Inexcusable (7 page)

“Because I am sorry, Gigi. Whether I did something or I didn't, I am sorry because of how you feel about it. How you feel and how you feel about me.”

She tries the doorknob again, and I grab her wrist with both hands.

I have both hands tight on Gigi Boudakian's lovely soft long wrist. She looks up at me, almost as if she is afraid of me. Things are so wrong.

“Please, Keir,” she says, and her voice is a shaky whisper. She looks down at my hands holding her wrist, and Gigi Boudakian's tears drop, right onto the back of my hand, and this is a nightmare now. I should be the one crying.

Things are so, so, so wrong.

S
omething changed in those weeks and months heading out of my high school life. Things were different. I was different. Physically different.

After football and soccer seasons were behind me and party season was in full session, I became aware of myself and my appetites. Myself
as
appetite.

But like I said, something changed. During the last half of the last year of high school, my body started treating life differently. I kept up with my hunger, my thirst, my desires of all kinds, kept them all going at a fairly high level, but my bod shifted down a gear.

My boyishness, which I had come to rely on, started to desert me.

My waistline had the nerve to protrude. “What have we got here?” I said to myself out loud as I stood naked in
front of my freestanding, full-length, oak-framed mirror, as I was wont to do. My father got me the mirror for my birthday. I had requested it.

I stared at it full-on. Turned sideways, then sideways the other way. Hell.

“Ray,” I called.

He came quickly down the hall, opened the door, found me there.

He stood with his hands on his hips, shaking his head at me, as I stared at me.

“You've got to get yourself a girlfriend, soon,” he said.

“I'm fat, Ray.”

He seemed a little surprised by this. We had been living alone, the pair of us, in bachelor conditions for a good while now. We were not shy or careful around each other. The house had its sights and sounds and smells, which we had gotten pretty good at not noticing, which the girls certainly would not have tolerated, but this here, me and the nakedness and the mirror and all, this was testing him.

“You are not fat. You're not so fine I want to see you naked, however. Get dressed.”

He left me there, alone. Me and my body, alone. Me and my body and my gut, all squeezed into my room together, uncomfortably crowded. My lean frame, cornerback lean, kicker thin, soccer-player light and springy, suddenly mutated with this jiggly Jell-O mold grafted on around my
beltline. I turned angrily away from the mirror, like it was the mirror's fault. It certainly wasn't mine.

But it was more than just that. I felt tired. And slow. And hurt. I had pulled a thigh muscle a couple of weeks before, just playing some casual basketball in gym class—nobody gets hurt in gym class—and it was refusing to heal.

I had to start training for real. I was going to get fit and stay fit. Something large, larger even than my belly, was coming over me.

It was over. This life, or this leg of it anyway, was over, and truth be told, I was not unhappy or unprepared for it. Except for living with my dad, there wasn't really any part of my life that I was not now prepared to trade in, trade up, for bigger and better things. Faster things, stronger things, prettier things, harder things, newer things, unknown things, and scarier things.

So when I came downstairs, I told my dad I would be skipping breakfast. And that was just the beginning. “I've been thinking, Ray, that I don't really want to have that open house here after graduation.”

He stopped washing up and looked at me as if I had stripped again and was looking at my naked reflection in the breakfast plates.

“You?”

“Right.”

“Keir MacTavish Sarafian?”

“Right.”

“You know that open house actually means party? You know you are saying you don't want a party. Could that possibly be true?”

“Ya, Dad. I just feel like . . . I've had enough. Not that I don't still love a party, Just that . . . I think I've done it now. Like I have had the breakup parties and the going away parties, and most of all the good-bye stuff and, honestly, I just don't feel like doing it again.”

I was briefly worried that Ray was going to be hurt. That he was going to feel bad that I had turned down his nice offer to throw me a do, that I had cut the legs off his big chance to send me off in style like he did for Mary and then Fran and that, I must say, he did spectacularly well. We were still pushing people out of the house two days later both times.

