The
Boy in the Tunnel
by
10.
Tim had not mastered the art of dating in high
school; but even his limited experience—a few school dances—were enough to make
it clear that it was a very different beast in college. All the little rituals
of dating that teenagers went through—asking the parents for use of the car,
the admonishment from the girl’s invariably terrifying ex-military father to
have her home by ten, the opening of car and restaurant doors, the manly
offering to pay for meal and tickets and attendant womanly absence of even the
offer to split the tab, the walking to the porch—these were ways to approximate
the experience of adulthood without the pressure of being an adult. They were
dress rehearsals. Tim found comfort in the rituals, for they were ways to
parcel the fear into easily manageable steps.
There was no such comfort now, as Tim crossed the
quad to Mary Rutherford. There were no steps, there
was no protocol to follow. There was only a vague plan to “hang out,” which
could mean anything and anywhere. He had no car, which meant she would have to
drive if they went anywhere, or they would have to walk, which raised the whole
issue of perspiration (the night was cool, but Tim had sweaty genes, plus he
was wearing wool and the walk to downtown’s coffeehouses and restaurants was
pretty much all uphill). Tim wasn’t even 100% sure that this was a date,
because “hanging out” could involve other people, whole groups of people—maybe
he was supposed to be the designated driver for the entire besotted women’s
volleyball team. Who knows. Maybe there were just
going to watch a movie in Joanie’s room, which
frankly was more terrifying than any other idea Tim could come up with. All
plans would go out the window then, and he wasn’t sure if he was ready to run
on instinct.
Tim wasn’t alone on the quad; it was a beautiful
late-October night, and the quad was host to arrhythmic drum circles, solo
studiers and a sloppy coed touch-football game. They all knew what Tim was
doing, he thought. They knew where he was going, and how he was going to fail
when he got there. A Frisbee sailed dangerously close to Tim’s head, but the
thrower’s cautionary “Dude!” failed to reach his ears, so fixated Tim was on
looking as nonchalant as possible.
The wide stairway at the entrance to Mary
Rutherford was made up of 27 steps, which fact Tim knew from walking up and
down them at least once a day for two weeks, trying to work up the courage to
do what Joanie had eventually been forced to ask him
to do. Tim could feel that everyone knew she had asked him, and though he was
oddly proud—she picked me—it was yet another subversion of the
rituals he so desperately wanted to cling to.
Tim counted the steps again as he walked up them at
a pace he hoped was neither too plodding nor too eager. He tested the front
door, which was of course locked, and reached instead for the receiver of the
security phone next to the door. He put it to his ear, but hesitated before
dialing. One thought was running through his head—
“Hey! It’s me”
--and he had to get that thought of his head and
into the world before he exploded from it. He closed his eyes and counted to
five—
“Hey it’s me hey it’s me”
--and dialed.
“Hello?”
“Hey! Joanie? It’s me. Uh, Tim. I’m here.”
Joanie said “Come on up” and the door buzzed open. Tim
entered Mary Rutherford by the front door for the first and antepenultimate
time.
The feeling of being watched Tim had experienced on
the quad was doubled in the halls of Miss R, for here he actually was being
watched. As he passed rooms on the long first-floor hall on his way to the
stairs, female heads turned to shoot withering looks through open doors, or to
close those open doors, because if it’s a guy on the floor, great, but I mean
look at this guy, he’s like a kid or something. Who is he even here to see? Tim
instantly realized the sweater was a poor choice, because the heat in Mary
Rutherford was absolutely brutal. His forehead was already damp. He wiped at it
with a hand, which succeeded only in giving him a damp palm to accompany the
damp forehead.
Finally, the stairs, but then it’s the second floor
and the same thing all over again. Room 237 was as far away from the stairs as
it was possible to be. But was in sight soon enough, and he had wanted the door
to be closed so he could take a moment to collect himself and then knock,
preserving some semblance of ritual, but the door was already open, and there
was no opportunity to stop, everything was inevitable now, so he hurriedly ran
a fuzzy sleeve across his forehead and leaned into 237 to knock on the open
door.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, said Joanie,
sitting on the bed, pulling on a boot. The low bed forced her long legs into
acute-angled abstract sculptures. Tim was grateful to see her putting on her
shoes, because shoes = being out, among people, and that required following at
least a few rules. And on the perspiration front, walking was looking a lot
better than staying in this sauna.
Joanie zipped up her boot and stood to her full height,
which, as it would never fail to do, produced a little involuntary admiring
inhalation from Tim. The boots even added a couple of inches, and Tim suddenly
realized what it was he wanted to do, and he was ashamed to admit it, even
silently, even to himself: he wanted to scale her. He wanted to climb her like
a tree. This was the kind of thing he knew he could not say. He knew this was
wrong, somehow, to think like this, but there it was anyway. He liked her
because she was so tall, and for that reason only.
