Never Is a Promise
When I finally saw Joe it was at his debut gig, in the basement of a popular bar close to campus. He killed. Granted, he’d stacked the audience with friends from home, girls with blown-out hair and back-slapping dudes—he was the Beatles to them—plus his many roommates and every college classmate he’d ever chatted up. It was enough to fill the space with a great, buzzy energy. The drummer and bassist had been chosen for their devotion to the cause more than their skills, but they kept a steady beat, and Luke Skinner’s guitar sounded great, at least until he turned his amp up too loud halfway through the set. Joe’s singing had improved too, though it still lacked the round confidence of when he sang alone to me.
I watched from the back like Oz behind the curtain. Nobody knew me. Nobody knew that lyric had been my idea. How lucky he was to take these songs public, to stand up there in the glow of their magic.
He closed with “Funny Strange” in its new form, easily nailing the new lyrics’ complicated, behind-the-beat phrasing. The crowd became destabilized by multiple discrete pockets of dancing girls; the guys either filtered to the back or began nodding vigorously, pumping their fists. I could barely see him now, there were so many hands in the air. “Thanks for coming out,” he said into the mic after the song’s crashing end, and yanked the plug from his guitar.
Immediately he was enveloped by hugs. I waited uncertainly for a while, holding my plastic cup of beer. Maybe it was five minutes, maybe fifteen. When my cup was empty I walked home alone.
It’s fine, I said to myself, over and over. This is fine. My friend played a show and it went well. I opened the door to my apartment: no Megan. I crawled into my bed fully clothed and turned on the TV. This was normal. He was my friend; I had helped him. I thought about calling Zoe, telling her how it went, but that felt wrong. Everything felt wrong.
Then the doorbell rang and he burst through the door, sweeping me into a hug, whirling us in a circle, shouting thank-yous into my hair: “We did it, we did it, thank you thank you thank you.” I responded with uncontrollable giggles, all my nerves releasing in tiny pockets of air.
When the whirling stopped it seemed strange that we were still in my hallway, that we hadn’t been transported to another, more colorful dimension. He leaned against the back of my front door, still holding me. I wanted to lift his T-shirt and crawl up in there. I looked at his face. The smile was gone; he looked like I felt now, serious and charged. His forearms rested on my shoulders now, loosely. I saw an opening to pull his hips in until they touched mine—it was such an easy move, I’d seen it in movies, it was right there. I summoned every scrap of courage from every cell of my body and then I did it: I hooked my fingers in his belt loops and tugged.
A tortured sound came from deep in his throat.
“What?” I said, panicking. Too aggressive. The wrong move. Oh god. Humiliation inflamed me, burning the entire organ of my skin. Why didn’t I just lean in for a kiss like a normal person?
“They’re waiting for me at the bar,” he said. “I just came here to thank you.”
I flinched. It felt like a violence. “Too soon?” I said, in a voice that didn’t sound like mine.
He shook his head. “It’s not that.”
Another flinch, this one worse. “So…never?”
“I can see it all like a movie in my head.” He looked like he was trying to back up, but he had nowhere to go, so his body inched up against the door. “We’ll be happy for a month, or a year, and then we’ll break up and it’s just—you’re too—oh god, this sounds terrible, but you’re too important. You know? Like you said when I asked why you don’t write songs—remember?”
“But that’s me,” I said, genuinely confused. “You’re not a person who’s afraid of trying.”
“Maybe I am,” he said, inching up again. “About this, anyway. Sex is weird and embarrassing, and you’re…you’re my critic.”
This echoed in my brain, louder and louder. I began to feel sick. I stared into the blackness of his T-shirt, the fraying collar, refusing to cry. I hadn’t fully admitted it to myself, I realized, how badly I wanted him.
“And I love your criticism!” he said. “I can’t lose that. I can’t .”
I looked up at him sharply. “Buddy, I can stop helping you with your songs any time I want.”
“No, you can’t.” A coolness entered his eyes, and his body seemed to settle, his heels planting. “You love it too much. You’ve never had this much fun in your life.”
“Neither have you.”
