Too Close to the Falls (41 page)

“Sure.”

“You should have said that The Rod told you to read it. He was so dazed, Flanagan would have believed it.”

“He could get in deep shit. What the hell happened to him, anyway, why was he so . . . so out of it?”

“
You're
the one who's out of it.” She began imitating me in the voice of the bumbling idiot that I obviously resembled. “Passion is justified anger, blah, blah. Martin Luther felt about Christian doctrine, blah, blah, blah.” She shook her head. “You are totally missing the point.”

I stopped walking and simply looked at Miranda. I was completely confused.

Miranda stopped dead on the sidewalk and screamed, “He wants to do
it
!”

“What?” This conversation was out of sync, like an Elvis 45 played on 33.

“What Lady Chatterley did, nitwit.” Miranda hit herself in the head. “Are you dense or what?”

I was feeling sort of weak. My body felt too heavy for my skeletal system. I felt I couldn't hold myself up. I didn't want her to say any more.

She saw me teetering, and gave it that last knockout blow. “He wants to be the gamekeeper, get it?”

“No, he's a priest. He studies philosophy. We're just kids. . . . Even if he did want . . .
that
. . . he would pick a woman.”

She exhaled in a world-weary way, as though she were sick of explaining the obvious to an imbecile. “We get into the movies for eighteen. I have breasts bigger than my mother's and a small waist.
We
are what men want, not old saggy ladies with varicose veins whose legs look like road maps. After twenty-five you start looking hungry, pushing your breasts out of your bathing suit, even if they're wrinkled. Men hate that desperate crap.
Now
is when men want you, before babies and husbands leave your body in a pile of bruised rubble.”

“That's not true,” I said, but I had a sinking feeling, and revulsion was beginning to grip my chest like a whalebone corset. I felt prickly heat under my blouse. My mouth was dry. A part of me knew that in matters of understanding the world, Miranda was always at a distinct advantage.

She began staggering off the sidewalk with laughter as we walked. Between doubled-over guffawing, she managed to say, “You're a riot. You
actually
think that The Rod cares about your rambling theories of transubstantiation?” Now she was laughing so hard that she splayed herself on someone's lawn. As she was getting up and dusting off her skirt she said, “He walks around with a stick, or haven't you noticed?”

“No, he doesn't. What kind of stick?” I was picturing Saint Patrick's staff, the one that scared the snakes out of Ireland. I was at Miranda's mercy now and I knew it.

“The one under his cassock.”

I had given up all semblance of knowing what she was talking
about. Obviously my pretence hadn't worked anyway and I had made a complete fool of myself.

“
Cock
,
dick
,
penis
,
little Willie
,
plunger
, whatever word will register in your deranged little walnut brain. You
are
aware that before men do it, their thing gets bigger?”

“No, if that was true they would have to make pants differently.” I tried to stick to the exterior.

Miranda opened her purse and read from
Lady Chatterley's Lover
:

“Oh, don't tease him,” said Connie, crawling on her knees on the bed towards him and putting her arms round his white slender loins, and drawing him to her so that her hanging, swinging breasts touched the tip of the stirring, erect phallus, and caught the drop of moisture. She held the man fast
.

“Lie down!” he said. “Lie down! Let me come!” And afterwards, when they had been quite still the woman had to uncover the man again, to look at the mystery of the phallus. “And now he's tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!” she said, taking the soft small penis in her hand. . . .

“Now do you get it, sacred heart? That's why he had to sit down at his desk, you moron.”

“You're wrong,” I said, breathless. I fell off the curb as we walked; the sidewalk suddenly seemed too narrow.

“Then why didn't he get up when Father Flanagan came in the room? After all, he is a Monsignor.” Again Miranda had her finger
on the pulse of the situation. “I would have had him crawling, but you were the only one who didn't get it and broke up the whole thing with your snore-fest philosophical drivel. Who cares? Not The Rod, I can assure you.”

“He studied it for ten years. That's a decade!” I said, with a defensive lameness even I detected. I was arguing from form now. She was right. All the pieces fit. I realized it was best now to go on a quick offense so I said, “Screw off! I'm the one who had to spell out the Linda Low plot. You were happy to watch me swing for it.”

