Staircase

Two weeks after our first date, Cate asks me to help her move out of her apartment.

I promised myself I wouldn’t. I need to draw the line somewhere and things are already moving too quickly for my liking. But she texts me the night before,

“My coworkers bailed haha.”

It’s the hottest day on record. We both come within spitting distance of heat stroke and her two cats lay panting on the sticky hardwood floor. I get stung by one of the wasps that live under the patio stairs—angry at our tromping up and down from the U-Haul. After that, we take refuge in my car, air-conditioning blasting as we share a wilting salad from the restaurant down the street. I hold a rapidly melting ice cube to the welt on my ankle. We’re both exhausted and barely speak.

“If we knew each other better this would probably be going a lot worse,” I say.

Cate looks at me a little perplexed, then decides to laugh.

Later on, an old woman drives by and rolls down her window to fuss over us as we load the last few boxes. Standing on the sidewalk, I shield my eyes, feeling flattened between the sun and the heat of the pavement. The woman asks if she can bring us anything, her face full of the cheap sympathy the elderly reserve for young couples. 

We decline, casting glances at each other. I can tell Cate feels it too—this simple trick we’ve played. She’s standing inside the U-Haul, leaning on the frame. She thanks the woman again, and in her white t-shirt, sweat sparkling on her nose and hairline, I think she is unbearably handsome.

～

That Friday I go on a second date with Noah. I matched with him on Tinder at the same time as Cate, but it took him weeks to ask me out—his messages always a little shy, halting. Tonight, we’re meeting his roommates in the university district for bar hopping.

“My buddies are bringing Tinder dates, too,” he says on the drive over, glancing at me. Even with his thick beard his face is boyish, and he’s ever so slightly shorter than me. “I hope that’s okay.”

It turns out that we’re the only two who have met before. The bar is busy, full of Friday night college student fervor. Even though it’s well dark now, heat rolls in through the open garage front. My thighs stick to the plastic booth. Sandwiched between Noah and his friend’s date, I take advantage of the anonymity. I sip whiskey and watch the group, chiming in with a smile or laugh when necessary, relishing the way Noah’s dark eyes flicker back to me.

We stumble into the chaos of an arcade bar and the night turns hazy, dream-vague, amongst the flashing lights and tinny 8-bit music. We play pinball, Pac-Man, Street Fighter. For a while Noah disappears in search of more drinks and I end up across from one of the Tinder girls at an air hockey table. She’s a loud, extravagant drunk. She groans with obnoxious frustration every time I score a goal and tosses the puck to her date and pouts after I win. I wonder if he likes this side of her, if he minds the way she keeps slipping her hand into his back pocket and whispering in his ear.

Eventually I forfeit my puck to Noah’s friend and sit back against the wall. Suddenly the third Tinder girl is at my side.

“So?” she grins at me, leaning a little too close in conspiratorial drunkenness. “You getting lucky tonight?”

I know she doesn’t care about my answer; she just wants me to ask her the same question. I shrug. “Dunno. You?”

As we leave, I’m amused by the motherly way Noah herds everyone into his massive SUV, which is comically large on the narrow city streets. He opens the passenger door and puts his hand on the small of my back as I get in. I look back at him, surprised. His eyes are steady, unguarded. 

In the car he makes good-natured conversation with the drunken chorus in the backseats. There’s a hard hat by my feet and dirt crusted into the floor mats. He keeps an easy hand on my thigh as we wind out of the bar streets and into the neighbourhoods.

In his bed I struggle not to offer explanations or apologies. I’d forgotten how broad men are, the texture of their hands. When we’re done he falls asleep on top of me and I lie awake staring at the ceiling, sweat pooling behind my knees. Around 3 a.m., I extract myself and he blearily insists on walking me out.

“This is kind of a power move,” he says. Again, that shy, boyish smile.

“No sleepovers,” I say. “House rules.”

～

I knew Cate and her ex-girlfriend were still living together. She brought it up quickly, to her credit, barely fifteen minutes into our first date.

“It’s complicated,” she’d said. “She’s straight now.”

They were together for seven years.

Our respective living situations cause problems for a while. At the time, I was an unwilling tenant of my parents’ basement. I woke up each morning surrounded by artifacts of my childhood and ate breakfast at a table where my feet once dangled off the floor.

We fuck in the park once, her car twice, and once on a coworker’s couch while she house-sits. Their home is stunning, a cedar A-frame with windows from floor to ceiling. I cook her dinner on a gas stove, squeezing lemon juice into a pan as she sidles up behind me, fingers into belt loops, lips lazy on my neck. We eat in the back garden under liquid gold sunlight and I close my eyes, trying to imagine that I live here.

I smile to myself.

“What?” she asks.

“We’re playing house.”

When the ex-girlfriend leaves and I’m allowed into the apartment, I find there’s only one bed. I think this should bother me, but it doesn’t. It sits dejected on the floor—a casualty of the moving process, along with all of the wine glasses and the kitchen table.

We sit on the rumpled sheets and kiss so slowly I feel like I’m spinning.

