V

THE WEATHER did not break, several hundred anti-war protesters were arrested in Washington, race riots broke out in Watts, and I did not drive to Morgantown. I sat night after night at the Yacht Club, staring at the river. Heat lightning blistered the sky, and when it did, I’d wait—sometimes it felt like forever—until I heard, far off in the hills, a low mumble of thunder, but we never got a drop of rain. All of my identities had melted away in that vile summer’s vile heat; I’d given up looking for any reason to do anything. One morning I found the letter lying innocently on the floor below the mail slot. I knew what it was before I opened it. I’d been expecting it, yet I felt a shock wave that surged through my entire body and prickled my scalp. Greetings! ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU.

I called Revington. “Christ, William, I’ve been drafted.”

There was a long pause. Then he said, “Well, I hope you’ll serve with honor.”

I hung up on him.

He called me back immediately. “That was the wrong thing to say, huh?”

“Yeah, that was the wrong thing to say.” I realized that somewhere along the way I’d lost the ability to tell the difference between Revington serious and Revington kidding.

“Well, John, it was bound to happen eventually. You knew that. Now you can stop worrying about it. It must be a relief. I wish things were that simple for me.”

“Oh, shit.”

“I’m still not certain that I’ll be entering law school in the fall.”

“Oh, shit!”

“I mean it, John. We might be there together.”

“Cut the crap, William, you’re home free. If they get on your ass in law school, you can always marry Alicia.”

He said nothing. “Christ, man,” I yelled at him, “this is fucking serious. This isn’t just another scene from Casablanca.”

“I know that, Dupre.”

“I’m thinking of going to Canada.” I hadn’t been thinking about it, at least not seriously, but I thought I’d try it out on him.

There was another long pause. Then he said, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Why is it ridiculous?”

“What is there in Canada?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t got there yet.”

“I’ll tell you what there is in Canada. Nothing. What the hell are you thinking about? You’re going to be some kind of expatriate like Hemingway? Well, Canada’s not Paris. And you’d be a goddamn exile. You’d never be able to come back. Do you understand that? Christ, you’re not serious, are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d go nuts in Canada, for fuck’s sake. You wouldn’t know anybody. You wouldn’t know where the hell you were. It is a foreign country up there, you know? You’d never see any of your friends again.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Or your parents.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s fucking cold up there,” he said. “They’re having their winter now.”

I had to laugh in spite of myself. “It might be fun . . . a new beginning.”

“Oh, a new beginning, my royal Canadian ass! You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to stay here and do your duty like a man.” I RIDE FROM TEXAS TO ENFORCE THE LAW.

“What is that crap?” I yelled at him, my voice flying away hysterically. “Fuck you, asshole. Do you ever believe anything you say? You sound like a parody of a parody.”

“You don’t like that one, huh?” he said.

“No, not much.”

“OK, how about this one? You had most of the goddamn summer to do something about it, but you didn’t do a goddamn thing. You pissed around and pissed around and now it’s caught up with you. That’s life, man. I’m sorry for you, but what the hell did you expect? You’re going in the army because you haven’t got any choice. It’s that simple, OK? Yeah, it’s a fucking stupid piss-ass war. Yeah, we never should have got involved over there. But we did. And we’re stuck with it. Jesus, John, I’m sorry . . . I’m terribly sorry . . . but what the fuck do you expect me to say? Just do the best you can. That’s all you can do. Try to impress them with how smart you are, and maybe they’ll put you behind a desk.”

He was right. Everything he said was right.

• • •

I SHUT myself into that terrible back bedroom, chain-smoked, paced up and down, drank cup after cup of coffee, and stared at the draft notice lying on my mother’s sewing table next to my failed Civil War novel. No matter how many times I read that goddamned letter, it always said the same thing.

In the afternoon I called Cassandra, but I got Zoë. “John! We’ve missed you. Yeah, really. Cassy keeps saying, ‘What’s with old Dupre, where’s he got himself to?’ and I . . . Oh! I’m sixteen, can you believe it? They threw a surprise party for me and I didn’t even . . . but they had balloons and everything . . .”

I felt old and weary and hopelessly distant from Zoë’s sparkling voice: “. . . just like you’re supposed to, a pink cake with sixteen pink candles, wow, you should have . . . Surprised? Was I ever! And Cassy found me the vinyl, you know for the patent skirt I showed you, she had to go to Bellaire for it, it’s going to be . . . and some neat fall clothes, I was touched, you know, and, oh, Jeff gave me a charm, now I have eight, real gold, I said, ‘You didn’t have to,’ and my dad . . . the Dave Clark Five album, it’s just fab, and my mom, some nice fall sweaters and you know how mom, underwear and stuff like that, oh, John, I’m so excited, now I can get my driver’s license! ”

Right, I thought, her sixteenth birthday, a big deal, and I probably should have got her something, but I’d forgotten all about it. I couldn’t take her today. I had to get her off the phone. “Happy belated,” I said. “Is your sister there?”

