7

IT WAS great to be back on the road. As I walked across the Bridgeport Bridge to Ohio under a pink mackerel sky, my exhilaration kept growing. I loved the bite of the cold, the steam of my breath, the rhythmic swing of my legs—loved being up, and out, and moving. This was exactly what I needed. I should have remembered that my nighttime thoughts were often melodramatic, overblown, even, on some fundamental level, unreal (in the Buddhist sense of illusion); in order to disperse them, all I had to do was encounter the solid and surprising edges of the world as it is. I felt graced by luck and made Huntington in three rides.

As Carol had told me to do, I called her once I got into town. She picked me up in a blue Buick and swept me up immediately into the strange, somewhat unnerving effervescence she was radiating. “Oh, John, hello!” in her phony, faintly British accent, leaning over to give me a quick peck on the cheek. “Thank you so much for coming. You’ve saved me from the ultimate depths of despair,” driving away before I had the door quite shut, tailgating the guy in front of her. “The moment we’re home, all of us resume our appointed roles in the ancient family drama . . . Oh, damn!” slamming on the brakes. “I’m considered hopelessly impractical, the silly little sister who studies poetry,” turning to look at me, her eyes sparkling. “My parents treat me like a twelve-year-old, and I can laugh about it when I’m away,” aiming the car continually uphill, away from the river, onto broad shady streets where the houses were starting to look like mansions, “but when I’m in the midst of it . . . Well, I’ve been going simply mad. It’s incredible to see you. How are you?”

We wound our way into a neighborhood that looked down over a park. Lots of money, I thought. Carol didn’t use the garage, slid the Buick to a stop directly below the front door. I followed her up the steps and inside where I was astonished to see, hanging above our heads, a thing made of a million pieces of cut crystal; of course I knew that “chandelier” was the name for it, but the term seemed too modest for such an elaborate, infinitely convoluted contraption of hard-edged glitter. Carol caught me looking up, laughed. “How do you like the Jewish Baroque? My dad had it shipped over from Italy. Every single piece of it came individually wrapped in tissue paper.”

Carol was walking quickly, her pleated skirt swinging, the leather heels of her loafers banging down hard on the parquet floor. A very pretty girl, a Negro (as we would have said then), stepped aside to let us go by. “Hi, Becky,” Carol said. “This is John Dupre . . . This is Becky. She helps us out.”

I guessed Becky to be in her twenties. She wasn’t exactly in uniform—wasn’t wearing an apron—but her navy blue dress was so severely prim and utilitarian that she was defined by it. I didn’t know anybody whose family had a maid (even the Revingtons didn’t; they had a Polish cleaning lady, but that was a whole other matter), and I felt hopelessly out of my depth.

I followed Carol upstairs. I was staying, I gathered, in a room that belonged to one of her brothers—a strangely impersonal space that looked as though it had been designed for boys in general but not for any boy in particular: paintings of sailing ships and an ornamental barometer, a massive oak desk and an equally massive bed with an oak headboard, everything done in shades of brown and beige. “You did bring a suit?”

“Sure,” I said, fishing it out of my knapsack.

“Oh, you’re pathetic . . . Give it to me. Yes, the shirt too.”

“Look, you don’t . . .”

“Shhh.” She pressed her fingers against my lips, took my hand, and pulled me along, back downstairs again, talking the whole way. I’d seen her like this before—Carol at her most vivacious, bright-eyed, charming, and phony. She usually reserved this performance for Andrew, her Englishman, and I suppose I should have been flattered that she was doing it for me, but it set my teeth on edge. I kept wanting to say, “Hey, it’s just me, OK? Stop it.”

I heard a murmur of voices in distant parts of the house, smelled something cooking that was rich and meaty. Someone was running a vacuum cleaner. I’d been imagining that Mrs. Rabinowitz would be like Bill Cohen’s mother—short, round, warm, and funny—but she wasn’t. She was a tall, cool, handsome woman who didn’t crack a smile. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said, and I saw an unmistakable ripple of distaste pass over her face; then her eyes moved away from me, back to the arrangement of silver on the mahogany sideboard. Becky was doing the arranging. Carol thrust my suit and shirt into Becky’s arms. “Could you iron these, please? No hurry, just some time before tonight. Thank you so much.” Mrs. Rabinowitz shot Carol an exasperated look. “It’s going to be a great party, Mom,” Carol said.

Her mother shrugged—an eloquent gesture—and turned her back on us. Carol grabbed my hand and whisked me out of there, back outside and into the Buick. “Your mother doesn’t like me,” I said.

“Don’t take it personally. The main person she doesn’t like right now is me.”

We were rushing to Carol’s hair appointment. I’d never been inside a beauty salon in my life. “Maybe I’ll go for a walk,” I said, but Carol was already towing me through the door where I was confronted by a dozen women and girls. The youngest looked to be about twelve, the oldest seventy; all of them were eyeing me suspiciously. There was not a male anywhere to be seen.

I was thankful to be hidden away inside a small pink cubicle. A fat lady with a blurry downstate accent washed Carol’s hair and set it on enormous rollers, lowered a huge silver sci-fi dryer over Carol’s head, and I had nothing to do but flip uneasily through last year’s issues of Glamour. Eventually Carol emerged; the fat lady unwound the rollers, leaving Carol’s head decorated with a precise arrangement of stiff black cylinders, and began to brush them out. The manicure girl arrived with her cart and began to work on Carol’s nails. “This party’s a big deal,” Carol was saying to me. “It rotates around year to year, and when it’s your turn, you’re supposed to outdo everybody else, absolutely kill them with excess . . . just like something out of Veblen. Oh, boy, am I ever going to be on display! Just wait till you see my dress. Oh, just wait till you see my shoes. You’re going to drop dead, I promise. Do you want me in a color?” holding up a hand.

“I don’t know. Do you want a color?”

“Here’s your chance, John. Do with me what you will.”

All three women were laughing. I wasn’t sure if they were laughing at me, but I certainly felt very much left out of the joke. I stared at the cute little bottles of nail polish, chose one that was as red as holly berries. “Of course that’s what you’d like,” Carol said.

Waving her newly painted nails in the air, Carol had me open her purse, pay the bill for her, and then drive her home. “I bet you like your girls helpless, don’t you, John?”

Returning to her brother’s room, I found my suit and shirt pressed and laid out neatly on the bed. I hadn’t worn that outfit since last spring when I’d taken Natalie to her grad parties, and, remembering her, I wished that I’d gone to Morgantown—as I very well could have. I paced up and down, smoking, feeling increasingly jumpy, waiting. Then, with a light tap at the door, there was Carol in a classic cocktail dress, an iridescent taffeta that threw back flickers of a second color, aquamarine flaring off the deep green. She entered with a feminine authority that dispelled in an instant any thought of Natalie in her pedal pushers—swept into the room, bringing with her the tangy scent of her floral perfume. She must have spent hours on her make-up. She smiled and executed a slow-motion pirouette, making her skirt swing. “Well, do you like it?”

“Like it? I love it.”

She hadn’t put her shoes on yet. Her nylons were sheer as smoke. “And don’t you look nice,” she said.

