And Now You Can Go (4 page)

A friend of mine calls and asks if he can take me out, get my mind off things. He's from San Diego and in ROTC. He has six brothers, all of whom were ROTC too.

"I'll protect you," he says. "Okay," I say.

The ROTC boy usually wears a hockey jersey. His favorite one says "99"—Wayne Gretzky's number, he's explained. But when we meet at the subway station, by the last car, he's wearing a tightish white T-shirt under an unbuttoned peacoat. No sweater. His black hair has been cut shorter since I last saw him. We go to a club to dance.

The club has a live singer, a woman wearing a bra with black leather fringes hanging down. They tickle against her ample brown belly.

The ROTC boy gets me a drink and dances close to me and not too badly. His nose is piggish, and his eyes are cactus green and thirsty.

"I dig that woman's belly," he says. "I know, I like it too."

"You what?"

"I like her belly," I yell.

"So do I," he says. He turns back toward me and I step toward him and we dance. We dance in tribute to the woman's protruding belly.

Another band comes on and a cage slowly descends from the ceiling. Inside is a woman stripping.

We stop dancing and stand at the back of the room and sip our drinks through red straws that are so narrow he's using four.

"You know what?" he says to me. He looks angry, his pig nose pigging up.

"What?" It's hot in here. He's soaked through his T-shirt. I'm wearing a sweater and the skin on my face is pulsing like it's sunburned.

"If I ever see that guy who did that to you …"

"Yeah?" I say, and wait. I'm actually balancing on my tiptoes.

"I'll kill him."

"With what?" I say, suddenly enthralled, thrilled, and in love. "With my bare hands."

"Your bare hands?" I ask. I come down off my toes, deflated, and look at his hands. "Would that really work?"

"Sure," he says. "Why not?"

"You're right, why not?" I say, doubtful and depressed. I excuse myself to go to the rest room.

. . .

We stay there until three, watching the girl in the cage dance and wishing for the woman with the belly to come back onstage. It's still so hot and we drink and drink to cool ourselves. Here, they make you pay for bottled water—you can't even get tap water—so we drink vodka.

Outside the club, in the welcome cold, the ROTC boy makes a sport out of jumping through traffic and not getting killed. It's a game called traffic dodging, he tells me, and he's been playing it since high school. A week before, I would've thought him an imbecile; now I find him exhilarating. Watching him so close to the cars, them honking, I decide he's a hero. When he comes back to the sidewalk, where I'm waiting, he's panting heavily and smiling with satisfaction. I let him hold me for a minute. Then I let him take me home with him in a cab. Cruising up the FDR, we chew Bazooka bubble gum and read each other our fortunes.

Back at his campus-housing apartment, most of the couch cushions are off and nowhere to be seen. The plant in the corner has been dead so long I can't make out what it once was. On the table, next to the DVD of
Slapshot
, is a brown leather pouch with a drawstring, and a cluster of marbles. When I try to pick up a marble—a green one with white swirls—I find it's glued to the table.

"Ha-ha," he says. "Sucker."

I pick up the pouch and dump out its contents—what look like white stones with strange engravings on them.

"What are these?" I ask, stroking a stone the size of a domino. "Runes," he says. "They're Norse. They're magical."

The red light of the answering machine blinks. He throws a sweatshirt over the machine. A black refrigerator stands and hums in the middle of the living room. Inside, on each shelf, beer bottles stand like bowling pins. He offers me one.

"So what'd you recite?" he asks.

"Philip Larkin, some Frost. I don't know." "What about Dante? You didn't recite Dante?"

"No." I sit down on the sole cushion on the couch, holding one of the runes in my left hand and the bottle in my right.

"Dante's the fucking king," he says. "Yeah," I say.

I hear an ambulance siren in the distance.

And then he does it: he stands on a plastic-covered card-table chair and belts out the first few lines of the
Inferno
.

I clap to stop him and get him down from the chair. He's too big a guy to be standing on a chair like that.

"You know the girl I wrote about in that story?" he says. "Yeah," I say.

