Ch. 11 All Tied Up
11:23am on Wednesday, July 30th, 2003. Ninety-seven minutes before I was supposed to meet Jane for lunch. After the cryptic phone call, I had been through three cups of coffee and two of my emergency cigarettes. Brian looked at me in horror when he caught me smoking. For a few moments, he looked back and forth between my haggardly face and the pack of smokes on the bar, and then he sat down next to me, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it from the burning stick in my mouth. It was one of those mornings.
Neither of us said anything for awhile. We sat idly at the bar in a classic trance of holding our heads in one hand and the coffee and cigarette in the other. The ominous, glowing clock on the microwave whittled down my minutes. 11:25. 11:29. 11: 43. What was I going to do? A heavy sigh from Brian caused me to notice that he was no longer sitting next to me and had moved around to the sink on the other side of the bar. He began violently soaping and washing his hands.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Trying to get out the smell of smoke on my hands. It stinks. It smells like guilt to me."
"You English PhDs have the strangest comparisons. What is that supposed to mean?"
"I'm not a PhD yet."
"But you will be," I said.
"Don't jinx me," he replied.
"Love you."
"Love you, too."
"So what makes cigarettes smell like guilt?"
He returned to lathering his hands in soap and compulsively smelling them before he grew unsatisfied with them and began to repeat the process. "My parents caught me smoking once with Joe, but I didn't know that they had seen me. When I got home, I denied having done it, so my dad asked me to breathe in his face. I reeked. The next time I smoked, I bought a pack of gum to get rid of the bad breath. Dad was rocking on the porch when I got home. He didn't even bring it up when he saw me, but before I could pass through the front door, he grabbed my hand and drew in a long breath of its scent. He turned to me and said, 'Smell your hand.' I quietly muttered that I didn't need to, and from then on, I thought that my hands smelled like shame and guilt from that encounter with my father. I hate that damn smell."
I silently laughed to myself, deciding that it would be better not to antagonize him. These little obsessive tendencies he had only made me obsessively love him more. I took a sip of what had become cold coffee and tried to focus on being calm.
Brian dried his hands with some paper towels. Coming from behind me, he wrapped his arms around my shoulders and pressed his face against mine. I reached my left hand up, the one I hadn't used to smoke, and stroked his cheek. We both sighed into each other, his chin resting on my shoulder and my head leaned into his.
"I can't believe I'm getting so worked up over this," I said, finally breaking the silence.
"I can. I don't like this situation one bit." He took my hand in his and walked us over into the living room. I took a seat and pulled him into a sitting position beside me with his head back on my shoulder and one of his long legs draped over mine. "I don't want to let you go, Evan."
"You won't have to."
"But this is crazy. All of this crazy. Jane sneaking around, trying to get into the apartment. Now she wants to meet you for lunch. And the weird phone call this morning. They can't all be unrelated."
"What am I supposed to do then? Not show up?"
"I just want you to be careful. Maybe I should come with you," said Brian.
"No, I need this chance to talk to her alone. So much has happened, and she's part of it, too—"
"I bet she has a bigger part in all this than we know."
"Bri, this isn't exactly helping."
"Shit. I know, but I'm having a hard time thinking through this clearly, too. You yourself said that you thought that Jane might have had something to do with Laura ambushing us."
"I know, but avoiding her doesn't seem like the answer."
"Works for me," he said in a flat tone.
"We're just going to have lunch. You're the one who said that we'll be out in public and there's not much that she can do."
We both seemed to give up at this point. We had gone back and forth with our opinions, changing our minds several times for the entire morning and in the end, I felt as though I had to go and make some sort of effort. Brian simply pulled me into his body and breathed deeply. I stared ahead into space and returned to counting the passing minutes.
***
My walk towards the park felt like some tunneled dream in which everything around me swirled and twisted as I passed by. I had put on a brave face for Brian, but the truth was that I was nervous about meeting Jane. At one point, I felt intensely dizzy and had to lean against a lamppost in order to steady myself. I inhaled deeply and tried to regain my composure.
I blinked once. I blinked twice more. And then I became aware of where I was again. I had stopped in front of a cart that was selling calendars and postcards. As luck would have it, they sold cigarettes as well. What cart in New York didn't? I pulled out another cigarette, now lighting up my fourth of the day.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one of the postcards with Van Gogh's "Starry Night." I looked at the large yellow-orange balls, and it reminded me of camping in the Pennsylvania woods when I was younger. Our group of scouts would trek into the trees, set up camp, and wait for night to fall. We would tell ghost stories, melt marshmallows, and late at night we would find a clearing, lay down our blankets and point up at the constellations that we could identify.
When I got home after that first weekend of camping, I couldn't stop raving about what it was like to be stargazing out and away from the cloudy city. Night and day, I began to talk and bother Maria with it. My mother somehow found a reason to escape me most times. Maria, with all the patience that she had for me, decided that she couldn't take my babbling anymore. She bought a bag of glow-in-the-dark stars and helped me stick them on the ceiling above my bed.
I invited Jane and Laura over to look at my new decoration. Laura and I were never exactly close, so she came into my room and left shortly after. I'm not sure if Jane was interested or not, but she pretended to be amused at least for my sake. I had arranged the stars to imitate commonly known constellations like the Big Dipper and Orion's Belt, until Jane suggested that we take them down and make patterns or write our names with them. Because I liked the realism, I said that her idea was silly and girly; she didn't understand what I saw in it. We fought over it; one of the only times that we ever fought. I shouted at her so loudly that it brought our mothers and Laura and Maria to my bedroom door. In a moment of passion and rage, Jane clawed at my stars, tearing them off the ceiling. She stormed out of the room, rudely pushing her way past the crowd that had gathered at the door and leaving me on my bed kneeling in the pile of fallen stars…
"SHIT!" I said aloud.
I dropped my cigarette out of sheer surprise. That's what that voice on the phone had said. She had been talking about that day. But who could have been on the phone? I didn't have time to think about who it could have been. That was the day that Jane truly flipped out on me. And here it was happening again. I thought about going home. I probably should have gone home, but I still cared too much about Jane to let her go on like this. She was slowly going out of her mind, and it was my fault. I needed to get her some help. I took a look back in the direction of my apartment, and then I looked down the street towards the park. I inhaled deeply and started walking, almost running, briskly down the street.
I found Jane sitting near the arch, though I almost turned around in fear. But she saw me, too. She rose to greet me.
"It's so good to see you, Evan," she said warmly.
My heart was pounding in my ears. I didn't know if I should try to confront her or simply play along with whatever game she had started.
"Good to see you, too," I said, doing my best to not sound nervous.
"Well, I'm starved. Shall we?" she said.
We walked to a nearby café-like restaurant, but neither of us made any attempt at conversation. She seemed cheerful enough, singing to herself as we went along. My mouth was dry and frozen with fear. Only once we sat down at our table outside did she speak again.
