So Shelly (16 page)

“What about you?” I asked. “Aren’t you coming too?”

“No. I need to … um … check on the boat. You two go.”

That said, Gordon threw her in my direction. She stumbled toward me. I caught her beneath her armpits, but she still fell so that her nose was literally buried in my crotch. Not strong enough to lift her myself—she was at least a foot taller and probably twenty pounds heavier than I—I laid her down as gently as possible on the rubber-chip mattress. She didn’t move.

I marched over to Gordon. “What the fuck, Gordon? Do you really expect me to just hang out with her while you go down to the boat?”

A smirk spread over Gordon’s moonlit face. “I don’t expect you to ‘hang out with her’ at all. It’s time you become a man, Keats. Like I said, you need to pop that cherry of yours.”

“Are you insane? I’m not sleeping with some random girl!”

“I don’t want you to ‘sleep’ with her either.”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “I don’t even know her!”

“Sure you do. Her name is Nadia and she’s willing to fuck you. What more do you need to know?”

“Didn’t you just say, not a half hour ago, that you hate ‘loose women’?”

“She’s not a loose woman, Keats. She’s a hooker. There’s
a difference. Look, this island is full of foreign workers who come here on six-month visas. They get paid minimum wage, which is probably ten times what they’d be paid for similar work at home, if they could find it. Most of them hold down at least two jobs and work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Some of the girls, like Nadia here, supplement their income even further with some selective hooking on the side. Hell, you’d be doing her a favor; you’d probably be feeding her family back home or helping her to finance a college education. Just consider it a co-sympathy fuck.”

“Why the hell do you care anyway?”

“Relax, dude. I don’t. I just thought you could use a good lay. You know, loosen up a bit. But whatever.”

Together, we studied Nadia, lying on the rubber with her skirt hiked up, exposing a tiny pink thong and a round Eastern Bloc ass. “Are you sure?” Gordon asked after a moment.

“I’m sure.”

“At least help me get her up,” he said.

We propped her between us and more-dragged-than-walked her to a nearby park bench, where Gordon gently placed her lying down, faceup. He removed a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet and placed it inside her bra.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“We can’t just leave her,” I argued.

“Sure we can,” he said, and headed toward the docks.

A cacophonic admixture of music from the bars and the stereos on the boats surrounding us made it impossible to sleep, so Gordon and I talked to pass the time until the island
and its visitors had spent themselves and we could grab a few hours of rest. Gordon lay next to Shelly on the deck of the Corsair, which rocked gently with the passing waves and the occasional wake made by late-exiting boaters. I sat cross-kneed on the steady dock.

“What’s up with the skull?” I asked at last.

“My sister, Shelly, and I dug that up on Johnson’s Island when we were kids.”

“From the prisoner-of-war cemetery?” I asked.

“No. But not far from it. We were digging a trench to recreate the Battle of Antietam, and there it was. A complete skeleton. Shelly insisted it was an Ottawa Indian warrior, but I didn’t think so. Anyway, I wrapped the skull in my T-shirt and took it home with me. Actually, I forgot I had it after a while. Found it in a box when I was packing for prep school. That’s when I read
Hamlet
in freshman English class. You know, Yorick? The grave digger scene? It reminded me of this skull.” He held it up for me to see.

“Why a cup?”

“When I came home to Ogontz after that year with the Brothers, I dug it out. For a while, it just sat on a shelf in my room. But then I thought it could be put to a better and more practical use as a memento mori, a reminder of death like the ones medieval monks kept around. You know, carpe diem,
hakuna matata,
the old gladiator’s code: ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ That sort of thing.”

I tried absorbing his philosophical musings, but my fingertips were busy impulsively tracing my cheekbones and jawline as an image of my own fleshless face flashed in my mind. “Gordon?”

“Yeah, Keats.”

“I should have done it with Nadia, huh?”

“Yes, Keats, you should have.”

After a few moments of contemplating what could have been, I heard Gordon’s light snore rising from the Corsair.

There was no way I would have been able to sleep on that dock, and I wasn’t ready to be left alone with my thoughts. So I said, “Gordon?”

“What? I was almost asleep.”

“Let’s play the disc.”

