This Is Between Us (5 page)

…

I was away for ten days, visiting family in Washington. I wished I were back at home with you, lounging around in underwear and socks, watching a movie after the kids went to bed. You suggested that we watch a movie together, over the phone. You had a copy of
Say Anything
at home already, so I went out and rented a copy from the video store down the street from where I was staying.

I called you back and we synched up our movies. We paused on the first frame of the movie studio logo. “Got it ready?” you asked me.

I counted down from five to zero and then we pressed play. We could hear each other’s television, the dialogue and music echoing together through the wires. We talked quietly, like we were sitting right next to each other on the couch. “I like the way her dad looks at him in this dinner scene,” I said. During the scenes where Lili Taylor sang songs about her ex-boyfriend, Joe (
Joe Lies!
) we sang along.

When John Cusack swept broken glass out of Ione Skye’s path, I could hear a romantic sigh come from your mouth.

We had a running competition to see who could name the various Seattle landmarks when they appeared on-screen.

During the boom box scene, we shouted back and forth to each other, “Yes!” “Yes!” “Yes!” as Peter Gabriel helped John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler—and so many other men around the world—woo the girl.

And when the plane took off in the last scene and the fictional couple held hands, you asked, “Would you hold my hand like that next time we’re on a plane?” Of course I said yes.

“I wish we could stay on the phone even while we slept tonight, but that would destroy my phone bill,” you said. “But let’s listen to this song until the end of the credits.”

We listened and watched until our
TV
s went black. “Good night,” we said at the same time.

…

We didn’t mention marriage—the word or the concept. It felt like poison to us. We didn’t want to stick our feet in its drying cement. We felt like we knew better.

We heard opinions from people who were husbands, wives, “partners,” people in “complicated” relationships, as well as those who were perpetually or newly single.

Just pretend it’s a paper that says you can share insurance
, our married friends said.

Stay strong
, said our divorced friends.

“Let’s take our time,” I told you. You nodded, glad for my caution. I think we both knew that the word
time
in that statement didn’t have any real meaning.

…

Sometimes I remember something strange and seemingly unimportant like the taste of a barbecue chicken sandwich or a friend’s dog’s name. It always seems to happen in the exact same spot where I remembered something last time. As if that specific part of the Burnside Bridge or the escalator at Pioneer Place is some kind of time/memory portal.

Sometimes I think I’ll remember something forever and I forget it two months later, while smaller, more trivial moments stick with me for years. For instance, I have a hard time recalling exactly where we went out to breakfast after our first night together, but I can never forget when your dad gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas.

One night, after some drinks, and after the kids went to bed, you took a Xanax and said to me, “Let’s neck.” And then we hooked our necks like swans. I completely forgot about that until just now.

…

You told me that your skin gets darker in the sun. “I’m going to get darker this summer. Just you watch,” you said.

And I did watch.

Like when I was a kid I would sometimes stare at the clock to see if I could see the time moving. The minute hand and its slow crawl.

I think about your skin and how it tans so nice and golden. I want to watch the color changing, up and down your arms and legs, like a slowed-down magic trick.

…

We snuck into the pool at the apartments down the street. You looked amazing in your vintage bikini. I was pasty and white compared to the few other people lounging around the pool-side. They eyed us suspiciously. I wanted to impress you by swimming a couple of laps, but I was winded within seconds.

“When was the last time you went swimming?” you asked me from the shallow end.

I had to catch my breath before saying, “I can’t remember.”

You dog-paddled to me and then slipped under the water and put your hand up like a shark fin. When you came back up, your whole body was shining, every bead of water like a stolen diamond.

…

Sometimes you have a hard time showing me your body. When we go to bed, you turn off the light before taking your clothes off. By the time my eyes adjust to see anything, you’re already under the covers with me.

“I want to see you,” I say.

“You can feel me,” you say.

“But I like looking at you,” I say.

“Why do men always have to be so visual?” you say. I’m not sure if you’re exasperated or inquisitive.

“I want you to please all my senses,” I say.

“But what if I don’t?” you say.

…

“You’re like a sexual predator,” you said. “The way you walk, the way you breathe.”

I wanted to ask
why, when, where
.

“The way you look at me feels like an attack,” you said.

I said nothing but couldn’t help thinking,
Get her. Get her. Attack!

…

One night I pretended to die while we had sex. I clutched my heart and you laughed. You knew I was faking it because I cracked a smile. I lay still under you, staring blankly at the ceiling to the right of your head, your blurry, bobbing hair. Dark lightbulb. You slowed down and then started to cry. Sometimes you cry when you come. I wasn’t sure what kind of tears they were. Maybe tears of pleasure, or frustration, or sadness. I thought maybe you were faking it.

When you were done, I stayed flat and lifeless, trying not to blink. You got out of bed and delicately pulled the blanket up to cover my body. You draped it over my face. My still feet sticking out.

…

I used to drive by my old girlfriends’ places and try to catch glimpses of them. I’m still friends with a few and could have called them on the phone for a nice conversation, but that seemed too rehearsed or staged or something. I liked the possibility of seeing something more random from them. I imagined what they were like with their guards down.

I didn’t tell you about this because you might not have understood it and I wasn’t sure if I could explain.

Some of the things I noticed on these drive-bys:

Mimi likes to sit in her front yard and read on a beach towel, flexing her toes in the air every time she turns a page. Diane leaves her shades open all the time, sometimes paying bills at her dining room table or talking on the phone. Annette is always on the couch with her new husband, the
TV
light flickering on her face.