My tone must have stopped her. She took a breath. Her voice went flat and formal: “Well, no, not at the moment. She went off somewhere with William. I don’t think she’s going to be gone too long. Do you want her to call you?”

“No. It’s not important.”

I walked on up to Belle Isle and sat on the river bank in the lethal sun. If this wasn’t in extremis, I didn’t know what was, and I needed to talk to somebody. It seemed strange—maybe I could even call it tragic—that when it came down to the crunch, there were so few people who really mattered. I could call my mother at the library, but what was the point of that? She’d be home in a few hours. And I hadn’t talked to Cohen in over a year; I didn’t even know where he was. Eventually, I dragged myself back to the apartment, walked in and saw my father sitting where he always sat, doing nothing, smoking the occasional cigarette.

I threw myself on the bed in the back bedroom. The heat in there was appalling, but I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. Once you’d been drafted, could you register in school and then request a reclassification? Somehow I didn’t think it worked that way—not when they needed thirty-five thousand men a month. Now what? Revington was right; I’d run out of options. Why the hell wasn’t Cassandra home? I couldn’t think straight. I really did need to talk to somebody. I’d never felt more alone in my life.

Eventually it occurred to me that I should tell my father—just to get it out of the way so I could move on to the next thing, whatever that might turn out to be. I got up, walked into the living room, and sat down next to him. Ordinarily I would have boomed out some stupid line in my heartiest voice—“Well, Dad, how are you doing?”—but I couldn’t do it. We sat there side by side and looked at the silent TV.

I’d come in quietly, and I wondered if he’d even noticed. “John?” he said.

“Yeah?”

He produced another of his spitty splatterings of words. I couldn’t make out anything. Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable. I got up, moved my chair around until I was facing him, and sat down again. He wiped his mouth with the back of his good hand. “John?”

“Yeah?”

He tried it again. I stared straight into his face. He was looking back at me, his dead eye glassy and strange, his live eye watery and blinking. He was trying his damndest—trying so hard that I could see the good side of his face vibrating with the effort of it. Then, for the first time since I’d been home that summer, it struck me how terrible it must be for him. What if his mind was the same as it had always been? The immaculately groomed tomcat with the gift of the gab, the spinner of fabulous yarns, the zany cackling joker, the good-time Charlie, the glad-handing con-man who’d always had a good word for everyone—trapped inside the prison of his body, unable to communicate? I couldn’t imagine anything worse. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I said, “I’m just not getting it.”

He sighed and fell silent. Sitting there simply looking at him began to feel increasingly embarrassing—difficult, unnerving, and strange. Every instinct told me to get up, turn away from him, and walk away. I don’t know what kept me sitting in that chair—perhaps the thought of how similar we were, something I’d always hated to admit. It was so quiet I could hear the fans going in every room. I felt lines of sweat trickling down my sides. It was cruel what the stroke had done to his face, how one side seemed perfectly normal while the other was like an unconvincing mask. I could see him looking back at me. I couldn’t imagine what he must be thinking. His eyes were a lot like mine, nearly the same shade of brown, but he was wider at the jaw than I was. There was something hard to define—a quality, a sympathy—in the expression of his good eye that I recognized as mine. Most of my life, he’d felt like a stranger who’d appeared out of nowhere, but he really was my father. And now, God help me, could I get up and leave? I wanted to. I’d been there long enough. I’d done my duty, hadn’t I? But no, it seemed that I had to continue to sit there and look at him. His good eye was watering heavily now. Could he be crying? Oh, God, I didn’t want him to be crying. That would be too cruel and embarrassing. I should say something. But what the hell could I say? I said the first feeble thing that popped into my mind: “Dad? What’s the matter?”

He smiled with the good side of his face. He took a deep breath and tried it again, but all that came out was yet another unintelligible splatter. He took several breaths, and then, spacing out his words carefully, trying so goddamn hard to be clear, he said something that I could make out: “I hate this.”

“Yeah, I bet you do,” I said. “I think it’s the shits. I’d hate it too.”

“John?”

“Yeah?”

“You oh kay?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m OK, Dad. I’m going to be OK.”

His good eye was really watering now. He wiped the moisture away with the back of his hand. “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm,” he said. I leaned closer. “I’m sor ry,” he said.

For the length of a heartbeat I was suspended in a bubble outside time. Then I said, “It’s OK, Dad, you did the best you could.”

