The Vast Fields of Ordinary (6 page)

He lifted his toes and balanced on his heels for a second in a pose that was decidedly aw-shucks, something to match the straight-armed way he had his hands jammed in the pockets of his black skinny jeans.

“Do you need a cigarette?” I asked, confused.

“No, no, man,” he said. “Do
you
need anything?”

“Do
I
need a cigarette?”

He laughed and sauntered over toward me. He pulled his hood back as he came over. He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned in. He had perfect stubble, the kind I could never grow, and huge brown eyes that were wide and a bit wild, like he was up for anything. His hair was a mess of black triangular pieces jutting out in every direction. I couldn’t stop staring at his full upper lip. He looked like the kind of guy who had a banged-up electric guitar and a sticker-coated skateboard and a lucky lighter that he never left home without. He was beautiful.

“Weed, man,” he said. “Do you want. To buy. Some weed?”

“Oh.” I stopped to think. There was a stirring in my pelvis, only partially due to the butterflies in my stomach. I didn’t need any pot, but I definitely wanted to keep talking to him. “I think I’m cool.”

The right side of his mouth stretched out into a sideways grin. It was pure charm, something he probably kept in his back pocket for frequent use.

“You sure?” he asked.

I had thirteen dollars on me. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t.

“I’m sure,” I said.

We stood there for a few seconds, waves of something awkward and unspoken passing between us. He looked up toward the party, then back at me, and he gave a polite but curt nod good-bye.

“See you around, man,” he said.

And he headed on toward the Montanas’, leaving me there on the sidewalk, speechless.

My father had already left for work when I woke up the next day. I found my mother mopping the kitchen floor in her housecoat. The air reeked of bleach and Lysol. Jenny Moore’s parents were on the refrigerator television. They were pleading into the camera, describing what their daughter was wearing when last seen—denim shorts, a pink T-shirt with a cartoon giraffe on it, canary-colored flip-flops. They talked about how sweet and special she was, how much she loved school, Jesus, and her new puppy Oscar. Her mother said something about how it was never too late to do the right thing. I thought of what Fessica had told me the previous night about the stoners supposedly spotting her on the golf course. Of course it wasn’t true. People were messed up.

“Do you need help?” I asked my mom.

“No,” she said without looking up at me. “I have it under control.”

I went back upstairs and put on a Vas Deferens album and stretched out on my bed. I reached over to the drawer in my nightstand and pulled out an envelope that Fairmont had sent me the previous day. It was filled with literature about the university. The campus looked idyllic, like something from a movie about college. The dormitories all had stately names like Ford House and Butler Place. I imagined myself in one of their rooms, autumn simmering outside my window while I read Dostoevsky or Pynchon or some other author I was still too scared to touch. I even inserted a hot roommate into a fantasy, a detail that quickly led to me locking my door, turning up my music, and jerking off. Afterward I lay there on my bed in a sea of Fairmont brochures and booklets and stared up at the ceiling.

“I’m gay,” I said to the ceiling fan as if it didn’t already know. “I’m a fag.”

I thought about what my dad would say when he found out. I’d have to tell him someday. I was sure he’d make some comment about me always having to do things the difficult way and then tell me that I’d better find a way to still have kids, as if that was the only way to save my life from being a complete waste. My mind wandered to Vicki, the woman my father had told me about at the country club.

A poetry class
, I thought.
A fucking poetry class.

I tried to imagine my father sitting at a table with a group of middle-aged adults while they listened to each other read their writing. What did my father write about? Did he write about me and my mother? Was his poetry praising us, or we were the root of some misery that he exorcised through awkward rhymes and bad metaphors?

I went down the hall to my father’s den. I opened the door slowly, nervous about entering a space that was so singularly his. I imagined him in his office across town, looking up from some contract and sensing that someone was trespassing on his domain. The walls were lined with bookshelves that housed leather-bound volumes of classics that most likely had never been opened by anyone in this house. His giant oak desk sat facing the window that overlooked our backyard. This was the one room in the house where he was allowed to smoke his cigars, and the scent hung heavy in the air as if he’d smoked one there that morning before heading to work. I sat in his leather chair and marinated in the residue of his aura for a few moments before going through his drawers.

In the bottom drawer I found a black leather portfolio with “Ned’s Poetry” embossed in gold letters on the front. I sniffed the cover, took in the leather smell. There was a photograph of a woman glued on the first page. It was an eight by ten with a waxy surface, the kind of photograph one gets taken in one of those department store portrait studios that always seem to be located down some depressingly narrow hall with scuffed floors and bright fluorescent lights. The woman in the portrait was black, probably about forty or so. She had a wide mouth and a slim face, and she wore a relaxed smile that made me think she was one of those women who always spoke in a low, controlled tone, a woman who prided herself on being a soothing presence. She wore a purple turtleneck and silver hoop earrings, and her hair came past her shoulders in wet ringlets. The backdrop behind her was a blue and white marble pattern, a weak suggestion of sky. There was a message written under the photograph in purple pen.

I turned the page, read the first poem in the book. It was written in my father’s obsessive miniature handwriting.

