This Is Between Us (18 page)

I believed in science. I believed in your smile.

…

When Vince was younger, he used to talk nonstop. He would start telling a story about something, and then it would spin off into some fantastical territory. He would dominate conversations so much that I would sometimes have to tell him to wrap it up. But I didn’t want to sound mean, so I would just say something like, “That sure is some story, Vince. Tell us how it ends.”

Some of those first times when all four of us would be driving somewhere together, Vince would get started on a new story, and the rest of us would be surrounded by his breathless words for thirty minutes. You and I would zone out on the lines in the road, the country scenery and clouds in the sky. Maxine would seem interested at first and then she would curl into a ball like she was angry. \

When Vince turned into a teenager, it was like he’d taken some secret oath to withhold information from parental figures. Our conversations became mostly limited to my questions and his one-word responses.

“How was school today?”

“Good.”

“Do you have any homework?”

“Some.”

“Did you have lunch with Roberto today?”

“Yeah.”

“Wanna go shoot some baskets?”

“No.”

One day I went in his room to put some clothes away. He was working on his computer, writing a paper for a class. It was dark in his room, so I turned on his light. “Don’t turn on the light. I don’t want the light on,” he said sharply. I was agitated by his tone and let it show. “Just settle down. I’m trying to do you a favor,” I said. “But I was on a good roll,” he said. I didn’t have a calm response ready, like a good father should. I blurted out, “You don’t have to be so dickish about it.” I flicked his light back off when I left. The rest of the night we were cold to each other.

The next morning was Sunday. We had omelets for breakfast, and then Vince went to his room and started playing a video game. I went in and sat down next to him. I asked him to set down his controller and tried to gather some authoritative composure. “I don’t like it when you talk to me like you did last night,” I said. “It makes me feel bad.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I’m glad you’re serious about your homework, but you could have been nicer in that situation.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“All right,” I said. And then I suddenly laughed for some reason. Maybe it was because I felt a kind of small victory had occurred, a tiny and jagged lesson learned (the sensation like a pebble extracted from a shoe). Maybe it was because I realized that his response to my interruption—
Turn off the light! Leave me alone!
—was one I wished I could give to someone.

I slid my arm around him and gave him a hug, though he did not return the squeeze. I heard a character’s voice from his video game interrupt our moment. “Sergeant! Sergeant! We have to get this mission started, Sergeant! What are you doing?”

You seemed troubled all day long, and then at night you told me that you had been wondering if dead people could watch us from heaven or wherever they were at. These were the things we talked about on quiet nights.

“Can my old neighbor, Mark, who died in a car crash, see everything I’m doing, or is it just my mom and the people I love who can see me?”

“That’s a good question,” I said. “But I think, if they’re in heaven, they can only see us if we’re outside or in a wide-open space.”

“Maybe heaven is just being able to watch people. Like voyeurism,” you said. “And maybe in hell you can’t see people at all, and that’s what makes it so painful.”

We had the obituary section of the newspaper spread out on the coffee table in front of us.

“I sometimes wonder if my grandfather can watch me,” I said. “Mostly when I’m masturbating or going to the bathroom. I wonder if only certain dead people can see my bowel movements.”

“Imagine heaven with a bunch of toilet cams!”

We thought about that while looking at the photographs of all the people who had died in the last few days. The obituaries were six pages long.

You took my hand and said we needed to go somewhere. We walked a few blocks to where a middle school was. It was a warm night. We walked through the grassy playground and found a discarded Frisbee that we tossed back and forth. It was the kind with a big hole in the middle, like a flying glow-in-the-dark halo. Then you ran toward me and flopped on the ground. You shimmied out of your pants and told me to join you. We held each other tight and made love in the dark. Some grass was flattened, torn out, destroyed. The big clear sky above us made us feel protected, like we’d never die. We hoped that God and the rest of heaven was watching us. We showed them what we were like on earth.

…

Our love was hardly ever equal. The intensity of our admiration was proportional to the amount of housework we did. There were months when one of us did everything for the other and then we switched places. It was always easy to figure out who was more in love: who was cooking dinner, cleaning the bathroom, sorting the laundry, and keeping track of all the activities on the calendar. I can’t really remember what the other person was doing while all these responsibilities were getting done, but that person eventually worked up enough guilty energy to do some work too.

But the more this shifting happened, the more wobbly we felt. I worried that you were getting bored with me, that you were outgrowing me.

