Boink, page 16
“Which one do you like?” he asks me when we get back with our coffees.
“All of them really. I know, that’s just what people say when they don’t have any taste.”
“No not at all, they are all different. Art is art when the artist is passionate about their work.”
“Then why are the critics always placing judgment on this piece or that? Usually that’s an indication of talent.”
“Whoa, look at you go, that was a pretty intelligent thing to say. I mean, I wasn’t calling you dumb...okay, I’m digging myself into a hole.”
“Yeah, well you know me, I’m pretty much a vapid whore. I don’t think far beyond the limits of what I’m going to wear the next day.”
“Of course not, you’re more the kind of girl who thinks about what she is going to wear two days from now.”
He smiles at me. One of those goofy smiles I’ve seen on his face before. It really is just like old times. I’ve missed him more than I am willing to admit to him, if for no other reason than we once tried to be something more than friends. It ended badly when he decided there was another girl better suited as a girlfriend. We tried to keep things civil and sweet because there was a friendship there, but it was too hard for me and I pulled away to save myself. But time heals all wounds and we were able to regain our friendship at the beginning of the year. Besides, she was a jealous bitch, and guys can only stay whipped for so long.
I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, because I can feel my phone vibrating and I know it’s Steve. He texted me again and it said; “Ash, I’m so glad you came over last night, I knew you felt the same way. Call me later, I wanna see you again tonight.” I know I can’t go. I have to make him want it just a little bit more than he already does. I’m not even sure I want him anymore. All the old feelings for Jeff have come back already. He meant so much more to me than Steve does.
When I come back, Jeff asks me if I want to go back to his place and watch a movie, so we leave. He puts his arm around me; he says it’s cold outside and body heat makes us warmer than layers. It has started snowing again. I tickle him just a bit under his arm; he winces and I take off running. Just as I knew he would, he runs after me. I let him catch me. We get all the way back to the bridge, and because it gets dark early, the lights are already on. He pretends like he was going to throw me over the side; he is so much stronger than I remembered.
I want him to kiss me. He wants to, but we don’t. We get back to his place and after he pretends he can’t find his keys, we go inside. He’s already put Christmas lights up, and the soft glow makes me feel even dreamier than I already do.
“What movie do you wanna watch?”
“I don’t really care, what do you have?”
“Everything really. C’mon, you’re the guest.”
“Got any comic book hero movies?”
“Absolutely. I have all kinds—Spiderman, Superman, Batman?”
“Superman.”
“It’s a classic.”
We sit on his bed, and because the mattress is so old we sink in towards each other. I am barely paying any attention to the movie. All I hear is his heartbeat. Suddenly, I feel the coffee hit me. I don’t want to move from where we are, but I have to. He asks me if I want him to pause the movie, but I tell him I’ve seen it a million times anyway so it wouldn’t really matter much. I have to go up a flight of stairs because there is no girls’ bathroom on his floor. I go as quickly as I can but not too quickly so he won’t think I’m anxious. I should have taken my purse with me.
I get back to the room, but notice as soon as I step inside that something is wrong. The movie is paused and Jeff has a look on his face that makes my heart sink into my stomach.
“What’s this?” He asks me, holding up my phone.
“My phone?” I reply unsure of what he meant.
“I was waiting for you, but your phone started playing that annoying ringtone...a lot. I didn’t mean to look; I was just trying to get it to stop.” He hands me my phone and I see a new text message from Steve and a missed call. “Ashley, I’m breaking up with Lauren for you. Tonight. Please call me when you get this, I love you.”
“Why is Steve telling you that he loves you?”
I can’t say anything. I try to think of some lie to tell to get out of it, but for once, I can’t think of anything.
“Has Steve been cheating on Lauren with you?”
“No...last night, Jeff...how could you go looking through my phone?”
