Robin and Ruby (21 page)

“Say something,” she tells him.

“Like what?” There’s a sulkiness in his voice.

“I want to get to know you,” she says.

He clears his throat. “You can ask me whatever you want.”

She hears this as an offering, a willingness to bare himself to her. Calvin has never said anything remotely like this. The sum of Calvin’s entire bearing seems to be,
don’t ask
.
If I don’t offer, I don’t want to talk about it.

“How well do you know Calvin?” she asks him.

He snickers, a bitter little sound. “That’s what you want to ask me about? Calvin?”

“I’m trying to put all these pieces together.”

“Yeah, it’s strange.” He grabs a fistful of sand and sprinkles it across their feet. “I dated Alice for a little while. And then she tried to pass me off on her friends. They do that, work their way through guys.”

Ruby steadies her breath, working to banish the image of Chris with these girls. She doesn’t want to think of him entangled in their awful world.

He says, “I think I was supposed to be on Dorian’s menu this weekend.”

“She’s a nightmare.”

“Everyone knows she’s a fucking alkie. Who knows what she’d be like if she stopped?”

“I thought she was with Benjamin.”

He snorts. “Trisexual Benjamin. Give him enough coke, he’ll try to fuck anything.”

“Really? He said the most evil things to me about gay people.”

“You have to be a code-breaker with that one. We were roommates last semester. I’ve heard his farts, I’ve heard him jerk off at night.” He glances at her. “Sorry. That’s gross. I just—like, I’ve seen him crying on the phone to his father, you know?”

She pictures Benjamin crying—it isn’t actually hard to imagine. All that bluster covers a core of softness. Weakness, even.

Chris speaks about Benjamin and Dorian, the drugs and drinking, their moods that swing depending on what they’ve imbibed. As he talks, Ruby can’t help but think about Calvin. Where is he? He must be worried about her. She knows that he does care about her, even if he’s rarely careful with her. It was wrong to walk away from him, but how could she go back to that party? How could she not follow Chris?

She waits for a break in his story. Then she asks, “Why was it so important that we were both looking at the moon?”

“Um, OK. Let me try to explain.” She doesn’t attempt to fill the silence. Lulls in conversation with Calvin seem like punishment: her failure to keep him interested. But with Chris it’s OK. With Chris everything is different.

He says, “Here’s how it went. After I saw you at the house, I was pretty freaked out. So I left, just started walking, not sure where, just needed to get away from all of them, needed to walk off the coke. I already said that. OK. So…I found a diner, drank a bunch of milk and ate pancakes with butter even though the cocaine had kind of taken away my appetite. I wanted to get it out of my system. Then it was dark and I went to the beach. I was under the pier, all by myself, my feet were wet, and I was getting cold, and I was feeling terrible.”

“Why didn’t you come back to the house?”

He takes in a long gulp of air, releases it. “I’m not sure you can handle this.”

“Of course I can.”

“I came down here this weekend—” his voice is pitching higher, there’s a warble in his throat “—thinking I was going to kill myself.”

The night drops into silence.

She can’t find words.

He spins to face her. “I’ve been feeling like shit for a long time, Ruby. Really unhappy, that’s the only way I can explain it. Partying way too much. Being a fuck-up. I’ve been making my mom miserable. I decided to get away from home. I didn’t want to make a mess, you know, cut my wrists in my mother’s bathroom or whatever, bleed all over the place.”

She thinks of the Swiss Army knife in his car, the New Testament in the back seat, enough aspirin to choke a horse. The notebook he shoved into the trunk before she could see it. Is that where he wrote his suicide note?

“I thought I could put rocks in my pockets and walk out into the ocean.”

“Like Virginia Woolf.”

“Yeah! Have you read Virginia Woolf?” His eyes light up for a moment.

“Yes. I wrote a paper about her, too.
The Waves.
”

“I thought, I could have one painful flood of water in my lungs and then I’d be shark food. Over and done, no mess. I’d leave a note and everyone would know what happened. That’s why I did so much coke. For courage.”

“Chris,” she says. She holds his hand between both of hers. Can think of nothing else to say.

He says, “I stopped believing that God could save me a long time ago. In San Diego, I had a bad car accident.”

The scar on his lip—a little shadow in the moonlight.

