“Great,” said Gordie. “That’s great. When you choke, don’t come running to me.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
He turned. Jess was strolling toward him, hands in her back pockets. He explained about Ebie while they watched her polish off her snack.
“You let her come out here without a leash?”
“I shouldn’t. I was just going back and forth with all this garbage, and she was giving me such a hard time I finally let her come.” Gordie jogged back to the place in the parking lot where he’d abandoned his latest load: three black heavy-duty bags. He heaved them over the top of the dumpster.
“Why so much garbage?”
“Aah.” He prodded a piece of broken glass with the toe of his sneaker. “Cleaning out a bunch of my dad’s things.” He wouldn’t have expected this to upset her, but evidently it did. Her brow furrowed; she took her hands out of her pockets and pressed them together under her chin.
“What things?”
“God—everything.”
“Not the dioramas, though?”
“Everything but. Cigarette cartons. Pill bottles. Calendars from like the nineties. Cassettes. Eight-tracks. Broken appliances. One of those bags”—he gestured with a foot toward the dumpster—“was filled entirely with broken clocks.”
She put a hand on his arm, just below the sleeve of his T-shirt. He’d worked up a sweat and her hand was cool. “Is it . . . It must be hard for you?”
Gordie shrugged. He’d been all right until she asked. Now his nose prickled; he wiped it vigorously with the back of his hand. “Hey, Ebie,” he called, snapping his fingers. The dog looked up, but, rightly ascertaining there was no real point to the summons, went back to licking the spot of concrete where she’d found the improperly disposed chicken. He cleared his throat. “It’s long overdue, I suppose.”
“Why,” Jess began, and then seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. “Why’d he have so many clocks?”
“He collected ’em. For his projects. He’d take them apart and use the little screws, the cogs, whatever. Hey, what brings you, anyway?” The full strangeness of her just showing up dawned on him.They’d spent a lot of time together these past weeks, but mostly down in the village center, and never without making a plan first.They’d take Ebie for long walks by the river, then wind up at Turiello’s for a slice.They’d hang out on the Ryries’ porch, where one day Jess persuaded Gordie to let her cut his hair; then they’d watched as the wind came along and blew away the thatches of reddish-brown fluff, which Jess said would end up in a bird’s nest. They’d poke around the bookstore, the health food store, the thrift shop, pick out little presents for the Ryries or each other. Jess bought Gordie old salt and pepper shakers shaped like a cat and a dog. Gordie bought Jess a baby spoon, with worn initials engraved in the handle, the bowl of the spoon black with tarnish. They were two young people with nothing to do. They were a fresh-minted orphan and an expectant mother. They’d found in each other a ready companion, unlikely and serendipitous.
“You walked?” Gordie looked over her shoulder, as if for evidence of a previously unnoticed conveyance.
It was a bland afternoon in early May, mild but not fair; there was a kind of dull haze that made the day seem skyless. A couple of kids were riding bikes at the far end of the parking lot, and an old white woman towed a folding cart full of grocery bags toward the entrance of one of the squat buildings. She progressed with such slowness as to strain credulity, as if the whole scene were an illusion, a film being played at the wrong speed. The sound of cars on the thruway behind them was the aural equivalent of the view: unnuanced, unchanging. Gordie felt, as he often did, conscious of the dismal quality of his surroundings.
“News,” said Jess, mysteriously. “And yeah, I walked.”
“News?” What news merited her walking this far, every bit of it uphill?
“About your dad, actually. About his . . . projects.”
“Oh. Really?” Gordie asked her inside. He wanted, he said, to wash the chicken grease and dog saliva off his hands. But he found himself wanting to stave off whatever she had to say. Because he feared dismissal? But she would not have walked all this way to make the announcement, certainly not with that expression on her face, if the news was dismissive of his dad’s work. Well, then, did he fear approbation? That seemed, as his dad might have commented, daft. He snapped his fingers for Ebie, and this time she charged after them willingly, pushed ahead and bounded up the stairs with a kind of fleet cheer, as if to curry favor after her recent transgression.
