We were at this party, was the situation. Holden was holding forth on his theory of beauty gradients. “You can’t get out of your depth aesthetically,” he said. “You do that and you’re done for.”
“I’ve heard this before,” I said. “I know all this.”
“All men and women are divided along aesthetic lines, see. That’s just the way it is. There’s maybe twenty, twenty-two such strata. At the top you’ve got the movie stars and models, okay? Tom Cruise and that skinny bitch he’s married to, all those fuckers. Then the soap stars and TV anchors. Then commercial actors, then actual nontelevised attractive people, down to the average, sort of ugly, and at the bottom the real sad cases, cleft palates and the like.”
“Right.” I watched Astrid Miller make her way toward the keg.
“The trick here is that every person recognizes intuitively where they belong on the beauty gradient. This is the first thing you gauge when you walk into a room. Right? It’s like: ‘Okay, better than him, worse than him, way better than him.’ That’s how people know who they’re supposed to end up with. It’s like that song about Noah: The animals, they came on, they came on in twosies, twosies.”
“Wait a sec,” I said. “That’s about species. Species of animals.”
Holden tapped his temple. “That’s what they tell you it’s about, man. That song’s about who gets fucked by who. That’s what that whole thing is about.”
“You’re so full of shit,” I said.
“If I’m so full of shit, how do you explain Kim Forrest and DeWitt Henderson?” This was Holden’s trump card, and he displayed it with a princely fluttering of his hands.
Kim Forrest was the hottest girl at our high school. She had run through most of the varsity captains by sophomore year, but never gone all the way. Then this guy, DeWitt Henderson, transferred to our school. He was droopy-eyed and blond, full of hunky grace. All year they circled each other. And the way we heard the story—a story so often repeated it had become, among our pathetic stratum, a kind of masturbatory liturgy—when they finally hooked up, out behind the old grange silo, Kim came not once, not twice, but four times, and was so dazzled by DeWitt’s sexual sangfroid that, lying in his arms afterward, she wept with gratitude.
“You think that happens to anyone other than Henderson?” Holden said. “No way. Kim Forrest was saving herself for the guy who was her match on the beauty gradient. But the whole time she’s waiting, see, she’s getting more and more lathered up. She’s like a bottle of Don Perignon that’s been shaken for months, right? So when she finally gets popped—kaboom.”
“What about different cultures?” I said. “You gonna tell me the bushmen of the Kalahari lust after Kim Forrest?”
“I didn’t say that. You’d probably like it if I did, because you’d probably like a shot at some of that dusty Kalahari pussy. But I’m not saying that. The beauty gradient is a cultural determinant, my friend. But there ain’t a culture that’s exempt. The whole world, right down to fucking Nashua Point, Iowa, runs on a beauty gradient.”
I knew this well enough. My mother, after all, had once been the most beautiful woman in Nashua. This beauty was what spared her when her mind began to unravel five years ago. She had always been an eccentric, strolling the aisles of the grocery store in her bathrobe, humming tunes in public. It was when she began lighting small fires in the front yard and picketing the phone company that my father sought professional help. He was sickened by her blooming madness. And yet the rest of Nashua treated her gently, like a princess who wanders from her throne and lies down to sleep amid the cows. My own grandparents, who had settled Nashua when it was just corn and fences, refused to acknowledge their daughter’s condition. They were astounded when my father left.
“I’m trying to teach you something here,” Holden said. “Just look at the instant case. Look at your pal Astrid.” Astrid was the first girl I had ever kissed, on the spidery blacktop of Palmer elementary. “Astrid’s getting herself in trouble right now,” Holden said. “Even as we speak.”
“How’s that?”
“She’s making a play for Scott Milikan, right?”
“Who says?”
“Everyone knows this. Shit, look at the rack.” Astrid was wearing a red, velvety-type shirt about three sizes too small.
“So?”
“So she’s in trouble. Milikan’s out of her range. He’s at least three, four grades up on the gradient.”
This was true. Astrid, with her chunky frame and underbite, was no match for Milikan. He had a boxy jaw full of boxy teeth and tussled blond hair. Plus, he played soccer. He started ahead of me at sweeper.
“Who says Ast can’t get him? She looks good tonight.”
“I’m not saying she can’t get him. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, she won’t be able to keep him.”
