The Dark Space (9 page)

I couldn’t find her.

I curled up in the warm space next to the dryer in one of the laundry rooms and rocked back and forth. I felt then like I was losing my mind — or not my mind, but like I’d lost some part of myself, given it to her when I was supposed to keep it . . . It’s hard to describe. We’d been so tight up in our business for weeks, hands in each other’s back pockets, her eating dinner with me and my parents three or four nights a week, me sleeping over in her room — I felt like she’d been ripped forcibly away from me, and it was only with her gone that I could see how big a hole she left.

Things had been so amazing, my whole semester sprinkled in fairy dust — hanging out with my mom, holding my dad’s hand, throwing out the box in my head with “LA” stamped on it — I didn’t want to believe it was all meaningless separate from Winnie.

Can a crush have a corona? Where you feel so much, everything shifts and realigns around this person, but when you lose the girl you lose the entire substance of your so-called transformation?

That’s what I was worrying about when she called me. If I was just that fucked, when I’d thought a few hours ago I was at the top of my game.

It was so loud wherever she was, I could barely hear her voice. “Calvin!” she shouted. “Calvin Darling!”

She said my name like I was someone she’d known in her youth, and we’d just bumped into each other on a transatlantic voyage.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m at the Longhorn!”

The Longhorn is a bar over in Grimes. Occasionally a group of students will head over there in a scrum to line-dance and drink dollar beers on a Wednesday night.

“Who are you with?”

“Nobody! But I want to be with you. Come over here, Calvin Darling! I’m lonely.”

She was drunk, is what she was.

Winnie doesn’t drink.

“Tell me where to find you.”

“It’s not
big
, Calvin Darling,” she said. “I’m on a stool at the bar. I’m not difficult to
locate
.”

I didn’t tell her I’d spent the past four hours trying to locate her. I just said, “Don’t move. Twenty minutes.”

“Do you have a cowboy hat, Calvin Darling?” she crooned. “Can you pretend to be a cowboy?”

“Do not move off that stool,” I repeated, and by that time I was at my car, keys in the ignition, yanking at the parking break. “I’ll be there before you know it.”

Maybe for her, time buckled. For me, twenty minutes was twenty minutes, and I kept hearing the way she’d said my name. Like it was the punch line to a joke.
Calvin Darling. Do you have a cowboy hat?

I was pissed at her.

It surprised me.

She’d never made me feel like a joke before, never made me feel as
ordinary
as I did driving down the back road to Grimes to pick up my drunk girlfriend from a local dive.

But god
damn
was I ever relieved to see her intact, sitting at that bar. She had a half-empty pint glass in front of her, a cowboy shirt on and this fringed buckskin skirt that was at least three sizes too big and looked like it’d come out of the props room.

It made me want to look around for the mechanical bull, that skirt. It should’ve made her ridiculous, because she’s no cowgirl. She’s tiny, and she’s got a butch haircut and no boobs to speak of.

It did make her ridiculous. She had no magic whatsoever in the Longhorn.

I told my mom once that I thought Winnie was gorgeous, the hottest woman I’d ever met, and she did this slow blink thing she does when she’s running through four or five possible responses and rejecting them all.

Her slow blink was the first thing to clue me in that most people don’t see Winnie like I do.

But that night, walking up to Winnie at the Longhorn — it was the first time I ever saw what she looked like to people who weren’t me. When she lifted her eyes and saw me, said, “Calvin
Darling
,” beckoned me closer with one drunk, lazy motion of her arm, she looked like the saddest buckle bunny in the world. Like a third-string bimbo who’d been riding rodeo boys for too many long and dusty years.

She looked like the same woman, a different woman, every possible woman in the world.

That’s when I figured out I didn’t have a crush on Winnie Frederickson.

I was fucked-over-stupid in love with her.

She patted the red leatherette stool next to her, and when I slid onto it she grabbed my thigh, gripped it up high, leaned into me. Her beery breath warmed my neck. “I am
so
glad to
see you
, Calvin Darling.”

“I’m glad to see you, too, Winnie-girl.” I picked up her pint and finished it off. “How many of these have you got in you?”

