This Must Be the Place: A Novel (34 page)

Eugene had achieved awesome. Lost his effing mind and never wanted it back. When he peeled off his too-tight jeans before falling into bed late Friday night, he discovered a folded piece of paper in one of his pockets—a note from Oneida, a college-ruled reminder of places her hands had been.

The note said:

Hey—

I think the rest of our history group is out, but you should come over tomorrow to work on our project. 10 a.m. My mom will be gone by then.

O

He read it a few times until he was absolutely sure he knew what she meant when she said
work on our project
, and then, instead of going to sleep like every part of his body save for a few choice bits was insisting, Eugene raided his parents’ music collection. The pressure of selecting the perfect make-out score focused his attention to a fine white edge, which immediately blurred and gravitated toward the greatest hits of Journey and Chicago—and Foreigner. Foreigner was one of those bands he didn’t know much about, other than that they were cheesy. Mockable. But there was something about the
idea
of Foreigner that spoke to him, something intriguing. The track list was enticing. Yes, he thought, it
is
Urgent. I
have
been Waiting for a Girl Like You.

He rode his bike over to the Darby-Jones Saturday morning in the
pouring rain. It wasn’t explicitly stated in Oneida’s note that he wait for her mother to leave, but Eugene hid in the trees until a blue station wagon creaked down the drive. He recognized the woman behind the wheel from their first group meeting, however many weeks ago, as her mother. Did that make the guy in the passenger seat her father? He’d gotten the impression that Oneida didn’t have a father, other than in the biological sense.

His curiosity, mixed with lethal levels of anticipation, made him impervious to the cold and wet, so that when he stepped inside the Darby-Jones, he barely noticed the lake dripping out of his hair, off his sweatshirt, weighing his jeans down, spreading across the checked tile floor, and making his sneakers squeak. All he saw was Oneida, wearing jeans and a blue and green striped shirt with a V-neck that didn’t plunge quite as low as he would have liked, telling him to take off his shoes and come back to the kitchen.

His shoeless feet were freezing. The kitchen, thank God, was much warmer than the front hall, but the items spread neatly across the kitchen table made his gut ice over: a stack of CDs and an old boom box, several large coffee table books about John Lennon and the Beatles, and two notebooks open to clean white pages, a blue uncapped pen laid neatly beside each one. Eugene didn’t understand. He had been positive,
positive
, that he knew what she was talking about. Was he crazy? How was he
supposed
to interpret a note jammed down the front of his jeans?

“Have a seat,” Oneida said cheerily. She tipped a teakettle over two mismatched mugs, and the smell of hot chocolate hit his nostrils a second later.

“I—sure.” Eugene sat in one of the chairs and picked up the blue pen, defeated. He started to shiver, and curled his ice-cube toes. Oneida plunked a mug in front of him that said
ASK ME ABOUT MY SMALL BUSINESS LOAN FROM CAYUGA COUNTY BANK, LLC
in slanted blue letters.

“Marshmallow?” she asked, settling into the chair opposite him.

It wouldn’t have been so painful, Eugene decided, if Oneida didn’t look so damn gorgeous. She’d pulled her hair back in a ponytail, and it framed her face the way it had that day she came over unannounced;
her cheeks were flushed, though how she could be warm enough to flush in this godforsaken tomb of a house, Eugene couldn’t fathom. She pulled open the top of a bag of giant marshmallows.

“Ever play chubby bunnies?”

“What?” he asked.

“Chubby bunnies,” she said. “It’s a game.”

A . . . game?
Oh, here we go
, he thought.
Yes, please
.

“I learned how to do it in Brownies,” she said, and handed him a single marshmallow.

“Dirty bitches,” he said, and Oneida looked up, confused, and he stuffed the marshmallow in his mouth before she could ask him to explain what he meant by that.

“Don’t chew it!” she said. “Hold it in your mouth and try to say
chubby bunnies
.”

“Wha?” He swallowed some spit. “Hubby unnies.”

Oneida giggled. She passed him another marshmallow and he popped it in his mouth.

