I looked up at him and shook my head. “How can you act like nothing’s happened? You honestly want to go eat
Chinese
food?”
He held up both palms in protest. “Whoa, whoa—Italian would be fine, too.”
I slammed my fist into the mattress. “Are you insane? Or am I, because there’s something really wrong here and I don’t even feel like we’re on the same planet.”
His expression darkened and he turned toward the window, slatted
blinds covering the glass. I could see his face in quarter profile, his mouth working over his teeth. A smell of sweat drifted off him.
“What are you so upset about?” I said.
He lifted his hands away from his legs and then let them fall again. Still facing the window he said, “Nothing.”
“Kilroy, this is
me
. You were upset Sunday night after we left your parents, and you still are, and I just feel
completely shut out.”
“I’m sorry,” he said dully. Then he turned to face me. “All right?” he added, his voice tightening. “I’m sorry I subjected you to it.”
“It was
fine,”
I said. “They were perfectly nice—that’s not at all what I mean, and you know it. I called you a million times last night, I came by. What’s wrong?”
He exhaled hard and looked away. “It’s just difficult for me to see them,” he said. “I have problems with them. We just—Well, we’re very different, that’s all.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s not.”
He stared at me for a moment and then turned around again, back to the window. After a while he separated the blinds with his thumb and forefinger and peered out. Dust motes swarmed in the bar of weak light that shone in. Watching him there, his back to me, I had a sudden sense of how it must be for his parents to have him living nearby—so close and yet so closed off.
“Kilroy?” I said.
He turned around. Against the blinds he looked pinned, trapped—like someone in a lineup.
“Why do you stay here?”
Color rose into his cheeks, and he looked away. “Do you mean why don’t I take my obviously huge trust fund and buy a nice co-op on Central Park West?”
“No,” I exclaimed. “God. I would never ask a question like that. I know I’ve said before that I figured your family had a lot of money, but what you do or don’t do with it is none of my business.”
“I try not to use it,” he said evenly. “That’s why. I’m not that much of an asshole.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re not an asshole at all.”
He smiled. “Of course I am.”
“Kilroy.” He looked so forlorn standing there, his sloppy T-shirt and his shaky smile. “You can’t mean that.”
“I’m not about to win any Mr. Congeniality awards,” he said bitterly.
I got up and went to him, but when I got near he drew back, as if he
were afraid I’d touch him. I stopped short, a sick, hot feeling coming over me. I wanted to touch him—I wanted him to want me to. “Mr. Congeniality would be a big, boring yawn,” I said.
“Mike was Mr. Congeniality, wasn’t he?”
“This has nothing to do with Mike.”
“But he was, wasn’t he? A nice guy?” A frown pulled at the corners of his mouth. “That’s what I’ve always figured.”
“ ‘A nice guy,’ ” I said. “That’s what you say about someone you don’t know. Mike was—Mike
is
a person. Sure, he’s nice—how many people do you know who aren’t nice?”
Kilroy shook his head. “Forget it,” he said, scratching his bristly jaw. “Let’s change the subject.”
I sighed and looked away. To what? We weren’t doing well with any of the subjects at hand. Maybe we just weren’t doing well, period. My worries from the junk shop on Long Island came rushing back. Was it true that we didn’t really work in the world, just in isolated, protected pockets of it? Mike and I had moved easily between our private and public lives: we were us at a party as much as in my apartment. Out of nowhere I remembered a beery frat blowout between the end of finals and graduation: we got separated for a while, and when I saw him again I was sitting on the steps up to the second floor talking to a girl from one of my classes. He was a little drunk, and he looked up at me and held out his arms in a way that I knew constituted an invitation to dance. He stood below us—tall, strong, hair curling in the humid party air, handsome in an impish, grown-up-boy way—and I felt a rush of pleasure at the fact that he was mine.
“What
did
you mean before?” Kilroy said. “When you asked why I stay here?”
I looked up. He was watching me curiously, and I wondered what he saw in me: a fetching small-town girl who’d been willing to break the heart of a nice guy.
“In New York,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, smiling a crooked smile, “that’s an easy one. I like the traffic noise.”
