Chapter 1 #3
We get under the sheets. We keep our shirts and underwear on. He spoons me and kisses my neck and my ear, and my body is in a riot. I need to leave. I need to stay. I can feel him hard against me. I never felt anything like this for Jay. He falls asleep way before I do and does not explain.
I wake up early. I need to go in search of a bathroom.
I slip off the bed without waking Sam. Once more I put on my jeans and open the door.
The sconce is still on and there are two doors at the end of the hallway.
Both shut. My guess is that the bathroom will be above the kitchen because of the plumbing, so I open the door on the left slowly, just a crack.
It’s not a bathroom. It’s Yash in a twin bed under a yellow bedspread.
He is surrounded by books. Books in piles along the walls and all around the bed, and a few beside him on the yellow bedspread.
He’s on his back with a concentrated, serious expression I’ve never seen before, as if sleep were very hard work.
I shut the door and go into the bathroom across the hall.
Sam is awake when I come back. I get in beside him and there’s a lot of kissing and pressing together.
With Jay I never liked sex in the morning, but sexual frustration in the morning is even worse.
I try to distract myself by looking over his shoulder at the spines of the books on his bedside table.
Confessions of Saint Augustine, Paul the Apostle, Mere Christianity.
Oh.
‘I’m hungry,’ I say. ‘I should get going.’
‘I’ll make you breakfast.’
We go down to the kitchen.
It’s a neglected, old-fashioned kitchen with a chipped ceramic sink and big black and white tiles on the floor.
There’s a back door with a glass window and a little yard outside with one sad chair perched in the overgrown grass.
I sit at the small table against the wall beside the old fridge.
Sam makes coffee in one of those percolators with a plastic cylinder at the top that shows the coffee splashing around.
He keeps his back to me even while he’s waiting for the water to boil.
He fills the cups and asks me if I take milk.
I don’t take coffee so I say no, and he says good, we don’t have any milk, and pants out a laugh.
He sits down opposite me at the table and takes long pulls of the coffee with his eyes closed then gets up for a second cup.
To me coffee is gross and only parents drink it.
I keep thinking I should go but don’t get up.
After his second cup he remembers food. He pulls things out of the fridge and I offer to help but he tells me to sit.
My body is all out of whack. I don’t remember this kind of silence with Jay.
I don’t remember ever wondering what to say or noticing any gaps.
I miss him then, for the first time since we broke up.
I ask Sam how he and Yash got the house and he says they’d been coming over here for dinner since freshman year when they had Gastrell for Late Medieval Lit.
That’s how Yash and Sam met, in that class.
Gastrell got Yash a research job at the Sparrow, Sam says.
Whatever that is. And, Sam says, he lets Ivan use his study in the faculty club.
‘He’s just really generous to his students. It’s too bad you never had him for anything.’
I’m a good student in English. I get A’s and A-’s and nice words at the bottom of my essays.
But I’ve never made friends with any of my professors, all men except for Iyengar.
No one has ever given me a perk or suggested a seminar.
I waited on Professor Wyler at High Five once, I’d had him for Modern Poetry sophomore spring.
He was alone and drank three bourbons and asked me what time I clocked out.
I don’t think he was planning to tell me about the honors program.
If I’d had Dr. Gastrell, maybe I’d have gotten to see his green bedroom, but I doubt he’d have given me this house for the year for nothing.
Sam makes toast and eggs over easy. He sets the plates down on the table with a ketchup bottle and I feel heavy as lead. I force myself to take a few sips of the black coffee.
I hear Yash coming down the stairs.
‘What’s for breakfast, good people?’ he calls before he comes in.
Somehow he knows I’m still here. ‘Morning. Morning.’ He stands at the table, looks down at our plates.
‘No, no, no. How many times must I say it?’ He removes the ketchup and replaces it with red and orange and yellow bottles from the fridge.
‘You must never let Sam make you eggs. It is an exercise in Baptist blandour.’
‘That’s not a word. Even in French.’
‘Blandiosity. Blanditas.’
I pick up the yellow and the orange and sprinkle a few dots on top of the fried eggs.
Yash grabs the third bottle and splashes red all over them.
The labels are faded and I can’t tell if the sauces are from India.
Sam told me Yash’s dad had come to this country alone from Delhi when he was nineteen.
He said that Yash’s dad liked to say he stepped off the plane and the first thing he did was get the craziest girl in Tennessee pregnant.
Sam and I watch Yash make his breakfast. He bounces around from fridge to sink to stove. He puts a kettle on and I’m relieved when he replaces my coffee with a cup of tea. He sits down between us, on the side facing the wall, and starts eating fast.
He looks up after a few bites. ‘Sorry. I eat like a jackal.’
‘Older brothers?’
He shakes his head. ‘Only child. But my mother needed to clean the plates as soon as she served the food. You have siblings?’
‘A brother. And steps.’
His eyes widen. ‘Divorced parents. Yay.’ He looks at Sam. ‘Two heathens against one saint.’
He definitely knows what happened in the bedroom.
Sam takes his plate to the sink. ‘One of her parents might have died, Yash.’
Yash looks at me.
‘Divorced,’ I say.
‘Evil stepmother?’
‘Satan’s sister.’
Sam stays at the sink, rinsing his plate for longer than it takes.
I’ve known a number of religious people and for a while my mother took me to Mass because she was in love with the cantor, but I’ve never known the kind who sleep with Saint Augustine and Saint Paul by their bed.
Sam pours himself another cup of coffee. Number four.
Yash sees me notice. ‘I hope you can stomach the smell of that stuff.’ He looks at Sam. ‘Can I tell her?’
Sam shakes his head weakly.
‘Do you know the Valkyrie?’
‘Who?’
‘Valerie Hayes?’
‘No.’
‘Sam’s old flame. Coffee made her gag. He stopped drinking it for her and he was a beast and that’s a whole different story, but one weekend Sam’s parents came into town and took us out to a lovely brunch and we’re eating our benedicts and Sam’s dad takes a sip of coffee, leans a little too close, and Valerie spews up her eggs so fast no one has time to duck. No one is spared.’
‘It wasn’t that bad.’
‘It was that bad.’
‘My parents loved her.’
‘His parents loved her. Even after that. Good people. Good country people.’
‘Shut up, Rooster.’
‘They’re a tad religious.’
Sam pants. ‘A tad.’
‘A speck. Sam is the rebel. Can you imagine? This is what a black sheep looks like in the Gallagher household.’
Sam is unreadable, looking down into his coffee cup.
‘I have to go,’ I say. ‘Unlike you overachievers, I haven’t even started Dryden’s essays.’
My sweater is upstairs by the bed and I think about leaving it, but my mother knit it for me in high school.
I go upstairs. Sam’s in the hallway when I come back out with it.
I can hear Yash clanking things around in the kitchen.
Sam puts his hands under my shirt and slips them down the back of my jeans.
He tastes like the coffee percolator and moves me back into the bedroom.
He shuts the door. We don’t make it to the bed.
We slide down to the rug and I have my back against the door and he pulls off my jeans and his tongue isn’t on me for more than half a minute before I come and he rocks me with his hands beneath me and does not take his mouth off me and I come some more and I can hear the door banging a bit and I try so hard to be quiet but I can’t do anything but let it out.
He was very good at that.
‘You’re very good at that,’ I say.
He grins up at me. ‘There are some advantages to abstention.’
‘You really haven’t had sex?’
He doesn’t answer.
I know I should ask more questions but I reach for the button of his jeans—no belt today—and he doesn’t stop me.
Everything but, we used to say in high school. Sam and I get really good at everything but.