Robin and Ruby (13 page)

T
hrough dark glasses, Ruby watches a girl in a hot-pink bikini—crimped hair, bony body, viper face—rush through the living room, laughing and shrieking as she moves toward the front door. There’s a guy in pursuit—burly but agile, dodging bodies, furniture, outstretched legs. “You’re dead, you’re
so fuckin’
dead,” he shouts, through a big, sloppy grin. His yellow tank top is soaked, doused in beer. Ruby can smell it as he flies by. Then more flesh—another girl, another bit of skimpy summer clothing. She holds high a plastic cup, sloshing beer, ready to dump it on one of them. Voices from around the room cheer them on. One, two, three, they escape through the screened door, sucked into the afternoon sun. One of the girls shrieks from the front yard. The other laughs loudly. The all-weekend party is hitting an early peak.

God—tell me, please, how I wound up here.

But she knows how it happened. Calvin wanted to. She came along. Same as always.

Remind me, God, why I said yes.

She sits on a lumpy love seat, squished between the sofa’s hard, upholstered arm and her fidgety boyfriend. Calvin is carrying on a loud conversation about what else?—movies—with the guy on the other side. Calvin’s a film student at Columbia and knows more about every movie ever made than anyone in the whole wide world. Ruby’s heard it all before. She’s struck by how out of place his snooty urban attitudes seem here, at this frivolous beach party. Maybe he senses this, too, maybe only half-consciously, which is why he’s getting louder. It’s like biting a hangnail. You keep biting until you’re nipping at the skin but you can’t stop. She wishes her nails looked better. The black paint is chipping off. She studies the arm of the couch. The upholstery is a ragged, pilly, green-and-white plaid. The white part is discolored to a popcorny shade, and the green part, where her elbow wants to rest, is marked by a hard, flattened splat of chewing gum. She becomes transfixed by that gray wad, wishing she could have witnessed the moment when it was left here. Just to see the person who did it, the
kind
of person who does something as vulgar as that. Was it deliberate vandalism? Or something casual:
Oops, meant to drop it in an ashtray, now it’s stuck, might as well leave it.

This beach house is a weird melding of things that have been neglected and things that someone spent money on. The furniture, which probably came with the lease, is battered and mismatched, but sprinkled throughout are the current renters’ state-of-the-art stereo system and lots of fancy knickknacks. She sees the kinds of things that rich kids—one of them being Alice, Calvin’s younger sister—bring to even the most downscale beach house. A huge, vintage poster of
Casablanca
on the wall, expensively framed by bright white matte board. A polished silver martini shaker, possibly an antique, coated in condensation. A big spray of long-stemmed pink roses in a vase on an end table. Where did anyone get roses? Near this she sees two preppie-looking guys in a beer-chugging contest, egged on by the group circling around them. Ruby expects one of their elbows will send that bouquet crashing onto the dirty, low-pile carpet. She’d get a kick out of that—except, for all she knows, she’s sleeping on that carpet tonight.

She sits in a wash of afternoon light, so bright that she’s left her cat-eye sunglasses on. Sunglasses in the middle of the summer shouldn’t necessarily draw stares, but she’s already overheard one girl say to another, “Maybe she’s blind.” What a bitch.
Maybe I’ll just leave my shades on for the whole weekend.

In a house full of tanned and sunburned bodies clad in neon swim-wear, she knows that she stands out. The black dye in her hair framing her frosty skin, her inky black Smiths T-shirt and black miniskirt up against the bare white of her arms and legs, her rubber-soled boots. The girls at this party are of the type who’ve sneered at and gossiped about her all her life, once because she was a quiet goody-goody too eager to please, and later because she reinvented herself as a cool outsider who didn’t seem to notice them at all. Now they look at her and then look away. Most of them are younger than her—most of them are probably still in high school, or just recently graduated. High school is only a year in her past, but it seems like something she endured a long time ago.

Until she determines a good reason to get up, she’s staying put on the couch, no matter how disgusting it is. Her hand, resting in her lap, is clutching a plastic cup of beer, which she has no taste for. The cup is half head—she has no idea how to properly fill up from a keg. The first gulp had the airiness of cotton candy and the sourness of French bread. When she licked off the foam, she tasted her own dark lipstick. The keg is on the front porch. She should have found the kitchen and poured herself a Diet Coke.

