Novels Stay Novels

"He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete." –The Great Gatsby

***

It was just after dark and the streetlamps in the park threw pools of yellow on smooth sidewalks. A boy and a girl made their way around the path of perfect, board-game pieces of sidewalk which surrounded a small lake. They listened to the hush of the fountain placed dead in the center, the only other sound within this tiny bubble of suburbia.

She was very aware of him beside her. They walked without touching, but every so often at the edge of her mind, she had to brush away the image of his hand sweeping towards hers, taking what she was too afraid to offer up herself. She heard but did not listen to the pleasant stream of “When I was little…” and “Haven’t you ever wanted to…?” The words were all there but what mattered was that he was talking, and it was a form of sharing somewhere between chit-chat and the nervous silence of not-quite together—a silly dance performed by young teens “in like.”

She had always protested her friends’ obsession with romance which—at this age—seemed insincere, even funny. She didn’t understand that when her own time came, the privacy of her mind allowed her to dream the silly-girl things she always mocked, like an imagined Oscar win or a day of undivided attention. At that moment she was thinking of English class—of how Gatsby had thought of Daisy, of stars and flowers and kisses, of silly-girl things. She laughed a little at herself, and inwardly rolled her eyes, but that didn’t stop her from wanting all of them.

The boy stopped walking, and took a breath. They sat down on the wooden balustrade which separated the lake from the path. She waited.

It was important that she did not know what she waited for—or, exactly what she waited for. It was this image of confessions, of kisses, of closeness that she expected. She willed her blood to stop pumping so hard, and reminded herself that this was a crush only and she hated the word love when it came out of the mouths of babes. But he looked so nervous, and so sweet, and he was looking at her.

“I have to tell you something important.”

She thought of the tuning fork hitting the star, about the poetics and how Fitzgerald wanted them to hear the faint tinkling of that image, and the smell of blossoms, as they thought of kisses.

“I’m gay.”