One night in bed, when I wasn’t sure if you were listening or even awake, I said, “You’re going to pass me by. You’ve already slid by. You’re beyond me. On some other side. Some side I can’t even see.”

I listened to your breathing in the dark. It did not change.

…

You told me about seeing an old friend at the store and how she asked you if we were still a couple. You said she gave you a disappointed look when you told her that we were still together. You did tell her, though, that we had broken up a few times and we were now seeing a therapist. She smiled warmly, maybe condescendingly, when you told her that part. She put her hand on your arm, even stroked your wrist a little. This was a friend whose opinion you used to respect, someone who has been married to her high school sweetheart for almost twenty years, even though she got more miserable every year.

“What has he done to prove himself to you?” she asked you.

You remembered how I bought you flowers, how I said I was sorry, how I undressed you like a starving man, but that was about it. You told your friend that it had to do with having time apart and how that put things in perspective. But in the back of your mind, several sad, defeated thoughts scrolled by:
This is as good as it will ever get now . . . I can’t remember what I was unhappy about . . . I have always overreacted about simple things . . .Why should someone prove himself to me when I can’t even prove myself to anyone? . . . It’s nice to have someone help with the bills and rent . . . I don’t want to die alone
.

Your friend gave you a hug and whispered something that sounded like a daily affirmation into your ear before she said good-bye. You continued shopping, even though you were quietly filling with an uneasy mix of shame and anger. When you got to the checkout stand, you saw your friend thumbing slowly through some garish gossip magazine with headlines about affairs, cellulite, and movie stars in rehab. Her eyes sparkled and her mouth twitched lightly with drool. She looked like she wanted to dive into the magazine and fix everyone’s shitty world.

…

We found someone to give Vince guitar lessons and he picked it up quickly. In just a few months, they were playing songs from Jim Croce, the Beatles, Nirvana, and some cheesy European metal bands that Vince liked. I would sit in the back bedroom and listen in while I read a library book or put laundry away. The whole apartment would be quiet and it was so peaceful to listen to Vince playing alongside his jazz-trained teacher—sometimes struggling to find the right finger position while keeping the tempo. Sometimes he’d keep pace with his teacher impressively.

During these forty-five minutes each week, I’d often recall my own guitar lessons. I was in junior high and I would take lessons from my history teacher, Mr. Drucker, after school. When we first started, he taught me to play “Smoke on the Water” and then asked me what song I wanted to learn as a goal. I chose “The Joker” by Steve Miller. About two months later, I had learned the song, but I couldn’t sing and play at the same time. Mr. Drucker sang the words. When he got to the line, “Some people call me Maurice,” I would make the whistling sound and try not to laugh.

Mr. Drucker died later that year when he was riding his bike home at night and was hit by a drunk driver. I didn’t pick up a guitar again for a long time.

…

Vince was playing some of his new favorite
CD
s for me in the car as I drove him to the dentist. The songs sounded like pop music from when I was a teenager, but filtered through a couple of decades of trying too hard.

But they also sounded like the kind of songs I might have liked if they had been around when I was his age. I felt torn about how to react. I was mildly embarrassed for him, and as a result, I also felt embarrassment for my past self. Had my parents felt the same way about the music I listened to? And had their parents felt the same way? And their parents before that?

I wondered if there had been a whole generation of parents long ago who were agitated by the emerging popularity of the harmonica. I made a mental note to look up the history of the harmonica when I got home.

Vince said, “Listen to this part.” A loud guitar part started to slow down and a skitter of drums twisted the song into a new tempo, a new mood. Again, it reminded me of something I’d loved in the past. One of my favorite bands, but this time with more eyeliner, more money. I tried to act impressed and I said, “That was cool.” The song went on. I was feeling my age, and I said in my head,
That was cool . . .That. Was. Cool
.

…

You took me to a strip club and we noticed that all the dancers had tattoos. We looked around and saw that all the customers had tattoos as well. “I guess it’s kind of unusual that we don’t have tattoos,” you said.

I put my hand around my mouth and whispered back to you, “I think we should get tattoos that say,
I don’t have a tattoo
.”

“Or maybe a tattoo that says,
Not a real tattoo
,” you said.

We finished up our fourth drinks and talked to the dancer whose legs had tattooed lines going up the backs of them, like she was wearing some sexy vintage panty hose. She also had an elaborately inked peacock going up her left arm and shoulder. Her knuckles said K-A-Y-A, even though she told us her name was Hurricane.

“What’s your names?” she asked us.

We made up names for some reason. Shawn and Shawna.

