Hearts In Atlantis (49 page)

Dearie was horrified.

“So you're against Vietnam now?” he asked when he saw it. Below his chin-out truculence I think our beloved floor-proctor was badly shocked by that poster. Skip, after all, had been a first-class high-school baseball player. Was expected to play college ball, too. Had been courted by both Delta Tau Delta and Phi Gam, the jock frats. Skip was no sickly cripple like Stoke Jones
(Dearie Dearborn had also taken to calling Stoke Rip-Rip), no frog-eyed weirdo like George Gilman.

“Hey, all this poster means is that a lot of people are making money out of a big bloody mess,” Skip said. “McDonnell-Douglas. Boeing. GE. Dow Chemical and Coleman Chemicals. Pepsi Fuckin Cola. Lots more.”

Dearie's gimlet gaze conveyed (or tried to) the idea that he had thought about such issues more deeply than Skip Kirk ever could. “Let me ask you something—do you think we should just stand back and let Uncle Ho take over down there?”

“I don't know
what
I think,” Skip said, “not yet. I only started getting interested in the subject a couple of weeks ago. I'm still playing catch-up.”

This was at seven-thirty in the morning, and a little group outbound for eight o'clock classes had gathered around Skip's door. I saw Ronnie (plus Nick Prouty; by this point the two of them had become inseparable), Ashley Rice, Lennie Doria, Billy Marchant, maybe four or five others. Nate was leaning in the doorway of 302, wearing a tee-shirt and his pj bottoms. In the stairwell, Stoke Jones leaned on his crutches. He had apparently been on his way out and had turned back to monitor the discussion.

Dearie said, “When the Viet Cong come into a South Viet 'ville, the first thing they look for are people wearing crucifixes, St. Christopher medals, Mary medals, anything of that nature. Catholics are killed. People who believe in
God
are killed. Do you think we should stand back while the commies kill people who believe in God?”

“Why not?” Stoke said from the stairwell. “We stood back and let the Nazis kill the Jews for six years. Jews believe in God, or so I'm told.”

“Fucking Rip-Rip!” Ronnie shouted. “Who the fuck asked you to play the piano?”

But by then Stoke Jones, aka Rip-Rip, was making his way down the stairs. The echoey sound of his crutches made me think of the recently departed Frank Stuart.

Dearie turned back to Skip. His hands were fisted on his hips. Lying against the front of his white tee-shirt was a set of dogtags. His father had worn them in France and Germany, he told us; had been wearing them as he lay behind a tree, hiding from the machine-gun fire that had killed two men in his company and wounded four more. What this had to do with the Vietnam conflict none of us quite knew, but it was clearly a big deal to Dearie, so none of us asked. Even Ronnie had sense enough to keep his trap shut.

“If we let them take South Vietnam, they'll take Cambodia.” Dearie's eyes moved from Skip to me to Ronnie . . . to all of us. “Then Laos. Then the Philippines. One after the other.”

“If they can do that, maybe they deserve to win,” I said.

Dearie looked at me, shocked. I was sort of shocked myself, but I didn't take it back.

There was one more round of prelims before the Thanksgiving break, and for the young scholars of Chamberlain Three, it was a disaster. By then most of us understood that
we
were a disaster, that we were
committing a kind of group suicide. Kirby McClendon did his freak-out thing and disappeared like a rabbit in a magic trick. Kenny Auster, who usually sat in the corner during the marathon games and picked his nose when he couldn't decide what card to play next, simply bugged out one day. He left a queen of spades with the words “I quit” written across it on his pillow. George Lessard joined Steve Ogg and Jack Frady in Chad, the brain dorm.

Six down, thirteen to go.

It should have been enough. Hell, just what happened to poor old Kirby should have been enough; in the last three or four days before he freaked, his hands were trembling so badly he had trouble picking up his cards and he jumped in his seat if someone slammed a door in the hall. Kirby should have been enough but he wasn't. Nor was my time with Carol the answer. When I was actually with her, yes, I was fine. When I was with her all I wanted was information (and maybe to ball her socks off). When I was in the dorm, though, especially in that goddamned third-floor lounge, I became another version of Peter Riley. In the third-floor lounge I was a stranger to myself.

