At first, I think the knocking must be happening to someone else’s door, like Manny down the hall, whose mother, Karen, often staggers in at strange hours, bearing cans of Coors Light and Lost DVDs, which they proceed to watch back to back while drinking beer and eating microwaved popcorn. Karen has a loud, insistent knock, because Manny is usually on the verge of passing out by the time she gets off her shift at Village Inn and arrives by cab in front of the building. She’s the most common last customer at the liquor store next door, showing up just as they’re locking the door and tugging down the grate. Through my window I can hear her wheedle and whine and offer them extra money, money she’s spent all night earning, pulling moist bills from malt cups and from under the leftovers of grilled cheese. I know this part because sometimes Karen cries about it to Manny, that she has to work such a late shift, that she has to deal with mean college kids and drunk clubbers. Manny comforts his mother, heating up a cup of coffee in the microwave to get himself ready to drink again. Manny and his mother are possibly the loudest people in the building.
I frown, looking up from my sketchbook. Only Mikey and Leonard, once, to unplug the sink, have come to my room. I’ve been sitting in just a T-shirt and underwear because the room is so hot, even with the fan I bought at the Goodwill. I pull on my overalls.
My heart quickens when I open the door and see it’s Riley, leaning against the doorframe, the darkness of the hallway spreading out behind him. He’s swinging a plastic bag in one hand.
“That’s so cute,” he says, “the way your face gets all pink around me.”
“What are you doing here?” I don’t even try to hide the pissed in my voice, though I’m not sure if I’m pissed at him for noticing and saying something rude or pissed at myself for getting all blushy around him.
“I see you wear short sleeves at home,” he continues, like I’ve said nothing. “You going to invite me in?” He’s been quiet at work the past few days, strangely calm.
I sniff the air around him, to stall. “Are you drunk?”
“I brought you a present.” He dangles the bag from a finger.
My mouth’s gone dry. His eyes are shining and he looks happy. I think, Everything will be easier if you don’t come into the room. Because now I’m sinking into his happy eyes, and remembering how kind he was the other day when it rained, and how nice it felt to talk to him on the porch, the warmth of his hand in mine.
But gently, he eases past me, tossing the plastic bag on the rumpled easy chair.
“You always hang out in the dark, Strange Girl?” He tries the lamp, but it just says click, click.
“I ran out of lightbulbs and my job doesn’t pay me enough to buy more,” I say grumpily. “The streetlight, and the light from the store over there, that works.”
He flops on the futon, kicking off his boots, and links his hands behind his head.
“Open your presents.” He points to the easy chair, his eyes glinting. “Right there.” Instead, I throw the bag at him. He laughs, rummaging inside. He holds up a faded green T-shirt with M*A*S*H on the front. “I know how you kids like the irony, and all.” He lays the shirt on the bed and puts the bag aside.
“Anyway, I was drinking at the Tap Room and I dropped my keys on the way home, I think. I’m locked out of my house. Can’t break a window, they’re fucking expensive.” He pauses. “I looked everywhere on the damn street, but it’s just so fucking dark out. Can’t see so well in the dark.”
He shifts onto his side.
I kneel down, spread out the T-shirt. “It’s too small,” I lie.
“Bullshit,” he says. “You love it and it’ll fit perfectly. I’ve had a lot of time to ponder your size, staring at your back four days a week for weeks on end.”
He pauses. “We aren’t so different, you know. I got you something else.”
There are other shirts in the bag and beneath them, I feel the flat edges of a card. In the half-light, I hold the postcard close to my face. A redheaded woman with patches of pink clouding her cheeks. Her face is half hidden in shadow, one enormous dark eye looking directly at me. Wife of the Artist, 1634.
“I saw you looking at all those books in the library. A while ago. I found this card in a junk shop way up on Twenty-Second. Thought you two had the same eyes. Kind of stormy. Sad.”
There is a stream of streetlight crossing his cheek. He saw me at the library? My stomach tightens. “What…what were you doing at the library? Why didn’t you say hi?”
“I read, you know. And there you were, looking at some big old art books, like nothing else mattered. You looked happy.”
He places a finger on my leg, making little circles on the denim. Circle, circle, traveling up, up, until his finger reaches the shoulder of my overalls. I stop breathing.
I bite the inside of my cheek, glad for the grayish dark, the streetlight that allows just enough for me to see him.
Louisa said no one would love us in a normal way, but I’m still a person, and I’m aching to be touched.
“You must have a million stories inside you,” he says softly.
He sits up. Fine lines spackle the corners of his eyes. I can smell the remnants of hard alcohol—bourbon?—something sharp and deep coating his breath. The electrical wire is coursing through my legs, through my stomach.
He says, “I’m a walking cliché,” and unhooks the shoulders of my overalls, the straps falling with a soft clank. He takes up my arms, turns them over and over, his fingers running up and down the rivers and gulleys of my skin. I’m sinking, and I’m not trying to stay afloat, because I do, I do want to go all the way under.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, grazing my neck with his lips. “We get each other, don’t we?”