God, please get me out of here quickly.

This is not a prayer, but the leftover habit of prayer, still holding on two years after she decided she was an atheist. She waited until her seventeenth birthday to announce that she’d no longer be attending mass—she’d been going every Sunday since Jackson’s accident. She didn’t explain herself, didn’t need to. Her mother, her brother, her father—not exactly churchgoing people. Nana was the only one upset, but she didn’t live nearby, so Ruby could just tuck that guilt away. Now “God” is just a placeholder. A way to contain a thought when the feelings are threatening to spill over—as they are now, with her annoyance at Calvin coming to a boil.

Calvin is raising his voice, so loud it’s starting to sound like he’s in an argument. Only thirty minutes at the party, already making enemies. The current topic seems to be that new movie,
St. Elmo’s Fire
, which Calvin has called “a perfect example of Hollywood trying to crush youthful rebellion,” and which the other guy is arguing “speaks for our generation.”

Calvin says, “Those characters would never be friends with each other in real life. They take one from every walk of life and then put them all through the same pseudo-romantic plot machinations.”

Ruby pipes up, “It’s not romantic. Half the guys in that movie are stalkers.”

“Exactly my point,” Calvin shouts, though that didn’t sound like his point to Ruby. “The quote-unquote bohemian character, the writer who keeps questioning the meaning of life, he’s supposed to be in love with the boring girl in pearls. If you ask me, he should have been in love with her boyfriend.”

“Man, that’s just weird,” the other guy says.

“It should be weird! It should be like life, which is messy and unpredictable!”

He’s getting worked up, his body jerking and shifting and creating vibrations that Ruby feels in her ribs, her hips, her arm. She gulps her beer to avoid a spill. Already she feels the alcohol doing its work, warming her up. She feels a trickle of sweat slide toward her elbow.

“Look, man,” the guy is shouting to Calvin above a synth-pop song that Ruby recognizes as the theme to
St. Elmo’s Fire
(“Wanna be a man in motion, all I need is a pair of wheels”)—the likely trigger for this entire pointless conversation—“I’m not saying I
like
this reality, okay? But after college, man, life is gonna
force
us to make tough choices.”

“
That
—” Calvin cries, rising up off the couch a few inches, “is exactly the brainwashing
bull
shit I’m talking about! This movie makes you think your only real option is to
fucking
settle down.” His arm goes wide for emphasis, and for a split second Ruby sees a twinkle of sunlight on the silver bracelet at his wrist. Then—
wham
—his elbow smashes into her beer cup just as she’s taking a sip.

The cup crunches into a ring around her nose. Alcohol floods her sinuses, rushes down her throat. She gags and spits, shakes her head. It’s like being jabbed inside her brain by two fat, wet fingers. Beer splatters her glasses, blurring her vision. The flattened cup lands in her lap. Her skirt is soaked.

“What happened?” Calvin asks, almost scolding her.

“Your arm happened,” she says, rising to her feet, coughing, flinging droplets from her hands.

“Hey! How about a towel?” he calls out to no one in particular, to the room at large. She recognizes the tone of his voice, rank with the confidence of someone whose needs have always been attended to, by parents, by his sister, by tutors and hired help.

She removes her sunglasses. Everything sharpens, becomes more defined, as if up until now it had all been a grainy movie on a far-off screen. Faces turn in her direction. A guy staggering nearby gets a look at her and says, “Nasty!” All of a sudden she is nine instead of nineteen. Small, confused, angry. These kids all around her, most of whom are younger than her, seem cool and worldly compared to the public mess she is.

She wipes wet snot from her nose and looks up at Calvin, nearly a foot taller than she is. Calvin, who has more or less ignored her since they got here, who hasn’t yet introduced her to his sister, who made her fill her own cup from the keg, the very same cup he’s just rammed in her face. He reaches his hand around her back and rubs her shoulder in little circles, asking, “Are you okay?”

She finally hears genuine concern in his voice, but he still hasn’t found her a towel. She doesn’t even know where the bathroom is, because they haven’t gotten past the couch since they arrived.

