Robert B. Parker (2 page)

Mr. Crosbie was getting mad, or desperate. “What do you think an expository essay is?” he said. The class, wretched in its hot boredom, coalesced into mute submission. I gave up. With my feet propped on the empty chair next to me, I tipped my own chair back against the wall, folded my arms across my chest, and let my head relax forward.

Mr. Crosbie was leaning forward over his lecture table looking at his seating plan. “Mr. Franklin,” he said, “define exposition.”

Franklin was hunched over his notebook and text, staring at them blankly. The more he looked the more they didn’t tell him what exposition meant.

“Mr. Franklin?”

Franklin was very ivy with his oxford button-down and chinos. He wore his blond hair in a crew cut, and his white bucks looked pre-scuffed. He was in college on some kind of church-related scholarship. He looked up
finally from the unobliging textbook and said, I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid I don’t know.”

Crosbie said, without looking up from his seating chart, “I’m afraid you don’t Miss Grayle, do you know?”

I felt a little thrill in the delta of my breastbone when he said her name. She sat up straight and looked right at him, but I could see the faint flush of embarrassment darken her face.

“It’s a kind of story that’s true,” she said.

Crosbie smiled without humor, “Oh,” he said, “really? What kind of a story exactly?”

Jennifer said, “Not a story that’s been made up.” She gestured slightly with one hand.

Crosbie placed both hands on his little lectern and leaned over it, looked straight at Jennifer.

“Miss Grayle,” he said, and let the name hang there in the stifling room. He shook his head. “Miss Grayle, an essay is not a story. It may or may not be about something that, as you so cleverly put it, ‘is made up.’ Mr. Franklin’s answer revealed that he didn’t know, but yours reveals
how much
you didn’t know.” His eyes swept the room. Jennifer looked down at her book. Crosbie’s eyes settled on me, slouched in the back. He checked his seating plan.

“Mr. Adams,” he said. “If I’m not disturbing your rest, can you define expository for us.”

“If an old man shows himself to a little girl in the playground,” I said, “that’s an expository act. If he writes it up after, it’s probably an expository essay.”

Billy Murphy, sitting in the other back corner of the room, burst out a loud “Haw.” Everyone else was silent. Crosbie’s face got red. He looked at me. I looked back. I
could feel anxiety and anger mingling in my gut. I was still tilted back with my feet up.

Crosbie said, “I think we’ve had enough of you in this class for today, Mr. Adams. You may leave.”

I shrugged, let my chair tip slowly forward, closed my book and notebook with exaggerated care, took the unlighted Camel cigarette from behind my ear, stuck it in my mouth, and walked slowly toward the front of the room. I looked down at Jennifer as I went by, and her eyes glinted with sharp, repressed humor. She understood what I’d done. It made my back tingle.

“Promptly”—Crosbie glanced down at the seating chart—“Mr. Adams.”

At the door I stopped, looked at Crosbie, and said, “The thing is, my answer was right.”

Then I looked at the class, made a short wave to Billy Murphy, whose face was bunched with amusement, and walked out. I left the door open behind me.

I looked at myself in the mirror back of Onie’s bar. Five foot ten inches, weight 160 pounds, hair medium brown, crew cut, complexion fair, some acne. Whiskers, none to speak of. I didn’t like the acne much, nor the lack of beard. Lots of my buddies had dark heavy beards and shaved daily. I sucked on my cigarette, holding it between my thumb and middle finger.

The bartender said, “You ready yet, Boonie?”

I nodded. He took my glass, drew another beer into it, and put it back. “Fresh barrel, Boonie, you’ll like it.”

I grinned. “Thanks, Reenie.”

In two months I’d made some progress. I was first name with the bartender at Onie’s and at school I was already on the dean’s other list. The smoke in Onie’s was fog thick, and it eddied in the narrow crowded room as people went to and from the rest rooms and shifted about in the booths. Someone played “Mixed Emotions” on the jukebox and I tried to listen through the noise that was as thick and eddied as the smoke. It was the Rosemary
Clooney version, not Ella’s, and I liked it better, although it made me feel disloyal.

“Hey, Boonie, I hear you got bounced out of soc class?”

“Just for the day,” I said.

