What She Saw... (9 page)

It turned out being comfortable with someone and being attracted to someone were two different things.

JASON DROVE HER home the long way. “So whadju think of the movie?” he asked her on the back roads of Ho-Ho-Kus.

“It was okay,” said Phoebe. “But you know that part where that girl does coke with all those Arab sheiks and then she freaks out? I thought that was really unrealistic.”

“In your personal experience, doing coke with Arab sheiks does not produce the same type of mental freakout?”

“Come on, you know what I mean! Like, when she's quivering in the corner and they have to go rescue her. I mean, that seemed so exaggerated to me.”

“Well, in my personal experience,” continued Jason with a signifying glance in her direction. “That drug can definitely fuck you up
big time.
”

Phoebe didn't answer immediately. She was too busy hating herself for always talking about things she didn't know anything about.

But then, she didn't know much about anything, so what exactly was she supposed to talk about?

“Well, I guess you know more about it than me,” she mumbled plaintively.

“No doubt,” Jason concurred. “But hey—I'm not looking for another drug buddy.”

She swallowed hard. “What are you looking for?”

He reached for the equalizer. “To tell you the truth, I'm not really looking for anything. I'm pretty much content with the way things are.”

“That's cool,” said Phoebe.

But it wasn't cool at all. In the days since he'd called to ask her out, she'd been harboring the fantasy that Jason Barry Gold had perceived in her a certain emotional depth—a certain affinity for the “poetry of life,” as evidenced by the dog-eared copy of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, one of few concessions to “weirdness,” she carried around school with her—that he'd been unable to find with a vacuous rich girl like Aimee Aaron.

BUT HE MUST have perceived something, because he called again on Sunday afternoon. “My parents are out of town,” he said. “Come over and we'll rent a movie.”

Phoebe couldn't believe this was happening. She couldn't understand why he liked her.

She didn't know if she could sit through another movie.

“Where'd they go?” she asked.

“Conference in the Bahamas,” he answered.

“What kind of conference?”

“Plastic surgery.”

“Maybe I should become a plastic surgeon.”

“Probably boring.”

“Probably,” she said.

She didn't know if Jason was referring to the conference or the plastic surgery.

She was too embarrassed to ask.

He picked her up in his father's canary-yellow Porsche. From Whitehead, they drove to Saddle River, to a modern château with a five-car garage and several acres' worth of pine forest in back. Dr. and Dr. Gold turned out to have matching canary-yellow Porsches. Her vanity plates read FACE. His read LIFT. The Mercedes station wagon had apparently fallen out of favor. So had the Chrysler Le Baron convertible. “Check out my blowfish,” said Jason, leading Phoebe down a long hallway that led to a walk-in aquarium.

They toured the house and grounds, the indoor and outdoor pools.

Then they went up on the roof with binoculars and spied on Richard Nixon's house. “I've always thought Tricky Dick got a bum deal,” volunteered Jason. “I mean, look at what he did in China.”

“What did he do in China, again?” said Phoebe.

“I can't remember. But people are always talking about what he did in China. Maybe he got his feet bound or something.”

“That's Japan.”

“Whatever.” Jason sounded annoyed.

Phoebe wished she'd let it go. Who was she to be correcting other people? Besides, maybe Jason was right; maybe foot-binding was a Chinese custom.

Maybe she didn't know shit about anything.

“What do you say we get the fuck down from here?” asked Jason, but he didn't wait for an answer.

Phoebe followed her date down a spiral staircase that led to a museum-style atrium, complete with vaulted ceiling, bubble skylight, low-lying chandelier, geometric art, and a marble side table for holding mail.

They wound up on a white leather sofa unit in a vast, sunken living room.

The carpet was white shag. The fireplace was white, too. All the lamps were made of chrome. All the tables were made of glass. Dried branches dyed the color of lapis sprouted from imitation Ming Dynasty vases. Orchids grew like grass. An original LeRoy Neiman—a colorful oil of an in-flight pole-vaulter— hung over a white piano. Another whole wall had been given over to photographs of Jason in various states of athletic dress and undress: Jason emerging from an Olympic-sized pool, Jason skiing at Vail, Jason snorkeling in the Caribbean, Jason at home plate, Jason windsurfing, Jason in full lacrosse gear holding a trophy high over his head, Jason in white gloves teeing up for a hole in one.

