Bleeder Page 9

  When we near Dad’s car, he opens his door and pulls a card from his seat. “Here,” he says. “Since we won’t be seeing you this weekend, it’s an early birthday present. It’s just a bit of money,” he says as I open the card and see the cash, “but we thought that you could get a good dinner somewhere.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Mom’s got something else for you, but you know you’ll have to come home for that. She’s not gonna mail it or send it by me.”

  “That sounds like her,” I laugh. “I’ll be home soon. I promise.”

  “Happy birthday, Son,” Dad says, giving me a farewell hug.

  And as he drives away into the fading purple, nostalgia overcomes me. I have grown up and moved out of the house. And it all happened so quickly.

  June 9. Sean and I drive to the store to get the keg for tonight’s party, and in the parking lot, he shoves me a wad of green bills, commenting that everyone should buy a keg on their twenty-first birthday. Inside, the lady behind the counter asks for my ID, and I proudly produce it. She is old and wrinkled, her eyes a pruned topography of skin.

  “Oh, happy birthday,” she says, coughing out of a phlegmatic lung while taking the cash I give her.

  “Thanks.”

  Another employee brings out the keg on a dolly, and I roll this outside and down the handicap ramp.

  “Aren’t you going to help?” I ask of Sean, who idles in my truck’s cab. “This thing’s heavy and I can’t lift it myself.” He flips open his passenger door.

  “Sorry, dude. I can’t touch it. I’m still twenty.” He laughs, saunters over, and hoists the keg into my truck bed. “Pussy,” he chides.

  Later, my house parties. Gleaming candles are set around the place, flickering in the corners and dancing shadows upon the walls. In the great room, the stereo booms, growing louder as the night lengthens. Two lines form along the hallway: one for the restroom, the other for the keg iced down on the small balcony. But really, one line is an extension of the other. A cup is filled, is drunk, and is then pissed out to make room for another. At least this is how I begin to see the night as I revolve from keg to toilet and so on.

  The party is a good-looking crowd. The fit captain of the crew team swings his arm around a cherub-faced teacher in training; a lithe basketball scholar proves his athleticism by performing several keg stands; and a steady couple brings their argument to the party, making loud overtures of their hate for one another. Several beers into the night, however, a partygoer discovers this same couple in my roommate’s bedroom and snaps paparazzi photographs of their naked embarrassment. We laugh. They laugh, they blush.

  I lay my eye upon Portia—a striking redhead with a wide and easy grin—and I absently trail her from room to room. For a time we dance together, but when she later hooks herself to a boy in a buttoned blue shirt, I give up the pursuit and find something else to occupy me. I chat with friends. I play songs on the stereo.

  By 3:00 A.M., the keg is dry and the party disperses. Two bodies with open mouths drinking in the inebriated night air sprawl on the couch; another several have passed out on the floor; and my roommates’ rooms are all occupied as well. I crawl through my second-story window and sit on the rooftop, pondering the few stars visible through the streetlights’ fluorescent glow. A cool breeze rustles the nearby trees while farther away, the crickets harmonize in the night. A car shoots out of the dark, rambles along the avenue, and beams light on the night-silver trees. Soon Sean steps out of my window to join me.

  “So, this is where you’re off to. Hiding out on the roof.”

  “I’m not hiding. I just felt like being here.” The smell of the river drifts in the wind and mingles with the fragrance of gladiolas. A light fog puffs about us. “Twenty-one,” I tell Sean as he lowers himself beside me. “Twenty-one.”

  “I know.” He nods his head, tips back his beer cup. “And you’re doing great.”

  “I am.”

  We sit quietly. Below us a man bicycles past, pedaling in the night.

  “I got a letter this week. A birthday card from Ana.”

  Sean sips his beer. “Really,” he says. “How’s she doing?”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly from her. It was from an AIDS organization, PWA. It says that she’s made a donation in my name, honoring my birthday.” Sean, staring off past the elm tree that shades the front lawn, brings the beer to his lips again and takes a long draw. “Can you believe that? It was a lot of money, too.” Sean nods. “I can’t believe it. I guess that even after all the hurt I caused her, I can at least feel like she doesn’t want me dead.” And then it is out there, the brutal irony.

  Sean and I can’t control ourselves. We laugh loudly. I hold my side and lie flat onto the rooftop to catch air, and it is good.

  “That’s great,” Sean says. “That’s really something, you know.”

  “I know. I can’t even say how it made me feel.”

  “So, did you tell anyone about it?”

  “No. And I’m not going to. This is just something I’ll keep to myself.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me,” he says as he stands. He sips again. “So I’m heading back in and will leave you to your thoughts. Besides, I’ve got this little hottie that I think may go home with me.” He ducks back through the window. “Don’t stay out here too long trying to solve all the world’s problems tonight,” he shouts back before a long silence returns and the crickets chirp in the background.

  A few minutes later, Sean yells up to me from the front yard, says, “I’m headin’.”

