Rowing in Eden (28 page)

The framed letter closest to the telephone came from Samuel Clemens, who wanted to inform a draper that he and his wife were dissatisfied with the curtains they had ordered. Curtains! A complaint about curtains exhibited on the walls of a library for all to see and admire! Franny laughed aloud, but just as quickly understood: a letter from the hand of Samuel Clemens. If she had received a letter from Ryan Marvell, wouldn't she have kept it forever?

Cherished it? Framed it?

A pretty woman now advanced toward the alcove (petite, agitated, wearing very high heels with very tight pants, a combination Franny knew only from the record jackets of certain jazz albums belonging to her father). The woman smiled and took a seat on the bottom step of the set of chained-off stairs that rose out of the alcove. “You waiting for a call, too?”

Franny nodded.

“A secret sweetheart?”

While Franny hesitated, the telephone began to ring, and the woman popped up to answer it,
bang
, much faster than Franny would have answered it. Franny would have let it ring at least twice, three times if she could have stood it, so as not to appear overly eager.

“No,” the woman said, “but just a minute.” She turned with a wink. “Franny?”

All her life, Franny had been told that only cheap girls rode next to boys in cars. “That girl's going to cause an accident,” her mother would say if they saw a girl sitting close to a boy, “crawling all over him like that.” Her father usually laughed, but Franny knew that he
could laugh at things that, later on, you realized he found utterly revolting.

She had felt awkward the first time that Ryan Marvell asked her to sit next to him but she did love to have him put his arm over her shoulder and hold her close. She loved his grownup stink of cigarettes and coffee, and look at him, now, better than a god because he was a man, a big man wearing a black and red hunting jacket, beard unshaven, he was a regal lumberjack, and see how the concrete pillars of the library flew away behind the Ford like streamers on the bride and groom's car. She had known those pillars all her life, but now she sat beside Ryan Marvell and the world became the setting for what happened in their story. She was giddy with it, and it seemed he was, too. Look at him smile her way.

“Whoops! Better keep my eye on the road.”

They stopped at a red light, too fast, and several things slid forward from beneath the seat: an empty beer can, a shotgun shell, and a book. She did not recognize the book at first glance because it had a different cover than the edition of the book that she had read, but she picked it up.

1984.

“This is one of my favorite books in the whole world,” she said. “Are you reading it?”

He sucked in his cheeks for an ironic effect. “That's just something I'm supposed to read for school. But, listen, I've got to tell you about Thursday night.”

On Thursday night, he had almost been arrested for underage drinking at the Lagoon. He and a number of others had been taken to the police station to be booked, but he saw a chance to run, and took it. “Here.” He reached in his glove compartment. “A souvenir for you from the booking desk.”

A small card held upright by a metal coil soldered to a metal base. N
O
S
MOKING
read the card. Franny pulled the card from the coil, then slipped the coil over her ring finger before extending her hand to exclaim, “But, darling, you shouldn't have!”

He laughed. “I should get you a ring, though, shouldn't I? What
kind of a ring would you like? Turquoise, or—amethyst? Opal?”

She colored with pleasure and confusion. “I'd like anything you gave me,” she said, a little frightened he might say it had been a joke, but he went on. “That's a good idea. I'll have to think about that. Maybe for your birthday? Only forty-eight days to your birthday, right?”

Because they came upon The Craft practice house from a different direction than when she and Martie had come upon it in July, and the formerly scruffy lawn was now mowed trim, at first she did not recognize the place even after Ryan Marvell parked.

“What's here?” she said while he stretched his arms out over the steering wheel and yawned—a little theatrically, it seemed to Franny.

“This is where The Craft practices,” he said through another yawn. “Richie said we could stop by and listen.”

Franny leaned forward to peer at the house in a way that felt at least as theatrical as his stretch. She wondered if he would think it bad if he knew she had been there before. “It doesn't look like anybody's there,” she said, but then a noisy guitar twang sounded and they both laughed.