Laughing, she led me down the hall, the taffeta rustling with every step. Entering her bedroom, I had again the sense of an oddly impersonal space, one designed, not for Carol specifically, but for a young lady: framed Watteau prints, a canopied bed, an elaborate vanity table, and, of course, the mandatory full-length mirror, everything in gold, sky blue, and creamy white. The clothes Carol had been wearing in the afternoon—even her bra and panties—were scattered all over the floor; I had to step over them. “Here,” she said, handing me a pearl necklace, and bent her head forward, gently cupping the back of her pageboy with both hands. “If you mess up my hair, I’ll kill you.”

The skin at the nape of her neck felt warm, smelt flowery. Her red nails gleamed beautifully against the black of her hair. I fastened the necklace. “Thank you,” she said, and turned to face me. She handed me a shoebox from her dresser. I held it a moment, unsure what she wanted. Then I took off the lid, folded back the tissue paper, and found a pair of black patent heels. Very high heels. “Do you want to put them on me?” she said in a low purring voice.

I don’t know what my face showed, but whatever it was, it made her laugh. “Oh, you don’t have to. But I thought you might want to . . . You’ll probably need a shoehorn. There’s one over in that middle drawer.”

I had to paw through scarves and belts to find it. My mouth had gone dry. Carol stepped to the end of her bed and took hold of one of the posts supporting the canopy—to steady herself, I supposed. I knelt at her feet, lifted the shoes out of the box. They were, like everything else she owned, of the very best quality. When they had been resting in their innocent white tissue paper, they’d looked as brilliantly hard as mirrors, but running my fingertips over one of them, I felt a shiny black surface that curved, that gave, that offered a sleek resistance.

I took her foot, felt the warmth of it through the silky film of her stocking, guided her toes in, slipped the shoehorn into the back of the shoe, pressed her heel in. She wiggled her foot, stepped down. I heard that small conclusive sound of her heel sliding home into the tight leather pocket. I took the other shoe out of its box and went through the process again.

“My God, are these ever high!” she said. “I’m practically en pointe.” She was exaggerating. Kneeling at her feet, I could see that she had a long way to go before she would have been en pointe, but still they were extremely high heels, probably the highest heels you could ordinarily buy—that is, without resorting to the little ads at the back of men’s magazines.

I stood up slowly. I was suffering, as I had sometimes with Linda, a sexual intensity that went far beyond something as simple as mere arousal. She was giving me an amused, knowing smile. “Hi, shorty,” she said.

“I’m still taller than you are,” I said in a hoarse voice I could barely recognize.

“Yes, but just nicely. Now I’m the right height to kiss.”

Although I wasn’t aware of having done it, I must have stepped toward her. “Oh, but not now,” she said, alarmed, making a gesture to stop me. “You can kiss me later. After midnight. I promise.”

She walked away in quick tiny steps, did a pirouette and walked back. “Oh, John, you’re so easy to please. If we were going together, I’d have to throw away all my flats and wear nothing but spikes.”

I didn’t think I was that easy to please, but she was so perfectly a figure out of my fantasies that I might as well have created her. I was appalled, both at her and at myself. She was playing a role for all she was worth, and I could see exactly how she was playing it, but I was falling for it nonetheless: that parody of a perfumed, painted, powdered, pampered little tease was exactly what I wanted all the way down to the finest detail.

“What’s it feel like?” I asked her. It wasn’t something I’d planned to say, and I’d surprised myself, but I had to keep going. “You know, to get all dressed up like that and then put yourself on display?”

I could see the beginning of some smartass Noël Coward line forming in her mind, but then she stopped. She looked puzzled. “You really want to know, don’t you?” As suddenly as if she’d just lowered a mask, she’d been transformed into someone I knew and liked. “You’re such a strange boy,” she said. “Sometime I’ll try to tell you . . .” She laughed. “Oh, come on, sweetie, it’s New Year’s Eve. Let’s go have fun!”

• • •

FUN? DRINKING a bubbly brown fluid with a celery stick in it, talking nonstop, laughing, even giggling, her eyes turned up to full blast, Carol shoved me into an uproarious sea of relatives: “This is John Dupre, my friend from WVU.” (I imagined every one of them thinking: Dupre? Is he Jewish?) Uncle Max, Uncle Sol, and Uncle Jake who lifted a squealing Carol into the air by her Scarlett O’Hara waist: “This is the college girl? You gotta be kidding. She should be in movies.” Uncle Izzy, Uncle Joey, Uncle Art. (“He’s not really my uncle,” she said about half of them.) Aunt Ruth, Aunt Maggie, Aunt Essie. (Carol waved her fingers in their faces: “Look at my nails! Aren’t you proud of me?”) Brother Michael who seemed like a nice guy. (At any rate, he spent a full minute talking to me: “English, huh? I bet that’s why you get along with Carol. What do you plan to do, teach?”) Her father, short and wiry with inky black eyebrows, who shook my hand and then dismissed me just as quickly as his wife had done. Guzzling the superb imported beer (“Pilsner from Pilsen!” brother Michael had said, pouring me a huge mug of it), I decided that Carol’s parents could go to hell. I was feeling that old reliable buzz coming on.

Grinning like a cretin, I followed Carol into a surging tangle of cousins, and boyfriends and girlfriends of cousins, and more kids our age who looked like cousins but weren’t really cousins— the whole lot of them whooping their way toward midnight. Handsome dark-haired boys in Ivy League suits and polished Florsheims seized my hand with the grip of death. Girls met girls, shrieked, hugged, and then yelled at each other over the din: “Oh, Carol, I hate you. You’ve lost so much weight.”

“It’s an optical illusion. You wouldn’t believe the waspie I’m wearing.” We wormed our way into the living room where middle-aged couples were dancing to a stack of LPs. (Every record sounded like Glenn Miller, and I despised Glenn Miller). The children were supposed to be down in the rec room, but they kept exploding back upstairs: rampaging little boys with noisemakers shoved into their mouths, screaming little girls with their petticoats flying, playing hide-and-seek, using the adults for cover. Fat old geezers were collapsed into overstuffed chairs (a couple of them had fired up cigars). A strident cluster of cute teenage girls pushed past us, giggling, every one of them as dressed up as Carol: “Come on, Michael, play some rock ’n roll. Please. Pretty please.”

We worked our way through the crowd and on into the dining room to contemplate the main event: roast beef with silver tureens of red horseradish, fat shiny yellow braided loaves (“Chullah,” Carol said as she walked me along the sideboard), bagels and lox, pickled herring, gefilte fish, chicken baked to a moist umber in a liquor of garlic and onions—and blintzes, knishes, and verenikes, a strange orange goo called tzimmes, kugel (it looked to me like an exotic macaroni and cheese, but it turned out to be a dessert), and chocolate cake, cheesecake, apple cake, poppyseed cake, plates of cookies (and scattered throughout all of the rooms on the first floor: silver bowls of nuts, chips, crackers, pretzels, and hard candy in case you might be threatened with starvation before you got to the sideboard). But I didn’t want to eat. Not yet. Eating would kill the buzz, and by now, the Pilsner from Pilsen was hitting me with a good wallop as the blare and clangor of the party beat my head in. I’d long ago lost track of which cousin was a cousin I’d met, and yet more people were pouring through the door, raising the ante on the whole damn works, pushing it toward fortissimo. “I’ll be right back,” Carol said, patting my hand.