Climbing the stairs rather more slowly behind the dog, and pausing on each landing in order to turn and gesticulate, and catch her breath in the process, Jess filled Gordie in on the details. John’s colleague’s friend—or friend’s colleague, something like that—knew someone who worked at a gallery, or curated exhibits—Gordie couldn’t make out whether this was two different people or one who did both—who had looked at the two and asked to see more. Jess seemed to put a lot of stock in that phrase, “asked to see more,” although to Gordie it sounded vague as could be. It might, he thought, signify anything from interest in acquiring them to polite brush-off. “John said if you want to go ahead with it, choose ten or fifteen and he’d get them to the guy, and I thought maybe I could help you de—”
She stopped talking the moment he opened the door to the condo. It was very different from the first time she’d seen it.The surface of the kitchen table was bare and had been sponged clean. The sink was empty, the drying rack full. The window over the sink gleamed. A single yellow dish towel, folded in thirds, hung over the handle of the oven door. On the floor beside the door, more plastic garbage bags were lined up. The boots, shoes, gloves, umbrellas, shopping bags, and the big glass carboy that had previously sat by Ebie’s water dish, weighted with coins, were nowhere to be seen.
“Holy shit, Batman,” Jess said softly. “Did you do all this today?”
“Today and yesterday, mostly.” Gordie washed his hands and filled two glasses with water, which they carried into the living room. Here, too, he’d done a lot of work. Gone was the clutter, the newspapers and books and boxes and extension cords and dirty plates and empty chip bags. The couch was free of all objects except two throw pillows. The carpet, which had previously been a sea of socks, pizza cartons, dead batteries, circulars, loose bills, take-out menus, ballpoint pens, junk mail, clothes hangers, and shot glasses, was not only debris-free but vacuumed. In one corner stood a pile of boxes labeled “GOODWILL.” The only thing apparently untouched was Will Joiner’s art, row upon row of the dioramas crammed cheek by jowl onto the standardand-bracket bookshelves that lined two walls of the room.
“Gordie—are you moving?”
He sat heavily on the couch, or as heavily as his light frame would allow. His muscles ached. Sweat stained the armpits of his gray T-shirt. He drained his entire glass of water. “That’s the thing,” he said then. “I have to.”
“Oh, Gordie. The money?” Jess sat beside him, facing him, crossing her legs, nesting her glass of water in two hands.
He shrugged elaborately and made a face intended to convey a sort of Zen urbanity: it’s all trivial in the long run—though he had an uncomfortable feeling he might have missed his mark, conveying something more along the lines of inanity. “It’s not so bad,” he said. “There’s money for a while, and Fordham’s offering me practically a free ride for next year, based on my ‘extraordinary circumstances’—that’s what financial aid calls it. Isn’t that weird? ‘Extraordinary circumstances,’ like people don’t die every day of the week. And there’s my uncle in Canada, who’s actually great, he’s offered like a hundred times to help out. The main thing is,
I
can’t stay. I mean I don’t want to.”
Ebie ambled into the room, accompanied by the leisurely clink of her tags. She came around the couch and inserted herself between the coffee table and Gordie’s legs, laying her chin on his knee. Bits of kibble and beads of water now clung to her greased muzzle. Gordie overlooked this and stroked her wonderful broad crown—incredible what the roundness of Ebie’s skull against the hollow of his palm did for his spirits—and she rolled her liquid black eyes up to meet his: an inherently, almost quintessentially empathetic expression, the Newf rendition of the proverbial sad clown.
Jess said nothing, and into this gap, Gordie wandered on. “It’s not that the memories are too painful.” He made his voice slightly ridiculous for the last four words. “It’s not—I
like
having the memories. I like that I think of him when I’m standing at the sink, making coffee, whatever. I
like
sitting in his chair out on the balcony, thinking of how he’d always be sitting out there, smoking his stupid cigarettes. Acting like he was looking out at the friggin’, I don’t know, French Riviera.” Gordie gave the littlest laugh, not at all bitter. He looked up and around the room, seeing and not seeing the many dozens of boxes lining the shelves, seeing and not seeing the many dozens of tiny worlds, the complete and elusive installations his father had left behind. “But it’s like, I’m nine
teen
. I can’t—I shouldn’t be here. You know? Living behind the”—he gestured a little wildly toward the kitchen—“
thru
way entrance, surrounded by all these young families and old people and stuff. It would be like . . . I mean, you know those stories where people go and fling themselves on top of the grave of the person who’s died and they never get up? They just lie in one spot and, I don’t know, freeze to death?”
