My Sunshine Away (11 page)

T
he party was thrown by a girl named Melinda Jones. Her family, even by Perkins School standards, was filthy rich. Her father was a lawyer and state politician, and this position had apparently granted him immunity from all things, including parenting, so Melinda’s mansion was considered by us to be little more than a well-furnished brothel. Understand, of course, that this was all rumor to me. I’d never been there before this night.

So, I was excited.

Artsy Julie and I piled into a car with four other kids and, before we were even out of the gymnasium parking lot, warm twelve-packs of beer were pulled from beneath the seats, joints rolled up and lit in mere minutes. I indulged. Artsy Julie, on the other hand, seemed immune to it all and politely declined both the booze and drugs as if she had no interest. She was wet with perspiration, happy and sober, and I could smell her sitting next to me. She stuck her head out the window and lifted her heavy hair from her neck. I felt oddly jealous of her, curious about what went on in her head. What did she think
of me, for instance, when we were kids on Piney Creek Road? What did she think of me now? What did she think about anything?

I didn’t ask.

In fact, by the time we arrived at Melinda’s house, I’d almost forgotten about our date entirely. The reasons for this were predictable and obvious. I was sixteen years old. My sister had just died. Lindy would be at the party. I was unhappy. This one night, I figured, could be the exception.

Similar to the way we used to race across campus as eighth graders, trying to form some sort of reputation, I fantasized that I could plant my own stake in the ground at this event and establish myself as a wild man of sorts, perhaps someone even a bit dangerous, someone like the older boys I had watched at Perkins who became famous as “partiers” and who girls like Lindy (I hoped) gravitated toward almost unconsciously. Someone, I knew, very much like Matt Hawk.

So when we entered the party, I scouted for trouble.

In the living room, expensive couches and antique end tables had been placed against the walls, where some boys I didn’t recognize were setting up instruments. People lined the staircase to the second floor and watched them get organized. They had amps, mics, drums, and guitars, and things looked promising. In the kitchen, half-empty bottles of booze covered the marble countertops and, scattered around the tiled floors, a series of ice chests sat stuffed with every cheap beer you can imagine. Natural Light. Miller High Life. Old Milwaukee. One chest, in particular, was full of Rolling Rock and the bottles inside that open chest glowed like emerald treasure. I grabbed one, drank it with a thirst I didn’t recognize in myself, and felt brave. I then grabbed another bottle, as to look perpetually double-fisted, and walked outside, where people were standing
around a swimming pool and smoking cigarettes, some inhaling, many not.

Parentless and free, we were beginning our trek into pandemonium that night and everyone knew it. We stood around, drinking in our nice clothes, not yet soiled, and stared at the shimmering pool like the finish line we knew it would be. I spoke to people I rarely spoke to and began intentionally slurring my speech to get the word out. When people asked how wasted I was, I told them, “I’m just getting started,” and they were encouraging. I smoked dope out of a two-foot bong in the pool room. I lied and told people that I had pills I wanted to take but left at home. I used words like “quaaludes” that I didn’t know the exact meaning of and tried to establish some semblance of mystery. When I heard the music crank up inside, I raised my bottle in the air and stood like a statue. I wouldn’t let anyone talk to me until the song ended. I then paid a guy five dollars for a pack of his cigarettes and lit one after the other, exhaling as often as possible through my nose to look tough, to look as if nothing could bother me.

Within the hour, everyone was hammered.

Boys began to wrestle around in their suit coats, and girls flirted with guys who were not their dates. A series of dramatic and complicated high school plotlines soon twisted through the house and, amid the madness, a Jack Russell terrier (Melinda’s, I’m guessing) swam in the pool, nipping at the discarded corsages that floated like candles at a Chinese funeral. I watched two guys climb up on the roof. I saw a girl fall into the bushes
.
Then, through the large picture windows that faced the pool from the den, I saw Lindy and Matt Hawk walk inside.