She drew a circle in the sweat-ring the glass had left on the bar. “Two?” she said. “No, three. Definitely three.”

Three wasn’t so bad. I didn’t think even a wee, elfin teetotaler was likely to suffer much from three pints of beer.

“You didn’t come to class.”

“I
know
,” she said. “I had to do this instead.”

“What’s
this
?”

She spun the barstool toward me and grabbed my other thigh, so she had me pinned in her hands, her face right up next to mine. “It was an experiment. My own kissing lab.”

“Who’ve you been kissing?”

I tried not to sound as alarmed as I felt, but I sucked at it. She stroked my cheek. “Nobody, Cal, baby. I had a hypothesis, you know? But my hypothesis was
dis
-proven.” She leaned on the
dis
with the heel of her hand on my leg, pressing into the bone. It didn’t feel good.

I didn’t want her to stop.

“What was the hypothesis?”

“The hypothesis was that Contact Improv is a class, not life. Therefore, everything that happens in Contact Improv is a phenomenon of the class. Who I am in that class isn’t who I am. Everything that happens
associated
with Contact Improv — that includes you, Cal-baby, and all our other friends from the class — are also a phenomenon of the class, not life.”

“That’s a shitty hypothesis.”

She frowned at me. “Maybe I should’ve talked to you about this first. But I thought,
Okay, you know, that’s the hypothesis. So prove it or disprove it.
Because if everything that’s come to me because of Contact Improv is going to be gone the day I graduate — if the rest of my life is the rest of my life is the rest of my fucking
life
, as dry and dusty as it was in December, if I’m going to end up in fucking Fayetteville working at a branch office of H&R Block, I want to
know
. I don’t want to be surprised.”

“H&R Block?”

“I’m trying to be realistic. The economy isn’t good.”

“You really should have talked to me about this.”

“I’m starting to get that. But what I did instead was figure,
Hey, if Contact Improv is a role, the experiment has to be whether a role can be your life.
Whether I can take who I am in Contact Improv and just
be
that person in the real world. Because if I can do it once, I can do it forever, right?”

“Who are you trying to be?”

I was baffled. Obscurely hurt. But I felt so tender toward my Winnie, too, for being more confused than she’d let on, and for that crazy fringed buckskin skirt she was swimming in.

“I’m not trying to be anyone
now
. The experiment was to see if I could go to a bar and kiss a man. Any man.”

“You were trying to pick up some stranger?”

“You’re looking at me like I’m crazy.”

“It’s a weekday afternoon. There’s hardly even anyone here, so yeah. You seem a little crazy, baby.”

“I needed to
know
.”

“What’s it prove if you kiss a strange man at a bar?”

“It would’ve proved that Contact Improv is life, not just class. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. So it’s not.”

Her explanation — it didn’t make any fucking sense to me.

It didn’t matter, though, because
she
made sense to me. The bones of her ribcage under my hands when I reached across the space between us and pulled her onto my lap.

The knob of her knee bumping into my sternum.

The smell of her dandruff shampoo, tar and lye, the goldenrod color of it in its clear plastic bottle the same as her hair when the sun hit it just right.

She
made sense to me, because I was afraid of all the same shit she was afraid of. That none of this was real. That the future was bearing down on us and we weren’t strong enough to take it.

That I would wake up in ten years in a generic apartment in some generic place with a boner for Winnie Frederickson, and I’d think,
What ever happened to that girl?
and
That was a wild time
, but I would no longer believe in anything I’d felt for her. I’d no longer believe in anything that happened to us in Contact Improv.

We were both afraid that days aren’t pearls. That the conversations we were stopping to have in the dining hall — three-hour gab sessions about politics, about semantics, about the meaning of life itself — were so much bullshit, naïve-kid nonsense that we’d feel ashamed of when we were running off manuscripts for the postgrad unpaid internship whose shape was, in fact, the shape of adulthood.

But how does that happen?

It happens because you let it happen. It happens because you choose it.

I chose Winnie instead.

