In 1955 Asa Thayer, a sixteen-year-old in the limbo between junior and senior years at Choate, spent his first summer in a decade at home in Cambridge rather than on his paternal grandparents’ farm outside Concord, New Hampshire. Staying had been a triumph over his parents’ insistence that he continue to help his grandfather chase chickens and turn, with large, corroded forks, the piles of compost at the bottom of the vegetable garden. Instead he was pumping gas at the edge of Harvard Square, in a station that issued inspection stickers without bothering to inspect. He made twenty-two dollars a week; he paid his mother ten, of which she banked five for his future and put five toward his board. “We cannot,” she said at the start of June, “simply carry you as part of the household while you waste your time.” He ate the eggs she cooked him every morning off blue Chinese plates plundered by a sea captain forebear; his bed, mahogany, with intricate and dusty pineapples on each post, had been the resting place for an infrequently remembered signer of the Declaration of Independence; when he walked down the stairs ancestors with noses and eyes like his watched from gilt frames. And the twelve dollars remaining to him on Fridays was the largest sum he had ever held in his back pocket.
The house was at the far end of Brattle Street. Asa’s father, a doctor, could not afford to live the four or five blocks closer to the center of town that would have been appropriate to his lineage. But the rooms were large, high-ceilinged, and many. Better, even in mid-July they maintained a dim, cool atmosphere perfumed with oils rubbed into wood, dust settled on books, and died-down fires of hard, slow-burning, sweet branches. It was a house that in no way admitted to the extreme seasonal changes of Massachusetts, as its inhabitants also ignored the fabulous February cold, the equally fabulous August doldrums. Its furnishings suggested a permanent early winter, and in this it reflected the climate of the three people who moved across the parquet floors.
It was a hot summer; the hoses ran all day on the lawns along Brattle Street, and Asa biked through the black pools collected at the curbs on his way to and from work. The hiss of his tires toward evening, when the sun was still high, was the whisper of the real evening, the dark evening coming, when he would move to the edge of his chair and say, “May I be excused?” His parents were propped like dolls at either end of the table, silent with incomprehension. They knew where he was going, they knew how he was spending his time, yet his life had become mysterious to them.
“Be home by ten-thirty,” his father ordered every night.
“Yes, sir,” Asa answered. He came back at one or three, when the stairs were a minefield of creaks and rattles.
“Going swimming at the Solas’?” his mother asked every night.
“Yes.”
But it didn’t satisfy them. They were unappeased. Sometimes his father telephoned there—“We’ll be at a movie when you get home”—and sounded piqued when Asa came to the phone. It would have been better to catch him out, drinking illegally in Central Square, busy on a sofa with a girl whose parents weren’t home. He was there. It was irrefutable. But what was he doing?
Asa biked back down Brattle through the puddles for a third time, accompanied by a thick slice of yellow moon. The trees leaned toward him, waving their soft leaves. It was a gauntlet he had to run. Seductive patches of gold windows held scenes of family life. Above, the sky was gashed by every color in the long, straight lines of summer sunset. He was headed for the intersection of five streets, a pentacle as potent as one drawn in chalk on a tiled floor in sixteenth-century Spain.
Overseeing this junction, but set back behind a wrought-iron fence and a stand of Colonial elms, was the Solas’ house. Fourteen black-framed windows dared a passerby to look in, but there was nothing to see. It was a most ungiving façade, entirely folded in upon itself; a hundred windows wouldn’t have changed that. Boxwood hedges crept up on it; wisteria as knotted as beech-tree roots veiled the porch that extended the length of the front. Someone, though not, surely, Professor Sola, had planted daylilies below the box, and their wrinkled orange heads fell on the lawn at dusk like falling stars. Hanging over everything was the rigorous unavailability of the house. It was absolutely a façade, because nothing could be like it. There was the echoing vacancy of a stage set: a twinkle of secrets from a light in a third-story room; a trill of curtains moving as a body made a breeze passing the long windows in front.
Asa slid his old black Raleigh behind the rhododendrons that flanked the door. It was his spot. Reuben’s Peugeot, as young as the summer, leaned against a laurel bush now past blooming. Further down the drive two other bikes sprawled on the gravel. These belonged to Parker, a classmate of Asa’s at Choate, and Roberto, Reuben’s older brother. Asa, with the care that comes of relative poverty, checked that no glint of metal showed through the gloss of leaves, then rang the doorbell.
He felt the lightening of his blood that followed the far-off, clocklike dongs of the bell. He was sixteen, and for the first time he loved someone. New muscles in his arms quivered, his back became alert, and his stomach pushed against his diaphragm, nauseating him slightly with anticipation. He wondered who would answer the bell. It was Roberto.
“We’re upstairs,” he said, and turned down the hall, leaving Asa to shut the door. From the back he resembled Reuben. They shared a beautiful posture, womanly in its grace and length. Asa followed him up the back stairs. On the second floor Roberto began to whistle. This annoyed Asa, but he knew it was to cover their footsteps for the father who was behind one of the twelve closed doors that ringed the stairs. Roberto whistled constantly, breathily, to interject himself into events, to protest his position. Suddenly he stopped and turned his fox face over his shoulder.
“Did you get them?”
“Not yet. I have to wait for the weekend, when my father brings his bag home.”
“Doesn’t he keep a cabinet? I thought doctors kept cabinets of emergency medicine at home.”
“It’s locked.”
“Break in.”
That was it, thought Asa, that was the difference, the reason he felt himself always lacking and yearning. They lived in a simple universe. Their desires dictated their actions, so that their lives had the quality of purity, unreflection, unswerving faithfulness—to themselves. He had lived so long for responsibility, consideration, and compromise that beside the Solas he felt polluted and deflected. For whose pleasure was his life? Roberto’s tapered hand opened the door. Haziness from cigarettes and young sweat interfered with the view. But Asa could see some bare legs and the beaming box of the television. This door Roberto was willing to close, and as he did, the gust of cooler, clearer air from the hall lifted the atmosphere a little, revealing a bed, with an obscured occupant, and the torso belonging to the legs, which were kneeling in front of the television. It was Parker, fiddling with the dials, wearing white boxer shorts and a waterproof Rolex on an alligator (and not waterproof) band. Asa thought the alligator ostentatious; he sported a flat gold pocket watch when dressed for school and not, as now, dressed in farm-faded denim and a T-shirt. His eyes were adjusting; the bed rumbled and he saw Reuben rise from the foaming white of the sheets, naked, a cigarette between his thin, pale lips.
“Hey, baby,” Reuben said.
Tracks of ice ran down Asa’s back and he turned from Reuben to the television. Unwatched, but knowing himself perceived, Reuben stretched his arms above his head and arched himself toward the ceiling. All four boys had the same coloring, but what was healthy, pink, and blond on Asa and Parker, and somewhat sallow on Roberto, on Reuben burned white and terrifying in clarity. His hair crested back in a triangle from his forehead in near-silver streaks. All the skin of his body, as Asa could plainly see were he to leave off watching a policeman chase a crook, was a pearly unmarked acreage stretched tight against his veins, which showed their purple mileage. His muscles and bones were prominent and his limbs were monkeylike, active and inquisitive-looking. This was especially true of his feet. Pointing to his left toe, his penis, pale and thin, lay with authority against his body. He was not naked, but a nude; in this he was different from his friends. They were unformed and uneasy enough to feel themselves exposed when stripped. He was finished, perfected, and above all, pleased.
