The Island Walkers (51 page)

And then it was over. They parted, standing at a loss among the chatting couples. He thought to move back to the table. But she was looking at him blankly, her head raised, a little to one side. He returned her look, held it for a breathless moment, until her eyes darted away. Flecks of light swam over her face and shoulders. There was something primitive in the way the light masked her: an ancient, living camouflage, like light penetrating a woods. Terror was in him, and at the same time he felt remarkably calm, remote. He had read somewhere that animals went calm, knowing they are about to be killed by a larger beast: he thought of this now. He looked around, pretending to be interested in what the emcee was saying, up there in the spotlight. But he was only impersonating normality. He put his hand in his trouser pocket and felt the handkerchief folded there: it, too, was his father’s.

“Hey, I read your poem,” he said, turning back to her with a grin, as if his news was a little joke, nothing important.

He thought she flushed. In the speckling light it was hard to tell.

“ ‘The Whirlpool,’ ” he said. “I got an early copy of the
Quill
.”

She looked at him.

“And what did you think?” Her voice hard.

“I love it,” he said. He could no longer be casual. His whole body had become a drum, pounding. “I memorized it. Actually—” He realized, too late, that “actually” was a word Liz used, ad nauseam. “I didn’t set out to memorize it. I just read it so many times it stuck. It’s a great poem. It’s —”

He was smiling helplessly. Why wouldn’t she help him? She was looking at him without expression, her head a little tilted in that way she had, skeptical and distant and penetrating. “I was wondering if it had anything to do with me. I know you often make things up, or people do, when they write a poem. But I couldn’t help thinking — that day we went to the whirlpool. There was a moment — well.”

“Thank you,” she said finally, softly. He could not read her expression, but something had crossed her face.

The Morganaires started into another piece. It was a mercy: he was sure he was drowning in his own incompetence. He felt his face must be the colour of Brad’s cummerbund. The loud music made more conversation impossible. It was a fast tune this time: an orchestrally jazzed-up version of an old Presley song. All around, couples flung themselves into the music. Joe thought Anna looked reluctant — in fact, he wasn’t very good at fast dancing himself — and they turned as if by agreement, walking back to the table. He was a failure. He had spoken his secret and nothing had changed. She was leading him away from the dance. The revelation that he thought had existed in “The Whirlpool” — that he was special to her — did not exist.

Liz and Brad weren’t at the table. For a while Joe and Anna made themselves busy trying to pick them out in the crowd.
There
they were, dancing in the swarm of little lights as if born to it. Brad moved
elegantly, Joe thought with envy, with a certain casual grace, like a tall black man he’d once seen on television: Cab Calloway, or Duke Ellington. Liz danced, as always, as if she were totally disinterested: but she, too, moved well, in her long dress in which her body bent in a willowy way.

“They look good together,” Joe said. His voice had caught in his throat.

Anna Macrimmon said nothing. Though her silence had an oddly palpable quality, as if she had conjured up a large stone that now sat on the table between them. More than ever he felt she belonged to another world: a world with the blue gem of the Mediterranean in its centre, so far from this one, and so superior, that it must be a torture for her to sit here, at a dance called, of all things, Springtime in Paris. He felt as oafish as any boy from a farm, a hayseed wearing his father’s shoes: perhaps someday she would tell the story of this night to friends he would never meet. For a laugh.

“There’s Mr. Mann,” Anna said, looking past Joe’s head.

In the balcony at the west end of the gym a number of people had come to watch the dance. Craning around, Joe saw the shadowy groups sitting on the wooden benches. The teacher stood behind a railing, his white hair unmistakable. He was staring towards the orchestra, though Joe had an intuition that, only a moment ago, the teacher’s gaze had been fixed on him.