“What disc?”

“Shelly’s. The R.E.M. mix. I can’t sleep.”

“I can.” He was testy but propped himself up on his elbows and went along with it. “The boom box is up front, but don’t play it for too long; I want to save the batteries for later.”

I lowered myself into the boat, stepped over Gordon and Shelly, removed the disc from my suit coat pocket, retrieved the boom box, and then climbed back onto the dock and repositioned myself with the player on my lap.

“Gordon?” I said again.

“What now?” He was on the verge of losing his temper.

“Which song did Shelly have for you?”

“ ‘Nightswimming.’ It’s number six. I ought to know; she played it enough,” he said, lying flat on his back with his eyes closed to the heavens. “But it’s not just mine. It’s Augusta’s and Shelly’s too. She called it ‘our song.’ ”

I put in the disc and forwarded to number six, but I immediately recognized the opening notes to “Losing My Religion.” Rather than bothering Gordon again, I pressed the
forward button, and the very first word from Michael Stipe’s mouth was “Nightswimming.” When he reached the second verse in a voice of raspy nostalgia over a piano-driven arrangement, the appropriateness of Shelly’s song choice for their less-than-holy trinity came clear: “Nightswimming deserves a quiet night. / I’m not sure all these people understand.” It was perfect. Twelve words captured both the beauty and the frustration of the threesome they’d formed.

I pressed pause, closed my eyes, and tried to imagine Shelly’s face, but it’s weird how soon you forget a dead person’s face. I think it’s because people wear so many of them that when you try to recall just one, you get a blurred blending that renders that one version, which you’re trying so desperately to see, unrecognizable. It’s like that with my parents.

“I hate that song,” Gordon said before rolling onto his side and turning his back to me.

I ejected the disc and made sure the power was off on the boom box. When I placed the disc back in its case, I realized that another, unmarked disc was already in the other’s place. I hadn’t noticed it when I’d removed the R.E.M. disc.

“Gordon?”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Keats! If you don’t leave me alone and let me get some sleep, I swear I’m going to throw you in.”

“What’s this?” I asked, ignoring Gordon’s rage and holding up the case with the mystery disc inside.

“How the fuck should I know? You had the disc. She must have put two discs in one case by mistake. What’s the big deal?”

I realized that not only had I not bothered to listen to
the disc since she’d given it to me, I’d never even opened the case. “It’s no big deal; it’s just not like Shelly. I mean, she could be careless about a lot of things, but not about her favorite CDs.”

I tried to make out any markings on it in the moonlight but couldn’t. “Do you have a flashlight?” I asked Gordon.

“In the bin,” he said, before sitting and finally giving up on trying to get any sleep before morning.

I jumped down into the boat and found the flashlight. Gordon met me at the captain’s console, where I shined the beam onto the disc.

“That’s not a CD,” Gordon said. “It’s a DVD. There’s a movie or something on there that she must’ve wanted us to see.”

“What
exactly
did Shelly tell you? Have you told me
everything
?” I asked.

Gordon hesitated, stupidly (or so I thought) still weighing whether it was time to include me in Shelly’s full confidence. “All she said was that if anything happened to her, you’d have the disc. ‘Bring the boom box and Keats. He’ll have the disc.’ That was all.”

I allowed a few moments for it all to soak in. “If anything happened to her?” I said. “What does that mean? Why would she have thought that something was going to happen to her? Why would she have made all these plans for us? Unless …”

“Unless what, Keats?”

“Unless she …”

“She what?”

“She …”

“Go on. Say it. Unless she knew that she was going to die.”

“You mean … Shelly killed herself?”

Once more I got the look of utter indignation regarding my apparent thickheadedness. “Don’t be an idiot, Keats.”

That said, Gordon closed his eyes and the door on any further discussion.

Alone with my thoughts, I turned my attention to the stars and searched for clues.

I remember that I blamed Shelly’s sadness during that November and December on Hogg’s expulsion; on Gordon’s aloofness; on the coming of winter, which also marked the end of sailing season; on her difficulty adjusting to her new extended family (remember, her father had hastily remarried in early December); and, obviously, on her abortion. It wouldn’t be until the near fulfillment of our pledge to Shelly that I would learn from Gordon the true motivation for her melancholy.