Astrid sipped her beer and laughed. Milikan was a few steps away, pumping the keg, smiling, a man with options.
“Everyone knows Ast is making a play for him, and he knows it too. Don’t you doubt it. He’s got a few beers in him and he’s sizing her up, mostly around the hogans. Sure, Milikan’s saying, why the hell not? Problem is, he’s not in it for the long haul. Beer can blur the picture, but it can’t repaint the lines.”
“What about personality?” I said. “Personality counts for something.”
“Not compared to looks. The only thing that beats looks is power or money. For crying out loud, Tommy, who do you think is getting laid in this country? Are you, my friend, in the great scheme of things, getting laid? No, you’re getting various hues on le palette de blue balls. You know who’s getting laid? Rock musicians. Politicians. Athletes. Why? Why are these men getting laid? Why are these often very ugly men getting laid? Because they’ve got at least two of the magic three. Dennis Rodman? You think anyone wants to fuck him if he’s not Dennis Rodman? Bono? Bono is dog meat. Who fucked Bono before he was Bono? No one, that’s who. Ugly chicks, maybe.”
Astrid had left the keg. She was off somewhere, powdering something. Milikan was talking to another girl.
“And I must tell you, my friend, this is good sex we’re talking about. Don’t delude yourself into thinking the prime studage of this country is having substandard sex. No siree. They are having pornquality, multi-gasm sex. They have fucked so many women, and women are so delighted to be fucking them, so moist at the idea of being part of the imprimatur, that these guys are getting hummers. These women, when they suck these guys off, they’re humming. Like the seven dwarfs. Humming while they work.”
“The dwarfs whistled.”
Holden and I had been best friends forever, though that was going to change soon because I was going East for college, while Holden—who was probably twice as smart as I was—was taking summer-school classes. He hoped to get his diploma in time to maybe enroll at Foothill, the local community college.
Milikan finally surrendered the keg, and I went to get more beer.
I felt a hip nudge me.
“Hey,” I said.
Astrid showed me her lovely underbite. “Hey yourself.”
“You look great.”
“Oh Tommy. How sweet!” She gave me an exuberant little hug. You could tell she was sloshed. “How’s the philosopher?”
“Oh, you know. As full of shit as ever.”
Astrid smiled and I could see a lipstick stain on one of her front teeth. She glanced over my shoulder. Milikan was behind me, talking with this little blond, a sophomore. Astrid hugged me again and stumbled off toward Milikan.
“That looked enjoyable.” Holden sniffed at me. “Did she spray you?”
“Drink your beer.”
We stood there and watched Astrid and Milikan and the blond. Astrid was doing most of the talking, her boobs right out there, swaying like loose signage.
“She looks hot,” I said.
“Not hot enough,” Holden said. “Milikan ends up taking blondie home.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
* * *
Astrid left the party with Milikan, in his fucking Jeep Cherokee, wobbled out the door, doughy but triumphant.
“You were wrong,” I said, as I climbed into Holden’s car.
Holden shook his head and grinned in a way meant to indicate I had missed the point. “A war of attrition. That’s all. Ast just set it right out there, said: Here’s what you get, bub. No games. No hassles. A one-night deal. Blondie’s biding her time. Smart girl.”
“Shut up.”
“The situation will correct itself,” Holden said.
“What if Milikan likes Ast, huh? What if he falls for her? You ever consider that?”
“Won’t happen.”
“Why not?”
“Different strata, sonny boy.”
“That’s sick,” I said. “You’re one sick fucking bastard.”
“What are you getting so worked up about?”
“I’m not worked up.”
Holden rolled through a stop sign. “It’s not like I invented the rules, all right? The beauty gradient’s just something that’s out there. Like photosynthesis. Wouldn’t exist at all, if it was up to me. Shit. If it was up to me, girls would dig us doggy guys with personality, okay? But it’s not up to me.”
“Just drive.”
I was drunk on about three beers and I hadn’t liked watching the little drama unfold, blondie fluttering around Milikan in all her unattainable beauty and Astrid crowding him, her tits brushing his arm every few seconds. Girls never behaved that way around me.