“You make me dizzy,” I say.

“It’s the heat,” she says.

When I leave I notice a makeup compact on the nightstand.

“That’s hers,” she says. “You can have it if you want.”

～

I logged their similarities in the back of my mind with tally marks.

Both of them liked pineapple on pizza.

Both of them had double-jointed thumbs.

Both of them brought peaches to the tiny lake by my parent’s house, usually too cold for swimming, where we floated aimlessly in the green-black water.

Both of them called me “good girl.”

～

Noah went to school for architecture and now he builds houses. Sometimes I notice pale brown smudges of dirt at his hairline or on his biceps. Shoved into a corner of his room is a model building made from cardboard and popsicle sticks, like an elementary school art project except it’s beautiful. A sloped ceiling cut through with skylights. A tiny, immaculate staircase. I imagine it could be a museum, a concert hall, a courthouse.

We’re lying half-naked on his double bed. The heat is abominable, and his house, like most in the city, has no air-conditioning. A useless box fan drones by the window. I ask him questions about buildings and half-listen to the answers. He describes cantilevers, egresses, fenestration—I can’t picture it at all. My head fills with abstract shapes and empty doorways.

He tells me his favorite style of architecture is brutalism because of its honesty. “It’s just material,” he says. “Math and material.”

I wonder what it’s like to have such a clear vision, to see something inside yourself and make it real. He talks with his hands and when he spreads his fingers I’m reminded of church rafters. I trace the soft valleys of his ribs. We discussed at one point what level of intimacy we were comfortable with—no cuddling, no sleepovers, no good-morning texts. But this isn’t intimacy, just idleness.

“Light is a material too,” he says. “People forget that. You can control where it falls, the shape of the shadows, how a room feels at noon or at sunset. It’s all part of the design.”

I close my eyes and imagine I’m inside the model building; barcodes of light travel across the floor with the arc of the sun.

“My friend is house-sitting at this gorgeous place south of the city,” I whisper into the heat of his neck. “You’d love it.”

～

There were others along the way.

A girl with dark skin and slim wrists. She made me lasagna from scratch in her tiny studio apartment. She didn’t measure anything and laid slices of swiss cheese on the final layer with a kind of reverence. When we kissed there was no feeling, like her body was hollow.

A boy with cigarette burns up his arms. He wore his hair in French braids and his sweaters were all frayed at the cuffs. We talked about his ex and the music they used to make together. He was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen and he wouldn’t look me in the eyes. Kissing him felt like pressing my lips to an open wound.

“When are you going to tell Cate and Noah?” my friend asked over a video call one night. I was sitting on the carpeted floor of my childhood bedroom, legs akimbo, painting my toenails baby pink.

“It’s too soon.” I said, without looking up.

“You’re playing with fire.”

“My profile says I’m not looking for anything serious.”

My friend shook her head and looked away. I blithely ignored the sideways comments she made over our next few calls, and eventually stopped telling her much altogether, because even I couldn’t explain my urge to push things to an edge. I mentioned Cate to Noah, and vice versa, as frequently as I dared, burying the lede and leaving out names. I gauged their reactions with cold interest.

Half of me believed it was all a dream. I never had the looks or the social currency in college to be choosy about who I dated, let alone carry on with two people at once. I’d watched my friends drift in and out of ephemeral romantic trysts with bewilderment. To them it was easy. I always ended up stuck on someone. I was a notorious serial monogamist, never seen without my other half.

This new attention felt intoxicating. I’d always played it safe, been good. Didn’t I deserve a bit of indulgence? Wasn’t I supposed to want a catalogue of lovers? All of us restless twenty-somethings, burying ourselves in each other. I could feel it in the air along with the heat—the city sinking with the weight of our desperation as we crowded the bars, scrolled the apps, tumbled into strangers’ beds in apartments we could barely afford.

One choice or another, what did it matter? None of it was real.

The summer felt infinite ahead of me.

～

“You’re kind of hard to read,” Cate tells me.

We spent the evening getting high and playing video games in her new apartment, nestled among boxes and packing paper. I’m sitting between her legs as she holds the controller in my hands and guides me through the levels, but I’m spectacularly bad and can’t stop laughing every time I send the character tumbling into pits of blue lava.

I give up and lay with my head on her lap and watch the lights play across her face, noticing how she purses her lips when she concentrates. She’s cute when she’s high, and has a habit of twirling her hair. Her statement makes me blink.

“How so?”

“I don’t know,” she says. The character dies again and she tosses the controller aside.  “I was honestly surprised when you asked me out again.”

I try to think back to our first date, dinner in the park by her place—no, that was someone else. We went…—what did we—

“Your body language was totally cold,” she says with a laugh. “Like you didn’t want to touch me.”

We got coffee at the boardwalk downtown. I remember the way she smiled at me when I walked up, so open and disarming. She thought I was cold?

“I can be shy,” I say.

She smirks a little, “At first.”

“At first.”

I think about what she said for the rest of the night, playing over and over the day we met. I think about Noah, and the others, picturing my body from all angles.