We stared at each other a minute, breathing audibly, his nostrils flaring slightly on each inhale. Then he looked away. “Maybe you’re not my type,” he said limply. He focused on his left forearm, which still rested on my shoulder. “I can see how I might’ve implied otherwise, fall semester. Once the album started coming together I got my head on straight.”
A garish visual appeared in my head of me and Zoe in a split-screen juxtaposition, like they do to celebrities in People magazine: her straight, muscular body and bright black makeup facing off against my curves, my mousy hair, my heavy stare. The sight was so painful I heard myself utter a small cry, and began squeezing my head with both hands.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I released my head and held up a warning finger. “Look,” I said. “I want you to know I’m not waiting around for you to change your mind. What you’re saying, right now, is never—you and I are never going to happen. And never is a promise.”
This was a Fiona Apple song I had loved in high school. I intended it as a negotiating tactic—fishing for a shrug, a foot wedged in a closing door, a never say never. What I got instead was a look of recognition, and a slow, serious nod. “And I can’t afford to lie,” he said, finishing the lyric.
It made me livid. “Why the fuck are your fucking hands still on me, then?”
He sprang off and pushed past me down the hall, into the kitchen and into the living room, then back into the kitchen. I stalked after him and watched him fumble in my fridge until he produced two bottles of different brands. He placed them across from each other on the kitchen table, then went into the living room and started digging through my CDs.
I sat and opened one of the beers, still adrenal. “I don’t have it,” I called through the open kitchen door.
“I’ve seen it here,” he insisted. He moved to the stacks on the bay window seat, where we kept leftovers from parties and never-returned loaners, and finally held it up. Fiona Apple’s whitewashed face bobbed at the end of his arm. He started “” and walked back to sit with me at the table.
The thing about Fiona is she fully commits. She’s not worried about sounding maudlin; she is always 100 percent inside of her emotions. Her songs can sometimes be a little tuneless as a result, weighed down by the heaviness of being Fiona Apple, but not this one. The melody moves with her emotions: low and limited when she’s pissed, climbing intervals with the release of her epiphany. Fiona would never do what you’re doing, I wanted to say to Joe, sitting at that tiny table, both of us peeling the labels from our bottles. Fiona would fuck me.
“Well, that was depressing,” I said when it was over. I didn’t mean this strictly as a complaint—the song had scratched the exact right awful itch, elevated my sadness to the cinematic, if only briefly. But it landed like a cheap shot, and I let it.
He looked miserable. I felt a flash of guilt for ruining his big night—but no, he had ruined it! He had ruined it! What a night it could’ve been, we would’ve stayed up till dawn again, we would’ve worked on his songs in fits of postcoital inspiration!
“Why are you even still here?” I said. “They’re waiting for you.”
His expression hardened at my tone. “Look, I don’t get red A-pluses in the corners of my papers. I don’t get proud parents. This is all I get.”
“Well, they adore you.” I gestured to the door. “Go forth and receive.”
He stood. “You should be with someone better anyway. Someone who doesn’t rhyme ‘bad’ with ‘sad.’?”
A line I had mocked—gently teased, really—in the original “Funny Strange.” “Good point,” I said, standing, pushing in my chair. “Or ‘frosty’ and ‘costly,’ while we’re at it.”
I saw him wince as he turned away. This was from the final version of the song, an awkward, forced line I had never mentioned because the rest of it was so good and I felt I’d used up my critiquing chips.
I followed him to the door. He turned back at the last minute, in the same place where I had made my big move, his expression suddenly open. “Perce? Is this going to ruin everything anyway? Because if everything is ruined anyway, we might as well just go for it.” He put a hand on his belt buckle. “Seriously.”
It made my skin prick with horror, the idea of losing what we had together, whatever it was. “No,” I said quickly. “You’re a jerk for saying it, but you were right: I’m having too much fun.”
“Oh thank God,” he said, sighing. He leaned back against the door again and ran a hand through his hair. “It’s a bit of a relief to have it off the menu, honestly.”
I nodded numbly. “Eighty-six the sex.”
“Hah—yeah! We’ve still got the collaboration, the conversation, right?”
