Why We Broke Up (23 page)

I don’t know why
this is the part I kept, this thing that was on the towel rack. It seems gross a little, like a reminder that they
did
have to change the linens after all. If I could have chosen anything, it would have been something from the lounge part of Dawn’s Early Lite Lounge and Motel, where I’d been once freshman year after a synagogue dance this guy Aram took me to. Aram and I had tall ginger ales and stared up at the ceiling of the lounge, taxidermy birds dusty in a circle along the molding, with a huge butterfly in the very center, flapping slowly slowly slowly with motorized fans for wings, and speakers playing nature sounds.
It
is
extraordinary, Ed. I’ll give you that. Even the big sign outside, the
Lite
lit up and flashing, is glamorous and attractive with those three arrows taking turns illuminating so the arrow is moving, leading everyone on South Ninth to the parking lot behind. It’s probably the most extraordinary place we have. You thought hard and found it, Ed, the place to take me.

But I didn’t want to go to the lounge. You said there was no rush but there
was
, we’d already pushed dumplings around at Moon Lake, pretending it was only another date. I ate maybe three bites. The whole night I tasted snow peas in my nervous mouth. Plus maybe somebody would see us in the lounge. I waited in the car while you brought back the keys.

The motel was laid out in curves and balconies at the edge of the vast lot. It probably looked like something from the air, I could see it in an aerial angle like a still in
When the Lights Go Down
as we crossed the dark asphalt with our bags. “Establishing shot,” is what the caption would say, “from
The Moron Who Thought Love Was Forever
.”

The room looked like a room, not extraordinary. The curtains closed with a long plastic wand like something Mika Harwich uses on the horses in
Look Me in the Eye
. The desk was flimsy, the hair dryer tiny as a revolver on the bathroom wall. There was a plastic globe plugged into a corner socket brand-named Spring in the Air that smelled like a violated
flower. I went down the hallway to get ice and found next to the machine some empty cardboard boxes stacked up loosely, all from furniture.
TWO WOODEN HEADBOARDS
it said on one.
ONE FLOOR LAMP
. I swear,
ONE NIGHT STAND
.

“I can’t make this work,” you said when I got back. You’d turned the TV around like you were giving it a haircut, fiddling with the plugs and holes and whatnot, looking for a connection.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready to film it, of course,” you said.

I must not have looked like I knew you were kidding.

“A movie. I was supposed to be able to play it through the computer. I thought it’d be nice.”

“What movie?”

“
When the Smoke Clears
,” you said, “from Joan’s collection. It sounded, you know, like something you’d like. And me too. These people, a soldier and a veterinarian meet in the war, out in the country I guess, it said in the description—”

“It’s good,” I said quietly. I put the ice down but kept my hands leaning on it. On the dresser were two small bottles, a beer for you and white wine from Australia, shipped or flown I thought, around the world.
All the way
.

“Oh, you’ve seen it.”

“Part of it. A long time ago.”

“Well, we can still watch it on the laptop.”

“It’s OK.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, maybe.”

“There’s strawberries too,” you said, lifting an eager container out of your backpack. I thought, you’d thought of everything.

“How’d you find strawberries in November?” I took them to rinse in the sink.

“There’s this place over on Nosson. It’s only open for ten minutes Wednesdays at four
AM
.”

“Shut up.”

“I love you.”

I saw me in the yellowy mirror. “I love you too.”

When I came back out, you’d changed the lighting somehow, though the bedspread was still ugly, nothing to be done. I put down the dripping berries. Your shoulders shrugged up underneath your shirt, I couldn’t wait to see them again, beautiful things.
Extraordinary
. And I looked you in your eyes, wide and lit with fondness and mischief and lust. For me, like me. I had such, you would not believe the such a feeling I had. You couldn’t film it, it couldn’t be captured. It couldn’t happen almost, but there it was happening anyway. I kicked off my shoes, biting my lip because I might have laughed. I was thinking of something Coach always said to you and your team at practice while I watched.
OK people
, he said sometimes,
let’s get right to it
.

Criminy
,
I remember you saying. I was smiling because I didn’t have to be guided like I thought I’d be, not as much. I could do some things. Some parts I was very good at.

“Was that time better?”
you said.

“It’s supposed to hurt,” I said.

“I know,” you said, and put both hands on me. “But, I guess I mean, but what is it like?”

“Like putting a whole grapefruit into your mouth.”

“You mean it’s tight?”

“No,” I said, “I mean it doesn’t fit. Have you ever tried to put a whole grapefruit into your mouth?”

The laughing was the best part.

And then late at night
we were starving, remember? “Room service?” I said.

“Let’s not push our luck, we’re paying cash,” you said, and found a phone book. “Pizza.”

“Pizza.” I was fierce with the thought of it. My first grown-up meal, I couldn’t help thinking, and what I want is kid stuff.

I was bashful and hid in the bathroom when it was delivered. I listened to you talk normally to the guy and even laugh at something, like it was all normal, standing in a T-shirt and boxers in the doorway, taking the pizza with
the dollars in change on top while I huddled by the sink running this through my hair. I felt like I was over by a pole, a bicycle or a dog, while the owner chatted oblivious and relaxed. It was your ease, I realized, your ease and expertise that made me nauseous. I grabbed the comb, the cardboard message on the rack, like I was hiding shameful evidence. I’d never felt something like this, but you’d done it all before.

My first pizza bite
sent sauce squirting onto my top, and it looked so bloodlike I had to take it off. You gave me this, another one of the astonishing number of items in your bottomless backpack, and I slept wearing it next to you, and then nights and nights at home, so long on me it felt like I was inside you, stretched down your tall legs and curled up in your chest where your heart beat. Which I guess made us even. We kissed so tender when we woke up, never mind our sour breath and the bedspread even uglier by day. But we had to run for coffee before Lauren called or anyone found out. It was already afternoon, a disapproving gray in
the sky. “I love you too,” I remember saying, so it must have been a reply, you must have said it first, but even now, looking at this shirt, I try not to think or picture anything at all. I wore this, Ed, is what I think, like shelter and skin, that night alone on the roof of the garage. The bed felt too empty to sleep, so I was out in the night lighting some of those matches, Mayakovsky’s Dream feeling decades ago, the tiny fires dying out in the wind as soon as they left my hands. Cold, for no reason. Hot, for no reason. Smiling, crying, nothing at all, this shirt my only company that night and so many nights after. I wore it, this careless thing you don’t even remember giving to me from your bag. It wasn’t a gift, this thing I’m returning. It was barely a gesture, almost forgotten already, this thing I wore like it was dear to me. And it was. No wonder we broke up.

OK,
these were a gift, waiting in my locker Monday. But now you had my combination, so you could do things like this. So ugly, or not ugly, really, but wrong for me. I don’t like to think about, Will! Not! Goddamn! Think about! who helped you pick them out. Or what were you thinking. Look at them, dangling stupid. What
were
you thinking?