The Last Worthless Evening (24 page)

“Yes.”

“She's so
nice
. I'm fucked up. But not her. She's
getting
fucked. You know? It's not
right
. Shit.”

Molly bent over the chest and pulled a Dos Equis from the ice. She was in the world again: that was it: you did something, then it was over and you were back in the world. She looked at the girl's face, imagined her sorrow for her sister, imagined the sister coming home from work to a man she had loved, his body and mind and heart and tongue racing about, within the walls of their home with its littered floors. She wanted to embrace the girl. She said: “He'll either get himself cured, or your sister will leave him and marry somebody good.”

“That's true. I believe it. It's just waiting for her to do it. That gets me. She doesn't even cry, my sister. When she talks to me. I'll tell you something about coke, though.”

“What's that?”

“It doesn't give anybody a good voice. You can really sing. I'm going to the john. How does this stuff make you fat when it doesn't even stay in your body? ”

Then she was gone, a pretty brown-haired girl walking with the concentrated steadiness of a drunk, around the corner to the room with the ping-pong table no one was using, and the bathroom where Molly knew there would be people waiting. She turned toward the room, the dancers; she had not felt Bruce close to her since she left the stairs. He was across the room, standing with Belinda at the couch, and yes it was Wanda sitting, smiling, holding a can of ginger ale. So Bruce had gone from the stairs to Belinda. Meaning what? That he was finished with her? Had been the first to hold her naked, and they had— No. He was being cool. She remembered his face in the light when she stepped out of the bathroom. She warily traversed the room to join him: angled from one person or group to another, stopped to talk, to smoke a cigarette, returned once to the chest for another beer, so that when finally she stood near him, with Belinda between them, she believed she had hidden any connections of time and space between her and Bruce, and their absence from the timeless swirl of the party. But Belinda said: “Where've you been?”

“Talking to a girl.” She did not look past Belinda at Bruce. “A senior. About her brother-in-law. He's hooked on coke.”

“That's Shelley,” Bruce said.

Molly asked Wanda if she felt better; Wanda raised the ginger ale and nodded.

“Time for the Cinderellas to go home,” Bruce said.

“Is it already?” Belinda said.

“Eleven-thirty. Where's Dotty?”

“I'll get her,” Wanda said. “I want to see if I can walk. In case Dad's still watching a ballgame.”

“This late?” Molly said.

Wanda pushed herself up from the couch.

“They're playing in California,” she said. “I
al
ways check.”

So as Wanda and Dotty and Molly approached the car, Molly quickened her last three strides and opened the front door, and Wanda followed Dotty into the back seat. Bruce drove out of the circular driveway and at the road turned right instead of left and Molly said nothing, waited in the sudden and brief quickening of her heart and breath, but Wanda and Dotty said nothing about the turn and the direction Bruce took, did not even give it an instant of divining silence: they kept talking and Dotty laughed at her fingers, said they were too drunk to roll a joint. Then Wanda and Dotty were gone and Bruce was driving to her house and Molly was trying to know what she ought to feel now, alone with him, or trying to feel what she ought to feel, or know what she did feel. She was not sober, and she was shy as with a stranger, and she tried to say something in the silence, and having to try tightened her stomach, and opened her to remorse and yearning. For they ought to be touching, and gentle, and they ought to fill the car with whatever sounds lovers made.

It was Bruce who finally spoke, when he stopped at the top of her driveway and turned off the engine and put his arms around her and kissed her, his lips open but his tongue withheld, a kiss so tender that it felt shy. Then he looked at her and asked if she would like to go to the beach tomorrow, in late evening, when the sun was setting and everyone had gone home and they could walk on it with the seagulls and sandpipers. She said yes and kissed him; a kiss she willed herself to give; yet when she felt and tasted his mouth her tension dissolved and she leaned into him, held him, and for those moments felt what she had wanted to, what she had believed during the quiet ride that she ought to: a yielding of herself to him, to his knowing her, and from his hard chest against her breasts she drew the comfort she was certain now that he gave. Then she went inside and heard his car start and back down over gravel as she climbed the stairs and quietly passed her mother's closed door, and went into her room. Almost at once she slept.

