable great gap in between the night people giving it up and the day people taking it over, in that luscious pink-orange spring morning light that you worry, if you're like me, that maybe you don't deserve, that maybe you are stealing, spoiling for everyone, by being out at this hour.

It was in that light that Gigi Boudakian took my hand.

She didn't
slap
my hand. She didn't seize my wrist. She slipped her hand into mine, mine into hers, so softly, so easily, that my reaction was to pull away and apologize.

“Ah, sorry about that,” I said.

She laughed. My sweet lord, such a sound. Made me wonder, momentarily, why I ever wanted to get a girl to do anything else but laugh.

They had to ask us to put our shoes back on when we entered the pancake house because we forgot and stood
there stupidly by the
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
sign with our shoes in one hand and each other in the other. But they asked us politely, even sweetly. Like there was something charmed and charming at work, and we were all of us in it together.

That's the way people all over the restaurant looked at us, very nice, very soft, very tilt-the-head-and-smile because, I guess, we had prom written all over us and we reminded them of other stuff, good stuff, their stuff maybe and their friends' stuff, way old stuff, and more recently their kids' own stuff, if it went well and didn't wind up all smutty and slutty and bloody and dead like a lot of prom nights seem to, and like this one obviously did not.

It was, too, all the good stuff of prom legend. This is what was supposed to happen, the barefoot sweetness and pancake house at dawn and nobody getting hurt or dirty, but instead giving off an unmistakable whiff of finer love things.

I lied to you earlier. I lied earlier because I loved Gigi Boudakian when I said I didn't. I just didn't know it before the International House of Pancakes sat us by the window, by the parking lot, by the parkway, by ourselves.

I ordered pigs in blankets. Side of bacon. Coffee. Cranberry juice. Didn't order toast, but they brought some, and little packets of jelly. Gigi Boudakian had an omelette with cheese and green peppers.

The food came, and I could not believe how good her
order looked and smelled. Caught me completely by surprise. They put hash browns there too, on the side, bumped up against the omelette, even though I did not hear her ask them to do that.

“You want to trade?” I asked her.

“No, I do not,” she said. “That's why I ordered this”—she pointed at her food with her knife, in the most attractive way, the most, I mean, kill-me beautiful way of gesturing—“instead of that.” She pointed at my plate. A whole different gesture entirely.

I was wearing a smile then, must have been pretty goofy from the way it felt.

“I'm thinking that you're a pretty friggin' great girl, you know,” I said.

She cut a neat perfect wedge of egg, reached across the table with her fork, and used her knife to gently slide the bite onto my plate.

“That's all you're getting,” she said.

I ate it, still smiling, still watching her.

“That's a pretty friggin' great egg, too.”

She smiled, tucked another prim little wedge of that egg into the gentle upturned corner of her mouth. We ate, mostly silently, but altogether pleasantly, comfortably, for as long as it took me to finish off a small herd of blanketed pigs. Which wasn't long. I was staring out the window, content and pleased and politely not watching Gigi Boudakian eat, seeing the parkway wake
up with cars, sipping my coffee, when she asked.

“Are you okay, Keir? With what you did? To that boy?”

I swung my head around, the way a crane moves from one site to another. I looked, wide-eyed, forcing her further just to do it, just to make her meet me in the middle of where she wanted me to go.

“Huh?”

“You know, Keir. The whole ‘Killer' thing. It must bother you. I know it must bother you.”

I looked back out the window. Not to be dramatic or anything, but just to look back out the window.

“You know,” I said, “it doesn't. It doesn't bother me, much. Bothered me before, bothered me at first. But really . . . really, it doesn't bother me now. Like you would think it might. Like
you,
obviously, think it does.”

I finished my talking, and my looking out the window, and faced her directly, waiting.

“Okay,” said Gigi Boudakian, with a shrug. “I just wondered. If it hurt, you know?”

“No,” I said. “I hit him just right.”

“That's not what I—”

I raised a hand. “I know what you meant. See, I heard from him, you know? Got a card and everything. We're okay. He says it's okay. Says
I'm
okay, okay? So it's okay.”

I didn't know there just what I was doing, but I was doing something, because a wave of trembly came up over
Gigi Boudakian's face and back down again, and she reached over the table and put a warm hand over my coffee-warm hand and tilted her head sadly.

I looked at her hand, I looked at her. I asked, “You want to meet him? I could take you to meet him, maybe. He'd like to see me sometime I think, and he'd
love
to see you anytime, who wouldn't?”

She pulled her hand back and pulled herself back a bit, to her side of the table, but not so I felt like a creep.

“I couldn't,” she said. “You mean, now? Anyway . . . whatever, no, I couldn't. No. Thank you, Keir.”

I leaned way over now, over her plate, even, which was not very mannerly, but I wouldn't stay long.

“Do you love me?” I asked.

“No,” she said matter-of-factly.

I leaned back, away from her plate.

“I knew that.”

“Yes, you did.”

