Robert B. Parker (3 page)

“Yeah, but I ain’t no virgin.”

“So you say.”

“Shut up,” I said. “You want to pass this fucking test or not?”

“Yeah. How much time we got?”

“Hour and a half.”

I saw Jennifer across the spa. She was barely visible talking with three girls in another booth. The ripe thrust of her lower lip and part of her chin were all that showed among the other heads in the booth. I shifted a little and caught her eye. She smiled. I winked at her. There were six of us crowded into my booth and the smoke was thick. It is hard to think of that time now without seeing it through the glower of cigarette smoke that hung in hot, crowded places.

“C’mon, Boonie, explain the goddamn poem, will you?”

“He’s saying if you wait too long to come across, you’ll die and then the worms will eat you in the grave.”

“Jeez, what a nice poem,” Billy Murphy said.

I shrugged. “And he says worms, rather than, say, ants, which also eat corpses, because a worm is like a schwantz, you know. It’s an appropriate image.”

Nick Taylor said, “Wait a minute. Wait just a fucking minute. I know what that is. That’s a goddamned phallic symbol.”

I nodded.

“Sym-bo-lism,” Guze said, dragging the word out. “Symbo-fucking-lism.”

“Terrific, Guze. Put that down on your exam.”

“Are you shitting? In the exam I’m going to cheat off of Boonie.”

“You better.”

Jennifer was looking at us. Nick Taylor, I suppose. She could hear most of the talk because she was close. But everyone knew she wasn’t bothered by swearing.

“Before that,” Billy Murphy said, “what’s this shit about a chariot?”

Jennifer took her cigarette from her mouth and flicked the ashes onto the floor outside her booth with a shake of her hand. There was a wonderful carelessness about her. A kind of arrogant disinterest in some of the most elementary proprieties, the way I always imagined a princess might act, first in line to the throne, adored by the king and queen, worshipped by the people, she could shake the ash from her cigarette without looking where it would land. She could do whatever she wanted. Her wanting it made it right. And yet she was very polite, she always called professors sir. She dressed exactly the way she should; she was always a complete expression of the received look at Colby in 1950. Exactly sloppy enough, exactly enough makeup, exactly right roll in the cuffs of her jeans. It would have confused me in someone else, this seeming discontinuity, both careless and careful, but I applied no mortal categories to her. I saw her in great detail, and clearly, but I saw her as if through a projected overlay, which imposed upon the real contours of her attraction, the ornate illuminations of my dream. It was as if a real person had walked in the path of a movie projector. My imagination played upon her face until the reality was neither she nor the projection, but the fusion of both. In those days, just turned eighteen, her carelessness seemed to me, breathless in adoration, the identifying gesture of breeding and style. She was never careless with me.

“Boonie, what’s this fucking chariot? If I flunk this test, they’ll draft my ass.”

“In a lot of classical myths and stuff the sun was seen to ride across the sky in a chariot,” I said. “And so Marvell uses it to suggest time.”

“What’s time got to do with the sun?”

“The sun is the basis of time. Why the Christ do you think there’s twenty-four hours in a day?”

“Oh, yeah. Why the hell doesn’t he just say it?”

I shrugged. “The idea of a chariot bearing down on the two lovers is also threatening, you know, like a war chariot.”

Billy Murphy said, “Guze, don’t try to figure it out, just remember it.”

“Whyn’t they have us read stuff we can understand?”

“If you understood it, what would the fucking English teachers do every day in class?” I said.

“I’m going to work the meat counter at my old man’s market when I graduate,” Billy Murphy said. “I wonder what good Crosbie thinks this will do me.”

“Liberalize your views of life,” I said. “Make you a better human.”

“Like Crosbie?”

“Yeah. That’d be good in the market, huh?” I put on a fruity accent. “Perhaps a slice of boiled ham, madam?”

The laughter rolled around the table. In the booth behind us I saw Jennifer smile. Her mouth was wide and bright when she smiled, making a broad crimson slash across her face. Her front teeth were white and slightly uneven, one of the canines barely out of line. The effect of the laughter on her face was to emphasize her cheekbones.

Nick Taylor said, “Come on, come on, we only got an
hour left. How about this next poem? How do you pronounce the guy’s name?”

“Donne,” I said, “rhymes with gun.”