“Get dressed, Sola,” said Parker, the only one brave enough to express their common embarrassment. “Get your pants on.” Turning to Asa, who sat dumbly staring at the screen, he asked, “Did you get them?”
“Jesus, why don’t you say hello first? Roberto asked me the same thing. When I’ve got them, I’ll give them to you.”
“We want them,” said Reuben, “so get them.” He had put on his pants.
“I’ll get them. I’ll get them. Leave me alone.” But Asa was reluctant to get them and furious that they caught his reluctance. “I have to wait for the weekend, when Father brings his bag home, and then I have to wait for them to go out to dinner or something. But I’ll get them.”
Nobody said anything. Everybody looked at Asa. Reuben took the situation in hand. “Let’s swim,” he said, and opened the door.
It was beyond midsummer; the crickets made a wonderful racket in counterpoint with the plosh of the pool’s water. Parker dove in straight and vanished without bubbles, still wearing his boxers. Roberto began to skim the surface of the pool with a long-handled net and to whistle. Reuben took his pants off again and draped himself at the shallow end, his toes curling and uncurling around the water. Parker’s sleeked head, almost white in the queer luminescence of July (stars, lights they’d left burning on the third floor, the pink blur of Boston smeared on the southern rim of the sky), came up near Reuben’s feet. Roberto stood beside Reuben, armed with his net.
But Asa lingered on the flagstones, watching his friends. The night had pressed up to them and to him, confusing their shapes. They seemed to have lost their faces and become statues. Even, thought Asa, they were momentarily manifest gods. Reuben sat with a leg drawn up to his chest, his hands linked across the knee; Parker and Roberto flanked him like guards. Parker had leaned his head on Reuben’s calf to steady himself in the water. Their eyes, in the dark, were also dark. Asa had a sharp understanding of the future—that is, a time when this would be the past. Time was rushing through and around him, he almost heard it whistling, and this awareness rounded the world somehow and made it sweet. Everything had a sweetness, a momentariness that captivated; behind him the rose trellis hummed with bees who were now asleep but would be there buzzing in the morning and so buzzed now. The circularity of things! He was safe in time, he was slung in a mesh of inevitability. And then his feeling of safety began to ebb. The whistle got sharper, almost hurt; it was a disinterested, determined sound, not made for his delight but the byproduct of gears as big as galaxies that turned for their own satisfaction. He—all of them—could be flung up anywhere, beached at misery, repetition, early death. The trio at the edge of the water was still fixed, as though they knew themselves to be well posed, but the glow of the perceived moment was gone; now they looked stuck. Nothing will stay the same, thought Asa, and this sad, simple idea calmed him. It returned him, somewhat battered, to his knowledge of the perishability of the present. He wanted to be rid of the whistling, the largeness. The present, with the promise of six more weeks of itself (the pool, the party Reuben would give on Saturday night, the twelve dollars he would pocket on Friday), was firm ground. He landed with relief.
On Friday night Parker turned up for dinner at the Thayers’. He was a cousin—his mother, Emily Graves, now Whiting, was the younger sister of Uncle John’s wife. “Not a blood cousin,” Asa’s mother had muttered at ten-thirty on another evening after Parker had shown up unexpectedly and eagerly eaten seconds. “Julia, what difference does it make? Ten generations ago we were all William the Conqueror,” Dr. Thayer said. “Robert, Robert,” said the mother. Asa loved his father in these moods. Too often he behaved as though he were himself William. “This family thing can be carried too far,” he said to Asa, who had planted himself in a chair hoping his father would continue. “It cannot,” said Julia Thayer. “In the end, everyone except the family is a stranger.”
“What’s wrong with strangers?” asked Asa. His parents turned toward him. His father coughed. “They don’t understand,” said his mother.
“Pure xenophobia,” said Asa to the mirror at midnight. It was a word he had learned recently. “I suppose I am to marry a cousin as well, a third or fourth cousin so as not to be inbred.” He thought of the Solas, who were not even the same race—whatever that was—and the girls who appeared at their house on weekends, who had long white necks, pressed linen shorts, no curfews. Some of them were cousins of his, probably; some of them were not at all, not possibly.
So, Friday night, the night before the party at the Solas’, Parker sat with the Thayers in the dark dining room with mauve walls and red-purple wood furniture, and ate six thin slices of roast beef, five boiled potatoes, and a few string beans. Both he and Asa drank milk from cobalt glasses; the Thayers drank a fair red wine. For dessert there was pound cake and strawberries. Dr. Thayer ate white grapes, his passion. He never shared them. They were placed before him by his wife every evening, in a small cut-glass bowl rimmed with silver.
“How’s school, boys?” he asked, between grapes. Asa and Parker didn’t say anything. “Harvard or Yale?” persisted Dr. Thayer.
“Oh, Harvard for sure,” said Parker. He kicked Asa gently under the table.
“I don’t know yet,” said Asa. “We don’t have to decide until November. Maybe I’ll go to Princeton, Dad.” He had no desire to go to Princeton.
“No, sir, it’s really become a serious school.” Parker, earnest and confidential, leaned toward Asa’s father. Asa hated this transformation of his friend and dreaded the cynical post-conversation comments he would hear as they biked to the Solas’ later. “I think Asa might really enjoy himself there. Very good English literature courses there—”
“Not your interest,” Dr. Thayer said. He did not meet Asa’s eyes. “Southern atmosphere, not conducive to study.”
“Much too far away,” put in Asa’s mother.
“It’s just a thought,” said Asa.
“Parker, do have some more cake. I’m afraid we seem to have finished the strawberries.”
The Thayers were going to a piano recital given by a niece of Dr. Thayer’s, at Paine Hall. Julia Thayer stood in front of the hall mirror patting her hair while Parker downed his cake. “You’ll clear, won’t you, dear,” she commanded, lifting her voice into the dining room. “Robert.” Dr. Thayer rose. Grape stems wiggled on the damask in front of his place.
“Going swimming, boys?” He sounded hopeless; Asa felt a surge of strength. He would go to Princeton, he would go swimming, he would marry a Phoenician.
“It’s a hot night,” said Parker.
“Give my love to Lilly,” Asa said. He did like Lilly, the pianist. She hadn’t gone to college at all, nor married, and lived in a bit of a slum near the river.
“You ought to have come,” said his mother, “but it is a hot night. It must be lovely,” she went on, turning to her husband, “to have a pool.” He wasn’t paying attention to her; he was putting his black bag into the coat closet, on the shelf next to the hats.
“Ah, Friday,” he sighed. “Summer. Let’s go over to the island next weekend, Julia?”
“We’ve got the Whitings for dinner Saturday. Not yours,” she called hastily to Parker. “Your Uncle Johnny.”
