18 Truths
18
TRUTHS
Teddy
Was I… friends with Jack Branksome now? Like, in reality?
In some ways, that felt like the biggest change I’d undergone in the past two months, though I recognized that objectively, there was no way that was true.
It was wild, though. He took me to his condo, ordered some food, and reverted to his usual silent self.
I crossed to a wall of windows and looked out. Jack lived exactly where you’d think he would—high in a condo building overlooking the Mississippi River. “Killer view.”
“Yeah, I bought this place with the advance on my first book. Hopefully it’s appreciated enough that I won’t be in the red when I have to sell it because I have to give back the advance for my second book.”
I turned. “You want to talk about this?”
I guess we really were friends now.
“Not really.”
Or not.
“You’re the one who keeps bringing it up,” I said.
He shrugged. “I guess I’m trying to get used to the idea that I might have been a one-hit wonder. Saying it out loud helps.”
I thought about giving him a pep talk, but then I thought, baby steps on this whole friends thing. We watched a movie and ate Thai food until it was time to go.
The setting for Gretchen’s new studio was totally different from the strip mall. It was a cute little main street, in what was probably once its own stand-alone small town, as the buildings looked historic.
“I’ve never been here,” Jack said as he parked. “This is some twee shit.” We got out and started walking. “There it is.” He pointed at a redbrick building on the other side of the street.
There was a taco place a few doors down from it with a sign that said “Cold Beer,” and I started to suggest we duck in for a drink, but Jack took my shoulder and physically steered me toward Gretchen’s building. The front door stood open, and I swear to God, I had a rush of stage fright worse than any I’d ever experienced.
What was wrong with me?
We’d stepped into a big empty space with maybe a dozen people milling around. At the back, a couple people were swinging sledgehammers at some built-in cabinetry. I could hear music thumping from the floor above us.
I saw her before she saw me. She was wearing a hard hat and her back was to me, so I’m not even sure how I recognized her, except that I knew her. In any context.
And that made the damnedest thing happen: it made all my fear evaporate.
And I suddenly understood why I was here. It had nothing to do with Anna’s recording session. Jack had been right.
I was in love with Sourplum.
Of course I was. She had floated with me in the lake, in her ruffly marshmallow swimsuit, and told me—gently—what was wrong with me. She told me how to fix it. And I let her do that because she understood me. Because in a lot of ways, we were the same. She was ambitious and brave and a fighter. She was also a bunch of things I wasn’t: wise and cheerful and beautiful.
We’d talked so much about contexts. About what was and wasn’t allowed. We could sleep together because we weren’t dating. It was “allowed” because we were at camp, which was somehow a different category from reality. She’d set it up as if we were exploiting a loophole.
I didn’t want a loophole. I wanted reality, a reality that included camp. But also this. I wanted all the contexts.
“I’m going to do it,” I whispered to Jack.
“Holy shit. Really?”
Yes. I was going to shoot my shot. I had never been more sure of anything in my life.
Overdue reckoning was about to come due.
My surety took a hit when I realized that Gretchen was low-level freaking out. I motioned to Jack to join me in hanging back to the side of the entryway, and to my surprise he did so without comment.
Gretchen was talking to a tall man also wearing a hard hat. “What do you mean?” she asked, her voice high and thin.
“It’s not the end of the world. It will add some time and money, but not a catastrophic amount of either. And there’s no mold, so it must be recent. Maybe triggered by when the seller uninstalled the dishwasher before the move.”
“This is like one of those shows where the contractor brings the bad news,” Gretchen said, her tone verging on hysterical. It was strange: I hadn’t known hysterical was a mode Gretchen did.
Rory, who had been huddling with Gretchen and the tall man, saw us and made her way over.
“Is everything OK?” I asked, still eyeing Gretchen.
“It will be. The contractor discovered a leak in the kitchen upstairs. Gretchen is taking it uncharacteristically hard.” She tilted her head and watched Gretchen take her hard hat off and run her fingers through her hair. “She usually rolls with the punches better than this.”
Yeah. Like her voice, Gretchen’s overall energy was very not Sourplum. She was stiff and she started pacing. I was no expert on body language, but to my mind she didn’t look like a person celebrating a milestone birthday and a business triumph. She looked like someone who would rather be anywhere but here.
“Do you think this is a good idea?” I asked Rory carefully. “The new studio, I mean.”
She whipped her gaze to me. “Do you think it’s a good idea?”
“You know her better than I do.”
“Do I?”
She seemed to want me to talk, so I did. “I don’t know. Just that at Wild Arts, Gretchen started doing some choreographing. Not for the studio, but some kind of personal project. I don’t know that much about it, except that she was on fire with creativity and… well, it was something to see her like that. And then it all went away when she was getting ready to leave.”
Rory nodded as if she’d expected this answer, but when I asked, “She told you about it?” she switched to shaking her head no.
