First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories (9 page)

On one long hill, my shirt tore. We had fallen behind, from truck to truck; this was the last truck in the procession. My shirt was almost ripped off my back, the truck grunted up the long hill and disappeared over the crest, and Duncan and I were alone in the middle of a birchwood. I looked at Duncan and was disappointed that I was there with him. The birchwood was lovely. Through the pale and fragile leaves, beams of sunlight fell in all directions. As I wobbled from one side of the road to the other, it seemed the trees leaned toward me, brushed my face with the tips of their branches, and then swung away; or, going downhill, I thought the trees leaned backward like a child’s drawing of speed. Around a curve the trees seemed to take off, soar upward at the sky. Suddenly we were in the midst of a horde of yellow butterflies; they filled the air; their wings beat and trembled; they were everywhere. They beat on our foreheads and on our eyelids, tangled in our clothes, died on the wheels of our bicycles. With horror, Duncan stopped his bicycle and then slowly began to thread his way through the yellow cloud. “Try not to touch them,” he said. “Their wings won’t work if you touch them; they die.” I was too drunk even to be able to slow my bicycle. I rode blindly through the butterflies, blinking my eyes, cursing when one lit on the wheel and was crushed. At the very last, a butterfly blundered against my eye, and my eye remained open with abrupt pity; between it and the sky was a yellow film laced with airy veins; the film beat, came apart. I closed my eyes and rode blindly into a tree.

Duncan helped me up, silently. We rode side by side, still drunk, but not as drunk as we had been. Occasionally, our bicycles lurched into each other. Duncan’s hand was cut where it had scraped against my handle bars on one of the lurches. My torn shirt flapped in the wind.

At four, we reached Arcachon. It was a small resort with several public beaches and miles of tiny villas. We could smell the sea, the stiff, salty odors from the bay, the wisteria, the pinewoods on the surrounding hills. We rode through the village and came to a large red brick villa, square and Victorian, with a large glass conservatory facing southward, by the sea. Its garden was filled with gardenia bushes and small lemon trees. We lifted our bicycles over a low wall, made our way through some trees, and climbed over another wall to the white beach.

I sank on the sand, and Duncan, beside me, muttered, “A resort is a resort is a resort.” The beach curved outward from us to a sandspit, where there was a picnic party, and southward out of our vision. Up the beach from us, a few people were sprawled beneath a pink-and-yellow umbrella. I said, “Do you want to swim out to the spit and see if we can join the party?” Duncan looked at me, frightened. He began to tremble. I turned away.

The waves of the bay were sparkling and blue. Small sailboats with tinted sails swooped about in the wide waters. The tide was out, and stranded on the sand lay, seemingly, hundreds of small craft, some with masts, some without, some the size of dinghies, some good-sized, with the rounded, almost voluptuously shaped hull of shallow-water craft.

Duncan was so embarrassed that he began to build a sand castle. I reached into the pouch on the back of my bicycle and took out a pad of paper and began a letter to my mother.

Dear Mother,

We have just come to Arcachon, a small French town which is a resort and very interesting. Duncan and I are having a wonderful time and learning a good deal which is what I told you would happen and why I wanted to come to Europe. You see, I was right about the trip and—

I threw the pad down and crawled over to Duncan and started to help him build his castle. He still wouldn’t look me in the eye. I got on my bicycle and rode into the village and brought back ham sandwiches, two bottles of Evian water, and two bottles of
vin ordinaire.
We had to get through the evening somehow.

The party on the spit packed up their hampers and disappeared. The pink-and-yellow umbrella was folded up and whisked away. We were alone on the beach. Duncan scooped out a place for his shoulders and piled the sand in a mound behind his head, so that he could watch the boats on the water. We drank steadily, pausing only now and then to run into the water and swim a few strokes, through the seaweed that was close to the surface at low tide. We decided that that—the low tide—was the reason the beach was so empty.

“Oh God!” Duncan said suddenly. “This is sheer hell!” In desperation, we began to work on the sand castle. The towers multiplied, the moats and bridges; spires arose, Babylonian ziggurats, Egyptian pyramids, Mayan pyramids, Christian steeples, and Moslem minarets. Our castle became a city. The city began to spread over the beach, foot by foot, more and more grandiose, more and more wistful.