Shelly’s piece for the
Beacon
that semester, which she began in earnest shortly after the night of the Halloween dance, reflected her atypical darkness of that period. It was a short tale titled “Since He …” It tells the story of a wealthy family unanimously considered exemplary as a model of Christian piety. That is, until the father is discovered with his throat slit ear to ear, on the floor of his study beneath the emptied wall safe, the apparent victim of an interrupted
home invasion. The police quickly determine that there had been no break-in at all and that the killer had to have been a family member. Lacking in duplicity, the daughter, under interrogatory duress, admits to the killing, committed with the aid of her mother. Their plea that the murder had been precipitated by the daughter’s victimization at her father’s incestuous hands falls upon the disbelieving ears of the townspeople, and the jury summarily sentences both mother and daughter to death.

“Since He …” was a huge success both for the
Beacon,
which sold more copies of that particular issue than of any other in its fifty-year publishing history, and for Shelly. Her emergence as a talented writer helped to transform her weirdness into quirkiness and lubricated for her the hallways of Trinity for the remainder of her time there. Her schoolmates, if not exactly inviting her to join in their reindeer games, at least turned their attention to finding fresher meat to skewer. Mr. Robbins encouraged Shelly to enter the story in various contests or to offer it to publications catering to young writers, but, to my disbelief, she refused.

It was that same fall semester of their junior year, and for the same issue, when Gordon, at the last minute, finally submitted something to be printed in the
Beacon
. He’d been reading Shelly’s story and knew it was good. He could have let her have the day, but he went ahead and stole it, for, in all honesty, it was most likely
his
story that caused the spike in sales, but as perhaps only Mr. Robbins and myself knew, Shelly’s was the work of greater literary depth and quality. Gordon’s was a masturbatory piece of self-aggrandizement, but the irregularly reading public of Trinity was incapable
of discerning the difference between artistry and sensationalism.

“Asmodeus” is the title of Gordon’s story. The title refers to the Judeo-Christian demon of lust. The narrative was a condensed version of what would become his second Manfred novel under the same title. The original, published in the
Beacon,
is a simple morality tale set in the near future at St. Jude’s, a coed Catholic high school similar to Trinity. The protagonist is a Goody Two-shoes senior named Toby who vies for the affection of the homecoming queen and class salutatorian, the virginal Rachel. His archrival for Rachel’s affection is a recent transfer student named Con, short for Conrad.

Con is nothing like Toby and Rachel, who are both academically gifted rich kids from traditional homes; both very likely to succeed. Con is the only child of an immigrant Scottish widow; she sleeps all day and works nights as a cashier at Wal-Mart in between getting high and sleeping with any number of low-life losers that she escorts to their tiny thin-walled two-bedroom apartment. (In case you haven’t figured it out, Con is Manfred’s son, his mother a vampire turned by Manfred. The losers she picks up? Dinner. Consider the stake through Manfred’s heart at the end of the first novel solved and a series born.)

Initially, Rachel finds Con repulsive. In fact, she finds all of the boys who have attempted to woo her repulsive. Including her senior homecoming dance, she has attended seven different formal dances with seven different boys, each of whom went home with bluer balls than the blue of Con’s piercing eyes. Toby has waited patiently, but he is goaded to
act when he recognizes a look in Rachel’s eyes as she watches Con ride out of the student parking lot on his Indian brand motorcycle, a look identical to the way Toby looks at
her
.

Over time, and in juxtaposition to all of the other boys she has ever known, Con’s moody bad-boy demeanor and hard-luck life begin to appeal to Rachel. Through his feigned lack of interest, Con ignites a longing that she didn’t think she’d ever feel. Ashamed, during confession she reveals her lust to Father Raphael and emerges armed with an arsenal of Hail Marys, Our Fathers, and Glory Bes to combat her sexual urgings, but her prayers prove inadequate to quell her primal lust for Con.

With Father Raphael’s urging, Toby finally reveals his love to Rachel and reclaims her through a nostalgic recounting of their twelve years of parallel paths to the present and by imaginatively portraying her likely future of ruin and ultimate damnation.