The Half-Life of Planets (15 page)

“Sometimes,” Hanks says slowly, “I like to hear a song and then deconstruct it. So I know everything about it. Then I put it together again and it's…” He looks at me. “Mine. Or something.”

We stay there, still as a photograph, as two lovers in London meet at the train station in song around us. And then, right as I hear my mother's keys in the side door, but before she finds the picture of Jenny, I move my hand onto Hank's. He breathes in deeply, as though he's trying also to inhale me, or us, or the whole day.

“Hank,” I say, and squeeze his hand before I sit up. “We can't kiss, okay?”

Double you tee eff.
This is a text-message abbreviation you're supposed to use when you're confused. Such as when you are lying down with your girlfriend, holding hands, the mother of all boners threatening to split your pants in half, and she leans over with her soft skin and her hair falling down and touching your skin and you want her to open her mouth so you can just crawl right inside and be the same person and then she tells you you can't kiss.

That is when you say double you tee eff.

I do not say double you tee eff. Instead I start trying to figure things out.

I look at Liana. I don't think she's cynical like Chase, but it seems clear that she feels somewhat betrayed by my lack of forthrightness on the dead-father issue, even after I explained about that. She says I don't owe her anything, but it would draw us closer. The distinction she's making is unclear to me, but being closer to her sounds pretty good. So I decide to be completely forthright.

“My parents met at a Rollins Band concert. My father was—well, he grew up before the diagnosis, but it seems clear to both Mother and myself that he was…like me. Nana and Grandpa did not know what to make of him. He was obsessed with music, and when he started hanging out at punk rock concerts, they were just happy that he wasn't in the basement with his extensive model train collection, making them uncomfortable anymore. All of this, by the way, comes from Mother, who does not get along with Nana. So perhaps we can take it all with a grain of salt.

“In any case, when my father died, I felt it was appropriate that I should…carry on the music obsession. But also. Here is the part I don't like talking about.”

“Hank,” Liana says. “You don't have to—”

But I kind of do, and in any case, now that I've started, I think it would be difficult for me to stop.

“We would sit side by side for hours, you know, him cataloging his music collection, me sharing interesting tidbits about, for example, the ever-shifting borders of certain African nations. This was…”

My voice is breaking, and Liana is propped up on an elbow looking at me, but I can't look at her.

“I know that this was his way of expressing love. I think he was as puzzled by Chase as Mother is by me. He would attend the games and cheer, but fundamentally not get it. So I know…I know he loved me. I know he loved me because he would sit with me and listen to me talk about maps, and because he would tell me the history of SST Records the way some parents tell the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

“But all the same, he never took me in his arms and hugged me and told me he loved me so much, the way Mother does.

“And this is why I listen to music. Because I miss him terribly. All the time. Time is supposed to heal these things, that's what I've read, but it hasn't seemed to work that way for me.”

And there are tears in my eyes, which is embarrassing. But then Liana's hand is wiping a tear from my cheek. This is a gesture I understand completely. It makes me smile.

She reaches down and gives my hand a squeeze, and we lie side by side not speaking. I hear Ray Davies say again that he doesn't feel afraid.

But I do, Ray. I feel afraid because when you love someone, when you feel that they understand you and want to spend time with you, then they go away. This is what happens.

I'm having a hard time stopping the tears. I suppose I let them out so very infrequently that there is quite a buildup. Also, I've never quite faced up to what feels like the inevitability of Liana's departure from my life. One way or another, it's going to happen. I squeeze her hand. Maybe if I can only hold it tight enough I'll never have to let go.

I hear the back door open, but I don't open my eyes. I don't want to display red eyes to Liana's mother and face a lot of questions. So I lie with my eyes closed. I'm almost certain this is rude.

“I've got some lemon shortbread if you guys are interested!” Liana's mother says.

Liana gives my hand a squeeze, gets up, and walks over to her mother. They have a quiet conversation, which ends with Liana's mother leaving quickly and stomping her feet louder than she did when she came in.

I hear Liana sit down next to me. She takes my hand again. “Hey,” she says. “You okay?”

“‘I am in paradise,'” I sing along with Ray Davies. Liana laughs.

“Yeah, that's usually how I feel when I have tears running down my cheeks,” she says, then says quietly, “but I know what you mean.”