I drove by slowly, sometimes parked for a while, and wondered if I’d had any effect on them and if I somehow haunted them. I wondered how people carry on.

I did this with you too, but you didn’t know it. It was before we lived together, whenever we got into fights. But I could only see your faint shadow in the window, maybe pacing or dancing with Maxine. I wanted to park my car, walk up closer, and peep between the curtains. I stayed in the car, though. If I rolled the windows down, I thought I’d be able to hear something, smell something, or feel some little clue in the air between us.

…

Sometimes you got long letters from your aunt Lydia in Missouri. After your mom died, she tried to become a surrogate mom for you. You were twenty-two years old at the time and your conservative aunt just annoyed you, for the most part. But eventually you started to like her a little and use her as a long-distance confidante. A couple of times a year, you’d get a bulky nine-by-twelve envelope in the mail from her. It would include photographs, clippings of uptight advice columns and op-eds, and a letter of at least twenty pages. Sometimes there was also a fifty-dollar bill, folded up and concealed inside a Doublemint gum wrapper. Aunt Lydia did not have email because she said the government controls it.

You did your best to write a long reply back to her, sometimes taking a couple of months to do so. You also included various news clippings and photographs, but no cash.

You locked yourself in the bathroom one night, rereading a new letter and replying to her. You came out once and asked me impatiently to look up a word in the dictionary for you.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Rancor,” you said.

I’d heard the word before but was not sure what it meant. I thumbed through our paperback dictionary. “It says:
Bitter, long-lasting resentment
.” I closed the book and looked up. You were back in the bathroom already. “Wait a second,” I said. “Use it in a sentence.”

You didn’t reply.

“Why do you need to know that word?” I asked through the door.

“Oh, nothing,” you said.

“Are you okay in there?”

“Almost done!”

“Tell Lydia I said hello.”

No response.

“Can I go to the bathroom?”

“No.”

…

It took Vince a while to outgrow his wizard phase. He read about them constantly for almost five years and had wizard-themed birthday parties for three years in a row. He started dressing like a wizard too. He even got Maxine to play along. Sometimes we saw them, dressed in capes and odd pointy hats, walking around the neighborhood. They would go to the big grocery store up the street and look at the mass-market books about magical demons and other ridiculous creatures.

One day I saw Maxine putting eyeliner on Vince and then they followed me around the apartment for several hours, asking if they could hypnotize me. I didn’t know if they wanted to look into my past or glimpse the future. I finally let them do it and I actually fell asleep.

When I woke up, they looked scared and then avoided me for the rest of the weekend.

…

There was a big rainstorm and our electricity was out all night. We all walked around with flashlights in our hands. Vince had a toy hard hat from when he was five with a light attached to it, like a miner’s. He squeezed it onto his eleven-year-old head.

For dinner we ate salad, with candles lighting the table. After that, we made up a game called Darkness Monster, which was basically hide-and-seek in the dark with flashlights. It turned out to be a really fun game until Maxine stubbed her toe on the couch.

After we put the kids to bed, we found our old alarm clocks and wound them up and put them on our bedside table (we had to wake up at 7:00
AM
for school). I tried to read with Vince’s hard hat on my head but it kept falling off and then its light burned out. You were using your flashlight to make animal shadows on the wall. “Let me see your hand,” you said. You tried to incorporate it into something you were doing, an elephant or some kind of bird. The way you were touching my hand got me excited. You shined your flashlight on the bulge in my shorts and then scooted down. “Let’s see what this can turn into,” you said. You slipped my shorts off and put the flashlight up close to my cock. You circled it with the beam, like a helicopter light looking for a criminal on the run. The room was totally dark except my cock in the spotlight. Then I saw half of your face enter the light and the cock disappeared. I grabbed the flashlight and angled it so that I could see the new shadows you were making with me.

…

There was a time when you didn’t want to have oral sex. You said it was a rape scene in a recent movie that was traumatizing you.

“It’s just a movie,” I said.

“But it happens,” you said. “It almost happened to me. I mean, it did sort of happen to me. I don’t ever talk about it.”

“When?” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“I was fourteen. At music camp. I’m only going to tell you this story once.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“It was such a gross place. I was one of the youngest people there and everyone was cracking dirty jokes all the time. Everyone seemed delinquent. There was a break every day that lasted two hours and kids would run off and make out. It was at this big high school in St. Louis. There was a classroom that someone found unlocked, so they called it the mashroom. Guys would tell you to meet them in the mashroom. You could say no if you wanted to but then they’d be really mean to you.”

I watched your eyes to gauge the pain of the memories, but at the same time my mind was racing forward on its own, filling in blanks. I felt perverse. I looked down at your hands holding each other.

“I went to the mashroom once, with my friend Susan Pelt. We were going to spy but the door was closed. So we went outside and looked through the window. We saw a girl named Krystal in there with an older boy. They were sort of on top of the teacher’s desk. We heard some muffled sounds but I couldn’t tell what they were doing. She was wearing a shirt that was unbuttoned most of the way and the boy looked like he was squeezing her too hard and sort of humping against her legs. I could see one of her nipples and I stared really hard, trying to get a good look at it because I hadn’t seen another girl’s nipple before. Susan nudged me and said, ‘Maybe we should help her,’ and I looked at her and almost laughed. And then when I looked back, Krystal was sitting up on the desk and buttoning up her shirt. Susan ran away from the window but I wanted to stay and see who was next in the mashroom. But the boy wouldn’t let Krystal leave. He was standing in front of the door and whispering something urgent. He unzipped his pants and I saw his dick. I remember thinking it looked like a finger.”