“I can’t keep it together when I’m around you,” he says. “I’m acting like a teenager.”
He asks if we’re still on for Friday. Says that over these past weeks, he thought about me constantly, was surprised at how much he missed me. At that, I narrow my eyes. Why surprised? “Because really we don’t know each other that well,” he explains. “But, my god, you’ve gotten to me.” When I ask him what he did for Christmas, he says, “Thought about you.”
The week feels like a countdown, like slow footsteps down a long hallway. Once Friday night arrives, it hardly feels real to shove the black nightgown into my backpack while across the hall Mary Emmett belts out that five-hundred-twenty-five-thousand-six-hundred-minutes song from Rent with her door wide open and Jenny strides by in her bathrobe on her way to the shower. Strange to think that for them it’s just another Friday night, how easily their ordinary lives go on, running parallel to my own.
At nine thirty I check in with Ms. Thompson, tell her I don’t feel well and that I’m going to bed early, then wait until the hallway is clear and sneak out the back stairwell, the one with the broken alarm. Hurrying across campus, I see Strane’s station wagon waiting with the headlights off in the lot behind the humanities building. When I throw open the passenger door and slide inside, he pulls me close, laughing in a way I haven’t heard from him before—manic and gasping, as though he can’t believe this is really happening.
His house is sparse and cleaner than I’ve ever seen my parents’, the kitchen sink empty and shining, a dishrag drying on the faucet’s long neck. A few days ago he asked what I like to eat, said he wanted to have my favorites on hand, and he shows me the three pints of expensive ice cream in the freezer, a six-pack of Cherry Coke in the fridge, two big bags of potato chips on the counter. There’s a bottle of whiskey on the counter, too, along with a glass holding a mostly melted ice cube.
In the living room, there’s no clutter on the coffee table, only a stack of coasters and two remote controls. The bookcases are neatly arranged, nothing thrown in sideways or upside down. As he leads me on a tour, I sip a soda and try to appear impressed but not too impressed, interested but not too interested. Really, though, I’m trembling all over.
His bedroom is the last room he shows me. We stand in the doorway, bubbles pinging inside my soda can, neither of us sure of the next move. I have to be back at Gould in six hours, but I’ve been here for only ten minutes. His bed stretches out before us, neatly made with a khaki comforter and pillows in tartan cases. It feels too soon.
“Are you tired?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Not really.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t be drinking this.” He takes the soda from my hands. “All that caffeine.”
I suggest watching TV, hoping to remind him of the offer he’d made of sitting on the couch and watching a movie, holding hands.
“I’m sure to fall asleep if we do that,” he says. “Why don’t we just go ahead and get ready for bed?”
Turning to his dresser, he opens the top drawer, pulls something out. It’s a pajama set, shorts and a tank top made from white cotton dotted with red strawberries. They’re neatly folded with the tags still attached, brand new, bought especially for me.
“I thought you might forget to bring clothes to sleep in,” he says, putting the pajamas in my hands. I say nothing about the black nightgown in the bottom of my backpack.
In the bathroom I try to make as little sound as possible as I peel off my clothes and break the tags off the pajamas. Before I put them on, I stare at my face in the mirror, peek in the shower at his bottle of shampoo and bar of soap, inspect everything on the counter. He has an electric toothbrush, an electric razor, and a digital scale that I stand on, curling my toes as the numbers flash—145, two pounds less than I was at Christmas.
Holding up the tank top, I wonder why he chose this particular set. Probably because he liked the print—he’s said before that my hair and skin remind him of strawberries and cream. I picture him browsing a girls’ clothing section, his big hands touching all the different pajamas, and the thought fills me with tenderness, similar to how I felt a few years ago when I saw a photo of that famous gorilla cradling her pet kitten, the vulnerability of someone so big handling something so delicate, trying their best to be careful and kind.
I open the bathroom door and step into the bedroom, shielding an arm across my chest. The lamp on the nightstand is on, a soft warm light. He sits on the edge of the bed, his shoulders hunched, hands clasped.
“Everything fit ok?”
I shiver and give a half nod. Outside the window a car drives by, the noise approaching then receding, a hush of silence.
He asks, “Can I see?” and I step toward him, close enough for him to wrap his fingers around my wrist and pull my arm down. As his eyes move over me, he sighs and says, “Oh no,” like he’s already sorry for what we’re about to do.
He stands, folds down the comforter, and, under his breath, goes, “Ok, ok, ok.” He says he’ll stay dressed for now, which I know is meant to soothe me, maybe also himself. On his shirt, dark circles spread out from his armpits, just like during the convocation speech the first day of classes.
I slide into bed beside him and we lie on our backs under the covers, not touching, not talking. The ceiling is covered in cream and gold tiles that form a swirling pattern my eyes circle around and around. Beneath the down comforter, my hands and feet are warmer, but the tip of my nose stays cold.
“My room at home is always cold like this, too,” I say.
“Is it?” He turns to me, grateful I’ve made this somewhat normal by speaking. He asks me to describe my bedroom, what it looks like, how it’s arranged. I draw a map in the air.
“Here’s the window facing the lake,” I say, “and here’s the window facing the mountain. Here’s my closet and here’s my bed.” I tell him about my posters, the color of my bedspread. I say that in the summers, I wake sometimes in the middle of the night to the sound of loons screaming out on the lake, and that because the house isn’t well insulated, ice forms on the walls in the winter.
“I hope someday I get to see it for myself,” he says.
I laugh at the thought of him in my bedroom, how big he’d seem there, his head brushing the ceiling. “I don’t think that’ll ever happen.”
“You never know,” he says. “Opportunities come up.”
He tells me about his childhood bedroom in Montana. It was cold in the winter, too, he says. He describes Butte, the old mining boomtown, once the richest place on earth and now a depressed brown basin cradled by mountains. He describes the abandoned headframes poking up between the houses, how downtown was built on the side of a hill and how at the top of that hill is a big pit of acid left over from the mining.
“That sounds horrible,” I say.
“It does,” he agrees, “but it’s the sort of place that’s difficult to understand until you see it for yourself. There’s a strange beauty in it.”
“Beauty in a pit of acid?”
He smiles. “Someday we’ll go there. You’ll see.”
Under the comforter, he links his fingers through mine and continues talking, telling me about his younger sister, his parents; how his father was a copper miner, intimidating but kind, and his mother a teacher.