  “Later,” I call back. A young blonde is leashed to his arm and they both stumble to his car.

  “She’s cute,” I call out.

  “Hey. What’d ya expect?” he says throwing up his arms and letting out a laugh that echoes through the quiet street.

  Sean falls into his car seat, cranks, swerves away, and howls out his window as he speeds down the avenue. I watch the taillights fade.

  Later, the stereo quiet, the lights out, the party over—I slip back through my window and fall into my mattress, listening to the box fan hum a sleepy breeze.

  At a club in downtown Wilmington, I meet Kaitlin. She dances, and as I watch her twirl to the music, I pine for the happiness that she exudes. A few songs later when she notices me smiling, she stops dancing, sidles to the bar next to me. I drink to increase my courage and to slow my nervous heart. I give her a hard stare.

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “No,” she says. “I think I’ve had enough tonight.” She curls threads of chestnut hair behind her ear and stares at the dancers still swaying on the floor.

  “Okay. Fair enough.” My palms sweat. My heart pounds. “What if I just sit here and drink for you while we talk.”

  “Sure, okay. But I’m getting ready to leave.”

  I take another sip. “Or I could just get your phone number and see if you’re interested in going out sometime?”

  She turns to look at me, her hazel eyes bright in the darklight. “Boy, you just cut to the chase don’t you?”

  I shrug my shoulders. “I think it’s the alcohol talking. I’m usually the shy guy you’d never meet.”

  “Sure you are. That’s okay. You don’t have to lie.” She opens her purse, pulls out a notepad, writes a number on it, tears a sheet off, folds it, and passes it to me. “Here. Here’s your number.” I read it aloud.

  “Is this real? It doesn’t sound like a real number. There’s too many fives.”

  “Guess you’ll just have to call it to find out,” she says as she stands to leave. She gives me a playful wave and slips away.

  I polish off my drink and play the scrap of paper between my fingers much as if I were twirling a flower.

  Walking home, I pause before a house’s bay window and listen to a piano echoing from within. The sound, soft and distant, haunts the quiet night. I lower myself to the curb and close my eyes in silent appreciation of this moonlight sonata.

  Saturday when K
aitlin arrives for our date, we stroll through a downtown redolent with the smells of summer. We walk, we talk, and a block away from the swirling black waters of the Cape Fear River and amid the thrum of nightlife, we dine. I like that I can now order wine, so as we settle into our sidewalk table, I request a bottle. It is quickly brought for me to taste, and, pronouncing it good, glasses are poured, and we toast.

  “To our first date,” I say, raising up the wine.

  We drink. The bread comes. We eat. The salads arrive. We eat. And when the seafood lands, we eat, refilling our wine glasses all the while.

  “The check, sir,” the waiter says, presenting the billfold. And as I count out several twenties, I ignore the great sum spent, telling myself I’m buying happiness.

  On our way out, I pause in the door’s threshold and mention a nearby coffee shop, adding that it’s poetry slam night.

  “Let’s go!” she enthuses.

  So along Front Street, we squeeze between bodies swaying down the avenue in summer intoxication. Clusters of pedestrians form moving walls along the sidewalk, and Kaitlin and I must dodge from one side to another, stepping off the curb and then back on as we go. When we enter the coffeehouse, Kaitlin reserves a table while I order. Then I sit, as a patron reads poetry from the small stage. This young poet muses about love, and although I recognize his meaning, I am glad that it is not something I have written. When he nears the end, his voice crescendos and feedback squeals out from the speakers, deafening me. Then the young poet gives a slight bow to say that he is done. Kaitlin and I smile politely, and we clap. Another poet takes the stage. She reads a poem where she was gifted a dead father for Christmas, and it is sad. Sort of. She steps down. We clap. Another takes her place. I refill our coffees.

  Later as we walk back to my house, our conversation carries us along. I tell her about Ana; she talks about Ray, her former boyfriend. I tell her I come from a small town; she says that she does, too. And so it goes, while the moon rises in the east and glides overhead. I stray from any talk about my hemophilia or HIV. There is no handbook for people with HIV, and there are no rules for how I should date, but I know that this, our first date is not the one for such a serious topic. I fear my HIV would ruin any hope I have with Kaitlin.

  On my front stoop, the sound of our voices in the night lulls me into a good feeling, and I want us to linger there forever, but eventually Kaitlin stirs.

  “I should go,” she says. The coffee has worn off, and the date has come to its inevitable end.

  “You should have let me pick you up like a real gentleman,” I say as we approach her car.

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t mind driving, and you were closer to downtown.”

  We hug. Then I feel it: the drawing closer. And we kiss. And it’s so uncomplicated, so simple. Before she leaves, we lean in again, breaking apart slowly.

  “We should do this again,” she says. “Call me.”

  “Count on it.”

  After her car disappears, I lock the front door, climb the steps, and crawl outside my window to watch a night as bright as silver day. The stars shine overhead, and the downtown river pulls down the crescent moon. I stretch out and trace constellations on this twinkling canvas, lining out Perseus, Pegasus, and Ursa Minor.

