If I Should Fall: The Second Book of Geshichte Falls

 THESE SIMPLE ECSTASIES

2.

“I AM SUCH AN IDIOT! Do you know what I told her? Do you know?”

Nehru put down his cup of ice cream and opened his eyes wide to indicate he was paying attention.

“She told me that she didn’t think I was meant for this job. She said it was so unfulfilling, right? Then I told her that if her job didn’t fulfill her she should get out. I told her that, to just get out.”

“Oh my—” Nehru was torn between laughter and absolute shock. Then he realized that he had broken his standard rule by losing his poker face when dealing with others, even—no, especially—friends.

But since he’d broken the rule, already...

“Let me get this straight: you told this woman to quit her job?”

“Because it didn’t fulfill her.”

“Well...” Nehru grew quiet, picked up his ice cream, and resumed licking it, “Technically she said your job wouldn’t fulfill you, and she would be your boss. So you wouldn’t really be doing the same thing.”

“Fuck.”

“However, what you said does make since. In a way... I mean, if she doesn’t like where she’s at, and she’s half the pill she sounds like—”

“She’s not that bad.”

“Sounds like a bitch to me.”

Nehru saw the look on Brad’s face.

“What? Brad said.

“Nothing.”

“Jesus of Spain, don’t tell me you like her. Please, don’t fuck her. But I’ve interrupted myself. I was going to say that what you said did make since.”

“But what the hell right do I have telling her anything! Look at my life! People I went to school with have wives and good kids—”

“I believe we’ve been through this, already!”

“And we’ll go through it again. They have good jobs and, shit. Look at me!”

“And some people who you went to school with are now either dead or in prison or living out of trash cans. It does cut both ways.”

Nehru was twenty-one, and had met Brad at a college function. Chilli Comet Sundae had lost its lead singer, and Nehru was performing with another group when Brad first heard him.  By the time Nehru knew that Brad was a decade older, they’d known each other too long for it to matter.

Brad spoke:

“When I got out of high school, I didn’t go into college right away because I didn’t want to be like my parents and a lot of the people I knew and just rush right through life until I was in my thirties, looking back and wondering where all the years had gone.”

“But that makes the most sense in the world.”

“So now instead of being in my thirties with a degree and wondering where all the time’s gone, I’m in my thirties living in my parents’ basement with three degrees, still wondering where all the time has gone!

“And you know what else?”

“What?”

“On top of it all, I keep on thinking about that Marissa Gregg—”

“And you want to fuck her.”

“Maybe…” Brad shrugged in frustration. “I don’t know. But mostly I want to do…. something.”

Nehru said nothing.

“I want to want something.”

Nehru had learned that the more silence he kept, the wiser he looked. Also, Brad seemed capable of arriving at things on his own.

“I want to fuck… I want to fuck something. And I want to want to fuck her.”

“Philosophical.”

 Brad nodded at Nehru’s comment, grabbed his scraggy chin and muttered, “Philosophically fucked. Shit!”

 

“If only it could all be math,” Cameron Dwyer lamented as Brad closed the literature book..

“Don’t worry, honey,” Bill Dwyer was saying as he came into the living room where Brad was tutoring his daughter. “You’ll get to some excellent school where you’ll be the envy of everyone because you’re one of the five people on campus who’s a math whiz.”

Politically, Brad kept his opinions to himself and only said, “Cameron, usually people like you are all about poetry and stories.”

“You mean girls?” she looked up at Brad with a raised eyebrow, as he stood up and pulled his grey sweatshirt over his tee shirt.

“No, I meant smart people.”

Cameron, who was prepared to be surly, suddenly blushed.

The phone rang. Bill jumped to answer it, then said, “It’s for you, Cameron. It’s… Mark Young?”

“Oh, relax,” she took the phone from her father. “It’s about Campus Ministry.”

“Say hi for me,” Brad said.

“It’s a small town,” Bill reflected.

“He’s a good kid,” Brad said.

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you because there’s a lot of talking,” Cameron said loudly and pulled the receiver into the next room.

“He’s the kid who was in that car wreck, right?” Bill said.

“Yeah.”

“That’s a shame,” Bill shook his head.

