I Knew You'd Be Lovely (21 page)

I'm not a sentimental person, but do you know I still have that stick? It sits atop my mantel, alongside some river stones and pigeon feathers I picked up on vacation in New Mexico.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Consider yourself warned,” he said, returning my wink. Then he left and took the long gravel path to the house. When he reached the end, he hopped up the steps, turned around, and waved. It felt as if he were waving at me from across a great distance, an unbridgeable abyss—across all the distance between what has been and what is to come.

In those days, I had girlfriends the way some people have freckles. I wish I could recall them all individually, but I've retained only the more peculiar traits of each, resulting in an odd farrago that looms in my mind like a Picasso. There was the girl whose prep school roommate had advised her to put root beer ChapStick on her labia before oral sex, and another who had a parlor gag where she could sign her name with her foot. One girl's mother had been in and out of mental hospitals her whole life; I remember she once served us roasted chicken complete with burned feathers and cooked innards. I drove to Killington, Vermont, for a weekend with a lively girlfriend who met me at the door wearing nothing but a bra, panties, and ski boots. I'm pretty sure she was different from the one who used to whisper delicious things to me while we were in bed, but she was too shy to speak up about it, prompting me, at the tender age of twenty-two,
to consider purchasing a hearing aid, as a kind of sex toy. The prettiest was a girl who belonged to a performance troupe called The Belly Dancers for Peace & Justice, who was convinced she'd seen the Virgin of Guadalupe etched on the hood of a '76 Monte Carlo.

There was one girl who stands out. Her name was Mandy Purcell. She was working at the swankiest old folks' home in Arlington, Massachusetts, when we met, during the summer of 1977. I was there doing community service as a result of my work with the Billboard Liberation Front (“adding the blemish of truth” was our motto); Mandy was there voluntarily. All the old guys loved her—the smooth young skin, the frank blue eyes, the gauzy hippie skirts. But there was one fogy, Harold, who reserved for her a special kind of affection. He had that condition old people sometimes get that's like a combination of Tourette's syndrome and Zen wisdom. Whenever Mandy would bring him orange juice or change the station on the TV set, he'd start.

“Want to hear a one-word description of the worst blow job I ever had?” Mandy would never answer, but he didn't need encouragement.

“Fantastic,”
he said.

At other times, he was more philosophical: “Appearance only goes so far in life. You show me the most beautiful woman in the world, and I'll show you the guy who's tired of fucking her.”

One day he told a joke I don't remember, except that the punch line had something to do with getting scrod in the pluperfect.

“Harold, my man, you are the court jester of the moribund,” I said. “You must be the funniest septuagenarian I've ever met.”

“I'm a sexagenarian,” he said.

“You most certainly are.”

In the kitchen, I tried to score points with Mandy.

“Seriously?” I said. “You're going to take that from him? What about women's lib? What about respect?”

Mandy stuck a plate sideways in a rack to dry. “Harold stormed the beach at Normandy,” she said. “He gets to say whatever he wants.”

She wouldn't go out with me. My community service ran through the month of June, and I think I asked her out every week. She always said no, but nicely, claiming she had some sort of boyfriend, although I never saw the guy. After my gig at the nursing home was up, I kind of forgot about her. Until the August afternoon when Ace showed up at my door with the car.

It was a Jaguar convertible. Ace had bought it at a police auction for no money. He'd found a pair of fuzzy handcuffs in the trunk, and dangling from the rearview mirror was an icon of the Evil Queen from
Snow White
. The Evil Queen had been his first erotic fixation, so he'd felt the car was speaking to him. Before taking it on its first joyride—first under new ownership—he came to get me.

We screamed up Route 2 with the top down. A car is not always the answer to the meaningless monotony of life. But sometimes it is. While we revved at the end of an exit ramp, blood thick with adrenaline, I experienced what I can only describe as divine inspiration. I took off my sunglasses.

“Let's go rescue Mandy,” I said.

I loved Ace because he never said no to anything. He'd been my closest friend throughout college, where I was first drawn to him because of his mastery of the art of enjoyment. Ace had taken the SAT stoned and had still gotten a nearly perfect score. Freshman week, during which he was blitzed 98 percent of the time, he found a smoke shop on Mass. Ave. and got a tattoo of Chaucer on his left biceps. When he discovered that the local squirrels were not afraid to jump from the tree limb outside his fourth-floor window into his dorm room, he made a nest for them, fed them, and then on walks through Harvard Yard would use his Dr. Dolittle charms to impress women. Before he got kicked out, he'd been working on a thesis proposal to rewrite the Bible in the anapestic tetrameter of Dr. Seuss.

When we got to the nursing home, it turned out Mandy didn't want to be rescued.

“I'm working,” she said, eyeing the car skeptically. “Come back at seven.”

By the time we went back we'd already split a six-pack of Schlitz in Ace's garage. Logistics had gotten away from us, and it was 7:45 when I rang the bell. Harold answered.

“She's gone,” he said. “You blew it, Bub.”

“Fuck,” I said. Before I could elaborate, Mandy came walking up the street.

“I figured you weren't coming,” she said. “I couldn't wait around all night.”

“But you came back.”

“I forgot something,” she said, mounting the steps and slipping her narrow body between me and the door frame. In her wake I smelled patchouli.

What'd you forget?
I wanted to ask, because I had the feeling she hadn't forgotten anything at all, but I didn't want to push things. I had already shown up forty-five minutes late for our first date.

