The Last Time I Saw Quinn

Elizabeth Lopeman

Quinn arrived the night before last when I was making Mark’s dinner. I heard the door crack open and then he was there in the light from the hallway with that black leather duffel his dad had given him before he went off to Hartwick College. His eyes asked if he could come in and then he smiled in a way that convinced me he could heal the sick and feed the hungry. Mark was diligently doing his homework at his desk in the far corner of our warehouse loft. I looked over my shoulder at him while I was still pushing cubes of steak around the pan with a spatula, for his dinner. Mark nodded his head and came over to me, in a deliberate way, holding out his hand for the spatula and Quinn and I went into my room where we held each other on my bed without a word until we eventually broke our embrace. I was so happy to see him and we stayed up talking and drank two bottles of wine and at one point I was jumping on the bed in my underwear like a seven year old while he kicked back in my big chair laughing, so comfortable in his skin. He told me he’d been hanging out in Austin, but we mostly talked about books and art, and about the old days until we finally fell asleep.

In the morning we made love and then I got up and made coffee. I warmed the milk the way we both like while Mark was in the shower and then we sat up in bed and talked about a Harry Crews novel he’d just finished and then we laughed about the time we’d shared an apartment in Amherst. We only had that place for a month in the spring right after college and it was the longest we’d ever lived together, but we hadn’t taken the time to talk about it since, even though it had been almost twenty years ago now. Our time together was sporadic and precious and we avoided fucking things up by talking about banalities. The rain started in on its numbing pattering against the sidewalk under my window and we sipped in coffee and I wondered where else besides Austin he’d been but I just let him come to those things on his own because it didn’t really matter. That was the deal. We tried to share our time together without any conditions. Of course I had a harder time not worrying about the future than he did, I think. I often dreamed that someday we could really be together. After a couple times when we’d gone our separate ways, my girlfriends would have talks with me about how I wasn’t getting what I needed and what I deserved, but I didn’t want anyone else I’d met. And I’d been married and had had the Tudor house in the West Hills, the Volvo. Beautiful Mark was the prize from all that. All those same friends of mine wanted love, but like always their marriages had grown stale or sour or ended in divorce. But love is an illusion and Quinn knew me like no other, and he inspired me and energized me when a lot of other people, men and women, made me wish I were at home working.

I told Quinn how I’d pulled the last of the beets up out of our building’s community garden, just as this year’s first flakes of snow had spun to the ground through breaks in sun and he said he would make borscht for me for dinner. Mark knocked on my door before he took off to school and we invited him in. I wrapped the down comforter around me and he gave me a kiss on the cheek and he fist bumped Quinn.

“Don’t forget your milk money,” Quinn said.

“Dork,” said Mark. We all laughed a little as Mark shut the door behind him. He was a senior in high school, a responsible student whose only illicit indulgence was graffiti. I often wondered what I would do once he was out of the house completely. Part of me wanted to take Quinn to Europe. No way would I want to steel myself to travel in the style he did in the U.S., but in Europe it seemed like it would be romantic and fun and he would have to tone down his death wish if he were with me. He usually made his money touring with bands, as a roadie and or guitar tech depending on the band’s budget. Sometimes he had a bunk in a late model tour bus and sometimes he drove all night in old vans with beer stained carpet, if he was really inspired. It wasn’t a life I had any interest in following, but Quinn was my other half–I’d tried to resist in the past and now was just resigned to the fact that it seemed we would always come back together.

He got up out of bed and picked through the canvasses that stood one behind the other on the floor by the window. “You’re using a new palette,” he said. Quinn looked at me for a response but my eyes were fixed on the high rebar-impaled concrete ceiling. I had two shows coming up. My first gallery show in New York and one in London. With the recent sale of a handful of paintings and a pending sale, I had more disposable cash than I’d had since I was married. And then there was the short article about my work in a glossy art mag, which I also didn’t mention. “New colors,” he said hoping I’d chime in. Quinn liked to talk about my work, he was generous with himself, and it usually hooked me every time but this new phase in my career made me think about my work more professionally, which for some reason didn’t seem to translate with Quinn in my life. But, he always listened with interest and never failed to surprise me with an honest response, so I probably should have told him. But Quinn and money and I were historically a bad combination.

