Robin and Ruby (35 page)

“No, because you can fall in love with someone slowly, or it can hit you hard, right away. With Chris, it just was like—” She snaps her fingers.

“I’ve fallen in love at first sight many times. I was so into Peter when he first walked into our seminar. But that kind of thing never seems to last. Do you remember Alton?”

“How could I forget? You used to go on and on about him.”

“That wasn’t love. It was just, I don’t know. Hormones.” Robin points to the notebook and flips through a few pages. He seems to scan them as he frowns and says, “I have no idea if George is feeling it. Did it seem like that to you? Did you notice anything?”

“I noticed that George seemed, like, less sheltered?”

“He’s turning into like, I don’t know, an activist. But he still doesn’t have a lot of experience. With guys.”

She tells him, “When I saw you two you at the cemetery, I thought, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you holding hands with a guy before.”

He looks back at the notebook and says, “I guess that’s probably true.” He seems to drift into thought, memory—she can only guess where he’s just gone.

She had been amazed by the sight of them with their hands intertwined, by its out-in-the-openness, and by how it seemed perfectly normal to her—or rather, a perfect fit for Robin. A natural expression. And even though she was sad that Chris wasn’t there with her—that she had left him behind instead of figuring out a better plan than
I’ll call you
—she still felt like there was some possibility for them. For her and Chris. If Robin could have this connection with George, more romantic than their usual friendship allowed, then she could find some way to fit Chris into her life, even though there were all these strikes against them.

She moves to sit down on the bed. And then she’s hit by a rush. She thinks it must be the turbulence in her stomach threatening to come forth. Then she thinks, no, not my stomach, something else, lower down—it feels like her period, but it’s too early for that. Then she feels the warmth, and excuses herself to go to the bathroom.

She touches herself, looks at her fingertips. Yes. There it is. She’s started to bleed. She must have calculated her cycle wrong. Or maybe it’s just come early—perfectly, joyously early.

She thinks, I should always have faith.

Back in her room, she lies down again, and she feels fifty pounds lighter. Cleansed. (The fact that that Clark has a girlfriend has worked in her favor. Tucked under the sink, she found what she needed. Never before has a box of Tampax seemed like such a gift.)

At last she is able to rest, to sleep. She even dreams, wild images of the ocean that are both scary and beautiful, as she floats on the surface in the sun and then dives into blue depths. There’s a far-off landscape, a lush green shore, Chris is in the water with her, swimming ahead, and he’s telling her, “We’ve got to get to the place.” He keeps saying it, “That’s our place,” but she can’t quite keep him in her sights and then he’s gone and there are birds circling overhead, their calls becoming louder and menacing, mechanical. The sound of machines grinding away.

She awakes, but the dream carries noisily into the room with her. Quickly she understands that the phone is ringing. She finds it, tangled up in the blanket with her.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

It’s him.

“Are you OK?” she asks.

“I’m OK,” Chris says.

“I called the motel, you weren’t there.”

“Sorry.”

“Did they give you my message?”

“I got it when I was checking out, so I had to wait to get to a phone and didn’t have any change, and I couldn’t find my phone card. I couldn’t find my wallet.”

“You lost your wallet.”

“Yeah. My driver’s license and my money and, well, everything.”

“That sucks.”

“I didn’t want to call collect.”

“I thought—” She’s not sure she should say it. “I was starting to freak out.”

“Sorry. You probably had a lot of dark thoughts. Why wouldn’t you?”

“So you’re not still wanting to—do anything?”

“I’m not gonna off myself.” He says this a labored way, almost as if he’s embarrassed, but it’s hard to feel reassured, because just hearing him voice it makes the possibility of suicide reassert itself. He says, “I’m back at my mom’s place now. How are you?”

“My family’s been pretty difficult. But I’m trying to tell them everything’s OK.” She rubs her face, feeling the weight of the dream still moving in her skull. “I mean, everything between us. Isn’t it?”

“Sure,” Chris says.

“Really?”

“I meant what I said, Ruby. I fell in love with you all over again.”

“I love you, too.” She rushes to say more, because even those three important words aren’t enough. “I’m sorry I said mean things.”

“I have so much respect for you. No one ever fights for me.”

“You’re the one who fought for me. I heard that you punched Calvin.”

“He threw a chair at me.”

“God, I’m so done with him. I never want to see him again.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Except now my brother’s supposedly going to work with him on some dumb movie.”

