Atheists Who Kneel and Pray Page 7

  “Yes,” I nodded. I pushed my halibut around on my plate, thinking about tacos.

  We declined dessert and drained the last of our cocktails. When it was time to pay the bill, David was five dollars short and I loaned him the rest. He didn’t seem at all embarrassed by it, which made me like him more.

  “I’ll buy you a restaurant one day to make up for this,” he said as we were leaving.

  “I’d love that. I’ve always wanted to own a restaurant.”

  “Oh, yeah? What kind?” He took my hand and immediately his thumb began running circles across my skin. I was silently thrilled. It felt so good to hold his hand.

  “Something soft,” I told him.

  He tilted his head to the side and made a face. I shrugged.

  “Soft?” he repeated. “What does that even mean?”

  “Soft lighting, food that melts on your tongue, brick walls, and muted colors. Some place that makes you feel good, you know?”

  “Mmmm,” he said. “Sounds like you’re describing your vagina.”

  I punched him in the arm and he pulled me close so that he could kiss me on the temple.

  “We’ll get you that restaurant,” he said. “What will we name it?”

  “IOU,” I joked.

  “Oh my God, that’s perfect. What vision! What excellent marketing we can do for IOU.” He was being loud and enthusiastic, and I found myself getting caught up in it.

  We launched into discussions of an ad campaign. By the time we reached my studio, David had composed a jingle for the commercial and we’d decided on some of the top menu items.

  “Sing it again,” I asked him as I opened the door to my building.

  He humored me, and the people lulling around the lobby of my building turned to look at us as we walked toward the elevators.

  “They’re so hungry right now,” I told him. “Look at their faces.”

  “They won’t be after they eat at IOU!” He said this loud enough for them to hear, and I flinched and laughed at the same time. We were good together on a few drinks, our inhibitions set aside. I was stiff the first time he spoke to me, it was a wonder he came back.

  “What did you see the first time you came to the bar and saw me?”

  “In you?” he asked.

  “Yes, in me.”

  “Well, you’re beautiful, Yara. You could be covered in shit, walking down the street mooing like a cow, and people would still think you’re beautiful.”

  “But, they’d also think I’m a nutter.”

  “That’s beside the point. You said nut,” he said. “There was just something. I looked and I knew. That’s not happened to me before, so I decided to explore it.”

  By the time we reached my apartment, I felt better about my new boyfriend. Thank God I stopped for that bikini wax after the Market this morning.

  David undressed me as soon as we walked through the door of my apartment. We didn’t even make it to the bed. We consummated our new relationship with ten wonderful minutes, during which he looked strained. He told me later that he tried to last longer but my body just pulled everything out of him.

  “You’re like sexual magic,” he said.

  “It’s always like that in the beginning,” I told him. “But then something changes.”

  He was lying on the floor where we’d landed when we fell over naked and kissing. He propped his head up on his elbow and looked at me intently.

  “What do you mean?”

  I suddenly wished I could take back my words. I slumped down, turning my face to the front door and away from David. I sounded too cynical sometimes, that’s what Ann told me, what Posey my London best friend used to tell me.

  “Come on,” he urged. “I want your thoughts, English.”

  “All right.” I leaned up on my elbows and he reached out to caress my breast. So familiar.

  “In the beginning of relationships, things are exciting. The sex is new, and the touches are new. You’re addicted to everything about the other person because it’s all fresh and untainted. Then monotony kicks in, the fighting about stupid things and the very same thing you found exciting becomes…irritating. Boring.”

  “I call bullshit,” he said. “When you love someone nothing gets old.”

  I wanted to laugh, but the sincerity in his eyes choked off my humor. Who was I to take this boy’s belief? Someone else would take it eventually, and then he’d know, but until then he had to learn the hard way. I lay back down on the hard floor and stared at the ceiling. It was one of those popcorn ceilings that looked like a skin disease. I’d never lain on my back in bed because I didn’t want the popcorn skin disease ceiling to be the last thing I saw before I fell asleep.

  “Why do you like being a bartender?” he asked.