“Bullshit, I came to your rescue,” Miranda defended herself.

“Yeah, after I bailed you out.”

Miranda turned at the corner of her street and started laughing again, and said over her shoulder, “Sure you don't need a compass to get home?”

As I walked home alone I realized that I was exhausted. I simply couldn't rehash the disgusting revelations of the day, so I read the ingredients on the back of my Owl Potato Chips bag. I was jarred by a fancy sports car which ground to a halt next to me. I kept walking because my mother had told me to do that. The car crept along next to me, trying to get my attention with its whining motor. I looked straight ahead and then I heard someone say, “Is this the road to Damascus?”

I knew that voice. I risked looking up and into the car window. It was The Rod. My heart began to gallop and I couldn't pull the reins. I was shocked at what he looked like. He wasn't in his cassock and his hair wasn't slicked back, it was streaked blond, and without the Brylcream it looked more free. He wore blue jeans and a short-sleeved blue broadcloth shirt which made his eyes look the colour of a mountain lake. He smiled a radiant
warm smile. I was struck suddenly with the fact that Miranda and I had never discussed his looks. Anyone, anywhere, would have had to say he was handsome. He had perfectly chiselled features. Obviously he was hiding an equally amazingly muscular body under that cassock.

“I'm on my way to basketball. Can I give you a lift?”

“No thanks. I'm not going home.”

“Oh.” He said it with that tone that expected more information.

“My mother is at her study club on Fridays and my father is at the store, so I go to Howard Johnson's.”

“All alone!”

“No, I meet the Apostles there for the Last Supper.” He decided to ignore that remark, so I continued. “I do it every Friday. I actually enjoy it.”

“The food there is awful.”

“You obviously haven't had fried clams with double tartar.”

“May I join you? I have an hour to kill.”

What Miranda had said flooded my mind. I immediately decided she was crazy — after all, she had failed geometry and I got the highest regent's exam in the class. When I walked in front of the car to get in on the passenger side, I felt a burning naked feeling. Suddenly I hated what I was wearing. It was so schoolgirl ugly.

“It's amazingly hot,” he said as I got in the car. “Sorry if the seat is sticky. Roll up the window and I'll put on the air conditioner.” I had never been in an air-conditioned car before, or an air-conditioned home, for that matter. Maybe Miranda and I had acted crazy today because of the heat. I know people commit more crimes in the heat, they said so on the news. A tape recorder on
the dashboard was playing music by some guy named Vivaldi or so it said on the tape cover, obviously Italian — probably someone from the Vatican.

The Rod looked so large in the car and so . . . manly. I could see his arms and legs and his neck for the first time. Suddenly I knew what Miranda meant when she spoke about “a little bit of ankle.” The newly exposed parts looked so strong, the arms with muscles that moved when he shifted gears, which he seemed to do with a kind of violence. I wasn't used to the gearshift being right next to my leg and I was suddenly appalled that I hadn't shaved my legs. Why did I believe my mother, who said no one could see blond hair?

I felt nervous or something — a feeling I hadn't had before. How long does it take to eat clams? Not long, I hoped. He cruised into the H.J.'s parking lot and looked around at the cars nosing ahead, circling like vultures, looking for a parking spot.

“It's jammed. Look inside, standing room only,” he said, idling in front. “People actually line up to eat this stuff?” He looked surprised. “Want to go for a bit of a ride?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said in a devil-may-care tone that I certainly didn't feel.

“I'll take you to a restaurant that overlooks Niagara Falls. It's so hot we can eat on the patio and hear the roar of the Falls. It's close enough to the rapids that sometimes, depending on the wind, you feel the spray.”

The Falls was miles away. I'm just a kid. Of course I couldn't go. “Sounds good,” I said. As we drove on the thruway I began to relax. The die was cast now anyway. Joyful music filled the car. The loudspeakers were great and that Vivaldi guy was fairly catchy. Once I caught The Rod looking at me. I pulled up one of
my kneesocks. This feeling was strange, a combination of nervous dread and happiness. What was particularly odd was that I was normally so chatty, but today I couldn't think of one thing to say. Suddenly everything I thought of saying seemed utterly trivial. My mind and my body were out of sync.

