Nothing Real Volume 1 (4 page)

After school, Nancy sheds Fiona easily by saying she's made plans with Val. Fiona is anti-Val, although it was through Fiona that Nancy and Val first met. Fiona's older sister was Val's classmate, until Val's famous flameout senior year, when Val exited his senior honors history class one day in late March by way of the second-story window. The story went—and Val corroborated this—that he'd gone to school incredibly high, having taken what he'd thought was a half dose of some pretty mellow acid, a local product known affectionately as Charlie Brown. The batch was a bad mix, though, and by the time he'd gotten to school, Val was tripping his ass off. He'd gone out the window not out of some delusion of his own invincibility, as many claimed, but, as he said, “Because it was there.”

“Any port in a storm,” he said. “Or window.”

Nancy parks behind Val's white van. She blesses the gods and goddesses of driving that she has neither stalled nor, incredibly, missed a gear in the whole drive over. Val's building has a peculiar pet-store odor, like cedar chips. It is the smell, Nancy has come to believe, of men who live alone.

Val is sprawled out on the couch when she comes in, bong by his feet, TV tuned to some movie channel.

“It's fucking
Lancaster
,” Val says. “Sit and see some serious Kim Craft.”

It took Nancy a minute to realize he meant
Lancaster
the movie, and not a friend of his lurking somewhere in the apartment.

Val is twenty-two, years from any college degree, a sometime housepainter, reviewer of local bands for the sorts of free newspapers available in piles at the front of coffeehouses and campus bookstores. Theirs isn't a college town, but the next town over hosts a “poet's college,” and so there is something of a scene if you look for it. Val does, but not much further. He doesn't like to go with Nancy into the city, to clubs, or shopping. Val doesn't like posers. Streets full of copycats in black leather or scraggly beards and skinny jeans. Hipsters. Metalheads. Val likes to think himself original. His scuzzy T-shirts just scuzzy, no slogans, no
fuck the rich.
His hair is a short jewfro, his cheekbones too wide for the chin, teeth very white, a flash of handsomeness. When they'd first met six months before, Val had been lanky, impossibly tall, nearly six five, and catlike in his movements, so it seemed athleticism might have been yet another of his squandered talents, but now that pantherish physique has broadened, the result of too much daily beer, a six-pack or more, and Val has acquired a bloatedness that reminds Nancy how soon it will all be over, how she'll leave sometime in August, for Boulder, and how she'll never come back. Once she's gone she can imagine herself springing back into shape—the body elastic. She will eat again then, grow back her muscle.

“Come give my feet a rub,” he says, and she sits down next to him on the couch, allowing him to place his monstrous size thirteens in her tiny lap, his white athletic socks dark and worn at the toe. His feet are heavy with disdain and boredom. He purrs like a kitten as they watch
Kim Craft writhe on impossibly silken sheets. “My God,” Nancy says. “She looks like my mom.” Her mother has that beauty-queen face, those old-school movie-star hips.

“That, chickiebabe, is no one's mom,” Val says, and Nancy wonders if she's seeing the signs of erection as Val rolls away from her, and if so why is he withholding?

“Want a beer?” he asks, and she shakes her head. He never says her name anymore, or when he does, the sound is harsh, alarming. He would love her if she were the kind of girl who could put her fear into words.
Say my name like you love me.

She imagines not being there, being anywhere else. Her house, her mom in the kitchen, putting away groceries, still in her tennis whites, the phone up against her ear, her voice terse, trying to be pleasant, speaking to her own mother. She could be in her room, radio on, waiting to hear something new, and she could write down the name of the song, tell Val, make a discovery, tell him something about her he'd never find out on his own.

Or she could be at Fiona's house, and Fiona's mom would be out, and maybe they'd go outside and smoke a couple of cigarettes, because Fiona would have a pack of Marlboros, and they could sit on the patio, and wish it were warm enough to lie out, start working the tan. She could leave and still go over to Fiona's, but she knows she won't. There is the hill on Villard she's never made it up without stalling, or maybe at all; the twisty-turny road Fiona lives on; the driveway, too steep to get out of. Getting home from Val's is a straight shot with one light on Wharburton on flat road. Her life is ruled by a gearshift. But that isn't
all. She is there because she is waiting. She is waiting for Val's eyes to settle on a color, to darken into a green or brown, to settle on her for once. She is waiting for him to see her.

