Chapter 14
When Ron called Zoe, he was politely told by her mother that Zoe was not at home and that she really didn’t know when Zoe would be back from Boston. Yes, she would leave a message. Ron took a deep breath and said, “Please tell her that I’m not going to back at my apartment.” Then he looked around at Rahway and said, “Tell her to please leave a message for me at Laureen’s.”
Mrs. LaDue said, “I’m not sure that she’ll be home this evening.”
Ron could not help but smile at her assumption and said with a grin that almost showed through the telephone, “That’s ok. She can leave the message here anytime over the next few days.”
Then he hung the phone up on its wall cradle and walked back through the kitchen passed the very clean sink and down the step into the living room, moving the length of the long, very large room he moved straight to Laureen’s door and knocked lightly.
“Come in,” said Laureen.
Ron pushed the door open; she was sitting in a chair that was tucked in a corner by the window. It was a low chair and covered with soft brocade of off white linen. She was reading a book that she closed when Ron came in.
“I just need a few minutes,” he said.
“Sure.”
Ron moved and sat down on her bed. He let his eyes travel around the room. It wasn’t the same color as when he and Robin lived in it and the double beds that Warren had strapped together were in his room now.
“Is it gonna freak you out if I take Warren up on his offer?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think that I’ll like living with you. You carry too much baggage of too many memories that you never let me forget, Ron.”
“I know. And me being me is not an easy thing for you.”
Laureen laughed. “That’s certainly true.”
“I’m gonna do my best to find a place quickly. I really don’t want to stay here. I’m worried about Chris and how it will make him feel.”
She laughed again. “Do you think that Chris would be worried about you if the roles were reversed?”
Ron didn’t want to answer that. The roles weren’t reversed and he knew that Chris would not take that into consideration but they weren’t the same people. He had never been Chris, could never have been Chris. “That doesn’t really matter.”
“So you are just going to spring this on Zoe?”
“We’ve talked about it.” Ron lied. There had been the short conversation that wasn’t really a conversation at all.
“She’s fragile,” said Laureen. “She is the craziest person that I know and that is really saying something. If you use her as someone to make Robin jealous, it will just tear her to pieces and if you do that, I’ll never forgive you.”
Ron looked straight into her face with his green eyes. He gave her a deep gaze that she did not meet. “We’ve all done unforgivable things,” he said.
“See, that’s what I mean, Ron. You do that to me all the time.”
“Ok,” he said “I’m being defensive. But I’m not interested in fucking Zoe or anyone else over and that includes you. We used to be friends.”
“We still are friends,” she lied.
“Do you have the number at Zoe’s sister’s house?”
“No,” she said, lying again. “But I might be able to get it.”
“I just don’t want her to keep calling my apartment and getting no answer.”
Laureen thought that after he left, she would call and give Zoe’s older sister the whole story and they could figure out how they wanted to handle this.
Ron said, “OK, listen, I’ll just try and stay out of your way and make this as painless as possible for you.”
“Where do you think you’ll live?”
“Somewhere north of here, closer to my school. I want to be close to those kids.”
“That’s fine,” said Laureen, without any interest in which kids and which school he was talking about. She knew that he had taken a job teaching but figured it was definitely a temporary thing.
“If you get the number, leave it for me on the refrigerator.”
When he walked back through the living room, classical music was on the stereo and Warren was sitting on his couch with a couple of piles of papers and books stacked neatly on the table in front of him. It felt off balance in a way that made Ron both at ease and uneasy. That’s what Warren always did to him. He knew that he could have gone to the car and got his book bag and gotten some much needed work done, but the idea of sitting in the same room while Warren controlled the environment made him want to rebel against the control.
Warren looked up smiling and said, “Did you have a good conversation with Laureen?”
“She’s going to get a message to Zoe for me said Ron.
“I’m going into the city in just a little bit and then the place is yours. You can have either one of the back rooms.”
Ron nodded and said, “Thank you, again. I’ll be back later.” He walked out the back door and listened to the very familiar sound of the chimes as it closed and get into his car and backed out of the driveway and onto St. George’s Avenue.
He drove over to the college by a familiar route. He knew all of the approaches and on Saturday afternoon it was a clear sail. He wasn’t as sad about the apartment as he thought he would be. The truth was that he always felt half in the hall there and when his landlady had told him that she could get “a good whiff” of his pot in the side alley, he wanted to get out. He did not, however, wish to be burned out.
He wondered if the fire was inside of him still. He had stared into it. It would have hurt him; it would have eaten him if it could have. Then a strange thought occurred to him. Why hadn’t it attached to his bed linens? They were certainly flammable. Why had it spread across the top of the couch portion of his hide-a-bed without spreading down around him? Why hadn’t he been burnt?
Ron thought about whether or not he was lucky. He wasn’t lucky the way that his father was lucky, but his Dad had more skills than he had. He had earned his skills with lots of bruises. Ron had gotten what he inherited there and not done much with it, except for football.
It was the fall and Ron didn’t know anything about what the Giants were gonna do. He hadn’t followed a team in a long time. Football had grown to mean his knees and what he could no longer do. He had been as good a football player when he wasn’t hurt as anyone, well almost anyone. Maybe the game was a part of things he had lost. Maybe Robin was another part of what he had lost. Maybe Welmont was gone too, like the Kennedys and Martin King, and the Viet Nam War. Maybe at 25, he was old enough to have some things be a part of history.