The band began to play “Turn On Your Love Light” just as she and Ryan Marvell reached the front door. Maybe that was the time to tell him about her earlier visit to the house? Or maybe not?

Richie Craft smiled and nodded at both of them as they took seats on the carpet at the back of the room. The band practiced “We Got to Get Out of This Place,” which was a current hit, and the Dovell's “You Can't Sit Down,” which was not. Ryan Marvell smiled at her, and began to move his arms like some old cornball doing the twist, and she laughed, and wished she could join in with his antics, sing to him, bounce around. Maybe he would like her better if she were able to be her whole self in his company, but to be her whole self in front of him would—require acting. Acting the part of herself. Which sounded odd. And, of course, there was the danger that if he knew her whole self he might not like her at all.

In the lull after “You Can't Sit Down,” Richie Craft looked at
Franny and Ryan Marvell, and began to warble “I Only Have Eyes for You”—a parody, Franny understood, but a pretty one, and then the bass player cut in with the theme song from the old TV show
Have Gun, Will Travel
, and the lead guitarist transformed that theme into “Muleskinner Blues.”

Bring the buck-buck-bucket, boy!

When Franny laughed, Ryan Marvell squeezed her tight, and said, “You are so great,” and everything felt perfect, then, but you could not stop at perfection, you could not stop anywhere, and there should have been some place to which they could go next: A football game. A movie with friends. Out to eat—

He smiled and stood up from the floor. So they were going. “Come on.” He gave her his hand. “Let's take a tour.”

He meant to lead her to a bedroom, she supposed, and she found herself closing her eyes as they moved down the hall. She let her fingers drag on the wall's sandy paint, and though her heart beat with fear, she laughed. In the company of boys and men—even in the company of her own father—she often seemed to be laughing when she did not want to laugh. She could not even say if it were wonderful or awful to let Ryan Marvell lead her down the hall by the hand. According to Tim Gleason, Ryan Marvell had planned to marry Noreen Frye, which maybe meant that he had sex with her. Franny could not ask him about that, though. You didn't ask a boy about things like that.

“Franny! Open your eyes!”

They stood in a room papered in light green horses drawing light green buggies. He took a seat on a bare mattress. “Ding dong,” he said, and ran his hand down her pants leg to the hem of her bellbottom trousers. Did they look faddish? Did the big black and white checks seem absurd? Rosamund had assured her they looked nice, but maybe Rosamund was just being kind.

“Whose room is this, Ryan?”

“I don't know, honey.”

She crossed the room to the group of familiar donation bags that stood, filled, in the corner. “Charity Village,” read the bags, and each
one carried a life-size picture, from the waist up, of a trim, uniformed man. The man smiled, and tipped his hat as if he stood at your door, right this minute, waiting to take away those items you no longer needed. His face was meant to be a face that you could trust: firm and forthright, teeth even, smile open, a tiny wrinkle of kindness around each eye. She and Susan Thomas had laughed over that perfect face when Mrs. Thomas gathered donations for Charity Village at the end of the summer. Franny started to tell Ryan Marvell how they had decided the Charity Village man actually came from another planet, like in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, only his ploy was to trick the earthlings into believing they gave to charity when, in fact, they were contributing DNA samples to the legions of—

She did not watch when Ryan Marvell got up and closed the bedroom door. While she talked, she picked up a set of deer antlers from one of the bags, and let the prickly hair at the base of the antlers work under her nails, the way she had with her teddy bear's plush when she was small. It seemed necessary to behave as if she and Ryan Marvell were not here, doing what they did. But when he came up behind her and whispered, “Hey, hon, it's not nice to get into people's private stuff,” she wanted to cry. It was just the sort of thing her father would have done: try to make her feel in the wrong by chastising her about something that did not matter a bit. She wished, then, that she did not love Ryan Marvell at all, and she set the antlers down and walked to the double-hung window that looked out on the neighbor's yard.

“So, what're you thinking about, Franny?”

