The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 20

  Chapter Eleven

  Lindsey once tried to explain to me this primordial connection, she said, that all lesbians have with vampire narratives; something to do with the gothic novella Carmilla and the sexual and psychological impotence of men when facing the dark power of lesbian seduction. As such, I’d heard all about “the scene” in The Hunger before ever seeing it for myself. I did eventually rent it, though, and while “the scene”—wherein Catherine Deneuve as Miriam, the ageless Egyptian vampire, and Susan Sarandon as Sarah, the doctor on aging, tumble around Miriam’s big silk-sheeted bed and totally get it on, and also do their vampire-blood-sisters-exchange thing with white curtains billowing all around them, blocking the shots of their tangled bodies at the most inopportune of moments, forcing me to rewind again and again—is very steamy and erotic and all of the things Lindsey described it as, it’s what comes before that scene that gets my vote as the much, much hotter moment.

  That’s the moment when Susan/Sarah, flushed by Catherine/Miriam’s piano playing—and probably also by her low voice and hypnotic but sometimes hard to decipher accent—spills three drops of bloody sherry on her very white, semitight T-shirt, and then there’s a jump-cut to her attempting to rub it out with a wet rag, creating a fraternity-movie-type wet T-shirt situation, and at that point all Catherine Deneuve has to do is walk behind her and gently trail her fingertips along Susan’s shoulders and cause this intense moment of eye contact between the two of them, and it’s go time: Susan Sarandon just peels off the T-shirt entirely maybe five seconds after that.

  And even though it was just some artsy vampire movie with David Bowie and two, to my knowledge, non-lesbian-in-real-life actresses, that single moment, the shoulder touch, the way they met eyes, it seemed completely true to me, and way more powerful or erotic or whatever than the sex itself. Maybe that’s because the first time I watched The Hunger I’d actually had a moment like that, but none of the “sex itself.”

  I had rented it sometime in my first months after knowing Lindsey, but at that point she’d given me so much lesbian-knowledge-building pop-cultural homework that I guess it was one assignment I’d forgotten to mention to her as checked off the list, because she sent it to me, a videotape in the original box with a pink PREVIOUSLY VIEWED MOVIE sticker placed inconsiderately over Catherine/Miriam’s face, in a care package that came all the way from Anchorage, Alaska. A care package that I didn’t really deserve given that I’d only written her once since the start of summer, and even more so considering how I’d blown off her plans for our Alaskan reunion in order to court Coley Taylor.

  The package was waiting on the dining-room table for me when I got home from work in a hurry to shower and change. For the first time in a long time Coley wasn’t with me. This was how we’d planned it. She was at her new apartment, the one that had been swarming with family and friends the last couple days, Ty and his cowboy cronies hauling furniture and hanging shelves; Mrs. Taylor’s crowd, nurses and GOP-goers, bringing old dishes and pots and pans; people stopping by with cases of soda, with frozen meals, with potted plants. Now finally everything was settled, ready to go, and we had made a date for our first ever nontheater, private-screening-for-two movie night. I was supposed to swing by Video ’n’ Go and rent something, anything, to serve as the outward reason for our get-together—one to be spent completely alone, with a door that locked, both deadbolt and chain, and a brand-new queen-size bed in the other room.

  But then smack in the middle of these plans came this package from Lindsey. I opened it while taking the stairs to my room, two at a time, trying to both tear apart the box and also to pull off articles of clothing as I went, unwilling to let any amount of time that I could be spending with Coley go to waste. I got a paper cut from the corner of the cardboard, one that I aggravated by pulling at the packing tape. I littered shredded newspaper as I went. I didn’t stop to pick it up. Inside, along with The Hunger, were two mix tapes, a bag of chocolate-covered nuts and raisins labeled Real Alaskan Moose Droppings, a snow globe with a fly-fishing grizzly bear inside, and a postcard with a couple of busty and tanned big-smiling women in neon bikinis standing in a very large, seemingly very cold snowbank, pines and cedars all around them, and the neon purple caption: Alaska’s Finest Wildlife.

