The Last September: A Novel (5 page)

“So,” I finally said, after battling against it the past hour. “What do you hear from your brother?”

His eyes weren’t visible, but he let out a little sigh. “Not much, Brett,” he said. “Not much at all.”

I waited for something more, and when he didn’t provide it I elbowed him lightly in the ribs. Charlie and I had spent our night together in the single bed in my dorm room. The next day we came here, to Dot’s Diner. I had slid into my side of the bench, expecting him to sit across the table, but instead he slid in right beside me. We spent most of that day leaning into each other, clinging to each other. It never occurred to me that our imminent separation—after such transcendent and life-altering togetherness—was any less painful for him. When Charlie left that afternoon, he’d told me that he didn’t have an email address, and neither of us had cell phones. Not everybody did, back then, the late nineties. I told him not to call me on the dorm phone.

“Write instead,” I said. “Nobody writes letters anymore.”

It had been almost a week and I hadn’t received a letter yet but was determined not to despair. Charlie wouldn’t have written his first day home in Hyde Park, where he was going to culinary school. He would, I thought, have written his first letter to me the next night and mailed it the following morning.

“Eli,” I said now. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

“For the moment, yes.”

I pushed him again, hard enough that his shoulder banged against the window at Nick-N-Willy’s. The pizza baker paused, catching his dough in midair to glance over at the thud. Eli righted himself and brushed off his coat.

“If I hear from him,” he said, “I’ll tell him to call you. Okay?”

“He said he would write.”

Eli nodded, unreadable, his eyes still hidden behind dark glasses. We turned and started heading up Ninth Street. Usually after a big brunch Eli and I liked to hike up the Sanitas Trail off Mapleton. I had my hands in my pockets, staring at my feet as they alternated on the crooked sidewalk. Obviously Eli was doubting it, the connection between Charlie and me. As worry fluttered, I tamped it down by remembering the way Charlie had looked at me and the fact that he was the one who’d had set the whole thing in motion, back in Eli’s crowded kitchen. Why would he have done that if he hadn’t wanted to be with me? My concentration on these matters was so complete that when I lifted my head to look at Eli, he wasn’t walking next to me anymore. I stopped short.

“Eli?” I said, more to myself than calling for him.

He must have bolted away from me at warp speed, because I could see him, more than a block away, standing on the lawn of an imposing brick house, doing some kind of battle with a German shepherd. Eli loved animals, so it was hard to work out the nature of this interaction, whether it was playful or antagonistic. From where I stood, I could see he had his hands on the dog’s head. The dog itself was tensed, haunches higher than its shoulders, as if it were trying to wrest something from Eli’s grasp.

“Brett,” Eli yelled. “Help me out here!”

I should have run, I know. But it was hard to conjure the motivation to get into a fight with a hundred-pound dog. My steps may have picked up a little bit, but tentatively. Halfway there I could hear the dog growl.

“Eli,” I said. “What are you doing? Leave the dog alone!”

By the time I got there the owner had emerged from the house. Eli wouldn’t let go of the dog’s head, and I saw that he actually had a legitimate reason for what he was doing: the dog had a kitten in its jaws. When the owner—a frazzled gray-haired man in a plush bathrobe—grabbed its collar, the dog spat the kitten onto the ground at Eli’s feet. Eli knelt to scoop it up, holding the ball of fluff protectively to his chest. The kitten was soaked—shiny with the dog’s slobber, encased, as if it had just been born. I didn’t see how it could be alive.

We walked away from the house and sat down on the curb. Eli rested the kitten on his knee to examine it for damage. It was still coiled into the shape of a half-moon, and to my surprise it opened its eyes and blinked at Eli. I could see the imprinting taking place, from both directions, two sets of blue eyes refracting sunlight and each other.

“I think she’s okay,” Eli said. God only knows how he’d determined its sex. Maybe a lucky guess. Eli pulled the cat back to his chest, cradling her, wiping her clean with his shirt, and I knew there would be no found kitten signs posted around the neighborhood. He placed her back on his knees and she shook herself off, little whiskers making themselves parallel, reclaiming dignity. Eli stroked her with a brisk kind of gentleness, and she arched her back into his palm.

“Look,” Eli said. “People think we domesticated animals with food. But really, it’s our hands.” He drew her back to his chest, two fingers scratching under her chin, her eyes half closed in newfound bliss. “Cats might be able to clean each other,” Eli said, “but they can’t do this. It’s people, we’re the only ones who can pet and stroke and scratch bellies. That’s why they love us. They can get their own food. But we’re the only ones who can pet them.”