“But I can tell something’s been going on with her since she got back.” We all watched Gretchen pace as Rory added, “She wanted to do something else. Something more. She thought this”—she gestured around—“was it.”
“Maybe it is.” Who was I to say otherwise?
She turned and did the narrowed-eyed thing at me again. “Why are you here, Teddy?”
Aww shit. Well, here went nothing. “I have… certain things I need to say to Gretchen.”
That seemed to be the right answer. “Gretchen!” Rory called. “Look who’s here!”
I was a deer in headlights as Gretchen turned. I couldn’t move anything below the neck, but I could feel my eyes widen and my mouth fall open like I was a fucking idiot.
It was OK, though. She would smile at me—or smirk, or roll her eyes—and say something snippy but fond, and I would be OK.
I caught sight of Maiv, making her way toward us. Normally, I would have greeted her, but she must have sensed the tension in the air because when she got within about six feet of us, she listed to one side and made like she’d merely been walking in a big circle near us. Jack guffawed.
“Jack,” Rory said, looking between Gretchen and me, “can I interest you in taking a giant pronged hammer thing and using it to destroy stuff?”
“You can indeed.”
Which left me and Gretchen. Sugarplum. Sourplum.
“What are you doing here, Teddy?”
There had been no smile or smirk or eye roll accompanying the question, just an unnervingly blank expression. I started to panic.
I thought about leading with the chaperone question, but I had enough functioning brain cells left to realize that wasn’t a good idea. Clearly Gretchen didn’t have the time to be lazing around in a studio for a week helping me with my shit.
“I think you are my muse,” I blurted.
“What?”
“I think you’re my muse,” I said again, as if the only problem here was that she hadn’t heard me the first time. “Remember when you told me I should sleep with you because maybe I’d get over my inability to write songs?”
“I was kidding about that.”
“I know, but I’m not.”
“So I’m your muse,” she said with what seemed like a strange lack of inflection.
“Yes.”
“Well, no thanks.”
I blinked. “I’m not sure it’s something you can accept or reject. It just is. ‘Sweet and Sour’ is about you, you know. I mean, it’s about a lake, but it’s also about you.”
“No.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. I hadn’t asked a question.
“Have you listened to anything I’ve been saying?” she said, her voice rising. “I’m done dating.”
“I know, but—”
“You can’t be here,” she said slowly, like she was talking to a child. “I didn’t agree to this. This is the opposite of what I agreed to.”
I could not argue with that. I was supposed to be her last hurrah. Maybe I’d been promoted to camp boyfriend there at the end, but I should know that camp boyfriends weren’t reality boyfriends. Look at me, I’d somehow gotten Jack as a real friend and Gretchen had to remain a camp friend.
Well, fuck.
I guess sometimes you shoot your shot, and you get shot down.
I could feel a kind of hysteria taking root in my brain. I pushed it away. If Gretchen never wanted to see me again, I was going to tell her some shit she probably didn’t want to hear. Because that was what you did when you loved someone—which I still did, even though it wasn’t mutual. “Can I say one more thing? Something unrelated?”
“Can I stop you?” she said, her voice resigned in a way that made me sad.
Here went nothing. Maybe I was wrong. But I didn’t think so. And if I was right, it needed saying. “You’re using the studio as a shield. You’re using this whole businesswoman/entrepreneur identity as a shield. A distraction.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I don’t think you want to be doing this.” I gestured around the room.
She didn’t say anything, just looked at me with a degree of affront that made me feel shaky. But I pressed on. “You don’t want me. Fine. But I think you want to be a choreographer.”
“Fuck you, Teddy,” she said, and I recoiled as if she’d struck me. “Go back and listen to ‘Lemon Tree.’ I’m the fruit. I’m sour. By choice. Don’t be telling yourself I’m sweet. Listen to the lyrics.”
I kept going. She had already rejected me, so I was determined to say what she needed to hear. “What happened to the hole?” I still didn’t know exactly what had been up with that, but I didn’t have to. I’d seen how it energized her. “You were on fire for a few days there.”
“What happened is that in normal life, you can’t fuck around digging holes. In normal life, you have to do your job.”
“I’m making a solo album,” I said. “I’m going to play all the instruments. I’ve got more songs than I can use. I wrote a ton over second session when you weren’t there.”
“So you were inspired by my absence ,” she shot back. “Sort of seems like I’m the opposite of a muse.”
Normally, a comeback like that would have been delivered in a bantery way. It would have delighted me, and I’d have dished something back. But there was no bantering here. She meant what she said.
So I kept pushing forward. It was all I knew to do. “These songs are completely different from Concrete Temple. They’re folk-rock.”
She didn’t say anything, just continued to gaze at me with a blank expression that freaked me out.
“I’m doing something new,” I said, in case she wasn’t getting the point. “I’m as scared as you are, but I’m doing my scary thing.”