She was rushing over to greet a boy—an astonishingly good-looking boy wearing a midnight-blue tuxedo. She gave him a hug and one of her bizarre kisses that never quite landed (if they had, half the males at the party would have been branded with her scarlet lip prints). I couldn’t hear his laughter over the racket, but I could see it—and the big, self-assured, delighted smile that went with it. If I were a girl, I’d drop dead for a smile like that. I felt a stab of jealousy and then, on some other level, a vicarious pleasure as though I’d just watched my best friend score a hard point in a tennis match.

The boy was leading her away. The little bitch didn’t even cast a backward glance in my direction. Oh, but it wasn’t really away— just over to meet a friend, another damnably good-looking boy—no, several boys. Now Carol was surrounded by boys. They seemed to be a clique. Maybe they all went to Marshall. Even at that distance, I could feel the full power of her performance. There were four of them—no, five. One of them offered her a cigarette; she took it, and I imagined the rest of the scene playing out exactly like something I’d seen in a musical comedy: in a moment all of the boys would, simultaneously, whip out their lighters, light them, and surround her with fire. They didn’t do that, of course, but she was surrounded with fire nonetheless.

I threaded my way back to the kitchen and refilled my mug with Pilsner from Pilsen. When I came back, Carol was still scintillating for her wolf pack. Seeing her like that dispelled any of my screwy conceits that I might have created her to fit my fantasies; no, she was herself, absolutely independent of me, and did what she did for her own reasons (the world, as Wittgenstein had told me, is everything that is the case), but if I hadn’t created her, I’d certainly chosen her. I’d always thought of falling in love as a fantastic event like being hit by a meteorite, something that had nothing to do with volition, but I’d been wrong; it had everything to do with volition. That rainy morning in the Lair when I’d first seen her, I must have, in a flash, gathered innumerable tiny clues: the girlish raincoat, the preppy skirt, the nylons instead of socks, the prissy pageboy, the coy voice and even the first words I heard her say with it: “I don’t know what I’m going to do! I’m so used to having a boyfriend . . . with his own car and apartment,” and I must have added it all up and decided that she was perfect— because you choose something that matches what’s already in your mind.

I looked around, found an empty space on a wall and backed myself into it, taking myself out of the traffic. I didn’t want anyone to see me standing alone and try to talk to me. Oh, dear God, I thought, how many more times am I destined to stand at the back of some crowded room, getting pissed, my mind racing? Having, more than once, been on the receiving end of Carol’s glitter, I could easily jump into the mind of that tall boy in his beautiful tuxedo—feel his feelings, think his thoughts. Smiling and smiling at Carol: hey, you exquisite little creampuff, I’d love to fuck the living daylights out of you. But, strangely enough, I could also jump into Carol’s mind, feel myself the center of all that wolfish attention, feel myself perched on gleaming spike heels, my waist cinched in, crinolines swirling around my thighs, waving my scarlet nails in the air, perfumed, powdered, painted, smiling, turning up the signal to a million watts of clear power: come on, come on, come on!

Come on to what? Did this show have a conclusion, or was it stuck forever in the middle of the act? Playing the boy in the tuxedo, I took Carol into my arms none too gently, thrust my tongue between her painted lips, unzipped her dress, stripped it from her—kissing her, kissing her—stripped off her bra, her crinolines, her wisp of lace panties, and what I had left was a men’s magazine image melting backward onto the bed—passive, eager, compliant—her legs open: come on! And then? Click: an obscure switch in my mind flipped over, and I was Carol. The boy’s tongue was in my mouth, and I was the one melting backward onto the bed. Hey, wait a minute . . . Then, just as quickly, I was the boy again. Wanting her. But, not twelve feet away from me, a real boy was smiling at a real Carol who was a creature of pure reflected light: ultramarine flickering from her green taffeta, a shudder of brilliance from the curve of her heels.

I felt a ghastly lurch of Sartrean nausea, but I was fascinated too, and I couldn’t stop looking. I kept trying to hold either position, the boy’s or the girl’s, and I couldn’t do it—couldn’t take either of them to its natural conclusion. In each position, the thought of the other ultimately undermined me. Each side corrupted the other. But no, that metaphor wasn’t right. It was like two lights: when one winked on, the other winked off. But no, that still wasn’t right. The two sides made a whole, a puzzle, a demonic construction that was unstable, irresolvable. Which meant that I was unstable, irresolvable—or maybe just drunk at somebody else’s New Year’s Eve party, out of place as always, doomed to be the eternal outsider, the only boy in the beauty salon, the only Gentile in the house, as alien as any visitor from outer space that Cohen might have invented for himself to play.

Wir sindt nicht einig, I thought. Rilke’s words. Absolutely true—about me, at any rate. It’s so nicely compact in German; in English, you have to scramble a bit to get at it: we’re not all of a piece, not all one thing, not single-minded. I don’t know how long I would have stood there, propping up the wall, running around in frantic circles in my mind, but I heard a girl’s voice saying, “Boy, do you look uncomfortable.”

I jumped as if something had stung me, heard a wry laugh, saw a skinny girl I didn’t know. Was she speaking to me? But then the world tumbled back into place, and the stranger turned into Marge Levine. Oh, I thought, that’s right, of course she’d be here: she’s Carol’s cousin. “My God,” I said, “you’re wearing a cocktail dress.”

“My God,” she said in an absolutely deadpan voice, “and you’re wearing a suit and tie.”

Her dress wasn’t an extravagantly showy one like Carol’s—was muted, a soft fabric in one of her funereal colors, a charcoal just off black; she’d toned down her Egyptian eyes almost to normalcy. I’d never seen her bare shoulders before; they looked bony and adolescent. “So what are you doing here, buddy?” she was saying. “Not that I’m not delighted to see you . . . because I am.”

“Carol invited me.”

“Oh, did she?”

Carol might have invited me, but, at the moment, she was certainly not with me—as was obvious to the naked eye. I made a hapless, shrugging gesture. Marge followed my gaze to the center of the wolf pack and laughed. “You ever heard of a Jewish American Princess?” she said. “Well, you’re looking at one.”

I must have needed to laugh, because that one damn near killed me. Marge rewarded me with her new-moon smile. “Come on, Dupre, let’s get loaded.”

“You bet.” We slipped around the edges of the wall and on into the kitchen. “Try the Pilsner from Pilsen,” I said.

“Speaking of phonies,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you . . . You know your pal, William Revington? Is there anybody in there? You know, behind all the poses?”

The question startled me, although, after a moment’s reflection, I didn’t know why it should have. “Sure there is, but you have to get through the poses. I think maybe you have to be another male to get through the poses.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “Unfortunately, he’s just great in bed.” In spite of myself, I was shocked.

“I didn’t think we were Romeo and Juliet,” she said. “I didn’t think we were much of anything, to tell you the truth, but . . . well, maybe a phone call? Or even a postcard?”

“No,” I said, “you won’t hear from him. He’ll just turn up sometime.” She’d never let it show, I thought, but he’s hurt her. Damn him.

The teenagers must have convinced brother Michael to switch to rock ’n roll; we heard Buddy Holly suddenly blasting out of the living room. “You want to dance?” I asked her.

