Homesick for Another World(21)

“No,” I replied, disgusted. And then for some reason—maybe I wanted to school her, blow her mind—I said, “I’m not a fag—I’m a homosexual.” I pronounced the word very carefully, elongating the vowels and punctuating the u, which I thought was a pretension quite in keeping with my statement.

“For real?” she said, flicking her cigarette and gazing down at my crotch. “How do you know MJ?” she asked. I put my shirt back on.

“A friend,” I said.

“What kind of friend?” she asked.

“A very dear friend,” I replied. The words just came out of me. I sat in the armchair and crossed my legs. Michelle seemed to read my mind and offered me a cigarette. She looked at me suspiciously. I smoked as faggily as I could, bringing the cigarette to my puckered lips, sucking my cheeks in, then flinging my arm out, hyperextending the elbow as I exhaled to the side. I had her fooled, I knew. I was like a purring cat.

“You come up here a lot?” she asked. “To see MJ?”

“From time to time,” I replied, swinging my foot. “When we can both get away.”

The girl kept sniffling. She threw her cigarette out the open door and closed it, went and knelt by the fire, warmed her hands.

“Where’d he go?” she asked. She was uneasy, but she wasn’t the type of girl to get offended. I was familiar with girls like her—tough, blue-collar teenagers. They were around when I was an undergrad, off campus. There was one like Michelle who worked as a bartender in a small pool hall my friends and I went to because we thought it was quaint. That girl was beautiful, could have been a movie star if she’d wanted to, but she just chewed gum and had dead eyes and seemed immune to all manner of flattery or abuse. That’s what Michelle was like. She seemed immune. And for that reason, I felt impelled to hurt her.

“He went out,” I said, “to buy a corkscrew.” I pointed to the Chateau Cheval Blanc on the floor next to my overnight bag.

She picked up the bottle, smeared her nose on her sleeve. She was pretty. A cold face with small features like a child’s, no wrinkles, no expression. She held the bottle by its neck and swung it around, squinted at the label. “You like wine?” she asked. She was being polite, making conversation. I was afraid she’d drop the bottle and break it. I tried to sound relaxed.

“I love wine. Red, white,” I said, “rose?.” I tried another word. “Blush.”

“MJ didn’t tell me you were going to be here,” she said, putting the wine down. “We’d had a time set and everything.” She shrugged, flipped her hair.

“He’ll be back,” I said. “We’ll sort it out.”

She nodded and sniffed and crossed her arms and looked down.

“Are you hungry?” I asked her. The second Whopper was still in the bag on the counter by the sink. I pointed.

“No, thanks,” she said.

“I’m a vegetarian myself,” I said. “MJ likes that kind of food.” I was feeling very clever, very bold. “That’s what I love about him—childish tastes.” With this statement I felt I had surpassed a misrepresentation and graduated to fraud, from novice to expert. “He just likes to play. Play and play. I suppose that’s what you two do together?”

She sat on the bed, folded her legs up Indian style. “We smoke,” she said. “Crystal?” She pulled a small glass pipe from her pocket, a crumpled ball of foil, displayed them to me on the palm of her hand like a fortune-teller or a blackjack dealer, then laid them on the blanket beside her.

“Aha,” I said. I must have looked like a grandfather to her. She was perched on the bed there like a bird, hair flipping magically with a flick of the wrist in the quivering light from the small window. We passed a minute or two of long, dramatic silence. I felt I was in the presence of some great power. Then it suddenly occurred to me that MJ might show up.

“Maybe I should go,” I said. “Leave you two to it.” She didn’t try to stop me. I collected my things. I put my boots on. But I couldn’t leave the girl in there alone. This was my cabin, after all. I sat back down. She looked at her phone for a while.

“No reception,” she mumbled, biting her lips. She yawned.

There was one thing about my brother I loved. He was loyal. He would punch me, and he would insult me, but he would not betray me. Despite all our differences, I believe he understood me. When we were younger, seven and ten, I suppose, our mother worked at an after-school day care at a church and would let us play in the backyard, where there was a swing set and a sandbox and a bush with berries on it we were warned not to touch. But I liked to collect the berries. I filled my pockets with them and flushed them down the toilet when I got home. MJ and I barely spoke all afternoon. He was a little kid. He dug in the sand and pissed in it, spat, threw rocks at squirrels, shimmied up the posts of the swing set, threatened to throw a shoe at my head. I mostly sat on a swing or under a tree. I was too smart to play any games.

As the weeks passed, we got bored and started taking walks through the neighborhood. It was a wealthy suburb—pretty Dutch Colonials, some big Victorians. Those houses are worth in the millions now. We just strolled around, peering into windows. MJ liked to rifle through mailboxes or ring doorbells, then run away, leaving me standing there with my hands in my pockets. But nobody ever came out of those houses. MJ must have known nobody would. He dared me to do things, stupid things, but I was a coward. “Pussy brains” is what MJ called me. I barely cared. He could say what he liked. He could do whatever he wanted to me. I knew, when the time was right, I would get back at him.