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Four
Vignettes 4. Colors We still dress up for Halloween, even though we’re adults. At least, we think we are. Meg and I in our 12’ X 15’ dorm room, it’s cream-colored walls look yellow in the glow of the dull ceiling lamp. It’s bulbous dome full of dead insects, each blocking a tiny ray of light, like gray freckles on a swollen face. Halloween. We paint our faces and arms white, and accent them with dabs of black and green and tiny drops of latex blood. We are the dead debutantes—I’m in a black hourglass dress with a dropped waistline, an old fur stole I acquired from a musty thrift shop, long black gloves, a slender cigarette holder with a burning butt at the end. Meg’s wearing my pinstriped suit, a man’s suit that I altered to fit me and never wore. She’s in my black fedora, she’s smoking a cigar. We are elegant in death, on our way to a Halloween party, where everyone is already too drunk and horny to notice the time and thought that we put into our morbid costumes, too sexy to see us. We know we aren’t going to have a good time, but we don’t talk about it. She goes because I go, and I go because She lives there, She and her roommates, who wear miniskirts and cashmere and gogo boots and own blue cookware and white furniture. She is smart and rich and has opinions and thinks they’re right. I am smart, too, but I’m shy, and I wear thrift store clothes, and I don’t have so many friends, like those neighbors of hers who like to drink and sing and tear their shirts off when it gets late. I go for them, too. Him, really, who sat next to me for a whole semester in Dunmore. We rarely spoke to each other, but She talked to him all the time. She talks to him all the time now, too—lied next to him on a mattress for twenty-fours hours once, watching videos, ordering Chinese food and pizza. Twenty-four hours, all of them—her roommates and his—on mattresses on the floor, just because they could. And I’m there for him because I think that, for once, I might have something to say to him. “Why did you cut your hair?” he asks. His eyes are glassy and he teeters a little when he finishes a sentence. “I liked it long.” He’s wearing a loincloth—that’s it. His chest is tanned, hairless, all smooth curves and swells. A small belly swells over the band of his leather cloth. “I don’t know.” I reply. Not, I like it short, or, I wanted a change, or even, none of your business! just “I don’t know.” And I can’t think of anything else to say. He casually scratches his chest and walks away. Meg says nothing. There must be fifty people in the apartment. She doesn’t know them, and She’s panicking, eyes wide, picking cigarette butts off Her carpeting and hovering around the white furniture, watching people’s beer cups. I’m not sure about Her costume—a lithe Dorothy perhaps—red scoopneck dress, red shoes, pigtails. Her wide blue eyes almost purple in the reflection of the dress. Her pale cheeks flushed. Three hard-bodies circulate in silver halfshirts and cheerleader’s skirts, their arms covered in hand-drawn tattoos, their bodies slick with some silverish paint—the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” cheerleaders. Meg and I position ourselves in the kitchen, by the tap, and drink. I toss the holder and light up a cigarette. “What’s the matter with you!” He scolds. “Why can’t you just relax and have fun! You’re always so serious!” We’re in Her room with the bunkbeds and the Indian tapestries. He was screaming along to Billie Joel’s “Captain Jack” before he noticed me standing there. When I don’t reply, he finishes the song. The volume is so high, I’m sure anyone can hear it from the street, ten stories down, but that’s what people do around here. Meg and I leave. As we are making our way out the door, he slips around us and stops before us in the hallway. “Did you have fun?” His voice is clearer, slower, like he’s concentrating. “Yeah, we did.” “Sure.” “Well, I have some more booze in my apartment. It’s right down the hall. You wanna come down?” He’s stepping sideways down the hall, looking at me sideways. “Why don’t you come down?” He’s beautiful in his loincloth and bare chest, his chestnut hair hanging in his eyes. “No, that’s O.K.” Meg replies, just as I’m about to follow him down the hall. “Let’s go.” she hisses under her breath, and takes my arm, pulling me to the elevator. I’m still watching him. “Seeya!” He calls over his shoulder, and he bounds away. And we get on the elevator. All’s well ... for now. |
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