Everything Happens Today (13 page)

“I'm waiting for the movie. Cookie, why don't you go upstairs and get ready for your movie? What are we going to see, anyway?”

“‘Zack and Miri Make a Porno.'”

“C'mon.”

“‘My Best Friend's Girl.'”

“Shit man, couldn't you find anything better?”

“Bobby likes Dane Cook. Bobby lo-o-oves Dane Cook.”

“Christ, all right. When and where?”

“Union Square, two-thirty.”

“What time is it now?”

“Dunno. Two?”

“Okay, go go go. We leave in ten minutes.” Wes began to unwrap the sweetbread as Nora pounded up the stairs to her room.

“So? Jesus fucking Christ, what the hell is that?”

“It's a sweetbread, obviously. Don't you know anything?”

“But what is it?”

“It's the thymus gland of a calf. I'm making it for dinner. Hand me that cookbook?”

“That is truly disgusting.”

“Shit, I forgot. You've got to change the water every fifteen minutes.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You've got to soak this for an hour to get all the blood out, but you're supposed to change the water every fifteen minutes. I've got to take Nora to the movies.”

“I tell you, Wes, you soak it for a year it's not gonna be any less revolting.”

“So you think it's okay if I just leave it in the same water?”

“Sure. What the fuck do I know? Now will you please stop fucking around and tell me what I came here for.”

“What did you come here for?”

“The skinny. The juice. The 411. How'd it go with Lucy last night? Pop yer cherry?”

“Oh, I'm not talking about that.”

“You've got to be shitting me! I set you up with babe-a-licious supreme and you're holding out on me? On me, man?”

“Why are you talking like that? Never mind, I'm just not ready to talk about it yet.”

“Not ready to talk about it? What's the matter with you? You think she's not talking about it? You think half the school doesn't know by now that the last of the red-hot virgins is no more? I guarantee you everybody knows, friendo. But to me, his so-called best friend, his only friend, he's not ready to talk about it, quote unquote. You're a total douche, you know that?”

“Can you keep your voice down, please? My mom's right upstairs. I'll talk, I'll talk if it makes you happy. I'm just feeling really weird about it right now.”

“Here we go. Did you fuck her?”

“Yes I did.”

“Brother man!” James leaped across the kitchen and picked Wes up in a bear hug and swung him around the room, then he dropped him and held him at arms' length. “How many times?”

“I don't know. More than once. Three, maybe?”

“She hot hot hot?”

“I guess.”

“Nice pussy? Juicy?”

“Gimme a break.”

“So how did it go down? Where were you? What did she say?”

“She texted me.”

“What do you mean she texted you? You were at the party.”

“I'm in the living room or the kitchen, I get this text. ‘I'm in the bedroom, come find me.'”

“Jesus, she texted you? That little slut.”

“Hey Leslie, I'm ready. Let's go. Who's a little slut?”

“No one.”

“Wesbo's girlfriend.”

“Leslie has a girlfriend? You didn't tell me.”

“There's no girlfriend, Nora. Just lemme get this thing in some water and we'll go. You guys wait for me outside.”

Wes hated it that Nora was subjected to such talk. He had no idea how long she'd been standing there listening to James, but even if all she'd heard was “slut” it was bad enough. It was true that she already knew everything—a little friend of hers had once innocently referred to her synagogue, B'nai Jeshurun, by its acronym, “BJ,” and Nora had sniggered like some redneck tramp—but that didn't mean Wes couldn't do everything in his power to delay the inevitable. Nora was growing up too fast, he felt, and the kids in her grade, the girls especially, were already far more sexualized than he'd been at her age. He couldn't stand it that she might know what a slut was, or worse yet, be able to picture in her mind what a slut did, or that one day someone might call her a slut or, worst of all, that she might one day come to think of herself as a slut. He wanted her to grow up straight and tall, confident and strong, immune to the peer pressures and self-image problems that plagued him and almost everyone he knew. Most of all, it was because he knew so many guys like James, who was a truly decent and thoughtful person most of the time but typical when it came to girls, that he never wanted her to be in a position where she thought it necessary to trade sex for something else, like self-esteem or popularity. The idea of other people talking about Nora the way people talked about Lucy was almost unbearable to him, enough to make him choke up when he envisaged it. It was a bit weird being involved with your little sister's sexual education, but he didn't suppose she was getting the right guidance from her parents, and Katrina was giving out handjobs by the time she was thirteen, and even if she wasn't people were saying she was, and that was practically worse. Wes would be leaving for college in less than two years, and Nora would be thirteen by then, and who would look after her and tell her right from wrong?

Having dumped the sweetbread in a bowl of water, added a splash of juice from a plastic lemon, and slid it into the refrigerator, Wes found Crispy waiting by the front door. He gave her a little scratch between the ears, whispering “I'll be back,” and slipped out. Nora and James were sitting on the top step, she with her hands cupped over her ears, listening to James's iPod and bobbing her head.

Wes smacked James on the back of the head and skipped down the stairs, leaving the other two to follow. The street was even more crowded with day-trippers than it had been earlier, but Wes strode purposefully forward, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of the hoodie. He found his way blocked by a slow-moving family of five, obese and oblivious, and muttered “New Yorker coming through” as he sidled around them. A moment later, he found James by his side.

“Slow down there, friendo. Your sister can't keep up.” Wes slowed and turned to see Nora, some 20 feet back, happily engrossed in scrolling through James's playlist, an oversized set of noise-canceling headphones on her head.

“I wish you wouldn't talk that way, especially around Nora.”

“What way?”

“‘Slut' and ‘pussy' and all that. That isn't you, and it's definitely not me.”

“Forgive me for offending your delicate sensibilities. I'm just happy for you is all. This is a big day for you.”

