The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years Book 1) (5 page)

The house itself had hardwood floors and dried flowers and lots of bookshelves. Something smelled good from the kitchen—fish with dill?—but it was also clear she had a cat.

I complimented her on her house, and she thanked me. Then she said, "So. What's your drink?"

"My what?"

"Your drink! Everyone has a drink. It's part of who you are, it defines you. One's drink is very important, because it helps tell other people who you are."

"I don't..."

"Oh, of course you do! What do you order when you go out to a bar with your friends?"

"Um, I don't really go out to bars."

Behind cat-eye glasses, she glared at me, hard.

"A beer?" I said.

She shook her head. "Nope. That's what you order because you're too poor to afford your real drink."

"What if I really like beer?"

"You don't."

I shrugged and sort of nodded. She happened to be right.

"You have a drink," she said, "you just don't know what it is yet."

Yet another thing everyone knows but me
, I thought.

"Don't worry," Vernie said. "That's a lot better than the posers who try to pretend that their drink is something other than what it really is—the whole 'double bourbon' crowd. It's just so tiring."

I actually found this somewhat reassuring.

Vernie gave me the fish-eye, considering. Finally, she announced, "I think you just might be a whiskey sour."

"That sounds about right," I muttered.

"Ha! I knew it. Whiskey sour, it is."

She stepped to the bar—how had I not noticed she had a bar with two stools in her front room?—and started pouring. Finally, she handed me the glass.

I took a sip. It was strong, but sweet—and sour, which I guess made sense.

She looked at me expectantly.

"I like it," I said. "I like it a lot." I really did. But was it "my drink"? That seemed like a lot of pressure to put on a glass of alcohol.

"If you like it, it's your drink," Vernie said. "At least for the time being."

"The time being? But I thought you said that everyone had to have a drink—that it helps tell people who I am."

"It does. But it would be a pretty sad world if people never changed, don't you think?"

I couldn't deny it.

"But I should point out that I cheated," Vernie said. "A whiskey sour is usually made with an egg white, and I was too lazy to go into the kitchen to get one."

"Well, that's a
huge
disappointment," I said, selling it.

"I know," she said, playing along.

"I mean, now how do I know if this is really my drink? Or maybe my drink is a whiskey sour without the egg white. How could you have done this to me? I'm so confused!"

"My irresponsibility knows no bounds."

I mock-turned away. "I can hardly stand to look at you. I'm blinded by the harsh light of reality. You've ripped the paper lantern off the light bulb."

Vernie's face cracked wide open. "Oh, Blanche Dubois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
! I love that play. People who say that Vivien Leigh was wrong for the part in the movie completely miss the irony that she could very well be Scarlett O'Hara twenty years later."

I got that irony!
I wanted to say. Did the fact that I'd finally met someone who understood my
A Streetcar Named Desire
references mean that she
was
Blanche DuBois—that Vernie was a desperate woman determined to seduce me in order to deny her own fading youth? It didn't seem likely, but I still couldn't be sure.

Vernie returned to the bar and held up a drink of her own. Not surprisingly, it fizzed.

"I," she said dramatically, "am a champagne cocktail."

I laughed out loud. "Somehow that doesn't surprise me."

"I'm going to tell you something, Russel, but you have to promise not to think I'm crazy."

"Okay," I said.

"No, I mean it! You have to promise. You have to not think I'm a barking-mad old lady. Do you promise?"

"I promise," I said, making a sign that was somewhere between cross-my-heart and the Boy Scout oath.

She stared at me for a second, sipping her champagne cocktail. Then she said, "You saved my life, correct?"

I shrugged again. I had a feeling I was going to be doing a lot of shrugging tonight.

"Well, I dreamt last night that I was going to save your life too. After all, I owe you."

At that, she stared at me. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to say, but suddenly I had a sinking feeling, like I was being set up for an Amway pitch.

"No, no!" Vernie said, reading the discomfort on my face. "You just promised you'd hear me out, that you wouldn't think I was barking mad."

"You're right, I did. So how? How are you going to save my life?"

"I don't know yet. The dream wasn't clear. Just that I would."

I swirled the ice cubes in my glass. "Maybe you already have. I mean, you've already found me my drink."

Vernie smiled. "Don't go anywhere. I've got to go spend a penny."

"Spend a penny?" I said.

"'Pee.' It's British."

She headed off to the bathroom, and that's when I finally knew: Vernie was no Blanche DuBois, or even Stifler's Mom. But she was definitely in the running for Kathy Griffin.

*   *   *

Vernie had made salmon for dinner, along with asparagus and a pretty flavorful rice and pea dish. It was just impressive enough to seem like a heartfelt thank you, but not so extravagant that it felt desperate.

"So just so you know," I said as we ate. "I don't have a girlfriend or a boyfriend. But if I did, it would be a boyfriend."

Vernie looked at me, confused.

"Yesterday at the lake?" I said. "You said I could bring a girlfriend or a boyfriend to dinner tonight. Well, I'm gay."

"Oh, please, you really think you had to tell me that? After the comment about the paper lantern and the light bulb?"

I shrugged. See? I'd predicted I'd be doing a lot of shrugging that night.

"But I'm glad you told me," she said. "All the interesting men are gay."

"You clearly haven't met my buddy Gunnar."

She dismissed it with a wave of her fork. "The exception that proves the rule. Trust me, I've been around enough to know. When did you first realize?"

"That I was gay?"