I read the lines over and over. I imagined my father standing in the darkness of their bathroom as my mother’s breathing steadied out into sleep. Perhaps he was the same as me, someone with the word
escape
flashing in his mind like a neon sign advertising an opportunity. For a moment I felt sorry for him, but then I flipped back to the picture of Vicki and I was angry all over again. I turned the second page to read the next poem, but there was nothing else. The remaining pages were all blank.

I put the book back in the drawer. I didn’t want to know anything else about my father or Vicki or his poetry. Some small part of me took pleasure in his apparent confusion, in the fact that he’d come to a fork in the road of his life and wanted to somehow take both paths. It just proved what I’d always suspected, that he didn’t know anything more than anyone else.

I sat there slowly spinning in his office chair and making myself dizzy. I thought of the guy I’d seen the previous evening when I was leaving the party, the one with pretty eyes and messy hair and sexy arms. The idea of him set off a whirlpool of desire in my chest. I wanted all of him. I wanted to know his name, his birthday, his favorite color, what he liked to have for breakfast, what his favorite bands were, the size and brand of his favorite pair of jeans. I wondered if everyone felt such urgent desire for people they hardly knew, if mine was actually unremarkable. I wondered if Fessica made a mental diagram that divided me into my tastes and smells and mannerisms and possessions, all the little things visible from the outside that made me who I was.

I went to my room to get ready for work. I kept the Vas Deferens on as I showered and then dressed in the khakis and white collared work shirt that all the Food World employees were forced to wear. I smiled brightly at my reflection, and there was an unexpected moment where I somehow found myself sorta handsome. I thought of the guy I’d seen the previous evening. I wondered what he’d think of me right then, of my retro tie and my shaggy hair and the pair of expensive Italian dress pants I found buried in a bin at a thrift store downtown. Could a boy like that ever like me? Maybe.

It was Saturday, and Saturdays were always busy at Food World. The parking lot was filled with the SUVs and minivans of housewives there to throw down hundreds of dollars on their family’s weekly grocery supply. I parked my car in the employee lot at the side of the building and entered through the fire door out back by the Dumpsters and bread racks. The supervisors went there to smoke throughout the day, and the door was always propped open with a cinder block. The old purple-haired woman who worked in the bakery was out there with her back against the open door, the smoke from her Capri drifting back into the store. I gave her a friendly nod when I entered. She just kept staring off into space.

I waited with the other employees in the break room for my shift to start. It was white-walled with a long boardroom-type table. The sound of the lights humming in their fixtures and the low drone of the pop machine created two dissonant notes, the perfect depressing soundtrack for waiting to clock in for work. Two freshmen were at the end of the table whispering to each other and chuckling dumbly.

I took a seat at the opposite end and flipped through one of the Food World newsletters that came out every month. As usual, it was filled with stupid crap. There were retirement announcements from employees at Food Worlds across the Midwest and breathless updates in the deli menu
(“Banana custard is being discontinued and will be replaced with hot mocha pudding as of July 1. The banana custard will not be returning to the Food World deli menu in the near future. We ask that you please inform all customers of this change so they can plan their summer menus accordingly.”).
There were recipes from Food World employees, mostly the older men and women who spent their semi-retired years bagging groceries on the early-morning shift, and these all seemed to involve raisins, nuts, or okra, sometimes a lethal combination of the three. On the back page there was a produce-themed crossword puzzle.

The door to the break room swung open, and Jessica walked in. Instead of a tie she wore a hot pink rhinestone brooch at the neck of her collared shirt. She pointed at me and let out a sharp burst of laughter before walking over to the pop machine and inserting a crisp dollar.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

She looked over her shoulder as she pressed the diet soda button.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. The smirk on her face suggested otherwise. “Nothing at all.”

My face felt hot. It was times like these that made me wish the desire to inflict pain upon others was an inherent part of my nature, but it wasn’t. I shook my head and went back to the newsletter and stared at an article about the upcoming car wash the Cedarville High cheerleading squad would be holding in the Food World parking lot to raise money for new uniforms.

Jessica took a seat directly across from me. She sipped slowly from her diet soft drink and stared at me. Her hair was a whiter shade of blond than it had been last night, and between this and the thick layer of foundation on her face, she looked especially trashy. The two freshmen at the end of the table stared at her and me like they knew something was about to happen.

“Yeah, I’m not laughing at anything,” she said. “Except for the fact that you spent a good portion of my party getting busy with my sister. What’s up with that, Dade? Is the whole gay thing not working out for you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I gave a quick glance at the freshmen. They were slack-jawed. “I barely talked to your sister last night. I got her some water and helped her to her room.”

“Well, that’s not what she’s telling everyone,” Jessica said. She sat up straighter in her chair, seemingly satisfied with how well her mortification of me was going. “She told me that you fingered her for, like, three hours. That’s gotta be grounds for getting your butt pirate license taken away. Or at least enough to get it suspended.”

I stared at the newsletter, my anger emptying the words and images of all their meaning. I could feel Jessica and the unfamiliar freshmen watching me and waiting for my reaction. I thought about telling her how I spent the day of the party having sex with her best friend’s boyfriend, but I knew that would only make things worse.

“Who did she tell this to?” I finally said.

“Just me so far,” she said. “But I’m sure by the end of the day everyone will know.”

“Why?”