“But I want to know more,” I say, with far too much vulnerability. And it doesn’t matter because I’ve already pushed things too far into ruin.
Elijah laughs. Not at this, but at something Roslyn’s said to him as they walk out the door. Something he doesn’t like, something he has to mimic joviality about and add “You know, I don’t know if you know how funny you are” to complete his response. He walks right up to Sun and hugs her. Hugs, rocks back and forth, hugs. And then looking at me, Elijah smiles even bigger and goes to hug me. The man is hugging me. Really hard. His beard brushes against my neck. His ginger goatee. It reminds me of Becks’s pubic hair, wet from sweat, shaved into damn near the same oval. Oh look, Sun and I have similar tastes in white people.
They walk right in front of us, the two of them, the official couple. The couple licensed and approved by time. Roslyn takes my hand again, pulls me on. I grasp it, keep staring ahead. She puts a hand on my chin, and aims my face at hers.
“You are a beautiful mixed man,” Roslyn tells me. This is not true, but it is truly a lovely mantra. For I am a beautiful mixed man. “You are a strong multiracial warrior,” she continues. “Thank you” doesn’t seem enough so I give her a kiss on her cheek. The side of her face offers much-needed warmth as I watch Sun and Elijah entwined a few feet beyond.
—
There’s a small, hand-painted, black-and-white sign with a white angel playing guitar on it. Under it is a door, and through that door, steps that lead to the second-story loft above an empty Greek restaurant. All the Oreos are up there. There are so many Oreos, it makes me want to eat one. “It really is a delicious cookie,” I whisper in Roslyn’s ear, and she nods and smiles because it’s loud and she can’t hear me. It is a delicious cookie, really, it is clear to me now. The chocolate crust, the creamy white cloud on the inside. “How could it be an insult?” I ask Roslyn, and she says, “I don’t know. I believe it’s guitars and banjo. Or perhaps ukuleles.”
The space is a shotgun, with a stage at the back, a few couches already filled with people sitting on every available surface. Roslyn walks toward one of them, and I look at the people crowded around it and I know them. They are the faces of people I sometimes nod to as I walk the grounds of Mélange, and sometimes they nod back. And sometimes they don’t, because I have an angry face or they heard the gesture is called a nigganod and want nothing to do with it. But they are fully invested in her, Roslyn, the great matriarch of the new people.
“How’s that date going?” is screamed into my ear. I turn to see Spider smiling.
“It’s gone to shit. I thought you weren’t going to be here?” I yell.
“Came to see the aftermath,” he yells back, then wags his head right and left as he laughs. He takes me by the arm, pulls me farther away from the speakers, sits right on the floor, and leans against the wall. I kneel down knowing how hard it’s going to be to get back up again, deciding not to do so till the alcohol in me is ready to find its final resting place in the toilet.
“It turns out, I don’t understand Sunita,” I tell him. “I don’t know if it’s a gender thing, but I don’t get her.”
“Don’t feel bad. I don’t understand some women either, and I was born one.” Spider shrugs, offers me a swig of the flask he struggles to yank out his hip pocket. I’m looking at the bottle, a lovely steel job, shiny, curved like the edge of his leg. But I’m thinking, He’s serious.
“You really were a woman?” I lean harder against the wall. I push into it. I want the outline of my body to mold into the plaster so something in my life feels firm.
“Yeah man, I told you. Biologically. Never quite fit in any other way, though. So I did what I had to do. This is, like, what, fourteen years ago?” He sees the way I’m looking at him. Because I’m not looking, I’m inspecting. I’m checking the leathered folds giving parentheses around his smile, clocking the receding stubble of his hairline, looking for the bulge of an Adam’s apple under the ink that crawls over his neck from out of his shirt. “Testosterone. It’s a helluva drug,” Spider adds. Nothing is what it is or what it was.
“That’s the problem right there,” he responds as if he heard my thought. “You gotta change. With life. Life changes, you got to go with it. Or you get pulled apart.” I don’t know if he’s talking about me, or Sunita.
I close my eyes. I close out everything but the sound of a dulcimer. My dad used to make his own dulcimers. Cardboard ones mostly, but wooden ones too. It was a part of some hippie forecast of an apocalypse where knowledge of dulcimer construction would be essential. It’s the first time in decades I’ve heard one and its music is light and tinny and the sound of a tipsy Craig Duffy, pipe of Cavendish hanging from the corner of his mouth and bathing in a tub of good mood. I open my eyes to see the player actually does remind me of my father as well, except he’s younger and, of course, brown.
“Hey look, the civil rights movement had a baby!” I say it loud, but none of the people around me respond beyond a glance my way then quickly back to each other again. They’re all young couples, in their twenties. Some wearing wedding bands, some about to put them on. They’re so beautiful. They have that skin, that youth skin, like Play-Doh when you first pop the lid. Even staring blank-faced, the ends of their mouths tilt toward a smile. Nothing has happened to them yet that doesn’t seem conquerable given their massive expanse of unused time. I look at each couple, examine them as they are now, add in any other moments from my memory when I’ve seen them huddled at Mélange, for my supporting data. I decide which ones will end in divorce when this moment is years behind them. Which ones will look at their partner and feel so little that the memory of any strong opinion seems a mirage? The ones that will say, I never truly loved you. Later, they’ll realize that there was love, and it was real, and that the fact that real love can dissipate so completely is even more devastating. That love is the greatest thing we have, the best thing we get, the only thing worth waking for, and even it turns into a putrefying mess just like the bodies we’re stuck in.
“A rocking night, right?!” one leans over to say to me. Skinny with a fat brown beard. The mop top girl with whom his legs are intertwined kisses him on the lips the second he turns back to her, as if he’s been gone a million years and miles. They both laugh, because they are young love and young love is as arrogant and self-involved as youth in all other forms. I hate that I was them. I hate that Becks isn’t here anymore. My Becks. Becks the abstract. The version of Becks I cared the world for. Not the actual person, who still exists now, out in the world. The real person — I don’t miss being with her, in that actual relationship we created. The constant bickering. The long and loaded silences. The moments weighed down by years of piling resentments that gave even the smallest interactions the potential to bring it all crashing down. What I miss is what came before, what always comes before. The euphoria of love. With her, I remember it with her. I could cry right here at the abstract idea of it. I miss being able to believe in it, so completely. That’s why I hate them, these couples around me. Not for their happiness, or for their love, or even for their self-delusion, but because they don’t know. They don’t know that the rot always comes. I don’t just want to love again. I want to regain the privilege to love like a fool.
—
They play “God Bless the U.S.A.” by Lee Greenwood to make us leave. I’ve always found its corny country-infused paleo-patriotism to be comforting in a post-9/11 way, but few in the crowd agree with me. They sing along in groans. When it gets to the line, “And I gladly stand up,” everyone sitting actually does, and soon there is a torrent heading for the door. At the exit, the crowd orbits around Roslyn, and she gives each their own personalized parting message.