There was a pause that felt like it lasted a year, but it was probably only five seconds, before she said, “I’m not scared. I’m busy.”
The way she was looking at me as she lied to my face: wow. She knew I knew she was lying, but she did it anyway. That was what hurt the most, more than her not wanting to be with me. To me, it said that all our frank conversations in the woods, in the lake, in bed, hadn’t meant anything. I understood the concept of camp friends, or a camp boyfriend, or whatever, but wasn’t half the point of those camp relationships that they cut out the bullshit? That without the distractions of technology, of cars and cities and jobs and family, you skipped straight to the truth? Confronted your own bullshit? Had your overdue reckoning?
I certainly had. I wasn’t the same person I’d been ten weeks ago. Some of that was down to the setting, to Wild Arts itself. But a lot of it was down to Gretchen. She floated next to me in the lake and listened. She lay in my arms—in the reverse Fruit Roll-Up and, later, in my bed—and told me her secrets. I’d thought. A prickling sensation started behind my eyeballs.
Fuck. I had to get out of here before I started crying.
So that was what I did. Turned and hightailed it out of the building in which Gretchen was preparing to imprison herself.
Jack followed. “Hey, let’s get that beer now.”
“No thanks.”
I crossed midblock, aiming for his car. When he didn’t follow, I got out my phone. “I’ll get an Uber.”
“OK, OK.” He jogged across the street. “Get in.”
I got in because it was the path of least resistance—the path that would get me out of there the fastest—but I would have preferred an Uber. My mind was reeling and my skin was hot all over. Shame, I was pretty sure. This was what shame felt like.
“Was that supposed to be your declaration of love?” Jack asked as he pulled away.
“Uh, yeah?” Jesus. Had he heard anything I’d said?
“I heard that song you wrote, that night at the fire at Wild Arts. How can you be so, to use a phrase I abhor, emotionally intelligent but also so utterly dumb?”
“Huh?”
“How can you write a song like that about the nuances of human relationships but approach your own like a caveman with a cudgel?”
I didn’t know what a cudgel was, but I suspected the idea of me having and/or using one was not a flattering portrayal.
“Look. I know I was hard on her, but I thought I owed her some straight talk. She’s making a mistake walking away from choreographing. I truly believe that, regardless of my feelings about her.”
“Right. And what are those feelings?”
“I would have thought that was apparent. You’re the one who’s been telling me I’m in love with her.”
“I told you, sure, but you didn’t tell her .”
“Yes I did. I—”
Wait.
“You made a cryptic, awkward speech about how she was your muse.”
“Yes, but…”
“My dude. You never told her how you felt about her. Only what she did for your music.”
“Well, shit .” I hadn’t intended it to sound like that. I’d only meant that she was so fucking amazing that she’d knocked me out of the pity party I’d been having and made it so I could write again. “What do I do now?”
“Maybe you should think about telling her how you feel independent of all this artistic bullshit.”
“How do I do that?”
“Hell if I know. I’m sorry you’ve ended up with me as your advice-giving sidekick, but I have reached my limit for the day—for the year—of navigating other people’s interpersonal problems. In fact, this is all so cringy that the idea of going home and working on my book seems less painful.”
“Glad I could help.”
The thing was, Jack wasn’t wrong. When I rewound the tape of the evening, I could clearly see the moment I was struck with how much I loved Gretchen. She’d been standing there in her hard hat at the center of her party, and I’d been overcome in a way you are when you finally see the truth. Overcome and energized. But then I’d seen the other truth, the mistake she was making. And I loved her too much to let her make it, or at least to watch her make it without saying anything. The worry had overtaken me, and the expression of that worry had crowded out the expression of what was in my heart. And since she had—seemingly—so soundly rejected me, I’d become fixated on knocking her off this wrong path. A parting gift, if you will.
I got my truths out of order.
Maybe she was making a mistake with the new studio. But who was I to say that? Who was I to lead with that?
God, I was such a fucking idiot.
I called my sister. Who would tell me I was a fucking idiot, but hopefully also tell me what to do in a more concrete way than Jack had managed.
I explained everything, and she said, “You need a big gesture.”
“What?”
“You know, a grand gesture. Like in a rom-com.”
“Like Lloyd Dobler holding the boom box over his head?” I asked, thinking back to my joking reference to exactly that at camp—I’d known that Gretchen would find such a thing distasteful and creepy.
“Exactly.”
A wisp of an idea floated through my brain.
“You know what I actually need?” I said. “A gesture that is both grand and funny.” Assuming I was going to try again.
Was I? I closed my eyes and tried to will the wisp into something more substantial. Something actionable.
Did I dare?
Well, shit, of course I did. I could hardly make things worse.
“A gesture that’s grand and funny,” Auden echoed. “How are you going to pull that off?”
I didn’t know if I was going to pull it off. But I was sure as hell going to try.