Modern Lovers (15 page)

I
t was an official date, as far as Harry could tell. The singer from the Aeroplanes lived in the neighborhood and ate lunch at Hyacinth every day, and so he was friendly with Ruby's moms. The guy put them on the list for the show at the Barclays Center, good seats, too. Ruby asked via text, like it wasn't a big deal, but Harry knew it was. He would have to tell his parents, and she would have to tell her parents, and one of them would probably pick the other one up at the door and sit in the living room for two minutes and make small talk. Harry really, really hoped that his parents would let him go over to Ruby's, but he wasn't surprised when they were both sitting in the living room, waiting for her to arrive. They said they were just making signs with pictures of Iggy Pop to put up around the neighborhood, but Harry didn't believe them. They were lingering.

“What?” said Elizabeth. “I just want to see her! It's just Ruby!”

Harry was pacing back and forth, stopping every time he heard a noise on the sidewalk. Andrew watched, amused, which was the worst. He leaned back and peeked out the window. “She's coming,” he said.

Harry zipped into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He needed the cool air, and also not to be staring at the door as Ruby walked in. The party at Dust's friend's house had been pretty dumb, not that
Harry had much to compare it to. There were lots of kids sitting around smoking, and he'd followed Ruby from room to room. Every now and then, they'd stop to say hi to someone, and when they moved on, Ruby would tell him how she didn't really like that person, no matter what she'd said to their face. Eventually they'd found an empty corner and just sat on the floor, Ruby ashing her cigarette into a discarded Snapple cap by their feet. Dust ignored them, and Harry was relieved. Parties were way less eventful than in the movies. No one was dancing, no one was barfing, at least not until the end, when Ruby's friend Sarah ducked into the bathroom and some pretty gross sounds came from the other side of the door. The only exciting thing that happened was that Ruby held his hand, even if their hands were tucked behind their knees, out of view of passersby. That didn't matter. What mattered was that after they got home, she sent him a text asking him to go on an actual date.

“Hey, Ruby, how are you?” Harry heard his father greet her. He closed the fridge door and wiped his hair out of his eyes. Ruby was hugging his father, then his mother. She'd done something different to her hair—it was all braided tight against her scalp for a few inches, when it exploded into curls.

“Whoa,” Harry said. “When did you do that?”

Ruby twirled a curl around her middle finger. “An hour ago.”

“I
love
it,” Elizabeth said. She scrunched a handful of Ruby's hair. “You look like your grandmother. For most people, that's a weird compliment, but you really do.”

“I was going for post-apocalyptic sun goddess, but I'll take grandmother, I guess.” Ruby smiled. “Thanks.”

“We should go,” Harry said. “We don't want to miss anything.”

“Right,” said Elizabeth. “You guys have fun. Tell the boys we say hi!”

Harry stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “Mom, I am not telling anyone that you say hi.”

“Fair enough.” Elizabeth blew a kiss, which Harry waved away, as if he could push it back through the air onto his mother's lips. They were out the door before she could say anything else. Ruby didn't take his hand on the walk to the train, but she did once they were on the Q heading toward the concert.

•   •   •

T
he Barclays Center was enormous. Harry didn't care about basketball, and so he hadn't been before. From the outside, the arena looked like a spaceship had just landed on Flatbush Avenue, and on the inside it was all gleaming black floors, like being inside an evil crystal ball. Ruby had been to a couple of concerts with her mum, and she pulled him through the crowd toward the will-call windows. Most of the concertgoers were in their thirties, with unseasonable beards and knit caps, which made Harry rethink his plain white V-neck. Ruby was dressed, as she'd said, as some kind of goddess, with her new hair surrounding the back of her head like a halo, and a flowy little dress over some giant heavy black boots. She scowled at everyone who came within three feet of her, which was about a hundred people a minute. They finally found their seats, which were in a roped-off section of the floor, only a few feet from the left-hand side of the stage.

“Um,” Harry said. “This is close. These guys must really like your mom's food.”

“My mom did the food for the singer's wedding,” Ruby said. “It's cool. They're like, whatever. They're not that famous.”

Harry gestured to the rest of the arena. “I'd say they're pretty much famous, not that that means anything in any real sense, but it does mean that they sold a lot of tickets to this concert.”

“Fair enough,” Ruby said. She snuggled her nose against Harry's neck. “I don't really like their music. It's for sad boys and dads.”

Harry could almost picture a day when Ruby's touching his neck
wouldn't give him an instant boner, but today was not that day. “I may or may not fall into that category,” he said.

“I know, that's why I invited you,” Ruby said. “That and the fact that I wanted to make out with you in public in front of ten thousand strangers.”

“I accept,” Harry said, but before he could say more, Ruby's tongue was pressing against his lips and her hands were on his face. The Aeroplanes walked out onto the stage, and everyone in the crowd screamed, and Harry felt the entire wall of sound inside his body. For the rest of his life, no matter where he was or what he was doing, hearing the first few chords of that one song would bring him back to Ruby's tongue and to feeling like the luckiest boy in Brooklyn.

