Amy Inspired (16 page)

A high-pitched ring pierced the silence. I released my finger, but the alarm did not stop. As I scrambled to remove the battery from the machine, Eli ran to my side. He pulled me down off the chair, climbed up in my place and expertly popped the battery out of its plastic cradle. The siren stopped. Zoë had stumbled from her room, stark terror on her face. Seeing me, her fear turned to exasperation.

“Well that was exciting,” Eli said. He set the batteries in my hand.

“Just take the steak knife to my heart the next time you want to kill me,” Zoë said. “It would be less traumatizing.”

Despite her irritation, relief washed over me, as if the cry of the alarm had frightened away any possibility of danger.

8

Once we’d all grown accustomed to the idea that Eli’s stay was temporarily permanent, he wasted no time getting famous.

Leaving the coffee shop with Zoë and Eli one afternoon, we were stopped by a middle-aged woman in a full-body sweat suit who let Zoë pet her new puppy while she asked Eli what to name him. “You’re so good with that kind of thing,” the woman gushed.

Without pause he said, “Name him Fargo.”

“Who was that?” Zoë asked when the woman had safely powerwalked out of earshot.

He stroked the growing beard that now covered his chin. Whether it was purposeful or the result of neglect was anybody’s guess. “I have no idea,” he said.

People began showing up at our apartment asking for him. Several were Jillian’s friends, who knew Eli from his previous job at Juxtapose. There was Diedre with dreadlocks the exact frayed blond of old ropes softened by use; she had somehow talked Eli into helping her collate two hundred handmade chapbooks she planned to scatter across the country. For a week they lay scattered across our living room. Amber and Lynn, Jillian’s housemates, liked to sit with him on the roof, chain-smoking and gossiping, even though Eli declined to participate in either activity. Kevin McCormick was the most frequent guest. He was a graduate student working on his MFA in sculpture, a painfully shy man who began every conversation with a comment about the weather. He and Eli spent whole days scavenging at junkyards and welding found objects. Because he was helping Kevin, because he worked after course hours, and because he was so amiable, no one bothered to ask Eli whether or not he had jurisdiction to use or even be in the campus studios. He returned to our apartment late at night, carrying freshly fired ceramic pieces and newly printed lithographs in ink-splattered hands.

He had a creative energy that would have been medicated with Ritalin in someone half his age. His hand trembled when he drew, from excitement or from caffeine. He drew on his jeans or his hands if he couldn’t find paper. He didn’t eat at home if he could find someone who would go out, and just about anyone would do: He handed out his friendship indiscriminately.

The Volkswagen was partly to blame for his notoriety. The van looked innocent and playful crowded between the bullying SUVs the students favored that year, a clown car infiltrating military camp. It bounced through Copenhagen’s narrow old streets like Mr. Rogers’ cheerful trolley. People honked and waved.

His new and many friendships, however, were a direct result of his job at the coffee shop. He hosted poetry night, introducing each artist with one-minute bios he’d drafted from brief interviews conducted beforehand. The menu marker board featured quirky Morretti illustrations. Because Jimmy, The Brewery’s owner, had created Eli’s position, assigning him to shifts that did not need a third barista, Eli was essentially paid to sit at The Brewery six hours a day hopped up on espresso and practicing Foam Art: the delicate making of patterns in people’s lattes. He could make a branch of delicate leaves, a wobbly star, and—most endearing with the women—a floating heart.

The first thing Eli did when he got his paycheck was offer to pay his share of February’s rent. He stocked the kitchen with things frozen and dyed, novelties our fridge hadn’t seen since Zoë’s dietary takeover: Tombstone pepperoni pizzas, salami, banana freezer pops. Because he was a guest, she didn’t protest.

Eli was mindful of our space and of our habits. If friends came over, he asked our permission before herding them all out to sit on the roof. Once outside, if he found out Zoë and I were writing, he stopped his friends’ intermittent guitar strumming or hushed their near hysterical tirades against the war. He didn’t mind that I blessed my food before eating it, and bowed his head in respect if not accompaniment. (Zoë had never participated.)

Though he had no interest in seeing the sanctuary of Copenhagen Baptist, he gladly came with us for one of our first of the month Saturday grocery giveaways. We drove together in his van to the edge of town to deliver turkeys and children’s coats to families who couldn’t afford either. I enjoyed seeing the children, but always felt awkward around the parents. Eli talked to them as if he were visiting his own family. He got into a discussion of baseball with Mr. Jones that went on so long we had to leave him behind to get to two other homes. He prayed for five minutes straight with Lawrence Kennedy, the resident alcoholic. And Bertie Lewis adored him. Bertie was a widowed black woman who weighed all of eighty pounds, had been on an oxygen tank for as long as I’d known her, and called me Honey. On seeing Eli with his long hair and beard, she grinned and announced it was like having Jesus come hisself to deliver her milk.

