What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Inspired by Raymond Carver:

Melanie was talking. Melanie had only recently become Mel. And I hadn’t adjusted yet. Lots of things hadn't adjusted yet. Like in that odd time of summer where children's dirty hands sweat and people sleep out on their balconies because it’s too hot to sleep between sheets. Mel McGinnis. The girl who makes too many people too hot to sleep. The part-time poet. The full-time drunk who rolls her own smokes. She was a born beauty queen who knew it, but pretended to resent it. Raised in the burbs of Jersey right next door to me but had imported a mouth from cable TV that was dirty like a West Coast sailor. And when the rest of us joined girl scouts or the drama club, worked with the 4H and dreamed of a ranch style home like our parents’, Mel pledged allegiance to New York and longed for Los Angeles. She was that girl. The first to have her period. The first to have breasts. That bone-thin girl with too pretty of a face. That dark, dark, eyed girl with thick, matted lashes and brown hair that shamelessly hung down her back. But of all the things she once was, or even still struggled to be, she had now been reduced to playing the role of mourning girlfriend. The sad, desperate, still painfully bone thin girlfriend of the late Patrick Foley. And some of the time, most of the time, it gave her the right. The right to break into melodramatics and beg us to cross the Schuyllkill. The right to convince us to leave Jersey, to abandon all of it: swimming pools, double car garages, good morning pancakes and good evening parents. And we did. We exchanged it all, traded it in for a single bedroom apartment we couldn't afford and stale tobacco to fill it with. We did it because I felt committed and responsible, and because I asked Nick to join me.

The loss of Patrick gave her the right to be belligerent before noon and to break into tears before six. It gave her the right to ask us to reserve afternoon upon afternoon along with early evening to her and to drinking and to street lights and park benches.

And there we sat. Mel, with her long pendant earrings and corduroy backpack. Nick with thick eye brows and a dinner vest, always overdressed with nowhere to go. And me. The girl with freckles who used to stuff her bra.

When we had first seen that Christmas-like glow of break lights, street lamps and neon store fronts fill a park that was open and public and used past midnight, we had fallen in love. We had disowned Jersey and claimed to have found our messiah in Philly, cried that Patrick couldn’t see our Israel, and joked about building tree houses in the beautiful branches of Rittenhouse Square. But since then, I had grown weary of how the fluorescent hue highlighted Nick’s five o clock and accented the bags beneath my twenty one year old eyes. I could no longer find the romance in making love behind bushes or the fun in getting shitty while sitting in a fountain. The three of us sitting at Rittenhouse. Every night, sitting in the circle we sat in. More like light fixtures or bums, disabled veterans than artists. We would just sit locked in place by our make believe name cards, while always leaving room for a fourth.

There was a paper bag gin bottle on our make believe table that our make believe name cards sat on. A half empty bottle that for a split moment dragged me into the sepia toned memory of spinning Heinz ketchup in basements of unforgettable, seven minute love. A love that only dares to flirt with the edge of your belt and the tip of your tongue rather than the inside of your navel and the bend of your knee, the angle of your neck and the bottom of your soul. The gin kept going around. And around. And I thought about our mouths. And about our lips. We drank instead of talking and I thought about our saliva.

Gin dribbled down Mel’s chin as she coughed and Nick and I looked at each other. He scooted closer to me and each of us settled in to the roles we played nightly.

“I love you, I love you. You bitch, I love you.” Mel was speaking to me.

There was never a definitive pro noun used, there needed to be one. It was me she was speaking to. I had been hearing that a lot lately or at least versions of it.

“I love you so much I want to kill you sometimes.”

“Or kill myself.” Which was a threat that felt far worse to hear.

Whenever Nick would ask me for an explanation, I kept my mouth shut. She loved me. That part was most definitely true. She was my sister, the only thing besides Nick, and an old jean jacket I had left of home. And I was a bitch. That part was also most definitely true. I deserved that and she deserved the vindication of calling me one. Sometimes I felt like we had discussed it though, flushed it out, drained it of its mystery and misery, shared it, tried it on and walked a few miles. Like we had sat down and talked about that night and the reasons behind it and the real reason she was so angry still or confused or whatever she was. I felt like we had discussed it, but with our mouths closed, like I had sat her down and told her all of the sordid details and had finally explained why I felt tied to her now more than ever. And we had determined why I was a bitch and why she should call me one. But in all truth, we had never had that talk, and yet, when she sat there, with Indian style legs and Indian style cheek bones, and those dark, dark, eyes, I could have sworn she knew. The story was pushing right behind that word bitch, it was tangled around the final “ch,” that strong accent that thrashed up against her two front teeth.

“Nicky, What should I do with a love like this?” She swayed to an impossible tune of music that did not exist. She stared straight at me while speaking to him. Her lips were perpetually chapped and she bit into the lower one while she waited for an answer she knew she wouldn’t receive.

It wasn’t Nicky’s style to interrupt a rant or more importantly, it wasn’t his style to challenge either her or me. Which was one of the reasons Nick was still here. And if you had asked Nick, beautiful blonde Nick, whose beard never grew in fully, whose hair was especially soft at the nape of his neck, who blushed easily. Whose hands were a little too small and wore pants that hit before the neck of his shoes, well then Nick would tell you that he was in Philadelphia because he had met a girl once who stuffed her bra all through grade school and had shockingly grown into the girl of his dreams. This is the story he would tell you. He would tell you that his best friend had died in a tragic car accident the year he graduated high school and nothing since his death, other than making love to his girl, felt right. That’s how Nick would tell you the story.