“Who gives a damn?” Parker muttered into his cake.
They left. Beyond the curtains the sky was pale, pale blue and changing. The boys sprawled in their chairs, silent, hot. Asa rummaged through the stems, looking for just one grape. None. The crickets began to whir, then stopped. The clock in the hall clicked into place and boomed the half hour. Parker poured himself a glass of wine. Asa, nervous, wanting to protect the remaining food, cleared the table.
“Do you always do what they tell you?”
“What else is there to do?” Asa held the roast on its silver platter in one hand and a clutch of linen napkins in the other. “I’m not here most of the time. I hate arguing with them. They’re so”—his eyes shut—“sort of dead, you know? They just go dead. It makes me feel awful. Hell with them. I clear the table, they don’t tell me when to come home.”
“But they do. You say they do.”
“Yes, but they don’t mean it.”
“Don’t mean it,” repeated Parker. He drank some wine.
“It’s a reflex, I think.”
“Let’s get them now.” Parker looked around for more wine, but Asa had taken it. “Do you know where the bag is?”
“In the coat closet.” Asa didn’t want to do it, he didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but Parker was staring at him like a conscience—a bad conscience—and he was trapped. “Let’s forget it,” he said, brave for an instant.
“Come on, chickenshit. Come on.”
Asa went to the hall, lifted the bag down, and slammed it onto the table. Then he turned his face. Parker opened it. Inside a stethoscope glittered, bottles jingled against each other, bright, full of colors. There were also a pipe, an extra pair of glasses, an Agatha Christie novel, a bone-handled brush. Asa felt sad to see his father’s mute possessions strewn on the tablecloth. Parker rummaged with determination.
“Hey,” he said, “codeine.” He pocketed a brown bottle.
“No, you said just the amyl nitrite.”
“Come on.” Parker didn’t stop poking through the pockets. “There.” He held up a small glass vial winking a flicker of violent yellow. “That’s one.”
“I don’t know if there are any more.”
“Sure there are. We need at least four, one for each of us. Or don’t you want any?”
Asa said nothing. Parker seemed to be taking hours finding them. Asa heard the ghost of his parents’ car in the driveway, the door opening. The clock boomed again. Eight-fifteen. Parker had found another ampule.
“You have to leave some,” said Asa. “He’ll be suspicious. See how many there are and leave at least half.”
“Suppose there are only two? Nah, I’ll take them. He’ll decide he’s getting old and forgot when he used them.”
Asa knew his father would never decide that. In truth, he saw no way to avoid a scene in which his father, pale and clenched, accused him of stealing. The only way would be if the whole bag vanished, as in a robbery. Silver, portraits, black bag—he wondered if they could arrange it. Leave the door unlocked. Then he’d be careless, reprehensible, but not a thief. That seemed too elaborate, and so calculating as to make him guiltier. Asa blanked his mind out and waited for Parker to finish. The bag was full of treasures, and Parker wanted them all.
“What’s this—phenobarbital. We could really get high on this. This is terrific. And here’s some, some—”
“It’s aspirin, for God’s sake. Just hurry up. Just get the ampules and let’s go.”
“You are chickenshit.” Parker’s face was too even-featured to express much emotion; his face appeared every year in the school catalogue, poring over a book in the sunlit library. “Building young men of character …” To compensate he had developed a gravelly, rather ominous voice. “I bet you’re not even going to try it.”
“I don’t have to try it.”
“Because you know what it’s like? You’ve never tried it. You’re just scared.”
“So what,” said Asa. “Let’s go.” He took the bag and put it back on its perch. He wanted to ride off on his bicycle to New Hampshire and disappear into the woods.
Instead the two of them rode down Brattle Street away from the sunset. Asa had left the back door unlocked in case he decided to stage a burglary in the middle of the night. Parker’s pockets jingled. The street flashed below their tires; they moved as fast as airplanes through the humid night. At the intersection in front of the Solas’ they stopped, Parker jamming his brakes hard enough to skid himself around facing Asa.
Somnolent evening in July, the crickets, the first patches of light in windows, Parker’s form dense against the approaching dark—Asa saw all this, all this crept toward him oppressively. He swallowed, blinked, tried to clear his head out. But his head was as full as if he had a flu. “I’m off,” he said, and rode away, down Brattle Street past the long curved driveway that drew Parker in like an arm.
It was Friday and he had money, so he went to Harvard Square. He ate a hot-fudge sundae at Schrafft’s. He went to the Out-of-Town News and leafed through Look until he was told to “buy it or put it away.” He put it away. There was nothing left to do except try to sneak into the movie at the Brattle Theatre or stand in front of the entrance to the Casablanca, the bar under the theatre, and hope some seniors from Andover or Choate would appear and take him in. He was not in the mood for a solo confrontation with the bartender about his age; groups were less likely to be harassed and more likely to cajole the bartender into serving a few beers.
For fifteen minutes he stood at the door to the Casablanca, a sorry figure with his hands pushed all the way in to the pockets of his pressed khakis. He had a sense of himself looking forlorn and ungainly and had just determined to leave—to bike to Walden Pond for a midnight swim—when Parker’s older brother, Clem, appeared with a girl. Clem was a junior at Harvard; the girl looked to be Asa’s age. She was lanky and dressed in red, and she had a wide-jawed face. Her full skirt swung out, then wrapped itself around her thighs as, twirled by Clem, she turned to greet Asa.
“Hey, meeting the boys?” asked Clem. He held the girl close with a heavy arm. He was a lacrosse star; his nose had been broken twice before his senior year at Choate. “Oh yeah, you’re not of age.” Clem moved his hand from the girl’s waist to her neck, so her bare skin shone between his broad fingers. “Come on in, we’ll buy you a drink.”
“Great,” said Asa. He extended his hand. “Asa Thayer.”
“Oh, this is Jo,” said Clem. He opened the double doors and pushed her in before she and Asa could touch. “My cousin,” he added, over his shoulder. He winked.
“First cousin?” asked Asa, when they were seated.
“Third,” said Jo. She had large teeth, very white and well tended, and a rough, low voice like Parker’s. She took a package of Luckys from her red skirt and put one in her mouth. Asa, who had no matches, looked at Clem, but Clem was ordering drinks. “Hey,” growled Jo, and she put her hand on Clem’s arm. The cigarette dangled from her lip. “Hey, light me.”
They had vodka martinis and Asa got drunk. It happened suddenly, in the middle of his second drink. A film of pleasure softened the contours of the bar and the two faces opposite him, giving everything a promising glisten. He felt hopeful; Jo leaned her head toward him when she talked, which she did more and more as Clem settled into his third martini. She talked about her hockey team at Winsor, about the sailing she was hoping to do over Labor Day, about her sister Anne’s new spaniel—“he loves to go out on the boat with us”—and the Pontiac she’d been promised for graduation. Clem leaned back and didn’t listen, but looked at her pale throat, which vibrated in the dark. She never asked a question, although her speech was dotted with interrogatives: “Do you see what I’m talking about?” “Isn’t that a sketch?” “Don’t you agree?” She tossed these first at Clem, then at Asa, snapping her wide, wicked eyes from one boy to the other. She was wicked, Asa saw through his haze, she was wickedly, deeply full of her flesh and her lanky limbs and her raspy, monotonous voice. There was an untidiness about her—a spot on her skirt, grit under her nails—that gave Asa an erotic tingle. She was not, quite, a girl he could imagine taking to a dinner dance. Undoubtedly she was taken to them, but he knew she would be the only one of her kind there.
