Christine (30 page)

"I never did that for any boy," she said against his shoulder. "That's the first time I ever touched… you know. I did it because I wanted to. Because I wanted to, that's all."

"Then what is it?"

"I can't… here." The words came out slowly and painfully, one at a time, with an almost awful reluctance.

"The Embankment?" Arnie said. gazing around, thinking stupidly that maybe she thought he had really brought them up here so they would watch F.I.S.T free.

"In this car!" she shouted at him suddenly. "I can't make love to you in this car!"

"Huh?" He stared at her, thunderstruck. "What are you talking about? Why not?"

"Because… because… I don't know!" She struggled to say something else and then burst into fresh tears. Arnie held her again until she quieted.

"It's just that I don't know which you love more," Leigh said when she was able.

"That's…" Arnie paused, shook his head, smiled. "Leigh, that's crazy."

"Is it?" she asked, searching his face. "Which of us do you spend more time with? Me… or her?"

"You mean Christine?" He looked around him, smiling that puzzled smile that she could find either lovely and lovable or horridly hateful—sometimes both at once.

"Yes," she said tonelessly. "I do." She looked down at her hands, lying lifelessly on her blue woollen slacks. "I suppose it's stupid."

"I spend a lot more time with you," Arnie said. He shook his head. "This is crazy. Or maybe it's normal—maybe it just seems crazy to me because I never had a girl before." He reached out and touched the fall of her hair where it spilled over one shoulder of her open coat. The T-shirt beneath read GIVE ME LIBERTYVILLE OR GIVE ME DEATH, and her nipples poked at the thin cotton cloth in a sexy way that made Arnie feel a little delirious.

"I thought girls were supposed to be jealous of other girls. Not cars."

Leigh laughed shortly. "You're right. It must be because you've never had a girl before. Cars are girls. Didn't you know that?"

"Oh, come, on—"

"Then why don't you call this Christopher?" And she suddenly slammed her open palm down on the seat, hard. Arnie winced.

"Come on, Leigh. Don't."

"Don't like me slapping your girl? she asked with sudden and unexpected venom. Then she saw the hurt look in his eyes. "Arnie, I'm sorry."

"Are you?" he asked, looking at her expressionlessly. "Seems like nobody likes my car these days—you, my dad and mom, even Dennis. I worked my ass off on it, and it means zero to everybody."

"It means something to me," she said softly. "The
effort
it took."

"Yeah," he said morosely. The passion, the heat, had fled. He felt cold and a little sick to his stomach. "Look, we better get going. I don't have any snow tires. Your folks'd think it was cute, us going bowling and then getting racked up on Stanson Road."

She giggled. "They don't know where Stanson Road ends up.

He cocked an eyebrow at her, some of his good humor returning. "That's what
you
think," he said.

He drove back down toward town slowly, and Christine managed the twisting, steeply descending road with easy surefootedness. The sprinkle of earth-stars that was Libertyville and Monroeville grew larger and drew closer together and then ceased to have any pattern at all. Leigh watched this a little sadly, feeling that the best part of potentially wondei7ful evening had somehow slipped away. She felt irritated, chafed, out of sorts with herself—unfulfilled, she supposed. There was a dull ache in her breasts. She didn't know if she had meant to let him go what was euphemistically known as "all the way" or not, but after things had reached a certain point, nothing had gone as she had hoped… all because she had to open her big fat mouth.

Her body was in a mess, and her thoughts were the same way. Again and again on the mostly silent drive back down she opened her mouth to try to clarify how she felt and then closed it again, afraid of being misunderstood, because she didn't understand how she felt herself.

She didn't feel jealous of Christine… and yet she did. About that Arnie hadn't told the truth. She had a good idea of how much time he spent tinkering on the car, but was that so wrong? He was good with his hands, he liked to work on it, and it ran like a watch except for that funny little glitch with the odometer numbers running backward.

Cars
are
girls
, she had said. She hadn't been thinking of what she was saying; it had just popped out of her mouth. And it certainly wasn't always true; she didn't think of their family sedan as having any particular gender; it was just a Ford.