“Ubby unnies,” he said, and rolled his eyes, because his mouth was full of sugar and spit and it was kind of disgusting but it was also kind of hysterical. “Oo ry it!” he said, pointing at Oneida, who understood, if not his actual words, that he’d thrown down his gauntlet. She popped three marshmallows between her lips and said, quite clearly, “Chubby bunnies.”

“Ur eating,” he said.

“Not cheating,” she said, and added another marshmallow.

“Ess oo ar.”

Oneida was giggling so hard she was rocking back and forth in her chair, shoulders shaking, not making a sound. Eugene, beginning to grasp the reassuring truth of the situation—that Oneida had just as much interest in working on their history project as he did—felt warm again.

And then, for no apparent reason, Oneida whipped a marshmallow at him. It caromed off his forehead with a powdery
fwop
and plonked into his hot chocolate.

Eugene stared at the bobbing marshmallow for a stunned second and swallowed his mouthful of marshmallow. Oneida’s face, when he looked up, stunned him anew. She was far too happy to be the result of
looking at him: smiling with her entire face, glasses winking in the light, glowing like a tiny sun. It was impossible, Eugene thought, unless Oneida was some kind of mirror, one that reflected the nameless warm knot that had lodged in his chest, gave it a nose and eyes and a wide crescent of a mouth, so that he could see what he felt like, albeit on the face of another person. She swallowed her mouthful of marshmallow neatly.

He placed both palms flat on his side of the table and leaned forward; as his dutiful reflection, Oneida followed suit. They met in the middle. He heard, quite clearly and almost certainly only in his own head, the slow synth intro of a Foreigner song, sweet, warm, and sonorous, and not at all ironic.

Heaven was a couch at the Darby-Jones. It was old and ratty, with more than a few unruly springs and worn patches; wide enough and long enough for two people to lie side by side or some variation thereof, provided those two people were Eugene Wendell and Oneida Jones. It was less than three feet from the stereo speakers gently oozing “Waiting for a Girl Like You” on single-track repeat, secluded in the den at the rear of the house. It was a world unto itself, and Eugene, who generally found the concept of eternity terrifying, finally understood the appeal of life without end.

The first thing Oneida said, after they’d relocated from the secular kitchen to the divine couch, was that he was the only person she’d ever kissed. “With tongue, I mean. And with specific, you know,
intent
,” she said. Eugene was getting a little better at recovering from the various curveballs Oneida pitched at him: he blinked, nodded, and said that he had technically first-kissed a girl at a family reunion, but he was five so it didn’t count.

“Also, you were related to her,” Oneida said, brows raised.

“No! No, I mean, I was at a family reunion, but it was in a big park and she was with another group at the pavilion next to ours.”

“Yeah, sure.” And she took off her shirt.

She took off her shirt and put it back on several times during the afternoon, though the only reason she put it back on, she admitted, was
so she could take it off again. “Your eyes get so huge,” she said. “A little bigger every time.”

They spent a cursory thirty minutes devising a plan for their group project presentation, which was due the following Thursday. It involved two index cards’ worth of biographical information on their respective Beatles, all taken from the same book, and a willful decision to crash and burn in all other aspects of the assignment, grades be damned.

“Dreyer can’t
really
expect us to regroup after the hurt I put on Lu’s guitar,” he said.

“That was awesome,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

She snuggled in closer to his side, tangling her cold bare feet with his own. The sun was setting, filling the room with harsh rays alive with dust. The Darby-Jones, the house itself, ate time. How long had he been here? Long enough for the rain to stop and the sun to come out, cross the sky, and begin to set; long enough to forget he was ever anyone other than Oneida Jones’s boyfriend Eugene. Wendy, who had truly only existed long enough to murder a guitar, was dead.

“Where did the bottle come from?”

“Hm?”

“The green bottle. That you hung outside my window.”

“Oh, that.” He swallowed. “Estate sale. My dad likes to go to estate auctions and buy cool junk.”

“He’s the painter, right?”

Sort of.
A tiny chill tickled his spine. He considered the lie of omission he was about to tell. The intense desire, felt so strongly the other day, to tell her the truth—to tell her everything—was gone, leaving nothing but a faint, terrifying memory of having ever been that close to spilling the Wendell guts. After last night—after what Astor told him—

God,
especially
after last night.

