The Short History of a Prince (34 page)

“Did Aunt Jeannie give that necklace to you?” he asked. It did not seem impossible that their aunt, at seventy-three, might unburden herself of some of her less valuable reproductions.

“No,” Lucy said. “Marc did, for Valentine’s Day.” She smiled down at the burning wood, thinking about her Valentine’s gift to Walter, the box of tulips that she’d had sent to his school with a mysterious note. “From your admirer,” she’d written. If he didn’t bring it up, if he hadn’t figured it out, she might tell him later in the day. She had spent a fortune on the mail-order flowers, and she had no idea if he would think of her along the way or if he’d never guess. With her long thumbnail she opened the heart and stretched the chain to show Walter. On one side was a tiny head shot of Marc, and on the other, the whole length of little Linda in a tutu.

“Ahhhh,” Walter said.

“What did
you
do on Valentine’s Day, Walt?” She snapped the locket shut and patted it in place against her sweater.

“What did I do?” He felt remiss, as if he’d forgotten that Valentine’s Day was a family holiday, one that required a meal with specific foods, an outing, offerings at the temple. She stood up, and she tapped her foot on the brick hearth, her arms crossed over her chest, waiting for him to answer. She looked imperious all of a sudden. “What did I do?” he repeated. She never asked him questions about his romantic life and he had always credited her with knowing better. “As, as always,” he said, “I waited around from morning until night for that certain someone to put a token of affection in my decorated shoe box.”

She was still tapping her foot. It was the wrong answer, he could see. What, he wondered, was the correct response? What would Marc have said to make the buzzer go off, to win the grand prize? The question deserved a retort, and a proper man’s retort should probably include something raunchy, a smutty joke set in a sports arena. Marc was sitting in the next room reading
Popular Mechanics
, and Lucy, humorless and strict, with her hair ratcheted into a French braid, was standing over him, waiting. He wondered later if in fact his answer was for
Marc’s benefit, if within his cobbled psyche he was stupid enough to want to impress his brother-in-law.

It seemed as if he should use the words in a sentence. “On Valentine’s Day,” he began. “On Valentine’s Day those of us without loved ones in the immediate area lit a bonfire on the football field. We tried to talk the freshmen girls into sacrificing themselves, but not a one was a virgin, so we gave it up.”

“Uuh,” she said. “You’re not funny anymore. That’s disgusting.” She slapped the box of matches on the table and went down the hall.

Had she ever thought him funny? She had been lighthearted only moments before, showing him the locket, and without warning, without cause, she’d had a mood swing. He was confused by her censure, not only because of the criticism but because he had gained something, her past high opinion, and lost it, in the same breath. If he’d been his usual sunny self, instead of a tired English teacher at mid-semester, he would never have made that remark to Lucy. Robert had returned and was both blowing into the logs and fanning the flame with the bellows. Walter, to his horror, found himself saying, “I don’t understand that—woman.” He realized right away that he had paved the way for a man-to-man talk about the inscrutable females in the family, about what it takes to manage them. He would have to hold up his end in the sort of discussion Daniel as a matter of course would have had with Dad at the holiday gatherings.

Robert slapped Walter’s back and gripped his shoulder. The universal father hold, Walter thought, and the palsy-walsy smack that was the preamble to talk. His father had made his way through parenthood admirably, without much formal pedagogy. Still, Walter waited, for the advice, the personal testimony, the warnings. He had asked for it. Robert held on for a minute, and when his hand came away it rested so quickly, so gently, on his grown son’s cheek.

