Here So Far Away(75)

As the pared-down cast spoke their lines, they leapt around, clamored over a moving set made of entirely of barrels and ladders, tossed one another into the air—athletic and forceful but also graceful and fluid. The stage lights went out and they somehow tumbled with lit candles in the darkness, and my eyes blurred again, it was so beautiful, and because it was so like Francis rolling down the mountain ridge with his flashlight the night I begged him to love me.

And the soul of the maiden, between the stars and the fire-flies,

Wandered alone, and she cried,—‘O Gabriel! O my beloved!

Art thou so near unto me, and yet I cannot behold thee!

Art thou so near unto me, and yet thy voice does not reach me?

So close and yet so far away.

I found myself thinking about how I would have described it to Francis, starting with how shockingly nimble Keith turned out to be. Then I remembered that if Francis were alive, he wouldn’t have been around to tell, and if he had been around to tell, I probably would have missed the play.

The applause was as thundering as half an auditorium could be, especially when Lisa took her bow.

“S’alright,” Joshua said. Dozens of white balloons had been released from the rafters and were now drifting down to the stage.

“Yeah. S’alright,” I said.

Nat and the boys were starting to make their way into the aisle, but I wasn’t in a hurry to return to real life. “Back in the fall I saw these small hot-air-balloon-type things floating up the north mountain,” I said. “Out of nowhere. It was so strange.”

“Paper lanterns. East Riverview science club does it every year.”

We watched the cast kicking the balloons into the audience.

“Well, whaddya know, Joshua.”

“I didn’t know it was your birthday until after I left the rose. I just felt bad about how you got suspended.”

“I deserved it.”

“So did she.”

He took a swig from the thermos, wiped a drip off his chin. “I never got why you lied about what happened between us, George. It’s not like there weren’t other girls who could vouch for me. But it seems like you paid for it five times over.”

I was slow to work out what he was saying, and then I couldn’t believe it—he hadn’t believed it! All this time, he thought the bad kiss was something I’d made up, the one truth at the center of all those lies.

I suppose I could have set him straight. Maybe his future girlfriends would have thanked me. Then again, Christina might have already sorted him out. And, you know, sometimes the truth is overrated. Years later I convinced Bill that I made out with Bryan Adams in the back of a Greyhound bus, and though he eventually clued in that I was pulling his leg, he still loves to tell people that story.

“I guess I wasn’t ready for a grown-up relationship,” I said, which was as close to true as we needed to be.

Joshua lightly touched a curl over my ear. Then he passed over the home brew. Unlike some of us, it lived up to its reputation.





Thirty-Seven


Doug dropped Bill and me off at Bill’s house before heading to the cast party at the Grunt. I started walking home, but decided to try sobering up first. Two seconds later I found the fifth cookie in my coat pocket, and decided to try not sobering up first. I must have walked for a couple of hours, through the old section of town, past the cat lady’s house and around the sawmill, looping back to Main Street, where I became fixated on the store windows. They were like museum exhibits, re-creations of eras gone by. The pharmaceuticals of yesteryear. The hardware of yore.

Dirty dishes and a large chartreuse feather on a key chain were all that remained of the cast party when I peered into the Grunt. I went inside, slipped into a booth, and ordered a coffee, leaving the keys on the table where Lisa had left them. Pushing my damp hair out of my eyes, I contemplated sugar, but the metal bowl with its flip-up lid was looking at me in a menacing way. I tapped it a couple of times, tried to provoke it into action, before deciding to drink my coffee plain.

And then she was there. The atmosphere of the Grunt was golden and luminous in my dilated eyes, making Lisa appear as though she were in the floodlights of some fancy Broadway show. “I love you,” I said.

It just slipped out.

“Why are you being gay?”

“People need to stop saying things like that. It’s the nineties.”

I started to cry.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“What is wrong with me is that I’m emoting a real emotion for once and I’m ruining it by being high and also having hands that don’t want to work at all.”

I flapped my hands at her until she grabbed them and held them on the table. “Right,” she said, sitting down. “You can put the cork back in the bottle.”

“Lise, listen to me.”

“I’m listening—”

“Shhhh. Listen to me. I loved your weirdo circus play. It was so you. I knew it would be good.”

“George, I know you tried to stop it.”

Now I was bawling.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No, it’s not. You were right. I’m such a”—here I sprayed her ever so lightly with saliva— “bitch.”

“I never said you’re . . . I said that to Christina, not you.”