This Is Between Us (4 page)

“Does Irish count? Redheads?”

“No, they don’t count,” you said.

We listened to the singer and watched everyone around us smiling, nodding their heads, off in their individual fantasies.

“I never had an Irish girl,” I said.

“Let’s walk around,” you said.

We told our friends that we were going to get some beers and then we wandered off to where the animals were.

“I wonder what kind of animals Irish girls like,” you said.

“I’m not really that interested,” I said. “I mean, can you even name a hot Irish girl? Someone actually from the country?”

We wandered through the monkey house and stopped to watch two monkeys grooming each other very carefully. No one else was around. The sound of the singer, crooning a Radiohead song, fluttered through the air.

…

You told me about the dead squirrel in the road and how much it bothered you. You were convinced that people hit animals on purpose, especially in our neighborhood. You talked about it the whole weekend but I couldn’t figure out which road you were talking about. You started to get a migraine and didn’t want to think about the squirrel anymore. I made you some chicken soup and massaged your head behind the ears. You turned off all the lights and lay on the couch, pinching the bridge of your nose.

I went out to the store to get you some medicine and on the way back I drove down the road where the squirrel was. It was right in the middle, where it wouldn’t be hit unless someone swerved. I drove past but then decided to turn around. I pulled over and grabbed a small empty box that was in the trunk. I didn’t want to touch the animal but I was able to scoop it up with the box. It didn’t seem as stiff as I thought it would be. It was heavy and flopped around. I flung it under a bush on the side of the road and covered it with brown and orange leaves.

When I got home, you were up and doing yoga. You said you suddenly felt better. You said the pressure had just faded and gone away.

…

For some reason, this squirrel incident reminds me of a time when Vince and I were playing at a park, when he was about five years old. He brought some of his miniature Lego figures and was playing with them on the slide and by the swings. When we were on our way home, he couldn’t find the little plastic sword that came with his Knight Guy. That’s what he called them: guys. Ninja Guy. Police Guy. Cowboy Guy. Worker Guy. Knight Guy.

He was sad and wouldn’t eat his dinner. I told him we could go look for the sword in the morning but he started crying and said, “He needs his sword tonight. He always sleeps with his sword.”

I told him if he ate five bites of dinner we would go look for the sword. He ate his bites with a sad face and then we drove back to the park. It was already dark, so we brought flashlights. I didn’t think we would find it—a gray piece of plastic barely an inch long. After ten minutes, though, I did find it. “Okay,” I said. “No more losing Lego stuff at the park.”

We drove back home, Vince strapped into his booster seat, worn out from the long day but happy and smiling, clutching his Knight Guy, who clutched his sword. It was one of the times I remember him being totally happy, totally at peace.

…

You came over to the hotel on your lunch break and we snuck into a room that I’d just checked someone out of. We made love quickly, then stayed, lying on the bed together. Our thighs were touching. We were looking at the ceiling, breathing heavy, then steady, then soft. We heard muffled music from another room. Something romantic and soulful.

“We’re like, in love,” you said.

“Yep. We’re in the middle of it,” I said.

“We really are. We’re, like, in love.”

“You say it like you just realized that,” I said, and looked over at you.

“I did!” Your eyes lit up when you said this, growing big like overinflated balloons.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, I knew I loved you. And I knew you loved me. But I didn’t realize that we were
in
love.”

I found myself fully and emotionally engulfed in the moment. I had twenty-five minutes left on my lunch break. I counted the minutes up instead of counting them down.

…

I’m spinning a loaf of bread on my fingers. Will you dance with me next? The sun is on our naked backs.

The park down the street is “our park.”

The old man who works in his garden three houses down is “our old man.”

The café where we get pumpkin scones on Tuesday mornings is “our café.” Those scones are “our scones.”

That song by Fleetwood Mac is “our song” and so is that one by LL Cool J.

I took my friend Sarah to the auto parts store on Eighty-Second Avenue so she could get a new battery for her car. You seemed upset when I told you, but you said that nothing was wrong. Finally, before we went to bed, you said, “I can’t believe you took her to
our
auto parts store.”

…

We forgot about nature sometimes. In the park, lying in the grass, it felt perfect and peaceful. The grass was so green, almost garish. It seemed exotic.

“Come over here and feel this,” you said.

I lifted my head to see you by a tall knobby tree. “I’ve touched a tree before,” I said.

“When was the last time you touched a tree?” you asked.

“Probably last week.” I shrugged.

“I doubt it,” you said.

You were right. We see trees all the time but never touch them.

I got up and pressed my hands on the tree, like I was searching for a heartbeat.

“Keep them there,” you said. You looked around to see if anyone was watching and then you started carving our initials into it.

