Kate Christie (29 page)

Of course, then I’d get stuck living in reverse, and that would no doubt be unsettling. But think of all the lives saved. Certainly it would be worth losing the rhythm of my own life if I could have a positive impact on hundreds or even thousands of others, wouldn’t it? Not that they’d ever know I’d saved them, of course, and there was part of the rub.

“Hey.” Jess’s voice interrupted my metaphysical reverie.

I turned from my search of the couch cushions for my missing Walkman. “Yeah?”

“Come here for a sec.”

I followed her into the bedroom, where she opened the drawer in her bedside table and pulled out a small object wrapped in the funny papers. “This is for you.”

“I have something for you too,” I said, and retrieved a bag from my backpack.

I sat beside her on the bed and made her open the bag first. It contained a small jewelry box and a mix tape stocked with tunes from the Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, Fleetwood Mac, the
Some
Kind of Wonderful
soundtrack, and “I Can’t Tell You Why” by the Eagles. As she read the names of the songs from the cassette case, she started laughing, and I wasn’t sure if I should be hurt or not.

Beautiful Game 211

“Sorry—I love it. Just, open yours,” she said, smiling sideways at me.

Turns out she’d made me a mix tape too, with nearly the same exact songs on it. Apparently we’d both paid attention to our relationship’s soundtrack.

“Open the box,” I said once we had recovered from our mutual mirth.

She lifted the lid carefully and pulled out the silver locket I’d picked out for her weeks before, etched with stars on the outside and containing tiny pictures of each of us—our official athlete photos from the SDU Sports Information office—on the inside.

“Now we both have necklaces,” I said, nervously fingering the sun pendant she’d given me at Christmas, which I rarely took off.

“I love it,” Jess said, tracing the engraved stars lightly. She hesitated and added, “I love you.”

It was the first time she’d looked me in the eyes as she told me she loved me, and I couldn’t help grinning. “Good thing.”

“It is a good thing.” She reached under the bed then, pulling out a small flat, rectangular package wrapped in brown paper.

“I have one more thing for you. I thought it might give you something to think about for next fall.”

It had to be a painting, I thought as I tugged at the string and slid the paper away from the canvas. I held my breath, not sure what I’d find as I turned it over. And then I had to laugh—

Jess had painted a close-up of a white soccer ball resting on a gorgeous lawn of springy, bright green grass, the stalks of which were enormous, as if the viewer were an ant or other invisible creature looking up at the giant leather ball, the words “SDU

Soccer” and the stitches holding the individual panels together clearly visible.

“Dude, this is awesome,” I said.

“You thought it would be something serious, didn’t you,”

Jess said, biting her lip.

“Yeah, but I love it. It’s perfect. You’re perfect.”

“Hardly,” she said, but she returned the hug I gave her. Then she kissed me, lightly at first and then more seriously, devouring my lips with hers until I felt a little dizzy.

212 Kate Christie

“Get rid of this, please,” she said, tugging at my T-shirt.

“And these.” With a pull on my shorts.

“Gladly.” I paused briefly to place our gifts to each other someplace safer than the comforter cover. Then I stripped down and slipped under the covers with her, my hands and mouth running over her body, which opened so easily to mine now.

She loved me, but what was more, she trusted me. That was the better gift, really.

Later, when we lay sated and quiet next to each other, as much of our naked skin touching still as was humanly possible, Jess murmured, “Now that we’ve given each other the sun and the moon and the stars, guess there’s not much else, hmm.”

I loved that she was as appallingly cheesy as me.

“I don’t know,” I said, and kissed her shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

We lay in her bed under the slanted ceiling together as the last of the summer light leaked from the sky and darkness seemed to settle on the house more heavily than it usually did.

