Asa, as I Knew Him (14 page)

Asa drank another beer. The sun got lower and hotter. Parker, who’d been asleep, woke and said, “Let’s go swimming.” But the water was cold. It curled their toes and made their heads hurt. Parker ran in yelling “Here I go!” and shot up from the water almost instantly. Asa watched from shore. “Too damned cold,” said Parker, resuming his nib, hat, and towel. Then the wind shifted and some flies arrived. Asa placed an egg at the edge of the towel to distract them, but they wanted blood. The trick was to kill them in midbite, when for a moment they were still. After six bites and two deaths, Asa was ready to leave. They didn’t bite Parker. “They don’t like my smell,” he said. “You are just what they like.” There was a cloud of them above Asa’s head, humming.

“Let’s go,” he called toward the red towel.

“Not yet,” Reuben called back.

“There are
flies
,” Asa insisted.

“Not over here.”

“I’m coming over with them.” Asa stood up and walked toward them with his halo. Jo turned onto her belly for modesty. A fly settled on her ass.

“All right,” she said. There was a flat, dark welt on her buttock. “Let’s go.”

They left the uneaten eggs in a row on the sand. Reuben forgot his comic book, Jo forgot her watch (“Good,” she said in the car, “I want a new one, with Roman numerals”), Asa forgot the brass-handled bottle opener he’d remembered to take from the lowboy at the last minute that morning, and Parker forgot his shirt. Before the low, white car had reached the edge of Boston, these objects had been washed over by the ocean and changed. The comic book swelled with water, the watch stopped, the shirt ripped and curled into a ball, the brass took on the green cast of the sea. Gulls poked the eggs with their beaks and tattered them. Sand and tide crept up on these things, and by ruining them made them mysterious. To the next visitors, the next afternoon, they would be not debris but artifacts, visible memories. “Look, an old picnic. There was a woman with this watch, and they were drinking …” And that couple’s afternoon would be enlarged to include all the other summer afternoons when people had warmed their water-cold feet in the sand and looked across the waves to see—couldn’t you, just over the horizon, see it?—Spain.

The ride back was punctuated by realizations of loss: “My watch!” “My shirt!” “Shit, my comic,” “Oh God, mother’s brass thing.” Only Jo was pleased. Reuben complained most, though his loss was the easiest to rectify. “I hadn’t finished it,” he groaned. “You can get another with a nickel,” Jo said. “Too cheap?” “I just wanted to finish it.” Asa decided the best approach with his mother was to announce having lost the bottle opener immediately and be contrite. Parker was planning to buy a pink shirt—maybe two—at J. August on Monday. Jo wanted to go directly to Shreve’s for her watch, but nobody else wanted to. Asa and Parker got a chance to
see her work on Reuben. “It wouldn’t take fifteen minutes,” she said, stroking his arm that stretched to the steering wheel. “I know just the one I want. We could just run in—we could double-park and leave them in the car.” She tilted her head back to indicate “them.” Reuben stared at the road. She began to stroke his upper thigh, and once or twice her fingers dipped into the dark above the edge of his shorts. Reuben smiled but said nothing. Then he took her hand, rather roughly, and placed it in her lap. “Forget it,” he said. He turned his face toward her, smiling and remote. “Go with your daddy.”

Although Asa was surprised by Reuben’s coldness and unsusceptibility (what wouldn’t he, Asa, do to have Jo’s fingers walking up and down his thigh?), he also felt a sympathetic dislike of her and an urge to torment her. Jo would be gratifying to hurt because she was tough and beautiful and expected to be treated well. He could sense Reuben’s pleasure in denying her, and wondered if they didn’t both take delight in his meanness—he for the simple power of it, she for the novelty. How long, Asa wondered, would it be before he was sure enough of himself to be mean rather than abject with women? It might never happen. He couldn’t imagine being anything but accommodating to a girl he was crazy about. More evidence of his weakness, or, from another point of view, his good upbringing.