When his grandmother died he’d gotten a heap of cash. It was just after I’d moved to Oregon, so he bought a Westphalia van and drove out from Boston and then we drove all the way to Puerto Escondido. On the way down everything felt beautiful – it was spring and we made good time through California, where we stayed a night with my cousin in L.A. And when we got down into Mexico we drove to La Paz and took the ferry to Mazatlan, and as we slowly wound through the small towns and jungles on the shoulderless roads between Acapulco and Puerto we finally talked like adults about our relationship and how important it was to us both. That was years ago but that whole trip to Mexico turned out to be a wreck.

We were going to rent a place and hone our surfing skills, and we did, kind of. Well, we surfed and rented a place, but we also bought enough cocaine to kill a pack of wild dogs. And then I had a total breakdown from lack of sleep and got paranoid and Quinn split, leaving me alone in the apartment for a day, and half of a night, while I staved off the sensation of the freezing cold even though it was eighty-five degrees outside. He came back at 4am after I’d finally fallen asleep and woke me up. We went out to the beach where we walked and marveled at the ocean and the moon and then we sat and watched the sun rise like spilled fire across the horizon. Once the early morning walkers started coming down the beach we moved on and were the first to arrive at a tiki bar where we ordered Margaritas and were drunk at noon. We went back to bed and at dusk we woke up so groggy all we could do was more blow and then we started fighting about him having left me. I got the late flight out of Puerto Escondido that night. Quinn arrived in Portland in the van a month later and our friend Henry had facilitated our reunion. Ever since the trip to Mexico we’d maintained a very loose long distance relationship, except for the brief period when I’d been married, but we saw each other a few times a year, generally.

And now he’d shown up after I hadn’t heard from him for five months, when he sent me an e-mail recommending a collection of short stories he’d read and I e-mailed him back to tell him about a show at the Dallas Museum of Art. I hadn’t seen his face in thirteen months, the longest ever, and we hadn’t talked in between the two points of contact, but it was consistent with the way we conducted our relationship—sweet and bitter, but we’d finally learned how to live without a lot of drama. Quinn had spent most of his life unmoored but he was deeply loyal to me when he was with me, so he caught planes or hitchhiked to places when he needed to go, or he caught a train or jumped one if he had to, and he knew there would never be a time of the day or the night that he wasn’t welcomed in my home. And I accepted that there would always come a time when he would have to blow out, like he had a sail on his back that caught the wind in it and he just didn’t have the emotional fortitude to resist the ride. On some occasions I felt our days together coming to a close and on others he was just gone again, and after an hour or two I’d feel a stone in my stomach and then another and another until I’d realize rock gardens are a slowly articulated language.

He put on a Jim Carroll record and picked out a pair of black jeans for me, white panties, a wife beater and a hunter green cardigan that I wore all the time, but which my mother had stopped wearing after she’d been kicked out of boarding school. I got up and pulled a bra out of the top dresser drawer and got dressed while Quinn looked at an old issue of Juice that he’d bought the last time he was in Portland. And then we went down to my storage unit in the basement and got out mine and Mark’s bikes. In the elevator I asked Quinn if he wanted to call Henry to join us for breakfast.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Not really into it,” I said. I just wanted Quinn to myself. I loved Henry, but Henry and I saw each other all the time so I knew he would try to hog Quinn.

“Yeah,” he said staring at the blocky wood floor of the old freight elevator with his layered lanks of brown hair cascading over his brow. We got off on the first floor and walked our bikes through the lobby. Outside we hopped on and took off down Everett Street with the slow rain polishing our faces. We rode past the Craftsman style houses with their yards of soggy roses and English gardens until we arrived at Spark and Grind café on lower Hawthorne Street. I locked our bikes up next to all the other revamped cruisers in the rack and Quinn waited for me by the door. The brass bells jingled as we went in and we helped ourselves to a seat at the only open table next to the hazy steam covered window. Quinn took off his black rain jacket and I spun my damp hair into a twist and let it fall down my back as he went to grab the New York Times left over from Sunday. This was our ritual. I got the Arts section he got the Travel section. We ordered coffee and breakfast from a doughy blonde in skinny jeans and a studded belt, who was satisfactorily indifferent. I ordered poached eggs and an English muffin and Quinn had an omelet with freshly harvested lobster mushrooms. He ate quickly, which meant he was hungry because he usually didn’t woof it in like that, and once he was finished he looked at me searchingly.

“You have a lot of new work, Budge.” He called me Budge when I was being quiet.

“Um hmm.”

“Umbers and lemons and greens. That’s kind of different for you.”