The bedside lamp was on, and we moved without talking so that we could look into each other’s eyes, both of us clearly trying to memorize what we saw. As her eyes seemed to grow lighter, more transparent, I wondered if this was the last time we would ever be together. Three months apart was a long time—longer than we’d been dating, even. What if Jess changed her mind? What if she got used to being alone again and decided she didn’t want me anymore at the end of the summer? What if by leaving now I was ruining any chance we had at a future together?

Jess lifted her hand and smoothed it over my brow. Her eyes intent on mine, she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you this all day—is now when we talk about monogamy?”

This was so far from what I was expecting that I burst out laughing for the second time that night.

“What?” Jess asked, looking worried. “Is this not the right time? Sorry, I’m new at this relationship thing.”

I laughed again. But a little while later, after we’d agreed on a monogamous summer, nothing seemed funny anymore as we lay in her bed wishing we could hold off morning.

As I drove away the next day, suffice it to say that we both bawled and it was awful and I almost turned around half a dozen times, possibly more. Only the Wallace family sense of honor—
I
Have Given My Word to the Portland Parks Department
—compelled me to continue forward when I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw Jess standing alone on the street beside her car, watching me leave her. I wiped away tears as I headed toward the freeway and turned north toward Oregon. Why was I doing this? Just then, money for school seemed seriously unimportant.

The day after I got home, I was up early and off to work downtown, and my summer of sullenness officially commenced.

“What’s your problem?” my friend Joe asked me that first day. We were out for the afternoon together on an irrigation job.

214 Kate Christie

“I had to leave my girlfriend in San Diego,” I groused.

“Oh, poor you,” Joe said.

His girlfriend, Jennie, lived in a tiny forest town out on the eastern side of the state, not far from the Idaho border. He left her for eight months every year to come work in the city, where the wages and benefits were too good to pass up. During those months, he was lucky to see her every other weekend.

“Shut it,” I said. “At least you live within driving distance.”

“Yeah, if you don’t mind an eight-hour trip every couple of weeks.”

Okay, so he had a point.

My parents were more receptive to my whining, and happily reminisced about the summer after their junior year of college when my mom went to work in a resort town a hundred miles north of San Francisco and my dad would hitchhike up on the weekends to visit her. Then they’d take a bus into the redwood forests and wander the trails there, feeling as if they had traveled back in time to an era with no cars, no telephones, no universities.

A time that contained only them and the primordial forest.

I, of course, was less than sympathetic to this turn of conversation. For one thing, I’d heard these stories innumerable times. For another, my parents currently got to see each other whenever they wanted and had done so for the last twenty-nine years. Kind of unfair to compare their long-ago separation, which, incidentally, hadn’t been nearly as extended or remote as Jess’s and mine, to the visceral heartbreak I was currently experiencing. I mean, couldn’t they see my heart literally breaking inside my chest as I pined away for the love of my life? They thought I didn’t see the condescending smiles they exchanged when I described my emotional state. Just made me grouchier.

The only way around the distance, Jess and I decided my first week at home, was to talk every night and write copious letters. Nearly every evening I took the cordless phone out into the backyard and sat in one of the deck chairs watching birds and red squirrels flit about my parents’ garden while Jess and I talked for an hour about our days, our jobs—she was working as a camp counselor at the Y for the third summer in a row—or nothing at all.

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Hummingbirds who guzzled sugar water from the various feeders hanging around the yard were my favorite. I came to know them by the sounds they made as they fed—the high-pitched chirps accompanied by the buzzing of their wings, like a hundred bumblebees circling overhead. On the weekends I helped my mom clean and refill the feeders, and sometimes the birds were so anxious for food that they would hover outside the kitchen window watching us and dive bomb us as soon as we emerged with the refilled feeders. Napoleon’s complex, my mom called it.

Sometimes I took the phone into my bedroom and Jess and I ventured down the road of phone sex, me always praying my mom and dad wouldn’t happen to pick up the phone themselves and accidentally receive an ear full. Occasionally I wondered if Jess preferred sex via telephone to the real thing—this way she didn’t have to cede any control over her body to anyone else.

