Page 6 of Center of Gravity

“Let me come out and see you for the weekend. One more time. Come on, Rob. I need it.”

I hated myself for granting nostalgia and old hope the briefest pass in my mind, where they colluded to whip up a twee montage of the two of us walking the beach, drinking wine, filling this house with more than the last sad year of its past.

All right.I mouthed the words, careful not to give them breath before I exhaled and said, aloud. “Don’t call me again.”

He called my name again as I hung up. I turned my phone off and let misery have her victory, rolling over in the bed and taking my cock into my hand.

2

Alex

It was my second month on the job with the Buffs and I was finding that there was a kind of art to it. Tom was into it because he said it was like someone paying him to work out. At first, I was into it because it didn’t involve a cubicle farm or more telemarketing. Some of the places we ended up were interesting, though. Not just the people, but also the things they decided to get rid of and the things they decided to keep.

Some folks were very organized and detached about the whole process, while others stood by with their arms crossed, biting their nails to the quick reconsidering every little thing they’d marked for us to take. Those were the ones who really interested me. If you’ve never seen someone agonizing over whether or not to toss a set ofFlintstoneglasses circa 1980, you’re missing out. But then I realized that all of these objects were attached to deeper meanings or emotions, that they in some way defined a portion of a person’s existence, whether big or small.

What they were actually deciding was…how important is this to the person I think I am?I’d been thinking about it so much lately that a loose project had begun sketching itself in my mind. Too bad nothing had materialized so far, aside from the fact that I’d filled my parents’ garage with other people’s throwaways.

I couldn’t help but think of Rob then, because what kind of person was willing to just throw away an Eames? I guess the same kind of person who would just ditch out mid-hookup. I’d believed him when he’d said he wasn’t straight, but his excuse was so lame and so unwillingly given that it made me wonder if it was a convenient lie to cover up that he’d been stepping out on someone. Which made him a dick. So after that, I wasn’t much interested in discussing the night anymore.

After we left Rob’s, we had one last stop for the day. It was supposed to be a straightforward one—a light donation haul and trash removal at a woman’s apartment just over the bridge that connected Nook Island to the mainland. And that was good because I needed another mindless distraction after leaving Rob’s.Rob.Not even close to the name he’d given me in the club, the one that was on his profile: Jason. It pissed me off. Not just because he’d bailed that night almost as soon as I’d swallowed, but because of the whole smoke and mirrors act—something else that made me suspicious.

Watching him squirm in his front yard had been amusing, though, and since I was capable of being professional, after a sadistic minute of gorging myself on his obvious discomfort, I’d let it go. Or had tried to. He was right: it didn’t matter anyway. He was one notch among many on my bedpost. Okay, half a notch. And so what if he was just as mouthwatering in the daylight? Not in a leading man kind of way, but like the second lead in a film, the sidekick or something. The one who was kind of invisible at first, but kept popping up with all his little inconsistencies and quirks that gradually became more appealing than the overexposed Tom Cruise-type in the foreground.

Rob’s parents’house turned out to be a mild downer compared to the apartment we arrived at next. The lady who greeted us, Mrs. Ware, spoke quietly and had nervous hands. Sadness was written all over the downturn of her mouth and her dull, watery eyes made more sense as she led us around to the side door of the duplex and unlocked it. Inside, someone’s downward spiral was scattered all over the place in piles of laundry, overfilled ashtrays, the stench coming from a sink heaped with dirty plates. A large, flat screen TV sat on the floor in one corner of the room. A lumpy futon had been shoved up against one of the walls, a coffee table made of a door on cement blocks in front of it. Small green and brown vials littered the top like toxic glass beads.

Mrs. Ware was trying hard to be in the detached category, but started slipping into the overthinker category as soon as Tom and I got inside the door and pulled on some gloves. We had an unspoken code that Tom didn’t deal with mourners. He got awkward and uncomfortable and when he got uncomfortable, he got inappropriate, so he started down the hall to the bedroom while I stayed in the living room with Mrs. Ware, a trash bag in one hand and a box for Goodwill in the other.

“I should’ve cleaned up the trash before I called you guys here. It’s a waste, and it’s something I could do…” She took a step forward like she meant to come closer to the table where I was picking up vials and dumping them in the trash, but she kept stalling out as if there was an invisible barrier stopping her.

