The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (22 page)

“Why did you lead me to believe Andy was a girl?” he said,
looking down at the white tile floor between his feet.

I switched the razor on; the buzz vibrated my fingers, made
them numb. I touched the blade to his neck.

“I don’t know.” I ran the razor over his skin, lifting hairs
with its vibrating blade. The hairs were soft and fine and almost invisible.

“Come on, don’t pull the
I
don’t know
, Vince.”

“...”

“Don’t pull the silence either. Did you think I’d never meet
him?”

“I knew you were going to meet him.”

“Wait,” he said, leaning up with a jerk that only by luck
did not liberate a patch of hair from his scalp. “That’s not even why I’m
fucking confused. I already
know
you
like guys too, Vince. Why lie when you finally start dating one?”

I didn’t say anything, just kept trimming. I finished one
side of his neck and moved the razor to the other side. He rolled the cord
between his fingers.

“I mean, what’s it
like
?
This is a major life experience for you. Don’t you want to
tell
me about it?”

“No, Griff, I don’t.” I rubbed my thumb over the shaved
places. “I don’t at all.”

His neck was smooth. I blew on it once, twice. I stepped out
of the tub and put the warm razor on the toilet seat and went back to our room.
A moment later he came in. He got his toothbrush from the plastic basket of
toiletries on his dresser, went back to the bathroom. The door clomped shut
behind him.

“Did you trim him?” Andy said as I maneuvered myself into
the small vacant space on the bed.

“Yeah.”

“He’s weird, huh?”

“...”

Griff came back into our room, stuck a marker in his book,
turned off his little desk lamp, and got under his covers. The movie ended soon
after, but not soon enough to save me from fearing that it was keeping him
awake. I imagined him quietly seething in the dark.

Hours later I lay in bed spooning Andy, who was by that time
long asleep. In the street light that came through the window between the beds I
could see Griff sleeping six feet away. His eyelids fluttered; he was dreaming.
I lifted my head slightly off my pillow and closed my right eye. Andy
disappeared from view and Griff came into place, his forced-perspective image
superimposed over where Andy had been. I hugged Andy’s body, clutching him
tight, and left my right eye closed until the other one followed it.

*

I woke up when the icy facecloth touched my mouth.
Griff was sitting Indian-style on his side of the bed, his iPod and its earbuds
tangled in his lap.

“It’s cold,” I said.

“That’s the point.” He smiled. He fished my hand out from
under the covers and raised it to my face, pressed it against the facecloth,
which I realized was full of snow. “Hold this here—your chin’s all puffy.”

“How’s the car? Did you buy it OK?”

“I bought it,” he said. “It’s in your driveway. Feeling all
right?”

“Eh.” The waves of pain had downgraded to ripples but they
flowed down my spine and tickled my stomach too.

“You’ll heal.”

“I don’t know if I will.”

“Vince, so dramatic.”

I wiped water off my chin with the edge of the cloth. “Your
stuff is still in the Jeep.”

“I brought it in.”

“The mattress—”

“I put it in the garage. We’ll set it up tomorrow.”

“Laundry—”

“In the dryer already. Dude, relax. I’ve taken care of everything.”
He wound the earbuds around his iPod and reached across me and put it on the
night table. “Push over, I’ll be in in a minute.”

“OK.” Did he have any idea what those words meant to me?
What I wanted them to mean?

He left the room and I listened to him rummage around for
half an hour in the boxes of things he’d put in the spare bedroom. Then the
water ran in the bathroom, his toothbrush clicked against the sink, the toilet
flushed. I felt the air change when he came into the room. It felt more comfortable
somehow, like I could relax, the feeling I’d been waiting for all evening, the
simple feeling of Griff. It took me out of myself, out of the pickle juices of
my own mind, and gave me something else to focus on. The blankets lifted off me
as he got under. They settled around us both. He did not put the pillow between
us tonight.

“You still awake?”

“Yeah.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and in the dark I felt
him fidget uneasily. “Was that a stupid thing I did today?”

“What?”

“Buying a car like that.”

“I don’t think it was stupid. You should have a car. It’s a
good thing to have. It was a responsible choice.”

