Pug Hill (27 page)

At the end of the day, after May has already gone, Sergei calls across the Conservation Studio. “Hey, we should go out and celebrate, all of us.”

I am shocked. I do not know what to say. This has never been a normal work environment, has never been the type of place where office friendships are formed. It has never been the type of place where we all go out to grab a drink after work. I mean where would we even go in this neighborhood? The Carlyle Bar? I do not think, in fact I am quite sure, that in all my years as a paintings restorer I have ever actually seen another paintings restorer outside of the museum.

“Uh, yeah,” Elliot says, leaning back, “that’d be cool.” “How about Saturday night? Make it really festive!” Sergei exclaims happily. I am now sure that in all of his disappointment over not getting promoted himself, Sergei has, quite clearly, gone insane.

“Hey, if you guys want to get out of Manhattan at all and want to come out to Brooklyn, I know this really cool new bar that just opened on Smith Street. We could go there?”

We,
I think,
we. We,
as in
me and Elliot,
going to a bar together, on Smith Street.

“Sounds great,” I say.

“The bar on Smith Street it is,” Sergei says happily.

Right, Sergei,
I think.
Me and Elliot and Sergei.

“I’ll look forward to it,” Elliot says, and all I can think is,
I’ll say.

I’ve thought about it more, a lot more. And while I almost went the way of thinking that maybe I’d give a speech about The Promotion That Got Away, in the end, I remembered Benji Brown.

Benji Brown. It’s that simple. The only answer—the only one—to the burning question of who is The One That Got Away is, of course, Benji Brown. Really, I can’t believe it took me more than a second and a half to figure that out. I just hadn’t been digging deep enough. All this time I’d been so busy sifting through exes that I’d had in my adult life. All this time I’d been reluctant to give the title to anyone, surely not to Evan, and definitely not to Rick, the one before him, the one who wore a Barbour jacket so well. And certainly not to Peter—the one before both of them—who must
never
be referred to. But if he absolutely must be referred to for some reason, he is only ever to be referred to as Cheater.

But then, when I went back a little farther, back to eleventh grade—the year, coincidentally (or not so) right after Mr. Brogrann’s English class and
The Grapes of Wrath
—I had my answer. The very second I thought his name,
Benji Brown,
James Taylor piped up in the background singing, “Only One.” The more I think about it, the more I think James Taylor might have been trying to tell me that Benji Brown was The Only One, or at least he was trying to tell me how much nicer it would be to look back over my exes if he were. That James Taylor song has been playing in my head for a few days now, along with The Cure and The Smiths and INXS and all the other music Benji and I spent such a long time listening to together.

I walk into room 502, ready to give my speech.

“Okay, claaaass. Tonight we’ll be hearing from Rachel—”

“I cannot go tonight,” Rachel blurts out as her foot jerks out in front of her.

“But Rachel, tonight is the last night for presentations, next time we’ll be watching the videos from our poems,” Beth Anne explains to her soothingly.

“There are three others who have to go tonight. There is not time for me to go tonight. I cannot go tonight,” Rachel counters robotically, pausing after each word. Beth Anne seems to consider the point.

“Well, yes, actually that’s right, but I think if we work quickly, and maybe all agree to stay a few minutes late, we can get through all the speeches. Claaaass ...” She looks around at us. “Can everyone agree to stay a few minutes late?” Everyone nods, murmurs in agreement.

“I CANNOT!” Rachel shouts and looks over her shoulder, says, more softly, “I
know.”

Beth Anne looks flustered, and smoothes down the front of her skirt. Everyone else has started staring at the floor. “Okay, Rachel,” she says, “I understand.” Rachel says nothing and Beth Anne says to us, more brightly, “Okay. So we have Lawrence and Lindsay and Hope.” Lawrence, and Lindsay, and
Hope. Oh my.

Lawrence’s hand is up in the air before Beth Anne can even ask who would like to go first. Lawrence, possibly worried that Beth Anne may ignore him, as she has taken recently to doing, jumps up out of his chair. He clasps his hands demurely in front of himself and announces, “I’m ready Beth Anne!”

“Wonderful, Lawrence,” she tells him.

He smiles, tilts his head, and says, “And I would like Alec to be my partner.” Alec looks tremendously uncomfortable, a bit pained as he follows Lawrence, who has just skipped out the door.

Upon their return, Alec looks even more pained. Lawrence looks ecstatic as he takes his place proudly in front of the room. Then, suddenly, his expression changes, becomes quite serious, as he looks at the index card in his hand. He looks back up at us.

“I would like to tell you tonight about my wife,” and I think what I imagine everyone must be thinking, well what Amy and Alec and Lindsay must be thinking because really, I’d rather not think about what Rachel must be thinking. I think to myself, not for the first time,
wife?

“I loved her. She was my life,” Lawrence continues and though the rhyming is distracting, he is such a poised and proud public speaker, has been it seems from day one, that it’s easy to sit back and listen. As I listen to his poem, part of me, for a moment wants to cry. Though rhyming and rhythmic, it’s also so sad. It’s about how he loved his wife and wanted to make her happy but because he was gay, it could never work out. He talks about how she said she’d never forgive him and never wanted to see him again. As I listen, I look around: everyone, even disturbingly freaky Rachel, looks touched, sympathetic. I think about Lawrence, such a showman, so endlessly entertaining, the sparkly disco ball equivalent of a person, and I think about the sad things, and how enduring them can get you to a far happier place.

