The Road Narrative
Easing into hour four of a balmy, lazy afternoon shift at Ann Sather’s, Julianne brings Charles Blackstone another diet Coke without even asking if he wants one. She places the sweaty oversized tumbler before him, beside the large plate where half a turkey Reuben remains, along with a smattering of burnt fries. He smiles appreciatively.
“How did you know?” he asks.
“Lucky guess,” she says.
Ed, the owner, is taking a long lunch, which, to those fluent in Swedish diner parlance, means that he’s off screwing Robin, the general manager. They think nobody knows they’re having an affair. Ed bought Robin a Saturn SC2, a sporty black coupe made out of plastic, which is usually parked out front in the tow-zone. It’s not here now, which is how Julianne knows they’re off at the Hyde Park Ramada again. Robin’s husband is supposed to be an academic—maybe Charles Blackstone knows him from the U of C.
“Still working on the dissertation?” Julianne asks him now.
“Actually, Julianne, I’m just in the master’s program.” Does she detect a flicker of sadness in his voice?
“Oh, okay. I’d thought you finished.”
“Ha,” he says. “I wish.”
Charles Blackstone was Julianne’s English tutor for a spell in high school. Jeanne hired him through the counseling office to help Julianne with a research paper for her Afro-American lit class. She had to compare modes of alienation in Trey Ellis’s Platitudes and in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. She had too much going on to focus on it properly. She was waiting tables at The Nile then and didn’t have time to make note cards, let alone read the novels. She’d gotten through the first chapter of Platitudes and had found it a little unyielding. Charles Blackstone basically wrote the paper for her. It wasn’t bad working with him, either. If you could really even call it working. Whether hammering out a thesis across a table at the Medici, hands salty from fries, or having coffee and outlining in the C-Shop, or huddled under the buzzing halogen light in her mother’s kitchen, she ceaselessly enjoyed him. He was definitely cute, charming in a quirky, self-effacing sort of way, and though she always felt a little dumb and young in his presence, she still was able to keep him engaged when they’d veer off-topic and land in grassy meadow reminiscences of their high school fast times at Lab. She left for New Hampshire and they sent each other a couple of letters throughout the year, and last summer got high together one afternoon at Bixler Park and, that night, ran into each other at Jimmy’s and kissed, but after that, nothing, and soon enough, once again, she had to pack up and go back to New Hampshire. Aside from a few sporadic calls and a postcard from the MLA in Boston the following December, they’d lost touch.
Until today, when Charles Blackstone ambled—alone, thank god—into the restaurant and, unbeknownst to him, took a booth by the window in Julianne’s section.
She’s vaguely aware of the fact that she’s mooning.
“Too much thousand island?” she asks. She points at Charles Blackstone’s leftover Reuben half.
He flashes his teeth sheepishly. “Maybe for one sitting,” he says.
A harsh metallic noise erupts and they both look back in the direction of the kitchen. “I think the cook is high today,” she tells Charles Blackstone.
He smiles again. He really has very nice teeth. Julianne recalls thinking the same thing the night a year ago when they kissed.
“So, Charles Blackstone, are you tutoring this summer?”
He chuckles. “No, actually. After you, I pretty much retired.”
She looks at him, pouting her lips, sort of. “You just couldn’t face the fact that I’d gone off to college,” she teases.
“Something like that,” he replies vacantly to his napkin. He turns to her and adds, “You’re kind of hard to replace. Did you ever finish Invisible Man?”
Gulp. What can she tell him that won’t make her sound like an indifferent teenager? “You know, I wanted to,” she says, “but it got away from me.” After checking the place for any customers waiting, any orders up, or Ed, or Robin, and finding nothing barring her from taking a moment of respite from her cinnamon roll and bland cheddar omelet drudgery, she slides into the booth beside him. Her paradise, may it be known, contains no cheeseburger.
“What are you reading now?” he asks.
She’s ashamed to admit the truth. She flashes on an article she saw in People that profiled a new novel, Thank You For Smoking, which some famous guy’s son wrote, and she asks Charles Blackstone if he’s heard of it. He shakes his head. “It’s about the tobacco industry,” she starts. Okay, this is good. “How, like, they claim to not want kids to smoke, but then they deluge us with pro-smoking images.”
“Deluge?” Charles Blackstone asks, one eyebrow raised. “I love that word.”
Julianne gives herself a mental high-five. Why is she getting so worked up about this flirt? Charles Blackstone isn’t what she’d call her type. He’s scrawny, not athletic, not particularly grunge—though Julianne does notice that he’s gotten a pair of broken-in maroon Doc three-holes since last summer—and doesn’t look particularly concerned with trying to come across as fashionable. His U of C T-shirt is wrinkled, as is the unbuttoned flannel over it. His jeans have paint stains, pen stains, coffee stains, a patch of something that from here resembles either grape jelly or nail polish, and gigantic holes at the knees. She can see the downy hair on his legs, wishes, to some degree, that she could reach down and touch it. She’s not exactly dressed for impress with her lingonberry– and icing-drizzled Ann Sather’s short-sleeved polo, complete with pastel logo above her boob—whoever thought white was the color in which to dress restaurant staff was definitely smoking crack—flour-dusted black apron and matching rayon pants. Even so, Charles Blackstone is clearly into her. She can tell he’s trying his best to keep his eyes from wandering down her unbuttoned polo. He’s trained his gaze on her face this entire time, with the fixity of a staring contest, but who knows what he sees when she looks away.
