Among the Ten Thousand Things (16 page)

Jack’s head was like a blister of brown liquor simmering under the mile of sun between the Super 8 and his car. He made it, each step a superhuman achievement, past the cardboard box of a campus chapel and the forsaken tennis courts around which the grass would not even grow for heatstroke, to the parking lot, to his ridiculous red convertible, long abandoned by the shade of tree in whose custody he’d left it. And then the car, when he got there, it wouldn’t start.

He sat with the door open, one leg swung out and the other growing slick against the leather interior—shorts were a mixed blessing—and pumped the gas and tried again. He could have taken it as a sign, right, if he were watching his life from somewhere far away, like a character in a book or movie. The sign would have been to go home. Go home, go home. None of this is for you. Only in movies do we heed the warnings of inanimate objects with due reverence. In life Jack ran the heater on high until it started blowing cool air, took the cap off the gas tank, and made his own shade, his back to the sun and his silhouette cast across what parts of the engine seemed important.

He’d woken up alone in his hotel room, on the scratchy-moss carpet, between the enormous, funereal beds. He was on his stomach, with a crick in his neck and some drool pooled around the corner of his mouth that made him want to move never. There had been, what, many drinks. He’d gotten sloppy with that girl. Kissed her in the bar and again outside after her friends had gone home. Made out, like a teenager.

He remembered no name, only that she was studying audiology. Whether it was a joke or not, she did seem to have a thing for ears, whispering into his like to drive him crazy, which it might have if his senses had not been so dull and if all of it were not so thin and so obvious. He was relieved when she didn’t want to go into the Super 8, and it was easy to turn down the invitation to her on-campus double because, while he was lonely, or horny, he was not completely stupid (despite all outward appearances). Plus, also, he had certain practical misgivings (specifically that he was drunk to the point where it might not work).

It took cycling the ignition ten more minutes before the car would start, but finally it did. Jack drove to the airport without any idea about flights and without calling Deb, without calling Jolie. It was a pleasure not calling, building a dam between himself and the voices reminding him of all he’d done, and hadn’t.

He was glad to be getting rid of the red convertible, which, like the Super 8, had become a failed irony. Funny for the Queen of England to stay at the Super 8, or for the Very Famous Architect. Not for you. In the shower he’d found an old washcloth, dried stiff, that betrayed the history of the place, the sad naked men and women who’d preceded him. If the washcloth was from the last person, or the one before that, or how far back did it go.

Jack knew he was behaving irrationally—that he wasn’t behaving, period—which was why everything he did now, all he was permitted, seemed suddenly too easy. The Super 8 people, Jolie, the ear girl—nobody knew. The woman elevated up behind the counter at the car rental did not know, or care. Her job was to say yes. We do have an economy model available for one-way travel, yes. To Houston, no problem. We have a branch located at Bush Intercontinental, very convenient if you plan on flying out. Yes, sir, it’s a sedan. Four-door. Sorry? Black, I believe. Yes.

Jack was going home.

That afternoon it was back, the big gray one with the yellow eyes that Kay had started calling Wolf. The cat had a way of making its body thin on the sides and squeezing past their bedroom door even as Simon closed it, running always to the same place on Kay’s closet floor, the pile of her clothes a kind of bed or nest.

“It’s going to give you lice or fleas or whatever,” Simon said in the warpy full-length mirror. He was trying out his fifth shirt of the day, fifth of the last four minutes.

“He doesn’t have lice,” Kay said from the floor, where Wolf was kneading a red sweatshirt with his eyes closed.

“Just keep it out of my stuff.”

“He isn’t interested in your stuff.”

“Yeah, okay,” stamping on his shoes.

At first it looked like a pile of trash, the pots, buckets, and vases heaped on the fringe of pale grass outside the house that had to be hers. Not without some reluctance, either, did Simon decide it was hers, only it had to be, because of the yellow swings she’d mentioned, and because the number on the house to the left was too low and the number on the right too high.

There was a yard sale in front of it.

Or not a sale, because the cardboard sign, flat on its back and weighted with rocks, when he stood over it, read
FREE!
TAKE ALL!
Most of the clay pots still had soil in them, and the glass vases looked not very well washed.

Simon rang the white plastic doorbell, which was slapped crooked by the door, and if it worked, if it did anything, the sound was not one he could hear. He stood on the porch that creaked under several rugs, and it was strange to have rugs outside, though he guessed welcome mats were like the same thing, and these might have been welcome mats, all overlapping each other, welcome welcome welcome. He thought about this so he would not worry about what was taking so long, if she’d forgotten the invitation, if he wasn’t really meant to come.

At last he heard a high shriek and a “Coming!” then a thumping down stairs.

The door opened to a green-beaded curtain and, behind it, Teagan, in a simple white T-shirt and the same shorts as before. Her eyes were rimmed purple, thick Cleopatra lines that curved out a little at the ends, like fish tails. She held out a bottle through the strings of twisted plastic. Beer, for him.

