Stages (8 page)

“Call an ambulance, somebody. Quick,” David was shouting. “Oh, forget it. I’ll call one.” He ran for the row of closed shops across the street from the beach.

It took forever for the ambulance to arrive.

After ten minutes had passed, Melanie had to sit down and take some slow, deep breaths.

When the ambulance finally did arrive, after nearly a half hour, Melanie and Paula got into it with Kathy. David and Mike wanted to go with her too. David was vehement.

Closing the door in his face, Melanie said, “There’s no room, for Christ’s sake, and you’re holding us up. Follow us, if you want to. And make sure Riddiford or somebody finds out so they can call her parents.”

“I don’t know where the fuck Riddiford is,” David screamed.

“He’s there,” said Melanie, throwing David a matchbook as the ambulance pulled away.

It was from a motel on Route 1 in Saugus.

David stared dumbly at it.

“Where’d she get this?” he asked.

“Lauren left a couple of them in the dressing room,” Mike replied. “Where they’d be easy to find. Melanie probably forgot that she gave me the other one. To put in my yearbook, she said.”

“Fuck Riddiford,” said David. “I just wanna get to that hospital. You got your car, right? Come on, I’ll drive.”

“I’ll drive,” Mike replied. “It’s my car.”

“I wanna get there,” David yelled.

“So do I,” Mike said. “And you’re shaking.”

11

Kathy had a concussion. Melanie and Paula learned the next day that she would be in the hospital for a week. They vowed to visit her every afternoon, and in their relief at learning she was in no danger, immediately began work on a fruit basket. The concept of the fruit basket grew in the theater’s green room. Papier-mâché and wire mesh were introduced. The final result was a six-foot fruit sculpture that Melanie said looked like the Jolly Green Giant in a state of sexual arousal. She and Paula carried it into the hospital under a white sheet. A nurse walked into Kathy’s room just as the gift was unveiled.

“Wowee,” said Kathy.

“It’s been a long while since I’ve had that effect on a banana,” sighed the nurse.

After she left, Kathy confided to her friends that she was a little worried about Eric.

“What about him?” Paula asked.

“He’s been here five times already, and he keeps apologizing all over the place.”

“So, he feels guilty,” Paula replied. “Didn’t you say David’s been here about every hour on the hour?”

“Yeah,” Kathy said. “Look at these candies he brought me. A two-pound box of
kosher
chocolates. He must have been thinking about those deli breakfasts we used to have. But I’m not worried about David the way I am about Eric. He’s blaming himself for what happened. I told him I know he didn’t crash into me deliberately, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference what I say. I can’t understand why he’s tormenting himself so about an
accident.
”

“Poor Eric,” Melanie said. “He hates himself for having hurt you, Kath. I mean, it’s not easy for guys like him and Mike. They hurt their mothers, and I suppose they think they hurt all women, because they can’t ever be with a woman.” Paula sighed. “I wouldn’t want to be Mike, or Eric.” She looked at the box of chocolates.

“Come to think of it, I wouldn’t want to be David, either,” she said, finishing her thought.

“When I was in high school,” Melanie said, “I had this little short friend who wanted a boyfriend so badly that she sometimes wished she’d been born a boy. She thought it was so much easier for men. I’ve never felt that way myself.”

She gave the Jolly Green Giant a sympathetic smile.

“I think it’s a privilege to be a woman,” she said. “I think it’s ennobling, when so much of your role in life is…forgiving.”

12

By the end of the week, despite what anyone said to him, Eric still had not snapped out of it. He was a pale, blond freshman with a weak chin, inexperienced and insecure. Little things got to him, and the accident was a very big thing. Late Friday afternoon, as Mike was leaving the theater for the hospital, he heard talking in Mr. Cherry’s office. He listened. What he heard was Mr. Cherry’s voice—that rustle that sounded as if he were stepping delicately, one teensy foot at a time, across lily pads or into the empty papers in Kathy’s box of kosher chocolates. Mike also recognized Eric’s voice.

