“Gabriel–”
He helped me out of the car; the chilly air closed in like a bite. “No, no,” he said again. “I don’t mean there is anything to work out right now. Don’t look so worried.” God help me he touched me on the chin like an uncle. “I just mean I’m here for you.”
“I know, Gabriel,” I said, and swallowed. The taste of
the hamburger I had for dinner–
fuck
calories–was still on my tongue and in my throat. As it turned out it was the last ham- burger I ever ate. There was something about the way Adam died that changed me. When you watch somebody die like that there comes a point when they stop looking like a person. The act of killing someone, after all, even if you’re just beating them with a blunt object over and over, is in effect squeezing the life out of a person, by which I mean: blood. Lots more blood than one would think, as it turned out. I mean, when it’s pouring out of a body it looks like more than could ever fit in a normal-sized high school boy. Maybe a little taller than normal, actually. The blood covers so much of the personality: the clothes are soaked through, and the face is covered in it, so even if the mouth weren’t split open and the nose weren’t squished in like a red garden slug, it wouldn’t look like a normal face. Adam kept trying to cover his face, but he was long past protecting himself, thrashing around in blood like a toy hopelessly smashed, engine whirring briefly before dying down. The blood covers the hands, the fingerprints even. (Note: I was wrong about that.) All the personality is drowned in it, like the actual taste of fries when Natasha puts as much ketchup as she likes on them. When the head caves in slightly like a deflating ball, when the arm, pinned beneath your foot, stops moving with a purpose and just starts flailing around like some separate creature trying to escape, it stops looking like a person. I mean, look at what I just wrote:
it. It
isn’t a person. Somewhere in the momentum the whole deal stops feeling like one person affecting another, because the victim gets less and less human. First the mallet causes bruises, then bleeding and then smashing. When you can see past the pouring blood into torn muscle and cracked bone, it doesn’t look like a
person anymore. What it starts looking like is, meat. By that time it’s too late to stop what you’re doing, so you have to just bear down and finish it, like doing anything squeamish, cleaning fish or skinning chicken. Nobody likes doing those things but you have to do them, and if you’re feeling gross about it you should just stop thinking about it as a cute little chicken or a happy fish swimming in the ocean or a classmate or anything, and just think about it as meat. No matter what they say–and at that point you can barely make out what they’re saying anyway, so why listen to it?–it’s just meat, that’s all. A piece of meat with distinct dimen- sions, a definite size and volume. There’s only so much blood it can hold, and when just about all of it is out you’re done and you don’t have to worry. The last lung may fill with blood, and col- lapse like a sinking balloon, making a gurgling noise that sticks in your head like the catchiest song you ever heard, gurgling there behind your eyes long after you’re bored of Darling Mud or Q.E.D. or Tin Can or Pan or whoever they are, just gurgling away, even in your dreams and when you wake up, and the thrashing may continue longer than you thought–I mean, it takes a bit of time for the nerves to realize there’s really not much brain left to send a message to–
to which to send a message
–but the person- ality is gone, the human part. It’s just meat. The only trouble is, after something like that has happened to you, you don’t want any meat. Real meat that is, like a hamburger. So I haven’t touched red meat since the garden party. Or really, since tonight. The taste of my last hamburger lingering in the dark with Gabriel–a sensa- tion to be remembered, locked in memory and noted in my journal as clearly as everything else.
“I could come in,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “I’ve been in these clothes all day. They
feel gross; I want to get out of them.”
He raised one eyebrow, just slightly. Oh God. “I could come in.”
For the first time since the school year began I wanted to have my parents be home, cute white American parents who wouldn’t let my boyfriend–my
black
boyfriend, mind you–come in late at night under any circumstances. Because this way I had no excuse. What could I possibly say–“
It just isn’t working out between us
?” He coughed slightly, and I thought for a minute I’d said it. “I told my parents I might stay at Douglas’s,” he said. “They’re not ex- pecting me back until morning. I could even stay over.”
“Oh,” I said.
“If that’s OK,” he said, smiling like of course it was.
