Mark Chiusano - Marine Park - Stories

This was after their trip to the Berkshires, and I was staying until Monday. Hayden was sitting at his desk, mixing songs on GarageBand, and I was lying on the mattress, trying to decide why it somehow worked that Hayden left all the walls blank in his room. Above his desk he had a quote—“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living”—but that was it, with his computer and the wires of his speakers in a corner. It was barely ten when three of his friends came over, bringing with them their leftover dinner, which we ate on the floor, the new people sitting on the mattress and Hayden in his chair. He offered them a beer but passed on one himself. He had told me that he was beginning to feel that he had a small drinking problem and had made me promise that I wouldn’t let him black out that night. He had a habit of doing so, back home when we’d go to bars in the East Village.

One of the girls got a text on her phone to say there was something going on in Gordon, which was a fifteen-minute walk away and just outside the main entrance to campus. There was a semi-famous DJ playing there who had been making the rounds of New England colleges. The walk was frigid, and when we arrived we found only six guys from the tennis team drinking pink champagne out of a bottle. They were sitting in a circle and passing the bottle to one another. Hayden seemed to know a few of them, and I was introduced, and we let the bottle go around maybe once or twice before it was empty. The tennis players were reminiscing about stories from their preseason camp, and Hayden was listening politely and asking clarifying questions here and there. For a while we passed around the empty bottle, taking a swig from it, as if there was some left at the bottom. There didn’t seem to be any more bottles, or any newcomers, so we left.

There was a similar situation in the works at a frat house, and this was promised to be better. Hayden had met his last girlfriend at a frat house. We had been slotted next on the beer pong table, and he told me to wait a second, he had to run to the bathroom. I never felt so alone as when he disappeared while I was visiting at Brandeis. Everyone, the entire time, knew that I wasn’t supposed to be around. The time he met his girlfriend he had disappeared, and when he came back, it was with two girls, one obviously his interest and one dragged along for my sake. That one, Gloria, had a perfectly diamond-shaped scar on her lower back. I traced the parallel lines later that night, in one of the upstairs rooms at the frat, once Hayden had brought his girl home. That lasted almost all semester, but she’d ended it after the Peace class started and he asked her to keep her eyes open during sex.

The frat party was in the basement, below a set of water-heating pipes, and every once in a while a particularly tall boy wearing a backward flat-brim cap would hit his head on the ceiling. We made our way over to the bar area to get drinks. Hayden gripped my outside shoulder and pulled my ear close.

Play along, he said.

We were next in line when Hayden started collecting cups and bottles and making two drinks himself, with the bartender frowning over him. One of the backward-hat kids stopped dancing and came over.

What’s up, big guy? he said.

Making myself a drink, and one for Bob Dylan’s grandson here. Backward-hat looked at me and then put a hand on the edge of the cup.

This is for Bob Dylan’s grandson? he said.

That’s right, said Hayden. This is him right here. We shook hands, his fingers clammy with sweat. He’s doing front work before his grandpa’s last concert, he said. Backward-cap nodded. Dylan’s doing something big this time, Hayden added. It’s a multivisual, audience-participation, varied-media project. He put his hand on my shoulder again.

It’s called Project W, I said. Opens at House of Blues.

Backward-cap opened his eyes wide. Well, it’s really great to have you here. Anything you need.

We’ll keep you posted, Hayden said, as we walked toward the dance floor.

I never like dancing with a cup in my hand, but Hayden was a natural. It became just another appendage to his gyration. He told me once in that new phase of being completely open that the dance floor scared him, that he felt that there were fish-strings going from the place where his neck meets the back of his head, out to his various responsibilities: me (was I having fun?), the girl from class who had put her hand on his arm outside, other hangers-on. It was almost too much to think about while trying to look passable. But he made it look easy, and if he hadn’t said it I never would have known. He was always doing interesting things with his arms in time to the music, mixing it up, keeping it light.

The friend from earlier who had brought leftover dinner had materialized here, and she was doing her best to edge closer and closer to Hayden. She’d told us earlier in the night that she didn’t drink but smoked weed on Shabbat, as long as someone else lit it for her. Religious, Hayden whispered in my ear, with his eyes going up and down.

I could appreciate that she was making an effort, and I started to look around to see if there was anyone else I’d met before whom I could tag along with while they danced. Hayden was premiering for the night a toothbrushing move I’d seen him pull off to great success before. She mimicked the motion and stayed in sync with Hayden’s twists, and got one hand on his hand, and twirled herself around.

They had both hands together now, and he was leading her in a sort of fake fox-trot even though the music was reggaeton, and she was laughing at the antics. I was pretending to be doing the same without a partner, so I was close enough to hear her say, leaning in, Let’s go back to Grad.

Hayden cocked his head sideways and then he said, Look, really drawn out. He was making perfect eye contact with her and still holding her hands. He kept holding them for what seemed like a moment too long, like he was a child again and he was waiting for one of our parents or teachers to tell him what to do. This was fun and I’d love to dance with you again some other time, but tonight I can’t, he said.

Then he patted her forearm and turned toward me and signaled the door.

• • •

It was snowing softly outside, but the wind with the snow on the ground was making sheet-fingers over the layer of frost. We crossed a street where I remember Hayden had told me about one time when he and a girl had kissed for fifteen minutes on the double yellow line. Cars went past them on both sides, but because the two of them were in the middle they never got close.

I remember once Hayden told me that he was finding it difficult to live in the moment, and that he thought this was the major problem in his life from which everything else stemmed. Hanging out with me, he said, he was always thinking about the next time I’d be able to come up. When meditating (he’d started meditating), he could only think about texts waiting on the phone in his pocket. He felt that if there were some way to narrow in, appreciate some type of now, he would be cured. It was a Heisenberg uncertainty issue, which the “Mathematical Topics” professor was always ragging on: only being able to know position or momentum. Physically, if you tried to measure either, you’d be pushing it just a little bit. The professor put red marks all over that on a test. Close, he wrote. Good to think about this.

It seemed like Hayden was going to bring something like that up again. There was a straightening of his posture that came when he was about to say something important. But instead he asked if I wouldn’t mind walking through the cemetery instead of going to find another party. He said it was absurdly beautiful at night — he used the word beautiful ; I don’t think I’d ever heard someone use that word out loud before — and he liked to walk on the gravel path.