He took his good hand and pressed it against his heart. “Stu pid,” he said. Then he pressed his hand against my heart. “Don be stu pid.”

• • •

THE NEXT day, while I was trying to pack, the storm that had been prowling around the valley finally hit us. I’d been hearing the wind all morning; it had been whistling in the fireplace in the living room; it had been making the roof groan. Violently driven sheets of rain blew up from the river, pounded the walls and rattled the windows in their frames. I dug out an old raincoat from the back of the closet, found my cowboy hat from my Morgantown days, and ran down to the riverbank. Lightning scrawled across smudges of blackened sky over the hills above town; in less than a second, the thunder shouted back. The storm was passing directly over me. I smelled the weirdly twisted burn of ozone; lightning was striking close (and I would find out later that a tree on the South End had been struck), but I didn’t care. The rain was hammering down my hat; the thunder seemed to be roaring up from the earth directly beneath my feet. I loved the sense of danger, the loose electricity, the roiling chaos—with me right at the center of it. Then the storm blew past, leaving behind a steady talkative rain. I paced up and down and smoked and felt the temperature drop. The valley had been transformed from dog days into slate-grey autumn. The ghastly heat was gone. This is all right, I thought. This is more like it.

I hadn’t felt so exhilarated in months, maybe even years. I hurried back to the apartment and headed straight for the basement. I was determined to do what my mother had been asking me to do all summer: go through my things. I found twenty or thirty dusty cartons stacked up in the storage locker; when I began to open them, I saw that my mother had imposed no order whatsoever on that mess when she’d packed it up for me. There were clothes stuffed in with books stuffed in with papers stuffed in with every damned thing I’d left lying around in my room in the old house: used guitar strings, electrical cords and plugs, shoe polish, cuff links, hair brushes, several pipes and some dried-up tobacco, stones from the river bank, records, candles, incense, a small brass Buddha, notebooks, childhood art work, old report cards, photographs, chess sets, my old track shoes, the stamps I’d collected in the third grade, everything. It felt as though I had to put my whole life in order—which, of course, is exactly what I had to do. Revington had been right: I’d been pissing away my time all summer—I’d been pissing it away for years—but I’d been caught. The long tall Texan was not just one jump behind me; he was here, and every second now had to count for something. I was ruthless. I threw away most of that crap.

I saved anything I felt might help to sustain me—a precious collection of fragments from my previously discarded selves: the Manila envelope with all of the terrible but painfully sincere poems I’d written between the ages of twelve and fourteen, and, in another envelope, the high-school poems I’d always thought were “mature” but I saw now as just as terrible and far less sincere; the nutty weight-height charts I’d tried to match at fourteen when I’d starved myself below a hundred pounds because that’s what a girl with “a light frame” was supposed to weigh; and, still glued to the cardboard I’d used to support it, the Salutatorian’s speech I’d read at my graduation. I threw away most of my medals from the Academy, but I saved the ones for riflery. Just as it always did, that strange picture of me dressed as Alice in Wonderland on Halloween when I’d been seven filled me with a queasy dread, but I knew I had to keep it—along with my Morgantown notebooks and the pictures I’d taped to my walls in my last dire days at WVU. I remembered how I’d rearranged those pictures with me as Alice at the center, how that pattern had, mysteriously, represented my whole life. Now I had to rearrange things again, find a new pattern. These artifacts, fragments, had no value in themselves; they were the records left behind by the powerful lines of force that had surged through my life—and that was how I was thinking about my Civil War novel now, not as an uncompleted work of fiction but as another record of a difficult time I’d survived.

“Consider,” Rilke had instructed me so long ago, “the Hero sustains himself; even his downfall was an excuse for his continuing existence, his final birth,” and I did consider it. The hard edges and bright shapes of the world were springing up into high relief again, and I could feel the great lines of the world in motion again. I knew that I was at a gathering point, so maybe there was a way out of this shit. Maybe the Hero hidden inside the fat drunken buffoon could sustain himself yet again and be reborn.

The only person I wanted to talk to was Cassandra, and where was she? Never at home when I called, so I stopped calling. The girl who had never played games with me was playing games. Well, I could play games too.

I didn’t know why, but Zoë was someone else who was on my mind. I knew I’d hurt her feelings on the phone, but that was trivial, wasn’t it? Of course I’d been abrupt, dismissive. I’d just got my draft notice, for Christ’s sake. It had never crossed my mind that I could tell Zoë about it. But why was I worrying about her feelings when my entire life was changing? I felt a line of force pulling us together—not in the way I’d thought that Cassandra and I were linked, at the level of soul, and certainly not in a sexual way—but linking us nonetheless. My book had not been a success; I wished Zoë well with hers, and I found myself remembering that ridiculous line from Lawrence of Arabia Revington had been muttering all summer. Wouldn’t it be good if, before I left Raysburg, I could find something honorable?

