Julia #2
“Hell, no.” He set down a stack of clean glasses.
“Think about it: Romeo and Juliet bucked the system, and look where it got them. Superman has the hots for Lois Lane, when the better match, of course, would be with Wonder Woman. Dawson and Joey—need I say more? And don’t even get me started on Charlie Brown and the little redheaded girl. ”
“What about you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Like I said, it happens to everyone.” Leaning his elbows on the counter, he came close enough that I could see the dark roots beneath his magenta hair. “For me, it was Linden.”
“I’d break up with someone who was named for a tree, too,” I sympathized. “Guy or girl?”
He smirked. “I’ll never tell.”
“So what made her wrong for you?”
Seven sighed. “Well, she—”
“Ha! You said she!”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, Detective Julia. You’ve outed me at this gay establishment. Happy?”
“Not particularly.”
“I sent Linden back to New Zealand. Green card ran out. It was that, or get married.”
“What was wrong with her?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Seven confessed. “She cleaned like a banshee; she never let me wash a dish; she listened to everything I had to say; she was a hurricane in bed. She was crazy about me, and believe it or not, I was the one for her. It was, like, ninety-eight percent perfect.”
“What about the other two percent?”
“You tell me.” He started stacking the clean glasses on the far side of the bar.
“Something was missing. I couldn’t tell you what it was, if you asked, but it was off.
And if you think of a relationship as a living entity, I guess it’s one thing if the missing two percent is, like, a fingernail.
But when it’s the heart, that’s a whole different ball of wax.
” He turned to me. “I didn’t cry when she got on the plane.
She lived with me for four years, and when she walked away, I didn’t feel much of anything at all. ”
“Well, I had the other problem,” I told him. “I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in.”
“What happened then?”
“What else,” I said. “It broke.”
· · ·
The ridiculous irony is that Campbell was attracted to me because I stood apart from everyone else at The Wheeler School; and I was attracted to Campbell because I desperately wanted a connection with someone.
There were comments, I knew, and stares sent our way as his friends tried to figure out why Campbell was wasting his time with someone like me.
No doubt, they thought I was an easy lay.
But we weren’t doing that. We met after school at the cemetery.
Sometimes we would speak poetry to each other.
Once, we tried to have an entire conversation without the letter “s.” We sat back to back, and tried to think each other’s thoughts—pretending clairvoyance, when it only made sense that his whole mind would be full of me and mine would be full of him.
I loved the way he smelled whenever his head dipped close to hear what I was saying—like the sun striking the cheek of a tomato, or soap drying on the hood of a car. I loved the way his hand felt on my spine. I loved.
“What if,” I said one night, stealing breath from the edge of his lips, “we did it?”
He was lying on his back, watching the moon rock back and forth on a hammock of stars. One hand was tossed up over his head, the other anchored me against his chest. “Did what?”
I didn’t answer, just got up on one elbow and kissed him so deep that the ground gave way. “Oh,” Campbell said, hoarse. “That.”
“Have you ever?” I asked.
He just grinned. I thought that he’d probably fucked Muffy or Buffy or Puffy or all three in the baseball dugout at Wheeler, or after a party at one of their homes when they both still smelled of Daddy’s bourbon.
I wondered why, then, he wasn’t trying to sleep with me.
I assumed that it was because I wasn’t Muffy or Buffy or Puffy, but just Julia Romano, which wasn’t good enough.
“Don’t you want to?” I asked.
It was one of those moments where I knew we were not having the conversation that we needed to be having.
And since I didn’t really know what to say, never having crossed this particular bridge between thought and deed before, I pressed my hand up against the thick ridge in his pants. He backed away from me.
“Jewel,” he said, “I don’t want you to think that’s why I’m here.”
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them. “Then why are you here?”
“Because you know all the words to ‘American Pie,’” Campbell said. “Because when you smile, I can almost see that tooth on the side that’s crooked.” He stared at me. “Because you’re not like anyone I’ve ever met.”
“Do you love me?” I whispered.
“Didn’t I just say that?”
This time, when I reached for the buttons of his jeans, he didn’t move away. In my palm he was so hot I imagined he would leave a scar. Unlike me, he knew what to do. He kissed and slipped, pushed, cracked me wide. Then he went perfectly still. “You didn’t say you were a virgin,” he said.
