Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking Page 13

  He dipped a few french fries into a puddle of ketchup at the edge of his plate. “So I’m curious,” he said. “From a totally neutral point of view, what did you think of Geoffrey?”

  “Your sister’s boyfriend? He seemed—nice.”

  He laughed, picking up his hamburger again. “No, really.”

  “I didn’t get to talk to him for very long,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said, taking the last bite of his hamburger. “I’ve never felt that comfortable with him. I don’t think he’s ever going to finish that book he’s writing.”

  “Why are they getting married?” I asked.

  “Because they’re in love, I hope.” He smiled at me curiously. “Why else would they get married?”

  I shrugged. I thought of Anne Marie Gleason, who’d married Bill Holmes after graduation because she was pregnant; in Greek myth people married for kingdoms and won brides by throwing spears. “People marry for lots of reasons,” I said, sounding more sophisticated than I meant to.

  “Yeah, well, unfortunately I don’t think Liz has any reason to marry Geoffrey besides that one.” He sounded a little offended. “I mean he’s not poor, but I don’t think he’s going to make much money being a writer. And anyway, Liz isn’t really like that.” He took a long sip of his milk shake. “Did your parents split up?”

  “My mom died when I was three. I don’t really remember her.” It always came out like that, automatic, a series of facts that never changed.

  “Wow,” he said, “I didn’t know that. Did your father ever think about remarrying?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He nodded, as if that confirmed something.

  “It’s not that I worry about her being in love right now,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m just sort of worried that she might not stay in love, if he keeps going along like he is. And I feel bad for not telling her. We’re pretty close. But she’s so caught up in this wedding stuff, she can’t really talk about anything else.”

  “You seem pretty caught up in it too,” I said lightly.

  He laughed. “Yeah, that’s true I guess. Do you want to try a sip of my milk shake?” He handed it over to me. “Sorry I’m being such a motormouth,” he said, watching me as I sipped it. “It’s nice to get to talk to you. I’m always afraid to interrupt you in the library. And Robert always wants to talk my ear off.”

  “He’s not as fond of me,” I said.

  “You’re not really his type,” Nate said, grinning.

  I laughed, though that wasn’t really what I meant. I didn’t need to take things so seriously, I thought, watching him finish off the milk shake. It was still true that he was the kind of boy Julie would have liked; he was honest, and he was kind, and he was more handsome than any boy I’d ever seen in Yvesport.

  By the time we left the pancakes had settled my stomach and I felt almost normal. Nate walked me all the way to the institute without asking if I wanted him to. The sky above the buildings had lightened by the time we got to the institute, and I turned around and kissed him.

  He tasted like ketchup—sweet—and faintly of onions, a meaty taste. I felt like we might tip over, standing there, and after a while I asked him if he wanted to come upstairs. He cast a shy glance at the institute behind me, but a minute later he was opening the door with his key, as if he were inviting me in, and we were both climbing the stairs in giddy silence.

  My drawings were still in a pile on the desk, next to the bouquet of already fading flowers on the table. He sat on the bed with a smile and reached out to take my hand. His hand felt warm. I was standing in front of him and it seemed the air all around him was warm. I put my other hand on his shoulder, to steady myself.

  “You’re really beautiful,” he said gently, touching my face.

  When I leaned down again I felt like an expert. His hands moved under my T-shirt and I kept kissing him, happy with his mouth, interested in the rhythm, until we fell back on the bed, tangled, and I stood back up to take off my dress. He watched me, unbuttoning his belt; I heard the change in his pockets as his pants slid off, landing softly on the floor.

  18

  The next morning the light was blazing through the window so hard it made the sheets glow. I lay in the heat until I could get up the courage to unwrap myself and move cautiously out of the narrow bed. Nate murmured something, his face pressed heavily into the pillow, and then rolled over. I put on the dress I’d worn the night before, watching Nate’s sleeping back, careful not to wake him, and went across the hall for a glass of water.

  “Where are you going?” he mumbled into his pillow as I creaked open the door.

  “Shhhh. I’m just getting a glass of water.”

  When I came back he rolled over and looked at me. I sat down on the bed and gave him the glass of water like a nurse.

  “Why are you all dressed?” he said as soon as he could put the water down, pulling me back on top of him.

  I giggled and we wrestled and soon we were serious again, kissing and moving together. What I hadn’t known about sex was that it was like playing—soon we were two porpoises, moving over each other, then we were two snakes. When we woke up again the sun had moved out of the window and we were starving. We pulled on our clothes and snuck downstairs and went outside; we ate lunch, and when we were done Nate gave me a kiss on the forehead and went home to his apartment to work on his paper for school.

  I walked south through the Village and across Houston Street. The towers of the World Trade Center glittered distantly in the afternoon sun, like two women still in their evening dresses from the night before. I kept walking, till I was wading through the knotted crowds along Canal Street and Chinatown, past shops jammed with telephones and headphones and cameras and CD players, batteries and watches and toys and tiny jade dragons, lacework lanterns and wind chimes and bird cages hanging from every awning. Some streets overflowed with strange fruits and vegetables, leafy greens and sharp-smelling roots pulled out of the other side of the earth; others were wet with melting ice from the piles of fish laid out cleaned and ready to cook. Before I knew it the crowds gave way and Manhattan reared up again, gloomy and municipal.