“I’m not much good at it, but what the hell.”

We made our way toward the music. People were packed around the walls, leaving the space in front of the hi-fi open for the dancers. Carol was jitterbugging with the boy in the midnight-blue tuxedo. “Who is that son of a bitch?” I said.

“That’s Larry Klein. Don’t worry about him. He went to school with Carol’s brother . . . you know, Dan, the older one. Carol’s been driving him nuts since she was about twelve. It’s just one of the silly little games she likes to play.”

“Yeah?” I said, “so how about her? Is there anybody in there . . . behind all the poses?”

I hadn’t meant the question seriously, had only asked it because I’d thought it would make Marge laugh, but she said, “OK, buddy, you really want to know?”

“Sure.”

“All right. Here goes, and don’t say I didn’t warn you . . . She’s spent most of the Christmas break chasing the elusive Stephen, but he’s got her number, so that’s nowhere. She’s bored out of her skull, so she invites you down. Stephen’s sure to hear about it, so maybe she can make him jealous . . . It’s not going to work, but she doesn’t know that, and in the meantime you’re good enough to amuse her for a couple days, but believe me, buddy, don’t think for a minute she means a damn thing by it. When she gets back to Morgantown, she’ll drop you like a hot potato and start chasing Andrew again. She always falls for men who could care less about her. And of course they can’t be Jewish. Jewish guys aren’t classy enough for her.”

Yes, I’d asked for it, but I was horrified nonetheless. “You really don’t like her at all, do you?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she smiled. “Oh, we’ll make it till spring.”

• • •

I WOKE to one of those bleak blinding hangovers in which you can see with searing clarity everything that’s wrong with you but you feel so ghastly you don’t give a damn. Happy New Year, asshole, I thought. Welcome to 1963. I hadn’t been merely loaded, I’d been pissed to the gills. I’d danced with Marge and Carol and most of the other pretty girls at the party. I remembered, God help me, jitterbugging with a cousin of Carol’s and falling on my ass, and I remembered Carol and Marge laughing at me. I remembered staggering upstairs with Carol at two or maybe three in the morning, both of us so hammered we had to hold each other up. In her bedroom, she’d said, “Now you can kiss my lipstick off,” and I’d done just that. It had taken me a while. I remembered her saying, “I think you left a little bit over here,” touching the corner of her mouth; “Maybe you better try again.” And I remembered her shoving me out the door to stagger stupidly down the hall not quite sure which room was mine. It had never crossed my mind to worry about her parents or where their bedroom might be.

That I was conducting this post-mortem in Carol’s brother’s bed was an irony that was not lost on me. I lay there as long as I could stand it; then I took a shower, put on my ordinary clothes, went looking for Carol—found her in the downstairs room they called “the study”: TV set, big leather chairs, wall to wall books that looked as though they’d been bought by the yard rather than by the title. She was simply sitting there, staring out the window. “Good morning,” I said.

“Oh. God. I feel like hell.” She was in one of her blouse and skirt outfits. There was nothing left of the glittering doll of the night before but her shiny red fingernails. She hadn’t put on any make-up, not even lipstick. “Did you sleep all right?” she said.

“Yeah. I suppose. Passed out is more like it.”

I sat down, and then we both sat there, saying nothing.

“I can’t stand this,” she said, “I really can’t. Let’s get out of here.”

“Where?”

“Lunch or something. Just out. Does it matter?”

I grabbed my jacket, followed her to the car. She pulled out too fast, sent us careening down the driveway. It had started to snow. Nobody else seemed to be on the road. It couldn’t have been later than noon, but already an iron-grey twilight was closing us down. “We could go see Marge,” I said.

“If you want to see Marge, take a cab.”

“Hey, wait a minute. We didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, and I was just . . .”

“Oh, hell . . . I’m sorry, John. I’ve got a miserable hangover, and I’m in a rotten mood.”

The closer we got to downtown Huntington, the more snow was coming down. Carol was a sloppy driver, heavy on the gas and inattentive; she depended too much on her brakes, jammed them on at the last minute, and she wasn’t making any allowance for the snow. I could feel in my bones that she was going to screw up, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. She whipped the Buick into a left turn and we went into a skid; then we were sliding—not horribly fast but fast enough to be alarming—into an oncoming Ford. Carol made exactly the wrong moves: spun the wheel to the right, away from the skid, and kicked down the brakes.

I knew that we were going to hit the other car. I grabbed the wheel, spun it to the left, and yelled, “Get your foot off the goddamn brake.” We missed the Ford by a couple of feet, slithered to a stop. The driver was a fat, bald, middle-aged man. He rolled down his window, motioned for Carol to roll down hers. She did it. He didn’t yell, but we could hear every word nonetheless: “You goddamned dumb broad, you should tear up your driver’s license.”

He rolled up his window and drove away. I’d never in my life seen anyone blush the way she did then: her entire face, even her neck, turned a spectacular scarlet. She looked hot enough to burn me if I touched her. She lowered her eyes, dropped her chin as though trying to hide behind her bangs; her lips were frozen into a painful, mortified, sickly smile. “Please,” she said in a tiny strangled voice, “will you drive?”

I got out, walked around the car. She slid across to the passenger’s side. “Where are we going?” I said.

“Just take me home.”

I drove around the block and started back the way we’d come. Suddenly Carol exploded into a fury of motion, began to kick the floor of the car and hammer the dashboard with her fists. I pulled over to the curb. A thin, finely drawn wail was pouring out of her. I’d thought she was crying, but she wasn’t. “Stop it,” I said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

She was really hammering the shit out of that car; God knows what she was doing to herself. I grabbed one of her wrists, then the other, held them as she thrashed back and forth and fought me, struggled to get free. I had to use all my strength to hold her. Then she went limp, fell back in the seat panting. Slowly she raised her chin until she was staring directly into my eyes. I kept on holding her wrists merely because I was already holding them. For one long eerie moment it felt as though the universe were teetering on a pinpoint; something truly significant was happening, but I didn’t have a clue what it might be. This is crazy, I thought.

I let go of her wrists, lit two cigarettes, gave her one. She took it and dragged, rolled down her window, stared out into the snow, her face turned away from me. “I ought to be spanked for that stunt,” she said.

I agreed with her but didn’t think that it was a good idea to say so. I couldn’t find a damned thing to say. Finally, I tried, “What’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter?” she yelled at me. “What a moronic question! What the hell do you think’s the matter? I just came within half an inch of smashing up my father’s car, that’s what’s the matter.”

She smoked the rest of her cigarette, snapped it out the window. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I simply loathe New Year’s. It always reminds me that there’s another year down the drain, and I’ve got nothing to show for it.”

“You’re one year closer to your Master’s degree.” I felt as though I were humoring a difficult child.

“Yeah. Big deal.”

She bent forward and pressed the heels of her hands against her forehead, kept on pressing, hard. She began to sob, gulping air. “God,” she said. “Oh, please, just take me home, will you?”

I pulled out carefully onto the snowy street. She stopped crying just as suddenly as she’d started. “I could go to Ireland for a year, couldn’t I?” she said in a small dead voice. “With my grades, I could even go to Trinity for a year, couldn’t I?”

