You Can Say You Knew Me When (47 page)

Standing in that room, aware of the revelry surrounding me—conversation, music, the enlarged antics of the fired and evicted—I felt all at once fragile, as if I were transporting eggs in my pockets.

I excused myself, leaving Deirdre to Brady, and went outside for air.

The alley was lined with smokers. In the shadow of a solid, corrugated-metal fence, I walked through their exhalations. I felt no craving, only curiosity: what to do with my hands—which is to say my mind—without the usual, reliable gestures, the smoke-colored illustration of what it means to pass time, breathing.

Farther along the fence I caught sight of a motorcycle and two guys talking heatedly beside it. I recognized that it was Ian’s motorcycle before I recognized Ian…with Jed. They shuffled apart at the sound of my approaching footsteps. “Jamie!” Ian called, sounding relieved. “Junior can’t get in. They’re carding.”

“Didn’t they ever hear of
all ages
?” Jed complained, his eyes locking on mine. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he added, his face half in shadow, making it difficult to read. More difficult than usual.

“Are there any other doors?” Ian asked. “Anyone who could bring Jed in? Maybe with a girl they’d let him in. Is Deirdre here?”

“She’s here. Everyone’s here.” I looked from one to the other. “I’m told that Woody’s here, too.”

“Did you talk to him?” Ian asked.

“Not yet. But I plan on finding him.”

Jed thrust himself away from us. “Fuck it. I don’t want to go to this stupid boring stupid fucking party.” He strode off, his rant continuing in mumbles.

“It’s been mood swings for days now,” Ian said, loud enough for Jed’s benefit. Then he moved closer to me, confiding, “All he talks about is leaving town with you.”

“I’ll speak to him.”

I caught up to Jed a few paces down the alley. He turned around, his eyes darting, the look of someone thinking fast, planning contingencies in anger. I reached out my hand, pulling his focus to me. We leaned against the fence together.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Nothing’s going on. That’s the problem. I’m sitting around waiting for you.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t wait,” I said gently.

“You told me to, until after your sister leaves.”

“I know. But I’m not sure I’m ready to pack up my life.”

He stepped closer, laying his palm on my chest, the same gesture he’d used to compel a kiss from me in my apartment. I felt that flutter in my throat again, like a bird that has spied an approaching cat. Or was I the cat, whistling the bird nearer and nearer, ready to swallow it whole?

I sloughed off his grasp. “I have to go back to the party.”

He moved in again, trying to close the gap. “You got a haircut. It looks trendy.”

“Every person I know is in there, Jed.”

“So?”

“So, if you can get in, great, and if you can’t, I’m still staying.”

“Are you getting back together with your boyfriend?” His voice split on
together.

“This isn’t about Woody,” I said. “It’s about my life here. The life I already have.”

“I don’t get you, dude. I don’t fucking get you.” He stormed past me. In his anger he was as sexy as ever. The inverted triangle created by his wide shoulders and narrow waist was an arrow pointing to his ass. It scared me to want him, to be just one more person using him.

“I can be your friend, Jed.” A used-up line, but it stopped him mid-step. I tried again: “Brothers, right?” He was facing me now. “Please don’t be mad,” I added, a plea that I thought he’d understand, that he’d first used with me, the underlying meaning of which I finally comprehended:
You have to trust me on this one.

I watched him think this over and then reject it. He forced himself past Ian, toward the parking lot. Away he went, among the car hoods splattered with streetlight.

“I have to let him go,” I said, so softly that Ian, approaching, misheard.

“Yeah, go back inside. I’ll deal with Junior.” He shouted Jed’s name, but got no answer. “Hey, are there any queers in there?”

“Definitely.”

“Okay, I’ll be back.” He lifted his helmet, started to walk away.

“Ian? Tell him I’ll talk to him later, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And one more thing—.”

“Yeah?”

“Just, thanks. For sticking with me, helping me out. All of it.”

He sauntered over with an almost romantic swagger. His arm settled on my shoulder. “You’re number one,” he said. “Everything else is just…keeping things interesting.”

