Chapter 3

Lori opened her apartment door. She almost immediately gave a happy "Hi Andy! Any messages?" as she walked back toward what I assumed was the bedroom. Their apartment was laid out just like mine, a fact I found surprising since my apartment was a single bedroom unit.

Andrew (though Lori always called him Andy, the more formal "Andrew" seemed to fit him) looked up from the book he was reading. He saw Lori disappear back toward the bedroom, then looked at me standing in the doorway. I cannot imagine I kept my disappointment to myself very well as he looked straight at me for the first half of the sentence, "Yes, your boyfriend called a couple of times," before he returned to his book.

Lori reappeared through the bedroom door. "Ray called? Oh good," then she looked at me. "Have a seat, make yourself comfortable, I just have to make a phone call." She then went back into the bedroom and lightly closed the door.

‘Thunderstruck’ and ‘dumbfounded’ are good words to describe how I felt right then. My brain was working hard in an effort to not allowing itself to believe Lori had a boyfriend, though my ears kept reminding it, "Well that’s what I heard!" I heard her pick up a phone in the bedroom and start talking. For want of anything better to do, I wandered into the living room.

Classical music came from the stereo, located in the entertainment center, at a volume designed for background music. The shelves of the entertainment center were strewn with CD cases, presumably because the large CD holder to the right of the cabinet was filled to capacity. A cello case, or at least a large case that looked to be designed with holding cellos in mind, was leaning in a corner next to a music stand and a folding chair.

I settled onto the loveseat that was set up perpendicular to both the entertainment center and the full sized sofa Andrew was sitting on. Andrew quietly appeared to finish up whatever he was reading, put his book down, picked up an empty tumbler and walked back to the kitchen. I heard a bottle open and he came back into the room with a beer and a tumbler of some manner of drink. He wordlessly put the drink in front of me. As he sat down, he picked up a pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter sitting on the coffee table. He slowly pulled a smoke out of the pack, then placed the pack back onto the coffee table. He opened his lighter and slowly lit the end. A slow drag followed, then an exhale before he looked me straight in the eye and nonchalantly asked, "Thought you were going to get laid, didn’t you?"

I looked at him for a second, unable to say anything. I shook my head from side to side, as I tried to come up with a clever reply. I rallied back into the conversation with, "What?"

Andrew looked back toward the coffee table with a little chuckle and a smile that looked surprisingly at home on a face that I’d only seen scowling, previously. He looked back at me and told me in an even voice, "At the very least, you were hoping you could get her out of that dress yet this afternoon."

All I could do was rub my forehead in an attempt to hide my uncomfortable, guilty smile. I leaned forward and took a sip of my beer. I was delaying in the hope I could make some sort of normal conversation out of this. I quickly realized that was impossible, so I leaned back in my seat and looked back over at him, waiting for what was next.

He was looking at me like he was expecting me to say something. I was, in turn, racking my brain for something worth saying, but nothing came to mind. Then he mercifully turned his gaze back to the coffee table. He placed his cigarette on the lip of an empty ashtray, picked up his book and started reading again. My stomach grumbled.

"Hungry?" Andrew asked me, then turned a page without looking back at me.

"Yeah," I answered. That was pretty damned obvious when my stomach was rumbling. "I haven’t had anything since breakfast."

"Where’d you eat?"

"Jack’s."

"Oh really?"

"Yep."

"And you haven’t eaten since then?" He looked up from his book with raised eyebrows.

"Nope."

"Huh," he said as he looked back down at his book, "most people cave in and have a hotdog."

I wasn’t sure if Andrew was one page ahead of me, or if he was having some imaginary conversation on his own, so I fired back my snappy rejoinder of, "What?"

"I was just talking about people who spend the day with Lori after they eat at Jack’s. They get hungry in the afternoon but they wait for Lori to get hungry, too. Then, after a while, they realize she’s still not even a bit hungry and probably won’t be anytime soon. That’s when they get something from a hotdog vendor."

"Now that you mention it, I did have a bag of chips a few hours ago," I admitted. The exceptionally vivid description of exactly what had gone through my mind made me feel like I was being interrogated by someone who had witnessed me in the act of shoplifting.

"That’s alright, it happens to everybody," Andrew told me in a fatherly tone. "Lori is the only person I’ve ever known who can pull that off."

I suppose I should mention that, throughout this exchange, Andrew had only looked up from his book on the one instance I mentioned. I was forced to assume he was both reading it and holding a conversation with me at the same time. I realized our banter was not the most stimulating fare, but I was impressed that he could, if nothing else, appear to be doing both at once. "Do you always read while you are talking to people?" I inquired. Impressive or not, it was irritating.

"Hm? Oh sorry," he said as he marked the page and put down the book, "I forget I’m doing that sometimes. Kind of like the way I forgot that smoke I left in the ashtray." He looked back at me as he tapped a long ash off his cigarette and took a last pull from the butt. "Waste of a cigarette," he told himself more than me as he diligently put out his ashes just before lighting up another one.

We sat there quietly for a bit before I broke the silence with, "Is this a one bedroom place?"

"Yep," Andrew calmly replied, distantly staring out the window, "it’s relatively inexpensive for two people, that’s why we live here."

"I would imagine it would be a good deal," I agreed. "But Lori said you two aren’t dating or anything like that." I felt like a fool for saying it like that. It sounded like I was trying to get information out of him, which was exactly what I was trying to do, though I didn’t want it to be so glaringly obvious.

"Nope, we’re just good friends," he told me, continuing to look out the window.

"That’s a little unusual," I thought aloud, "I mean two people who aren’t officially dating would go in on a place where they split a bedroom."