  I kept walking, the dusty afternoon wind stirring my dress. The empty avenue widened and then narrowed until the buildings rose high above me. I came through to a paved park where the sky was lit unmistakably with the ocean. The sun shone in a dull way over the melancholy benches and trees. Two girls skated past in Lycra shorts, stopping up ahead to adjust their Velcro wristbands and plastic skate straps, preening like birds. A crowd gathered by the water to wait for a boat, and I walked up to find that the ground was paved all the way to where the land dropped off, with no shore, as if the whole island was made of cement.

  The bay spread out in front of me, sparkling for miles, bridges and tankers gray in the distance. I leaned on the railing to watch a small ferry go by, water frothing merrily around it, a group of tourists sitting on the deck. Ahead of the ferry, heavy and milky green in the sunlight, was the Statue of Liberty, the water like a carpet at her feet. The sight and smell of the sea almost hurt, it was so close and familiar, like the delicious smell of sheets when you are too tired to sleep; it was already September and I could picture the bay in front of our house, the islands just beginning to color, rafts of eiders by the shore, eagles and ospreys on the hunt, readying to leave for warmer coasts.

  I smiled again at the thought of my father remarrying, though I couldn’t say why it amused me so much. It was impossible to imagine him applying himself to courtship, straightening his hunched shoulders and putting on a new shirt. Nate seemed to take his not remarrying as a sign that he had loved my mother, but in fact I had never actually thought about him being in love at all. But then he had been here, in this city, and that was hard enough to imagine too: Arthur’s parties, the club, his glittering library. As I turned around to look at the buildings, rising away from me as if they spanned as far as the sea, it occurred to me that beyond a doubt my fat
her had loved this island more than our own.

  He had never said—the way Mr. Blackwell always did—that the summer was worth waiting for, or that he’d never seen the bay so beautiful. In all the time he’d lived there, he’d never managed to predict the weather, catch a shift from northeast to northwest, or tell when the fish were in and the bay was frothing with krill. When Mr. Blackwell looked out at the bay he saw boats he knew and a map of lobster pots; he saw new heron nests and the stir of cod. But when my father looked out at the sea he looked into the past.

  He had been in New York, after all, for nearly as many years as I had been on the island. He’d come here from Boston, where he’d had his only stint teaching in a university. Now I remembered how he’d said he had given up his job to live here; he’d come to the city without a plan. And somewhere out of it he’d met Arthur, by chance, and things had fallen into place. He had stayed, and then met my mother.

  I went home along the West Side, past a series of big glassy buildings and a small park, up alongside crumbling old docks and next to a highway. I crossed the street when the buildings got smaller and less factory-like, and before I knew it I was in the Village again, in a neighborhood like the one the institute was in, tiny curved streets and quaint apartment houses. I had always imagined—since all I knew about Arthur was that my father had helped him found the institute—that the picture my father had on his desk had been taken the day the library officially opened. But in fact it could have been taken any day—on their way out to the club, or on their way out for a walk, Arthur holding his cane off the ground, dressed in a dapper suit and ready to explore the bars, the restaurants, the cafés with their little patios, the antique shops and used bookstores.

  And as amazing as it seems to me now, though I crossed Christopher Street on that day and did not fail to notice how many storefronts sold condoms and fetish clothing, T-shirts and rainbow flags, it was the antique shops, filled with their friendly miscellaneous clutter, that once more delivered me the word fag-got. This was because I knew one man, in Lubec, whom everybody called a faggot; he owned an antique store and he wore a handkerchief around his neck like a cravat. There were a lot of men here, walking in pairs, and these men, it finally dawned on me, were also faggots—or queens, as Liz called them. The neighborhood was full of them. I simply recognized it the way a few blocks later, I recognized the street I was on, and kept walking. Not once did I think: Arthur was a faggot! Not once did I think that my father might actually have been in love sometime, anytime in his life, with anyone but me.

  the age of iron

  19

  I slept at Nate’s apartment for the next few weeks, and the arrangement suited everyone. I came back to type in the library in the afternoon, and sometimes went up to my room to draw if Nate had something else to do. When I peered into the kitchen after the first few days I’d been gone, the toaster was back on the stove and a pile of newspapers, albeit a neat one, was already growing in the corner. The audacity with which I had established myself in Robert and Walter’s life startled me; in a matter of weeks all my righteous domesticity seemed to have dissolved along with my nervous solitude.

  Nate and I went out to dinner, we watched television, we listened to music. He bought me two miniskirts to show off my legs and we went to movies and bars and parks all over the city. He was still teaching at the institute, which meant he had to write lesson plans, and he was also in school, which meant he had to study. When my father sat down to work it swallowed him whole: his lamp, his chair, the books he liked to keep in stacks on the floor, the piles of manuscript around him—they all became a part of him. But when Nate sat down to work he looked as if he were planning a meal. He would scoot in his chair, arrange his pencils, turn on his computer, get up for a glass of water, sit back down and look at everything all over again. All I had to do was meet his eye and he would walk over to kiss me.

