Snark and Stage Fright (9 page)

As we climbed the whitewashed stairs hand in hand, I said, “I have a confession to make. You remember last spring, when you caught me at your house on that historic homes tour my mom made me go on with her? Well, I wanted to see your room so much that I tried to sneak up there. I’d have made it all the way, too, if you hadn’t come in.”

He stood motionless long enough for me to worry, then let out a bark of a laugh.

“Ha! I suspected as much when I found you in the foyer. But why?” He resumed the climb, then opened the door to his summer room and waved me in with a flourish. “What did you think you would find in my room?”

“The secret to who you are,” I answered as if that were the most obvious answer in the history of questions. He led me to the bed, which was, like everything else in the room, white and wooden and vaguely nautical, with a light quilt of various squares in stripes and plaids. Unlike his cousin Megan’s room back at the Glass Boat, this one looked like it belonged to someone. To Michael. There were books lined up neatly on the low white shelves—Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, Dave Egger’s first book, a collection of
Spiderman
comics bound in three volumes,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
—and a gray polo shirt draped over a cane-backed chair. There were photos and ticket stubs from Red Sox games tacked to a small bulletin board with navy blue wood trim.

He sat down next to me and began nuzzling the back of my neck, murmuring, “And have you found the secret yet?”

“Not yet. But I’ve learned some new things on this trip. Like … you play poker … go to drag bars … sleep with supermodels … you’re a total rock star.”

He frowned for a second and then ran a hand through his hair. “I thought we were past that,” he said.

“We are,” I assured him. “Just a little nervous.”

“Don’t be,” he said, distracting me by running a smooth, warm hand up my spine beneath my shirt.

I was determined to be past fear, past jealousy, past everything, so I nodded and ran a hand along his back underneath his shirt and felt the muscles and bones glide past my fingertips. He wriggled out of his shirt and I gasped a little at the sight of the hard planes of his chest even though I’d seen them before. And then he was easing my own T-shirt over my head and soon we were kissing each other everywhere with a hunger and ferocity that frightened me. I didn’t know I could feel these things. They seemed dangerous.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he invited, pulling back the quilt and top sheet, and I wriggled out of my shorts and slid between the sheets with my heart hammering away in my chest. He wriggled out of his jeans and joined me, nestled in the sheets and wearing only my underwear. I was suddenly petrified, even as he was kissing my neck and shoulder and chest in ways that made my toes curl up.

This is real,
I thought,
this is really going to happen
. Was I ready to be this close to someone, even to him? Because you can’t get much closer than to have someone putting a part of them inside a part of you. It would make everything different. How would I ever look at him afterward? How could we just sit across from each other at a table or on the couch in one of our houses, knowing what we had done to each other? Did I know him well enough to do that? Could anyone know anyone enough to do that with them? I realized that I wasn’t even sure what his favorite color was. I’d bet it was blue, but could I really get naked and invite another person into my person without knowing something that basic about them?

To get a grip on myself, I focused on the stuff in his room, the stuff that was his, that revealed who he was and that meant something to him and my eyes landed on a photo of him and Catalina among those tacked to the small bulletin board over a small desk. They were both impossibly tanned and beautiful and smiling. They looked very happy. I wondered where they were when it was taken, what they were doing, and why he had kept the photo if he didn’t really care for her much. But then Michael gave me a lingering kiss on the lips, said, “I’ll be right back,” and shuffled over to a chest of drawers under the window as I sat there blinking and overwhelmed.

I tried to forget about the photo and instead thought about what it would feel like when we did it. Would it hurt? I’d heard it did, but Tori said it didn’t really—but she also said the first time isn’t that great, not like in the movies where skyrockets fly overhead and the character looks like they’ve just had the secret to life whispered in their ear. And because apparently my brain would not take an hour off and leave my body in charge for once, I recalled what my dad, the Victorian lit scholar, had told me once about 19
^th
-century advice to women on their wedding nights:
Lie back and think of the Empire
. There was nothing even remotely reassuring about this thought. Or having my parents in my head as I was about to make love for the first time in my life and pondering whether I was ready to have another person enter my person, both literally and metaphorically. Especially since my dad, if he knew what I was about to do, would probably be unable to look me in the eye ever again.

I closed my eyes and gripped the pillow to my chest. It smelled like Michael’s hair and that made me feel a little better.