When we went back to the bar, we talked about how the tattoos were too much like a shield, or a substitute for clothes.
“These girls are not one hundred percent naked,” I decided. “They have tattoos.” We came up with all kinds of theories and then you looked up “strippers without tattoos” on your iPhone and there were no matches.

“I guess we’re stuck here,” you said. We borrowed Sharpies from the bartender and asked each of the dancers to mark us. “We don’t want to be naked either,” you told the tall redhead with stars on her ass.

…

I went to bed a few minutes before you one night and decided to lie the opposite direction in bed, so my head was where my feet usually were. My feet were sticking out and resting on the pillow, like a weird joke. I heard you getting out of the bath and then brushing your teeth. I readied myself anxiously but quietly in this new position. This probably wasn’t quite what you had in mind when you said you wanted to try some new things in the bedroom. You crawled into bed and hugged my legs against your chest. At first you froze, but then you started kissing my ticklish ankles. Your toes brushed my cheeks. The night seemed upside down.

…

You were in the hospital and I was at work, even though I didn’t want to be there. It was the day after you had back surgery and you were high on some kind of painkiller. You kept calling me on my cell phone while I was at work, and I was both concerned and annoyed. But I took a break and snuck into an empty room to listen to you when you started talking about the feeling between your legs. Room 529, where we had spent time together in the past—our favorite room.

“It feels like a bunch of small birds,” you said.

I wasn’t sure if that was an erotic feeling. “What are the birds doing?” I asked.

“They’re flying, but in slow motion,” you said. “Their wings are so soft. I have a parachute but nothing else on. I’m falling and I feel the wind and wings, and I thought about you.”

I asked you what I was doing in your thoughts.

“You’re waiting for me on the ground, on your back. Your hands are up, ready to catch me.”

You asked if I was excited and I said yes. I heard your bedsheets rustle. I imagined you melting into them.

“I want you to touch yourself,” you said. “Tell me what you do when you catch me.”

I told you that I wanted you to land like that, legs spread, on top of my face, against my lips. The parachute would cover us softly. You made a long moaning sound when I said that and then you said,
Uh-huh
over and over until it turned into heavy breathing.

“Your face is the best place to land,” you said. “I want to make a nest in your mouth.”

…

For a while, you became more aggressive with your biting and your need for me to bite you. I remember when we first met you didn’t like it at all. I’d often bite your lips a little when we kissed and you’d always yelp and tell me to stop. I think one time you said, “I’m not a dog!”

Then, in our fifth year, when we were having sex, you’d sometimes arch your neck and pull my face into it. I couldn’t figure out if this was because you were fantasizing about some kind of sexy movie vampire or if you were really into the feeling of it. I didn’t close my jaw, I just pressed my teeth against your skin.

When you bit me, you closed your jaw. One time, it was such a hard pinch on my neck that my hands flew up and pushed you away. I swore and turned over. It felt like you did it on purpose and I was trying not to get mad.

You touched me on the back softly and whispered, “Are you still hard?”

…

In the morning, we were making breakfast and coffee as we waited for your brother to wake up. He was staying with us for a few days, visiting us from Denver, where he had just moved. You were wearing new jeans and a white T-shirt. I liked it when you wore a black bra under a white shirt. There is something assertive but coquettish about that look, like a woman undressing in her tenth-floor hotel room with the curtains open.

I rubbed the rim of my empty coffee cup on your ass cheek. “Let me get some of this ass in my coffee,” I said with a perverted sneer. I was like a bartender salting a margarita glass. You were bent over, putting biscuits in the oven, moving your hips in circles like a tease.

“Do you want honey in your biscuits?” you asked.

“I like your pants,” I said.

When your brother came out ten minutes later, he asked if we had anything he could put in his coffee.

“You want cream?” I asked him.

“You got honey?” he asked. He was smiling and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. I felt his focus scanning between you and me. You were making eggs next to me as I poured the cream. “I like your pants,” he said to one of us.

We said “thanks” at the same time. Then a few moments of silence.

…

We were out at a local club where a new band was playing. The bass player of the band was a famous young actor, so there were a lot of young women dressed their sexiest. Most of them stood near his side of the stage. People were jumping up and down all around us. The drum sounds bounced against the chugging guitars. “I’m being felt up by like twenty people,” you shouted in my ear, but you were smiling as we swayed with the crowd.

I felt badly for the lead singer. No one was looking at him. They all watched the famous bass player, who did nothing exciting and even had his back to the audience.