As any person in love would do, I threw some immediate and irrational thought toward what they had been doing in the past hour (they fucked in his car, she blew him in the driveway, they shot up
drugs in some public-school bathroom), and the worst in me came out. I declared myself officially wasted and began stumbling around. I imagined myself a bigger person, physically, and fantasized about bedding down any girl that dared look at me. This was not entirely an act. Since I rarely drank at that time, the beers had made my face numb and emboldened me. I walked inside and watched the band.

I’d taken up the guitar myself since Lindy went dark, remember, and so I spent a few songs sizing up the guitarist. And although it is not in my sober nature to boast, the truth of the matter is I could wail. Such was the end result of many nights spent alone with my guitar, aping the songs I imagined Lindy listened to, the result of myriad fantasies of myself center stage with Lindy in a spotlight before me. I was a true Artist in this regard, I suppose, as all people are when they spend time alone with their heart and mind and try to bridge the great distance between them.

So when the band looked like they were about to take a break, I asked the guitar player if I could sit in for a song. He asked me if I could really play or if I was just wasted and I said something asinine like, “Does the pope shit in the woods?”

“If you break any strings,” he told me, “I’ll kick your skinny ass in front of your date.”

“Relax,” I told him, and did a few impressive scales to put him at ease.

Then I searched the crowd to find Lindy.

When I saw her, she was standing in the corner and arguing with Matt, who looked like he might as well have been waiting around at a dentist’s office. His boredom was well rehearsed and unshakable, and Lindy was becoming animated, drinking something out of a plastic cup. She looked already drunk, and this pleased me.

I turned to the band, cranked up the amplifier, and played the
first few notes of the Guns N’ Roses song “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” the one I’d seen Lindy attempt to get Matt to dance to at the party. The band recognized the song, like everyone our age did, and picked up the beat. When I turned back toward the crowd, the song coming together better than even I had hoped, I saw Lindy looking at me. She’d cocked her head to the side like a dog sizing up a stranger and there passed between us a moment, I believed.

Then she turned back to Matt.

This gesture only fueled me, however, only gave shape to my thoughts, and I played better than I had ever played before. We sounded like professionals, and I was lucky that the drummer and singer were skilled. There is no better gift to a boy alone in the world with a guitar in his hand, that I can promise you. So, I set the volume at ten and let my hair hang over my eyes. Kids sang every word in robust chorus as they beat their leather shoes on the stairway banister and played air guitar with their dates. I saw Randy peek his head around the corner of the kitchen and salute me with a bottle of rum. I looked back at the drummer, who smiled, the bassist, who nodded, and, as the window to the backyard became crowded with harkening faces, I collapsed inside of myself for the solo.

In the place I found there, in the world I imagined, Lindy was filling up with wonder about me. How had the boy she had known as so meek and so shy in her neighborhood grown into this man now before her, playing a song that she loved? How had she neglected the obvious similarities between them? How had she not noticed that he could be all things to her, dangerous if she wanted him to be, sweet-hearted when she needed him?

Even more so, how had she been so foolish as to let other men know her, when the one that knew her first had not wavered? How? I saw her wonder about herself in this place. Why?

Why not?

This was my fantasy.

The reality is that when I opened my eyes, the house was rocking. Kids were hopping up and down in place as the singer began unleashing Axl Rose’s trademark lamentations over the song’s swelling composition:
Where do we go?
Axl sang.
Where do we go now?

At that age, it was the best question we’d ever heard.

So I stood firm on the plush carpet and delivered to my peers what they wanted. I flexed every muscle I had. Finally, as the song was coming to a close, I saw Lindy dancing by herself, her date now disappeared as if I had driven him off my land, and I urged the band to play one more measure, for good measure.

They understood my desire and we rocked it.

God, yes.

This is Romance. This is Memory. This is the good stuff.

It did not last long.

A
fter the song, I spent a short time as a hero.

