The Future for Curious People: A Novel (18 page)

If I wasn’t on fire before, I am now. Then I say, “Sorry, Mr. Carlos! We’re just finishing up here.”

He slams his window down hard.

Below, Godfrey is talking to Dot. I can’t make out anything they’re saying, and even though it’s freezing, I lean out the window a little farther. What could Dot be saying to him? Even more so, what could Godfrey be saying to Dot? And I realize I’m leaning so far out the window I might fall. I grip the window frame. Dot hugs Godfrey and looks up at me and blows a kiss.

And then it’s just Godfrey. Staring back at my window. I know he can’t see my red ears, but he’s looking at me like he can see my red ears, so I give him a nod.

“YOU’RE IN THE PHONE
book,” Godfrey tells me. He smells like frost, like those first fifteen minutes when you’re sitting in your car, waiting for it to warm up and the windshield to defrost. It is easy to look at him; his midtwenties are being kind to him. His voice is deep but tender, sensual, and briefly, I imagine him spreading me out in bed, his mouth over my ear, telling me exactly what he’s going to do to me while he’s doing it. I can’t look away.

We’re each holding cups of hot cocoa in my living room. I lean against the wall that separates the living room from the kitchen because every thirty seconds or so I think it’s the only way I can keep myself upright. I find myself squeezing my legs together, imagining how hard he’d grip under my thigh, if he’d bite my lower lip.

Godfrey looks around the apartment like it’s a museum, but I’m staring straight at him—his face and his arms and the white oxford under his coat before returning to his face again while Godfrey just keeps talking. “The white pages—not the yellow ones, because you’re not a business.”

“Are you warming up?” I ask him, finally finding my mouth again. “You should drink the cocoa.”

He nods, but he doesn’t bring the mug to his lips. He’s listening to the record that’s started over again. I listen to him listening. The record player is an automatic, so when the side finishes, it flips the record itself. “There’s always music, but this is the good kind,” he says.

“You should sit down,” I tell him. “You look flushed.”

“I’m probably drunk.” He finally brings the cocoa to his lips, but I’m not sure if he actually takes a sip. “Which I am.”

He finds the hei
ght markings in the doorjamb. “What’s this?”

“I take people’s heights when they come over,” I explain. “My mother didn’t believe in writing on doorjambs, so it was a childhood ritual I missed out on.”

He notices the name at the very bottom. “Who’s Fipps Fuoco?”

“My friend Dot, who you just met, has a bichon frise.”

“You measured her dog?”

“
Th
e bottom is pretty empty. Do you want me to measure you?”

“My childhood doorjambs were properly cluttered.”

“Oh, I should have known.”

“What?”

“You had a happy childhood.” I lean in a little closer to him, touch his eyebrow, his cheek. “Now I see it.”

“See what?”

“
Th
e years of being steeped in safe happiness.”

“Imperfect, but yes, safe and happy.” He smiles. “Do I stink of a happy childhood? Do you think it’ll scrub off ?”

“If there were a scented candle called ‘happy childhood,’ it would smell like you.”

He tilts his head. “Are you sure?”

“I’m really, really sure.”
He hasn’t touched me yet, but it feels like we’ve played house for twenty years.

“And what would your scented childhood candle smell like?”

“Quiet permanent loss.” It’s the closest I’ve come to telling someone the truth.
I can still feel the cold coming off him. “And libraries.” I regret not turning up the heat while I was making the cocoa, but I don’t want to do it now—I’m worried he might not be here when I get back. Our legs aren’t touching, though I’m tempted. I want to tell him that we have a strange future together—wild and bright, the bunnies, the sky, the pool . . . He’s about to ask another question, but I say, “I can’t swim.”

“You can’t?”

I shake my head.

We’re staring and staring and staring and then he says, “I want to be lost in a human Habitrail with you.”

“Really?”

“Did you know your friend’s name is Dot? As in Dotty?”

“Sometimes I call her Dotty Dot Dot.”

“Hey, let me ask you a question.” He doesn’t wait for me to respond. “How do you feel about yachts?”

“I don’t feel anything about them. I’ve never been on a yacht. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I thought about a yacht.”

“Bart wore boat shoes,” he says. “In the winter. In Baltimore. Can you believe that?”

“Who’s Bart?”

“How are you in so many places at once?” he asks me.

“I don’t know what that means,” I tell him.

“Do the rain boots grow the flowers, or do they come that way?”

“I make them that way.”

