Everyone but You (2 page)

She said, “That’s something else. Quite a fire, too. All those explosions.”

“It was good for me.”

“It was fate.”

“I don’t believe in fate.”

“You will,” she said. “After you’re done with me you will.”

“Oh, I’m
sure
I will.”

Lola slapped me gently before passing me the joint. She leaned back, yawned. “Listen, I need a place to crash,” she said. “Are you hearing me? Stop laughing, because this is a serious query. Lucius, listen, will you? I need a place to
crash
, and after I’ve sucked your dick, I think it’s the least you can do.”

“Crash and burn,” I said, snickering. I was going to tell her all the reasons she couldn’t stay at my apartment. I was going to tell her I had a girlfriend, or tell her the place was infested, the latter of which was at least probably true. Instead I inhaled slowly and thought too long about all this, and Lola took that pause to be an affirmation. She lifted a long, thin leg, stared at her thigh, and stroked it. “Great,” she said. “It’s settled. I could
use a new boyfriend, anyway. My last one turned out to be a real dud after everyone thought he was promising. The right people always end up being wrong.”

I exhaled. I passed her the joint. “And the wrong people?”

“Beats me,” she said. “I never tried one out before. Anyway, that’s part of the reason I need a place to crash—old boyfriends and the like who are jealous, practically lunatics, really. And
stupid
, Lucius. You have no idea how incredibly stupid some men can be. So just tonight, I’ll stay. Maybe a few days. Definitely not longer than a week, okay?”

The pot had made me mellow. “Lola,” I said. “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

“I’m harmless,” she told me. She held up an imaginary gun and squeezed the trigger. “Or do I look like Annie Oakley to you?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed.

“Look, it’s just that my last boyfriend was a real fucker, Lucius. He messed around with my best friend, my
roommate
,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “She was a real fucker, too. I needed a change of pace after that, let me tell you. I needed a way out of that dorm room.”

My legs felt heavy, like doused wood. I wanted Lola to leave. When you tell yourself it’s about sex and the sheer presence of a girl, you don’t leave room for conversation in the equation because conversation is frequently a mood killer. You certainly don’t expect to hear about ex-lovers. It was all a bit alarming, but the alarm was still distant, like sirens making their way across the city.
Danger is near
, the sirens announce. You sense it, too, the faint alarm it stirs in you. But it’s not in your home, in your bed,
your
place isn’t in flames yet, and in that regard it’s still okay. I cupped my hands behind my head and stared at the watermarks
that spotted the stucco ceiling like a huge question mark. “We were getting along, Lola,” I said.

She inhaled deeply, allowing herself time to calculate a response. “Good, then,” she said. “It’s settled. I’ll stay.”

Somewhere during the course of two hours she had gotten the upper hand. That much was clear. I said nothing. There were practical considerations to Lola entering my life so easily. Even Sheila, my last girlfriend, didn’t stay overnight on most nights we slept together, and certainly not even until a few weeks into things. This was Lola’s and my first meeting, our first fuck. There were modern-day discretionary boundaries, I felt, that were being quickly toppled, and I felt unnerved at the prospect of Lola spending the night in close proximity. If you give a girl enough leeway, she’ll take over like wildfire, like Sheila eventually did. It took only a few weeks before Sheila acted as though she owned me.
What are you doing, Harold?
Sheila would ask when she called from the office.
Are you thinking about me? Have you thought about other women? Do you want to fuck someone else, Harold? Do you?

Et cetera. Sharing fluid was one thing, but sharing an apartment was an altogether different matter. What if Lola peed voluminously? Hung her clothes from the curtain rod? Lined the medicine cabinet with condoms and tampons? Worse, what if Lola was a lunatic? I hadn’t indulged the thought before that moment, but as the pot took a stronger hold over my thoughts I wondered:
What if Lola was the one who set the fire?
I had often heard that criminals hung around the scene, which made sense, and in Lola’s case certainly would have been true. Deviance of the criminal kind was definitely something I couldn’t handle in my life. This was what I thought in the amount of time it took
Lola to hand me the joint, get up again, and go to the bathroom and pee voluminously.

