My Secret History (16 page)

“When?”

“At the pool—looking at you.”

“You were thinking about
that?”

She laughed and said, “Yes!”

I was slightly shocked that a girl would sit down and stare and think about screwing; but I was glad, too.

I said, “It’s hot in here, Lucy.”

“I’ll open the window,” she said.

“That’s okay. I have to go pretty soon.”

She didn’t object. She just said, “And I have to eat.”

Amazing. We had just made love passionately and furiously—and in a few minutes she would be eating spaghetti or something and I would be on the bus to Medford Square, as if nothing had happened.

I said, “As soon as I get some money we can go out to eat. I know a few places. I’d like to see you again and have some fun.”

She said, “Sure.”

I thought: I don’t want anything more than this. And then I was walking down Pinckney Street alone, and whistling. The sun was behind the houses and the air was cool.

I kept glancing up from my book, expecting to see her in her blue bathing suit. But she didn’t turn up that day, nor the day after, which was July Fourth. We always worked on holidays. Kennedy came to Boston, and Larry and Vinny ducked out to
see him. They were very grateful to me for taking over, but it was no sacrifice. Kennedy was a bad Catholic and a millionaire. I had grown up with the sense that the rich were dishonest.

At about eleven o’clock Larry and Vinny came back saying that they had seen him and that he had class.

“What’s Jackie Kennedy like?”

“I’d fuck her,” Vinny said in a praising way.

A little later I was looking for Lucy and saw a man staring at me.

“Excuse me—you got a minute?”

I had always found that a forbidding question.

He was skinny, with very short hair and piercing eyes that were two different colors—one gray, the other blue. That made me think he had been hit very hard on the side of his head. His mouth hung open, making him seem both thoughtful and stupid. He breathed through his mouth in a laborious way that suggested he had low intelligence. His bathing suit was too tight, and I began to wonder whether men who wore very tight bathing suits were strange.

He said, “Does it bother you that we’re sending tractors to Cuba, I mean actually shipping them to that dictator Fidel Castro?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. I said no, it didn’t bother me; and I looked around the pool for Lucy. “I wrote him a letter. I called him names.”

“Castro? Did he write back?”

“Would you write back if someone called you names?”

I could only think of my letter to Kaloostian, which was actually a letter to the entire Maldwyn Country Club. Was there anal symbolism in shoving potatoes into their exhaust pipes?

“Then I wrote to the President,” the skinny man said. “Of the United States. ‘Ike,’ I says. ‘How can you be so stupid?’ That’s all.”

“Any reply?” I was still glancing around.

He laughed. “I was telling him something!”

I saw Larry tapping his watch: lunchtime.

“I have to go, pal.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“You already did. I think it’s very interesting that you wrote to Fidel Castro. Maybe next time you should write in Spanish.”

“See, the thing is,” he said, not listening to me. “I’ve got one of these tiny little cameras. Japanese. I can take pictures of anything.”

I thought I was walking away from him, but he was following. I could hear the air going into his mouth.

“I want to take your picture. I mean with your clothes off. You’d probably be too shy, huh?”

When I stopped and turned he bumped into me. He was apologizing as I said, “You like it here, pal?”

“My name’s Norman. You can call me Norm, or Norman. I’m here for my nerves. I can’t work. It’s my nerves. The doctor told me to swim.”

“If you want to swim here, then swim. But don’t make strange requests. Understand?”

But the man had startled me and made me uneasy. And that crazy talk had given me a strong desire to see Lucy. She was what I wanted—I needed a girlfriend. And she worked in a bookstore. I thought of sex and I also thought how she might get me a discount on books.

“Aren’t you having a beer?” Larry said at the Harvard Gardens.

We had taken our sandwiches there, to the bar, because it was air conditioned and there was a jukebox. He was drinking a Budweiser.

“This is going to sound batty,” I said, “but I don’t have any money. About five bucks, that’s all. It has to last me until payday.”

“A fin until next Thursday!”

“And I wanted a take a girl out.” I didn’t tell him who it was. I didn’t want him to know that I had met her at the pool. “I could use about thirty bucks.”