Ron drove passed the college and kept going. This was also a part of history and then he found the car pointed in the direction of Westfield. Colonial Westfield with its snobbery and the history of two people who thought about the most in his life: Chris and Robin. The thought that struck Ron next was that neither one had heard from him since the fire. Robin, as it turned out, had known and had tried to help but Chris knew nothing about any of it.
Laureen was able to reach Zoe easily. First she called Barbara and filled her in. Her friend sounded worried about her sister. “Do you think that he cares for her?”
Laureen answered, “I think that he believes that he does, which is not the same thing, particularly with Ron.”
“She’s crazy about him,” said Barbara.
“Ron isn’t the artist that she is, at least I don’t think he is, but he gives off this feeling of being able to protect the people that he cares for. They might be good for each other.”
“What do you think I should do, Laureen?”
“Give them a chance. Maybe they really are in love.”
“Maybe just she’s in love and he is getting laid regularly.”
“I don’t think that’s him. I think he’d like to think that’s him but I don’t think that it is.”
Ron circled through Westfield slowly. He drove along Palsted and then over to Robert and then around through the center of town. It looked very pristine and secure. He thought about his time there and how he had never felt like anything more than a loose thread on the fringe of the piece of material that made up the fabric of this place.
Heidi answered Laureen’s call on the second ring. Her voice sounded young and filled with spirit. It made Laureen grin. “Heidi, this is Laureen, how are you?”
“I’m more than terrific, Laureen, how are you?”
“I was wondering if Zoe was there.”
“Sure, hold on.”
It took a long minute for Zoe to come to the phone. Her voice sounded strong although not as exuberant as Heidi’s voice had sounded. “Hi Laureen.”
“Zoe, Ron’s looking for your number.”
Zoe almost squealed in delight. “I’ve been trying to call him. Is he there?”
“He had a problem. He’s alright but he had this fire that burnt up his apartment.”
“He had a fire,” repeated Zoe, “but you’re sure that he’s OK?”
“He seems fine, a little worse for wear maybe but fine. Zoe, he wants to get in touch with you and he’s going to ask you to live with him.”
There was a long pause and then a small voice said, “I want to live with him.”
“Zoe, Ron’s got a lot of baggage.”
Another long pause followed by, “I want to talk with him now.”
Ron headed his car back towards Rahway. Springsteen was singing Jungleland on his radio and his thoughts drifted along the line of the music. He needed to call New York. He needed to call Zoe.
Returning to Rahway, Ron found the back door open and walked in with the sound of the jingling bells over his head. For a second he thought that it must be what a jester’s hat sounded like in a king’s court, a bit of a fool. On the refrigerator was a note that read, “Spoke with Zoe, she’ll be back tonight, she’ll call you as soon as she gets in.” Ron smiled and opened the refrigerator where the note had been tacked. Except for the crumb bun with his Mom, he could not remember the last time that he’d eaten. There was nothing that he wanted to eat in the frig and so he started brewing a pot of coffee and sat at the oval oak table and rolled joints.
With a hot mug of coffee in one hand, a joint in the other and the phone tucked under his chin, he listened to the phone ring in Chris’s apartment.
“Hello,” said Chris in a voice that seemed almost surprised that someone was calling him.
“Hey Chris, it’s Ron.”
“Hey, what’ happening?”
Ron took a dramatic breath and said, “Well, let’s see…I got burned out of my apartment late last night and it looks like I’m going to have to spend a little time in Rahway with Snake and Sheriff.”
“You got what?” said Chris.
“I had this electrical fire, Chris. It burned up almost everything.”
“Are you OK,” Chris’s voice sounded tremulous.
“Yeah, aside from being homeless, I’m fine.”
“What are you goin’ to do? I mean, do you need help?”
“As usual” said Ron, “I need lots of help, but for now. I’m going to stay in Rahway and see about getting an apartment with Zoe.”
Chris didn’t acknowledge what Ron said about Rahway. It was almost as if it didn’t register. Ron waited for him to bring it up and then saw that he wasn’t going to say anything about it. Ron loved that about Chris. It was something that he wouldn’t have been able to do.
Dragging on the joint and walking back out to his car, Ron walked the book bag back into the kitchen. Although he hadn’t checked, it felt like he was the only one there. He dusted off the bag and got some damp paper towels and tried to rub the remains of the fire off of his work. Then he opened the bag and began to prepare. A second and then a third cup of coffee and the second of the joints and he was deep into his work when he heard the announcing jingle of bells. Laureen walked into the kitchen followed by Zoe and Barbara.
Laureen said, “I see that you’re recovering nicely and making yourself at home.”
Ron didn’t answer her cause in the next seconds Zoe was in his arms and squeezing him with her body and shamelessly rubbing herself against him in front of her sister and her sister’s friend.
Watching them together, Laureen turned to Barbara and said, “Well this is obviously no time for conversation.” Then the two girls laughed as Ron and Zoe kissed and stroked and held each other, seemingly oblivious to them.
In Ron’s room, they fell onto his bed and she whispered, “It feels like forever since you held me, can you just stick it in me right now?”
Ron did and they came hard together and then they lay in each other’s arms, him feeling relieved of a tension that he hadn’t realized was building inside of him. She wondered if this was the time that he had impregnated her. “Do you want to live with me?” said Ron.
“I want to live with you and make babies with you,” answered Zoe.