“Let’s not talk about him. He’s a chump.” She laughs, but she notices he doesn’t. He says, “So you really didn’t have sex with him?”

“No. But—look. I don’t want to talk about virginity. It’s just this patriarchal construct, and it’s so fucked up that people put all this value on it—”

“I wish I’d been a virgin for you,” he says. “I wish I hadn’t boinked a bunch of airheads I didn’t care about.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” she says. She thinks,
a bunch
? She wonders,
Do I want to know
?

He says, “I have to tell you something. I’d rather tell you in person, but I don’t think I can wait.”

“When can we see each other?” she asks. She starts proposing plans—should she take a bus down to Princeton? Does he want to drive up here, or could they meet in Manhattan? Should they try to find another hotel room?

He’s quiet as she throws out all these ideas. Why isn’t he saying yes? She feels a stab of panic—it’s that dream all over again, but now she’s way, way out in the ocean, and the ocean is finite, and like some kind of Old World vision it ends in a waterfall plunging into the void, and she has to swim with all her strength to avoid the fall.

Then he says, “I’ve been talking with my mom. She’s had this plan in the works for a while. She wants me to go to this camp.”

“Summer camp?”

“It’s for young people with substance abuse problems.”

“Really? Like, you’d be a camp counselor?”

“No…”

“I don’t get it.” She’s not sure why she can’t follow this.

“I’d be there to get off cocaine. Once and for all.”

“Oh.” And now she’s out of the dream entirely. The water has gone still. Chris is there saying,
the place we have to get to,
and she’s waking up all over again. There was no edge-of-the-world plunge. There is just his voice on the phone, in the darkness of her childhood bedroom, where she lies wrapped in a blanket, with the sensation of blood fresh upon her.

“My mom’s been trying to get me to go to this place for a while,” Chris says. “And I’ve been saying no, because I don’t trust anyone to really help me, you know?”

“Yeah, I know that feeling.”

“And actually it was one of the reasons I was thinking about killing myself. I mean, she wanted me to go to this camp, and I wanted to do anything in the world except go there. I brought all this money down the shore thinking I could do so much coke that I’d…I don’t know. Just surpass what I’d done before. But then, when I got to the point that I was actually writing a suicide note…”

She feels herself recoiling for a moment. Thinks of Robin’s suspicions, thinks that he was right after all, that Chris is too much trouble. And then is fighting back against that vision, which she does not want to believe.

Chris tells her that after she drove away, he spent part of the afternoon at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, on his knees, head bowed, struggling to figure out what to say. “I didn’t want to pray to that mean old man on his fucking throne in the clouds. So I figured, I’ll just sort of make a list of what I want, like, what’s important. Like, I don’t want to be high all the time. I really don’t. And I can’t lose you again. I almost lost you because I was high.” It sounds to her like he might be crying now. There’s a hoarseness to his voice, a sniffle between the words. “So now I have to do something about it, right? Because you can’t just speak the truth and then ignore it.”

“No.”

“So, maybe I have to give this rehab camp a try.”

“For how long?”

“Six weeks.”

“The rest of the summer,” she says quietly. It might as well be forever. How can she let him go for six whole weeks when they’ve only had a day together?

“Will you wait for me?” he asks.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because I’m a drug addict.”

She pauses. “That’s an intense word.”

“It’s a pretty big deal, Ruby. More than I probably let on.” He says, “College has been one big coke party.”

She listens as he tells her about this problem, its escalation, its greedy hold over him. He talks about sniffing flyaway bits of powder out of the upholstery of a sofa, of spending money meant for textbooks on buying more coke, of carrying around too much cash all the time and buying from scary men in the dark alleys behind nightclubs. He says he will probably drop out of school again, probably find some kind of job when he’s done with this camp. Work for a living, keep himself busy, stay away from people like Benjamin and Alice. Stay away from temptation. She thinks this must all be a good thing, that his confession is what she needs to erase the worries she’d had about him. If she can just be with him again, look into his remarkable eyes, kiss that lip with its tender, innocent scar, she’ll know that all will be well.

But this is when he tells her that camp starts tomorrow. In a Midwestern state.

He has a flight out of Newark Airport first thing in the morning.

His mother is already packing a bag for him.

And in this moment her entire life realigns. What matters and what doesn’t. What is passion and what is just passing time. What everyone else has wanted for her, and what she wants for herself. I’ll wait for him, she thinks. What else would I do?

They talk. They talk about everything that’s happened in the hours since she left him down the shore, and then about everything that transpired in the years since their phone calls ended. “Those were our lost years,” Chris says.