Twice he came to my drop-in sessions at the Learning Center for help with his writing. I had him pegged as a thick-necked jock who I'd help distinguish between "it's" and "its," between colons and semicolons. But after he showed me a story he'd written, a story I had to verify he'd written, I told the ROTC boy he didn't need any tutoring, none that I could provide. Besides, I was being paid by the university to help undergrads with art history papers.

"You know, the girl with the lips and the skin?" he says.

"Yeah," I say, recalling the love interest in the story. "I remember." "That was you."

He burps. Then we go into his bedroom.

I take off my sweater. I'm wearing a camisole underneath.

"Hey," he says. "Why didn't you just wear that when it was so hot in there tonight?"

"Because I can't wear just this." I look down at what I'm wearing. The straps are so long, the top barely covers my nipples. "I can see down my own shirt."

He's so tall that his bed is extra long—"You have to get extra-long sheets to fit the mattress," he tells me—and I'm almost scared to get into it. I'm afraid of what I might find. And sure enough, there are rough areas where liquid has dried.

"This is disgusting," I say.

He takes a retainer out of his mouth. It has two fake teeth on it.

"From hockey," he says, and drops it on the floor. Then he kisses me. He doesn't try much else, and for this I like him. For this and for Dante and for the fact that he will kill a man for me, I like this ridiculous tooth-missing brother of six who has stains on his extra-long sheets that I can feel with my bare feet.

He puts his hand on my stomach and I resist the impulse to suck in. We talk about the woman's belly. "It was the fucking coolest, most womanly thing in the world," he says.

I wish I had a bigger belly.

When I get home I find a note from my roommate saying that Tom called three times last night, wondering where I was. I e-mail him and say I've been spending the night at my friend Theresa's mother's house. "Theresa's in D.C.," I type, "but her mom's a therapist and helping me through all this."

The odor specialist I've called signals his arrival with three loud knocks on the apartment door. The ad in the phone book claimed they could identify and remove any smell—from cooking, pets, corpses.

The specialist is wearing a uniform with suspenders and white shoes. He takes a quick tour around the apartment. "I don't smell anything," he reports.

"Really?" I say. I softly exhale and secretly try to smell my own breath.

"Then again," he says, opening a kitchen cupboard, "I wouldn't be the guy to smell it. My sense of smell isn't so hot. My brother, though—he's really good. He'd probably smell something."

He recommends that if the odor continues to bother me, one option is to close the windows, turn up the heat so as to extract the smell from the walls, and then open the windows again to let it out.

"Even now, in winter?" I ask.

"Yup," he says. "You might have to check into a hotel or something while the windows are open."

I thank him and write him a check, knowing it will bounce.

Sarah calls. "Sweetie, are you okay?" She's the only woman I let call me that. She's been away for a few days and didn't get my message until now.

"Has it only been a few days?" I say.

She asks for the full story, from beginning to end. I give her an abridged version; I'm aware of the minutes ticking, the phone bill adding up to an amount I know she can't afford.

"I know I'll run into him again." Saying it, I realize this is true. "You won't," Sarah says.

I tell her I'd love to believe that's true.

"Well, you said he didn't even know what part of town he was in, right?" "Yeah."

"And think of it this way: the last thing he wants to do is return to the scene of the crime. He's going to stay as far away as possible."

"You think so?"

"I know so," she says. Sarah is the smartest person I know.

"How are
you
doing?" I say. I'm growing tired of every conversation being about me, about him. After Sarah's older brother died, all our conversations were about her. I preferred it that way.

"Fine," she says. "Great." She tells me how she's spent the last few days with the family she nannies for on an island off Galway where nothing's changed for hundreds of years. "The

people speak and dress the same way they did a century ago," she says. "When you visit, we'll go."

I have no money for a trip. "That sounds wonderful," I say.

I go to my job at the Learning Center where I tutor foreign grad students and undergraduate athletes. I like it much better than my old job in oral history. I'm paid by the university to see ten art history students privately for one hour each week; of the ten, I like six. I adore three.

My first student of the day is a star basketball player who looks too short to be good at basketball. She's trying to write a paper on a picture by Picasso. In the painting, a girl is looking at herself in the mirror but sees a different reflection. I get annoyed trying to explain the painting to her. Rules seem to have gotten me nowhere, so I decide to no longer follow any of them. I take a pen, and while she's sitting across from me, I write a five-paragraph essay.

