Walking Dunes (24 page)

That night Ellis called. “You listen to me, Puckett,” he said. “I don't ever want to know you do things like that.”

David started to protest. “I didn't do—”

“Stuff it! If I ever hear of it—because it won't happen with me around—I'm not going to stand in the same sunshine as you, I will find another tennis partner. Do you get it? I'm not going to be partners with someone who takes girls on joyrides.”

“It wasn't me.”

“You sat back there like a wooden Indian, and you stayed, didn't you?”

David did not think it fair that Ellis hung up before he could tell him he took the girl home, that he bought her a hamburger first. LaVonne. At least he did that; he did not run away. Leland drove, and waited in the car, while David walked her right to her door, like a date. He even said, “See you sometime, LaVonne.” She said. “Oh sure you will.” She gave her butt a little twitch before she shut the door.

24.

“I'll understand if you have to say no,” Beth Ann said. She did not sound the least bit worried. “I know it's short notice.” It was the day before New Year's Eve. “But we'd really like it if you could come.”

Excited, a little insulted, he was clenching his free hand into a fist. Beth Ann had called the day before the country club dance to ask him to escort her. “It's a family tradition. All the club families. Not just ours.”

“I did have plans,” he said.

“Well, if you can't change them—”

“What happened to your date?”

“He's not like a real date! Cliff Easterling, he's a sophomore at Princeton? He's like a
cousin
or something, our families are best
friends.
” She took her time. “He's not who I'd ask, it's just
tradition.
” He didn't help her out. He knew she would say something and then he would say yes, but she ought to have to say it. The day before! “I'd ask you, wouldn't I? He's sick, so I can. Even my mother said, now you can take someone you really want to.”

He wondered who else she had called. “It's formal,” he said. A prom for special people only. He could not go in his stained jacket.

“Oh yes, it's a big party, it'll be a lot of fun. There'll be champagne. My daddy is getting the flowers for Mommy and me. I'll have you a boutonniere here. All you have to do is come.” She knew he would. “I'll pick you up, David. You will go, won't you?”

He called his father at work. A light snow was falling. “I haven't got any way to get to the store!” he said frantically. “You've got to come get me. I want to get a new jacket and pants. I've got my own money from the summer.” His father wanted to know, where's the fire? He had to tell the rest. “The Kimbrough girl. I'm going to the club with her. It's formal.” He held his breath, waiting for his father to say something ridiculing, but he did not.

All his father said was that he was busy; David's heart sank. It would take him twenty minutes to walk, in this cold. But his father relented. “I'll pick you up about 5:30, son, and bring you back. We'll have the store to ourselves.”

“Do you think I'll still get a discount?”

“I'll see what I can do.” There was a sound—a snicker, a sniffle? “Considering the importance of what you wear to the
club.
”

“Thanks, Dad.” He stopped worrying about what his father thought, and started thinking of what to tell Glee, and when to call her. He wondered if he should get a haircut.

At the store his father carried clothes back and forth, tucking and adjusting, seriously attentive, as to a client. David chose gray wool pants, a pale pink shirt, and a new white jacket. Bradley, apprised of the occasion, stayed to give advice, and threw in a bow tie for free. David viewed himself in the three-way mirror. The two men stood slightly aside surveying the net effect; David could not remember ever seeing them shoulder to shoulder like equals. He felt admirable, handsome, “likely to succeed.” Wasn't his appearance working some sort of magic on employer and employee? “There'll be a band,” Bradley said admiringly. He pulled his shoulders back. “The wife and me are going to the party at the hotel. We go every year.” He winked at Saul. “I usually get away for a little craps upstairs.” He straightened David's tie. “Anybody asks, you tell 'em where you got this jacket, hear? They don't come any better in Basin.”

“Don't you know I'll do that,” David said, with a perfectly straight face.

That night he took Glee to see a movie, and then he took her home early. He said it was too cold to park, and he wouldn't come in, he wasn't feeling well.

“You're not coming down with something?” He could hear the panic in her voice, and he suffered a prickle of guilt.

