Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (97 page)

 

RYAN VAN METER
is currently an MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His work has been previously published in
River Teeth
and
Quarterly West
, and is forthcoming from
Indiana Review
and the
Iowa Review
.

 

In your sixth grade social studies class, fourth hour, when Mrs. Perry assigns the group project on European world capitals, don’t look at Mark. Don’t look at Jared. See if there’s another group you can get into. The quiet girl who sits in front of you needs someone to work with, too. If you could avoid working on this project with those two boys, you could avoid all of this.

If you do end up in a group with Mark and Jared you should insist that you meet at the library. If you could meet at the library then they couldn’t do what they are planning to do. If you do agree to meet with them at Mark’s house then I don’t know what to tell you. If you meet there it’s probably all going to happen the way it’s going to happen.

You will show up at Mark’s. His sister will answer the door. Your backpack will weigh down on your back, and his Dad will be watching football in the living room, but you don’t see him, you only hear the dull roar of the TV crowd. His sister will point you down the hallway, “first room on the right” she will say, “across from the bathroom.” You’ll knock on the closed door. You’ll think it’s odd that the door is closed. They know you’re coming over. They know it’s the day before the project is due. They know all of this. You will hear whispering on the other side of door, and then it’s swung open, and Mark stands there, smiling. Jared is flung across the bed reading a magazine. The television glows in the corner. A video game is on, but the action is paused, a figure with winged shoes and a bow and arrow frozen in the middle of the arc of his jump. You’ve played this game before. You’re good at it.

You’ll let your backpack slump to the floor, unzip it, and pull out your books. You’ll balance them in your lap, split open folders and pull out the assignment worksheet. “OK,” you will say. You read over the assignment, the social studies project you’re supposed to be working on, and you won’t notice that they aren’t listening to you. You won’t notice they are mouthing words to each other. You won’t know their plan is about to take shape.

And you won’t know when they ask you to grab the box of Hostess cupcakes on the kitchen counter that they really don’t care about the cupcakes. They just need you out of the room for a second. Of course you’ll do it. You’ll hop up and head to the kitchen. You’re so excited to be over at Mark’s house, hanging out with other boys. It’s what your mother has been telling you to do for years: “You need to spend more time with boys. You should do more things that boys like to do. Why are you always just hanging around girls?” That’s why what you see when you walk back in the room will be so confusing. You’ll think, “this isn’t what boys do, this isn’t what I thought we were supposed to do.”

The door will be shut when you return from the kitchen, though you’ll know you certainly didn’t shut it as you left. The rest of the house will be quiet, but you can still hear the football game from the living room. You will twist the knob and push open the door, and you will see them, on the bed. Jared will be under Mark, and they are turned so you can’t see their faces, not the front of their faces anyway, and they are pretending to kiss. Mark’s thick forearms will be stiffly curled around Jared, Jared’s glasses will be folded, shoved in the corner of the windowsill. Both of them will peek under not-quite-closed eyelids. You will know right off they aren’t really kissing because one of them — it’s hard to tell if it’s Mark or if it’s Jared — will slide a flat palm in between their wet mouths so their lips can’t touch. But they hope you will think they are kissing, and that’s the idea behind this. You will know they aren’t kissing, but you will also know they want to pretend they are kissing. You will guess correctly when you think the project isn’t going to be worked on today.

They will pull away after you’ve stood there for a second. You will start to step away, though you don’t really know where to go, and they will say, “come back, come back in, we’re sorry.” You are back in the room, and they are sitting on Mark’s navy blue comforter holding hands. You’ll feel immediately nervous, your face will feel suddenly hot and pink. There’s no way now for you to cover your skin for them not to see the blushing color and for them not to see how you try to swallow, though your throat is too dry.

They will start talking about it, which you were afraid they would do. “What’s wrong?” Jared will ask you. Mark will ask, “Yeah, what’s wrong, Ryan?” They will look at each other and down at their hands, one flopped over the other. “We hope you don’t mind us doing this stuff. This is just something we do,” Jared says, and he will shrug as if it’s normal, as normal as note passing. “Don’t you ever do stuff like this, Ryan?” Mark will ask you, and here you are, at the point of all this. “You like to kiss guys, right, Ryan?” They are trying to get you to say things about yourself that you won’t be ready to say for several more years, and that’s what will hurt the most about this afternoon. Hurt more than never hanging out with Mark or Jared again. Hurt more than anything anybody will say at school about what actually happened in Mark’s bedroom. It will hurt most when you realize they saw something in you that you thought you’d hidden so well you couldn’t even see it yourself anymore. They found something in you before you did. They saw it, and there it will be, holding a box of cupcakes.

Years after, you will wonder how you managed to get through the rest of junior high and high school with out ever speaking to Mark or Jared again, but somehow you will do it. In high school Jared will trade his brown glasses for contacts, and you will overhear girls in hallways whispering to each other about how pretty his eyes are. Mark will begin hanging out with the boys who wear dark jackets throughout the whole school year, no matter the weather, the boys who smoke in the sunken garden behind the school building, sitting on rotted railroad ties, sharing cigarettes every morning before the bell rings and after lunch. You will eventually find your own friends, and from that afternoon in sixth grade to the evening of your high school graduation you will never tell another person about Mark and Jared’s kiss.

One day someone will ask you about the first time you kissed a boy, and you will think of this kiss, the one between Mark and Jared, the kiss that isn’t really a kiss and isn’t really yours. You could almost laugh. It will be funny to you, in a way, how important this kiss will be — it was the first kiss between two men, however young they were, you will have seen. Funny how of all the kisses in your life this is the one you will think most about. It will be the biggest kiss you ever saw.

