The Way Life Should Be (16 page)

“Hello, Angela!” Eileen Davis trills when she sees me. “I notice you took the new David Sedaris out a few days ago,” she says. “What do you think of it?”

“I like it,” I say. “He’s so dry.”

“Isn’t he?” she says. “You know, I was thinking—if you like him, you might want to try P. G. Wodehouse. Very different writing style, but similarly outrageous. I found myself laughing out loud.”

“Thanks. I’ll give him a try.”

“If you’ve never read Wodehouse, I’d say start with
The Inimitable Jeeves
. Here—I saved it for you.” She hands me the volume
from the shelf of reserved books behind her head. The book is wrapped in white paper with my name on it, secured with a rubber band.

In New York I might have contemplated taking out a restraining order at this point, but here I just take the book and sign it out. This small-town friendliness is hard to get used to, but I’m learning to adapt. Years ago I started a Wodehouse book, perhaps this very one, and couldn’t get into it. But who knows? Maybe this improbably friendly woman has a better sense of what I might like than I do.

At home after work, I read in bed until I fall asleep. I wake to a loud rattling noise and sit upright. It’s dead dark. I’ve never seen this kind of darkness—a darkness of shapes and shadows, with depth, a lake of darkness. The wind whines under my window, a low complaint; I hear the compliant rustle of the curtain, the thud-thud of my heart. At the foot of the bed, Sam whines in his sleep, then raises his head, his ears instantly up and alert. I am afraid. I tell myself I’m being ridiculous—what could happen? But things happen.

I shiver, trying not to look out the window. What am I proving, so far from home, vulnerable to unknown, unseen intruders? There’s a reason people used to live in villages all their lives, surrounded by family and extended family, marrying at twenty a boy they’d known since childhood. They might have felt stifled, but at least they didn’t have to face this silence filled with noises, this stark terror of being alone. Even in New York, behind my metal front door with multiple locks, I felt safer than I do here, where my flimsy glass-paned door opens onto a dark road and my guard dog is more nervous than I am.

CHAPTER 16

I miss my television. I can visualize it, on the floor of my dad’s garage
in a cardboard box. I miss talk shows and hour-long dramas with wisecracking banter. I need a break from all of this reality.

“I am craving TV,” I confess to Flynn.

“TV is evil,” he says.

“Yes, and I need to watch it.”

“So come over,” he says. “But you have to watch what I want. Tonight is
Lost.
”

Sitting on the couch in Flynn’s cozy heated apartment above the ice-cream store on Main Street, flipping channels, is glorious, even if Flynn’s the one controlling the remote. “Stick those idiots on
this
island and let’s see how they do!” he heckles the TV.

After
Lost
we watch
Sex and the City
reruns. “So which one were you?” Flynn asks, twisting the top off a Bar Harbor ale and handing it to me.

“This is the same beer Rich drinks.”

“It’s the same beer everybody drinks,” Flynn says. “Don’t say Carrie. Everyone says Carrie.”

I take a sip. “But I was Carrie. Well, without the designer wardrobe. Or the five-hundred-dollar shoes or the great apartment. Or, for that matter, the sex.”

“Yeah, you were
just
like her,” Flynn says, opening a beer for
himself. “Here’s a better question. Who did you want to be on
Beverly Hills 90210
? I wished I was Luke Perry, but I was probably more Brian Austin Green. You know, if they’d had any courage they would’ve made that character gay.”

“He was so gay,” I agree. “You got that show in Australia?”

“Oh yeah, baby. All your American trash washes up on our shore. So who did you want to be? And don’t say that Goody Two-shoes Andrea.”

“You have a lot of rules.”

“Andrea bugged the shit out of me.”

“Why, because she wasn’t a Barbie like the others?”

“Nah. Her personality was
actually more annoying
. By the way, that’s an important thing I’ve learned from TV,” Flynn says. “Plain-looking people are less tolerable than good-looking people.”

“Well, that’s true,” I say. “And brains require glasses.”

“And brunettes are smarter than blondes.”

“Obviously. And people with curly hair are quirky.”

