Know Not Why: A Novel (7 page)

“$48.22,” I correct, because, hey, that extra
$1.78’s gotta ease the blow a little.

“You’re kidding.”

“Yep,” I deadpan. “They’re really free.”

“Seriously?”

“No,” I say. “I was kidding. It’s $48.22.”

“This is retarded,” one of the guys declares.
How are you going to argue with
that
eloquence?

“Well, just hurry up, lunch is over in like
twenty minutes,” one of the girls urges.

“No way I’m paying for these,” the guy shoots
back.

This leads to a big festival of “Well, me
either!”, “Well, I’m not gonna!”, “I only have a five,” “How are we
gonna get lunch, then?”, and so on, and so on. I stand there,
feeling so awkward that I start to wish I could just give them the
damn flowers. Privately, in fact, I can’t help but agree. Fifty
bucks for fake flowers? Really?

But it’s not like I
can
give them away.
Especially with Mister Doom ‘N Gloom hovering around.

“Maybe,” I suggest at last, because this is
getting too stupid for even me to handle, “you could just get a
few—”

And then I stop talking because, all of a
sudden, one of the guys bolts.

I kid you not:
bolts
. Sprints out the
front door, flowers in hand, cackling his head off. The door slams
shut behind him. The bells go into a mad jingling frenzy.

“Oh, shit!” another guy yells gleefully, and
immediately follows suit.

“Oh, God, you
guys
!!!” a girl cries.
“Stop it!”

I stare. Because, like, what else are you going
to do? It’s just – I – shoplifting
fake flowers
? They’re not
even real flowers!

And, okay, not like that’s the issue at hand,
but still
.

One of the girls goes, “Oh my God, I’m so
sorry!” but they’re all giggling like crazy. They drop the flowers
they’re holding and rush out after those … well, okay, ‘hoodlums’
might actually be an apt description.

“Jesus!” I say, turning to Arthur. I’m willing
to make (temporary) amends. “Can you believe—”

But I don’t even get to finish my sentence,
because he’s got this look on his face – this look that’s kinda
scary, this look that means business. He starts, with freakish
efficiency, to take his apron off. There’s this fraction of a
second in time where I realize what he’s going to do, where I can’t
quite bring myself to believe that he’s going to do it.

Surely,
I think,
Surely he’s
not…

And then he does.

Arthur Kraft the Second – tieless, homeless, a
man with nothing to lose – throws his apron down onto the counter
and sprints, without a word, out the door after them.

“Are you
serious
, man??” I shout after
him.

Apparently, he is.

I have no idea what to do. Do I
help
him?

Okay, wow, I have no trouble figuring that one
out, actually: no. No I don’t. Fake flowers might mean enough to
Arthur that he’s willing to run out into the icy rainy elements to
regain them, but guess what? That same flame of devotion doesn’t
burn bright in my heart.

So instead, I survey the mess left behind, the
flowers that didn’t get brutally shoplifted. After spending a
little time just staring at them, I start gathering them. Might as
well have things straightened up so Artie can’t pitch a hissy fit
when he comes back. If he comes back.

Oh, Christ, if he breaks his tailbone or
something, I am so not dragging him to the hospital. Dude can just
deal.

I head over to the fake flower aisle. There’s
mud tracked onto the floor, and a bunch of the stuff got knocked
out of the racks. I’m struck by this disgruntled sense of
You
young people today
that scares me a little. You’re not supposed
to be feeling that at twenty-two, are you? I mean, technically I
still
am
a young person. I like to think.

Whatever. I start picking the flowers up,
straightening things out, putting stuff back where it belongs. (Or,
well, where I think it looks okay. I don’t quite have specific
places for things memorized yet.) To be totally honest – no-shame
honest – I like the fake flower aisle. It’s nice to be surrounded
by color and, I dunno, some facsimile of stuff that blooms, stuff
that’s alive.

I take my time putting the flowers back. It’s
nice, mind-numbing work. I’m sick of thinking, and so I don’t.
Every time a thought threatens to traipse into my brain, I stop it
in its little thought-tracks and put more effort into staring in
front of me. Put one yellow flower next to another yellow flower.
Kristy who? Futile existence what? These things have no presence in
my world. This one’s kinda shaped like this one; put them together?
Sure.