…

I liked the gaps in you. The top of your shirt billowing open for my own peep show when you bend down to tie your shoes. The smooth skin space between the bottom of your shirt and the buttons on your Levi’s when you reached up for something in the kitchen cabinet. The gap between your front teeth. The thin delicate bridge between your toughness and sadness.

I would watch you walking up the stairs ahead of me and concentrate on the bottoms of your feet clapping against your flip-flops.

…

It was Sheryl, my ex-wife, who taught me to go slow in bed. I was a jackrabbit. That’s what she whispered to her friends. One of her friends told me that later. Or maybe it was a
jackhammer
. A handful of thrusts and it was over, like I was in a race.

I’m not sure where this method came from, but I was quick to blame a weekly circle jerk I had with friends when I was in tenth grade. We took turns having sleepovers, lugging our smelly sleeping bags from basement to basement. Rusty zippers always getting stuck. To cut down on possibly incriminating evidence, we could use only one piece of stimulation—like a page from
Sports Illustrated
’s swimsuit issue, a banana peel, or massage oil. Sometimes we traded panties and bras from our moms’ or sisters’ dressers. This little private club lasted from Christmas break to summer vacation and then we all went to summer camps and grew apart.

For a long time, I was a speed demon and knew no other way. I could summon a handful of sticky in twelve seconds. I didn’t think about how this eventually affected my girlfriends. I thought me coming = them coming too. Their fingers were usually called on to finish my unfinished job. I’d lie there, exhausted, and watch their faces change as their bodies squirmed next to me.

When I met Sheryl, she was just as inexperienced as I was, but she read magazines and had some strategic ideas of her own.

Her best one was the candle trick. She would put lit candles on the headboard of the bed frame. The surface there was only about five inches wide, so if the bed jostled too much, the candles would fall over. Night after night, I would watch the small lineup of flames nervously as I moved inside her. When I was close to climax, I would be tempted to go faster but I had to be careful. For a couple of months, I couldn’t even look at her face for more than a few seconds. My brain would play tricks on me. I’d see flames growing tall out of the corner of my eyes. I imagined the bed going up in flames at the same time as my premature ejaculation.

Eventually I mastered the slower speed, the steady pace of delicious friction and heat. I could watch Sheryl’s face and breasts and hips again. They glowed in the dark.

…

If I flipped over and put my back to you in bed, I called this “cooking the other side.” I called it this because I imagined myself as a big piece of meat on a grill. On some nights, I had to flip over continually until I was more comfortable (evenly cooked).

I also liked how it felt when you put your back to me at the same time. We called this “butt to butt.”

There were some nights when you lost your patience with me and would ask me to face you for a good-night kiss, and I’d say, “Hold on a minute. I have to finish cooking this one side.”

…

I told you that I still loved all my past girlfriends.

“How many is that?” you asked.

“Well, probably not all of them,” I said. “But five or six for sure.”

You turned your eyes from me and I could see your shoulders drop.

I tried to explain it further. “Love is fluid, I think. It doesn’t follow timelines. Once it starts, it doesn’t end or anything. I mean, it might stop growing but maybe it just buries itself inside of you when a relationship ends. So, like, you can dig it up again if you want to. All of those exes contributed in different ways to make me who I am now. Same with you and your ex-boyfriends. If you never went out with John, you would have never learned to like cool music.”

“I’ll always appreciate John for that,” you said. “But can’t you just be thankful?”

“That’s part of the love,” I said.

“I always think about who will be at my bedside when I’m dying,” you said. “What if all of my ex-boyfriends were there?”

I wasn’t sure what to think about that. “Are they nice?” I finally asked. “I mean, do you love them?”

“I did,” you said. “But what’s the point of that? The hospital room can only fit so many people. Are they all going to huddle around me and try to hold my hand? I’m claustrophobic. Besides, that’s what the funeral is for.”

“So you just want me there?” I asked.

You answered back quickly. “I don’t want anyone else to see me die. It will be our own private moment.”

…

We went to see an ex-boyfriend of yours play in a band at Berbati’s. It was about a year after we started going out. I had never met the ex-boyfriend before, but I knew he was the one you went out with before you got married and had Maxine. You said the relationship was a good one, but then he moved to Seattle to play bass in this band. You said the breakup was “reluctant” at the time. His name was Peter.

It was a slow night at the bar, with only twenty or so other people there for the show. This made me feel good for some reason, that his band wasn’t popular.

You pointed him out to me while the opening band played. He didn’t look so great, which also made me feel more comfortable.

When they got on stage though, the guy you had pointed at sat behind the drums and another, taller and better-looking young man picked up the bass.

“Is Peter the drummer?” I asked you.

“No. I told you he plays bass.”

I looked at the bass player and realized I must have misread your pointing finger earlier. We watched the band’s set of aggressive noise-rock as I felt a knot in my stomach getting tighter. I remembered you once told me that you were turned on at rock shows because you thought the way musicians played their instruments must be the same way they had sex. You could see the passion in their faces and in their tensed muscles, you had told me.