He pushes me back on the futon, pulling my overalls off easily, moving his hands down my thighs, exposing the ladderlike lines there. He rubs his thumbs across them like he’s testing guitar strings, easily and without apprehension.
This is happening, and I’m letting it. It’s one more thing that’s falling away, one more thing on Casper’s list, and soon, everything about Casper will disappear. I cover my face with my hands and listen to my breath ricochet against my palms.
And then he moves his hands higher, lighting on my stomach outside my T-shirt for a brief second, then slipping under so suddenly my breath sharpens. His thumbs brush my chest.
I pull his face down with force, greedy for the feel of his mouth on mine. I don’t mind the taste of his mouth, the smell and lingering heat from cigarettes in his hair, on his skin. I see blue and tangerine on the insides of my eyelids. His hands knead my waist, travel down my legs, the insides of my thighs. I barely feel his weight, he feels light, he fits somehow with the makeup of my bones. I let my hands wander over his pants, a few fingers tucking experimentally between the waistband and his skin. But he pushes my hand away, nuzzles his face against my neck, slides his fingers down my boxers, between my legs, and inside me.
I say No, no, and Riley pulls back, saying, You want me to stop, and I say No, no, taking big gulping breaths, because I don’t want him to stop but I do, and everything gets all tangled up inside me then. When I try to unbutton his pants, he stops me, No, just this, let me do this, and I understand then that he’s way drunk, too drunk, but the insides of my eyelids are on fire, bursting into black and red, and I can’t stop what’s happening to me. He laughs softly into my neck as I shudder. Far down the hall, we both hear Kate shout, “Jack! Jack!”
—
In the morning, I wake to him tracing the faces of the people in my sketchbook. He doesn’t say anything about them, though, just smiles at me, a smile that shoots through my blood and makes me ache. He rolls on top of me, says, “I was drunk last night, but I’m not now,” and I’m shy at first because we are in the full light, no more dark, all of me is open and exposed, but that falls away in time.
We rise and dress without speaking. My body feels a blur, still, my brain is fuzzy from confusion. Like a couple, we buy coffee at a bustling, tidy, fern-filled café on Congress Street, so unlike True Grit with its grubby walls and fingerprint-laced pastry case. Like a boyfriend, he buys me a chocolate coffee concoction with whipped cream and sprinkles.
I have never had a boyfriend. I had those boys in garages, but that wasn’t anything. I’m almost eighteen, and a boy has never bought me anything chocolaty until now.
We trace the sidewalks from his house to Hotel Congress, where the Tap Room Bar is, looking for his keys. The hotel lobby is a gleaming, sunlit place with leathery couches and a Western, punkish feel. An enormous painting of a beautiful, creamy blonde in denim shorts, flicking a whip, adorns a whole wall. He shows me the main room of Club Congress off the lobby, the small, squat black stage with loamy red curtains, the long, old-fashioned bar at the back of the room. He stares at the stage for a minute and murmurs, “We opened for John Doe here once,” but I don’t know who that is. He seems in his own world and I have to remind him that we have to be at work soon.
Off the club is the door to the Tap Room and through the window I see a plain, empty bar with high stools, a jukebox, homey cowboy art high on the old-timey papered walls, and simple, worn red booths.
We find his keys glinting in the early-morning sun, in the simplest of places: at the base of a stop sign. He has a keychain that says ICELAND.
“The band, we stopped there, once, on a layover. It was the prettiest place I’ve seen,” he says. “You ever travel?”
Iceland. He’s been to Iceland. I wonder what Ellis would say to him about that. Paris, London, Iceland, wherever.
“Here,” I answer. “I’ve traveled here.”
That makes him smile.
On the way to work, he smokes and offers me drags, which I take without even thinking. We separate, as usual, a block away, me heading in first, smiling cautiously at Linus. I empty the urns from last night and give them a quick rinse in the washer, returning them to the front counter. The screen door bangs, followed by Riley’s easy “Hello” as he shuffles to the telephone and listens to messages from last night, writing things down for Julie. He fires up the grill, dumps a vat of home fries on it, squirts butter and oil over them, and messes them around with the spatula. He makes himself an espresso, brings me a cup of coffee, asks Linus something about a loom.
I tie an apron around myself, listening to the bell clang as the first customers straggle through the door. Steam seeps out of the dish machine, but I’m not as hot as I usually am, not nearly, because I’m dressed in the faded green short-sleeved T-shirt with M*A*S*H on the front.
When I turn with a stack of saucers, Riley is sipping his espresso, looking at me. A current shoots through me again at the sight of him, electrical and sharp. Flashes of last night, his mouth and hands; I can still feel his breath on my neck.
I catch the saucers before they escape my fingers. He grins.
I sense, throughout the day, sneaked looks at my arms, whispered talk among the waitstaff, but I am also aware of Riley watching over it all, issuing silent, stern looks, raising his eyebrows. He makes a point of conversing with me, making light jokes, including me in his conversations with the staff. It is as though he is spreading a veil of protectiveness over me, and I am greedy for it.
