Asa, as I Knew Him (7 page)

Asa, sixteen, having kissed two nice girls, one at a dinner dance only two months before (Jenny, dark-haired, tasting of a cigarette sneaked and shared behind a rosebush), having secretly, in June, spent most of his paycheck on a whore fifteen years older, who took a phone call in the middle of his session and whose thick waist he gripped with sad passion,
having nobody to imagine her as, was looking—staring—at Jo and thinking of—longing for—Reuben and company. He missed the comfort of being understood. He missed the familiar shape and smell of Reuben, and the dizzying competition among the other three for Reuben’s admiration, which, though hard to provoke, could be lavish. So when Jo, talked out at ten-fifteen, asked the first question of the evening, “What are you doing with your summer?,” he answered immediately, “Hanging out at the Solas’.”

“Reuben Sola? Those rich Jews over near Sparks Street?”

“Yes,” Asa said, startled, “them.” It was a new outlook on the situation.

“Oh, well. Why don’t you come out on the boat next week? I think we’re all going to sail up from my uncle’s place in Duxbury to Manchester. Clem’s coming, isn’t that right?” Clem didn’t nod. “I think Parker’s coming too—you’re classmates, aren’t you? I’m sure he’s planning to come. And I’d love you to come.” She took another cigarette from her pack and kept her eyes on Asa. “It’ll be grand, don’t you think?”

“I’m working.”

“Oh. I didn’t know you had a job. You didn’t say you had a job.”

“Yes, I’m working,” repeated Asa, taking refuge behind the gas pump and the hot, black tarmac. “Thanks, though. Maybe next year.” Then, sensing she must be placated more, “It sounds like it will be fun.”

“They’re not so bad,” said Clem suddenly. “He’s an interesting man, Sola. Got a great art collection—you know that’s a Goya he’s got in the living room. Got some terrific dirty etchings, too, some Picassos. And a Daumier. You know that Daumier in the library?”

“Clemmy, I didn’t know you knew about art. Isn’t that a sketch? Where in the world did he get that stuff?”

“My minor concentration. Major concentration, European history; minor in art. Get the whole picture. I don’t know where he got it. Paris, I suppose. He was in France during the war.”

“I think I’m going to major in English,” Asa said.

“Oh, are you going to be a beatnik?” Jo put her hands in her red skirt and flipped the hem around her knees. “Live in a garret and stuff?” She was nasty from too many martinis.

“I didn’t know you knew the Solas,” said Asa.

“A girl in my class went out with Reuben last fall. I think it was Reuben. He’s the younger one, right? The good-looking one? Who doesn’t look Jewish.”

But Asa had been talking to Clem. Clem was gone again, thinking of the whole picture, or Jo’s legs, or whether to have a fourth martini. “He did,” said Asa. “Who was that?” Everything was getting far away from him.

“Marjorie Fish. She has curly hair.”

“Oh yes, Marjorie,” Asa said. It was news to him. The evening was full of news, which he wanted to be considering, alone.

Some social situations are difficult to disengage from, especially at sixteen. There was the matter of the bill (Asa refused to let Clem pay for his drinks), and snagging the waitress, and waiting for the change from Asa’s end-of-the-week five. Then there was a round of invitations to sail, swim, come to Western art classes at Harvard, buy gas at Asa’s station—none of which any of them wanted to do. Asa wanted air.

“Well, well—” He had managed to stand up. “Good night.” Their smoky faces looked up at him; both had petulant expressions, and he realized they wanted to be alone as much as he did. He fairly ran out the door.

There was his bicycle leaning on a lamppost, the dew of
the hot night streaked down the street, the quietness everywhere. It was ten-forty. Asa turned his wheels west and rode down Brattle Street until he came to the Solas’ house. Then he stood on the street and looked at it.

He was trying to impose his new information onto the familiar shape. He wanted to see it as a Jewish palace, a folly full of plundered goods, because that was how he understood Jo’s remarks. He thought of the paintings—those Goyas and Daumiers he had ignored, imagining them some Jewish equivalent of the ancestors who lived on his stairway—and the black statuettes in the bookshelves (these were by Degas, Clem had said), and tried to see them as objects with their own importance; that was how he defined art. They steadfastly remained Professor Sola’s things, the way his mother’s blue-and-white ginger jar on the mantelpiece was hers by virtue of the pencils it had held since the beginning of time. He didn’t understand the indignation in Jo’s voice. She had made it sound as though the Solas had no right to these things or this house, with its beautiful arced driveway, its pre-Revolutionary trees. But for Asa the Solas had merged with their house just as all the owners of Brattle Street houses had; if they had accomplished it in fifteen years rather than a century, that was to their credit.