As Thanksgiving approached, a kind of blind fatalism set in. None of us talked about it, though. We talked about the movies, or sex (“I get more ass than a merry-go-round pony!” Ronnie used to crow, usually with no warning or conversational lead-in of any kind), but mostly we talked about Vietnam . . . and Hearts. Our Hearts discussions were about who was ahead, who was behind, and who couldn't seem to master the few simple strategic ploys of the game: void yourself in at least one suit; pass midrange hearts
to someone who likes to shoot the moon; if you have to take a trick, always take it high.

Our only real response to the looming third round of prelims was to organize the game into a kind of endless, revolving tournament. We were still playing nickel-a-point, but we were now also playing for “match points.” The system for awarding match points was quite complex, but Randy Echolls and Hugh Brennan worked out a good formula in two feverish late-night sessions. Both of them, incidentally, were flunking their introductory math courses; neither was invited back at the conclusion of the fall semester.

Thirty-three years have passed since that pre-Thanksgiving round of exams, and the man that boy became still winces at the memory of them. I flunked everything but Sociology and Intro English. I didn't have to see the grades to know it, either. Skip said he'd flagged the board except for Calc, and there he barely squeaked by. I was taking Carol out to a movie that night, our one pre-break date (and our last, although I didn't know that then), and saw Ronnie Malenfant on my way to get my car. I asked him how he thought he'd done on his tests; Ronnie smiled and winked and said, “Aced everything, champ. Just like on fuckin
College Bowl
. I'm not worried.” But in the light of the parking lot I could see his smile wavering minutely at the corners. His skin was too pale, and his acne, bad when we started school in September, was worse than ever. “How 'bout you?”

“They're going to make me Dean of Arts and Sciences,” I said. “That tell you anything?”

Ronnie burst out laughing. “You fuckin pisspot!”
He clapped me on the shoulder. The cocky look in his eyes had been replaced by fright that made him look younger. “Goin out?”

“Yeah.”

“Carol?”

“Yeah.”

“Good for you. She's a great-lookin chick.” For Ronnie, this was nearly heartrending sincerity. “And if I don't see you in the lounge later on, have a great turkey-day.”

“You too, Ronnie.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Looking at me from the corners of his eyes rather than straight on. Trying to hold the smile. “One way or another, I guess we're both gonna eat the bird, wouldn't you say?”

“Yeah. I guess that pretty well sums it up.”

It was hot, even with the engine off and the heater off it was hot, we had warmed up the whole inside of the car with our bodies, the windows steamed so that the light from the parking lot came in all diffused, like light through a pebbled-glass bathroom window, and the radio was on, Mighty John Marshall making with the oldies, The Humble Yet Nonetheless Mighty playing The Four Seasons and The Dovells and Jack Scott and Little Richard and Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon, all those oldies, and her sweater was open and her bra was draped over the seat with one strap hanging down, a thick white strap, bra-technology in those days hadn't
yet taken that next great leap forward, and oh man her skin was warm, her nipple rough in my mouth, and she still had her panties on but only sort of, they were all pushed and bunched to one side and I had first one finger in her and then two fingers, Chuck Berry singing “Johnny B. Goode” and The Royal Teens singing “Short Shorts,” and her hand was inside my fly, fingers pulling at the elastic of my own short-shorts, and I could smell her, the perfume on her neck and the sweat on her temples just below where her hair started, and I could hear her, hear the live pulse of her breath, wordless whispers in my mouth as we kissed, all of this with the front seat of my car pushed back as far as it would go, me not thinking of flunked prelims or the war in Vietnam or LBJ wearing a lei or Hearts or anything, only wanting her, wanting her right here and right now, and then suddenly she was straightening up and straightening
me
up, both hands planted on my chest, splayed fingers pushing me back toward the steering wheel. I moved toward her again, slipping one of my own hands up her thigh, and she said “Pete,
no!
” in a sharp voice and closed her legs, the knees coming together loud enough so I could hear the sound they made, that locking sound that means you're done making out, like it or not. I didn't like it but I stopped.

