Beware of Love in Technicolor (27 page)

             
I took the nights John blew me off very personally, but never said anything. I’d tell him I understood, that I had a paper to write anyway, that I already had plans with Topher. None of it seemed to faze him.

             
Gwen tried to get me to open up. She would invite one or two girlfriends over and they would talk about their own boy problems over pizza and rum and cokes. Instead of seizing the opportunity to make some real female friends, I would usually excuse myself after about fifteen minutes of their chatter, escaping to Topher’s room, or the library.

             
“What do they know?” I’d ask myself, nose buried in some book. John was supposed to be my Heathcliff. Falling out of love never happened on the moors.

***

              Halloween that year gave us a number of choices of parties to attend, and around Cloud 9, there were plenty of psilocybin mushrooms to go around. Mushrooms. Another first.

I stood in the living room at Cloud 9, staring at the shriveled, sad looking brown things in my hand.

              “I’m supposed to just eat these?” I asked with some disdain.

             
“I could eat them for you,” John offered, fidgeting with his gray turtleneck.

             
He had been decidedly uninvolved when it came to picking out a costume that year. But when everyone pressured him not to be an asshole and have some fun, he dumped the responsibility of his costume on me. Payback is a bitch, or so they say.

             
“Why couldn’t I be the Wizard?” he whined.

             
“Why couldn’t you say something three weeks ago?” I placed the mushrooms on the counter and helped him into his cardboard vest and began to tie it in the back. “Topher and I worked on this damn costume all week.”

“But the Tin Man?”

“Perfect, isn’t it?” I asked. He sneered at me and shoved a handful of mushrooms in his mouth. He grumbled.

“If it was perfect, you wouldn’t be Dorothy,” he joked, though his reference to the Wicked WItch wasn’t all that funny. I ignored the insult when I saw Ben approach.

“Here,” Ben said to me. “Dorothy! Love it, love the pigtails,” he continued, grinning and tugging on one of my short braids. ”If you eat the shrooms in a peanut butter sandwich, they’re better. I’ll trade you.” And he handed me a half sandwich of white bread, peanut butter, and hallucinogenic mushrooms. I swept my pile off the counter and gladly made the trade.

I felt giddy when he looked me in the eyes and grinned and our hands touched in the exchange. He was dressed in a white, button-down shirt, open to the middle of his chest, revealing a long, beaded necklace. Jim Morrison, from The Doors. His black jeans fit him perfectly; he looked really good walking away to make himself another sandwich.

“Thanks,” I called after him, eating my sandwich and feeling it in my knees when he turned and grinned at me and went about joining the guys in the other room. I don’t think John even noticed the exchange. But Topher did. The scarecrow may not have had a brain, but he was no dummy.

Sitting in the backseat of John’s car on our way to our first party, Topher and I knew that Patrick, dressed all in brown as our group’s cowardly lion, and John were too absorbed in whatever it was they were talking about to pay attention to us. We always felt like kids along for the ride, just lucky to tag along.

“
People are strange, when you're a stranger, faces look ugly when you're alone,”
he sang vacantly, staring out the window of the back seat into the darkness zooming past us. I sat back and closed my eyes, feeling the warm haze of a mushroom trip kick in.

***

The party was your typical, off-campus, two-keg affair. College kids must come in a close second to grade-schoolers when it comes to enthusiastically greeting All Hallow’s Eve. There were yuppies in business suits, superheroes of all sorts, Jesus, Elvis, and Marilyn in droves. Most were homemade concoctions, thrown together and named at the end. More than one guy came dressed as a woman.

John set about quickly getting drunk. It didn’t matter that we were tripping, and I didn’t much care. It meant that I had more freedom. I couldn’t remember the last time I found his drunkenness “cute.” Trouble was, I was so obsessed with him losing interest in me that I did not notice my waning interest in him. I thought I was motivated by his lack of attentions, instead of propelled.

Standing in the kitchen of the small apartment on the second floor, I sipped at a beer and looked around at all the costumes. I’ve always been a fan of the holiday, and appreciate a creative attempt at dressing up. Conversation wrapped around me, but didn’t touch me. I was lost in my own head. In my daze, my eyes happened to rest upon Ben, deep in conversation with some chippie I did not know. She was dressed as Wonder Woman, with half her ass hanging out of her leotard.

I looked across the room at John. He was busy taking credit for his costume from Raggedy Ann. I tried to place her, but it is difficult on Halloween. Just some girl. I wondered how long it would take for him to notice his girlfriend was in the same room.

Maybe it was the mushrooms, but it was hard to really care. I felt that I should care, but it was difficult to muster the energy for it. I looked back to Ben, still in conversation with the slutty superhero.

Looking up and catching my stare, he smiled one of his trademark, butter-melting smiles, and gave me a slow, Jim Morrison wink, before returning his attention back to Wonder Woman. I was glad for the stability of the counter behind me. I’m not sure if it was the costume or the chemistry, but I actually swooned.

***

The rest of the night went as any other hallucinatory, Halloween night should. We wandered from the original party to another party down the street. Topher walked with his arm hooked in mine. We sang songs from The Whiz, and laughed as Patrick stumbled down the street, calling out
“Ain’t it the truth? Ain’t it the truth?
” in his Cowardly Lion costume.  John walked up front, taking long strides, talking mostly to himself.

At one point on our walk, Topher bent down to pick something up in the darkness. He stood hunched over in the small wash of light coming from a distant porch lamp. Then he turned to me.