“Oh?” I said, cinching my voice into at least a semiseductive tone. I had opened my door but hadn’t stepped into the dark yet. “So,” he said, leaning over to catch my eye and taking a hesitant
step forward. “If it’s OK.” “Well,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he said, leaning in close and kissing my neck like a butterfly or maybe a flapping moth, hitting the same damn lightbulb over and over. “Don’t worry about anything,” he said. He must have felt how tense my body was, misread it entirely and completely. Oh, Gabriel. “Don’t worry, I’m not going any- where,” he said, clinching it. We stepped into the dark together. My hand reached toward the wall to find the light switch but found Gabriel’s hand instead. He gently helped me find the way to his shirt. “I’ll hold you, all night,” he said, wrapping me in python arms. The door slammed shut. In a movie it would cut to morning, but those of us living it have to go through all of it, minute by minute by minute like a school schedule or a well-kept diary or a thousand
other things I can’t even think of.
Saturday October 30th
One. When I woke up this morning Gabriel still had his arms around me like a straitjacket, not that I’d know. With difficulty I lifted his arm from around me and took a shower. When I got back I thought maybe he’d be gone, or at least up and about, but he was still fast asleep. I sat on the bed and watched him, trying to conjure up some sort of fond feelings, but instead it just felt like watching a movie you’ve already seen and didn’t actually like that much. Who knows why you don’t switch it off?
When I got up to change my clothes Gabriel’s hand was sud- denly on my leg. I turned and his eyes were wide open; happiness was making him bold as a drunk. His smile was so desperate I put my fingers to it to blot it out. He kissed and kissed my fingers. What I really wanted was coffee but I lay back down on the bed and we fooled around.
Then he wanted to cook me omelettes, but I made him go home instead. “Change your clothes and I’ll change my clothes and pick me up and we’ll go to V ’s and make salads. It’s already eleven-thirty, plus we don’t have any eggs. Come
on
, Gabriel.”
“OK,” he said. “I just don’t want to be away from you.” “Stop, you’re making me swoon,” I said blankly. “Get in the
car.”
He blinked and decided I was kidding. “OK, OK.” He got in the car, and I hurried to the kitchen to throw all the eggs down the disposal in case he caught me later. I didn’t need to change my clothes, so I figured I had time to stop by Adam’s house. Plenty of cars were parked on his street
on a Saturday morning, so remaining inconspicuous was an easy caper.
The sky-blue flicker of a television was winking behind the States’ lovely white curtains. Adam, on his last full day of life, was watching cartoons. I mean, there’s no way to know for sure, I guess, but it wasn’t his parents, and it wasn’t The Frosh Goth. She’s probably so excited to be invited to the Big Party tomorrow she has all two hundred of her black dresses out and is sitting in her slip, debating the merits of each one.
I thought maybe we’d find V in black shrouds or something, but when Gabriel and I walked into the kitchen she was actually laughing at something Kate was saying.
“The door was open,” I said.
“No problem,” V said. “If I devein another shrimp I’m going to go out of my gourd.”
“Too late,” Kate said, and they both giggled. I noticed two glasses, half-full of champagne; no wonder.
“No wonder,” I said, pointing to the glasses. “Any left?”
Kate and V laughed again. “Lots,” V said. “Satan bought crates and crates at some discount place. You want orange juice in it, or just straight?”
“Just straight?” Douglas said, coming in with Lily and what looked like a bag of two thousand limes. “In that case I’d better leave.”
Kate and V laughed and V poured everyone champagne. The kitchen got busy. Somebody put on the old Darling Mud al- bum and we sang along in between blasts of the blender. Lily was hand-whipping cream and Gabriel was doing something with mangoes in a small saucepan when Jennifer Rose Milton and Flora Habstat arrived, and for some reason even Flora’s chatter about a record-breaking storm happening across the country
wasn’t as annoying as usual, or maybe it was the champagne. Natasha didn’t show.
“Who thought that the Basic Eight would ever be socializing in
this house
?” Lily asked.
“Well,” V said sheepishly, “usually my parents are–”
“Let me guess,” Gabriel said, wrinkling his brow and turning down the heat under the mangoes. “Entertaining?”
