Sons of the 613 (16 page)

Three carpeted steps down to the main floor, girls dancing on the stage to my left, the rectangle of the bar in front of me, the exit just beyond that. A man staggers away from the bar, into my path, his back to me, and I push him aside angrily, feeling him yield and totter away, saying, “Hey!” But I'm already at the exit, darting past another massive doorman, up the steep steps to the street, the music fading and light changing as I make it to the sidewalk at a full run and plow right into Lesley McDougal.

I'm on the back of her Vespa and we're flying through the streets.

She smells of clove cigarettes and of some sort of perfume and of her. I can feel the warmth of her torso radiating through her white T-shirt, the outline of her bra visible through the fabric. My hands are resting on her hips, and I'm incredibly conscious of them and incredibly conscious of my crotch and of the tiny space between my crotch and her rear end, a space that despite my best efforts disappears each time we go over a bump, leading to a moment where I'm involuntarily grinding against her, and then immediately reposition myself, wiggling back guiltily on the cracked vinyl of the Vespa seat.

Do not get a boner.

Strands of her hair have escaped the confines of her helmet along the lower edge, and the wind whips them back to tickle my face. The scooter vibrates and hums beneath us. The rain has stopped but feels like it might start again, and we're traveling in a tunnel of lights that smear and streak by: streetlights, neon, cars. Her neck is pale and freckled and delicate and beautiful, and once the idea of kissing it crosses my mind I am not able to uncross it. It's almost overwhelming.

Do not get a boner.

When I nearly ran her over outside the bar there was a confused moment of What are you doing here? and What's going on? and Did Josh bring you here?! And then I interrupted my own incoherent explanation and just said, “Please, I want to leave.”

She hesitated, looking at the strip club entrance and then back at me, and decided. “Okay,” she said, and I climbed onboard.

We pull to a stop at a light, the wind noise dying for a moment. “Lesley,” I say, “can I stay with you? I don't want to go home.”

And she says, “Okay.”

M
ERIT
B
ADGE
: S
LEEPOVER

I do not want to sleep.

I'm so tired. My thoughts blur and wander, my eyelids weighted down and closing in gentle slow motion, then opening again halfway to focus on the parallel strips of light on the ceiling from the venetian blind. I'm afraid to sleep, afraid that if I do it will all go away, and I don't want this particular now to end, ever.

I don't want to sleep because she's next to me on the futon. She's lying on her side, her back to me, wearing nothing but her T-shirt and some flannel boy boxers, the elastic rolled once at the waist. The sheet is bunched up and forgotten down by her feet—our feet—and if I roll on my side and scootch back to the edge of the futon I can look down at her pale and perfect legs, the freckle on her right thigh, the shamrock tattoo on her calf.

Nothing has happened. We haven't had sex or even kissed, although she did kiss me on the forehead. Although it's not like I thought for a second that we were going to do anything. Although maybe I was hoping. Although I knew that was impossible and ridiculous. Although hope springs eternal. Although I don't even feel horny. This is better than horny, better than anything. What I feel like is that I'm hearing every beautiful song I've ever heard, all played at once. I feel like I'm floating in those songs, that I am those songs. I'm lying in bed next to Lesley McDougal and the universe is perfect. I feel that way even when her cat steps on my face for the third time and I have to push it off the futon again, its body soft and yielding like an accordion, making it hard to move.

I don't want to fall asleep, so I shift positions, turning slowly to my side so as not to wake her. I can see her ribs, delicate through the shirt, rising and falling with her breath, up, down, see the pattern of her vertebrae, the curve of her pelvis, and I reach out my hand and hold it an inch from her surface, feeling her warmth.

 

The ride on the Vespa lasted forever and was too short. We pulled up in front of a four-story apartment complex in Uptown, dark brown bricks covered with ivy. She parked the Vespa at the curb and we climbed off, and she took a moment to turn and stand there, helmet under one arm, and look at me, smiling and shaking her head. Then she just said, “C'mon.”

The building was old and dark and smelled old and dark: dark floors, dark wood trim on the walls. I followed her up two flights of stairs, neither of us saying a word. It's after midnight and I'm at a girl's place and no one even knows where I am.