It was the first I’d heard of it. “Sure you could,” I said, “if you wanted to. Why don’t you check into it?”

“Do you think they really have bee-loud glades?”

“I’m sure they have bee-loud glades.”

I put my hand on her shoulder in a gesture I meant to be comforting. She shrugged it away. “Don’t. Please.”

• • •

BACK AT the house, she walked straight upstairs and into her bedroom; the sound of her door slamming was like a rifle shot. Hungry, my head pounding, I shut myself into her brother’s room, threw myself onto his bed. I never traveled without a book. The one I had was The Hui Neng Doctrine on the Transmission of the Mind, and I tried to read the damned thing. I had to go slowly, one difficult sentence at a time. It seemed to be a text expressly designed to destroy anything you’d ever thought about anything. Eventually I gave up and watched the fat snowflakes float past the window. That’s all I needed. Snowed in. No exit.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what Marge had told me. I’d always believed that the two girls really were, just as Carol had always said, like sisters—that they might bitch and complain about each other, say catty things and get into fights, but underneath it all, they were joined by a deep and unshakable bond. But I’d been wrong; they thoroughly despised each other. I found that revelation unnerving. I trusted Marge Levine and liked the way she looked at the world; she was a girl who always said exactly what was on her mind, and I liked that too. I considered her a good friend. But I wasn’t sure I trusted her when she was talking about Carol. There’d been so much vitriol in what she’d said that it couldn’t possibly all be true, could it? But what if some of it was true?

They surely ran buses between Huntington and Morgantown. But it was crazy to be even thinking about it. I had to go back home to get my Martin and my books, and besides, there was something pathetic about running frantically from girl to girl: Cassandra to Carol to Natalie. Oh, and I shouldn’t forget Zoë. I hadn’t thought of it before, but Zoë had mysteriously set off this whole fabulous chain of events. If I went over it step by step in my mind, I could see, however improbable it was, that I was stuck in a snowstorm in Huntington on the first day of the new year with the worst hangover of my life because, two days before, I’d kissed Zoë under the mistletoe in her kitchen in Raysburg. But, be that as it may, if I didn’t get some food into me, I was going to die.

The house was humming with muted sounds: someone moving furniture, someone vacuuming. Yep, I thought, the hired help was cleaning up. I wandered into the kitchen. Becky was washing crystal wine glasses, dozens of them. Carol’s mother was rinsing and drying them; that she was actually doing something made me prepared to like her if she ever gave me the chance. She hadn’t said ten words to me since I’d arrived, but now she said, “Oh, you poor boy, come in here. You’re probably starving.”

She made me a roast beef sandwich. When I sat down at the kitchen table to eat it, she let her hand rest momentarily on my shoulder. “Don’t mind Carol,” she said. “She’s always been a moody girl.”

I stumbled back upstairs and made another futile attempt to read Hui Neng. Eventually I laid the book aside and fell asleep.

“KNOCK, KNOCK.” Carol was standing next to my bed. “Wake up, you naughty thing. It’s nearly five.” My entire body felt unraveled.

With the familiarity of someone who’s done it often before, she reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. I liked that small gesture. “I went back to sleep too,” she said. “Oh, my God, we tied on a good one last night, didn’t we?”

She looked rested. She’d redone her make-up. She sat down on the edge of the bed, took my hand and held it. “I should have had the good manners to say it at the time, but I’ll say it now. Thank you. You really saved me.”

I shrugged. “It’s OK.”

“No, really, John. I had no business driving anywhere the way I was feeling, and you really did save me. My God, if I’d hit that car . . . Thank you.”

Everybody had gone out for the night, she said; we had the house to ourselves. We could go out too if I wanted, but she wouldn’t mind staying home and watching TV. That was fine with me. I liked lying there on her brother’s bed in the circle of yellow light that made such a comforting contrast to the blue-black chill of the window. I liked her sitting next to me holding my hand. Despite all the times she’d called me her brother, I’d hardly ever experienced her as a sister, but I did now, and I decided not to trust anything that Marge had told me.

Carol asked me what I was reading, and I handed her the book. “Oh, you and your Zen Buddhism.”

I’d never told her much about Zen; she’d never seemed particularly interested. Now I gave her a thumbnail sketch of Cohen’s satori experience. “If it can happen to him,” I said, “it’s real. If he can do it, then any of the rest of us can do it.”

“Oh, come on, John. Bill Cohen’s a really sweet boy, but an enlightened being? Do you really see him that way? He just seems . . . like a brilliant, charming, precocious twelve-year-old.”

“That’s because you don’t know him.”

“Maybe . . . Does he have a girlfriend?”

I laughed. “He hasn’t even had a date.”

“Oh,” she said, raising her eyebrows.

I was suddenly, inexplicably angry. “What’s that mean? That ‘Oh’?”

“Let’s not get in a fight. I didn’t mean anything. It’s not important . . . Come on, get up. I’m starving.”

She took my hands and pulled me to my feet. I followed her downstairs. There were a million leftovers from the party. We ate baked chicken, blintzes, knishes, holishkes, kugel, and cheesecake. “When we get back to Morgantown,” she said, “it’s going to be nothing for me but cottage cheese and stones.”

Groggy with food, we collapsed in the basement rec room in front of the TV. I put my arm around her. She snuggled into me, and we watched whatever was on. “It’s good to have you here,” she said.

After a while she began talking about Stephen. “I’m really glad I saw him again. It was painful . . . but all the ambiguity’s gone now. It’s really over.” She sighed.

“My parents have never forgiven me, you know. All the time we were going out together, all I heard was, ‘Carol, he’s not Jewish.’ My mother was so happy when we broke up it was sickening. I wanted to kill her. If she’s been cool to you, that’s the reason. Oh, I know exactly what she’s thinking . . . oy vey, another one. I told her you were a good friend, not a boyfriend. She doesn’t think girls can have friends who are boys . . . I don’t know, maybe they can’t. I always thought you were a friend.”

“I am your friend.” I hesitated, then spoke the rest of the sentence I’d already written in my mind: “but I always wanted to be more than that.”

“Oh, I know.” She gave me what I read as an affectionate smile. “But we’d be terrible together. You’re years too young for me . . . I know I tease you about it, but you’re absolutely right to go out with high-school girls. You need a much younger girl who’s going to look up to you and admire you, and I need a man at least ten years older than I am.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Come on, John, it’d never work. You know that. I probably shouldn’t admit it to you, but I have thought about it . . .”

My heart jumped. “You’re really sweet,” she said, “and I like you a whole lot. And you’ve helped get me through a rough time, and we do have fun together . . . Oh, I could wear high heels and frilly dresses and play the pretty little miss for you, and I’d rather enjoy it. But when anything got too serious, we’d just . . . Can you even imagine being a father, for instance? And if you’re going to go on and get a PhD in something . . . which you should, by the way . . . But if you do that, you’re going to be in school for a million years, so you won’t be in any position to start a family. And I need someone who can take care of me . . . and give me babies. And you know all of that as well as I do.”

I was devastated. Everything she’d said—delivered in such a calm, friendly, rational way—was absolutely true. “Oh, honey, don’t look so hurt,” she said. “We’ll always be friends.”

We settled back to pretending to watch TV. It really had been a mistake to come to Huntington, I thought. All I wanted now was to get out of Carol’s house, but it was too late at night and I was stuck.