“I’m the wrong person to ask, Mel.”

That was Nick’s attack. Like they both lived the same kind of love story, like they agreed that I was a crazy bitch who broke them both. Which was true. Which was viciously and completely true. Nick, or Nick Knack, or Nicky, my love, when I needed something, Nick-Knack-Paddy-Whack, give me a damn bone, or St. Nick, as Patrick sometimes called him—Nick, regardless of the nickname, was of the kick-me-so-I’ll-know-you-love-me school.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

I pushed him off my knee like the puppy he pretended to be.

He was a romantic, a hopeful one, a quality that made me nauseous and blissful, anxious, and tired, and giddy, and bashful, made me simultaneously love him and hate him.

“Neither of you know anything about love.”

And suddenly I was the drunk one.

They knew nothing of the love I was talking about. A love that had nothing to do with trying to kill people, but a love that at the end of the day, played a powerful part of the death of so many things.

And I choked out loud, shook my hands out, and drowned the last sip of gin, chased it with a handful of pretzels and decided to stand up. Because if I didn’t stand up and leave right then and there, then that was going to be the night we discussed it. And if that night was going to become the night that we talked about the night of all nights then that would be the last night I’d probably speak to either of them. And it would become the second most defining night of my young, now tragic life. It would end up ranking right up besides that last night, the night that was equal parts beautiful, equal parts heinous, that last night that I noticed that Patrick smelt like cream soda and Irish Spring. And I didn’t want to tell that story, the story of Patrick’s last night alive. Didn’t want to tell it to a lightheaded audience in shitty lighting, in a shitty park I had grown tired of. It was not the time. Not the place. Not for Patrick.

Mel turned the Styrofoam cup she always drank her liquor out of over. She spilled it out on to the grass.

“Gin’s gone and you’re just gonna walk out on us. I don’t think so, pretty, pretty, princess. I think you owe us something.”

Her mouth was paying a certain extra attention to the hard sounds. She was narrowing her eyes, struggling to sound intense, when the intention was already coming across loud and clear.

I could hear my heart beating in my eyes. And Nick, like a bad visioned little girl in the outfield, stared at the ground and picked at grass. There was no need for him to speak, Mel was did it for him. Mel was speaking for each of us. She was the only one pushing for momentum, while the world slowed to a halt. While the leaves stopped their rustling and the wheels stopped their turning, I watched each frozen drop of gin drop from the edge of her discarded glass, and she kept going.

“Tell him and tell me. Tell us, big sister. Tell us.”

She almost seemed to be enjoying it-- A thought that frightened me, flustered me, and as the skin tightened across my knuckles, I grabbed for straws, for only the edges of thoughts, at neuron misfires, at the fly away threads of old sweaters.

“I could eat something. I most definitely could go eat something. Yeah? Maye we’ll just go eat. Forget anything happened at all. We must just be hungry.”

I was stranded in quick sand, I was freezing, I was sweating. There went my footing. There went my life, my everything, my past, my last excuse and final attempt to turn around and avoid this moment.

“Well you’d like that wouldn’t you? I want to hear it. I want to hear it from that mouth of yours. Tell us how you fucked him that night. Tell Nick, especially Nick, how you got to be Patrick’s last fuck.”

“Shame on you, Mel.”

I began to cry, for my first time since that last time. I had cried a lot that last time and I cried a lot this time. I had cried when Patrick had knocked on my door unexpectedly and told me he was running away to New York. I was crying only a little bit when I asked about Mel. And the tears dried up a little when we sat down and discussed how he would leave her and why. And when he cried and said he was positive he didn't love her anymore, unsure if he ever did, I was foolish and overly honest. I told him that I’d always loved him, that I was positive enough for the both of us. I told him I'd go to New York in a heartbeat. I told him that even when he was covered in childish acne, I found him beautiful. I told him that I loved it when he shaved, loved it when he didn’t. Loved it when he had lost all that weight sophomore year, even more before he had. I told him that I had always loved him, that I always would. And when he asked to come inside me, I cried and I cried again when he left my house. And most certainly once again when Mel had called only an hour later worried and scared because Patrick had told her he was heading over to meet her at the coffee shop and that she didn’t know where he was or why he hadn’t arrived yet. And then I cried for the last time when Patrick’s brother told Mel first, then Nick and then finally me.

And as I was about to regain my final strand of dignity by allowing her hateful, ignorant statement, ignorant because what Patrick and I had shared was not fucking, to linger in the air untouched, she interrupted my moment with words that stung like mascara pooling in my eyes, like hunger pangs after midnight, like knowing that I was the tenth, fifteenth, or even twentieth person to find out that the love of my life died while remnants of him were still inside me.

“Did you know that? When he left your house? Did you know he was going to drive over to see me? To make up with me? To kiss me with the mouth he probably kissed you with? Had he told you that? Told you that he had tears in his eyes when he apologized?”

I could suddenly hear everyone’s heart beating. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the park went dark.