Pug Hill, page 20
“Well, yes, actually that’s right, but I think if we work quickly, and maybe all agree to stay a few minutes late, we can get through all the speeches. Claaaass ...” She looks around at us. “Can everyone agree to stay a few minutes late?” Everyone nods, murmurs in agreement.
“I CANNOT!” Rachel shouts and looks over her shoulder, says, more softly, “I know.”
Beth Anne looks flustered, and smoothes down the front of her skirt. Everyone else has started staring at the floor. “Okay, Rachel,” she says, “I understand.” Rachel says nothing and Beth Anne says to us, more brightly, “Okay. So we have Lawrence and Lindsay and Hope.” Lawrence, and Lindsay, and Hope. Oh my.
Lawrence’s hand is up in the air before Beth Anne can even ask who would like to go first. Lawrence, possibly worried that Beth Anne may ignore him, as she has taken recently to doing, jumps up out of his chair. He clasps his hands demurely in front of himself and announces, “I’m ready Beth Anne!”
“Wonderful, Lawrence,” she tells him.
He smiles, tilts his head, and says, “And I would like Alec to be my partner.” Alec looks tremendously uncomfortable, a bit pained as he follows Lawrence, who has just skipped out the door.
Upon their return, Alec looks even more pained. Lawrence looks ecstatic as he takes his place proudly in front of the room. Then, suddenly, his expression changes, becomes quite serious, as he looks at the index card in his hand. He looks back up at us.
“I would like to tell you tonight about my wife,” and I think what I imagine everyone must be thinking, well what Amy and Alec and Lindsay must be thinking because really, I’d rather not think about what Rachel must be thinking. I think to myself, not for the first time, wife?
“I loved her. She was my life,” Lawrence continues and though the rhyming is distracting, he is such a poised and proud public speaker, has been it seems from day one, that it’s easy to sit back and listen. As I listen to his poem, part of me, for a moment wants to cry. Though rhyming and rhythmic, it’s also so sad. It’s about how he loved his wife and wanted to make her happy but because he was gay, it could never work out. He talks about how she said she’d never forgive him and never wanted to see him again. As I listen, I look around: everyone, even disturbingly freaky Rachel, looks touched, sympathetic. I think about Lawrence, such a showman, so endlessly entertaining, the sparkly disco ball equivalent of a person, and I think about the sad things, and how enduring them can get you to a far happier place.
“And so, for her I will always wear this ring.” He flips his wrist around, holds his hand up for us to see.
“I couldn’t hold on to any part of her, but I hold on to this one thing.”
He looks down at the floor, briefly traces a line on it with his Capezio and then looks back up. I remember how he stood and clapped for Amy, how he said, “Bravo!” to her, and how that seemed to make her happy. I stand up from my chair and start clapping. “Bravo,” I say. “Bravo.”
When Beth Anne asks Lawrence what his anxiety level is, he inspects his fingernails, and only says, “you know,” before returning back to his chair, with a new spring in his step.
“Okay, wonderful job, Lawrence, and thank you for sharing that with us. Lindsay? Hope? Who would like to go next?” Neither of us makes a move. I don’t really want to follow Lawrence, because he was so good, and I’m pretty close to sure that no matter how deeply I remember Benji Brown, I won’t be that good. But at this point, I feel like I’ve been waiting so long. Longer, I imagine, than I even know.
“I’ll go,” I say, as I raise my hand high.
“Wonderful, Hope. Who would you like to be your partner?” I look around the room.
“Lawrence,” I say, and we walk together out into the hall. “You’re poem was really good,” I tell him once Beth Anne has shut the door behind us.
“Thanks, Sweetie.”
“I’m, um, I’m sorry it was so hard.”
“Oh.” He waves his hand in the air. “Don’t be. It’s all hard, sugar, and figuring out who you are might be the hardest part of all.”
Wise words, I think, wise words indeed.
“Okay.” He claps his hands together twice, right up by his ear. “Let’s get you in fighting shape! Let’s do The Lion!”