While she was inside, Harold squeezed my shoulder. “Next time, bring me one of those beers you been drinking.”

Once we were on our way, Ace kept checking Mandy out in the rearview mirror.

“Mitch tells me you're the flower of Golden Meadows,” he said. Before I could protest, he added, “Not in so many words.”

“Oh, really,” Mandy said. “May I ask where we're going?”

“Don't you think you should have asked that before you got in the car?” Ace said. Half my time with Ace is spent on disaster control.

“To Cronin's,” I said, twisting to face her. “It's a bar in Cambridge. If that's all right.”

“Sure,” said Mandy. “Why not.”

“Mandy, Candy,”
Ace said. While we were in his garage, he'd also smoked half a joint. “I like you already.” He grinned. “Tell us something about yourself we would never guess.”

The top was down and Mandy's hair was airborne; she kept pulling strands of it out of her mouth. “I used to work for a greeting card company,” she said after thinking for a minute.

“And?” said Ace. “Did you get fired for embezzling truckloads of money?”

“I quit. I designed a card that said
Tikkun Olam
, and they didn't like that it was in Hebrew. They said: ‘This is America. Write in English.' ”

“What does it mean?” I said.

“ ‘Repair the World.' It was translated on the inside.”

“Bastards,” said Ace.

“It's all right,” Mandy said. “I didn't like it there that much anyway. I hardly ever got to design. Most of my time was spent using a glue gun and glitter. I worked with glitter so much that one day I sneezed and it came out sparkles.”

“Awww,” I said. “Like a fairy. A fairy with a head cold.”

“Exactly,” said Mandy.

At Cronin's, I ordered a pair of Buds and found us a booth in the back. On the way in, Ace had stopped to talk to some friends of his who were congregated outside with their Harleys. The song playing on the jukebox was barely audible above the noise, but I could make it out.

I said: “Tell me if I'm crazy, but—”

“You're crazy,” Mandy said.

“Don't you think a better name for this album would have been
The Far Side of the Moon
? It's not the part that's in shadow that they're singing about. It's the hemisphere
that's never visible from Earth, that's permanently remote.”

“Why don't you write Roger Waters a letter,” she said.

“I'm serious.”

“So am I.”

A couple walked in with their arms around each other and sat in a nearby booth.

“Your boyfriend doesn't mind you coming out like this?” I said.

Mandy brought her beer bottle to her lips. She had one of those sexy gaps between her two front teeth. “What do you care what my boyfriend thinks?” she said. “Word on you is you have a new girlfriend every week.”

“Because the one girl I really want won't say yes.”

She gave me one of her forthright glances, and I felt like a student whose paper was being graded in front of him, a patient whose X-rays were being examined.

“Maybe you like them that way,” she said. “Permanently remote.”

I laughed. “Even if that were true—and I'm not saying it is—can a man help what he likes?”

“I know all about your type,” she said. I noticed with surprise that she was farther along with her beer than I was. “You won't believe me. But I do.”

I reached for her hands. “Prove it to me,” I said.

She held my gaze for several unblinking seconds, then let go. Her eyes migrated to a spot beyond my left shoulder.

“Your friend,” she said. “Is he always like that?”

Ace was coming toward us, wearing one of the bikers' helmets. He put three more beers on the table and sat down.

“Ask me a question in Latin,” he said. “And I will answer you in Greek.”

“Is that how you greeted your friends with the hogs?” Mandy said.

“My greetings are audience-appropriate,” Ace said. Years later, while Ace is giving a lecture titled “Don't Ever Pay for Electricity When You Can Make It Simple and Cheap at Home,” a man in the crowd will raise his hand. “If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?” he'll ask. To which Ace will reply: “If you're so rich, how come you're not smart?” An audience-appropriate riposte, to be sure. But I also believe it marks the exact moment at which Ace became obsessed with making millions of dollars.

“Ace speaks five languages,” I said. “He has one of the highest IQs on record.”

Mandy turned to him. “Does that mean you're happy?”

“Be careful of this one,” I said. “She'll see into your soul.”

Ace rotated the bottles of beer in and out of a triangle pattern. “As my father used to say: ‘There are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what you want. And getting what you want.' ” The overhead lights reflected in the hyaline surface of his helmet. “He also used to make us stick our pencils up our noses and leave them there for the rest of dinner if we were caught doing homework at the table.”

Mandy sat back. “How could you eat with a pencil dangling in front of your mouth?”

“And he once put stickers on everything in my bedroom, indicating how much it had cost. The bed frame,
the lamps, the desk, the pillowcases, the carpet. All with price tags on them.”

Ace had been my best friend for five years, and I'd never heard any of this. I didn't even know he
had
a father.

“Don't take this the wrong way,” I said, “but are you full of shit right now?”

Apparently Mandy believed him. “Ace is always full of shit,” she said. “
Except
for now.”

After that, no one said anything. I guess Ace didn't know how to live up to the burden of not being full of shit, and I didn't know what to say. Eventually Mandy turned to me.

“What about your father?” she said.

“If you find him,” I said, “tell him I say hi.”

I can't recall who drove, or how we even made it to the Little League field in one piece. All I remember is lying with my back flat on a wet sea of grass, with Ace on my left somewhere and Mandy over on my right. And all those stars.

“Ad astra per aspera,”
I said.

“Okey dokey, Sir Polyglot,” said Mandy.