Andrew smirked a bit. "I agree," he said, still not looking at me.

I wasn’t sure what to make of that little grin, so I asked him, "So how do you make it work with just the one bedroom?"

Just then, Lori walked out of the bedroom, announcing she was off the phone. She walked into the kitchen and grabbed some sort of canned drink from the refrigerator.

"Okay," Andrew answered Lori over his shoulder. He added, "I’m going to show Tom here the setup in the bedroom." He turned to me and reassured me, as he was pushing himself out of his seat, "Don’t worry, it’s not a bunch of S&M gear or anything of a sexual nature at all. We just have an unusual setup for our bed."

My immediate concerns allayed and my interest piqued, I followed Andrew toward the bedroom. What I saw sitting in the middle of the bedroom astounded me. "Wow," was the first thing out of my mouth. "Wow," was also the second thing out of my mouth. "That’s an interesting variation on the bunk bed concept," I observed aloud.

"Mm-hm," he replied as he dragged his smoke. He seemed to take a quiet pride in it.

"You sleep there?"

Andrew nodded and followed it with, "I sleep on the bottom, Lori is in the top."

"Is that a king size mattress on the bottom?" I asked, quite unsure what I was seeing was furniture and not some sort of mechanism for ensnaring tigers. There were so many questions I needed to ask about what I was seeing that the least interesting question was the first one to pop into my mind.

"Mm-hm."

"And a twin on the top?"

"Yep."

"I’d never even heard of a bed like that."

"We built it ourselves."

"What is that holding up the top mattress?"

"Cargo netting."

I searched the bed for the next place to ask a question, finally falling on, "Why did you make it a tripod?"

"That’s all the wood we could afford at the time."

"Is it only that block and tackle holding up the top bunk?"

"Some piano movers were selling it cheap."

"How do you get into it?"

"The ropes on the side steady it somewhat, then you use a rope ladder attached on the other side. We cut out some of the netting on one side, so it’s got a little doorway sort of thing."

"How much does it sway?"

"A surprising lot when you’re in it."

"How do you stay in it?"

"You don’t use silk sheets."

"No, I mean with the swaying."

"So do I."

I rephrased the question. "How is anyone able to fall asleep comfortably up there?"

"Lori likes it that way."

"You’re kidding."

"Not a bit."

"I think that would make me sick."

"That’s why Ray doesn’t sleep here."

"Who’s Ray?"

"Lori’s boyfriend."

"The guy she just called?"

"Mm-hm."

I returned to staring at the bed, attempting to find the trick to it. A frame hidden somewhere on the structure, perhaps. My continuing failure to see anything like that made me run my eyes over it more carefully each time until, eventually, I had to concede the whole trick was there was a large wooden tripod supporting a hook that held a net containing a twin bed.

"Don’t you get nervous with that thing hanging over you?"

"Not at all. It’s only fallen on me a couple times."

I must have looked at him as if he were an idiot because I looked back at him thinking, "Are you an idiot?"

He either read my face or read my mind when he looked straight back at me, explaining, "It’s really not that silly. The bed’s very light and Lori doesn’t weigh all that much. At first, I did the lashing on the top wrong; but that last time it fell, it was finally done right. Just so you know, the top section never really just dropped free right onto me. The bed kind of slid down into itself."

"Having that happen just once would scare the bejeezus out of me."

"Eh, it wasn’t that bad. Lori woke up, helped me out and we reassembled the thing."

Lori walked in just then drinking a Diet Coke. She asked me, "What do you think?"

I reiterated my original point, "Wow." I was now moderately used to the sight of the bed, allowing my eyes to look around the rest of the room. A large dresser with an undulating face and an oval mirror atop it sat against the wall adjacent to the apartment next door. Two more dressers sat next to the wall between the bedroom and the living room. Identical six-foot tall bookcases flanked the bedroom window. The set of shelves on the left was filled with a mishmash of differently sized books. The books lining the shelves in a traditionally upright manner were piled under books lying horizontally across their tops. I was still standing in the doorway, so I could not determine the nature of their contents. Some of the books appeared to be of textbook or reference book format. Others looked like the sort of books that are normally placed conspicuously on coffee table in order to impress guests. The rest appeared to be a variety of novels.

The other bookcase was filled with music and more music. Good old vinyl records almost entirely filled two shelves. The rest of the shelf space, save the lowest level, was filled with CDs stacked horizontally atop one another. A few of the stacks had space between the top CD on the pile and the shelf above; most had none. I could not imagine the way these could be organized, as alphabetic order would require the rearrangement of up to four piles of disks in either direction if another CD were added. I remembered the jewel cases piled on the entertainment center and the full CD rack located in the living room and I was literally aghast at the quantity of music contained in that apartment. The bottom shelf was almost completely filled with nothing but tapes. It must have been at least three tapes deep from the front layer to the back. I still cannot imagine the time required to listen to all those recordings, but I figured at the time that they must have listened to some of them not at all.

"Taken it all in yet?" Andrew asked me.

My eyes had stopped goggling and were finally calming down enough to actually rest on objects, instead of jumping around from one strange sight to the next. "I think so," I told him.

Lori chimed in with a general, "So, are we going to dinner?"

Andrew said, "Yes." I declined her offer this time around, despite her insistence I join them. The shock of disappointment I felt over Lori seeing someone else still hadn’t completely worn off. Plus, I had no desire to make more conversation with Andrew. I claimed a need to take care of a few things in my apartment and make some phone calls yet that evening and I had to turn in early in order to make it to work the next day and so on. I joined them on the walk down to my apartment before bidding them both good evening.