In the cool of the evening, a small blond boy came out of the red brick villa and began to play by himself in the garden. He was wearing a blue sailor blouse and short pants and a tiny pair of sandals.

Duncan was admiring the castle. We were quite drunk again. “It’s really a nice castle,” he said sadly. “If I had a camera, I’d take a picture. It’s worth saving, don’t you think?”

I felt that it was a wonderful castle, but I was damned if I knew what to do with it. “We could throw rocks at it,” I suggested.

The little boy wandered down the wall and peered at us through the gate; one arm encircled one of the iron bars and the other arm lay over the top. He hung there, occasionally drawing lines with the tip of his sandal in the sand that had blown into the garden. He saw the castle; his eyes grew round. He and Duncan stared at each other. Then the little boy turned away and sat down behind the wall. We could see only a portion of his leg.

“He’s bored,” Duncan said desperately. “He’s unhappy. I can’t stand it.”

I remember we tiptoed—we must have confused the little boy with the butterflies—to the wall and stuck our heads over it.

“Hi,” Duncan said.

“Bonjour,”
the child said.

“I can’t remember any French,” Duncan said to me. He leaned over the wall anxiously.
“Voulez-vous
—What’s the word for play?” he cried, turning to me. I didn’t know. I was leaning on the wall for support.

The little boy looked at us; he was polite, un-frightened, and mystified. Finally, Duncan reached down and lifted the child over the wall. The little boy’s face went pale.
“Les brigands?”
he asked, in a tiny voice. Duncan didn’t hear; he carried the little boy over to the castle-city and placed him in front of it. “Yours,” he said grandly. “All yours.” The little boy looked at Duncan and then gave him a wan smile. “Go ahead,” Duncan said patiently. “Play with the castle. Wreck it if you want. I don’t care.”

The child’s head, cocked to one side, stayed motionless. The small hands grasped each other. Duncan fell to his knees and, with a face suffused with emotion, said, “I don’t frighten you, do I? I’m a coward. I can’t frighten you. Can I?”

“Comment, Monsieur?”
the little boy said. He was quite close to tears.

Duncan gently took the child’s hand and patted one of the ziggurats. A few grains of sand crumbled off. Duncan pointed to the little boy, then to the castle. Then, still holding the little boy’s hand, he walked him all around the castle. The little boy began to smile. He looked up at Duncan.

“Oui,”
Duncan said excitedly. “For you.
Votre,”
he shouted in triumph.
“Pour vous, s’il vous plaît,
or whatever.”

“Pour moi, Monsieur?”

“Oui,”
Duncan said.
“Oui.”

“Tout château? Vraiment?”
The child clapped his hands.

A little later, just as we were finishing a new super three-way tunnel, just as Duncan was asking me, “He’s happy now, isn’t he? I haven’t hurt his feelings, have I?” we heard a woman’s voice. The little boy cried out in reply, and a woman came running—a tall, fair woman, with large, intent, genteel blue eyes. She swept down on the little boy and scooped him up, and when he was safe in her arms, she turned and glared suspiciously at us. We were drunk and unshaven, with bloodshot eyes and dirty clothes. Duncan made a bow of sorts, and explained that we were Americans. The woman exclaimed, and then a smile came over her face. She stepped forward and shook Duncan’s hand.
“Enchanté, Monsieur”
she said brusquely, and then,
“Enchanté,”
as she shook my hand, too. She stood a moment, holding her child, talking to us slowly and kindly, in careful French. She asked us where in America we came from, and nodded at our replies. She asked us if we planned to be in France long, and when we said a year, she nodded her head again and said we were
très sage.
Her voice was both grave and soft, and at first Duncan and I stared at her; Duncan caught himself up, and sent me a dirty glance, and then we both, shyly, stared at the ground. If we needed water, she said, we could come to the back door and get it. She had to cook dinner for the boy’s grandparents. Her husband was working late in Bordeaux. She shook hands with us again, and then, still carrying the child, she went back into the garden. She was wearing a light-blue skirt that blew back and forth against the iron bars of the gate as she closed it.

