Bring It on Home to Me
Bring It on Home to Me
We were together by Christmas. I would’ve been embarrassed by the swiftness of it if anyone had been around. Upper Manhattan was like our own private snow globe.
Raj lived in a university-owned building too, just a few blocks from mine, but he and his roommate had bought rugs and a rice cooker and multiple lamps with dimmer attachments. I was constantly marveling at the lighting. The first night I slept over, he put up tea lights along a crown molding ledge near the ceiling—one tiny flame every foot or two, down the hallway, around the living room and his bedroom, even in the bathroom. It tinged everything with hushed, flickering sepia.
I had packed a toothbrush that night. I felt very aware of my toothbrush in the backpack as we ate the dinner he’d cooked, a whole roasted chicken with lemons and rosemary. Otherwise I had taken no special measures for the evening. I was wearing the plain black T-shirt and skinny jeans that I had started wearing every day and would wear some version of for the next several years, having decided that my bangs could do the heavy lifting in signifying the existence of a personality.
We kissed in the sepia that night for a long time, standing on our knees in the center of his bed. I liked how he kissed me. Sweet, short kisses on the lips, threaded together by compliments and self-effacing jokes. He had a George Harrison smile, toothy and bashful, lopsided. Several times he kissed me through the smile.
“I keep picturing you putting up these lights,” I teased, between kisses. “Did you use a ladder?”
He looked down, hiding the smile. His nose brushed against my lips. “Stepladder,” he whispered.
“Mmm. So grown-up.”
“Mmm.”
A playlist traveled from a laptop through real wired speakers installed above his bed, lots of Cat Stevens and Carly Simon, like a classic rock radio station’s chill-out hour. I didn’t mind it. It was impossible to mind anything in that lighting. Then Sam Cooke came on, “Bring It on Home to Me,” the exact song you want to hear while kneeling on a soft surface with a man in a candle-rimmed room.
I collapsed onto him, hoping he understood not to say a word until the song was over. He held me quietly through the first call-and-response with Lou Rawls. I felt his chest draw in, about to speak, but I shushed him in time. People think of Sam Cooke as a voice more than a songwriter, but he wrote this shit. Sam Cooke was a miracle.
We started to sway in the second and third verses, as the strings got louder, building with the gospel longing in his voice. The increasingly soulful swing of the drums. I noted the absence of a bridge, but this was soul; it didn’t need one. For a song about brutal rejection and heartbreak, it’s strange that it makes me feel so heart-swellingly happy, always, just drowning in joy to be alive on this earth.
By the time it ended I had decided I never wanted to leave this apartment. At least not until spring. In spring we could wander out to Central Park.
We didn’t talk about the song. I was sort of relieved not to have to hear myself go on and on about it. We resumed our kisses, which grew longer.
“What do you want to do?” he said eventually. “I mean, I’m happy to spend the whole night kissing, but.”
“Right,” I said. I’d overindulged his generosity.
“Just checking in.”
I sat down on my heels. “Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be sorry.”
“I didn’t mean sorry,” I said. “I just—I’m not super, you know, experienced.”
“Okay. Well, you’re young.”
“Am I? I feel too old to have had sex only one and a half times.”
He sat down against his pillows.
“Thanks for telling me that,” he said. “I’m more experienced, but I’m twenty-nine. At your age I had only slept with one person, I think. Anyway, I figured there was something, based on your last submission for workshop—I figured something had happened toyou.”
“Oh god.” I saw the piece again in a terrible, embarrassing light. “Did I come across as completely damaged?”
He tried to look kind. “It was quite a bit of vitriol for Leonard Cohen.”
I groaned. “Honestly, nothing has happened to me. That’s the problem with my life, more than anything, probably: nothing has fucking happened. I don’t deserve to write a piece like that. I didn’t have some terrible boyfriend or father or something, if that’s what you’re thinking. My dad wouldn’t even hug me once I grew breasts.” This wasn’t a thought I’d had before, at least not so clearly. But I realized it was true. A memory arrived, fresh from the deepest well of my mind, of my dad hugging me while walking home from kindergarten. I had tripped on nothing and scraped my knee. Dad’s chest was warm and so broad I could barely get my arms around it.
Raj was waiting patiently. “Of course, something has happened to everyone,” he said.
“I mean, sure. There has been some unpleasantness at the hands of men.”
He didn’t say anything.
“And the one and a half times I did have sex were terrible, absolutely terrible. But mostly it’s just been Joe, or the fantasy of Joe, and that’s lasted for so long that I’m worried it’s gotten to a point where Joe has become…” I couldn’t say the rest out loud. It was too predictable.
Raj pulled a pillow over his lap and retrieved his glasses from the nightstand. “So, okay, let’s attack this. First, there’s this Joe loser, touring Europe with his band—ugh, sounds like a real waste of space. You’ll forget him soon.”
I smiled.
“Then there’s the terrible sex. Can I ask what part of it was terrible?”
“All of it.”
“Specifically, I assume, the intercourse?” He wrinkled his nose. “Sorry for that word.”
I nodded. “Yeah. That.”
“Okay. We won’t do that.”
And we didn’t. I stayed until summer.