“Jesus, why doesn’t he spell it right?”

“Never went to Colby,” I said. “Doesn’t know shit.”

Guze was a tough kid, a fullback on the football team, with biceps that made his shirt sleeves tight, and the intensity of a wolverine when he got in a fight. We were the only two college kids in the Arena Café, and that made me nervous. If you were drinking with Guze, the odds on winning any fights you got into went up. The bad part was that the odds on getting into a fight went up too. I was uneasy. This was a town bar, full of lumberjacks and mill workers. I was uneasy, too, because we were waiting for two girls.

“They fuck like bunnies,” Guze said, “both of them.”

I felt the excitement bore into my solar plexus. It mingled with anxiety. The prospect of being with a girl who fucked like a bunny was a little scary, especially since I’d never actually done it at all, exactly. I felt awkward and sweaty. I dragged on my cigarette.

“Where we going to take them,” I said.

“We’ll take them in the car. You get in the back with the sister, me and the Shark up front.”

“The Shark?”

“Yeah, it’s her nickname. I don’t know why. Maybe sharks are supposed to fuck a lot.” Guze shrugged. “Anyway, I haven’t seen her sister, but the Shark says she’s good-looking and hot.”

“Like me,” I said. I drank some beer. “You got any safes?”

“Sure.” Guze fumbled in his jacket pocket and came out with a handful of Ramses. He skidded one in its small cardboard box across the tabletop. I picked it up quickly and put it into my shirt pocket.

“You always have a supply handy, Guze?”

“Bet your ass,” he grinned. “Big G man from the west, Boonie.” He looked across the room. “Here they are.”

I wished I hadn’t come. I looked at the two girls as they slid into the booth with us. One beside Guze, the other one beside me. The one with Guze looked a little like a shark: dark and smooth and not exactly sharp-featured but sort of a streamlined face. Her hair was black and cut short and brushed back like Doris Day wore hers, with a pompadour in the front.

“Boonie, this is Shark.”

I said hi.

“Hi, Boonie, this is my sister, Barb.”

“Hi, Barb, how ya doing?”

“Nice to meet you.”

Barb was smaller than Shark and younger. It was hard to tell. Maybe she was pretty young. But she had tits; you could see them. She had slid her coat back off her shoulders and her sweater was tight. Her hair was lighter than her sister’s and she wore it shoulder length. Her face was like Shark’s but less complete, more tentative.
She had on very red lipstick. Her nails were short, as if she bit them.

I said, “Want a cigarette?”

Barb said, “Sure.”

I shook one out of my pack of Camels and she took it. I lit a match, cupping it inside one hand, and lit her cigarette. She held it out near the tips of her fingers and I don’t think she inhaled. I was in a panic. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“So where you from?” Barb said, moving her cigarette in front of her face, waving the smoke away.

“New Bedford, Mass.,” I said.

“That’s a long ways.”

“It’s not a long way,” I said. “This is a long way.”

“Huh?”

“You go to school?” I said.

“Sure,” she said. She puffed on her cigarette.

A big waitress shuffled over. Her arms, in her short-sleeved dress, were fat and solid looking. She wore old fleece-lined bedroom slippers.

“Four beers,” Guze said, making a circular gesture with his right hand. The waitress shook her head.

“They won’t bother us about under-age college kids,” she said, “but not the girls.” She looked at Barb. “How old are you, honey? For crissake, you’re about fifteen.”

“I’m twenty-one,” Barb said, and puffed on her cigarette.

The thick-bodied men at the next table were looking at us. I felt kiddish and ineffectual. Barb’s face was a little flushed. The waitress grunted.

“You can’t stay in here,” the waitress said. “You’re too young.”

Guze took a five-dollar bill out of his pocket and folded it in half, the long way, and showed it to the waitress.

“You’re sure you don’t want to change your mind?” he said.

The waitress gestured with her thumb toward the door. “Beat it,” she said.

I didn’t want to be the first to get up, although all of me trembled to leave. “Why don’t we pick up some booze and take a ride,” I said. Inside my voice sounded small and piping, like a child’s. Guze nodded.