At Otten High, Valentine’s Day had passed more or less without incident, as far as Walter could tell. The Spirit Committee had decorated the lunchroom with pink and red and white balloons, and at a table by the office the band had sold flowers with the promise of in-class delivery.
Walter had woken up that morning wondering if his students were celebrating by getting high, or were already in the sweaty grip of a loved one. He hoped those few who had read the last chapter of
Great Expectations
had enjoyed Estella and Pip’s exit into the starlight. He thought through the spastic movement of his day, first hour through eighth hour, freshmen and sophomores, prep period, Swiss cheese sandwich for lunch, more sophomores, more freshmen, hall monitor duty, a buzz every forty minutes, change, change, change, and after school
South Pacific
. He would sit erect on the one folding chair in the gym during rehearsal, watching his cast stumble through their lines, moving helter-skelter, flagrantly disregarding the blocking he had shown them so painstakingly time and time again. He would walk them through their moves with the patience of an ant, and he would also praise his leading lady if she showed any detectable improvement in her dance numbers, if she got herself across the stage just once without evoking the camel heading into a sandstorm. He naturally would not be able to keep from singing along to “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Bali Ha’i,” and his favorite, “I’m Going to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.”

He sometimes wondered if he wanted Mitch to hear about him through some extraordinary small-world encounter. Trishie Gamble might run into him at a gallery opening of her photographs in Del Mar, and she’d tell Mitch that Walter was teaching English at Otten High, as well as directing the school musicals. The danger lay in the fact that Mitch might possibly have developed a sense of irony in his twenty-odd years away from Oak Ridge. He’d laugh out loud, so glad that his old friend was condemned to remain within the walls of an institution that not only had the age-old smell of B.O. and fried food kept warm under heat lamps, but was also a place that came right out and marked the poor loser’s painful anniversaries. Walter, running the scene through his mind with Trishie Gamble as the messenger, always concluded that it was better for Mitch not to know what had become of him. He would have to satisfy himself with the thought that Miss Amy, wherever she was, would approve of his directing ability as well as the dances he had choreographed for Nellie and the girls.

Although he never celebrated Valentine’s Day as Lucy might have wished, Walter had always observed February 14. She couldn’t fault
him for ignoring the date. He had kept it, privately, trying to mark what was long gone, trying to hold up to the light what he knew had existed, however briefly. In spite of the passage of time he had not been able to reduce his teenage prank on Valentine’s Day, 1973, and the aftermath, to an anecdote. He never told it. He once had begun to whisper the story to a lover, but the man right off had not been impressed by the concept of a paint-filled balloon.

In Otten, Walter had lain in bed that Valentine’s morning, and he thought that if he was religious he’d light a candle every February 14 or burn a stick of incense. It seemed to him that there should be some ritual, a lamb cake, a string of ancient words to mutter, in order to observe the day with respect. He would pay his dollar for the votive candle and light it, not for the dead and not strictly for remembrance. Why, then? he asked himself in the pearly winter dawn of his bedroom. Why light the candle at all if not for remembrance? The past was swallowing up the year and becoming more real than the present, and he might as well acknowledge that it was so with a cupcake, a sparkler, a handful of candy hearts.

He jammed another pillow under his head. There was nothing in his room except the futon and one painting on the wall of a pink butterfly, the work of a dead friend from his New York era. He had spent years at the dollhouse shop and he could reduce it to a fifteen-second dream. The Oak Ridge life intruded like a pushy woman sticking her nose into Walter’s business. He could sometimes shut it out by thinking of the round, earnest face of Betsy Rutule. Or he could close his eyes and hear Kimmy Roth, the inert girl with a voice like a charm who played Nellie Forbush in
South Pacific
. She opened her mouth and Walter got chills down his spine, but every time she moved the spell was broken and she was simply herself, a tall ungainly girl with the gait of a pack animal. He would have liked to tack on a prologue to the play, a short scene where Nellie gets her leg blown off by a land mine so that she could zip around the stage in a wheelchair for the rest of the show. The kid he’d cast as Emile could sing and he delivered his lines with confidence, but he was hampered by being about a foot shorter than Kimmy, and with his partially shaved head did not have the look of a debonair Frenchman. Walter didn’t know what he was going to do about that hair, beyond making Emile wear a pith helmet
for the entire evening. He’d managed to get his seventh-hour problem girl to try out, and he’d brazenly given her the part of Bloody Mary even though she was not much of a musician. It looked as if she was going to have to talk her way through the songs in her grass skirt and the red bikini top that he’d decided should be covered with a sheer blouse, to play it safe.

