‘Girls, I want to talk to you.’
Greg had been quiet in rehearsals. The tech was tomorrow and things were busy, but everything seemed pretty much on schedule and, in my humble opinion, the play looked fantastic.
‘I’m not sure I should have you over any more.’
Jess and I sat opposite each other at his dining-room table and now mirrored one another in the confused and somewhat fearful gazes we directed across the room.
‘I do like you and I like being with you in the theatre and having people to chat to afterwards – you both have guts and tenacity and that’s refreshing here – but sometimes it scares me.’
Jess and I sat motionless. I was more shocked than embarrassed and an uncomfortable feeling began to creep from my toes. Greg’s kitchen was one of the few places I felt truly relaxed in this strange country, but now my calves were tense and an acidity on my tongue told me I might be about to lose this safe place.
‘You are such good pals, I am so fond of you, and at times, I admit, I just like being with people so passionate and young. Forgive me if this embarrasses you.’
Stop! Cut! Hold! Freeze! I wanted to shout. I couldn’t form it in words but I knew the area of my mind he was about to force me to acknowledge and I knew I didn’t want to have this conversation. I was certain Jess didn’t either. Sure, we’d had a heavy tipsy chat late one night a while back, wrapped up in comforters in my dorm room, about how we were confused by simultaneously wanting Greg to be our dad and wanting him to find us attractive. And we had contemplated renting from the library the ancient arthouse film the cast kept playing in the green room in which a younger Greg gets naked. But we hadn’t rented the film and we hadn’t beaten up our psyches over possibly inappropriate desires because there were two of us who felt the same, because we trusted Greg never to hurt us and because we loved the friendship as it was.
‘Now, I don’t give a damn what the department heads say about me inviting students round,’ Greg continued, turning to the counter as if he was about to start preparing us a meal. ‘I’d never do anything, you know that.’
There was a pause and Jess shifted her head to her elbow. She seemed calm, perhaps even amused. I held my breath.
‘But I find myself hanging out with the two of you, talking about theatre and bodies and Jess’s creepy older man. And it’s fascinating. But then, when you leave, I feel so alone in this weird place.’
Greg stopped. He fixed his slouch and turned to face us. When he began again, his voice was cold, as if he was suddenly bored by the conversation. I worried he was about to ask us to leave. ‘I’m not sure how appropriate it is, that’s all. It seems like a kind of creepy Nabokovian thing and I can’t excuse myself for it. So I think maybe it’s best, especially if you’re taking my class next semester, that we try to be a little more appropriate.’
I chewed a fingernail and realised with embarrassment that I would not be able to respond without my voice cracking.
Jess broke the silence. ‘Um, not so much.’ She sat up straight so her mint T-shirt unfolded and I could read the ‘Howdy’, which I knew was accompanied by a ‘Dammit’ on the back. She looked brazenly at Greg. ‘Seriously, we appreciate the sentiment, but you don’t creep us out and obviously we like your company, so it would be totally lame for us to stop hanging out.’
Greg seemed taken aback for a moment, but eventually the lines on his face smoothed and he began to reassume his characteristically cocky posture. ‘Oh really, Ms Hunt? You think you can demand my company?’
‘You just need to chill out.’
I looked at Jess in amazement.
‘You don’t think I’m a creepy older professor, luring you into my trap, like all the other girls seem to fear I am?’
‘Whatevs.’ Jess didn’t appear to have experienced any of the things I had in the last ten minutes.
‘And what about you, Ms Lucas? Is this how you feel?’
I looked from Jess to Greg and wondered what to say. I couldn’t play Jess’s game, even if it might have been the best method of dealing with Greg’s little crisis. But I also couldn’t even begin to tell Greg how desperately I wanted to keep coming to his house, keep listening to his and Jess’s tales, keep feeling like I belonged somewhere.
‘Uh, yeah, I think so. I mean, I don’t think you’re creepy. And, I kind of really like that we can talk about sex and everything, but that I can also trust you and feel safe here. It’s only awkward now you’ve said it.’
‘Yes, I see that,’ Greg reached for a saucepan. ‘I don’t really understand you two very well, but as long as you don’t mind me perving into your lives a little, I guess I can accept my role as the old goat.’
The conversation that followed was somewhat stilted, but by the end of dinner we were laughing like normal. Jess moaned that she’d never find a boyfriend at Rosella, I told them I was too scared of the militant lesbians to hit on anyone, and Greg told us he thought we were both stupid because Dylan, a boy from the co-ed with a role in ’Twas, was ‘eminently fuckable’.
Shortly after that comment, Jess finished drying the dishes and Greg looked at us pointedly: ‘Enough. Now I sleep.’
Jess and I said our goodbyes and stumbled into the chilly darkness.
The following day, I sat at my desk and carefully typed an email:
From: Natalie Lucas <sexy_chocolate69@sweetmail.com>
To: Matthew Wright <theoutsider@worldopen.co.uk>
Sent: 12 October 2003, 08:36:21
Subject: Us
Dear Matthew,
This is hard to write. I don’t want to cause you pain.
Please know that I never want to regret anything, but I’m in this new place and I want to try living a new life. I’m sorry I have to hurt you in doing this, but please understand I need my space.
You have made me who I am and I owe you everything, but now I need to learn for myself. I hope we can find a way to be friends.
I will always love you.
Nat x
My nineteen-year-old brain told me this was the friendliest way I could end things with the man I had given my soul to. I did not blame him for anything and I truly wanted to stay friends, but I wanted to be close to him like I was to Greg – without the passion, arguments and lies that had dictated our lives for the past three years.
Matthew’s sixty-three-year-old brain, however, told him (and he in turn told me) that I was being an ungrateful, spoiled brat and I was ruining both our lives. My inbox exploded with expletives, curses, begs, threats and flattery.
I stuck to my resolution, though. On a bus back from a party, holding a broken umbrella and tasting sour beer on my breath, I told Jess most of the details, omitting only Matthew’s age. The day ’Twas the Night Before … opened, she and I donated eleven inches of hair to Locks of Love. Two weeks later, I cropped my remaining bob into boyish spikes and marched into the closest tattoo parlour to have my nipple pierced.
Over the coming months, I worked to construct the normal life I’d desired. I shrugged off Jess’s persistent questions about Matthew’s age in the same way that each morning, after I closed my bedroom door behind me and reminded myself of the protective Atlantic Ocean, I could ignore the fact I’d just sobbed for an hour before ten violent and accusatory emails. In overheated classrooms, noisy dining halls and on the snowy walkways of the Rosella campus, I was learning to be my new self: a slightly dorky, very shy but sometimes funny little lesbian without a past, without pain and without a head full of poetry beneath her blunt bangs.