“Yeah, this place sucks anyway,” he said. He dropped the five on the table and walked toward the door without looking back. We followed him, the two girls, and me last. I slowed, frightened, by the table full of men, so it wouldn’t look as if I were running. None of the men looked up, and I swaggered slightly, keeping myself between the girls and the men, as we left the bar. Outside I felt relief and self-satisfaction. I had been brave walking past the men; they’d had plenty of chance to give me lip and they hadn’t. Now if this little babe would let me fuck her …

It was mid-November in central Maine, but the weather was warm. It had been cold the previous week, but the way it did sometimes, it had warmed, and you could walk around in a Windbreaker. It seemed like early fall as we drove up toward the college in a car Guze had borrowed. We had a pint bottle of Ballantine’s scotch that we passed around. It tasted to me at the time like one of those medications taken to induce vomiting. Always in the movies it looked good when the men rode in and bellied up to the bar and poured a big drink. I took a
pull at the bottle and passed it to Barb. I gave no sign that it tasted dreadful. Barb drank and gave no sign either. Guze swung the car onto the road behind the dorms and pulled up on the far side of Johnson Pond.

“Shark and I are going to take a walk down by the lake,” Guze said. “Keep the bottle.”

Then we were alone in the back seat. I drank again from the bottle and forced myself not to shiver. I held it toward Barb.

“Want another shot?” I said.

“Sure,” she said. She drank.

Across the pond the lights of the fraternity houses were bright. With the windows down we could hear the sounds of radios and record players and occasional shouts. I took some more scotch. My stomach burned with it.

“You like college?” Barb said.

I said, “Yes,” and lunged against her as if I were plunging through a window. She put her mouth against mine and opened it and stuck her tongue out. I felt the hot red surge that I would feel again, a surge that wasted all inhibition, that brooked no hesitance. Barb with her tongue motionless in my mouth went supine on the back seat, face up, with me clumsily on top of her.
Jesus Christ, she’s going to let me
. And she did. She lay perfectly still while I fumbled under her blouse and felt her small breasts inside her pointy, wired bra. She lay perfectly still while I put my hand inside her underpants, and perfectly still while I pulled them down over her thighs awkwardly with one hand. Still with one hand I got my fly unzipped, and she lay watching me with a slight quirk of a smile that rested without movement on
her mouth. When I got my pants down she reached out and took hold of me the way a child might hold its father’s finger. I remember us that way, frozen in time, her face in that fixed small smile, holding on to me, motionless as I looked down at her in the back seat of a 1946 Ford sedan.

I said, “Can you help me put it in?”

She stared up at me and made no sign that she’d heard, but she let go of me and put her legs apart and I managed on my own.

When it was over she put her underpants back on. In the bright moonlight they were white cotton, puckered at the waistband from laundering. We sat silently and drank some more scotch until Guze and Shark came back and we drove the girls back downtown.

Guze and Billy Murphy and I were kneeling in a rear pew in Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception Church at 7:20 on a Saturday night. There were short lines at each confessional.

“The French priest is in the booth on the left,” Billy whispered. “He can’t understand English. He just gives you three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys no matter what you tell him.”

“You never had nothing to tell him, Billy,” Guze said.

The smell of candle wax lingered in the chill silence of the church. An elderly man and woman knelt before us, saying penance. I wondered what they had left to confess.

“What if he’s not in that booth,” I said. “The other guy is brutal.”

A young woman with a kerchief over her head walked up from the altar. Her heels clicked in the silent
church. Her hands were clasped in front of her. She looked down at them as she walked. On either side of the altar there were banks of candles flickering in red jars. Above the altar arch the Lamb of God looked sweetly down and cherubim were poised in holy ecstasy along the rim of the arch. I could feel the infinite reach of sanctity stretching back along hushed passages of time, in living connection with Dickensian England and the France of Charlemagne, with Bethlehem and Eden. Church had surely felt this way to Shakespeare, to Columbus, to Niccolo Machiavelli; clear and cool and breathless with the memory of ancient sacrifice; the sloe-eyed virgin holding her child; the sacred heart, crimson in the middle of the martyred breast; frozen in statuary that seemed coeval with the events memorialized.

It was my turn in the booth. Kneeling in the confessional, I murmured the familiar formula, my throat narrow with embarrassment. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was a month ago and these are my sins.” There was a small velvet drape across the window between me and my confessor, and I could only sense the presence on the other side as it shifted slightly, and its breath whistled faintly in its nose. “… and I had intercourse.”