The Last Worthless Evening (25 page)

“Just what?”

“I don't know. That's what's so bad. I don't know.”

“Let's go to one of those beach stores. We'll get sweatshirts. With I Heart New Hampshire or something. Then let's go to Salisbury. Eat. Ride the roller coaster.”

“No roller coaster.”

“The ferris wheel.”

“Okay.”

Their sweatshirts were red with a white breaker on the chest and, beneath it, in white block letters: Seabrook Beach, N.H.; in the store, they pulled them over their heads, and when Bruce's hair and face pushed through the collar, he said: “Seabrook Beach, home of the nuclear power plant they can't get built; and if they do there are no—I repeat no—escape routes.”

He paid for them, and as they walked to the car he said: “So maybe we just have three days anyway.”

“It's not built yet,” she said as he drove out of the parking lot: “And if we only had three days we wouldn't need that rubber.”

“
What
rubber?”

“In your wallet.”

“You didn't see that.”

“I didn't have to.”

“Holy shit. You know something?”

“What.”

“This is the weirdest first date I've ever had in my fucking life.”

“Me too,” she said. “In my sucking life.”

“
Mol
ly.”

She smiled and lit a cigarette, passed it to him, and lit one for herself. She did not know what it was: the darkness spreading in the sky, the headlights now of cars, her hunger for Italian sausage and egg rolls, but now they were all she knew and wanted, those and the ferris wheel circling above the lights and crowd and at its top showing you the white breakers and black sea and the paler dark sky at the horizon; and she felt too a control, a power, new and solid: she could tease him. She could do whatever she wished. When he stopped at a red light she leaned over and kissed him, mouths open, a brief kiss, and she felt she was his girl.

Felt it too with the taste of egg rolls and hot mustard and duck sauce in her mouth as the ferris wheel began its slow circle, and she was warm in her sweatshirt—was any material softer than a new sweatshirt?—and their seat went back and up, Bruce's arm around her shoulders, hers around his waist, tightly there between him and the wood of the seat as they rose above the people in the streets and the six policemen leaning against their motorcycles, and the buildings—bars and short-order restaurants and food and game stands—above the lights, but not beyond the voices of the crowd and the roller coaster's clacking roar and disco music from one of the hurtling rides, and the smells of hot grease and sausage; up to the top of the circle where for moments she saw the sea but not as she knew it and loved it. For the breakers were hidden by buildings and there were too many bright lights so all she saw was an expanse of black, too wide and its length forever, without horizon, for with so many lights there was only the low sky above the amusement park. It frightened her, that large black space that was not sea and sky at all, yet she stared at it, as though looking at the night of her death. Then the blackness was gone behind roofs and lighted walls and her legs hung over the street as backward she circled down past the man controlling the wheel, then up again, and as they rose she said to Bruce, loudly over the street voices and the roller coaster and screams from it and the cacophony of music from rides and booths and nightclubs: “Watch the ocean!”

Holding him tightly she watched it with him, her face beneath and parallel to his, and she glanced at his mouth and left eye to see if he saw it too, felt it, but she could not tell, and she looked again at that black space and tried to imagine fish in it, and ships on it, but all she saw was Molly Cousteau, not scattered ashes now, nor ashes drawn back and contained again by flesh and voice, and eyes with vision; but Molly as one tiny ash on the surface of the earth, looking into the depth of the universe, at the face of eternity.

