Love Is the Higher Law (5 page)

he comes back, he has sheets in his hand. “For the sofa,” he explains. “Don’t worry—it’s really comfortable.” And now I’m wondering why I didn’t go home, if I’m only going to sleep on the lime-green couch. But now it’s way too late to go home—or even to John’s. So while Jasper brushes his teeth, I put the sheets on the couch. He offers me a toothbrush, and I go into the bathroom when he’s done and look at myself in the mirror for a good long time, as if the reflection’s going to tell me what to do. But instead of coming up with the answer, I stay in the land of inertia, which I guess is the same as deciding to accept defeat. It is, after all, just a first date. When I emerge from the bathroom, he’s changed into an old white T-shirt and some boxers. This is unfairly sexy. He walks over and puts his arms around me and gives me a hug. “Sleep tight,” he says. “I’m just down the hall if you need me.” And of course in this situation, none of the questions I want to ask—“Don’t you like me?” “Am I that unattractive to you?” “Can’t I join you?”—are appropriate. So I go to the couch and lie down and clutch at the cushions. It’s ridiculous to think I’ll be able to go to sleep, so I turn the TV back on. Then I’m worried it’s too loud, so I put it one notch above mute and keep it on CNN, so even if I can’t hear what they’re saying, I can use the crawling text at the bottom to read myself to sleep. A half hour passes, and the storm outside is getting stronger—there’s even thunder now, and that sound of raindrops hitting branches and pavement. I hear a door open, and then Jasper is back in the room. He comes right over and sits down on me, right on my legs, like I’m part of the couch. “Hello,” he says. And I say,
“Hello.” Then he asks, “What are you doing?” And I’m thinking,
I’m trying to sleep on the couch
, but I don’t say that. He bounces up and down on me a little, like a kid. “Isn’t the couch comfy?” he says. I can only say, “I guess.” “But why are you sleeping here?” he asks. And I honestly think that’s not a question I should have to answer. He bounces on me again, then stands up and offers his hand. “Come on.” So I take his hand, and he pulls me up off the couch, and we leave the TV on as we walk to his room. The bed’s the only part of the room that’s cleared off, and I assume we’re going to end up there. First, though, we stop at the window, because he’s left it open, and there’s lightning now as well as thunder, and the rain is coming down hard. “Look at that,” he says, and while I do look at that, I’m also looking at him, and in this gray-tone light, he couldn’t be more attractive. In the shadow of that window, right at that moment, we are both luminous. He’s let go of my hand, and I try to take his back, but he just smiles. “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” he asks. So I lean in and kiss him, but it’s not as warm as I thought it would be. When I pull back, he’s still observing. “Is that all?” he asks. It’s cold in the room, from the window, an end-of-summer chill. And I stand there, waiting. Because I do want to kiss him, and I do want to sleep in that bed, but when I kiss him again, it’s the same feeling of incompleteness, and I don’t know what to do with that. “What’s going on?” I ask. And he says, “I guess it’s raining.” And I say, “That’s not what I meant.” Which only causes him to say, “I’m sorry. This was a bad idea. I should have left you alone.” Finally I decide to take a stand, and I say, “I’ll just
go back to the couch.” And he says, “No, you can stay here. We can just sleep.” But there’s no way I’m going to be able to sleep next to him like it isn’t weird—there’s no way I want to stay if staying means nothing. I already feel such a deep sense of being lost—something even more fundamental than confusion, the dark equivalent of white noise. So I say I’ll go back to the couch, and he pulls me into a hug again, and we stay like that for a little while, to the point that it’s almost like we’re slow dancing. We just sway on the same spot as time beats out an empty tune. I look out the window, and the sky lights up into a pure view of electricity. Then he lets me go, and I go. I head back to the couch, turn off the news, and try to sleep. In the morning, he offers me breakfast, and I say I really need to get back home. I have my disappointment and confusion, and he has whatever it is that he has. He acts like nothing happened, and I act like nothing happened. We both hold on to that delicate lie.

LIMBO
Jasper

I felt there was a piece of me missing, a piece that had become so unnerved that it fell away without me feeling it. I didn’t even know what piece it was—I just felt the gap, and knew that whatever it was, it must have been important.