But he was okay. Which I should have known he would be.

“What do I want?” he said, lightly butting my head with his.

“You want what I want, Dad.”

“That's right, goofus, and don't you forget it. So, what
do
you want? A trip to Bermuda or someplace, I suppose.”

“No. All I want is Rollo.”

He dried off his hands. “Rollo?”

“Ya, just Rollo.”

“Really? Just Rollo, not his limousine?”

“Duh, Dad.”

Ray's cousin, Rollo, owned what was by some distance the finest, gaudiest, most hysterically decked-out stretch limo in this area. You normally had to book him months in advance for a weekend. He was expensive, and only slightly moved by family considerations.

“And what exactly do you want with Rollo?”

“All I want is just to ride around. For a few hours. Tooling around. Seeing places, seeing people. Picking up a friend here and there, having a laugh, dropping them off again. Showing off. Doing only what I feel like doing, when the mood hits me. Taking a stretch limo through the KFC drive-through. Seeing who I want, when I want, skipping all the rest of it, then when I'm done with it, being done.

“And not getting up out of my seat the whole time.”

He looked at me with great intensity, leaning up close. Like one of those pictures of the Kennedy brothers conferring over the Cuban Missile Crisis or Marilyn Monroe.

“Damn,” he said with pride. “That's a plan.”

*  *  *

As graduation approached I felt lighter and righter about it. While a lot of people at school were preparing for parties—mostly by partying all the time—I was pulling back, slowing down, stepping away. And it felt good.

I found a new and brilliant method for getting in condition: I ate and drank less and exercised more. I found that—miracle—if I stretched regularly and correctly, my thigh muscle didn't hurt anymore. I started going out for
long runs for the first time ever and discovered that I liked it. Not just the running, the
thump-thump-thump
of it, which could be boring as hell sometimes, and painful, and sick-inducing, but the touring element. Nearly every time I went out running in the weeks leading up to graduation, I felt like I was making my victory lap. I even began to have some kind of hazy fantasy, in which I had achieved something heroic and monumentally physical and was running around acknowledging the love and respect of the townspeople. I caught myself, on occasions, returning somebody's normal greeting wave with a big all-hail-Caesar wave of my own.

I hadn't done anything. I knew I hadn't done anything. All that was going on was the same thing that was going on for hundreds of other kids in town at the same time, that had gone on for thousands and thousands of other kids before us over the generations. I was finishing school, respectably but unspectacularly, and moving on away to college. I had done my time, had my times, and made my mark, although some might say my mark would have been better left unmade.

But that was past, and it was okay now.

I was starting to feel what was maybe an appropriate level of nostalgia for the old town. Passing my old ugly 1960s-style grammar school, I didn't feel the same cold and disagreeable urge to cross the street and pretend I never knew the place. I felt more like a benign, warming,
safe appreciation for it, a feeling stoked by the completely unexpected return of a few good memories there. Same for the church I no longer attended. Same for the Hi-Lo supermarket, which had changed to the A & P, which had changed to Stop & Shop, all of which I worked for, however briefly.

Maybe, I thought—because I realized that I could have thoughts when I was running that I couldn't seem to have at any other time—this was all a sign that I was getting old. Getting old really, really fast, like Robin Williams in that movie
Jack.
I was having to watch my weight, I was getting nagging little old-man injuries (my arches were now hurting), and I was getting all wishy-washy about a place that I really would have told you just a few weeks ago didn't mean much more to me than hot meals, a nice house, and Ray.

But I wasn't getting old. In fact, if you asked most people, they'd say it was rare to even catch me acting my age.

No, it was simpler than that. Simpler and more boring and normal.

I was leaving. Leaving everything I had known, the place I was me, the people I had only ever known, and Ray.

And, I suspected, I wasn't coming back. Not really.