I kept my eyes on the paper. The bells on the door jangled again and a tall angular woman came in carrying a chic, shiny black purse spotted with drops of rain. Behind her was Henry who, even with his fedora, was at least an inch shorter. I looked into Quinn’s face and at the subtle definition of his solid chest under his New York Dolls t-shirt, and then back at Henry before I got up and squeezed Quinn’s shoulder and bent down to kiss his cheek. “Henry,” I said into the hair that lay over his ear. I slipped between packed chairs to get to the door and gave Henry a kiss. Quinn followed me and put his hand on the small of my back as he kissed Henry’s other cheek. I was afraid Henry would say something about my upcoming shows and I didn’t want him to give it up. Not yet. And how uncanny to bump into him, especially after we’d agreed not to call him.

A friend of Henry’s in Savannah had recently bought one of my paintings for seven thousand dollars – the most I’d ever gotten, and Henry helped me get me the show in London. That was before the stock market sucked the cream filling out of his portfolio and now he was hoping to get a good show himself. I was worried that if Quinn knew too much about what was going on it would change everything between us, and I think I was superstitiously afraid it would mess up my recent good fortune, somehow.

“Fancy meeting you two here,” said Henry. Crow’s feet broke around his eyes and his amber irises shone with pleasure. “This is my friend Ginny.”

“Hi Ginny,” I said. She smiled demurely.

“You’re back,” said Henry to Quinn. “What a delightful surprise. Can we join you?”

“We’re just finishing up,” I said.

Henry put his arm around Quinn’s neck and pulled their heads together. “Come for dinner tonight?” he said. “Both of you.”

“Yeah, Dude. Will do,” said Quinn.

We were jamming up the door as a group of five pushed their way in. I handed the waitress a twenty and we said goodbye to Henry and Ginny before we went out to our bikes. The sky ran with rivers of blue between islands pregnant gray clouds. We pedaled home, uphill the whole way and when we finally got in the door Quinn started taking off my damp clothes and then his own and then he turned on the shower for us. Life felt normal and right when he was with me, which meant that most of my life was lived feeling abnormal, in a sea of isolation in which I painted and read, and occasionally went out for coffee or drinks with my girlfriends who were all too mired in the real world for me to be able to comfortably be myself, a phenomenon that seemed to be happening more and more. I had trouble focusing on my work after chatting with them about the culinary creations they’d concocted from carefully selected ingredients, or the boutiques they were excited about. It distracted me and pulled too much energy away from the things I really cared about. I worked well when Quinn was around, it was like a continuous stream of the most poignantly inspired days, the ones I had to work hard for when he was away.

Quinn spent the day reading Dostoyevsky. He finished the Gambler, from which he read excerpts aloud, and then went on to the Brothers Karamazov with which he was so enraptured he said nothing for a couple of hours while I painted. And then at some point he stopped and adjusted the fan and opened a couple of extra windows to clear out the paint and turpentine fumes and then he watched me clean my brushes. It was about seven o’clock and Mark hadn’t come home yet so I called him.

“Where is he?” said Quinn when I hung up the phone.

“His girlfriend’s house,” I said.

“What girl?” he said.

“She’s smart, she’s a fencer and gets good grades.”

“Just like you in high school.” He laughed.

And then the phone rang and it was Henry and he asked when we were coming and I’d completely forgotten about dinner but he said if we got there by eight that would be wonderful. I called Mark back and told him where we’d be if he wanted to stop in, even though I knew he wouldn’t. I washed my hands and tried to scrub the stubborn paint that somehow always bled into the crevices of my nail beds. I put on a short black wool dress with some black boots.

“Borscht tomorrow,” Quinn said.

I gave him a long slutty kiss – a thank you for the offer and then we turned out the lights and went outside. My old Mercedes wagon shuddered and rumbled and exhaust rolled out the back filling the rearview mirror with gray black. We stopped off at a supermarket so I could run in and pick up some flowers and a bottle of wine while Quinn sat in the running car listening to the Purrs.

The stark whiteness of the lights in the store struck me like an insult and appeared to have already taken the souls of everyone in the store, the panhandlers, the last minute lunchbox packers, the clerks, everyone had accentuated gray rings under their eyes. A malaise washed over the entire region in winter that made me want to catch a flight out. I chose a dozen white roses and hustled over to grab a good bottle of ten dollar wine but they were out of my favorite so I found a pinot from the Willamette Valley and proceeded to pay too much for it.