The band played. All the people around them stood up and swayed or bopped around in their seats, and when they felt like participating, so did Harry and Ruby. Harry found that Ruby would just make fun of the people around them and/or the band if he wasn't kissing her, and so he felt like it was his civic duty to do that as much as possible. About halfway through the show, the singer in the band, a tall, scrawny-looking guy with greasy black hair that hung down to his ears, said, “This next song isn't one of ours, but I think you'll know the words anyway,” and then the guitar player launched into the opening lick of “Mistress of Myself.” Ruby and Harry pulled away from each other and started laughing. The entire crowd—thousands upon thousands of people—sang along.

“This is so weird!” Harry said, shouting over the noise of the crowd.

“I know,” Ruby said. She bobbed her head and mouthed the words. “I think the singer has a crush on Zoe.”

Harry shrugged. A lot of people did. It was sort of a joke in their family, Zoe's sex appeal. When Harry was young, before he understood about lesbians, he'd once asked his father if he'd ever had an affair with Zoe. She was so beautiful, and she was always around.
Maybe it was like bumper cars, being a grown-up, just crashing into whoever was closest. He didn't know. Andrew had laughed, and Harry had felt instantly ashamed, having clearly misunderstood something important.

The singer writhed around, bending in half and jerking back up. It was like watching someone be electrocuted over and over again. Ruby threw her hands in the air and danced. “Don't tell my mum,” she said, bouncing up and down.

Harry shook his head. “Not in a million years.” They didn't kiss or even touch again until the song was over, because otherwise it would have felt like their parents were watching them, like the song was a radio transmitter and something in both of their houses would start beeping and show their parents what they were doing. Like incest, almost. It wasn't like that—sure, they'd grown up in tandem, Harry in his house and Ruby in hers, on the same block, and sure, there were those old photos of them standing naked together, but that was before life was real, before Harry could actually remember. What Harry could remember was feeling nervous when Ruby walked by, and her not paying attention to him once they were in middle school. Their families didn't all hang out like they used to, in and out of each other's houses. Everyone was too busy now. That was when they were someone else, some babies who looked like them. They weren't kids anymore, they were actual people. Harry worried that his parents would never notice that he'd stopped leaving his dirty underwear on the floor, or that he'd started eating avocados. Almost everything about him had changed, or was changing, and they had no idea. Harry had watched porn, he'd smoked weed, he'd jerked off a thousand times. In their house! Sometimes he felt like he could build a robot out of old pictures of himself and his parents would never know the difference.

All Harry wanted was to have sex with Ruby, preferably all day long, for at least a week. They'd gotten close—or at least he thought
so. In the house, she'd given him a blow job, his first, and since then it had been mostly hands-over-the-pants-type stuff, which was obviously a huge improvement from staring at her surreptitiously down the hallway at school, but after her actual mouth had been (he could hardly believe it) on his actual dick, there was no going back. Ruby had invited him to her house, but Zoe was always around, and she didn't seem to knock, and Harry wasn't ready for his very first coitus to be interruptus, too. His mom had more open houses coming up. Or it didn't have to be like in some high-school movie, the deed taking place underneath a fluffy pink duvet, the guy all cautious and serious and asking “Is this okay? Is this okay?” every two seconds. It could be anywhere. Even just being around Ruby made him feel braver than he'd been before—like with Dust, at graduation. Harry had never dreamed of hitting anyone before, ever—but it was for Ruby, and so he could do it. He could do this, too.

“Let's go,” Harry whispered in Ruby's ear.

“What?” she asked, still dancing. He put out his hand, and she took it, and this time he was the one leading her through the crowd.

The arena was enormous, and the Aeroplanes had been on for only an hour, so when they made it out into the halls, it was mostly empty except for vendors selling beer and T-shirt stands.

“This is your new thing, huh, like, International Man of Mystery?” Ruby said.

Harry looked around until he saw the exit. “Maybe it is,” he said.

“Maybe I like it,” Ruby said.

T
here was a playground tucked just underneath the bottom of the park. Ruby had always preferred it to the tiny one on Cortelyou, because the one in the park was big enough to get lost in. Someone's parent was always wandering through, calling a kid's name. Ruby and Harry opened the little metal gate and hurried inside. Unlike the rest of the park, which was “open” until midnight, playgrounds were technically closed after dark, but that still didn't mean they were actually locked. There was a row of swings running along the right-hand side, closer to the street, and then there were big fiberglass cutouts of animals on a squishy floor, soft enough that little kids could fall and not actually hurt themselves. The playground was empty, except for the two of them.

Harry walked around a large purple elephant, running his hand along the elephant's back. “Would you do that to my hair?” Harry said, without looking up.

“You want to look like a disco goddess?”