She snuggled into me again. Annoyed, I looked down at her. She let her lower lip drop slightly, a signal that was unmistakable. I bent forward to brush her lips with mine. It was the last thing I’d expected, but we were immediately locked into a long serious kiss. Oh, I thought, so friends get to make out, do they?

To my surprise, she took my hand and guided it under her sweater. I felt the stiff, shiny fabric of her bra. As she seemed to be inviting me to do, I massaged her breasts. She reached behind her and undid her bra, made a shrugging motion, drew the bra out from under her sweater, and let it fall onto the floor. She stood up momentarily—I couldn’t imagine what she was doing— raised her skirt and sat down on my lap with her back to me. I had to bring my legs together to make a seat for her. She arched her back against me, turned her head so we could kiss. I reached under her sweater and took a breast into each hand. They were far bigger than I’d expected, and heavier—powdery smooth and deliciously warm. She made a low, resonant sound in the back of her throat. “Oh, your hands are so soft.”

Her bottom, protected by nothing but her panties, was pressed tightly into my crotch. She moved her pelvis in a series of small rotations and kissed me. It was delicious and excruciating and seemed to be going on forever—and there was no way in hell I could have an orgasm that way. I was almost relieved when she said, “Baby, we’ve got to stop this.”

She slid off my lap, smoothed down her skirt, and turned to me. She gave me her “kiss me” look again. I glued my mouth onto hers. She slipped one of her legs between mine, and now, finally, I was getting exactly what I wanted. She’d suddenly acquired an itsy-bitsy voice: “Baby gets all excited, doesn’t he? Baby’s really persistent tonight.”

I was damnably close to finishing when she said, “John! Stop it. Right now.” She’d changed voices. This was the teaching assistant. “Now. I mean it.”

She pushed me away. “Am I going to have to send you upstairs for a cold shower? I will, you know. I’m not kidding. Ice cold.”

She retrieved her bra from where it had fallen onto the floor, slipped it under her sweater, and fastened it. She stood up and straightened her skirt. She was looking at me with that glittering mask she’d been wearing the night before. “I told you not to start anything, so why don’t you ever listen to me? Will you get me my purse, please? It’s on the counter in the kitchen . . . Oh, don’t look at me like that. You know we shouldn’t get too worked up. I’m sorry. I get carried away too. I’m only human.”

In a daze, I walked upstairs, found her purse, and brought it to her. She took out a compact and a lipstick, redid her lips. She took out a hairbrush and began to restore her pageboy. “The TV guide’s over there,” she said, gesturing. “Let’s see if there’s something worth watching.”

I handed her the TV guide and sat down in a chair at the far side of the room. “Oh, don’t be silly,” she said and patted the couch next to her. I walked back over and sat down next to her.

“There’s some kind of special on six,” she said. “Let’s try that.” I got up and changed the channel. When I sat down again, she snuggled into me, head on my shoulder. “Be a good boy now,” she said.

We watched the TV for a few minutes. Whatever was playing made no impression on me whatsoever. Eventually I looked down at her. She was looking at me with her magnificent shining dark eyes. She tilted up her chin and opened her freshly painted lips. Oh, my God, I thought, here we go again. I bent forward and kissed her; her tongue was in my mouth at once, along with the cloying taste of her waxy lipstick. She paused to murmur in a low smoky voice, “Oh, John, I told you not to,” and then she was sucking at my lips, gnawing at them.

She licked my tongue. She drew a line of tension up the leg of my jeans with her fingertips, taking her time, until she finally arrived at my crotch. Slowly she began to massage my trapped penis. It seemed impossible for me not to respond, but whenever I moved, even slightly, she’d stop. Then, after a few seconds, she’d start again. Horrified, I heard a thick, involuntary groan come out of myself. “We’ve got to stop soon,” she murmured. “Baby gets too excited.”

But she wasn’t stopping. Not a single message coming from anywhere in her body was telling me that she was even remotely considering stopping. Astonished at my own boldness, I slipped my hand in between her legs, sliding her skirt up. She wasn’t wearing exotic underwear; all I saw were plain white garters supporting everyday beige stockings, but that image was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen in my life. I’d never touched a girl between the legs before. I massaged her lightly, felt the small moundlike shape of her there. Her panties were warm and moist. I slipped my fingers inside the waistband, felt hair and then more moisture. She was sopping wet. I’d read about this in books.

I jerked my hand away. It was a motion as instinctive as if I’d touched an open flame. A steel fear chopped me in half, and I heard the slam of my heart and then a buzzing in my ears. My erection withered instantly. She kissed me a moment longer and then sat back abruptly, withdrawing her hand from my leg. She pushed me away. She pulled her skirt down. She said, “Give me a cigarette.”

I lit two and gave her one. We smoked in silence. I kept trying to catch her eye, but she—deliberately, I thought—wouldn’t look at me. I felt utterly humiliated. Everything I’d ever feared about myself had turned out to be true.

“Carol?” I said.

“Change the channel. That show’s boring.”

I didn’t move. “John, did you hear me?”

“What channel do you want?”

“I don’t care. Try anything. Try three.”

I changed the channel. “Carol?”

“Don’t say anything for a while. Please.”

I sat down in a chair on the other side of the room. I was looking at her, and she was looking at the TV set. “Make me a rye and ginger, please,” she said. “The rye’s in the liquor cabinet in the dining room, and the ginger ale’s in the refrigerator.”

“OK,” I said. “In a minute. But look, I just want to . . .”

“John, could you just keep quiet please? I really don’t want to hear your voice right now.”

I couldn’t believe how angry that made me. “Make your own goddamn rye and ginger.”

“Well, that’s nice,” she said. “That’s just lovely.”

“Carol, for Christ’s sake . . .”

“Shut up,” she said. “Don’t say, ‘Carol, for Christ’s sake’ to me in that hurt, whipped-dog tone. I hate that tone. I just hate it. Just keep your goddamn mouth shut, all right?”

“Carol, what on earth . . .?”

“You’re talking. I just heard you. Didn’t I tell you to shut up? Why am I hearing your voice?”

I stared at her. She sat primly on the couch, perfectly upright with her knees together, her eyes glistening with something that looked like pure undisguised malice. “Carol,” I said slowly, “what’s going on?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, if you ask me another question, I swear I’ll scream. You’re like a six-year-old. Questions, questions, questions . . . OK, go ahead and talk. I don’t care. Just don’t ask me any more questions . . . Come on, I said you can talk, so talk . . . What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Let’s hear one of your Zen stories. Or maybe you could sing me a song. That’d be fun. Why don’t you do that?”

“Carol, what’s the matter with you?”

“What was that? A question? Could it possibly be a question? No, I must have heard wrong. He couldn’t possibly be asking me a question, could he? Oh no, not John Dupre. Not him. He never asks questions. He’s a man of action.”

“Carol, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t use that whiny tone on me. It won’t work. I’m not one of your little schoolgirls. Why don’t you go back to grade school and play spin the bottle? Or post office. Isn’t that about your speed, little boy?”

I walked out. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” she yelled after me.