“I know where you can make an easy twenty-five.” He was eating a meatball sandwich and just then a meatball fell out of one end as he bit into the other. He was chewing and picking up the loose meatball as he said, “Over at the hospital. We can go after lunch. It’s a tit.”

“And just pick up twenty-five bucks?”

“That’s what they pay for a pint of blood,” he said. He was still eating, chewing the meatballs, so I knew he was serious.

*   *   *

We were still wearing our bathing suits and our red T-shirts lettered
LIFEGUARD
, but no one took any notice of us. We walked through the hospital, went up to the third floor in an elevator that held a whimpering woman in a wheelchair, and then down a corridor to a waiting room with posters saying
BE A BLOOD DONOR
. A nurse at a desk recognized Larry and began talking to him. She was about twenty and had dark eyes. She was pretty but had hairy arms.

“Loretta, this is Andre Parent,” Larry said. “He wants to give blood, and so do I.”

“As long as it doesn’t hurt,” I said.

“Not a bit. Ask Larry. He’s been here lots of times.”

“It’s nothing,” Larry said. “It might even be good for you. Like I noticed this strange thing. The more times you give the easier it is. The first time your blood is sort of thick and ketchuppy. But after a few times it gets thinner.”

“How do you know, if it’s in a bottle?”

“It gushes out faster.”

His saying
gushes out
made me nervous. I said, “We have to get back to the pool.”

“Muzzaroll’s on the chair,” Larry said. “And you covered for him this morning.” He turned to Loretta and said, “We went to the parade. Saw Kennedy. He was about as far away as I am from you. He is definitely going to win. He has class. I mean, he’s Irish. And his wife’s a piece of ass.”

“Please watch your language,” Loretta said. She was smiling, but she became brisk. She stood up and said, “This won’t take long.”

“It’s a business proposition,” Larry said.

“If you want to be paid we’ll give you twenty-five dollars afterwards. And a cup of coffee.” She smiled. “But some people do it for nothing.”

Larry said, “You charge patients for it, so why shouldn’t we cash in.”

“Step inside,” Loretta said.

It amazed me that we were talking about bottles of blood.

Loretta pricked my finger and tested it on a glass slide. She said, “You’re B-negative. We always need that group.”

I lay down on a high-legged bed and she suspended an empty bottle beside me. I looked away when she poked the needle into
my arm, but I saw her connect it to a tube that led to the bottle. I started to perspire, so I concentrated on staring at a machine at the far end of the room. A sign over an opening said
DO NOT INSERT ANY PART OF YOUR BODY INTO THIS MACHINE
. I could only think of one part, and that gave me a twinge.

Loretta gave me a rubber ball to hold. It was black and a bit smaller than a baseball. “Squeeze it slowly and watch what happens.”

I gave the ball a squeeze and a plop of blackish blood ran down the side of the clear glass bottle. I looked at the machine and kept squeezing.

After she connected Larry, he said, “I’ll race you.”

When my bottle was full I stood up and felt weak and lightheaded. I had a coffee and collected the money and we went back to the pool. I still felt woozy, and so I climbed the lifeguard’s chair and stayed there without reading for the rest of the afternoon. I hoped the feeling would pass. I was also watching for Lucy.

At closing time—still no sign of Lucy—Larry said, “Want to try something great? After you give blood it’s very easy to get drunk, because there’s less of it. Let’s go over to the Gardens.”

I had money in my pocket and nothing else to do. And Larry was right. After one beer I felt drunk, but I had another one just the same. Then I began to miss Lucy, and got sad because I couldn’t tell any of it to Larry. Eventually I was too drunk to go home.

We staggered outside and Larry said, “Let’s get something to eat. What do you feel like?”

I said, “Whale steaks,” and imagined chewing one.

He said, “You’re shitfaced,” and laughed in an unfunny drunken way, and in the Chinese restaurant—I could not remember how we got there—he was still laughing.

I said, with my brain buzzing in my head, “See, it’s not Jonah inside the whale. It’s the whale inside me. That’s what I want my life to be like.”

He said, “God, are you shitfaced.”

This Chinese place was supposed to be cheap, but it cost us seven dollars each, and an ice-cream sundae was another dollar, and afterwards I threw up at the bus stop. Larry said, “Put your head between your legs” and left me there. Thinking it was a
police car I waved my arms, and when I realized it was a taxi I took it home—another seven dollars.