“Look,” Holden said, “if it’s any consolation, I think Astrid is within your range.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it means. You’re a couple of notches down, but she’s within your range. She likes that you’re heading East to school. She thinks it shows character, you’re not just sticking around here and going to State. She told me.”
This pleased me. I myself was dreading school. As much as I hated Nashua, the idea of adjusting to a new city terrified me. Then I remembered Milikan, the muscles showing beneath his soccer sweats, his phony-ass teeth.
“Lot of good it did me tonight.”
“Wait it out,” Holden said. “We’re in July. It’s a long way till August.”
“September. I leave September second.”
“Right.”
We were drifting down Alma, through flashing reds. Out beyond the strip malls was the corn, all that fucking corn, growing yellower by the day. I thought about my mom, wondered what kind of state she’d be in when I got home.
“What about you,” I said. “Jenno looked good tonight, no?” Holden had been feebly circling Jenno Wilkes for months.
“Nah. I’m laying low for a while.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Holden began tapping the steering wheel and shifted in his seat. “It means what it means, Kimosabe. Hey, did I ever tell you about Valentino?”
“Who?”
“Rudolph Valentino. The silent-film star.”
I shrugged.
“You’ve seen pictures of him, right?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Sure you have.”
Holden had this habit of never quite allowing me to not know something.
“So tell me. Tell me about Randolph-fuckin-Valentino.”
“Rudolph,” Holden said. He was impossible to annoy. “All right, here’s a guy who couldn’t pay to get laid for most of his life. He was an Italian, right? Dark, swarthy type, like you. He grows up in this little town, down there in Sicily. And when he’s about fifteen or something, his mom puts him on a ship to America. He can’t speak a word of English, right? And he’s living in this era that has zero tolerance for immigrants. So he gets to America and he’s bumbling along, working as a ditchdigger out in L.A. A ditchdigger, for Chrissakes. Him and his Italian buddies. Just swinging a shovel, sweating all day in the sun and eating onion sandwiches.”
“Onion sandwiches?” I said.
“He can’t afford meat,” Holden said. “Meat cost a lot of money back then. Anyway, one day this big-shot director spots him. They’re doing a job out near the director’s house. Digging a ditch. Valentino’s humping along. His shirt’s all sweat-stained and he hasn’t shaved in like a month and he’s puffing on a little Turkish cigarette. But this director, he sees something, some kind of special mark. He has his driver pull the car over and he calls out to Valentino, ‘Young man. Young man!’ All the other guys, the other Italians, they’re whistling and hooting. Like: Who is this old fag? But three days later, Valentino is cast as the lead in his first movie. He goes on to become the single greatest sex symbol of the entire century. The gold standard of the male beauty gradient.”
“Your point being?”
“Wait it out, Kimosabe. Tomorrow never knows.”
“Very moving,” I said. “Thanks.” It was a strange story for Holden to tell, full of that ugly-duckling hopefulness that my mother was always pushing.
“Hey, lemme ask you a favor,” Holden said quietly. “Can I crash at your place?”
“Sure.”
Holden had problems with his stepdad. My mom didn’t mind. She liked Holden. She said he had character.
I was working six days a week that summer, scooping ice cream at the Hungry Penguin. Holden was working construction with his stepdad, and this was not a pleasant situation. He didn’t like for Holden to say anything, which was like telling a puppy not to wag its tail. Holden would never admit this, but the old man kind of bullied him around.
We went to all the lame parties that summer, the ones at Robbie Grove’s and Carrie Madsen’s and Trent Carmichael’s and even one up in Porter Hills—which aren’t really hills, just a plateau where the rich kids live. Holden used to live up there. His real dad had been a doctor.
The parties were always the same thing—a keg in the backyard, lots of milling around, maybe a few drunk girls dancing. This is just what we did. It gave our lives a focal point, however dim, and kept us locked within the social cloister of high school, where we felt safe to rail against the lives we were about to leave behind. Also, these parties were advertised as the only way to get laid in our town, however remote this possibility might have been in the case of Holden and myself.
My mother said nothing about my impending departure, though her behavior became increasingly erratic. Often I would return home to find her peeling the wallpaper with a steak knife, or painting designs on her arms with my old watercolor set. Her gaze was jittery and the meals she prepared were elaborate and nonsensical: mashed potatoes with chocolate fondue, Jell-O parmigiano.