I couldn’t stop myself from frowning. “So which am I, your collaborator or your critic?”
He ignored this, keeping the tone upbeat. “My point is, sex is just one thing on the menu. It’s not even the best one!”
I hesitated. This had been true in my experience so far. But the sex we’d been about to have, in my head, was better than any collaboration in history, better than Lennon and McCartney going eyeball-to-eyeball in Hamburg. I reached around him to turn the doorknob, put my hand on his chest, and shoved him out.
—
I met Zoe at Cafe Milano the next morning and she made me tell the story twice. I ordered a coffee and a low-fat cranberry muffin but couldn’t consume more than a few sips of the coffee. The muffin smelled like cough syrup.
After the second retelling she went concave, hugging herself. She wasn’t drinking her coffee either.
The first thing she said was “Not his type, my ass. He can’t keep his eyes off you. And we’ve had multiple conversations about how gorgeous you are.”
This made me feel better, though I wasn’t convinced. It seemed to me the truth was probably somewhere in the middle, and the middle hurt just as much as the idea of him being completely repulsed by me.
“I’m not buying the excuse about protecting the music either,” Zoe said. “?‘Too important’? Joe’s a weirdo, and he’s very driven with his music, but he’s still a red-blooded college boy.”
“Seriously,” I said. “We were this close to kissing—in my apartment, alone—and he’s thinking about his songs ?”
Even though I was agreeing with her, my insistence seemed to make her reconsider. “Well, he is always thinking about those damn songs.”
“He mentioned me making fun of his rhymes too.”
“What’s weird is he’s never been the type to care what people think, until he met you.” Then she nodded suddenly, firmly. “That’s the problem: his ego can’t handle you. It can handle you creatively, although just barely—he knows he needs you—but it can’t handle you in the bedroom. What a spineless little boy.”
I saw it clearly, finally, a Venn diagram diverging in my head. He needed me to be his critic. But a critic will never be girlfriend material.
I moaned. “Why am I like this, Zo? I have nothing but respect for his songwriting—and admiration, and envy, honestly—why can’t I just tell him that?”
“Stop it,” she said firmly. “He begs you for your criticism.”
I slumped over my muffin.
Zoe looked over my shoulder so intently, I thought for a second he might be standing behind me. “He’s a bit weird about promises, you should know.” Then she told me that when his mom was first diagnosed with cancer, his dad had promised him she wouldn’t die. And when she did, of course, little Joey was furious. “He felt like he would’ve spent the summer differently if he’d known, spent more time with her or whatever. He’s taken promises super seriously ever since.”
My eyes stung, as always when I imagined Joe that summer. “Cool,” I said, blinking hard. “So by trying to find an opening, I actually slammed the door completely shut.” I sat back in the rickety café chair, astonished by my stupidity. “Why do I push so hard?”
“That is not what I said,” she said. “It’s really grossing me out how you keep blaming yourself.”
Then a new thought occurred to me: if the promise had been my idea, it had less power than Zoe seemed to think. I could wait it out. I could be less critical in the meantime. More patient.
“This is classic Joey,” Zoe was saying. “Obfuscating everything so there’s nothing left to do but blame yourself. It’s borderline Republican, honestly. Global warming is all our fault, we didn’t recycle enough!” She was getting breathless, her chest puffing, teeth on edge. “God, this is making me so glad Joey Morrow is finally out of my life. He can be a real manipulative son of a bitch.”
“Don’t call him that,” I said sharply. And then I doubled down: “Don’t call her that.”
I held her gaze as her face registered surprise, then hurt, then a sputtering pissiness. “It’s something people say, Percy. Are you serious right now?”
I didn’t know who I was defending. Maybe Joe, maybe his dead mom, maybe just my right to hate myself, which I’d been doing since long before I met either of them. My chin inched upward of its own accord; a defiant muscle twitched in my jaw. I felt a small, pathetic relief of having exited a crossroads, having chosen a path—not the one I’d wanted, but at least Joe was on it.
“Fuck you, Percy,” Zoe said, and sent her café chair skidding.