Gumshoe Romance

There is a sequence in the Scottish film ‘Shallow Grave’ where Chris Eccleston’s character David Stephens goes funny in the head. Previously the nerdy foil to his apartment mates, he becomes dominant after defeating the home invader who knocked down his companions. In doing so, he “completes” the transformation begun when his mate coerced him into smashing a corpse’s teeth with a hammer, and guards the loot - and his apartment mates - by becoming a one-attic version of “big brother.” He drills holes into the ceilings of all their living spaces, and scrabbles about like a crab, analyzing all of their movements, serious or mundane. It’s a fantastic movie, but my parallels to Stephens made me uneasy that hot summer I rented out the only room available on such short notice, the attic above the Santangelo townhouse.

It didn’t have peepholes, but sounds easily traveled up - and down, as Elena Santangelo was fond of telling me. She needn’t have worried. I had been between girlfriends for two years, so she would hear me knock boots less than I would hear her and her husband scream about how far my rent would have to stretch this month. When that or similarly themed arguments occurred, the four youngest Santangelo children darted out of the house in all directions, finding refuge in the homes of the neighboring families, with parents who took an interest in their children’s teeth and homework, parents who stiffly smiled when the Santangelo brood fell in line behind their own, begging for juiceboxes or discs of baloney.

Not Ariel. The eldest daughter of the household had matriculated in better times, and had little in common with her street urchin siblings. She took every opportunity to climb up the fire escape and throw her skinny leg over the window sill, followed by the other, shimmying butt-first into my apartment under the sash that only went halfway up. Back then, she could pull this move off, because she was nineteen with a seventeen year old’s body.

I looked at her and I though I must be seeing a thornless variety of a rose. For good and for ill, she completely lacked the Santangelo hardness, although she had inherited her father’s impulsive and dreamy nature. I’d only been living there for two months, but I had figured out the household’s natural rhythms. Ariel’s rhythm was never in sync. She’d first come to me through my hallway door by trailing her mother and bearing a plate of cookies. She had never used it since, preferring the window and the secrecy.

She always brought a new object of curiosity, as if I was a homeroom teacher and every day was show-and-tell. One week it was book of horoscopes, the next it was a copy of our town’s map from colonial times. She always wanted me to listen to her story about how she acquired every item, and then sat back on her haunches and begged me to tell her more about it, as if my five year advantage gave me all the knowledge I needed to answer any question.

It was hard not to get a big head when she sat at my feet and soaked up every word I said, and harder still to resist her when she implored me to sneak across town with her to drop a lei around the neck of the horse in the equestrian statue of the town founder, or other mild forms of mischief. The truth was, I rarely got out, something that Ariel never acknowledged, no matter how many times I turned her down.

That day she finished sliding through the window and turned and flashed me another conspiratorial grin. Below, Mr. Santangelo groused about the piss-poor job market.

“Brace yourself, Zeke,” Ariel began, but I knew it was impossible to prepare for any such thing that came out of her mouth. She shuffled around until she was on her knees, sitting back on her heels as if it were show and tell, and she had already given me something precious that I would now have to explain.

I crouched down beside her and waited, hoping she wouldn’t say anything too loud in the moments when her parents weren’t arguing. It was a given that they didn’t want her up here, and I didn’t want them to know she was here, either.
“I want you to help me decide which guy I lose my virginity to.”

There really should be a spit-take to accommodate comments like that.