I was quick to shake my head when she faltered. “Nah, it’s our job to take care of all of it, anyway.” I picked up one of the ashtrays, mounds of ash spilling to the table, and started to toss it in the trash bag when her hand whipped out and grabbed my wrist so fast it stung. I glanced up at her in surprise.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, withdrawing her hand.

“Not a problem.” I gave her a cheery smile and set the ashtray back on the table. Once it had been emptied, I discovered it was clay, fired in a kiln into permanent misshape. A child’s school project. Initials and a date had been etched into the bottom. “Should I put it in the Keep box, then?”

Mrs. Ware shifted from one foot to the other, her fingertips drumming over her lips. Then, she reached for the ashtray, cupping it in her hands the way someone would hold a bird with a broken wing. “It’s hard to know what to keep,” she said. “He made this, my son, when he was in fourth grade. I had no idea it was here. I didn’t think I’d be—that I’d—” She shook her head and looked to the ceiling the way people did when they were trying to keep their tears from spilling over.

I might have been the more socially capable of our team, but sometimes I didn’t know what to say, either. It was hard to confront a stranger’s grief, to show the proper level of sympathy, especially sweating in a neon orange T-shirt with a caricature of a greaser dude on the back. Mrs. Ware, like some of the other mourners we’d encountered, was self-conscious about it, I could tell, but she couldn’t help herself. Usually, I’d make a few sympathetic noises and it’d be fine. I didn’t exist, not really. They were stuck in their grief and I was meant to be a silent witness.

“How about a box for keepsakes—whatever your gut says? We can just put it in here and you can seal it up and put it away until you’re ready, if you want.” I placed an empty box next to her foot, then turned away to sweep ashes from the table and give her a little privacy.

When I got to a trunk of old paperbacks and CDs, Mrs. Ware and I sat on the floor together sorting through them, opening jewel cases and reading off the band names. “He had some of the strangest taste in music. I never understood it.” She smiled.

I nodded, fighting the fact that it was difficult to sit next to her and be close to her while she sorted through her dead son’s things because it was like her sadness was sitting right there next to us, too, thick in the air. I searched for a distraction, going back in my mind to the Eames chair and the figurine and Rob himself. And, unlike the heaviness of Mrs. Ware’s grief, Rob’s felt less like grief than resignation. Like a breath finally exhaled.

What he did with his house was none of my business, but I thought I’d been trying to provoke a reaction out of him when I’d said all of that. The man in the club had been nothing but directness and rawwant. I’d loved it, been drawn to it like a hummingbird to nectar—how sure his hands were on me, how his voice had twisted and grated with passion as I’d worked him over in the bathroom. In daylight, he seemed so mild-mannered and indifferent and then in the middle of the afternoon there’d been that random curse like a shock of ice water—a hint of his club persona beneath the polite veneer. I’d wanted to see if I could hit the button to unmute his personality again when we were in the kitchen. I guess I had, but not necessarily in the way I’d meant to.

“Buzzkills all around today, Jesus,”Tom said as we climbed into the truck after finishing up. He blasted the A/C and we sat at the curb waiting until the air cooled and the interior of the truck stopped smelling like burning plastic. “There’d better be a sorority house clean-up in the schedule next week. I can’t take all these sad people. No offense,” Tom said, tossing a look in my direction as he pulled away from the curb.

I shrugged. Tom knew my dad was sick, but there was a kind of silent pact between us that we didn’t talk about it that I was grateful for. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore than he did, and I knew he understood because the first day we’d worked together, he’d told me his dad had died in a car accident when he was ten.

“It’s fine. I don’t mind them. I guess in a way it’s like practice.” My dad’s diagnosis of colon cancer had shattered every ounce of predictability in my life like a cheap vase. Every day, week, and month was a waiting game based on chemo, drug trials, and scans, and none of the doctors could give us anything more than statistics, so we’d all been living in a weird limbo for the past six months. And it might’ve been a weird thing to say, but I’d gotten used to the chaos. Not pleasantly, but in the way you’d eventually get used to sleeping on a sack of rocks if you had to, or had a piece of glass buried in your foot. It hurt, but the days kept coming and at some point you had to get up and keep moving through them.

“But yeah, a sorority house would be okay with me.” Hunting for a subject change, I asked, “Wanna come to The Tap House with me tonight?”

I gave Tom my best eyebrow waggle for good measure. The Tap House was our favorite drinking spot with a hundred beers on tap, a big deck furnished with misters, and a slew of tourists and locals on summer break for eye candy.

“Pass,” Tom said without hesitation, my eyebrow waggle wasted.