“I still can’t believe I found you again,” Ruby says.

They talk without thinking of time.

When at last Chris’s mother calls him away, and they hang up—
I love you, I love you
—Ruby feels almost embarrassed—even though she’s alone—to discover the snot dripping from her nose. Down below, there’s been more blood. She didn’t want to break away from him and now she’s sticky and she wants another shower.

When she comes back from the bathroom, she sees that there’s moonlight in the room. Outside the window, fat and orange and filling the sky almost magically, the moon is finally there, on the ascent. It’s a different moon than last night’s—already shrinking on one side, like a piece of fruit left on the counter to age.

She’s aware of what a deadly quiet night it is. There’s barely a car on the road. No laughter from neighbors barbecuing in their yards. All she hears is the sound of crickets, a faint musical croaking that has always been the sound of summer nights in New Jersey.

Then she picks up the gurgle of the television from downstairs. Clark must be settling in for the night. A lot of those lost years passed by right there, on the couch, near her father, with the TV on and not much being said. She has at times resented all those vanished hours, resented the split in her family that forced her to spend time here, when she might have been somewhere else, of her own choosing. But right now, in the middle of this silent summer night, drained of the energy she just gave to Chris, as she sent him off to repair himself, the comfort of the living room seems like all she can manage. She pulls herself up and heads toward the stairs, toward the sound of something familiar.

A
car in the driveway brings Robin to the window. It’s not just any door, but the distinctive heavy slam of the Cadillac. The yard is bright with moonlight, and George is making his way across it.

He’s been poring through his diaries for a while now, feeling the distance between who he was then and is today, and also, more obviously, how time has failed to change him. All the ways he hasn’t yet mastered his fears, focused his actions. He reads a line he wrote at fifteen or sixteen, like,
I’m going to try harder to reach out to Ruby,
or
I’m going to rehearse more outside of class,
or
I’m going to learn to be a better listener,
and it could just as easily have been written today at age twenty.

It’s been strange to be holed up in Greenlawn, this close to Manhattan, and not go into the city. Not even feel the pull of it. When his mother left, she invited him back with her, and as he told her, no, I’m going to stay here so George and I can make an early start for Philadelphia, he could see that she wasn’t quite sure how to take it; in the old days, if Dorothy was driving from Greenlawn to New York, her children were always in tow. But they’re not children now, not in the same way. So some things in your life do change. External things. Inside, it seems, if these diaries contain any insight at all, you continue to be the same person. Unless you can be brave.

Home is a powerfully mysterious concept right now. Philadelphia is new and temporary. Manhattan is his official address, and yet he spends less time there than at any point in the past five years. With all of them in Greenlawn today, this place has the whiff of family life as it might have been lived had the earth not shaken under their feet all those years ago; but he could hardly call this home. Clark lives here, amid the memories, but Robin feels caught in a role between a visitor and a guest, like a squatter with an old claim who pops up from time to time for a meal and a nap. He knows he’ll never again do more than pass through this house, never stay for long. He’ll return to Pittsburgh in the fall, but he wonders if it will seem like Peter’s turf, if he’ll have to start all over, sift through friends, find new hangouts, try to resolve what is still his, as opposed to what used to be theirs. And then in the spring comes London, the big unknown, the test. He’ll go. He knows that now. He has to; it’s the brave choice. But London won’t be home. None of these places seems solid, or permanent. He could be in any one of them and still feel like he belonged somewhere else. Or nowhere at all.

Robin takes the steps downstairs two at a time, wondering what could have brought George back so soon. In the living room, Clark and Ruby are sitting on the couch together, watching what appears to be a science fiction movie, though a rather ridiculous one, with fake-looking spaceships and a lot of overacting. They’re both laughing, Clark rather heartily and Ruby almost against her better judgment. As Robin passes by, Clark says, “You gotta come back for this. It’s
Buckaroo Banzai
.”

George is at the back door, looking worn-out in the same T-shirt and scrubs he’s worn all day. His face portrays absolute dejection. His eyes look like he’s been rubbing them, as if he’s been crying, which is not like him at all.

“I told them,” he says.

Robin doesn’t need to ask what. “Come in. I want to hear.”

George drops his bag on the floor and slumps into a kitchen chair. “Is there any beer?”

Robin opens the fridge and digs among the lower shelves. In the back he finds a couple cans of Miller. “That’ll do,” George says. Then Robin gets another idea. In the upper cabinets he finds a bottle of Scotch, a fancy bottle in a blue velvet bag. George nods eagerly.