We all laughed, and Douglas came back in the room to ask V
if he should bring flowers tomorrow or if one needed flowers for a garden party. We all nixed flowers and dumped what we’d been chopping into bright silver bowls for Gabriel’s use. Gabriel said he needed one more purple onion chopped so, being the girlfriend, I volunteered while everyone else beat eggs and eggs for some meringue thing that Jennifer Rose Milton insisted she knew how to make. Halfway through the onion my eyes were watering too hard to finish, so I asked V if there was anything nonkitchen to do and she said I could go out and help Kate move the lawn furniture. When I went out there I was surprised that the light was already into deep afternoon, and Kate wasn’t moving anything but sitting on the steps with an empty champagne glass crying her eyes out.
“Oh,” I said. I felt like one of those mute victims in monster movies, leaving the safety of her own home to help the scientists. They take her deep into the forest and show her footprints, claw marks, a shattered window in a wrecked cabin. She nods. Yes, the monster’s been here. I’d know his wreckage anywhere. When Kate turned around the heartbreak of Adam’s rejection was streaked across her face. It was like she’d borrowed my clothes. I sat down next to her on the steps. From here we could see the garden, mocking our messy lives with its perfect design, its flawless execution.
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t take it so hard. It
is
a lovely
garden. A lot of people are moved by horticulture, Kate.”
She tried to smile but just cried harder. Grateful that I had been chopping onions and thus had every reason to have red, bleary eyes, I patted her shoulder until she was just hiccuping. “How could he?” she finally said. “How could he?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s–”
“Oh, God,” she said. “At least with Garth, I knew what was going on, you know? I didn’t want to face it, but really, I saw it coming. But this was from the blue. He just walked into the courtyard–remember?–asked to talk to me, and all of a sudden it
just wasn’t working out
.” She started to cry again. A perfect white bird swooped out of nowhere and landed on the croquet set to peer at us. I could see each mallet gleaming at me, sturdy, able to withstand anything you could do with it. Maybe in some other language, some bird tongue, Kate crying meant something else, something better. Write a poem about this. Write a poem about everything.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, grabbing Kate by the hand. “You and me, we’ll grab some food or something.”
“Yeah,” Kate said, looking at her empty glass. “Or something.” We went back to Kate’s house and made a big Freshman Cock- tail–poured an inch off each of Mom and Dad’s bottles into a large plastic container, something we hadn’t done in years. We stopped at a little corner store and bought two pints of fancy ice cream and some bags of cookies and chips, left the car at my place and went up to Twin Peaks, a big beautiful tourist view of the city rife with couples making out in cars on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s great to go up there on foggy nights because it’s the ultimate irony: a beautiful view you can’t see. Kate and I drank to that, the square mouth of the plastic container spilling liquor on our shirts. We were freezing–it’s part of
the tradition of drinking on Twin Peaks that you forget to bring the blanket
again
–and there was way too much schnapps in the Cocktail but we kept drinking anyway. Kate talked and talked, and as it got darker and darker her navy-blue sweatshirt faded to black and I could just see her white face and hands hovering around.
“You’re better off without him,” I said. “We all are. He’ll never come to one of our dinner parties again.”
“And there’s no worse punishment!” she cried. Some of her hair dangled in the Cocktail. “That’s all we are, Flan, a bunch of dinner parties! A bunch of hostesses!”
“With the mostesses,” I added. “Give me some Cocktail.” “Try these cookies. Too much cream filling, but–he’s such an
asshole, Flan.”
“You’re better off without him,” I said for the millionth time. “Better off without Adam.”
“Better off without Adam, Adam, Adam–” she sang to the tune of something. She was sniffling but I didn’t know if she was crying or not, didn’t know if I was.
“We’re all better off without Adam. We would have been better off without the
original
Adam. Who needs him? Just a couple of Eves in the garden would have been OK.”
“Yeah,” Kate agreed, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. “If you and I had been in the garden, Flan, we would have left the fucking apple the hell alone!”
She and I cackled; behind us, some car was playing smarmy love ballads. “Better off without Adam,” I said. “Better off without all the Adams.”
Peter Pusher: That’s nonsense. If there were only Eves in the garden the entire human race would have died out, and then where would you be?