There were lights on the third floor. They were up there, Parker and Roberto, Reuben was up there, they had beer, they had drugs that had made them first dizzy, then sick, now bored and waiting for the next event. In the Casablanca Clem was breathing martinis into Jo’s small and not-clean ear, the bartender was wiping the copper counter, the clock above the bar was clicking on its electric way toward midnight. Asa was standing on the street straddling his old Raleigh while the night cooled. All his options were the opposite—constrictions. Back in Harvard Square there was nothing except
circling around the empty, gray streets, leaving tire marks in the dew. At home just the ill-fitting tread on the second step on the way upstairs, the awful square bottle of milk, blue as ice, from whose thick, cream-clotted lip he would drink while holding the refrigerator open with his left hand and staring blankly at the leftovers in their covered bowls. And here, upstairs behind the canvas shade that smelled like second grade because it smelled of paste and dust and sunshine, Reuben lolling on the braided carpet, satisfied without Asa. Nobody was looking out the window for him; nobody was out on bicycles following his trail.

He could go in by the secret way—through a door in the basement, where Reuben kept a mattress to sleep on, and kiss girls on, when he was supposed to be somewhere else. For instance, at Andover. Reuben took the train back to Cambridge on wintry Thursdays and lay there, under his father’s feet, reading magazines, watching the day go away through the slits of glass near the ceiling. Then in the dark down to North Station, onto the six o’clock train, back in the dorm by seven. Asa knew how to get in, but he didn’t want to get in. He wanted, he realized, to stand on the street and be forlorn.

Asa made a short, difficult foray into his mind to look for the source of his wish to be forlorn and didn’t find it there. What’s the matter with me? was the deepest he could penetrate. His heart, calling for attention, made a little flurry of beats, but he put that down to martinis. He tried again: What’s the matter with you? By removing himself this one step more he kept himself safe from knowing.

He rode home and drank milk and went to bed.

Everything was different in the morning. First, it was wonderfully hot. At eight-thirty the tarmac at the gas station was
oozing under his sneakers. Heat, Asa had noticed, exhausted adults; the party at the Solas’ would be less chaperoned than usual. Professor Sola would sit near his air conditioner and look at his bronzes rather than pace his flagstone terrace with a glass of gin the way he tended to do when Reuben gave parties. Second, his parents had not noticed the unlocked door, and his father had taken his black bag out of the closet, opened it, put his lunch into it, and gone off to his half-day at the office (lunch on the riverbank in front of the hospital as always) without finding anything amiss.

And then, in the middle of the morning, Jo appeared in a Buick, wearing a sleeveless green blouse that made her eyes, which last night had been yellow, green also. She put her elbow on the edge of the door, exposing her pale armpit, and rasped out, “Asa.” Asa was stacking cans of oil. The day was so hot his hands ached from touching the seething metal. And Jo looked cool like fruit—all fresh white skin and green cloth peeping out her window.

“I thought you were going sailing,” said Asa, standing up. He finished his pyramid of cans and went, automatically, toward her gas tank.

“Hey, I don’t want gas,” Jo said. She moved across the seat and leaned out the other window, where Asa was pointing the nozzle at her. “I wanted to see you.”

A few drops of gas dripped from the tip of the hose. “You did?” He put the pump line back in its socket. “I thought you were going sailing.” He realized he’d already said this and blushed.

Jo, watching Asa blush, lifted her arms to her hair and pushed her hands into it, pulling it straight back from her face. She had thick hair, probably close to brown in the winter, but now tawny and shiny from the sun. She let her hands
fall down abruptly. “Hot,” she said. “Want to get some iced tea?”

“I don’t get lunch until eleven-thirty.”

“I’ll come back.” She drove out cautiously. This surprised Asa; he had imagined her a reckless driver. She flashed her taillights at him as she left the lot. He had an hour to fill.