So they drifted through their third drink, Clem watching Jo, Asa interjecting ums and reallys, which were hardly needed. It was ten o’clock and the bar was starting to fill up. It was an odd bar, serving three distinct groups who segregated themselves automatically. Hard-drinking lawyers in their thirties with no reason to go home sat at the bar itself, in low conversation with the whiskey-colored bartender. Harvard boys and their dates sat in the wicker booths that lined three walls. In the middle, at wobbling tables meant for two, quartets of homosexual men spilled their stingers on the checked tablecloths. These groups were not absolute—doctors, writers, and professors joined the lawyers at the stools; the homosexuals included women with brightly colored stockings who were not homosexual; and prep-school boys toting finishing-school girls passed themselves off as their older brothers and sisters along the wall. Still, as in all bars, sorrow, sex, and love were the preoccupations, and a man hoping to swamp his sadness in gin doesn’t talk to a man thinking to score, or thinking of how those cashmere shoulders will look at forty. The only overlap occurred when one of the younger boys caught the eye of a man in the middle. Asa and Reuben and Parker had drawn many unacknowledged glances on other nights. Only Reuben had noticed them; when he pointed out admirers (“That fellow in the yellow shirt, he’s sweet for you, Asa”) the others cringed. “Knock it off,” Parker would say. “Fresh flesh,” Reuben said, pinching Asa’s thigh, which hung over the arm of his chair. He alerted them to this other world, this distorted mirror world, and to their own power in it. “For a little handjob you could get a Peugeot ten-speed.” “Yucchh,” said Parker. He spoke for them all, despite Reuben’s bravado. They bent their blond heads over their beers and the man in the yellow shirt sighed. “Like a young lion,” he said to his stinger and his three companions, seeing in his drink Asa’s lips open from sleepiness and the pale beard he didn’t need to shave.
Asa, sixteen, having kissed two nice girls, one at a dinner dance only two months before (Jenny, dark-haired, tasting of a cigarette sneaked and shared behind a rosebush), having secretly, in June, spent most of his paycheck on a whore fifteen years older, who took a phone call in the middle of his session and whose thick waist he gripped with sad passion, having nobody to imagine her as, was looking—staring—at Jo and thinking of—longing for—Reuben and company. He missed the comfort of being understood. He missed the familiar shape and smell of Reuben, and the dizzying competition among the other three for Reuben’s admiration, which, though hard to provoke, could be lavish. So when Jo, talked out at ten-fifteen, asked the first question of the evening, “What are you doing with your summer?,” he answered immediately, “Hanging out at the Solas’.”
“Reuben Sola? Those rich Jews over near Sparks Street?”
“Yes,” Asa said, startled, “them.” It was a new outlook on the situation.
“Oh, well. Why don’t you come out on the boat next week? I think we’re all going to sail up from my uncle’s place in Duxbury to Manchester. Clem’s coming, isn’t that right?” Clem didn’t nod. “I think Parker’s coming too—you’re classmates, aren’t you? I’m sure he’s planning to come. And I’d love you to come.” She took another cigarette from her pack and kept her eyes on Asa. “It’ll be grand, don’t you think?”
“I’m working.”
“Oh. I didn’t know you had a job. You didn’t say you had a job.”
“Yes, I’m working,” repeated Asa, taking refuge behind the gas pump and the hot, black tarmac. “Thanks, though. Maybe next year.” Then, sensing she must be placated more, “It sounds like it will be fun.”
“They’re not so bad,” said Clem suddenly. “He’s an interesting man, Sola. Got a great art collection—you know that’s a Goya he’s got in the living room. Got some terrific dirty etchings, too, some Picassos. And a Daumier. You know that Daumier in the library?”
“Clemmy, I didn’t know you knew about art. Isn’t that a sketch? Where in the world did he get that stuff?”
“My minor concentration. Major concentration, European history; minor in art. Get the whole picture. I don’t know where he got it. Paris, I suppose. He was in France during the war.”
“I think I’m going to major in English,” Asa said.
“Oh, are you going to be a beatnik?” Jo put her hands in her red skirt and flipped the hem around her knees. “Live in a garret and stuff?” She was nasty from too many martinis.
“I didn’t know you knew the Solas,” said Asa.
“A girl in my class went out with Reuben last fall. I think it was Reuben. He’s the younger one, right? The good-looking one? Who doesn’t look Jewish.”
But Asa had been talking to Clem. Clem was gone again, thinking of the whole picture, or Jo’s legs, or whether to have a fourth martini. “He did,” said Asa. “Who was that?” Everything was getting far away from him.
“Marjorie Fish. She has curly hair.”
“Oh yes, Marjorie,” Asa said. It was news to him. The evening was full of news, which he wanted to be considering, alone.
Some social situations are difficult to disengage from, especially at sixteen. There was the matter of the bill (Asa refused to let Clem pay for his drinks), and snagging the waitress, and waiting for the change from Asa’s end-of-the-week five. Then there was a round of invitations to sail, swim, come to Western art classes at Harvard, buy gas at Asa’s station—none of which any of them wanted to do. Asa wanted air.
“Well, well—” He had managed to stand up. “Good night.” Their smoky faces looked up at him; both had petulant expressions, and he realized they wanted to be alone as much as he did. He fairly ran out the door.
There was his bicycle leaning on a lamppost, the dew of the hot night streaked down the street, the quietness everywhere. It was ten-forty. Asa turned his wheels west and rode down Brattle Street until he came to the Solas’ house. Then he stood on the street and looked at it.
He was trying to impose his new information onto the familiar shape. He wanted to see it as a Jewish palace, a folly full of plundered goods, because that was how he understood Jo’s remarks. He thought of the paintings—those Goyas and Daumiers he had ignored, imagining them some Jewish equivalent of the ancestors who lived on his stairway—and the black statuettes in the bookshelves (these were by Degas, Clem had said), and tried to see them as objects with their own importance; that was how he defined art. They steadfastly remained Professor Sola’s things, the way his mother’s blue-and-white ginger jar on the mantelpiece was hers by virtue of the pencils it had held since the beginning of time. He didn’t understand the indignation in Jo’s voice. She had made it sound as though the Solas had no right to these things or this house, with its beautiful arced driveway, its pre-Revolutionary trees. But for Asa the Solas had merged with their house just as all the owners of Brattle Street houses had; if they had accomplished it in fifteen years rather than a century, that was to their credit.