The restaurant was a throwback in time, like something from a set of one of those extravaganza movies. The Rainbow Inn was built on an overhang of rock at the edge of Niagara Falls, where supposedly the Indians had stopped, after several of their war canoes didn't make it over the Falls. When my mother drove me to my father's store, she had pointed out this exact spot, saying it was used as one of the locations for Marilyn Monroe's
Niagara
. The entrance was dark and there were flickering lanterns on the wall. There were stuffed animals in settings of their natural habitat, a beaver with a little whittled twig in his mouth next to a similarly chopped and stripped pile of wood. The main dining and dance room was huge. Windows on all sides dripped with mist. As the waiter guided us through to the patio, I saw a woman in an evening gown and white kid gloves with little pearl buttons. Odd, wearing an evening gown in Niagara Falls at 5:30 p.m. I guess it was no weirder than being out with a priest for dinner after reading
Lady Chatterley's Lover
in religious instruction class.

The patio was magical. Gorgeous tropical-looking flowers grew up the railing, because of the mist from the Falls, the waiter said. The patio was built on a promontory whose stone floor looked as if it had been worn away by generations of Indians, explorers, and now lovers and honeymooners. The wooden furniture was old and seemed almost part of the rock ledge. There were festoons of coloured lights among the flowers, and each table had a deep red
candle flickering in the wind inside a hurricane globe. A rainbow hung above the Falls in the mist lit by the setting sun, casting a coloured light over the floor. We had to speak loudly. The Falls roared and the whirlpools made suctioning noises.

“What causes whirlpools, anyway?” I wondered aloud.

“I think it happens when opposing currents meet, two currents going in opposite directions at the same time,” he said.

“This is an amazing place.” I looked around. “The furniture looks as old as the rock.”

“There is quite a story behind the place. This furniture was made by French-Canadian explorers. The Indians wouldn't let them go any further on the Niagara Gorge, and they were not as familiar with the Falls as the Indians. They wanted another route around the Falls. The Indians made them donate blankets and this furniture in exchange for information on another route across the Falls. The French Canadians had to wait for three months for the ice to form and during that time they made this furniture. They left it when the Indians took them across on the ice that builds up from the mist at the narrowest part of the river. It was a good deal all around. In summer this place is very cool because of the fine mist, but it is sheltered by the ice in winter, like an igloo. What's amazing about the furniture is that it has lasted all of these hundreds of years. Apparently the caning was done with buffalo gut, which gets tougher as it grows older. Look at the dowelling. The joints look like new.”

I felt as though I'd never noticed the details of the physical world before, and he was adding colour to a black-and-white photo. Philosophy was only one of the things he made interesting.

“This is a very sacred spot for the Indians. Legend has it that
the Indians offered the most beautiful virgin of their tribe to the gods each year, thanking them for another year of plenty.”

“Offered how?” I asked.

“She actually stood on this jetty and jumped over the Falls. She was called ‘the maid of the mist.' It was a sacrifice of one for the sake of the tribe's well-being in the next year. The legend also states that the mist we feel today is the tears of the sacrificed virgins crying for their loved ones.”

I put my hand up to my face and felt the infinitesimal spray of salty tears. “It's hot,” I said.

“Pin up your hair and let the mist hit your neck,” he said in the nicest, most gentle way. He leaned over and held my hair while I pinned it.

The waiter approached. “We won't be serving dinner for about an hour. Would you care for any cocktails?”

An hour! I was starved. The Rod, who was so easily flipped out in class, was as sophisticated as someone from a Fred Astaire movie. He ordered two Manhattans, for the moment, and white wine to follow, saying he knew we were early. He knew that seven was
early
for dinner? Frankly I doubted it. The waiter said it was the hottest day since 1943 for this date and while leaving the drinks he said they were expecting a big crowd because it was ten degrees cooler here by the Falls. This was the first time in his working memory that the stone floor was hot after six. Even the cooling spray from the Falls couldn't keep up with the heat.