But—

Forget it, jet rid of all the hocus-pocus and phony stuff. The truth was much more brutal and even crazier, wasn't it? She couldn't make love to him, couldn't touch him in that intimate way, much less think about bringing him to a climax that way (or the other, the real way—she had turned that over and over in her mind as she lay in her narrow bed, feeling a new and nearly amazing excitement steal over her), in the car.

Not in the car.

Because the realty crazy part was that she felt Christine was watching them. That she was jealous, disapproving, maybe hating. Because there were times (like tonight, as Arnie skated the Plymouth so smoothly and delicately across the building scales of sleet) when she felt that the two of them—Arnie and Christine—were welded together in a disturbing parody of the-act of love. Because Leigh did not feel that she
rode
in Christine; when she got in to go somewhere with Arnie she felt
swallowed
in Christine. And the act of kissing him, making love to him, seemed a perversion worse than voyeurism or exhibitionism—it was like making love inside the body of her rival.

The really crazy part of it was that she hated Christine.

Hated her and feared her. She had developed a vague dislike of walking in front of the new grille, or closely behind the boot; she had vague thoughts of the emergency brake letting go or the gearshift popping out of park and into neutral for some reason. Thoughts she had never had about the family sedan.

But mostly it was not wanting to do anything in the car… or even go anywhere in the car, if she could help it. Arnie seemed somehow different in the car, a person she didn't really know. She loved the feel of his hands on her body—her breasts, her thighs (she had not yet allowed him to touch the center of her, but she wanted his hands there; she thought if he touched her there she would probably just melt). His touch always brought a coppery taste of excitement to her mouth, a feeling that every sense was alive and deliciously attuned. But in the car that feeling seemed blunted… maybe because in the car Arnie seemed less honestly passionate and somehow more lecherous.

She opened her mouth again as they turned onto her street, wanting to explain some of this, and again nothing would come. Why should it? There was really nothing to explain—it was all vapors. Nothing but vague humors. Well… there was one thing. But she couldn't tell him that; it would hurt him too badly. She didn't want to hurt him because she thought she was beginning to love him.

But it was there.

The smell—a rotten, thick smell under the aromas of new seat covers and the cleaning fluid he had used on the floormats. It was there, faint but terribly unpleasant. Almost stomach-turning.

As if, at some time, something had crawled into the car and died there.

He kissed her good night on her doorstep, the sleet shining silver in the cone of yellow light thrown by the carriage lamp at the foot of the porch steps. It shone in her dark blond hair like jewels. He would have liked to have really kissed her, but the fact that her parents might be watching from the living room—probably were, in fact—forced him to kiss her almost formally, as you might kiss a dear cousin.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I was silly."

"No," Arnie said, obviously meaning yes.

"It's just that"—and her mind supplied her with something that was a curious hybrid of the truth and a lie—"that it doesn't seem right in the car.
Any
car. I want us to be together, but not parked in the dark at the end of a dead-end road. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he said. Up at the Embankment, in the car, he had felt a little angry with her… well, to be honest, he had been pretty goddam pissed off. But now, standing here on her stoop, he thought he could understand—and marvel that he could want to deny her anything or cross her will in any way. "I know exactly what you mean."

She hugged him, her arms locked around his neck. Her coat was still open, and he could feel the soft, maddening weight of her breasts.

"I love you," she said for the first time, and then slipped inside to leave him standing there on the porch momentarily, agreeably stunned, and much warmer than he should have been in the ticking, pattering sleet of late autumn.

The idea that the Cabots might find it peculiar if he stood on their front stoop much longer in the sleet at last percolated down into his bemused brain. Arnie went back down the walk through the tick and patter, snapping his fingers and grinning. He was riding the rollercoaster now, the one that's the best ride, the one they really only let you take once.

Near the place where the concrete path joined the sidewalk, he stopped, the smile fading off his face. Christine stood at the curb, drops of melted sleet pearling her glass, smearing the red dash lights from the inside. He had left Christine running, and she had stalled. This was the second time.