Dena came in and said, “Here’s the check for this week, Bradley,” and then, as he was saying thank you, Bill’s pager rang and he quickly answered.

“Oh, hi,” he said gently. “It’s a colleague,” he informed Dena and Brad, “I’ll take it in the den.”

Dena eyed her husband narrowly as he walked away, tucking the back of his shirt into his pants. Brad felt like he belonged to a whole different generation from the Dwyers. They had it all so together and yet, this little glimpse of oddness reminded him that they were only a few years older than him.

For once, Brad did not envy the Dwyers.

 

Next morning, Lakreasha came in smiling.

“There’s a friend of yours who wants to see you,” she told Marissa who looked up and murmured, “A...”

Marissa didn’t know who it could be, could admit to really having no social life.

“Send her in.”

“Her?” Lakreasha raised a comic eyebrow, chuckled to herself, and raising a finger, left.

“Oh, my Go—” Marissa started.

It was Brad Long again, this time again in his jeans and tee shirt.

“Mr. Long, I told you about the job, that—”

“I came to ask what time your lunch break is.”

She looked straight at him, bewildered.

“Librarians don’t go to lunch?” He’d asked that same question the other day. “Oh, that’s right. It’s one. You already told me.”

When Brad stretched, Marissa was amazed by how tall he was.

“Let’s you and me grab something. Today I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“Today,” Marissa thought about telling him the truth, but then decided it was easier than lying, “I am actually leaving for the day at one.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“Then… what should I say?”

“You should say,” Marissa told him, “that you will be waiting downstairs for me in the reference section.”

He grinned quickly at her and said, “I’ll be waiting downstairs in the reference section.”

 

 

“Do you know,” he began as they walked out of the large building into the sunlight of downtown, “that when Constantine built Constantinople it was already ancient? I mean he filled it with stuff from all over the world. Picture an Egyptian obelisk here, and Greek statuary there, and a few Persian lamassu?”

“Lamassu?”

“Lions with bird heads!”

He shook his head. “No, they’re Assyrian. Well, they didn’t really have lamassu in Byzantium anyway. I was just using that as an example. I mean, the guy really threw the city together.”

“So, what do you want to eat?” Marissa said. If she had to be with this man, the conversation might as well be stirred to something normal.

Across the street from them was the old abstract grey building that housed Bell Telephone.  The Number Seven bus rolled past them, south toward the collection of buildings that made up downtown.

Brad took her down and around the corner to the oldest part of of downtown, busy at this time of day, old brick buildings with faded painted signs on the their sides, and turn of the century Victorian fronts. Near one of these they arrived at the hot dog stand.

“This is the closest Geschichte Falls can come up with to a street cafe,” he said, escorting Marissa to one of the little tables shaded by red and yellow umbrellas. The hot dogs were loaded with grilled onions and smelled of steamed beef and Chicago, Marissa thought. Brad gallantly paid,  and when she bit into hers and felt a glob of mustard touch her chin. Brad reached over to wipe it away. She grinned, and he laughed. Marissa realized that it had been the first time she’d seen him laugh though he seemed to always be happy.

“So, where do you usually eat lunch?” he asked her, sucking on the straw of his Coke.

“Not here,” she grinned, and wiping her mouth, looked around at the other tables.

“I mean, usually I’ll eat in the lounge of the library. Occasionally I’ll get to eat with Lakreasha when we have the same break.”

“The lounge,” Brad made an exaggerated face, “How unfun.” He picked one of the onions off of her hot dog.

“I know. I’m actually glad you dragged me out of there.

“Brad?”

“Yeah?”

“What do you do?.... When you’re not applying to work at libraries?”

“Primarily? Primarily, I’m with my band.”

“You have a band!”

He guessed the look on her face and grinned knowingly.

“Of course you have a band.”

“We all need a hobby, don’t we?”

“I don’t have a hobby,” Marissa said reflectively.

“I bet you do.”

“No.” Then, in a tone of wonder, “No.”

“Well,” Brad was wiping his hands off on his jeans.

