Trying the Knot (2 page)

Despite his limited access to the most vague
details, he reasoned it had to have been an overdose. Vange was not
the kind of person to slit her wrists and watch herself die – she
could not sit still long enough. And her legendary vanity rendered
any sort of disfigurement out of the question, which meant
drowning, jumping or hanging were not an option. He could not
imagine her fashioning a noose and trying the knot.

Rubbing his eyes, Nick hacked up the phlegm
lodged in the back of his throat and regretted having smoked so
many cigarettes. Thad kept handing them to him for lack of anything
to say. Kneeling before the toilet, he could still smell the traces
of her perfume on his bare chest.

In the moonlight, her pallid shoulders shone
luminescent while her sad eyes flickered, ablaze with
determination. Leaning against the tavern, she tossed an empty
plastic cup in the bushes and lit a joint before handing it to him.
“Here, you might as well indulge in a few vices before you’re taken
into captivity.”

He took a hit of the weed. Being with her
seemed more clandestine now that they were practically related.
They had not hooked up since before Kate’s father married Vange’s
mother. Leaning against the tavern, he arched his back and closed
his eyes in anticipation. She rolled herself onto him and snarled
seductively before chewing open the buttons of his shirt. She
littered his chest with kisses until her teeth found his left
nipple. He dropped the joint on the ground where it smoldered,
wafting between them like incense. As she wrapped her heart-shaped
mouth expertly around him, he doubled over in ecstasy, thinking he
was being swallowed up into heaven.

As she stood up, he palmed her breasts and
hiked her short dress over the curves of her full hips. Reaching
between her fleshy thighs, he pressed his wrist against the wetness
he found there. As he cradled her buttocks with his open hands and
lifted her until their mouths met, she wrapped her legs around him.
Half naked and shivering with chilly nighttime desire, they fumbled
to the piss-soaked earth. The sweetness of the fresh cut grass
intermingled with the briny wet soil to concoct an intoxicating
aphrodisiac.

As Nick thrust his way inside her, she
recalled, “I saw your mom in church last week.”

“What?”

“She only noticed me because I was wearing
cashmere,” Vange laughed.

“Could we please leave my mother out of
this?” he asked perturbed, and she clutched his shoulders as he
cupped her full breast in his large hand.

“Then this time make it last forever,” she
whispered, before twisting her tongue into his ear. A master at
seizing the moment, she skillfully maneuvered her way on top
without missing a beat.

As always, they relished every moment
together. Sport fucking in the hinterlands was a recreational
pastime that provided each of them with more of a charge than
almost anything else. In fact, it was about the only thing they
ever really had in common, besides their mutual disdain for team
sports. Since high school graduation, he had evolved from an
all-American jock into a medical student, and she had grown from a
teen tart into a small town tramp. He was college educated, and she
was a beauty school drop out. But at one time in the not-so-distant
past, they had pursued a sexual charge from half the high school
population. Their overblown reputations, his as a stud and hers for
being a slut, were the culminating results of their efforts. Of
course, most of their pursuits had amounted to furtive groping
sessions in the dark, no doubt embellished or minimized by their
respective dates.

Evangelica, despite her rather evangelical
name, considered her reputation her birthright, as her mother was
the local floozy; however, Nick found encouragement in his exploits
from his father, who was inclined to take in frequent dips into the
sullied waters of extra-marital gratification. For fear of bumping
into one another with their respective dates, father and son once
covertly juggled the family cottage between them. Their shared
observation was getting them on the pier was a sign of a sure
thing. Nick heard a rumor once his mother tossed one of his dad’s
mistresses off their docked pontoon boat into the lake. Vange, on
the other hand, only ever heard rumors of her mother being a
home-wrecker or occasionally a kept woman. Although it would never
occur to Vange to compare seduction tips with her own mother, she
had found herself sharing other things, mainly warding off the
unwanted attention of more than one of her mother’s suitors.

Taking his father’s advice, Nick bagged most
of the small town babes while they were in their prime because they
tended to grow haggard too soon after high school graduation. In
the ensuing years, since encountering the real world, most of his
teen-aged conquests had descended into small town domesticity.
Evangelica, of course, was the exception as it was her nature to
break all the rules.