I’d done everything I had to do. I was almost out of time—but not entirely. When I called the next day, I expected Zoë to answer the phone, and she did. “Cassy’s not here,” she said. I heard her take a breath. “I’m really sorry you got drafted.”

Oh, I thought, Revington must have told everybody. I almost said, stupidly, “It’s OK,” but caught myself. How ridiculous could you get? “It’s happening to a lot of guys.”

“Yeah, it’s horrible. I hate this war, just hate it. It’s all so stupid and wrong. It’s immoral. I really am sorry.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that. I’m trying not to think about it right now . . . Look, Zo, I’m not calling for Cassy, I’m calling for you. I’m sorry I missed your birthday, but I’ve got a present for you . . . if you want it. I can get us a studio over at Middleton’s for a couple hours. Do you want to make some pictures?”

She didn’t answer for so long that I was afraid I’d crossed an invisible line into forbidden territory. Then she said, “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“What do you mean, a studio? A real one? With lights?”

“Yeah, lights and all. It’s not that big, but . . .”

“Oh, my God, you’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not kidding. I’ve got some time, and if you’re not doing anything . . .”

“Oh, my God, I’d love to. Tell me you’re not kidding.”

“Hey, just one or two outfits, OK?”

When I pulled up in front of the Markapolous household, Zoë was waiting for me on the front porch, her hair up in rollers and wearing a pop-art raincoat so trendy she must have bought it in Pittsburgh. She pulled the hood over her head and ran through the rain to the car. I stepped out and grabbed her suitcase and tackle box; she gestured toward the porch, and I scurried up to get her father’s camera case. She was talking before I could even get the car in gear: “I can’t believe this, I really can’t, I thought you were kidding, I wasn’t doing anything, thank God I did my nails last night. My hair! Good grief, it’s never going to dry, I got it as dry as I could but, tried to think what, we already did back-toschool, and the summer’s over so I don’t want to do any flowy, you know, some-enchanted-evening, and go-go boots are out, they’re still showing them but they’re kind of like for children now, and then I just looked out the window, all this rain, I thought it’s just like fall, and I, hey, I finished the patent skirt, it was a real drag to sew but it fits like a dream, I mean it’s fab, I mean just supercool, and I thought fall, fall sweaters, Argyle, and then I thought, oh, right, that’s it, LET’S DO THE COVER OF SEVENTEEN! ”

Doc Middleton greeted me as though I were an old and valued customer. “Sure, it’s all yours. You’ve got till five-thirty, how’s that?” We agreed on a figure, and I paid him. He sold me six rolls of Agfa, ushered us into the studio, and left us alone there. The modeling lights created a small, self-contained, brilliantly lit world. Zoë let her suitcase and makeup box fall to the floor and stood, frozen, staring at the huge silver umbrellas, at the pale grey seamless. Surrounded by darkness, that patch of lit emptiness was going to be her stage. We heard the rain hammering the building. I tried to imagine what she was feeling. “You must have seen all this stuff before,” I said. “It’s pretty standard.”

“Yeah, when we did our head shots. But I was with a whole bunch of other . . . and we only got . . . maybe a minute. But this is like . . .” She sent me a swift blue look that I couldn’t read, grabbed her things, and ran into the change room.

I unpacked the Nikon, attached it to the lights with the cable. I’d be shooting at f 22, and the flash would be faster than any shutter speed, so Zoë could move as much as she wanted and so could I. Doc had left the lights in the classic forty-five degree setup, and I certainly wasn’t about to try anything different. There was a small back light on the ceiling that would separate Zoë from the seamless. White fill cards were resting against the wall, but those were for head shots, so I wouldn’t be needing them. It was a genuinely professional studio but simple enough for even a photographic idiot like me, and where was Zoë? In the change room, on the other side of the partition. I could hear her breathing. “Zo,” I called to her, “you OK?”

“Sure. It’s just . . . I can’t . . . It’s like, ah . . .”

I waited, but that seemed to be it. I stood there, baffled, in the patch of darkness just at the edge of the brilliant set. I listened to the rain muttering to itself. I could sense Zoë’s misery radiating out from the change room like a force field, but I didn’t know what to do about it, and then, with a sudden inner lurch, I lost all confidence in myself. What the hell was I doing? Playing a cut-rate version of John Hunt Morgan—trying to make a gesture as romantic as presenting a captured train to the local ladies? I imagined some hypothetical point in some hypothetical future when Revington and I might again have the luxury to piss away a few hours, drinking Irish whiskey and bullshitting each other, spinning a few more layers of legend around our already fabulous selves: “Well, yes, William, time was of the essence, but you know, man, before I left, I just needed to find . . . something honorable.” And then what? I would gallop away into the sunset on my big white horse?