  In the first week I was there he showed me the article in his college alumni magazine about his rowing trip, titled “Following a Hero.” It began with a photo of the ship, a reconstruction of an ancient trireme, the type Jason of the Argonauts was said to have sailed.

  “I was right there,” Nate said, pointing at a photograph of the ship, dwarfed by the background panorama of the Mediterranean coast. “That’s my oar.”

  In another photo all the rowers stood on a dock beside the ship. They were muscled and sweaty, a few of them raising their arms to the camera in a victory salute, some with gloves on, some with their hands taped. Nate stood in the back, jostling two other boys who were trying to get up on a pylon that would raise them above the group.

  “That’s me,” he said, as if I might not recognize him.

  “So you actually had to row?”

  “Some of the time we were sailing,” he admitted, turning the page to show the ship under sail. The glossy Mediterranean underneath made it look like a toy. Another section of the article showed the vase paintings, coins, and sculptures on which they had based the design of the ship. The distinctions between myth and legend and history seemed a silly thing to take offense at after all, I thought—why did one have any more claim to truth than another? I leafed through the rest of the magazine, drawn in by Nate’s obvious pride. One alumnus was a scientist, who was responsible for the successful regulation of a new pesticide; another owned a cattle ranch, and stood against a fence beside a group of distracted cows.

  “My dad knows that guy,” Nate said, when I paused to look at the man standing with his feet out of the mud. “He’s loaded.”

  Though he wouldn’t have said so, it appeared that Nate was “loaded” as well; he showed me photographs of his house on the shore of Connecticut, which looked like a hotel, and the boat his father raced in Bermuda every year. “Do you think I look like my mother or my father?” he asked as we gazed at a picture of his family together, standing by the net of a tennis court.

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking uncertainly at their perfect features.

  “My mother thinks I look more like her side of the family. We all have this pointy nose.”

  “I think you have a fine nose,” I said, turning away from the picture with relief. I kissed the tip of it.

  “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it,” he said. I kissed him more urgently and when he rolled his eyes I grinned at him, unbuttoned his pants, and took his penis from the tent of his boxers. I was bending over when he pulled me back up to eye level, kissed me, and then led me to the bed.

  It seemed to me I had changed. I was Galatea, the statue turned to flesh in her creator’s hands. I had come from my island in Maine in my foul-weather gear, typing and cleaning and drawing in my room, and Nate had brought me gifts and made me warm to the touch, a girl in the city like any other. But then when I walked him to class at the university, and watched as he disappeared easily into the throng of students outside the buildings surrounding Washington Square, I would look at the girls with their books pressed to their chests, laughing, talking, walking in short skirts and long pants, high boots and little sandals—and wonder why, in the end, I was still not like them.

  The coffee cart was not on my route to the institute when I was staying at Nate’s, and there was a café on the corner that he introduced me to. They had a menu of espresso drinks served with piles of frothy milk in various flavors; they had iced drinks and they had a maple scone—Nate’s favorite. But one day when he told me he was craving a donut I led him off to Ana’s cart.

  It was his city, and it wasn’t often that I led him somewhere, so even though it was several blocks out of the way, he indulged it like a game. We’d developed a rating system for the restaurants he took me to. When he’d asked me what I had thought of the Korean restaurant he’d taken me to on what we now referred to as our first date, I’d said it was “weird,” and he’d pretended to be hurt; thereafter restaurants were termed “good weird,” “bad weird,” and “plain weird.” As I learned to take into account the décor—the fountains in sushi rest
aurants, the piñatas in Mexican ones—we rated that on the weird scale too.

  “Looks plain weird,” he said as soon as I pointed out Ana’s cart from down the block.

  “Wait ’til you see,” I said, undaunted, skipping along beside him.

  It was morning, and there was a short line of hospital workers and businessmen. Ana’s expression was blank and meditative. As more people got in line behind us I began to wonder if it might be better to come back later—she hadn’t seen us yet—but Nate told me cheerfully that the line was moving quickly.

  “I’m not getting coffee,” he said, peering over the shoulder of the man in front of him to check out the selection of donuts. “Which is the best donut?”

  I looked anxiously at the shelves of mediocre pastries, sitting on their greasy strips of waxed paper, already knowing what Nate would think of them. Ana saw me and smiled.

  “Hey, Chica,” she said, as she turned to pour another coffee. “Been a while.”

  “I know,” I said, as her eyes slid over to Nate. “I told you you need an espresso machine.” We were at the head of the line, both of us standing at her window.

  “Regular?” she said, with a slightly impatient smile, turning to make the coffee before I could reply. “Just one or you need two?”

  “Just one,” said Nate, “and a donut. Which one should I get?” he asked me.

  She put the coffee down on the counter and for a second her eyes met mine. Chocolate’s a tiny bit crispier, I heard her saying, the first time I’d met her. I couldn’t answer him; I saw her eyes harden as she looked away.