“My mom’s asleep,” she said, nodding in at the living room as they passed it, but he didn’t know if she meant they should be quiet. He couldn’t see anyone there, only the back of the couch, and for a moment the reflection, in the black, glassy face of an ancient Sony Trinitron TV, of what could have been a body or could have been only a mass of sheets and throw pillows. Of the house he was ready to say things like, No, it looks great, in case she said something like, Sorry for the mess, which she never said.

They came out onto the back porch, which turned out to be the same porch as the front, wrapped around. “He made it,” said a pair of legs high in a hammock. Pale and freckled legs, the girl attached near to upside down. An
Us Weekly
splayed open on her stomach, she held a cigarette in the air so that the ash, if it fell, might hit her face.

That
“
he
”
made Simon uncomfortable, as though they’d been talking about him recently. And there was another
he
that bothered him, but this one an actual person, sitting on the floor with his back against the railing.

“You know Laura, and that’s Manny. This is Simon.”

Manny tipped his beer. The whispery brown hair, the divot in one eyebrow, and Simon knew this was the cashier who’d bagged their groceries that first day, when his mother had called him “squirt
.
”
Please may he not remember.
Simon pressed the neck of his own beer against his chest and twisted the cap, hoping it was the twisting kind, and when it fell off a light mist rose up from the rim and the cold left a dark moon on his shirt.

Teagan kicked off her shoes, soft yellow Keds, and climbed up into the hammock with Laura and Laura’s legs. “So! Simon.” She blew invisible strands of hair from her face. “Tell us something.”

“Something,” Simon answered. No one laughed, or even smiled. “Like what? I mean, I’m from New York. My parents have a house here? Um.”

“What do you do for
fun
?” Laura asked, idly turning the leaves of her magazine.

“Regular stuff, I guess. Hang out with friends, play videogames.”

“Gamer, huh?” Manny said. “Right on.”

“Quit being a dick,” said Teagan, though Simon hadn’t realized he was. “Simon likes to read, too, don’t you? Unlike some people.”

“Well, my school.” Simon swallowed. “I’m still in high school, and our school is like—”

“Wait,” Laura said, looking suddenly, troublingly interested. “Say again?”

“Just, we have like a lot of electives at our school, so—”

“You know
we’re
in high school, right?” Laura pitched herself forward, anchoring her chin onto Teagan’s shoulder. She’d lit another cigarette.

Simon could feel all parts of him tighten. “I know. Me too.”

“But,” Laura went on, “the way you said
you
were in high school, like we weren’t.”

Simon tried staring only at the piece of ash that had settled in a curl of her hair. “Yeah. Yeah, no.”

“We’ll be seniors in the fall,” Teagan said, “but Manny graduated.”

“Oh?” he asked, turning to the boy on the floor. “What are you doing now?” Like this was a person he wanted to know better. The nick in his eyebrow he’d probably had from birth, but here, minus apron, plus cigarette, plus
girls,
it seemed more like something he’d won in a fight.

Manny was no more interested in Simon than Simon was in him, or in anything—the world, it seemed like—except whoever or whatever was on the other end of the old flip phone he never shut or let out of his hand, pressing buttons that clicked. “Uh.” He looked up and then back to his phone. “I’ve got a band.”

“You
used
to have a band,” Teagan said. “He works at McQuades.”

At that, Manny snapped his phone shut. “Okay, it’s my time.” He grabbed the last beer from the tub of ice on the floor, mostly melted, and stood letting it drip as he and Teagan seemed to say something to each other without speaking. He might have been waiting for her to walk him out.

She didn’t. “Fine. Later.”

They listened to him leave, and for a while there were still four of them, the girls and Simon and the sound of Manny walking out.

“It’s cool you guys have jobs,” Simon said. “I want a job, but, I don’t know, you need experience it seems like. Like, how do you get the first job if they always want you to have experience? It’s a total catch twenty-two.”
Catch-22
was a thing he always realized too late that he might not be using correctly but never remembered to look up later.

Teagan picked a cuticle. Laura stayed with her chin on Teagan’s shoulder and began to blow smoke out her nose. Simon finished his beer and it didn’t make him feel anything. Maybe he should have been going. He’d only just gotten there, but he’d delivered himself, or some version of self, and they were not interested.

Then Laura said, “Actually, Teegs, I gotta go too.” She hoisted herself out of the hammock and into the same sneakers Teagan had had on before. She dropped her cigarette into the tub and
Us
onto the floor, where the cover flapped off at the staple. “I gotta be at that thing really early.”

“Boo,” Teagan said, but the way she said it and the way she threw herself lengthwise along the hammock made Simon wonder if it was at all possible that she could want to be alone with him.

Laura walked out along the wraparound porch, the same way that Manny had gone before. Now Simon’s only questions were (1) was this on purpose? and (2) or should he leave?

Teagan dug her bare feet deeper into the hammock’s open netting, toes curled around its strings. “So.” She looked at him. “Are you going to ditch me too?”

“I don’t have any things in the morning.”

“Ha.” She spun herself around, tried scooting out from the middle of the hammock, which she could not do well. It was the lowest point and where gravity wanted to keep her.

