You first, p.12
You First, page 12
“It’s been a bad few weeks,” I say.
“So I gathered.”
“He’s been driving me nuts.”
“It happens.”
“I’m applying for a job I’m completely unqualified for.”
She gives me an eyebrow. “You’re white, male, and super. Chances are you’ll get it anyway.”
“That would likely be a travesty for all involved.”
“So why apply, then?”
“Because I can’t lose him.”
She doesn’t ask questions. I wonder how much Jay told her downstairs.
“How do I keep things from changing?” I say.
She makes a light pffff sound.
“If I knew the answer to that,” she says, “I wouldn’t be alone.”
I glance at her, surprised. “You’re never alone. You’ve got Miranda, and your friends are always over, and—”
“You know what I mean.”
We go quiet. She sweeps her hand over the wallpaper tenderly, tracing the antlers on one of the deer. I think of my mother running a hand through my hair when I was eight and sick with a fever. Lynette doesn’t notice the torn part of the paper, or if she does, she doesn’t mention it.
“All these years,” she murmurs. “You really did keep it this way.”
“I keep my promises.”
“That’s good.” She knocks on the wall twice, like she’s testing its strength. “For as long as they’re still worth keeping.”
then
“It’s been shut up for twenty-five years,” said Lynette, leading us up the cracked concrete walk to the duplex. “Promise you’ll be kind.”
Jay and I promised, following our possible-future-landlady to the brick steps like a couple of puppies. We were cowed by her middle-aged elegance: the precise click of her black high heels, the sleek lines of her plum silk jumpsuit. She reminded me of Tasha, a swan-necked intellectual in my freshman Psych class on whom I’d developed a punishing crush that ensured I would never make eye contact with her, let alone speak to her. Lynette’s teenage daughter shuffled behind us in cropped jeans, one earbud jammed in her ear and her thumb speed-circling the clickwheel of her iPod.
“Nice little porch.” Lynette gave a wistful nod to the bare concrete slab. “Good for entertaining, relaxing. Dinner on a summer night.”
Jay and I grinned at each other, a flipbook of summer-porch mac and cheese dinners flickering by in our heads.
“All right, then.” Lynette took a deep breath and slipped her key in the lock, resting a hand on the door as if she were checking for a heartbeat. “Let’s take a tour.”
We linked hands and stepped inside, our eyes shut tight at first. We’d toured a parade of crappy one-bedrooms in run-down brick buildings and above bars and barbershops, and we were aching for this long shot to work. We’d spotted the small twin flags fluttering beside Lynette’s mailbox—the rainbow one, and the red and blue S flag that meant she’d rent to supers without a hassle—and despite the price, we knew we had to at least see this place.
“Open your eyes, you two.”
When we did, we both let out a tiny gasp. The living room was a 1970s time capsule, and not in a strictly positive way. Wood paneling, puke-green shag carpeting, gold velvet swivel chairs. But stepping into this place with his hand in mine, behind a woman who was proof we weren’t the only queer people in Summerhill, lent every detail an air of defiant romance.
“I love it,” said Jay.
“Me too,” I said.
Miranda leaned against the broken stair rail and gave us a side-eye.
“Now, of course, it’ll need some work.” Lynette said, her eyes trained on the grimy glass pillow of the ceiling light. “The furniture comes with the place—you can keep or get rid of it, whatever you like. I don’t mind if the paneling goes or the carpet’s pulled up. There’s hardwood underneath. Are you handy?”
“So handy,” I lied.
“Super handy,” Jay added.
Lynette pressed her lips together; clearly she knew two fools when she saw them. But she led us through the other rooms with friendly efficiency: the kitchen, with its mushroom wallpaper and matching wall clock; the bathroom, with its avocado toilet and yellowed linoleum; the small bedroom, with its heavy blue floral drapes and an empty space where a bed should be. The house smelled sad, its mustiness cut with chemical citrus, the smell of a forgotten place that had recently been cleaned with impersonal haste. But I was spellbound, picturing our life together filling each space. In this room, we would fry grilled cheeses on cold winter nights while sharing ridiculous work stories. In that room, we would make out on the couch, drunk on cheap wine, while watching Withnail and I for the forty-seventh time.
