It seemed impossible not to remember something like that. The first time a girl put her lips on yours. What kind of chump forgot being a five-year-old mack? I would've coasted on that for years if I'd known. But I did know. I was there. What put it out of my mind? I looked at Melanie's profile, the coast of her nose and mouth and chin. She was one of us. A Sag Harbor Baby.
We were at the corner, the end of Richards Drive. The natural destination was town. Where we'd run into somebody and then it wouldn't be just me and her anymore. There was nowhere else to go.
Melanie said, “There it is.” I turned and saw the old place up the street and I knew it wasn't her at all.
I will take the world at its word and allow that there are those who have experienced great love in their lives. This must be so. So much fuss is made over it. It follows that there are others who have loved but came to realize over time that what they had was merely the shadow of a greater possibility. These settled, and made do, or broke things off to continue the search. There are those who have never loved, and they walk through their days grasping after true connection. And then there is me. Ladies and gentlemen and all of you at home just tuning in, the angel of my heart, my long lost love, was a house.
There she was, my Sweet Lollipop. Posing coyly behind the old hedges, just a wedge, a bit of thigh, visible behind the trees. When people were inside at night, the light from the windows splashed through the leaves and branches, diluting the darkness. It was always a comfort rounding the corner and seeing that after you'd been running around all day. Soon you'd be inside with everyone else.
The windows were black. Since the swap, where we got the beach house and my aunt kept the Hempstead House, she rarely came out. Occasionally she gave the keys to friends for the weekend, and it was disturbing to see an alien vehicle in our driveway. Ours, even though it wasn't anymore. My mother would call her sister to double-check that everything was okay. I hadn't seen anyone there all summer.
“Let's go see,” I said. She walked with me without hesitating. The house my grandparents built was a small Cape Cod, white with dark shingles on the roof and red wood bracing the second story. It was made of cinder block, stacks of it hauled out on the back of my grandfather's truck. Every weekend he brought out a load, rattling down the highway. This was before they put in the Long Island Expressway, you understand. It took a while. Every weekend, he and the local talent put up what they could before he had to get back to his business on Monday. Eventually he and my grandmother had their house. Their piece of Sag Harbor.
The hedges out front were scraggly and disreputable, but the lawn was grazed down to regulation height. The house looked like it did at the start of every season, ready for us to open it up. “Do you want to go inside?” I asked.
“Will we get in trouble?”
“No one's using it.”
She said, “Okay,” and the way she said it zapped my groin, pushing my dick up against my jeans. It was almost dark.
The driveway led to the back patio. Weeds and low flowers sneaked through the cracks in the decaying concrete between the paving stones, and it was still light enough to see some anthills in there, too, the telltale volcanoes of orange dirt. In former days Reggie and me knelt over them with a magnifying glass from the Wharf Shop, tilting the incinerating beam on any unfortunate critters popping out for a hive errand. It was where we had arranged the doomed radio men and bazooka guys from our plastic platoons into the path of Tonka bulldozers, and, farther back, filled bright plastic buckets with water from the hose. The toddler games we found meaning in. We spent drawn-out afternoons transferring water from container to container, spilling some each time until the cement was drenched and we were all out and we cried for a refill. Crawling around like ants ourselves, doing nonsense things like that. Behind the patio, the backyard sloped up, and the pump still stood there like a rusted scarecrow, its underground pipes leading nowhere. I don't know if they ever led anywhere.
The patio furniture was piled on the screened-in porch, a rickety contraption that kept the sun off us on hot days and the rain off us on cloudy ones, the water rolling off the roof into worn-away hollows as we swung on the old rocking couch, watching this and kicking our feet out. The roof of the porch was directly under the upstairs windows and Reggie and me used to sneak out onto the tarpaper in Alcatraz breakouts. Not that we had anywhere to go. Eventually we got big and bold enough to jump over the side, that long seven-foot drop. We wasted a lot of time doing that. Wishing, Maybe this time we'll break something.
I told Melanie to wait there and scuttled through the furniture. We left the window to the junk room unlocked when we lived there. Maybe my aunt did, too. What was there to steal? We were more likely to be accidentally locked out than robbed. I shoved the window open, clambering onto the lumpy guest bed, which was covered with our old board games and my aunt's spy thrillers. Stained shades from thrown-out lamps and busted Weedwackers, fishing poles and plastic boxes full of screws. I walked around to the back door and let her in.
The house looked small from the outside. That was its trick. Step inside and it went on for miles. We were in the kitchen, where the pale green General Electric appliances hummed, the matching dishwasher and fridge and range nestled among the pink Formica countertops. The electricity was turned on and they sparked to life; the electricity was turned off and they shuddered into comas for nine months. The door creaked as I closed it, as it always did. You never forget your first creak. It was the original creak, the creak standard that I would compare all other creaks to. Everything in that house was my model for things out in the world. This is what a doorknob looks like. This is what a drain looks like. The first chair I called a chair was there in the living room, next to my one and only and ever lamp. My feet dangled for years until the floor finally reached up to meet them. Window. Couch. Coffee table. My everlasting objects.