While she shook her head, he put his arms around her from behind. She drew a mental line between a corner of the Crafts' bedroom window and the bedroom window of the house next door, and then she connected that line to the corner of an air-conditioning unit across the street. She did want to be in his arms. Just let them stand there, together, forever and ever. But he reached out and pulled down the window blind and guided her over to the bed.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I thought we'd just lie down for awhile. I thought it'd be nice.”

Really, she had no desire for him to take off her clothes, except that she felt it would be ugly and wrong—coy—to fight over her clothes if she meant to let him take them off eventually. And why not? When what was precious was his love?

Of course, a thirteen-year-old girl could not have sexual intercourse—that is, so absolutely
should
not, it might as well be
could
not. But she found she could lie on a bed in a bedroom, wearing nothing but her underwear, while Ryan Marvell took off his own clothes, and there was the shape of what she knew must be his penis—it made her want to cover her eyes—swaddled in its clean white jockey underwear. His bare legs were there, of course, too, below the underpants. Arms, legs, torso. Ryan Marvell—all alone in a room with Franny Wahl.

Ryan Marvell lay down beside her. His arms and chest and legs were there—bare skin—and then the skin and all of him lay on top of her.

“You're my girl, right?” he whispered. “Forever and ever?”

Of course. Of course. She adored him, but it was not from desire that she allowed him to push his knee between her thighs. Did he like that? She thought: a gift. Even when she saw that he believed he robbed her of something—that part of him seemed to
wish
to believe himself a robber—she thought: a gift.

How long did they roll about and rub limbs? At some point, the house had gone quiet. Hours must have passed, surely, while she hovered high above that striped—and slightly stained—mattress and Ryan Marvell stroked her breasts and whispered his delight. She gathered material for the nest in which she meant to hold them forever, yet could not help feeling frightened at the way he moaned and tried to steer her somewhere with his swaddled erection.

“Look at that,” she said finally—she needed to hear her own voice say something more than
no
—“it's so white out there, Ryan, it's silver.” She pointed to a seam of the afternoon world that entered the room where one window blind did not quite touch the base of its window frame, and he lifted his head and looked and said a fuddled, “What? Oh, honey.”

Abruptly, he rolled off of her. He rubbed his face with his hands and cleared his throat and made odd noises just the way her father did when trying to collect himself before a cop came up to the window of the car with ticket book in hand. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

He turned from her while he pulled on his pants. She touched his back, the muscular shoulders with their dusting of freckles. She wanted to be brave for him, for his love, but could not tell what brave might be.

When they stepped out of the hall and into the kitchen, they found Richie Craft, alone, gluing a chair rung back into a chair. He looked up at the two of them and smiled, then said, “Jesus, Marvell, do you think you could have scratched up the poor girl's face any worse?”

Though the remark embarrassed Franny, she appreciated Richie Craft's friendliness, and the way that he spoke to her and Ryan Marvell as if they were just any couple.
Where are you two off to now
, he asked, and
Had her big sisters had any more of their crazy parties lately
, and she felt reassured by the comfortable conversation—until he mumbled an apology about “that business with Patty when you and Martie came by.”

A look that she had never seen passed over Ryan Marvell's face; something sour and knowing.

“So, Franny”—he jingled his keys as they started down the sidewalk—“you'd been here before, huh?”

“Just once. With Martie. To listen to them practice.”

“Hm. I suppose Martie didn't just listen to the practice, though, right?”

“She certainly did,” Franny said, though it did not escape her attention that he had just expressed disapproval of a girl doing what Franny herself had just done with him; and maybe this occurred to Ryan Marvell, too, because he ran ahead of her, then, and tossed his keys high into the canopy of a sugar maple, catching them as they fell. “The thing is,” he said when she came abreast of him, “I know Louie Nicholson.”

“Louie Nicholson?” Franny remembered Louie Nicholson. A
thick-limbed boy with blond hair as curly as a lamb's coat. Years ago, Louie had come by the house on Ash Street to play foursquare with Rosamund and Martie. “What about Louie Nicholson?” She opened the passenger-side door. Took a seat.