“You shoulda seen it, Pat. Boonie was passed out in the back with a bad hangover and old Schlossberg says to him ‘Mr. Adams, do you mind if I interrupt your rest for just a moment?’ And Boonie’s got his eyes still closed and he says ‘Yes.’ ”

“Honest to God? Booner, you are a hot shit, I’ll give you that. So did Schlossie kick you out?”

I nodded.

“You’re never going to make it, Boonie. You won’t last the year, never mind four.”

In the mirror I saw Jennifer come in with a date. It was the tall kid from Long Island she’d danced with the first night I’d seen her. His name was Taylor and he was supposed to be the best basketball player ever to come out of Douglaston High School. I drank the rest of my beer and gestured at René. He drew another and put it before me, took a dime from the change on the bar in front of me, winked, made a sort of clicking sound out of the corner of his mouth, and moved down the bar. I lit another Camel in the corner of my mouth and let the smoke drift up past my eyes. Through it I watched Jennifer in the mirror. She took off her camel’s-hair coat and Taylor hung it on the hanger by the booth. She was wearing a white cashmere sweater and a Black Watch plaid skirt. When she slid into the booth I saw her thigh for a moment. Taylor said something, and she put her head
back and laughed. I couldn’t hear the sound of her laugh across the boisterous room, but her face colored slightly with it. I’d already noticed that when she laughed she flushed slightly. I had already noticed, too, that her mouth was slightly crooked. Her upper and lower lip did not center exactly.

“Hey, Nick Taylor’s going out with Jennifer Grayle?”

“Yeah, since the homecoming dance. I’d like to get a piece of that, uh, Guze?”

“I’d like to go over right now and take a big fucking bite out of one of those thighs. How about it, Boonze, you like some of that?”

Their voices came sifting through the smoke as if they were in another room. I looked at them.

“Want to get into Jenny Grayle, Boonie? I’ll bet Taylor’s getting his share.”

The smoke swirled and thickened and mixed with the noise until I felt enclosed in a kind of transsensual element of which my own soul was but an inlet.

I shrugged. “But how much beer can she drink,” I said.

“I thought she was going with Dave Herman.”

“She’s gone steady with three guys already this year.”

I watched her in the mirror. Her hands resting quietly on the table, her head forward slightly, her eyes on Taylor’s face. Taylor tapped each of her fingernails with the tip of his index finger. She smiled. Her beer was barely touched. I knew she didn’t drink much, although it was said that she did. But she didn’t. The music changed on the jukebox. Billy Eckstine, “I Apologize.”

“What’re you doing about that short story, Guze?”

“I’m getting my buddy Boone here to churn one out. How many you written so far this semester, Boonie?”

“Twenty-two,” I said. “It’s the dumbest fucking thing I ever heard of, making the whole freshman class write a fucking short story.”

“You write one for me, Boonie?”

I nodded. “So far I got a B average. It woulda been higher, but Billy Murphy rewrote the one I did for him and got an F.”

“How much you want?”

I made a rejecting wave with my left hand. “You can buy me a few beers some night.”

“You got an A on yours, Boonie?”

“Yeah. Really piss me off if I got a worse mark on the one I handed in than the other twenty-one.”

“You think they’ll get wise? How about Guze passes in a terrific short story? Think they might get suspicious? Guze can’t even fucking talk.”

Jennifer had shifted in the booth and had her feet tucked up under her, sitting half sideways. She was smoking a Pall Mall with the red crescent of her lipstick impressed on the tip. Taylor walked two fingers along the back of her left hand and up her arm as it lay on the table. Then he said something and got up and walked to the men’s room.

“Hey, Boonie, how about the time you wrote a paper for Jackovich and Markham calls him in and asks him to explain it. Jackie about shit. Did he read it even before he handed it in?”

“Jackie can’t read,” I said. “You know that.”

Jennifer took a compact from her purse, opened it,
and looked at herself in the small mirror. She turned her head a little to the left and then a little to the right, tilting the mirror to get the overhead light. She took a small gold tube from her purse and applied more lipstick, then looked again in the mirror, touched it up slightly, touched her hair in several places.

“What happened to him?”

“Markham flunked him.”

“You shouldn’t sound so smart, Boonie.”

“I try, Guze. But I can’t sound as dumb as Jackie, for crissake.”

