Bright Before Us (12 page)

Our connection became more acute than in high school, something deeper and more abiding than friendship; I don't know that there's a word for it other than
peace
. You gave me a kind of peace, and I think I gave it back. When you heard my voice on the line, you sighed with relief. I would show up at your job, and just like in the movies—those scenes in which the unresolved love walks in unannounced, there to settle some old score—you would flash your wry smile and say,
Well hello, stranger.
Because we reserved a certain place for each other, a privileged place. And I tried to believe that was the same as you being in love with me.

Because I was in love with you. I didn't figure this out until our junior prom. That night, you and I and our now forgotten friends paid forty bucks each to split a limo. You wore a cream dress, the color just darker than your skin. At the dance, we didn't dance. We sat at a table and I made fun of people. (Zelner, for one: the old bastion of the
Red Asphalt
educational doctrine was chaperoning,
in nylon track pants, a sport coat, and a heinous plaid tie.) It was a joint prom with five other schools, and I hoped the strangers mistook me for your date. I couldn't stop looking at you.
Are you having fun?
My voice was drowned by the cranked-up bass.
You want to go outside?

I had this idea that we would stand on the balcony overlooking the Berkeley marina—its chain restaurants, corporate-convention hotels, and glittering black water—and you would kiss me. I thought you might be overcome by the view, the moment, enough to see me differently. I remember actually having the thought, This is when it's going to happen.

Just let me hit the bathroom,
you said.

I stood against the railing, loosening my bow tie. A blonde in orange casually leaned next to me, the bust of her dress sagging.

Are you from Armijo High?
she said.

She shoved her hand at me.
So what's your name?

Francis,
I said, shaking it.

Lowell. In the city.
I motioned behind us.
I'm actually waiting for—

My name's Greta,
she said.
I go to Skyline.

I shook her hand again as you came out and found me. You told her your name and held out your hand too. Greta motioned for her friends to come over. Awkward conversations sprouted. I kept waiting for them to wander away. They never did. The tables got dismantled and the
DJ threatened last dance, and we all moseyed toward the sea of limos. Greta asked for my phone number, pulling a pen from her purse, and I wrote on her hand, thinking, She brought a pen to the prom.

I was sixteen, so rabidly in need of sexual stimuli I scoured my school-issued copy of
The Scarlet Letter
for blue bits, engineered homemade stick-figure porno. You talked about your crush on Greg Linderhoefer incessantly, before apologizing for talking about it incessantly. There was a live girl two towns over who seemed lonely, and dim, and giving. I cut my losses and took what I knew I could get. I could do both: pine over you, and flail over her.

Our friends met Greta at caravanning jaunts to the mall during which none of us bought a thing. Greta never spoke first, just answered questions: Yes, she liked the Clash. Sure, the Mongolian barbeque place was fine by her. They all pretended to like her, which worked out fine. They were all pretending to like me too.

Greta, like you, was only an occasional witness to the embarrassments that trailed my parents like a stench—their casual swearing, my mother's confessions (
Honey, I was twenty-six before I had my first orgasm ...
). Greta reacted, like you did, with polite puzzlement. If she sensed that things were worse than what she saw, she never brought it up, and I never told her otherwise.

Until a day early in our senior year, when I came home from school one afternoon to find my parents waiting. They had some mundane grouse: I had promised to drive my sister somewhere and, having forgotten, never showed. My father yelled, a caricature of an angry man—he was beet-faced, out of breath. I hardly needed to be
there; this was for his benefit, not mine.

You told me you were going to take her,
I said.
Don't you remember?

As I spoke the lie, an involuntary smirk came to my face. I saw him register my expression. He looked at my mom as if to say,
The balls on this kid!
The three of us hung there, suspended. I felt the ice break, like we had stepped out of our scripted roles. He knew I was lying; I knew he knew it. The whole thing was absurd and suddenly lighthearted. We were still smiling, a triangular exchange of deflated tensions, when my father began to undo his belt. He grinned, so I grinned—it was a joke, he was miming like I had gone and done it and so he was gonna stripe my ass good; a pantomime from another era. He liked to get tough, push me around. He liked to tell me that I made him sick, and why. But he had never whipped me. I knew not to take the gesture seriously. He lightly flung the belt outward, using the buckle as a handle, so that on the recoil it licked me on the upper thigh—he had expended no effort, and still it nipped at my skin through my jeans.
Hey!
I said, laughing through the sting.

I was about to speak. That's what I recall most vividly—I was about to apologize, concede. I was opening my mouth to form the words
You're right, I'm sorry for forgetting
, when I was interrupted: a salty, throbbing pain, thick and cutting, across the side of my neck and shoulder blade. I never got the words out. The hit came hard, and it was enough to pop a white burst at the outer edges of my vision, my teeth biting down on my tongue, my mouth filling with the taste of blood.

You little piss-ant liar,
he said.

When my vision came back, I saw my mother's hand on the dining room table. I didn't dare look up. I put my hand to my neck, then my face: it had happened fast enough that I was still smiling.

Without pausing I walked into the bathroom—the only room with a lock. A coral-colored welt had already taken root, suppressed enough by adrenaline that it didn't yet hurt. It would linger for days, doggedly visible and impossible to explain.

I found my keys and walked to a pay phone. I had six digits of your number dialed before I reconsidered. I couldn't tell you this.