“A lot of shit happened to me, and I thought, fuck this God stuff. But truthfully, I never stopped praying. And as I was driving down here, I said a prayer over and over. I said,
God, give me one sign.
It’s the most selfish way to pray. Expecting that the Supreme Being will swoop in and take care of my life. If you read the Old Testament, you realize God has other things on his mind. Like, the whole human race, and the fate of nations. But I thought, fuck it—I don’t want to live if there’s no reason. I mean, I don’t know where you’re at with your faith, but…”

“Sort of like what you’re talking about. Prayers just pop into my head.” One pops in now—
God, don’t take him away from me.

“So, like, that was when
you
walked into that room,” he says. “I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. I thought it was the drugs. I went into the bathroom and splashed all this water on my face. I even brushed my teeth. Then it dawned on me:
You
were the sign, the sign I asked for.”

“Chris—”

He cuts her off. “But maybe you were a sign that I should go ahead with it.”

“Chris—” Now it seems that she
must
speak, must slow him down.

“No, listen. You were there, like some kind of reminder to me of a time when I was more hopeful. But you were changed, too. You were being turned into another girl like Alice or Cicely, just another soulless person.”

“No, I wasn’t—” Why won’t he let her say something?

“I know that now. But I couldn’t tell. And then someone made that comment, that you were a virgin. And I thought, wow. Ruby MacKenzie stayed true. She kept to her word all these years. Like you were still waiting for me to be the one. Remember how we talked about that? That’s why I kissed you.”

She jumps to her feet and wraps her arms around herself, feeling how cool the night is, how the ocean carries a chill from some faraway place. She wonders if it’s an indication of a storm. “Is it supposed to rain?” she calls over her shoulder to him.

“I didn’t check the weather report. I wasn’t really thinking past this weekend.”

The bright stripe of moonlight on the water’s dark surface breaks apart and comes together, breaks and rejoins.

Should she tell him? Tell him the truth? The dilemma churns away inside her, sets her teeth chattering. She senses that behind her, Chris has risen to his feet, is closing the gap between them. She commands herself: Don’t walk away. He’s being honest. Be honest with him. She turns around, he’s right there.

He pries her arms loose, takes her hands. He steadies her as he speaks. “When I came out from under the pier, I saw the moon. I had this feeling that you were looking at it, too. That’s why I didn’t go through with it. I went back to the house instead.” He explains how he returned to the party, where Benjamin told him that she went for a walk. He knew then that what he’d sensed was right, that there was this connection between them still. He drove around for a while, hoping to find her, refusing to let go of this vision. He was working up the nerve to go into the club, and then there she was, getting dragged out by the bouncers.

The moon floats over his shoulder, descending. Half his face is pale with reflected light, the other a gray shadow.

He is quiet again, and she thinks, this is the story he had to tell me, he’s gotten through it. Now it’s my turn.

I’ll say it fast. Tell him it was just once, it went by in a blur, it only lasted long enough for the pain to shoot through me, up from between my legs into the rest of my body, only until I found my voice and could tell Brandon to stop. It hardly even happened. It’s never
counted.

He touches her face, runs a thumb beneath her eye. Is she crying? She blinks. Her eyes are wet.

“Chris, I’m not a sign. I’m not even—”

“What?”

A virgin.
The words don’t come out. She’s never said them to anyone, not since she told her mother about that quick in-and-out from Brandon Richards, those minutes of discomfort and the blood that followed. Her mother hugged her tightly, insisting, “If you don’t want it to count, just forget it. It has to
matter
to you. You haven’t lost anything.”

She can see Dorothy’s face, meant to reassure her, though now, years later, it reveals itself as a mask of falsehood, the imposition of wishful thinking. It was bad advice, to establish this lie of virginity. It’s been a bad idea to keep it going.

“I’m not—” she repeats.

Chris is waiting.

She can’t say it. He needs it to be true.

“I’m not a believer,” she finishes. “I stopped believing in God a long time ago. How can
I
be a sign?”

He stares into her eyes and again she’s afraid, afraid of what will happen if this elaborate image of her he’s constructed now crumbles.

But he smiles. “Oh, I forgot! I won you something. When I was looking for you on the boardwalk, I played one game, Whack-A-Mole, and I won.” He squeezes a hand into his pocket and pulls out a toy ring with a big fake red stone on it. “It’s a ruby.”

She shakes her head as he takes her hand. “Don’t make me a hero, Chris.”

“You don’t have to be perfect. That’s not what I meant. You just have to be you.” He slides it onto her ring finger, and she lets him.

