The Gap Year

NOVEMBER 9, 2009



The practice field is a different place beneath a gray sky with a freezing wind knifing across it. I try to time it so that I’ll appear on the field right as practice finishes, but I am early. The players wear long-sleeved, stretchy shirts under their uniforms. Most wear gloves. Tyler’s hands are bare.

The metal bleacher under my butt feels like a plank of ice as I sit there waiting for some version of the moment when Ashton Kutcher jumps out and everyone cackles about me getting Punk’d. Madison, Paige, and the rest of them are all huddled beneath a blanket together at the other end of the bleachers, hoods of their North Face jackets pulled up like a row of little monks.

The players run up and down the field. They slam into one another. They grunt. Their hard plastic pads clack together. They weave around the field even more like ants than the band kids, all trying to pick up the scent of a trail. It is random chaos, a minor distraction from watching Tyler.

Coach Hines whistles, yells, “All right, y’all huddle up, now! Huddle up!”

They end their meeting with everyone piling hands together, do a tick-tock-the-game-is-locked, clap, and head for the locker room.

Madison yells to Tyler in a singsongy, babyish voice, “Ty-Mo, I already finished your assignment in English. Wanna come to Paige’s house and I can print it out?”

I think of Madison’s perfect 800 on the SAT math section. I guess math geniuses don’t always sound smart.

Tyler pulls his helmet off. His hair is flattened against his head with sweat. He shakes it out and shoots Madison the Dimple. He doesn’t even look my way.

Did I imagine the person he was at the quarry? Did I hallucinate him asking me to come here?

The team manager hands him a towel and takes his helmet. He wipes his face and walks toward the bleachers. By the time he reaches us, he still hasn’t looked at me once and I’ve concluded that he’s a psychopath who set this all up just for the fun of torturing me.

“Madison, thanks, you’re a sweetheart. But I’m good. I think my girl A.J.’s got me covered.” He tilts his chin my way. “Paige, Madison, you all know A.J., don’t you?”

There is a fraction of a second’s pause. Enough time for me to study Paige Winslow’s and Madison Chaffee’s faces to see if they are in on the joke. They aren’t. Instead they deal gracefully with whatever reversal of the laws of physics has allowed me to enter their gravitational field.

The team manager takes Tyler’s used towel.

“Madison, you want to give A.J. my homework?”

Madison nods her head, probably to help the process of me going from utterly invisible to being a fully formed object capable of stimulating the rods and cones in her retina. “Not a prob.”

When Tyler leaves for the locker room, the girls turn away from me. Not in a mean way. Just a sort of been-there way. No doubt they figure that I am some epic skeeze bag who is doing things to Tyler that require the limberness of a Ukranian gymnast and the morals of a bonobo monkey. That there have been others like me before and there will be others like me after.

Madison pulls some papers out of her zip-up notebook and brings them to me. I want to tell her that I am as baffled as she is and that, no doubt, Tyler will return to their planet very soon. But she seems so genuinely friendly when she says, “Don’t write too neat. That’s a giveaway,” that I just nod and take the papers.

Some might say that Tyler Moldenhauer is just using me to be his gay cover-up. But so what? I’m just using Tyler Moldenhauer too. To be happy.





NOVEMBER 9, 2009



Which character do you think is the most important in Animal Farm?”

Tyler, lying on his back on the red vinyl padding of his weight bench, ignores the question. We’ve gotten into a groove over the past week. I refused to straight-up do his homework for him like Madison and the other girls before me had, so we do it together during his after-practice workouts. He explained that, with all the workouts Coach demanded on top of the program he’d designed for himself, he could either spend time with me or do homework. And he’d rather spend time with me.

Which is why I am with him in Coach Hines’s garage. All the times I’ve come over, I’ve never actually been inside the house. Or seen Coach Hines. Or his wife. I hear his giant dogs barking a lot but I haven’t even seen them. Tyler lives in the garage. It’s his choice. He has a room inside Coach’s gigantic house, but he likes it better in the garage. On his own. Coach likes it better too.