We don't say anything for a while. I've already said more than I've said in years. It occurs to me that I may have just completely exhausted my supply of words. Maybe I'll never say anything again. I wonder idly if this would make my life easier or harder.

“I just…I want you to know,” Liana says, “that it's not because of you. It's because of me. The reason I can't kiss you. I just…they were…” She takes a breath and shakes her hair. “I've kissed a lot of guys, Hank. A
lot.
But none of them were…I never…This”—she points to me and then back to her herself—“is better than all that. And I just don't understand myself, you know? I don't know why I kiss boys and run away from them, and I'm afraid if I kiss you I'll run away from you too. And I don't want to do that.”

“That would suck,” I say. It appears I have some words left in me after all.

“I'm sorry, Hank. You're really…You deserve…I guess, I mean, I don't know what you think. I know it probably sounds nuts, but I have to prove to myself that the note isn't true; I have to figure out what the hell's wrong with me. I guess I…well, you're a guy, so you'll probably want to bail, and I guess I can't blame you.”

It takes me a moment to realize what she means. She assumes that I'm like Chase; that I will feel she's not upholding her end of the exchange, and I will therefore want to stop spending time with her. It occurs to me that she has no idea what I'm thinking or feeling, and I wonder how she could be so clueless. Perhaps this is how people feel when they talk to me. She thinks that if I spend time with her with no hope of kissing her (well, no immediate hope. Surely this period of self-discovery that precludes kissing can't last forever), I would naturally prefer to return to hanging out alone with no hope of kissing anyone ever.

“It's going to be a lot harder than that to get rid of me.” Finally I chance to look at Liana. She's looking at me. “I'm like John Oates. I'll always be there, even if nobody really understands what I do.”

“I don't know who that is,” she says. Her eyes are right on mine.

“Few people do. He is half of Hall and Oates. They are a kind of white pop soul duo. They were big in the '80s. Except that Daryl Hall writes and sings all the songs. And G. E. Smith handled most of the lead guitar duties. So what, exactly, is Oates doing there? Nobody knows, but Daryl Hall has put out solo albums without him, and nobody buys them.”

“So he's mysterious, yet indispensable.”

“It would appear so.”

I look at her, and for just a moment I understand something social. Liana is caught in a contradiction. She wants to kiss me for agreeing not to kiss her. Which of course would thwart her plans to abstain from kissing.

There are a number of blogs written by people with Asperger's and other autism spectrum disorders. They refer to the autism
community
, which strikes me as a humorously oxymoronic phrase, and they write often about our “wonderful difference.” My reaction upon reading this in the past has always been that anyone who thinks this, or for that matter any, difference is wonderful has obviously never attended an American middle school.

And yet here, watching Liana sort through the puzzle of multiple meanings and intentions that seems to constitute her social life, I feel grateful for my utter ignorance of such things. I may not understand much about the way other people work, but I don't have to second-guess myself. I want to be with Liana even if our relationship is different. Because it's wonderful.

Eventually I wind up back at my own house, having exchanged hand squeezes rather than kisses with Liana. It occurs to me that if hand squeezing were the defining gesture of intimacy rather than kissing, I would not feel that there was anything missing from our relationship. Except if that were true, Liana would have tearfully admitted to having squeezed a lot of hands and would have kissed me good night, leaving me longing for a hand squeeze.

I am not particularly jealous of the fact that Liana has kissed a
lot
of guys. After all, she likes me better. And, really, if she had kissed me and fled, I would have been ecstatic for a couple of days, and then summer would have returned to its normal routine of loneliness and obsessing about music.

I lie in my bed and cannot sleep. Masturbation is normally a pretty good sleep aid, but tonight it only serves to make me more hyper. (Since discovering that I possess the skill necessary to disguise my fantasies from the outside world, I've been rather unstoppable in this area.)

Finally, I get up and wander down to the basement. I plug headphones into the amp, plug in my Gibson, and begin to play. I try “Pipeline,” but it doesn't sound right on this guitar, and anyway it doesn't really capture the way I'm feeling. I try “Waterloo Sunset,” which gets closer but is still not on the mark.

I search my mental catalogs. Surely someone has written a song that perfectly captures all of the contradictory emotions I'm feeling—the longing for Liana's touch that feels like a physical pain, the happiness about having her in my life tinged with sadness at the knowledge that nothing is permanent. I can't remember ever feeling so many emotions so strongly in my life. Certainly I have felt grief and loss so strong I thought they would destroy me, but I've never felt this bittersweet wonderful sad happiness before.