There were lights on the third floor. They were up there, Parker and Roberto, Reuben was up there, they had beer, they had drugs that had made them first dizzy, then sick, now bored and waiting for the next event. In the Casablanca Clem was breathing martinis into Jo’s small and not-clean ear, the bartender was wiping the copper counter, the clock above the bar was clicking on its electric way toward midnight. Asa was standing on the street straddling his old Raleigh while the night cooled. All his options were the opposite—constrictions. Back in Harvard Square there was nothing except circling around the empty, gray streets, leaving tire marks in the dew. At home just the ill-fitting tread on the second step on the way upstairs, the awful square bottle of milk, blue as ice, from whose thick, cream-clotted lip he would drink while holding the refrigerator open with his left hand and staring blankly at the leftovers in their covered bowls. And here, upstairs behind the canvas shade that smelled like second grade because it smelled of paste and dust and sunshine, Reuben lolling on the braided carpet, satisfied without Asa. Nobody was looking out the window for him; nobody was out on bicycles following his trail.
He could go in by the secret way—through a door in the basement, where Reuben kept a mattress to sleep on, and kiss girls on, when he was supposed to be somewhere else. For instance, at Andover. Reuben took the train back to Cambridge on wintry Thursdays and lay there, under his father’s feet, reading magazines, watching the day go away through the slits of glass near the ceiling. Then in the dark down to North Station, onto the six o’clock train, back in the dorm by seven. Asa knew how to get in, but he didn’t want to get in. He wanted, he realized, to stand on the street and be forlorn.
Asa made a short, difficult foray into his mind to look for the source of his wish to be forlorn and didn’t find it there. What’s the matter with me? was the deepest he could penetrate. His heart, calling for attention, made a little flurry of beats, but he put that down to martinis. He tried again: What’s the matter with you? By removing himself this one step more he kept himself safe from knowing.
He rode home and drank milk and went to bed.
Everything was different in the morning. First, it was wonderfully hot. At eight-thirty the tarmac at the gas station was oozing under his sneakers. Heat, Asa had noticed, exhausted adults; the party at the Solas’ would be less chaperoned than usual. Professor Sola would sit near his air conditioner and look at his bronzes rather than pace his flagstone terrace with a glass of gin the way he tended to do when Reuben gave parties. Second, his parents had not noticed the unlocked door, and his father had taken his black bag out of the closet, opened it, put his lunch into it, and gone off to his half-day at the office (lunch on the riverbank in front of the hospital as always) without finding anything amiss.
And then, in the middle of the morning, Jo appeared in a Buick, wearing a sleeveless green blouse that made her eyes, which last night had been yellow, green also. She put her elbow on the edge of the door, exposing her pale armpit, and rasped out, “Asa.” Asa was stacking cans of oil. The day was so hot his hands ached from touching the seething metal. And Jo looked cool like fruit—all fresh white skin and green cloth peeping out her window.
“I thought you were going sailing,” said Asa, standing up. He finished his pyramid of cans and went, automatically, toward her gas tank.
“Hey, I don’t want gas,” Jo said. She moved across the seat and leaned out the other window, where Asa was pointing the nozzle at her. “I wanted to see you.”
A few drops of gas dripped from the tip of the hose. “You did?” He put the pump line back in its socket. “I thought you were going sailing.” He realized he’d already said this and blushed.
Jo, watching Asa blush, lifted her arms to her hair and pushed her hands into it, pulling it straight back from her face. She had thick hair, probably close to brown in the winter, but now tawny and shiny from the sun. She let her hands fall down abruptly. “Hot,” she said. “Want to get some iced tea?”
“I don’t get lunch until eleven-thirty.”
“I’ll come back.” She drove out cautiously. This surprised Asa; he had imagined her a reckless driver. She flashed her taillights at him as she left the lot. He had an hour to fill.
First, time was slow and the sun made a glare in the spilled gasoline. Then two people wanted oil. When Jo came back there was a line of six cars waiting for gas, and Asa was sprinting from window to window taking money and orders. Jo parked near the office and smoked a Lucky. Asa did not look up, did not watch her smoke making circles on the solid atmosphere, counted change instead, said, “Thank you, sir,” kept her a secret from himself for a few minutes. Then he was done, and had to face her and where to have lunch in the nether end of Cambridge where nobody either of them knew lived or ate.
“Wait a minute,” he mumbled as he passed her on his way to wash. His face in the mirror was tracked with grit. His hands smelled of fuel, and then of fuel and yellow soap. Through the open vent above the sink he heard the scratch of her match lighting her second cigarette. He was keeping her waiting, which was ungentlemanly.
But what was he to do with her? There was a sub shop down the block; he imagined Jo in a red booth with her elbow avoiding a puddle of Coke. He preferred imagining her in the gloom of the Casablanca. He stood on tiptoe and looked at her through the vent. He had three dollars and she looked like a five-dollar lunch, maybe even an eight-dollar lunch. She was putting on pink lipstick, which didn’t become her. She had a mirror that fit the palm of her hand; she held it two feet away with an extended arm so as to get the whole picture. Her self-absorption enchanted Asa. He was spying on her privacy, which added interest to an already interesting scene. Jo and her mirror did a duet they’d practiced many times: She turned her head left and right, checking the sweep of her hair against her pale cheeks; she pushed her nose close to the glass and examined her pores—were they bigger? Did she need to use some alcohol?—then drew back and smiled; this showed her teeth, and she licked them quickly to make them shine. The mirror obediently reflected the prettiest girl in the parking lot. Asa’s arches began to ache from standing on tiptoe. Jo put her mirror in her purse and pulled out another cigarette.
“Hey, Thayer,” she said suddenly, in a normal tone of voice, as though he were standing beside her. Asa dashed from the washroom, pulling from his pocket the matches he had found that morning after a long search through the shelves of oil filters, spark plugs, wrenches, and gray rags. When he reached her she had lighted her cigarette.
“Let’s eat,” he said. He hoped if he said it firmly a pleasant sandwich shop would spring up on the sidewalk around the corner. But in the end they took a red booth and waited for their grinders (Asa’s meatball, Jo’s Italian cold cuts with everything) to arrive.
It was a $1.70 lunch, $2.10 with two iced teas and tip. Jo’s paper plate glistened with fallen chips of onion and green pepper. Asa was fearful of getting tomato sauce on his face.
“How come you didn’t go sailing this weekend?” Asa ventured, after a few difficult bites of meatball.
“God, you don’t forget a thing, do you?” said Jo. She folded a thick slice of salami in half and popped it in her mouth. A trickle of oil was left on her chin. “I thought it would be more fun to go to the party.”
“Yes. Is there another one?”
“I don’t think so.” As other parties would not be worth going to, he hadn’t listened for news of them. “Have you ever been to one?”
“A Sola party? No, but I’ve heard about them. I’ve heard people end up swimming with nothing on and, well, absolute orgies.”
Asa had never been at an orgy; had he been uninvited? “Not quite orgies,” he said, “but it gets pretty wild.” It hadn’t. The pleasure lay in the space—the pool, the long, lovely lawn, the knowledge that Professor Sola could patrol only one area at a time, the idea of possible wildness.
