With or Without You (2 page)

My favorite is an octagon-shaped window, just more than a foot across, with an oak border and slats that divide the glass into a tic-tac-toe board. I found it at an estate sale at an old farm house about twenty miles north of Madison. I lugged it around with me this past year, painting different scenes into each of the little squares within. This is what’s in each box:

Each box depicts a moment from my nine-year friendship with Davis. A moment that represented a turning point for us. A moment when everything that followed could no longer impersonate what had gone before. The last box is empty. My plan was to fill it in tonight after our last day of high school—with what, I still don’t know. Of all my work, this is also Davis’s favorite. He doesn’t know it, but I’ve been planning to give it to him as a graduation gift.

I’m no longer sure that’s a good idea. None of the images represents the Davis sitting in front of me. The Davis that I see in my mosaic hasn’t been around for several months. Senior year was hard. I keep hoping that if I wait it out long enough, the Davis I grew up with will come back. But I don’t think that’s going to be tonight.

I wish Davis had a diversion, like I do. I envision my death and the repercussions for those who remain. It’s not, as I’ve explained to Davis countless times, a wish for death. I just find a strange solace in the imagined aftermath.

Davis is logical. He has no use for imagination. He has no way of escaping. So everything rots inside him. Davis rarely chooses anger.

He chooses it now.

Like an eruption, he leaps from my bed. I fall back,
favoring my left side. Davis slams my bedroom door shut. He kicks the wall. My paintings—most hung from hooks by thin wire—dance in place. His face, freshly cleaned, is marred with more tears. This is not my best friend. This person is molten. Dangerous.

He falls to his knees on my lousy old carpeting and keens. I have seen Davis cry many times. High-pitched and intermittent. Not this time. His sobs are low and forceful, what I’m sure the end of the world will sound like.

“I hate this fucking city!” He pulses, beating useless fists into the floor. It’s a sentiment we’ve both uttered over the years, neither completely believing it. But he makes me believe it now.

I kneel next to him; he sobs uncontrollably. I lay my left arm across his shoulders, easing my right arm around his front, and I hold him. These moments—where consolation seems impossible—are rare, but I’ve always excelled at getting us through. He continues to cry, words reduced to fevered gibberish. He shakes. I shake.

“Don’t forget,” I whisper, praying quietly for the words that will fix this. If they exist. “Chicago. In the fall. College.”

The University of Chicago has glimmered on the horizon since last summer. No matter what happened, we told ourselves, “Next year, we’ll be in Chicago.” The worry that ate our lives for months—would we both get in?—vanished
when our acceptance letters came in January. Done deal. Escape from trogs, from parents, from everything that held us down never felt closer than when we discussed our college plans.

“Chicago” is the magic word. Davis stops shaking. This is where, if we were boyfriends, I would kiss him. But we never went there, he and I. That’s not who we are, and that’s not who we can be. That was decided long ago. Maybe forever ago.

His peace evaporates. Davis gets up and paces a fiery swath across my room. “And do what? Meet another version of Pete Isaacson in college and get the shit kicked out of us all over again? No. Bullshit. I’m sick of this. We’re done. Right now.”

I’ve seen this. Heard this. For nine years. And like saying he hates Madison, I believe he means it. And it worries me.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a crumpled piece of paper, which he thrusts in my face. It’s a lousy photocopy job of a handwritten flyer:

CHASERS
Learn what it means to be gay!
Stop being a doormat!
Join Chasers
First meeting: this Friday
7:00 p.m. RYC—Upstairs, room Four

“These were posted at the Rainbow Youth Center,” Davis says as he continues to pace.

The Rainbow Youth Center, Madison’s only hangout for GLBT teens, is always starting new social groups. But the notices are usually typed, with tacky clip art. This one pings my radar as suspect.

There’s something familiar about this: the energy burning in his eyes, the apprehension building in my stomach. Probably because I’ve spent nine years following Davis on any number of schemes aimed at making us fit in, finding us friends besides each other. None of them has worked. But I always followed. I probably always will.

“Sure,” I say, setting the paper down. “If that’s what you want.”

I don’t argue. Davis has enough on his mind. Next week, he’s moving into the shelter at the RYC. His dad, one of those “you’re eighteen, you’re graduated, you’re no longer my responsibility” kind of guys, is kicking him out. He thinks it will build Davis’s character. I think he’s an asshole.

My response calms him down but his eyes are still determined. Then, a grin slides across his face.

“Besides,” he says, “maybe we’ll meet some hot guys. We could use a couple dates, right? First time for everything.”

His laugh sounds more like a grunt. I nod, but I look to the side. My eyes would give too much away.

“C’mere.” I ask him to take the octagon off the wall, which he does without question. We go downstairs and into the empty garage. I tell him to take a seat on a stool while I attach the window to THE CLAW. Every time I tighten a vise clamp to secure the octagon, my tender arm threatens mutiny.

Davis laughs nervously. “What are you doing?”

I hide the pain as I fasten the last clamp. “I’m finishing your graduation present.”

His mouth drops and forms a smile for just a moment. He winces—smiling hurts—and lets his face harden again. His unswollen eye meets my gaze, saying what a smile can’t. Not thanks, exactly.

I turn THE CLAW so it’s facing Davis and I push it toward him, zooming in until his ravaged, discolored eye fills the last empty box in the lower right corner. I squirt paint from my wrinkled tubes onto a palette and quickly begin to mix colors.

Davis stiffens. He wants to be perfectly still while I paint. He wants me to get it right. He knows that I paint honesty. I can do sunsets and perfect pecs when the moment merits. But I can also do life when it breaks and you can’t ignore it. Davis respects that about me.