I leaned my head back against the fogged-up window on the driver's side, breathing hard. My cock was an iron bar stuffed down the front of my underwear, so hard it hurt. That would go away soon enough—no hardon lasts forever, I think Benjamin Disraeli said that—but even after the erection's gone, the blue balls linger on. It's just a fact of guy life.

We had left the movie—some really terrible good-ole-boy
thang with Burt Reynolds in it—early and had come back to the Steam Plant parking lot with the same thing on our minds . . . or so I'd hoped. I guess it
was
the same thing, except I had been hoping for a little more of it than I'd gotten.

Carol had pulled the sides of her sweater together but her bra still hung over the back of the seat and she looked madly desirable with her breasts trying to tumble out through the gap and half an areola visible in the dim light. She had her purse open and was fumbling her cigarettes out with shaky hands.

“Whooo,” she said. Her voice was as shaky as her hands. “I mean holy cow.”

“You look like Brigitte Bardot with your sweater open like that,” I told her.

She looked up, surprised and—I thought—pleased. “Do you really think so? Or is it just the blond hair?”

“The hair? Shit, no. Mostly it's  . . .” I gestured toward her front. She looked down at herself and laughed. She didn't do the buttons, though, or try to pull the sides any more closely together. I'm not sure she could have, anyway—as I remember, that sweater was a wonderfully tight fit.

“There was a theater up the street from us when I was a kid, the Asher Empire. It's torn down now, but when we were kids—Bobby and Sully-John and me—it seemed they were always showing her pictures. I think that one of them,
And God Created Woman
, must have played there for about a thousand years.”

I burst out laughing and took my own cigarettes off the dashboard. “That was always the third feature at the Gates Falls Drive-In on Friday and Saturday nights.”

“Did you ever see it?”

“Are you kidding? I wasn't even
allowed
to go to the drive-in unless it was a Disney double feature. I think I must have seen
Tonka
with Sal Mineo at least seven times. But I remember the previews. Brigitte in her towel.”

“I'm not coming back to school,” she said, and lit her cigarette. She spoke so calmly that at first I thought we were still talking about old movies, or midnight in Calcutta, or whatever it took to persuade our bodies that it was time to go back to sleep, the action was over. Then it clicked in my head.

“You . . . did you say  . . . ?”

“I said I'm not coming back after break. And it's not going to be much of a Thanksgiving at home, as far as that goes, but what the hell.”

“Your father?”

She shook her head, drawing on her cigarette. In the light of its coal her face was all orange highlights and crescents of gray shadow. She looked older. Still beautiful, but older. On the radio Paul Anka was singing “Diana.” I snapped it off.

“My father's got nothing to do with it. I'm going back to Harwich. Do you remember me mentioning my mother's friend Rionda?”

I sort of did, so I nodded.

“Rionda took the picture I showed you, the one of me with Bobby and S-J. She says  . . .” Carol looked down at her skirt, which was still hiked most of the way to her waist, and began plucking at it. You can never tell what's going to embarrass people; sometimes it's toilet functions, sometimes it's the sexual hijinks of relatives, sometimes it's show-off behavior. And sometimes, of course, it's drink.

“Let's put it this way, my dad's not the only one in the Gerber family with a booze problem. He taught my mother how to tip her elbow, and she was a good student. For a long time she laid off—she went to AA meetings, I think—but Rionda says she's started again. So I'm going home. I don't know if I can take care of her or not, but I'm going to try. For my brother as much as my mother. Rionda says Ian doesn't know if he's coming or going. Of course he never did.” She smiled.

“Carol, that's maybe not such a good idea. To shoot your education that way—”

She looked up angrily. “You want to talk about shooting
my
education? You know what I'm hearing about that fucking Hearts game on Chamberlain Three these days? That
everyone on the floor
is going to flunk out by Christmas, including you. Penny Lang says that by the start of spring semester there won't be anyone left up there but that shithead proctor of yours.”

“Nah,” I said, “that's an exaggeration. Nate'll be left. Stokely Jones, too, if he doesn't break his neck going downstairs some night.”