I pluck the harmonics like I'm going to play Yes's “Round-about,” but this is just absent-minded strumming. There is not an intoxicant powerful enough to make me feel that a song about becoming a traffic circle relates to me.

There is no song that relates to how I feel. I'm losing myself: she's the sun, and I'm just a planet orbiting her. Or, more accurately, I'm a moon orbiting a Planet.

I tiptoe upstairs and grab a notebook and pen from my book bag, and tiptoe back into the basement, where I play guitar until I can hear the song. The song about Liana and me. With some effort I pull it from the air through the guitar and manage to transcribe it.

It was always complete, but after an hour, Liana's song is also complete on the page and on the tape deck I've hooked up to the amp. I have to be at work in four hours. I am exhausted. I've never felt better in my life.

I wake up three and a half hours later, and the first thing I do is look over the lyrics to the song I wrote last night. They are mawkish, clumsy, and embarrassing. It's possible that what seems like genius at four a.m. may turn out to be excrement in the cold light of day, which is, of course, when I'll be playing at Beachfest. I rip up the lyrics and throw the scraps away. I'll try again tonight.

Nothing says fun like getting pelted
in the face with a wet sponge. “Hey, asshole, chuck it over here,” Chase says to some guy who is pretending to fix his flip-flop but is really crouching down for protection from the water-dodgeball masses. I look around for Hank but he still hasn't shown up. Chase said, “Hank? He's working. Or sleeping. Or something, but he told me he'd show up,” and then convinced me to follow the summer lemmings and take part in this demented version of gym class.

I fling an oversized wet blue sponge at some girl who just whipped it at my back, and allow myself to get caught up in the mayhem of summer. I defend myself, running, twisting, trying to avoid being the body target for the continual barrage of soaking sponges. There's a mix of people at Chase's friend's house—the kind of odd blender of schools and ages that you can only find in the summer. Chase's crew from college, a herd from my high school, unfamiliar people from Hank's, some kids whose parents have summer homes here. On the lawn, with all of us dripping, our T-shirts clinging and our hair plastered to our heads in the blaring sunshine, we're all just one cluster, though.

“Hey, Liana, catch this!” I look up just in time to catch a sponge—heavy with water—with my face. Reeling slightly, I regain my sight after I wipe the liquid off, only to find Hank as the culprit.

“Ow, Hank, that hurt,” I say to him. He's in long sleeves and jeans despite the fact that its eighty degrees and there are more tank tops and bathing suits on display than in a catalogue.

Hank shrugs, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Everyone's throwing them.” He picks up the offending sponge from the grass.

Instinctively, I flinch lest he throw it again. “Yeah, but you chucked it at close range.” We stand there for a few seconds not saying anything while the shrieks of glee echo around us.

“Quite an arm there, buddy.” Pren Stevens, shirtless and grinning, jogs by on his way to douse someone with a bucket of water. “You should go out for varsity!”

“Varsity what?” Hank asks him, not realizing it was a rhetorical comment. I swallow, feeling the blood begin to pump faster through my heart, all four chambers working overtime so I don't freak out when I notice that not only is Pren here, but Jett Alterman too. And over by the keg, which someone has elaborately draped with a beach towel as though that will disguise its function and illicit nature, Mitch Palmer is filling his cup. With a couple of deep breaths I will myself not to panic. They are just boys. Boys whose lips have been on mine, some in the dark, others under the bleachers in broad daylight, or outside the candy shop where I stood with Hank. Hank. I look at him.

He's staring at something off a ways. “Do you have a bathing suit?” I ask him. My nose hurts from the sponge-whack, but I try to ignore it.

“No.” Hank crosses his arms. “I'm not a swimmer.”

“I didn't mean to swim,” I say, and wave back when Summer Sanderson, every inch her name, waves to me before her bikinified body is drenched with ice water. I only know Summer from a chem lab last year, but at parties like this, it feels as though everyone could be your long-lost buddy, that each person is part of this larger mass of cells, or solar systems, connected, if only by the space between them. I sigh and then punch Hank on the arm. “Come on, Hank, just loosen up and get wet.” I grab a sponge from near my bare feet and toss it around, trying to tempt him with play.