Most of the space on the polished concrete floor is taken up with weight equipment. A single bed with an orange sleeping bag flung across it is pushed up against the far wall. Clothes, mostly shirts and jeans, hang in dry cleaner’s bags from nails hammered into the walls. It is surprisingly neat for a garage where a football player lives.

I want to know why Tyler is living with Coach, but the answer to that question involves his mom and dad and lots of other unsimple issues that he obviously wants to avoid. Like why he is really hanging out with me.

I know that it isn’t homework. There are so many girls who’d do it for him that I can’t even seriously consider that he is interested in me only for that. Besides which, Coach Hines has a list of “tutors,” fan girls willing to do homework for any player who can’t recruit his own volunteers. Tyler’s choosing me to do his work for him is a strange honor in his world.

“So which character do you think is most important in Animal Farm?” I repeat, trying to remember whether I’d read Animal Farm in seventh or eighth grade. I do recall, though, that, even then, the study questions had been about the political allusions and the dangers of groupthink, not which character was “most important.”

As Tyler considers Animal Farm, he is gritting his teeth, quivering, and hoisting barbells up and down. I wonder if his face looks like that—almost a grimace, lost in what his body is doing—when he makes love. What it would look like making love to me.

“And ten!” The clang of the barbells as Tyler sets them down on the holder above his head jolts me out of my ridiculous daydream. I refuse to be that girl with an impossible crush on a gay guy.

Tyler is wearing a gray sweatshirt with the arms cut out. He sits up. Sweat streams down his face. He sticks his hands under the sweatshirt and lifts it to wipe off his face. His abs belong on a movie screen. Maybe I would be that girl.

“OK, most important character in Animal Farm? I’d have to say the horse.”

“Boxer? Yeah, I can see that. He is certainly the one willing to sacrifice the most for the good of the group.”

“There’s no i in teamwork.” He grins, picks up a dumbbell, and starts doing curls. His biceps swell up, then flatten like a speeded-up film of a python swallowing a pig.

As he works out, I read him the next question: “ ‘Is Animal Farm set in (a) wartime Germany, (b) a desert island, (c) a farm?’ ”

“Is that a trick question?”

“No, just incredibly stupid.”

“Uh, I’m going to solve the puzzle, Pat: (c) farm.”

“Farm it is! Bringing your total today to seventeen dollars! Next question: ‘In the end, the pigs become like (a) robots, (b) humans, (c) dogs.’ Is this a joke?”

“No, it’s just ‘keep the jocks in school as long as they’re winning games and keep collecting the money from the state for every day all the morons show up.’ You know how it works.”

I do. In spite of Miss Olivia’s personal obsession with tracking down a few kids here and there who ditch, the whole attendance office is mostly about proving how many kids are in school so that Parkhaven High can get paid by the state. Or else that the kids who are absent are at doctors’ offices or something else that is excused and the state will pay for. That and crowd control. Attendance is also mostly about crowd control.

Tyler finishes ten reps, then pauses, waiting for the next question. Without thinking, I ask, “Here’s a question with no wrong answer. Seriously, you’ll get an A for whatever you say.”

He starts in on the next set. Watching his muscles bulge up and down, he nods my way. “Shoot.”

“Are you attracted to me? In any way? I mean, is there any bi possibility? And, seriously, it really is not an issue if you’re not.”

Tyler stops and holds the weight half up for so long that his arm starts quivering and I deeply regret my question.

“Forget that I asked that. I love hanging out with you. And it’s way less complicated that you’re not. You know. Interested. In me. That way.” I have to physically press my finger against my lips to make myself stop babbling.

Tyler puts the weight down, pulls up his sweatshirt to wipe his face, and flashes his perfect abs again. This time, though, he keeps his head lowered, buried in the sweatshirt. His back and shoulders quiver, trembling a little bit. Alarm shoots through me, and I don’t know what to do. I would give anything not to have opened my big, fat mouth. Not to have made his being gay such a gigantic issue.