So she told him. Not on the wheel, or when they left it and moved through the crowd on the streets to his car, and not while he slowly drove, changing gears, with the congestion of cars leaving Salisbury, then merging and increasing speed and the spaces between them, stopping once more at a traffic-lighted intersection, before dividing, taking separate roads to the north and south and west, and Bruce reached the highway and its middle lane, and she felt his body relax even as he lit a cigarette and settled in his seat. Felt like his girl again, as she told him of looking at death from the ferris wheel, felt like his girl when he listened, and said he had not felt it on the wheel, had felt only her against him, and her arm behind his waist, and her hand pressing his side, and himself holding her. But he had felt it before. Earlier in the summer, at night, in a strange mood, not sad or depressed or anything like that, but strange, and he wanted to be alone and drove without music to the sea and walked on the beach, at Seabrook, where they had walked at sunset, and he had stood looking at the ocean, at its huge deep blackness coming at him, coming straight to
him
till it stopped on the sand, and he was afraid. Really afraid. And he tried to talk himself out of it, because at first he thought what he feared was something stupid like a sudden tidal wave, the sea rising to take him and pull him away. Or that the sea could actually decide to drown him. That it was alive and could do it if it wanted to, just send in a big wave to knock him down and a current to take him under and out. Then he realized it wasn't drowning. It was that he felt so small. Tiny. And so empty. He tried to remember school, where he did well, and being class president, and having friends all around him. He did not have a girl then but he tried to remember old ones, their faces, the way they smiled at him. But he could not make the girls real so he could feel them, and he could not make school and his friends real, or even Belinda and his parents and his bedroom. So he could not feel himself. Except as that tiny empty breathing thing under stars in the biggest sky he had ever seen, frightened by the sound of the breaking waves and all that black out there. He turned his back on it and walked as quickly as he could over the sand. Only pride, as though he were being watched, kept him from running. On the ride home he played a cassette; the front windows were open, and his speakers were behind the back seat, and he turned the volume all the way up, so the music was louder than the rushing air.

She felt like his girl too when he parked on a country road not far from her house, and unbuckled his seat belt and she unbuckled hers. The car was on grass beside the road and under the branches of trees, and dark woods were on both sides of the road, a different darkness here, a quiet enclosing private dark that turned her to his lips and hands. His hands on her body were slow and as gentle as they could be, with the gearshift and hand brake between them. Then he stopped and pulled off his sweatshirt and she pulled off hers and they tossed them into the back seat. She received his tongue, and his hands unbuttoning her top button, then the next and the next until he reached her waist and she drew in her stomach muscles so he could unbutton the jeans, and with her legs she pushed herself upward so he could pull the zipper down. Then she pushed her jeans beneath her knees, until they stopped, and were crumpled at her feet, lower than the high leather calves of her boots, and she saw herself sitting on a toilet. But then he unbuttoned the lowest button of her shirt and helped her arms out of its sleeves and dropped it onto the back seat, and they embraced above the brake and gearshift, and she heard his side hitting the steering wheel. As they kissed she unbuttoned his shirt, unbuckled his belt, then he opened his door and took off his shirt and was gone, around the front of the car, his brown chest darker than the air above the road, lighter than the trees, as he moved to her door and opened it and with his toes pushed off his sneakers and stepped out of his jeans and scooped them and his shoes from the earth and shoved them behind her seat. Then he was holding the calves of her boots; and slowly still, gently, he turned her toward him, and pulled off one boot at a time and put it on the floor behind her, and lifted her jeans from her ankles and laid them in the back seat. The brake was against her back as he drew her pants down her legs and she watched them, pale in his hand above her, as he dropped them over the seat. He stepped out of his underpants and crouched to enter the car, then murmured something, not a word, only a sound like pain or anguish, a sound more intense than that of mere hurry in the quiet of the trees, and he reached into the back seat, and she listened to his wallet sliding out of denim, then the tearing of foil. Her back was still against the brake, and she said: “How do we —”

“Sit up.” His voice was neither aloud nor a whisper: a moan, nearly plaintive, and her heart received it, felt the urgency that consumed him, as if the cock's tumescence drew all of him into it, diminishing his mind and soul to its length and circumference; but her body felt none of this, pinioned in static transition, seated naked, facing the windshield. She turned to watch him standing beside the car and unrolling the rubber, so white in the dark, onto his cock, and she remembered that she liked his waiting for Wanda and Dotty last night to get safely into their homes before he drove away, and she liked his walking between her and the breeze from the sea. Then he ducked and entered the car, bent over her, and he reached down between her legs and raised the lever under the seat and pushed it backward, and now he had space between her and the dashboard. She wanted to kiss him but his hand was between the door and her seat, his breath that of someone at work, and she heard plastic moving in a slot, and the back of the seat angled to the rear, but only a few degrees, and declined she sat and waited while he lifted her calves until her feet in socks pressed the dashboard.