I’d skipped the kissing lab that day, but Maggie had described to us how it was supposed to go. She would bring two people in front of the group and hand them a slip of paper. On the paper would be the barest sketch of a scene.

A first kiss at the end of a bad date.

A kiss in the bathroom of a crowded club, people pounding on the door outside.

A kiss after the first time one of you has cheated on the other.

The audience wouldn’t know the scene. It would be you and your partner’s job to broadcast the emotion, the feel, the reality of that scene to the audience with your kiss.

When you ended the scene, the audience would tell you what they had felt, what they had seen. If what you had done was real.

I pulled Winnie against me, my dick hard, my heart pounding, my hands all over that skirt, sliding up against her bra strap, clamping down on her neck. “This is real,” I told her.

“It’s not, though,” she said. “The experiment failed.”

“Fuck the experiment.” I stood, wobbling because, Christ, I’m a skinny fuck, I shouldn’t be carrying anything bigger than a dachshund. “We’re going home.”

I carried her to my car.

I probably would have given up halfway there, but Winnie said, “You’re carrying me to the
car
?!” about a hundred times, which made me feel like fucking Ajax, so I kept going. Striding.

Okay, staggering.

The next morning I couldn’t move my arms, but it was worth it just for how she kissed me when I finally put her on the ground.

It was worth it for the slide of her body down mine, the hitch of her hip against my hard dick, for my hands on her ass in that buckskin skirt, for the way she went after me like I had all the oxygen and she needed it back.

We kissed against the door of my car for ten fucking years, and it was magic. It was. Real magic.

As far as I’m concerned, all the magic that came after was just a bonus.

“It
isn’t
.” Sarah was angry.

Cal was uneasy, shut down.

Marvin kept spinning a heavy black fountain pen on the bone of his thumb, his other arm across his body.

Beth was angry, too, her chest completely broken out in red splotches. Cal had invited her. For the first time, I’d pretended with Cal. I pretended I was glad he wanted to include Beth in our circle. I said,
That would be perfect
, but I made myself inaccessible to him when I said that, and he knew I did, and I told myself I was just feeling the uncomfortable stretch of our ever-larger reaches of intimacy and that this was what I wanted.

Funny how pretending is almost exactly like lying.

Jason and Finn were texting. Probably each other. Their hipbones and thighs touching where they sat side by side on the sofa in Cal’s parents’ living room.

“It’s not art,” Beth insisted. “No one at all is remotely deluded that it is except those of you pretending to be artists so that you can produce fucking porn.”

Beth said
pretending
like she was spitting poison out of her mouth.

That’s when Cal reached over and put his hand on Beth’s shoulder.

She looked at him and put her hand over his.

You could hear the ocean, like the leafy street outside the windows had been replaced by the shore.

“I have homework,” I said.

Cal looked at me, all of him reaching out to me, the new light in him that I hadn’t figured out yet, in his chest, his throat, reaching out steadily.

“I have homework,” I said, again.

In bed, staring up at my ceiling, the smell of Cal’s hair in the pillow, I realized how easy it had been to leave.

“I’m suspending part two of the physical intimacy lab today. Stand up.” Maggie gestured us up. There were only a couple people in the class grumbling about missing a stage kissing day.

The rest of us stood up and looked everywhere but each other, the relief palpable.

“I’m not going to bother wasting time about why. You can feel it for yourselves. It could be my fault — I was pushing you up against the edges of what you were accomplishing. I might have pushed too far.”

Maggie said that, and it sank hard in my belly.

Next to me, I felt Beth yearn. Her yearning was a solid thing. It was making me sick, and it was so big I knew everyone could feel it. Because I was carrying part of it for her, trying to keep her together like she was dry sand in my palms, everyone also assumed that yearning was for me.

Meanwhile, directly across the circle from Beth, Sarah had such a big fucking wall around her, not even the sound of the ocean could get through.

The door backstage banged open.

Winnie.

She came around the scrim.

Her hair was purple.

Actually, part of her forehead and the tops of her ears were purple, too — that head shop Technicolor rainbow hair dye is fucking messy shit — but her hair had taken the dye like she had been meant to have hair the color of a grape Popsicle since birth.