Trying the Knot (31 page)

“Those disgusting Feldpausch kids,” she
imagined Portnorth residents saying behind their backs, “a bunch of
dirty cousin fuckers.”

She never understood why, of all the families
in all-the world, she was condemned to be adopted by hers. It was
the luck of the draw, she guessed. But she had to get out town
before their drunkenness and depravity rubbed off on her for good.
Standing in the middle of the street, Alexa was not sure where she
was headed, but she knew where she had been, and she had to get out
of this place, her hometown by any means necessary.

chapter fifteen

The drizzling rain ceased falling as soon as
Nick rang the Dooley’s doorbell. For a few impatient minutes, he
stood on the back porch knocking frantically until discovering the
sliding glass doors were unlocked. He entered the dimly lit house,
and the dry warmth felt comforting, but his clammy clothes stuck to
him like a second skin. Leaning against an old vinyl dining room
chair, he felt achy and tired as if he were coming down with a
cold.

Music played softly in the background, and
Evangelica’s pure voice flooded the room with lush soothing tones.
Nick went to the kitchen, searched the refrigerator, and grabbed a
bottle of Miller Lite. Only then did he wander into the living
room, where Ben sat on a gold velveteen ottoman. Wearing paisley
boxers and a stained wife-beater, Ben’s long black hair streamed
over his face with its usual unkempt lassitude. He ate melting ice
cream straight from the carton, and a mess of glossy black and
white photographs lay scattered at his feet.

Nick sat in a nearby recliner. He scooped up
one of the photos and studied Thad, Chelsea, Ben and Evangelica
straddling separate haystacks.

“What’s this?” Nick asked.

“A few summers ago, we went out and took a
bunch of pictures of us trying to look like J.Crew models,” Ben
explained. “It was Vange’s idea.”

“You guys look so young,” Nick said. He paced
the room while Ben shoveled the medicinal tasting, mint-chocolate
chip ice cream into his mouth.

“What’s wrong,” Ben finally asked, over the
sound of Evangelica’s rousing vocals.

“You’ll never guess what just happened.” Nick
shook his head distraughtly, and he slugged the beer back in four
quick pulls. “I don’t think there’ll be a wedding tomorrow.”

“Huh?” Ben asked with his mouth numb from the
frigid ice cream. Nick retreated to the kitchen to fetch two more
beers, one of which he set next to Ben, and the other he drank in
two less swallows than the prior bottle.

“C’mon, the suspense is killing me. What the
hell happened?”

“Well, it all started last night,” Nick
began, “remember at the bar? I don’t know, you were so intent on
trying to score with Kate’s matron of honor, you probably didn’t
even notice Vange hanging all over me.”

“Sure I did.”

“You know how it is, one thing led to another
and we ended up getting it on in the bushes outside the bar.”

“Oh, really?”

“I swear to God, Benny, it was one of the
best lays of my life, that’s what makes it so freaky that Vange
should do what she did.”

“She’s a freaky chick.”

“Well, you’re closer to her than I am. Why’d
she do it, Ben?” Nick asked genuinely perplexed. “Do you think she
was deliberately trying to punish me?”

“Who knows,” Ben deducted, “she’s not exactly
a sane and rational person.”

Nick rubbed his hands over his face and
through his wet hair as he sighed with regret. “Everything was
going okay, I guess until Kate found out about it at the
hospital.”

“Jesus, how the did that happen?”

“I blamed Thad, but it was my fault, really.
She overheard us talking,” Nick said, and he flopped back on the
recliner. He was still unable to believe how stupid it was for him
to confront Thad at the hospital next door to Kate’s room.

Ben kept eating the melting ice cream, and he
apathetically watched Nick rock back and forth. When Ben felt full,
he set down the carton, lit a half-finished joint and smoked it in
silence.

Nick faced Ben and lamented, “I’ve no idea
what to do.” Ben offered him the roach, which he declined.
Evangelica’s wedding vocals came to a halt, and the music
stopped.

Cracking his knuckles, Ben sympathized,
“That’s a bummer, man.”

Nick threw up his hands despairingly. “Kate’s
gone. She drove off, and I’m afraid I’ve lost her forever.”

“What’s she thinking, running off the night
before her own wedding?”