“Clemmy’s going to take me.” Having announced this, Jo filled herself up with a large installment of cold cuts. Asa was disappointed; he had reckoned on asking her to go with him—offering himself as her escort. It occurred to him that she was tormenting him, and he wondered why she had turned up. Surely not just to bother him. If he’d been twenty he might have had the wit to say, “I’m so delighted you came to have lunch with me,” and watched her face for clues, but all he could think of was the way she might taste, if he were able to lean across the Formica and put his mouth on hers. Or her cheek, or the bone near her eye, where her lashes made a shadow trellis.
“Tell me about Reuben,” Jo said.
“Why do you want to know about him?”
“He seems interesting. All you boys hang around with him—he must be interesting. Tell me some things about him.”
“All who?” asked Asa, postponing. “Just me and Parker.”
“Oh, Clem goes over there, doesn’t he? And I know some other people …” But she wasn’t going to say who. She looked at Asa as if the information he wasn’t giving out were a match he wasn’t striking for her cigarette.
“He’s not very good at school,” said Asa. “He’s at Andover, you know, and he was on academic probation all last year. I don’t think he studies. He’s very smart.”
“How do you know he’s smart?”
“Well, you just know.”
“And you are good at school?” Jo put her elbows on the back of the booth, so her shirt pressed against her breasts and her collarbone made a half-circle of white against her skin.
“No, but I’m better than he is. He doesn’t even write papers—at least he says he only writes the papers that interest him.”
“What interests him?”
“He likes dissecting things. Frogs.”
“Ugh!” Jo put her arms down and held hands with herself.
“And he likes American history. He says it’s a string of disasters and it cheers him up.”
“Huh? I don’t get it. What’s he like, I mean, what’s it like to be with him?”
“It’s fun,” said Asa. “He’s always thinking of something new to do.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Why don’t you talk to him yourself?”
“Jealous?” She smiled. “I’ve heard that he climbs things. Buildings. Is that true?”
“Oh.” Asa didn’t know what to say, because it was a secret. Reuben had a policy of climbing the scaffolding of every building under construction in Cambridge. There were not many of these, and they were usually lower than six stories, but in June a ten-story apartment was going up in North Cambridge and he had, in the middle of the night, scaled it alone, lighted only by the beams from passing cars and the hissing street lamp forty feet away. At least he claimed to have done this. He made them promise to keep it a secret. “Next time,” he’d said to Parker and Asa, “you’ll come along. It’s wonderful up at the top. They’re going to build something around the corner from this apartment building—I saw them digging up the ground. Let’s hope it’s fifteen stories.” Asa hoped it wouldn’t be.
“Where did you get that idea?” he asked her.
Jo smiled again. “You know he’s very rich. I mean, he’s got his own money, and when he’s twenty-one he’ll have more. Not rich the way you and I are—”
Are we? thought Asa.
“—but like movie stars. He’s sixteen, isn’t he?”
“Yes. But he’ll be seventeen next week. This is an advance birthday party. His birthday’s on Tuesday.”
“You watch, he’ll buy a car on his birthday. His own—you see? I can’t do that. My parents will give me a car, but I don’t have my own money to get one.”
“What sort of a car?” Asa thought of a wonderful car, a tapered, bottle-green Chevy with the softest backseat in the Northeast, long enough to stretch Jo out on while he skillfully undid the buttons of her blouse.
“And because they’re Jews,” Jo continued, “he’ll get the fanciest car he can find.”
“Why? Why does that mean …” He put his finger in the cooling puddle of tomato sauce on his plate and drew a circle in it.
“Oh you! You don’t understand anything!” Jo laughed at him, and it was not a pleasant laugh. “We’re cousins, aren’t we? Aren’t you and Clemmy cousins?”
“Not first cousins. Second, I think.”
“And I’m Clemmy’s cousin—”
“He said third. That’s barely cousins. That means we’re fifth cousins.”
“Well, you know what I mean. We’re related.”
“So what?” said Asa. He stared at her eyes, which were yellow again. “Does that mean I can’t kiss you?” He blushed. Jo, however, did not blush.
“Try it,” she said. It was a dare.
“I have to get back to work,” said Asa, and he made a pile of nickels on the table.
“You are a responsible little fellow.”
“How old are you?” Asa was standing up, and angry. “You’re my age, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” said Jo. “Or maybe just a bit younger. It’s good for the girl to be younger, isn’t it?”
Then she stood up as well, and came near him, so he could smell her and feel the warmth of her limbs. She smelled of onions and smoke. He moved away. “I’m late,” he said. “I’m sorry, I must get back.”
“I’m coming, stop rushing me.”
Walking down the block to the gas station they were silent. Asa’s hand brushed hers for a second, but she neither flinched nor turned her palm toward his. The air smelled of hot rubber and gasoline. The night to come, which earlier had seemed a chilly-blue oasis—the water in the pool, the music soaring out of the speakers that hung off the garage, the fellowship of himself and Reuben and Parker contrasted with the dozens of strangers in whose company, bolstered by his friends, he would be at ease—now might be as steamy and restless and incomprehensible as the day, all because of Jo.
“So you’re coming tonight,” he asked, as she got into her car.
“Oh yes,” she said. She looked at herself in the rearview mirror and blew herself, or maybe him, a kiss. “I’ll be there, looking great.”
“Okay,” said Asa. Okay, what? he asked himself. Okay, she can look great? Okay, she can come tonight? He wished that she would break her arm playing tennis or that Clem would whisk her off to a fancy restaurant in Boston where they wouldn’t eat dinner until ten. He wanted—was it privacy with Reuben? Perhaps relief from her attractiveness. “See you later, then.”
She left, in her slow, deliberate way, and gave a honk as she turned the corner.
At ten o’clock the party was rising to its crest. The fifty or so guests had passed through the stages of entry, huddling with three friends, scouting the crowd for romance, and dancing with unknowns, and had started to form a mass, a crowd with its own mood. It wasn’t clear where the mood came from; it wasn’t even clear what the mood was—but Asa felt the change. The mood existed independently of any particular person and had come over the moist patio like an ether, piped through the speakers with Chuck Berry. Asa felt turbulent, like a hurricane day in September, thick and changeable and poised on the edge of novelty. And he knew, from the faces around him, especially Roberto’s, that everyone shared his sensations. Roberto’s characteristic expression, which was petulance overlaid with a brash and false indifference, had shifted to anticipation. Girls who earlier had kept their dancing partners an arm’s length away now pressed their cheeks on white broadcloth, leaving faint dabs of powder there at the end of the song. Boys who had arrived in ties (Asa had not) had pocketed them. Professor Sola had made his round, gin in hand, at nine-thirty, greeted Asa and Parker, whispered a few words to Reuben, and left. But before leaving he had done something that startled Asa into wondering about him. He was a tall bony man who usually wore a black suit, and he moved in an awkward, bony way, as if he consisted only of joints and cartilage. He scuffed along floors, so the boys always knew when he was coming. Tonight he had paused on his way back to the house and turned around, facing the lines of bobbing dancers, and stood watching for a while. Then he had walked, without scuffing, back to the edge of the pool and knelt, swiftly and easily, beside it. Folded up near the ground he looked to Asa more jagged and bloodless than usual. How odd, thought Asa, that Reuben is so unlike him. Professor Sola dipped his hand in the turquoise water and drew it toward him, cupped in his palm. The image of the simply colored paper lanterns strung above the terrace, pink and yellow, swayed on the surface of the pool. Again his hand slid through the water, and he swept his arm along with the ease that Reuben curled his arm to throw a ball. “Grace,” he said. Then he did leave.
