Floyd Harbor. Joel Mowdy
bubble bath, ready to dip into when she came in from the cold. I cleaned the bathroom. I set up candles on the sink, put a radio on the toilet seat, and found a station playing smooth jazz that floated like steam around the shower curtain. But when I went to fill the tub half an hour before she was to get home, all that came out of the faucet was freezing water. By the time she showed up, I had four huge pots of water heating on the range top and four potfuls already dumped into the tub.
The second time was the following summer. It was blazing hot for over a week, and when I came to Shelly’s house from my line-cook job at night she would moan and wheeze with a damp washcloth on her forehead. On one particularly boiling night she sat up crying in the dark because she felt as though she were suffocating. I told her to get dressed. We sneaked her out the window and walked to a motel on the highway that had air-conditioning.
In early August, when I had just gotten back from tanning and getting my roots bleached, Oryn came home with a big cardboard box. He carried it into the living room, where I lounged on the sofa in my boxers, watching Kids in the Hall reruns.
“I got you something,” he said. He put the box on the coffee table. “Guess what it is.”
“A silk shirt.” He had gotten me three by this time, and the last time I had offended him when I didn’t act surprised.
“Come on, be serious.”
I stretched my leg out to the coffee table and tapped the box with my foot to estimate its weight. The box was heavy. He always brought home samples of shampoo and fragrances that the company gave away. I thought the gift might be that, and I said so.
“No, why would I give you that as a gift? It’s something else. Something you said you wanted.”
I didn’t remember asking for anything. “I give up,” I said.
He opened the box. There were half-used tubes of acrylics and oils, brushes, watercolors, a little bottle of paint thinner, a small palette, and some other painting supplies.
He said, “I know this retired professor who used to teach art history at NYU, and he paints too, and now he’s writing a book on interior design—but anyway, he was getting rid of some old supplies his partner left behind. He said I could have them, so I brought them home for you.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Thank you.”
Oryn seemed disappointed. “You know, that one day when you said you might want to take up painting? That day we were watching that painting show?”
Then I remembered. It was my first week living with Oryn and we were watching Bob Ross paint a landscape on PBS. Oryn leaned in toward me, slowly got his hand under my shirt, and started rubbing my side with the backs of his fingers. He rubbed for about five minutes, finally wedging his hand between my back and the sofa, but I really wasn’t into him touching me right then. I’d told him that I wanted to paint like Bob Ross, just so he would get the point that I wasn’t in the mood.
I sifted through the box of art supplies and felt the weight of a paint-speckled pallet in my hands.
“I guess you don’t want this stuff,” he said.
“Yeah, I think I changed my mind about painting.”
“You don’t even want to try?”
I dropped the pallette back into the box. “I want to finish watching this show, actually.”
He stood there, to the side, by the coffee table, looking at me. The show cut to a commercial and I flipped through the channels.
“Whatever you want.” He picked up the box and carried it toward the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m putting this by the curb. Someone else can take up painting.”
“No, just leave it here.” I had to say that, or the night would be one of him sulking, of long silences and, finally, me mustering up an apology. And whatever way it went at that point, it would conclude with sex. I might as well make it pleasant.
“What, now you want it?” he said.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m not confident yet. I might change my mind. Are you angry? Do you really want me to have it?”
“I want a talker,” he said. “That’s what you were when we met.”
Weeks later, I stood at a pay phone in Penn Station with two garbage bags filled with my belongings. I was moving out. Oryn had lost his job the week before when the whole company shut down. They were commissioned to make the cap for Calvin Klein’s CK One bottle, and the materials they used caused a chemical reaction with the fragrance, made it smell like dog sweat, and they had to recall a shitload of units. They’d screwed up once before with a small shampoo manufacturer in France. It was a kids’ shampoo with a ladybug cap, and the spout, which was also a spot on the ladybug, would pop off and present a choking hazard. That problem was nothing but a hundred-thousand-dollar loss—big deal—but fuck up with the big boys, and there goes your reputation. No one wants your business.
When I left Oryn’s place that evening, I’d meant to go to the college and surprise James, but at Jamaica I got on a train going in the wrong direction and slept until I arrived at Penn Station.
I called James to tell him I was coming. “Come out. I want to play the game.”
“Umm, can’t tonight,” he said.
“Fuck you can’t. Come out.” I checked my warped reflection in the metal plate on the phone and was reminded that I needed to bleach my roots. “Come out, come out, come out.”
“Uh, well, there’s this thing. There’s this stuff.”
“Come out.”
“Who is it?” said a female voice on James’s end.
“Just a friend, sweetie,” he said, his voice distant. Then it came back: “Jared, I really can’t.”
I bought coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts and sat by the escalator. A woman in heels walked quickly down, digging through her transparent purse with fingernails like tweezers, finally pulling out a Metrocard as she stepped off the last sinking step. She trotted down the corridor and around the bend, toward the subway entrance. And you can always tell the group of kids from Long Island going to a rock concert. They sat on the floor by the ticket window before heading off to the venue, laughing at their stupid jokes and posing as though everyone had their eyes on them, as though everyone wanted to be them. And then there was this couple walking in step like they fit each other, the man in his weekend denim and leather, everything scuffed in the right places; the woman’s stride, draped in shining club clothes, threw back the brightness of the station. Their arms crossed each other’s back, and it looked like they’d been walking that way forever. I wondered how anyone ever stayed that way—two people together unchanged—and while I watched them ride the escalator toward the exit at Madison Square Garden, waiting to see them falter, I spilled my coffee down the front of my shirt.
In the bathroom of the Long Island Rail Road waiting lounge, I changed my wet silk shirt for the college sweater I dug out from the bottom of one of the garbage bags. Paint supplies were scattered all throughout the bag. I’d thought that maybe I could sell them to some art fag once I got to the school.
When I left the bathroom, it hit me: about a hundred and twenty pounds on my back, skinny arms around my neck, and long, thin legs in big pants constricting my waist. I dropped my bags and the force of the weight pushed me forward a few steps.
“Jared!” she said. It was Shelly. She got off me and I turned to face her. I didn’t know what to say. It had been the better part of a year since I’d seen her, but only a day since I’d thought about her, and when I’d thought about her she was wearing a black dress and a peacoat with pearls around her neck, her hair cascading past her shoulders. Now she wore these extra-baggy blue jeans and a white shirt with long orange sleeves and matching crewneck collar, the sleeves ending right after the elbows.