“Andrea had it all,” he muses. “The plainness, the glasses, the curly brown hair. A triple whammy. Poor kid—the deck was stacked.” He’s quiet for a moment. “Maybe that’s what I hated about her. She was so vulnerable. Kind of the way I felt as a kid.”

This confessional nugget startles me out of my TV haze. I put down my beer and pull myself into a sitting position. “Really?”

“Or maybe I hated her because she was so frigging annoying.”

“You’re not getting off the hook that easily. You were about to say something real.”

He takes a long swallow and holds the bottle up to the light. It’s empty. “I was joking,” he says. “Time for more amber fluid.”

A few days later, during a slow afternoon at the shop, I ask, “So what happened with you and Lance?”

“You’re just bored,” he says. “You don’t really want to know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Can’t I be bored
and
really want to know?”

“But you don’t really care.”

“Stop,” I say. “You’re picking a fight to avoid the question.”

The next day, after the lunch rush and before the late-afternoon pick-me-up rush, Flynn says, apropos of nothing, “It’s that old cliché. We had different goals.”

I’m chopping green pepper. “What?”

“He was into the whole gay-marriage thing. I just wanted to shack up.”

“Why didn’t you want to get married?”

He takes the knife from me and starts mincing the pepper strips into little squares. “My family had a hard enough time with my being gay. That’s ultimately why I left Oz. But marriage—that seems like a statement for the sake of making a statement. It seems—contrived.”

“Maybe you were afraid of making that kind of commitment.”

“Yeah, maybe. It’s hard to commit to someone—anyone—forever. And there are some things about Lance that I wasn’t sure I wanted to live with for the rest of my life.”

“Like—?”

“Well, for one thing, he’s a recovering alcoholic. I always felt guilty having a beer around him.”

“That doesn’t seem like such a big deal.”

“And he snores.”

“Oh, come on. Everyone snores.”

“They do not.”

“Sure they do. I mean, even
I
snore.”

“Why does that not surprise me?” he says.

“Flynn this, Flynn that,”
my friend Lindsay says. “So he’s your new best friend now?”

“Of course not. Speaking of which, when are you coming to visit?”

“Is it still winter up there?”

“Oh, come on. It’s not even December yet. Besides, the Gulf Stream—”

“Yeah, yeah, the Gulf Stream, blah blah blah. You can lie about how warm it is up there all you want. There’s a reason people call that place
Vacationland.
You aren’t supposed to actually
live
there. Just visit. In August.”

“That doesn’t sound like something a true friend would say.”

She laughs dryly. “It’s something only a true friend would say. So tell me,” she says. “Is your quality of life better? Are you happier?”

Am I happier? What a question. My shack is cold, I’m working at a coffee shop for just above minimum wage with a small, caustic gay man as my only companion, I’ve adopted a sad, starving dog, the sky has been relentlessly gray for the past five days. “Happiness is overrated,” I say. “I’m having an adventure.”

“You’re clinging to that little island for dear life. That’s not adventure. It’s hibernation.”

“Make fun all you want,” I say. “I’m glad I’m here.”

“That’s your story, and you’re sticking to it,” she says.

“So,” I say in an attempt to change the subject, “how’s Hot4U treating you?”

“Peter is
great
in every way,” she says, enunciating emphatically. She has warned me that I’m not allowed to call him Hot4U anymore, but sometimes I can’t resist.

“Well, that’s
great,
” I say.

“Go ahead, tell me more stories about Flynn,” she says. “I know you want to.”

Every few days a tall,
diffident man in paint-splattered jeans and a white button-down shirt comes in and orders a small black coffee to go. He has fine lines around his eyes and an intense gaze, and appears to be in his late thirties.

After several weeks, he says, “You’re new here, aren’t you?” as I hand him his change.

I look into his eyes and stammer, “Uh—yeah.”

When he leaves, Flynn says, “Smooth.”

“Shut up.” I neaten the rows of muffins in the case, sweep away the crumbs. Then I say, as casually as I can manage, “So who was that?”

Flynn claps his hands. Smugly. “I made a bet with myself that you’d start sniffing around that guy by the end of this week.”

“You’re a strange little man,” I tell him.

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” he says. After holding out for a few moments, Flynn says, “His name is Tom Martinelli. He’s a woodworker. Been here a few years. Came from California, I think.”