“You’re a gardener,” he says. “You’re everything.”

“You’re drunk,” I say.

He ignores the accusation or maybe just accepts it. “I’m not scared to be alone again, you know.”

I reach up and run my hand through his hair. I can feel the cold leaving. I can feel the heat from my fingers and the steadying of his breath. My body feels drunk but my mind is very, very still. “Who said anything about being alone?” I say. I can feel the night in his hair. “This is the least alone I’ve felt in years. In fact, I feel kind of thawed out, heart-wise. You know?”

And then in one fluid motion, Godfrey sets his mug of cocoa on the floor and then reaches up and cups my face and kisses me. A kiss that means we’re just getting started.

The air is different. That’s what I realize before I even open my eyes—like there’s a window slightly ajar somewhere, letting in little bursts of cold, fresh air. Madge likes to keep the apartment stuffy with heat.

I open my eyes to see if Madge is trying to fumigate the apartment or something, when I’m suddenly, brutally aware of my skull—the avalanche of pain inside of it.

I’m lying in a bed in a bedroom with crown molding.

That’s not my crown molding. Madge and I don’t have crown molding. Madge is envious of crown molding. I can’t watch HGTV when Madge is around or she’ll grip the remote too tightly when a newly married couple references the perfect curves in the crown molding of the house that’s just slightly above their budget but still probably manageable if they don’t eat out so many times a week.

And then I remember that Madge hates me.

I jerk my head around and see a pillow covered in tendrils.

Evelyn Shriner’s tendrils, to be exact.

I sit up, delicately—my head pounding—and peer over her head to see if I’m right.

I’m right.

And there I find her beautiful lips, the smudges of mascara around her eyes, her jaw, her cheek . . . and Evelyn Shriner’s nude shoulder.

Evelyn lets out a short sigh. I freeze and hold my breath, but she doesn’t open her eyes. I feel a twinge and I try to talk myself out of the morning wood I was too hungover to wake up with. But I can’t stop staring at Evelyn. She has freckles. I must have missed them last night. They’re light. They dot the left side of her nose. Where do they go? I hope I get the chance to find out. I want to thank whoever put them there.

I decide this is my favorite part of her neck—the left side—but if someone were to ask me tomorrow, I might say,
No, no, it was the right all along
. Or
I never said it was her neck—why do you think I always walk behind her at grocery stores and strip malls?
But this neck! Men don armor for this kind of neck. Break oaths to God. Discover continents and cut off their ears.

The most obvious fact here is that she’s real. Evelyn Shriner isn’t an image on a screen. She isn’t just flowered rain boots and legs pumping an old bike. She is actual. And this terrifies me.

I try to keep myself calm, brave, confident, but there are heartbeats in my fingers. I feel brutally alive. I slide closer to Evelyn, cautious not to wake her. Or maybe I’m cautious not to wake myself. This trance—even with the ache between my temples compounded with my imminent ax murder by the hands of Madge—is something I want to nest in. The air is clearer here.

Last night comes back in patches, with each patch being really fucking bright. Briefly, the Velvet Underground gets stuck in my head:
White light, White light goin’ messin’ up my brain / White light, Aww white light it’s gonna drive me insane
.

The painting therapy went badly. I remember that much. I was overly contentious about boat shoes. I got drunk. I made a toast. I was a winner. I found a phone book. I got drunker. I walked for miles because I had to see Evelyn, real, in person. There was a window. Pebbles. The window opened. A strange girl was framed within it, and then Evelyn. I was in her apartment. Evelyn’s. And I loved her immediately. I think she loved me, too. Is that possible, so fast?

There was kissing, bungling, a couch too small to fit the two of us, and we landed here. The sheets are a mess, ruffled and uneven and mostly bundled around her. Evelyn must have stolen most of the sheet and blanket in the middle of the night.

The sleeve of my button-down has been shoved over the hook of a hanger that hangs on a closet doorknob. The sleeve has been buttoned up, so it looks like the hook of the hanger is a goose and the sleeve is a stuffy collar. I remember that we thought this was hilarious.

My pants are staring at me—the top of them has been shut into a dresser drawer so they’re upright—zipped and all. My cell phone number is written on the mirror in lipstick—my handwriting, undeniably; the numbers have kept a blocky fourth-grader feel. And I remember her telling me how bad my handwriting is. Her eyes squinting as if she’s astonished that a grown man could be so incredibly bad at something so basic.