He'd rented
Caddyshack.

He said he'd already seen it three times, but he wanted to see it a fourth. He put the tape in the VCR, turned off the lights, kicked off his shoes. Phoebe did the same. Then she sank her backside into the sofa, rested her sock feet on the coffee table, but it didn't last. Midway through the movie, Jason had rearranged things so she was leaning against him—against his chest and between his legs, his arms wrapped around her like a straightjacket, her legs extended before her. Then he pressed his open lips to the back of her neck. And he smelled like dandelions and beer and fresh-cut grass. Then he hit “pause” on the remote, dug his elbow into the back of the couch, and rolled the two of them over, inch by inch, limb by limb, until all 185 pounds of Jason Barry Gold rested on top of Phoebe's shapeless body, and Jason Barry Gold was breathing like an elephant.

Phoebe was hardly breathing at all.

As Jason groped the waistband of her army-surplus pants, she lay there like a cadaver, petrified that things would careen out of control—and then what? Did he think she was going to have sex with him? Would he be angry if she didn't? Had she “asked for it” by coming here while his parents were away? Would she be able to face him on Monday if she did? And what if she didn't? What if she got pregnant? She could never admit a thing like that to Roberta. If it came to that, she would have to call Emily at college. And how soon could she go home? How could she act natural when she felt anything but? How could she enjoy what was happening to her when the burden of experience—her lack of it, her need for it, her desire for it, her fear of it, her exhaustion in the face of it—was a heavier load to bear than all 185 pounds of Jason Barry Gold?

And was it okay to skip from first base to third base, or did you have to go to second base first? Phoebe pondered this last question as she steered Jason's hands down and away from the site of her shame—her nearly nippleless flat chest.

Years later, Roberta would express the belief that her younger daughter had stunted her frontal development with all the strenuous exercise she'd undertaken between the ages of eight and eighteen, when most girls recede to the couch to watch TV, snack, and talk on the phone. She postulated that Phoebe ran too many laps, played too many tiebreakers, straddled the uneven bars one too many times. Maybe she was right. Back then, however, Phoebe's flat chest struck her as just another sick joke on the part of an unjust God. Here Emily was a busty 34C, while Phoebe was flatter than a two-lane blacktop in Iowa. She felt cheated, she felt cursed. What was the point of having horrible cramps and ruining all your underwear once a month when you still looked like a nine-year-old? In the beginning of tenth grade Roberta bought Phoebe a training bra, but in that flimsy bandage Phoebe felt like an impostor. She might as well have been wearing a police badge.

She went back to her little-girl undershirts with the applique flowers on the neck.

And she let Jason Barry Gold finger her underwear instead— her white cotton panties decorated with tiny red apples. Then he lifted her underwear away, pried apart the intruding skin, and jammed a finger inside. It felt cold and vaguely constricting. It didn't feel like much else. Or maybe Phoebe was too busy wondering what Jason Barry Gold wanted from her when he could have Aimee Aaron? And did she even like Jason Barry Gold, or was she just flattered that he would pay her this kind of attention—flattered that the most popular boy in the twelfth grade would have sex with her if she were willing?

THE ONLY GUY Phoebe was absolutely sure she had a crush on was Coach Clay. Not that she would have admitted such a thing to Rachel or anyone else. He doubled as the trigonometry teacher. He was pushing forty-five and completely bald. His skin tone was about six shades darker than the white Mercedes sedan he heedlessly parked in one of two handicapped spaces outside the gym. He was generally regarded as a tyrannical prick.

Phoebe wanted desperately to please him.

It had been like that since the first day of practice—since he'd bounded onto Court 1 as if tennis were no laughing matter, the collar of his white polo shirt standing up, name-brand sweatbands circumscribing each of his well-defined wrists. He held his racquet by its throat. His lemon yellow shorts were so tight they made smiley faces around his crotch. He smelled of cologne and sweat and things still unnamed. He leaned his shapely backside against the white leather tape that ran along the edge of the net. “How you guys doing?” That was Coach Clay's first line—a line Phoebe and her teammates, huddled together on the service line, were too intimidated to answer— until he said it again: “I SAID HOW YOU GUYS DOING TODAY?”

