The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes - Страница 5

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Inside the room, Neil sat at his desk, using his mouse and keyboard to lead a knight on a horse across a hilly landscape.

“You have a minute?” Pete asked.

“Okay,” Neil said, not looking up. “I’m supposed to meet someone from my guild in like ten minutes.”

“Sure,” Pete said. He sat on Neil’s bed, which had been made with almost military precision. There was no junk on the floor. His books were put on their shelves in alphabetical order. There were no posters on the walls. It had never occurred to Neil that he might want to personalize his space.

“Are you still friends with Mason?” Pete asked.

“I guess,” Neil said, continuing to ride his horse across the landscape. “I mean, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Do you like her? I mean, like for a girlfriend?”

“Nah.”

Pete needed a moment here. There was no awkwardness in this. No embarrassment. Pete had the distinct feeling that Neil had never considered Mason as an object of desire — that now that the topic had been raised, he still didn’t.

“Does she still want to hang out?” he managed.

“Not really.”

“Since when?”

“Sleepover, I guess.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

Neil shrugged. “I don’t feel anything about it.”

Pete stood up. “You don’t feel anything about it? You don’t have any friends, Neil. Don’t you care that you don’t have friends? Don’t you care that this beautiful girl wants to spend time with you, that she’s been — I don’t know — chasing you? Haven’t you noticed? Are you just going to let her get away from you without even noticing that she’s there?”

Neil stared at his father with a surprise that bordered on a kind of confused alarm. “She’s okay, but you know.”

“Okay,” Pete said. He walked toward the door, now afraid he’d raised his voice, that Roberta had heard him. He put his hand on the doorknob, turned back to Neil, and said, “Okay,” again. And that was it. Neil was already back at his keyboard, piloting his horse toward another figure on a horse. He tried not to think about the impossible, nonsensical, fantastical possibility that Mason had used his son to get to him. Why would she do that? Who was Pete that a fourteen-year-old girl would give a crap? Maybe Mason liked Neil for his own sake. Maybe she saw something in him that his own father simply could not, and while Pete found that thought as comforting as he did shameful, he could not make himself believe it. Even if it was the most logical explanation, it did not feel true.

Pete walked back to the TV room and sat next to Roberta, who hadn’t noticed he’d been gone, let alone heard him raise his voice. Roberta watched her show, and Pete thought about what might have happened if he had watched Showgirls with Mason.

Wasting no time, I texted Pete just before noon the next day.

ME: what r you up2

HIM: Hi Mason. I’m working. Shouldn’t you be furthering your education?

ME: take me 2 lunch

HIM: Wouldn’t you have to miss school?

ME: So not ur problem 12:15 at gas station, 1 block north of school

HIM: I don’t know.

ME: Yes u do I’ll b there

He came. Of course he came. How could he not? I’d made it so easy to say yes, so hard to say no. He picked me up in his Accord and smiled politely and did not touch me or leer at me, despite my wearing a very tight black T-shirt and short skirt in which I looked entirely like a woman and nothing like a child. I had my hair back in a ponytail, and he liked the way it looked. He liked being able to see my white neck. He liked my profile. He liked it all.

Pete had decided he would do everything he could to act as though meeting me for lunch, helping me to skip school, were the most natural thing in the world. He wore khakis and a button-down shirt, and he felt certain he looked handsome and competent, and he felt muscular and trim and ten years younger than he was, and he kept trying to forget what he was doing, how crazy and strange and dangerous it was. He wanted to enjoy the sensation of being near me, of being so close to my youth and vitality and freshness, and my near total absence of world-weariness. He didn’t want to think about what any of it meant or where it would lead or how insanely and foolishly self-destructive this single act was, how it could ruin his marriage and his life and everything. He wanted to inhabit the experience, and he could not remember the last time his life offered up a moment sweet enough to deserve that kind of attention.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“Someplace I can get a beer,” I said.