“It wasn’t much of a band. I didn’t start it. I’m not even responsible for it. A friend of mine is. His sister was lead singer. But then she went to enter the real world. Then they brought me in. So one night, I’m at this college function, a talent show of sorts. Someone I knew was teaching there, and this student starts singing. Just killing it. So I hear him again. He never does original music, but he really knows how to blow the roof off of everyone else’s. I talk to him about it. He says he can’t write. I show him my lyrics—which I can’t sing.”

“So he’s your new lead singer.”

“He is.”

“How old is he?”

“You have an obsession with age,” Brad said.

“Do I?”

When he didn’t answer, Marissa thought, then said, “Maybe it’s because I’m feeling my own.”

Brad confessed, “I feel mine too.”

They were both quiet before Brad added, “He’s twenty-one. Academic, completely given over to college. Possibly my opposite.”

“Not really.”

By now, Marissa had finished the hot dog and she was balling up the wrapper which she put into Brad’s outstretched palm.

“What do you mean?” he asked her when he’d returned from the trash drum.

“I mean, that was you, right? Given over to education and all.”

Brad laughed and shook his head. “But I couldn’t sing. I mean, it took me years to become the disrespectable nobody standing before you.”

They left the hot dog stand and walked through downtown. It wasn’t huge downtown or even very busy. There were card shops and book stores and drug stores and doctors’ offices and only the banks and hotels exceeded six stories.

“You were telling me, earlier,” she said, “how I ought to just quit my job if it didn’t fulfill me. Do what made me happy. The way you did.”

For the first time Brad blushed and he ran his hand over his unshaven face.

“That was out of line.”

“No,” Marissa said quietly. “But seriously, would working in the library make you happy? Would it content you?”

“Marissa, I don’t know. What I know is that the whole time I was growing up I thought I knew exactly what I wanted, and then... things changed. Now the one thing I know is that I don’t have what I want.”

She asked Brad to take her somewhere he knew, and he brought her to the fudge shop that was only a block from the library.

“Since the first week I started at the library, I’ve been wanting to come here,” Marissa told Brad when they bought the two blocks of fudge. They were little and heavy and brown, wrapped in slick plastic and Marissa could smell the sweetness through the cellophane.

“How long ago was that?”

“Six years.”

“You should have come. See, if you had, then I would have met you sooner,” he told her walking out, to hold the door for her, the bell tingling behind Marissa as she followed him onto the street. “But I’ve met you now after all, so maybe fate is real.”

Marissa began unwrapping her fudge, and as she did, Brad took it from her.

She looked up at him, startled.

“We eat the block together. Like finding the forbidden fruit. You’re Eve and I’m Adam. Only there’s no condemnation and… neither one of us is naked.”

Marissa laughed at the analogy, and then smiled widely, and Brad did too. He peeled a bit of the fudge off and put it to her mouth, then he bit some off himself, lifting his finger.

“Just savor.”

The fudge had a grainy consistency that began to melt into a cocoa sweet mud, and the mud melted into her tongue into all of her mouth. Marissa felt, and this sounded foolish, as if she were a part of the sweetness, and of the sun that was red and orange through her eyelids. Only now did she realize she’d been standing on Main Street with her eyes closed, sucking on fudge.

When she opened them it was to Brad who was smiling down at her. His green eyes seemed darker and bluer and deeper like the sea.

“I am convinced,” he said, “that life is composed of a series of these simple ecstasies.”

Brad’s dick was hard. He was aware of it’s swell, its firmness the way he had been as a high school aged boy when, mesmerized, he would take it out of his jeans and, in the same basement where he slept now, polish it till it shone and stroke it to ecstasy. He’d been this hard, this constantly and almost unconsciously hard since he’d broken up with Debbie.

Brad became aware of all this when Marissa asked:

“What made you ask me to lunch?”

 It was a whisper. Marissa believed what Brad said, and did not want to disturb this small life the two of them had just entered.

He started to give her a hooked grin, but when her cheeks reddened, so did his.

He only said, “You’re beautiful.”

Marissa was five-six and blue eyed with curly blond hair and dressed in a floral print. Cute, yes. But no one had called her beautiful in... she couldn’t recall when.

Brad Long’s eyes were not five inches from hers. He was all around her.

“Where do you live?” he asked her.

The world was composed of these simple ecstasies.

So she told him.