The heat in the car soothed the bite of the cold parking lot. Quinn had moved on to listening to the BBC. He kissed my cheek below my eye when I got in and I smiled at him and the way he hunched with his legs crossed when he was listening to something intently, the light refracting dully from his expensive leather jacket. I pulled the car out onto the street. Going to Henry’s with Quinn was always a treat. We’d passed more sublime evenings together talking into the early morning than I could count. Sometimes Henry had a girlfriend there sometimes not, but we always had a great time and left with wine on our lips and a slow burn in our hearts. I spent a fair amount of time with Henry when Quinn was gone, but it was frequently coffee or an impromptu dinner, or out to a restaurant. When Quinn came to town Henry cooked and it was more of an event.

Quinn had known Henry first. He’d been his heroin dealer in Brooklyn in the early nineties. Henry was a young genius printmaker who got a job teaching at an art school, but then did a very bad job of managing his addiction and lost his position. He left New York for Portland in 1994. I first met Henry when Quinn and I stayed with him after we took one of Henry’s cars on a whim to the West coast. That’s when he convinced us to get clean too. Henry’s house at that time was some kind of twisted underground hospital scene – him playing Nurse Ratchet as Quinn and I tried to sweep together the wreckage of addiction. It was sheer living hell for me, but the way Quinn’s limbs contorted and the way he complained about bone pain, we were afraid he’d broken his forearm and then we’d have been really screwed because neither of us wanted to go legit with the detox. But after five days for me, eight for Quinn, and about five thousand hot showers. Henry successfully got us through the first stage of withdrawal and then when I was ready I drove us most of the way back East. I never touched the stuff again, but the process drew the three of us together, and Quinn eventually helped me move to Portland and Henry had always been there for me. I met Eric about six months after our trip to Mexico, a thirty-six year old lawyer who played in a punk band. We fell in love and I married him when I was twenty-three. That’s when Quinn relapsed. He was living in a hovel in Boston and called to ask for money once or twice, but I really thought it was over at that point. I’d given birth to Mark before I’d figured out how to be a wife and was divorced by 25. That’s when Quinn had kicked H again and he came out to hang out with Henry and me, and we’d gotten together, again.

We stood on Henry’s porch arm in arm waiting for him to answer the door and let us in out of the drizzle. And when he opened up we stepped into the warmth of the fire and each got a kiss on the cheek and I handed Henry the roses and the wine and something about the way he held them reminded me of Miss America for a second–in a victorious and tragic way. Henry’s place was a small house built in the twenties or thirties that he’d restored and updated when needed. His aesthetic was modern meets Craftsman so it was cozy and clean but also woody and industrial.

“Come in here,” Henry said. He led me into the kitchen. He leaned his hip into the black concrete counter and held open a cookbook between his thumb and pinky. “This recipe says to use sage on the pork tenderloin.” He looked up over his reading glasses at me as I scanned through the ingredients on the page. “Don’t you think I can use rosemary?” he said as he ran his hand over his closely cropped gray hair.

Asking me, of all people, for cooking advice was one of the minor annoyances of Henry’s personality to me, and it never failed. “Of course,” I said. “Rosemary will be great.” He just wanted reassurance, and once gotten he went to the door and started to pull on his shoes. Quinn was still standing by the door looking at a small framed print of a smokestack.

“Where are you going?” said Quinn.

“Rosemary,” said Henry.

“I’ll get it. I still have my shoes on,” said Quinn, and he took the doorknob in his hand before there was time for discussion. Henry came back into the kitchen with his glasses perched on his nose, his magnified eyes took inventory of my face and then he picked up his knife. He could feel it coming I suppose.

“Henry,” I said. I drew in a breath. “Could we please not talk about the shows with Quinn.”

He stopped chopping green onions and looked over his shoulder at me. I saw the ghost of a smile spread across his face. “What? Why?” he said. And then he started chopping again.

“I’m not ready,” I said. “I need to keep it in my head right now. Besides, I don’t want him to think I have disposable—”

“Please,” he said.

“No, I’m serious, Henry, I feel like I’ll become overwhelmed.”

Quinn bounded into the kitchen with boyishly flushed cheeks and handed a sprig of rosemary to Henry. “What’s going on in here?” he asked. Quinn looked amazing to me standing there, his jeans draped from his waist, his muscular arms, the flashes of white blue in his eyes, his brown hair with the few gray strands.

Henry started breaking up the fragrant rosemary between his fingers and then sprinkled it over the long, raw pork tenderloin that sat on an old cookie sheet on the counter, and then he dipped his fingers into a salt cellar and sprinkled the pink grains over it too.