I’m almost done when I hear the door open, the
momentary roar of the rain. Then it shuts again, and there are slow
footsteps. God, I’m so not in the mood to put up with glitter
glue-wielding lunatics.

Luckily enough, I don’t have to. It’s just
Arthur. I look over and there he is, standing at the start of the
aisle. He’s breathing hard, soaked to the bone. His hair is dark
with rain, plastered close against his head. He’s shivering. Of
course he is, crazy bastard.

“No luck?” I say.

“No.”

“Too bad.”

Then it gets quiet. I watch a raindrop slide
down his face; it makes it all the way to the floor. Pretty
impressive, for a raindrop.

“None of those are in the right place,” Arthur
says, looking at the flowers. He comes to stand next to me, staring
at my crappy handiwork.

“Yeah, well,” I say, “how was I supposed to
know?”

I expect him to get snippy at that. He doesn’t.
He looks like he wants to for a second, but then it’s like he gives
up, like he realizes how totally pointless it would be to even try
to bother with me. Yeah, baby, that’s how I roll; that’s just the
effect I like to have on my fellow humans.

“Give me those,” he says, nodding down toward
the few flowers I haven’t put back yet. There’s a part of me that
wants to fight it, but I’m pretty sure that’s also the part of me
that’s stupid. Like, fine, it’s not like I exactly dream of being a
fake flower arranger. Let old Artie here take care of it. It
is
his life’s calling and all.

So I hold the flowers out to him, and I do feel
sort of, like, lamely weird about it, like, is there ever a
scenario where one guy hands another guy flowers and it’s not a
little questionable? But maybe I should get used to this feeling,
this daily sense of emasculation, because I’m pretty sure it comes
with the territory.

Arthur reaches over to take them. As he does,
his thumb brushes my thumb, and it’s so cold, this sudden shock of
cold. The flowers get dropped. They make a slight, swishy sound as
they hit the floor.

“Shit,” I say, my voice sounding really loud in
my ears.

And then he kisses me.

It’s—

I don’t know.

I don’t know, I don’t know.

It’s my brain turning off, it’s nothing. It’s a
feeling. It’s a mouth on mine, and fuck it. Fuck my whole goddamn
life, man. Just fuck it. I don’t move away like I should, but
neither does he. He puts one of his hands on my face.

Then the bells on the front door ring. We break
apart and I open my eyes.

And there’s Arthur looking back at me.

We stare at each other. My mind turns back on
gradually, clunkily, the way lights go on in a warehouse, row after
row,
click-buzzzzz – click-buzzzzz – click-buzzzzz.

“Excuse me!” comes a little old lady voice from
out front. “Excuse me! I’d like to return this, if you don’t
mind.”

“Absolutely,” Arthur says loud. He’s breathless,
but he regains his poise so fast it’s scary. Scary and awful,
infuriating, something about it makes me sick. He casts one last
look at me. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Then he turns, easy as
that, and goes to help our shiny new dissatisfied customer. Like
it’s that simple. “I’ll be right with you.”

And so I’m left standing by myself, shaking like
I’m about to bust apart into atoms, fake flowers on the floor at my
feet where I dropped them. We dropped them.

Chapter Five

“He’s in love with him,” the girl next to me
declares fervently that night at my Shakespeare class. “It makes
such perfect sense. It enriches the story as a whole so much.”

I work really hard on not stabbing myself in the
brain with my pencil.

“And how’s that?” asks Professor Herrick.

“Well, in a way, it turns Shylock and Antonio
into equals, even though they’re pitted against each other the
whole time. If Shylock’s a Jew and Antonio’s a homosexual, that
leaves both of them on the outskirts of society, right? Shunned or
whatever.”

“Marginalized,” Herrick suggests.

“Marginalized. Which has this great irony –
like, Antonio’s all disparaging to Shylock, but then it’s like he’s
in the same boat. Not to mention that it really heightens the –
like, the parallel tragedy between them, where they lose the thing
they love most, because Shylock loses Jessica when she marries
Lorenzo and Antonio loses Bassanio when Bassanio marries
Portia.”

“Interesting.”