It fits. It won’t fall off. Now she is crying. His skinny arms are cradling her. He’s kissing the top of her head, lifting her face to him. She looks up into his eyes and there’s this click, this moment of broken pieces being snapped back together. She knows that this is the beginning of a night of kisses, and more. He isn’t pushing for it, but she’s ready, she knows where it will go, she’s ready. But there’s still this reserve, this pressure, behind her tears, behind the kisses. She pulls away from him.

“What?” he asks her.

“Are you still thinking about doing it?”

His eyes flutter. He shakes his head. At last, he speaks. “I’m thinking I’m going to fall in love with you.”

As she moves in to kiss him once again, she hears her own mind working. She hears the thought take form,
God, stay with me.
It is not belief, but the memory of that time when she did believe, which is, she understands, the hope for belief’s return.

F
eet pressed against the dashboard, gaze fixed on the landscape through the windshield, Robin feels the heightened awareness that comes from making your way
toward
something: toward his sister, yes, he hopes, but also toward some larger thing that he can’t quite define or see. It’s as if he and George, moving along a rural New Jersey highway in George’s battered Cadillac, are filaments being pulled magnetically toward some stronger, steely force, some complex machine, the great and powerful Oz.

But of course Seaside Heights will not greet them like the Emerald City. It will be like high school, minus teachers and rules, plus alcohol, plus the anything-goes attitude of summer. He thinks of the time he and Ruby went to Coney Island and squealed through the ups and downs of a roller coaster, and afterward the guy from the car behind them made some comment about “the two girls who wouldn’t shut up” while the guy’s friend lisped out “that wuth thsssoooo thhsscary.” What can you do? If you say, “Fuck off,” they say, “Wanna make something of it?” You think you’re on vacation, but some things follow wherever you go.

It’s not that he expects intimidation when they get there. This anticipation feels bigger: more like confronting a monster than dealing with a bully. It has something to do with Jackson’s birthday; if today was any other day, he might have waited longer before getting on the road. Whatever trouble Ruby has stirred up has the power to set ghosts into motion.

George hasn’t said much. As he steers them along Route 70, a winding road cutting through a lush South Jersey landscape, his face is unreadable, his eyeglasses reflecting the bluish white hue of the late-day sky. The car’s air conditioning is unpredictable, so the windows are down, those that work, anyway, and hot blasts of wind carry in the smells of Robin’s childhood: cut grass, car exhaust, tar released from softened asphalt. All the foliage is familiar, too: elm trees with patchy green bark like Army-issue camouflage; round azalea bushes, their red and purple blossoms now browned and littering the ground; spindly dogwoods, refusing to let go of wilting pink flowers. This part of the state is another world from the congested suburbia where they grew up. It’s rural, quaint, stopped in time. They pass the Evergreen Dairy Barn, with its sign for “soft serve custard,” looking as if the same coat of paint has been peeling from its walls since the 1950s. Farther along is The Hub Cap Place, a nearly dilapidated shack announced by a hand-lettered sign and a fence covered with cast-off car parts. The occasional road marker points the way to towns called Chairville, Leisure-town, and Mount Misery, names that suggest histories Robin can’t quite put together.

“Look at that one,” George says, pointing to a sign marked with only an arrow and the word
RETREAT
.

“We’ve been warned,” Robin says, and then adds, with heroic emphasis, “Onward!”

“What are we going to do when we find her?” George asks.

“I guess that depends what condition we find her in.”

They are both quiet for a while after that.

He isn’t sure what George is thinking. But his own mind is full of grim scenarios stronger than any attempt he makes to push them away: rape, kidnapping, his sister drugged and abused, gone for good. He doesn’t even have images to go with these fears, just the ugly words and the anxious intensity attached to them. He rubs his eyes. He feels a dull pounding behind them.

George turns on the radio and rolls up his windows so he can hear the music. He can still pick up the Philly R&B station he likes. An Aretha Franklin song is ending, and the smooth-voiced DJ comes on to introduce something by Nat King Cole. Rosellen plays this music at the restaurant, and to Robin it conjures up the sensation of being at mid-shift, sipping Diet Coke by the bar during a lull in the orders and becoming aware, in the momentary calm, of the soundtrack that’s been playing all along. “I feel like I should be checking in with the kitchen right about now,” he says. “Or visiting Table 3.
How’s everyone doing here?
”

“Or not.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You check your tables too much. You hover over them.”