  On the back of the postcard Lindsey had written:

  I was glad that she had put the postcard inside the package. And though, at first, I read her seduction suggestions as jokes, The Hunger was in fact a movie that I knew Coley hadn’t seen, one that I had sitting on my bed and could just bring with me, saving myself a few otherwise wasted minutes at the video store. I mulled it over in the shower, where I used Ruth’s extensive lineup of personal body scrubs and moisturizing washes and refreshing rinses—all of them in various shades of creams and greens, perfuming the whole bathroom with their natural plant extracts and fortifying vitamins and minerals. Somewhere between leg shaving and toweling off I decided just to go for it. I’d bring The Hunger, tout it as a wacky vampire story, put it in the VCR, and let things happen from there.

  The dark wooden stairwells and long hallways of Coley’s apartment building were thick with hot air and the smells of various tenants’ dinners: definitely fish sticks for 3-B and maybe McDonald’s or Hardees for 5-D. The whole place whirred with the sound of in-window air conditioners. On the sidewalk outside the building they’d dripped on me, fat drops of machine-induced rain, and inside those ripe hallways, their constant humming along with the muffled sounds of TVs and stereos made Thompson Apartments feel at once alive and also a good place to hide out, to be unseen.

  Outside Coley’s door, which was glossy reddish wood with 6-A painted on it in black, I stood for a moment before knocking. I was holding the video, the bag of Moose Droppings, and a Gal-on-the-Go Necessities Only pink toolbox, an apartment-warming gift courtesy of Ruth and Sally-Q. I could hear the radio on inside, the country station, Trisha Yearwood singing about being “in love with the boy.” I was sweating, and not just because of the heat in that hallway. I took a bunch of deep breaths that didn’t really do much to calm me down. I wondered, for maybe the first time ever in my life, if I should have dressed better, something other than my same-as-always tank top and shorts. I looked at my dark-brown toes, forever the tannest part of my tan body, so dark they looked dirty even right out of the shower. I looked again at the door and worried that Coley was watching all this through the peephole Mrs. Taylor had gotten the landlord’s permission for Ty to install. I knocked.

  She didn’t answer right away, so she couldn’t have been peepholing me, or maybe she just wanted me to think otherwise. I heard the metal click of the deadbolt and the slide of the useless (according to Ty) chain lock, and then we were face-to-face, both of us in tank tops and shorts (Coley’s much shorter than mine, or maybe it was just that her legs were endless), both of us with shower-wet hair, and both of us grinning shy, weird grins.

  “Okay, so it’s magma hot in here,” she said, stepping back so that I could come in.

  “Any excuse to use the word magma,” I said as she relocked the door.

  The shades were all drawn and a single lamp did a bad job of lighting one corner of the living room. The space was filled with Trisha Yearwood still singing and also the loud chug of the apartment’s sole air conditioner, one that Mrs. Taylor had found at a garage sale and that Ty had tinkered into functionality. It was in the bedroom, and Coley was right: It wasn’t doing much to cool the place off.

  “On the plus side it smells way better,” I said, leaving my flip-flops by the door because I saw that Coley was barefoot and I had worked out this plan to try to follow her lead all evening, even with the minor things.

  “You think?” She walked ahead of me into the tiny kitchen with its olive linoleum floor and olive-painted cabinets.

  “Undeniably. Much, much better than my first visit.”

  Coley opened the door to the fridge, talked to me with her head stuck in it. “So I made that cabbage-and–ramen noodle sala
d of my mom’s that you said you liked, and a fruit salad and a chicken salad.”

  “You’ve gone all Becky Home-Ec-y,” I said, backing out of the way so that Coley could unload a stack of Tupperware bowls onto the countertop.

  She peeled off the lids, stirred each salad with its own wooden serving spoon. “I’m too classy for that. Try gone Martha Stewarty.”

  I switched on my best announcer voice. “Well, certainly Martha would approve of this exquisite pink plastic toolbox complete with a Busy Lady hammer, a pair of pliers, a tape measure, and both a flathead and a Phillips screwdriver.” I held the box the way I imagined Vanna White might, showcasing it for all its glory.

  “God love Ruth,” Coley said, opening the kit while I held it. She took out the hammer, practiced a couple of imaginary nail blows. “Wow! Useful and comfortable. I’ll never go back to a man’s hammer again!”

