Chapter Eight
Javanese gamelan performing “Kinds of Flowers”: Music of Earth
It was summer in Seattle, the best season.
There was blue everywhere—the sky above, the water below.
The clouds were fluffy white confection, the evergreen trees a proud, deep green.
The beaches were crowded, and little dots of swimmers sprinkled the lakes, and in the sound, triangles of white sailboats everywhere, too.
All around were the zips of bicycles and speedboats.
And it was too hot for pizza. This weather meant watermelon and sandwiches.
Hot dogs and potato salad, peaches and Popsicles.
I had a lighter work schedule, but you sure didn’t.
The Center for Wooden Boats, a tucked-away treasure in South Lake Union where people could rent historic wooden boats to take out on the lake, was always busy.
“Come, please?” you asked for the hundredth time.
“Are you sure? I mean, your workplace? Your boss and all?”
“It’s Chester. You know Chester.”
I did know Chester. At least, I was beginning to.
And Santiago and Norty, Lily, and Rainey, too.
Ben was pretty shy. I’d gone with you to the top of Tiger Mountain three more times already, and he hadn’t said a lot more than hello.
But Chester, who seemed to know a lot about a lot of things, showed me how to ward off a bear if I ever saw one in the wild, and taught me how to tell when the sun would set, and always said I reminded him of his niece.
Norty shared his fruit gummies with me, and showed me how he could zip up his jacket and walk backward, and Rainey asked me lots of questions about college and my future.
She’d studied business at UW, like I was supposed to, but changed her mind midway and recently became a librarian instead.
Lily, though. She was the one who was closest to you.
You two had a thing, a grandmother-grandson thing, not that I had any great experience with those.
My dad’s parents died when I was little, and so did my mom’s dad, and I only knew my grandmother through the checks she’d send in the mail and the phone conversations that always upset my mom.
But Lily was the kind of grandma most people hoped for.
She wasn’t anything like your real grandma, your dad’s mom, who lived in New Mexico and was fussy and prim and the sort of religious that’s actually just a cover for racism and more.
Lily was smart and funny, with so many interesting experiences, and I could tell she loved you.
With her playful eyes, she taught me telescope basics.
How, yeah, they magnified things, but their larger purpose was to collect light.
She told me that Galileo said that telescopes revealed the invisible, and that, to her, telescopes proved that invisible things, unseen things, could be as real and true as that tree over there.
We’d been a couple for a little over a month, so I knew a lot of things.
All the petals that made up one flower. I knew that you bought your old VW by selling a vintage record collection, which was hard, but necessary.
Hard, because you loved music, and all old records reminded you of the old record, the golden one, that beautiful and somehow inexplicable record on a record, a record of us—a holy relic time capsule of outreach to the future and to other.
Necessary, because you had to leave, you know.
Home. As often and in as many ways as you could. Leaving was breathing.
I knew, too, that you thought dandelions were the underdog of flowers, and that you’d scoop a spider onto a paper towel instead of killing it, and that you pretty much only judged people who judged.
You didn’t like to talk about your dad, not because his death was some big, traumatic thing, but because you had little to say about a guy who felt like a stranger after only a handful of visits to New Mexico over the years.
You worried about your mom, a lot, and didn’t drink alcohol because she did drink alcohol.
You could fix almost anything, from cars to kitchen sinks, because you and your mom had plenty of everything that had broken down.
Your pants were always slipping down your hips, and you used your milkshake straw as a spoon, and you believed in always taking your shoes off at the beach and looking at sunsets and staying up as late as you needed to in order to see a meteor shower.
You were a collector of people; you had friends of all ages.
That kept coming up again and again, didn’t it?
How different we were that way? Because over and over I saw it, how friendly and open you were in ways I sure wasn’t.
People saw my hesitancy first, an uncertainty that they sometimes thought was aloofness.
But your kindness and curiosity were the first things anyone noticed about you.
Most of all, what I knew was that you were golden.
We saw each other as often as we could, at night after work, and on our days off.
