Page 49 of Torn
YOU MAYbe wondering, what the hell happened to Boutros? You might be saying, “He figured so prominently in the first part of the story, and now it seems like he’s vanished, or you dumped him as a friend.”
I’m embarrassed to admit the latter, the part about dumping, is more than a little bit true. Now don’t get the wrong idea—I didn’t feel any less affection for Boutros, and I assume he felt the same about me as he always did. Our bitter backbiting and insults were a curious kind of love, but make no mistake—they were love. No one else but he could tell me I had a face that looked like “a smacked ass” and make me feel seen and, maybe, a little bit adored.
Ours was a strange and unique relationship.
But it worked.
The truth is, I’d fallen prey to what many of us have when we begin to fall in love, or in lust, or become infatuated—whatever you want to call it. Friends often experience a little hiatus when a new love interest comes into the picture, and that’s what had happened between Boutros and me. The phenomenon of ignoring one’s friends when a new love appears on the scene, I believed, was a time-honored law of the jungle.
Yet I did feel guilty about not getting together with him over the past couple of weeks or so but figured he’d understand. A manalwaystrumps a friend, right?
Ah, even I didn’t buy that. How could I? I could have at least called him, updated him on my dilemma of meeting not one, but two men I could well be falling for. He’d call me a slut and I’d tell him he was heartless. We’d laugh and make plans to meet up for breakfast at the Melrose, a Boystown institution known for its greasy fare, late-night hours, and its clientele, almost all of whom were gay.
As it turned out, I’d been a very bad friend indeed.
What happened was I did try to call him on the Monday after dinner with Tom and his mom. I tried before work (Boutros was a chronically early riser—it was when he got his best writing done, he said). I called again on my lunch hour and then again when I got home from work that night around six-thirty.
There was never an answer, which was odd. Unlike me, Boutros did own an answering machine, and I’d left messages each time I called. The first was a breezy kind of “hey girl, what’s up?” message. But the subsequent ones got progressively more desperate and worried.
Where was he? My best friend rarely didn’t pick up the phone. And even if he was out and about, he’d always return my call.
Always.
I got a chill, a premonition that things were simply not right. You may say I was worrying needlessly. After all, it was only one day and three missed calls, a trifle for almost any other adult. Hardly an excuse to file a missing person’s report.
But you don’t know Boutros. He may be eccentric, cut from a cloth no one else had ever seen, but as a friend, he was unfailingly reliable.
I decided I needed to drop by, just to make sure he wasn’t lying naked and rotting in his apartment, smelling of decomposition and Christmas pudding.
I dressed hurriedly and headed out to make the journey over to his place. I knew it was going to take longer than I wanted, especially because I was anxious and also because patience has never been one of my virtues.
Boutros lived in a gigantic apartment overlooking the Chicago River in a very quiet, tucked-away West Side neighborhood of Chicago called Ravenswood Manor. To get to him involved taking the Red Line L down to Belmont, switching for a Brown Line train out to Francisco, the street-level stop in Boutros’s quaint neighborhood. Once you got off the train, you felt as though you’d stepped back into a more idyllic, quieter era.
He’d lived there for years, holed up in his roomy two-bedroom with oak floors, a fieldstone fireplace, crown molding, and thousands and thousands of books. I suspect the books were the reason he’d never bought himself a house or a condo when he could well afford it. The prospect of moving all those books was simply too daunting.
Anyway, I arrived at the Francisco stop almost an hour after leaving my apartment. There was a delay at Belmont, and I watched in vain as two delayed westbound trains rushed by me, running express, leaving me in a breeze of longing and disappointment.
But the good old CTA did eventually deliver me to my desired location, anxious and annoyed. It was twilight, and there was a chill breeze as I hurried down the tree-lined streets to Catalpa Avenue. Boutros’s two-flat apartment building was at the eastern end of the street, where it dead-ended at the river.
I looked up at the windows of Boutros’s second-story flat with despair. They were all dark, and it was getting late enough, the sky various shades of lavender and darker blue, that he should have had at least a few lights on.
When I reached his door, I rang the bell, hopeful that he was just napping or watching porn or conducting a séance, whatever kind of things he’d do that required no light. Nothing he might be doing would surprise me.
I rang and rang, the hope dribbling out of me like a pricked water balloon. My worry felt like needles under my skin. A growing dread was creeping up.
I sighed and was grateful that I could at least resort to desperate measures. Well aware that I could be interrupting a passionate three-way with a Polish saxophone player and an African-American truck driver, I stooped down in the darkness and lifted the potted ceramic plant to the right of his door.
He’d told me the location of the key a long time ago, and I’d filed it away for an emergency like this one.
My hands trembled a little as I attempted to fit the key to the lock. I had a bad feeling, so it took me three tries to get the door open.
Once I went inside, I dashed up the creaking stairs, hoping against hope I’d find him okay. But another part of me, the reasonable, non-Pollyanna side, worried about what I might find, so much so that I paused at the front door at the top of the stairs.
Boutros usually never locked this door, as far as I knew, so I hoped that would continue to be the case.
It wasn’t.
The door was locked, and I whispered, “Shit.” I pounded on the door, again and again, my heart beating faster, certain it wouldn’t be opened from inside.