“Cobwebs,” Melanie said, scraping her face.
A seafaring sort, my grandfather had paneled the living room in broad, brown planks of knotty pine that made it look like the belly of a ship. A buoy from his old sailboat hung over the couch, the name arcing across it in weathered black paint: MY GLORY. The old horseshoe crab was still there, the dried shell hanging on the nail my father had hammered into the wall after I brought it back from the beach. The only thing I noticed that was different was the TV, but I couldn't believe that the old black-and-white still worked, so I forgave its replacement. It took five minutes to warm up, making all sorts of frantic sounds, like you'd startled the people inside from their dozing. A white dot finally materialized in the middle of the screen. A white dot in a sea of blackness. The first star in the universe on the first day. It grew and spread and the sound came on and eventually the comedian hit his punch line, the weatherman told the future, the monster stepped out of the fog. You had to wait for it to come around.
“Nick's working tonight you said.”
“I'm not his keeper,” she said.
“Do you want to go upstairs?” I asked. Our eyes were getting used to the dark and a car came up Hempstead, illuminating the room and us in a lighthouse sweep.
“Okay.”
This was my old house where all the good things still lived even though we had moved on. Everything as it was. Even the boy, the one who always seemed happy. He had to be here. This was where he lived. Haunting the place in his polyester pants and fucked-up Afro.
Was the same bottle of hydrogen peroxide sitting in the medicine cabinet? The grisly white foam. He was always running around and not looking where he was going. It all bubbled up. I saw it clearly. I thought it had been the kiss that the song retrieved, but it was this place. My lost love's face was the two windows facing the street, the front door for a nose, and the three brick steps for a mouth. Darling. I hummed the chorus and I didn't care if Melanie heard. Certain songs got you like that. You could make fun of them, ignore them, try to tune them out, but the verses still got inside. People you'd never meet offered the words you were
unable to shove past your lips, saying what you felt about someone once, or might become capable of feeling one day. If you were lucky. They spoke for you. Gathering the small, rough things you recognized in yourself.
The kids' rooms were on the second floor. I walked up ahead of her, my fingers lighting on the banister made smooth by all our hands, finding the nail heads raised by the settling wood. I anticipated each one before my fingers discovered it. I'd fallen down the stairs plenty when I was learning how to go down stairs. Slamming my stupid head across the steps and finishing in a bruised heap at the bottom. This was the place where I learned to pick myself up, because when I fell the house was always empty.
Elena's room was on the left, me and Reggie's was on the right. The shades at the back of our room were open, enough ambient light sneaking in for us to make out the two beds, the dresser, and the weird vanity table that had been moved up there before I was born, for lack of a better place. The mirror of the vanity was flanked by two mirrored wings on hinges—if you moved them into a triangle, leaving a slot for you to peek inside, the mirrors retreated into endlessness, tossing images of themselves back to themselves in a narcissistic loop. It looked like a tunnel burrowing through the back of the vanity, through the wall, and into an extradimensional beyond. It was amazing how long I could stare at that. The shouts of my friends playing with Reggie came up through the window, or my sister yukking it up with her girlfriends in the next room and I stood there staring.
“This was my bed,” I said. I sat down and spread my palm out. The bloom of rusted springs spotted the mattress. She sat down next to me. She said something and I responded, drawing up sentences from a reservoir. I hadn't been on my bed for years. The last time I slept in it—the night of that summer's Labor Day party—I hadn't known it was going to be the final time. A car crept up Hempstead, the headlights casting a window-shaped trapezoid across the ceiling. I knew the circuit—the light traversing the wall next to the vanity, creeping up the white ceiling tiles, then elongating and disappearing in the middle of the room. If the trapezoid blinked off there, the car contained strangers, revving up to 114. If it continued across the ceiling, it was my parents returning after a night out, turning into the driveway, driving the diamond into its home berth above my bed before my father shut off the engine. When that happened, I was safe from all the night sounds that had unsettled me since we were sent to bed. I couldn't sleep, even then. I followed each transit of light, hoping. When the light hovered and stopped, my parents were home and everything would be okay.
“It's quiet up here,” she said. Her knuckles rested against my thigh.
“It is, isn't it,” I said. She looked into my face. Her eyes glistened in the dark. Then she shut them, screwing them down like she was concentrating very hard, and she pursed her lips.