My boxers? I look on the floor, next to the bed. There’s an old Liz Phair record, a tin of Altoids, some plastic flowers, but no boxers. I look for any remnants of condom wrappers—or used condoms, for that matter—but don’t see anything. I reach under the sheet below my abdomen. I’m still in my boxers. And thank God. Why am I glad to still be in my boxers?

Well, it makes me just a little less detestable. Even though Madge doesn’t wear the ring, I’m still maybe-engaged, for shit’s sake.

Also, if I have sex with Evelyn Shriner, by God, I want to remember it—in exact detail. How else will I keep the image on a continuous loop?

I look back at Evelyn. I want to bite her shoulder like a piece of fruit. I’d like to have sex with her now in this bed.

Because this is it—after all these years—my animal nature, the one my mother warned me about at the age of eleven and telling me that my real father is not Aldo Burkes, but this other man named Mart Thigpen—the beast, the animal! I believe my mother told me all of this in hopes that I could curb my animal tendencies. People tried talking me out of it, but my mother was right all along. Here is my predisposed animal nature, finally out in its natural habitat. Maybe it only needed a night of shitty beer and an open phone book to set it off.

I’m my father, Mart Thigpen—my animalistic, biological father.

But Madge would kill me. There’s no segue in my head. No transition. Just this image: yellow police tape, no chalk outline because the detectives won’t find my body—just my head in the freezer. The medical examiner will have to use my dental records to identify what’s left of me. She won’t make it a murder-suicide. No, that’s not Madge’s style. She’ll want to take full credit.

But damn it. I’m lying beside Evelyn Shriner. I should drink this in. I know what I want more than anything: to go back to sleep and wake up like I belong here.

I shift slowly, trying not to wake her. This is a
huge
bed. It’s like sleeping in an ocean of bed. Who has a bed like this?

And then Evelyn Shriner’s completely all-nude shoulder rises and falls, working her ribs under the blanket; a quick sigh moves through her beautiful lips. She turns on her shoulder. As she does, the sheet slips farther down her body. I catch a thin strip of fabric, then a clasp. It must be a bra. With each breath, Evelyn shows a little more of herself. Her spine, arched back like the middle of a parenthesis. She leans forward; her back arches. I imagine my tongue tracing her awake, rolling down the outline of her backbone. I imagine doing this every morning until dementia sets in, until . . .

I’m alive. This might be the first time I’ve ever really been alive in my whole fucking miserable life. This moment is what causes wars to start. The only books worth reading have been written about those lips.

Evelyn turns and stares at me. She’s a little stunned, too. She tugs the blanket up. “Godfrey Burkes,” she says. And then she smiles. The smile is inexplicable. I mean, she has an animal in her bed. She should be reaching for a tranquilizer gun.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“What? Why?”

“I’m Mart Thigpen. Jesus.” I try to sit up, but my head feels like a piano dropped from a seventeenth floor window.

Evelyn doesn’t blink. “Wait. You’re Godfrey Burkes. I know you are. I said your name in an envisioning session and you showed up and last night . . . and well . . .”

“You envisioned me?” It’s incredible how quickly I can go from loathing myself to an inflated sense of self. Should I confess I envisioned her, too?

“Who’s Mart Thigpen?”

“No one. Just a family thing. And not the kind of family thing you really talk about.”

“I have one of those.”

“You do?”

Evelyn relaxes a bit. She lets the sheet slide down below her collarbone. She bites her lip and nods. And I think, that lip biting might turn me on more than anything in the world. That lip biting. Goddamn.

I’m aware that I’m shirtless and haven’t been working out the way I should. I’m no prison-Godfrey, that’s for sure. The Iron Gym that I ordered so I could do regular pull-ups made black indentations on the doorjamb and Madge told me to just stop already.

I sit up in bed. Madge. My head in the freezer. I think I might throw up.

“Godfrey,” Evelyn says.

“What?”

“I don’t know you all that well, but I’m pretty sure you’re freaking out.”

“I am.”

“Why don’t you lie down for a second? You’re breathing really hard, and I think if you stand up, you might pass out.”

I am breathing like a bull. My head settles on the soft pillow. I say, “There are a lot of feathers in this pillow.”

“I haven’t opened it up and counted, but I bet there are thousands. Are you feeling any better?”

My breathing has started to slow. “You have a huge bed,” I tell her.

“I spend a lot of hours here every night.” She turns and faces me, up on her elbows.

“Why are my pants clipped in the drawer like that?” I would point, but I don’t need to. It’s right there, directly in front of us. “And my shirt looks like a goose.”

