The Cool Part of His Pillow

Chapter 1: Blue Roses-1

Chapter 1: Blue Roses

We make our way downtown as others scurry home in a Friday night rush hour in the final breaths of summer.

“The sunset is like the healing stages of a bruise,” Andy observes.

“It reminds me of a church window lit from within,” I suggest.

“Like you’ve been in church to know.”

“Does the ‘Church of the Poisoned Mind’ count?”

The nightclub for which we’re bound is a temple of sorts—a sanctuary of hymns, sisters, at least one choirmaster—and there is sure to be ritualistic sipping. It is as close as we’ll get to a place of worship on this, my birthday weekend.

At his request, Andy is at the wheel. I brake too much, he says. We’re in my 1971 Mercedes 280SL Pagoda convertible—Mercedes-Benz red 576 over a black leather interior. It’s the same model and year my father once owned and always regretted selling. I called it Mercy B. The broad assumption was the car, purchased via auction, was the prickly heat of a midlife hot flash. A Caesar haircut would have been cheaper, friends mocked. After my winning bid, the car was transported to the Mercedes Benz Classic Center in Irvine, California, where it spent weeks—at one-hundred bucks an hour—being rebuilt, restored, rechromed, repainted, replated. The wood in the car is show quality; even the upgraded armrests match the veneer. Mercy B. has only gotten better. Damn shame I haven’t.

At first, Andy isn’t taking one of the many alternate, and shorter, routes, giving us more time for what we do best: banter. He pushes my buttons until his finger cramps. I yank his chain until I need a heating pad. We pick each other’s scabs like bored kids at summer camp.

“Did you realize we’re the same age right now?” Andy asks. He turns forty-six at the end of October.

“Technically,” I remind him, “I’m forty-four until September 16, tomorrow. Still and forever younger than you.”

Both of our fortieths were, by decree, private. Leaving our thirties was more tearshed than watershed. But after that, we would intermittently arrange something special.

“So how shocked do I act when I walk in? Should I s**t my pants?” I ask.

“And make that twice today?”

“I wouldn’t pursue that. I do your laundry. I had to buy you new jockey shorts in camouflage.”

This forty-fifth birthday party isn’t a surprise. I hate surprises. That I surrendered the guest list to Andy’s charge worries me enough. “I hope you didn’t invite fillers to make the room look crowded.”

“No meat-extender guests,” Andy promises.

Good. I don’t want to get drunk with the man who cleans our gutters. We’ve been to enough private parties populated by cardboard cutouts watching the lips of others, trying to figure out who’s being toasted. What I like is anachronistic clash in the minutiae. Everyone will know, for example, that I commandeered party details when they encounter the concessionaire hot dog machine alongside ceviche. Andy is a banker for a reason; intended irony is not part of his astrological sign.

It’s one of the many traits we don’t share. Our longevity as a couple also doesn’t extend to looking like one another or our pugs, Gertie and Noel, although I think we chose that breed knowing we’d also someday be low to the ground, wheeze a lot, and require that our facial creases be thoroughly washed. Many think Andy resembles Matthew McConaughey. I don’t see it except during arguments, when his deep dimples smirk at me. Our physicality, though, is similar enough that we can literally give the other the shirt off our back. Not that I’d want the Tommy Bahama shirt he’s wearing tonight.

“Did Rick and Sarah get an invite?” They are new to our neighborhood.

Andy nods and says Sarah mentioned she’d never been in a gay bar. “I think she wet herself.” Then he requests, “Find some tunes. Not the theme from On Golden Pond.”

I shuffle through my iPod. “On the subject of loons, did you invite LezbyAnn?”

“She won’t be there. She has a blind date. She’s already making out a change-of-address card, I’m sure.”

“Hers come with bubble gum by now,” I observe. It will help her prospects if the blind date is also deaf. LezbyAnn has such a filthy mouth I’m surprised her face hasn’t evicted it.

Andy warily watches my fiddling. Controlling music is a skirmish without end, one of many. The muffins don’t have enough chocolate chips, our pool is too cold, why don’t you ever shut off the hallway light? Then, when it’s finally sorted, tastes change. Now the muffins are gooey, pool water’s downright hot, I can’t see where I’m going.

“Something other than show tunes, at least.”

I think I hear a muffled cell phone ringtone. “You or me?”

Andy evenly notes, “Since it’s not the Overture from Gypsy, it must be me.”

“Better not be work.”

He begins to counsel someone quietly. I won’t have it. “What do they want? Someone’s debit card won’t swipe at Walmart?”

Andy puts the phone to his shoulder. “Barry, I am talking to a very wigged-out twenty-four-year-old IT programmer through a system workaround in Kentucky.”

“It’s my birthday.”

“It’s my job, you f*****g brat. Like your employer never calls.”

“I am the employer.”

“You know what I mean. We all answer.”

People that many—and by people, I mean my mother—would call dodgy huddle outside an abandoned storefront and glare at Mercy B.

I watch a toddler in a full diaper skip off a sagging porch. “Why are our bars always in terrifying neighborhoods?”

A few minutes later, at a train crossing, the caution arms lower and lights blink red. The metallic warning clang represents nothing but a challenge to Andy. He maneuvers between, then around, the beams.

“Back up!” I direct.

“What is life but caution lights to be outrun, little butterfly? Nothing’s coming. Really. Look.”

I look. Of course something is. Suddenly, the train is zooming toward the crossing. We easily clear the tracks, but still I fume. “Everything’s a damn dare with you!”

“And everything with you is sarcasm.”

As we turn west, we agree the sky looks like succotash.