Michael returned and slipped under the sheets and thin woven blanket with me. His kisses felt as good and reassuring as the feel of his naked, strong legs beneath the sheets as they twined around mine felt new and slightly alarming. We continued to kiss as he got my bra off with impressive dexterity; for a few glorious moments I managed to stop thinking about anything else and felt like I was swimming in a sea of sensations and tangled arms and legs. Then he slid off to the side of the bed and slipped off his boxer shorts; on his return I felt the shock of his full nakedness beside me. My heart caught in my throat.

I have only seen one penis in real life before, when I was about six. My family was living in New Jersey then and it belonged to my friend Tommy. I had opened the door to the bathroom at our house when he was using it and I’d caught sight of him standing up to pee; his struck me as a truly alarming appendage that was unleashed and streaming pee. I’d closed the door before he’d noticed me. I remember feeling sort of sorry for him.

So much for penis envy.

Now, as I couldn’t help but notice Michael’s as we were both tugging at my panties, every nerve in my body went on high alarm. As I kicked my underwear free from my ankles, I couldn’t help but remember descriptions of male body parts from the terrible romance novels my mother gets from the library. Tori and Cassie and I used to read the sex parts just so we could laugh at the descriptions of penises. Which meant that as Michael was sliding on top of me and doing amazing things to my neck with his mouth, my traitorous brain was recalling phrases like “love lance” (Cassie’s favorite term), “throbbing manhood” (Tori’s), and my personal fave, the “pulsing pillar.” The memory of this last euphemism made me almost choke on a giggle-gasp, so I turned my head to the side and buried my face in a very plush pillow to muffle it.

I swear my brain is out to get me sometimes.

Michael was off the bed and looking down at me with great concern, saying, “Georgie, are you all right?” And then a terrible shadow crossed his face and he said, “Oh. You’re laughing.”

“No!” I cried, sitting up and touching his back, which seemed to be about as stiff and lifeless as a plank now. He pulled away from my touch and yanked his plaid boxers back on and I could see that something else was suddenly pretty lifeless and no longer stiff as well. I felt my heart drop like a stone into my stomach. “I wasn’t … I’m sorry. I’m just … really nervous.”

“Why? What is it you are afraid of?”

“I don’t know!” I wailed. “I’m sure Catalina managed to get through this without laughing,” which was, of course, exactly the wrong thing to say, almost as merciless and self-annihilating as laughing at your boyfriend’s penis.

“‘Get through this’?” he repeated through clenched teeth. He still wasn’t looking at me, but I could see in the fading twilight that his face was dark and tormented. And I had done that to him. I couldn’t have ruined our Big Night Together any more effectively if I had taken a flamethrower to the bed.

I pulled my knees up to my chin and tried to explain, even as I knew I never could, “I was so worried about messing everything up that I messed everything up … I do that. I just keep doing that.”

“Yes, you do. A lot.”

I know I had just insulted his manhood—albeit accidentally—but those words struck me like the blade of an ax.

“Seeing that didn’t exactly put me at ease,” I snapped, pointing vaguely at the photo on the bulletin board. “I’m sorry I don’t have the vast experience she has. Which she happily shared with you, probably the night that picture was taken.”

He stood up and pulled his T-shirt over his head with such speed and ferocity I thought he’d snap his neck.

“Oh, don’t start with that again,” he said, tone sharp as a whip. “You obviously can’t deal with having a more mature relationship than teasing the crap out of each other so I need to just accept that and move on.”

“I don’t want to move on! Not without you! I—” I had to stop because there was a big hard glob of something lodged in my throat and no words could get past it. Every part of my body had turned to lead, heavy and ugly, burdensome and useless. I almost wished it would get so weighty it would crash through the bed, then the floor, and just keep dropping through the earth until I hit magma below the surface.

He sat down on the bed with his back to me and said, “This shouldn’t be this hard. This just isn’t working out. Maybe it’s just not meant to be.”

He shook his head, which then drooped over his shoulders for a moment like a wilted daisy. I had done that to him. I had hurt him because I was afraid that having sex would ruin everything. And so I went and ruined everything. Upon my demise, the coroner’s report will read “Death by Irony.”

“Do you believe that?” I choked out past the glob.

“I don’t know, George. But I do know I don’t want to do
this
anymore.”