“God, Ty,” I say, my voice squealy from embarrassment. “I was only kidding.” I play-slap at him. “Come on, girlfriend.”

He still doesn’t answer.

“Tyler, it’s fine. I am cool with all forms of alternative sexuality.”

He lifts his head then, and I see that the trembling is from laughing. “All forms, huh?” He looks at me like a dad whose little kid has just said something cute.

“Well, you know. Not bestiality.”

“Damn! And I was just about to introduce you to my girlfriend, Bossie.”

He sees that I am embarrassed.

“Hey, Aubrey Julie, come on. I was just kidding. I like that you’re the way you are. That’s why I want it to be different with us.”

“ ‘Different’? Different how?”

He reaches out, almost touches me, stops himself, and picks up a weight instead.

“Just different, OK? Forget it. More workout. Less talk.”

The weight in his hand is heavier than any I’ve ever seen him use before. He props his forearm on his knee and lifts. As his chest beneath the gray fleece rises to meet his fist, his whole body trembles from the effort. I don’t know if it is from the effort of lifting the heavy weight or the effort of keeping something out of his mind that he doesn’t want to think about.





FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010



Not now,” I whimper to myself as the Bentley slows to a stop. Not with Aubrey God knows where and my life at the point of greatest disarray it has sunk to since he left. In the dream scenario, Martin would have driven past while Aubrey and I and our hunky, successful, sensitive, insanely smitten boyfriends were romping on the front lawn together, joyous at sharing the perfection of our lives. Maybe we’d be playing badminton or some other sport that would allow the sun to illuminate our radiant complexions and stream through our golden hair and spotlight the obvious adoration of our menfolk. It would be a scenario that would leave Martin withered with envy and stupefied by the full extent of his idiocy in throwing away such paradise and the angels who dwelt within.

Not this. Not Aubrey gone and me looking like Courtney Love after a bad bender. I lick my finger and rub as much smeared mascara from under my eyes as I can. I don’t have time to do more: I have to get to the porch before Martin does and preempt any possibility of him getting a peek inside at the warehouse of untouched college supplies. He has no right to any image of my life that I don’t choose him to have. And I choose the Cape Cod version.

On the porch, I take a breath and brace myself for Martin to step from the car. But, instead of Martin, Martin’s father emerges. A second later, he disappears and Martin, sixteen years older, is there in his place. Where Martin had once absorbed light—dark hair, dark olivey skin, dark thoughts—this middle-aged man reflects it. I see now that the shielding palm in the more recent photos had also hidden hair that has thinned and turned the color of ash. A pair of silver-rimmed glasses now magnify his eyes, giving Martin, in the instant he sees me again for the first time in sixteen years, the goggling, bewildered look of a newborn.

Is he wondering why my mother has replaced me?

He’s wearing a suit that must have once been expensive. Perhaps it’s the same one he’d worn in the photos I’d seen of him palling around with Oscar winners and dodging paparazzi. Now, though, the rumpled, bagged-out suit has a Dust Bowl–soup line look, as if he’s slept in it for the past few weeks. He removes the glasses, tucks one stem into the collar opening of his shirt, and smiles up at me. A trio of lines strain around the edges of his eyes. More net his forehead. His lips, once almost girlishly plump, are less generous, more sharply etched.

“You’re looking good, Cam.”

“You’re kind of beat to shit,” I call back down to him.

The thought that these are the first words we’ve exchanged face-to-face in sixteen years runs like the steady crawl beneath a chaotic disaster story.

“You’re wearing glasses,” I point out, really saying, What about Opt Tech, Mr. Master of the Universe?

“I am.” His answer rejects my hidden sneer. He opens the trunk of the Bentley, removes a tire iron, and holds it out to me as if it were an olive branch. “Wanna hit me in the face?”

“Is that an attempt to defuse the situation?”