After the show, we talked with the old boyfriend while the band packed up their gear and you bought one of their
CD
s. We drank a beer with him and then you hugged him for a couple of seconds longer than I expected.

“Peter is a pretty good-looking guy,” I said on the drive home.

“You sound surprised,” you said.

“He looks young,” I said.

You didn’t say anything.

“How old is he?” I asked.

“He’s seven years younger than me,” you said. “Don’t be a dick.”

“I heard that it’s hard to date guys in bands.” My voice unexpectedly cracked.

“I don’t know,” you said. “I’m not dating a guy in a band.”

…

One night, I saw an old girlfriend at a bar and made out with her in the unisex bathroom. I reached inside her shirt and felt the heavy weight of her breasts. She touched me through my pants and made me come. I told her I wanted to make her come too, but she just laughed and asked me to buy her another drink instead.

I got home two hours later than I said I would. I went into the neighbors’ yard and peed in their bushes and then tore some flowers out of their garden. I rested them on your pillow and fell quickly asleep.

…

You were arranging the flowers I’d brought home to you in a tall vase. You had pricked your finger on a thorn and it was bleeding so softly and quietly. You didn’t ask me what the occasion was.

…

You told me that you used to spy on your parents when you were in seventh grade. You and your brother, Daniel, who is about three years older than you, sometimes took turns peering through a secret peephole that he had made in his closet. It was tiny, but you could see a little bit of their bed and the reflection of a big mirror on their dresser.

“I wanted to look all the time,” you told me. “But Daniel said he would only do it when he was bored. He also said not to come in his room when he wasn’t home, but I still did it. I would be quiet and I would get in there, behind his hangers and his clothes.”

I asked if that was how you learned about sex. “Yes, probably. But sometimes it would be too dark to see anything. I’d only be able to listen and guess what was happening.” You closed your eyes tight, trying to remember.

Your parents were probably our age or younger when you were spying on them. I imagined you, twelve years old, a cute mess of knees and elbows and long hair. And then I could see Maxine in the closet and you and me reflected off that mirror.

“I was so happy to see them that way,” you said. “The peephole was so small that it gave everything I saw a fuzzy edge, like when they used to smudge Vaseline on camera lenses. I could tell they had romance and passion and it gave me this elevated sense of hope for the future. But maybe even more than that, I was turned on.”

You stopped and exhaled, as if you’d been holding your breath in. You looked at me and then quickly away.

“Do you think it turned your brother on too?” I asked.

“I think so,” you said. “He tried to hide it, but it did. Sometimes we would both cry while watching them. I’d wipe my eyes with the sleeve of one of his shirts because I wanted to seem like I was more cool or something. But he could see that my eyes were red. We were a close family that way. It was secret and it was magic.”

…

Tragedy keeps us grounded. If things are going well for too long, we get suspicious. But still, we don’t know how to act when something bad happens. We accidentally laughed when our friend told us about her dead bird. When Maxine got her first period and cried, I cried too.

…

Sometimes we try to make sad things beautiful. One night, my cock was an airplane and your legs were the Twin Towers. I held them up and watched the plane land smoothly between them, over and over.

…

Sometimes I’d roll the passenger-side window all the way down and take my foot off the brake and creep forward next to the sidewalk in our neighborhood, and Vince would jog alongside for a few seconds before dramatically jumping in through the open window. Like
Starsky and Hutch
, I said. He didn’t get the reference but still thought it was funny.

“
DTYM
,” I would say, and he would laugh because he knew it was a ridiculous stunt that would be too hard to explain to his mom anyway.

For a while it was his favorite thing to do and we did it for about six months before he had a growth spurt and was getting too big for the window. “
Starsky and Hutch
,” he’d say, and I’d roll down the window.

One time, Maxine was with us and he wanted her to do it with him. “I’ll go first,” he said.

I wanted to say it wasn’t a good idea. I wanted to be a responsible adult. But I said, “Just this once.”

“I’m Starsky,” Maxine said. She was laughing so hard she almost couldn’t do it. I slowed almost to a stop as she flopped through the window with Vince pulling her in.

“We did it!” Vince shouted. Then he gave me a soft punch on the arm. “Step on it, Dad. Go!”

I pushed the car to a steady twenty-five miles per hour.

…

“I think we all want to kill our children at some point,” you said while falling asleep on one of our first nights together.

We’d been talking in the dark about parenting for two hours, most of it positive. Then we were finally fading. There was that sleepy silence and then those words, groggy and slurred, like maybe they weren’t meant to be heard at all. But it was the kind of statement that only parents would know was true—something that most parents have thought about, but then laughed uncomfortably to themselves while thinking it. I knew how brave you were then, or at least how brave your honesty was.