Heart the Lover (2)
‘He’s on sabbatical, doing research at Merton.’ He sees my lack of recognition. ‘At Oxford. He asked us to take care of the place for the year.’
‘Us?’
‘Yash and me.’
Yash?
There’s so much he expects me to know.
Neither of us is sure what to say after that. Sam shuts the drawer with the pipes and I ask where the bathroom is. He points to a sloped door beneath the stairs. I don’t really have to go. I just need to be alone for a minute. The toilet bowl is deep and the tiny bit I pee makes a loud sound when it hits the water, so I stop. The mirror above the sink is an oval fixed high on the wall. I can see half my forehead at a time, one eye or the other, if I stand on tiptoe.
The hallway is empty, the door out to the street a few steps away. In ten minutes I could be back in my room on Pye Street. But Carson and Bud will be there going at it in one way or another. A refrigerator opens and I follow the sound.
We sit with our bottles of beer on the striped couch in the navy room. Its cushions are stiff and we are stiff and he isn’t a guy who’s afraid of the long pause. We pick at our labels and speak sporadically. He asks if I have a lot of work this weekend and I say I have to write a short story.
‘Why?’
‘For my fiction class.’
He nods slowly, full of some thought he’s decided not to share. ‘What will you write about?’
I look around the room. ‘Tonight, probably.’
He looks alarmed. Then he pants. ‘Good one.’
The front door opens and slams against the wall.
‘Fucking fucking hell,’ says a voice from the hallway. The door shudders shut. ‘I’m locking it in case she followed me.’ A whoop-laugh. ‘You here? How was the daisy?’ He swings into the room, the other guy from our class. Yash. ‘Oh my. If she isn’t right here before us.’
His hair is out of its ponytail, thick and black, just past his shoulders. He is trying hard to stop laughing.
‘The daisy?’ I say.
‘Date, daisy,’ he says. ‘We call all our dates daisies. And my daisy tonight was a doozy.’ He smiles wide and comes closer. I glance at Sam, worried that he’s going to kick him out, but he’s got a little grin on his face I haven’t seen yet. He’s as relieved as I am that there are three of us now.
‘What happened?’ he says.
‘Well, I go and pick her up at Kappa,’ Yash says, standing in front of the coffee table facing us. Sam and I lean back at the same time, as if we’ve turned on a TV. ‘You have to sign in and give blood and take a vow of chastity and then you have to wait in a fucking parlor with doilies on all the tables for twenty minutes with all the other pathetic dudes. God, that guy Ian was there—the one who quoted Victor Hugo’s last words.’
Sam chuckles. ‘I see black light.’
‘I saw black light at Kappa for sure. It’s creepy in that room, and sort of smelly too, like if I get a whiff of my mother’s fingers, all the stuff she’s poked her fingers in during the day.’ He looks at me and jabs a finger in the air a few times. ‘My mother is a real poker,’ he says. ‘Finally we hear steps on the stairs and these girls all come down together and they look kind of alike and now none of us remember anymore who we’re taking out because we’ve been stuck in that playpen all night. However, someone identifies me from the lineup and we get the hell out of there. I take her to Pip’s, we talk about her father, who has some rare ghastly disease, and her brother, who sounds like an a-hole, and I order something that should have been called maroon glop over dirty sponge and bring her back to Kappa. She wants to show me something back in the playpen, which is now empty and very dimly lit, and I have to look at some god-awful Confederate musket on the wall, which she reveals belonged to her grandfather, and I head fast for the door, but her legs are suddenly ten feet long and she gets there first and presses me up against some coat hooks and unhinges her jaw like a snake. It was terrifying. I make a break and manage to get the screen door between us’—he holds up the imaginary door like a shield—‘and say goodnight politely and run.’
Sam is laughing so hard he makes sound.
Yash snorts and apologizes and wipes his eyes. He straightens up and wiggles his fingers at us. ‘I hope this is going a little better.’
‘It’s a little awkward,’ I say, and they both laugh.
‘It’ll get better. Sam is an acquired taste,’ he says. ‘Bonne nuit.’ And he clomps up the stairs.
Sam gets up and shuts both doors to the living room. When he sits back down on the couch, he’s closer.
‘The daisy? Please tell me not as in Daisy Buchanan.’
‘In a good way,’ he says, and kisses me.
On Monday Sam walks me to Modern Furniture, and when I get out fifty minutes later he’s waiting.
‘Want to come over for lunch?’
We eat turkey sandwiches and make out on the couch again. He doesn’t rush things. We kiss and kiss until I have to go to Logic.
I walk across campus a little lightheaded. I keep bursting out laughing, thinking about making out on Doc Gastric’s couch on a Monday in broad daylight. All the awkwardness dissolved when we were kissing. He said little things and I said little things and we made each other laugh on that striped couch.