“It’s a hobby,” he said.

“So who died?”

“What?”

She tented her elbows across his chest and propped her chin on her hands. “Who died so that your dad could buy the bottle?”

“Some old guy named Joe.”

“And Joe was a big bottle collector?”

“Joe collected . . . all kinds of crap.”

“So what else did your dad get from Joe?”

Eugene hated this conversation profoundly. He didn’t think she was consciously badgering him—she was grinning, and her questions were chirps more than anything—but it felt like an interrogation. Then again, everything felt like an interrogation when you had something to hide. He shifted beneath her, tried to get comfortable, but what had felt warm and thrilling earlier was now only a dead weight pressing against his rib cage. He was afraid to lie to her. He was more afraid of the complicated half-truths he knew he would tell her instead.

The night before, when Eugene had been in the happy fog of early Christmas in October, but before he found the note and before his thoughts turned to Foreigner, Astor had asked him to help move boxes out of the studio. Once inside, he’d nudged his son, pointed to the battered suitcase on his desk, and asked if he could guess what all that junk was for.

“Uh . . . what junk?” Eugene asked, reminding himself that he’d never seen the suitcase before in his life.

“Open it.” Astor propped his hands on his hips and grinned. “Tell me what you think.”

So he opened it and was greeted by the familiar nest of paper and plastic and glass: tiny ceramic cups and pipes, curlicues of metal, and stacked folios, funky and musty with age.

“This is it, Gene.”

Astor walked over to his bookshelf while Eugene gamely poked through random crap he’d already poked through several times before. He rubbed his index finger against the blue velvet and thought of Oneida and smiled.

“This is beyond forgery. This is creation, authentic creation and misdirection. This could be my masterpiece. Look at this.” He thrust a book in Eugene’s face, pages splayed with his thumb and first finger, open to a picture of a small wooden box that looked like a much fancier version of the shitty dioramas Eugene had made for book reports in third grade: a paper cutout of a hotel, under glass, amid a forest of spindly trees. There was a lot of glitter.

He didn’t quite know what to do with his father, who had never been this excited about any of the forgeries before; had never told Eugene so much before, never shown him anything in such an early stage. He felt honored and, frankly, more than a little freaked out to see Astor, King of Cool, flip his shit.

“This guy, Joseph Cornell—total wackjob, antisocial—kind of bounced from the surrealists to the abstract expressionists until the pop artists figured out he’d scooped them by about thirty years. Strange, strange guy. Lived with his mother his whole life in the same house in Queens, worked on everything in the basement, which was just . . . Christ, it must have been
packed
with shit just like this. He made intricate shadow boxes and collected every tiny bit of junk he could get his hands on, thinking someday he’d use it. Major obsessive-compulsive. Loved ballerinas and kids and perfect pretty girls he couldn’t touch.”

Eugene stepped back, clear of Astor’s pinwheeling gesticulations.

“This suitcase—all this junk—this belonged to him.”

“How do you—” Eugene started to ask.

“Terry found it.
At a flea market
. Downstate. The schmuck seller didn’t have a clue what it was, but Terry knew right away. C’mere, look.” Astor hustled Eugene over and closed the lid of the suitcase, revealing a tarnished brass plate that read
J. CORNELL
. “Seller thought the case was the find; you know, what with the lucrative antique-luggage-enthusiast market today.” Astor crowed. “Cornell never
went
anywhere in his life, so the case is in perfect condition, of course. There’s an entire folder in there, photographs, clippings, all devoted to Rose Hobart, who was this obscure silent movie actress Cornell adored. There’s only so much I’m prepared to take on coincidence, you know, before I start calling it evidence.” Astor actually giggled, and Eugene, swept up now, followed suit. “It’s perfect—it’s pure profit, minus the thirty bucks Terry already paid; and Cornell’s famous enough to fetch cash but obscure enough to avoid major scrutiny, I mean, I’m not passing off an undiscovered
Rembrandt
, right? It’s going to be a challenge, for sure; I’m not the most skilled collagist in the world, but really, how hard can it be? To hit the right notes, to make people see what they want to see?”