I stand up straight. I take a deep breath. I don’t quite Take the Room; I take about half of it, but since the sweating has started, I figure the best thing to do right now is start. I steal a quick glance at my index card even though I’m pretty sure I know it all by heart.
“When I think about Benji Brown,” I say as my voice falters a little, “a British Invasion band from the Eighties is often playing—really loudly—in the background.”
I pause, look up. Lawrence is smiling at me brightly, he pumps a fist in the air. I can do this, I think. I continue. “It’s something about all the guys I went to high school with, something about the memory of hearing them blast their Smiths, their Cure, their Erasure, their Depeche Mode.” I close my eyes for a minute, I can still see them all: the way they were back then. I can see all the Flock of Seagulls haircuts, all the bangs. I can see the baggy pants folded at the bottom and rolled up, the black penny loafers with nickels where the pennies should be, all the sockless ankles.
“The second I saw Benji Brown, I knew he was going to be important. I knew it the second I saw him,” I say again, for emphasis, “I knew it right away. It was the summer before eleventh grade. There was Benji, at a party in someone’s basement in Northport, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I’d heard his name before; people had mentioned this guy who’d moved here from Boston and was coming to our high school in the fall. No one new ever came in eleventh grade, so by virtue of that alone he was special, and he was rumored to be this completely amazing soccer player, and then, of course, there was that name. His name, the first and the last name both starting with B, that he still went by Benji at sixteen years old, seemed so dorky, but at the same time so cool to me. He seemed so dorky and so cool to me.” And he was. He had the combination down. Equal parts dorky and equal parts cool. It is a mixture I think I’ve been searching for for some time. Come to think of it, ever since high school.
I speak clearly and not too fast. I tell them how Benji had such thick, curly dark hair, how it was a little bit like an Afro. I tell them how he had eyes that always looked a bit sad. I tell them how Benji’s family was Unitarian Universalist. I tell them how with Benji, I never felt weird for being Jewish and Catholic, something in high school I used to feel weird about a lot, and, as you know, sometimes still do. But Unitarian Universalist was like an entire religion that didn’t care that I was Jewish and Catholic, it was like a giant religious melting pot; the kind I’d always wanted to be able to see myself as. I tell them how Benji was a great athlete, but so sensitive, so completely void of any Captain of the Football Team behavior. Or rather, Captain of the Soccer Team behavior, because at my high school, all the cool boys played soccer.
“Also,” I continue, “there was a little bit of cinematic romance in the fact that he transferred in eleventh grade. Heathers was playing in the theaters the summer that I met Benji, and I sometimes thought of us as Christian Slater and Winona Ryder. Before, of course, they killed all Winona’s friends and blew up the school.” Everyone laughs, and I think that’s good, that I made people laugh. It’s good and it buoys me, so I can continue, and tell them about the most important part, about the mix tapes.
“Benji made the best mix tapes of anyone I’ve ever met, and most of the time, I think, of anyone I ever will. A lot of the time we spent, we spent listening to his mix tapes. We used to drive around to nowhere in his car, listening to Erasure and New Order and Flock of Seagulls and R.E.M. and The Smiths and The Cure, always The Cure, for hours. And then we’d pull over, and listen to them for a few hours more. I can remember kissing him a thousand times in that car.”
I leave out the part about how I can remember the exact feel of his body, the exact feel of my own, as he maneuvered himself over the stick shift, and reached over me to pull that lever on the side to get the seat to recline, while Robert Smith sang about looking so long at these pictures of you. It was the best kind of kissing back then, the kind that lasted all night, the kind that lasted forever because you didn’t know what came after it.
“Sometimes,” I continue, “Benji made mix tapes for me, and other times I’d just take tapes he’d made for himself, and pretend he’d made them for me. I’d take them home and sit on the floor by my stereo, hitting pause and play again and again, until I’d written down every last word to every last song in a notebook that I don’t have anymore but wish I still did.”