“It's just a studio,” she said when we entered her apartment, and I nodded, not sure what that meant, although it sounded apologetic. It was one big room with a small kitchen at the far end, and a door to what turned out to be the bathroom. A kitchen table, a futon sofa, bookshelves that were just planks of wood on cinder blocks, and that was it for furniture. There were some laminated ID cards on lanyards hanging from a peg on the wall. FILM CREW, they said. There were paintings on the walls. She saw me looking at them.

“I painted those.”

“They're nice.”

She smiled. “You're nice. You hungry? I'm hungry. Want some cereal?”

She sat me at her vintage table, the chairs mismatched, and poured me a bowl of Cap'n Crunch—as illicit in our house as a bong—poured herself one, then sat.

“Well?” she said.

I started telling the story sleepily as I ate, details coming out in disordered splotches, hopping around in time: We were at the strip club, I played pool, there was this guy at the pool hall, Indians, pushups—then interrupted myself again, like I'd done outside the strip club.

“Who,” I said, “is Trish?”

She was pouring more milk into her bowl as she spoke. “The devil,” she said through a mouthful of cereal. “She's screwing, like, a dozen married guys. At
least.
” Then it occurred to her who she was talking to and she put the milk down, looking up at me guiltily.

“Jesus, I'm sorry,” she said, and reached out a hand to place it on mine. “I keep forgetting how young you are.”

“I'm not that young.”

“Okay.”

“I'm not.”

“Okay.”

My dad is seven years older than my mom,
I wanted to say,
and you're only about six years older than me.
That's not that big a difference.
But of course it is.

“I'm not stupid,” I said instead.

“Didn't say you were.”

She patted my hand and released it.

“You look a wreck, Isaac. Bedtime.”

“You said you were going to pierce my ear.”

“If you want to, I will. But some other time. We need to sleep.”

“I want to talk more.”

“I'm tired, too,” she said, and stood to put away the milk and cereal. It was like at the restaurant when she got busy and her attention slipped away.

“She's a stripper?” I said as I watched her put her bowl in the sink.

“Was. Is. Sort of. She still works the bar there sometimes. Can I clear?”

“She's . . . his girlfriend?”

“She's lots of people's girlfriend,” Lesley muttered.

“But his, too.”

“Was,” she said, depositing my bowl and spoon in the sink as well.

“Not anymore?”

“Right. Except that's where the problem is. I don't think he gets that part.” She looked at me. “C'mon, let's shower.”

I had the very briefest meteor-flash of a fantasy that maybe she meant shower together, which of course she didn't. She led me into the bathroom and gave me a towel and handed me a new toothbrush that was still in its plastic packaging. “Gotta have a few extra around for all the strange men like you that I bring home,” she said, and I said “Ha ha,” even though I suddenly got jealous, thinking of times that maybe she does do that.

I took a very quick shower, seeing myself from above, a shot that included me naked in the shower with Lesley just a few feet away from me on the other side of the bathroom door. The shower was an old-fashioned tub with a cloudy plastic curtain, the water splashing through the gap onto the tile floor. I kept the shower running while I peed so that she couldn't hear it. Before I turned it off I quietly opened her medicine cabinet and looked inside: a jumble of toothpaste, aspirin, deodorant, shaving cream, girl razor, and a torn-open box of tampons, which made me feel a little embarrassed. I think I was looking for condoms. I didn't find any, which made me feel better.

When I turned off the shower I could hear her on the phone.

“Kidnapping him? Really, Josh?
Really?
Josh, you took him to a
strip club.
”

Pause.

“Josh, you come over here and I'll pepper-spray you, and then I'll call the cops, and then I'll pepper-spray you again.”

Pause.

“Yes, I will deliver him safe and sound, with his honor intact.”

Pause. She started to laugh, entertained by something he said.

“You're gross, Josh. G'bye.”

She lent me a T-shirt and some cutoff sweatshorts. When she emerged from the shower she wasn't wearing a bra under her T-shirt and I had more of the boob issue that I'd struggled with all night, the trying to look without looking. If she cared, she didn't show it. She just said, “Help me get the futon set up.”