  I blew air out through my pursed lips. How did I explain something like that? I had a degree in hospitality management, and yet I had no desire to leave the bar for a more prestigious role in the restaurant business. I’d been offered all sorts of positions and had turned each one down.

  “I like the way the bar sounds,” I said. “The tinkling of ice in a glass, the smell of the liquor, the foam the soda gun leaves on top of a drink. It’s all soothing. You can come to work and there’s a formula for what people need. Not to mention the people. I like to watch them, listen to their lives without being involved in their lives. They’re like friends but without the hassle.”

  David was laughing. He held his naked belly he laughed so hard.

  “You have the personality of an artist, you know that?”

  “No way,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t have an artistic bone in my body.”

  “Sure you do. You just haven’t found it yet.” He said it with so much conviction I started to consider all the hidden talents I might have.

  “One day you’ll wake up and want to make something. Mark my words. Maybe it’ll be a painting, or maybe it’ll be a baby with me.” He shrugged. I punched his arm and he rolled on top of me, my shoulder blades digging into the wood floor. “I know what we could make right now,” he said, kissing my chin. I lifted my head so he had access to my neck.

  “We could make—”

  I shoved a hand over his mouth so he couldn’t say the words. “Don’t,” I warned him. “We are not a cheesy eighties movie.”

  He started to sing “I’ll Make Love to You” by Boyz II Men while I cringed and tried to roll out from underneath him, but in the end, he kissed me so well I lost the will to escape.

  David lived in a one-bedroom condo called Hillclimb Court, so close to Pike Place Market you could feel its pulse through the walls. It was the type of building architects in the eighties thought was cutting edge. It reminded me of an office space or a parking garage; all steel and concrete with a private courtyard to shield residents from the tourists that perused the street outside. To add some much needed creative flair, they threw in a wall of glass tile. Ooh la la! The residents made an effort to warm the place up with plants and that went a long way. It had a parking garage/greenhouse vibe. David’s unit faced the Puget Sound where you could see the Olympic Mountains spread out in front of you like nature’s buffet.

  I was expecting something small and dingy, perhaps a place where he had roommates and a stained brown sofa with cigarette burns. But, it was none of that. It was industrial. I imagined the light was beautiful when it came in through the large west-facing windows. Brick walls, concrete floors, Edison lights that hung above the kitchen glowing yellow. He had copper pots and pans, and he drank water out of mason jars, which I wasn’t surprised about. There was art hung tastefully on the walls, oil paintings of female nudes. And his one piece of furniture was an oily looking leather sectional that faced the television. I was especially impressed when I searched for a video game console and found none. David flicked a switch and a fire jumped to life below the television. He made us espresso while I looked around and we sat near the fire to drink it.

  “You’re wondering why I drive such a shit car
and have such a nice place,” he said.

  “Yeah, I suppose I am.” I set my espresso cup on the floor next to me.

  “It’s my aunt’s place. She rents it to me.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Where does she live?”

  “Out on Bainbridge. She bought this twenty years ago when she worked in the city. She’s attached, I guess, doesn’t want to sell it, so she lets me stay.”

  “Lucky you,” I said.

  A slow lazy smile spread across his face, and he pulled me toward him. I liked the way he smelled, and I liked that he was wearing pink boxer briefs under his black clothes. And I liked the way he’d looked at me tonight while he was onstage. I tried to make as many of their shows as I could, especially if I wasn’t working.

  I once had a musician friend tell me that the hours coming down from a show were the loneliest he’d ever felt. “You go from a hundred miles an hour to ten. One minute everyone is screaming for more, the next you’re at home in your boxers folding laundry and making yourself toast.” I wanted to ask David if he ever felt that way, but he wasn’t the depressive, melancholy type. Even now he was cleaning up our coffee mess with a small smile on his lips. I suddenly had a hankering for toast and beans, and I was about to ask him if he had any when he walked out of the kitchen.

  “Take off your pants and lie on your back. I want to taste you.”

  My eyes glazed over, toast dreams forsaken. I didn’t need those extra calories anyway.