“You like me, though?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I knew that.”

“You know what I think?” Gigi Boudakian said, pushing her plate out into the dangerous deep water of the middle of the table where I could get at her scraps of egg and hash brown and large corners of toast that were way more than crusts.

“Let me guess: You think you love me after all.”

“Well, no. What I think is, I think you weren't so wild, you weren't so . . . difficult, when you weren't the Killer.”

For this I stopped eating. Stopped chewing, with food in my mouth.

“That's what you think?”

She nodded sympathetically.

“Jeez, I wasn't even close, was I?”

She shook her head.

“It's just a name,” I said.

No response.

“He said it was okay. He said everything was okay, I was okay. You'll see in the card he sent me, you'll see.”

She nodded.

I returned to eating. There wasn't much left on either plate but crumbs, snail trails of grease and butter, jelly daubs.

“You think I'm wild?” I asked.

“Kind of.”

“But you still like me.”

She gave me something of a how-sad smile. You know, the one that comes with the sideways tilt of the head.

“Do you still remember, in kindergarten? My joke?”

Like it was yesterday.

“Not sure I do, actually,” I said.

“Sure you do.” She started giggling. “My mother was walking us to school like she did, and it was very cold. I had on my big parka. Oh, come on, you do.”

It was robin's egg blue, the parka. With tawny flecked fake rabbit fur around the hood and cuffs.

I sighed, like I was bothered. “I think I recall some distant memory of you getting me to look into your sleeve because you said your hand had gone missing.”

Now she was laughing. She covered her mouth with both hands, but was pretty clearly audible anyway.

“I'm so sorry, Keir,” she said, pulling off the miracle of sounding truly sorry and delirious with laughter at the same time.

“What?” I said now, and had to laugh myself. “For punching me in the face? For taking advantage of my trusting nature?”

I was only making it worse. She could hardly form words. “Yes,” she said, nodding frantically. “You were so sweet.”

“No, I wasn't, I was just stupid.”

“That is not true,” she said, calming down and grabbing both my hands in hers. “And you never even tried to get me back.”

“I think I was just afraid you would beat me up.”

She looked up close and all the way in at me. “No, you weren't,” she said. “You just didn't have it in you. And it was right then that I started
almost
loving you.”

It had to be possible for her to feel the thunder of my heartbeat through the contact of our hands. I pulled away, but she could probably still feel it through the floor.

“Like you do now,” I said.

“Now and always, as always,” she said warmly.

Almost loved. To be almost loved. To be almost loved by Gigi Boudakian.

What a wonder was that? What a horror was that? I was so proud ecstatic grateful angry I felt for that instant I knew what it was like to be fire.

“Ya,” I said, standing and very politely wiping the corners of my mouth with my yellow paper napkin, “well, I was very happy when your mother smacked you.”

“Who are you kidding?” she said, standing across the table from me like a gunslinger. “She only did that when you started crying.”

There was nothing left that the International House of Pancakes could do for us, so we left. The morning was still so beautiful, soft and dewy and warm, that we tried to finish what we started and walk all the way home. But that was just not practical, not possible, not a very good idea.

The world was waking up, the spell was lifting, and we were coming down. Things were starting not to feel the way they felt before. Every step was heavier than all the earlier steps. We carried our shoes again, but the pavement was getting hotter, harder, grittier. Sweat stains were blooming under the arms of my shirt and were even trying to fight their way all the way through the mighty polyester rented jacket. Worst, worst of all, sweat dared to appear
under the arms of Gigi Boudakian where sweat should never ever be, creeping down her sides like poison ivy staining a lovely satin garden wall.

We were getting so, so tired. The sun, which a while ago was a sunrise, was now my evil nemesis.

“I'll get a cab, huh?” I said.

“I thought you would never ask.”

What I would like right here is to tell you about how, in that cab, I didn't try anything, not right in the closing moments of the greatest night, the finest memorable prom night, with the wondrous Gigi Boudakian. How I treated her with the respect and adoration she deserved. And I would like to tell you that she loved me beyond almost.

T
his is the problem. This is what Gigi does not understand. Things have conspired, to cloud her mind. She's not a drinker, Gigi. Some people shouldn't drink. It is understandable, but she has just got it wrong. Some of it is cloud, some of it is misunderstanding, but all of it is wrong, and all of it can be straightened out. It has to be straightened out.

“We just need to talk,” I say. “Please, can't we talk?”

“No, we cannot.”

“It's practically not even light out yet.”

“It's light enough. Let me go. You have to let me go.”

“Okay, Gigi. What if, even if I didn't, I said all right, you're right, whatever. What if I did that and then I said it so you can feel all right, and we can just leave it there, leave it right here in this room behind us when we leave,
and nobody, not Carl and not my father and not your father or anybody, has to be involved or upset about it? What about that, and then, like I said, we can leave it behind us, close the door on it, and you can feel all right and we can get on with stuff. What if I did that for you?