First, time was slow and the sun made a glare in the spilled gasoline. Then two people wanted oil. When Jo came back there was a line of six cars waiting for gas, and Asa was sprinting from window to window taking money and orders. Jo parked near the office and smoked a Lucky. Asa did not look up, did not watch her smoke making circles on the solid atmosphere, counted change instead, said, “Thank you, sir,” kept her a secret from himself for a few minutes. Then he was done, and had to face her and where to have lunch in the nether end of Cambridge where nobody either of them knew lived or ate.

“Wait a minute,” he mumbled as he passed her on his way to wash. His face in the mirror was tracked with grit. His hands smelled of fuel, and then of fuel and yellow soap. Through the open vent above the sink he heard the scratch of her match lighting her second cigarette. He was keeping her waiting, which was ungentlemanly.

But what was he to do with her? There was a sub shop down the block; he imagined Jo in a red booth with her elbow avoiding a puddle of Coke. He preferred imagining her in the gloom of the Casablanca. He stood on tiptoe and looked at her through the vent. He had three dollars and she looked like a five-dollar lunch, maybe even an eight-dollar lunch. She was putting on pink lipstick, which didn’t become her. She had a mirror that fit the palm of her hand; she held it two feet away with an extended arm so as to get the whole
picture. Her self-absorption enchanted Asa. He was spying on her privacy, which added interest to an already interesting scene. Jo and her mirror did a duet they’d practiced many times: She turned her head left and right, checking the sweep of her hair against her pale cheeks; she pushed her nose close to the glass and examined her pores—were they bigger? Did she need to use some alcohol?—then drew back and smiled; this showed her teeth, and she licked them quickly to make them shine. The mirror obediently reflected the prettiest girl in the parking lot. Asa’s arches began to ache from standing on tiptoe. Jo put her mirror in her purse and pulled out another cigarette.

“Hey, Thayer,” she said suddenly, in a normal tone of voice, as though he were standing beside her. Asa dashed from the washroom, pulling from his pocket the matches he had found that morning after a long search through the shelves of oil filters, spark plugs, wrenches, and gray rags. When he reached her she had lighted her cigarette.

“Let’s eat,” he said. He hoped if he said it firmly a pleasant sandwich shop would spring up on the sidewalk around the corner. But in the end they took a red booth and waited for their grinders (Asa’s meatball, Jo’s Italian cold cuts with everything) to arrive.

It was a $1.70 lunch, $2.10 with two iced teas and tip. Jo’s paper plate glistened with fallen chips of onion and green pepper. Asa was fearful of getting tomato sauce on his face.

“How come you didn’t go sailing this weekend?” Asa ventured, after a few difficult bites of meatball.

“God, you don’t forget a thing, do you?” said Jo. She folded a thick slice of salami in half and popped it in her mouth. A trickle of oil was left on her chin. “I thought it would be more fun to go to the party.”

“Reuben’s party?”

“Yes. Is there another one?”

“I don’t think so.” As other parties would not be worth going to, he hadn’t listened for news of them. “Have you ever been to one?”

“A Sola party? No, but I’ve heard about them. I’ve heard people end up swimming with nothing on and, well, absolute orgies.”

Asa had never been at an orgy; had he been uninvited? “Not quite orgies,” he said, “but it gets pretty wild.” It hadn’t. The pleasure lay in the space—the pool, the long, lovely lawn, the knowledge that Professor Sola could patrol only one area at a time, the idea of possible wildness.

“Clemmy’s going to take me.” Having announced this, Jo filled herself up with a large installment of cold cuts. Asa was disappointed; he had reckoned on asking her to go with him—offering himself as her escort. It occurred to him that she was tormenting him, and he wondered why she had turned up. Surely not just to bother him. If he’d been twenty he might have had the wit to say, “I’m so delighted you came to have lunch with me,” and watched her face for clues, but all he could think of was the way she might taste, if he were able to lean across the Formica and put his mouth on hers. Or her cheek, or the bone near her eye, where her lashes made a shadow trellis.

“Tell me about Reuben,” Jo said.

“Why do you want to know about him?”

“He seems interesting. All you boys hang around with him—he must be interesting. Tell me some things about him.”

“All who?” asked Asa, postponing. “Just me and Parker.”

“Oh, Clem goes over there, doesn’t he? And I know some
other people …” But she wasn’t going to say who. She looked at Asa as if the information he wasn’t giving out were a match he wasn’t striking for her cigarette.