We went to Shilshole Beach, and on a hike up Mount Si, and we talked on the phone late at night, you in your room, and me outside, sitting behind the big tree in the backyard so I couldn’t be heard.
Because, in terms of knowing things: Your mom knew about me, but my parents didn’t know you existed.
Sure, she barely tolerated my presence the handful of times I saw her, treating me the way a kid might treat the peas on his plate, eating a few because you had to, for now.
But I hadn’t given my mother or father the chance to do even that.
I hiked with Addison and went to the beach with Addison and was on the phone with Addison.
I’m so sorry. You hated that. You tried to understand, but didn’t really. It was a maroon flag! I didn’t want my dad to destroy things with his blustering control. You were like a precious ruin he could bulldoze, or a beautiful historic building he’d smash with a wrecking ball.
Okay, well. I was wrong about what would destroy us.
I also maybe liked the secret; I admit it.
I understood Maurice, the way none of us were aware that he’d still been playing drums, performing for months with Sandrine in Solar Flare.
No one’s boots could stomp your flowers if the flowers were in a secret garden.
It could flourish or not on its own. It could do what it needed to do and be what it needed to be.
But the garden was just so sweet, too, you know, so deliciously hidden, so much mine, when no one else knew about it.
I wouldn’t say that I loved the secret more than I loved you, but I did love it.
It was so great, honestly. Secrets get such a bad reputation, but when you’re used to people in every corner of your life, taking it, taking you, smooshing their selves over your breathing face, a secret is a place to be alive.
I told Addison and Priya about us, though.
Addison seemed relieved, like she didn’t have to worry about me anymore, now that she had Liam and Priya had Maddie.
She wanted us all to get together, meet you, at least, but I kept making excuses.
I was still protective of my garden. You were the kind of guy who’d have gotten bullied in our middle school.
Sorry to say that, but it was true. I couldn’t even imagine you and Liam in the same row at a movie theater.
See, I was someone who thought dandelions were underrated, too.
And I did tell Winnifred Evans. Weirdly (I thought weirdly), she didn’t even give me a hard time about keeping us a secret from my parents.
Instead, she said, I notice how you always use the word alive when you talk about him.
I got the idea that she approved of the way that my life was suddenly larger.
Trying new things, she said. A real relationship, not in your head.
Taking risks, she said. Being out in the world, she said.
Kind, she said. Pfft, she said about my maroon flags. But she was wrong about that.
You and me—our emojis had gone from whales and otters to comets and fire.
Starbursts and lightning. After that kiss at the concert, there were so many more, in your car and at the beach and in your room, and everywhere.
We didn’t have sex or anything. Maybe I’d be ready when you’d be ready, but maybe you’d be ready when I was; it was hard to tell.
But I did also know how your skin felt. I knew what it was like to be in your room, to slide my hands up your shirt after we’d heard “Music of the Spheres,” Sounds of Earth on the Golden Record, haunting tones meant to correspond to a century of planetary motion.
And what it was like to loosen the drawstring of your shorts, too, after the Chinese ch’in “Flowing Streams” on the record ends and the raga “Jaat Kahan Ho” begins, kissing you silent after you started to explain that raga meant color, mood, passion.
Do you remember when Janite came home once unexpectedly and caught us all intertwined on the couch?
Oh my God. Your shirt was off, and mine was all hunched up.
We flung ourselves upright. I’d never been more embarrassed in my life.
She was pissed, but silently. I hurried out of there.
She didn’t seem to like me anyway, even if you kept trying to tell me otherwise, something you said to make me or you or us both feel better.
The next night, we were supposed to go to Seattle’s Outdoor Cinema with Maurice and Sandrine to see Asteroid City, out on Lake Union Park, but you canceled.
Janite was sick, you said, and you needed to stay around.
Maurice insisted I go with them anyway, and I loved being with Sandrine.
She made all this great food, because she could cook, too, but it was awkward. I kept thinking they’d rather be alone.