“Grace,” repeated Asa. Was that a name or an idea? He couldn’t decide which would be stranger. If a name, whose? And why was Professor Sola whispering it by the edge of the pool? Grace as an idea was something Asa associated with Bible studies, the story of the Good Samaritan, the drowsiness he felt after lunch, which was when the class was held. It was a puzzle.
Also puzzling was Jo, who hadn’t arrived. Asa hunted down Parker, who was clasped in beige linen arms at the far corner of the terrace, and coughed.
“Hey, Parker,” he said.
Parker lifted his head up and frowned. “I’m busy,” he said, then turned the girl around and introduced her to Asa. She was about fifteen, her hair was the color of her dress, and her eyes were still shut, looking in at the memory of Parker’s mouth. Her name was Amy.
“Sorry, but I wonder if your brother’s coming.”
“Clem? I don’t know. Why should I know? Why don’t you dance? He’ll be here, if he’s coming.” Parker saw Asa wince at this string of rudeness and pulled a flask from his pocket. “Have a shot. Have a few shots and ask Lydia to dance.”
“Who’s Lydia?”
“There must be somebody here named Lydia. Find her and ask her to dance.”
This was an assignment only Parker could have thought up or carried out. Asa couldn’t go from girl to girl asking if her name was Lydia. Did Parker offer challenges like this just to make him, Asa, feel weak? He stomped into the garage, where Reuben had hidden beer in a cooler behind some snow tires, and stood in the gloom drinking. And in the gloom he saw something new in the garage: Reuben’s car, predicted by Jo.
It was low, stout, white, and entirely novel to Asa. Its snub-nosed hood said PORSCHE. He walked around it once, looking at its handles and its single strip of chrome before peering through the glass to inspect the dashboard and seats. On the seats—red leather, bucket, ample—sat Reuben at the steering wheel and Jo on the right. His hand lay on her thigh; she was wearing the red skirt again. And her hand with its bitten nails grasped his wrist like a handcuff, as if it would never let go.
Asa stepped out of the garage into the pools of light cast by the paper lanterns on the driveway. His bicycle was leaning against a bush, and he wanted more than anything to be on it, riding down a dark country road without a thought for Reuben or any of them. No side street in all of Cambridge would do; he needed blackness, the hum and strum of a thousand animals poised at the edge of the woods watching him pass, the living, soft country night all around him, to erase what he wanted to erase. Therefore he walked back to the party.
Roberto sidled up to him and offered him a swig of something golden in a glass. Asa took it; it burned and stank like nothing he had ever drunk.
“What is that?” he asked. “Kerosene?”
“Special old brandy I stole from Papa. Where’s Reuben?”
“Sitting in his car.”
“All by himself?” When Asa didn’t answer, Roberto asked again.
“No,” said Asa after a while, “he’s sitting with a girl.”
Roberto did something unusual then. He put his arm around Asa’s shoulders. They stood together, sharing the nasty brandy in silence. And because Roberto was making a special effort for him, Asa was comforted. At the same time he knew it was his sense of injury that let him accept Roberto; in the normal course of things Roberto was an extra, a cranky appendage he and Parker tolerated from loyalty to Reuben, who felt loyalty to his brother.
“We’re both outsiders, aren’t we,” said Roberto suddenly. It wasn’t a question. “I organized this damn party—all these parties, in fact. Did you know that? Reuben says, ‘Let’s have a party,’ and then I call people up, I arrange for the beer, I spread the word around town, I even hang these stupid lanterns. But they look nice, don’t they? I like the lanterns reflected in the pool. I do everything, and then I stand around watching it, while Reuben and Parker smooch with ninth graders in the bushes. I do attic patrol—you know what that is? Checking the upstairs bedrooms to make sure there aren’t any couples in them. I even make sure Papa has a fresh drink every hour on my way downstairs from attic patrol.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Oh, why not? I like a party too. Anyhow, it’s what I do. Then I watch it. I watch people making fools of themselves, falling in the pool, getting lipstick on their cheeks, puking on a deck chair. I’m sort of the guardian of the party.” He laughed and looked at Asa sideways. “And you’re sort of the ghost of the party.”
“What are you talking about?” Asa moved out from the shelter of Roberto’s arm.
“You’re never in the bushes smooching, you’re always trailing around after them, jealous because they’re smooching or they’re drunker than you are and they’re having more fun.”
“The hell I am,” said Asa. But Roberto wasn’t listening to him.
“And you do what you have to do to pass—you know, to look as though you’re part of the party. You dance a few rounds, and you carry a beer bottle, and you know enough not to arrive in a jacket and tie. But you’re as out of it as I am. More. I live here, for Chrissake. I can tell everybody to go home. It’s my house. Shall I do that? This isn’t much of a party. The one in May was a lot better.”
“No, oh, no,” said Asa. Roberto, standing in the glare of his lanterns, seemed flooded with a sudden power, and Asa half believed that a snap of his fingers would cause the crowd to evaporate. But he also knew himself to be just suffering from the inconsistency of life: Jo was in the new car with Reuben, and he was a ghost, and he hadn’t expected either of these events. So why shouldn’t Roberto turn out to be a sorcerer? There was also the question of “Grace.” Roberto had begun to whistle and tap his foot, signs that he was about to move away and make trouble elsewhere. “What was your mother’s name?” asked Asa.
“We don’t talk about her,” Roberto said.
Asa knew that already. She was more unmentionable than the source of the Solas’ money, which was variously reported, by Asa’s parents, Parker, and Clem, to be from a drugstore chain, the Rothschilds (cousins, maybe?), or smuggled from Europe at the start of the war in the form of diamonds. Professor Sola’s wife had been: blonde and bad—and this Asa knew from deduction.
Roberto was on the other side of the pool, jostling the dancers at the edge in the hope that some were unsteady enough to fall in. None did. Then he took up his skimming pole and cleaned the surface of the water, moving, with his net, the lanterns’ garish daubs that like a new constellation ringed themselves in that liquid sky. He stirred the water and made little whirlpools and whistled and splashed. The long pole’s end was interfering with Parker and Amy, who had come out of the shadows to dance. Roberto had managed to insert it between them, and every time he stirred, the pole described an unpredictable ellipse at the level of their knees.
“Pole,” said Parker.
Roberto beat on, unheeding.
“Pole, you asshole!” Parker yelled. One moment later he grabbed the handle and flipped Roberto into the pool by jerking it from his hands. And then there was nothing to prevent everybody else from going in—the water was cool, dancing was hot, midnight had struck on the church clock up the street, and they were all young.