“Hey,” I said. “Eli. Did you ever think maybe you should be a vet instead of a human doctor?”

Eli smiled, his eyes still on the cat. “When I was little, that’s what I wanted to be. A vet. We had this girl who used to take care of us during the summer, Sylvia, she was so great with animals. I always said my plan was to be a vet and marry Sylvia.”

I reached over and touched my fingers to the kitten’s head. Her fur was still spiky with dog slobber. She opened her eyes and glared at me with an adult cat’s disdain.

“Maybe you still should,” I said. “Be a vet. You love animals so much.”

“I like people, too,” Eli said. “I want to help. More than just animals. You know? The world.”

“Well,” I said. “What you just did was brave. Saving this kitten. That was helping the world.”

Eli smiled. “Maybe I’ll do both,” he said. “After Harvard Med I’ll go to vet school. Open up a whole family practice—people on one side, pets on the other.” We stood up and started walking back down Ninth Street, the idea of a hike abandoned.

“What are you going to name her?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Eli said, then started listing possibilities. But my thoughts had turned back to Charlie. Remembering his face, the way his fingers grasped my upper arm as he kissed me good-bye, I told myself I wasn’t worried. Tomorrow at the latest: the letter would be in my hands. I walked all the way home with Eli, stopping at Delilah’s to buy kitten food, barely talking at all.

TWO WEEKS LATER, NO
letter from Charlie had materialized. I checked my mailbox twice a day and started to wonder if I’d given him the wrong address. Or maybe Charlie had lost it in his travels. I tracked Eli down at a Thursday night Pub Club, a weekly party thrown by the Deltas. It took me a half hour to find him. At ten o’clock, in the basement of a packed fraternity house, Eli had just poked a hole in the side of a beer can and was about to bring it to his lips.

“Hey,” I said, tugging on his sleeve.

“Brett,” he said, visibly happy to see me. “Want to do a shooter?”

I could barely hear him over the music. I stood on my toes and yelled into his ear. “I need to get Charlie’s number from you,” I said.

Eli paused and looked around like he wanted to put down his beer can. But he’d already poked the hole, and as soon as he let go it would spurt everywhere. So he shrugged and went ahead with the shooter while I waited patiently. Then he took my arm and led me over to a corner.

“Brett,” he said, yelling over the noise. “Charlie wasn’t even supposed to be there for the party. I didn’t think you would meet him. And you know, there’s a reason I didn’t plan on introducing you two. I wish I’d been there when you did meet, I mean, I wish I’d gone into the kitchen with you.”

The other day, at Dot’s, I hadn’t wanted to hear anything Eli had to say about Charlie. Now I felt like I needed to, but at the same time my heart knocked in agitated protest against everything I immediately knew he’d say. I didn’t want it shouted, here at this party.

“Can we go outside?” I said.

We moved through the crowd together. Eli kept his hand just at my back, not touching me but letting it hover there, like he was guiding me. We stepped through the back door into the parking lot that bordered an alley. People milled about in thinner numbers, and we sat down on the curb. When Eli spoke, it was quiet, cautious, like he knew I didn’t want anyone else to hear.

“I love my brother. He’s a very cool guy. But he’s not reliable. And with women he’s not . . . he doesn’t follow through.”

With women.
In my mind, an endless stream of us unfolded, before me, and after. Eli said, “I would have told you before if I knew, if I had any idea you two would get together. But by the time I found you guys—”

“It was too late.”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “He’s a helluva handsome guy, Brett. And decent. I mean, he doesn’t mean any harm. But he’s just not so keen on commitment. You know? He kind of lives in the moment.”

I stared at the pockmarked pavement. Eli ruffled my hair, a brotherly gesture.

“Wow,” I said. “I feel so stupid.”

“Don’t. It’s not your fault.” He let his hand rest there on top of my head. “It’s Charlie. This is what he’s like.” A beat before he added, “I should have told you. He’s sort of a womanizer.”

This almost made me laugh. I’d never heard anyone except my mother use that word.

Eli went on. “He doesn’t mean to be, I don’t think.”

“Except we just throw ourselves at him.” The words sounded more bitter than I meant them to, and even as I spoke them I thought: had I thrown myself at Charlie? It hadn’t felt that way. More like, I’d just made it easy as possible for him to reel me in, not the barest struggle on the line.

