Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

He asked me if I was warm.

Yes and no, I said. And I’m not on the Pill yet, I told him, which he said was cool but when would I be. Maybe two weeks, I said.

Should we take off our clothes anyway, he asked. I guess we could, I said. We lay in the open box of the truck like two dying fish on the bottom of a small boat. He told me I was cute in the moonlight. I wished he’d said beautiful. Cute made me feel like a garden gnome.

He said we should go to Europe together and I could learn how to bake bread and he’d sell his writing and we’d have this little place up hundreds of stairs in a building in Paris with a courtyard and we’d ride bikes everywhere and play in fountains and make love continuously. I said: I do ride my bike everywhere. No, he said, but in Paris, with a big carrier that could hold baguettes and wine and fresh flowers. I said: Baguettes? Then why would I have to learn how to bake bread? And hey, I said, what did I just say about carriers?

Nomi, it’s romantic, he said.

Well, but how would we get to Paris? I asked.

We’d save money from our jobs, he said.

What jobs? I asked.

Nomi, you have…

No, too many variables, I said. What’s that bright light headed straight for us? I asked. It could have been a seeder. It was some kind of giant farming implement bearing rapidly down upon us like the Apocalypse.

What the fuck is that, asked Travis.

It’s like we’re in Jaws, I said. He told me to roll myself up in the shag carpet in the back and then he jumped out and ran around to the cab and started it and took off. The field was really bumpy and I felt my bike fall on top of me again, although this time I was rolled up in a carpet so it didn’t hurt as much.

He drove to The Golden Comb’s trailer out on Kokomo Road and parked behind the purple gas tank and that’s where I emerged from the carpet like a cute but not beautiful butterfly and put my clothes back on. I had orange wormy pieces of rug in my hair. He pulled them out one by one. He was so gentle and sweet and he sang an Eric Clapton song in this weirdly satirical operatic voice but underneath he seemed to mean it so I put my hands on his waist and up under his shirt and we waltzed around, badly, and then we fell.

We sat in the grass and sang stupid nursery songs that had perverted hand movements. We tried to whistle “Crying” by Roy Orbison straight through without laughing. We loved Roy Orbison. Let’s name our baby Roy Orbison, said Travis.

Do we have a baby? I asked.

We will someday, he said.

Hmmm, Roy Orbison, I said. What if it’s a girl?

Nova, he said.

Nova? That’s a car.

No, it’s a star, he told me.

I don’t want to have kids named Nova and Roy Orbison, I told him. I liked the name Miep. Miep was the woman who had saved the letters of Anne Frank and had also done kind and dangerously heroic things for her. A real star.

Anyway, said Travis. We did this thing where I lie on my back in the grass and he stands at my feet really rigidly with his arms straight out like he’s on a cross and then he falls forward and I scream quietly and he puts his hands down at the last second, mere inches away from crushing my body. After that we just sat around sniffing purple gas for a while, lighting matches and flicking them off into the dark, and I asked him if he wanted to go halfers with me on Wish You Were Here. He said what if we break up which made me kind of sulk a bit and made him act tough like he’d have four thousand girlfriends in his life and I stopped talking except to answer his questions.

I hated the way I always wrecked beautiful moments. We saw The Golden Comb open his trailer door and spit and then slam the door shut again. Spitting is how people in this town both mourn and celebrate. It’s the standard response to everything that occurs. The screen on the door was covered with moths. Travis and I stared at it longingly. Do you have any money, he asked me. I didn’t.

What about the carpet, I asked. We could trade it for dope and tell your dad it fell out the back of the truck somewhere and we hadn’t noticed and that when we retraced our route we couldn’t find it.

Travis told me that when I was dying to get high was when I was the most together and brilliant.

Well, I said, it’s the dying part that makes me feel alive.

I asked him if we were waiting for something and then he got up and hauled the rolled-up carpet out of the back of the truck and we each took an end and walked over to The Comb’s trailer and banged on the door.

Oh my God, said Travis, they’re listening to Yes.

The Comb opened the door and looked at us. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and he looked pissed off. No, he said, I don’t want an orange carpet, but thanks anyway. He was just about to slam the door but Travis put his foot in the way, movie-style, and said it was a shag carpet with triple-thick inlay. The Comb came outside and rolled the carpet out in the dirt and lay down on it for a minute. We stood there staring down at him. He ran his fingers through the shag.

Well? I asked. Yes or no?

He got up and told Travis to roll it back up and bring it into the house. I stayed outside and leaned against the ripply aluminum outside of his trailer and said thanks, man, you’re a lifesaver. The Comb smiled and put his hand on my arm and then leaned over and kissed me on my fuckin’ lips and said he’d seen me getting dressed by the purple gas tank.

Hmm, bionic eyes, I said. I shrugged. He tried to kiss me again and I asked him if we were doing the thing or not and he said I didn’t really have much of a choice, did I, referring to the fact that there was nowhere else that we could go, and I said no, not much of one, but that Travis would be out very soon and shit, we had given him a carpet, so…then Eldon yelled something from inside about not being able to find the scales and The Comb said he’d be right there and Travis came back out and The Comb went in and I lit up a smoke and tried to act intensely nonchalant while we waited for The Comb to come back out again.

I hate that motherfucker, Travis whispered.

What does that have to do with anything, though, I asked him. On the way home Travis told me that when he was a boy he’d asked his mom whom she loved more, God or Dad. God or Dad! he said. God or Dad! She wouldn’t answer, just hummed. Then she finally said God already! and Travis was weirded out by that but he’d said: Thaaaat’s right. For some reason I laughed hysterically while he was telling me about it and afterwards I felt like an idiot.

We drove past my high school and the junior high and the track and the Sunset Diner and the cemetery and past a few houses and up onto my driveway which made a nice cracking sound that bothered Travis because he thought his tires were being punctured.

I was relieved to see my dad not sitting in his yellow lawn chair. We sat in the truck for a while listening to an American radio station.

Music really is the glue of our relationship, isn’t it? I said. Travis said yeah, shhhh, I’m listening to this song.

I mean really, I said. It’s brought us together, right? Yeah, it has, said Travis. He turned up the radio a bit.

Music’s probably altered our DNA so you and I are like twins now. You know? I said. I know, said Travis. We’ll feel the same thing at the same time even if we are miles apart, I said.

Can you be quiet for a minute, please? said Travis.

I shut up after that, thinking about the words salve and salvation. I got out of the truck without kissing Travis and said ciao for the first and last time in my life.

That night it rained softly. I could hear it through my screen. And then I felt it on my face, and it was warm, but it wasn’t rain.