Simon left his beer bottle to buoy with the cigarette butts and, trying hard not to seem brave, sat down beside her. So that he became the hammock’s lowest point, so that Teagan rolled a little onto him and for a moment their legs pressed.

Smiling, she asked, “Want to see something?” and stuck her tongue quickly out at him.

“What?” he said, not daring to laugh. She did it again, slower this time, and Simon could see a hole where she’d had it pierced. “Whoa, that’s. When’d you get that?”

“A while ago. Manny did it for me. He’s an idiot. Anyway, my mom made me take it out.”

“That sucks.” He thought for what else to say. “Do you get, like, food stuck in it sometimes?”

“Gross,” she said, but laughing. “Sometimes. My mom’s a bitch. Well, we’re Catholic.”

“Yeah, if I did that, my mom would be all,” but he didn’t know what she’d be.

“But you live in New York.” She said it like it was worlds and not an Amtrak ticket away.

“It’s not that great.”

“Have you been to the Chelsea Hotel?”

“No. I mean, I’ve seen it. But I think it’s being renovated or something.”

“I just used to watch this movie a lot about Sid and Nancy. It’s stupid. Do you like them, the Sex Pistols?”

“Sure, yeah. I mean, I’m not, like,
super
into them.”

She nodded. “Anyway. My mom wants to move, but it’s like, to her sister’s in Providence.”

Even in the shade, with the sun mostly gone from the sky, her skin held the summer in it. He saw that her blond hair was lots of blonds, a banana when it is first peeled and then at intervals after, as the air rusts it brown. Warm came off her shoulders, smelling like smoked suntan lotion.

“Tell me something,” she said, though for a minute it had seemed they might do without talk, without anything to remind them that they were strangers to each other.

He asked, “What should I tell?” and she said, “A story,” and he said, “About what?” and she laughed and said, “Anything,” so automatically he started to tell her Everything, why they were in Rhode Island really, his dad’s affair and the box he’d found (in this version he had found it).

“I thought that guy at lunch was your dad.”

“Who, Gary? No, he’s my mom’s—I don’t know. I barely know him.”

And No, he had no idea what was going to happen, only it was Good for Them to Get Away, good for his mother and his sister, to get
perspective
(and, he didn’t think he’d meant to, but the way he was telling it made it sound like a decision he’d made for them, as man of the house, which actually he kind of was).

The sky and Teagan’s face got dark listening to him. She looked worried, a little impressed by what he had gone through, and it was pretty much exactly the reaction he’d been looking for in people,
this,
except then, when she asked where his father was now and he said “Who knows?” he might have given her the wrong idea, based on what happened next, which was, she touched his back and said, “I don’t know where my dad is either.”

This, where they were sitting, was her grandparents’ porch, her grandparents’ house where her mother had grown up. She had an older brother, Brady, in the army. Only twenty but married, with a daughter who lived with his wife’s parents, in another town. “We don’t get on, though. My mom calls Vanessa ‘the mother and the whore.’ ” Men passed through from time to time—“like your Gary”—but never stayed. Her father, she said, had been gone forever already. Since she was seven.

“But you remember him and stuff?”

“Duh. You remember seven.”

He wasn’t sure. The years all fused together without major milestones. Seven might have been the age he went to the set of
Sesame Street,
where his father’s friend designed Muppets. Simon remembered that Oscar’s trashcan, from which he’d hoped to collect souvenirs, had been trash-free and carpeted, also that Mr. Snuffleupagus was kept hanging from the ceiling.

So, seven.

Teagan pressed a pointed foot against the porch floor and started them rocking. She had a small, white scar on her chin, and he asked her where it was from.

“A swimming pool one time.” Another kid had pulled her under.

“Ouch.” What little space there’d been between them subtracted itself. One or maybe both leaned in, he knew only that first the space was there and then it wasn’t, as if God or someone had pressed the delete key, and when they kissed it was the only sound, the suck of air as their lips arranged themselves against each other.

He was observing more than he should, sitting outside himself and trying to drum up a laugh when there was an especially loud smacking, or when her top teeth tapped his lower ones, which happened. The laughing was to show he knew when things had not gone the way they were supposed to. But she seemed to want him, this perfect girl.
She
wanted
him.
She had her reasons. He did not know them.

He thought if he told someone about it, it would not have sounded like much, just kissing, but it wasn’t just. Already hot, they became sweaty. He was learning what he had never known about girls’ bodies, that there was so much more there than the parts that get talked about. A whole person around those three or four places you were supposed to focus on. A neck that pulses under his thumb when she angles her head to kiss him there. A hip, where it is sharp in front when she is on her side and where it gets softer, further back, making him think of a pitcher’s mound, the way it fills his palm. There are places that flutter and flex and so much symmetry.

They pushed and pulled at each other in the hammock that drew them both together, and the world turned blue around them. When the yellow light ticked on in the living room, Teagan fell apart from him, saying something about having to start dinner. She walked him out along the porch that was like a moat around that house, and Simon had to be careful not to trip into pots and vases in the tall, black grass.

She’d whispered goodbye to him at the house’s edge, stopping short of the front window. “Hey,” she said, her bright attention snapped to him. “Come back tomorrow?”