She doesn't really know how to drive, just fakes it. She doesn't know how to make her boyfriend notice she's alive, or what it is to have a real boyfriend, because what is Val? He doesn't come to her house for dinner. Has never shaken her father's hand. Her father, if he knew, would say it would be good for her to get away from that “wastrel.” She can imagine him using that word. But Val isn't wasting away exactly, more like getting bigger, bloating her brain while she is shrinking. Is she trying to prove something? That she can change herself, narrow herself down to some essence of Nancyness that will finally know whether to stay or leave? Who is the essential Nancy, she wonders, and can she drive? If she were her real self, could Val, genius that he is, love her? She is finding her real self within her body, the way it is with those fake fossils you'd get in gift bags at birthday parties when you were six, and you'd chip away at the thing, and then finally something definite appeared, a leaf shape, spiral shell, the outline of an organism.

The sofa Val lies on is navy blue, or was, but it is faded now to almost gray in the parts they sit on, his-and-her gray butt patches. His TV is antique, bulky, and small, borrowed from the guy downstairs and never given back. The kitchen is just one counter at the end of the living room with a few squares of pinkish linoleum, a sink that is always
full, and a fridge, narrower than the usual. He calls it a beer cooler. The whole place smells like bong water, even the spider plant off in the corner he waters with the spent water, and yet it grows surprisingly lush. In the bedroom, there's an electric guitar he could play if he wanted to. He taught himself to play back at sixteen, and at seventeen sometimes stepped in to do a set here and there with a local band, got good enough so they asked him to take over bass, but Val said no and then quit altogether.

“I can't watch this shit anymore,” Val says, and switches the television off. The room seems suddenly dark. Outside the one window, a squirrel climbs an unblooming tree. Spring seems to recede, the sky a stone gray like midwinter. Nancy cannot imagine a green world. The simplicity of it. Of seeing something, anything beautiful.

“Let's get something to eat,” Val says. He leans his elbows onto his knees in a funny Val posture, his back curved, his belly bunching up over the low-slung jeans, shameless. “Did I tell you Davy paid me an extra hundred for that job on Hillside? Because of all the hassle that lady gave? Too blue, not enough blue.” Val mimicked the woman, pursing his lips, talking in a falsetto. His nose is perfect, long, and straight. His height, combined with the perfect teeth, once gave Val an aura of overwhelming attractiveness. He had godlike attributes. At first it was something to live up to, but then he got like this—inattentive, overweight, the crazy, kinky hair. He is a dazzling failure. But she is overwhelmed by her own dullness, her thick tongue, the clumsiness she feels in his apartment. It must be something about him, a negative energy, though she doesn't go in for that new age shit. The
Bubblemen had measured something in him, but could they measure what he'd lost, what he could squander?

“Okay,” Nancy agrees. Val hasn't asked her to go anywhere in a week, maybe more. They've just been sitting around his place. All weekend. Then Tuesday night. Now, again. “Where, Larry's?” It's Val's hangout, a beer-and-burger place Val had once worked at. They'd been regulars there in that first rush of shared ecstasy, when they'd both thought he'd change, and he enrolled in the community college, and she'd cut her hair into the miraculously spiky bob she had now. Best haircut ever, better now she is so thin, her body a stem and the hair yellow, dandelionish.

“No, the diner, maybe,” he says, which is surprising because they don't sell beer. “I need a cup of coffee.” He stretches his arms over his head and glances her way, looking her up and down, taking in the black lace-up boots, black jeans with rolled cuffs, the blond bangs and the poufy, stringy blond mess on top. She knows she looks good, cheekbones sharp, eyes huge.

“You look like you could use some chow, chickiebabe. Don't they feed you at home?”

She shrugs. “I like being this size.”

“No size?” he says. “You got this skinny ass, but you used to be like this.” He makes a crude gesture, as if he were grabbing a fat ass, thrusting himself forward. She narrows her eyes and crosses her arms across her chest. She can feel her own chest bone. He finds it amusing. Her former ass, their former fucking.