“And so, for her I will always wear this ring.” He flips his wrist around, holds his hand up for us to see.

“I couldn’t hold on to any part of her, but I hold on to this one thing.”

He looks down at the floor, briefly traces a line on it with his Capezio and then looks back up. I remember how he stood and clapped for Amy, how he said, “Bravo!” to her, and how that seemed to make her happy. I stand up from my chair and start clapping. “Bravo,” I say. “Bravo.”

When Beth Anne asks Lawrence what his anxiety level is, he inspects his fingernails, and only says, “you know,” before returning back to his chair, with a new spring in his step.

“Okay, wonderful job, Lawrence, and thank you for sharing that with us. Lindsay? Hope? Who would like to go next?” Neither of us makes a move. I don’t really want to follow Lawrence, because he was so good, and I’m pretty close to sure that no matter how deeply I remember Benji Brown, I won’t be that good. But at this point, I feel like I’ve been waiting so long. Longer, I imagine, than I even know.

“I’ll go,” I say, as I raise my hand high.

“Wonderful, Hope. Who would you like to be your partner?” I look around the room.

“Lawrence,” I say, and we walk together out into the hall. “You’re poem was really good,” I tell him once Beth Anne has shut the door behind us.

“Thanks, Sweetie.”

“I’m, um, I’m sorry it was so hard.”

“Oh.” He waves his hand in the air. “Don’t be. It’s
all
hard, sugar, and figuring out who you are might be the hardest part of all.”

“Okay.” He claps his hands together twice, right up by his ear. “Let’s get you in fighting shape! Let’s do The Lion!”

I stand up straight. I take a deep breath. I don’t quite Take the Room; I take about half of it, but since the sweating has started, I figure the best thing to do right now is start. I steal a quick glance at my index card even though I’m pretty sure I know it all by heart.

“When I think about Benji Brown,” I say as my voice falters a little, “a British Invasion band from the Eighties is often playing—really loudly—in the background.”

I pause, look up. Lawrence is smiling at me brightly, he pumps a fist in the air.
I can do this,
I think. I continue. “It’s something about all the guys I went to high school with, something about the memory of hearing them blast their Smiths, their Cure, their Erasure, their Depeche Mode.” I close my eyes for a minute, I can still see them all: the way they were back then. I can see all the Flock of Seagulls haircuts, all the bangs. I can see the baggy pants folded at the bottom and rolled up, the black penny loafers with nickels where the pennies should be, all the sockless ankles.

“The second I saw Benji Brown, I knew he was going to be important. I knew it the second I saw him,” I say again, for emphasis, “I knew it right away. It was the summer before eleventh grade. There was Benji, at a party in someone’s basement in Northport, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I’d heard his name before; people had mentioned this guy who’d moved here from Boston and was coming to our high school in the fall. No one new ever came in eleventh grade, so by virtue of that alone he was special, and he was rumored to be this completely amazing soccer player, and then, of course, there was that name. His name, the first and the last name both starting with B, that he still went by Benji at sixteen years old, seemed so dorky, but at the same time so cool to me. He seemed so dorky and so cool to me.” And he was. He had the combination down. Equal parts dorky and equal parts cool. It is a mixture I think I’ve been searching for for some time. Come to think of it, ever since high school.

I speak clearly and not too fast. I tell them how Benji had such thick, curly dark hair, how it was a little bit like an Afro. I tell them how he had eyes that always looked a bit sad. I tell them how Benji’s family was Unitarian Universalist. I tell them how with Benji, I never felt weird for being Jewish and Catholic, something in high school I used to feel weird about a lot, and, as you know, sometimes still do. But Unitarian Universalist was like an entire religion that didn’t care that I was Jewish and Catholic, it was like a giant religious melting pot; the kind I’d always wanted to be able to see myself as. I tell them how Benji was a great athlete, but so sensitive, so completely void of any Captain of the Football Team behavior. Or rather, Captain of the Soccer Team behavior, because at my high school, all the cool boys played soccer.

“Also,” I continue, “there was a little bit of cinematic romance in the fact that he transferred in eleventh grade. Heathers was playing in the theaters the summer that I met Benji, and I sometimes thought of us as Christian Slater and Winona Ryder. Before, of course, they killed all Winona’s friends and blew up the school.” Everyone laughs, and I think that’s good, that I made people laugh. It’s good and it buoys me, so I can continue, and tell them about the most important part, about the mix tapes.

“Benji made the best mix tapes of anyone I’ve ever met, and most of the time, I think, of anyone I ever will. A lot of the time we spent, we spent listening to his mix tapes. We used to drive around to nowhere in his car, listening to Erasure and New Order and Flock of Seagulls and R.E.M. and The Smiths and The Cure,
always
The Cure, for hours. And then we’d pull over, and listen to them for a few hours more. I can remember kissing him a thousand times in that car.”

I leave out the part about how I can remember the exact feel of his body, the exact feel of my own, as he maneuvered himself over the stick shift, and reached over me to pull that lever on the side to get the seat to recline, while Robert Smith sang about looking so long at these pictures of you. It was the best kind of kissing back then, the kind that lasted all night, the kind that lasted forever because you didn’t know what came after it.