Beware of Love in Technicolor (7 page)

Yeah, I played pool. But I didn’t tell John this.

Instead, I shrugged my shoulders, and said, “I’m a fast learner.”

***

Downstairs in the game room, I said “hi” to Ben and was introduced to his roommate, Jared. He was from New York, skinny, and moved fast. Ben stepped up to me. Even in a faded Dartmouth t-shirt and khakis with a hole in the knee, Ben looked good.

“Don’t worry,” he said to me with a smile. He was a close-talker, and I needed to take a step back from him to maintain my personal space. “We’ll take it easy on you.”

I walked away with $67 of their money that night.

I assuaged their egos by buying them dinner from Carl’s, a university institution that consisted of a silver lunch truck, and one crusty old New Englander named Carl.  Every evening, his silver truck would round the traffic circle at the center of town, and glide into position in the parking lot just outside the SUB. He would crank out his tattered, red and white striped awning, get the fryolators sizzling, and open for business. But there was a special way of ordering your food that made Carl’s what it was.

“Whaddya want?” he asked hurriedly, eyes darting in a million directions as he managed the surges of students that circled his truck.

“Three big guys, abused, and three brown cows,” John ordered for the guys. Translation: three cheeseburger subs with everything and three chocolate shakes.

“Snotties, on the rag!” I called out to him, finishing our group’s order. It was Carl-speak for French fries with melted cheese and ketchup. “And a Diet Coke!”

I know. It was pretty gross. But he did a great business. I feel bad for the students there today, now that Carl’s is but a piece of history. What a drag to have only Pizza Hut and Taco Bell to choose from.

***

We walked back to Ben’s dorm, on the other side of campus from where John and I were housed. Area 3 consisted of two near-identical brick towers, built in the eighties. Each had eight floors. They were modern, compared to Wyndham or Holt, and I immediately wished I lived out here in the woods, with the safe elevators and quiet, hidden pipes.

The guys had obviously been getting to know each other over the moth, but I think that sort of thing comes easier for guys, anyway. Women need so many more details to feel close. Men are just looking for someone to shoot pool and eat greasy food with. I ate about half my fries, and then gave them up to the group. They descended like vultures, leaving an empty box behind in about four seconds flat.

Jared was one of those guys I immediately had a strange feeling about. He was either going to end up as some kind of genius billionaire, like Larry Flint, or in prison for masterminding a grand-scale scandal. His dark hair was a mass of tight curls, worn close to his head. To this day, I cannot hear the Beastie Boys without thinking of Jared.

Despite my feelings for John, Ben remained a pretty thing to look at. He was so damn good looking, sometimes it was hard to look directly at him. Like it had a power of its own. Girls were constantly flocking around him, tossing their hair and giggling. It was something to watch.

With the door to their room open to the ebb and flow in the hallway, plans for the night started being made, parties were being discussed, and girls in baggie jeans and baggier sweatshirts were increasing in number. John checked in with me a couple of times, to be sure I wasn’t fading into the shadows. I spent a bit of time just watching him, pretending to be interested in hearing about this person’s major, or that person’s dining hall experience. He towered over everyone. I wondered what it would be like to kiss him.

For the first time since arriving at the steps of Wyndham more than a month earlier, I was having fun. John, remembering that I didn’t drink, excused us from the group when talk of beer runs and “getting shitfaced” became the focus.

“You could have stayed,” I told him as we stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor of Harrison.

“Would you have stayed?” he asked.

“Probably not. But I wouldn’t have been mad at you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

We were outside now, following the narrow paved path through the woods that would dump us out in the main part of campus, near the theater building.

“What about smoking?” The chilly air gave our words weight; the billowy, steamy puffs wafted from our mouths as we strode across the street.

“Cigarettes?” I asked. “I’ve never seen you smoke.”

“Weed,” he stated.

“Oh.”

Now, I was not anti-drug in any kind of Nancy Reagan, just-say-no kind of way. I saw drugs as a weakness. They were a crutch. They were psychic suicide. It was all just theory. I had never so much as abused Nyquil.

“How do you feel about that?” John pushed me for a response.

“Are you not going to smoke if I tell you I don’t want you to?”

“No,” he answered honestly.

“Then why do need to know how I feel about it?” I was irritated that he had brought it up. I had been having a good time.

“Because I care how you feel.”

“You’re acting like a boyfriend or something,” I crossed my arms in front of myself. The night was cold, and I hadn’t prepared to be out this late. My teeth were chattering. My green sweater was made for style rather than warmth. Seeing this, John removed his leather jacket and placed it over my shoulders. It nearly swallowed me whole.

“I like you Greer, and I want to be your friend.”

“So be my friend, and stop asking me these questions,” I told him.

“I don’t know what to make of you,” he said, shaking his head. We were back in the woods, following another narrow path beside a small, babbling brook. I paused on a wooden bridge, and looked down at the swirling water. He stood behind me, and placed his hands on my shoulders. We each stared at the water for a few moments. I turned around and looked up at him. The dappled light from an unseen lamp in the trees made strange, dancing patterns on our faces. Without much effort, he lifted me up and sat me down on the railing of the bridge. We were almost eye to eye. He stood between my knees.

“I lied,” he said. “I don’t want to be your friend.”

“What is it you want then?”

Our first kiss was there on the bridge in the woods. How do you describe a first kiss? It is like trying to hold water in your hands.

