Eden

Frey slept till nine o’ clock and thought he would sleep longer. After a night of lovemaking his body still thrummed. He hugged the pillows to himself, and he could still smell him, smell Rob. He could smell the ghost of his cigarette smoke, the sweat memory of his body in these sheets. And there was the possibility that he would come back. Frey squeezed his thighs together, hugged himself and rolled about in the heavy covers, the covers that were wonderful with the feeling of being in a bed not his own that was his own, in a life that was not his own that was now his too in a place where he had never been. Mother would be okay, Sharon would be okay. The children would be okay, they were grown anyway. Put them all away. That’s why he had left.

He lay on his back for some time, and when Frey looked at the clock he realized it was still not ten o’ clock. But hadn’t he planned to sleep all day, deep into the day? But now he didn’t want to, and the sun was coming through the shades. Now a new idea was in his head.

“But I was going to sleep late, eat pizza, drink beer. Write.”

But instead he was getting in the shower. He was dressing, and drinking a beer while he dressed. This would be so much less energy than when he took the train from South Bend. He loaded his bag, got his keys, locked the door behind him, though he wondered if that was even necessary, and then rolling his bike across the yard, took it up the hillock and set down the road for the train station. After a quick half mile, he turned and rode past the convenience store and over the tracks. He locked his bike in the station that looked like it saw few visitors, and waited for the train. He could see it tiny in the eastern distance a little before he could hear it, and then there it was coming closer and now, in all of its largeness, here it was, and he climbed on, and just like that, the original plan for the day was gone, and Frey was on his way to Chicago.

Less than two hours later, he was on Randolph Street and it was cooler and greyer than the green place he’d left, Stretching his neck to the buildings above, he rejoiced in the clatter of the rails, and bustle of people walking back and forth. He walked toward Wabash and then State and turned toward Lake, walking up and down the broad lanes and smiling politely, but avoiding canvassers and beggars. Now, as he passed the Chicago Theater, the sun began to peep out, shining over State Street with its cars passing in stately fashion while bikes glided up and down and around corners. He passed the subway entrance and climbed up the network of wooden platforms that was the Brown Line Station. looking down on the street Today he didn’t want to be underground. He wanted to see the Chicago he was coming through. He wanted to see the brick buildings and limestone ones, the high glass buildings, glittering blue from reflected sun and sky, and he wanted to see the river as the El clattered over Wacker Drive and over the blue green water..He didn’t really want to see the city.

He loved the grey and brown brick passing backs of the apartment buildings with their trellis of steps connecting back porch to back porch, and he looking over the streets stretching out to left and right with appreciation, but he was not here for them. He didn’t understand that right away, and the train was filled with people who looked busy and tired of life, who were not visiting the city on an outing, not trying to get away from their life. When he got off at Loyola, Frey went up Sheridan noticing how he moved too slow for someone who lived here anymore, and too assuredly for a visitor, and then he turned into Arondale and made his way to the beach where the world was in three strips, the tan earth of sand and cement, the deep blue of the everlasting water, and the pale stretching blue of the sky, and he sat on a rock, took out his pad, and began to write.

This water, so huge, so blue, so don’t leave me stay with me, changing in its colors, was speaking, and now everything he had felt did not matter. He didn’t understand how he hadn’t quite been able to breathe, how since hearing about Adam’s wedding, his heart had been living somewhere in his throat. Now, looking down into the water from the pier he saw the blue to green and then the green to blue, green to glass green and now nothing, and he scribbled as it came to him:

She said yes, be all

She flipped her tail and shimmered

first green to blue,

to pearl to nothing at all

she said be tender

She said, yes be small

She said be little

She said it by saying nothing at all

He walked across the sand, sandals in hand, and looked down to see a stick washed up by the sand, then reached down and tugging it, realized it was a root. He looked all around and up, across the beach to the trees in the park. Was it possible? But it had to be that this root going into the water of Lake Michigan had to be from one of those trees. What a far flung root.

A fat dog, something like a not quite corgi ran up to him, its eyes sparkling and its tail wagging. It barked and he said, “Hello.” It barked again, and wagging it’s tail, having said all it needed to say, it ran away. Trudging behind it came a man in black who didn’t seem fun enough for this dog. Frey followed the dog to the beginning of the pier and sat down, taking up his phone and looking up the word radical:

rad·i·cal | \ ˈra-di-kəl \

Definition of radical

(Entry 1 of 2)

1:of, relating to, or proceeding from a root: such as

a(1):of or growing from the root of a plant: radical tubers

(2):growing from the base of a stem, from a rootlike stem, or from a stem that does not rise above the ground: radical leaves

He took out his pad and thought of the tough tree root, and while the green blue water lapped beneath him he wrote.

Radical, not farsical

Simple, not quoting the quotable

Stand there in the small breeze

The sand washed up, black and soaked to show

a thick root from a distant tree

It said: be like me

Small, and tough as stone,

Slender and lyrical

it rose from the sand alone

such is the mystery and meaning

of being radical.

Well, then that was what he had to be right now.

On the way back home, as the train rolled from under the shadow of the Van Buren Street station, he was still scribbling, and all the city of Chicago had finally peeled away and he was looking over the small towns and their bungalows and factories when he wrote the beginning of a poem, but could not find a way to end, and so stopped.

He was half asleep when his phone buzzed. At first he thought it was someone from home, but the noise the phone made told him it was his dating app. He turned it on and there was the darkened icon and then a message that said, “Are you around tonight?’

Rob.

From last night.

Rob who had left this morning asking if he could write again.

