You

19

EVERYTHING peaks. It’s just the nature of all life.

As we cab over to Peach’s, I feel more and more certain that I peaked in the carriage (not a “horse taxi thingy” as you said), and I know I will never be that great of a man ever again. I will never be in that precise place, having picked you up and literally swept you off your feet with your skin fresh and your skirt clean and the night still ahead of us. It’s like Michael Cunningham says in The Hours: Happiness is believing that you’re gonna be happy. It’s hope.

Peach took my hope away. You’re reading e-mails and sending texts and how do you hold on to me for the first time in our life together and shut it off? You’re a million miles away from me, talking to people who have nothing to do with us.

“Hey, um, Beck,” I try.

You don’t look at me, you are blunt. “What?”

“Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“A lot,” you say and finally, you look at me. “Oh, you’re mad.”

“No,” I say and it’s not my fault that your friends are such assholes and it’s not my fault that you couldn’t stay off Twitter for one fucking night. These things are out of my control and I am better than you and you know it or you wouldn’t be holding my hand and droning on about Peach and the fact that she thinks someone broke into her place and stole shit again, which is ridiculous because I only broke in once and I never stole a damn thing.

“Huh,” I say.

You cross your arms. “Look, Joe. She’s alone. She’s scared. And she’s my friend.”

“I know,” I say.

You snap, “Then don’t go huh.”

You don’t have the guts to stand up to Lynn and Chana and I’ll gladly be your whipping post tonight. “I’m sorry, Beck. I really am.”

You nod. You are loyal.

“But let me just say this. That building is tight. It would be seriously hard to break in.”

But you aren’t moved and you huff. “Well, it doesn’t matter if it happened. She feels like it happened.”

I let you win; you’re a girl. You’re allowed. We ride in silence and I privately note that Lynn and Chana don’t call you up on our date and claim that Bigfoot is trying to drown them in the fountain of youth. You’re out of the door before the driver has the car in park and I pay, sad.

When I get out of the cab you throw your arms around me, hard and you whisper, “This was the best date ever.”

“Define ever,” I say and I know you want a kiss and so I kiss you. When we walk into the building, we are very much a couple and we get into the elevator and your phone buzzes and you answer and it’s Peach.

She screams, “Where the hell are you?”

“I’m sorry, we’re in the elevator!”

She groans. “We?”

The signal goes and you sigh. “This is gonna be a long night.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

I can tell that you wish I was gone, but you link your arm through mine. “Please go easy on Peach. Look, I know she’s a lot to handle. But, she’s tried to commit suicide, a couple of times. She’s weak. She’s sad.”

“I just don’t like to hear you get yelled at.”

You smile and squeeze my arm. “You’re a protector.”

“I am.” I pick up your hand that was on my dick. I kiss it and promise you that you’re safe.

You coo, “My knight in shining armor.”

The elevator yawns and shimmies and the bell chimes and the doors slide open to an ugly sight. It’s loud, Elton John is blasting and Peach looks electrocuted, with frizzy hair and sleepless eyes. She’s armed with a fucking paring knife, of all things. “What took you so long?” She growls.

She storms through the living room, which is even more vacuous without Brown people. You squeeze my hand, sorry. I squeeze your hand, it’s okay. We follow the angry Peach through her home and if I lived alone in a place this huge, I’d be crazy too.

IT’S been less than ten minutes and already I’m getting that unpaid delivery guy feeling. Peach speaks only to you and when I dare to interject, she waits for me to finish before droning, as I was saying. . . . I don’t take it personally and I honestly think she’d be just as pissed if you brought Lynn or Chana. But it’s not fun, Beck.

I sit back in the sofa with my arms outstretched and you are beside me, but forward, on the edge of your seat. I can’t tell you that Peach is poison. Listening to her lie and listening to you get hooked is too much but I can’t say a word.

You grab your phone. “I think we should call the police.”

She shakes you off and I can’t take it anymore and I stand up. “I think I should check things out. You mind?”

Peach shrugs. “Knock yourself out, Joseph.”

“Are there any suspects?” I ask and you wrap an arm around my leg. I pat your head.

Peach looks out the window, a classic liar’s move. “There’s a sad, incompetent delivery boy from this juice place. But I can’t fathom him having the wherewithal to break into this building. I mean, no offense, Joseph, but I doubt this kid even graduated from high school.”

“None taken.”

She squirms. “That came out wrong.”

“It’s fine,” I say and she’s lucky I don’t care what she thinks. I lean over and lift your chin and kiss you on the lips, wet, open mouth, full on. I pull away and salute Peach on my way out of the room.

I wander into the library-ish room to check on poor Mr. Bellow. No wonder you don’t get enough writing done. Peach is an albatross, constantly dragging you down with her troubles, her invented dramas. Right now that Blythe girl in your class is hunkered down over a pot of fuckface tea with a red pen and a tenth draft of a story. She’s listening to Mozart and lost in her work. You prefer life. You like the melodrama of this penthouse. I pick up the Bellow (now in a case; you’re welcome, Salingers), and I listen to you girls walk into the kitchen. Peach tells you to put a pizza in the oven and you object. “I thought you can’t eat tomatoes with IC?”

“Honestly, when I’m flaring and stressed like I am right now, it makes no difference.”

“Sweetie.” You purr.

“I know,” she says. “This is so. Not. Fair.”

That’s it for me and I bid poor Mr. Bellow good-bye and head upstairs. My first stop is, of course, Peach’s bedroom. Last time I was here, I thought it was bigger than the bookstore and upon reentering I realize that to my dismay, I’m right. You could have eight games of Twister going at once in here. And it’s well designed, of course. The rich know how to make their walls work for them. French doors abound. Some open into the twenty-foot closet. And some open onto the terrace. I feel the most beautiful piece in here, a bleached mahogany dresser, antique, eighteen, maybe twenty feet long.

