The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (12 page)

“Do what?”

“Put your arm around me like that,” I said. “Made her think
we’re a couple.”

“Eh, she’s got enough on her mind with Bernie’s war stuff.
Let her know you’re taken care of.”

“Oh.”

“Will you really go to her art thing?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“You should. She’s fucking gorgeous.” He glanced back at the
corner around which she’d disappeared. “How about in the sack-a-roo?”

It was a memory I’d conjured in the shower more than once. I
told him how her hair used to whip around like she was on a roller coaster.

“Nice.”

“Yeah. Yeah it was.”

He started walking down the aisle again, pulling the cart
behind him.

“Hey, where are you going?” I said.

“Uh, we need more than pancake mix and donuts.”

“Wait, we have to wait here a minute.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to pass her again in every other aisle. Let
her get ahead.”

“Ah...” He let go of the cart, let it roll away by itself.
“Then help me look for the Pantie-O’s.”

***

“Tell me you’re kidding,” I said as Griff slid his
tray across the dining hall table. “Tell me those are just for decoration, for
ambiance
.”

“Taco Tuesday, baby,” he said with an impish grin. His hair
was tied back in a short pony-tail. This was a brief experiment.

He took a seat beside me in the red vinyl booth. Beth was
sitting across from us. She had burgundy hair and picked at a salad, discarding
pieces of lettuce and spinach by flinging them with her fork off the plate onto
the tray.

It was rush-hour in the dining hall. I liked how it looked
full of students, friendly swarms of young adults I could watch from my own
booth with my own friends. That was as close as I wanted to get to most of
them. I preferred them as decoration to set the scene.

“What’s wrong with tacos?” Beth asked. She twirled a forkful
of bean sprouts smothered with enough ranch dressing to pretty well negate any
nutritional value.

“They wreak havoc on his legendary delicate stomach,” I told
her. I turned to Griff. “Last time, last
Tuesday
,
I think, what did you say when you were slamming yourself face-down on your
mattress to alleviate the gas that was quote-unquote tearing you apart from the
inside?”

He rubbed his face with his hands and growled. “I said,
Vince, don’t let me eat tacos again
.”

“What else?”

“
Ever in the history
of the universe
,” he said. “But it’ll be fine this time. I brought Tums.”
He plucked a roll from his shirt pocket.

“All right,” I said, “but it’s going to be
me
pounding your back to burp you and
it’s going to be
me
carrying you to
the toilet to barf/shit your brains out.”

He puffed on the end of his straw and shot its wrapper at
me. It bounced off my face and landed in my pasta. I fished it out and laid it
across his wrist like a soggy red bracelet.

“What
is
this,
exactly?” Beth said with a grin. Her hands were opened toward us like we
belonged on display.

We looked at each other and then at Beth.

“What’s what?”

“Is there, in the Year 2000, a
name
for this? What would you
call
this? Are you some new breed of life partners? Are you lifebuddies? Nonsexual
husbands?”

“I don’t remember being proposed to,” Griff said.

“...”

“Oh Vince my prince, you are so perfect, so spectacular in
every way,” Griff said in spoken-word rhythm and bit a mouthful of taco. The
shell cracked and meat slathered in thick sauce plopped onto his plate. “You
are my life Vince. You make me forget how much I love tacos. Oh, tacos are so
yummy in my tummy yummy yummy—but not like Vince. Oh Vince my prince, you
make me forget about tacos.”

When I thought I could speak without laughing I asked if he
was finished.

“Not yet,” he said. He pressed his greasy lips to my cheek.
“Taco-flavored kisses for my Vince.”

*

Griff and I put away the groceries and then we made
breakfast for supper—French toast with ham and bologna fried on the
griddle. He had a
Rolling Stone
open
on the counter and read between rounds of dipping and flipping. A few times he
read me parts of articles.

Later, when the dishes were clean and the record player’s
needle had crawled across two Athlete albums, he padded into my bedroom and got
into bed beside me. After socking his pillow a few times with his fist he laid
his head carefully in the dent. There was no pillow between us tonight and he
must’ve noticed that at the same moment I did: as though he could read my mind,
he reached to the floor for the extra one and placed it in the middle of bed. I
wondered whether it was something he wanted or something he thought I wanted.

