Amie Barrodale - You Are Having a Good Time

He wrote: “Of course he will. Being torn apart is what a relationship is. So don’t be afraid. Play the game.”

* * *

I met one of my friends for dinner, and we walked to a bar. The leaves were making a dry clicking sound. They were gray in the streetlight, and moving with the wind, which was changing direction, making the leaves look like schools of fish. I saw the drummer coming toward me and my friend. He was talking on his cell phone. I bent forward at the waist to catch his eye, and he frowned. As we came closer, I noticed that he was gasping for air and dripping with sweat. He extended his hand like an iron rail at my friend, and he said in a loud, manly voice, “I’m Elliot.”

My friend mumbled his name.

I said, “Are you late or something?”

The drummer said, “Yes. Do you know where the Tea Lounge is? The Tea Lounge?”

My friend pointed it out, and the drummer crossed the street at a diagonal. He ran to get away from us. I asked my friend what he thought of it, after about a block, and he said, “Nothin’.”

When I got home I described it all to the priest. He wrote back, “COME ON you are thinking too much.”

I wrote: “I love him. I think maybe he loves me. Please tell me.”

The next afternoon at Starbucks I got his answer: “Yes, he does, but he is afraid.”

I stood up and went walking on the street. I hugged my computer to my chest. I had walked about a block when I realized that the priest didn’t know how the drummer felt.

* * *

I was at a sushi restaurant. The sushi chef was missing the tip of his pointer finger. It was recent and looked like he’d cut it three-quarters off and just torn off the tip and gone back to work. I watched him slicing salmon. I ordered another small pitcher of sake.

I wrote to the priest on my phone: “I thought maybe I should just tell him how I feel. I thought maybe I should even just email it.”

He wrote back: “Yes, say it.”

I tried, but I couldn’t do it. Writing “I” into the message body field made me shake violently. I wrote: “I was wondering if you could come over sometime,” and sent that.

A fat businessman started up a conversation with me about fresh wasabi. Then I wrote to the priest. I said, “I can’t. Is that enough? There’s time, isn’t there?”

* * *

That night around 2 a.m. I woke up to the sound of thunder. Half sleeping, I thought God was communicating with me through the weather. I said, “Not now. Not now.” The thunder redoubled.

I sat up in bed and waited. After a few minutes I went to the window. The sky was full of light. Missiles were falling to the ground. I envisioned a brief, bleak, postapocalyptic future — wolves, yellow light, rags. I really believed that I was going to die, and then my mind went to the drummer, and I was sorry I hadn’t told him how I felt. It wasn’t because it mattered. It was because it didn’t matter.

I went outside, and then I could tell it was a storm. It was a summer storm, heat lightning, and the lightning was that strange kind that comes in plumes. I’d mistaken it for missiles. So I wrote an email to the drummer. “I woke up to the sound of thunder. I went to the window and thought the lightning was missiles. I thought I was going to die, and I felt sad I never told you that I love you. I came outside and it was clearly a storm. A homeless man who looked like Bob Marley was running down the street. He stopped in front of me, did a jig, held up two peace signs and ran.”

* * *

The drummer came to my apartment a month later. He held his palm to his chest, bent over. He rested with his hands on his knees in the doorway. Then he started taking off his shoes. He said, “Do you have any water?”

“You don’t have to take your shoes off,” I said.

“I always take my shoes off.”

After he had taken his shoes off, he sat against the wall with his knees folded into his chest and his arms wrapped around them.

I got up and opened the oven. I tapped the quiche, took it out, and cut two pieces. When we had eaten, the drummer said, “I would have a second piece, but I’m on the baseball diet. You don’t have to clean your plate, but then, every night, like clockwork, you have a scoop of vanilla ice cream.”

“I don’t have ice cream. Anyway, you don’t need to lose weight.”

“For a while I was getting a little heavy. I was turning into one of those skinny guys with a potbelly.”

“I think that’s kind of cute,” I said. He frowned, so I said, “But you don’t have to.”

I brought the plates into the kitchen. We went outside and sat on my steps. The drummer asked me what a normal week was like, and I didn’t know how to say, “I’m alone all the time.” I had it in my head that his life was full of glamour. I said something about work and friends.

“That sounds nice,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s okay.”

He told me about being in Dallas. He said their waitress drew a diagram to show the path of the bullet that shot Kennedy in the head. He wasn’t a very good storyteller, and I could see he was trying to say there was some kind of magic in the moment, but to me it just sounded like a thing a waitress told people.

“I can’t explain it,” he said, noticing my expression. “Having all this shown to you by a Texas girl.”

I said, “I’m from Texas.”

I told a story about my aunt. She had been in the Bolshoi Ballet, and then she got a degree in quantum mechanics from Rice. Then she tried to run her husband over in a parking lot, and she was fired, and years went by, and she was arrested for disorderly conduct in Houston. She was in the drunk tank with her boyfriend and my mom picked her up. When she came out, she said, “Patty, I think that police officer raped me,” and her boyfriend, who was still in the tank, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Both of ’em did, baby.”

I laughed at the story, but I could tell it made the drummer uneasy. He asked me if I had any history of mania in my family, and I said, “Well, obviously, her.” I was pretty sure he was leading us toward a so-called healthy discussion about the end of our communication, so I was surprised when he said, “What should we do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“We could go out.”

“Do you want to?”

“Well, do you have any wine ?”

“I do. I didn’t bring it out with dinner because I thought you didn’t drink.”

“Ha, right.”

“You asked for water.”

“I was thirsty.”

We went into the kitchen. I held up a cut-crystal glass with a stem and a simple crystal sake glass.

“For wine? I think that one.” He pointed to the one with the stem. “It’s more elegant .” He laid emphasis on the word “elegant” in the uncomfortable way that he did with words he liked.

He had a sip of wine and I handed him a fig. He took my hand and said, “Let me see your nails.” There was purple fig peel under two nails. He thought it was dirt and he grimaced. Then he gave me my hand back and looked into my eyes for a long time.

“So … what else can we talk about?” he said.

“I don’t know. I don’t mind being quiet with people. Do you?”

“No.”

We started talking again. We sat on the floor in front of the bay window. It was summer, and the sun set late. The drummer said that, in Europe, his brother had gone through customs with marijuana in his carry-on.

“Why?”

“He said he forgot it was there. I told him that was so stupid. I don’t know. I think he just wanted it.”

We were quiet. I looked at the open windows. I said, “Do you think people can hear us?”

“Who?”

“Well, the windows are open.”

“No one can hear us. My voice is incredibly soft.”