“Chase is loaded,” Hank says, pointing to his brother, who has a Frisbee balanced on his head, but still plays dodgeball.

I shrug. “Maybe he's just inebriated with fun.” I squint and then laugh as Chase takes a running leap on the wet slicked grass and slides toward a group of girls.

“I'm a human bowling ball!” Chase shouts as he knocks the girls over.

A bright pink sponge thwacks me in the stomach. I catch it and immediately throw it in the direction whence it came. “Don't even think about nailing me in the chest,” I say as James Frenti, all surfer shorts and glowing from his day job at the community pool, eases by us.

“You never know when you're gonna get splashed here!” he says, eyeing Hank.

I wonder how he sees him. Us. A couple? A girl he kissed and some guy dressed wrong who won't play the game? Despite everyone being connected here, I see the guys I've fooled around with as sort of bright spots on a map. The places I could mark with a thumbtack. This hits me as hard as the sponge: that kissing someone, marking them like I just envisioned, is just another way of saying you've been somewhere. That you are somewhere. That you exist.

“Who's that?” Hank asks as James sponges his next victim, Nicola Breuner. In a bright yellow tank top with crisscrossing straps, Nicola giggles. No doubt she'll secure the coveted Most Personable spot in the yearbook, always smiling and cheerful, even to me, and she hardly knows me.

I pull my T-shirt away from my body, trying to unslick it from my skin. Hank watches with great interest, and I grin at him. “That's just a guy. James.” Hank doesn't say anything else, so I keep going, being honest with him as always, as though we're back on the porch and no one else is around. I lower my voice. “One of the guys I told you about. The kissing?” I sigh. “He totally suffers from lead-singer syndrome. Plays in that band Alligator Smile.” James lets Nicola go and careens toward a cheerleader from my school. “Not worth the price of admission.”

Hank surveys the crowd, his fingers chording faster. “Isn't that the guy—the one we saw on the beach that night?”

“Stop pointing!” I knock Hank's hand down from its prominent and obvious position. “Yeah, Jett Alterman.”

“Let me guess—another, um, lead singer?”

Water drips from my ponytail onto my back; from my bangs down my cheeks. The sun is hard on my face. “Yeah. As I said, there are people here…” Chase waves to us from a ways down the hill. I give a halfhearted wave back.

“Yeah, it's really crowded.” Hank checks over his shoulder like he's scouting for muggers.

My voice fills with annoyance. Not so much at him, but at him with me. We stick out now, where I was just a few minutes ago blending in with the atmosphere. “It's just a party, okay?”

Hank keeps chording, immune to the tumble of people behind him, all piling atop one another, a wet version of Twister on the grass. “The music sucks.”

I try to hear it, but it's just a bass rumble overtaken by chatter, and screeches, and some girl yelling, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” as she's willingly carried on some guy's back. “I don't think people are here for the music,” I say.

“Hey!” Chase runs over. “Come to the kitchen—rumor has it someone's grilling steak!” He smiles, wiping his face on the shirt in his hands. “Glad you came, bro.” He studies Hank then turns to me. “He's trying to get out more, you know? Like, try new things?”

I nod, feeling a mixture of frustration that Chase is talking to me as though Hank's not here, and disappointment when I realize he's kind of right: Hank's blank stare makes it feel as if there were miles between us. “Hank—let's get something to eat, okay? I've been in the sun too long anyway.”

We head inside, where the shock of cold air is nothing compared to walking smack into Mitch Palmer and Margo Rattner making out by the fridge. When you've kissed someone, had them shirtless against your own shirtlessness, and then you see them pressed into someone else—it's beyond weird. It's not just like being replaced, but like you were never there. So I mentally take out the thumbtack I created before.

My Littered Kisses tour is virtually assembled at this party, and my brain is on overdrive. “I gotta go to the bathroom. I'll be right back,” I tell Hank and Chase. I head to the small powder room at the back of the house, take a few breaths, and ignore my disheveled state. When I emerge, I am a bit more relaxed. Until I find Hank deep in conversational throes with Pren Stevens.

“But Helium has street cred,” Pren says as he crunches on baby carrots and dip.

“Who's talking about street cred?” Hank answers. “Jude Mission can't drum for shit, and Martin Lewis didn't even write the lyrics.”