“I just feel so rotten,” he was saying.

Mr. Cherry’s reply to this was indistinct.

Mike heard Eric say, “I can’t concentrate on the books or anything.”

This time Mr. Cherry’s reply was clearly audible.

“Eric, I think you have a thing or two to learn about yourself. Perhaps I shall be the one to teach you these things.”

Mike wanted to kick in Mr. Cherry’s door and yell at Eric, “Don’t you know what he’s after?”

Then he thought,
But what am
I
after?

And he slowly walked away.

The following Monday morning, Mike tried to look the other way when he saw Mr. Cherry’s old, derby-shaped Peugeot pulling into the theater’s parking lot. But out of the corner of his eye, he saw something that made him stare in spite of himself. Mr. Cherry was not driving the car.

Eric was.

By Tuesday, when Kathy was released from the hospital, everyone but she knew. And she found out about it at the little homecoming party that Melanie and Paula threw for her at the Greek bar and grill.

One of the first things Kathy said was, “Is Eric still depressed about what happened?”

“It seems that Mr. Cherry has taken Eric under his wing, Kath,” Melanie replied.

“That’s one way to put it,” Paula said. “The fact is, the kid’s letting himself be carted around like a kitten in a little girl’s baby carriage.”

“I heard Riddiford say that Cherry might take this offer he got from someplace up in Vermont,” David said.

“Why not?” said Melanie. “Now that he’s got Eric to take along as a souvenir of this place.”

“Riddiford would probably like to take off somewhere himself,” David said. “With Lauren.”

“Oh, it’s all so sordid,” Melanie sighed. “And in such a small-town way. All these student-faculty affairs…I wish I’d skipped mine. There’s so much arrested development that has to go into them. I remember when I was growing up, there was this kid on our block. He sort of looked like Goofy, you know, in Mickey Mouse. He was around fourteen when I was around ten. And he liked playing with the ten-year-old set. Everybody’s mother thought he was a little retarded. Ha.”

“Did he ever try to do anything to you?” Paula asked.

“Yeah,” Melanie replied. “And I hit him in the face with a great big piece of raw rhubarb. If the mothers in the neighborhood had ever found out, I think they would have been proud to know that I defended my honor with something that came from one of their vegetable gardens.”

“Was he ever arrested?” Kathy asked.

“No,” Melanie said. “As a matter of fact, last Christmas vacation I heard from one of my friends that he just got his doctorate. In medieval literature. Somebody ought to tell him that there’s a place up in Vermont that’s hiring.”

Paula made a face at her beer mug and said, “Yuck.” She continued, “I wonder if they think you don’t notice them trying to look up your dress while they’re delivering their lectures.”

“I think it stinks,” Mike said softly. “I think it all just stinks.”

“Gee,” said Kathy, “I’m having such a nice time I wish I’d get kneed in the head more often.”

“Sorry, Kath,” Mike said. “Maybe I should have stayed home. I’m tired. And I always get in a bad mood when I’m tired.”

David signaled for a second pitcher.

Four pitchers later, the party was over.

David said he was going to meet his girlfriend at her sorority house.

“Don’t keep her waiting any longer,” Melanie advised.

“Someone in that sorority was kept waiting too long last week, and she died from brushing her hair.”

Mike said that he was going on to another place.

Melanie and Paula walked Kathy back to her dorm. On the way, Paula said, “Mike’s going to some gay bar, isn’t he?”

“Yup,” said Melanie.

“Our company is never enough for him,” Paula said. “His evening’s never complete without…
”

“The sad part of it,” Melanie put in, “is that he never has an evening in a gay bar that’s complete either.”

“Oh, I’m just glad to be me,” Kathy sighed. “Whatever the knocks may be that I’ll have to take.”

After her friends left her in her room, Kathy undressed and put on the blue terry bathrobe that her mother had brought her to help speed her recovery, the way she had by buying her pink flannel pajamas when she was sick with the measles as a child.