Before she rolled over and went to sleep she gave me that peck on the forehead. “If I start snoring, just elbow me.” Then she turned, shifted around for a bit, and was still.

She's not snoring now, just breathing quietly. My hand hovers over her shoulder, follows the topography of her side, moves slowly down to her hip, not making contact. It glides now to her lower back, then slowly traces the path of her spine, pauses between her shoulder blades. I'm two-thirds asleep, the borders of reality blending and mushing, my hand sinking toward her like a leaking helium balloon until it comes to rest on her back. I can feel her heart beating through the palm of my hand. She doesn't move or react for a moment, and then she takes a deep breath in and lets it out like a sigh, shifts a bit, and is still again, and I think,
I should move my hand, I should move it,
and then everything blurs and dilutes and spreads and I'm asleep.

M
ERIT
B
ADGE
: W
OODWORKING

It's light when my own snores wake me up. It takes a few seconds for all the parts of my brain to return from wherever they went and reassemble themselves, awareness coming back to me in small units: I'm not in the tent. I'm at Lesley's, meaning it wasn't a dream. She's not next to me anymore in bed. From what I hear, she's sitting at the table, quietly reading the paper. I'm spreadeagled on my back. I'm wearing the T-shirt and cutoff sweatshorts she lent me.

I have morning wood.

Oh my God.

I'm lying here on my back with a hard-on, which I'm sure I had when she woke up. I roll on my side and go fetal to camouflage my condition, and realize that the sheet is over my lower half, which it wasn't when I went to sleep, meaning that maybe she noticed my bonerness and tried to save me the embarrassment by covering me up, which is worse. Also bad: I have to pee, like
now,
and I'm hoping things will sort of calm down down there and I'll be able to get up and run to the bathroom. For now I pretend I'm asleep and hope she doesn't realize I'm up, in both senses of the word.

I hear the newspaper rustle. “You want some eggs?” she says. I don't think I'm fooling her.

“Uh . . .”

“I'll make some eggs.”

I take advantage of when she turns to the stove to scurry to the bathroom—
she
totally
knows
—and then have to do the waiting thing until my plumbing is in the correct state for peeing. I take advantage of the time to punch myself in the head a few times and bite my fist, trying to replace my embarrassment with physical pain.

I camouflage my peeing with the shower again, then realize once I'm in there that I don't have any clothes to change into. Which is when the bathroom door opens partway—panic—and her hand pokes through the opening, holding my pants and another T-shirt. Then she leans her head in, her eyes squinted shut.

“Hey,” I say, hands cupped over my personal parts.

“I won't peek,” she says. She holds up the T-shirt blindly. It partially unfurls, and I can see that it's the English Beat T-shirt that she was wearing the first time we met. “I'm lending you one of my favorite shirts, so don't get it dirty, right?”

“Okay.”

“Want me to lend you some undies?”

“Uh, no.”

“I've got some great pink ones with lots of lace.”

“No, thanks.”

“Okay. You're either gonna have to recycle or go Canadian, then.”

“I'll go Canadian.”

She suddenly opened her eyes.

“How you doing in there?”

“HEY!”

I can still hear her laughing after she closes the door. After a few moments I start to laugh too.

 

We eat breakfast together and talk. I don't know what we talk about. We talk about everything. We talk in an easy manner, no rush, lingering over our food, laughing and joking, and I think,
This is what it's like. This is what it's like to spend a night with your lover
—that's the word that comes to mind,
lover,
a sophisticated word for sophisticated people—and wake up in the morning and break your fast with that person. It's the daylight, waking version of what I felt last night, everything timeless and perfect. It's only been about eight hours since we collided outside the strip club, but it feels like that was weeks ago. If she saw me with a hard-on, fine, I don't care. She saw me naked. I don't care. I like it. It's not even about sex. As we're talking, I see it, understand it, understand something I never understood or felt before: I
want
her to see me, to know me in every way. I want to be able to reveal myself completely to her and have it be all right.