Last night’s hookup with Vange replayed in
his mind on an endless loop as if their drunken tryst in the dirt
had lasted a mini-eternity. Flooded with such feelings of
nostalgia, Nick nearly forgot his periodic one-night stand and
future stepsister-in-law now lay comatose in the hospital.

Charging footsteps sounding on the stairs
startled Nick upright. He cast Vange from his mind and left the
bathroom to greet his two former high school buddies. In truth, he
could count on two hands how many times he had spent with either
Ben or Thad since high school. But as with most milestones in his
life, his wedding was an opportunity to gather around fixtures from
the past in order to measure exactly how far he had come along in
life. Once reunited, it was as if nothing at all had changed in the
past five years.

“What’s the prognosis? She’ll be okay, won’t
she?” he asked as he stepped into a pair of faded corduroys. With
no answer forthcoming, Nick looked bewildered and asked, “How’d she
do it?”

“Pills,” Ben answered. He was too antsy to
see the look of relief flash over Nick’s face.

“So, it was an accident?”

“Not a chance, man. Your mom said she
swallowed enough pills to drop an ox.” Wrinkling his nose, Ben
asked, “Hey, you going to shower, or what?”

“You think I should?”

Ben anxiously widened his dark almond eyes
and tossed his longish black hair about as he shifted from side to
side. The chain on his black leather coat rattled to the beat of
his impatience. The word Substance was etched in faded letters on
the back of the well-worn coat.

“Didn’t you wear that back in high school?”
Nick marveled as he searched for a shirt.

“Hey, what’s wrong with my coat? You gave it
to me!”

“Nothing was wrong with it, but it’s the
Nineties,” Nick said. “Besides, I was ordered to get my ass to the
hospital A-SAP.”

“Chelsea,” Ben said her name, and he twisted
up his warring factions of Irish-Asian American features as if he
had swallowed something foul, “is being a total snatch.”

Half Irish and half Vietnamese, Ben was a
simmering stew of multicultural diversity. The running joke was he
was the melting pot personified. Regarded as a likable enough
eccentric by Portnorth locals, he tried to assimilate by dressing
more like a hick than even fourth generation natives, but his
exotic appearance dashed any hopes he ever had of ever becoming an
authentic, Grade-A local yokel. Although his antiquated leather
jacket helped advance the cause, since it illustrated how out of
touch he had become since moving back to Portnorth.

“How’s Kate holding up?”

“She’s hysterical,” Ben answered, bouncing
off the walls with hyper-kinetic energy.

“Stand still, will you?” Nick commanded. Ben
was pacing, more like an expectant father than someone whose
on-again off-again girlfriend lay in a coma. “You’re making my head
spin.”

“Drink too much?” Thad asked. Underweight and
ambiguously bland, he stood blocking the doorway
uncharacteristically rigid and uncompromising.

“Something like that,” Nick answered. One
look into Thad’s downcast eyes and Nick realized his probable
knowledge of last night’s transgression. One knowing glance
exchanged between the accuser and accused confirmed both their
suspicions. In a split second, Nick knew he was being judged
guilty, and it put him on the defensive.

“I hate when that happens,” Thad said.

“Well, it happens to some of us more than
others,” Nick said pointedly.

Ben was acting so distracted and Thad so
obviously disapproving, Nick opted to shower in order to sort out
his thoughts in solitude. Grabbing a towel from the back of a
chair, he lifted it to his face and inhaled. Undecided, he sniffed
again.

“Trust me, it smells better than you do,” Ben
said.

On his way to the bathroom, Nick stopped
before his brooding one-man jury. He placed a hand on Thad’s arm,
which blocked the doorway, and he said, “Excuse me, it’ll only take
a few minutes.”

“Sure,” Thad said unmoving, and Nick ducked
past him.

Basking in the comfort of the pulsating
water, Nick forgot everything except for his unquenchable thirst.
He swallowed the steamy water as it sprayed into his face and
rinsed the previous night’s rendezvous with Vange down the drain.
He washed away Thad’s knowing condemnation, Kate’s distress,
Chelsea’s caustic impatience, and Ben’s masked nervousness. He
flushed the entire wedding along with his mother’s lofty
expectations and the disappointment that consisted of Kate’s
alcoholic father.