“So is he married?”

“Is he gay, more important,” Flynn says.

“Gay?”

Flynn shrugs. “I’m not getting the usual signals, but then again I’m not so familiar with West Coast karma.”

“What kind of gay man are you?” I say. “Can’t you identify your own people?”

“You’re one to talk,” he says. “You thought Rich Saunders was your soul mate.”

The next morning I am lifting cooled chocolate-chip muffins from the baking tin to the display tray when Tom comes in. He’s
wearing oilcloth overalls and a down-filled green jacket, a black knit cap pulled low over his ears.

“Ahoy, matey,” says Flynn. “You look like a longshoreman.”

Tom glances down at himself. “I feel like one,” he says. “I have to get over to Little Cranberry Island today, and it’s going to be damn cold.” I read about Little Cranberry Island in the free tourist guide; it’s a mile-wide landmass about three miles from Mount Desert, accessible only by boat. Thirteen kids attend its one-room schoolhouse.

Out of the corner of my eye, I covertly inspect him. Tom is sinewy, like a long-distance runner, with thinning hair cropped close. His mouth looks several times too big for his head, and his teeth are California white. His skin is rough and his nose beaky. He’s tall, and looms a little. You wouldn’t call him handsome, though something about him is compelling—his intensity, his inquisitive gaze. If he were a bird, he’d be a bald eagle.

“Business or pleasure?” I ask.

“I’m doing a project out there in the spring for a new client, and I need to scope out the property. So it’s business.” He shrugs. “But—you know. Business is pleasure.”

“Is it?” I can’t tell if he’s serious. After all, it’s frigid out there on the open water. “Black coffee?”

“Yeah, thanks,” he says. I hand him the coffee, and he puts a handful of change on the counter. “Sure; you have to like what you do. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

“Some people might say the point is—oh, heck, I don’t know—buying groceries? Paying the rent?” Flynn says.

“Yeah, of course.” Tom nods. “You gotta take care of Maslow first.”

“Huh?” Flynn says.

“You know—Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.”

Flynn and I look at him blankly.

Tom takes a sip of coffee. “Maslow was this humanist psychologist who said that you can’t expect to have a civilized society until humans’ basic needs are met—water, food, safety. If you don’t have a roof over your head or food in your stomach, you’re not going to be asking existential questions about autonomy and personal happiness, right? So of course I’m talking about a situation where my needs are met, more or less, and I have choices about what kind of life I want to lead. Within that context, yeah, I wouldn’t do the work I do unless I found it exciting and intellectually fulfilling.”

“Well,” Flynn says. “Good on ya.”

“Was I just a total blowhard?” Tom asks.

“Kind of. But I get your vibe, man—your groovy West Coast vibe. I dig it.”

Tom laughs and rolls his eyes.

As I slide the muffin tray back into the display case, I wonder, Am I doing enough existential thinking about my own autonomy and personal happiness?

“Are those raisin?” he asks.

“Chocolate chip.”

“I’ll take one. Thanks.”

I hand him a muffin and a napkin and he digs around in his pocket for change.

“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “That muffin was squished. But it should meet your basic needs just fine.”

“I’m sure it will. Some of them, anyway,” he says, grinning.

There are few options for eating out,
even in Bar Harbor, so despite the fact that Flynn and I spend most of our waking hours together, I have begun inviting him over for dinner after work. He’s in charge of fire and I’m in charge of food. Flynn doesn’t know how to cook, but has impulsively decided that he wants
to learn. At least a few things, he says, to impress prospective paramours.

“Teach me how to make risoda,” he says one evening, sprawled on my couch sipping fumé blanc.

“Risoda? You mean risot-to?”

“Yeah, whatever. That’s an impressive one, isn’t it?”

“Maybe, but it can go horribly wrong. If you stop stirring—and you have to stir it constantly—you’ll end up with a sticky mess. Also, if you’re trying to impress a hipster, you should know that risotto was trendy in the nineties but is now considered a little passé. It’s been around for centuries, of course, but like quiche and pesto, it got caught in an unfortunate trend warp.”

“That’s sad,” he says. “Why can’t a risotto just be a risotto?”

“You wouldn’t want someone who’s that superficial anyway.”