I sighed heavily and moved away from him, shaking my head. I sat on the bed again. On the floor I spotted a stray green sock I’d thought I’d lost, and I bent over for it, then picked a clump of dust off it and flicked it away.
Kilroy watched me from the window, his eyes narrowed, one forefinger laid along his jawline. He stared for so long that I started to feel
nervous, wondering what would happen if he kept staring without speaking. How long would we stay like this? Apart, silent. My hands felt heavy in my lap.
At last he shifted and cleared his throat. “You know how you just got in your car and drove, that night in September? You just locked up your apartment and took out your garbage and drove? Well, sometimes it’s just not possible to do that, or it’s not going to solve anything. I don’t see my parents much, and because of that it’s hard when I do. And, to turn it around, because it’s hard when I see them, I don’t see them much. I’m sorry about last night—I should have answered the phone. I should have, but I didn’t, and that’s where we are now, and I don’t really know what else to say about it. Either we go on or we don’t. I can’t be someone else, much as you might want me to be—much as
I
might want to be. So what I’d like to do is clean up and then go get something to eat.” He gave me a pleading look. “OK? Please?”
I nodded. I was less hungry than tired, exhausted to the bone, but I understood that he couldn’t say any more and that we had to leave the apartment for a while. I made the bed while he showered, and then, heading for the front door, we walked down the hall together, our sides jostling awkwardly.
C
HAPTER
30
During the next few weeks Kilroy was mostly his funny, sardonic self, but his overall demeanor had darkened, and the darkness was just under the surface. He complained about things he’d read in the newspaper, or ranted about something he’d seen on the street—two women, say, who stood blocking the sidewalk, shopping bags at their feet, never a thought for the people who had to step around them. Spring arrived with a cold, clear wind that whipped the sky blue and left behind it air that was softer and warmer than it had been in months. I was itching to go out walking, but Kilroy declined, instead spending whole weekend afternoons inside reading, the newly empty shelves of his bookcase gradually filling with thick histories and multivolume biographies. It grew hard to get his attention: he was on the couch one evening, reading a book about Gothic architecture, and I called his name four separate times without his hearing me. Finally I sat down and ran a finger up the bottom of his foot, and he startled so dramatically that he dropped the book and lifted his arms and legs in fright.
“Carrie, Jesus. What?”
“I said your name four times.”
“Well, sorry—I was absorbed in my book.”
It sounds as if he were snippy, but he wasn’t, not really: he was remote, vague, but only for the exact amount of time that I could stand it. Just as I’d be on the verge of true frustration, he’d pull out of it, come
stand behind me and rub my shoulders, suggest dinner, a movie, a game of pool at McClanahan’s. It was uncanny how he knew my limits, as if I emitted something he could smell or faintly hear. We slept closer than ever, our legs entangled, our hands tucked around each other, but waking in the morning he was careful to reclaim himself, pull his arms away and roll onto his back before speaking to me or touching me again.
One early morning—very early, barely dawn—I got up to use the bathroom, and when I came back he was facing my side of the bed, eyes open. He reached for me, and I moved close and felt how hard he was against my leg, then between my thighs. He pulled me on top of him and onto him in something close to one fluid motion, and while we moved I pressed the side of my face against his, first seeking the abrasion of his stubble and then something more. I pushed my face hard against his and he pushed back, and we kept on like that until we were done and my face actually hurt.
Much later I woke to feel the sheets cool beside me. I rolled over, expecting an empty bed, but there he was, lying so far away that I had to reach to touch him. He was on his back, just staring up into space, and when he felt my hand on his arm he jumped a little, then reached up and tucked his hands behind his head, his elbows pointing at the wall behind us.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
I touched him again, on the side, but he didn’t react—didn’t look at me, roll over to face me, anything.
“What were you dreaming at five o’clock this morning?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing, you don’t remember? Or nothing, you’re not going to say?”
He shrugged. “Nothing, I don’t remember—I never remember my dreams.”
“Never?”
“Only the most boring, banal ones. I had this recurring dream for about six years where I’d be walking along a road, walking and walking, and finally I’d arrive at this little store where I’d buy a pad of paper and a pen. After paying I’d walk to the door, then I’d suddenly turn around because I needed something else, and that’s when I’d wake up.” He looked over and smiled at me. “See, you’re so bored you’re not even paying attention.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No, you were definitely thinking of something else.”