“You didn’t ask.”
But he’d assumed. He shuddered and began to move inside me, a poetry of limbs. I reached up to hold on to the gravestone behind me, words I could see in my mind’s eye: Nora Deane, b. 1832, d. 1838.
“Jewel,” he whispered, when it was over. “I thought . . .”
“I know what you thought.” I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.
· · ·
I blame Campbell Alexander entirely for my bad luck with relationships. It is embarrassing to admit, but I have only had sex with three and a half other men, and none of those were any great improvement on my first experience.
“Let me guess,” Seven said last night. “The first was a rebound. The second was married.”
“How’d you know?”
He laughed. “Because you’re a cliché.”
I swirled my pinky in my martini. It was an optical illusion, making the finger look split and crooked. “The other one was from Club Med, a windsurfing instructor.”
“That must have been worthwhile,” Seven said.
“He was absolutely gorgeous,” I answered. “And had a dick the size of a cocktail frank.”
“Ouch.”
“Actually,” I mused, “you couldn’t feel it at all.”
Seven grinned. “So he was the half?”
I turned beet red. “No, that was some other guy. I don’t know his name,” I admitted. “I sort of woke up with him on top of me, after a night like this one.”
“You,” Seven pronounced, “are a train wreck of sexual history.”
But this is inaccurate. A runaway train is an accident. Me, I’ll jump in front of the tracks. I’ll even tie myself down in front of the speeding engine. There’s some illogical part of me that still believes if you want Superman to show up, first there’s got to be someone worth saving.
· · ·
Kate Fitzgerald is a ghost just waiting to happen. Her skin is nearly translucent, her hair so fair it bleeds into the pillowcase. “How are you doing, baby?” Brian murmurs, and he leans down to kiss her on the forehead.
“I think I might have to blow off the Ironman competition,” Kate jokes.
Anna is hovering at the door in front of me; Sara holds out her hand. It is all the encouragement Anna needs to crawl up on Kate’s mattress, and in my mind I mark off this small gesture from mother to child. Then Sara sees me standing at the threshold. “Brian,” she says, “what is she doing here?”
I wait for Brian to explain, but he doesn’t seem inclined to utter a word. So I paste a smile on my face and step forward. “I heard Kate was feeling better today, and I thought it might be a good time to talk to her.”
Kate struggles to her elbows. “Who are you?”
I expect a fight from Sara, but it is Anna who speaks up. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea,” she says, although she knows this is the very reason I’ve come here. “I mean, Kate’s still pretty sick.”
It takes me a moment, but then I understand: in Anna’s life, everyone who ever talks to Kate takes Kate’s side. She is doing what she can to keep me from defecting.
“You know, Anna’s right,” Sara hastily adds. “Kate’s only just turned a corner.”
I place my hand on Anna’s shoulder. “Don’t worry.” Then I turn to her mother. “It’s my understanding that you wanted this hearing—”
Sara cuts me off. “Ms. Romano, could we have a word outside?”
We step into the hallway, and Sara waits for a nurse to pass with a Styrofoam tray of needles. “I know what you think of me,” she says.
“Mrs. Fitzgerald—”
She shakes her head. “You’re sticking up for Anna, and you should.
I practiced law once, and I understand. It’s your job, and part of that is figuring out what makes us us.
” She rubs her forehead with one fist. “My job is to take care of my daughters. One of them is extremely ill, and the other one’s extremely unhappy.
And I may not have it all figured out yet, but .
. . I do know that Kate won’t get better any quicker if she finds out that the reason you’re here is because Anna hasn’t withdrawn her lawsuit yet.
So I’m asking you not to tell her, either. Please.”
I nod slowly, and Sara turns to go back into Kate’s room. With her hand on the door, she hesitates. “I love both of them,” she says, an equation I am supposed to be able to solve.
· · ·
I told Seven the Bartender that true love is felonious.
“Not if they’re over eighteen,” he said, shutting the till of the cash register.
By then the bar itself had become an appendage, a second torso holding up my first. “You take someone’s breath away,” I stressed. “You rob them of the ability to utter a single word.” I tipped the neck of the empty liquor bottle toward him. “You steal a heart.”
He wiped up in front of me with a dishrag. “Any judge would toss that case out on its ass.”
“You’d be surprised.”