Court and I are working on formatting (he’s working, I’m writing). You know what that means?
Chapter 4
Monday, April 19, 1999
Monday, after school, Ethan walked home alone. He told Joe not to worry about him. Ethan needed the relaxation of a decent walk. He was to pick Deborah up at Seven PM from Lisa Durch’s house. He hoped Deborah wouldn’t hear about the time Lisa and Ethan screwed on her parents’ washing machine.
On the way home, he stopped at a park and watched little kids play, fight, run around and yell. They were free. They were pure. And he wanted one.
Holy shit, he thought as he lit a joint walking through the woods away from the park, I want a kid. Ethan could not believe his own mind. What the hell was happening to him?
Deborah and Ethan had eaten lunch together. They kissed in the hall. They made eyes at each other in class. He was smitten and scared. Life was happening too fast.
Who the hell am I becoming? he asked himself and received no answer.
He shook off the thoughts as he emerged in his neighborhood. It had been three years since he walked home from school. He missed it.
At six, o’clock his phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Ethan, it’s Joe. What are you doing tonight? Darby and her friends are fucking rolling up a storm later. It’s sex season, Baby.”
“Can’t, Man. Got shit to do.”
“Like what?”
“Like minding my own fucking business?”
“Cool, Man.” Joe sounded disappointed. We on for Tuesday?”
“Four Twenty,” Ethan said and he hung up the phone.
At eighteen years old, Ethan had already slept with approximately two hundred girls. He had enjoyed women as old as forty and as young as thirteen. He had enjoyed nineteen different nationalities worth of women but had never been on an actual date. He was unsure of proper dating etiquette. And, as if tonight weren’t complicated enough, at ten he had to meet Mario downtown.
Robert Lee had no problem with Ethan’s borrowing the car. In fact, he was relieved to see his son go out on a date. For years, he wondered why the kid seemed so sheltered. After all, Ethan spent Friday and Saturday night working as a janitor downtown. He never went to parties. Sure, people came by to watch the television and what not, but still, the kid needed more of a social life.
“Have a good night,” said Robert as he handed over the keys to his ’98 Ford Taurus Sho.
“Thanks, Dad.”
Deborah Van Klein looked dazzling in her skin tight, brown Gucci dress and Lisa Durch told her so.
“Thanks,” she said. “Now, if my father calls—“
“I know,” said Lisa. “We’re not here because we went out to catch a movie. I’m going to be out until eleven, anyway. So the story’s airtight, but if you spend the night with Ethan, I might have to use the backup excuse.”
“Which is?”
“You drank a little too much and you’re dead asleep.”
“It should be cool,” said Deborah. “He won’t call after eleven. He’s not rude.”
“Just remember to call him from some place quiet.”
“Got it.”
“Wow,” said Lisa. “I can’t believe you got Ethan Lee to take you out. He never dates.”
“I know,” she said. “I wonder why.”
“I don’t know,” Lisa lied.
The doorbell rang and Lisa hid her smile.
Both Lisa and Deborah met Ethan at the door. Both Lisa and Deborah felt their jaws drop when they saw Ethan. He was dressed in a black Perry Ellis suit with a silk, black and white tie. He had a rose in his hand.
“For you,” he said to Deborah.
She accepted it gracefully, as she was taught, with a slight curtsy. He, not sure what the hell to do, extended an arm and ushered her to the car.
“Have a good night,” called Lisa.
“Goodbye,” chimed Deborah, trying to hide her smile.
Dinner was excellent. Ethan and Deborah ate at Fazio’s, a nice Italian place on The Hill (a section of St. Louis where the city’s finest Italian restaurants sat side by side). They talked. They laughed. Deborah was careful not to finish any one of the seven portions.
Ethan had no clue that she went to the bathroom and threw up her meal. He also had no clue that she’d just gotten off her period and started on birth control.
He knew she was impressed when he tipped forty percent. The bill itself was two hundred thirty dollars. Ethan paid cash.