People came up to me and shook my hand. They poured me warm shots of vodka and tequila, which I drank. I’d become a mark of the evening, it seemed, a signpost, as in my bravery I had boldly proclaimed into the microphone that every Rolling Rock in that house was now mine and that only the foolish would try to stop me. As the evening progressed, kids asked me what number beer I was on and the answer bloated. I ended up in the second-floor game room, playing pool with a girl I had never seen before and constructing a pyramid of green bottles on the top of a pinball machine. It was well past two a.m. at this point and the lot of handsome young boys at the dance had aged into exhausted-looking businessmen, their ties loose around their necks, their hair skewed. I was legitimately drunk, for the first time in my life, and wondered how I’d ever been satisfied with anything else.

Back downstairs, the band had finally quit playing and the atmosphere was now a jumble of things: a drunkard banging on the drums that had been left there, a girl screaming at her date, and the blare of
a Michael Jackson record. Kids had long ago begun to smoke cigarettes in the house as well, ashing into porcelain vases, and so the upstairs game room had the feel of a bar. Four or five guys played Nintendo on the large projection-style television on the far wall, and Trent Wilkes, a heavyset boy who played offensive tackle, was passed out underneath the pool table. Every once in a while I’d hear someone howl for no reason. It was that kind of night. Things felt great up there.

Then Lindy walked in and everything changed.

She stood in the doorway of the game room and steadied herself.

I had no idea what had passed in her life since I played my song for her, since I’d become a man on the scene, as I’d done all I could to act tough and ignore her. Still, I had the feeling that it hadn’t gone well. My evidence to this effect was that her dress was now covered in stains where liquor had been spilled—Jägermeister, maybe, or some thick and brown beer. A black smudge of mascara beneath her eye now lent her the look of an athlete. She scanned the large room as if she’d forgotten why she’d come up there, and then, finally, she looked at me. She smiled.

I smiled back.

“Hey, you,” she said, and there it was, the end of my loneliest year.

I’ll spare you from all flights of fancy that you can assume took charge of me at that moment: our heartfelt confessions, our long conversations about star-crossed love and epic misunderstandings, how we’d wasted so much time without talking. None of those possibilities came true.

Instead I will only give you the words:

“Hey, Lindy,” I said.

She took a long time to respond.

“Look who it is,” she said, and walked toward me. Her combat boots were untied. She gave me a hug and I felt her falling into me, pressing herself against my chest for balance, and I inhaled a scent I did not recognize as of yet. It was a scent I would later come to know in college: the syrupy breath of a drunken girl, the not yet ashen smell of a freshly smoked cigarette. At the time, however, this scent was a rich mystery, and I enjoyed it.

I helped her gain her balance, and looked into her eyes for the first time in a long time.

Unfortunately, I saw little there.

Lindy was present, undoubtedly, standing right there before me, but nothing in her countenance attested to this fact. Her eyes, instead, scanned my face benignly, as if considering a child’s drawing held up by a magnet on the fridge. She smiled, sure, but I had no idea at what. When I think back about her now, she reminds me of so many other women I would know only briefly in life, only drunkenly, and I suppose this night is the reason I never ventured to know them any longer. Because when I later saw this same look in other women—pitiful, vulnerable, immediately attainable—I knew there would be no future between us.

As for Lindy, she stumbled, caught her balance, and squeezed my arm.

I flexed my biceps like an idiot in love.

“Look at the rock star,” she said.

“Who, me?” I smiled and, behind me, I heard someone say,
“Please.”

I turned around to see the girl I’d been playing pool with rolling her eyes at Lindy and waiting for me to take my turn. This gesture seemed impossibly crude, grossly ignorant, but it was just one of many vulgarities the kids in that room offered forth. The guys on the
sofas were watching us, too, I realized, and also making fun of Lindy. She was a mess, there was no doubt. In hindsight, I suppose I should have taken this as a sign that I should be escorting her to the bathroom, washing her face with a warm cloth, and caring for her. Instead I wanted only to talk with her, to be with her, and I wanted this desperately. As such, I made numerous mistakes.