“I don’t know what’s going through her head,”
Nick answered Ben’s rhetorical question earnestly. “She was acting
so peculiarly, she didn’t seem surprised or anything. Her eyes were
so cold and hard, like glass.”

Ben nodded, slightly stoned.

Nick coughed and took a seat. He slugged Ben
affectionately and said, “What a mess, huh?”

Ben tossed his hair to one side and again
picked up the ice cream. Suffocating silence filled the room and
made Nick ill at ease with the same unnerving feeling he had at the
hospital. He began pacing around the room like an expectant father.
The orange, sunburst clock above the fireplace had stopped at
twelve-thirty, and it bothered Nick that Ben should be so
unaffected by the passing of time, or rather the halting of it. It
was as if the entire house had fizzled and faded, fixated blurred
in a bygone era.

“You know something, Benny,” Nick began, “we
haven’t hung out enough together lately. Remember all those crazy
adventures we used to have? High school seems so long ago, but
really not a lot of time has passed.”

“Not much time at all,” Ben mumbled.

“Hey, remember how we used to go camping,
wake up at the crack of dawn and fish all day? And those fun times
on the boat – just swimming, drinking beer, and roasting hot dogs?”
Nick recalled fondly, for those summer days seemed endless, and
there was always fun to be had back then.

Nick grabbed the beer he had set down earlier
alongside Ben and cracked it open. “I’ll reimburse you, okay? I owe
you a couple. Hey, do you remember those sinkholes we hiked through
our senior year? You got me high out there for the first time, and
Thad with his camera kept taking all those pictures. I wonder if he
still has them. God, that weirdo is still photographing everyone
and everything.”

Nick set down the empty beer bottle, and he
continued rambling, “Who can ever forget all those snow days – how
we’d down tequila shots and then do donuts driving Thad’s mom’s
station wagon in the boat harbor parking lot?”

Ben managed a chuckle, remembering how Thad
used to throw a fit whenever they wrestled him out from behind the
wheel of his mother’s car, which was ordinarily only ever driven at
senior citizen speeds. They would spin out in icy parking lots just
to hear him scream.

“And we had some wild times at the cottage,
didn’t we?”

“Yeah, we did,” Ben admitted fondly.

“We’d get wasted on Bacardi 151 and go skinny
dipping. Those were crazy times. We’d get hammered and listen to
music until we passed out from exhaustion. And that one time, we
were all set to play strip poker, but Vange refused. Oh my god,
even Chelsea agreed to it but no not Vange.”

“She always thought she was fat,” Ben said.
He sat unflinching and motionless through most of Nick’s rambling
reminiscing of their past teenage exploits.

“Why? She has an awesome body.”

“Her mother always made fun of her because
she was always skinnier than Vange,” Ben said. “Shayla used to make
her get on a scale every night.”

“That’s crazy.” Nick sighed, and he thought
Shayla’s perceptions must have been truly warped to think her
daughter was fat. Nick grinned and recalled, “You found out what a
great body she had after I dragged you both out to the cottage and
we begged her to relieve you of the burden of your virginity. She
must’ve taught you everything she knew that night.”

“By the time you finally broke down the door
with pizza, it was cold,” Ben finished for Nick.

“Vange always gave the best head, don’t you
think?” Nick asked, smiling fondly.

Mildly entertained, Ben could imagine the
preacher concluding Evangelica’s eulogy with a wink and the words,
“And she always sucked a mean cock, now didn’t she boys?”

“You became such a wild man afterward.
Christ, you even fucked my sister in my bedroom at my graduation
party with all my relatives upstairs!”

“Nanette wasn’t even Tristana back then,” Ben
recalled. “To think she was ever normal.”

“Normal might be a bit of an overstatement.
She’s always been too beautiful for her own good, and that might be
the equivalency of a death sentence in this town.”

“It’s the same reason no one ever liked
Vange,” Ben added.

“Too beautiful for Portnorth. What sort of
ugly, perverted place persecutes beauty?”

Silently thankful for the remote control, Ben
yawned and snapped on the television without any volume. He was
growing tired of Nick’s pontificating and rehashing days gone by.
He paused at the news, which advertised upcoming ceremonies in
Washington to welcome home more than 8,000 Gulf War Veterans. Only
then would the yellow ribbons be taken down from the trees lining
Main Street. Ben had no patience for Nationalism of any kind. He
was proud to be an American where at least he knew he was free to
turn the channel.