  Kaitlin and I share a string of several nights together, all reminiscent of our first date: a walk downtown; a meal; wine; coffee; and a few heavy kisses as my fan whirs beside us laid out on my mattress. I do not push things beyond the roaming of hands, and Kaitlin always leaves before passion overrides reason, at least until a night, two weeks later.

  Kaitlin and I have eaten dinner, watched a movie, and we now recline on my mattress reading. I have Flaubert, she Plath. It is late, and Kaitlin stretches her arms out and yawns, letting her book rest in her lap.

  “Tired?” I ask.

  “Very,” she says as she lies back.

  I close my book. She puts her head against my chest. The night rustles with kisses and movement.

  “Should I go home, tonight?” she asks. “I know it’s not that far, but . . . well . . .” She looks to me, and I realize that the time has come for me to tell. We kiss again, and my heart tenses.

  So I begin: “When I was a little boy about ten . . .”

  When I finish, Kaitlin huddles with her knees between her arms, staring at nothing. It is a moment one could breathe a life between. The night paints us in shadow and mystery and sorrow. When Kaitlin cries, she buries her face in the hollow of my chest, and I hold her and let the darkness fall around us.

  I glance around the room and notice Kaitlin’s book of poems still open beside her. It was this, I think, she was reading before her life changed. When she falls asleep, I get up quietly and shut my door, turn the fan on low, and pull a sheet over us. I rest my arm across her and lie against her. However, I cannot sleep. Outside, the full moon paints a silver silhouette of the elm tree against my blue wall. It moves ever so slightly as the hours go by and as the fan whirs wind over my sad heart.

  In the morning, the shaking bed wakes me and I blink open my eyes and see Kaitlin gathering her things. I kick off the covers, and Kaitlin looks over to me.

  “I’m going home,” she says. “I can’t sleep anymore.”

  “Okay.” I prop myself up in bed, hold the pillow between my arms as if it is her. “Will I see you again?”

  “Yes. Don’t be silly.” She clasps her purse shut. Zips her bookbag.

  “Okay. When?”

  “I don’t know. I need some time, okay. I can’t talk right now. There’s too much in my head.” She stoops to kiss me good-bye—a light peck on my cheek—and suddenly, I am alone in the world again.

  I cannot sleep, so I pull myself up and make coffee, thinking of what I should do on my day off. It already feeling somehow spoiled, I try to slug through: a few hours at the coin laundry, another hour divided between lunch and grocery shopping, and several long minutes edging my way through a slow river of traffic. The sun crests the midway point as morning drops into afternoon. I visit the tobacco shop, purchase a cigar, and carry this to a patch of sand overlooking the waterway channel at Wrightsville Beach. White gulls swoop above the water, diving occasionally, and a few vessels motor by, their flags whipping in the coastal breeze and their small carriage sailing underneath the drawbridge. I clip the cigar’s end, light it, breathe in, and taste. The yellow smoke puffs in an ocean of sea-blue sky.

  For several days, Kaitlin doesn’t call. My heart beats uneasily, nettled by unhappiness. But then one afternoon, there is a knock at my door, and, when I open it, she is there.

  “I think I just needed time,” she says. “I needed to think clearly about this, and I couldn’t have you in the way.”

  “And what does this mean?” I brace myself against the doorknob gripped in my palm.

  “I like you.” My heart races. “And I think I’d like to work through this. But . . .” My heart slows. “After my last relationship, I felt so used there, and I don’t want to feel like that again. I didn’t feel like a person. So, already you can see I’m not a big fan of sex.”

  I clench the doorknob, then release. “I can understand that. We can leave sex off the table for awhile.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I’m gonna want to for a very long time really. I just wanted to be clear on that upfront.”

  “Oh. Okay. I see.”

  “Well really, and more importantly, my abstinence isn’t related to . . . well . . . you know. . . . Because it’s not. It’s a decision I was already working towards.” She comes toward me and we hug. “So do you think we can give this a shot?”

  I pause, think. “It’s definitely worth a shot.”

  And we are back together as before. We listen to albums and, later that night, we climb underneath my covers, which soon rustle with kisses and heavy petting.

  “Is this okay?” I ask as I slide my hand into her panties.

  “Yes,” she breathes out. “This is great. I want you to.” She leans back and nu
dges my hand lower; then she places her hand in my boxers, and we please one another as we can. A thought crosses my mind whether, without HIV, we’d be having sex, but I squash it and let desire take over, and soon, this quenched, we cuddle close: her chestnut hair tickling my nose while I kiss her shoulder and the nape of her neck.

  “I love you,” I whisper into her ear.

  “What?” she asks, turning her face toward me.

  “I said, ‘I love you.’”

  “Oh . . .” She rests a hand against my face. “I love you, too.”

  She nestles close. She holds me. I hold her. We pet. We tremble. We sleep.

  THE PINE CONE DID IT