I want to relax so I lock the door behind me. I kick off my shoes and peel off my socks and the mink area rugs—fucking mink—feel like heaven. The bed is a beauty, an ornate four-poster California king that sits center stage. Ralph Lauren sheets—I check—and mountains of Virginia Woolf books in the built-in bookcase, hardbacks, paperbacks, new, old. She’s run a million marathons. The ribbons are the proof, stuffed like bookmarks into the books at random. I run my hand over the bleached mahogany dresser and this is good stuff. What a shame. You can barely see the top because of the plastic forest of hair products. There’s a giant TV, but that’s a given in a joint like this.

I want to go out on the terrace but the door jams. I yank it, come on you bitch, open up, and it does. But I lose my balance and I’m grasping at plastic bottles of hair goo trying to break my fall. It doesn’t work and I’m splat on the floor. I knocked over a bunch of bottles and a well-worn copy of A Room of One’s Own and a bunch of photographs fall out onto the mink. I can’t believe my luck as I flip through all sixteen beautiful, revealing photographs, all pictures of you. Peach is quite the photographer, as it turns out.

But the mark of a true great photographer is an independent eye. A great photographer can photograph a gutter and find the right angle and turn that gutter into a steel prism. These pictures are lovely, but these pictures are not art, Beck. No. These pictures are fucking porn and I have to sit down because this is a lot to take in, to know. Peach loves you. Peach wants you. My senses are riled; an enemy lives here and now I realize that these pictures are smeared, loved, and sticky. Some of them have fingerprints. She doesn’t just love you, Beck; she’s fucking deranged with obsession. I look closely and see streaky layers of lady juice and that’s why they all have this filtered look. She touches herself and then you, herself and then you. It’s been eons and no wonder the girl is so angry, so pent. The pictures offer the history of your body (thank you, Peach), and I see you at eighteen, maybe seventeen, in a loose tank top, no panties, asleep on your back, in a bed. Light pours in from the beach in the background and you are an angel, eyes shut, legs spread. I see you in a bikini dipping one toe into the water. Your ass is, ironically, a ripe, delicious peach. I see you on a beach at night, mounting some dude, naked. Peach has a good camera because I can see into your eyes and your nipples pop like buttons.

I have to get onto the California king. These photos, Beck.

These.

Fucking.

Photos.

There is a lump under the comforter and I lift the comforter and find a mess of Peach’s soiled, dank workout clothes and bloody socks. I climb over the mess and toss another one of her shawls, great for hiding her invisible erections I now understand. I spread out these photos and thank Christ the bed is big. I want to fuck every single picture. The one of you in high school, with bangs and the one of you in college, with hips and the one of you mid-fuck, the black-and-white version of you riding some guy. That’s not me in that picture but it will be me and I’ll grab your neck the way you like, and you’ll cry for me and moan, Joe. I spew a tankload of hot cum into the nearest fucking thing I can find: a musty sports bra.

Peach won’t miss it and I have no choice but to shove it down my pants and tuck it into my boxers. I take pictures of the pictures before I tuck them away into their little Beck box and I smile.

When I calm down and clean up I head downstairs and find you both on the terrace. Everything looks different now and it’s a problem. Peach is in love with you and you’re mine and life is never going to be easy with her playing sick, playing victim, playing taken, playing anything to get your attention. And I’m different too now, afraid to look at you with the pictures so fresh in my mind. Peach is drunk and babbling about being stalked. I sit down on the arm of a chair the way a detective might sit and hold my chin in my hand. “If I may, Peach. I notice that you’ve run a lot of marathons. Do you run every day?”

“Why?” she snipes. She wishes I were dead. It’s not because I didn’t go to college. It’s because of the way you look at me.

“Well,” I begin. “If you run every day, it’s very easy for some creep to figure that out and stalk you.”

You wave your hands and the shawl falls onto your lap. “Omigod omigod Joe! Peach runs every day before daybreak through the park.”

“Not every day.” Peach corrects you, but she lowers the volume on Elton, all the better to hear you sing her praise.

“Yes you do, Peach. You’re amazing, fearless, I mean you run in the woods.”

Peach shrugs but you can see her committing those words to memory: amazing, fearless.

“That’s not safe,” I say.

“Well, I live outside of the box, Joseph,” says Peach. “That’s just who I am.”

You pick up the list of men you girls have been working on and I can’t listen because of the slide show in my head of you and you and you and you.

“Peach,” you say. “Can you think of anyone else? Some guy you dated?”

She shrugs. “Maybe that Jasper guy. We had lunch the other day and I could see that I dented his heart. Who knows? Maybe I broke it and didn’t realize.”

It’s a fucking lie but I have to be strong. “This Jasper guy, did he lose his shit?”

If I said the sky were navy blue, Peach would correct me and call it midnight blue, so of course, she objects. “In my experience, men like Jasper handle rejection quite well, actually. Men like Jasper have such rich lives that they don’t tend to be overly emotional about their personal lives.”

“So, you have a lot of ex-boyfriends?” I say and I know I should step off.

“We’re all still friends,” she snaps. “We’re not seventh graders, there’s no drama.”

“Good for you,” I say and I want to choke her. “I’m not friends with any of my exes, too much passion. I can’t just toss that passion aside and go out to lunch.”

She doesn’t have a comeback and I lean over to kiss you. “Be safe,” I say.

“Oh Joe,” you say and you don’t need to be so dramatic. “Thank you for understanding. I do need to stay here.”

Look at all the love in your heart. You are loyal, sweet, and you rise up to walk me to the door and thank me again for being so understanding. We kiss good night as Elton John sings louder, sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair. I tell you to go back to your friend. You do.