“So, I’m teaching now. An eight-week course.”
“Oh, yeah? Anything good? I should have taken bio this summer. My science requirement is out of control.”
“Well, it’s not as exciting as bio, but I like it. The Road Narrative.” He looks at her closely. “Julianne, do you know anything about the road narrative?”
She thinks for a moment. “Just Easy Rider, I guess.”
“We’re reading On the Road right now. Kerouac.”
“I’ve never read anything of his. But I definitely like road trips.”
“That’s the only book of his you need to read.”
“What about the others?”
He scrunches his mouth, as though trying to find a good way to put something. “They basically cover all the same stuff, but, you know, far less eloquently.”
“Yeah? Well, I’ll check it out sometime.”
Charles Blackstone touches her hand and it sends a shiver through her. “I can lend you a copy. It’s in my cube. You want to take a ride with me back to campus?”
She looks at her watch. “In about forty minutes. Can you hang out until then?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Charles Blackstone says. He takes a yellow-covered notebook out of his green backpack. “I’ll do some grading.”
She goes back to the kitchen.
“What was that noise?” she asks Jose, the cook.
With his eyes vaguely crossed, he says, “What noise?”
“There was all this screechy scratching noise.”
“I didn’t hear nothing. Juan dropped a pan.”
“I don’t think it was a pan. Never mind.”
She checks the floor, debates refilling coffees and sodas, but she can’t pry herself away from Charles Blackstone. She’s obsessed with everything about him: the way he holds his pen, the way he touches his forehead as he squints at small type containing smaller ideas, and she wants to leave here, go back to his office, get this Kerouac book, read it as quickly as she can, and then return to him, quote passages, swap insights, share jokes she’d only be privy to at that point. If she still has a chance. But when doesn’t she have a chance? Guys always are willing to jump in, regardless of history, regardless of unfamiliarity with the context, as long as she’s willing to let them. And she really wants to let this one in. He’s not like the others. She feels like she’s worth something when she’s with him that transcends the purely physical.
Ed returns from his afternoon romp looking even more fat and sweaty-faced than usual. Robin must have made him go down on her for at least an hour. She always has that bitchy you’re-going-to-have-to-work-to-be-with-this thing going on. He must not have made her come, though, since she hasn’t returned to work, even though her Saturn is now parked in the tow-zone. Ed takes his usual seat at the end of the counter. He asks Julianne for a wine glass, which she doesn’t have on hand since they don’t serve alcohol. She retrieves a dirty one for him from the office and wipes it out with a paper napkin.
“Thanks,” he says, in his flat, slightly squeaky voice.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“Nothing much,” he says. “Things crazy around here?”
She again surveys the floor. There are even fewer diners than the last time she looked. A few old people dribble coffee onto their paper menu placemats. A pair of Chinese professors is huddled close together at a four-top, ignoring their Sprites and whispering to each other. Charles Blackstone is the most animated of the diners, off in his window booth, furiously scribbling margin notes.
“It’s been pretty quiet, Ed,” Julianne says.
“I think we need to have a soda fountain. To take things to the next level.”
“A soda fountain?”
“Yeah, like a malt shop from the fifties. Hey, we could do malts too.”
“Ed, you’re in a good mood.” Julianne loves to fuck with Ed, pretend like she really believes he was just off at Morry’s Deli having a sandwich for the last two hours.
“Yeah, well, it’s a beautiful day,” he says.
She leaves the counter when he starts fumbling with the corkscrew, pretending to spot some diners coming in. She fills a pitcher with water and brings it to Charles Blackstone’s table.
“Hey,” she says, as she fills his empty glass.
“You knew again,” he says. “Two for two.”
She knows Charles Blackstone has desires—first hand, no pun intended—so how does he sit here and remain so good about keeping them subterranean? And what is it she likes so much about him? It’s more than just the challenge. She thinks again about those nights writing her Afro-American lit paper. They shared something that she could never share with the countless other guys. They bonded on a deeper level. Maybe that’s why it felt like it ripped her skin apart when she had to leave Chicago and go back to school, despite the absurdity of getting so attached to somebody after such a short period of time. Maybe that’s why she buried the summer kiss—the briefest of things, committed obliquely, viscerally, in the back of Jimmy’s, she exiting the bathroom, he on his way in, no words exchanged—and only now, with him across the room, in person, is she allowing herself to drudge it all up.
“So you still wanna get that Kerouac?” she asks. She brushes a piece of lint from his shoulder, but lets her hand hang around for a few extra seconds. Just in case he’s wondering what her intentions are.
They make it as far as his blue Toyota Tercel before they start going at it. It’s been a while since she made out with someone on vinyl.
By Charles Blackstone
Charles Blackstone is the author of The Week You Weren’t Here, a novel, and the co-editor of The Art of Friction, an anthology of genre-defying short fiction and creative nonfiction. He lives in Chicago.
© 2009, Metazen. All rights reserved.
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