Marine Park(26)
It seemed like Hayden was going to bring something like that up again. There was a straightening of his posture that came when he was about to say something important. But instead he asked if I wouldn’t mind walking through the cemetery instead of going to find another party. He said it was absurdly beautiful at night—he used the word beautiful; I don’t think I’d ever heard someone use that word out loud before—and he liked to walk on the gravel path.
We were leaning against a pedestal, TAYMAN, JAMES—1927, off the path, out of the wind. Hayden said, You know, I’ve thought about kissing you, but I don’t think that would make me happy either.
I asked what he meant.
He straightened his back and raised his head, and then he slumped back down lower on the rock.
It sounds a little like something, but that’s not the way it really was in my head, he said.
I’m sure.
It’s just something I said.
Yeah, yeah, I said.
He tapped his finger against the T in Tayman, and I watched the dirt get under his fingernail. His nail and the rock made a dry clink, again and again.
Then he said, Let’s try something. He jumped up. Let’s be spontaneous, he said.
What do you want to do? I asked.
He told me, and we ran down the hill—toward the Charles, frozen there on the bottom.
It was close. He was ahead of me. There were the train tracks; up at the top of the little mountain the castle was blinking, an antenna hovering up above, some of the windows lit, full of the warmth of other people, their books and lights and extra sweatshirts. Hayden got to the edge of the ice first, and he rolled up one sleeve and threw a big rock from the bank out toward the middle, and it bounced. There was a cracking sound, as if something live was coming up from the bottom. But he was already at the center, and I started running to catch up, and I’ve always felt that you run faster at night, that you’re counting the lampposts, or the trees, or the number of man-made objects stuck in the ice flow, as if to say that we have been here. We must have run for miles, Hayden half a pace in front of me in that perfect form he had, dodging islands and branches and large objects in the dark.
It was a cold winter. Fall came late, winter early. It snowed a little, but mostly it was just cold. You could run on rivers like that, without any problem, the dry ice tractioning your feet. The air bit the back of your throat. The surface was always solid. The skin on your fingers got dry and white. The ice cracks in the night sounded like conversation.
CLEAN
The first one of them to get herpes was Desmond. He was at NYU graduate school at the time, studying microbiology, and they offered him a free room in the grad student cabins on the Sterling Forest upstate campus for a semester. He didn’t have much money. His dad wasn’t getting the same amount of plumbing work as he used to. He took it, and moved out of Brooklyn, for the first and last time, and sequestered himself in the woods near Woodstock, which he’d always wanted to get to but never had the chance.
Those were long winter nights. The skiing was good, and cheap, in Sterling Forest. It’s only an hour north of the city. But nobody much knows about it. Desmond taught himself how to ski that season. One evening, right as it was getting dark, he dislocated his thumb sticking his hand into the hard snow for balance, and had to go to the office for a first-aid kit. The woman working there was warm and gave him hot chocolate. She told him to make himself comfortable, and he did. He stayed on the couch while she changed radio stations, looking for the Rangers game. Later, when they went to his cabin, he had almost forgotten what it was like to love a woman. He came quickly, embarrassingly, hot and sweaty under the polyester sheets. She left to drive to her house in the dark, and he didn’t offer to take her; and he never called again. In two weeks he started getting cold sores. Perhaps it hadn’t been her, but he always assumed.