I said the first thing that came to mind.

“Where’s cool guy?” I asked her. “Where’s Matt?”

Lindy screwed up her face like she didn’t know who I was talking about. She then twisted her body around to scratch some sort of itch on her back and stumbled forward again. She pushed me against the pool table and spilled red juice on my shirt. She held my arms again and we laughed.

“I know you,” she said.

“I know,” I smiled. “I know you, too.”

“No,” she said, and took a low tone. “I mean, I know what you do.”

I felt panicked as to what this could mean. Still, I acted coy about it all. I tried to be flirtatious. “You know what I do?” I said.

Lindy nodded.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Lindy leaned in close to me and lingered there. She stood on her tiptoes to speak, her face right next to mine. I felt her hot breath in my ear.

“Let’s go somewhere,” she whispered.

I was unprepared for this request.

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

Lindy looked at me again, not directly, but in the vicinity in which she thought my face ought to be. She then smiled dumbly, a million miles away, and leaned in to whisper again. “I know you want me,” she said, and I felt her lips on my neck. “Let’s go somewhere.”

How can I explain the utter disappointment?

It wasn’t so much that Lindy was on to me that made her remark so depressing. The secret, after all, was not well kept. I’d done what I could in that year to let her know of my affection. I’d let the word slip out to friends in random conversations about who we would like to bed down, who deserved the attention of our awkward desires. I’d also dressed like she had and trotted the sidewalk in front of her house like some doomed C student in a teenage love film. I’d sent Mrs. Peggy, her mother, home with my kindest regards. And although she didn’t know this, although it’s possible she may not have known
any
of this, I’d also spent countless nights perched in a tree outside her house, watching her shadow play opposite the closed white curtains of her bedroom and praying for her to open them.

All I’m saying is this: if there are vibes in this world, I had sent them.

So, it wasn’t that she’d busted me.

It was instead the obvious way in which she didn’t understand what she’d uncovered.

“Let’s go somewhere,” she’d said, as if it were as simple as that. “I know you want me,” she’d whispered, as if “want” was the same thing as “need.”

I did what I could to stall.

It didn’t go well.

“No, I don’t,” I said.

Lindy put her hands on my stomach. She leaned against me as if she was falling asleep.

“Let’s you and me go,” she said again.

“Lindy,” I told her, “I think you might be drunk.”

This was the wrong thing to say.

Lindy stood up straight and glared at me. She squinted her eyes
as if someone had turned on the lights. She said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Lindy then pushed herself away and wheeled toward the other kids in the room. I saw a purple hickey, the shape of a continent, on her neck. She looked furious and petty in this pose, and a blue vein rose in her forehead. She pointed at me. “This guy,” she told them. “This guy watches me all the time. You can’t trust this motherfucker.”

“Lindy,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

Lindy glared at me, and I wonder, even now, if she felt she’d finally cleared the air between us. If maybe the
real
reason she hadn’t spoken to me in all that time was not only because I’d spilled the beans about her rape, but also because my adoration had become too obvious for her to bear. There’s nothing worse, after all, is there, than having to endure a love that you don’t return? So maybe she thought outing me might do it, might finally cut me off from her completely, might end whatever admiration I’d held for her for so long. She stood before me after she’d said this, panting, and waiting for my defense.

I didn’t get a chance to reply.

In the background, one of the guys sitting on the sofa said, “Go home, you drunk bitch,” and the room filled with laughter.

At this, my heart broke for Lindy—it died for her—for the first of two times that night.

Lindy scowled at these guys, a couple of jocks who had long ago written her off as some skank, I suppose, some girl who deserved nothing but scorn, and she threw her cup across the room at them, splashing red juice on the pool table. This gesture had no effect. The guys just laughed more deeply and turned their attention back to the game.

Lindy stomped out of the room.

“Why do you talk to that slut?” one of the guys asked me.

“Don’t call her that,” I said, and stood there energized, ready to defend her again.

