16
The Porch Furniture
THURSDAY AT NOON, Gus was back at his kitchen table, looking less “sexily disheveled” and more like he’d been dragged behind a dump truck with a loose tailgate. He smiled and waved, and I returned the gesture, despite the sick roiling in my stomach.
He scribbled a note: SORRY I’VE BEEN MIA THIS WEEK.
I wished that hadn’t replaced the nausea with the zero-gravity rush of a roller coaster loop. I looked around: I hadn’t brought my notebook in today. I went into the bedroom and grabbed it, writing, NOTHING TO BE SORRY ABOUT as I ambled back into the room. I held the note aloft. Gus’s smile wavered. He nodded, then jerked his attention back to his laptop.
It was harder to focus on writing now that he was back but I did my best. I was about a quarter of the way through the book, and I needed to keep up.
Around five, I (discreetly, at least I hoped) watched Gus get up and move around the kitchen, making some semblance of a meal. When he’d finished, he sat back down at his computer. At about eight thirty, he looked up at me and tipped his head toward the deck. This had been our signal, as close to an invitation as either of us got before we moseyed onto our respective decks and not quite hung out at night.
Now that seemed like a blatantly obvious metaphor—his keeping a literal gulf between us, my readily meeting him each night. No wonder I’d gotten so confused. He’d been keeping careful boundaries and I’d been ignoring them. I was so bad at this, so unprepared to find myself drawn to someone completely emotionally unavailable.
I shook my head to Gus’s invitation, then added a written note to my pass: SORRY—TOO MUCH TO DO. ANYA ON MY ASS.
Gus nodded understanding. He stood, mouthing something along the lines of If you change your mind … then disappeared from sight for a moment and reappeared on his deck.
He walked to its farthest point and leaned across the railing. The breeze fluttered through his shirt, lifting his left sleeve up against the back of his arm. At first I thought he’d gotten a new tattoo—a large black circle, solidly filled in—but then I realized it was exactly where his Möbius strip had been, only that had been blotted out entirely since I last spotted it. He stayed out there like that until the sun had gone down and night cloaked everything in rich blues, the fireflies coming to life around him, a million tiny night-lights switched on by a cosmic hand.
He glanced over his shoulder toward my deck doors, and I looked sharply toward my screen, typing the words PRETENDING TO BE BUSY, VERY BUSY AND FOCUSED to complete the illusion.
Actually, I’d been at my computer for nearly twelve hours and I’d only typed a thousand new words. Though I’d managed to open fourteen tabs on my web browser, including two separate Facebook tabs.
I needed to get out of the house. When Gus looked away again, I sneaked from the table out to the front porch. The air was dense with humidity, but not uncomfortably hot. I perched on the wicker couch and surveyed the houses across the street. I hadn’t spent much time out here, since the water was behind Gus’s and my side of the street, but the cottages and dollhouses on the other side were cute and colorful, every porch packed with its own variation on the lawn furniture theme. None was so homey or eclectic as the set Sonya had chosen.
If I’d had no negative ties to this furniture, I’d be sad to have to sell it, but I figured now was as good a time as any. It’d be one less thing to worry about later. I stood and flicked on the porch light, snapping pictures of each individual piece, and some of the whole set, then pulled up craigslist on my phone.
I stared at it for a moment, then exited the browser and opened my email. I could still see the bolded words from Sonya’s last message. I hadn’t deleted any of them, but I didn’t want to read them either. I opened a new email and addressed it to her.
SUBJECT: Porch furniture.
Hi,
I’m beginning to sort out things at the house. Did you want the furniture on the porch, or should I sell it?
I tried out three separate signatures but none seemed right. In the end, I decided not to leave so much as a J behind. I hit SEND.
That was it. All the emotional labor I had in me for the day. So I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and climbed into bed, where I watched Veronica Mars until the sun came up.
ON FRIDAY, THE knocking on my door came hours earlier than I’d expected. It was two thirty in the afternoon, and as I’d fallen asleep at five that morning, I’d only been awake for a couple of hours by then.
I grabbed my robe off the couch and pulled it over my outfit (boxers stolen from Jacques and my worn-out David Bowie shirt minus a bra). I drew back the linen curtain that covered the window set into the door and saw Gus pacing on the porch, his hands locked behind his head and pulling it down, as if stretching his neck.
He stopped, wide-eyed, and spun toward me as I opened the door.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. In that moment, I saw the part of his gene pool that overlapped with Pete’s in the way that his expression shifted from confusion to surprise.
He shook his head quickly. “Dave’s here.”
“Dave?” I said. “Dave as in … Dave? Of Olive Garden fame?”
“It’s definitely not Wendy’s Dave,” Gus confirmed. “He called me a minute ago and said he was in town. He drove out on an impulse, I guess—he’s in my house right now. Can you come over?”
“Now?” I said dumbly.
“Yes, January! Now! Because he’s in my house! Now!”
“Yes,” I said. “Just let me get dressed.”
I shut the door and ran back to the bedroom. I’d fallen behind on laundry this week. The only clean thing I had was the stupid black dress. So naturally I wore a dirty T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
Gus’s door was unlocked, and I let myself in without thinking. When I stepped inside, it all struck me. We’d been friends almost a month and I was finally in the house I’d peered curiously into that first night. I was tucked between those dark shelves, far overstuffed with books, Gus’s smoky incense smell in the air. The space was lived-in—books left open on tables, stacks of mail on top of anthologies and literary journals, a mug here or there on a coaster—but compared to his usual level of sloppiness, the room was meticulously neat.
“January?” The narrow hall that veered straight into the kitchen seemed to swallow his voice. “We’re in here.”
I followed it as if it were bread crumbs leading to some fantastical place. That or a trap.
I stopped in the kitchen, a mirror image of mine: on the left a breakfast nook, where the table I’d seen Gus sit behind so often was pushed almost flush to the window, and the counters and cupboards on the right. Gus waved at me from the next room over, a little office.
I wanted to take my time, to examine every inch of this house full of secrets, but Gus was watching me in that focused way that made it seem like he might be reading my thoughts, so I hurried into the office. A minimalist desk, all sleek Scandinavian lines and utterly free of clutter, was pushed against the back window.
Where Gus’s house sat, his deck overlooked the woods, but the trees fell away before the furthest right side of the building, and here the view of the beach was unobstructed, the silvery light filtering through the clouds, bouncing along the tops of the waves like skipped stones.
Dave wore a red T-shirt and a mesh-backed hat. Bags hung under his eyes, giving him the look of a sleepy Saint Bernard. He took his hat off and stood as I entered the room but didn’t stretch out his hand, which gave me the disorienting feeling of having wandered into a Jane Austen novel.