My speech is almost over. As I work my way through another few sentences about Benji, I remember kissing him. I remember kissing him in November when we were home from college. We’d gone outside at a party and were lying together by someone’s swimming pool, on a lounge chair. Wherever we were, whoever’s party we were at, I remember thinking how their family was much more relaxed than mine about when to pack up and put away the pool furniture. I remember telling him that, and I remember him saying that it was a good thing we weren’t at my house. I remember thinking how it wouldn’t have mattered, how I would have been with him in the wet November leaves. I would have been with him in the almost frozen pool.
I remember how we decided that November that we should see other people since my college was in New Hampshire and his was in Virginia, how college was important, and we didn’t want to spend it on the phone. I remember how he went back to the University of Richmond where I’d wished I’d applied, and I met someone new at college, his last name was Glickman. I remember Nana called and said she heard that at last someone had the sense to date someone Jewish.
“Hope?” Oh, damn, I’ve stopped talking again. I have no idea how long I’ve been standing up here so very much like a deer in the headlights. I take a deep breath. I get ready for my big finish. I like my big finish. I begin speaking again,
“I’ve noticed in life that the older you get, the fewer men there are who will take the time to make you a mix tape. I’m not sure,” I say slowly, taking care not to rush, “that there are any men left in the world who are going to make me a mix tape. I’m still optimistic, though. I like to think he’s out there, and that I’ll meet him, and on our third, fourth date, he’ll say, ‘Here, look,’ as he pulls something out of his jacket pocket, ‘I made this for you.”’
I look out at the room and then over to Lawrence. He is on his feet in a flash, clapping away quickly and saying, “Bravo!”
“Very good job, Hope,” Beth Anne says, and I’m happy she doesn’t want to talk about the part when I forgot that I was in the middle of giving a speech. But then I think, Wow, I really did forget I was giving a speech.
“Thanks,” I tell her.
“What was your anxiety level?”
“You know, it really wasn’t that bad. Like, at most a five.”
“Excellent, Hope, good to hear.”
Lindsay also selects Lawrence as her coach and they head off into the hall. When they return Lindsay delivers a slightly choppy, but actually very funny, speech titled, “The E-mail That Got Away.” I don’t pay as much attention as I really should, because my mind is still all tripped up, my mind is still a freshman in college, saying a long good-bye to Benji Brown, a good-bye that I didn’t believe was ever going to be real.
I’m trying to remember the last time I kissed him, and I can’t. I wish I had known when it was going to be the last time I was ever going to kiss him. Because I would have concentrated more, paid closer attention, tried to somehow record every last detail about it. If I had known it was the last time, I would have kissed him for longer than I ever had before. And then, just for old times sake, I would have kissed him again.
As everyone except for Rachel sits around the big table up on the second floor of the Cedar Tavern, the air between us is softer, kinder than it’s been. It’s more familiar also, like we know each other more. I think how much more you know people when you know what they’ve lost.
I wonder where Benji Brown might be in the world at right this very second. I have no idea. The James Taylor album that’s been playing in my mind skips over to a different song. I lean back a little in my chair, take a sip of my white wine spritzer, and listen as James Taylor sings so softly: this is a song for you far away from me.
chapter twenty-six
Standing on Smith Street in My Pumas, Waiting
“Listen, man, thanks for suggesting this, it was fun,” Elliot says as he leans over and does some sort of guy handshake-snapping thing with Sergei.
“A lot of fun!” Sergei agrees. “See you all on Monday. Bye, Elliot. Bye, Hope.”
“Bye Sergei,” I say and I wonder if that just came out slurry, or if I just think that it did. It is two-thirty in the morning. I can’t remember when I was last out this late, and I think the possibility might be high that it was in a different decade. I also think the possibility might be high that I am wasted. Elliot asked Sergei and me at work on Friday if we minded if some of his artist friends came with us as they, too, wanted to celebrate Elliot’s promotion. We both said that of course we didn’t mind and then I couldn’t sleep at all last night trying to think of what to wear that would make me seem cool to Elliot and all his artist friends, the type of people who surely sneered at people who lived on the Upper West Side, the type of people who only lived in artsy, exotic places like Brooklyn.