They had come to the bridge again. The fat, four o’clock June sun was lighting up the structure, making a net that caught Asa’s attention. He looked at it, rather than the scene it encircled, and saw it as a “monument,” as Reuben saw it. Under their tires the steel rang and quivered—the bridge was a vibrating corridor between country and city. Asa was struck by an awareness of progress through a landscape, as if for the first time he understood what travel was: He moved and things stayed behind. Yet that description was not exactly
right, and he let his head fall back against the cushions openeyed, so the scaffolding of the bridge could strum his vision and, perhaps, provoke a better explanation. Everything was shiny and hot and changing, everything was moving past him—he reversed his understanding: He was the same, an open eye, and the world shifted and shone. And these thoughts themselves flashed through his mind the way the changing scene flashed past his eye; for a moment each was entire and round, then had gone and was unimaginable, or rather lived only in the imagination because it was not present. But where was he in this landscape? Only an eye, either moving or static? He remembered his resolve to Do Something. But it was hot, the car smelled comfortably of cigarettes and suntan oil, and the world flickering beyond the windows could be a roll of pictures unfurled for his pleasure—Reuben pulled the car over abruptly and got out.

“Hey,” said Parker.

“Checking out this bridge,” said Reuben. He put his hand on one of the girders (it was almost too large for his palm to fit around) and leaned on it.

Asa sank into a stupor. He knew what was coming: Reuben saying, Who’s going to climb this bridge with me? He could hear himself volunteering, to placate his ambitions. He could hear Jo’s protests, or encouragement, it didn’t make any difference because she was irrelevant to bridge climbing. Parker stepped out of the car also, and stood beside Reuben on the grillwork of the walkway, assessing the possible approaches they could take. Asa stayed in the backseat and thought about how he was too cowardly to refuse to climb and too cowardly to enjoy what he would agree to do. Then he stopped thinking about it. He said, “Yes, sure,” and decided it would be like a trip to the dentist—he would determine to live through it nobly. His objective was to endure.

But he knew that objective made the enterprise a failure. What he did might fool Parker, and even Reuben, into thinking he was brave, but he wouldn’t be brave, he would be acting brave. He was out of alignment somehow—and when had he not been? Bicycling around sleeping Cambridge, but what sort of adventure was that? When Jo had kissed him and he’d asked her to kiss him again: That had been the intersection of desire and action. But it hadn’t worked. She’d gone back into the garage.

“Great bridge, I’ve wanted to climb it for years,” Reuben said, settling himself at the steering wheel. “We’ll go Monday night. Thayer, you’re not going to fink out, are you?”

Asa could say yes and grow up in a hurry, discard his friends with one word, and put pranks and daredeviltry behind him. He realized it would mean that. The pressure of having to reaffirm popped the shell of the situation; the inside, the foolishness and foolhardiness, was exposed. He realized there was a choice, and he wanted summer, risk, admiration—all waiting for him on the struts of that bridge. Climbing the bridge was the closest he could come to being Reuben, and wasn’t that his real ambition? He wanted that the way Reuben wanted to be high and perilous.

“No, no,” he said urgently, “I won’t fink out.”

On Monday morning Reuben phoned to say he should wear sneakers, long pants, and a long-sleeved shirt. “And wear dark colors, so they don’t notice us.” They were to meet at the Solas’ at eight; Roberto was going along. “Should I bring some rope?” Asa asked. Reuben laughed and said they weren’t going to use rope. “That’s cheating,” he said, and hung up.

Asa mowed the back and front lawns without being asked, oiled the lawn mower, and sanded the rust off his bicycle. At four in the afternoon he thought he might die before the
sun went down. He lay on his mahogany bed and stared at the ceiling and wished he could sleep, and oversleep, to wake at ten o’clock when the crickets were singing and his friends had reached the halfway point on those thick wires. For a while he did sleep, and dreamed he was kissing Jo, lying in the hollow of a dune. He woke up sweating and empty-headed, feeling he had passed through danger. Flies bombarded his screen, the late sun fell on his naked feet, and he was conscious of summer, the slowness, the roundness of it. From far below he heard the faint rattle of his mother making dinner. He stretched. In the middle of stretching, just at the point when his muscles were about to tingle with relief and pleasure, he remembered the climb; a pain went through him, and in his mouth was a bath of penny-flavored saliva. The clock in the hall bonged six. He got up and put on a navy-blue sweatshirt.

The Solas were eating dessert when he arrived. Professor Sola sat at the middle of their long, polished table with a son at either end. Each had a bowl of cream with strawberries bobbing in it. Reuben had a cream mustache. Asa was deposited in the chair opposite Professor Sola by Lolly, who then brought a bowl for him too.

“What are your plans for tonight, boys?”