Paula returned to her room and opened a fresh carton of Parliaments.

Melanie went to her room, changed her clothes, and went out again.

13

Sporters, the oldest gay bar in Boston, did not give itself away knowingly. Its facade was as blank and anonymous as painted plywood could make it. There was no sign on the place, and the windows had been boarded against the intrusion of daylight or the authorities.

Pushing open a door that looked nailed shut, Melanie walked into a U-shaped bar room that smelled of cigarettes.

A few heads turned to check out the newcomer, and then quickly regrouped around their drinks and ashtrays and
sotto voce
gossip.

Just as she knew she would, Melanie found Mike sitting on a stool at the end of the bar. Most of the men who frequented Sporters were regulars, like Mike, and most of them gravitated to the same spot every evening, as he did, for security in the face of rejection.

“You come here often?” Melanie asked.

Mike turned around.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said.

“Let me try again,” Melanie suggested. “You live around here?”

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” Mike responded.

“Because I feel comfortable here, that’s why,” Melanie replied. “It’s the one place I know of where I can sit down and have a drink with the absolute certainty that some slob isn’t looking at my boobs and thinking about coming on to me.

“Oh, in that case, why don’t you pull up a stool and join me?” Mike said.

“Don’t mind if I do,” said Melanie.

She ordered a Bud from the bartender.

“Nice vibes in here tonight,” she said to Mike after she was served. “I mean, nicer than usual.”

“You know the Boston crowd as well as I do,” Mike replied. “Nobody ever loosens up unless they’re at an Irish wake.”

“This is what?” Melanie asked. “It must be the fifth or sixth time I’ve come here.”

“Try it once, you’re a philosopher,” Mike said. “Twice, you’re a pervert. Voltaire said that. Or words to that effect.” He drained his glass of Scotch and ordered another.

“I’m not a pervert,” Melanie said. “What I am is perverse, which is not what you have to be if you want to sleep with a guy on the swim team without joining a sorority.”

“Seeing as I’ve been drinking,” Mike said, drinking, “I’ll be frank. I’m glad you showed up.”

Melanie shrugged.

“Nice to know I’m welcome,” she said.

“Really,” Mike said. “The few times we came here together, I had fun. I really did have fun. All the times I’ve been here alone, I’ve just sat or leaned against a wall, not talking to anybody. And…slowly shrinking in my own estimation, until I feel like a troll two feet tall.”

“Self-loathing is what keeps us all coming back for more,” Melanie said cheerfully.

“You know, I’ve known about this place since I was in high school,” Mike said. “A couple of girls I knew used to drive in here on weekends sometimes to stare at all the queers. One of them—her name was Mary Margaret—used to say, ‘Some of them are so
cute.
If only I could
reform
one of those guys.’ ’Course I could understand the way she felt. At the time I felt exactly the same way. About the guys on the hockey team.”

“It’s a basic human instinct,” Melanie said. “To want the ones you can’t have. Anybody who wants somebody they can have is taking the chance of ruining their unhappiness.”

“Psychology one-oh-one,” Mike said.

“History one-oh-two,” Melanie replied. “One-oh-two is
personal
history.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mike as he took another sip of Scotch. “You know, seriously, Mel, I can’t get over how it doesn’t bother you being here when you know the only guy in the joint who’s interested in you—even as a person—is me. Most women at least want to feel, well, appreciated, don’t they?”

“Sure, plenty of women want to be pursued by the general public,” Melanie said. “Why are there actresses, and ballet dancers, why is there makeup? But in the end it’s not a crowd of admirers that counts, it’s a Valentine you got in the fourth grade from this kid and it had a little gray mouse on it with a heart under its arm, like a little paperboy delivering papers, and just because of that card you fell in love. For a long, long time.”

“Okay, I understand,” Mike said. “I just thought you might feel awkward.”