  My favorite thing about David’s condo was the taproom connected to his building. It was one of those trendy joints that has a mini-pretzel warmer and five gazillion types of beer. Hipster Christians had Bible studies at the tables downstairs, and there was always at least four men wearing slouchy beanies and plaid. On rainy nights we’d walk over and sit under the strings of Edison lights, drinking pint after pint until they shut the place down. We made a lot of noise when Ferdinand and Brick joined us—sometimes they brought girls who reeked of fruit perfume and cleavage and said fuck a lot—that always made the Bible study guys pack up early and leave. When we were sufficiently drunk, we’d stumble the ten paces back to his building and make grilled cheese with the nasty cheese slices that come in plastic sleeves. I bought a nice hunk of fancy cheese from Beecher’s in the Market, but it molded in his fridge and eventually I threw it out.

  I learned that Americans have nostalgia for taste buds. This was proven to me when I lived in Miami. A girl I bartended with who was originally from Ohio suggested a road trip to Georgia. She was craving White Castle, she told me, and was willing to take a three-day road trip to eat it. I’d expected magic, maybe In-N-Out on crack, but after my first bite I’d put my sandwich down and asked her if we’d really driven to Georgia for hamburgers or if there was something else going on.

  “Yara,” she’d said. “In America, we feed our obsessions. We don’t care if they’re not practical.” She’d then eaten my sandwich and three of her own then ordered a dozen to go, which she put in a cooler in the trunk of her Prius. “They’re not as good heated up, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

  I’d gone home wondering if we’d made some sort of drug run I was unaware of. I mean, who drove up the Florida Panhandle and went to another state just for hamburgers that tasted like dirty feet? When I got home, I’d searched the internet and found that people were quite passionate about dirty feet burgers. It was a thing. Also, if you put cheese on anything, they’d eat it: coated, stuffed, sprinkled, saturated—you name it. Cheese sells as well as sex.

  We frequented JarrBar across the street too. It was a closet more than it was a bar, barely large enough to host a dozen well-fed people, but it reminded me of the intimate neighborhood bars in England. Sometimes we went after I got off of work. We shared a bottle of Lobo and ate anchovies until our tongues were raw from the salt.

  “Am I your type?” I asked him one night as we were walking back to his place. He looked at me like I had just said the craziest thing.

  “Of course you’re my type, baby.” His voice was raspy and the wind caught it and carried it away.

  “Who did you date before me?” I asked.

  I expected him to laugh it off, say something to deflect, but instead, he gave me his memories.

  “My last girlfriend was Italian.” He pronounced it Eye-talian to be funny. “She was jealous. If I even looked at a bank teller when thanking her for my most recent transaction, she’d not talk to me for a week. I was scared of making eye contact with any woman over the age of eighteen and under the age of fifty.”

  I laughed even though I knew he was sort of being serious.

  “You’re not talking about Elizabeth, are you?” I asked, remembering the poor girl he’d broken things off with around the time he met me. We passed a couple of drunk guys on the sidewalk, and David quickly crossed from my left side to my right, placing himself between me and them.

  “English, I’ve told you that Elizabeth and I were not a couple.” He pretended to be upset, but it was a farce. We argued about Elizabeth all the time. He insisted they’d never been a couple and I insisted they had.

  “My last real girlfriend cheated on me,” he said. “That’s why we broke up.” He grimaced. “She was cheating the whole fucking time we were together. That’s the reason she was always accusing me of something—because she was so damn guilty, you know?”

  “What did she look like?”

  He made a face at me. “Ah, I see where you’re going with this.” He reached out to tickle me, but we were crossing the street and I danced away from him.

  “She had dark hair, dark eyes. Curvy.”

  “What about the girl before her, what did she look like?”

  He grinned. “She was a redhead. I went through a redhead stage in college.”

  “Thin or curvy?” I asked.

  “Thin. Tall.”

  We reached the door to his building and he pulled out his key.

  “What were you saying about your type?” I laughed.