He touched his lips to mine, and as he pulled me into a hug I recalled exactly what it had been like to first kiss him at the Detour in the light of a pinball machine all those years ago. We’d both had thicker hair and thinner waists, and what we knew about each other was pure imagination. What had lasted was this: the sense that as soon as I knew Ian, I knew everything about him, and was willing to give him as much in return. The time was always now. The manifesto was eternal.

Jed had retreated into silhouette. I had assumed he was only pouting, a tantrum fueled by impatience and jealousy. I might have done things differently if I knew I would come home that night to a voice mail from him telling me he had left—off to Mexico, or wherever the road would take him. His raspy voice forced back emotion, saying,
You should be coming with me
, while I stared at that goddamn Darth Vader head, entertaining the thought that he might be right. If I had known all this, I would not have let our last words at the party be angry ones. I would have tried harder to explain to him what he’d given me, which was different than what I’d simply taken. I would have offered him my blessing for his trip.
You have a lot of living to do
, I might have said, as Ray had written to Teddy when she set him free.

Ian’s bike gunned, its light snapping on—a roaring brilliance cracking open the darkness, parting stragglers from its path. I watched as the distant figure of Jed assumed shape in the headlight. Words I couldn’t hear flew between him and Ian, with aggravated gestures to match. For an instant, Jed turned his face my way. I waved, and he sent me a nod so deliberate and grave it looked like a signal. I had read it as
Later, dude,
but he’d meant good-bye. He took Ian’s extra helmet, swung a leg over the bike and was carried from my sight.

I had avoided the dance floor. There were gay guys circled together in groups, with shirts off or with shirts on tight, accentuating the armature beneath. For years I’d let this breed of peacock bother me, but now I thought, Maybe I don’t care. The effort it took to be annoyed by someone else’s good time was a waste of my own. So in I went, dodging elbows and arms extended with drinks,
leading with the hip
, as a queen once taught me. Getting through the crowd is a treacherous thing no matter how many times you have braved the dance floor.

I knew where to stop, at a beam of mote-heavy light, an empty disk of concrete floor waiting to be occupied. I settled in, and my arms began to piston, sending my body in search of the beat. Around me: a white chick in cool glasses at two o’clock; a dark-skinned guy with dreads and a Brazilian football jersey at four; and at six, one of the only drag queens in the house, towering over everyone. She could have been almost any race, but her hair was a white girl’s pure platinum, blown sky-high as if from dynamite. With her was an adoring admirer, a handsome hipster in silver sneakers, striped pants, a sleeveless T-shirt pulled tightly over a short-sleeve button-up. He had curly brown hair, thick eyelashes, a face full of silly expressions. The kind of guy you look at and think,
My next boyfriend should be this cool.

The beat overtook me, like a guardian angel making all my decisions. Without trying, my arms and feet were in sync. I was busting out little moves I hadn’t tried in ages. I positioned myself in the direction of the drag queen, hoping her friend would peel his eyes away from her, so I could partake in the simplest kind of flirting: smiling at a stranger on the dance floor.

Then my eyes landed on Woody’s face above the hopping masses.

His movement, that head bob, was so familiar it took the air from my lungs; his shorn hair still surprised me. Disco lighting, scarlet-gold-violet-blue, refracted in beads of sweat on his forehead. I had to avert my eyes just to get my breath back, and then immediately needed to see him again. His hairline, so prominent now without the curls, was like a pencil sketch of a bird in flight, a line dipping to a point, then swooping up again. Concentration tugged at his brow. I caught him counting his steps, his lips fluttering so imperceptibly you wouldn’t have noticed unless you knew to look. I knew. He stood far enough away that he wouldn’t necessarily see me, and each time a twitch in his cheek or a torque to his shoulders threatened to send his gaze toward me, I snapped away. To him and away. To, away. I didn’t know which was worse—that he’d catch me looking or that he wouldn’t notice me at all.

He was dancing with the woman I’d seen Roger air kiss, celebrating their freedom from the dot-com sweatshop. His tongue escaped his mouth and poked past his upper lip, catching a drop of sweat slinking down his cheek. His shoulders were sweat soaked under a white V-neck, overhead light carving crescents of shadow from his clavicle.
He wears those V-necks to work under button-up shirts. Did he come to this party right after they fired him?
Did he even know I was here, as I knew he was, long before I stumbled on him in the only place I hadn’t already looked.