Quinn put his arm around me and I tipped my head into his cool cheek. And then he let go and said, “I’m going to put on a record.” Henry slid the pork into the oven and I followed Quinn into the living room. He put on Nina Simone and Henry came in with a bottle of burgundy and some short glasses.

“So tell us, Quinny, where have you been?”

“Well, I’ve been on tour with this country singer, Lynn James. Have you heard of her?”

Henry smiled at me and I shrugged my shoulders. “Nope,” he said. “She any good?”

“She sucks. Well, she’s all right. Depends what you’re into.” Quinn sipped his wine then smiled slyly as he thought about it. “She’s got nice guitars and the record company got her a bus, so, you know.” We all kind of laughed. Quinn enjoyed the fact that his life seemed absurd at times as much as we did.

“Well, you must have made some money.”

“Yeah, not bad, actually.”

The fire crackled and Henry got up to refill our glasses. Nina Simone sang about spells and sinnermen. “Francis Bacon’s sure getting a lot of press again. All those retrospectives,” said Henry.

“He was a crazy motherfucker,” said Quinn. “I read a biography. Crazy.”

Henry knew I loved Bacon—admired his particular style of being painterly and subversive, but Henry always had some kind of axe to grind about him and he liked to get me going on Francis Bacon. His timing tonight sucked.

“He was a genius,” said Henry.

“His lover killed himself,” said Quinn.

“He was a genius,” I said.

“It’s true,” said Henry. “He had an amazing sensibility for distorting the human form with such pretty pretty brushstrokes. Lucian Freud does a much better job. He’ll eclipse Bacon, has already, really.”

“Please,” I said. “He’s a totally different guy.”

“All that violent sex,” said Quinn.

“This is stupid,” I whispered. I pushed my back into the couch and stopped participating.

Quinn squeezed my knee and gave me an indulgent smile. “What’s up, Budge?” he said.

Henry got up and set the table with his mother’s old silver and some black cotton napkins. He flipped the record and then took a joint out of a rosewood box on the bookshelf. He sparked it up and handed it to Quinn, who hit it and passed it to me, but I waved him off. Henry took it with him to the kitchen and I heard the oven door yawn.

“Looks delicious,” he announced.

“You okay?” Quinn asked quietly.

“Tired.”

“You did good work today.” He kissed my forehead. “You’re really rocking it lately.” He raised his voice, “Isn’t Jayne just killing it these days, Hens? Have you seen her new work.”

Henry came out of the kitchen with the pork and some roasted beets and celery root on a bone china platter. “Let’s sit down,” he said.

Quinn and I wandered into the adjacent dining room with our fingers loosely woven. I always loved the beveled mirror that floated over a built-in sideboard with its dark unpainted wood. And on the wall that abutted the kitchen was the colorful Jacob Lawrence print of three women and four children. Henry hid it on one of the least conspicuous walls in the house.

“Her work is fantastic right now,” said Henry. His brows arched as he lowered his eyes to his plate and sliced a piece of pork before popping it into his mouth.

“I had pork tenderloin recently with cherry chutney, Hens. At that new restaurant that bottles its own whiskey,” I said. “What’s that place called?”

“Dunno,” said Henry.

“Have you seen the one with all neutral colored blocks in the background, like a cityscape, with umber colored women in the foreground?” asked Quinn.

“There are two of those that are really similar, one with a greenish sky and one with ochre foreground.” Henry looked into my eyes. “The one with the ochre was sold.”

“Hm,” said Quinn. He put down his fork. “Guess I just saw the big one with the greenish sky. It’s got great rhythm–the women, the buildings.” Quinn leaned gently into me. He smelled warm and clean. “It’s really good.”

The record ended and we heard the amplified brushing of the needle against the paper label. Henry got up and changed it. He put on Miles Davis–Sketches of Spain with its melancholy horn and its ominous processional percussion. I wanted to get the hell out of there. I didn’t like where the conversation was going. Besides, by now it seemed too late to fake good news.

“Yeah right,” said Henry. “The other one sold. That’s the one that went to Savannah.”

“Savannah?” said Quinn. He put his last bite into his mouth.

“Yeah, it went to a friend of mine.”

“Wow, Jayne, did you do well on it?” said Quinn.

I pushed my pork to the back of my plate. Quinn rubbed my back vigorously but I bristled.

Henry raised his shoulders and tipped his head. His eyes said, See? No big deal. “And she has a show in London – and one in New York.”

I rolled my eyes and clamped my jaw.

“Whoa, guess I’ve been in the dark,” said Quinn. “London? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed outside of our scope.”