Another guy steps up, a solid, jocky man-boy with a button nose, thick neck, and dark, wavy hair. “I got ya,” he says. He yanks his football jersey up and over his head. “Use this.”

“Look, she’s with me. I’ll take care of it,” Calvin says.

She takes the shirt and runs it across her cheeks and neck, dabbing at the excess, but she’s so wet it doesn’t really help. Her gaze lands on the guy’s bare torso, rippled with dark curls, as muscular a body as she’s ever seen this close up. She feels heat flare in her neck—she imagines he can see her blush. “Thanks,” she says. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Through the kitchen,” Calvin interjects, a long arm pointing through the crowd. “That’s my guess.”

“Stay here,” she tells Calvin.

Shirtless Guy steps closer. “Want me to show you, baby?”

He wobbles a bit, clearly buzzed, but he has her attention. His lips are red as punch and probably taste like wine. She imagines saying yes—yes, show me the way—and once there, pulling him in with her, closing the door and kissing him on the lips. He’s a fantastic kisser, experienced, sensitive, the kind of guy who holds your head carefully in his palms while his tongue spreads your lips, the kind of guy with soft curls on his chest, soft like the fur on a big, gentle dog.

But Calvin’s standing between them. Calvin whose chest is smooth as a girl’s, a baby-soft surface too much like her own.

Last night, back in Manhattan, getting ready for the weekend but already regretting it, she found herself rehearsing a breakup speech. It had been months since she first understood that something was off. Something physical. She had started pulling away from his kisses—his tongue too hard, like a lollipop in her mouth, his lips too dry, like bread crust. She’d been offering instead her neck, her bare shoulder, any patch of flesh to satisfy him while she looked away and fretted. Last night, she’d looked into the bathroom mirror and mouthed the words, “I don’t need a boyfriend, I need a lover.” It was a word her brother used about the guy he was dating. Peter was Robin’s
lover
. They were
in love
, they were having a
love affair.
She liked the sound of “affair,” the way it held the word “air” inside it—lovers carried upon the air in a private chamber for two, whisked away to somewhere exotic. Calvin was the opposite of that, Calvin was earthbound and too familiar.

She pushes past the stained sofa, past a TV cabinet covered by a plastic tablecloth dotted with puddles of beer and melting ice. Into a dining room, where a noisy drinking game is in full force around a circular wooden table. Then a crowded kitchen. She has to knock into people to get past, muttering, “Excuse you, excuse you.”

From behind her she overhears two girls she’s just blazed past:

“That goth chick just totaled her beer.”

“Do you know her?”

“I think her boyfriend is Alice’s brother.”

“Alice has a brother?”

“Yeah, that tall freak?”

She steps into a dark hallway, mostly empty, no windows. She tries a door on either side—a linen closet with nothing on its shelves except frayed contact paper, then a bedroom with overnight bags piled chaotically along the walls.

She opens another door. Another bedroom. A handful of guys and girls are huddled over a small mound of what looks like cocaine. A half-dozen faces pivot toward her, like button-eyed lemurs in the Central Park Zoo. “Oh, sorry.” She pulls the door shut again.

At the end of the hall, a guy and a girl are making out in front of what must be the bathroom door. She takes her place behind them, leans against the wall, waits for her turn. She wills herself not to cry, she can feel something welling up.
I’m stronger than this,
she thinks. She’s sticky all over.

She blames Calvin for this mess, but really it’s herself she’s angry at. Calvin told her Alice was renting a house down the shore, and that she was having “a few friends” over for “a little party.” A perfect way for Ruby and him to escape the June humidity for the weekend, he said. But hadn’t she pictured exactly what this party would look like—pictured herself in the midst of not
a few friends
but a big crowd? She knows the Jersey Shore. Her family spent the occasional summer weekend in towns like Seaside Heights, where they are now, and Wildwood. Boardwalks and packed beaches. Motel rooms with icy air conditioning that carried the whiff of mildew. She used to gaze out the window of their Plymouth at teenagers draped over the porches of rental houses. Longhaired guys air-guitaring to amplified music, girls in bikini tops and cut-off denim shorts, all of them glugging from plastic cups like the one that just smashed her in the face. Her mother disapproved of these people, which was enough of a reason, as a young girl, to be fascinated by them. But she hasn’t been that girl for a long time.