Page 50 of Endless Summer: Stories
“Well, Pierre let something slip, the dumbass, but it’s fine. She was going to find out sooner or later.”
Was she? Genevieve wondered. Mouth always claimed he was hamstrung where his wife, Danielle, was concerned because her parents owned the garage and they were also bankrolling the band, so Mouth needed to keep Danielle happy, which meant he could never leave her and she could never, ever find out about Genevieve. Genevieve’s relationship with Mouth had meant months of living in the shadows; the good news was Danielle rarely came to Mouth’s shows because she found them “too wild.” The one time Danielle did appear, Genevieve blended into the crowd and scrutinized her rival. Danielle wore a boatneck cotton sweater and a pair of slacks and flats; she looked like a secretary. Plus, she wasold,maybe thirty. Genevieve had actually been disappointed that Mouth’s wife was so uncool; she’d nodded along to the music in places but she didn’t try to dance, and as soon as the crowd started to bounce and pogo—which Genevieve did with extra enthusiasm—she left.
“Did she moveout?” Genevieve said.
“She told me to move out,” Mouth said. “I’m just here at the garage grabbing my tools.”
“Grabbing your tools?” Genevieve said. “Where will you go?”
“It’s like we always talked about,” Mouth said. “I’m coming to be with you.”
I’m coming to be with you.Here were the words Genevieve had been longing for since the night she attended her first Fungus show, when the bouncer at the Decline invited her backstage afterward, saying, “The drummer, Mouth, saw you in the crowd. He asked me to find you.”
“Hedid?” Genevieve said. This statement seemed nothing short of miraculous. Genevieve had, at that point, only dipped her toe into the pond of punk—she’d worn her Rocky Horror T-shirt, a studded dog collar, and heavy black eyeliner. She let the bouncer lead her down to the damp, smelly basement room where the band hung out, and she tried to recall which guy was the drummer. (Like everyone else at the show, she’d been mesmerized by Rancid Pierre, the lead singer, who wore silver contact lenses.) It turned out the drummer was a thick-necked guy with a shaved head and a zipper tattoo running down the center of his cranium to his neck. He introduced himself as Andrew but said most people used his stage name, Mouth.
“Why Mouth?” Genevieve asked.
Mouth brought Genevieve’s hand to his lips and then sucked the length of her middle finger. Her first instinct was to yank back—the women at Brown were all about consent,no means no,et cetera—but Genevieve found herself aroused. A few minutes later, once she had been offered a cold Coors Light (which she accepted) and a line of cocaine (which she didn’t), she and Mouth found a moldy chair in a corner of the room and made out.
For a long while, Genevieve saw Mouth only at shows, all of which started at midnight and ended at two or three in the morning. They would drink a beer or two in the gross basement, talking with the rest of the band about how the show had gone, what their take at the door had been, how they could attract more fans, whether their so-called manager, Ernie, was doing them dirty, whether the cover art of their EP—a standard-issue red-and-white toadstool—was too predictable. Then they would head out to Genevieve’s black Integra, which had been a high-school graduation present from Joey Whalen (Joey was known for extravagant gifts), and have sex in the back seat.
This routine stayed the same, but Genevieve changed. One night, she drank Jim Beam with a wiccan in her dorm named Esther and she let Esther pierce her left ear with a row of safety pins. Next came the vintage leather jacket that Genevieve found in a thrift shop on Orchard Avenue. She told everyone it was a gift from Mouth, not quite a lie because when Mouth saw it, he said it was exactly the jacket he would have bought for her if he could, but he couldn’t because jackets like that were expensive and in his real life, Mouth (Andrew) was a mechanic and his wife kept very strict control over his finances.
Yes, Genevieve knew Mouth had a wife. She’d asked him about it the first night because he was wearing a dark, flat ring.
Ball and chain,he said, then he jammed his tongue down Genevieve’s throat.
Initially, Genevieve cared very little about the wife. She was as incomprehensible to Genevieve as Genevieve’s differential equations course was to Mouth. He was a mechanic; she was an engineering major at Brown. Their Venn diagram overlapped only at the Decline, in the wee hours of the night.
But as the weeks and months passed, the things that didn’t bother Genevieve suddenly did. She kept trying to find new ways to prove her devotion. She got the toadstool from Fungus’s album cover tattooed on her forearm. (“You realize you’ll have that thing when you’re eighty?” Genevieve’s roommate, Melanie, said. “You’ll be buried with it.”) Then Genevieve shaved off most of her hair and dyed her buzz cut pink. (She’d considered a mohawk but that seemed too obvious.)
Genevieve and Mouth started talking about “being together.” When was Mouth going to leave his wife? He repeated the same litany about the garage, Danielle’s parents; they’d invested in the band, his Zildjian cymbals were expensive! Genevieve’s devotion to Mouth became an obsession that bordered on insane. And why? He wasn’t handsome; he wasn’t particularly successful. But he was exotic, especially in the context of Genevieve’s collegiate life. She was dating areal person,not some privileged Ivy League elite who popped in a Steve Miller cassette and turned on his lava lamp when he wanted to seduce a girl.
When the school year ended, Genevieve talked about subletting an apartment on Prospect Street. She dreamed of cooking for Mouth, of having sex with him in a real bed, of having a shared life, but when she finally summoned the courage to mention this, Mouth blanched. “Shouldn’t you spend the summer with your family?” he asked. “I’m sure they miss you.”
There were a lot of words to describe Genevieve, butstupidwasn’t one of them. She didn’t bother telling Mouth that her mother was spending the summer in Paris or that her twin brother, George—who was working for a Republican—would be only too happy to have their family home in Wellesley to himself. She knew Mouth was trying to get rid of her. He would spend the summer underneath broken-down Dodge pickups while his wife in her slacks complained about the price of pork chops at the Finast.
Fine,Genevieve thought. She’d seenSt. Elmo’s Firethree times her junior year in high school, so she knew the best way to get someone to love you was to ignore them. “You’re right,” Genevieve said. “I’m going to spend the summer on Nantucket with my aunt Kirby. She’s a Hollywood producer.” Genevieve kissed Mouth and patted his cheek with as much derision as she could muster. “See you around.” Genevieve then climbed into her Integra and drove away before Mouth could see her cry.
Now, it seems, her bluff has worked. Mouth wants to be together. Starting this weekend, he said.
“This weekend?” Genevieve said.
“It’s your birthday,” Mouth said. “Of course I’m coming.”
“My whole family will be here,” Genevieve said. “Could you maybe get a hotel room?”
“Baby, you know I don’t have that kind of money. Plus, I just lost my job. Don’t you want me to stay with you?”
“No, I definitely do,” Genevieve said. “But my grandmother will be here and my aunts and uncle, and they’re pretty conservative. I’ll have to introduce you as Andrew.”
“That’s my name,” Mouth said.
“And you should probably bring a collared shirt.”
“A collared shirt?” Mouth said. “Are you kidding?”
Was she kidding? It felt a little bit like lipstick on a pig because a collared shirt wasn’t going to cover the zipper tattoo across Mouth’s skull. Genevieve’s grandmother had proved to be incredibly cool, but Genevieve sensed that introducing Mouth to Kate would be pushing it.