Jay glowed beside me, squeezing my hand. It was more room to live than we’d ever hoped to have. Unfortunately, it was also more than we could afford, even with our college graduation money and combined savings and the modest cash trickle from our new low-key jobs. The ad had said “rent negotiable,” and I knew we were thinking the same thing: that one of us, in the next ten minutes, had better nut up and get good at negotiating.
“The last room is that one,” Lynette said, as we stood in the cramped upstairs hallway. She tipped her chin at an apple-green door. “We’ll stay out here. You two can take a peek for yourselves.”
Miranda gave her a look that was equal parts concern and judgment. The same kind of look my mother gave me after Samantha Woodley dumped me under the pinprick stars on our high school field trip to the planetarium.
“Before you go in, though,” Lynette said, “I have a special request.”
“Mom,” said Miranda.
“It is my house, Randi.”
“You’ll never rent this place if you—”
“Hush. Do you hear me?”
“What’s the request?” said Jay.
Lynette toyed with her necklace, a flat, wafer-thin golden heart on a delicate chain. “I would like it,” she said softly, “if you could keep this room as it is. You can put your own books on the shelves, of course, but everything else—I’d like it to stay. The furniture. The paintings. The wallpaper, especially.”
“Oh my god,” Miranda muttered.
“We’ll do it,” I said.
Jay shot me a look. Lynette had mentioned that her parents lived here before they passed away, and I could see him envisioning the sentimental horrors we might be committing ourselves to preserve: a brown velour swing-bed dangling from chains, or flocked wallpaper that induced hallucinations without the benefit of drugs. But when we opened the door, it wasn’t bad—a small reading room in largely inoffensive shades of green. A velvet chair the shade of moss in the Wishpenny woods. A circular rag rug in hunter and jade. Seafoam-painted bookshelves, mostly empty except for some wildlife books and a small ceramic bowl filled with old elastic hair bands and bobby pins. Forest-green wallpaper printed, incredibly, with white deer.
“Look.” Jay tapped the wall. “It’s Parsons.”
In the doorway, Lynette looked up.
“Parsons is a deer we know,” I explained, like a weirdo. “He lives in the woods. Behind Wishpenny Park.”
“A white deer?” Lynette said.
“Almost. He’s a piebald. We’ve known him since he was a baby.”
“There’s another one,” Lynette murmured.
“What?” said Miranda.
“Nothing,” said Lynette.
“Levon can talk to him,” Jay blurted.
Lynette gave me a new kind of look. Softer, as if she’d realized she recognized me from somewhere. She stepped into the room, the hardwood planks squealing under her shoes.
“You’re an animal talker?” she said. “I’m sorry, it’s rude to ask—”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “I am, but no prestige animals. Pests, mostly.”
Miranda cackled. Lynette shushed her. Then she looked me up and down and nodded slowly.
“Let me make a proposal,” she said. She took a pen from her leather purse and started scrawling something on the back of an envelope. Miranda gave Jay the eye as her mother wrote.
“What’s your power?” she asked him.
“I can manipulate liquid and freeze it,” Jay said. I knew he’d keep the flying to himself.
“Cool, like entire lakes and stuff?”
“No, more like entire Big Gulps and stuff.”
“Do you ever freeze your enemies?”
“Nope. That’s a major code violation.”
Miranda shrugged and turned up “Pon de Replay” so loud I could hear it from the window. Lynette presented us with the envelope, her final offer circled three times.
“Does this sound like a fair price?” she asked.
We looked at each other. She’d knocked $150 off the monthly rent.
“I—guess…?” I said.