“I didn’t until I saw who was calling you, and I thought, why would Steve call Ashley? It’s not like they are that close, and I could see on your phone that he texted you too. I shouldn’t have looked, but I’m glad I did.” He turns away from me and faces the window. “I can’t believe you would do that to Lauren. They’ve been dating for over two years, Ash.”
“Jeff...I don’t want Steve. It only happened once, it was a mistake—”
“Yeah, right. He wouldn’t be telling you he loved you if it was only a one-time thing. I’ve known Steve just as long as you have, and he has never cheated on her before. And I would expect more from you if you really cared about him...you’re screwing with other people’s lives.” “How do you know he’s never cheated on her before? I didn’t do anything wrong, Jeff. He cheated on her, where does my moral responsibility come in? Just because he says he loves me doesn’t mean I love him, and quite frankly, it doesn’t mean he’s being honest about his feelings either.”
“Your moral responsibility? She’s your fucking friend, Ashley! Do you have any idea how hurt she would be if she found out? She’s gonna be crushed when he dumps her, but if he tells her about you, it’s gonna absolutely kill her.”
“It was a mistake, and I went there last night to tell him to stop with his advances, but I was weak, Jeff, and that’s the truth.”
“I think you should leave. I can’t believe you, Ashley. Just go.”
I don’t know what to say. Nothing I could say can bring us back to where we were ten minutes ago. It is over.
The tears start streaming down my face as soon as I leave. I don’t know where to go. I don’t want to go back to my dorm. I have to call Steve. He told me to come over, and that he would leave the door open. I know my face will be tear-stained but I know him well enough that he won’t ask too many questions as long as I kiss him.
I get to his house and he is waiting downstairs for me. He hugs me and kisses me on the cheek telling me that it’s okay. He thinks I’m upset about us. I’m glad I don’t have to tell him the truth.
“So what did Lauren say when you broke up with her?”
“I haven’t done it yet.” I give him a look. I’m fragile right now; I will believe his lies for now, so lie to me.
“You said you were going to. That’s why you called me, isn’t it?”
“No, I called you because I wanted to see you. I haven’t done it yet. I tried, Ash, believe me. I had my phone in hand and everything. I just don’t know what to say to her yet. Give me another day.”
“Why don’t you tell her the truth?” He laughs at me. A smug little laugh, the kind where you don’t mean to but it escapes anyway.
“Ashley, I don’t think you want me to tell her about you.”
“Why not? I can handle it. And she’s gonna find out sooner or later.” He looked at me like I was missing teeth or something.
“Ash, are you sure you’re all right? Last night you were pretty hesitant about us and now you seem all gung-ho. What gives?”
“What do you mean, what gives? I want to be with you. You convinced me last night and your messages today made feel secure about where we were going.”
* * *
You can’t mend a broken heart with a new love, because when it gets broken again, you start forgetting how all the pieces fit back together in the first place.
* * *
Jamie and I: The Scraps of Memory
by ARIEL
PRIVATE COLLEGE
“Yeah, about that...Ash, even if I break up with Lauren, I’m not sure I wanna just jump right back into a relationship. I mean we have been dating for over two years.”
“If?”
“No, I mean it’s all about you, baby. You’re my girl, in my heart you always have been. I just want to take it slow with us. Just give me some time to get my life in order.” He tries to come over to me again and kiss me, as though he just made it all better. He wants me to take the scraps he’s throwing me when he just inadvertently ruined the one thing I had going for me. Steve, right now, I just want you to make me forget about losing Jeff for a second time, and you can’t even keep me in this fantasy that we started last night. He kisses me harder, and deeper, but it isn’t the same. The rush is gone, it’s been tainted.
I leave. I’m sure he won’t break up with Lauren now. She will probably never find out either. He’ll go on pretending like she has his heart forever. I don’t think he ever had one. But that’s what they’ll say about me. What they don’t know is mine has been shattered for a long time. You can’t mend a broken heart with a new love, because when it gets broken again, you start forgetting how all the pieces fit back together in the first place.