As we were leaving she clasped my hand in hers. Her palms felt dry and fragile as autumn leaves. “You hold on to that one now,” she said. “That’s one of the good Lord’s better creations. Don’t you let him outta your sight.”

Instead, I took to avoiding Eli altogether because I couldn’t talk to him without betraying the fact that I found him incredibly attractive.

Zoë was upset. She wanted to know why I didn’t like Eli.

“Who says I don’t like him?”

“No one says. It’s obvious to anyone who’s in the room when the two of you are forced to share it. You do everything in your power to avoid him. ” She reached into the last of the remaining grocery bags and stacked the leftovers on the shelf with the twenty other cans of peas and kidney beans. “When I asked him what was up, he said he didn’t know how to talk to you; he said you’re a nervous person.”

“I like him fine,” I insisted. “I treat him just like I treat you.”

“No, you treat him like an infestation. He’s our guest.” She slapped the empty bag against her knee to deflate it. “It wouldn’t kill you to treat him like one.”

“He’s not our guest, he’s
your
guest. And I’ve never treated him any different than I treat you.”

I rotated the cans she’d just put away so their labels faced outward.

“He said I was
nervous
?” I asked. “That’s a terrible thing to say about a person. Do you think I’m nervous?”

Zoë watched me situate the last can so the Green Giant on the carrots stood identical to the Green Giant on the corn. She answered carefully. “I don’t think you’re a
calm
person.”

“Eli doesn’t even know me.”

“Right.” She shrugged, already resigned to the fact that he and I would never get along. “So why should you care.”

“Sometimes I worry that people think I worry about what people think of me.”

She’d looked at me plaintively before rolling her eyes and leaving the pantry.

The next night she had to work the closing Sunday shift, leaving Eli and me home alone. I carried my stack of textbooks into the living room. He was sitting on the couch with his legs crossed the way women do, a posture that highlighted the length of his body to admirable effect. His reading glasses were wrong for his face, too square and thin-rimmed and out of decade.

“Mind if I work in here with you?”

“Sure.” He got up to flick on the second lamp. He returned to his magazine, the first of a stack of sloppily piled
Art in America
magazines
.
He flipped through each quickly. He was looking at the pictures.

“Anything interesting?” I asked.

“Some,” he murmured.

I made a few more gentle attempts at conversation. He met each with a succinct reply. I finally gave up. I worked; he read pictures. Had a stranger walked in the room, she might have found the situation companionable, but I felt acutely aware of his silent rebuttal.

Around eleven he tossed the last magazine aside and wandered into the kitchen. The fridge door open, shut. He returned to the living room empty-handed.

“Are you at all hungry?” he asked.

I hesitated. It was late, a school night, and all I really wanted was to sleep.

“I could eat,” I said.

We took his van, driving slow over the mounds of accumulating drifts, fat flakes of snow getting mashed in the windshield wipers. I suggested Bailey’s Bistro or the Chinese restaurant, but both were closed.

“The Lucky Tavern?” he asked.

“Sounds good to me,” I replied as enthusiastically as I could manage.

There were more bars than restaurants on the downtown strip. I hadn’t been in a single one since the last time my graduate workshop had met to celebrate Valerie’s thesis defense. I counted The Lucky Tavern among my least favorites. It was the hot spot for upperclassmen jocks who came in droves to watch The Big Game. It was crowded and dark and perpetually damp. Everything came with grease: fried pickles, oily onion rings, and soggy menus.

While the waitress led us to a booth, Eli eyed me skeptically over his shoulder, as if his first glance around the room had been enough to tell him how little such a place could possibly have to offer and how unlikely it was that a person like me would actually prefer it. His skepticism rallied what little school spirit I had. I resolved to have a wonderful time. I resolved Eli would have a wonderful time.

“All burgers are good here and the curly fries are superior to the French fries,” I said as he reached for his menu. “But I wouldn’t recommend the veggie burger. It’s a patty of beans squashed between toast. The taste is bad and the texture is even worse.”

“Anything burger, no veggie,” he echoed.

I considered the menu without any real interest. I couldn’t think of what Eli and I could possibly talk about for an hour and a half. And there was the problem of what to drink. I never touched beer, but it seemed wrong somehow to order wine in The Lucky Tavern.