“Midnight ride,” Reuben said.

“Sultry. Are these the dog days?”

“No, Papa, those are in August,” Reuben said. “Why don’t you swim?”

“Perhaps.” He pushed his spoon around, trying to gather more cream. “I’ll have coffee,” he said, quietly. Lolly appeared immediately with a cup. “Will you have some?” He smiled at Asa.

“Thank you.” Again the instantaneous appearance of a cup,
as though Lolly were a mind reader. Reuben and Roberto were not drinking coffee.

“A cognac?” asked Professor Sola.

Reuben started laughing. “Papa, it’s Asa,” he said.

“No reason not to be hospitable.”

Reuben slumped in his chair, and Asa felt something banging at his ankle. It was Reuben’s foot, warning him not to accept cognac.

“No, thank you, sir,” he said obediently.

“No cognac?” Professor Sola was nearly awakened by this. “Remarkable. If I were to offer it to my children, I can’t imagine them refusing.”

“You never do,” Roberto said.

“It’s too hot for cognac,” said Professor Sola. “So, you will go on a midnight ride. Where will you go?”

“Oh, somewhere cool,” Reuben said, airily. “The beach or something.”

“Summer nights,” Professor Sola muttered. “Summer nights.” Then he looked at Asa. “What is your field?”

“I don’t know yet, sir. We won’t have to decide until sophomore year.”

“But you must have an inclination. A tendency. Even Reuben has that—a tendency to daydream. So he will probably major in art history. That’s an excellent field for a dreamer. And Roberto”—he leaned his head slightly to the left, where Roberto sat; Roberto shut his eyes—“if and when he reaches college, will probably major in rebellion and criticizing his betters, or, as it’s called these days, political science. But you strike me as more contemplative than rebellious. And contemplative is not the same as dreamy. Perhaps mathematics? That’s a contemplative science.”

“No, sir, I can’t do calculus.”

“Botany?”

“I think English literature,” Asa said.

“Pah,” said Professor Sola. Asa flinched. “That’s for women.” This was astonishing, because Professor Sola taught English literature. “It’s the refuge of those who can’t think,” he continued. “Botany. Quiet, orderly, elegant. Consider botany, Asa.”

“But sir, there must have been some reason that you chose English literature.”

“It was different,” he said. He said nothing else, so Asa was left wondering if English had been different once, or if Professor Sola’s case was different from his own.

He tried again. “I love to read.”

“Then for God’s sake major in botany. If you enroll in my department, every book you’ve loved you will learn to hate; and by the end of two years you will have become an illiterate. It is only useful if you begin as an illiterate, such as Roberto.”

“What good is it then, having an inclination?” Asa asked.

The bell rang. “That’s Parker,” said Reuben, rising.

“Lolly will answer it. We’re not finished with dinner.” Professor Sola swirled the dregs in his coffee cup and looked into it; he seemed disappointed and put the cup back on its saucer.

Parker came in, got strawberries, told Professor Sola he intended to major in French. “Why not Russian?” he was asked.

“Baudelaire didn’t write in Russian.”

This answer started Asa giggling. Professor Sola politely pretended not to notice and continued his conversation with Parker in counterpoint to Asa’s muffled gasps.

“Tolstoy wrote in Russian.”

“Rimbaud didn’t write in Russian.”

“All the French speak English; why learn French?”

“All Americans speak only English. I think it’s impolite.”

“And Pushkin.”

“I’ve read him in English.”

Asa stood up and headed for the bathroom in the hall, where he could let himself laugh. It was the image of Baudelaire in an enormous, bulky Russian coat made of weasel or fox, striding down the green boulevards, smelling of herring, mooning over his melancholy, that had done him in. He pounded his hand on the wall beside the sink and looked at himself in the little mirror. There were tears in his eyes. He realized he was probably hysterical. Somebody ought to come and slap him on the cheeks to calm him down. He put his head under the faucet and ran cold water on his face.

“Are you okay?” Reuben asked. He was standing in the hallway, looking at Asa through the half-open door.

“Fine. Wasn’t that a funny conversation, though? Wasn’t the idea of Baudelaire in a big coat—” Asa sputtered and drops of water flew off his cheeks.

“Cut it out,” Reuben said. “You don’t have to come.”

“That isn’t
it
.”

“You don’t want to. Why don’t you stay here and talk to Papa about books?”