I enter the bar and sit at my usual stool. The bartender comes over to me with a ripe cherry martini. He gives me a wink and says, “You look like you’ve had a rough day. This one’s on me.” Though I’m sure the tears are still stuck to my cheeks, I put on the usual smile that works so well with men. They’re all the same in the end anyway.
A PHOTOGRAPH: COLOR. SLIGHTLY FADED, some fingerprints visible along the edges. “October 6, 2003” on the back in blue ink. In it is a candid shot of a boy and a girl. Together, they look as if they belong locked in marble, like one of Auguste Rodin’s sculptures. The boy has coffee-with-cream skin and short curly dark hair. He is sitting in the grass, glossed by the sun. His legs are folded to his right, and the girl fits perfectly behind his legs, her head rested on his shoulder. Her hair is loose, and reaches all the way down her back. She is looking up at him, and he is looking somewhere else, somewhere out in the distance.
I want more than anything to tear it up, but instead I just shove it into the glove compartment. I’m too exhausted to be upset.
The girl was me, about a lifetime ago, and the boy’s name was Jamie. It was the only picture I instantly recognized in a three-year-old roll that I developed last month. We were on the lawn of Satchel Heights College, fingering the grass and bitching about our Philosophy homework. Revealed also in the roll were random shots of this and that, of my first dorm room and my first roommate, a tree here, a squirrel there. Arbitrary scraps of memory that had no real texture. But here was this one memory, among all the rest, that seemed to spike my hands, to burn my mind.
I. He was the only one I trusted at the time. “I really like this guy in my lit class,” I said to him once, while we were driving somewhere. It was a lie. He rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. “Who?”
“Ian Stenza. Floppy hair, dress shirts, cuffs rolled up, sometimes.” I watched for his reaction. Was he jealous?
“Mmm...I’d hit it.” No, of course he wasn’t. Of course. I turned on the stereo. Billie Holiday. We sung along. Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own. Jamie said sometimes she sounds like she’s choking on her heart, she just sounds so wounded. I extended my arm out toward him and flexed my hand in the “gimme” action. He handed me the cigarette and I sucked it into my lungs, coughing a little as I blew out the smoke.
We met sometime early on in our freshman year in one of the dorm houses on the lawn. All the big personalities on campus lived in a lawn house. The Four Houses of the Apocalypse is what they were called, because when one of them threw a party, the axiom adhered to was “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” And although everyone made it through the night, the house would be in ruins the next morning: smashed light bulbs, beer stains on the carpet, a light fixture on the chandelier wobbling from its wire like a loose tooth from its root.
The kids who lived in those houses had unstoppable energy and rumored speed addictions. They were the loud ones, the guys that spiked their hair with Elmer’s glue and rode skateboards down the banisters; the girls who snorted coke off mirrors and urinals, who came shrieking downstairs to the parties, their tits falling out of their lacy babydoll dresses.
II. I remember hearing loud sex when I met him. The throbbing bass of the music probably should have drowned it out, but I could hear every sigh, every grunt, every ardent shriek. I was standing in a circle with a few strangers and Kelly and Natalia, two girls I knew vaguely from my French class. They were doused in glitter that night, tight jeans riding up their asses, lips drenched with a clear gloss that smelled acutely of watermelon Bubblicious bubble gum. “Jamieee!” one of them squealed, and ran over to embrace an attractive black boy. She brought him into the circle. “You don’t know Jamie, do you?” she asked me. I shook my head.
“Sorry,” he said, “I’m Jamie.” A muffled orgasm.
“I guessed that,” I said. “Hi.”
He told me that I had a nice face. I blushed and said thank you, although I’d never been that thrilled with it.
“Can I do your makeup sometime?” he asked. I laughed, and said that I don’t usually wear makeup.
“Please?” More sex sounds.
We became close friends over the next few months. He was one of the most charismatic people I had ever met, and the kindest. He was interested in changing the world, and would convince me to go to meetings about protests on the war, or taking a semester to teach English in Chile, or spreading gay awareness, but he never did any of it. I would spend hours on the other end of his bed, watching his hands as they animated his rich opinions on orphans and Iraq and sex. “Why are you telling me all this?” I would ask him, “Why don’t you go to a protest, or start an organization?”