She and Holden got along famously. I could hear them giggling over Scrabble, or assailing the late-night movie on Channel 39. They both talked back to the TV. If I returned from a party alone, my mother would inevitably look up and, with a certain lazy grimace caused by her medication, say: “Where’s Holden?”
July’s last party was thrown by my neighbor, Liz Wheaton. I was working late that night and had to race home on my bike to catch the end. I turned onto my street and saw someone walking, a girl in a short skirt and thick-soled sandals. I recognized those legs, which were thick and pale. It wasn’t going to look good, me riding my old ten-speed, wearing a shirt with a little penguin holding a platter of ice cream. But I was thrilled at the chance to talk with Astrid alone.
I circled around and called out to her.
“Who is it?” She jerked a hand to her throat.
“It’s me.”
“God! Tommy, you scared me.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry. I was just coming to see you.”
“Well, here I am.” I couldn’t quite make out her face, which was hidden in the shadows cast by the mulberry trees.
“How was the party?”
“The same old stuff.”
I laughed a little because stuff was what Holden and I had taken to calling our crotch areas. As in: You ain’t never gonna find a home for that stuff. Or: Don’t be bringing that stuff round here, less you aims to use it, Mr. Rooster. We were dorks. This is how dorks in our town talked.
Astrid stepped out of the shadows. She was puffy around the eyes.
“You’re lucky to be getting out,” she said. “Heading off somewhere real.”
“What happened? Was it something at the party?”
She took a breath and straightened up, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Nothing I couldn’t have predicted a month ago. Walk me home, okay Tommy?”
I don’t know that I can express the extent to which I welcomed this invitation. My body made all sorts of little yips. It felt good to be taken into confidence, to play a supporting role. I wanted that to be the extent of my interest. But, of course, I was also hoping. Any guy who tells you otherwise is full of shit.
“Sure,” I said. “Yeah.”
“I’m no idiot,” Astrid said. “I knew Milikan was a sketcher.” That was the word we used for guys who slept around a lot, whereas girls in our town who did that were called skeez. “I figured it might be a one-night thing. But he didn’t need to play me. He didn’t need to tell me how he was so happy to be with me and wasn’t this special and he’d been waiting for months.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah, he said a lot of crap. A real sketcher. A real sketch artiste.” Astrid laughed, sadly. “And, you know, you always wait for the phone call. I mean, we had a great time. That’s the worst part.”
A great time. I pondered those words, what they implied in terms of limbs and leverage and sweat. I ached to be the subject of such a statement.
“I knew he might not call, okay? But there was no need for him to show up with Little Miss Perky Tits. I mean, he knew all my friends were going to be there.”
“He showed up with her and everything?”
“They were macking the whole time. God, I hate that little bitch.” Astrid looked surprised she’d actually said this. Immediately her tone softened. “It’s not her fault. Whatever. Scott doesn’t like me because I’m not a little sporty girl.”
“What about volleyball?”
“Volleyball doesn’t make you a sporty girl.”
She was right. This was, in its own way, a kind of variation on the beauty gradient. There were people who had bodies that looked as if they played sports and people who didn’t and often it was irrelevant, especially in the case of girls, whether you actually played sports or not. The cheerleaders, for instance, who wouldn’t be caught dead chucking a softball, all had sporty bods. It was a matter of appearances. And there was no middle ground, not in high school, not in a town like Nashua. I didn’t have a sporty body, even though I played soccer and badminton. I looked like “a fence post with arms,” as Holden’s real dad put it after one of my long-ago physicals.
“I knew he was a sketcher,” Astrid murmured. “But I would’ve liked to have fooled around with him again.” She shook her head. “Hey, you should maybe go back and see about the philosopher.”
“Why?”
“He was getting pretty wasted.”
“He can take care of himself,” I said.
We were near Astrid’s house. I felt a gnawing desire to touch her, to touch her there under the flickering streetlamp, the faint moon. I knew the circumstances were all wrong, that she was heart-broken over this jerk, and that any affection thrown my way was going to be of the incidental, compromised, rebound type. And I didn’t care.
I felt I deserved Astrid. I worked hard in school, and during the summers. I worked hard at listening to people, and helping them, and I had a mom who was difficult to live with, crazy, and this craziness carried a kind of taint that I had to battle against all the time, to convince everyone, myself included, that I was just a normal kid, maybe a little goofy, but normal.