• • •

I WAS used to traveling light, and I’d already packed my dress shoes and my damnable suit in my knapsack. I heard Carol’s heels on the stairs coming up after me, but she’d waited a few seconds too long, and I was one jump ahead of her. “John!” she called out, but I knew the layout of the house by then. Carrying my boots in my hand, I shot down the back stairs in my socks as quietly as a ghost. Once I was outside, I walked away at a good clip. I didn’t feel completely safe until I was several blocks away. You’re crazy, I told myself. Nobody’s going to pick you up at this hour. But on another level I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop a soaring elation. I’d made my escape. I was back on the road.

It took me over an hour to walk down from Carol’s neighborhood, through Huntington, and across the bridge to Ohio. It was a bitterly cold night and snowing lightly, but as long as I kept walking, I was warm enough. When I saw that there was no traffic whatsoever on the river road, I began to feel the first tickle of fear. I walked north. Eventually I simply couldn’t keep going. I always kept cardboard signs in my knapsack; I unfolded the one that said “RAYSBURG” and paced up and down behind it, stamping my feet and blowing on my hands. I smoked several cigarettes. It was nearly one in the morning, an impossible time to get a ride. I began to wonder what frostbite was like and how I would know if I was getting it. Then I began to wonder what freezing to death was like. OK, I thought, I’ll stay here a while longer, and if nothing happens, I’ll walk back across the bridge and try to find an all-night restaurant or even a hotel.

Around two, I saw a semi-trailer in the distance, roaring north on that deserted road. I’d long ago run out of hope, but I stuck out my thumb automatically, and then I saw—I couldn’t believe it—that the truck was slowing down. By the time the driver got it stopped, it was a hundred yards ahead of me. I grabbed my knapsack and ran to catch up. I had a horrible fear that he was just teasing me, that he’d pull away before I got there, but he didn’t. “Get your ass in here, son,” the driver yelled at me. “You look like you’re about half froze.” I scrambled on up and into the cab; it felt a hundred miles in the air. I couldn’t see the man clearly in the dark, just the silhouette of a lean face with cheekbones prominent as golf balls. From the radio some Southern preacher was shrieking the name of Jesus Jesus Jesus! The driver began to crank the truck through its million gears, and Jesus was lost behind the bellow of the engine.

“Help yourself,” the man yelled at me, pointed at a huge steel Thermos lying on the seat between us.

“Thank you,” I yelled back. I unscrewed the lid, poured out something and took a sip; it was strong black coffee heavily laced with whiskey; the mixture tasted raw and delicious. “Go on, son,” he yelled, “have as much as you want.”

The preacher on the radio was howling about Christ coming again in all his glory: “WILL YOU BE READY?”—a voice pitched high with hysteria, on the edge of tears. Savoring the heat and the alcohol, I finally allowed myself to realize how stupidly close I’d come to disaster. I could have died of exposure out there on that road, but once again the world had conspired to save me. The horror was over, and I was beginning to get warm. I relaxed into the seat. “Be in Morgantown in no time,” the driver yelled at me.

“I’m not going to Morgantown. I’m going to Raysburg.”

“Change your mind, did you?”

“My sign said Raysburg.”

“Aw, come on, son, you telling me I can’t read?”

For a moment I was disoriented, considered the possibility that I’d set out the wrong sign. But no, I remembered it clearly; I could see it in front of my knapsack: RAYSBURG.

Now the driver was laughing. “Shit, I’m just funnin’ you. But that’s all right.” He reached over and punched off the radio. Until that crazy preacher’s voice was gone, I hadn’t realized how hideously loud the radio had been. “Seen you standing out there,” the driver said, “and I thought, hell, only a college boy would be crazy enough to do that. Figured maybe you was going to the university.”

“Well, I do go to the university, but I live in Raysburg.”

“See, what did I tell you? Hey, pass that, will you?”

I passed him the Thermos, and he drank directly from it; I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing. I felt the whiskey hitting me. I got out my cigarettes, offered him one. “Yeah, sure,” he said. I lit two and gave him one. “So what are you hauling?” I asked him.

“Steel rods. I’m way overweight. You seen how long it took me to stop?” He was chuckling as though telling me the funniest story he’d ever heard. “Some poor son-of-a-bitch pulls out in front of me, he’s a dead man. But don’t you worry, son; it’s all in the hands of the Lord.”

He had that distinctive southern West Virginia accent that I could recognize instantly but could never imitate. “You drink up the rest of this,” he said, handing me the Thermos. “You need it worse than me.”

I smoked, drank the rest of the coffee. The alcohol and the heat were wiping me away, and I began to drift in and out of sleep. The driver turned on the radio again; the cab was filled with another preacher’s voice: “JESUS PAID THE PRICE, THE ULTIMATE PRICE. HE TOOK IT ALL ON HIMSELF.” I fought to stay awake, but I couldn’t do it; sleep was too seductive. The sound of the engine, the preacher’s voice, the driver’s voice— all of it kept winding itself around me like thick dark cords binding me to the seat. Every few minutes I’d wake with a start, not sure where I was, thinking, oh, God, I don’t want to be here. I want to be home in bed. “HE PAID THE PRICE FOR YOU AND FOR ME, GLORY, HALLELUIAH.”

The driver was saying something to me, but I didn’t get it. I sat up and stared out at the road. Tiny splinters of snow were falling in the truck’s headlights as far ahead as I could see. I thought he’d been telling me not to ask any more questions, but that couldn’t be right. “What’s that?” I said. “What did you say?”

He turned off the radio. “I just ast you what you thought of that preacher.”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“You didn’t miss much. Some of them make sense and some of them don’t. That one weren’t worth a bucket of piss . . . Tell me, son, are you religious?”

“I guess I am . . . in my way.”

He laughed. “That’s a good one. You’ll be standing at the gates of Hell so close the heat’ll be scorching off your eyebrows, and St. Peter will ask you, ‘Son, are you religious?’ and you’ll say, ‘In my way,’ and he’ll say, ‘That’s all well and good, boy, but what about God’s way?’”

“I don’t know what God’s way is,” I said.

He surprised me by saying, “Well, there ain’t many that does, although many claim to it. Now me, I just spend all my time driving up and down in the world, going to and fro in it, and asking questions. Funny thing is, nobody hardly ever has the answers. You with me, son?”

“Yeah, I’m with you.”

“I’m a worrying man, you see. Always have been. And you know one thing I worry about? Damnation. I ain’t ever been real sure there is a hell, but if there is, one thing I am sure about, and that’s I don’t want to go there.”

I was still groggy and I didn’t want to talk to him, but I knew I should make at least a minimal effort. “I don’t believe in a hell after you die,” I said. “I think we make our own hell right here on earth.”

“Is that right? Well, I have heard that opinion expressed, and it’s always puzzled me. What kind of hell you been making for yourself, boy?”

“Standing by the side of the road freezing my ass off at two in the morning.”

He liked that one. He laughed hard at that one. Something told me that I had to be far more alert than I was, but it was an effort to keep my eyes open. To try to wake up, I lit another cigarette.

“But let’s say there is a hell,” he said. “You know, son, I seen things that’d make you puke. I seen men shot. I seen men burnt alive. I seen a man oncet, all ripped open with his guts hanging out. Don’t take much to get a man yelling, ‘For Christ’s sake, Sarge, shoot me, shoot me!’ But if they was in Hell, you’d have to say, ‘Sorry, buddy, you’re already dead. That horrible pain you got . . . that you can’t bear for another second . . . well, you’re stuck with it forever and ever through all eternity.’”