But Zoë wasn’t playing a game. She was sixteen. The same age Cassandra had been when she and I had stood at the top of North High Street in Morgantown and read each other’s minds. The same age I’d been when I’d shocked everybody by going out for track. And, with that, I felt again the full force of being sixteen— the tension, the ache, the despair of it—the sense of being caught in a fine mesh net, a tremendous power just beyond my reach, knowing that just thinking about it wouldn’t get me anywhere, that I had to do something.

It didn’t occur to me that a boy should not walk in on a girl in a change room until I’d already done it. Zoë was sitting motionless at the makeup table in front of a mirror ringed with bare light bulbs. She hadn’t taken any of the rollers out of her hair. She was wearing nothing but Argyle tights with a bold diamond pattern and a plain white cotton bra. She looked up, and our eyes met in the mirror. “Are you OK?” I said.

I didn’t know where she’d been—lost—but I saw her come back to right now, and then there was nothing we could possibly be except a boy and a girl alone together, and the boy had just caught the girl half dressed. The complex charge of that sexual polarity crackled between us—surprise, fear, confusion, embarrassment, maybe even, on some level, desire. I took a step backward. I was the wrong person in the wrong place. She didn’t need a horny, terrified, phony Buddhist Confederate who’d just been drafted into the Yankee army; she needed a girlfriend. “Sorry,” I said, “I was only . . .”

Then I stopped myself. No, it didn’t have to be like that—I could feel it, the good, solid, useful energy of it. I had a choice to make, and I made it—allowed myself to step through a door in myself that had always been open. “What’s the matter, Zoë” I said. “Do you want me to leave you alone? Is there any way I can help you? Tell me what to do.”

She looked at me a moment longer, and I saw something change in her eyes. The polarity between us vanished into irrelevance like a card falling out of the deck; I swear we both felt it. “Oh, I’m such a little pin-brain,” she said. “I should have . . . I don’t know whether . . . I guess I should have put my sweater on first.” She picked up the sponge she’d been using on her face and showed it to me as though it explained everything—and maybe it did. Her hand was shaking.

“That’s foundation?” I said.

“Yeah. I’ve got to do my neck too or I’ll look . . . you know, two-tone. I feel like such a little butterfingers today. I can’t . . . Oh, I want to be so good!” She’d tried for her usual bright voice, but I heard a high wet trill to it—the edge of tears.

“I know,” I said, and I did know. “You’re going to be good.” I reached for the sponge. She handed it to me. “What do I do?” I asked her.

“Just smooth it on and blend it in.”

It was a shade lighter than her skin, so I could see what I’d done and what I hadn’t. It blended in with hardly any effort. “Is this all right?” I said.

“Oh, yeah. It’s great. You’ve got to do my ears too. You can look really ridiculous if you don’t do your ears.”

I did her ears and handed her the sponge. She looked at herself in the mirror, smoothed out a spot on her neck. I’d guessed that she was suffering from stage fright, and I knew from my days as a folk singer that there’s a good kind and a bad kind of stage fright. The good kind makes you better—keys you up, makes you more alive. The bad kind makes you stupid and clumsy and slow. You get the bad kind when you’re thinking about yourself. You get the good kind when you’re thinking about the music. “I’ve always loved makeup,” I said, “tell me how to do it.”

“Oh! Do you really . . . ? OK. It’s called foundation because that’s what it is. It evens out your skin tone. Miss Fairfax says it’s like an artist’s canvas. Now I’ve got to put the color in.”

My plan was working. She was coming out of her trance, the words beginning to tumble out of her again. She described everything she was doing: the color on her cheekbones, the lines around her lips and eyes, the complex layering of color on her eyelids. “It’s got to look natural . . . if we’re doing the cover of Seventeen . . . dewy and fresh and just natural, not like last time. I overdid it the last time, it’s so hard to get the . . . you know, the ones in Cassandra’s gown . . . the minute I saw the pictures, I knew, but it’s so darned . . . you’ve got to put more on than in real life, for a photograph you do, but you’ve got to . . . ‘Know when to stop, girls,’ that’s what Miss Fairfax always says, ‘Restrain yourselves, girls.’”

I helped her on with the sweater that matched her tights— stretched the neck wide so she could slide her head through it without smudging her face. I fastened a plastic cape behind her neck so she could powder herself to “set” her artwork. I’d watched Cassandra take the rollers out of Zoë’s hair, so I knew how to do it; Zoë didn’t seem the least bit surprised that I’d taken over her sister’s job. I loved the way each section sprang back into a perfect cylinder once I’d released it. When I was finished, she brushed herself out into a magazine-perfect pageboy. “It’s easier for a picture,” she said. “In real life it never stays like this longer than about five minutes.”