That I found myself at Foot Locker first thing this morning, buying a pair of Pumas (my thinking being that Pumas were indeed a hip footwear choice) actually did not do a whole hell of a lot to increase my confidence about my level of coolness.
Claire is not here. Maybe Claire is at fat camp. Or better yet, maybe Claire doesn’t exist at all. The artist friends have come and gone. It’s just Elliot and me. I have spent a tremendous amount of this evening thinking that Elliot is perfect. And dreamy. Though to my credit, when, over the course of the evening, Elliot has gotten up to get us yet another round, or to go to the bathroom, I have refrained from thinking things like, “God, look how fucking hot he is when he walks.” Thinking such things, I know this, would generally not be a good idea. Thinking such things could be but a stop or two away from Penis-Lunging-Ville, a Ville to which I do not wish to go.
Elliot takes another sip of his beer, puts it down on the table. “So how’s it going with the Rothko?” he asks. It is the first time tonight that I have remembered that Elliot is now my boss.
“Good, hard though,” I say, and take another sip of my beer.
“Paintings Conservation,” he says, draining his beer, “it’s so hard. It’s painful and you’re always alone.” I live for this shit, I really do. Elliot is so deep. And so blurry. I nod in agreement and take another sip of beer. Elliot reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone. He glances at its screen, and as he goes to put it back away, I remember standing on the steps of my brownstone so long ago, imagining typing “Elli” into my phone. I know that I am drunk, yes, but I feel that the symbolism, whatever it might be, needs to be captured. I reach into my bag, grab my phone.
“What’s your number?” I ask. “I should program you in.”
“Uh, yeah,” he says, “718-555-1212.” I key in the number, type in E-L-L-I, smile to myself, and flip my phone shut. As I slip the phone back into my bag, I think that I’d like to have sex with my boss.
“Uh, what’s yours?”
“Oh, um, 917-222-1515.”
“Cool,” he says and I watch him type in the number. A wave of dizziness sweeps over me. It occurs to me that I’m too drunk, that going drink for drink, for some inexplicable reason, with Sergei and Elliot wasn’t a good idea at all. It occurs to me that possibly I’m thisclose to something I’ll later regret. I watch as Elliot types the four letters of my name into his phone. H-O-P-E. It occurs to me that the only thing you can shorten Hope to is Ho.
“I think I’m just going to grab an ice water,” I tell him.
“I’ll get it for you,” he says, and heads to the bar.
God, I think, look how fucking hot he is when he walks. He comes back and I thank him for the water. I’m careful not to drink it too quickly, lest there be unseemly vomiting. He’s telling me something about some new black light he used recently, and I can’t really listen. I’m looking at his eyes. They’re usually green but in this light they look so much more like purple. And I don’t think they’re ever going to light up for me the way they do when you tell him that Claire’s on the phone. I’m also thinking a little bit that it’s happened, that even though I didn’t want it to, that somewhere along the way I might really have become a stalker.
When the bar closes at three, even though I’ve been on water for the past half hour, I am still much drunker than I’d like to be. I also have a very, very bad taste in my mouth from all the beer.
But, also, I am blessed; I only have to dig in my bag for a second to find my gum.
“Can I have a piece?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say, and hand him the pack. As he takes it from me, a thought pops into my head. I think maybe he doesn’t just want the gum for the sake of the gum. He wants the gum so that he has fresh breath when he kisses me passionately, like he’s been waiting his whole life for me. Like he’s been waiting his whole life to kiss me. Really, it’s not simply because the eleven beers he just drank left him feeling like a small burrowing animal crawled into his mouth, lied down, and quietly died. No, he wants the gum because he and I, Elliot Death and Hope McNeill, are destined, just destined, to be together.
We walk, each chewing silently on our gum, cosmic symbol of our togetherness that it is, into the quiet desolation of Smith Street.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” I say and we look at each other and I move the cosmic gum around in my mouth a bit and then I bite down on it.
