Quabbin - 19. Chapter 19

After a long, almost silent supper, I almost thought about going to the cemetery. Not to stay. I just hadn’t been there for a while, a couple of years, to visit Mom, Maddie, or Emily Dickinson. Funny thing was, I couldn’t remember one of Dickinson’s poems, not all the way through. I worked on that while watching Dad slowly dice his carrots. And it’s not like we hadn’t been forced to memorize a whole crateful of Dickinson poems -- you can’t grow up in Amherst without that. I kept trying for Dickinson and ending up with Frost: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

Hey, Dad. Are you a wall? Or are you just like a wall?

I know old spinster Em wrote something about “Nobodies,” and something about “Hope,” but I couldn’t get any of the words right, or even the thoughts. Still, cemeteries were spooky, if not as spooky as reservoirs that can drown you. So I decided to skip the Stephen King depths, the dead, and poetry, along with married or virtually married guys and their husbands, and go pick up a single one.

It sounded stupid, but I knew it was coming. It followed wiping out with Dane, and hearing, if not wanting to hear, Cameron’s advice, plus acknowledging our shared mess-up with Kevin. Still, just so I didn’t completely embarrass myself, I made a couple of rules.

First, no matter how desperate I got, I wasn’t going to pay for company, though I knew where I easily could, in Springfield and Holyoke. How did I know? Just something I grew up hearing. I’d never taken advantage of it, not in this country.

Second, I wasn’t going to hurt anyone. I wasn’t going to meet a guy, and make him promises, and let him fall even the tiniest bit in love with me, then never see him again. It wasn’t like I could even take him out to dinner. I’d already eaten that, and Dad had cooked a lot. Besides, by the time I cleaned up and drove to Northampton, it would probably be nine o’clock. I was just going to go into a bar, smile broadly, play some pool, throw some darts, and see what happened. And I knew something would happen. It was a college town, and I wasn’t bad looking.

Third, I wasn’t going to take him home -- at least, not to Dad’s house. That would be too much to explain. Way too much. Tons too much. Kind of impossible. Hi, Dad. You don’t know this guy, and I don’t know really know him, but we’re all having breakfast together. The best thing would be if the guy had his own apartment and lived alone. But I could deal with roommates, too. You smile. You talk small. At least, you don’t have to tip them, like in a whorehouse. If the guy didn’t have an apartment, like if he still lived with his folks, and he thought going to a motel was way too sleazy, we could slip into the Founder’s House. I could quickly get the key from whoever was working nights. Cameron would laugh his ass off on Monday, even sooner, ‘cause I’d probably see him at the gym, but that would be then, and this was Friday night, and I was facing at least eight hours alone. Besides, there was a whole history of employees using the Founder’s House for things it wasn’t built for. I’d just be part of the long Mill tradition.

So I hit a bar in Northampton -- Amherst was where the kids hung out. And I had a couple of beers, and played a little darts. I put some money in the juke box, and let people know what kind of songs I liked, and, before eleven PM, I had a winner.

He was in real estate, in Amherst. He was really smart, and really cute, and ten years older than I was, and knew poetry. He was also with a friend, a woman, but they said goodbye in the parking lot, and I followed Leigh to his house.

It was a half-hour drive because he lived up 95, in South Deerfield. It was a small house, just a couple of rooms on two floors, with a barn out back now used for a garage. Of course, I couldn’t see most of this. It was dark, and I didn’t ask for a tour. We also didn’t spend a lot of time downstairs. Soon we were upstairs, in his tiny bed, in one of the tiny bedrooms.

It was hot. I mean, there was no air. The bedroom had one small window, and there were drapes and curtains and blinds on it. I got the feeling Leigh didn’t like light. The bed, I was told, was “a sleigh bed.” “I didn’t intend to buy it,” Leigh said. “I was actually at the auction looking for Early American rugs. But I saw the bed and got a great deal ‘cause most people couldn’t fit into it.”

Leigh looked good, but he was also maybe 5'-6", so I would be “most people.” And while I had to admit it was a cool bed, I would’ve traded it for an air conditioner. At least, a ceiling fan. But the ceiling was so low that even a fan that hugged the plaster would’ve cut off my head. “You’re so big,” he told me, words every guy loves to hear. But he meant “tall,” and even for a poetry-lover who’d had a few drinks on a Friday night, he could have picked his words more carefully.

But it was fun being curled in a tiny bed with tiny Leigh. Tiny conservative Leigh. It turned out he was from Minnesota, a state even colder than Massachusetts. No wonder he didn’t mind the heat. And you almost never need air conditioning in Amherst. It cools down at night, except for a few weeks in August, and that’s what porches are for. Unless you’re trying to have sex in an Early American attic.