That’s why you’re doing this, he told himself, to
get to know her better, because “She’s so tall” is not anything to build a
relationship on; but even if you do get to know her better, is there anything
you could learn that would trump the height thing? If it turns out that she
loves Bottle Rocket or plays the
cello or knows all the words to “The Gift,” is that going to make her any more
attractive? Is that going to replace how goddamn absurdly tall she is as the
reason you want to sleep with her?
“Where do you want to go?” said Joanie.
Please don’t ask that. Please. I don’t know, Tim thought, I don’t know I don’t
know I don’t know. You didn’t give me time to plan. We can’t just leave things
so open-ended. We have to have something in mind. We have to have at least the
outline of a goal. We can’t trust that a good time will find us. We have to lay
out a mission to find it ourselves. And you know what, that doesn’t even really
matter, because where I want to go is anywhere you go, so you decide. Tell me
exactly what you want to do, and I will happily go along with you. I just want
to make you happy. And I know that in the long run that attitude is going to
get old, but for now let’s not even pretend that my opinion matters. I came
here for you, so now you may do as you will.
********************
Looking out the window, Joanie
could see Tim crossing the quad as she pulled on her shirt. It was hard to find
clothes to fit her elongated frame, so the majority of her wardrobe that wasn’t
supplied by Reebok, official sponsor of the UNWG women’s volleyball team, was
made by her mother. Jessica McKittrick owned a
vintage clothing store and every month sent Joanie a
new Frankensteined garment: a half-leather, half-fur
jacket, jeans in seven shades of denim, a shirt of patchwork
lamé. The most recent care package contained a white
blazer that, halfway down her torso, became a bisected red velvet dress. She
pulled on this coat as the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Hey! Joanie? It’s me. Uh, Tim. I’m here.”
“Come on up.” Joanie
pressed 9 and replaced the receiver on its cradle. She had finally asked Tim
out after two weeks of waiting for him to call her. She still wasn’t sure what
she thought of him. On the one hand, he was nice enough, plus he was in the
Handbook. On the other hand, so was this:
That boy,
the one at
the Morphine show...160
the one in
the tunnel...28-30
the one on
the basketball team...295-7
the one who
dies...329
the one with
the scar...203
the one you
will love...30, 242-253
Tim would not be The One; she knew that, and if he
had done any reading in his Handbook, he probably knew that too. But that
didn’t preclude them spending time together now. After all, of the other That
Boys, only one had appeared in her freshman year, and he died in a bus crash before
she could even think about getting serious. Plus Tim did warrant three pages
(of which she had only read a paragraph before her phobia of having endings
ruined got the better of her). And he was clearly inexperienced and skittish,
which charmed Joanie almost as much as it annoyed
her. She knew she would be his first, if it came to that, and she found she
didn’t mind the idea. To be honest, she felt kind of protective of Tim, almost
like a big sister, but she was wary of developing that thought further into
ickier territory.
“Him?”
Yes, him, Joanie thought.
Why not? At least she was making an effort to include
Or was it just loneliness? Was it something as lame
as that? Was it that other, perhaps more desirable men were too intimidated by
her height to even approach her? Was it that, an idea
she had refused to believe in since her sixth-grade growth spurt, but which now
seemed depressingly plausible?
Or was she just
blindly following the Handbook, as always?
She stepped into a pair of chocolate suede boots
and sat on the too-low bed to zip them up. She wanted a line of gunpowder, but
she could already hear Tim’s footsteps shuffling closer to her door. You called
him, she heard
What’s strike one?
It doesn’t even
matter.
She called him, true, but when she had said “Do you
want to hang out Saturday night?” and he had replied with such a joyous,
emphatic “Yes,” she couldn’t have helped but feel a twinge of that same
happiness in herself—happiness that she had made someone else that happy simply
by suggesting they spend time in each other’s presence. That sounded lame, and
she hated that she could still get that way over a boy—a boy, I mean, come
on—but there was no way around it: she wanted him to want her. She liked it.
Tim materialized
in her doorway as she zipped up her left boot. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said.
Joanie stood up, straightening her jacket. She could hear
Tim’s little intake of breath, and she liked that, too, though she knew from
experience it wasn’t necessarily a good thing, in the long run. From her
height, perched on the high heels of the boots, she could see more of the top
of Tim’s head than his face. “What do you want to do?” she said, and she hoped
he had an answer. She had something in mind, but she hoped he had thought about
it and devised a plan, something fun and special she would never have dreamed
of, not in a million years. She wanted to know that he had put some effort into
this. She wanted to know that he could see the this
night would go, the way he wanted it to go. If he could do that, then she could
surprise him. Then he would have something she could make him forget.
© 2005 Gardner Linn