She drew a red line around her lips with a pencil, filled in the line with lipstick applied with a sable brush. “This looks easy but it’s not,” she said. “It’s got to be clean, but it can’t look painted on.” She curled her eyelashes and coated them with mascara— twice. She saw me studying her. “No, no,” she said, “don’t look directly at me. Miss Fairfax says when you’re doing another girl’s makeup, you always look at her in the mirror. Then you’ll see what the camera’s sees.”

I stepped behind her and looked at her in the mirror. “Your eyeliner’s a little smudgier on the left,” I said.

“Oh, yeah.” She blurred the line on her right eye until it matched. “Better?”

“Yeah. That’s it.”

“Oh, drat. Look. My mascara’s clumped.” She pointed. “Do you see it?”

I saw it. She rummaged in her tackle box, came up with a pin. “I hate this,” she said. “It’s really hard to do yourself.”

“Do you want me to do it?”

She handed me the pin. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Just separate the lashes.”

She sat perfectly still, staring straight ahead, holding her eyelids just slightly more than halfway open. I leaned toward her with the pin in my fingers, felt a momentary panic, but then that too dropped away. I’d never looked at anyone’s eyelashes so closely before. They were not merely part of a decorative fringe cleverly designed to show off beautiful eyes; they were individual hairs, each growing out of sensitive living tissue. I inserted the pin into the clump of mascara at the base of her lashes—carefully, carefully—and stroked each lash clean.

“Oh, that’s absolutely perfect,” she said in a little voice as prim as Miss Muffet’s. “Thank you so much.”

“Oh, please don’t mention it,” I said. We both laughed.

She jumped up, lifted the short black vinyl skirt out of her suitcase, stepped into it. I zipped it up, smoothed it down to ride on her hip bones. “Don’t you just love it?” she said.

“I love it.”

“Me too.” She did a pirouette, showing herself off.

“Zoë, you’re a doll, you’re a dream, you’re perfect.”

“Yeah, I am, aren’t I?” Then her face fell as though some nasty inner voice had whispered: “Zoë, don’t be stuck on yourself.”

“It’s OK to believe it,” I said. “Go ahead and believe it. You’ve got to believe it.”

She’d bought patent leather shoes to match the skirt; they were shaped like loafers but, like all of the girls’ shoes in those days, cut tight to the foot and tapered to a gentle point. “Don’t walk onto the seamless with your shoes on,” I told her. “Put them on once you get there.”

I looked at her through the lens. Under the modeling lights, her vinyl skirt caught the light and stated the superb lines of her hips. She stood, unmoving, waiting for me—willing herself to stand and wait. Her makeup was doing just what it was designed to do: her face really was as beautiful as a doll’s—and just as blank. What we needed now was the charge, the kick of animal energy that would bring the doll to life. “You’re wonderful,” I said. “You’re better than the cover of Seventeen,” and there it was—that vital flash zapping straight at me from the center of her live eyes—and I hit the shutter. The lights fired with a deep thud. I heard her squeal. As the lights recycled, we were plunged for a moment into total darkness “Oh, my goodness,” she said, breathing the words gently. “Boy, is this ever cool. This is so cool. It feels like for real.”

“It is for real,” I said.

WHEN WE got back to the house, Cassandra was sitting alone on the front porch glider. It was a perfectly ordinary thing for her to be doing, but finding her there shocked the hell out of me. I felt confused and undone—but no, that wasn’t right. Startled, surprised, pole-axed, apprehensive, panicked, dismayed, appalled, God knows—I couldn’t find words that were intense enough. To buy myself a second or two, I carefully set her father’s camera case down by the door. “William told me,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Zoë was right behind me. “Mom’s going to kill you,” Cassandra said to her. “You should tell her when you’re going to go play with John. She didn’t have a clue.”

“Yikes! I was going to leave her a note, but I must have forgot.” Zoë ran inside, banging the door behind her. “Mom?” we heard her calling, “Mommy? I’m home.”

Cassandra reacted to Mommy—a thin smile and flick of the eyes that said, “Oh, she’s such a little kid,” inviting me to join her as a fellow grown-up, share the joke on little sister, but I was far from ready to do that. She must have read my expression as the deadpan stare of a just-drafted man; she stood up and put her arms around me. I hugged her back and squeezed. “Poor baby,” she said. “I can’t imagine you in the army.”

“Yeah, I can’t either.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I do, but not just yet.”

