Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

You also kept repeating my name in a certain way. Oh Fraaank, you’d go, drawing it out, sort of sighing. Oh Fraaank. And then you’d be silent. That’s not a very good imitation, but I remember it like it was yesterday, Marianne. I remember listening so hard to those silences, like I could almost hear in your breathing what you wanted to tell me. I’ve never forgotten that phone call, is all.

She says, And you think I might remember whatever it was I was trying to say?

I guess not, I answer. But here’s the thing. Ever since, I’ve felt convinced that was the first time anyone ever told me they were in love with me. You didn’t, I know. But that’s what I heard in your stammering and in those silences, that really you wanted to tell me. Years passed until the next time a woman told me she loved me and meant it. Sad but true, Marianne. That must be one reason why I remember it the way I do.

Marianne’s expression looks a little amused and moved too, maybe. She says, You think that what happened with Ian prevented something further from happening with us. Is that it?

I was really in love with you, I tell her. You knew, didn’t you?

Yes, she says. I guess I did know that.

I wait a moment, in case she’s about to say something more. But then I say, Even if it wasn’t requited, at least I knew what love felt like. Except after that phone call I felt it was requited, that the feeling was there, anyway.

At least my hands have stopped shaking.

She looks at me through squinted eyes, her smile lopsided. I wish I could remember that phone call as well as you do, she says.

I’ve always thought that if we’d gone to school in another town, maybe things could have gone differently between us.

I’ve never thought of it that way, she says. Maybe you’re right, in another town. She smiles at me in a way that reminds me of how she used to smile at me back then, both warmly and humorously, as if we were silently sharing a secret joke.

Friday

Given how much we’d had to drink, I suggested to Marianne that maybe she should get a hotel room, or even stay on the extra bed in my room, instead of driving back to Topsfield. But she insisted she was fine. Plus she had her weekly tennis match in the morning. She promised to call when she got home, but once I was in my room, I fell fast asleep. When I woke this morning, there was a message on my phone from Marianne: “What a fun night, sweet Frank. We’ll see how I play tennis with an ice pack on my head tomorrow morning, ha! Please, let’s stay in touch. It’s almost spring, let me take you canoeing on the Ipswich River.”

No messages from Lulú, but it’s still early, barely eleven. I’d meant to save half of this giant oatmeal and chocolate chip cookie for later in the day because I always get hungry at the nursing home and there’s nothing I ever want to eat there, but I’ve just taken the last bite. I look around at the other customers in this techie-seeming café having their healthy breakfasts and coffees, so many fresh-faced, casually stylish young women, and, unusually for Boston, not all of them white, and doubtlessly all highly educated and knowledgeable about ways of life I don’t have an inkling of.

I might as well get going. I’ll walk all the way back to South Station, maybe swing past the Congress Street Bridge, too, pulling along my wheeled suitcase, knapsack over my shoulders, gym lock muffled inside a pair of socks, and carrying the tin of French butter cookies inside its pretty shop bag. The exercise and chilly Atlantic air will do me good, but my bad knee aches like it’s a little hungover too. So what about last night? I think Marianne and I both got from it what we’d wanted. She was still hurt, after all these years, by what Ian and so many of our classmates had done to her, from one day to the next shattering everything she’d understood and trusted about her world and who she was in it. She’d wanted to talk to me because we’d been close back when it happened and she knew that I’d been hurt by it, too, and that at least I’d be interested. There are people who think, Oh come on, that was adolescence, how can you not be over it? They’re like the people who say, Who cares what happened in faraway tiny Guatemala all those years ago now, why do you make such a big deal out of it? I don’t like people like that. So why shouldn’t Lexi talk to her shrink about what it did to her to watch Bert beating me up all those years, if that’s what she thinks she needs? Who am I to dictate what should and shouldn’t leave a mark? My walking pace actually quickens, I feel hyped up to tell Lexi and to apologize for having been nasty about it before.

Last night with Marianne I got to confess something I’d kept silent about for over three decades, and the way I’m feeling about it this morning, it’s like I had a requited high school love after all. So I can go back in time and start my romantic life all over, fast-forwarding to now: a man confident since adolescence in his ability to inspire love, who knows what to do with it. Some people passing on the sidewalk glance suspiciously at a grown man laughing out loud to himself, like maybe he’s about to pull an axe out from under his coat, but others genuinely smile, what is it that makes them react so differently?

Exactly out there, past the far side of Fort Point Channel, on a sun-scorched field by Logan airport, at