“I threw up pink one time from sweet and sour chicken, but it wasn’t pretty. It was chunky and it tasted bad.”
We adjust our pillows and watch Intervention on his laptop, the woman addicted to pills and bingo. Her husband is about to leave her and she has a lonely, closet-hiding kid. When she’s passed out on the floor in broken glass and casserole, Ben says he feels a little better. Then he says, “Seriously, though,” as if it’s a conversation we’ve been having all night, “what percent chance do I have?”
We’ve been over this so many times, it’s just a game we play: what is the chance that I’ll be with him, that our relationship will ever be more than a friendship stretched to its breaking point?
I think about it and say, “Thirty-seven percent.”
“In baseball if you hit the ball thirty-seven percent of the time it’s pretty good.”
“If you have a thirty-seven percent chance of living it’s bad.”
“If you have a thirty-seven percent chance of winning the lottery,” he counters, “it would be fucking excellent.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
“I’ve always been lucky,” he says, which isn’t true.
We watch another episode of Intervention, a heroin-addicted prostitute. I’ve seen this one twice already—it’s one of my favorites because the girl is so beautiful. She paints her face in bright colors, twists sections of her hair around a curling iron. Her boyfriend shoots the heroin straight into her jugular.
Ben falls asleep and then jerks himself awake.
“Do you want some water? Can I get you anything?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “I’m okay.”
I lie in the crook of his arm and say soothing things and it is eleventh grade all over again and I’m in love with a boy who carves things into his arms with the sharp edges of beer cans. I rub Neosporin on his cuts, brush his hair. I hide with him in bedrooms at parties, behind bushes—the world slows, stops. But everything that happened between us could easily be counted in minutes.
In the morning, Ben wants to make me breakfast, but all I want to do is go home and get in my own bed. Once I get there, though, I’m not tired. Melinda is gone, her open doors inviting me in.
I walk into her bedroom—messier than yesterday, panties and wet towels on the floor. I go into her bathroom, which is filled with tiny things: size 5 flip-flops, hotel bottles of lotion, lip gloss you could attach to a key ring. Even her bar of soap is small. Her toilet doesn’t look clean, but I pee anyhow and then go back to my room to search for a poem Ben wrote for me. It hung on the refrigerator at my old apartment, but when I moved I folded it up and stuck it in whatever book I was reading and now I can’t find it. The poem was about how he was going to turn all of the blackbirds in his heart to flames, or was he going to turn the flames to blackbirds? I look through dozens of books before giving up. It was pretty good but not his best. I’ll tell him I misplaced it and he’ll make me another copy, write it out on fat-lined paper.
I sit on the counter eating cashews as I gaze out the window, stare at a corner of the blue-tarp roof. I wonder where Melinda has gone, how it’s possible that she is so much busier than I am.
Lifting the window, I dislodge the bottle and climb out. I haven’t been on a roof since I was a teenager watching a meteor shower at Leslie Hodo’s spend-the-night party—ninth grade, tenth? Or maybe I was somewhere else in the house while the others were on the roof; the memory’s unclear. It is soft under my feet. I move slowly and bent over, as if this might make the burden of my weight less, and then stand straight to observe our yard and the crack house from this new perspective—the same but different.
Three of the crackheads are already in the garage, two men and one woman, and I’m pretty sure they’re looking directly at me but I feel invisible, like I’m so high up no one can see me. No one can touch me. If I crashed through, I would fall into the living room of the man and his dead lover’s son. They would come running from different parts of the house and stand over me in their boxer shorts, eager to see what new tragedy had befallen them.
PROPER ORDER
It is a great big old beautiful house and he stands in my kitchen and says, “This is exactly where I pictured you living,” and I take this to mean he thinks I am beautiful, that I am the type of person who should be living in a grand house. I want to see myself as he sees me, as someone who deserves to live here.
He is my student. I am his professor. The house I live in is not mine. It belonged to a famous writer who donated it to the university at which I am employed for one academic year. The house is gated, situated on ninety rolling acres. My friend Clarke says it’s the site of an old Cherokee Indian burial ground; a man who wants to sleep with me says that Geeshie Wiley haunts these woods. He sends me links to her songs, asks if he can come out and take a look around. My dog and I have walked every inch of this property, I tell him, though of course this can’t be true. We have looked for bones and gravestones, men camping in our woods, but mostly I keep my head empty and walk fast to burn calories; when my dog jumps up to lick my hand, I imagine her presenting me with a skull, her teeth in its eye sockets, a hand in my hand. And then the police will yellow-tape the place and the university people will have to move me into a cozy little condo somewhere off the Square, where the past writers-in-residence have lived.
There are two ponds, a tennis court, a lumpy croquet court, and an overgrown baseball field. There is an old home site, steps leading to nowhere that someone roped off with vines. There are two garages. In one of them, I found the famous writer’s baseball cards scattered all over the floor and a neat stack of postcards, the paper cheaply curled. The photograph on the postcard must have been taken there: bare wooden slats behind him, blue jean shirt, staring directly into the camera. He was younger then, and newly famous. The watch on his wrist sits oddly high on his arm. His wedding band seems to be sliding off his finger.
The famous writer and his wife are everywhere: their names carved into the driveway, wallpaper they picked out themselves. His books on the shelf, unsigned, worthless. They aren’t dead but they’re gone, which is a little bit like being dead, and which is, perhaps, the reason I keep moving. This has been my life for so long now: counting the number of paychecks until the paychecks run out and I have to find new paychecks, new boyfriends and friends and living arrangements. There is so much promise in these new places that I can almost convince myself I’ll be different there.