“We could totally change the world, you and I,” he’d say if we had been drinking.
I had been applying to a few other schools, looking to transfer to one of them. Satchel Heights didn’t really have the type of literature department I had been hoping for. “Stay here,” Jamie said, “I can promise you years of entertainment.” I licked a stamp and smoothed it onto the corner of a manila envelope that said:
Admissions Office
Caldwell University
22 Main Street
New York, New York 10011
“I’m destined for the big city,” I said, “come with me?”
“I’m not really a city man.”
* * *
The first time we made physical contact: about two weeks into our friendship, during a long day after a sleepless night. I broke down. He held me tightly, a perfect hug, a full-body embrace, all of our essential parts aligned like magnets.
* * *
III. When does it begin to get easy? “Never,” he said. “Matters of the heart never are.” We were discussing my relationship with Alex, my boyfriend at the time. We had been dating for two months, and I was certain he was being insincere, that he had lost interest or met someone else. But maybe it was me, maybe it was my fault. When I wasn’t studying, I was spending most of my time with Jamie. Alex and I really only saw each other at night, when we had finished our homework and taken showers and I had dialed his extension and climbed the two flights to his room. I wasn’t sure if I could love him, but I loved being wrapped in his arms with freshly shampooed hair, and I loved falling asleep in his bed, which was warmer and more comfortable then mine. And I loved, of course, when he would throw me onto the bed and fuck me right when I walked in the door. I loved those nights; I knew he had been waiting for me, thinking of me. And I loved the way he would brush the hair out of my eyes. The skin to skin contact. The heat.
Jamie said once that there is something quiet about a happy life, something imperfect. It is afraid of the spoken word; it does not like to be talked of, harped on, glorified. “Don’t talk about the good things in your life,” he told me, “You’ll jinx them.”
“What about the bad things?” He said I should talk about them until I’ve wrestled them to the ground with words, but never to bring them up again. “Okay,” I said, and shook my head.
I talked about it with anyone who would listen. And, as Jamie had promised, my relationship with Alex shriveled up at the command of my voice. He broke it off with me, and I, because I wanted to be dramatic, wrote him a letter:
You said you were going to stick around. So why does this happen? Why is this happening? Why is there gravity between us one minute, then an inexplicable electromagnetic push the next? What did I do? What did you do? Am I being punished for my own indecision?
And then I burned it.
IV. So I’m kissing this boy, Quinn or Quentin or something strange, some boy I met at Paint Fest in town the other day, and my phone starts ringing. I break away and look: it’s Jamie. Quinn or Quentin or whatever takes the phone from my hand and starts kissing me again, sliding his hand up my thigh, under my skirt. Don’t pick it up, I tell myself over and over, but my hand, which should be rested on the shoulder of this boy with the strange name, is searching the area around me for my phone. He says I can call them back, whoever it is, and tugs at my underwear. I kiss him hard while I continue to search. There it is. “Hey.”
“Got a boyfriend or something?” he asks when I hang up. I say no and he shrugs. “It’s okay if you do. I have a girlfriend.”
“Well, shouldn’t you be getting back to her?” I ask, trying to sound offended. “Nah,” He says, “I need a little spice in my life.” He outlines my lips with his thumb. “And you’re so sexy.”
This was a predicament I didn’t know how to get out of, or if I even wanted to. I looked up at Quinn or Quentin and said something like “This is wrong,” but I didn’t mean it. And it didn’t seem to matter that when I kissed him I didn’t feel that rush that you feel when you like someone so much, everything else becomes peripheral, insignificant. But I did feel content. I liked him enough, and he liked me more than enough, and it helped to have someone tell me I’m beautiful, to have someone who wants you that much. And it gave Jamie and I something to talk about.