Frey stirred from his sleep and typed:

“I went to Chicago. I’m on the train coming home now.”

“To your home home, or home back here?’

That was a good question, but Frey realized he hadn’t even thought of going back to Calverton.

He said, “Back where you are.”

A few moments passed, and Frey thought of writing something, and then Rob wrote back.

“Are we on for tonight? Or no?”

“Yes,” Frey said, because he didn’t want to turn down… well, anything, really.

He was about to type that he needed to take a nap, that he needed to wash the road, or the train off of him when Rob wrote.

“I work next to the station, in this convenience store. I could just pick you up.”

It almost sounded desperate, but why did it sound desperate? He was so used to men being distant and bad. He thought, and then he said, “Alright then.”

I’ll be off the train in…” he looked at the schedule and then at the clock on the upper corner of the phone.

“About a half hour.”

“I’ll be off work in about fifteen minutes. I’ll meet you.”

When Frey signed off he wondered what he was feeling. There was desire, lust too, for tonight he and Rob would go to bed, that was for sure. But there was something else too.

“Hope.”

Frey once heard someone say that hope was too small a word, and he had gone with that. She had been a militant writer, and she had said what people needed was not hope, but determination. But there was no determination here, just the idea of a possibility. He lay back in the seat and let the train rumble through him. Sunlight came in and out as the train passed through trees. Contentment like the contentment he’d waken up with suffused his body.

Last night he hadn’t really gotten a look at him. Or maybe he had just made himself not look too closely. Almost as if, since they were coming together in the dark, to look too well, would be a violation. But when he came off the train, Rob plainly knew him.

“Good trip?”

“There’s a beach near here, right?”

Rob pointed past the train, up the road.

“Then it might have been a wasted trip.”

“It’s not as close as you think. Besides, you got to go to the city. We can put that bike in the back of the truck.”

“I just walked around the beach,” Frey said when they had lifted he bike up and he climbed into the passenger seat of the cab. “Put my feet in the water.”

He shrugged. “Noticed how unhappy all the people looked.”

The truck rumbled under them and Rob said, “My dad used to take me. And we’d go on field trips, so to me Chicago’s just museums and dinosaur bones.”

“Well,” Frey shrugged, “it’s a little bit more than that.”

Rob laughed and Frey said, “Like, for example, it’s got tall buildings and gay night clubs too.”

“I don’t know if that’s my speed.” Rob said. “I mean, not the tall buildings. The tall buildings are fine. I don’t think I’d like the clubs, though.”

“I’m not really a fan, either.”

“You know what I don’t understand?”

“If you’re anything like me, a lot.”

“Drag queens. I don’t get drag queens,” Rob said as they were pulling up to the house hidden behind the hedge. Another train was chugging by on the other side of it.

“Like, I don’t get the fun of it. I mean, my mom never liked getting dressed in all that shit but she thought she had to. But men put it on and then they put more of it on than a woman ever wears and… that’s fun, I guess. I don’t get it.”

He stopped the truck and rounded it, and they pulled the bike out and Rob followed him into the house.

“It’s pretty early,” Rob said.

“Yeah, it is. I mean, I keep yawning, but it is early.”

“You wanna do something? Eat?”

“Eating is good. I could definitely Eat. I don’t know if I wanna do another frozen pizza.”

“I know just the place. It’s a bit of a drive.”

“I got nothing to do.”

Great,” Rob grinned at him. “Let’s go.”

“Was Mass good?”

“That’s a… weird question,” Rob looked at him.

“That’s the only kind of question I know to ask.”

“It was Mass,” Rob shrugged. “Nothing bad happened. No altar boys were molested, so I guess everything went alright. Then I went to work. I kept yawning all day because of you last night.”

“And yet you message me.”

“And yet I messaged you.”

When Rob looked at him, Frey was surprised by his smile, by the green in his eyes and the light beard that fringed his jaw. He had the clearest palest skin, and Frey wanted to kiss him. He wondered if Rob would be alright with it. After all, last night hadn’t been a date, and whatever they were about right now wasn’t exactly a date either.

“I was going to take you to this one place my uncle used to take me,” Rob said, “but I thought it would be… different.”

“Different.”

“A place you might not have been to. It might a little bit…”

“Hillybilly?” Frey guessed.

Rob said, “That might have been the word I was looking for.”

“I like hillbilly things,” Frey said. “I don’t mind a seedy bar with country music.”

“Oh,” Rob looked at him. “You don’t?”

Then Rob said, “I don’t want you thinking I’m some hayseed.”

Frey was about to say it didn’t really matter what he thought, but he just said, “People are people. But the food had better be decent.”

“I was going to go to the restaurant outside of Crown Point. It’s kind of stuck up. I mean, it’s a regular restaurant and everything, but its kind of stuck up.”

“I bet its nothing but white people there too.”

Rob thought and said, “That’s true.”

“Then it really doesn’t matter where we go.”

And that’s how they ended up a Jovi’s on their third beer with Rob losing to George at pool.

“You want the last slice of pizza?” Frey asked.

“I thought you were gonna take it, just like you took everything tonight.”

“Well, just for that shit,” Frey pulled it onto his plate, “I will.”

Frey looked it over and then said, “I don’t know if I can actually eat this right now. You want it?”

“Wrap it up and take it with you.”

“That’s so…” and then Frey shrugged and said, “I think I will.”

It was getting crowded, and the music was getting louder.

“You ready to get out of here?”

“I was ready about twenty minutes ago.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” Rob demanded, and Frey only shrugged.

“Come the fuck on then,” Rob said, laughing as he slammed a tip down on the table.