“The guy’s a jerk,” I said. “Milikan. He doesn’t know a good thing when he sees it. Really. He’s making a big mistake.”
“You’re sweet,” she said.
“Really. He acts like he’s God’s gift. You should hear the way he talks.”
This was a mistake. Astrid’s eyes sharpened. “What does he say?”
“Oh, you know. Just the standard bullshit.”
“Does he talk about the girls he’s scammed on?”
“No,” I said quickly. “Nothing like that. He talks about other guys’ girlfriends, how a particular girl looked at a party. Shit like that.”
Astrid seemed relieved and then, in the space of a sigh, simply tired of worrying the situation. She was a big, cheerful girl and some of that cheer was obviously in place as a way of holding dark feelings at bay.
“Hey,” she said, “when’re you heading out?”
“Beginning of September.”
“Psyched?”
“Yeah, I guess. It’ll be good to get out of Nashua.”
We were right in front of Astrid’s house, a house I used to pass every day on my way back from grade school. It was a green colonial, two stories high. I’d been inside a couple of times, for parties. Her father was a dentist and her mother was a big shot in the PTA who made unbelievably good cupcakes. When I was a little kid I imagined it would be nice to have Astrid as a girlfriend because I could have those cupcakes whenever I liked. My mom didn’t bake.
“I’m jealous,” Astrid said, and sighed. “I’d like to get out of this whole county.”
“State’ll be cool,” I said. “I mean, there’ll be plenty of people you know.”
“That’s the problem,” she said. “Everywhere I go around here I already know everybody.”
“Just think of it as an option,” I said. “You can hang out with them, if you want. But they’ll be plenty of new people.”
“Right,” she announced. “The best way to be a grown-up is to be a grown-up.”
I was hoping for an invitation to come inside, or at least sit on her porch. She might want some company, and we could shoot the breeze in the way grown-ups do, talking into the night, having some wine and cheese, maybe. Sophisticated food. And then, when the time came, one or the other of us would make a very sophisticated reference to getting ready for bed, and we would go about our business like nothing special was going to happen, just two grown-ups getting ready to have consensual intercourse.
“Listen, Tommy, thanks for walking me home. You’re the best. Really. You should go see about the philosopher.” Astrid gave me a quick hug and I looked into her round face for something, anything, beyond friendship. Her lipstick was crumbling at the edges.
The quick hug was the worst, most deadly sign of friendship. It showed just how little physical contact could mean. Even cold shoulders were better than quick hugs, Holden maintained, because they at least signified some sort of tension.
I was sure Valentino never got a quick hug.
There wasn’t much left of the party by the time I arrived. A few couples were lumbering to some old Lionel Richie song. Liz Wheaton herself was in tears for some reason and her friends were huddled around her. The keg was suds. A snub-nosed little blond who had once kissed Holden at a junior high dance and never forgiven him looked up when I opened the gate. “If it isn’t the fucking Good Humor man,” she said.
I stood there on that lawn and stared at the drunk dancing couples and the few guys picking at chips and felt an intense need to be free of it all. It was like Astrid said: everywhere I went, I knew everybody, and they knew me. I was the sweet, skinny kid who scooped ice cream in a smudged white shirt, who got put into soccer games at the end, when it no longer mattered.
I was happy to see Holden’s car in front of my house. He could tell me what happened at the party, at least. I put my bike away and slipped in through the garage door. I didn’t like to make too much noise because my mom was a light sleeper. Anything you did might wake her up.
I flicked on the light in my room but Holden wasn’t there. Then I heard a door close down the hall. I bumped right into him in the hallway.
“Hey dude,” he said. His shirt was unbuttoned and he stunk of beer.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Nothing,” Holden said. “I decided to crash over here, thas all. Too lit to drive home.”
“Who let you in?”
“Your ma.”
I didn’t like the way Holden kept angling his face away.
“Were you in there?” I pointed to my mom’s room.
“Shit, dude. Lemme take a piss.” Holden ducked into the bathroom. I reached for the doorknob but Holden held it shut. “I’ll be out inna sec,” he said. “Just hold on.”