Jess shook her head apologetically.
“Whatever. That kind of thing?”
“Like . . . people who don’t get on with their lives?”
“Aaghh. That sounds lame. Forget it. I just know I can’t stay here.” He set his empty glass on the coffee table. He felt her looking at him. He felt her still looking at him. “What?” He glanced sideways.
She was smiling mysteriously, abstractedly, seeming to study at the same time his face and her own private thoughts. Her eyes, he was reminded—remembered thinking—were like Junior Mints. Like Hugh’s. Darkly soft. Did she know it? Did she actively
train
that limpid gaze on him, make it all melting on purpose? His own witlessness in the face of such a gaze maddened him. Was he meant to respond in some way? To counter, to match her, to up the ante, what?
“What,”
he demanded.
“No, I was just thinking—”
“That I sound completely lame.”
“That you sound completely old. I mean . . . you make
me
feel lame.”
The confession sounded honest, shyly so, yet the likelihood that he could cause her to feel lame seemed so farfetched he could not help eyeing her with suspicion. He liked her. It was true. True, too, that she reminded him of Hugh, and he had really liked Hugh,
like
-liked him. Hadn’t he? Why didn’t he know for certain? He’d pictured kissing Hugh. He was picturing it again right now; how could he help it? Did that mean he wanted to? Was imagining the same as desiring? His dad—for fuck’s sake—had made that wedding cake, the two grains of rice on top both men. What had that been, that crazy little message from beyond the grave? A blessing? A knowing wink? It was crap. What had his dad known, or guessed, about him, and why in hell hadn’t he ever talked about it with Gordie while he’d been still around? Gordie felt his palms grow slick with sweat.
“That’s what I was thinking,” she maintained. “And. That.”
“. . . yes?”
“You’re fantastic.”
“Oh, please.” He snorted. Ebie quirked up her ears.
“No, I—”
“Are you ever just genuine?” He was a little startled by his words; also, by the force with which he spoke them.
“What?”
“Right, though?” Gordie continued as though he had just made a point, which it seemed to him, inside his head, he had. “It’s like you’re always . . .
flirting
with me, in this half-assed, borderline way that doesn’t really mean anything. I mean I know that. It’s pointless. Obviously.”
His antagonism sprung from a source of which he had no prior knowledge. Without his intending or even anticipating it, the conversation had changed course, become different from any exchange they’d had in the preceding weeks. But it was true, he thought: she was always touching him, small, sororal gestures—a hand lighting on his back, a shoulder pressing against his—punctuated by more devilish, intimate flashes of contact: a finger-flick on the side of his head; or a push, with both hands, knocking him clear off the sidewalk and into a bush. What was that if not flirtation? And yet, what was flirtation if not ambiguous, as likely to be mocking as sincere?
The indirection was bedeviling. Likewise the threat of hope. And how could he fault her for her ambiguity when he himself was so torpidly ambivalent? Could he be attracted to Hugh and Jess both? Or was what he felt something less explicit than attraction, a merely reflexive response to the magnetism of another’s coquetry? How on earth did people recognize their own desires? What was wrong with him that he alone seemed incapable of doing so?
“Obviously,” he repeated, as though this word somehow contained the crux of his complaint, encapsulated his most concentrated grievance against her.
Jess uncrossed her legs and sat up straight, but although she opened her mouth, words apparently failed her. She gaped a little, fishlike. And even so was not unlovely: her pursed lips opening and closing; her eyes showing rims of white around the pupils; her cheeks dark with rising blood.
“I don’t need . . . false flattery, or flirtation.” Gordie spat out the fricatives, his own vehemence continuing to surprise him. “I don’t need anything false from you.”
Jess rose so violently water spilled from her glass. “Fine. Only I’m not false. I’m very sorry you think so. Fuck you,” she added, all in the same low, evenly spaced voice.
Gordie stood, too, mirroring her belligerent stance more out of a knee-jerk sense of etiquette than out of any instinct for preservation or to do battle. They stood face-to-face, both of them fairly radiant with anger. Ebie looked from one to the other, wagging her tail, ready to play. Gordie felt unable to recall exactly how they’d come to this point.