WHO ELSE WOULD MOVE IN WITH ME?
He had so few things. Two trips with the Cold Shoulder van and his apartment was empty. Crates of LPs, a couple of boxes of leftover band merch and records, the slim Danish couch. The guitar. A real mattress. Ryan took up hardly any space, outnumbered by my sprawling archives.
We dropped the boxes in Summer’s empty room. On the floor was a scattering of dust bunnies and bobby pins; in the closet, wire hangers. She’d left in a hurry, impatient to get to her new life with Marcy.
“What’s with that cat?” he asked. Edith Head, who was nowhere to be seen while we carried in the boxes, had now emerged onto the porch and was mashing her head against his shin.
“She mostly lives under the porch. Summer’s allergic. Was.”
“Well, let her on in.”
“I guess we can.”
I held open the door and Edith swanned past, stopped in the entry, and took a look around the place, tail flicking back and forth in a slow question mark. Then she dove under the couch.
Finished, we sat on the top step of the porch. It was newly April. Pink and white cherry blossoms soft as kitten ears carpeted the gutters, smelling like fleshy candy, sweet decay. The afternoon and evening lay ahead of us with nothing planned. I hadn’t thought we’d be done so early. What were we going to do?
Edith emerged from the house, rolled onto her back, and stretched her paws over her head. I reached out and rubbed her downy belly. According to the neighborhood, she’d had a litter of kittens before she shacked up with us. What was it like to have so many? I tried to picture ten babies squirming in her belly, packed in like sticky gummy bears, a tangle of umbilical cords like the cables behind the television. How extravagant that humans have only one, with all that space to itself. No wonder we turned out so entitled.
Ryan opened a beer and tipped the bottle my way. I hesitated with the rim at my lips. “I don’t think I should,” I said.
“Not even a sip?”
I handed it back to him. “From here on out, I want to fuck up as little as possible.”
He sighed. “Good policy.”
Ryan stayed up late. I woke early. We shared the same bed for a few overlapping hours in between. How strange now to wake up beside him, with no sense of alarm, nor any devious thrill. Back when every minute with Ryan felt forbidden, stolen, my senses had stayed keen. Now the urgency was gone, and with it, my desire. We had sex a few times—lights off, I tried to project a fantasy—but neither darkness nor surging pregnancy hormones could summon my lust. Our bodies slammed methodically, a rehearsal of mating. He sensed it and asked me if it was the pregnancy. I said yes. We stopped. We went with that, for now.
Ryan rehearsed or went out in the evenings and I worked days at Artifacts and as long as I could at the studio, trying to earn as much money as I could while I was still mobile and responsible only for myself. Sometimes we wouldn’t see each other until ten or eleven at night. Sometimes, if I could stay awake for more than ten minutes after I got home, we made big late-night snacks, a mountain of nachos or popcorn or spaghetti, and I sat on the counter eating as he drank a beer and we talked. Sometimes one of us would eat leftovers while the other read on the couch, or I would get ready for bed while he showered to go out. Sometimes we would pass each other in the short hallway between the bedrooms and smile awkwardly like strangers in a supermarket aisle. A certain companionable rhythm set in, our lives like two instruments playing at different speeds, falling in sync for brief regular overlaps.
With Flynn I had merged. We yoked together our routines, shared our friendships; even our cycles synced. The intensity gave the illusion of a life impossibly full. Living with Ryan was like living with open space. There were times when I’d come home and hear him drumming in the basement, and I wouldn’t announce my arrival. I’d go about my routine, walking carefully so as not to alert him. The steady beats beneath the floor were like a sense of purpose, spare but persistent. I would catch myself moving or breathing in time with it. This incomplete music.
“I’m a scab,” Ryan said. This was a few weeks into our cohabitation and he was lying on his couch—now our couch—with a pillow over his face, already ten minutes late for practice. As if to prove something, he had joined another band almost immediately. But it turned out the megalomaniac singer, a trust-funder who preferred things tailored to his liking, had fired his entire original band and then thrown together a new session lineup, instructing them to play exactly like his former band members.
“So quit.”
“We just got booked to play the Craig Kilborn show in May.”
“So quit after that.”
“If I can make it to North by Northwest that should be enough money to hold me for a while.”
“The singer’s an asshole to you.”
His hands fluttered up and his voice rose to a womanly pitch. “I just have to let it flow around me. I have to be the pebble in the water,” he said, as if quoting someone. His hands and pitch dropped again. “Whatever.” He sat up and rolled his shoulders and I saw once again how he could slip detachment over himself like a loose shirt. He sent this ripple through his body and then turned to look at me with a calm sweetness. Those creek-colored eyes.