"There," I say, and hand her what I've written.

The basketball players wearing a baseball cap that says "Bad Hair Day." She looks at the pages and then at me.

"That's really cool that you can do that," she says.

"It's always easier when it's not your own paper," I tell her. "No, I mean, it's cool that you can do that for me."

"I shouldn't have," I say, and lean in toward her. "Please don't tell anyone." "What's there to tell anyone?" she says, and smiles.

My second student is from Hungary. He's a triple major who likes to eat cheese. One of his majors is art history; the others are German and biology. He once explained to me how Buda and Pest were on opposite sides of a river. I told him "San" and "Francisco" were on the opposite sides of a bay.

This Christmas, he tells me, will be his first trip back to his family in years. He's brought me a duty-free catalog from a Hungarian airline.

"Can you please help me pick out presents for my family?" he asks shyly.

We select perfume for his mom, a Walkman for his sister, cologne for his brother, and a watch for his father.

"Thank you," he says. I know he can barely afford the gifts.

He's brought an application for a scholarship he's hoping to get. We work on the application for three hours, taking a break at one point to get pizza with extra mozzarella. I volunteer to write him a letter of recommendation.

"Really?" he says. He has a huge trusting smile that makes me want him to get everything he wants and needs. "You'd do that for me?"

"Sure," I say. I have no idea why I like this kid so much.

I go to my friend Carl's house to write a paper. There are too many phone calls at my apartment—and there's the smell. Carl is thirty, a fellow grad student. He and his girlfriend see me as a little sister, a role I've rejected until now. I let him make me tea and a sandwich and set up a desk for me in his apartment. We talk about Chile, where he went when he was my age and in the Peace Corps, and where he got sick and lost twenty-five pounds. He shows me pictures of him dancing with Chilean children. He looks skeletal, but happy. His girlfriend calls and says she wants to stop by and give me a hug.

When she comes through the door, she takes off her jacket, but not her ski hat. She never removes her ski hat. Two people have told me she's bald, that she pulls out her hair. She's brought over some grapefruit her grandmother sent her from Florida.

"Is that where she lives?" I ask. "No," she says.

We're in the kitchen. She's opening the crate with a knife; I'm filling the kettle with water for more tea.

"Listen, we've been talking," she says. With the knife in her hand, she gestures toward her boyfriend. "And you just need to forget about all this."

"Forget about all this?" I say. I light a match and hold it to the stove. The flames rise in a hushed roar.

"Yeah," she says.

I blow out the match.

Before she leaves, she touches my shoulder; I make myself count to four before I turn away.

I take my tea, sandwich, and grapefruit to the living-room couch. The phone rings. After a few minutes, Carl comes into the room and tells me that another art history grad student wants to come over and say how sorry he is.

"I've never met him," I say. "I've seen him around but we've never talked."

"I know," Carl says. "But he feels just awful about what's happened. He's been through some heavy stuff too."

When the doorbell rings, I sit up. I've been waiting for the friend's arrival.

Carl opens the door and the friend's soapy smell fills the room. He has blue eyes and a face red from the cold. His hair is longer than mine, and curly. He's pulled it back into a loose ponytail. "He's so creative," my mom would say. She thinks any man with long hair is an artist.

"Hello, El," he says, after greeting Carl.

"Hey," I say, from the couch where I'm eating my sandwich.

He's not more than five foot nine—or maybe ten. He stands by the door with his fingers laced together in front of him. He wants to say something.

"I'm sorry," he says. He says it like he's the representative of everyone in the world who's sorry.
He's the representative of the world
, I think.
The whole world is sending its apologies through him. I don't even know him
.

"Thanks," I say, because I can't say, "It's all right." But somehow it does seem all right, with him there, red-faced and earnest and soapy-smelling, telling me that he—and, by extension, all the world—feels bad about what happened to me. He's the first person I've seen since the incident who hasn't told me what I should have done, or what he wants from me, or what I should do now. I want to smell his skin close up.