The Night Before(37)

He has a bottle of scotch and he pours two glasses.

“I know. It’s pathetic. Maybe we can go to IKEA on our next date … assuming you still want to have one. I do. I know that much.”

He hands me the scotch and leads me to the sofa in the otherwise empty room.

We sit on opposite ends. Still, it’s small and when he pulls one knee up onto the cushions, he’s one lean away from me.

“Tell me more about the fun things. The good things,” he says. “It sounds like you have great memories of your childhood—with your sister and her husband and the other kids in the neighborhood. It must have been incredible to grow up next to all those woods.”

Well, when you put it that way …

“I guess it was happy in some ways.” I say this and I somehow even believe it. Yet the word “happy” is not quite right. I try to clarify.

“It’s strange, though. I can pick out certain moments that, in my mind, right now, play back as joyful. Like—oh my God! How we used to tightrope across this enormous fallen tree. And right below it was the nastiest pool of mud and skunk cabbage you can imagine. I nearly fell in it once, but I dug my nails into the bark of that tree so hard that I was able to hang on and shinny to the other side.…”

Joy.

“But then other times, I remember this unrest that was always there, casting a shadow on everything.”

Anger.

“Well, that was your father, right? Your mother knowing he was cheating. Crying in the kitchen to your neighbor—what was her name?”

“Mrs. Wallace. Gabe’s mother.”

“Right—of course you were unsettled. Your very foundation was like quicksand.”

I nod solemnly. It was all Dick’s fault. So neat and tidy.

I change back to the joy.

“I had my first kiss in those woods.”

“Really!” he says, and I feel him shift a little closer. I didn’t mean to be provocative. But now it’s too late.

“It was nothing romantic—believe me! There were seven or eight of us. We were playing spin the bottle by this fort we’d made with a piece of plywood.”

“Very high-tech.”

“Yes. Very,” I say, smiling now. “Rosie and Joe weren’t there. I’d brought two friends home from school. Gabe was there. His brother, Rick, but only because of this girl, Noelle, who also lived on our street at the time and was in Rick’s grade. I think she had a friend as well.”

Jonathan Fielding adjusts himself with nonchalance, but manages to move a little closer.

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen, maybe. Joe and Rosie were together by then, so they were sixteen and seventeen. Gabe was sixteen as well. His brother was about eighteen. I don’t know—we were all teenagers.”

“A giant pool of raging hormones.”

“Ugh…” I cringe at the image he’s put before me. “Anyway—there were three boys there. One of them I didn’t even know and I can’t remember his name—can you believe that? The first boy I ever kissed and I don’t even know his name.”

“That always seemed strange to me, that game. Kissing friends in front of other people, then watching them kiss other friends.”

“I only played that one time, but I didn’t like any of the boys that way and thank God the bottle never landed on Gabe. He was my best friend, so that would have been awkward.”

This was not entirely true. I would come to like one of those boys after that day. If like and desire are one and the same.

“I’m just saying—as a guy—that it would have been more than weird. He would never have looked at you the same way.”

“He was like my big brother, so I don’t think he would have even done it. It would be like kissing Joe. Can you imagine if he’d been there? Jesus.”

A little closer now, with a shift of his leg, a move of his elbow.

“It sounds a little incestuous—your neighborhood. Growing up together like that, and then Rosie and Joe getting married. They know everything about each other. Sometimes I think it’s good to have some things you keep to yourself, or only share with people you aren’t involved with. People who can be objective.”

“And who won’t use your past to win arguments over who has to take out the garbage.”

“Exactly!”

Awkward silence. I drink more scotch. Thank God for scotch. He takes my glass. He gets up and goes to the kitchen. I hear ice cubes. I hear them crack when the liquor hits them.

“So you kissed that one guy whose name you don’t remember. But not Gabe. And the other boy who was there—Gabe’s brother?”

He returns, hands me the drink. Sits noticeably closer and I realize he got us refills for this sole purpose. There have been many kisses since that first kiss. I know what’s what.

“Yeah—Rick. He was a bad kid. Down to his bones. He spent nine months a year at military school in Virginia, but he came home for a few summers. His mother used to cry about him to my mother in our kitchen. She was actually relieved when he joined the army.”

“And you had to kiss this guy?”

“Yeah. Kind of killed the whole first kiss thing—the guy I didn’t know and the guy I wished I didn’t know. But it was really short—he was a little scared of me, to be honest.”