“Is that why you don't want to do it anymore?” she says. “I'm too
skinny?”

“It's not like you're exactly jumping my bones.” He looks down, pokes at his own flab. “Let's just go,” he says, and gets up and grabs his army jacket from a hook by the door. She admires him for that, for cutting off the conversation, for preserving something, whether out of fear or pride. All she can do is prod and retreat, skulk and ambush.

He drives her car, like always, and his size makes it feel toylike. Her toy car, and she, his doll girl. Only Val seems large enough to be real. Or maybe the opposite is true. He is a giant, an ogre, and she, the damsel, an outline of a girl waiting to be filled in by some other guy, her rescuer. She begins to wonder who he might be.

As soon as they enter the metallic atmosphere of the diner, she knows it is going to be awful. There are cases filled with bowls of Jell-O, a bright green, a plum color, and pastries under a glass cover, dry and crumb covered. She skips most meals, but usually eats dinner: real food her mother makes—steaks, burgers, but no starch. She has lost her taste for either sweets or fries. Sugar coats her teeth, and fries taste to her like baby food.

They are seated in a red booth by the window, where she can see the street, the bookstore, a girl holding her mother's hand, wearing a red hat with a pom-pom. The sight makes Nancy's eyes ache, and her legs feel light, a fever beginning with her vision. There is nothing adorable anymore, nothing as sweet as a pom-pom made of yarn.

Val orders a chef salad, dressing on the side. It is a flamboyant gesture, but she isn't sure what it signifies. She orders a grilled cheese, which she knows she won't eat. It's an easy thing to leave on the plate,
cheese hardening, butter quickly losing its enticing heat.

Val gazes out the window. He looks reflective, but also seems to her to be playing the part of someone who reflects, who struggles, who tries to improve and not shatter. Val is her ghostman. She could walk through him, stab him with her knife, and nothing. Most of his salad is gone, and the dressing scarcely touched. “Maybe I can finish ten credits by end of summer. Maybe more. I've got the six now, and then over the summer I could take another six, get up to twelve.”

“You've been working?” Nancy assumed the opposite—that with the fat belly, the beer in the afternoon, he'd dropped whatever classes he was taking. But no, this is the change, the secret.

“I've been thinking if I got the twelve credits, it'd make sense to make a move.” He looks at her intently. The muscles of his cheek twitch. Maybe he isn't as bloated as he'd been on Tuesday. Maybe he hadn't actually been drinking. Was there a bottle by the couch? He hadn't smelled of it. Would two, three days make a difference?

“Where to?” She tries to sound casual.

He stares at her hard, with his no-color eyes. There is a hint of emotion there, a shade of darkness, but it seems forced—he is that clever. He is an actor; he shades himself in. “Are you being dense or do you not want me to come?”

His lips part like he's been punched. She wants to reach out to him, kiss him, tell him no, how could he say that, playing her part. His coming to Boulder is everything she once wanted, even if she knows by now that being with Val is like being in a film of being with Val. That sometimes he steps out of the frame, and into some other place,
which is the real world that she is now ill-equipped to enter.

She cannot let him come with her to Boulder.

Her empty stomach is filled with a substance like lead, and she can't move. There is a recoiling from within her that she can't mask with a kind word. It is occupying her fully, a snake of hatred. She thinks of herself this way, somnolent as the snake, then quick with venom. One day, she will unfold herself.

“My father,” she finally says. “Would never go for it.” It is a spellbreaker, the word
father
, the enlistment of the forgotten. He can't be Val and listen to her say such things.

Only she underestimates him, either his shrewdness or his earnest desire for her to witness his most grandiose display: his transformation into the sort of being other people could never hope to become. Val could do it, Nancy thinks bitterly, in an hour or so, and suddenly he'd become wise and prudent, healthful and disciplined. He could be all those things, as though being a person of excellence were as simple as filling in the proper bubble. It is this chameleon ease she loathes. She gets up every morning and it is all she can do to find something she can allow herself to eat.

“He'd get used to it. Your dad's not such a hard-ass. Anyway, you could stay in the dorm first year, and I'd get my own place, and he couldn't say anything about it.”