Going Home Again by Dennis Bock Read Free Book Online Page A

one British, the other German. It was a sort of postpunk tribute by the look of it. The Waterboys, Kraftwerk, the Smiths—the sort of mideighties stuff we were all listening to in those days. She didn’t quite look the part, aside from the army surplus jacket. Tying her hair back in that ponytail seemed more preppy and clean-cut than anything. But I liked her taste in music because, well, it reflected my own.
    What did I feel that day when I learned of their living arrangements? Envy, if not outright jealousy, I suppose. My best friend, a
peer
, was already living with a beautiful woman and enjoying what I could only imagine was the sort of boundless sex that surely went along with the rest of it. Technically Holly shared a room on campus with a Bermudan girl named Georgia and still made an appearance there once, maybe twice, a week. But this hardly dampened the wonderI felt for my friend’s situation. That his girlfriend was willing and able to sleep in his bed five nights out of seven impressed me terribly. I just couldn’t believe it. He was the luckiest eighteen-year-old kid in the world. We’d talked endlessly about such things, of course—girls and women—but that he’d come as far as this in so little time was nothing short of miraculous. It was something to beat your chest and crow about. Miles, however, did no such thing. He hadn’t even mentioned her on the two or three occasions we’d spoken on the phone while setting up that visit. For that reason he seemed all the more mature. It was as if the position he occupied now, that of the freshman with the beautiful girl on his arm, was a place he’d occupied all along and I’d just failed to notice.
    After the introductions we walked through downtown on our way to my friend’s apartment. The sidewalks and outdoor cafés were busy with people. The sky was clear and bright, and the October air pleasant. Shadows moved on the shops’ plate-glass windows. Pretty girls were everywhere. I felt the excitement of the approaching weekend, the longing for sex, the promise that something in my life was going to change. I wondered if Miles and this new girl were already in love or if by some stroke of luck he’d stumbled upon a girl who sought out sex for its own sake, just because she liked it. I couldn’t get over his good fortune. If fate could shift so swiftly for him, then it surely might offer me some similar opportunity that weekend. It was as if he had always known that something was waiting for him on the other side of the life we’d led back home,as if all the dreaming we’d done was little more than a preamble to the bigger and more interesting game that awaited. And it seemed he was right. In the splendor of Holly’s feminine presence, and the fact that they were together now, I saw that he’d been right all along.
    I tried not to stare that first day in Montreal. But I couldn’t stop my eyes from wandering back to her again and again. She smiled easily, and the light scattering of freckles on the bridge of her nose and high cheekbones made her look as wholesome and cheerful as a summer’s day. Her ponytail bobbed delicately as she walked, the way I imagined a ballerina’s would.
    In the heart of one of the student ghettos, the building they lived in was a three-story flat-roof town house of dull, tobacco-colored brick. On weekends, he said, it was usually just one big party up and down the street.
    “Sounds like fun,” I said.
    “Oh yeah. You’ll see.”
    I noticed bicycles chained up everywhere outside and in the entrance by the tenant mailboxes. The flat itself was small and dumpy and smelled vaguely of other people’s food. The afternoon light falling through the windows turned its walls and the bamboo curtain separating the kitchen and living room a beautiful rich orange. The only object of any size familiar to me from Miles’s house back home was his desk. It sat to the left of the door that led out to the small balcony looking over Rue