I stare through the glass at my best friend’s grotesque
eye, preparing to make Pete’s handiwork my own. I choose to mimic Seurat with this picture. Painting hundreds of tiny dots should give Davis time to stress down. “I’m calling this:
Last Time
.”

“Fuck, yeah,” he whispers with that darkness I’ve grown to fear. The Davis I know has taken his leave again. “Last time.”

His eyes, using our unspoken shorthand, tell me he’s got something planned. I don’t ask. I can only wait. It’s what I do. He gets reckless and I fix things. That’s the way it’s always been.

“Hold still.”

I paint hurt.

TITLE:
Perfection

IMAGE:
The perfectly toned pec of a
UW volleyball player

INSPIRATION:
A single panel of Warhol’s
Marilyn Monroe prints

PALETTE:
Flesh tone = lavender
Musculature highlights = pink
Nipple = off-white
Background = cobalt

The strokes are thick and precise. The colors are harsh, surreal, like holding a Technicolor film negative to the light. There is no doubt a lifetime of push-ups crafted the subject. From a distance, the contours resemble a child’s failed attempt at drawing a circle.

A year ago, Davis and I took THE CLAW to James Madison Park. I tried to paint Lake Mendota while he sorted through
college brochures. A gaggle of shirtless UW guys were playing volleyball nearby. Davis was so busy drooling over the guys that it took no time at all to talk him into the most convenient choice for school: the University of Chicago. I started mixing blues on my palette, our futures decided.

When the game finished, one of the volleyball players—not too muscley, but not exactly rail thin like I was—made to leave the park, then turned and walked straight at us. Davis and I shared a glance: When guys with arms that big come our way, pain typically follows.

Not this guy. He smiled, looked THE CLAW up and down, then asked what it was all about. I explained how I paint on windows. Volleyball Guy smiled again, said he loved the idea, and asked if I ever painted people. I told him the truth: I’d never painted a person. Only still life. Expecting him to leave, I turned back to have another go at painting the lake.

Volleyball didn’t leave. “Maybe you just need a model?”

He kept staring right into my eyes, pouty lips in a half smile. His head, while in no way unattractive, had a slightly atypical shape, like a square egg. It was kinda sexy.

My body tensed, still not convinced this wasn’t a joke where the punch line involved actual punching.

That’s when I caught Davis’s glare:
Are you crazy? He’s gorgeous. Do it.

Volleyball stood there as I lined up the window, wiped
the glass clean, and painted his pec. Davis tried to make small talk but Volleyball gave only one-word answers: His eyes never left me. When I was done, Volleyball came to my side of the window to inspect my work. He laughed, clapped me on the shoulder, and said, “So you’re a chest man?”

Volleyball tossed his shirt over his shoulder and dug in his pocket. He scribbled his phone number on the back of an old receipt and told me that he knew someone at an art gallery who might be interested in my work, because my medium was so unique. I thanked him and tucked the receipt in my pocket as he walked away.

All the way home, Davis talked about how cool it would be if Volleyball could hook me up with an art gallery. But we laughed it off. We didn’t get beat up this time, but guys like that never helped guys like us.

Later that night, I examined the receipt and found Volleyball’s name—Erik—and phone number, followed by a single word:

Dinner?

When I stumble bleary-eyed into the kitchen for breakfast, Mom stops darting around the kitchen and gags into her coffee cup when she sees me. At first, I think she notices: the scrapes on the side of my head, the light purple bruises shaped like knuckles that dot my chin. My war wounds are subtle and could be the result of anything. One of those mysterious doors that I always claim to walk into. Maybe if I hadn’t fed her a steady diet of stories growing up, explanations for where various black eyes and sore wrists came from, she’d take more interest. My fault, I guess. Still, given that she bought every story, she must believe painting is a full-contact sport.

Her eyes fix on the graduation gown I’m wearing, a little test-drive before the main event. I pour a bowl of Cheerios as she eyes me up and down, a slightly guilty frown crossing her lips. “Graduation’s tonight. Isn’t it?”

“Got it in one,” I say, drowning my cereal in milk.

“Don’t be smart,” Mom warns. She’s running late, snatching at stacks of inventory lists and spreadsheets before pulling her long green work smock from a hook on the wall. “Gina called in sick and I’m opening alone. I’m not in the mood.”

We live above the small corner grocery store that she and Dad own. The store’s cute, old-fashioned. We let customers run up a tab and we deliver groceries to people’s homes, to give you an idea. You have to watch TV Land to even know what a grocery tab is anymore.

Mom’s stress is easy to understand. Last week, Dad fell down the stairs. Broke his leg and shattered his hip bone. He’s in pretty rough shape and getting him around is not easy. The burden of keeping things running is all on her, and pressure is not her friend. It doesn’t help that every day since his accident, Dad’s been calling down every half hour to make sure she’s handling things. Right now, I can tell she’s not handling the thought of more questions about handling things.

I grimace, sucking air in through my clenched teeth. My arm, which was sore yesterday, is practically unusable this morning. Time to dig out my sling.

“Shan mixed up her flight,” Mom mutters, and it takes me a moment to realize she’s talking to me. “She won’t be at graduation tonight.”

I drop my spoon into the bowl. “You’re kidding, right?”

Shannon, my older sister, lives with her husband, Brett, in New York City. She’s taking the summer off from grad school to come home and help around the store while Dad’s laid up. She was
supposed
to be flying in this afternoon so she could make it to graduation.

“Joan!” Dad calls from the bedroom. I can hear him down the hall, grunting and gasping as he fusses to get dressed. “Joan, it’s Thursday. It’s Dairy Day. You need to call Land O’Lakes to—”

“—get the milk order in, I know!” Mom hollers back. “Have you taken your pills?”