“Seriously?” Robin pivots toward him, and George nods.

Instantly he revisits a string of recent customer interactions that all seem like evidence of hovering, of
too much.
“George, I can’t pay
less
attention to them. I’m on probation.”

“Probation is nothing, it’s just an expression.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Someone on probation just means they’ve been
caught.
Like you got caught with that wine bottle.”

“You have to remind me?”

“Well, people are still talking about it.” George relates a conversation he heard between Malik and the hostess.

“I don’t really want to know,” Robin says, feeling his mood turn sour.

But George keeps going. “I was thinking, it’s kind of like when Cesar said you were uptight. People can read that on you, man. You gotta figure out how to get into Rosellen’s vibe more. When folks come for Southern cooking, they want a laid-back experience. Why don’t you do like I do?”

“You’re not
Southern,
George. You’re not even that black.”

“I’m not
what
?”

“I mean, compared to everyone else who works there. You’re from the suburbs. You’ve got a scholarship to Penn. You only sleep with white guys.” The car seems to be slowing down, and for a moment Robin thinks George is going to pull off the road. He suspects he’s gone too far, but he can’t stop. It’s one of those moments when you probably should just shut up and apologize, but you keep digging in. He says, “Come on, we grew up in the same town.”

“Except I grew up in the black part of Greenlawn. In my black skin.”

“Marble Road isn’t West Philly.”

A vein seems to pulse in George’s neck. “How many black families lived on
your
block? How many black friends did your parents have?”

“My family isn’t racist. They’ve practically adopted you.”

“Like a stray from the Humane Society?”

“What are you talking about? You’re my best friend.”

“If I was your
boyfriend
we’d see how racist they really were.”

Robin almost says,
But you’re not,
which seems exactly the wrong thing, though he doesn’t understand why. George turns up the music, too loud. He accelerates again, and Robin feels pushed back into his seat. The conversation is over, but the hostility buzzes in the air like a persistent mosquito. Melancholy settles around Robin like a net, barely keeping their harsh words at bay.

The radio shifts to James Brown panting to a crackling beat—the lyrics all sexual innuendo.

A half mile down the road, George swerves suddenly into a tiny gas station that looks like an abandoned farmhouse, except for the two pumps advertising a brand Robin’s never heard of.

A stern, pale-faced woman in a kerchief takes her time moving across the gravel, scrutinizing the Cadillac as she approaches. She peers into the backseat, as if there’s something half-hidden there. Over James Brown singing from the back of his throat, she asks, “What’re you boys doing out this way?”

George just glares at her, so Robin leans across him and answers, “We’re driving down the shore. From Philly.”

George says, “Did you just call me
boy
?”

The woman emits a stunned little grunt.

“Because I don’t have to buy my gas here.”

She says, “Mm-hmm,” as if confirming a suspicion, and then backs away, her lips tight.

George twists the key in the ignition and within moments is tearing back onto the road, tires shrieking a protest. Robin looks at him, astonished.

A couple minutes later, a police car appears behind them and stays there for a mile, a couple car-lengths back, like a hawk tailing its prey.

“Jesus Christ!” George exclaims. “Are we in South Jersey or South Carolina?”

“You think that lady called the cops?”

“Apparently I was black enough for
her
.”

The squad car pulls alongside, the cop at the wheel peering at them, all scrutiny. Gradually he moves past before at last speeding away. Robin takes a deep breath, but George remains on alert, his fingers so tight on the steering wheel his knuckles blanch.

The miles roll by, marked by the whoosh of the road and the radio.

Robin rests his cheek against the window, wishing he could roll it down, wanting to smoke, mystified. It all happened so quickly.

A song comes on that he recognizes, “Let’s Stay Together.” It’s not the version on the Tina Turner record that he bought last year but a man with a sort of high-pitched voice. Marvin Gaye? Teddy Pender-grass? There’s a whole era of music, late sixties to early seventies, that he doesn’t know much about. He hadn’t actually known that Tina’s version was a remake. It’s a little deflating to find out that a song you’re into, that has the crackle of something new, is a retread of something else; what felt like a discovery becomes tarnished. This is the kind of observation he would have made to Peter as they drove around Pittsburgh, popping tapes in the cassette player, sharing with each other their favorites, keeping a running commentary. At this very moment Peter is likely driving in the exact opposite direction, back toward Pittsburgh, and that kid Douglas might be with him, playing his own mix for Peter. Change is already in motion: Douglas will move on in, share Peter’s bed, make breakfast for him before his first class of the day. He’ll become for Peter a safe, young, trouble-free boyfriend. The anti-Robin. The remake.