“What would you do if I asked for his phone number?” I said. “What if I asked you for his address?”

“I would give it to you.” Eli’s voice sounded very quiet, concerned, and a little bit reproachful. I could picture him—fifteen years from now, a doctor, with a soothing but faintly admonishing bedside manner, telling his patients not to smoke or eat fatty food.

That subtle admonishment helped me face the fact that if Charlie wanted to reach me, if he wanted to keep me in his life, he would have already done so. If Eli gave me his phone number, all I would do was humiliate myself further. Still, I brought my knees up to my chest and leaned my head into them, not able to prevent my teenage heart from asking,
Why?
Why don’t you love me?

TH
AT SHOULD HAVE BEEN
that, but over the next days I couldn’t help waiting. Part of me waited to stop wanting Charlie to write. Another part waited for him to change his mind. Every day, I checked my campus mailbox, which only stood empty or held a magazine or a letter from my mother. In a particularly weak moment, I called Information, but there was no Charlie Moss listed in Hyde Park.

One evening Eli called. He’d won a BURST award to do research work for a biology professor and wanted to celebrate. I met him at the Sink—he’d already ordered a large veggie pizza and a pitcher of beer.

“Congratulations,” I said, sliding into my chair. Eli filled my beer mug as I grabbed a slice of pizza.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m very stoked. This will look great on my med school application. Even if I do fail Russian Lit.”

“Good to know,” I said. Eli was still resisting my attempts to help, holding out for my writing the entire paper. He picked up the plastic teddy bear on our table, tipped back in his chair, and squirted honey onto a shred of pizza crust. We drank the pitcher of beer and ordered another. A few people from school joined us, including a girl named Wendy whom I thought had a crush on Eli. She had applied for the same BURST award.

“I’m glad you got it if it wasn’t me,” she told him.

Eli ordered more beer and poured her a glass. I watched them through fuzzy eyes, wondering if he would take her home, if she would fall in love with him, if he would blow her off. “No,” I said out loud. “That’s Charlie.”

“Brett?” Eli asked. “Are you okay?”

Wendy looked over at me. I expected a glare for interfering, but she mostly just looked sympathetic. She would be a nice girlfriend. I thumped my head onto the table. Eli patted my arm.

“Do you want me to walk you home?” he asked.

“No.” I pushed back from the table and stood up, hoping Eli would pick up on Wendy’s cues and go home with her. Someone should fall in love, if I couldn’t.

Back in my dorm room, instead of passing out, I stayed up late with Yeats and Coleridge, determined to erase Charlie’s memory with poetry. But the next day in class, the pages of my text were soggy and tearstained and blurred before my eyes as I remembered the sorrows of Charlie’s changing face. I’d thought he loved the pilgrim soul in
me
. But it turned out only the reverse was true.

Until that moment I had resisted poetry, my mother’s specialty. But right then I gave in. Novels need a logical arc, a progression of events, whereas all poetry requires is a moment, a feeling, a complex and unreconciled reaction. In other words, all I ever had of Charlie. Without the ability to write poetry myself—my critical faculties already overdeveloped—the only thing left was for me was to study it.

“Why?” I used to ask Charlie, years later. “Why do you think that one night made such an impression on me?”

“I don’t know,” he always said, sometimes with a shrug. “Maybe it was the bear.”

IT WASN’T THE BEAR.
And it wasn’t my youth, or the fact that I’d been a virgin, though certainly all those details played their role. When I think back to that night—or really any night with Charlie—it was the way he could be so utterly
convincing.
That he felt exactly the way I’d been waiting for someone to feel about me. Smitten.

That night, after we’d escaped the bear, we left the skis back at Eli’s house and walked to my dorm, holding hands. My mouth still carried the chocolate-tinged remnants of Charlie’s spiked cocoa, but I wasn’t drunk, not at all, except on his nearness. We walked through the overlit halls of my dorm, and into my small, dark room, and although I’d said no to more than one boyfriend, I didn’t utter a word of protest as Charlie eased my sweater over my head, and I knew I wouldn’t, not even a token one. Light from the courtyard spilled through the blinds, illuminating his serious face, his blond curls, the fair stubble across his jaw. How could I even consider letting a word like
no
intrude upon this moment? Instead I told him, because I thought it was information he needed, that I had never done this before.