Mary came back a lot, for a while that first year. Then she came back less. Then Fran started college, started coming back for lots of weekends and holidays, and then,
lots less. And with the two of them now already signed up for some summer study program in Wales, it was not too hard to see the center of things here kind of pulling loose from its moorings.

Maybe that's what was getting to me. Why should that be getting to me? I'd been happy to move on. Anxious, even. Except for Ray.

“What are you going to do, Ray?” I said without a word of explanation as I burst, sweaty and more breathy than necessary, through the door after my run.

I felt a little ridiculous when I saw him there, cool as a cuke, cool as Ray, sitting in front of the TV with a turkey sandwich in his hand and a beer at his feet. He was watching a home improvement show, which was a passion of his. He personally refused to ever lift a hammer, paint a brush stroke, or oil a hinge so shrieky with rust the neighbors must have suspected the old single dad had been beating his poor kids daily for decades.

“Look at the nonsense these guys waste precious life time on,” Ray said, pointing half his sandwich like a gun at the tool-belt-wearing TV guy. “There are so much more important things to do with your life, if you got a life, than putting shelves and track lighting in your garage.”

It was always this way. Always. He shook his sandwich hard at the guy, to try and shake him out of it. A slice of cucumber fell on the floor. I went over to him, picked it up
off the floor, and ate it. Then I kissed him on top of his head. He had the very beginnings of a bald spot toward the back, exactly smacked-lips size.

“Going to take a shower, Dad,” I said.

He waited until I was almost out of the living room.

“Going to buy another dog, probably, maybe,” he said.

I stopped. “What?”

“You asked me what I was going to do. When you came in, there, you asked me.”

He did not take his eyes from the TV, as if he were actually taking note of the instruction going on.

“Ya, right, but I didn't think you—”

“And maybe fix up the house. A little. With the extra time. I kind of let it go, over time. Over time.”

I stood looking at him. He knew. He already knew what I was asking, what I was thinking. He was already thinking it. He was thinking it here, while I was thinking it out there, running.

“You had other stuff to do, Ray. You were busy.”

“Yes I was,” he said. “I was busy with other stuff.”

I could not, for the moment, walk away. The sweat, clinging to me and cooling, felt awful, the way it could, felt like a thin skimming of drying cement all over my body. Talking wasn't much easier.

“Another dog?” I said.

“Ya. Maybe. Maybe something really small.”

“That's good, Dad. That's good.”

“That, and starting my other family, of course.”

“Of course.”

I cracked the cement, backed out of the room and partway up the stairs.

“Risk?” he called while simultaneously turning up the TV too loud.

“Of course,” I called back. “When I come out.”

“Fran called, wants you to call her back,” he said even louder because the television was getting louder. He had accidentally left his thumb on the button, which was not as uncommon a thing as you might imagine.

“Take your thumb off the button, Dad,” I yelled.

“Oh, right,” he yelled back. The volume subsided. I took my shower.

When I came out, feeling newly skinned and light, I found, on the telephone table, a plate of cracker sandwiches left for me. Ray's specialty, Ritz crackers filled with crunchy peanut butter and raspberry jam with the gigantic seeds that snapped when you bit them.

Hmm. These were suspicious little treats. Snack sedatives that Dad used to whip up at times of duress. Sometimes my duress, sometimes his. Sometimes we just invented some duress that was nobody's.

I picked up the phone, sat in the chair, and dialed Norfolk.

“No, Fran,” I said.

“Try to understand, Keir. I wanted to come. We both wanted to come—”

“Tomorrow, Fran. You are supposed to be here tomorrow. How can you be calling me today to say you are not coming tomorrow?”

“We just . . . you're right, we should have let you know sooner, but we were really trying to make it. We so wanted to be there, but exams, they're just killing us. We are studying every minute as it is, and I just don't see how we can be there at your graduation on Sunday and be ready and be here for the exams at eight o'clock Monday morning.”

There was an extremely long pause.

“Are you going to talk to me?” she said.