Personally, I found the long distance line to be a poor substitute, but hey, it was better than nothing.

After a couple of weeks, the phone bill arrived and my mother sat me down to have a talk about the cost of long distance phone calls to Southern California. I glowered through the whole lecture, though I knew she was right. What was the point of me coming home to work and save money for school if I was going to blow hundreds of dollars a month talking to Jess? For that, I might as well have stayed in La Jolla for the summer.

“I know,” I finally said when she paused. “I just miss her so much.”

“You really love this girl, don’t you?” my mom asked.

“I really do. You would too if you met her.”

From then on I timed our calls, and we took turns so that we were both spending money, since my parents had made it clear that any communication expenses I incurred were my sole responsibility. Harsh but fair, I had to admit.

We went on like this for weeks, both of us working long hours outdoors at physically strenuous jobs during the week, good-naturedly arguing about which was more taxing—diesel-operated weed whackers or large groups of seven-year-olds. On the weekends, I would traipse around the city taking photos and 216 Kate Christie

writing accompanying letters to send to Jess. She returned the favor, sending photos and pictures she painted of Sidney and Claire’s backyard and the ocean at sunset and my favorite, a collage from Seal Beach.

But the letters and pictures and phone calls weren’t enough.

I missed her deeply, in an almost sweet way. It was like when you get a bruise from soccer and you test it all the time, pressing on it to see if it still hurts just as much. Only in this case, the pain didn’t ever really fade. In this case, I wouldn’t be able to heal until the summer was over and we were back together again.

I turned twenty-one the Friday before the Fourth of July, which fell on a Tuesday this year. The guys on the crew were psyched about the holiday—we’d get Monday and Tuesday off paid, which meant a four-day weekend. I should have been stoked to be turning twenty-one, but summer birthdays were often less than memorable. You were lucky if school friends even remembered, let alone sent anything on time. Jess told me the night before that she’d sent me a package. It should be waiting for me when I finished work today.

“Happy birthday, Cam,” Jim, my boss, said as I was leaving the Park Bureau building just across the street from Chapman Square.

“It’s your birthday?” Joe echoed, pausing as he changed out of steel-toed boots into beat-up sneakers.

“Yeah. I’m legal today,” I said, and waved as I ducked out into the summer evening.

I had to hurry if I was going to catch my bus. But as I rounded the corner, I stopped dead. There directly in front of me, leaning against my Tercel at the edge of the curb, was Jess. She smiled as she saw me, straightening up and pushing away from the car. It was the best smile I’d ever seen. Best birthday present ever.

“Tell me again how this happened,” I said that night as we lay in my childhood bed in the dark, naked flesh to naked flesh.

We’d had dinner with my parents, and then we’d gone out for a drink—my first legal alcoholic experience—with Todd, Ben and Josh, guy friends from high school, and their respective girlfriends. We’d had a good time, and I’d been happy to show off Jess, who was of course the most impressive of the assembled Beautiful Game 217

g-friends, in my entirely unbiased opinion. But the entire time I had buzzed with sexual energy. We’d been apart for nearly six weeks now, and I couldn’t wait to get her into bed. It was all I could do not to nibble on her ear or feel her up in the Irish pub my buddies took us to, especially after I got a couple of shots of tequila into my belly. But I refrained, and so did she—barely, she admitted later—and we waited until we got back to the house to slide our hands down each other’s pants.

We didn’t, however, make it all the way upstairs. Our first encounter took place on the staircase, and we both had the rug burns to show for it afterward. I was aware the entire time that either or both of my parents could at any moment stumble out of their bedroom in their matching bathrobes from Christmas 1983, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. Jess couldn’t either.

Eventually we made it up to my bedroom, where we shushed each other as we made love again just down the hall from where my parents were sleeping. My mother used a machine that simulated ocean waves to drown out city noises. I hoped it also drowned out the sounds of lesbian lovemaking two doors away.