When she came back, I said, “We were getting along so well, just with the impromptu fucking. Why go and ruin things?”

“The first Lucius said the exact same thing. What is it with Luciuses?” she asked, biting her lip. “I’ve
got
to try out a new name.”

“Not that it matters,” I said. “But my name is actually Harold.”

“Harold?” She made a face. Then she cackled. “That’s not much of a name. It’s a little outdated.”

“It’s my mother’s father’s name.”

“Does that make it right? What, does your mother hate you or something?”

“No.”

“You might not think so,” she told me. “But with a name like that I bet she does.”

S
O, GOOD, I THOUGHT
.
Sex with a mysterious stranger! Bodies slapping together! Raging climaxes!
But Lola wasn’t some dumb chick you could easily fuck and then discount. In the four months we were together, in that hazy time I’ve come to think on as our
relationship
, I learned that, on the contrary, she had big plans and ambitions that for a time stretched outward to include yours truly. She had
aspirations
. She had a bank account. I spent my days scrubbing down toilet seats, vacuuming rugs, scraping caramelized soda from tables, and placing signs about the specials in the windows at Red Robin—Ninety-nine cent burger! All you can eat buffet! Free Coke with meal purchase!
Advertise, advertise, advertise. I was barely getting by riding a beat-up bike to work and earning three bucks above minimum wage, a salary enhanced thanks to my associate’s degree. It turned out Lola was a sophomore in college part of the day and the other part of the day she spent balled up on a couch at the Barnes and Squat downtown. She drank cappuccinos. She read Voltaire and Salinger and thought the world of literature would, in her words,
rise again!
She gave me a copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
and told me I could stand to learn a thing or two. “Here’s a dictionary,” she said one day after I came home from work. She had checked out an
actual
dictionary from the library. She said, “Now use it, will you?” This, all while she was contributing so little to the apartment, or the refrigerator. It was as if her sense of responsibility was both grand on the one hand and totally lax on the other. She aspired to the greats in art and literature, but she also seemed to think that the orange juice she so loved would just magically appear for her consumption every morning. Voltaire didn’t think about buying orange juice, she told me once as we sat eating breakfast, so why should she?

There are certain differences in people that stem down the line of generations, certain things you cannot overlook that should be factored into relationship equations. For example, star-crossed fantasy aside, children of doctors generally end up finding well-to-do, well-groomed, and well-mannered mates. Or, as another example, people who hate eating meat don’t generally end up marrying a butcher. Things like that. As for Lola and me, my mother was very old-school about things and probably wouldn’t have approved of the way Lola introduced herself, if she ever found out. Also, my mother and father didn’t have a lot of money. They were middle class, which translated to pretty
damn poor and fucked in America. My father worked as a cashier at a retail store. My mother worked at a dentist’s office, filing papers. She crocheted at night while my father went hunting on fall weekends and spent the rest of his time watching CNN and complaining about taxes. It turned out Lola’s parents, whom I never met, lived in an entirely different state: Connecticut. Her father was a doctor and made something like a zillion bucks a year. Lola’s mother didn’t work at all. She volunteered at the church shop and served meals to the homeless. She dressed in designer clothing and read to the elderly on weekends. They were good, Christian people, who, through the mystery of genetics, still managed to crank out a hellion like Lola. They were
Republicans
. They spent their summers in France. France, for Christ’s sake. Lola spoke three languages, while I was struggling to master the nuances of one.

I
’M GETTING AHEAD
of myself. It happens sometimes, looking back at things from a distance, that the time line of love becomes obscured; things meld together. How did I even come to wonder or to care about Lola’s background? How did we cross that mystical line, where
she and I
became an
us
?