A nagging sense of responsibility tightened
and situated in the back of his neck, and he longed to be as far as
medical school would take him. Squatting in the shower, he let the
water massage his knot of worries. Throughout his misspent youth,
he drove his dirt bike mindlessly over country byways. Wearing only
running shorts he basted in the heat and dust arising from gravel
roads until a filmy sweat glazed over his bronze skin. Inevitably,
he parked the motorbike alongside an isolated bridge and navigated
barefoot down an embankment to jump without hesitation into the
river. The swirling current never failed to exhilarate his
exhausted flesh, and there he caught a pale full of crayfish to
boil later and eat drowned in butter.

Ordinarily, solitary rituals held an almost
religious significance for Nick, mainly because they made him feel
thoroughly self-sufficient. Growing up, he frequently indulged in
such escapism, especially when the confines of Portnorth threatened
to engulf the sprawling parameters of his imagination.

The only other time he ever felt as carefree
was while sunbathing and drifting on the boat without destination,
or else during those long past, snowy Saturday afternoons he
whacked away the hours on the family room floor. With his mom and
dad toiling at the hospital and his sister off to boarding school,
the house was his alone. Spent and half-tuned to “Apocalypse Now”,
he was responsible for only himself, accountable to no one and free
to indulge his mind in whatever lurid fantasies he was capable of
conjuring.

Long ago, while cruising through town with
Ben and Thad, during yet another unproductive quest for an alcohol
buyer, he asked each of them what they would do immediately after
hearing the news of an impending Armageddon. Nick’s initial
response was to hug his loved ones and then “run naked and free
along the beach, until becoming swept up into nothingness.”

He wished it were possible to experience pure
unadulterated freedom. Such notions of escapism seemed ridiculously
juvenile to him now considering his wedding day loomed ahead,
approaching faster and faster, like a speeding train he failed to
dodge quickly enough.

chapter two

Standing near rows of tattered novels and
moldering National Geographics, Ben exclaimed with mock excitement,
“Oh, man, check it out, one for each year of our high school
career.” He snatched up the hardcover book and flipped through the
pages. Laughing without bitterness, he made sarcastic comments
about their former classmates.

“Glad I could never afford one. What about
you, Thad, ever buy a yearbook?”

Mildly bored with the prospect of reminiscing
his less-than-glorious heyday, Thad answered, “Um, yeah, just one.
Senior year – PHS 1986. I ripped it up in a fit of drunken rage. I
did keep snapshots of a deposed Imelda Marcos and Rock Hudson.”

“Hey, they weren’t classmates.”

“Neither was the crew of the Challenger, but
I kept a picture of them blowing to bits.”

“That’s bogus,” Ben said, flipping through
the stiff pages.

“I thought so.”

“Whoa, Nick and Chelsea are practically on
every page, no wonder they were voted Most Likely to Succeed,” said
Most Artistic and Prettiest Eyes. “Hey, I don’t see your name
anywhere. Didn’t you get voted anything for mock elections?”

“Yeah, Most Likely to be Forgotten,” Thad
said.

“Hey, remember that time senior year, we road
tripped to Saginaw to the Fashion Scare Mall to buy school
clothes?” Ben asked, wearing a pair of tattered Girbaud jeans from
the excursion.

Ben tossed the book to an unsuspecting Thad,
which he barely caught. As if by a twisted perversion of fate, it
landed open to Evangelica’s senior picture. She pursed her lips
wryly and looked surprisingly demure but knowingly sophisticated in
black. A lump settled in his throat. They had shared the good
fortune of being misunderstood and overlooked by the same lame
classmates they had the nerve to think they could transcend.
Perhaps in a more populated setting they would not have stood out
for being poseurs in a sea of mullets and feathered-hair.

“Hey, what’re you looking at? Pictures of
Chernobyl?” Ben asked. “What’s so interesting?”

His inquiry met only silence as Thad gazed
transfixed out the bedroom window. The endless expanse of Lake
Huron reflected a cloudless sky and the water appeared more
blue-green than usual. It had been a few months since Thad had
spent any meaningful time with Vange, but it felt much longer; all
the more reason they should have gotten together to stoke the
embers of their friendship.