We sat down on the glider. Cassandra was studying me. I was trying to keep my face neutral but didn’t know whether I was succeeding or not. In the old days, she would have seen right through me. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, gesturing toward the rain.

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s wonderful.”

I must have jumped too quickly from little sister’s world to big sister’s; that’s probably what it was—or at least that might explain some of my wretched feelings. I’d liked it so much in Zoë’s world I’d almost forgotten that there was another one, but now I was back in Cassandra’s world, and, I had to admit, it was my world too—a world of endless bombing raids and guys in jungles getting their asses shot off, of burning monks and burning children, of an insatiable draft that was gobbling up thirty-five thousand boys a month. Cassandra couldn’t wear pink lipstick or a vinyl miniskirt in a world like that. No, she wore a boy’s white shirt, tight jeans, flat beat-up shoes, dead white nails and lips, and fine black lines around her somber grey eyes. “Why didn’t you call me, asshole?” she said.

“I did call you. Why aren’t you ever home . . . asshole? ”

She laughed. There was not much humor in it. “Your fucking friend,” she said.

“My fucking friend?”

“Yeah, your fucking friend . . . Give me a cigarette.”

I gave her one, lit one for myself. “OK, what about my fucking friend?”

“Shit. You know the night you got utterly plastered? Remember how Mom banished us to the back porch? And we were drinking that goddamn mint julep . . . I’ll never touch that stuff again, believe me . . .”

I already knew how the story was going to unfold, but it was fascinating to hear it from Cassandra’s point of view, and Zoë obviously wanted to hear it too; her face shiny with cold cream, she stepped quietly out onto the porch and settled onto one of the chairs. Her big sister sent her a complex look—an acknowledgement and a warning. “And then he’s right behind me,” Cassandra was saying, “and I turn around and he plants one on me. I mean tongue down my throat, the whole bit. God, I was shocked. And he says in one of his movie voices, ‘Dear Cassandra, I’ve wanted to do that for years.’ Like I’m . . . I don’t know what. Gigi. And I’m thinking, oh, Jesus, when did I suddenly become irresistible?”

Zoë giggled. And it was funny, damn it. Really funny. Why wasn’t I laughing?

“If he’d just knocked off the crap, if he’d just said something like, ‘Look, Cass, I’ve been having a hell of a summer. Alicia’s been in Europe since school was out, and I’m horny as hell, and I’m bored out of my mind, and you’re probably horny as hell too, and bored out of your mind, and we’re obviously attracted to each other, so why don’t we go to bed?’ I probably would have said, ‘Sure, why not?’ But that’s not what he said. Oh, Jesus. Do you want to know what he did?”

Because I knew him, I could guess easily enough what he’d done, but I let her tell me all about it—the intimate dinners at the country club, the nights at the movies, the walks in the park, the drive to Pittsburgh to see the ballet. I already knew I’d won the bet, and the more she told me, the more ashamed I felt. For years I’d believed that she was closer to me than anybody, so what had I been trying to do, get her to prove it?

“OK,” she said, “so what the hell does he want? Well, it’s obvious what he wants, but why? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even like me all that much, and I’m thinking, all right, William, let’s just see how far you’re going to run with this one . . .”

Cassandra’s assessment was right on the money. He didn’t like her all that much; he thought she was an arrogant little bitch who needed “a good, thorough, methodical, therapeutic screwing,” quote, unquote. But I didn’t need to tell her about the goddamned bet, did I? If I told her, I’d be ratting on my friend and hurting her to no good purpose, so I should keep my mouth shut, laugh in the right places, play out my own drama, shuffle off into the wings as the curtain went down, and she’d be none the wiser. Didn’t I have the right to do that? My life was changing forever. By this time tomorrow, none of these silly games would matter a damn.

“And when we were having our little tête-à-têtes,” Cassandra was saying, “do you know what he talked about? Himself. For hours.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Oh, yes. And you can see where all this is going, right? His dad’s at work and his mom’s at some damn meeting of some damn society you belong to if you’re Mrs. Revington, and we’re alone in the house. And do you know what he’s doing? Jesus. He’s handing me this huge load of shit, this unbelievable snow job. He wants me to feel sorry for him. Him, of all people! Staring off into space, all this crap about how he’s going to be in uniform by Christmas and probably get himself killed over there. And all of a sudden it just makes me sick. So I say, ‘I think you better take me home now, William. I don’t feel very well. I must have got too much sun.’“

“He didn’t try the one about the baby?”

“What?”

“How he wanted to leave something honorable behind him after he went over there . . . a baby?”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Cassandra,” I said, “it was a bet.”

“What?”

“He bet me a bottle of Scotch he could screw you by the end of the summer.”