Robin calls out, “Clark, we’re borrowing your Scotch.”

“What?” Clark calls back, his voice barely carrying above the explosions from the TV.

Robin fills two glasses with ice and pours an inch of amber liquid over both of them. He finds a half liter of Diet Coke in the fridge and pours it into one of them. “Straight up for me,” George says, and then adds with a rueful twist to his mouth, “So to speak.”

Robin raises his glass. “Here’s to one of the biggest moments of your life.”

George gulps and winces as the Scotch goes down. “I hope it wasn’t one of the biggest mistakes.”

“Come on, you know it wasn’t.”

“Telling them was the only thing on my mind. I was thinking, if they had a meltdown on me, I could leave and go to a bar. There’s that gay bar in River Edge, Feathers.”

“The worst name for a bar ever,” Robin says. “Plus, I’ve never gotten past the guy checking ID.”

“I kept thinking of how your mom asked you about Peter. Seemed so normal. I thought, OK, it’s possible for people to open up their minds.”

“Hey, not to interrupt, but I’m sorry about that thing before, when I didn’t tell you that Peter had left me that message. I don’t want you to think—”

George sucks down some more Scotch and makes a dismissive gesture. “My mom had made a whole bunch of food, all my father’s favorites, like this battered steak and mashed potatoes, so she heated some up for me. My father was saying what a great surprise it was that I showed up for Father’s Day. I didn’t give him the whole story, about Ruby. I just said that you and I decided we’d surprise our fathers. And he was really in a good mood. I figured, I’ll build up some goodwill. Cash in on it later. And they wanted to know about school and about the restaurant and all sorts of things—”

“Did they ask about me?”

“Well, I mentioned you first, and then my mother said something.”

Robin thinks that he may not want to know what that “something” was. There was a time when Mrs. Lincoln was really fond of him, but the first time she saw him visiting from New York, wrapped in some not-very-masculine outfit, she notably cooled. Now, when he talks to her on the phone, she’s polite, but it’s never more than small talk. “She used to like me,” Robin says. “But she can smell it on me now.”

“Hold on, this isn’t about you.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” His diary mocks him:
Be a better listener.

“So then out comes the chocolate cake, and I finally just told them, ‘It’s time to discuss the fact that I am gay.’ And my father just got this angry look on his face and said, ‘When did you make this decision,’ and my mother said that I’ve seemed confused for a while now. And I tried to give them, I don’t know, a little personal history. And I told them everything I knew about science, about how it’s inborn, probably genetic, so it wasn’t a decision to be gay, and my father said, ‘There are no homosexuals in our family,’ and he said I’d lost my way. I was like, ‘There’s Rosellen, she’s a lesbian,’ and they just acted shocked. I mean, come on! Then my mother admitted that she’d been worried about me, and she went to our pastor once to ask him about homosexuality, and he said something about love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin. And my father said the sin was leading to disease.”

“You got it from every angle,” Robin says.

“I was ready to fight. I mean, I was
prepared,
I had my facts and figures, you know? I said that the government had to do something to educate people about this medical crisis, and that there were people doing research, and the government wasn’t funding it. ‘How do you know the government didn’t
cause
it?’ my father said. ‘I don’t,’ I said. And because my folks are such die-hard Democrats and despise Ronald Reagan, I got some glimmer that maybe they might understand the situation that way. So that was the best I could do. But they could not understand that I was telling them, this is who I am. I mean, they basically told me I
couldn’t
be gay. That takes a lot of nerve.”

George empties the glass. The ice cubes settle into the bottom.

The sound brings Robin back to the Greek restaurant, to Peter. The sound of dissolution. He reaches across the table and pries George’s hand from his glass, holds on to his fingers, which are chilled. “Parents are always telling their kids who they are,” he says.

“Not your parents.”

“Well, not as much as they used to,” Robin says.

In his last conversation with Dorothy before she left, when she came into his bedroom still trembling from the words that had gone back and forth between her and Ruby, Robin told her that he had had a talk with Clark. And he told her then that he had expressed this fear to Clark, that if he got sick Clark would reject him, and Dorothy had said, with steel in her voice, “I won’t let him.” And Robin found that he believed her, because she and Clark were communicating again, had approached something like a truce, would perhaps rebuild a civil relationship and maybe even turn to each other when needed, if required. But a mother who is willing to stand with her adult child, no matter who he has turned out to be, is a mother who has gotten used to her child as an adult. There has been a reckoning, and an acclimation. He tries to tell George this, that his parents will come around, some day, but there’s no way for George to take comfort. The rejection still burns hot.

