“Maybe later,” I say.
Aunt Amy gives me another eyebrow raise. I didn’t use to read outside, or just go outside in general, but she insisted. Saying what a lovely spring it had been and the summer was just as nice and I should get outdoors. It would be good for me, she said. She was gentle about it at first and allowed me to wallow alone in the guest room with my comics andLes Misérables, keeping the perfect company. But she pressed the issue one morning at breakfast, her hair curlers falling out, her lips without color, and then she cleaned up the lawn chair and a little table and set it up. I didn’t have a choice but to go outside then.
I’m worried she’s going to keep talking, and I’ll lose track of the time. I won’t see him come out. I won’t be able to get to my spot between the shrubs and the fence, where I can watch him undetected. But Aunt Amy says nothing more. She goes inside with the laundry basket. I wait a beat or two, and slink over to my hiding place.
I guess I shouldn’t want her to go away so quickly, because it’s Aunt Amy I have to thank for this.
Or curse.
Whichever.
Because I first noticed him two days after she made me read outside. I sat in the lawn chair, waving away a fly from the rim of my glasses, and I glanced up. He sat on a stained wooden chair on the balcony, hunched over, the smoke from his cigarette curling upward. His T-shirt was bleached white, sleeves rolled up against biceps that clenched and rippled as he sat back. His sandy hair, heavy with pomade, framed a face that all at once appeared nonchalant, disinterested, and haunted.
His eyes glanced over to me, and I’d quickly crouched down by the fence out of his sight. In my head I decided to call him Blue, because I was sure—and I’m still sure—that’s the color of his eyes. I’m never close enough to see, but that’s what they look like to me. A crystal blue; azure prisms of light.
And when I readLes Misérables, I have to wonder if Blue is more like Javert the Inspector, orderly and obedient to the law, or Jean Valjean, the convict who changed his identity, soft-hearted and giving. I wondered if Blue had taken a new identity to hide his past or if he was harsh and exacting in all things. But then I felt like he could be Cosette, orphaned as a child, loved by Marius; just a mystery for me to unfold, enamored and pining, only I’d never be brave enough to search for him if he were ever lost to me.
At exactly five-fifteen, the doors to his balcony slide open and Blue steps out.
Today he wears another bleached-white T-shirt, a pack of Lucky’s rolled up in the right sleeve. No, left sleeve. His left. His denim pants are dark, the cuffs folded up over black work boots, reminiscent of a factory worker, or a mechanic. Sometimes he wears this short-sleeved plaid over the T-shirt, the buttons undone, and I’d die if there were no T-shirt underneath.
He lights a cigarette and drinks from a can of beer. Sometimes he brings out one can. Sometimes two. I’ve tried to figure out if there’s a pattern or a reason, but there doesn’t seem to be a reason at all. Just what he feels like. Blue often stares out as he smokes and drinks. It’s all leisurely, and I suppose it’s how he relaxes. He never seems to notice if dogs bark or if the kid downstairs wails. His eyes gaze across the rooftops, up to the sky, into a distance only known to him.
I’m safe in my spot and there’s just enough room between the shrub and fence for me to sit cross-legged. Sometimes the smoke from his cigarettes wafts over this way, depending on the breeze and how long he sits. I like to watch his hand travel to his mouth, his lips pucker around the filter, and the occasional glisten of moisture on his bottom lip from the beer. I imagine the tip of my tongue licking it up. I imagine those eyes staring into mine as he returns the favor.
I feel an erection beginning and try to think of something else, so I don’t have to run inside hunched over like some virgin; even though I am, but I can pretend. I’m good at distorting reality.
Blue must work somewhere dirty. I see it, faint, around his fingernails. Motor oil? Dirt? Grease? I picture him in coveralls, covered in black oil, pushing out from underneath a Cadillac. I imagine him telling the square businessman just how much it’s going to cost him to fix that leak. And the square complains, his suit and tie too straight, and Blue is just too cool to give a damn. He’d be like the shady innkeeper inLes Mis,Thènardier, just can’t be bothered, lighting up a Lucky, and blowing smoke in the old fella’s face.
But I don’t want him to be Thènardier, so I go back to Marius and Cosette, the young lovers, and wish it was the other way around. Or worse: I’m Éponine, who loved and never had it returned, and I’ll die with his name on my lips.
Blue…
At six-oh-four, two beers and nine cigarettes later, he goes inside.
I’m left to wonder what happens then. I guess that he’s in the shower, washing away the day. The parts of him I don’t see, just under those clothes, I have to create in my mind. I imagine his chest hair is a shade darker than the hair on his head. I imagine there’s a trail of it from his navel to his cock, and it’s huge and it just has to be. It’s got to be. Maybe he touches it and it hardens, flushing red, and stands upright against his belly. Maybe he jerks himself off in the shower and comes on the tile so it just washes away and there’s no evidence. No one would know. He gets out with a towel around his waist and I bet he smells like Ivory and spice. He’s gasoline in the summer heat, bed sheets damp, and eyelids fluttering through his dreams.
“Paul!”
I’m pulled from my otherworldly musings by Aunt Amy’s shrill. My dick deflates, and I stand up from behind the shrub. She’s in the patio doorway wearing the apron my mother made for her, the smell of marinade floating out from the kitchen behind her.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I thought I saw a bird’s nest.” I stick my hands in my pockets and make fists. I walk inside the house, right past her, to join her for dinner.
It isn’t so bad this evening.
The steak is tender, the potatoes crisp, and the cake tempting from the stand on the counter. I can tell Aunt Amy is used to eating alone, because it’s like she has to remember I’m there. To ask me things. I’d rather she didn’t ask me things, but I feel as if I have to go along with it. She didn’t have to take me in.
In between bites of steak and the cry of kids’ laughter a few doors down, she glances at me, and I pretend not to notice. It’s clear she’s got something on her mind.
Last time I came to stay with her was when I was thirteen and my mother couldn’t get out of bed. No one would tell me why, but the glimpse I caught of her one morning as Pops helped her to the bathroom told me everything I needed to know. She was far too skinny, her knees knobby, and her skin yellowish. I figured they’d sent me to Aunt Amy’s so my mother could die in secret; they didn’t want me to see it. But two months later, the day before I started eighth grade, I went home and there was a doctor at her bedside. She was still too skinny, but her skin looked normal, rosy.
She’d reached out her arms and embraced me for the first time in months. I didn’t like how I could feel her shoulder blades, her ribs. Pops came in, told me to get up to my room, and shut the door behind me. She was okay for a while after that. Gained some weight, and went to the beauty parlor. Then one day after school when I was a sophomore, I went into my bedroom to find my shirts hanging in the closet and ironed, rather than folded neatly on my bed to put away myself. I met our new housekeeper, Lola, and she made us a roast while my mother sat at the kitchen counter in her robe, sipping tea. Her smile was tired, her eyes sagging.
My mother would get better, then she would get worse, then better. On and on, a carnival ride with twists and turns, and I got so tired of it. I wanted something to stay the same. I wanted it all to just be over.
And then one day I got my wish.