Harry ruffled his hair and fluttered his eyelashes. “Yeah. And maybe cut it shorter?” He pulled up a curl, stretching it out straight from the top of his head.

“I'll cut it, I'll bleach it, whatever you want. Full service.” Ruby walked around to Harry. They'd probably played together, right here.
She just hadn't seen him recently. She'd
seen
him, sure, on the block and at school, but that was just his familiar face, like his father and mother shrunk down in some sort of machine. The machine of procreation. They were robots, all of them, built with eggs and sperms and covered in goo. Ruby had seen the photos of herself coming out of Zoe's vag—some friend of her moms who'd been in the room for that exact purpose, to snap pictures of Zoe's vagina and Ruby's hairy little head and all the blood and the goop and the whatever. And then there you were, this tiny person, a doll that would grow and grow and grow until you were standing in a playground at ten o'clock on a Wednesday in the middle of the summer and you were about to slide your undies off and kick them to your old friend, your new boyfriend, whatever he was.

Cars drove past, but Harry and Ruby didn't once stop looking at each other. Harry held her underwear in his hand, his fingers loose around the cotton. Ruby walked up to him, waiting until their lips were touching, and then she pushed him lightly backward until they were both lying on the ground. She reached down for his zipper and took him out of his pants.

“I don't have anything,” Harry said, stammering. “If I wasn't afraid to walk through the park by myself right now, I would run to a Duane Reade and buy every condom in the store just so that I would never, ever be in this particular situation again.”

“I do,” Ruby said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a condom. “In fact, I have more than one, in case this goes well. Or fast.”

Harry coughed. “Ruby,” he said. His cheeks were pink—even in the dark she could see it. That was one thing she loved about boys as pale as Harry—it was so easy to make them turn color, like a chameleon trying to blend itself into a tree.

“I know,” she said. Ruby unrolled the condom onto Harry gently. He was already convulsing when she climbed back onto him and slid him into her body.

“Oh, fuck,” he said. Harry pulled her torso down to his and kissed her. Ruby rocked back and forth, enjoying Harry's little spasms of delight. “Oh, fuck,” he said again, and Ruby felt him come. She kissed him and gave her Kegels a squeeze, which elicited another great big moan.

“Oh, my God,” Harry said. “Did that just happen?”

Ruby laughed, and kissed him. “Um, yes. That's why I brought more than one.”

“No,” Harry said. “I don't mean. Well, yeah, I guess that is what I mean. But I also mean, wow.” He looked up at her with astonishment.

Ruby had slept with four people, including Harry and Dust. That was only counting actual sex. If you counted other stuff, the list was longer. But out of the four guys, only Harry had ever looked at her like this. Even with Mikhail, who she'd lost her virginity to when she was fourteen, Ruby had never felt like she was doing anything that really mattered to anyone. Jamal, who had been her second, had been an RA at her summer program, and she was pretty sure that having sex with the campers was exactly what he was not supposed to do, which didn't seem like a great sign. Not that the boys she'd slept with hadn't enjoyed it, or hadn't wanted her—and she had wanted them, always, she wouldn't have done it otherwise—but Ruby had never, until this second, felt like she was watching herself become a part of someone else's story. She could see the whole thing: no matter what happened with Harry, even if they never slept together again, even if she got hit by a bus when they walked home, even if she moved to the North Pole and they only communicated via Santa Claus, Harry would always remember this playground, and her face, and the fact that she had agreed to be his first.

There weren't very many differences to having gay parents, or parents of two races. It wasn't like being raised a pagan or a Wiccan or whatever conservatives wanted their constituents to believe. No one was being indoctrinated. In fact, it was the opposite. Most of Ruby's
friends with straight parents grew up assuming they'd be straight, too, and that they'd marry someone who looked pretty much the same way they did. If you had two moms, though, or two dads, or your parents weren't the same color, then you were born knowing that there wasn't actually a default setting. Ruby was open to being attracted to anybody. She'd thought a lot about being a lesbian, even though she knew she was attracted to boys. Sometimes she wondered if that was just her wanting to be different from her parents, or buying into the societal pressure pushed on her by Barbie dolls or whatever. There were a few out girls at Whitman, two little baby dykes who wore bow ties and dress shoes and one pretty junior who had a girlfriend already in college, which Ruby found creepy from a purely statutory standpoint. There was one other family she knew at school with gay parents, but those kids were still in middle school, and so Ruby wasn't about to ask them what they thought about the whole thing. She was pretty sure that she was straight, but maybe not. Maybe she'd change her mind later, who knew? Her mum had been with guys when she was a teenager, too. Her mom wouldn't have had sex with a guy in one trillion years. Everyone was different.

Sex wasn't a big deal. Sex was the biggest deal. “Wow yourself,” Ruby was about to say, but then there were flashlights and a voice coming through a megaphone, and she and Harry were scrambling away from each other like cockroaches when you turned on the light.