42.
“We’ll keep on spendin’ sunny days this way
We’re gonna talk and laugh the time away
I feel it comin’ closer day by day
Life would be ecstasy
You and me endlessly.”
-Rascals
One of the bad things he’d done that he’d had no other explanation for besides the shrugged-shoulders explanation of “anything goes,” was he’d come on to Bell, the woman George used to help, when he was leaving George’s apartment once and decided to walk up the stairs to each floor, just to see what the rest of the building looked like. On the fifth floor, she’d been standing in her doorway in an oversized t-shirt, and he’d walked over to her as though magnetized, and talked her into letting him move in; he’d just been kicked out again by Shirley. They hardly talked at all during the couple weeks he stayed with her. He did make her happy once; he went down on her and made her come, and then he’d immediately reached for a joint on the bedside table, put it in her mouth, and gallantly lit it for her, saying, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” She slept peacefully that night; lying next to her, he could feel through her skin that for once she wasn’t holding her muscles tensed. Eventually, he put some of her money in his pocket and snuck out in the middle of the day when she was napping.
Later, he spent about a month living in Bronxville, in a house rented by August, the girlfriend he had after Bell. Overly caring August, and a pretty, sullen vegetarian named Rebecca, and her boyfriend Tim, whose leisurely inquiries about other people’s well-beings and whose amusement with nature Christopher would spy on and grow jealous of. They all lived in this house that they decorated with old-fashioned knick-knacks along the windowsills and in the bathroom. They put seashells in the flowerbeds that lined the front windows, planted yellow Dahlias, and cooked meals for each other. He always thought about how he should be able to make love to her, it would be such an easy thing that would make her so grateful, but even kissing her made him nauseous. She was a good sport, who never pouted over his lack of interest. An avid admirer of Kerouac and Bob Dylan, she didn’t want to impinge on any boy’s freedom or inhibit his creativity by making demands on him. She wore boy’s clothes and was as tall as him, and in bed each night he wore a soft blue pair of her jeans and a man’s pajama top of hers that she called a “blouse” and felt sexy in when she wore it, because its thin cotton revealed the outline of the dark bras she wore.
Usually on Sundays, he slept heavily until noon, while she lay next to him, achingly conscious, trying in slow inches to coax one of his arms around her waist. There was this one Sunday, though, when he woke up early. Birds were chirping wildly and it was spring. All of the pretty, useless things in August’s room shone with reflected sunlight and for a second he felt unwelcome, but then he decided to make a contest out of it; he would trick her and her spoiled housemates by acting at ease in this radiant environment. Then, gradually, this self-consciousness of his melted away and he purely basked in this day that was like a Motown song. The four of them had a breakfast picnic, and then planted some basil in the cool soil of the backyard. They had a long conversation with the next door neighbor, a lesbian Raymond Chandler fan who brought out a cooler full of beer for everyone to share. In the evening, Christopher said to himself, “I’m going to look at the world with new eyes.” He glanced over at August as she crouched to pet a cat near the garage and pretended she was not being observed (“Move slowly, smile beautifully” she was coaching herself). He saw her newly, newborn, a girl in a pink dress with a pink sunburn, curled inside the tender, pink womb of dusk. That night he parted her stubbly legs like one gingerly opening an oriental fan and not understanding its function, only noticing its obsolete, pleated delicateness. “I love you,” she told him, pleased, when she was about to drift into sleep, consumed with the sensory contentment of the warm left-over dampness in her underwear and her own body’s smell on his hands. He was able to tolerate her for two more days before he abruptly moved out when she was at a class one afternoon.
Tim, Rebecca, and August lived in the house for five more months and then their landlord sold it to a realty company who raised the rent by $150, and they moved out. The way people that age do, they left the things behind that they hadn’t gotten attached to, camouflaged amongst the things left behind by other people on the high shelves in the garage and behind the bedsheets that hung over the two crawl spaces in the attic. Christopher had left his guitar and amp there. He’d left a well-fitting pea coat he’d always felt cocky in, and a Who songbook, a suitcase of clothes. At the time, when he left the house for good that day, he had imagined that those things of his were safe there in that place, that they were being kept company by three kind, vigilant people who would live there for a long time and who, in some strong way bordering on the paranormal, cared very, very much about him.
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