“Dog. Nice to meet you,” she says to the dog, who says nothing.
The maybe-Four remains at the table throughout this exchange. She’s absorbed in her phone, slurping her smoothie, but now she looks up. She wrinkles her forehead. I consider smiling. But no. I can tell she’s the kind of girl who’ll call me a perv to her friends the moment I leave: “Did you see the way that perv was smiling at me? Fucking gross.”
It’s time to go anyway. I’m sure I got this. Just look at Dolores trying not to look at me.
Kelly moves her hand to shield her face from the sun, “So you live around here?” She’s trying on confidence.
“Vacation. The grey house over there,” I point in the direction of the beach house. It’s a four-bedroom, two-garage nautical castle complete with solar panels and white wooden columns that support all three decks. It belongs to me, paid for courtesy of my grandmother’s will.
“The big grey one? Dope,” Kelly says.
“House-sitting for my friend,” I say. Dope.
“Not yours?” she says, her voice like a sigh. I imagine her life already taking shape: assessing and comparing friends’ possessions. One friend’s car, another friend’s pool. Another friend’s graduation party. Just like her mother, probably, with her friends’ Botox jobs, husbands, summer homes and children graduating from prestigious colleges. “Nice gig,” she says.
“It is. Well, it was nice to meet you. Gotta take this guy home.”
“Which guy?” says the maybe-Four from the picnic table. How could she hear that far?
“Nice to meet you too,” says Dolores. “Nice to meet you, Dog.”
I walk away. The sky is turning even bloodier around the edges. The beach is famous for its spectacular sunsets. Around this time, you start seeing the beach people holding their phones up, taking pictures of the sun. Romantics.
I know that Dolores is looking at me walking away. She sees my wide back, the way my calves spasm slightly. A twitch that lasts a moment too long. I’ve had women tell me that I strut a little. This used to bother me, but it doesn’t anymore. It’s not a put-on strut like what my best friend, Jason, does with his walk. He’s just trying hard to not be mediocre, which he is.
For me, the way I move, it’s natural.
“It’s like you’re trying to pick a fight,” Gloria, my girlfriend, said once.
But I’m not trying to pick a fight.
Just the opposite.
2
AS A CHILD, I LIVED WITH MY MOTHER, MY SISTER AND MY father in a small town in Ontario, Canada, where everyone knew that the dentist was a drunk and that the one, part-time homeless lady lost her kid in a freak accident in a silo after her husband had left her for the drunken dentist’s receptionist. There was a library and a courthouse in our small town. Also, three high schools. My mother taught at one of the high schools. My father worked at the courthouse.
My early childhood was uneventful. There was one funeral – my mother’s mother, whose will divided the family, with us ending up on the lucky side – and one birth – my younger sister.
At twelve, I was a well-adjusted boy. No setting things on fire or drinking my mother’s vodka. I never did drugs. I was not into upsetting my parents since that would draw their attention to me. This is why I never bothered telling my father about walking in on my mother touching hands with our neighbour, Karl. Karl who – I could always sense – wanted to, or had done so and wanted to again, fuck my mother. It was doglike, the way they seemed to pant at each other as they talked.
I also never got caught with my pants rolled down in my mother’s underwear drawer, spending myself right into the wooden corners of it. That was probably the most troubling sexual thing that I’d done in my life. I’ve never done truly creepy things like touch my little sister when tasked with changing her shitty diaper. (The takeaway? It’s not my fault she was anorexic in her twenties.)
Overall, I was a good kid. So it was a surprise to everyone when Caroline happened. The way I think of it – Caroline happened – is intentional. It was an event, like a hurricane, threatening enough that it gets its own name. Though looking back on it, it was more like Guy happened to Caroline; perhaps that’s what she would say.
Caroline was one of my mother’s students. My mother had an altruistic side, and she provided tutoring for the underprivileged kids.
Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, the basement filled with those retards sitting or standing beside my mother at a large table, their homework spread out in front of them like war maps.
Caroline was older than me, fifteen to my thirteen. But she looked closer to my age with her almost breastless body. She was not pretty. Not only that, she wasn’t even ugly. She was just something drawn randomly. A bunch of squiggles and lines that made up the form of a girl so incredibly uninteresting that she immediately fascinated me. I could not understand it fully, or explain it to myself as I acknowledged it. It was as if her lack of attractiveness was some kind of a vacuum for my attractiveness. We complemented each other that way.
The first time I saw her, she was holding some papers in her hand, nervously. She wanted to read her homework to my mother or something. Something that stressed her out. I stressed her out too. Before I turned away, I sensed her attention on me. You can tell those things. I remember the intensity, the urging…the desperation even, as I felt it. Was she in trouble, and was I the only person capable of saving her? Her attention was thrilling, the obviousness of it, the way it surrounded me and made me feel powerful, big. A big boy.
“You’re so adorable,” she said later, in a mocking way. “You’re like my annoying little brother.”
She was probably unaware of the fact that the whole time she was scanning me, I was thinking about things I had seen in German nudie mags. What would it look like to shove my dick in her mouth? Or flip her onto all fours to try to penetrate her? I was imagining pinching her tiny nipples till she squeaked. I knew about the things people did to each other. I was always good at research.
She started staying longer after her tutoring lessons, and my parents didn’t mind. We sat in the backyard – it was spring – and talked. I dwelled on the details of her. A tiny braided bracelet. How delicate it looked wrapped around the protruding wrist bone. I wanted to take the bracelet in my mouth, taste the dirty threads that had accumulated her sweat.
Her knees. A dark spot from a scab that left a mark, like a kitten’s paw. Also, the way her hair looked wet on a hot day when it got too greasy from being outside. Or how she scratched the side of her leg and then would sometimes clean the same nail with her bottom teeth, which was disgusting, but somehow wasn’t.
She was a collection of images, impressions – artifacts that I’d bag up and file for later. All those images, parts of Caroline brought out something in me – a need to be in contact with another human being. Not just any human being: her, specifically. It was sexual, but it was not exactly about sex. I couldn’t tell what it was. It felt as if there was a short-circuit in my brain, some pleasant malfunction. Yet. I was troubled by this need; it was as if I absolutely had to be around her all the time. It was like the flu. I hoped it would pass. I wasn’t sure if this was okay, what I felt. In retrospect, it was probably just puberty.
Sometime near the end of the summer, I lost my virginity to Caroline. It happened on the weekend when my parents were away with my younger sister.