  “I don’t have a physical type.” He shrugged. “Is that what you were looking for?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I was.”

  “I like smart women, English. Cultured women. Funny women. Kind women. I like that type in every color and size.”

  I liked that.

  “When was the last time you had a blonde?” I asked. We were up the stairs and almost to his door.

  “Last night when I had you.”

  “That’s not what I mean, Lisey.”

  “You’re my first blonde,” he admitted.

  “So you’re going through a blonde stage,” I joked.

  “No,” he said. “No more stages. I found what I’m looking for.”

  And then I was stunned into silence, playing his words over and over in my head.

  “This is the most beautiful my life has ever been,” David said. “This is what I want.”

  I wondered about that when I was away from him. David had barely left the Pacific Northwest. I’d traveled all over the United States and a little bit of Europe—yet I never felt like I’d arrived at a significant moment. I chased that moment so hard I could barely stay still in one place for more than six months, yet he could eat anchovies, his teeth stained with wine, and tell me it was the most beautiful his life has ever been. It was innocent and simple, and all the things I wanted to be. That’s when I realized that David was who I wanted to be. Someone who hadn’t necessarily mastered his art, or his life, but was goddamn trying with everything in him. There was this creeping feeling that sneaked up on me, mostly when I was alone, it made my throat close up like I was eating too many crackers without anything to drink. He was too much and I was too little.

  I learned that David cared about everyone. The homeless man on the corner of Union and 2nd that he bought sandwiches for, the crying forty-something woman walking out of the sushi restaurant that almost bumped into us, the girl with the piercings who sold hand-knitted beanies at the Market. He wanted to discuss their plights in det
ail.

  “You don’t just end up on the street. He had a mother, a family. Someone loved him, so what happened?”

  I thought him naive. He could have been a foster kid. He could have had a disinterested mother like me.

  About the beanie girl, he said, “She has the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen…”

  Beanie Girl, she was the one that bothered me most. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. We had to pass her to reach the sausage shop we liked, and once David bought two beanies from her just to see if she would smile. Pink and a mottled grey. He took the pink one and gave the grey to me, though I stuffed it in a drawer as soon as I got home.

  “Do you think she knits beanies because she’s sad, or that she’s sad because she has to knit beanies?” he asked. He always looked really stressed out when he spoke about her. I was rather annoyed by it.

  “Well, first of all, you need to stop staring. It’s making her quite uncomfortable. And why does she have to be anything? She makes beanies, end of story.”

  “She’s sad. Have you looked in her eyes?”

  I gave him a look. “Have I stared in Beanie Girl’s eyes? No, David, I have not.” That wasn’t exactly true. She had very, very blue eyes—startlingly so. She wore a kohl eyeliner around them which made them pop out even more. Look at us! they said. We’re so vulnerable!

  “Well, that’s where she keeps it all.” He made circles with his fingers and lifted them to his eyes like they were binoculars. “Everyone has a story.” He took my hand and squeezed it as we walked.

  “So I’ve heard,” I replied tartly.

  The last thing I wanted was David sniffing around some pierced, blue-eyed Olivia Newton-John lookalike. One with sad eyes at that. Men had a thing for female vulnerability. They wanted to be their hero.

  It was a Sunday morning, the boys were playing a gig two hours away in Bremerton, and I had all day to be alone. That was one of the things you forgot to miss when you were in a relationship, how good it felt to be uncoupled for a time, to enjoy your own company. I chose a book from my shelf, one that I’d been promising David I’d read, and carried it to a little Asian tea bar that sat under the Market. Colorful stools made their way around a low circular bar. Today most of the stools were filled. I spotted an empty seat and made my way over. I didn’t recognize her right away—her hair was hidden underneath a bright yellow bandana. She glanced up at me as I shrugged out of my jacket and I startled for a moment when I recognized her face. I slid into the stool and cleared my throat wondering if I should say something. No. That was weird. I ordered my tea and pulled my book from my bag. I’d read a few chapters and then we could talk about them tomorrow when he got back. It was then that Beanie Girl looked over and asked if my book was any good.