I forgot all about the cold. His lips were soft, as I had imagined, and he was certainly not a novice at the craft, as I was. I felt enveloped by him, and safe. He used his hands to cup my face, and took his time, which I have since learned does not come naturally to most men.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that compares kissing to drinking salted water. “You drink, and your thirst increases,” it says. Time, I’m sure, passed by, but we remained unavailable for comment.

***

John walked me back to Wyndham. On the stairs outside we kissed some more.

“Is this the part of the movie where I invite you inside?” I asked during a break in the kissing.

“Only if you want to,” he laughed.

“I want to.”

Once inside, we crept quietly past the door to the study lounge where I was supposed to be watching
Steel Magnolias
or some such piece of melodramatic crap, with Molly and the other girls from The Pit who had yet to find a life on campus. I opened the door to my room, and we slipped inside, unnoticed.

I slid his coat off my shoulders and draped it over my desk chair. He put a Kate Bush CD in my stereo, and we sat down on the bed. My heart was
beating like a hummingbird’s, and I was thankful for Kate’s soaring soprano as camouflage for my nervousness.

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t feel comfortable with,” he said to me. He tucked my hair behind my right ear, and looked in my eyes. His hands were soft. As he leaned in and began kissing me again, the song
Wuthering Heights
came on, which I am sure he planned, but made an impression nonetheless.

A minute may have passed. Maybe an hour. I knew when he turned off the light and locked the door that I was going to have to come clean. I just wanted the moment to stay as it was. Just keep kissing me, and don’t stop, and don’t ask any questions, and please don’t expect too much of me.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“You’re lying,” he said. He took hold of both my hands and looked in my eyes. The light coming in from the street lit us up in strips seeping in through the blinds. The whoosh of water raced through the pipes that ran down the wall behind my bed.

“I’m pretty new to all this,” I finally said. I dropped my eyes and looked down at how tiny my hands looked in his. They looked like a child’s hands.

“How new?” he asked gently.

“My last ‘boyfriend’ was Greg Cohen, and I let him kiss me after a night of mini golf in the summer of ‘88,” I replied lamely.

“Wow,” he said, almost under his breath. I noticed his shoulders drop.

“I’m sorry, I should have said something.”

“No, no,” he said, cutting me off. He squeezed my hands, and bent his head down so that I had to look him in the eyes. “I’m just a little stunned is all. How did you go through high school without a real boyfriend?”

“Nobody ever asked me out.”

“What a bunch of idiots,” he said. It made me laugh.

“To be fair to the idiots, I didn’t really look like this in high
school,” I admitted.

“And I’ve spent all this time being intimidated by you,” he said. He looked at me intently, his slate blue eyes moving downward over my nose, and resting on my lips. He traced their outline with his index finger, then leaned in and kissed me again.

He kissed my lips, my nose, my chin. I wanted to push the curls out of his face, but I was afraid to move. I closed my eyes and did my best to relax. I prayed that biology would kick in and I would suddenly have a clue what to do next. With one hand on the back of my head, and one around my waist, he guided me down on the bed so we were lying down, facing each other. He propped himself up on his right elbow, leaned in, and continued kissing me. His left hand wandered from my shoulder, down my side to my waist, and over my right hip. He pulled me closer, and kissed me harder. I felt my body turn to liquid, and my right hand find its way to the small of his back. At that moment I think I would have let him do anything.

Anything, that is, if the doorknob hadn’t started twitching and turning, and Molly’s voice hadn’t squeezed in under the door, shredding the moment with her twang as sharp as a wet cat’s claws.

“What the hay? Now I know I didn’t lock this dang door!”

We heard the clicks of the combination door lock being punched outside the room, but before we could sit up and straighten ourselves out, Molly was standing in the door, backlit by the fluorescent hallway lights. She flicked on our overhead light, and jumped when she saw us.

“Good Lord! Ya’ll scared me nearly half to death!” she laughed and walked into the room. “Hi John,” she continued, seemingly oblivious to the scene she had just interrupted.

“Hi Molly,” he replied, rolling onto his back and grinning at me. I rolled my eyes and mouthed an apology to him. He took my right hand in his and kissed it.

“Where were you?” she asked me while she switched on her computer. “I thought you were going to watch the movie with us.” She kicked off her sneakers; they landed in the pile of clean and dirty clothes growing in her closet.

“Something suddenly came up,” I told her.

“Like what?” she pressed.

“Like I had to fleece John’s friends out of a bunch of money.”

“Nice work, by the way,” John said to me. “I haven’t yet told you how damn sexy that was.” He grinned and gently pinched my butt. I swatted his hand away.

“Oh good Lord,” Molly said dramatically. “Why don’t you two go get a room?”

But the moment was lost, and instead, we got a pizza.

***

There is a rule in writing that goes something like this: Don’t introduce a gun in Act One if you don’t plan on using it in Act Two. The gun, in this case, was John’s affinity for illegal narcotics.

Like I said before, I was not a fan of drug users. I found it hard to respect people who would deliberately trash their body and their mind for some cheap high, only to come crashing back down in the end anyway. Many of my group of friends in high school had been “straight edge.” Some even wore black X’s on their hands to symbolize they were clean.

The problem was not new to me, though it had never been this personal. Many of my heroes had been terrible drunks and/ or junkies. Bukowski and Kerouac to name two. Hemingway, Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison. The list is too long to go into.

I always felt so disappointed in them, when I came to the end of their stories. But it was all theoretical. Dealing in reality, and with matters of the heart, is always a much messier affair. John and I forged a deal. He could do all the drinking and smoking and whatever else he wanted to do, but not when he was with me. When he was with me, I wanted him sober.