Hearts In Atlantis (43 page)

She smoked, not answering me for a moment, but she was still smiling and I knew she was going to say yes. Earlier, all I'd wanted was to get back to the third-floor lounge and play Hearts. Now that I was away from the game, however, the game seemed a lot less important. Had I been hot enough to say something about beating the snot out of Ronnie Malenfant? It seemed I had—the memory was clear enough—but standing out here in the cool air with Carol, it was hard for me to understand why.

“I've got a boyfriend back home,” she said at last.

“Is that a no?”

She shook her head, still with the little smile. The smoke from her cigarette drifted across her face. Her
hair, free of the net the girls had to wear on the dishline, blew lightly across her brow. “That's information. Remember that show
The Prisoner
? ‘Number Six, we want . . . 
information
.' ”

“I've got a girlfriend back home,” I said. “More information.”

“I've got another job, tutoring math. I promised to spend an hour tonight with this girl on the second floor. Calculus. Ag. She's hopeless and she whines, but it's six dollars an hour.” Carol laughed. “This is getting good, we're exchanging information like mad.”

“It doesn't look good for Bogie, though,” I said. I wasn't worried. I knew we were going to see Bogie. I think I also knew there was romance in our future. It gave me an oddly light feeling, a lifting-off sensation in my midsection.

“I could call Esther from Hauck and tell her calc at ten o'clock instead of nine,” Carol said. “Esther's a sad case. She never goes out. What she does mostly is sit around with her hair in curlers and write letters home about how hard college is. We could see the first movie, at least.”

“That sounds good,” I said.

We started walking toward Hauck. Those were the days, all right; you didn't have to hire a babysitter, put out the dog, feed the cat, or set the burglar alarm. You just went.

“Is this like a date?” she asked after a little bit.

“Well,” I said, “I guess it could be.” We were walking past East Annex by then, and other kids were filling up the paths, heading toward the auditorium.

“Good,” she said, “because I left my purse back in my room. I can't go dutch.”

“Don't worry, I'm rich. Won big playing cards today.”

“Poker?”

“Hearts. Do you know it?”

“Are you kidding? I spent three weeks at Camp Winiwinaia on Lake George the summer I was twelve. YMCA camp—poor kids' camp, my mom called it. It rained practically every day and all we did was play Hearts and hunt The Bitch.” Her eyes had gone far away, the way people's eyes do when they trip over some memory like a shoe in the dark. “Find the lady in black.
Cherchez la femme noire
.”

“That's the game, all right,” I said, knowing that for a moment I wasn't there for her at all. Then she came back, gave me a grin, and took her cigarettes out of her jeans pocket. We smoked a lot back then. All of us. Back then you could smoke in hospital waiting rooms. I told my daughter that and at first she didn't believe me.

I took out my own cigarettes and lit us both. It was a good moment, the two of us looking at each other in the Zippo's flame. Not as sweet as a kiss, but nice. I felt that lightness inside me again, that sense of lifting off. Sometimes your view widens and grows hopeful. Sometimes you think you can see around corners, and maybe you can. Those are good moments. I snapped my lighter shut and we walked on, smoking, the backs of our hands close but not quite brushing.

“How much money are we talking about?” she asked. “Enough to run away to California on, or maybe not quite that much?”

“Nine dollars.”

She laughed and took my hand. “It's a date, all right,” she said. “You can buy me popcorn, too.”

“All right. Do you care which movie plays first?”

She shook her head. “Bogie's Bogie.”

“That's true,” I said, but I hoped it would be
The Maltese Falcon
.

It was. Halfway through it, while Peter Lorre was doing his rather ominous gay turn and Bogie was gazing at him with polite, amused incredulity, I looked at Carol. She was looking at me. I bent and kissed her popcorn-buttery mouth by the black-and-white moonlight of John Huston's inspired first film. Her lips were sweet and responsive. I pulled back a little. She was still looking at me. The little smile was back. Then she offered me her bag of popcorn, I reciprocated with my box of Dots, and we watched the rest of the movie.