“It was a lot of money. It put a big dent in my money.”

“Not compared to what you have.”

“Twenty-five grand is a lot no matter what. I could’ve lived
for a year on that. Two if I was careful.”

I moved my hand to straighten the hem of the blanket that
was tickling my chin; when I pulled it back under the covers my fingers touched
against his bicep. I didn’t move them away.

“But live and do what?” I said. “Stay in the house and eat
store-brand cereal for the rest of your life?”

He sighed, smoothed his hair.

“You had your fingers in my mouth,” I said.

“My fingers? Oh. I wanted to make sure you didn’t knock out
any of your teeth. We would’ve had to look for it. They can put those back in,
you know.”

“It felt funny.”

“They’re just fingers, Vince.” He exhaled. “Funny the things
you’ll do when you’re panicked, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“What a rough couple of days, huh?”

“You seemed OK.”

“Most of the time it was fake. Most of the last couple of
hours I’ve felt like sobbing.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“We’re such a couple of sensitive pussies,” he said. He
turned his head to me, flashed a quick smile. “Aren’t we?”

“I’m half gay. What’s your excuse?”

He laughed, then sighed. “It’s just that for a long time
there I really thought Beth was the One. I thought I’d found the One. I was
going to marry her. And then, I don’t even know. It became more and more
obvious that she wasn’t—and if I had any doubt, last night cleared that
up. I mean, we were kissing and then we were fucking and I was like, What the
hell am I
doing
? I don’t know what I
was thinking, going in our room, going to the apartment even. I didn’t want to
get back with her, I’m just—I don’t know—trying to be comfortable. And
on top of it all I realized on the drive home—I mean, to here—that
I’m not a step closer than I’ve ever been to finding the One.” He turned again
to look at me. “You know, Vince? Not one fucking step.”

“You’ll find your other half,” I told him. “They say it
always happens when you least expect it or something.”

“I keep telling myself that. And sometimes I wonder
if— Or— I don’t know. It’s very complicated.” He sniffed hard and
swallowed. “How was your ride back with Zane?”

“OK.” My fingers encircled his bicep now. In the space
between his arm and his ribs he was soft and humid, like a mitten warmed by
breath. And he wasn’t pulling away.

Now, I knew, was the time to lean over and kiss
him—just one kiss, just once. I’d always felt that one kiss was all it
would take to get him to feel for me what I felt for him. One kiss would
demonstrate it, would wake him up like Sleeping Beauty to the happiness we
could have together. He would feel on my lips everything he meant to
me—and why would he not reciprocate? Because I was a guy? Only because I
was a guy? How could something like that possibly spoil what we could have
together? I was Vince, his Vince. Vince, his prince. This touch, my hand
circling his arm, the tickle of my knuckles in his armpit, might be all it
would take. Or maybe a hug tomorrow. Or a sympathetic glance next week. Or one
kiss right now.

I was bi and my heart was off-limits to no one, at least not
for any reason like what they had between their legs or whether their chests
were flat or round. And maybe because of that I never really could believe or
understand that Griff, or anyone else, could be deterred from falling in love
by such a trivial thing as gender. The idea of not being wired to love certain
people had never made any sense to me, and did not make sense to me now. If I
could just show him. If he would give me one chance. I would show him he could
love me. Just one kiss. That’s all. One kiss, please God, and if I’m wrong I
promise I’ll call it a day.

“Zane was really worried about you when you got hurt,” he
said.

“But so were you.”

“If you had seen his face, you’d be a lot more willing to
give him a chance.”

“Griff, you make it sound like I’ve ever once said I want to
be with him.”

“Don’t you? He obviously adores you, Vince.”

“What do you mean, don’t I? Why should I— It’s not
even— Just shut up. He’s just a kid.”

“He’s not a kid. He’s a man. You’re making excuses. And
you’re overthinking. You overthink, Vince. You never just
do
.”

“And you underthink. You wouldn’t’ve half-fucked Beth if
you’d thought a little bit beforehand.”

“That’s harsh. You should be
glad
I underthink. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. And then where
would we be?”

It was on my tongue to say that we’d be better off, that’s
where we’d be, but of course I didn’t mean that, and I was glad it hadn’t
slipped out.