45

THE FOUR OF THEM
drove to Liz’s house to change into more casual clothes, then went on to Laura Becker’s place, the first stop in a series of all-night parties. Laura lived on the river side of the Shade Survey, in a big ranch-style house of yellow brick, with a run of picture
windows looking east across the backyard and the distant river, towards chains of lights that marked a gravel pit. Joe left the others in the house and went into the yard, where a group of boys were smoking and drinking by the fence. Petie Brennan, a broad-chested farmboy in thick glasses and an oversized white dress shirt, open at the throat, held out a wine bottle. “Get loaded,” he said thickly. It was not clear if this was a statement or an order.

Joe took a deep swig from the flattish bottle — the wine was fizzy and sweet, almost like pop — and stood looking over the wire fence, listening to the others talk. It was over, he felt, his long, solitary campaign to win Anna Macrimmon was over. Clumsily, he had made his move and nothing had come of it. He might as well get drunk.

After a while he turned, letting his weight sag back on the wire. Above the yard, the expanse of candle-lit living-room windows suggested a dark aquarium, swimming with the flailing forms of dancers. He couldn’t see Anna, though he momentarily glimpsed Brad’s tall form sliding through the light from a doorway. Liz came to the window and peered out, then her pale face retreated. Below, in the brightly lit rec room, a game of ping-pong was in progress. The wretched hopping of the ball seemed to be taking place inside his own head.

He turned again to the valley. Low in the east, an orange fire raged: the moon, edging slowly from shadow. Below, the Shade glinted like scrap metal. He drank again from the bottle and passed it back. “You can’t say that,” a nearby voice said. “Nobody says that.”

“Anybody got a cigarette?”

At her voice — the familiar-unfamiliar light voice — he turned and saw Anna Macrimmon approach the crowd of boys. She did not look at him, though he sensed she knew he was there. Several of the boys began hunting for their packs, but Dick Christopolous beat them all to the punch, and in a moment had his lighter going too, shielding its flame under her dipping face. She blew out a plume of smoke with an experienced, blasé air, like a woman in an old movie.

“So is this a special club,” she said, “or are girls allowed?”

Strangers to irony, they all hastened to assure her that girls were allowed.

Petie Brennan and Bob Black signalled each other with wide eyes.

Joe watched in amazement. She stood with her back partially turned to him — her back in its tight, short sweater, talking to Dick Christopolous and the others — but especially to Dick. Dick’s usual type of girlfriend had teased hair, smoked as a matter of course, and had a reputation. His sharp-handsome Greek face, under the well-oiled droop of his forelock, leaned close to hers, his mouth twisted slightly in a wry smile.

Her smoking shocked him. It was if she’d revealed a coarser side than he’d suspected, though he wondered if it wasn’t an act. Just her being out here shocked him, behaving like some ordinary girl happy with the kind of chatter Dick Christopolous specialized in. The other boys, too, hung on every word that was said, occasionally putting in their two cents’ worth. She talked to them all, laughing every so often. Only once did she glance over at him, with a look that went straight to his eyes, a look without expression, yet which seemed to brim with meaning, angry meaning. Was she upset with what he’d asked her about her poem? Well, let her be.

After a few minutes she thanked Dick for the cigarette and ground it out under her shoe. “Think I’ll have a look at the moon,” she said. She went along the fence, away from Joe and the others, towards an old wooden gate held shut by a loop of wire. She unfastened the wire and let herself into the shadowy tangle of bushes and small trees. Joe watched her descend out of sight. A few seconds later, Dick Christopolous, gently touching the fingers of one hand to his forelock, walked out the gate. He, too, went down the hillside, with his hunched, high-shouldered walk, his cagey air, disappearing into the mass of bushes.

Joe watched in despair. He could hear voices: Anna Macrimmon laughing, and Dick Christopolous going on in a low monotone, making her laugh more. Then their voices were lost in the throb of music from the house.

“Fuck me,” a boy said in a low voice, near Joe. Andy Schull flicked his butt over the fence.

“Fuck
her
,” someone said.

“Don’t you wish,” someone answered.