Then they said, “Fine.”

Then he said, “Two rules on my team. Come here to hustle, or don't come at all. Is that understood?”

They nodded.

They never heard the second rule.

“Drop your racquets,” demanded the head coach of Pringle Prep's varsity tennis team. So they dropped their racquets. “I want you to touch the net, run backward to the baseline, touch it, run forward to the net, touch it, and repeat ten times. NOW GO!”

They lunged for the white leather tape. Then they started backward. Coach Clay was the size of a tennis ball by the time they hit the baseline. He seemed larger than life on Phoebe's way back to the net.

He stayed that way for the rest of the school year.

“Get your racquets, go back to the baseline, and form a line,” he ordered his panting subjects upon their completion of the drill. “THERE WILL BE NO LASSITUDE TOLERATED ON THIS TEAM!”

Standing at the net, he fed them each three balls, two into the left corner and one into the right. They were to hit all of them straight down the line. Without a doubt, Phoebe had the best ground strokes of the lot. But Coach Clay wasn't one to throw gratuitous flattery around. “Racquet back earlier,” he demanded her first time up.

“Deeper,” he ordered on the second.

“Nice.” He caved in her third time up. “I want you all to notice how—what's your name again?”

“Phoebe Fine,” she told him, delirious.

“. . . Miss Fine follows through.”

Then he hit an extra ball to her forehand. And she hit that one perfectly as well—so perfectly that he was unable to stop himself from meeting it midair. His backhand chop volley fell to the right of her feet. She barely had time to take her racquet back—to scoop it up and off the court and then right past him. He lunged but missed. Then he turned sideways to trace its charmed trajectory—to watch her forehand drop just inside the parameters of the right pocket, before he turned back around to congratulate her on her “nice execution.”

And in that magic moment it seemed to Phoebe as if Court 1—like the Garden of Eden; it was just as green—had only two players to its name: Phoebe Fine and Bradley Clay.

But it turned out there were others. “Next!” he thundered.

Whereupon Phoebe scurried out of the way of Pringle Prep's soon to be crowned first singles, Amanda Chang, and assumed her place at the back of the line. (It was always like that, Phoebe found. There were always others waiting in the wings.)

And would she ever be the star of anyone or anything?

WITHOUT WARNING, PHOEBE squirmed out from under Jason, expelling his finger in the process.

“What's the matter?” asked Mr. Popularity, trying to bring her back under his sway.

“I just—I can't,” she said, planting her feet on the carpet.

“Can't what?” said Jason, trying to regain lost ground.

“Please!” She must have cried out a little too frantically. Now Jason sat up with a start, wiped his finger on the side of his jeans, then his mouth on the back of his arm. Then he walked over to an enormous gilded mirror, where he stood with his back to her flicking at an invisible eyelash. “Jason,” she began again, suddenly as desperate to reconnect with him as she was consumed by guilt. No doubt he hated her now, hated her for leading him on. . . .

“What?” he said.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Depends what question.”

“Do you, like, like me?”

“Sure I like you. Why?”

Marginally encouraged, Phoebe readjusted her hairband, re-buttoned the top button of her army-surplus pants, took a deep breath. “Because you could be with any girl at Pringle, and I just don't understand why you're with me.”

“It's not like we're going out,” he said.

Then he turned back around. His face was blank. And she couldn't believe she'd ever talked to him—couldn't believe he even knew her name. “I didn't say we were going out,” she said, swallowing her own words.

“So what
are
you saying?”

“I'm just saying that I don't understand why you're not fooling around with Stephanie Cohen or Jennifer Weinfelt or something.”

“How do you know I'm not?”

Phoebe could see now that it was a losing battle. And she turned away, defeated, debilitated, but somehow still unprepared for the final analysis: “Look, Phoebe, I don't want to hurt your feelings or anything. But I fool around with a lot of different girls. No, I take that back. You
are
different from the other girls I fool around with.” He let loose a disdainful snort. “You're more of a challenge—'cause you're a virgin.”