Then watching Madonna gyrate across the
screen, Ben decided she looked more like a corrupt choirboy than a
premier sex goddess. He wondered how exactly she had seduced the
masses into believing she was the second coming of Marilyn Monroe.
Silently, Ben wished the hedonistic media manipulator would return
to her brunette roots, because she most resembled Vange in the
Pepsi ad with the burning crosses. He wondered if maybe Nick had a
point, small towns persecuted the freakishly beautiful among their
midst as a homegrown sacrifice for the benefit of society at large.
Who would want to live in a world where Demi Moore, Nicollette
Sheridan, or Wynona Ryder never left their hometowns?

Nick picked up one of the glossy photos. For
an eternity, he glanced down at Evangelica, sitting on the steps of
an old general store. She looked sweet and angelic. He found
himself shaking with emotion as he watched the rain run down the
picture window. He felt his insides swelling with sadness, but the
tears remained safely under lock and key without a chance for
parole. Nick could not remember the last time he cried, and he
guessed he was so young his father had probably scolded him for
acting like a girl.

Shuffling over the photographs, Ben dragged
his bare feet across the shag carpet. Anxious for Nick to leave, he
switched off the television and removed Evangelica’s wedding
cassette from his tape player. They would need it for the ceremony
tomorrow.

Nick accidentally dropped the picture he was
holding of Vange, and it landed at his feet despite his fumbling
attempt to retrieve it. “Hey, you remember the Christmas Fiesta,
where Vange and I got together for the first time. It was before we
conspired to rob you of your virginity. The party was out of
control. Somehow, she and I ended up together in a bedroom with a
piñata full of condoms.”

“Then we went snowmen bashing,” Ben recalled,
trying to change the subject from Vange’s seemingly insatiable
sexual appetite.

“We smashed half the snowmen in town, except
for Mrs. Norris’s, but only because she tried to shoot our asses,”
Nick said laughing.

“Those were wild times,” Ben said admitted
disdainfully.

“I don’t know what to say, Benny.” Nick
collapsed back on the sofa. The beer was beginning to have an
effect. “I’m not so sure what to do about Kate. How do I make her
see this last fling with Vange doesn’t mean anything?”

“Nothing at all?”

“All I want is to be married to Kate until
death do us part.”

Ben shrugged and said, “Looks like you’re in
quite a jam.”

Nick rose to his feet and appeared lost as if
he were altogether unsure where he was. He knew he was not in
Portnorth anymore, not in spirit. Standing in this time warp of a
house did not help matters. It was disorientating. Nick glanced at
his watch, paced around in a half-circle and loitered before a
macrame hanger that was home to a sad looking spider plant.
Finally, Ben walked to the door, opened it slowly and said, “Good
luck working everything out.”

Flabbergasted, Nick could not believe his
oldest friend in the world was showing him the door during the most
catastrophic crisis of his entire life. Nick thanked Ben for the
beer and apologized for consuming such a large chunk of his
valuable time. Banished from Ben’s dungeon-like house, Nick felt
slightly discarded as he made his way down the desolate street. As
his feet carried him in no particular direction, Nick glanced over
his shoulder and saw Ben had resumed sitting blankly on the
crushed-velvet gold chair next to the ice cream carton.

Lost in his thoughts, Ben attempted to
remember if any of his flings with Evangelica had ever not meant
anything at all. Eventually, he concluded they all meant something
even if it was only great sex followed by interesting conversation.
Post-intercourse was never dull, Vange either babbled incessantly,
cooked up a feast, or bawled in his arms.

Ben sensed an inexplicable anger festering
within, and he felt the need for definitive answers. So, he jumped
to his feet, ambled over the scattered photos and carried the
carton of soupy mush to the kitchen sink.

As he dressed, the phone rang without end,
and it occurred to him he should have made arrangements to meet
with Ginny Norris. Above all, his encounters with Ginny were a
welcomed escape from his everyday life. Her languid disposition
always put him at ease, and her lazy smile of satisfaction would
have certainly made him feel more effectual and competent than
Nick’s endless prattle.