  We both laughed at that, there in the shades-drawn semidark of the kitchen, close together in a small space and totally alone. The ease of our laughter somehow made us remember our nervousness, both of us at once. They were playing the ag report on the radio, that guy with the gummy voice. Coley put the hammer back and I put the case on the counter. She got us plates from a cupboard above the sink, from a shelf newly lined with contact paper sporting tiny, perfect yellow pears, each with a single, also perfect, green leaf. We’d done all the drawers and cupboards the day before.

  She dished up our plates and I got us silverware. We were careful how we moved our bodies, careful not to brush against each other or even to stand too close, which took precise maneuvers in that small space.

  Coley nodded her head toward the bag of chocolate and the movie. “So what’d you rent us?”

  “I didn’t,” I said, opening the fridge so that she could reshelve the bowls.

  “What’d you bring, then?”

  “Lindsey sent it. It’s a vampire thing with Susan Sarandon. It’s okay. Kind of weird.”

  Coley emerged from behind the door with a plastic pitcher filled with an orangey-yellow concoction. “You’ve already seen it?”

  “I’ve already seen everything.”

  “We can drink to that.” She motioned for me to move out of her way, opened the cupboard under the sink, pushed aside the Pine-Sol, and removed a bottle of rum.

  “Ty left this,” she said. “And he specifically told me not to drink it.”

  “So obviously we’ll be drinking rum and whatever’s in the pitcher,” I said.

  “Orange/pineapple juice.”

  “Very tropical.”

  Coley gave me her wink. “Absolutely. We can start with rum and juice and work our way up to rum and rums.”

  We did this next part like a ballet, careful and precise, barely any talking between us, the presence of what we had planned for the evening, though as of yet officially un-spoken, as thick and heavy as the heat. We carried our plates into the living room, set them on the coffee table, came back and mixed our drinks, made them strong, added ice from the purple plastic trays Coley’s mom had just bought for her. We drank big swallows in the kitchen. We clinked our glasses. We drank again, then refilled those glasses to their tops with more rum. Coley carried our drinks and I brought the video and the chocolate, switched off the radio on the way. I put the tape in the VCR and took the remote from the top of the TV, brought it over to the couch with me, pressed PLAY. We sat, plates on our laps, as far away from each other as possible, each against the opposite brown armrest, with much greater distance between us than we ever had at the theater. I worried, right then, that we wouldn’t move from those spots all night.

  We ate and watched the movie’s moody, hard-to-follow intro, with Bowie and Deneuve at a foreign-seeming dance club, neither of us speaking until Coley said:

  “This is really weird, right?”

  “The movie?”

  “Yeah. What’d you think I meant?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Coley put her plate on the coffee table and reached over and took the remote from where it was partially wedged beneath my thigh. She had to touch me to do this, and both of us were very aware of that. She pressed PAUSE. The frozen scene left the screen in a bright, sterile, white hallway, with David Bowie and the female half of a couple he and Catherine Deneuve had lured back to their apartment pressed together, all black leather and punk hair and piercings.

  Coley turned to me with this intense look and asked, “Is it gonna be like this all night?”

  “The movie?” I asked again, grinning.

  Coley grinned, too. “You are such a smart-ass. Thankfully I’ve chosen to overlook your many immaturities.”

  “Yes, and I’m ever so grateful, ma’am,” I said.

  “I’m sure.” She grabbed the video’s case. She studied the back and then read in an overdone Dracula voice, “Nothing human loves forever.” She did the Sesame Street Count cackle, tossed the case back onto the coffee table. “Why did she send this to you?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? Lindsey’s a vampire.”

  “Well, that was my guess.” Coley jiggled her drink at me, a notice to get to work on my own. “Seriously, why?”

  “You’ll find out once we watch it.”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” she said. “You two and your secrets via the postal service. Why is it bothering you that I’m asking if we’re about to watch it anyway?”

  “It’s not.” I took a big bite of the fruit salad, a really big bite, two grapes and a bunch of slices of banana.

  “It definitely is.”