It was true: my mind had drifted off, but only to the way we’d been earlier and how he’d erased it. It was as if we’d sent emissaries to have sex, the two of them urgent and unacquainted—and one of them unwilling to report back. It made me think of my first time with him, the hesitation and the ecstatic falling into it. Then I found myself thinking of Mike, of our first time, at Picnic Point—the trees tall around us and the smell of the earth, the way the beach towel rucked up beneath me. Afterward he told me it had been very different from what he’d expected, but he couldn’t say how. Having done it once, though, the state of not having done it yet dissolved—he said it didn’t even feel the same to be aroused. Remembering that, I wondered: Did Mike ever have sexual dreams about me now? Was it possible to have a sexual dream if you couldn’t have a sexual feeling? We hadn’t talked in three months, but his ring was still on my finger. I thought of how he must look in bed, sleeping or not, in what used to be the den, his paralyzed body arrayed before him, and my mind made its reluctant way back to the first night in Montauk with Kilroy, when I’d lain motionless on the bed and let him make love to me as if I were unable to move a muscle. As if I’d become Mike.
One Saturday I convinced Kilroy to go for a walk. It was April now, and all of New York was out—the hip and the destitute, but also the people who’d been in hiding all winter: families with small children, the very old. It felt good to be out walking, the sun warming us and warming also the people we passed, so that they seemed slowed somehow, enlarged and happy. Kilroy, who usually strode along quickly and purposefully whether he had a purpose or not, moved today at more of an amble, and even stopped occasionally to tilt his face to the sun. As we made our way downtown I had an idea that we were walking toward ourselves, who we were together and who we could be.
At the corner of Sixth Avenue and Houston, he stopped to watch a bunch of guys playing basketball in a little chain-link park. I stopped, too. As we watched, one of the players—not particularly tall, but lean in his sweats, and fast—stole the ball and dribbled to the far side of the court, where he fired a long shot that hit the rim with a clank and then fell through the netless hoop.
“Nice,” Kilroy exclaimed. He turned to me. “Imagine what that feels like. Having that power.”
“Did you ever play any sports?”
He smiled. “Baseball. I wanted to be a baseball player when I grew up, seriously. I played second base five, six months a year from when I was seven until I got to high school. I had a good arm, but the main thing was I was fast. Not on my feet—I was fast enough like that, but I mean fast-reacting. I’d see a ball coming and I’d already be thinking about my tag or my throw. I was a solid hitter, too, nothing great, but I held up my end. What a game. I loved it.”
“So why’d you stop?” I said. “What happened in high school?”
He shrugged. “You know. Things happen. I sort of lost interest.”
“But you loved it.”
He shrugged again.
Kilroy playing baseball was an entirely new thing to fit into the picture. It was surprisingly easy to see him as an intense little second baseman, skinny in those tiny white pants, a narrowing of concentration in his eyes. Eight, nine years old. Picturing him in high school was a lot harder. I wondered what he wasn’t telling me about why he’d stopped. Was it like Mike and hockey, like Mike’s decision our first year at the U not to go out? He would have made the team, but he would have been a supporter, not a star. Was that what had happened to Kilroy?
We headed across Houston, turned, and then turned again onto MacDougal, where we happened past the bookstore where the woman had stood behind me and said
the complacence of extreme beauty
. Squinting through the plate glass into the dark recesses of the store, I wondered who she was, where she was now. The connections among strangers in New York lay over the city like a faint grid, fragile as the strands of a spider’s web.
We made our way to the Hudson, where we walked along the crowded riverfront walkway of Battery Park City. There were people zooming along on Rollerblades, people with dogs. Kilroy pointed out Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, as small in the distance as one of the replicas I’d seen for sale around the city. Color leached from the sky and the warmth of the day receded, but we kept going, through the chilly narrow canyons of Wall Street. I was surprised by the massive form of the Brooklyn Bridge suddenly looming overhead, and I stopped to marvel at the sheer enormity of it.