“Do you think God would do that to people?”

“Now that’s a good question. I’ve ast that question myself and I never found the answer for it . . . You know, I’m really enjoying talking to you, son, I really am . . . All right, let me ask you something. Maybe you can help me out. You see, there’s two more things that trouble my mind. You want to hear them?”

“Sure.”

“Well, there’s that story Jesus tells about the beggar who goes up to heaven and the rich man who goes to Hell. And the rich man down in Hell cries out for mercy, and you know what he gets told? ‘Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot.’ Now you think about that one. There’s a great gulf fixed, and even if we wanted to help you out, buddy, we couldn’t do it. Does that mean you can fall so low even God can’t help you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think you’d be much help on that one. There ain’t many people is. OK, and here’s the other thing that troubles me. It’s the sin you can’t get forgiven for. You know, the sin against the Holy Ghost. Now I been worrying I committed that sin.”

“If you’re worried about it, that means you haven’t committed it.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that opinion expressed, but I ain’t so sure. Let me try something on you. Suppose I told you that I took a dog out in the woods and tied him down to a tree. And suppose I told you I made me a fire and whittled some sticks and got them good and hot and burned his eyes out with them. And then suppose I told you I got out a hunting knife and went cutting away little pieces off that dog for hours at a time while he was howling and yelling. And then suppose I told you I cut his pecker off and then walked away and left him to die however long it took him. Could I get forgiven for that?”

I was suddenly wide awake. I began to sweat. “You could get forgiven for that . . . if you were really sorry.”

“Suppose I told you I weren’t sorry at all. Suppose I told you I just enjoyed the hell out of it. Suppose I told you I enjoyed it so much I pulled out my pecker and squirted all over that poor dog. Could I still get forgiven for that?”

Fear had knotted my stomach. I couldn’t think straight, but I had to say something. To remain silent was simply not possible. I didn’t know much about Christianity, but I thought I knew the central point of it: “Look,” I said, “you always get another chance.”

“Oh, buddy, if you believe that, you are a fool . . . OK, all that shit I told you I done to a dog, suppose I done it to a woman. Could I get forgiven for that?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose I done it to a little child. Could I get forgiven for that?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that, son, because it’s been a heavy load on my mind. Here’s what gets me real turned around. If you committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, then you can’t get forgiven no matter what you do. You’re damned forever. So after that, what’s to stop you from doing anything? Are you with me, son?”

I was holding my body rigidly on the seat. If I hadn’t clenched my jaws, my teeth would have been chattering. “Did you do these things?” I said.

“I didn’t say I done them. I said suppose I done them.”

We were rolling through some town. Glare from the passing street lights pulsed across the driver’s face; his skin looked yellow and sick. His eyes met mine and held. The hair on the back of my neck and arms stood up. “Let me out of this truck,” I said.

“Well, sure,” he said. His voice had changed, had pushed up high into his nose and came out now like a whistle. “I never carry no man no farther than he cares to go . . . especially no man of action like yourself . . . but you better give me some money for gas.” I reached into my jeans. “No,” he said, “not your chicken-shit nickels and dimes.”

I took out my wallet. He pulled over to the curb. He caught my hand. His skin was cold and wet. His grip was unbreakable. I gave him all the money I had.

• • •

I WALKED. Already I was recoiling from what had happened to me—trying to put it all behind me as though it had been nothing more than a nightmare. I was lost in some dumb Ohio river town, but I didn’t know which one. Nothing looked familiar. I kept staring at buildings, but I didn’t recognize any of them. On some level, I knew it was a trick—that if I could make a turn in my mind, I would be all right. Stop, I told myself. Just stop.

When I came back to myself, I was sitting on the steps of the Ohio County Public Library directly across from the Baptist church where Lyle had seen the old woman who had cursed him. It didn’t make any sense. That insane trucker had been driving up the Ohio side, and I didn’t remember him crossing the river. But he obviously had. And once he was on the West Virginia side, he certainly wouldn’t have turned around and driven south again, would he? So how did I get to the library? Could I have walked? Why would I have done that?

I began walking up town. The streets were empty, covered with a fine layer of brilliant frost. Already the nightmare was distancing itself. I could no longer separate what that madman had said from something I might have imagined he’d said. Perhaps, if I kept moving, I would come to see the entire experience as illusion. By the time I got to Sixteenth Street and started up Market, I was bitterly cold again.

I passed the New Moon Cafe where Lyle and I used to eat fish sandwiches on Friday, cheeseburgers every other day of the week. At Twelfth, I crossed from Market down to Main, getting closer to the river, passed the Silver Stein, one of my father’s favorite haunts. It was so quiet I could hear every click of the mechanism that changed the traffic lights. I saw, between the buildings, the first black flash of the river, and beyond it, a strip of sky going crystal blue at the edge. I passed the Jamboree Shop where I’d bought the cowboy boots I was wearing, where Natalie had bought her pair, and then I was at Tenth and Main where I used to meet the boys on Friday nights when I’d been at the Academy, where I’d stood and watched the girls walk by to Gerry’s Inn. That time felt impossibly long ago.

Nothing was left for me to do now but turn at the corner and walk across the Suspension Bridge, but instead I stood and looked at the empty streets. I stepped inside a phone booth, took off my gloves, pawed through my pockets for change. The glass of the booth was frosted over, the phone so cold it felt hot in my hand. My breath steamed. I needed, not just someone to talk to, but someone important, a lifeline.

After a few minutes I hung up the phone, put the dime back in my pocket, walked across the bridge to the Island, and continued up Front Street. By the time I got home, I was sick with exhaustion. I lit the gas heater in the living room and huddled in front of it. My mother must have heard me come in. Wearing her slippers and bathrobe, she joined me as discreetly as a ghost. We sat for a long time together without either of us saying a word.

Finally she said, “I didn’t expect you home so soon. Didn’t you have a good time?”

“It was OK.”

“It’s been a sad Christmas. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Mom.”

She heated sweet rolls for me, made scrambled eggs. I ate, went back to my room, pulled off my boots, and stretched out fully dressed on my bed. I was exhausted, but I didn’t think I could sleep. I must have drifted off without noticing. When I woke, it was dark.

The next afternoon I rode the Greyhound back to Morgantown. While I’d been gone, a fine layer of dust had settled over everything in my apartment. I’d left four quarts of Stroh’s in my fridge, but, of course, no food. I popped a bottle, turned on the radio, found some good rock ’n roll on a distant station, turned it up loud, and started cleaning. I washed every dish and dusted every surface. I arranged my books on my desk just as though I might be a student again. By then I was ravenously hungry, half drunk, and far too depressed to call Natalie. I decided to walk over to Johnny’s. I’d never seen the campus so deserted. Nobody but a damned fool would have come back from Christmas break four days early, and Johnny’s, of course, was closed. I wandered around until I found an open grocery store, went back to my place, got really loaded, made spaghetti, ate it, and passed out. All of the next day, and all of the day after that, I found a million perfectly good reasons not to call Natalie.