Still he bent over her. Then he pulled her buttocks forward, and the cock touched her. He kissed her breasts. His hands pressed the back of the seat above her shoulders, and she held his swelling biceps, and wanted him now but in her bed, and was about to say:
Outside. On the ground
. So he would not be poised at the top of a push-up and they could lie together, slowly, and with grace; but then it was inside of her. Hard and pushing and she tried to jerk back from the pain but could not move; her hands left his biceps and loosely held his waist, and here it was again, the push against
her
, that small thin part that was her now; his pushes were rapid but still she had an instant to wait for each one's pain, and without seeing or even knowing numbers in her mind she counted, as if her hymen were counting and recording the assaults that would destroy it. The number was five and with that pain was a new one as the cock plunged and reamed, and she tried to move her hips and saw Belinda and Wanda and Dotty in their separate homes, or together in one, with music, and laughing—
No wonder they call it screwing
. Her jaws were tight against the pain, and the sound of it:
oh
and
oh
and
oh
held in her throat till it had the force of a scream. But she did not. Then he was saying it, his voice a boy's, high yet soft: Oh oh oh Molly oh Molly
oh
—

Then his right hand moved down, and he was out of her, holding his cock at its base, and she realized it was the rubber he held, the backflow of semen, and it just took one seed to work its way up and into her womb. Crouched above her, he stepped over her right leg, lost his balance leaving the car, but hopped and drew his other leg across her, then was standing on the grass, holding the rubber still, and in her pain she thought of blood on the seat and she swung her legs out of the car and stood facing him, standing in her socks, her feet pressing down the high and soft wild grass. Slowly he pulled off the rubber and dropped it and she looked at it lying on the grass. She wanted to step toward him and hold him, but her eyes, her face, would not move so she could not, and she looked down at that length of flat white draped over the dark blades. Then she turned to the car and leaned in to her purse on the floor in front of her seat, felt in it for Kleenex but everything she touched was hard or the leather of the purse. She looked over the seat, saw her pants lying on her clothes, and she reached around the seat and picked them up: soft cotton bikinis. They were pink. She stood and looked at Bruce's face: the same as last night when she stepped out of the bathroom and the light shone on him: not joyful or even happy, and not wicked, but humble and solemn. Then with her pants she touched the opening of her pain. Still she looked at his eyes. She dabbed the gentle warm flow; then wiped it, and her hair, and the tops of her inner thighs, but under the cotton they were dry. She looked down at the blood on her pants. Then she turned them and held Bruce's cock, hard still but angling downward, softening even as, with the clean side of her pants, she wiped it, then wiped her hand, and dropped the pants. She looked at them lying near the rubber.

When she looked up at Bruce his eyes and mouth had changed: a nuance of fear, of— Then she knew, or almost knew: something of awe, of responsibility; then she did know, felt it with a certainty as if he had spoken, had told her, or somehow his flesh naked under the dark of the trees had touched her own through the two feet of earth and air between them. He stood at the edge of remorse, and if she did not hold him, she would lightly push him over. He was all of Bruce again, his limp cock returning to him all those parts she had known for years, and perhaps now was loving as well. She stepped forward and tightly held him, her heart weeping but not with sorrow, her body quivering but without passion or fear. She kissed him, and closed her eyes, and breathed through her nose the smell of his face, and a sweetness of wild flowers, and the summer scents of grass and trees.

She would never forget holding him under those trees. The memory of the pain, renewed next morning by the doctor's cold probing and measuring while her mother sat in the waiting room, would fade until she no longer recalled it with the fear and helplessness she had felt that night. By the end of summer it seemed merely a brief and necessary suffering, and she could remember it as one remembers any rite of passage that is physically arduous and whose result is a change of the spirit, of the way one moves in the world. In fall she could laugh about it, talking with Belinda and Wanda and Dotty; mostly she talked to Belinda, though, for she was a virgin still, while Wanda and Dotty had been the first to lose their hymens and had long since lost the boys who broke them. So Molly felt closer to Belinda.