Walking back to the Chamberlain-King-Franklin complex of dorms, I took her hand almost without thinking about it. She curled her fingers through mine naturally enough, but I thought I could feel a reserve now.

“Are you going to go back for
The Caine Mutiny
?” she asked. “You could, if you've still got your ticket stub. Or I could give you mine.”

“Nah, I've got geology to study.”

“Bet you wind up playing cards all night instead.”

“I can't afford to,” I said. And I meant it; I meant to go back and study. I really did.

“
Lonely Struggles
, or
A Scholarship Boy's Life
,” Carol said. “A heartbreaking novel by Charles Dickens. You'll
weep as plucky Peter Riley throws himself into the river after finding that the Financial Aid Office has revoked his grant package.”

I laughed. She was very sharp.

“I'm in the same boat, you know. If we screw up, maybe we can make it a double suicide. Into the Penobscot with us. Goodbye cruel world.”

“What's a Connecticut girl doing at the University of Maine, anyway?” I asked.

“That's a little complicated. And if you ever plan on asking me out again, you should know you're robbing the cradle. I won't actually be eighteen until November. I skipped the seventh grade. That was the year my parents got divorced, and I was miserable. It was either study all the time or turn into one of the Harwich Junior High corner girls. They're the ones who major in French-kissing and usually wind up pregnant at sixteen. You know the kind I mean?”

“Sure.” In Gates you saw them in giggling little groups outside Frank's Fountain or the Dairy Delish, waiting for the boys to come by in their dropped Fords and Plymouth hemis, fast cars with the fenderskirts and the decals saying
FRAM
and
QUAKER STATE
in the back windows. You could see those girls as women down at the other end of Main Street, ten years older and forty pounds heavier, drinking beers and shots in Chucky's Tavern.

“I turned into a study-grind. My father was in the Navy. He got out on a disability and moved here to Maine . . . Damariscotta, down on the coast?”

I nodded, thinking of Diane Renay's steady boy, the one who said ship ahoy and joined the Nay-yay-vee.

“I was living in Connecticut with my mother and going to Harwich High. I applied to sixteen different schools and got accepted by all but three . . . but  . . .”

“But they expected you to pay your own way and you couldn't.”

She nodded. “I think I missed the plum scholarships by maybe twenty SAT-points. An extracurricular activity or two probably wouldn't have hurt, either, but I was too busy grinding away at the books. And by then I was pretty hot and heavy with Sully-John  . . .”

“The boyfriend, right?”

She nodded, but not as though this Sully-John interested her. “The only two schools offering realistic financial aid packages were Maine and UConn. I decided on Maine because by then I wasn't getting along very well with my mother. Lots of fights.”

“You get along better with your father?”

“Hardly ever see him,” she said in a dry, businesslike tone. “He lives with this woman who . . . well, they drink a lot and fight a lot, let's leave it at that. But he's a resident of the state, I'm his daughter, and this is a land-grant college. I didn't get everything I needed—UConn offered the better deal, frankly—but I'm not afraid of a little work. It's worth it, just to get away.”

She took a deep breath of the night air and let it out, faintly white. We were almost back to Franklin. Inside the lobby I could see guys sitting in the hard plastic contour chairs, waiting for their girls to come down from upstairs. It looked like quite a rogues' gallery.
Worth it just to get away
, she had said. Did that mean the mother, the town, and the high school, or was the boyfriend included?

When we got to the wide double doors at the front of her dorm, I put my arms around her and bent to kiss her again. She put her hands on my chest, stopping me. Not pulling back, just stopping me. She looked up into my face, smiling that little smile of hers. I could get to love that smile, I thought—it was the kind of smile you might wake up thinking of in the middle of the night. The blue eyes and the blond hair too, but mostly the smile. The lips only curved a little, but the corners of the mouth deepened to dimples all the same.

“My boyfriend's real name is John Sullivan,” she said. “Like the fighter. Now tell me the name of your girlfriend.”

“Annmarie,” I said, not much caring for the sound of it as it came out of my mouth. “Annmarie Soucie. She's a senior at Gates Falls High this year.” I let Carol go. When I did, she took her hands off my chest and grabbed mine.