The boys were all at the fence now, staring as one into the night. All of them, Joe suspected, were virgins. They were probably thinking that acts they could only dream of were about to take place, down there in the dark. He twisted the fence until it hurt his hands and turned around twice, in a spasm of indecision. He went back to the house. He looked in the window at the ping-pong players. He returned to the fence. The valley was dim, though as his eyes became accustomed, he was able to see more trees and bushes, picked out by the moon, and what looked like the tin roof of a shed. Farther away, the empty flats stretched towards the river. From the gravel pits across the river came a faint clanking sound; a truck grunted as it changed gears. Anna and Dick Christopolous had been swallowed by the night. He felt he knew nothing about love or sex at all. She had chosen
Dick Christopolous
! Dick the hard rock; Dick who was said to sleep in his car; Dick who spent half his life in the pool hall! She was down there with him now, doing God only knew what.

After a while the other boys heard a rumour of food and went back to the house. A few minutes later, Brad came out. He was eating a slice of pizza; a second slice drooped from his other hand.

“You seen Anna? She wanted some pizza.”

“She’s down there,” Joe said, turning back to the fence.

Beside him, Brad peered into the darkness, his mouth open in a silent, disbelieving laugh. “She’s with Dick Christopolous. She might not want you disturbing them.”

He felt wonderful, saying this, and terrible. The gloss of happiness disappeared from Brad’s face. He went out the gate and down the hill into the darkness, with his pizza.

Joe went back towards the house. In the light from the rec room, he examined his stinging hand. Blood had trickled onto his palm, from the cut the wire had made in his thumb. Upstairs, he stood by
the huge fridge, pretending to nurse a glass of punch. The kitchen counters were loaded with food — several kinds of pizza and sandwiches with their crusts cut off and paper barrels of fried chicken and a chocolate cake dotted with jelly beans. Laura Becker’s skinny, red-haired mother, a woman whose voice seemed pitched at near-hysteria, was walking around with a paper hat on and an empty glass, encouraging them to eat. Joe had no appetite. He considered going home. Liz came in and asked him to dance. “I dunno,” he said with a brutal evasiveness and continued to stand there, ignoring her. She hung on beside him, talking with an inclusive air to people who came by, as if Joe were actually present. She made enough social noises for both of them, pretending to be enthusiastic about things he knew she didn’t give a damn about. Of course, like everyone, he had done the same thing himself, but he didn’t think of that now. Finally she went off with some other girls to dance. From time to time she danced near the light that fell from the kitchen, putting herself squarely in his sight, twisting her body in a way that was meant to attract him, while her face with its pinched-in lips remained cold. She was his fate, the best he could do, and he loathed her. He looked up at the clock, its face like a pizza with numbers on it. One-thirty-two.

Sixteen minutes later Anna came in, followed by Brad, her eyes preternaturally bright. Her upper lip was stained with pizza sauce. He supposed they’d been kissing. But where was Dick Christopolous? Had she been kissing him too? No, he no longer understood a thing. Maybe all you had to do, if you were a boy, was go over and kiss her. Maybe it was that simple. “Joe, you should see the moon!”

“He’s
seen
the moon,” Brad said sardonically. “We’ve
all
seen the moon.”

Ignoring Brad, she took Joe by the hand — hers was as cold as ice — and began to draw him across the kitchen. “You have to see how it looks on the river.”

He let himself be drawn to the stairs. So now, apparently, it was
his
turn. Maybe by the end of the evening she’d have them all down there, even Petie Brennan with his thick glasses. For a moment, in the rec
room he drew back. He’d be damned if he went one step farther with her. She glanced around at him. He followed her out of the house.

Beyond the fence, the paths in the scrub were worn deep, like troughs. “I think they’re goat paths,” she told him. “At least it smells like goats.” She was proceeding down a steep path ahead of him. Beyond the light from the house, the grey moonlight held sway, turning the trees and bushes to blotches of dull silver. He glanced back at the yard, half-expecting to see Brad coming after them. But no one was there and he experienced a flash of triumph. Maybe she was only being nice to him, one boy among many, but he was with her, and Brad wasn’t. She had asked —
ordered
him to come with her and he stumbled along, following her down the hard-packed trails.