“I heard you talking before you rang my doorbell. You can’t afford the listed rent, is that right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Can you get the voles out of my garden?” she asked me.
“I can try.” Jay pinched my arm. “Yes. Yes, I can.”
“And you—can you get water out of the basement?” She pointed her pen at Jay. “It floods every time there’s a hard rain.”
“Nooo problem.” Jay hooked his arm through mine.
“Then we’ve got ourselves a deal.”
We shook Lynette’s hand. Her handshake was pitiless. I wondered what she thought of my sweaty palms.
“Can we have a few minutes alone in here?” Jay asked her.
Miranda whispered boom chicka wow wowww. Lynette gave her daughter a look.
“We just want to talk,” Jay assured them.
“No more than ten minutes, all right?” Lynette checked her watch. “I have a town meeting. I’m on the Cultural Resources Advisory Board.”
“Mom’s on more boards than a rocking chair.”
“Say goodbye, Randi,” said Lynette.
“Bye, Randii-iiii-ii!” sang Miranda, her voice cracking on the high note.
When they were gone, Jay took my hands in his. Afternoon sun streamed through the window. A bird sang sweetly outside and I tried not to think of what Ma told me once, that sweet birdsongs often have sinister lyrics.
“I felt like we should make a pact or something,” he said. “To make this official.”
“Okay.”
I warmed inside at the finality of pact. We’d already decided we wouldn’t get married—my parents weren’t a great ad for it, and Jay associated “marriage” with his parents’ campaign to pair their children off with fellow water movers and breed more Lev-B semi-superstars. But private vows, made entirely by us and with no witnesses outside this room, felt exactly right, and exactly as binding.
“On this day, the twenty-ninth of June,” he said, “we promise to each other and proclaim to the world that this life, and this house, and our love, are all we need.”
I squeezed his hands. On the outside I couldn’t match his open-hearted earnestness, but inside I was melting.
“Yes,” I agreed. “We promise to be true to each other—”
“Well. True-ish.”
“Monogamish.”
“No cheating, though. Threesomes occasionally. Just for fun.”
“With a nonthreatening person mutually agreed upon by us both.”
“We promise not to have a bunch of kids,” Jay said fiercely. “We won’t have any, or if we do we’ll never pressure them to be something great.”
“Never,” I said. “And if we do have a kid, we’ll adopt—”
“An older kid.”
“Yes.”
“Everyone wants babies and that sucks.”
“We’ll buy local and grow our own vegetables,” I said.
“We’ll always recycle,” Jay said.
“We’ll never take money from your parents.”
“Or your sister.”
“Furthermore,” I said, my voice getting louder, “we promise not to use our powers to get a fancy job or get ahead. We formally withdraw from the grand competition of life.”
“No ladders. No rat races.”
“Unless it’s a literal rat race, because sometimes those are cool.”
“We’ll use our powers only as a hobby. To have fun. To make people happy.”
“And we’ll always be enough for each other,” I said, my voice cracking a little.
He looked up at me. “Of course we will.” His fingertips skimmed my hot cheek. “Of course.”
I surfed a wave of pure happiness. I belonged here—in this house, with him—more than I’d belonged anywhere or with anyone ever before. I was only twenty-two but I would have signed a sea witch’s scroll to make this feeling last forever.
“Hang on,” I said. “We need something to seal the pact.”
I picked two hair bands from the bowl on the bookshelf and held them out, as if my palm were a blue velvet box. They were dark brown bands laced with thin gold threads that sparkled in the sun.
“Jay Bartholomew Jantzen,” I said, in the voice of that guy from the sordid cologne commercial. “Will you rent this weird half a house with me, and make me the happiest man on earth?”
He slapped both hands to his cheeks and dropped his jaw at the hair band. “I…I don’t know what to say.”
“Say yes,” I intoned. “Or, you know. Yes for now.”
He kicked my shoe with his. “Yes for always, you nerd.”