We were sharing the same room for the first time in weeks. We were breathing from the same reserve of air. Standing near enough to watch him lick his lips, I felt it like a kiss. Jed, Ian, Woody: It was a night of remembered kisses.

His dancing was still awkward, less endearing without those collegiate curls framing his manly forehead.
He’ll never be a good dancer.
An unkind thought: It took effort not to be hurtful. My thoughts like spears, poisoned at the tips. He had given me his trust, and I was careless. I thought I could throw plates to the floor and they wouldn’t break. I thought I could hurl the boomerang without getting nailed myself. I thought I could hate my father and not hate Woody.

I looked away for too long, and I lost him. I could stay with the beat and look again later. Or I could chase him. I had no reason to believe he wanted to speak to me. But I wanted him to know I had something to say, if he let me.

A guy stepped into my path. Shadowy eyes caught my glance. “Holy shit, it’s you!” His voice unmistakably excited.

“How’s it going?” I said, trying to recall where we’d met. We’d had sex, that’s all I was sure of. Cornered by a trick as I tried to reach Woody.

“Do you remember?” he asked, grinning with mischief. Brown skin, close-set eyes, a prominent nose. Give him a baseball cap and a backpack and—.

“Newark Airport,” we both said, a jittery release. I felt heat in my neck.

“It’s Rick,” he said, hand on his chest as if pledging allegiance. Or he might have said Rich. I had trouble hearing so close to the speakers.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I’m staying with some friends. They said this was the best party in SF tonight.”

“Are you still traveling?”

“This is my last stop before I go home. I love it here! It’s so fun! I’ve been all the way around the world.” He named countries I’d never visited, never even considered. He asked, “Did you ever finish
On the Road?”

“You remember that?”

He smiled that smile again. “You did me a big favor, Jamie. It set the tone for a lot of my…adventures.”

He was charming. I saw why it had been so easy to hand myself over to our instant infatuation. If I hadn’t broken a pact with Woody, I would never have looked back on this with shame.

Stranded in an airport lounge, two strangers intersect, a random collision that should mean nothing but alters everything. Each proceeds on a tangent according to the force of that collision. And what if they’d never met? What if I hadn’t followed Rick into that rest room? What if I hadn’t been reading Kerouac that day, attracting his interest? What if that box in the attic hadn’t sparked my curiosity; what if I hadn’t gone into the attic in the first place? What if my father and I had spoken in the years before he died, if I’d been forgiving of him, or him of me, no matter what the personal cost?

All these influences we cannot control, bleeding into the moments when we must choose: the power we take versus the mercy at which we are placed. In the face of this,
What if
was the perpetual, imprisoning question, the one without an answer. The dead end inside the maze.

I brushed a hand along Rick’s cheek, surprising myself with how tender I felt for him, which was really a tenderness for the human heart—for my own, for Woody’s, for Jed’s, none of which I had been tender enough with; and for my father’s, the mystery of which I was implicated in, even now, after the quest, as I suppose I had always been.
You are part of me,
I might have said to Rick, as the chaos of pleasure tornadoed around us. But I chose to say, “Take care of yourself,” and I kept moving.

If everyone keeps moving, no one finds anyone, but sometimes you can’t sit still. Sometimes it’s up to you.

Past the dance floor, in the far reaches of the warehouse, an enormous, enclosed structure had been built: a temple, woven of branches. Braided wooden walls twisted fifteen feet high toward a minaret roof. It looked solid and fragile all at once. An arched doorway opened into a womblike chill space, aglow under black lights and smoky with incense as I entered. An altar curved along the far wall under a Frida Kahlo self-portrait silkscreened on a tapestry. The altar was covered with dozens of idols, sacred and profane: the Virgin Mary, Saint Francis surrounded by animals, different versions of the Buddha (the old fat one, the feminine princely one), Barbie and Ken dolls, Transformers, Smurfs. A field of trinkets and charms spread out below all this: folded notes, photographs, keys, stuffed animals, a hand-glued collage of Princess Diana, a
VOTE NADER
2000 bumper sticker. A guy and a girl crouched at the altar, adding to the devotional clutter.