“So, you say you like Cambridge.”
“Yeah.”
“Good, good.” Newland watched the road ahead of him intently. “So, why are you really still here?”
I’d never felt guilty about lying to people in conversation. I didn’t think of it as lying, more as ad-libbing. The script wasn’t working for me, so I improvised. There was no use in making something up, though. He’d seen the car and what little I had in it. “You want the truth?”
“Nothing but.”
“Well, then, I’m out. I’ve got nothing in the bank, and nothing…” I reached down and pulled out a quarter. “…Twenty-five cents in my pockets. It’s that loan I took out for college, and it’s coming back to bite me.”
“Sounds painful.” Newland switched on the radio. “And, as I recall, your parents aren’t exactly loaded.” He scratched his chin. “So you’ve got no way of flying home. You can’t road-trip it, judging by the state of that heap back there. Besides, you’d need a VW. You just can’t road-trip it without a VW. So here you are.” He turned into the parking lot of a small apartment complex and the car came to a stop. “And here we are. Here, let me help you with that stuff.” We stepped out of the car and walked around to the hatchback.
I stuffed the CDs, and the iPod into my backpack and picked up my sweatshirt. “Can you stick the water in the bag and get that?”
“Yep.”
“Just leave the books here. I can go back and get them later.” Newland nodded and then led me toward the door. After a trip in the elevator and down the hall, we were at his apartment. The living area was small, but there were two bedrooms and a bathroom, and I was pleased to find that it didn’t smell like the Aveo. Having made that discovery, the place already felt like home.
“Let’s put your stuff in the other bedroom. I’ve been using it as a sort of office space, but from now on it’ll be your bedroom.” We walked in and dumped it all on the bed in a pile. Heaped together, it looked like even less. Newland gestured to a small bookshelf in the corner. “You can put your books over there. You want to get those now?”
“Sure, why not.” We turned around and walked back out of the apartment.
“So, do your parents know what’s going on?” He asked. I shook my head. “You’ve got to tell them at some point, man. You know that.”
“Yeah.” I pushed the button for the elevator.
“So?”
“So?”
“So, why haven’t you?”
The doors opened and we stepped in. “I want to wait until I’m stable, you know? Until I have a job and can say that I’m working toward being able to come home.” Newland opened up the hatchback and we started grabbing books. “They worried like heck when I left for college, and now they’re relieved that I’m finally coming back home. How do you think they’re going to react when they find out that I’m not coming back anytime soon?”
“How do you think they’re reacting now? They haven’t heard from you since what, a couple months?”
“It’s just been a month. I’m sure they’re fine.”
“I’m just saying,” Newland said as he closed the hatchback, “it’s going to be a while before you have any sort of actual money. You’ve still got that loan to pay off.”
“Well, yeah, at some point—” I started. Newland cut me off.
“And don’t you even think about defaulting on me. Trust me, man.” He put down his books and closed the hatchback. “You don’t pay off that loan now, and you’re going to pay for it later.” We headed back towards the building. “So first on the list is getting you a job.”
“And once we do that, I can start paying my share of the—”
“Don’t say it, man! You focus on paying off that loan, and I’ll handle the rent.” He backed into the door to push it open and I stepped past him into the lobby. We walked past the main desk for the third time, and I took a look at the girl sitting behind it at the computer. She stared at us, and I could see her formulating a theory for why we were bringing all those books upstairs. She was pretty cute. I hoped she thought I was famous.
A few minutes later, we were inside the apartment. We dumped the books on the bed. “I’ll get settled in later,” I assured Newland.
“Want something to eat?” he asked.
“No, no, I’m good,” I answered.
“I was just being formal,” He answered. “You’re going to eat.” He just about stepped from the doorway of my new bedroom to his kitchenette. He opened up the refrigerator and pulled out a plate of chicken wings. “You have no idea how good these taste reheated.” He motioned for me to sit down on the couch by the coffee table. “It’s so dorm room, I know.”
I sat down. “Well, after what I’ve been through, it’s good to know that some things in life always come back to haunt you.”
Newland turned back to the kitchenette and took out some plates from a cupboard underneath the counter space. After four years, I could still never gauge his reaction. He hardly ever smiled, he rarely frowned, and he never laughed. His mouth always stayed firmly in that straight line. He could get rich at the big-money tables in Vegas. “It’s so cheap that I don’t care, honestly. Try getting all of this for cheaper here in New England. You won’t.