The band was way too big when I slid it on, so I doubled it around his finger. The old elastic stretched reluctantly, threatening to crumble. He did the same with my band. When we held out our newly ornamented hands, the faux-rings looked so sad and pathetic they begged for a story to save them.
“Now, these might seem like crusty old hair bands from 1978,” I told him. “But they’re actually made of ultra-rare umber elastro…cite.”
“Is that right.”
“Yep. It’s mined from a single cave in, uh…” I tried to think of someplace mysterious and failed. “Wisconsin.”
“Wisconsin Wisconsin?”
“Yes. And hand-laced with genuine gold filigree. By highly trained artisans.”
“Oh my god.” He laughed and slid his arms around my neck. “Who are you?”
The question addled me. I pulled him close, my heart pounding against his ironic I’D RATHER BE FISHING t-shirt.
I am Levon 2.0, now free to audition absurd wit and charm because I know you’ll laugh in a good way even if I get it wrong.
I am a portrait of myself painted with your eyes, and when you see me as beautiful I almost believe it.
I am the same dorkish weirdo I always was, except I’ve finally found the someone who thinks my brand of dorkish weirdness is cool.
I am a boy-shaped brick of anxiety whose acid reflux flares when he’s on the verge of claiming a life that’s maybe too good to be true.
“Who knows,” I said, shooting for sexy but landing on silly. “Guess I’m a mystery.”
He broke away, but only to smile at me. We fit our hands together like a steeple, twin bands aglow in the day’s waning light, and we were home.
now
His band is broken. It bothers me every time I look at it.
On Saturday morning, I take a break from Pease-without-Caritz prep to stare at our twin elastic bands, mounted together like a Venn diagram in a square white frame on our blue bedroom wall. We’d had to snip out a tiny piece of his band so they’d lay flat while creating the illusion of interlocking. I’d hated the symbolism of that, hated that he’d been the one to offer up his band for snippage, unperturbed that it would never be whole again.
The bands were my idea. I trace them lightly, rest my fingertip in the intersection of our Venn. The bands were me, but the pact was all him.
The cuckoo clock cuckoos across the room, marking nine a.m. I finish getting dressed for the Wishpenny show: felt bowler hat, billowy green shirt with supersized bow tie, baggy tweed pants with green patches sewn on, jumbo shoes with newspaper stuffed in the toes. Without Jay my costume makes no sense—I’m just an asshole with peas on my suspenders—but I can’t bring myself to wear anything else.
Downstairs, two eager voices volley. He’s on the couch with Her.
I don’t like thinking in resentful capitals, because I met the super when she first arrived and she seemed perfectly nice: a smiley, short-haired Asian woman in her early forties, younger than I’d expected but old enough to have nearly twenty years of enticing professional adventures to share. Her voice is loud and buoyant and I picture them side by side on the couch, leaning into each other’s words. She is the solicitous type, always in recruitment mode, and everything Jay says is lavishly interesting.
A peal of laughter rings out. I creep close to the top of the stairs, as softly as my giant shoes will allow.
“Now, the Riverside flood,” says Naomi Hara. “Tell me about the techniques you used there.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, I’d never tried anything like that before, so I went on instinct—”
“Mm-hm. Mm-hm.”
“First I made some tallish waves and froze them, and I did that really quick all across Main Street—kind of a makeshift dam, I guess.”
“Yes.”
“And then I used some side streets—just the street part—as the base for a tunnel. I froze some of the flood waters into a tunnel that went all the way down the street and back downstream to the river, and then I directed the water into it, like as much as I could, so it could drain.”
“Amazing. Yes! You made a temporary diversion channel. That’s the exact technique we use for stormwater in smaller-scale floods.”
“I found that out later, yeah!” Jay’s voice gets high and sprightly, like when I bring surprise egg rolls home after work. “I researched the tactics you guys used in Berryville last year. Fascinating stuff. And the lift-and-funnel technique you use for bigger flooding events—I’d love to learn more about that.”