Why me? She was going out with Nick, but maybe she wasn't anymore. Certainly all the evidence pointed to the conclusion that she wanted me to kiss her. The tale of the childhood smooch, the phone call yesterday, her current pose—oh, let's stop there, I think we have what they call a preponderance, good people of the jury But why? I reviewed our recent encounters. Had I been cool or said something funny? Accidentally brought forth the winning parts of me? I couldn't think of anything outside of my usual shtick. Maybe my Bauhaus T-shirt was finally kicking in, advertising my sophisticated musical tastes. Did she like Bauhaus, too? It was unlikely. She seemed pretty New Edition. It occurred to me that Nick looked a lot like Bobby Brown. Was she trying to get back at Nick for something? I wasn't the person you made out with to make someone jealous. I was the person you made out with to make someone pity you, like, look how far I've fallen since you left me, what with the far-off stare and general air of degradation. I was missing something. My braces were off. But that seemed such a trivial thing. I was a dummy for skipping my appointments. I could have been doing stuff like this all the time, apparently. I thought of Emily Dorfman sliding her long fingers around mine and now Melanie Downey perched on my bed like a nymph in a painting by one of the Old Masters or like one of the buxom camp counselors in Friday the 13th, about to burst out of her cherry hot pants. The girls had to reach out to me. I was too involuted. They had to pull me out of myself. Pull me where? As if it were better outside, with the rest of the world. I needed people to be able to see past my creaky facade in order to prove their worth, but when they did see past it, I refused to accept it. If people looked inside, surely they'd quickly discover there wasn't much to see.
She said, “Uh?”
All this thinking! You understand the impediments I faced back then. Everything came to a halt before this relentless grinding-over. A normal person would have concentrated on the matter at hand, but I came from a degenerate line. I was at a party chatting up a high-probability but got foolishly distracted by the long-shot lovely across the room whose smile kept me on the hook. In this case, the bewitching lass wasn't even a lass at all, but a two-story part-time home with a leaky roof and periodic squirrel infestation. I was part of a dead-end tribe of human beings twiddling our thumbs for extinction. We picked the wrong line in supermarkets, sitting like bags of cement with our meager foodstuffs in our basket, counting and recounting to make sure we had less than ten items, and when we finally resolved to switch to the faster line, it was too late and now that was the slow line. In fact, the act of us joining that line made it the slow line. We peered into the doors of packed buses and decided to wait for the next one, like we had all the fucking time in the world, and looked up the street for twenty minutes for the next one, finally deciding to walk, and then the next bus zoomed past as we galumphed between stops. We sat like idiots as gorgeous girls with big, patient lips offered themselves to us while we reveried over bygone cobwebbed things. We never know when we have it good, and we forget so easily. We will die out. Not that this particular occasion was a chance to pass on my wretched genetic material and extend my kind's useless reign on this earth, but you understand where such behavior leads—eventually the accumulated missed opportunities, shortsighted decisions, and wrong turns will overtake us. We are too stupid to live. It's amazing we made it this far.
Just kiss her. I kissed her. Leaned over, every adjusting spring in the mattress zinging in loutish commentary. It was the house. I could be the real me because this was where I lived, free from what happened and who I came to be. No matter what people saw when they looked at me, there was this man inside.
Did I mention that my eyes were open? I watched her eyes rove under their shadowy lids. Her tongue was soft. Softer than my tongue, or were all tongues the same degree of softness and mine was soft, too? I lifted a hand and rested it on her tit. I squeezed it. Gingerly, like a sailor who'd been thrown overboard and woke to find sand under him. Is this real, the soft stuff between my fingers? She exhaled through her nose. This was a real feeling. The chorus went like this:
'Cause oh, Baby I know
I know I could be so in love with you
And I know that I could make you love me too
And if I could only hear you say you do, oo oo oo oo
But anyway, what would you say?
I know that I could make you love me too. I was wrong again. It wasn't the house I was in love with, either. It was what I put in it. I saw it clearly now, the day I first heard the song, as if I were peeking into the vanity to find the scene unfolding in infinite truth. It was in this very house, many years ago. The sun was bright and every color dazzled. Me and my brother were on our knees on the cement in the back of the house, ramming our toy eighteen-wheelers into each other. Everyone thought we were twins because we were never apart. CB radio was king, and we talked in misapprehended CB lingo. “Breaker One Night, Breaker One Night.” I had a red rig and my little brother had a blue one—when our mother took them out of the shopping bag, it was my turn to pick first, so I got the one I wanted. “We got a Smoking Bear on our tail.” My sister was lying on the faded green chaise, painting her toenails a brain-splitting red with small, delicat
e strokes. She and her friends had just discovered nail polish and eye shadow and stuck to a strict practice regimen. She said, “Come here, Reggie, let me do your nails,” and he said, “No, no!” My mother flipped the pages of a magazine at the patio table, wearing the white sweatbands that were always on her wrists that one summer she played tennis. “It's good for the heart.” She looked so young. She said, “Elena, leave your brothers alone,” and turned the page. My father upended the bag of Kingsford and shook a mound into the grill. He said, “The first batch will come off in approximately fifty-five minutes.” And I said, “Yay! Yay!” because there was nothing better than his barbecue. We were a family. This was the scene the song gifted to me. The radio played in the kitchen, the black transistor radio sitting on top of the green GE fridge. The man sang through static, “I know that I could make you love me too.” That perfect day so long ago when we were all together. The beautiful afternoon before it went wrong.
Of course it never happened. But that was WLNG for you. Got you every time.
I was sucking on her neck. My stomach growled. My eyes were still open. That's how I saw the headlights. The lights moved across the wall, tracing the distance like a needle sweeping across a record. But the lights didn't disappear where they were supposed to. They kept going, to my parents' place, and we heard the tires snapping the pebbles and stones in the driveway.