  I hadn’t told Coley all that much about Lindsey and me. She knew that she sent me shit all the time. She knew that she was into chicks. But what she knew was definitely lacking in detail. I put my own plate on the coffee table and said, “If you just push PLAY, then all the secrets will be revealed.”

  “No way. Too easy. How about you give me three guesses?” Coley pulled her bare legs up onto the couch and folded them beneath her, turned herself toward me completely.

  I did the exact same thing with my own legs.

  “Oh my God, you’re so tan,” she said, looking at my knees, which were a close second to my toes in darkness, mostly because of all those hours up on the guard stand.

  “So are you,” I said.

  “Not my legs.” She untucked one of them and extended it down the length of the couch until her red-toenailed foot was in my lap.

  “Well, you work in jeans,” I said. “What miracle of solar power were you hoping for?”

  She could have pulled her leg back after that, but she didn’t, and I pretended like having it there was just a slumber-party, girls-being-girls kind of thing. I didn’t know what the hell to do with a foot in my lap, anyway. I’d seen a movie with toe sucking, but that seemed entirely out of my range of ability and also fairly unappealing, as nice as Coley’s toes were, not to mention that such a move would be a gargantuan leap from whatever it was we were doing at the moment.

  Talking seemed the best route. “So make your three guesses,” I said.

  “Okay.” She closed her eyes for a second, folded her hands in her lap, and readied herself as if a contestant on a game show answering the big-money question. “Okay. Is it—because it’s superscary and it’s gonna freak me out and I’ll want you to spend the night because I’m afraid to be alone?” She did the corny double eyebrow raise at me.

  “Not even close,” I said. “It’s like artsy scary, and not even, really. There’s barely any blood. You won’t be afraid to be alone.”

  Coley nodded her head like a knowing TV psychologist. “Mmmm-hmmm, mmm-hmmm. Just as I thought.” She studied the frozen image on the screen, looked back at me. She asked, with more seriousness than the last question, “Are they all gonna have vampire group sex?”

  “A solid guess,” I said, blushing despite myself. “But no. No group sex, vampire or otherwise.”

  “None anywhere in the movie?”

  “No. None at all.” I thought about it, then pointed to
the TV. “Well, I mean, right now two couples are making out at the same time, in the same room, but only one on one, so that’s not really a group. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah,” Coley said. She just looked at me, not for too long, and then she picked up the remote and pressed PLAY, just like that, Bowie and the chick back in action.

  “What about your third guess?” I asked.

  “I already know what it is.”

  “Oh really?” I said.

  “Oh really,” she said.

  She pulled back her leg and fitted it beneath her again, and for maybe fifteen seconds I felt like I’d fucked something up without knowing how or why. But then she scooched herself to the middle of the couch, close enough to offer me her hand, which I took, and I also moved myself toward her, and we wrapped ourselves up just like at the theater, but better, tighter, and Coley traced her supersoft fingertips over the top part of one of my bare legs, making me tickle and itch in the best way, and we finally got the first kiss of the evening out of the way and I was ready to do more but Coley said, “I just want to watch until it happens.”

  And I said, “Until what happens?”

  And Coley said, “You’re not half as tricky as you think you are.”

  And I said, “Okay.”

  After that I got up once to refill our drinks, and when I came back, we wound ourselves together again.

  When, in the movie, white T-shirted Susan/Sarah rang the doorbell at Catherine/Miriam’s creepy-fancy town house, Coley said, “I knew it,” and even just her saying that made me shiver along the length of my spine.

  We barely made it through the scene, left the tape playing as we bumbled our way, still twined together, toward the bedroom.

  The chug-whirring air conditioner was even louder in there, but it was noticeably colder, too. Coley, her tongue in my mouth, lifted the bottom of my tank top and then stopped with it pulled halfway up. I finished the job for her and then removed hers as well. It wasn’t as complicated as they sometimes make it seem, for laughs, in certain movies. Coley pulled back the summer quilt and we tumbled onto the cold sheets together, shivering, laughing, pulling the quilt up and over us, giggling at our goose-bumped skin, the softness of those chilly sheets, the hot closeness of our bodies. As we wound our limbs and warmed a pocket beneath the covers, things got more serious again.