Arm raised, head dipped in thought, Martin hangs for a second on the upraised trunk lid. In that instant of hesitation he is transformed. Like fabric that shows iridescent from certain angles, the Martin I met on a train twenty-two years ago peeks through and again I see the young man who was seeking answers. I see the bump of glossy hair he was always pushing out of his eyes. Like Abe Lincoln, the haunted ectomorph, Martin’s wrists, hands, Adam’s apple were all too large for his gangly frame. There still is the juicy bottom lip that I wanted to kiss immediately.

Martin tosses the tire iron, the attempt at levity, back in the trunk, slams it shut, straightens up, and the iridescence disappears. He points toward the house. “You never fixed that leak.” I glance at the dribbling faucet with a beard of black fungus staining the brick beneath it.

“I had a lazy husband.”

“Must have been a loser.” He saunters toward the porch.

“Oh, he was.”

His walk—cocky, shoulders rolling—is something else that came along with Next. I’d fallen in love with his old walk, his old voice. They were tentative, uncertain. The way Martin mumbled acknowledged that the world was a place of doubt and nuance that could not be battered into line with bluster and positive thinking. After Next that hesitant young man with his boyish awkwardness disappeared. I waited and waited for him to return, for the android stranger who’d claimed his body to release him back to me. But it didn’t happen then, and, aside from that iridescent flash a moment ago, it clearly isn’t going to happen now.

He stops to pet Pretzels. I’m hoping she’ll give him the tennis-ball-in-the-garbage-disposal growl. Maybe a feeble attempt at a bite. But the traitor wags her tail and follows Martin to the porch. When he sees her struggling to climb the stairs, he stops to lift her hindquarters and help her up. As he draws closer, I see that his white dress shirt is speckled with smears of ketchup and mustard, a spritz of soy sauce.

Before he sets foot on the porch, before he can get the first shot in, I go on the offensive. “You changed the trust. You changed it without consulting me.”

“That’s one of the reasons I’m here. I thought I needed to address that enturbulation in person.”

“Could you not talk to me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like with those bogus words made up by …” I can’t bring myself to say, “Next.” Next is the name of the other woman who stole my husband. But that isn’t right. No metaphor is exactly right, except maybe the one involving body snatching; it was confusing when he left that his body was not either dead or in the possession of another woman. And it is confusing now that the body of the man I loved more than any on earth—though now with a few wrinkles, a loud voice, and a strutting walk, yet still, essentially, the same body—stands before me.

“No, you’re right. Sorry. I’m trying to talk like a normal person again, but I lose track of what words come from what world.”

I think of Dori’s article about rekindled romance. There is clearly no rekindling going on here; still, Martin’s voice, even the altered Next voice, is worming into someplace in my brain beyond my conscious control and making synapses I’d thought were long dead sputter back to frantic life, and that annoys the shit out of me.

“You gave a girl you haven’t seen in sixteen years thirty thousand dollars. What kind of a pea-brained numbskull does a thing like that?”

“A panicked pea-brained numbskull. I panicked. Aubrey called and said there was an emergency. She needed to pay her tuition immediately and you were out of the country.”

“What?”

“Clearly you were not out of the country.”

“Jesus. Did it ever occur to you to check with me?”

“I wanted to, but …”

I watch as he decides what to tell me. Aubrey inherited Martin’s dark lashes and the soulful shape of his eyes, tugged down a bit on the outer corners like Paul McCartney’s. Her nose, with its teardrop-shaped nostrils, is his in miniature. These similarities confuse me.

He shakes his head, overwhelmed at the impossibility of making me understand. Another similarity with Aubrey. “Cam, so much was happening. Things got crazy. I had to act fast.”

“You didn’t have time to make one phone call?”

“Yes, actually, at that moment, I literally did not have time to make one phone call.”

“So? What? You amend the trust, then just hop in the old Bentley and cruise on down? That’s a two-thousand-mile drive.”

“Yeah. I’ve been on the road nonstop since I faxed in the codicil. And, just for the record, the car belongs to the church.”