“Yeah, well I told you, I'm feeling kind of weirded out about the whole thing.”

“Did something untoward happen last night? You didn't, like, slip her a roofie or anything?”

“For fuck sake, I'm serious. I'm just not feeling good about it, you know?”

“I don't follow you.”

“I don't know. I guess . . . I guess I just wanted it to be a little more . . . special.”

“Jesus, you know what you sound like right now? You gotta try to be a little more manly about this sort of stuff.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Is this about Delia?”

“It must be. I mean, I've never even kissed her or asked her out or anything, but somehow I just thought . . . It's all I've thought about for a year, and now I've fucked it up before we've even got it started. You remember that time I spent the weekend at her place? I mean, I didn't even care that we slept in separate rooms or that she didn't sneak into my bed that night. I was just so happy to be around her, and her family was so cool and nice, I had this idea that there was something incredible, like we were destined for each other or something. I had this idea that I had to be extra specially something to deserve her, that if I did it differently from everybody else there would be this amazing, like, payback—no, not payback, I just wanted her to see that I wasn't like everybody else . . . I mean, what can you do?”

“You could've asked her on a date.”

“But that's just it, that would've been too . . . I wanted her to see what I was doing, everything I was doing because I loved her really, like, purely. For her, for who she was. I thought, when I'm ready, when I'm transformed, when I'm not just acting it out but I really am that person I want her to think I am, she'll see it, she'll know it, she'll come to me. But she didn't do anything, I mean she didn't do anything wrong. It's not like she turned out to be some jerk who was fucking with me just because she could, and then she broke my heart and I just went out and found anyone I could. You know that Elliot Smith song—‘You broke your own ‘cause you can't finish what you start?' That's me exactly. I broke my own fucking heart.”

They walked down West Thirteenth in silence, and James took Wes's left hand in his right and gave it a squeeze, but then he held on to it for a few seconds, and that unit of two hands hung between them like a hawser mooring a ship to its berth. Wes even lowered his gaze to look at it, its surprising substantiality, then glanced backwards to make sure Nora was still following them. At that moment, she happened to look up from the screen of James's iPod and she smiled at him shyly, a little frightened maybe, and flicked her head to disengage her bangs from her eyebrows, and Wes had a momentary vision that she was the most beautiful soul on Earth. He wanted to run to her, like in a movie, and sweep her up in his arms and tell her how much he loved her, but he didn't want to scare her and in any case he thought that maybe there had been enough melodrama for one afternoon. James let go of his hand and they walked on.

“Can I just say one thing?” James asked as they reached the corner of Fifth Avenue.

“Yeah, of course.”

“See, no offense, but it seems to me you're telling two different stories here. There's the story you think you're telling, about how basically you're the knight in shining armor on this impossible quest to win the love of the fair maiden or whatever, and you failed because you weren't, like, pure enough of heart. And then there's the story I heard, which is that you're waiting and waiting for something that might never happen, which is that
she
asks
you
out, because you're too chickenshit to take a risk. I mean, you put it all on her, and when she doesn't come through you blame yourself? It's not her fault she doesn't love you, but it's not your fault either, Wes. You shouldn't be so hard on yourself. You should've been able to enjoy yourself last night. And now look at you. It's all fucked up in too many ways.”

“No kidding.”

And now Wes felt that he was back exactly where he had started that morning. Nothing had changed after all. Everything had happened, and nothing had happened. Wes wasn't a different person; he was exactly the person he had been twenty-four hours earlier, no wiser, no smarter, no happier, no nothing. He thought of Elliot Smith again, “fighting problems with bigger problems.” Whenever he heard that line it made him think of boxes within boxes. You have a bunch of problems and you put them in a box and they become a single problem. Then you accumulate enough of those boxes and you put them in a bigger box, and they become one problem again. Elliot Smith, for instance, had put all his problems in a box so big that ultimately it was life itself that was in the box, life had become the one and only problem, with one and only way to solve it. But life, living, wasn't a problem for Wes, he would never commit suicide no matter what, so even his biggest box would have to be smaller than Elliot's. What, then, was his own biggest box? Was Delia a small, discrete problem or did she share a box with other, similar problems, and if she did, what bigger problem did that box represent? Some problems seemed to come in different sizes, too. You could say that Wes was indecisive, fearful, a dreamer, shy, lonely, whatever, and put it all in a box called “Delia.” But you could look at his love for Delia as just one little problem, along with his mother, his sister, his father, that all belonged together in a box of their own. Either way, Wes was no closer to solving any of them today than he had been the day before or would be the day after. And in any case, Elliot Smith wasn't talking about solving problems; he was talking about fighting them. Wes wouldn't know how to go about doing that.

“So what should I do?”

“I think you've already done it.”

“You think I should drop this thing with Delia?”

“What thing with Delia? There is no thing with Delia. There never has been a thing with Delia. It's all in your head, like a piece of shrapnel. Look, all I'm saying is, think about it. Here, I brought you a present.”

James reached into his back pocket and pulled out an overstuffed billfold, through which he rummaged with his fingertips before extracting a strip of torn scrap paper. He handed it to Wes.

“I wrote it down a couple of nights ago when I was reading
The Great Gatsby
.”

Wes took the gift. On one side of the scrap, a phrase was written in blue ball-point in James's hallmark scrawl. It said: “Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.” Wes read it through carefully several times to make sure he understood it.

“What's it supposed to mean?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. Anyway, I thought of you when I read it. Let me know when you've figured it out.”

They'd reached the movie theater at Thirteenth and Broad­way. The crowds flowing down from the farmer's market on Union Square made it difficult even to stand on the sidewalk and have a conversation. Wes was convinced he had something important left to say to James, but he couldn't think of what it might be. Nora disentangled herself from James's paraphernalia and handed it to him with a curtsey.