I didn’t really leave the house. This wasn’t all that different from my original plan for when Mom and Dad were gone, only now there were people calling all the time, checking to see how I was, asking me if I wanted to meet up. It was like some mass email had gone out, and everybody was going out of their way to prove to me that we still lived in a caring universe. But I didn’t want any of it. The good thing about everyone’s post-disaster catatonia was that nobody wanted to be intrusive—they’d express concern or issue an invitation, but they were more than understanding if you said, “I just want to be alone right now.” So that’s what I did. I didn’t rant like a crazy person. I didn’t tell them to fuck off. I didn’t ask them what the point was. I just said I wanted to be alone. And then when I was alone, I ranted like a crazy person, told the world to fuck off, and wondered what the point was.

The only exception I made was this boy Peter, because he
was so persistent it was almost surreal. He made it seem like us getting together was a belief he had. So finally I told myself what the hell. I made him come out to Brooklyn, because there was no way I was going into Manhattan until it had straightened itself out. My initial impulse to go save it was gone. The more footage they showed on the news, the more horror stories we heard, the less I wanted to be there. I would just stay in Brooklyn and listen to my
Moulin Rouge
soundtrack on repeat until the happy times were here again. Or until I had to go to school—whichever came first.

Mom was calling two or three times a day—it was probably costing them more than their plane tickets to keep in touch. She wanted to come home as soon as possible, but I kept telling her I was fine, that she and my father should stick to the original plan and take care of my grandmother and let all the other people who were stranded in Korea get home first.

It was a testament to my respect for Peter that I actually found a clean shirt and a relatively clean pair of jeans to wear for our night out. The truth was, I wasn’t remembering much of what he looked like or what we’d talked about at Mitchell’s. I remembered thinking he was cute, if a little young. But that was enough. I also sensed that he was as trapped in his house as I was trapped in mine, because I would get emails from him like

jasper—

only 8 more hours! i will be the guy in the brown tshirt and the levis. also, i will be the one ringing your doorbell. if that is not enough to recognize me, i could also have a tulip between my teeth. or behind my ear, if you would find that more aesthetically pleasing. i have both a florist and a dresser on standby, awaiting your answer.

see you soon (say, seven hours and fifty-five minutes?)

peter

Seven hours and fifty-five minutes later, he was at my front door. His T-shirt really fit him well, and he was boyish in a Ewan McGregor kind of way, albeit without the brogue.

I took him to Olive Vine—I knew there was a chance of bumping into some of the people I’d been dodging, but I figured that would be a risk anywhere. It’s not like anyone was leaving the neighborhood. Flags were starting to pop up everywhere, along with the MISSING signs. It was like we’d cleared away all the papers that had blown over and were replacing them with our own.

I was relieved, because clearly Peter wasn’t a closet case, and he seemed to know what some of the dating rules were. Not that I was seeing it as a date—more as a diversion. It’s not like I was going to put him in my pocket and take him up to college with me. And he didn’t seem like the random-hookup type. (A shame. Or maybe not.) I asked him all the things I felt I should ask, like where he’d been when everything happened. He told me he was waiting to buy a Bob Dylan record, which I thought
was pretty funny. “The times, they did a-change?” I said, but his laugh was more polite than anything else. I chalked it up to the fact that you had to be twisted like me to find the humor in the situation.

Usually I treated dates like they were chess matches, trying to plan my moves a little bit ahead, carefully deciding which conversational pieces to deploy, willing to sacrifice pawns of small talk if it would get my opponent to fall in love with my king. But this was a different kind of board, a different set of rules—almost like all the pieces had been knocked off, and we were both trying to agree on where they’d been before. I wasn’t having any fun with it, which wasn’t his fault. Fun was included in the piece of me that had disappeared.

He talked about seeing things happen, about being near, and while he expressed a momentary jealousy that I hadn’t had to go through that, I think we both knew that it was better to be an unharmed witness than the guy who slept through it and still had to deal with the aftermath. One of the things the terrorist attack has done was to send us all into these
Sliding Doors
scenarios—all these what ifs. What if I’d gotten up earlier that morning? What if I’d decided to go to Battery Park for a run? I’d done that once … in 1998, before the SATs. What if, along the way, I’d taken the spot on a crowded subway car that some guy who worked at the World Trade Center was supposed to take, so the doors slid closed on him and he ended up getting to work late enough to be saved? Bullshit—all of it complete bullshit. And you couldn’t help but wonder why your mind went there
anyway—was it to exert control or to find comfort in the fact that there wasn’t really all that much control, after all?