“Hold out your hand,” he said. Our friends continued on their way, oblivious to our delay.

I held out my right hand, palm side up, and waited. Topher placed a small, round object in the center of my hand. It was cool and heavy for its size. I held it up in the outlying light.

“Is it a marble?”  I asked, squinting my eyes to make out the colors.

“Best I can tell,” he said. We resumed walking, no longer arm-in-arm.

“Thank you,” I said holding on to the tiny gesture in my hand.

“Don’t mention it,” he answered.

John was so far out in front, he failed to notice, and even if he had, I don’t think he was in any condition to care.

***

Now, I would not have brought up the marble if it didn’t play a part in our story. Funny the way some things happen.

The marble, I must say, is a lovely specimen of tiger’s eye. Gorgeous ribbons of gold, honey, and espresso-brown, intermingling in a silky luster. I still have it, in a box in the top shelf of my closet. On the night Topher found and gave it to me, I found it to be the perfect mushroom companion. Smooth and round and hard in my hand, easy to turn over and over with absent-minded tenacity. I did not drop it once in all the hustle and bustle of an overcrowded three-floor house party, or during a squished ride back to Cloud 9, where I had to sit across the laps of three guys in the backseat of John’s little hatchback.

I did, however, drop it in John’s bedroom, as I was removing my costume and preparing for an uneventful night’s sleep. John had decided to have “one more” beer out on the deck with the guys, after letting Topher and Patrick take his car back to campus.

I was on my belly, halfway under his bed, with my head turned to the left. The dim light in the room made it hard to see under the queen sized bed. I swept my right arm up and over my head, slowly feeling for the small object.

“Got it,” I mumbled to myself when at last I retrieved my tiny treasure. It was when I was pulling my arm back to my side to shimmy back out into the room that I scraped my arm against a stack of magazines.

About ten minutes later, John stumbled into the room.

“Hey, Sweetness, how are you feeling?” he slurred, trying to bend down to remove his boots without falling over. It was no good.

“Like a house fell on me,” I answered, disgusted by his sloppy display.

He removed his boots from his sitting position on the floor, then struggled to get up, holding onto the corner of his chest of drawers. He made a loopy stumble forward toward the bed, then stopped short, and actually stood up straight.

“Oh, shit,” he groaned. His slicked back hair was breaking free from the gel, and falling forward in stiff, stretched out curls.

“I think I like the farm girl bent over the tractor best myself,” I started, kneeling on the bed, and pointing to a photo in one of the magazines I had spread out. His bed was covered, corner to corner, in porn.

“Though I can see what you like about this one, in the dog collar and leash. She’s so dark and scary, like Abby with a boob job.”

“Knock it off, Greer,” he finally said weakly, making a move to gather the evidence.

“Oh, no,” I said, placing my hand smack down on two pilots servicing one flight attendant. “No, I’m enjoying this way too much for you to take it away now. My favorite part is thinking about all those glorified speeches about how demeaning the adult industry is to women. Remember those? When there were real girls around to impress? Ones who don’t just, oh, I don’t know, get so intimate with the contents of a toolbox on a first date?”

It was too much for me to control the swell of anger, and I resorted to throwing one of the sleazy rags at him. It bust open in a fan of perverse pictures, without hitting its target.

“Do we have to do this now?” he asked, shoving the magazines aside and sitting on the edge of the bed. He glared at me.

“Oh, you’re angry at me?” I asked incredulously, jumping back and standing on the opposite side from where he sat. “I find this crap under your bed, and you’re mad at me?”

“They’re just magazines, for Christ’s sake,” he rolled his eyes.

              “Then why aren’t they out on your desk with the Rolling Stones?”

             
“That’s your problem with them? That I don’t display them?”

             
“No, my problem with them is that you have them at all. All these girls,” I said absently, staring at the photos still open in front of me. Still prone to hallucinating, my eyes swirled the photos into a pulsating blend of filth in front of me. With a sweep of my right arm, I sent them flying off the left hand side of the bed. They settled on the floor at my feet.

             
But I was the only audience to my anger. John had passed out.

***

It was hard to say, exactly, why my little discovery got under my skin so much. I had always thought myself pretty open. If those women wanted to make money in an industry that treated them as nothing more than freakishly big-boobed, brainless nymphomaniacs, I figured that was their problem, not mine. There was some feeling of being deceived, of being made a fool of.              John had been so good at declaring his distaste for porn.

“It speaks to the lowest common denominator,” he would say, sounding so smart and evolved. “It leaves nothing to the imagination. It relies on common cliches and stereotypes.”

I guess part of the anger was with myself for believing him.

But even that wasn’t it. Not really. I worked so hard to be what he wanted, what he thought was cute and sexy. And there was no way I was ever going to be one of those girls. It wasn’t even an option. So what was I to do when faced with this? How was I to ever believe him again when he told me he wanted me, when he so obviously wanted them?

***

So, I was pissed. And left standing there at the side of the bed, with my pervert boyfriend snoring obnoxiously, blissfully unaware of the anger seeping out of every pore in my body. Even the mushrooms couldn’t mellow my mood.

I stood there for a while, arms still crossed in front of me, just staring at him. Hating him. Wondering what it was that I hadn’t been able to do to keep his interest. Hating myself for even caring anymore.

             
I looked at the clock. 1:38 am. There was no way I could sleep; no way I could lie down next to him. Topher had taken John’s car back to campus, so I was stuck at the house.