“But they rock.” Pren shrugs. “And if download sales are anything to go by, other people see my point.”

I let them duke it out, feeling my cheeks blaze. Pren doesn't know about me and Hank. Does anyone? Does it matter? I fiddle with some ice, scooping it into a cup and reaching for the soda.

Hank sees me next to him and stops me in mid-pour. “You don't like Coke,” he says. Pren raises his eyebrows, suddenly cluing in. The soda dribbles onto the granite countertop and drips onto my feet.

Chase hands me a towel. “Anyone want a burger?”

“Sure,” I say as I mop up the sticky soda and put the cup back on the counter. By the sink, someone's saying something about Beachfest, and Pren is disagreeing in that way only guys do, all “No no no, dude, you gotta play hard and then follow with a…”

“Are you ready for Beachfest?” I ask Hank.

“Dude, you're playing?” Some guy I don't recognize raises a glass to Hank.

“Who is that?” I ask.

Chase answers for Hank. “Judd Parrish—lacrosse player.”

Hank shrugs, saying to no one and everyone, “Yeah—I mean, I think I am. No, I am. Playing at Beachfest.” He turns to me. “I gotta find the stereo system and switch this crap.” I watch him saunter off.

Nicola smiles at me and reaches for the Coke bottle. “Hey, Liana.” She takes a sip. “Nice to see you out and about.”

I nod. “I'm glad to be out of the lab.”

Her skin is a deep bronze, her hair somehow not matted, still perky. “That's right. I heard you were doing some research thing?”

“Extra credit,” I explain as a few of Nicola's friends come into the room. They stand in a girl huddle, all pressed together, conferring over something. “Colleges, all that.”

Nicola nudges her friend Claire, who nudges back. They laugh. “Fine,” Nicola says, acquiescing, “I'll ask.” She swivels to face me again. “So…what's the deal with the snowman over there?” She points to Hank.

“The snowman?”

Nicola's friends laugh. “I mean, it's like a zillion degrees. Isn't he…hot?”

I could say he's got a skin condition or something else to shut them up, but I don't. Instead I just shrug. “He's out of tank tops.” Nicola laughs good-naturedly. Hank returns to where we are and proceeds to sift through the snack bags, no doubt looking for pretzel sticks, which are about the only salty item he likes. Chase wolfs his second burger, taking a turn at the grill.

Nicola grabs a handful of chips and notices Hank's rummaging, but decides to ignore it.

Pren leans on the counter, talking to all of us, but looking at me like he's picturing the way my mouth tasted, making me wobble. Nicola flinches like someone stepped on her little toe, and I'm hit with the knowledge that she was the one I'd seen him with outside Espresso Love. That maybe they're a couple. That maybe I'm intruding. Or did before. I lean back, looking for Hank, but he's rearranging the burger Chase gave him, removing the bun and adding mustard.

Nicola steps in. “So, Liana. What else have you been up to this summer?” she asks, her voice ever placid but her lips stretched taut on her teeth. “You know, aside from extra credit.” She says extra credit as though it means blow job.

“Basically, I'm all about the extra credit,” I say, wondering what I'm implying. “Planetary science, lunar cycles, stars.”

“You always were a brain,” Pren butts in, hoisting himself onto the counter so he's between me and Nicola.

Why can't it be normal to talk to him? Just because you've kissed someone doesn't mean the air between you is permanently altered or anything. I let my eyes rest on his lips, remembering how it felt when he wrapped his arms around my back, how he whispered onto my neck. I focus again on his eyes, remembering, too, how when the kiss ended with him, I felt kind of empty, like you do after eating only candy. You know you've had food, but it hasn't registered.

Nicola tugs on Claire's tank top. “But not only work, right? Looks like you've had some play.” She raises her eyebrows toward Hank. So much for Most Personable.

Hank's back by the stereo, locked in verbal combat with whoever is controlling it. I wave to him, trying to stay calm, but also needing him near. Everything with Hank is so not what I had or didn't have with Pren. Or Jett. Or anyone. But no one can see that here.

“That kid knows nothing about music,” Hank complains, coming over. “He won't let me play ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime.'” I give my best wide-eyed drop-it signal to Hank, but he goes on. “I gotta hear ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime.'”

I lower my voice, reaching for his hand, but he's too fidgety to find mine. “Hank, no one cares about Sly and the Family Stone right now.”