“Yes. Really. It’s good.”
“Okay. But I expect a full explanation this time. Not your usual evasion.”
“I promise. I’ll tell you everything.”
She says to have a good time. I think it’s remarkable that she’s trusting me. But she is.
“You’ll tell her you met a boy,” A says once I’ve hung up.
“A boy I just met?”
“Yeah. A boy you’ve just met.”
It’s strange to think of that conversation. No longer a Mystery Man. Just a boy.
If only it were that easy.
I follow him in my car. This is the moment I could decide not to go. All I need to do is turn the steering wheel. All I need to do is return to the highway.
But I keep going.
His name is Alexander Lin and his parents are away for the weekend. A tells me both things at once.
“Alexander,” I say. “That’s easy enough to remember.”
“Why?” he asks.
I thought it was obvious. “Because it begins with A.”
He laughs, surprised. I guess it wasn’t as obvious, from the inside.
The house is a very nice house. The kitchen is about twice the size of our kitchen, and the refrigerator, when we open it, is already pretty full. Alexander’s parents did not leave him to starve.
“Why did we bother?” I ask. I can barely find space to put away what we bought.
“Because I didn’t notice what was in here this morning. And I wanted to make sure we had exactly what we desired.”
“Do you know how to cook?”
“Not really. You?”
This is going to be interesting. “Not really.”
“I guess we’ll figure it out. But first, there’s something I want to show you.”
“Okay.”
He reaches for my hand, and I let him take it. We walk like this through the house—up the stairs, to what is clearly Alexander’s bedroom.
It’s amazing. First of all, there are sticky notes everywhere—yellow squares, pink squares, blue squares, green squares. And on each of them, there’s a quote. I don’t believe in fairy tales, but I believe in you. And Let all the dreamers wake the nation. And Love me less, but love me for a long time. I could spend hours reading his room. In a field, I am the absence of field. —Mark Strand. Most of the quotes are in one handwriting, but there’s other handwriting, too. His friends. This is something he shares with his friends.
There are pictures of these friends, too, and the way they arrange themselves looks like the way my friends would arrange themselves. Not Justin. Never Justin, who didn’t like having his picture taken. But Rebecca and Preston and the others. They would like it here. There’s a lime-green couch to hang out on, and guitars to strum, and what looks like the full collection of Calvin and Hobbes. I look at the records he has leaning against the record player. Bands I don’t know but like the sound of. God Help the Girl. We Were Promised Jetpacks. Kings of Convenience.
I read more of the sticky notes. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. I check out the books on his shelves. Most of them have sticky notes sticking out—pages to be collected, words to be remembered after they’ve been forgotten.
I like it. I like it all.
I turn to A, and know he likes it, too. If he could have a room, this would be it. How cool that he’s found it. And how depressing that he’ll have to leave it in a few hours.
But I’m not going to think about that. I’m going to think about now.
I see an almost-finished pad of sticky notes on Alexander’s desk, and put it in my pocket, along with a pen.
“Time for dinner,” A says.
He takes my hand again. We head back into the world—but not too far into it, not too far away from this.
I find some cookbooks. We choose, by and large, to ignore them.
“Improvise,” A says. And I think, yes, that’s what we’re doing. Improvising. Living by instincts. It’s a big kitchen, but we make it feel like a small space. We fill it with music from Alexander’s iPod and steam from the boiling pots and smells as different as basil picked from the stem and garlic sautéed against a flame. There’s no plan here, just ingredients. I am sweating along and singing along and I am not stressed, because even if none of it ends up edible, it’s still worth it just to be putting it together. I think about my parents, and how they’ve missed this sensation of working together, or putting your hands on the back of the person as he stands at the stove, or having one person start the sauce but the other person take it over without a word. We are a team of two. And since it’s not a competition, we’ve already won.
In the end we have a kale salad, garlic bread, a huge pasta primavera, a quinoa and apricot salad, and a pan of lemon squares.
“Not bad,” A says. And what I want to tell him is that now I understand why people want to share a life with someone else. I see what all the fuss is about. It’s not about sex or being in a couple when you hang out with other couples. It’s not for ego gratification or fear of loneliness. It’s about this, whatever this is. And the only thing wrong with it right now is that I’m sharing it with someone who’s bound to leave.
I don’t say any of this. Because the last part makes all the rest of it harder to say.
“Should I set the table?” I ask instead. The Lins have a very nice dining room table, and a feast like this seems fit for a very nice dining room table.