In bed he clapped his right hand around his left wrist, as if he meant to catch the thirty-eight-year-old Walter McCloud. It was proof, wasn’t it, that Mitch and Daniel were distant if he was troubling himself with the particulars of
South Pacific?
Were his students less real to him than the characters of his high school career? From the vantage point of his futon that early in the morning they were all remote, all equally insubstantial. And yet if he didn’t build a bulwark against the images, he looked across the room and Otten, the Braves included, faded away. He saw himself more than twenty years before, waiting to hear from Mrs. Gamble. The fact that it had taken her three days to discover her newly decorated carport roof still had shock value.

Walter could not remember the incident without marveling, each time, at the delay. How could she have missed it? Trishie and Greg Gamble’s bedrooms looked down on the flat surface that did somewhat resemble a Jackson Pollock painting. Walter inspected the roof first thing when he woke the day after the happening. He hadn’t anticipated that their—work—would look quite so vivid. Even the concoctions they’d made at the end, when they were getting carried away, when they had mixed up murky browns and purple, were surprisingly lively in the morning light. The splatters had the cartoon look of open mouths spraying angry words. He and Mitch, the two of them, together, had done an impressive job making the colors in the dead of night. Twenty-five brilliant bursts, some overlapping, some distinguished. The fragments of the broken balloons were stuck in the smears of paint and gave the splashes an interesting textural touch, and in the winter sun the supergloss latex had a plasticky shine. Walter was pretty sure that Pollock would have approved. One of the tosses, he noticed with a gasp, had hit the side of the house. Perhaps that was the pitch that had made Walter almost fall to his death. Mitch had rescued him; he vowed never to forget that Mitch had grabbed his
hand and pulled him from the edge. The enormity of such a thing, a friend saving your life. He couldn’t dwell on it now, couldn’t comprehend his debt of gratitude until they’d gotten through the next phase, until after they’d been discovered and punished.

He had gone down to breakfast and sat straight in his chair in front of the boxes of cereal on the table. He had thought that he’d loved Mitch before, but that old feeling, he realized, had been nothing. As usual he saw through Mitch’s eyes, so that everything he touched and looked at and heard and read recalled his friend, his Romeo. His beloved. He never thought himself alone, and even in private he did the simplest tasks and ablutions for Mitch’s benefit. That was one of the chief powers of love, he’d learned, that it could so beautifully erase a personality. He had lived with the condition for several years, nothing new about carrying Mitch just under the skin. But that night, hidden in the shrubs, it was as if Mitch had opened a door for Walter to step through. Each kiss had brought Walter closer to the threshold, until he believed that he’d safely crossed over into Mitch’s every moment and every thought. He hardly dared to think it was possible, and yet it had been Mitch, after all, who had moved to kiss Walter. Mitch, when he woke in his bed at home, might think of the friend, the Romeo—the beloved—with the lush head of curls and the sincere and poignantly tapered brown eyes. He might put his foot over the bed and think,
Walter
, and feel down through the pile of the carpet to the skin of the rug and breathe,
Walter
, and put his hands to the imaginary form in front of him and say,
Walter
.

Joyce was at the sink scrubbing a pot, talking to herself while Walter sat at the table yearning and feeling himself yearned for. It was more than double the longing, different from everyday multiplication, and he had to hold his stomach with one hand, his chest with the other, to contain the ache of it. Mrs. Gamble was going to discover the roof and find him out and have him arrested, but he wasn’t going to care because he had love on his side, love of the sort she had never known with her dingy hair pinned up in curlers and her flat, low-slung serviceable buttocks and her nicotine-stained fingers. She may have been wooed, routinely, by Mr. Gamble, but while he said his pretty words she’d have been thinking with pleasure about cleaning up after the future dogs of her married bliss. There was no passion in the gray
flesh of Mrs. Gamble, and never had been, and when she came after Walter he could effortlessly dip back into that scene under the bushes; he could surround himself, protect himself, with the blinding shield of tenderness and desire.