He paused for a moment, and then decided not to be shocked or surprised or concerned. He decided to go with it. In some sense, he decided I was in charge, and he knew he was deciding that, and it was possible he even liked it. Pete was not accustomed to drinking beer in the afternoon. He might do so at a weekend party, but on a weekday, when he ought to be working — that was something that had quite literally never happened before. When you are self-employed, working entirely without supervision, it is healthiest to view midday drinking as strictly for drunks and losers, the pathetically unproductive. He knew that, and yet now that I had suggested it, Pete could not help but find the idea appealing. More than appealing. Seductive. It was a doorway to an entirely different life, and he was surprised how easy it was to decide to step through it. “What time do you have to be back?” he asked.

I pressed myself into the seat. “I don’t. I don’t ever have to be anywhere.”

He took me to a Korean place off Walzem where we ordered barbecue and drank Japanese beer while we snatched up spicy pickles and potatoes and little tiny fish with our chopsticks. Pete hadn’t known what to expect when I ordered the first round of beer, but the waiter had only nodded, not so much concealing his reaction as never having one. Maybe he was used to parents ordering drinks for their underaged children. Maybe he never doubted that I was of age. Maybe I simply had that effect on people. Certainly, Pete reflected, he’d already done things with me and for me that he never would have imagined doing, so he simply assumed the waiter was no different.

The beer turned out to be just what he needed. It didn’t make the situation any less strange, but it helped him to settle in, to work up the nerve to say what needed to be said. “What exactly is up with you and Neil?”

I let the bottle of beer dangle between my thumb and index finger, swinging like a pendulum. “What do you mean?”

“Give me a break, Mason,” he said, loving the feel of my name in his mouth. “You know what I mean.”

“Nothing is up with me and your son,” I said. “He is my friend. I like Neil. I’m not dating him. We are not having any kind of sexual relations, if that’s what you want to know. Anyhow, I have a boyfriend.”

“You do?” Disappointment, followed by chastising himself for that disappointment. What possible concern of his could it be if I had a boyfriend or not? I had a boyfriend and had no interest in Pete in that way, just as he had supposed, just as he had always known. He felt utterly deflated and utterly relieved. He felt like the world was righting itself and, in the process, he was sliding off the surface and into the void.

“You don’t think I could have a boyfriend? You think ghouls don’t deserve love?”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” he said. “Of course it isn’t. I’m just making conversation, I guess. Acknowledging that I heard you.”

“He’s older than I am,” I said. “I like older guys.”

This got his attention. “How much older?”

“Tenth grade.”

I could see the emotions swirl across his face like the time-lapse image of a hurricane. Never had Pete felt quite so many of his forty-five years all at once, all so bitterly. He ordered us another round of beer.

“His name is Ryan,” I said. “And he is so hot. God, I love him. He plays JV football, but he’s not the jock type. He’s really cool. You would love him. I can’t wait for you guys to meet.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know how feasible that is,” he said.

“And he is so good in bed. Fuck. I know I shouldn’t say things like that. I know. I’m sorry. Cindy always says I need to censor myself better, and I swear I’m working on it.”

So now Pete knew. I wasn’t hitting on him, he concluded. He was an absurd, self-deluding, middle-aged clown. That much was now clear, wasn’t it? But then how to explain the flagrant flirting, the inviting him over to watch Showgirls? Could he have been so wrong about all that? How could he have misunderstood so many signals? He couldn’t have, but then how could he make sense of this new development?

It would have been so easy for him to escape. He could have done it right then, and to do it he only would have had to say precisely what was on his mind. He could have asked me what I thought I was doing with him. He could have asked me why I was flirting with him and then talking about my hot boyfriend. He could have said that he found this situation very confusing and strange, and maybe the strange part he could live with, maybe he liked the strangeness. He could have said how much he enjoyed me and being near me and talking with me and drinking three or four or five beers with me in the afternoon and blowing off that work he swore he would get done that afternoon because being with me was so much better than any of that, but he could not deal with how confusing it was. He could have said that he didn’t know if it was because of my youth or the generation gap or just the peculiarities of my personality or the fact that maybe I ought to be on meds, but clearly I did not understand the mixed signals I was sending, and he needed me to explain. That’s all it would have taken. Web snapped, snare broken. It would have been so simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy, and for Pete the hardest thing would have been to say the words that banished the illusion that a beautiful, impossible, unobtainable girl desired him. So he said something else. He said, “You know what? You should feel free to be entirely yourself around me.” “I will,” I lied as I took a piece of kim chi.