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I expected silence, the usual aftermath of when my talking becomes talking consisting of shocked, uncomfortable quiet. Henry, for the first time, challenged my expectations.
He looked over at me and said, “You’re messed up on something, right?”
“I’m not. That’s just me.”
“You’re one of those art girls.”
“No,” I said. “Teaching. Crazy, right?”
Henry moved closer to me, and I wished the bed were a waterbed sloshing beneath our weight, throwing both of us to the clean, white carpet upon the slightest of wrong moves committed by my ass or his. I focused on my peripheries, waiting for one hand or another to sneak toward my shoulder or the small of my back or somewhere more scandalous.
“If I keep sitting on this bed,” he began to say, and as his voice got lower and lower, I experienced an appalled moment of realization: Jesus Christ, he thinks he sounds husky — seductive, even. “Will that make you feel any less crazy?”
I tried honesty. “I don’t think so.” His hand touched my arm, and though it didn’t feel much like human interaction, it didn’t feel bad. Mostly it was a nothing-touch, like the sensation of holding the phone for so long that your hand goes numb — you know you’re still holding something, but you can’t quite discern what that something feels like.
“Well,” he said, “if I keep sitting on this bed, will you feel any worse?”
My streak of honesty continued. “Not really.”
His hand moved up my leg. I wasn’t really doing anything else, so I let him turn off the lights. Henry seemed to have genuine fun, while I thought about the nearby phone and wished it would ring. When my hand found him limp, I said, “Oh,” without meaning to.
He held me afterward, my back pressing against his chest, and I couldn’t decide if we were keeping each other heated, or just sapping the warmth from one-another. The post-coital holding didn’t come entirely as a surprise — his eyes looked genuine enough, despite his intentions being obvious from the start — but life had acclimated me to distance.
“Something’s still bugging you?” he asked. His voice had lost both its failed huskiness and genuine, awkward charm. He sounded like a neutered tomcat.
I couldn’t tell what kind of answer he wanted. Genuine? I had already given him more than my usual amount of honesty. Fake? No, as I could only come up with the dull lie of “nothing.” Sexy? I couldn’t think of many compliments for his inability to maintain an erection.
“Charlie?” he asked, and I wondered why I hadn’t given a pseudonym. In those wonderful, early-college years, I often lied, about my name and about anything else I could — for example, Melisa’s perpetual other-half, Randy, had known me as Penelope for a good three weeks before someone had clued-in his underdeveloped brain.
I couldn’t see Henry staring at me, but somehow I could feel it, and I kept trying to think up a good lie until I remembered the pained way he had looked at me when brushing my hand away from his struggling manhood, how his eyes had looked at me with such focus, as if faltering his gaze for a moment would cause those tiny spheres to fall right out of his head from pure embarrassment. That genuine moment stayed in sight of my closed eyes, and I wondered how often people lied to Henry.
I decided not to lie to either of us for at least ten minutes.
“I’m thinking about my family,” I said.
I felt his weight shift, unable to discern whether he was moving closer or farther from me. “Still?”
“Always,” I said. “You don’t think about yours?”
“Not after sex.” Did his words carry a spitting sort of disgust, or did I imagine such flavor? Regret for saying anything, the humble beginnings to a self-doubt storm, brewed in the base of my brain.
He said, “What about them?”
I said, without stopping to take breaths in-between, “Preston is smart like they used to think I was, but he’s too serious like Mother, and everyone thought he would be head-fucked like me for a while. I think he’ll be okay, if he can just remember to sleep now and then. Except he can’t, because Dad’s gone now, and I’m gone now, and someone has to take care of Dave, or he’ll accidentally fall off a roof, or something equally tragic.”
“Where’s your mom?”
I asked myself the same question before continuing. “She’s there, but she doesn’t get it. She tried, she really did, but she didn’t understand. Mother thought she could raise us right, make us into intelligent little scholars. We didn’t have TV when we were growing up, just books and classical music. She thought she could make us better than her. Better than bad neighborhoods and bad headaches.”
“Are you?” When I didn’t follow, he added, “Better than her?”
“I don’t know. I came into your bedroom because being around more than five people at a time starts to give me a panic attack. Mother is an underpaid secretary at a paper company that threatens to go under every other week, and spends most of every night alone in the bedroom my father couldn’t keep being in. Dave is fourteen, and he just fucked up so hard, he could be sent away if it gets out. Mother tried so hard to make us happy, and she’s probably going to die alone. Preston spends so much time taking care of Dave and taking care of me when I can’t take care of myself that he’s one stress-induced outburst away from becoming just as off-balance as I am, running away to college in the middle of nowhere and spilling his guts to one-night-stands.” I paused, in vain hope he could absorb that much unwanted information. “Did you keep score? Who won?”
About Jonathan Persinger