“You’ll never guess who called me today,” he said in the
dark, a touch of annoyance in his voice. He rubbed his feet together under the
covers.
Zwoop zwoop zwoop.

“Who?”

“Beth. This afternoon.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“Oh.”

“... What’d she say?”

“She wants me to come back to Boston.”

I laughed or snorted or something but in fact I suddenly
felt very silly. I felt ridiculous in bed with him here, playing house with a
straight guy, a straight and taken guy; living a sad, pitiful fantasy. He didn’t
belong here and I was a fool for thinking he did. He belonged with Beth. Of
course he belonged with Beth. “Oh,” I said.

“Yeah, she’s back from her parents’ and wants me to come get
the rest of my shit.”

“Oh, to— to get your shit.” With a jolt I felt the
opposite of the moment before: relieved and confident we would be together
forever. That’s how it had always been for me. I lived in tones and
inflections, in glances and winks and stupid little taps. I analyzed and sought
meaning from meaningless things. It was a constant tug-of-war between what I
wanted and what was reality. It had made me, among other things, fickle. “Do
you think she’s just using that as a reason to see you?”

“I doubt it. When I told you she was final I wasn’t kidding.”

We lay quiet for a while. He pulled the sateen hem of the spinach-colored
blanket back and forth between his fingers.

“How much stuff do you have there?” I said. “We could take
my Jeep.”

“And do what with it, bring it all here?”

“You could keep it in my junk room until you decide what to
do with it.”

“Hm. There’s not a lot that’s full-on mine,” he said after a
moment. “Computer, some DVDs and CDs, clothes. It would fit in the Jeep. All
the stuff we bought together she can just have.”

“You don’t still have that huge-ass monitor, do you?”

“That one from college?”

“Yeah.”

“Haha. No, that took a spill down some stairs senior year.
It’s just a laptop.”

“Well then how about tomorrow? Store’s closed Sundays.”

“Sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”

He took off his t-shirt, dropped it to the floor, rolled
over and faced the dark window. The nakedness of his shoulders made him seem
even nearer than he was, and I felt the same sad and dizzy lightness of last
night. Would it really be so terrible if I touched him? How could that be bad?

“I don’t even know how you guys got together,” I said,
barely aware I’d said it out loud until he responded.

“Me and Beth?” Rolling onto his back again, he inspected me,
as though I were once again unfamiliar, a stranger. “How out of the loop were
you, dude?”

It made me feel sad and ashamed in equal measure. I hadn’t
been left out of the loop, of course. I had closed myself outside it.

“Did you like her our year?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a little. Probably not yet. It was
really the next year that we got closer.”

“She lived in your dorm, right?”

“The little dorm, yeah. She was on the floor above me. I was
sort of lacking in the best friend department at that point.” He didn’t say it
to make me feel guilty, I could tell that by his voice. He said it, maybe, to
make me feel better. Beth, as close as they’d been, was initially a substitute;
she filled a gap—the gap of me. “But we didn’t actually get together
until my senior year, her junior. Beginning of the year. We were at a party,
and when it was over we went back to her room. She had a single. We weren’t
drunk or anything, but I just didn’t leave. I think it started as one of those
casual things—”

“A friend-love-is-better-than-no-love thing?”

“Yeah, exactly. But it was just really nice, you know? I
didn’t expect it. I don’t think she did either, but there it was.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, that was my reaction too. It was out of left field.
We started hanging out as more than friends, and it was still nice. It just
kind of worked. But then I graduated.”

“Then what?”

“I looked at apartments near Shuster but there was nothing I
could afford by myself and I couldn’t stand the idea of having a roommate. So I
moved back to Pittsfield. We did the long-distance thing for almost a year.”

“What did you do in Pittsfield?”

“I worked at this furniture store place. Then in the spring
she lost her place in the dorm in the housing lottery, so she got an apartment
and it wasn’t long before I moved in too.”