“How can you afford that?” she asked.
“Trust fund,” he lied.
As they drove to Washington Street, she asked where he was going.
“I gotta’ talk to a friend.”
When Ethan drove by the attendant and showed him his card, he hurried away before the attendant could call him by name.
Mario, always prompt, was quick to hear Ethan’s instructions.
“I got a date, Man. Just put the shit in the trunk,” he said as he handed Mario a wad of cash.
“Give me my velvet bag.”
“Shit, I forgot it.”
“Fucker. Better not forget on Friday.”
“I won’t.”
Ethan quickly threw the little cardboard box in the trunk of the Taurus.
“What was that about?” asked Deborah. “Are we going to a club?”
“No,” said Ethan as he rubbed her left thigh. “We’re too young.”
“Why are we here?”
“I had to pick up some cables for my Dad.” Ethan paused, decided to change the subject, kissed her on the lips and said, “You want to go to my place?”
She smiled: a delectable sight. “Yes,” she practically breathed the words.
On the way out of the garage the attendant said, “Leaving so soon, Jonny?”
Ethan did not respond.
“Guess he thought I was someone else.”
“Guess so.”
Ethan and Deborah entered through the sliding glass door. Ethan held the package in his right hand. Deborah held the rose in her left hand.
Before he could even take off his suit-coat, she had her arms around him. The rose and the package fell to the floor.
That night, for the first time in his sexually deviant life, Ethan Lee made love. He felt Deborah’s heart. He caressed her body. He even fumbled with her bra, something that hadn’t happened to him in years.
He had placed candles in front of the dormant strobe lights. A bottle of wine chilled in a bucket of ice on his kitchen counter. Love songs softly sailed from his speakers.
Afterwards, they smoked excellent quality marijuana from a glass pipe and drank wine in bed.
“I can’t believe how overwhelmed I feel,” said Ethan, unsure of the emotions rattling loose inside him.
“You,” said Deborah. “I’m tingling. I’ve never known a man who could make love like that.” And that was only our first time, she thought.
“What do we do now?” Ethan felt dumb asking the question.
“We talk,” she said. “Like we did at dinner, only deeper.”
“Where do we start?”
She smiled. “Tell me about your dog.”
He told her the story of Lulu, the dog she would meet in the morning.
She told him of her cat Gus, whom she had saved from death at the pound and brought to the farm.
He told her how he felt about his life, about being a drug dealer, about hating all the people at high school.
“It’s like,” he searched for the words. “I was this mixed up fourteen year old kid. One day, I walked to a gas station to get some gum and I met this guy named Dave. We bullshitted for a little while and he told me he had some pot. We smoked it. Then he sold me some acid. I ate it. Next thing I knew, it was like, I was free.
“I began selling drugs to older kids. They call it running. I was a runner for Dave. Before I knew it, everyone was buying drugs from me. With the drugs came a certain respect. With that respect came this shitty reputation.”
“That package,” she asked. “I’m not stupid. I know that was drugs.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t care.”
She kissed him.
“I like you just the way you are, but why sell if it makes you feel that way?”
“Because I have thirty seven thousand dollars saved. I’m going to Berkeley and I’ll never have to work because my parents will pay the tuition. I want a new freedom, the freedom to be a wandering philosopher.”
“I have a drug problem, Ethan.”
“Sure you do,” he laughed. “What, diet pills? Marijuana?”
“Forget it, Ethan. I guess by the standards of St. Louis, my marijuana habit doesn’t even constitute an addiction.”
“Not hardly,” Ethan laughed the words.
“Would my raging heroin addiction still qualify?”
“You’re the greatest woman I ever met,” he kissed her on the cheek.
At three in the morning, they were still awake, telling stories of friends lost and found. As Ethan spoke of how he met Joe, he noticed her eyes had closed.
She fell asleep on his chest.
While she slept, Ethan felt tears well up in his eyes. He fought them back as his coaches had taught him.
Intimacy, thought Ethan, is so fucking real.