Taylor, on his way back from the men’s room, looked over at me and said, “Hey, Boonie, come over and sit down. I’ll buy you a beer.”

A sharp sensation flashed up from my buttocks and tightened my throat. I sucked in half my Camel and held the smoke in my lungs and then blew it out the way you blow out a candle. My beer glass was empty. I picked up my cigarettes and walked over toward the booth where Jennifer sat.

I slid into the booth on Taylor’s side. “I’ll sit with you, Nick, so your date won’t be all over me.”

“You know Jennifer, Boonie?”

“Seen her around,” I said. “Aren’t you in my English class?”

“Mr. Crosbie?”

“Yeah, that’s where I’ve seen you. When I make it.” I lit a cigarette. “Which is not often. Unless something goes wrong I still have a hangover at eight in the morning.”

“I remember you quite well.” Jennifer’s eyes glinted again. “So does Crosbie. How is he treating you these days?”

“I got an F on my first paper, but after that I’ve done okay.”

“What you gotta understand is that Boonie’s smart as a bastard,” Nick Taylor said. “I know he don’t look it, but he is. Did you have to write a short story for English?”

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “Wasn’t it awful.”

“Boonie wrote half the ones in the freshman class. How many’d you write, Boonie?”

“Twenty-two,” I said, “but who counts.”

“Do you want to be a writer?” Jennifer said. She looked really interested. The way she had when I danced with her, as if what I said really mattered.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s not something you can just interview for, is it. Does the uncertainty scare you?”

“I don’t know, I guess so. But you have to assume you can make it, I guess, or you wouldn’t try.”

“What do you want to do besides write?” Jennifer said.

“Drink beer,” I said.
And lie beside you in a spring meadow forever
.

She laughed, “And you’re down here practicing.” She was interested. “Would you want to work at a newspaper, or in advertising?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I could stand the office and briefcase bit. I don’t want nine to five for the rest of my life in some goddamned white clapboard suburb.”
Unless with you. I’d do anything to be with you
. “I thought I might write the great American novel.”

Jennifer puffed on her Pall Mall. There was reserved appraisal in her eyes. Nick held her hand across the table. “I hope you do,” she said.

“I’m a business major,” Taylor said. “I’d like to get into sales, work my way up to sales management maybe.”

Her attention shifted from me to him and I could feel slackness, a kind of ebbing, as Taylor traced small patterns on the back of her hand. Mixed with the smoke and the malt smell of spilled beer, her perfume persisted,
and as I became aware of it, the smell of it overpowered everything else. I felt disseminated, as if I eddied, commingling with her sound and the smell of her in the loud and smoky room.

Nick looked at his watch. “Better get you back, love,” he said to Jennifer. “You have to be in in an hour and we need some time for parking, right?”

She smiled. “Good to see you, my dear,” she said to me. “Maybe I’ll see you in Bing’s class someday.”

“Tell him to sing ‘When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day’ for me. I might come for that.”

Jennifer laughed. She and Nick got up to go out. As they edged down the narrow, crowded aisle between the booths, Nick patted her companionably on the fanny. She looked back at me and winked and then leaned her head against Nick’s shoulder. Get up to the campus for a little make-out time. The press of her wide mouth, the taste of her lipstick, the smell of cigarette smoke faintly mingled with beer on her breath. Her perfume. The tousle of her hair. The smell of fresh autumn air about her … with Nick; but there had been the wink and the moment of shared knowledge. Knowledge of what I didn’t yet know.

I was alone in the booth, smoking my cigarette. Her glass with the lipstick circle on the rim stood three-quarters full across from me. I took in a lungful of smoke and picked up her glass and drank the rest of her beer. Then I let the smoke out slowly and watched it drift and eddy and disappear into the larger haze of the barroom.

We were in the spa drinking coffee and smoking and I was explaining a poem.

“Think about it,” I said. “Why worms?”

“Which line is that,” Billy Murphy said.

“Down here,” I said, “line twenty-seven.”

“My echoing song then worms shall try that long preserved virginity,” Nick Taylor said, running the words and lines together without pause or comprehension.

“A worm’s gonna screw her?” Guze said.

“Screw who?” Billy said.

“I don’t know, this is some sick poem, Boonie. A worm screwing a virgin?”

“It’s about you. You’d screw a worm, Guze, if someone would hold it.”