“That’s not my home anymore,” George says. “So I’m here to drive you back to Philly tonight.”

“I thought you were here to get drunk.” Robin pours more Scotch into George’s glass. “Stay over,” he says.

“Will your dad mind?”

“He doesn’t even know what’s in his liquor cabinet.”

“No, will he mind me
staying
?”

Robin shakes his head, thinking that he won’t give Clark the chance to say no, if it comes to that. “Come on,” he says. “They’re in the living room.”

Clark and Ruby wave hello to George but remain fixed on the television screen, which shows a close up of a remarkably handsome actor with sharply chiseled features, gelled hair, a sexy space-age suit. He seems to be a scientist but is also singing in a rock band. “Who’s
that
?” Robin asks, not recognizing the actor.

Clark says, “That’s Buckaroo Banzai.”

Ruby offers a sly smile, understanding from the tone of Robin’s voice what he was actually asking.

There’s another character, a black guy with a Jamaican accent and foot-long dreadlocks hanging down his back, who is saying, “The situation is explosive.”

“You planning on wearing your hair like that?” Clark says to George, with a slight chuckle as if the idea is more comical than anything else.

“Anything could happen,” George says.

“How much time do you think that takes, for that length?”

“Depends how quickly it grows.”

“Well, we like you just the way you are.”

“Dad,” Robin says, “how about making room for some expansion.”

“Fair enough,” Clark says. “Fair enough.”

Robin tugs George on the arm. “George is staying over,” he announces, and they move toward the stairs.

On the TV, Buckaroo Banzai is saying, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

Ruby makes a sarcastic click with her mouth. “Profound,” she says.

Robin looks to her, and she glances toward George, making his ascent. Without a sound, she mouths the words, “Sweet dreams.”

They stand together inside the garish bedroom, the silver vertical lines making a kind of cage around them. George is staring at the single bed. “So, we flip a coin to see who gets the floor? Or should I just sleep on the couch downstairs?”

Robin takes him by the shoulders and pushes him backward. They fall one then the other onto the blanket. Robin drapes himself across George, feeling how solid he is, and how warm, and how the smell of his body is strong and familiar. Robin lowers his face, close enough to kiss. But George unexpectedly turns his head.

“What?” Robin asks.

“There’s something else I didn’t tell you,” George says. “Yesterday at work, before I left early, that guy Matthias called the restaurant. He wanted me to come over again.”

“Did you tell him you found someone better to have sex with?” He makes sure George can see that he’s smiling, though in fact he feels something like jealousy.

“I told him I was
busy
. Then I felt bad for not speaking up for myself. Because I wanted to say, ‘I’m not interested in being sexually colonized.’”

“They sure teach you a lot of big words at that Ivy League school.”

George frowns, “You don’t think I’m serious?”

“Of course you’re serious. You’re always
serious.
” Robin rolls off George, finding room alongside him on the bed. “Look, if a guy says something idiotic to you, sometimes you gotta just laugh it off. A guy like Matthias—just tell him he’s an idiot. And that he’s not much of a lover.”

George seems to take this in. “I think it’s more complicated than that.”

Robin waits another moment and says, “At the risk of saying the wrong thing for like the ten-thousandth time this weekend—”

“Why hold back now?”

“You need to know, George, that you’re turning into a babe. All those push-ups you’re doing are working.”

“Shut up. I’m a short black guy with glasses and no fashion sense.”

“No,
you
shut up. I’m telling you, you’re gonna get a lot more attention. And some of the guys are going to be jerks. Racial stuff is part of it. But sex is just like that. The way people treat each other, it’s not always about respect. You should trust me on this one.”

“Well…”

“Well, what?’

George is quiet for a while, so Robin prods him to speak. “OK,” George starts, pushing up his glasses. “Last night, you went back to your bed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We fell asleep together, but you snuck out and then you sort of tried to avoid the subject.”

So that’s it.
“Your bed was too small,” he tries. But George is waiting for more. “I didn’t know that would bother you.”

“It didn’t seem very respectful.”

Looking into the soft brown of George’s eyes, Robin admits, “Last night stirred up a lot of feelings for me.”

“So sex has an emotional component for you,” George says.

“Doesn’t it for you? Doesn’t it for everyone?”

“Even casual sex?”

“That wasn’t
casual!
”