“Well, I sure don’t mind it,” I said gratefully, looking around at the apartment. The walls were bare, just like our dorm room back at Boston U. No posters, no pictures, just paisley that followed us all throughout the building. If it were anything else it wouldn’t be Newland’s.
Newland placed the plates, along with a pair of forks, on the coffee table and sat down on the opposite couch. He stabbed a piece of chicken with his fork, then stopped suddenly and put it down. “What am I thinking? We haven’t said grace yet.”
“Shame on you for forgetting.”
“Right. I’ll say it.” We folded our hands and bowed our heads. “Grace,” said Newland, with an air of reverence. He lifted up his head and began shoveling food. It was a joke that stretched back to the first night we had spent at Boston U together, and it had gotten after a few days, but we hadn’t stopped. It was almost like an actual religious ritual to us now.
I picked up a wing and chewed it. “You’re actually right, this is good.”
“Told you.” Newland never stopped shoveling. I’d never seen him in a fancy restaurant before, and I couldn’t see it now. I continued in a similar manner. It was as if we had never left college, we’d just moved to a different area of the building.
“So, what’re you doing here?” I said.
“What am I doing here? You’re the one who’s been sitting in a car doing nothing for a week.”
“Four days,” I corrected him.
“You want to know what I’ve been doing this week, while you’ve been doing nothing?”
“Four days.”
“What? Newland finally looked up.”
“It’s only been four days.”
“Same difference. Anyway, your obsession with that little detail tells me that you don’t want to know what I’ve been doing.”
“I want to know,” I insisted.
He smiled one of his infrequent smiles. “I’ve been doing nothing too.”
“Explain.”
“It’s nothing, man! What’s there to explain?” He leaned back, already finished with his dinner. I had four wings left to go. “Okay, yeah, I do a little something. Work, you know.”
“Where do you work?”
“Best Buy. Hey, I bet I could get you a job there.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know computers.”
He shook his head back. “You know video games.”
“That’s seriously all it takes to get hired?”
“No.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“You also have to look like a total geek.”
“That all? I could do that.”
“I know,” he said. “You totally look like you could work there. We’ve only got two guys in the gaming department. You could do music too, I bet. I’ll hook you up, man. Don’t worry about it.” He paused, mulling over what he had just said. “Well, we’ll get to that soon enough, maybe with your friend at the front desk. For now I’ll just work on getting you a job.” He looked at my chicken. “You going to finish those?” I slid the plate over to him. “Thanks, man.”
He and I talked about Best Buy for a few more minutes while he finished my chicken. I couldn’t see it happening, but Newland seemed to actually think it would. At least, I think he seemed to think so. I really can’t read him at all. After he was finished I walked into my room and started taking things off of the bed. Newland walked into his own room and returned a few minutes later with his guitar. It was a nicer one than the one he’d always had at Boston U. The name Takamine meant nothing to me; it sounded like an alcoholic beverage, but the guitar looked nice. He still used the same pick.
“You don’t mind if i—”
“No,” I answered. He took the chair to the right of my bed and started strumming. I picked up the bag of groceries and brought it over to the refrigerator. He strummed louder. I got the food settled into its new home and closed the door. I walked back to my bed and began to stock my bookshelf.
Newland stopped mid-strum and picked up a paperback. “Blue Like Jazz?” He scanned the back. “Is it any good?”
I took it from him. “It’s funny. There are some interesting thoughts in there, too.”
“Thoughts?”
“Thoughts about life, spirituality, astronauts, penguin sex, you know, that sort of thing.” I took it from him and put it on the shelf.
“Life,” Newland repeated to himself. “Jazz,” he said, after much thought, and started playing again. “Do you like jazz, Mick?”
“I guess. Why?”
“I play jazz with some guys down in the Square. We’re practicing tomorrow. You could come listen if you want to.”
“Maybe,” I said, vaguely. I had finished shelving the books and was now just sitting on the bed, listening to the music. The music was asking me too. I caved. “That actually sounds really good.”
“I figured,” He said. He and the music worked on me for another hour, and by the time I got to sleep that night, I was hungry for more jazz.