Yet evidence started to surface that Ryan was no quasi-Buddhist pebble. I found a smashed plate in the bottom of the trash can. A split drumstick in the basement. I remembered that boot-level dent I’d noticed in the wall of his emptied apartment. And the guitar, a thing he had loved.
He was always gentle to the living. So I let these things go.
I began to see billboards and advertisements in a new way. A family frolicked on an afternoon-gilded lawn, a woman threw her arms around a man’s shoulders and they gazed at a screen together, everyone grinning and buying, grinning and selling. Insurance, restaurants, real estate, cleaning products. It played out everywhere, this smiling and selling—selling to us. To what we were supposed to be.
It’s the gays who say, We are everywhere, but straightness really was everywhere. The world was sodden with it. Versions of the relationship I was now in played out in everything ever written, acted, sung, sold, declared. The abundance of representation dizzied me. There was so much written and sold about the love and trouble between men and women that if you lined it all up end to end the whole world would be wrapped as thickly and totally as a rubber-band ball.
The unsolicited validation was stunning, and it kindled a new rage in me—rage that I could find almost no evidence of what I’d had with Flynn, or Vivian, or even living with Summer. Our worlds hardly even existed on record, while this one played publicly in endless permutations.
The billboards beamed down at me, Yes, you. The magazine covers flaunted answers to questions I’d never thought to have. What does he mean? How to excite him? How to placate her? Who wants to talk? Who doesn’t? Who drives better? Who cares?
The traffic roared by, oblivious.
To think that doing it with a man had once felt illicit or subversive, when it was just . . . normal. It was a straight world after all. We all lived in it, but I had tuned it out for years, and now I could not.
But how do you tell this to the person you sleep beside each night when they ask why you’re being so quiet, is something wrong? You don’t. You say, “I’m just so tired all the time now.”
When Ryan was around, Lawrence liked to talk music gear with him, and her conversation would even become animated; Meena widened her stance and narrowed her eyes, either half ignored him or listened intently to everything he said, scanning for an offense. She preferred to come by while he was out, and I was okay with that. Summer never came back—unlike me, she was in love jail, all Marcy all the time, and besides, she felt guilty about Bullet. When my turn came to host family dinner, Robin offered to hold it at the Spawn instead, due to my condition. Whether my condition was pregnancy or Ryan I didn’t ask, but I let them have it. I invited Ryan but he said he had rehearsal, and we all let it rest at that. And what a relief it was to join my friends for dinner, even to dive into full gossip, with no need to moderate or explain. When I came home that night, he asked, determinedly casual, “They say anything about me? Was it a bloodbath?” I said, “No bloodbath. They asked how you were and that was that.” True, but I wondered if their restraint was less decorum than avoidance or bewilderment. The family stayed in our comfort zone this time. We needed it.
I met some of Ryan’s people too. He took me to a barbecue on an unseasonably warm May Day. Men drank PBR from cans. Girls in sundresses and little vintage cardigans clustered by the back door and perched like herons on the deck and the arms of chairs. They fingered each other’s hems and sleeves with murmured admiration and gazed at me with a curious, distant serenity. I didn’t know what to say to them. My jeans were partly unbuttoned, which I tried to mask with a belt, and my untucked thrift-store T-shirt was a little too snug on my soft, barely swollen gut. I smiled and kept walking as if I had a purpose.
Out in the yard by the grill I found a couple of women who were rugged and funny and crass, who had tattoos and played in bands or did photography or wrote. They were in their late twenties and early thirties, a little older than me. They pried open bottles with their lighters and smoked while I sipped my ginger ale. I wanted to say something that would make me real to them, more than a background girl, but couldn’t find the words. One of them had a black shepherd mix who leaned into my legs and gave me something to do with my hands. And there were a couple of gay men, one long and bald, one bearded and inked—
All these little signifiers seemed to mean so much at the time, when I was twenty-four and everything meant everything. Any space I entered, I looked for people I could feel safe with.
I liked some of these people. They weren’t the billboard heteros. We overlapped in music and clothing choices, in art and vintage furniture taste, in electoral politics. We’d read the same books. But I never stopped being aware of my hands or the sound of my own voice. I missed my friends and the relief of being unexplained and understood.
The afternoon dimmed to evening and drunkenness settled in. Everyone but me got looser, louder. Ryan moved among them effortlessly. He paused and joked, he introduced me, he had a comment for everyone. I couldn’t tell whom he was closest to, or if there were any he didn’t already know. At parties, I always clung to familiar social rafts, jumped from one and latched on to the next as quickly as I could. But Ryan sauntered through, equally close to everyone. Or to no one at all.