Our wine was gone. The sunset was beginning, its pink splendor reflected in Duncan’s bony kneecaps. He sat back on the sand, talking, piling the sand over his legs. “You know what makes their figures so beautiful? Work. They don’t use these lousy labor-saving devices. They bend, they walk, they ride bicycles. Did you see how small her waist was? There’s no use pretending that American women are as charming.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “France is fine, but—” All around me the air was perfumed, and the sunset was unraveling its tinted streamers across the sky. “You know. We’re seeing it for the first time. I’m sure America—”

Duncan grew quite fierce. He told me I was being stubborn, defensive. Just because I didn’t fit. After all, I hadn’t even said a word to the woman.

“That’s true,” I admitted lazily. “But that’s because I was so impressed I couldn’t speak.” I propped myself on my elbow and looked at him. I was smiling—a little uncertainly, it’s true, as one does at an elder brother, or at someone inexpressibly dear, whose approval one longs for. Duncan gave me a sidelong glance. Then, several seconds after I’d spoken, we both laughed, as if I’d been quite witty.

The shadows, blue, liquid, were gathering across the beach. There we were, the two of us, with all of our fears and flaws, and our hopes that we didn’t really believe in, and our failures; there we were, nineteen and twenty. From one of the houses along the beach came the strains of a phonograph playing “La Vie en Rose.” Duncan began to hum the song. The kindness of France spread around us like the incoming night. I listened to Duncan and the distant phonograph and the dreamlike rush of the waves, and I knew I would survive my youth and be forgiven.

I
T WAS EIGHT O’CLOCK
on a warm September evening, and all the bells of Harvard were striking the hour. Elgin Smith, tired of studying, was standing on the steps of Widener Library—those wide, Roman, inconvenient steps—blinking his eyes and staring into the distance, because that was supposed to refresh the corneas and the retina. He was thinking, but not of his schoolwork. He was thinking of what it would be like to fall in love, to worship a girl and to put his life at her feet. He despised himself, because he feared he was incapable of passion and he believed that only passionate people were worth while and that all other kinds were shallow. He was taking courses in English Literature, in German Literature, in Italian Literature, in History, ancient and medieval, and every one of them was full of incidents that he thought mocked him, since they seemed to say that the meaning of life, the peak of existence, the core of events was one certain emotion, to which he was a stranger, and for which he was very likely too rational. Therefore, he stood on the steps of Widener, so cracked by longing that it seemed only gravity held him together.

He was very tall, six feet three, and gangling. He had a small head, curiously shaped (his roommate, Dimitri, sometimes accused him of looking like a wedge of cheese), and a hooked nose. He wanted to be a professor in the field of comparative philology, and he believed in Beauty. He studied all the time, and there were moments when he was appalled by how hard he worked. He was known for his crying in movies. He was not unathletic.

Somehow, he had become convinced that he was odd and that only odd girls liked him, pitiable girls who couldn’t do any better, and this singed his pride.

It was his fate that this particular night he should see a girl walking up the steps of Widener Library. She was of medium height and had black hair cut short; she was wearing a light-colored coat that floated behind her because she was walking so fast, nearly running, but not quite; and the curve of her forehead and the way her eyes were set took Elgin’s breath away. She was so pretty and carried herself so well and had a look of such healthy and arrogant self-satisfaction that Elgin sighed and thought here was the sort of not odd girl who could bestow indescribable benefits on any young man she liked—and on his confidence. She was that very kind of girl, that far from unhappy, that world-contented kind, he believed would never fall for him.

She carried her books next to her bosom. Elgin’s eyes followed her up the steps; and then his head turned, his nostrils distended with emotion; and she was gone, vanished into Widener.

“Surely this year,” he thought, looking up at the sky. “Now that I’m almost nineteen.” He stretched out his arms, and the leaves on the trees, already growing dry at the approach of autumn, rustled in the breezes.

He thought about that girl once or twice in the days that followed, but the longing for her didn’t really take root until he saw her again, two weeks later, at a Radcliffe Jolly-Up in Cabot Hall. It was in one of the dimly lit common rooms, where couples were indefatigably dancing in almost total darkness. Elgin was swaying in place (he was not a good dancer) with a girl who helped him on his German when he caught sight of his Widener Library vision. When the next dance began, he wound through the couples looking for her, to cut in on her, but when he drew near her, he turned and walked over to the wall, where he caught his breath and realized he was frightened.