He rolled over and his arm pulled away from my fingers. I
wasn’t sure he ever even realized they were there.

“I miss college,” he said, and went to sleep.

T U E S D A Y

I put a spare set of house keys on the kitchen
table and left for work without waking him up. The morning was cloudy and cold
and on the ground was a dusting of new snow. Griff’s new Jetta was parked in my
driveway, its charcoal paint shimmering through the snow. The license plate had
a lighthouse on it.

The mattress was no longer against the garage—when I lifted
open the door I found it inside. The plastic wrap covering it crinkled in the
cold breeze.

The exertion of lifting the door reawakened the pain in my
mouth. I spent most of the morning at Golden Age alternately rubbing my temples
and adding letters to the crossword Zane had started days before. Simon had supplied
a few answers too. I circled the counter, arranged the action figures in order
of preference for character, Windexed the display case. When Marissa arrived at
four to relieve me I could’ve kissed her, had her lipstick been a more
appetizing shade of blue.

“Hey loverboy,” she murmured. She tossed onto the counter an
army-green messenger bag bedecked in buttons, went to the back and returned a
minute later wearing her Golden Age shirt. Underneath it was a black
long-sleeve t-shirt that went down to her knuckles. Her thumbs came through
holes in the sleeves.

“I heard your electricity finally came back on,” I said.

She nodded, peering at me first through a curtain of dark
square bangs that hung against her eyes, and then through purple horn-rimmed
glasses. The lenses were plain glass—she didn’t have or need a
prescription. “You get in a fight?” she said. She leaned with her arms folded
across the counter, her long sleeves ending handless.

“Oh, this.” I touched my chin. “Just a little accident. We
were tracking deer in the woods. Although yes, I guess I did.”

“Stitches?” She raised the purple glasses and looked more
closely.

“It’s just a good scrape.” I’d experimented with Band-Aids
of various sizes but decided that even the smallest looked creepier than the
wound itself. “I’ll probably have a scar though.”

“Scars are memories made of flesh,” she said. “What about
the fight?”

“Eh.”

“Sore subject? —Haha.”

I smiled. “Sore subject.”

She shrugged.

“Did you write your column yet?” I said.

She shook her head. “I still need to choose the letters.”
Marissa dispensed relationship advice in her college lit club’s weekly zine,
The Salty Marlin
. (I’d never known her
to be in a relationship herself, beyond the fake one she was in with Zane when
his parents’ attention needed deflecting.) She pulled a stack of printed emails
from the main pocket of her bag. “Here we go. You can help me pick out a sob story
worse than yours.”

I laughed. I had a little crush on Marissa for the way she
was both warm and off-putting, a combination that seemed unique to her. It was
just a playground crush, the kind that might induce me to throw a snowball at
her, make sure she knew it was me, then run away. When Simon introduced us, out
in the parking lot where she was sitting on the guard-rail smoking a cigarette,
she asked me how old Siegel and Shuster both were when they first published
Superman. I was off by two years but that had been enough to impress her.

“I have to do two columns this week, actually,” she said,
“since I’ll be away for WonderCon in a few weeks.”

“I’m still jealous you’re going to that. I keep saying
next year
. —What kind of letters
do you have?”

“Let’s find out.” She skimmed one of the emails. “Blah,
blah, blah—three-way.” She crumpled it up and dropped it in the
wastebasket behind the counter.

“You get a lot of three-way letters?”

“Oh jeez yeah. From straight guys who want to know how to
get their girlfriends to agree to it. From straight girls who want to know if
they should do it for their man. From homos who want to know if it’ll wreck
their relationships.” She rolled her eyes. “Apparently it’s the ultimate
I-need-advice question. Should I do it, should I not. They can check the back
issues. It’s been covered.”

“My sob story involves something like that, actually,” I
said.

“A three-way?”

“Not in the traditional sense.”

“Zane told me you’ve got a houseboy.” She said it
matter-of-factly. It was pretty hard to shock Marissa.

“A roommate,” I corrected. “There’s no nude vacuuming
involved. Griff is straight.”

Now she raised her eyebrows. “A straightboy. Must be some
three-way then. Who’s the third?”