“You look sick,” my mother said.

I didn’t say anything about giving blood, or the Chinese food or the taxi—she would have asked me where I got the money.

“Where have you been?” she said.

“Nowhere.”

That was my Fourth of July.

In the morning I felt fine, but I only had ten dollars left and that wasn’t enough for a date with Lucy. But where was she?

“There was someone looking for you, Andre,” Muzzaroll said one morning. “She was kind of disappointed.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That you’re late for work.”

I said the bus was late. But he wasn’t angry. He didn’t care.

He said, “When I see a pretty girl waiting for a bus I always get horny, because I know that all I have to do is stop and she’ll get into my car. I can plank her, because she wants a ride.”

“Maybe she doesn’t,” I said. “Maybe that’s why she’s waiting for the bus.”

It was a lovely day. Norman was writing a letter—probably to Eisenhower, or maybe Khrushchev. I steered myself away from him and reflected on how typical it was that he was sitting against the fence scribbling. Weirdos never went into the water, except to yank down kids’ bathing suits, or fondle them underwater. They lurked, they lingered, they stared and muttered. Public swimming pools attracted the strangest people. Mrs. Mirsky wore a corset under her old-fashioned bathing suit and used to sing; Mr. Schickel ate his lunch in the changing room and said, “I’m still very hungry” to naked boys; the boy who
stood outside the fence holding his radio against his head; the man who swam in sunglasses and wearing a baseball hat.

The normal ones screamed and splashed, and went home with wet hair. They were mostly kids. The rest were mental cases, or else very lonely. The pool was for everybody, which was why I found it interesting.

Just as I was leaving that day, Lucy stopped by the office.

“I’ve been tied up at the bookstore,” she said. “I just wanted to say that I’m free at the moment if you wanted to do anything.”

We immediately went to her room and made love. Afterwards I felt very shy, because she seemed shy. It was so odd to make love to her like that in her bed. We had hardly spoken before then, and so there was not much to say afterwards. Just a moment ago she had been gasping and saying
Oh God!
and showing the whites of her eyes. I felt I owed her something.

“Maybe we could go to a movie sometime,” I said.

“There’s a French movie called
Breathless
that I want to see. Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.”

They were always the expensive ones; and a meal after the show. I would have to wait until payday.

“Let’s go next week,” I said.

“Can’t we meet and do something before then?”

Do something
meant one specific thing to me now.

“Sure,” I said, and picking up her copy of
On the Road
I said, “Can I borrow this?”

It was also my way of telling her that I was going home.

I stopped at the pool to pick up my bag. Muzzaroll and McGinnis were playing cards in the office.

“That wasn’t her,” Muzzaroll said.

I stared at him.

“The woman who came looking for you this morning. That wasn’t her.”

I was in the lifeguard chair reading Lucy’s copy of
On the Road
, and liking the book. I thought: I’ll hitchhike home tonight instead of taking the bus. And next year I’ll go out west. When I thought of travel I remembered the sentence I had underlined in Baudelaire,
Anywhere out of this world
. But Kerouac was familiar—he came from Lowell. My aunt Eva was from Lowell! Sometimes his writing was truly terrible, and that gave me hope for
myself. Again and again, I read the same line about “the charging restless mute invoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power” and I could not make up my mind whether it was baloney or genius. It was probably a little bit of both.

Larry said, “You’re going to ruin your eyes, Andre.”

The little Puerto Rican kids were screaming and jumping into the deep end. Above me, the Mass General was like a fortress, with the faces of patients looking out. I saw myself as a Kerouac character who was capable of feeling a holiness in this confusion: holy children, holy sick people, holy weirdos.

Then Lucy’s voice said, “What are you having for lunch?”

She was smiling at the fence, still in the pretty dress she wore to work.

“I’ve got my mother’s meatloaf sandwiches,” I said, climbing down from the chair.

“Why don’t you eat them in my room, in style?”

Larry asked me where I was going. I said, “I’ve got to take a wicked leak.” I didn’t want to tell him about Lucy. “I’ll be right back.”