Now in the car with Bruce she sat again in tactile silence, and the car seemed strange too, smelling of an engine in the summer heat, and upholstery, and summer air coming through the windows, for until she actually entered it the car smelled forever in her mind of marijuana and cigarettes and the exhaled odor of beer; last night the windows had been closed; Bruce had said:
You can't open windows when girls are in the back seat
.

“I read all afternoon,” she said.

“Really?”

“In the hammock.”

“What did you read?”

“
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Or a lot of it. By Hemingway.”

“I know.”

“Have you read it?”

“No. We read
A Farewell to Arms
. In English.”

“Is it good?”

“It's sad. But it's good.”

“I think this one will be sad too. It's so exciting, I can't stop reading it. But I don't understand what's going on.”

“Why?”

“It's in Spain. In a civil war. I don't even know when.”

“Neither do I.”

“They're fighting the fascists.”

“That's good.”

He climbed up away from the river, through a neighborhood with old trees, toward the highway.

“And there are Communists. And Robert Jordan is an American fighting with them. He's a Spanish teacher. Can you believe it? From University of Montana. Can you see Howell going off to war?”

“I'm trying to.”

He entered the three-lane highway and drove northeast; she had never ridden alone with him, on a drive in daylight, and she was relieved when he moved into the middle lane and stayed at fifty-five miles an hour while on both sides cars and trucks passed them.

“I don't know shit about history,” she said. “I've never had a history course that got up to World War I.”

“Neither have I. The school year ends.”

“It's crazy. There was this important war going on, and everybody's ready to
die
for it. Even this A
mer
ican, Robert Jordan. And I don't know anything about it.”

“Maybe it doesn't matter.”

“Knowing about it? Or that it happened?”

“Knowing about it. It had to be important for the people in it.”

She looked out her open window at the green hills and trees, then a dirt-streaked camper passed them, moving across her vision; the rear license plate was from North Carolina.

“Heading to Maine,” she said. “Or Canada.”

Bruce moved behind the camper, then left the highway and drove toward the sea, and quietly she watched the houses they passed: small yards, shaded by trees, most of them pines, and small houses: a juxtaposition of Americans she knew nothing about, people who were called working people because they did the real work, whatever that was, some fathers mowing lawns, others sitting with beer on their front steps, the wives probably inside cooking the dinners. Someone had told her that blue-collar people ate before six, then drank beer. Their children were on the lawns, with gloves and baseballs or toys, and she believed she could see in their faces some predetermined life, some boundary to their dreams, enclosed as tightly as their bodies were by their lawns and small houses. They were five minutes from the beach, these families, and Molly's notion was that they never went there. That they received the ocean's weather, and its smell too when the wind blew from the east, yet some routine of their lives—work, habit, or something of the spirit— held them at home as surely as it contained their hopes. She had never seen anyone like them at the beach. In the faces of a group of teenagers who stood under a tree and watched her and Bruce passing, she saw a dullness she thought was sculpted by years of television, of parents who at meals and in the evenings had nothing to say to them, nothing to teach them; and breathing now the first salt air coming through her window, she thanked her mother. Then the houses were behind her and on both sides of the car the tall grass of a salt marsh gently swayed, its green darkening in the setting sun, and she touched Bruce's shoulder, squeezed its hard width, and said: “Maybe I'll major in history.”

He looked at her, and before he looked at the road again, the relieved expectancy in his eyes reminded her that this touch was their first since last night. She left her hand resting on his shoulder, moving with its motion as he steered.

“I don't know anything,” she said. “It's like the whole world started fifteen years ago. My mother told me about Vietnam. And old movies.”

“And old songs.”

“Oh: those. They were before her time. She likes jazz.”