Zoë emitted a small strangled yelp. “You just shut up, twinkle toes,” Cassandra snapped at her. “You shouldn’t even be hearing this shit.”

I looked at Cassandra’s profile. She was staring at a fixed point somewhere out in the street where the rain was falling. It was the kind of undistinguished rain that felt eternal. I looked at Zoë. I was afraid of what she might be thinking of me, but she sent me a sympathetic glance and a barely perceptible flicker of a gesture, one I read as: “Come on, say something! ” Yeah, right, but what could I say?

“You prick,” Cassandra said, still not looking at me, “what are you doing, making bets on my ass?”

“Just like everything else,” I said, “it was supposed to be a joke. I don’t know what’s happened to us, I honest to God don’t.”

“Oh, it’s funny all right. Of course it’s funny. You goddamned vermin, you almost got me good.” She turned and looked into my eyes.

This was not the existentially flattened, jaded, bored and bitter girl she’d been presenting to me since I’d come home. This was a girl I’d hurt. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Guess what, Dupre? You bastards owe me a bottle of Scotch.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s fair enough. Maybe he’ll even think it’s funny.”

I only wished that a bottle of Scotch would do it—restore the essential sense of balance, of proportion, that must have slipped away from us over the summer. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her. Maybe I’d just ruined everything. Events kept outstripping my punch lines, and now I seemed to be stuck with my own chain of causality—with nothing left to do but follow it out, step by step.

But it was painful, damn it—and I’d been making a series of evasive maneuvers to save myself from having to feel how painful it was. When I’d walked up onto the porch and found Cassandra there, what I’d seen had been the gravity of my own life, and this time it wasn’t a poetic flight of fancy but literally the truth: I might never be back here again. I knew how easily I could turn it all into lies and nostalgia—remembering this porch, this glider, this rain, these girls, putting names to it like “dear” and “lost,” and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to remember it as it was— the annoying squeak of the glider, Zoë’s shiny clean face and Cassandra’s dark one, the light, the pause, the breath, the pearly grey, the rain, the rain, the rain. Oh, my God, I was leaving.

COME ON, DUPRE, THAT’S ENOUGH OF THAT. WRAP THINGS UP. Well, yes, I could do that. But I needed Revington. I’d written him into the last act. “Where the hell is he?” I said. “It’s not like him to miss his cue.”

“Who? William?”

“Yeah, William. I’m damned near out of time, for Christ’s sake. I’m leaving tomorrow, for Christ’s sake. What’s he waiting for? Call him up and tell him to get his sorry ass over here.”

Cassy called him, and Revington arrived in less than ten minutes. He pulled up in front of the house and stepped out of his car. He was wearing a highly improbable fedora. He walked purposefully toward the porch but then stopped abruptly and stood stock still in the rain. Scowling, he stared up at the ceiling above our heads. Wonderful, I thought. I knew exactly what he was doing. It was perfect. “Say there, buddy,” he yelled at me, “why don’t you fix that leak in your roof?”

I squinched a yokel’s bemusement onto my face, cast my eyes upward, furrowed my brow, and studied the imaginary leak. “Hell,” I yelled back at him, “I can’t fix the roof when it’s raining.”

“Well, why don’t you fix it when the sun comes out?”

“When the sun comes out . . .” I said to Cassandra, shaking my head, mugging my amazement at the idiocy of this stranger who had suddenly appeared at my shack. “When the sun comes out . . .” I repeated to Zoë to make her giggle. Then I turned back to Revington: “Mister, you are a fool. When the sun comes out, the roof don’t leak.”

“Drum roll,” Cassy said. “Cymbal crash . . . God, you guys are pathetic.”

Revington stepped up onto the porch and offered his hand. I rose to my feet, grabbed it and squeezed. “How you doing, ace?” he said.

“Not half bad.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow.”

I sat down again on the glider. He settled into a chair. “Do you have any idea where you’ll be stationed?” he asked me.

“Wait a minute,” I said. William Revington wasn’t the only one with a flair for the dramatic. I pulled the envelope out of my jeans and threw it to Cassandra. I’d been saving it for precisely this moment: my joker from the bottom of the deck.

“What’s this?” She opened the envelope, looked inside, and laughed. There was no bitterness in that laugh, only delight—a sound as clean as the rain. Of course we were linked. We always had been and always would be. It was stronger than if we’d been lovers.

Grinning, Cassandra handed the envelope to her little sister. It took Zoë a moment to get it; then her lips silently said, “cool,” and she passed it on to Revington.

He frowned, passed it back to me: my one-way ticket to Toronto. His eyes were as hurt as if I’d done some terrible thing directly to him. ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU. “You’ll be back,” he said.

“No, I won’t,” I said.