By the time I tuned back in, Peter was talking about crying because people at Starbucks were being extra nice. The fact that he could be so moved only reinforced my own emptiness. When he asked me how I felt, I didn’t lie—it didn’t seem like the kind of thing to lie about. And I found myself telling him—or at least trying to—about how the emptiness worked, how you withdraw from something and you feel the distance inside of you as well as outside of you. But it was clear he wasn’t really understanding, and that made me wonder yet again why I’d agreed to meet up with him. Clearly, there wasn’t much I could give him, and there wasn’t much he could give me.

“So you just withdraw?” he asked me. And I couldn’t convey to him the extent of it, so I just said, “Not totally.” Then, since that didn’t seem like enough, I added, “I mean, you can’t let it get to you.”

“Because if you let it get to you, then the terrorists will have won?”

I wished it were as simple as that. But it wasn’t.

“It’s not about them, really,” I said. “It’s just about me.”

I knew how monstrous that sounded—I knew September 11th wasn’t about me. But my reaction to September 11th—that was
entirely
about me.

Peter quickly switched the subject to my parents, and I gave him the update. I was totally running out of steam until he drifted off and then, when he came back, said, “If we stop having
sex, then the terrorists will have won.” Normally, when someone says something like that, it’s a total bad pickup line, but it was obvious that wasn’t Peter’s intention, and I liked him more for it. He asked me about school, and I told him I had no idea when it was going to start—yet another thing I had no idea about. Like any high school student, he had this fascination with college, and I found myself getting nostalgic—if September 11th was really going to be this big before/after dividing line in our lives, I was sorry that I didn’t have at least a bit of high school in the after. High school actually seemed longer ago now because of what had happened.

I tried to imagine Peter up at school with me. I tried to imagine us as boyfriends, and it felt about as realistic as me dating Sarah Jessica Parker. I knew what I had to do: get the check, say goodbye, send him on his way. But one of the missing parts of me made a slight guest appearance, because I also felt this strange
fondness
for him, like he was a stray and I had to take him home and give him a bowl of milk. That, and I didn’t particularly love the idea of going back to the house again and spending another night in the company of the TV set. At least Peter wouldn’t expect the same things from me that my parents or my friends would.

So I found myself asking him over, and he seemed up for it. It was a little weird at first, because having him in the living room made me realize what a shitheap it had become, like I’d let objects fall from my hands whenever I was done with them, my very own sculpture garden of a ruined week.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said. I almost added, “The housekeeper is in mourning.” But that was pretty awful, so I added, “I never did get that housekeeping merit badge.”

“You were a Boy Scout?” he replied, totally interested. And I didn’t have the heart to tell him that no, I wasn’t—somehow the scouts filled their gay Korean Brooklynite quota without me. So I nodded, and I lied, and while I lied, I decided to make myself an Eagle Scout.

Hoping to make my way back to being a good host, I offered him a drink, and clarified what kind of drinks I was offering when he seemed to want water—which is acceptable if you’ve just run a few miles, but not really in a social situation. Since the local bodega owners would only laugh if I showed them my fake ID, I had to resort to my parents’ stash of Korean beer, which was probably great if you’d never left Korea and had never tasted any other beers, but was pretty damn unexceptional if you’d ever kept the company of Mr. Samuel Adams and his brethren.

Peter sipped the OB politely and declined to make the usual OB-GYN jokes about its name. We watched the news for a while, and I pretty much confessed my crush on Peter Jennings. And maybe it was all the talk of Peter Jennings, but suddenly I was like,
Why am I here on the couch with this seventeen-year-old Ewanish boy and totally keeping my hands to myself?
Was it him or was it me that was stopping us? I figured he’d be into it, but I didn’t want to freak him out if he wasn’t. I decided to turn the flirtation up a notch, remembering that I’d said we were
going to watch
Cabaret
. Once I put the movie on, I asked him if he liked the lights on or off—clearly code words for “Do you want to sit here like we’ve been sitting or do you want to start making out?” He said he could do either, which was no help whatsoever.