Asa, in his capacity of ghost, sat in a deck chair and waited to hear the car doors shut. He wanted a specific thing: Jo coming to him in the dark and kissing him. He imagined it with words—“Why are you sitting here in the dark? Why aren’t you swimming?”—and without: her hands on his shoulders, her thigh pressing against his arm, which rested on the arm of the chair, the smell of her hair as it fell around his face; her two rather small lips pushing against his, tasting of lipstick and Luckys and her own secret taste, which would be peppermint; the instant when he pushed beyond her lips and into the heat of her mouth. Perhaps she would push her way into him first? The way her skirt would slip under his hands when he put them around her knees to hold her steady through their kiss. How they would, without having to walk or discuss it, be lying in grass hip to hip and be warm up and down from each other’s heat. Her fingers undoing his buttons. Their shoes paired like sentries on the ground. A small pile of clothes, crickets singing to them, silk and silk, wet silk and dry of her stretched out for him.
When she did come, things happened so quickly he barely caught the details. She stood behind him, put one hand on his neck, and pulled his head backwards by his chin. She kissed him upside down, so he didn’t know if her eyes were open or shut. It was a professional kiss; her tongue was in and out of him and the whole thing was over in ten seconds. She stood briefly behind him, still holding him on the shoulder, and they breathed together. Asa put his tongue between his lips to taste her again; she tasted, naturally enough, of Reuben—beery, yeasty, slightly tart from chlorine and sweat, a taste that, translated into smell, Asa could have identified anywhere.
“Do that again,” he said, arching his neck back to her. His voice was low and thick, but he was pleading, not commanding. And Jo, with her excitable red skirt, was not a girl to be pleaded with. He knew that the instant the sentence was out. Overcoming centuries of inertia and miles of internal boundaries, Asa rose from his chair and turned around to embrace her. She wasn’t there. He couldn’t even see her disappearing into the garage.
He sat back in his chair. Was she now kissing Reuben, who was tasting Asa’s taste in her? Or was she moving from Parker to Roberto to Harrison Grey, who always wore a seersucker suit to the party? Was she sitting next to Clem in his Ford while he pumped the gas pedal and hoped the car would start? If he waited for her again as intently as he had, would she reappear? He tried. This time he supplied himself with her breasts, whose dimensions he could guess from the moment when she had pressed herself against his shoulders, trying to reach the rims of his upper teeth with her tongue. But the taste, the Reuben-taste, which remained vivid in his mouth and mind, confused his image of her, so that her honey hair kept bleaching into Reuben’s pale hair, and her small bony face, which looked, now that he thought of it, a little like Reuben’s, kept looking exactly like Reuben’s. Brandy and fury at being peripheral had him confused; a creature with a boy’s face, breasts, and wearing something white—a ghost hermaphrodite—was what he had created for his fantasies. That sort of thing would never appear on the Solas’ terrace to kiss him.
Beyond his outstretched feet the party sang the last verse of its song. The pool was empty and unruffled again. Those who had been in it were standing beside it with damp patches on their clothes saying good-bye to ones they had kissed or wished they’d kissed. Cars and bicycles were crunching the gravel of the driveway. The lanterns were pale, as though shining all evening had exhausted their pigment, and the table where ginger ale and orange juice (mixers for the vodka carried in silver flasks in back pockets) had been ranked like ninepins now held one bottle of beer with two cigarette butts in it. Roberto was sweeping up the broken glass surrounding the table by kicking it into a paper bag; the shards he trod on, exclaiming “Ping,” as each one cracked. People leaving clapped him on the shoulder.
“Wonderful, terrific, thanks,” they said.
“Don’t mention it,” he growled. “Come tomorrow night, same time, same place.” Crack of glass, jingle of a piece that made it into the bag with the others.
Asa stayed in his chair. He could have taken the broom that rested at the far edge of the garage and swept the butts from the edge of the pool, but he didn’t. He could have joined Roberto and saved the remaining pieces of glass from being crushed into sand, but he didn’t do that either. There was no point to Roberto’s cleaning. In the morning Lolly, their pale servant, would clean everything. Roberto only started to clean when he wanted the party to end.
“Roberto, cut out the cleaning,” said Parker, who had walked Amy to the end of the driveway and kissed her until they were both out of breath, and returned with a hot face and a happy self-absorption.
“Why don’t you clean something up, Whiting,” Roberto said. “Sweep up the butts.”
“Oh, let Lolly do it,” Parker said. He yawned and flopped onto the deck chair next to Asa’s. “Sulking?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m sulking,” said Asa.
“Did you find Lydia?”
“I didn’t look for her.”
“Who’s Lydia?” asked Roberto.
“Never mind. Forget it.” Asa got out of his chair. It felt strange to be standing up. The blood whizzed up and down his legs in a peculiar way that made him queasy.
“Great party,” said Parker, after a minute of silence. “Don’t you think?”
“I thought it stunk,” said Roberto.
“How about you, Asa?”
“Fine,” said Asa.
“Lively bunch here.” Parker sank back in the chair and went to sleep.
Roberto had finished with the glass and was walking around the pool picking up cigarette butts. Parker wheezed and opened his mouth, but kept sleeping. Asa stood on his tingling legs in the shadows and hated everything. He hated Parker for being able to sleep and for being able to find a girl who would kiss him more than once. He hated Roberto for making everyone feel guilty by cleaning up. He hated himself for sulking, for wanting what he couldn’t have, and for not being dignified enough to have punched Roberto when he called him a ghost. He hated the party for being over and for having ever begun, and the night for its thick, cricket-crazy air, and the pool for its imperturbable surface, which he envied, and Professor Sola for his secret Grace, and Reuben—Reuben who wasn’t even there to be hated—he hated simply for being himself, that self which, in its blare and blaze of assurance, could draw all eyes and hands as a fire.
Suddenly the four spotlights on the garage roof came on. The terrace, the pool, and half the lawn were under their white auspices. They were so bright that they gave all objects a vibrating aura—metal in particular changed its character. The legs of chairs and the three-step ladder leading into the shallow end of the pool quivered and shot out white-green penumbras, as though the light were a new element that had altered their composition and transformed them into slices of comets or stars—something, at any rate, that burned hot and fierce. The light made confusion out of living things, isolating each movement, so that Roberto, bending down to gather trash, was kin to a time-lapse photograph of a ballet dancer, a series of postures living in ghostly yet vivid sequence, dozens of Robertos shimmering around the real Roberto hidden in the middle of his duplicates. Even Parker asleep had twenty rising and falling chests.
“For Chrissake, turn the lights off!” yelled Roberto. “You’ll scare the neighborhood.”
Reuben, wearing nothing at all, burst out of the garage and into the pool. He was a huge white fish underwater for the whole length of it. At the deep end he darted up, pulling his torso out of the water, and yelled, “Fuck the neighborhood!” He went down again, he turned somersaults, he splashed Roberto on purpose. After five minutes of this, satisfied, he catapulted over the ladder and stood on the flagstones, shaking himself like a dog while the water ran down him in green and ash-white streams. “I’m going to be seventeen,” he cried, raising his arms to the night sky. “Seventeen.”
Asa took his bike from the bushes and rode home.