I called the studio where Greta had piano lessons; I knew her exhausting, application-padding honor student's schedule as well as my own. A man answered and I could hear someone playing in the background: uncertain, faltering notes among more confident ones, and then the mistakes being repeated, corrected. I asked for her and the playing ceased.

She answered.
Greta,
I said, loathing the desperation in my voice. Fucking disgusting, asking for help like this.
God,
I said.
Fuck, I'm sorry, this is—

I heard rustling on the other end.
I'm packing up,
she said briskly.
I'll meet you at MacArthur BART in an hour,
she said. Her voice was clipped and efficient.
Get out of there,
she said. She had known, without my saying, if not the specifics then the tenor of what had happened.

At the BART station she cried.
I wish I could keep you safe,
she said.

It was the sort of remark that usually made me ill with embarrassment, stupidly angry, or derisive toward its weakhearted
source. But I wanted, in that moment, to take from her anything I could. She was the only person who knew this, who knew me. I was so grateful to Greta it frightened me.

And once she was the keeper of that information, it took so little time for things to change. When I looked at her I saw my shame. She thought of me as a victim, and gauged my actions accordingly: he's not unkind, only injured. She told her parents. The next time I came for dinner, her father cornered me in the den.
This is abuse,
he said.
What your father did. What your father does.

I smiled, shaking my head.
Mr. Carver,
I said.

Your father is a bad man,
he said, his hands on my shoulders. His breath smelled like butterscotch.

No,
I said, looking away.
He's just an idiot.

 

That night at the BART station, before Greta and I parted, she kissed me good night. I had to go home. I was seventeen—where else was there? She reached up to caress the mark on my neck but stopped herself, pulling her hand back.

It's okay,
I said.
You can touch it.

Her cool, gentle fingers grazed the reddening welt. It was when they pulled away that it really began to hurt.

After we left your college we drove back to your apartment, and, distracted by your hand in mine, I forgot to avoid my car: it was still right where I had parked it that morning. You gasped.
Oh shit—somebody sideswiped you!

I parked your car in a stranger's driveway, my ears burning, and you ran to mine, touching the gash in the paint.

Maybe your neighbors saw something,
I said—realizing a beat too late how unconcerned I sounded.

You peered at me.
You're not upset?
You bent back down, touched the massive dent again. Your voice flattened.
This isn't a swipe, somebody hit you for real. Somebody T-boned you.

I rubbed my neck without thinking and you watched my hand as I did it.
It's no big deal, just a fender bender,
I said, stepping toward you.

What happened to your neck?
You stood against the crater in the door. Your voice broke.
Somebody hit you? You were in a car accident and you didn't tell me?

Your tears came anyway. A spiteful burst of speech came to my lips, and I rolled my eyes:
Oh God, I can't—

I had started to say,
I can't do this anymore.
I could no longer handle having to anticipate, moment to moment, what would make you cry. I wanted you to stop crying. I wanted you to get over it, to banish your parents' ghosts. I wanted to get where we were going, for a move to be made, without the specter of your heartache sucking the air out of the room.

I put my arms on the car, on either side of your body, pinning you without touching you. I got close enough to smell your car's sun-cooked vinyl scent on your clothes.

What is this,
I said, inches from your face, my voice gentler than I expected.
Tell me what we're doing.

You paused.
We're deciding what we'll regret more.

What?
I said.

These things only end badly,
you said.
You know that. Everyone knows that.

I stood there in disbelief. It was like you had suddenly become someone else.

Fuck that,
I said.
You know what?
Seconds died like weak snowflakes, disintegrating as they hit the ground.
Fuck you.
I walked around the car, opened my passenger door, and finagled my way over the gearshift. Your torso eclipsed the window as you pleaded through the glass. But I ignored you, taking off toward my apartment, gunning through stop signs and blasting the radio. The cassette player had cannibalized a tape that remained there, dormant. I found a Christian rock channel, some honeyvoiced young thing basking in holy light.

As I walked into the apartment, sounds came from my roommate's door that didn't compute right away—a mélange of male earnestness, rickety carpentry, a girl's barks of pleasure phrased as questions:
Unh? Unh? Unh? Unh?
A wave of revulsion rolled the length of me, and I shut my bedroom door, hearing them just as clearly.

I looked around the place: toppled fast-food cups, fragrant socks, a stack of loose CDs next to cracked CD cases. Down the hall my roommate approached liftoff, groans stretching out and growing frenzied, and in that queasy moment it felt unfair to be born male. I would always be a messy, grunting animal. My face, if left alone, would grow coarse with hair; I would have to wage a lifelong war not to smell like an armpit. I missed you terribly right then. I had acclimated to you like a new time zone. You knew a lot about strange things, like old typewriters and Eastern philosophy. You tipped well and sometimes did a goofy little prospector's jig when you were happy. You were effortlessly lovely. Your hair smelled like tropical fruit.
You were so sad, and so strong. You were good at being a person; you were a good person.

I got up, lifted my rolling desk chair, and readied myself to hurl it at the wall of bookshelves, 1, 2, 3
NOW
—

I stood there with the chair in my slightly raised arms, muscles locked. It suddenly seemed like a stupid thing to do. Am I really this angry? I thought. It made no sense to be this angry. You were right. You were deciding if being together was worth ruining our friendship, and I already knew that it was. The only thing you had phrased incorrectly was the “we.”