“Actually it’s more like a four-way,” I said. “There’s the
ex-girlfriend I don’t think I was done being with yet when she dumped me. I saw
her the other day for the first time since, and that was—” I sighed and
continued. “There’s the straight best friend, who in college I was crazy in
love with, who was and seemingly still is my fucking ideal
everything
, who has come waltzing not only back into my life but into
my
bed
. And then there’s the
spiky-haired guy I’ve been smitten with since the first time I laid eyes on
him, when he was standing behind this very register selling me a new copy of
Crisis on Infinite Earths
, who is now my
employee and four-fifths my age to boot.”

She stopped shuffling the letters. “Predicament much?”

“It’s like they just keep piling on. I had this dream last
night where I’m in the tub, right? And suddenly Griff is in there with me, just
sitting there bare-ass, talking, the water running. And then Melanie is getting
in too, and it’s the three of us. And then Zane’s there and he’s like,
Can I get in too?
”

“That’s bizarre.” She scrunched her eyebrows, turning this
over in her advice columnist’s brain. A customer came in and began pawing
through the new arrivals. Marissa reached under the counter and boosted the
volume on the store’s audio system. The Ramones started singing a little
louder, loud enough to cover us. “So you had an orgy dream?”

“No, that’s the thing. It wasn’t sexual. Well, not really.”

“Did it freak you out?”

“In the dream?”

She nodded.

“No, in the dream it all seemed natural enough. The conflict
was just that not everyone could fit in the tub.”

“And Zane was there too...” It was a statement, not
question; like a fortune teller, she was ruminating.

I sighed. “Yes.”

“That’s kind of a surprise. I assumed you didn’t like him
like that.”

“Because of the Halloween thing?” The customer came up to
the counter with a few comics and a credit card. When he left I asked again,
“Because I said no when he asked me out?”

“He told me you did,” she said, pushing her glasses up on
her nose. “He was pretty disappointed. I told him it was for the best, though.”

“You think it was?” I felt kind of vindicated that the relationship
guru agreed with me.

“Well it’s like you said. What if things didn’t work out? You
both love the store. It would get messy.”

“It could.”

“Zane
is
delicious,
though.” A dreamy rouge rose in her cheeks and she suddenly looked more girly
than usual.

“Oh boy. Not you too. I should’ve seen it before.”

She shrugged. “Why do you think I agree to be his beard? It
lets me pretend. He’s the only guy I’ve ever seen who’ll come out of a tattoo
parlor after getting inked and pierced and then help an old lady cross the
street. But like sincerely.”

That made Zane seem like something I didn’t want to lose. If
she was trying to convince me to leave the Zane situation alone, she wasn’t
doing a very good job. Was it supposed to be reverse psychology or something,
or did she really just suck at relationship advice?

“Don’t worry, you did the right thing.” She patted my hand,
her rings thumping my knuckles. “I read letters about heartbreak every day. It’s
better to avoid the situations where it seems destined, you know?” She picked
up the letters, stacked them into a neat pile against the counter. “Plus,” she
said, “there’s plenty of spiky-haired, quarter-Japanese, comic book–loving,
do-gooder gay boys on Cape Cod, right?”

“...”

“Right?”

I drove home trying to decide whether Marissa had
meant that last part sarcastically. When I got there I found Zane’s car in my
driveway, parked behind Griff’s. I parked beside the Jetta, annoyed that they
were hanging out without me. I tried to remember whether I’d told Zane anything
about Griff that he might be telling Griff now.

The garage door was open and the mattress was not inside. I
pulled the door shut and went in the house. Habit made my hand reach for the
switch even though the lights were already on.

“I’m home,” I called, suspicious, getting out of my coat.

Zane’s peacoat was hanging over the back of the blue chair;
his boots stood side by side by the door. Griff jogged into the living room. In
his hand was a wrench.

“Hey dude,” he said. “We’re doing some construction.”

“Zane’s here?” I mouthed.

He nodded. He came closer; he smelled of apple Dum Dums pop.
“Son of a bitch from the high school fucking outed him. He came here looking
for you. I told him he could chill.”

“The high school? Who?”

He raised his hands over his head. “Stick ‘em up.”