I knocked on my mom’s door, but there was no answer. Holden took what sounded like the world’s longest piss. Finally, he appeared in the doorway.
He held up his hands, like the light from my desk lamp was hurting him. Then I saw that one eye was all red and swollen. His lip was swollen too.
“Fuck, dude, what happened?”
Holden touched his lip. “You ever been punched? Man, gettin’ punched sucks.”
“Who punched you?”
“Aw shit. My head really hurts. I wanna go sleep. Lemme go sleep.” He leaned into my room and slumped against the wall and slid down, until he sat with his head between his knees.
“He hit you, didn’t he?”
Holden stayed where he was and waved his arm a bit. I could see that his knuckles were bruised, and I hoped that meant he’d gotten in a few shots of his own.
“Yeah,” Holden said quietly.
“Why’d he hit you?”
Holden’s head, with all its shaggy hair, bobbed a bit. Then it stopped. “I was lit,” he said. “Whatever. I talked back. I told him what I really thought. Christ he hits hard.”
“Did you call the cops? The cops could arrest him for hitting a minor.”
“No. No cops.”
“So that’s why you came back here? You were talking with my mom?”
“Yeah,” Holden said. His head began bobbing again and I could hear wet breath rattling through his nose. From down the hall, I heard my mother start wailing. Then Holden began crying too.
There are moments when life requires you to rise to the occasion of some deep, otherwise irrational understanding. This is what separates friendship from acquaintance, kindness from consideration, grace from goodness, maybe, and in the sound of both of them, Holden and my mother, weeping and weeping in the small house where I had grown up, in our shitass town, on this too-warm July night, with snot dripping from Holden’s nose onto his bloodstained shirt, I saw how desperate he was. The feeling of a life going nowhere, of being an enemy in his own home, of having no place to put his thoughts or feelings except into sad, overblown theories, his desire to replace one mother for another, and, in a moment of weakness, his desire to touch and be touched, and all the anger, and how all these feelings might make him want to do something taboo and full of betrayal. I understood all of this. I even wanted to forgive him. But I knew also that I needed to get out of the house, needed to get away from the two of them, to clear my head.
“You’re in pretty rough shape,” I said. “Why don’t you take the bed.”
“Hey Tommy,” he said. “Yer the best, man. I gotta tell you something, okay?”
“You don’t have to tell me anything.”
“No, lemme tell you man. Hey man.”
“I’m gonna go get the fan. Go to sleep.”
“No man, you listen to this, man! You’re my best friend and you gotta listen.” Holden was hyperventilating. I didn’t know what to do. I stood in the doorway with my chest clenching and unclenching.
Holden tried to get up. He wanted to address me face to face. But his legs gave way and he hit the carpet and lay there palming his forehead. “All that stuff about Valentino,” he said. “That stuff was bullshit. I made it up, okay? Valentino was born beautiful. He was a beautiful fuckin’ little baby.” Holden looked up for a sec. His eyes were wet and starting to blacken. “Look, your ma and me were jus talkin.”
“Sure,” I said. “Go to sleep.”
I slipped outside and let my feet march me through the neighborhood I knew so well that even the cracks in the sidewalks seemed reminders of a history I did not want, that I was going to have to rewrite anyway. I got the idea that I wanted to see my old grade school. I did this sometimes, late at night. Or had done this, anyway, in the days after my dad left. I liked how small everything seemed, small and peaceful, the playground stuff and the murals and even the doors to the classrooms.
The lights were out at Astrid’s house, but I walked over to the window I was pretty sure was hers and knocked. I tried to imagine what it was like inside her room, what it smelled like and where the bed was, and what the sheets felt like. I saw a light flick on and after a minute a hand cleared the curtain away. For a second I thought I’d fucked up, because the face hovering behind the pane looked saggy and webbed. Then I saw the volleyball T-shirt and realized it was Astrid after all, only that she was tired.
When she saw me her shoulders fell a bit. She cranked open the window. “Tommy. What are you doing?”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m heading over to Palmer. You know, to the playground, to hang out. It’s quiet over there, and I thought, you know, you might want to come.”
The lamp behind her was shining through her T-shirt. I could see the outline of her chest, each breast swelling over her ribs, and I guess I must have been staring because she went and got a robe and came back and sat on the sill. “It’s late, Tommy.” She yawned. “I was sleeping.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry.”