I struggled to get my underwear back on while still under the sheets, though I don’t know why I was being so modest or shy since he had seen it all moments ago and wasn’t even looking at me anyway. I guess I was determined to hold on to whatever little piece of dignity remained, so I stood up and pulled on my shorts and shirt. I hovered by the rumpled bed for a moment, but he still wouldn’t look at me.

“Okay,” was all I could think of to say.

“Let’s just go back to Longbourne tomorrow and we can take it from there,” he said quietly. “We’ll see how we feel in a few days.”

“Okay,” I said again and clasped my sandals to my chest as I walked blindly to the door. There, I turned and, wiping the back of my hand across my watery eyes, I said, “I just want you to know … I wasn’t laughing at you. I would never laugh at
you
… I was laughing at myself. At how stupid I am.”

The ghost of a smirk crossed his face for a moment and he conceded, “You’re not stupid. You’re just … really complicated.” Even in his pain and disappointment he could be dignified and generous. Which made me feel even more like hurling myself somehow out the little porthole-shaped window on the far wall.

We stood there looking at each other for a while and every muscle in my body wanted to reach out to him. I wanted to run to him and throw myself into his arms and make him see that I wasn’t some neurotic, frigid, castrating monster but a confused girl who nonetheless loves him. But he sat so still, so closed in on himself with his shoulders bowed forward like the wings on a gargoyle on some Gothic church in Paris that I just kept standing there until he finally said, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and I could do nothing but nod and walk away.

I went into my room, sat on the bed, and willed myself to not feel anything for as long as I could. I listened to my heart beating and felt like my lungs had been doused with acid and left to bleed inside. I heard Michael go downstairs moments later and then the screen door slammed; for a second I wondered if he had called Catalina, deciding that she was infinitely easier to be with than I am, but I knew he would never do anything like that. He’s too good a person. He was probably going for a run.

I know that about him
, I realized.
I know him
. Maybe I don’t know his favorite color for certain, but I know the important things about him, like what he does when he’s upset. And I should have known that I could have, and should have, trusted him.

But now it was too late for that and I had no one to blame but myself for losing him.

Sobbing, I grabbed my phone and hit Tori’s number, but she didn’t answer. Once again, she was probably snuggled up somewhere in the arms of Trey, her boyfriend, as happy and un-conflicted as a person can be. I left her a croaky three-word message—“I blew it”—and then went to the bathroom to grab a roll of toilet paper to take to bed with me because I was pretty sure I was going to cry all night.

And I did. I didn’t even try to draw anything, or to call Tori again. I just cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. And then I simply lay there, useless and gross as a crumpled Kleenex in a trash can. There was nothing else to do.

It was all over.

And it was all my fault.

8 
Home is Where the Heartache is

It was a long and quiet ride back to Longbourne the next morning. I’d offered to take a bus back, but Michael had just looked at me like I had told him I was going to crawl back to Western Mass. on my hands and knees in some kind of sick effort to make him feel sorry for me. Before we left the Cape, I insisted on going up to the Glass Boat one last time to say goodbye and thank you to all of Michael’s relatives. Painful as it was, there was no way that I was going to wuss out on common courtesy and besides, I actually liked many of them.

We barely spoke during the whole two-and-a-half-hour ride. No one can do vaguely accusatory silence like Michael. On the ride to the Cape, we’d played “Name That Tune” with the radio on scan and after stopping at a Cumberland Farms for Nantucket Nectars’ Half-and-Half and red licorice, I’d read him the headlines from a bunch of local papers we had collected. His favorite headline? “Uxbridge Boy, 9, Stung By Bee.” “Manhunt Formed,” he’d added, and I had laughed so hard I’d choked on my half lemonade-half iced tea. “Can’t take you anywhere,” he’d teased. Now, on the way home, when I tried to make a joke about how clean his car always was, saying, “Your dad could perform surgery in here,” he just grimaced. I considered explaining that I meant this as a compliment—but I realized that I was pretty sick of having to explain myself to him. So instead I spent the rest of the ride wondering how I’d go back in to work for his dad as a temporary receptionist, and if I even could or should. Maybe Michael’s dumping me meant I was fired. But that didn’t sound like something Dr. Endicott would do, and I didn’t want to let him down. I sank deep into the seat as I felt the new sharp pang in my stomach that came with realizing that I would miss Michael’s parents, too.