“That guy? Awh, fuck.” I wondered how much of this was my
fault for stumbling in on Zane and Jeremy, for scaring the kid off. There were
ways I could’ve handled that situation better, I was sure.

I followed Griff into the spare bedroom. The new mattress
and box-spring were leaning against the wall by the window. Zane was sitting on
the floor in the middle of the bed frame, twisting a nut onto a bolt.

“What happened?” I said.

He looked up at me. His spikey hair seemed drooped like the
hair on a sad cartoon character. I knew he had been dreading this day. His
parents were hard to feel out, were old-school, conservative. He’d always
feared the worst.

“Can I give you the NC-17 version?”

“By all means.”

“Well, the little motherfucking
cocksucker
apparently decided to do some preemptive-strike public
relations,” he said in a tone of forced calm. “Blabbed around to the basketball
team that Ralph the water boy’s brother tried to blow him. Which is especially
ironic given that
he
was the one who
was fucking desperate to get his mouth around
my
dick.”

“Do your parents know?”

He nodded. “My mom, at least. Fucker blabs it at school,
brother comes home pissed that he’s now associated with a rumored fag, tells
mother, mother asks homo son if it’s true.”

“What did homo son say?”

“I said yes.”

“What did she say?”

“Ready for this? You might want to sit down.” He patted the
desk. “She said,
No you’re not
, with
the same fucking matter-of-factness she would if I was insisting I was from
Pluto or something.
No you’re not.
And then she started to cry and said I was just confused and that they would
get me help, that there are people I can talk to.” He put a wrench around the
nut and turned it. “This is the twenty-first century, you know? This is fucking
Massachusetts
. We have gay marriage.
We live an hour from Provincetown, and she’s this fucking clueless? Well
bullshit. I take it from the governor, from the president, from the pope. I
will
not
,” he said, with a weary
emphasis on
not
that broke my heart, “take
it from my family too.” He noticed his teeth were clenched and he rubbed his
jaw. “You look like shit,” he said, pointing at my face with the wrench.

Because there was really nothing to say about anything, the
three of us finished assembling Griff’s bed in a weary silence that grew more
comfortable as we built this thing. We connected the headboard and footboard to
the sides and laid the box-spring on the frame and the mattress on top of that.
And when it was done, it was a bed. Zane kicked a leg of it the way Griff had
kicked the tires of the Jetta.

“Not bad, huh?” Griff said. He laid down and crossed his
arms behind his head, kicked his heels against the mattress. “Yeah, this’ll do
me a couple nights. Then I’ll have a place for when I visit.” He began
gathering up the tools. “Thanks guys.”

“Sure.”

“No problem.”

“Anyone hungry now?” he said, his arms full of tools and
plastic wrap as he left the room. “I could boil up some spaghetti?”

Griff called all pasta spaghetti. He cooked a pound of
rigatoni and the three of us balanced plates on our laps and watched
Evil Dead
in the living room. They sat
in the two chairs and I turned the ottoman on its side and sat on the floor
against the cushion. When the movie was over Zane brought his plate to the sink
and went in the bathroom. Griff stood up with his plate and picked mine up off
the floor.

I told him thanks and pressed the stop button on the VCR
with my toe. The television turned to static.

“Are you surprised he came here?” Griff said. He sat down
again with the plates in his hand.

“Sort of.”

“He probably figured you could relate?”

“I guess. What I can’t relate to is how his mother could say
all that bullshit, though.”

“Yeah. Incredible.”

“And that’s not even close to the worst of what I’ve heard.
Sometimes I honestly feel like I want to line up every single person who’s ever
made life difficult for a gay kid and shoot them one by one in the face.”

Griff laughed.

“I’m serious, Griff. And it scares the shit out of me, you
know? Because I really feel like I could do it. That’s how angry it makes me.
It makes me a monster.”

“Vince, you’re no monster. You’re just angry. And yeah, you
have good reason. People fucking suck a lot of the time. The people who don’t
sort of have to clean it up. So get out your mop. WWSD?”

He brought the dishes to the sink. Zane came out of the
bathroom drying his hands on his pants and pulled his coat from the back of the
chair.