“This is information,” she said. “Information, that's all. Still want to kiss me?”

I nodded. I wanted to more than ever.

“Okay.” She tilted her face up, closed her eyes, opened her lips a little. She looked like a kid waiting at the foot of the stairs for her goodnight kiss from Papa. It was so cute I almost laughed. Instead I bent and kissed her. She kissed back with pleasure and enthusiasm. There were no tongues touching, but it was a thorough, searching kiss just the same. When she drew back, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright. “Goodnight. Thanks for the movie.”

“Want to do it again?”

“I have to think about that,” she said. She was
smiling but her eyes were serious. I suppose her boyfriend was on her mind; I know that Annmarie was on mine. “Maybe you better, too. I'll see you on the dishline Monday. What do you have?”

“Lunch and dinner.”

“I have breakfast and lunch. So I'll see you at lunch.”

“Eat more Maine beans,” I said. That made her laugh. She went inside. I watched her go, standing outside with my collar turned up and my hands in my pockets and a cigarette between my lips, feeling like Bogie. I watched her say something to the girl on the reception desk and then hurry upstairs, still laughing.

I walked back to Chamberlain in the moonlight, determined to get serious about the geosyncline.

I only went into the third-floor lounge to get my geology book; I swear it's true. When I got there, every table—plus one or two which must have been hijacked from other floors—was occupied by a quartet of Hearts-playing fools. There was even a group in the corner, sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring intently at their cards. They looked like half-assed yogis. “We chasin The Cunt!” Ronnie Malenfant yelled to the room at large. “We gonna bust that bitch out, boys!”

I picked up my geology text from the sofa where it had lain all day and night (someone had sat on it, pushing it most of the way down between two cushions, but that baby was too big to hide entirely), and looked at it the way you might look at some artifact of
unknown purpose. In Hauck Auditorium, sitting beside Carol Gerber, this crazy card-party had seemed like a dream. Now it was Carol who seemed dreamlike—Carol with her dimples and her boyfriend with the boxer's name. I still had six bucks in my pocket and it was absurd to feel disappointed just because there was no place for me in any of the games currently going on.

Study, that was what I had to do. Make friends with the geosyncline. I'd camp out in the second-floor lounge or maybe find a quiet corner in the basement rec.

Just as I was leaving with
Historical Geology
under my arm, Kirby McClendon tossed down his cards and cried, “Fuck this! I'm tapped! All because I keep getting hit with that fucking queen of spades! I'll give you guys IOUs, but I am honest-to-God tapped out.” He went out past me without looking back, ducking his head as he went through the door—I've always thought that being that tall must be a kind of curse. A month later Kirby would be tapped out in a much larger sense, withdrawn from the University by his frightened parents after a mental breakdown and a half-assed suicide attempt. Not the first victim of Hearts-mania that fall, nor the last, but the only one to try and off himself by eating two bottles of orange-flavored baby aspirin.

Lennie Doria didn't even bother looking after him. He looked over at me instead. “You want to sit in, Riley?”

A brief but perfectly genuine struggle for my soul went on. I needed to study. I had
planned
on studying, and for a financial-aid boy like me, that was a good plan, certainly more sensible than sitting here in this
smoky room and adding the effluent from my own Pall Malls to the general fug.

So I said “Yeah, why not?” and sat down and played Hearts until almost one in the morning. When I finally shambled back to my room, Nate was lying on his bed reading his Bible. That was the last thing he did every night before going to sleep. This was his third trip through what he always called The Word of God, he'd told me. He had reached the Book of Nehemiah. He looked up at me with an expression of calm enquiry—a look that never changed much. Now that I think about it,
Nate
never changed much. He was in pre-dent, and he stayed with it; tucked into his last Christmas card to me was a photo of his new office in Houlton. In the photo there are three Magi standing around a straw-filled cradle on the snowy office lawn. Behind Mary and Joseph you can read the sign on the door:
NATHANIEL HOPPENSTAND, D.D.S.
He married Cindy. They are still married, and their three children are mostly grown up. I imagine Rinty died and got replaced.