In the week following the fire and our first, fateful encounter, Lola showed up each night at my apartment, even though I hadn’t committed, in any overt way, to letting her room with me. I’d be bone-tired after work, and she’d be standing there at the door, waiting, dressed in cut-off jean shorts, a top that clung to her. Sometimes she’d have on bohemian-type bracelets and long earrings. She’d look red hot. “Hey, we should probably get some ice cream tonight before bed,” she’d say, matter-of-factly. Or, “I brought Scrabble and a copy of
Backdraft
, in honor of our
meeting.” Or, “Baby, we’ve got to stop running into each other like this.” She’d reach out and squeeze my arm, bite her lip, and give me a rebellious, mischievous look. After sex I’d resist having her stay the night. I told her, like a lot of guys my age, I didn’t necessarily want a girlfriend or a roommate; I pretty much just wanted to get laid. I explained that sex was one of the great motivating forces in life. “Sex and food,” I said. “Just watch
Animal Planet
sometime and you’ll see what I mean.”

She thought I was joking. She said, “Don’t tell me I’m not the best thing that’s happened to you all year.” She was right. By the end of the first week, she was cleaning out my closets and moving in her things. By the second week she had keys and was painting the walls because she claimed to be allergic to drab surroundings. Every night when I came home from work she’d make dinner and light candles. My professed need for only sex and food aside, it was hard to deny the benefits of Lola’s entrance into my life. The place began to feel like a home. She even brought her goldfish, Boo, over from the dorm room. “Boo isn’t safe with that lunatic fucker of an ex-roommate of mine,” she said. She wanted to know how I reacted to animals. She tapped her finger on the glass bowl. “I learned in my psychology class that most deviant people don’t relate well to pets,” she said. “Can you please tell me your thoughts on that?”

“It’s not a pet,” I told her. “It’s a goldfish.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, like she was noting this. “Having a fish is no different than having a dog or a cat or a new boyfriend or girlfriend, you know. If you’re not going to learn how to take care of them, if you’re not going to give them the proper conditions in which they can thrive, then you don’t have any business having them in the first place. In that case you might as well be
like my ex-roommate or boyfriend, both of which are some serious fuck-ups, Lucius.”

“I started out alone,” I remind her. “Happily.”

“Didn’t we all start out alone?” she said. “Happily?”

I tried to be reasonable about all this. I stopped asking her to leave when it became clear she had no intention of leaving anyway. I stopped resisting her affections when it was clear that resistance only made her desire stronger. That’s the kind of girl Lola was. I pushed her away but she persisted and hung on and made me love her.

I’d heard that romances were sometimes born under extreme, hostile conditions, which I suppose is how things went with Lola. After Floyd’s, and in those weeks when Lola and I were reconfiguring our boundaries, fires sprang up all across the city. The blazes were set in the dead hours of night. The police began referring to the culprit as the “Lunar Pyro,” since the person set the fires during those occasions when the moon was full and beamed down and grew diffuse amid the artificial lights of the city, those same nights when crime in general rose and sirens sounded in urgent ways.

Lola and I followed the story. One night in September we sat and listened to the latest news report on the Pyro’s antics out on Third Street, where a small Mexican restaurant had been set ablaze. Hearing this, Lola shook her head in disbelief and bit into the apple she was holding. She tucked her legs under her and turned to face me. “Lunar Pyro,” she said. “It really doesn’t have much pizzazz, does it?”

I agreed in an absent way, thinking how good Lola looked eating an apple, how in her hands and against her full lips an apple became a thing of beauty. “You know the type Lunar Pyro
is?” she continued, chewing. “He’s probably your average Joe, the type you’d never expect, seemingly pleasant, oh sure, but a man who holds a grudge against not just a single person, but against the entire world.”

“Hm,” I said. “Can I have a bite?”

“Get your own.”

I went to the kitchen and retrieved an apple. When I came back to the couch, Lola turned off the TV and tossed the remote on the table. She gave me a curious expression. She said, “Why do you ride a bike, anyway, Lucius? That’s what I want to know.”

“Harold, Lola. I’ve told you before to call me Harold.”

“Okay,
Harold
. So why the bike?”

“Environmental protest.”

She raised her wonderfully expressive eyebrows. “Really.”

“Somewhat,” I said. “Also I don’t have a ton of cash. Do you know what gas costs these days?”

“Next question,” she said. “Have you ever been in love? I mean, before me.”

“Well, there was Sheila,” I said. “She was pretty hot.”

Lola studied me intently. She waited.