I decided to be romantic. I picked up tiny, naked Leigh, who couldn’t have weighed more than a small barbell, and carefully carried him down his steep and very narrow stairs. Steep, narrow, low-ceilinged, and dark stairs. And I was barefoot, of course. And he had cats. Or a cat. Or something that darted between my feet while I was pretending to be the Dark Knight. And I’d had a couple of new beers, on top of the beers I’d had in the bar. But I wasn’t drunk, or I didn’t think I was, and I was used to creeping around Dad’s house in the half dark, so, somehow, we made it downstairs alive.

Leigh was thrilled. He’d never been carried before, ‘specially by someone whose chest alone probably doubled his weight. Though when I reached the dining room -- that was at the bottom of the stairs -- I discovered it was just as stuffy as the attic. “I’m almost never home,” he apologized. “And living alone, I kind of keep the windows shut all the time.” So I pushed on to the back porch.

Not a lot of furniture there. Not even a rug. A porch swing, yeah. But it was another undersized antique, and even less comfortable looking than my Dad’s. There were some boxes, too, ‘least that’s what I thought I was squinting at, but I couldn’t make out how sturdy they were. And there was one of those folding, wooden, I’ve-only-seen-them-in-museums, clothes drying racks. Maybe Leigh also liked vintage clothes. In the bar, he’d been wearing jeans and a T- shirt -- my kind of guy.

I set him temporarily on the swing. “Be right back,” I said, and he kind of giggled. You can do that if you’re hot and thirty-one, and still make a guy think it’s cute. And I thought he was more than cute. So I went back inside his house and improvised like hell.

There was nothing in the dining room or kitchen that was soft, and from what I could see of the living room, it was full of spindly antique furniture. I was guessing he didn’t have a lot of friends my size, though I’d never thought of myself as especially tall. In front of the living room was a glassed in porch. I’ll bet the storm windows never came out there, either, to actually let in air, but that wasn’t my job at the moment. There was a couch. It was mainly wood, like the back porch swing, but there were some cushions on it and a mess of pillows. I grabbed them all, plus a blanket that seemed to come with them. And I brought the pillows and quilt from Leigh’s sleigh bed, hoping the quilt wasn’t also some kind of auction house special. I took them all to the rear porch, where we kind of built a nest.

It was probably more comfortable for Leigh -- after all, he also got to lie on top of me. Though that, right there, was almost enough to make me happy. He also thought I was “the funniest man he’d ever been with,” which goes right along in importance for guys with being “tall.” And, once we got settled in, we had a damned nice night.

The morning was OK, too. Leigh woke me while the sun was just coming up, ‘cause in the daylight, you can see how close his house was built to his neighbor’s. And we went back upstairs -- me following this time. The bedroom had cooled by at least a degree or two, and, being more familiar with each other, we were more relaxed. Then I went back to sleep, and he must’ve showered and fed the cats, and when he woke me, it was with the words everyone seems to know these days: “I have to go to work.”

“Isn’t it Saturday?” I asked.

“Real estate, remember? It’s a big day.”

So I kind of took a shower, in his small, old tub, with a rubber spray thing that pointed around the middle of my chest. And I tried not to step in the cat box when I tired to comb my hair in a mirror that must’ve been hung about three feet off the floor. And we didn’t have breakfast, because Leigh didn’t cook or even stock his kitchen with coffee ‘cause he always got that driving to work.

“I can offer you a tomato,” he said. “My neighbor picks them for me. She grows them herself.”

“Awfully early for tomatoes,” I joked.

“Hothouse,” he replied.

Exactly.

But we kissed on the back porch. And he gave me his business card, with his home number already written on the back -- he had, no surprise, small and very neat handwriting. And a tiny part of me really wanted to think that I’d ever call that number, and ask him out for dinner, and do this again, somewhere more comfortable. But I dropped the card on my passenger seat as I backed out of his narrow, unpaved driveway, so he could back out, too, then I let him lead me to Route 116, as if I could ever get lost in a place as small as South Deerfield. But after we crossed the Sunderland bridge, and he went on into Amherst, I turned and went to the top of Mount Sugar Loaf.

I hadn’t been up there for years, even before going on my trip. It had a great view, but was as corny as a tourist calendar. Still everything looked especially pretty in the morning light. Alone, practically on the edge of the forest, I hollered to see if there was an echo ‘cause I couldn’t remember. There wasn’t, but I gave a couple of yells, anyway, feeling like a jerk. But a happy one. A very happy one.