Roger brought out a side of my mom that my father and I couldn’t. We were both jealous. With him, she laughed harder than she ever did with us and it was usually impossible to tell what exactly was so funny. A used car ad on TV, my uncle’s dead on impression of their mother, the smell of bleach—any of these things could set them off. It sometimes felt as if they were gloating in how much humor there was to be found in the world, if only you knew where to look for it. Even her speaking voice changed with him, a little higher, a little more alive. My father and I tried to console each other with rolled eyes and shrugs, but we both wanted to laugh that hard, and, more than that, longed to make her laugh like that.
Last month, I got home from the hospital and found Emily emptying her desk into a cardboard box. Two packed suitcases were lined up by the front door.
“What’s going on?” I poured myself a shot of Jameson. Through the living room window, I glimpsed a car idling outside our building, its headlights like startled, jaundiced eyes.
“I’m moving out,” she said. I sunk into the couch.
We’d been fighting and we hadn’t seen each other for more than thirty consecutive minutes that week. It’s no way to live, and I know that. But we were only months away from a different kind of life, one in which I’d be working fifty instead of eighty hours a week.
She took a deep breath “I’ve fallen in love with someone else,” she said as if announcing that she’d gotten a new job. Emily’s currently a bartender, but she’s also cut hair, taught first grade, cleaned houses, and done retail. Paid work is largely a distraction from writing confessional, mostly bad poetry. I can say that now although for years I sat gamely in the front row of her packed readings and tried to ignore how closely her poems resembled those of her friends.
“You can’t be serious.” I stood up and stepped to the door, blocking her way out.
She bent to pick up a suitcase. She’d left before, for a night or two, but never with more than her purse. “C’mon, babe. This is absurd.” I tried laughing but she reached for the doorknob. I grabbed her forearm. When she tried to pull away I gripped her wrist more tightly and pulled her towards me.
“Let go of me,” she said, her breath warm against my face.
I squeezed until I could feel the speeding beats of her pulse.
“You’re hurting me,” she said and when I let go, she jerked away as if I was radioactive and in that moment the floor and bookshelves began to shake. Car alarms went off up and down the street. Dishes rattled in the kitchen. When it passed, a radiant look spread across Emily’s face. She always hated these minor quakes, which happen every few months out here. But this one she interpreted as a booming geological exclamation point to the utter rightness of her departure. I took it as further evidence that if God exists at all, he is either a twisted bastard or a space cadet.
She walked out and I followed her down the hall and out to the sidewalk, the tycoon joined the scene, ballsy enough to extend her hand for an introduction before she loaded Emily’s bags into the trunk. Emily went blank and mute as she got in the passenger’s seat, tears rolling down her cheeks as I begged her to stay and the tycoon, behind the wheel by then, put a pale, venous hand on her thigh. For two blocks, I chased them, keeping their tail lights in sight. And then the tycoon gunned it and they were gone. I called Peter sobbing. We’ve been best friends since we were six and now he and his fiancée, Felix, live a block away. He found me on the sidewalk and I spent the next week with them, calling in sick and vacating my apartment as if it had been condemned.
The year Roger lived with us, my parents were broke and sleep deprived. At their worst, they seemed barely able to tolerate each other. For years, those fights presented like the symptoms of a looming divorce. Now they seem to have been nothing more than the awkward, bucking alignments of one life to another, full of chafe and struggle and moments of ecstatic recognition.
In the winter of 1982, my father’s father had a heart attack in Philadelphia. My parents bundled my brother into our battered Corolla and raced to his hospital bed, leaving Roger and me alone for the weekend. I wanted them to stay away for an entire year, during which I would cook dinner for Roger every night and we would somehow get tickets to the SuperBowl, and he, rather than my exhausted parents and wailing brother, would cheer from the sidelines during my Pop Warner football games.
After my game that Saturday, we headed to Duke Forest on his bike. Roger rode helmetless and I wore a beat up football helmet that he’d bought at a yard sale and painted maroon with a gold stripe in honor of the Redskins. I wrapped my arms around his waist and felt tough and terrified as we sped down two-lane back roads. He pushed the bike into the woods and after half a mile on the main trail, we forked off onto a minor dirt path that ran along the Eno River.
Other than the tall, swaying pines, the trees were bare. Dry, fallen branches cracked under our feet and ice pocked the trail. Behind him, I tried to imitate his swagger. When he accidentally stepped in a puddle, I followed suit. The frigid water soaked through my sneakers and socks. By the time we stopped to rest at a bend in the river, my toes were numb.
“It’s easy,” he said, continuing his primer on cussing. “Just pretend you’re saying a normal word. Like this. Money. Toast. Dog. Fuck.” We were squatting on the bank next to the river, the soles of our shoes gripping the sticky red mud. He rolled a joint and I scanned the shallows of the river’s clear water for skipping stones. I had never cussed before. He licked the rolling paper with his tongue, a quick flash of pink, and then lit up.
“Let’s start with shit. That’s an easier one,” he said. “You’ve heard your parents saying that, right?”
I nodded.
“It’s ok,” he said. “I’m the only one who can hear you.”
I dipped my hand into the water and selected a chipped, misshapen stone. I hurled it into the dark water in the middle of the river where it immediately sunk. “Shit,” I ventured. My hand was now as cold as my feet and it occurred to me that perhaps there were ways to impress him that didn’t involve being so uncomfortable.
“Excellent,” he smiled, palming the crown of my head with his hand and squeezing it. Blood surged to my heart. Year later, I would take Peter to this spot during the six months that we dated during our senior year of high school. We would sit by the river and make out, both of us eager for the distraction of conversation. A few times, I tried to explain what it had been like to be there with Roger, but then, as now, it was hard to get it right.
That day in 1982, it took another hour for Roger and me to circle back to the trail head. As we walked, I watched the brown and whites of the river rushing by, the barn-red flare of a cardinal swooping through the trees, Roger’s shoulder bent and his palm cupped around the joint to shield it from the breeze. I stayed close enough to make sure that he could hear me whispering fuck to the sparrows hopping from branch to branch and asshole to the low-hanging pine boughs that brushed my cheeks.
The next night, we watched the Redskins play the Eagles. Roger had heated up two TV dinners and I tried to coax myself into an appetite for Salisbury steak. “Do you think they’ll make the Super Bowl,” I asked, soaking a chunk of gristly meat in steaming brown gravy.
“Highly likely,” he replied, tearing the plastic sheath off his cherry pie.
“We could have a party,” I suggested.
“That’s a long time from now,” he said.
“It’s the same day as my birthday.”
“I know,” he said and for several minutes we watched the game in silence, as Darryl Green picked off a pass and, three plays later, Theismann connected with the lanky Art Monk on a twenty-five yard slant into the end zone. After the extra point,