“That’s when you got the blueprint job.”

“Mm.”

It was so much to take in, years of back-story starring a
character I knew so well, yet I couldn’t imagine him in any of these
situations. With Beth? It seemed too weird. Beth was the little freshman who
lived in our suite, two doors down, in the room with the chubby girl named Gia.

“I didn’t know any of that,” I said.

“Well there it is.” We were quiet for a moment, and then he
cleared his voice and said, “Did you miss me?”

“Yeah, I missed you. Very much.” And I still missed him even
though he was here, his shoulder almost touching mine. I missed him from those
years that were gone and that I could never get back.

“Well,” he said, “this time we’ll keep in touch, OK? I’ll do
my part. I was as much to blame as you were.”

“That’s bullshit, Griff.”

“No, I took the hint. Junior year, I’d call, you wouldn’t
want to hang out, you’d be busy-tired-working, take your pick—and eventually
I just took the hint. I shouldn’t have taken any hints. I should’ve been like,
What the fuck is up
? Maybe I would’ve
figured out how you felt about that stupid email sooner.”

“I guess.”

“Better late than never, right?” He exhaled a punctuation
and then asked to hear more about Melanie.

“What about her?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “how’d you meet her and stuff?” I
didn’t respond right away and he added, “Did you haul her out of a snow-ditch
or something? A WWSD?”

“It wouldn’t have been a WWSD with her. It’s only a WWSD if
they’re ugly.”

“Haha!”

“It was nothing that dramatic. We were on the same coffee
schedule at Dunkins in the morning. I saw her every day for about a week and
then asked if I could buy her coffee. We started going out.”

“Nice.”

“She’s an insomniac,” I went on, “and she’d paint while I
was asleep. This’ll sound cheesy but it’s true. She had a little painting board
set up by the window, right over there, and I used to love listening to the
brush move over the paper. Watercolors. You couldn’t hear it at any other time
except at night, you know, when it was quiet enough. And the breeze would come
through the window and blow her smell toward me; she had lilac
perfume—still does. And sometimes she’d be naked while she was doing
this; it would be after we’d, you know, had sex. She’d get up and paint.”

“Wow,” he said. “That’s like the most romantic thing I’ve
ever heard.”

I felt a hollowness at the idea that those nights were in
the past and not something I could still look forward to. “It was pretty nice.
But now I wonder if she really had insomnia or if she was just lying awake
worrying about Bernie.”

He was quiet a minute. “Did you love her?”

“I don’t know. I may have? If we’d had more time I may have.
But you can potentially love everyone you’re in a new relationship with, right?
Or else why would you bother?”

“That’s true.”

“Of course, my qualifications for love are super low.”

“They’re not low,” he said, “they’re just wide open. You
have no
Need Not Apply
signs in your
windows.”

“...”

“Really.”

“Well regardless, it was short and sweet, and I didn’t have
time to notice any flaws before old Bernie came home shell-shocked. I think she
felt bad, like us together was the last thing the guy needed. Maybe it was.”

“You’re a good man,” he said, reaching over the pillow to
squeeze my arm. And then after a few minutes of quiet he said, “Sorry about
that.”

“What?”

He kicked at the covers and warm reeking bed-air billowed
over my face. “That.”

“Oh god, what the fuck did you eat!” I laughed even as I
gagged. It was funny the way farts are always funny.

“That bologna was maybe partially fossilized.”

“You used that? I told you to use the new!”

“I didn’t want to waste the old.”

“Well now it’s wasting you.”

“
Ba-dum-bum.
Oh, oh
another one. My poor ass.”

“Oh god, remember how we used to make fake farts at night?
Remember that? And we’d wake up half the suite?”

“Beth would come pounding at our door.
Guys, shut the hell up!
And we’d be all snug in our beds, laughing like
fucking mental patients.”

I put my forearm against my lips and blew. He laughed, a
Pavlovian response. “See?” I said. “Still works.”

“What is it that makes farts so funny?” He made a noise with
his cheek. It sounded like wet clay blasting from a fire hose.