They had no interest in debate.

So, with nothing left to do, I let my mind implode around what had just happened. I’d wanted to run after her, of course, to clear things up. In fact, I’d wanted the whole scene to be played over again. And the truth is, at that moment, when I was sixteen, if I could have done it all over again, I probably would have reshuffled the scene to end with me and Lindy kissing in the backseat of a car, in a bathroom, or maybe wrapped around each other on the very pool table upon which she had pressed me. I wondered angrily why I had let that opportunity slip out of my hands, and couldn’t fathom how another would ever appear. So I threw my pool stick onto the table and went into the bathroom, where I locked the door behind me.

I raged in this place.

I threw around inconsequential things like toilet paper rolls and toothbrushes, yet couldn’t bring myself to do any real damage. I stood for long minutes in front of the mirror, cursing at my pimpled and drunken face. I spat in the sink like a tough guy might do and recognized little about my own reflection. You fucking sissy, I called myself. You fucking loser. Yet I felt no connection to these words as I said them, no connection to anything at all.

Eventually, this anger waned and I grew hopeful.

After all, she
had
spoken to me, had she not? She had expressed some desire, no matter how drunkenly, how clumsily. Surely that must mean something. I began thinking about the number of guys at that party and why, out of all of them, she had chosen me. Even as a teenager I knew how alcohol was said to let loose your most sunken desires. So maybe there was something behind it all to believe in?
This was not outlandish. Alcohol had also given me the confidence to play for her that night, to pick up a stranger’s guitar and let fly. This type of stardom was mere fantasy before this party, before the booze, and so maybe her display in the pool room was similar. Perhaps she
had
been watching, all those days, as I walked the sidewalks of Piney Creek Road. Maybe she, too, had just been waiting for the right moment to speak.

Yes, I thought,
all of that
.

I washed my face in the sink. I rinsed out my mouth. I tidied up the place. And when I emerged from the bathroom, the party was over.

A few stragglers still lounged around on the leather recliners, but the only noise I could hear now came from outside, where I later learned a fistfight had broken out over Matt Hawk making out with somebody else’s date. So I stumbled through the filthy house, full of adrenaline, and ran into a guy I used to play soccer with.

“Have you seen Lindy?” I asked him, and he laughed.

“Last time I saw her,” he said, “she was standing over there, trying to make out with Chris Macaluso.”

“What?” I said. “That’s impossible.”

Chris Macaluso was an average kid. He sat the bench on the basketball team. I remember an anecdote about his parents not letting him drink Cokes. All this to say that he was nice enough, I guess, but a mere afterthought on the high school landscape. So this was no small blow. Surely my friend’s eyes had deceived him. Surely he’d mistaken some other drunken beauty for Lindy. Surely all was not lost.

I did what I could to erase this image from my mind and walked outside to smoke the last crumpled cigarette in the pack I’d bought earlier that night. Here I saw the swimming pool, shimmering and
littered with garbage, and at the far end of the pool, I also saw Lindy. She was sprawled across a lawn chair, passed out cold. Nobody else was around.

I figured this was my chance.

I walked over to her and pulled up a seat.

There, with just the two of us, I was finally allowed to study Lindy’s body.

Her legs, still muscular and lean from her years of running track, from her former joys on Piney Creek Road, from youth, were strewn to the sides of the chair. Her arms were flung over the rests. She looked as if she had been dropped there from a great distance, and her hair covered most of her face. As I scanned her body I noticed that the hem of her dress was lifted well above her knee, exposing her inner thigh, and I saw in this place the tail end of what looked like a scar.

I checked the area around me to make sure I wasn’t being watched, that this wasn’t some dubious setup, and it was not. My only company was the Jack Russell terrier, who was now turning in circles on the edge of the diving board, waiting for a party that wouldn’t return. So I looked back at Lindy’s thigh, the ripe muscle, the soft skin, and, in an act I’m not proud of, I leaned forward and nudged her dress farther to the side with my hand.