"Wet wires," he muttered under his breath. "That's all." It couldn't be plugs; he had put in a whole new set just the day before yesterday, at Will's. Eight new Champions and—

Which of us do you spend more time with? Me… or her?

The smile returned, but this time it was uneasy. Well, he spent more time around cars in general—of course. That came of working for Will. But it was ridiculous to think that…

You lied to her. That's the truth, isn't it?

No
, he answered himself uneasily.
No, I don't think you could say I really
lied
to her…

No? Then just what do you call it?

For the first and only time since he had taken her to the football game at Hidden Hills, he had told her a big fat lie. Because the truth was, he spent more time with Christine, and he hated having her parked in the thirty-day section of the airport parking lot, out in the wind and the rain, soon to be snow—

He had lied to her.

He spent more time with Christine.

And that was—

Was—

"Wrong," he croaked, and the word was almost lost in the slick, mysterious sound of the falling sleet.

He stood on the walk, looking at his stalled car, marvelously resurrected time traveler from the era of Buddy Holly and Khrushchev and Laika the Space Dog, and suddenly he hated it. It had done something to him, he wasn't sure what. Something.

The dash lights, blurred into football-shaped red eyes by the moisture on the window, seemed to mock him and reproach him at the same time.

He opened the driver's side door, slipped behind the wheel, and pulled the door shut again. He closed his eyes. Peace flowed over him and things seemed to come back together. He had lied to her, yes, but it was a little lie. A mostly unimportant lie. No—a
completely
unimportant lie.

He reached out without opening his eyes and touched the leather rectangle the keys were attached to—old and scuffed, the initials R.D.L. burned into it. He had seen no need to get a new keyring, or a piece of leather with his own initials on it.

But there was something peculiar about the leather tab the keys were attached to, wasn't there? Yes. Quite peculiar indeed.

When he had counted out the cash on LeBay's kitchen table and LeBay had skittered the keys across the red-and-white-checked oilcloth to him, the rectangle of leather had been scuffed and nicked and darkened by age, the initials almost obliterated by time and the constant friction of rubbing against the change in the old man's pocket and the material of the pocket itself.

Now the initials stood out fresh and clear again. They had been renewed.

But, like the lie, that was really unimportant. Sitting inside the metal shell of Christine's body, he felt very strongly that that was true.

He
knew
it. Quite unimportant, all of it.

He turned the key. The starter whined, but for a long time the engine wouldn't catch. Wet wires. Of course that was what it was.

"Please," he whispered. "It's all right, don't worry, everything is the same."

The engine fired, missed. The starter whined on and on. Sleet ticked coldly on the glass. It was safe in here; it was dry and warm. If the engine would start.

"Come on," Arnie whispered. "Come on, Christine. Come on, hon."

The engine fired again, caught. The dash lights flickered and went out. The IGN light pulsed weakly again as the motor stuttered, then went out for good as the beat of the engine smoothed out into a clean hum.

The heater blew warm air gently around his legs, negating the winter chill outside.

It seemed to him that there were things Leigh could not understand, things she could never understand. Because she hadn't been around. The pimples. The cries of
Hey Pizza-Face!
The wanting to speak, the wanting to reach out to other people, and the inability. The impotence. It seemed to him that she couldn't understand the simple fact that, had it not been for Christine, he never would have had the courage to call her on the phone even if she had gone around with I WANT TO DATE ARNIE CUNNINGHAM tattooed on her forehead. She couldn't understand that he sometimes felt thirty years older than his age—no! more like fifty! and not a boy at all but some terribly hurt veteran back from an undeclared war.

He caressed the steering wheel. The green cats' eyes of the dash instruments glowed back at him comfortingly.

"Okay," he said. Almost sighed.

He dropped the gearshift into big D and flicked on the radio. Dee Dee Sharp singing "Mashed Potato Time"; mystic nonsense on the radio waves coming out of the dark.