He followed her into the living room, then stood between her and the open door. “I can't go tomorrow,” he blurted. “There's all hell over at my house, my sister whining, my mother crying, my father in a steam. There are—things—I've got to do.”

“There are things you've got to do on
New Year's Eve?
”

“Really, Glee. You don't understand. You don't know what it's like.” He pushed the door open behind him. “You'll still have fun, you know you will.”

She ran out of the room.

Beth Ann scooped black jelly onto a cracker. “You'll like it better with sour cream,” she said, and added some. She held the cracker as he bit into it. The taste was salty, sharp, fishy. “You have to cultivate a taste for it,” Beth Ann said.

“I like it fine.” He took another. They snacked from the trays of elaborately arranged foods and then returned to the dance floor. He could not have named half of what he had eaten, and he had not honestly liked much of it, but he was acutely conscious of what it meant to eat caviar at a party, instead of popcorn. Beth Ann was beautiful, in a long straight-skirted dress of deep rose silk. All the girls at the prom had worn crinkly dresses with big skirts, but here he saw elegant dresses, probably bought in Dallas on special shopping trips. The singer, who wasn't bad, was singing “Chances Are.” David had begun to lose his stiffness, but he did not hold Beth Ann close. He held her in what he hoped was a courtly manner, as if he were a visiting knight. He had been careful not to assume too much. He was a guest; he did not belong. Yet the other kids he knew from school greeted him warmly. “Beth Ann! David!” they said, as if it were the most natural thing for him to be there. Such was the power of invitation. The club was lavishly decorated and lighted. It was Fitzgerald territory. The young couples looked more relaxed than anybody had at the prom. Kids he knew from school were wildly unfamiliar in their finery, as if they wore saris or carried Mau Mau shields. They seemed to be their real selves here, older and more beautiful, far removed from the world of Basin High and its hysterical social machinery. A sudden thought pierced him: They have always had this world to go to. They have always been visiting the world where I was living. None of it has ever mattered to them.

Beth Ann's cool fingers lay lightly on his neck. “This is going to be the most exciting new year, isn't it?” she said. “When I think about going away, pledging a sorority, it makes me just tingle.”

He pressed his hand into her back. She let her chin rest on his shoulder.

They were at the table with the Kimbroughs and another adult couple when the band began the drum roll that led to a moment of loud horns. Confetti poured over them as if by magic, the room was filled with the cheers and cries of the assembled. Both of the older couples kissed. David did not know what to do. Beth Ann smiled up at him. “Happy New Year, David,” she said, and raised her face. He kissed her lightly on the lips. “Happy New Year, Beth Ann.”

The four of them went back to the Kimbrough home and ate scrambled eggs and toast off pretty china dishes. Laurel Kimbrough wore a long embroidered apron over her evening gown. She smiled at David and said, “I hope you can eat, after all the food at the club. We always have a New Year's breakfast. It wouldn't seem right not to.” He settled comfortably at the round table in their nook. Windows looked out on a garden, now bare except for scraggly bushes, and, farther on, onto a wall of stone or brick, now deep in night shadows. He tried to see the picture they would make to someone from outside, clustered around the table under a light that hung from the ceiling, but of course no one could see them, because they were at the back of the house, and there was the wall. The Kimbroughs chatted cozily, swapping observations of their friends, the food, the band, taking pleasure in recollection. They reminded him of Glee after a ball game or a dance, wanting to catalog everything she had seen, everything they had done. “Such a nice salmon paté!” Laurel said. “Didn't Carl Bentley look smug with his pretty new wife?” Hayden said. “I liked all the slow tunes,” Beth Ann said dreamily. They did not seem to expect comment from their guest, did not seem to mind his presence or expect anything from him. They had allowed him into their “tradition” to make an odd number even. David thought, this must be what Cinderella felt like. He longed for his own room, his bed, he wanted to take off his formal clothes. He would want to think about the night, but suddenly there was too much of it. He felt foolish in his pink shirt. He wanted to be home.

Beth Ann took him there in her mother's station wagon. In front of his house she said, “I'm so glad you could come.” The motor was running and she had her hands on the steering wheel. She had thrown a long cashmere scarf around her head, giving her the mysterious air of an older woman.