Where should I have put my hands?

How should I have smiled?

～

The night Noah finds out, some friends of mine from school come to visit. They’re the kind I know I won’t keep in touch with much longer. The four of them decided to stay in our college town after graduation and get a house together. I watch them through social media as they decorate the living room, collect mismatched glasses and silverware, and watch 90 Day Fiancé on their Goodwill couch. I’m jealous, though I don’t want to be. I know the house is falling apart. I know Amy is a control freak and the other three already secretly hate her.

From the dark of my parents’ basement, these feel like small prices to pay for something resembling real life.

Someone’s boyfriend’s brother is in a local band, so I meet them at a restaurant nearby and then head to the dingy community centre for the gig.

I text him,

“I’m in your neighbourhood lol. Drinks?”

I give my friends a clipped version of the story over dinner, leaving out the less flattering details, skewing timelines in my favour. Leaning in around the table, their wide eyes make me bold. I wonder when I got so comfortable with lying. They gasp at all the right details and shower me in girlish, gossipy interest.

“It’s so not like you.”

“And you haven’t told them?”

Noah texts back,

“Sure. Meet you at hazlewood?”

I make some pale excuses and leave my friends at the show. Already tipsy, I head towards Francis Street. The night and the heat and the fading sounds of the band fill my chest. I wish I could always be here, in a moment between moments—leaving one place, on my way to somewhere else, another lover waiting in some other corner of the city.

I don’t remember how the conversation starts. In the same bar where we had our first date, we sit at one of the high tops. The decorative candle on the table is starting to sputter. We drink gin and tonics and I tell exaggerated stories about the girls. I don’t remember what he asks. I don’t know why I feel compelled to answer, why I choose this moment out of all the others. None of it is real, anyway.

“I’m seeing other people.”

For a moment I’m right. It doesn’t matter.

He laughs. I think I try to say something reassuring. The conversation moves on and he orders us shots of whiskey and by the time we’re walking back to his house I’m properly drunk. The peak of the night crowd has passed but a few rowdy groups are still meandering down the sidewalk and I feel a kind of camaraderie with them.

It isn’t until we’re back in his room and I try to kiss him that I realize my mistake. He holds me at arm’s length with a hard grip.

“She’s a woman,” I say, “if that matters.”

I watch him take in the information, watch his eyes as they don’t look at me, the light moving behind them as he thinks.

That night we fuck harder than usual. His bites leave bruises. I think this should bother me, but it doesn’t.

～

I dress silently, sweat slick on my back. He opens his phone and I steal glances at his face in the blue light, but there’s nothing for me to find there.

“Should I text you?” I ask.

“Probably not.”

I leave his house unobserved, walking back through the neighbourhood to my car, still parked at the community centre. Sitting behind the wheel in the dark I try to convince myself I have some kind of dignity to salvage in this.

The smell of him lingers on me, and my mouth tastes like whiskey and sex and I know it would be absolutely idiotic if I started crying, but I do anyway. I drive back to my parents’ house in silence, the stoplights washing me red, green, yellow—a useless baptism.

～

Around August the temperature finally peaks and breaks like a fever. Everyone seems to forget almost instantly. My parents comment on what a beautiful summer it’s been. Kids set off fireworks after midnight. The yellow grass by the lake and the singed pine leaves linger like omens. Smoke from the forest fires will roll in soon, driving us all back inside, but for now the parks are crowded, restaurants bustling and leaking laughter well into the bright evenings.

Cate and I drift slowly apart. I want to blame it on the change in temperature, on her job, on lingering issues with her ex—but I know none of those variables are the cause. Even in the casual closeness of her apartment, the soft moments where we brush hands or she strokes my hair, I feel we are playing pretend. I want to apologize but I’m not sure what for. When she tells me she’s leaving for a two-week trip to Ireland, I take that as my exit cue. I end it over text message. Her response is chilly, respectful, and better than I deserve.

I never tell her the other half of the story.

～

In the months after, I have the same dream again and again.

I’m wandering through the garden of her coworker’s house and everything is over-sized—or maybe I’m just very small. I’m carrying boxes piled full of dishes, clothes, lamps, and they feel impossibly large in my arms. But I don’t mind. The late summer air is clear and warm, my bare feet sink into the grass as I walk through corridors of wildflowers—lavender bulbs the size of my face, towering daisies casting long, skinny shadows.

I round a corner and the model building is there waiting for me, enormous and more beautiful than I could ever imagine. A set of broad, shallow stairs lead up to a facade of windows beneath smooth, maple beams. The glass flashes blindingly in the afternoon light.

I live here. I know I do. But I can’t find the door.

The sun sets and I walk in circles with my boxes and there is nothing but windows and walls. No way in; no way out.

When it’s fully dark, the building lights up from within and I slump wearily onto the steps, my worldly possessions scattered in the grass like a shipwreck. I stare through the impenetrable windows at the hardwood floors and the beautiful empty space waiting for me to fill it.

I can see the staircase clearly inside, winding gently upwards to some height I can’t fathom.