“I've been wanting to tell you something for a long time. I'm sorry your father took off.”

“ I cursed him today.”

“On the phone?”

“I've never talked to him on the phone. I cursed him at the kitchen table.”

“What's it like? With just a mother?”

“I don't know. She's all I've ever had. Look, the tide's in.”

They crossed a bridge over a tidal stream of rapid blue water moving at the tops of the banks. With her hand on his shoulder he turned north, then east, and parked facing a sand dune. In front of the car he took her hand and they climbed the dune. He was right: the beach was empty save for gulls standing in groups, their tails to the sea, and sandpipers darting across the sand. The surf was high and loud, and washed far up the slope of the beach. Beyond the white foam of the breakers and green of the shallow water the sea was deep blue to the horizon where it met the arcing cover of the sky, a clear and lighter blue. She wished she had remembered to bring her shawl, but her legs in denim and boots were warm; and her face, and her arms and body in the cotton shirt, still held that afternoon's slow burning in the sun, and the cool salt air soothed it. But soon she would be cold.

Holding hands, they descended the dune with short quick steps, then walked toward the surf. Sandpipers flew away from them, low over the beach; the seagulls in their path became restless, walked as a group farther up the beach; one flew ahead of the rest, then a second, and they both landed, but the others walked only far enough to allow Molly and Bruce to pass behind them. At the edge of the surf, where it hissed and spent itself at their feet, Molly shivered. Bruce put his arm around her and held her against his side.

“We should have brought sweatshirts,” he said.

“Nobody knows what to wear to the beach.”

“In New England, anyway. Let's keep moving.”

She put her arm around his waist, and they walked south; his body shielded her from the breeze; in the distance she could see the ferris wheel at Salisbury, where the beach ended at the Merrimack River; in front of them the sandpipers flew and landed, and she said: “What are we doing?”

“Walking on the beach. Getting ready to freeze our asses off. Maybe we'll get hungry.”

“I don't even know you.”

“Only for eight years.”

“Belinda's big brother. You don't know me.”

“I know you're a fox.”

“For eight years?”

“Three.”

“So what are we doing?”

“I don't know.”

“In the book. That I was reading this afternoon. They only have three days.”

“Who?”

“The lovers.”

“Why?”

“He has to blow up a bridge. Probably he'll get killed.”

“How does he know that?”

“He doesn't. But he feels it. And a gypsy woman sees it in his hand. If we just had three days I'd know what we were doing. Did I tell you I'm a virgin? If you can call it that now.”

“No. But I knew.”

She stopped, releasing his waist, and faced him.

“
How?
” With a new shame now, seeing Shelley at the beer cooler—
I'm fucked up
—and probably she had made love for years, did it all the time with what's-his-name, and Bruce had been with girls like her—
I'm fucked up
—and then last night she had been on the couch, a naked clumsy frightened—

“Hey. Hey, Molly.” He held her biceps. “I could just tell, that's all. I was surprised. I mean that you wanted to go upstairs. I thought that's why you wanted to go. And you took
me
. Out of all those guys.”

“Was I that shitty?”

“Don't say that. It's—” He looked above her head at the sky, and squinted his eyes against the last of the sun. “Sweet,” he said. “You're sweet.”

“Really?”

“What do you think I'm here for? Not shitty, Molly. Sweet.”

“Is that what you're here for?”

“Jesus. Let's walk back. When that sun goes, we'll freeze.”

He turned her and held her on his lee side and they walked north. She watched the rose and gold above the distant pine trees that hid the sun.

“I didn't come out here to make love,” she said.

“Maybe I didn't either. Why did you?”

“To see if I wanted to. No. To understand last night. If it was just coke and beer. Can we just—”

Then she watched the sand ahead of their feet and listened to the roaring and smacking waves to her right and looked at the shadows cast now by the dunes. Far beyond them the pines in the sunset were darker; soon the red sky at their crowns would be twilight, the trees black.