The song gets taken over by static. They’ve fallen out of range. He decides he prefers the original version better, the way Al Green sounds both needy and absolutely sure of himself at the same time.
Al Green.
He’s remembered! How does he even know that? Because it’s something George taught him.

He looks to George, who stares straight ahead, unflinching. Robin says, “OK, not to make excuses, but I just got dumped by my boyfriend, and then my sister goes AWOL, and so to get criticized by you about my job, which was your idea to begin with…I’m a little touchy today.”

“Don’t take it out on me.”

“Well, you’re not exactly
relaxed,
either.”

After what seems like five minutes, but is probably thirty seconds, George finally looks at him. “It’s like this,” he says, pushing his glasses up, a gesture Robin has seen him do a hundred times: logical George, ready to present his case. “If I was any blacker, that cop would have pulled us over. And if I was any less black I’d get my ass whooped in West Philly, living with a gay white boy like you.”

“OK, I probably shouldn’t have,” Robin begins. “I’m not sure why I…”
Just apologize.
“I’m sorry I was talking shit back there.”

“And if you’re not into working at Rosellen’s, you shouldn’t stay. If you’re not into living with me, ditto.”

“Do you want me to move out?” Robin asks, alarmed.

“No.”

“Because I like living with you, even if it sometimes sucks for me in that neighborhood. Maybe if I could get another job…”

“If you quit, you’d probably just go back to Pittsburgh and throw yourself at that hairy white boy. Which would be a mistake.”

“You sound pretty sure about that.”

“I have a prediction,” George says.

“What?”

“I predict you’re going to be over him really soon.”

Robin smiles, against his will, really, and then, for whatever reason, neither of them says anything else, and the silence settles in, and it seems like the worst has passed. Robin keeps thinking he should say more, explain something, clarify, but letting George have the last word feels intuitively right.

On George’s face, in the set of his mouth, perhaps, and in his eyes, shining behind glass, Robin sees the best friend he knows so well and, truly, loves so much. The rock-solid George of so many years, peeking out from the new George, who is someone changing and less predictable. This George is deciding who he wants to be and how he wants to see the world. It is this new George he was trying to wound with words, this new George who’d rightfully gotten angry in return.

Without warning Robin is overtaken by a fluttering of heat rising up through him. It opens like a tiny bud on a branch, in the air after a storm. There is pulsing energy inside this feeling, and he understands that it’s this new George who makes him feel this way. The more confident one. The one who wanted to take control. The one he had really exciting sex with, who read the tea leaves this morning and saw more in their future. This morning, George called it a rebound fuck, but
rebound
doesn’t cover it. This is something else. You can learn a lot from someone like this, someone who isn’t afraid of who he is.

Unpopulated countryside gives way to the loose density of coastal towns, their names identified on water towers that loom above the landscape like giant eggs. On Route 37, in the town of Toms River (“Where’s the apostrophe?” George wonders out loud), the traffic thickens. It’s even heavier in the outbound direction, as a congested stream of weekenders heads back home. These are the folks who leave the shore at four o’clock to beat the evening rush and wind up creating an afternoon rush of their own.

The highway funnels eastward onto a drawbridge that arcs over the bay. Robin has a memory of stopping near the top of this bridge, as a kid, marveling as the road snapped up in front of them. He’d been in the backseat, licking at dripping ice cream, a braided swirl of vanilla and orange sherbet, while Jackson leaned across him to gawk at the boats cutting through the passage below and Ruby wanted to know if cars ever fell into the gap. It all comes back to him: the summer heat, the sweet melting cone, the road splitting open and stopping the world for a moment. From that long ago day to this one seems like a journey of loss: not just of his brother, of his family’s cohesiveness, but of wonder, of awe. When was the last time he even enjoyed ice cream without guilt? (Probably before his fellow actors started bombarding him with cautionary edicts like, “If you want to do film roles, the camera adds ten pounds.” And this was also when he started getting more self-conscious about being naked in front of other guys, worrying about his body, fretting over little folds of excess flesh pinched between his fingers.)