She nodded, and I had to think about that. People had asked me that question before, but I had a feeling Vernie was looking for something different, a more real kind of answer.

"I remember when I was just a little kid," I said. "I mean, like, four or five years old, not too long after I learned to read and write my name. I saw that this guy had the same name as I did, but he spelled it with only one 'l'. 'Russel,' not 'Russell.'" Here I made a point to emphasize the second "l". "And I must have known—maybe my parents told me—that that was unusual, that most people spelled it with two 'l's. But I really liked it. I told my parents I wanted to spell it with one 'l' too. They just sort of laughed, thinking I'd forget about it. I mean, I was five. But I didn't forget. I made a huge deal about it. I really, really wanted to spell Russel with one 'l'. I think it was because on some level I knew I was different, and I wanted other people—my parents—to know it. I didn't know
how
I was different—I wouldn't have said I was gay if anyone had asked. But I just knew on some fundamental level that I wasn't like everyone else. Anyway, finally my parents said, okay, spell it how you want. I mean, what difference did it make? It's a perfectly acceptable spelling. It's not like they changed my birth certificate or anything.

"So I grew up, right? I got older and older. And all through grade school, every time someone spelled my name, a teacher or something, it was always with two 'l's. And I had to correct them—I had to say, no, I only spell it with one 'l'. And maybe it was all in my imagination, but it seemed to me that people would sort of roll their eyes and go, 'Oh, one of
those
people, huh? Gotta be different.' And by now I'm slowly figuring out why I feel so different from everyone else, that I'm gay, and also that I'm this bookish, overly-sensitive geek of a guy who loves Tennessee Williams plays, and this is all stuff I definitely
don't
want people to know, not in a million years. So I'm feeling more and more awkward every time someone asks me to spell my name—like I'm telling them this secret that I really don't want them to know, or at least giving them a big hint. At one point, this guy at school actually said, 'Here comes the fag who spells Russel with one "l"!' And of course I totally panicked. I even went to my parents and said I wanted to change it back—that's when I found out they had never officially changed it. In the end, I decided it was just too much of a hassle to change it again. And besides, I quickly realized that changing it would just be way too suspicious. When you
are
gay, at least if you're the kind of gay guy who can pass for straight, you become really, really good at knowing exactly what looks suspiciously gay.

"Anyway, I came out eventually—that's a whole other story I don't want to bore you with here. And now I'm really glad I didn't change it. I love that I spell my name with one 'l'. It's like this secret conversation between me and my five-year-old self. He's telling me, 'Hey, I have all these feelings I don't understand, what do they mean?' And by embracing it, by being so proud of that one 'l', I'm validating him, telling him, 'Kid, you are great absolutely the way you are, even if you and everyone else won't understand it for another ten years.'"

Vernie just stared at me for a long time, this little smile playing along her lips.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing. That story was just too perfect. What else is there to say? You just told me everything I need to know about you. Anything else you said would be anticlimactic, so let's just end the meal here." She started to stand. "You wanna clear the table? Then I'll walk you to your bus."

I laughed out loud again. This was something else I was doing a lot of this evening—laughing.

"Can we at least finish dinner?" I said, taking a bite. "It's fantastic, by the way."             

"Thanks." She sat back down again. "So. Are you seeing anyone?"

I thought about telling her about Kevin, but I knew what she'd say, that I needed to
call
him—that I needed cram life into the juicer and drink it down (or something along those lines). I wasn't ready to hear that, so I just said, "No, not now."

We ate in silence for a bit. Then Vernie said, "It's funny how being gay is no big deal anymore, at least in cities like Seattle. Which is just great. I mean, I voted for Hope and Change. Go-bama! Equality forever! But what if being outsiders and misunderstood is part of what made gay men so interesting? God knows it's misery and suffering that made so much music so great—jazz and the blues. Joni Mitchell had polio as a child—it weakened her hand, so she had to figure out how to retune the guitar and re-finger the cords. And
that's
what gave her that distinctive sound and all those unusual harmonies. But then I remember what it was like being a woman in Hollywood, and I think, 'Screw misery and suffering!' They'll always be pain in the world. Why not eliminate as much of it as we can? If gay boys and girls start to grow up as boring and conventional as everyone else, well, that means we
won
."

I nodded. I'd had all these exact same thoughts, including the conclusion that suffering isn't good for anything.

"What did you mean by being a woman in Hollywood?" I asked.

"Yes, enough about you, let's talk about me." She wiped her mouth with her napkin. "I'm a screenwriter. Or at least I was."

"You were?"

"You bet your boots."

"What movies did you write?"

"Did you ever see
Pretty Woman
?"

"Are you kidding? You wrote that?"

"You know the scene when Julia Roberts realizes that her childhood fantasy about a knight on a white horse is offensive, childish nonsense, and that if she wants her life to change,
she
has to change it, not just wait around for some entitled rich guy like Richard Gere to rescue her?"

I thought back. "Um, I guess so."

"No, you don't. Because it's not in the movie! I did a draft, but absolutely nothing I wrote ended up on the screen. It's just as well. They knew exactly what tripe the audience wanted to see back then. Speaking of which, what the hell was that whole
Twilight
thing about? I thought your generation was supposed to be so much less sexist than mine."

I hung my head in mock-shame. "I have no defense. But I do know we shouldn't be lightly forgiven. My generation is going to have to, like, end war if we truly want to atone for
Twilight
."