“Our scope?” Quinn gave me a curious look, or maybe incredulous, I couldn’t tell. I felt busted.

Henry got up and went to the kitchen. I pushed my chair back and stacked my plate on Quinn’s and followed Henry. He was at the counter cutting into a butterscotch pie, his specialty. A fork slipped off the plates I was carrying and fell into the sink where it bounced and clanged excessively.

“You aren’t mad at me, are you?” said Henry.

“You know it’s totally insane that you would ask me that, right?”

“Why Darling? Quinny’s fine. He can know about your life. You’re doing well. Why don’t you share that with him?”

“Maybe because you already shared it with him.”

“It’s not as if it’s none of my business,” he said.

“That’s rich. Fuck you, Henry.”

I went into the entry, grabbed our coats and found Quinn in the dining room, where he was balancing on two legs of his chair reading a coffee table book about interior design. He was waiting for his pie.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Take it easy. What are you so warped out about?”

“I just want to go home. I have work to do.”

“Okay, well, let’s get you home to work then, Superstar.”

Henry came out with two plates of pie in one hand and the third in the other. “All right, then,” he said when he saw Quinn putting on his coat and me standing there in mine. He put the plates down on the table without resistance and showed us to the door. I opened it myself and stepped out onto the porch. The cold air swam up my legs. Henry winked at Quinn and gave him a one armed hug. He looked at me and said, “She’ll calm down.”

I turned on a heel and got into my car, it rumbled to life and Quinn got in. “What the fuck?” he said.

“I wanted to tell you in my own time,” I said.

“Why?” he said. “I think you’re flipping out. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

My vision slipped and my heart felt like it was crowding out my chest and I didn’t answer him the whole way home and the streetlights and stoplights bounced off the wet streets in an unnerving way. I thought I might kill Henry. I parked in front of my building and Quinn started rubbing my back and I knew he thought I was being really dramatic, and maybe I was, but I didn’t want him to leave again, but I didn’t want him to stay.

“Let’s go in,” he said.

Quinn took the walk, but I went through the garden where once split, now desiccated, tomatoes leached into the soil. The corn stalks that had stood so proudly against the August sun were now waterlogged and stooped over and they shone dully in the partly obscured moonlight like a fallen city. Water seeped into the seams of my boots when they sank into the place where I’d pulled out all of the beets. I thought moving forward was supposed to feel good. I stamped my feet against the concrete walk and Quinn took my hand and we walked the last ten feet to the brightly lit door. He keyed in my code and when we got into the entry he gave me a long tight hug.

“I’ll put you in the bath,” he said.

But when we got into my apartment Mark was in the shower so we lay down on my bed and I rolled all the way to the wall but the brick was cold through my wool dress. A few strands of my hair had caught in the texture of the bricks and I heard them snap out of my scalp when I moved into the center of the bed.

“I want to stay with you. I don’t want to travel anymore. It’s silly. I’m forty-three years old,” said Quinn.

I had thought I’d wanted to hear that for years. “What will you do here?” I said. I picked up his hand and studied the bone structure under the weathered skin. His hands made me think of wood and saltwater for no particular reason, but they also reminded me of guitars–the toned meaty places and the calloused pads. He’d tended the guitars of Patti Smith, and Johnny Thunders, Bonnie Raitt, and , and who knows who else – and now, Lynn James.

“I’ll get a job. I’ll work.”

Tears pooled warmly in my eyes and I couldn’t seem to help myself from crying because I didn’t think Quinn could work in Portland. He required more stimulation than three Portlands and he didn’t have many skills; he had no roots. His rooting device had been so thoroughly hacked and pruned away for so many years I had no faith in it at all, and I knew already that if he were living with me I would wake up every morning wondering and every time I came home I knew I would wonder if he would be gone again. And besides, we’d never learned how to settle down together.

“Come on Jayne. We’re older now. We can do this.” He rubbed down my hair.

“I don’t know, Quinn. Can we?” I didn’t cry anymore and he eventually got up and picked out a canvas by the window and hung it on a bolt that stuck out of the bricks. It was too high, but he just wanted to look at it. I rubbed my eyes and watched him watch it and then his knees and ankles cracked as he squatted and then sat on the floor. I heard the shooshing of water through the pipes die, and the click of the bathroom door so Mark must have come out, and then I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until morning and Quinn was reading by the window.

Elizabeth Lopeman teaches fiction writing at Portland State University. She is a freelance editor and arts and culture writer who lives in Portland, Oregon.