She yawned again. I worried she was going to ask me to leave.
“You’re going to Palmer?” she said. “Why’re you going there?” She peered at me more carefully now. “What’s going on, Tommy?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I just wanted to talk.”
Astrid played with the belt on her robe, ran it between two fingers, let it fall. “Do we have to go to Palmer?” she said. “It’s creepy over there. I don’t like the apartments near there. Just come around to the porch.”
“Sure,” I said. “Cool.”
“Shhhh. Quiet down, Tommy. If my dad hears you, he’ll kill me.”
“Sorry. Sorry.”
I went around and sat on the porch swing, and thought about the last time I had been on that porch, which was five years ago, at a big Memorial Day picnic. My mom had her hair piled on top of her head, and a summer dress, and fresh lipstick every time she turned around. All the girls from my year in school were there, and Holden in his sad little leisure suit. I watched my mother lean over the table to serve potato salad. Her arm moved like a swan’s neck and her lips were the wings of butterflies and I can see now that it took a lot of effort for her to look as put together as she did. It was days like that, I guess, that kept my dad around a couple more years.
But now Astrid was padding toward the door and I looked down and arranged myself, sort of puffed my crotch and finger-combed my hair. Astrid had her robe on and a baseball cap. She looked around and then sat down on the wicker chair across from me.
“What’s going on?” she whispered. “You’re acting weird, Tommy.”
“Weird?”
“Knocking on my window like that. You nearly broke the glass.”
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay. You were so upset before.”
“And this thing of going over to Palmer? What kind of crazy thing is that to do?”
I was glad Astrid hadn’t turned on any lights, because the way she said this rattled me. Her tone reminded me of my dad during his visits, the way he questioned me, as if frisking my heart for sorrow. What I’d envisioned when I woke Astrid was this romantic scene which would involve her realizing that she loved me, or at least liked me enough to take off her clothes. And also, later, afterward, that she would understand me, that I might be able to put my head in her lap and explain some of the things that had happened and the feelings I was having.
But now it was going the other direction and I was having to realize that I’d had all these crazy desires, and that they were just that: crazy. That rather than being rescued by the love of Astrid Miller, I was actually exposing myself in a foolish way, and this was dangerous. I felt like I might start bawling. “I was just worried about you,” I said quietly. “You know, you’re usually a pretty happy person, a strong person, and I wanted to make sure you were okay, that’s all.”
“I’m fine,” she said. I could tell she wanted to say something more, to maybe defend herself from so much caretaking. But what she said was this: “How’s your mom?”
I don’t know how much she knew about my home situation, but she must have known some because her dad worked at the clinic where my mom got her medication.
I said nothing.
“I used to think about your mom,” she said. “She is such a beautiful woman. Is she all right, Tommy? Is that what this is about?”
I felt something shutter up inside me and shook my head and tried to laugh. “No. It’s like I told you, I just wanted to talk. No big deal.”
Astrid nodded.
I tried to make my mind go blank, and when that didn’t work I heard myself say, “Listen, Ast, I just wanted to tell you a story. That’s the truth. As I was walking back to my house I was thinking about this story I heard recently. About Valentino. Rudolph Valentino.”
“The old movie star?”
“Yeah.” I swallowed, and waited for my voice to firm up. “Do you know anything about Valentino?”
It was a warm night in Nashua and the crickets were sawing away on their legs, and I could see, for a moment, that I was going to leave it all behind, that I didn’t have much longer, and that made the night, with its dark air and failed moon, almost beautiful. And then Astrid did something that was also quite beautiful, something that probably saved my life, in the sense that I could keep it in my memory forever, and return to it, and let it stand against everything else that seemed so awfully true at that moment.
She loosened the strap of her robe and pulled it open a bit and fanned herself, and I could see the tops of her breasts there, rising from the white of her chest. And she nodded at me, nodded me forward, and I saw from her expression that this was like a gift she was giving me, a final gift, and I got up slowly and knelt down before her. And she closed her eyes and took my head in her hands and moved me against her skin, which was warm and smooth and smelled like lotion. And she said, “Tell me.” And I said, “Tell you what?” And she said, “Tell me what you were going to tell me. Tell me about Valentino.”