I’m really starting to wish I hadn’t come. There
was a minute or two where I thought about it. But staying home
would make today different, like it’s not just any other Friday,
and that, that’s something I’m not down with. Sure, weird shit
happens sometimes – weird, weird, crazy-ass shit, the kind of shit
that will melt your brain if you think about it – but you just
gotta ignore it, you know? You just gotta … keep on keepin’ on.
Like, whatever, man.

Keep on keepin’ on.

“Yes? Erin?” Herrick says, nodding at a girl
with her hand up in the second row.

“It also really plays into the whole theme of
love versus money, doesn’t it? Like, if you stop to think about it,
the message seems to be that you can’t have both. But then Bassanio
marries Portia, who’s rich, and who he apparently loves. But in the
end, when he’s forced to choose between Portia and Antonio with the
whole ring thing, he sides with Antonio. So maybe that’s like …
something there, too.”

Yeah, Erin, or maybe it’s
nothing
. Bros
before hos. It’s not like that’s a new thing. It’s not like
Shakespeare missed the memo on that one. Shakespeare had bros up
the wazoo.

Or, well, not, you know, literally, I just –
shit, whatever, whatever, seriously,
whatever.

“Yes,” Professor Herrick says. “Well, the
argument that homoerotic subtext exists between Antonio and
Bassanio is by no means an unpopular one. In fact, W.H. Auden wrote
in his essay ‘Brothers and Others’ that—”

“Or maybe,” cuts in a voice that’s – oh, hey,
look at that,
mine
, “you’re reading too much into it.”

Herrick looks taken aback for a second; then he
says, “That’s a valid opinion as well, Howie.”

“I don’t think you can necessarily argue against
it,” the girl sitting next to me says, turning her gaze on me.
“Like, it’s ambiguous. You can see it if you want to see it, and if
it weirds you out or whatever, then, fine, don’t.”

Herrick tries to take the reins from here. “The
ambiguity of Shakespeare is certainly—”

“But who’s to say it’s gay.” It’s like I’m
fucking possessed. “What is up with this, like, desperate need to
make all guys gay just because they dare to interact with each
other for more than five minutes? Like, here’s a really crazy
theory: Frodo and Sam were
just buddies.
”

“How about Antonio being all depressed at the
beginning of the play?” the girl argues.

“He doesn’t know
why
he’s depressed! ‘In
sooth, I know not why I am so sad’ – it’s only the first friggin’
line of the entire play—”

“That’s what he
says
. We never get an
explanation why – it’s not like it’s a stretch to interpret that
it’s because—”

“He
says
it’s not because he’s in love,”
I remind her, pretty pissed off, like, what, did she even bother to
read the damn thing? Fie, fie, bitch.

“Because if he’s in love with a man in
Elizabethan England, oh, he’s absolutely gonna scream it from the
rooftops! Maybe the reason he’s saying it’s not love is because he
knows that it will completely ruin him if that knowledge gets
out.”

“And
maybe
it’s because he’s
not
.
They could be friends, you know, that’s not exactly inconceivable.
So they care about each other, so what? Since when does that mean
they secretly want to screw each other’s brains out? It’s
ridiculous and unnecessary. It’s gross.”

“Oh, that is such typical macho homophobic
bull,” snarls the girl. I wouldn’t be surprised if she leapt out of
her desk and started beating me over the head with the textbook.
And, like, on any other day, I’d say something back, I’d hurry to
assure her that everyone can do their own thing and I’m totally
cool with it. But today? Today? I don’t know, man, I just want to
laugh. Or maybe just get up, storm right out of the room and never
come back.

I don’t. I ignore the fact that she’s trying to
blow up my head with the power of her stare. I ignore the jumpy,
unsettled, sick feeling that’s burrowing down into my bones. I just
look away from her, back down at my notes. So far, they consist of
the date.

Keep on keepin’ on.

“Okay, let’s move on,” Professor Herrick says.
He glances over at the two of us like he’s afraid we’re going to
start dueling.

“It’s not like you can catch it, you know.
Especially not from reading a five hundred year old play,” she
hisses in my ear as Herrick strikes up a Shylock discussion
.
“Grow up. It’s assholes like you who make this world the way it
is.”

And it’s not like I’m even going to bother
replying to that, because what do I say? ‘Actually, for your
information, I just kissed a guy this afternoon, so.’ Yeah fucking
right.