Before you will ever be able to actually tell another person about this kiss you will try to write it as fiction. You will try to recast it as a short story. You will have moved to Chicago by then, after college and college creative writing classes, and you will spend evenings sitting in cafés, working, bent over a legal pad, and one night this kiss will come to you, and you will think, “now that’s a good story.” You will begin by vividly describing it, the class project and the bedroom door and the glasses on the windowsill. There will be something about watching it happen on the page, about having control over the afternoon and these three boys. You will try to rename them, but you will never find the perfect substitutes for the names
Mark
or
Jared
. With out
Mark
or
Jared
the story somehow won’t work. You will read over it, you will witness the afternoon again, and it won’t seem real. You will try to change the layout of Mark’s house, change the ages of the boys, move them through time, make them years older or younger. The boy in the story holding the cupcakes — even in the fictional version, you include the cupcakes — just standing there, blushing, his stunned silence, is something you yourself can’t believe. You will think this doesn’t seem real, it doesn’t sound like something that would really happen.

Finally you decide to just tell it. It will be almost eleven years from that sixth-grade afternoon. You will sit with three close friends and together drink several bottles of wine. None of them will have gone to your high school, and none of them will have heard of Mark or Jared. You will sit in an old armchair, a plastic cup of wine hanging from your hand. Votive candles will be scattered on a coffee table, their dull lights reflecting across the bare hardwood floor in the dim apartment. When you begin to tell the story you will feel the rise of a familiar panic. There will be the dry throat and the same flushed and sweating neck. Your friends will watch your face turn. And it will feel silly, your body still affected, still intimidated. A man in his twenties afraid of two twelve-year-old boys on a bed, miles away and years gone.

If you can’t stop any of this, if you can wait sixteen years, it will end well, or at least, better than you’d guess. At your ten-year high school reunion, near the night’s end, on the crowded patio, Jared will approach you.

At the reunion, throughout the evening, you will have noticed that most of the boys from your high school — the football players and basketball players, the class officers and the prom king — are quickly balding or already bald and somehow all shorter. Everyone’s life is sort of rearranged: the quarterback walks on prosthetic feet now, and the class president is a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. You are taller than you were then, and your classmates look at you and look again and tell you that you look grown-up. And instead of hiding a part of yourself from them like you did in school you will have decided to bring your boyfriend.

You stand next to him. The open bar is closed. Classmates make plans to meet at nearby bars, promise to email each other, send letters, and exchange photos of children to keep in touch. Your best friend and your boyfriend are smoking cigarettes. You are standing outside with them on a patio overlooking a courtyard, waiting to walk back to your hotel room and look through the senior yearbook you brought, to point at pictures and talk about the faces. Out of the clump of classmates and spouses Jared suddenly walks up to you. You already knew he was at the reunion, and you almost thought you’d made it through the night with out talking to him. He looks like he did in high school — big and thick, a round chest, thick stump legs, a spread-out face with large, wet eyes — only he’s losing his hair, and his skin is lined with age. He has a wife; she’s extremely thin. Jared extends his hand, and you shake it. He says “Hey, Ryan,” like he’s surprised to see you. The patio is very dark. Classmates crowd around you both, squeezing the space away, their faces covered in shadows. Jared’s nametag — like your nametag, with a scan of your senior picture printed on it — is stuck to his shirt, a crease down its center and dotted by drops of beer.

Your boyfriend and your best friend drop away, leaning to each other in their own conversation; they won’t notice Jared. He asks you the customary questions, the ones answered this evening already a hundred times. Where do you live now, how are you doing, what are you doing, do you like Chicago? You tell him, wondering why he’s talking to you. You are still afraid of Jared. Or at least you are still afraid of that Jared, the one with the glasses on an afternoon in sixth grade. The conversation comes to an end, once you’ve exhausted the usual, casual exchange. Then Jared lifts his big arm to your shoulder. He says, “Hey, listen, you probably won’t even remember what I am talking about, but there was this time, at fuckin’ Mark’s house, when —” and you stop him.

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“You do?”

“I know exactly what you’re going to say.” You are surprised, too.

“I don’t have to say it?”

“No,” you say, and actually you don’t want him to say it, you don’t want to hear him tell it. It would seem too easy, too obvious for this tormentor to apologize at your reunion. You wouldn’t even test this moment on the page — if it was a story you could write — since no reader would believe it. “It couldn’t really happen this way,” you think, standing in front of Jared, watching it happen.

“Well, look, I just want to say that what we did, it was stupid. I’m really sorry. We were just asshole kids.”

You think it’s strange that you assumed you were the only boy hurt by that kiss in Mark’s bedroom. But you see that Jared carries that day with him like you do; he carries a shame not very different from yours. Somehow you’ve shared a scar for this many years. You say to Jared that just knowing he remembers that afternoon is enough. He thanks you and grabs you again. On your shoulder his hand feels a little like the warmth of comfort, and a little like the squeeze of danger.

David Foster Wallace

 

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
is author of the novel
The Broom of the System
and the meganovel
Infinite Jest
, as well as the short story collections
Girl with Curious Hair
,
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
, and
Oblivion: Stories
, and the essay collections
A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again
and
Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the John Traine Humor Prize from the
Paris Review
, an Illinois Arts Council Award for NonFiction, a Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award in Fiction, and a Lannan Foundation Award for Literature. He is the Roy E. Disney Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and professor of English at Pomona College.