“Actually a duck,” she says. “Don’t you remember?”

It’s coming back to me, piece by piece, and thank God because it’s glorious. “But we didn’t . . .” I look over at her.

“No,” she says. “But it was sexy.” She pulls back the covers and she’s wearing a red, white, and blue retro-looking swimsuit. “For some reason, I put on my vintage 1976 bicentennial two-piece. We sang the national anthem.”

I smile. “I usually only mouth that song at ball games. I’m not a strong singer.”

“We did it à la Barry Gibb.”

“I see.” I remember the feel of that swimsuit against my skin. I remember kissing her, too, running my hands up her ribs.

“So why are you freaking out, Godfrey? Tell me that.”

“Shouldn’t I save that for my therapist?” I try to crack a smile.

“Don’t get coy with me now. What happened to the boy throwing pebbles at my window?”

I start to sigh, but Evelyn cuts me off.

“Don’t sigh at me, Godfrey Burkes.”

“Okay,” I say. “How about we make a deal?”

“I’m listening.”

“I’ll tell you my family story if you tell me yours.”

Evelyn looks startled, like I’ve asked her to put on a bicentennial bikini and sing the national anthem à la Barry Gibb. She flops backward and rubs her temples with both hands, considering very carefully. “Okay,” she says finally. “Okay, fine. But you go first.”

“I’m a bastard, Evelyn.”

She turns on her side, so she’s facing my right cheek. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. I obviously didn’t mind that you came over the way you did.” She points to her bikini. She points to my pants. “Like I said, it was sexy.”

“You’re not understanding me. I’m legitimately illegitimate—a bastard. The Merriam-Webster version of the word.”

“Oh.”

“Mart Thigpen is my biological father.”

“Mart Thigpen?”

“The man who knocked up my mother and then left her.”

“Have you ever met him?”

I shake my head. “My mother sat me down one day after school and said, ‘That man who watches
Jeopardy!
every night in his underwear isn’t really your father.’ ”

“So your father is actually your stepfather.”

“Technically.”

“And Mart Thigpen is . . .”

“Probably the man who helped us cross the seven-billion population mark faster than we were supposed to.”

Evelyn shifts herself closer to me. I can feel the heat from her mouth, from the tops of her breasts not covered by the bikini, even from her neck and the smoothness of her thighs. “So we can solely blame him for global warming?” she says.

“My father, the Great Mart Thigpen.”

“ ‘Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.’ Margaret Mead said that.”

“And I always thought I was the accident,” Godfrey says.

“You seem handcrafted to me.”

“Well, I hope Margaret Mead is wrong. I’d like to be a nonaccidental father one day.”

She looks at me and smiles—just the corners of her mouth. “I want to mother some kids like crazy.” And there’s something about the way she says that makes me feel like she has a huge vast capacity for love. Her love could stretch on unconditionally and endlessly, like it’s a universe within her. I’m drawn to the edge of that universe. I’d like to fall into a black hole of it somehow. I just whisper, “God.”

“What?”

I shake my head. I feel like I’m going to get in a fight one day about the validity of falling in love so fast. Not a heated one because why would I give a shit if some other person gets it or not? Right now, it’s no longer the big flooding rush like when I saw her naked shoulder. It’s just this honest, frank truth. I love Evelyn Shriner. Love doesn’t start with need. Love meets love and just fucking recognizes itself. I’m supposed to be scared to death. Modern man isn’t built for these kinds of things. But I feel good.

“What kind of animal did your mother say Thigpen was?” she asks.

I have no fucking clue. All of these years—how did I never ask such an obvious question? “I never asked,” I finally say.

“You know, penguins are monogamous. Lassie was based on a true story.”

“Is that right?”

“Everything in black and white is true,” she says. “Besides, you’re not supposed to argue with a girl in a bikini. A girl in a bikini
in bed
with you, no less.”

“Are you just going to always be mostly naked so I can never really argue with you?”

“Whatever works.”

“That’s not fair.”

I’ll never forget what Evelyn Shriner looks like in a 1976 bicentennial bikini. “Cats will eat their dead owner’s face once they run out of food.”

Evelyn sighs. “Really?”

“I only know where half of me came from. I guess it’s dumb, but sometimes it’s hard to rest myself.”

“Have you ever tried to find out about your dad?”

“I looked him up in high school. He was living in Burlington, probably trying to raise the census level of Vermont. It’s really low, you know.”