“I had a wonderful time,” he replied. There was nothing else to say. He stood on the edge of the yard and watched her drive away. He saw her glance into the rear-view mirror and wave her gloved hand. The station wagon did not look anything like a royal coach, but as it disappeared it was easy to imagine that if he ran after it, he would find a pumpkin.

He made his way through the house in the dark to his room. As he switched on his light there was a pounding at the alley door. Glee stormed into the room. She was wearing a wool coat over a dress. “I've been waiting for two hours!” she cried.

He glared at her, embarrassed in his white jacket and fine pants.

“You're a bastard! You lied to me! Where did you go?”

“It's none of your business. You have no right to spy on me.”

“You lied to me.”

The door from the kitchen flew open. His father was standing there in his baggy robe. “What is going on out here?” David moved quickly to shove his father back into the kitchen. “Go to bed. This will be over in a minute.” He slammed the door and turned back to Glee, who was standing in the middle of the room. Her coat had swung open. She was wearing a dress he had never seen, something blue and shiny. On her high heels, her one ankle turned awkwardly, she looked dangerously off-balance. “You go home,” he said menacingly.

She began weeping loudly, making pig noises with her nose. “I thought you loved me!” she shouted. “We've slept together a thousand times!”

He despised her for catching him. “That's because you're a whore, Glee,” he said. He felt as if he had fallen through an elevator floor. His stomach jumped and his head throbbed.

Glee was wearing the pearl drop necklace he had given her. She tore it from her neck and threw it to the floor, screaming. “I'm a whore! A whore! Whores get paid, David. What did I ever get from you for putting out? What did I ever get from you?”

He hung up his clothes carefully, and draped a towel over the shoulders of his white jacket. He heard movement and voices in the kitchen, so he went in to see who was up. He was in time to see his sister disappear around the corner, back to bed. A lamp was on in the living room; he heard the groan of the easy chair as his father's slight weight settled in it. Marge sat at the table, sipping a drink with no ice. It was a little after two-thirty in the morning.

David poured himself some whiskey, added half a glass of water, took ice out for both of them, and joined his mother. She drank slowly as he told her about the evening. Her nose crinkled when he described the strange food, but by the time he told her about his one o'clock breakfast at the Kimbroughs, she was too blank for expression. Still he was certain she listened to every word.

25.

He spent all of New Year's Day with Patsy and her friends. They lay around on the floor on folded blankets, listening to Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck. All the music was new to David. “Sketches of Spain” reverberated straight up his spine. Patsy kept smiling at him, as if to say, I told you so. The two men, James and Ari, treated her affectionately, teasingly, but David could not see that neither one was especially attached to her. That made him feel better about them. Patsy was at ease, though she did not have much to say. There was plenty of Lone Star beer, and pretzels, Fritos, fat pickles, and a chicken Ari had roasted on a bed of onions. Patsy encouraged her friends to talk. James told about the beer and sausages in Germany, the easy feeling his blondness gave him there. Ari told about the Philippines, where he was stationed before Germany. He said he had eaten dog meat.

David got up to stretch, and walked around the room. Books lay in no order: Lawrence, Kerouac, Buber, Pound, and others. David picked up books, held them and riffled the pages, read a line or two in each. He would have liked to ask Ari what he thought, but about what? His reading? Basin? The world in general? He wanted, really, to ask him: How do I get where you are? How do I know to have these books, and where to get them?

He could not think why the New York Jew would want to spend half a year in a place like Basin, a place
he
only longed to leave. James he understood better. He had gone away, to the army, and he had grown up. He had seen things. He knew how to order in a restaurant in another language, maybe more than one; he knew how to ride cheap trains (he told about visiting Italy that way) and find a room not too close to the station. Coming back allowed him to see what he had left behind, and to be glad of it; David did not believe James would stay this time. He would not want to lead a boom and bust life dependent on the vicissitudes of the oilfields. He would find a kind of work that he could do in the greater world, the world Ari had come from; he was lucky, to have made a friend to show him the way.