NINE #2
It struck me as ridiculous that after eight years of banter and flirtation delivered in sleek boardrooms high atop Manhattan, and at cocktail parties and formal dinners in elegant dress attire, Murph and I were finally getting together while wearing disgusting dirt-stained Parsons Valentine Prosecutors T-shirts.
It was absurd. It was absurd, and it was perfect.
I let out a soft laugh.
He looked up. “What?”
I shook my head, smiling. “Nothing.”
I stood up. Grabbing both of his hands, I backed slowly toward the hallway leading to his bedroom.
“Come here,” I said.
He did.
I lay on my side with my head resting on Murph’s chest, listening to his breathing slow down and even out, and then I flipped onto my back, exhausted and happy and close to sleep.
Murph raised himself up on an elbow and asked quietly, “Do you want some water?”
“Sure,” I said, and my voice came out scratchy. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Water. Yes.”
“Okay. I’ll be right back.” He kissed my cheek, disentangled himself from me, and rolled deftly to the side.
I sat up in Murph’s platform bed, my back resting against the low angled headboard, the covers drawn self-consciously up over my chest, and watched as, unself-consciously, he shoved into gray boxer briefs before crossing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows on his way out to the hall.
In another moment, I heard him opening and closing kitchen cabinets, as he belted out an old Aerosmith song at the top of his lungs.
He was singing it off-key, Broadway showstopper style, and I knew he was trying to be funny for my benefit. I hugged my knees to my chest and grinned to myself. I had gotten my old Murph back, only better. And I really, really liked him.
I felt around underneath the covers for my clothes. They weren’t there. I experienced a fleeting panic before noticing that my softball jersey, underwear, and leggings had been neatly folded and draped across the back of a chair—and I found it oddly touching that he had taken the time to do this.
I retrieved my underwear and lay down to tug it back on, grateful that I’d had the random luck yesterday to have been wearing a pretty pair of robin’s egg blue panties.
Feeling less vulnerable now, I sat back up and peered more closely around Murph’s bedroom. So this is where Jeff Murphy lays his head at night, I mused happily. And probably where he’s laid a whole lot else, too. But I quickly banished this thought.
On Murph’s nightstand sat a Bose SoundDock, his iPhone, and two snapshots in simple black frames. I waited a moment, then, when I was sure Murph was still busy banging around his kitchen, picked up both photographs and examined them.
One showed a tanned, unshaven Murph with his arms slung lazily around the shoulders of a couple of other grinning college-age men.
They were all good-looking guys, wearing windbreakers and baseball caps, holding beers and standing on the deck of a beach house, with hillocks of sandy dunes and scrubby yellow grass visible behind them.
The roommate’s fabled house on the Cape, I presumed.
It was a charming house, shingled and gabled and weathered gray and white in the solid old New England style.
It was handsome and tasteful, and looked completely assured of its place in the world, not unlike Murph and his friends did themselves.
So unlike the suburban McMansions that my parents and their friends all lived in back home, with faux marble columns and yawning two-story foyers, houses with something to prove.
I set the photo back down on Murph’s nightstand and peered closely at the second one, an old-fashioned snapshot of a young family.
An earnest-looking mother and father posed next to a fire truck with two kids—a beaming ponytailed girl and an adorable towheaded boy easily recognizable as a four- or five-year-old Murph.
Murph was hauled up onto his dad’s shoulders, high in the air, and he was wearing a red fireman’s hat that was too big for him.
Murph’s father, I was not at all surprised to see, was himself a handsome man, striking and well made, and quite dashing in a black dress uniform of some sort with fancy epaulets and big brass buttons.
Murph had an astonishingly beautiful and happy-looking family—the sort you would expect to see pictured on the front of a catalog, wearing linen and seersucker and dungarees, running along a beach, or cheerfully knotting a necktie onto a Labrador retriever.
I heard Murph’s footsteps just outside the door and quickly arranged both picture frames exactly the way I’d found them.
Murph strode back into the bedroom and handed me a glass of water. He stood next to the bed, raised his own glass to his lips, and took three or four long swallows.
“Is this your family?” I asked, nodding toward his nightstand.
“What?” He glanced at the photograph. “Oh. Yeah. Those would be my folks.”
“It’s a nice picture. Your parents make a really handsome couple.”
“Thanks. They try.”
“Is that a fire chief uniform your dad’s wearing?” I asked.
“Captain.”
“Oh.”
“He never made chief.”
“It must have been fun as a kid having a dad who was a fireman,” I said.
Murph didn’t respond, draining the rest of his water. Then he asked, “What does your old man do?”
“He’s a college professor. Of economics.”
He smiled as if I’d said something funny.
Then he said suddenly, “Hey, you hungry?”
I glanced at his phone. It was after one in the morning. Neither of us had had anything to eat since lunch the day before. I hadn’t felt hungry at all, but as soon as he asked the question I realized I was starving.
Murph retrieved a stack of delivery menus from his kitchen and splayed them out in accordion fashion on his bed.
We ordered from the all-night sushi place down the block.
Then we slurped miso soup and gorged ourselves on shrimp tempura and spicy tuna rolls while sitting across from each other on his mattress, Murph in navy blue pajama bottoms and me wearing an ancient Williams College Baseball T-shirt of his that smelled of sweat and deodorant and reached nearly to my knees.
In faded letters it read, WILLIAMS MEN DON’T STOP AT THIRD BASE, which made both of us laugh.