I note that, although adrenaline, shock, and anger are keeping my mind fairly coherent, the beer has worked its malty magic on my legs. Refusing to falter in front of Martin, I ease back down onto the rattan rocker. Martin takes a seat on the glider, the same glider that he assembled from a kit we bought together at Home Depot. It creaks beneath his weight. I hope he doesn’t notice how new and unworn it is. I hope he imagines Aubrey and me gliding through sixteen summers of happy, firefly-lit evenings and mourns for all that he missed.

As he settles in, his shoulders slump the tiniest bit, and just that minute shift causes the hidden iridescence to emerge, transforming him back into the Martin I lost, and I remember the last time he was in this house.

He’d already moved out by that time, but still came over to take care of Aubrey. I’d given up on nursing and, after my own bad experience with breast-feeding, had decided that Parkhaven needed a decent lactation consultant. So while I put in the hours at the hospital I needed to become certified, Martin babysat.

It was two days before Christmas. I was late getting home that night because the consultant I was training with was working with a baby girl who had developed jaundice and was too sleepy to nurse and a mom brainwashed into believing that nursing was some kind of sacred experience that would be ruined if she jiggled her breast enough to wake up Sleeping Beauty.

I’d splurged on a big tree, hoping that Aubrey would remember the smell of pine, shiny bulbs, and silver tinsel rather than a haggard mother who cried a lot more than she did. But even the biggest tree I could afford looked ridiculous dwarfed beneath the high ceiling of the great room. Martin didn’t hear me come in that night. He was sitting slumped as he is now, in the darkness with his back to me, watching the automatic lights fade from blue to yellow to green to red. Along with so much else, he’d stopped slumping once he’d pumped himself up with Next theology. A box of ornaments sat opened beside him.

When we lived in Sycamore Heights, we used to collect ornaments all year long. Mostly as souvenirs from trips we took together. A Statue of Liberty from a visit to New York spent eating the kind of Italian food it was impossible to find down here and seeing every play we could get half-price tickets to; red satin lanterns with yellow fringe from Chinatown in San Francisco; a tiny ristra of red-lacquered chile peppers from a visit to Santa Fe. At Christmas, we hung them on whatever spindly Charlie Brown tree we put up. Those pretend trees confirmed our belief that we were pretend adults. We rode old, fat-tired bikes everywhere and picked jobs by how casually they allowed Martin to dress and how few hours I could put in as a nurse and still make a living. That Martin could wear cargo shorts and a T-shirt to his software-writing job balanced out the ridiculous hours he had to work. Wardrobe and flexible hours were more important to us than things like earning potential and insurance. The things that I should have been paying attention to.

On that last Christmas, I’d stood at the door and watched Martin for a moment, slumped in the chair, and he was Martin again, the Martin I’d fallen in love with, fully occupying the body I’d fallen in love with. He was the Martin I could have a conversation with about the mom I’d just been helping at the hospital whose baby had jaundice. Then I remembered that that Martin was gone and I armored myself once more. I walked in and my tone was crisp, unapologetic, when I said, “Sorry I’m late.”

I was in front of him before he could turn away. In the stained-glass illumination cast by the colored lights, I saw that he was holding the first ornament we’d ever collected, a drink coaster made of cedar and inlaid with ivory we’d bought in Morocco not long after we met on the train, and that his face was streaked with tears.

Martin put the ornament down and lifted his arms up to me. I held him and he cried into my neck. He pulled my scrubs off and put his mouth and tongue on all the places that he knew pleased me the most. He pushed into me, but even as we surged together, he went farther and farther away. I felt the sliver of connection between us being hammered to nothing and grew frantic. I took him into my body, but he withdrew more and more of himself from me, from our life together, until, finally, he surrendered. His erection obstinate and unconvinced between us, Martin wiped his face dry, whispered, “I can’t,” and left.

The last time I saw him before the divorce proceedings was on Christmas Day, when we gave Aubrey Pretty Hair Purple Puffalump. And now, sixteen years later, he is back. At any rate a body is back similar enough to the one I fell in love with that, despite my howling rage and ardent desire to be beyond caring, its presence agitates me more than the presence of any other male body has in the past sixteen years.