Into the Great Wide Open (22 page)

Kenny looked up sharply but she was keeping her eyes to herself. You
had
a crush or you
have
one? A crowd of talkative assholes, all men, came in for an early lunch. Kenny put it together. She was
available
, or she wasn’t far. The silence lengthened between them. Her hands were cupped around her coffee still; the next step was for Kenny to take one of her hands in his, to make the connection. He thought that it was better to regret the things you did instead of regretting the things you didn’t do; but in the end he kept his hands to himself.

Finally she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, I’m just sort of—I tend to blurt things out. Which is another beautiful word, isn’t it?
Blurt
.”

“It’s good,” he said. “Right up there with
sycamore
.”

“Which Annie Dillard—never mind, I told you that in class, didn’t I?” She colored when she saw Kenny’s little joke he was playing.

He said, “I know what you mean, though,” trying to apologize. “Sometimes a word will come along and you’ll just notice it, like finding a dollar in the street. You wander around trying it out for the rest of the day. That is an
indefensible
hat.”

“See, I knew,” she said. “That’s all I wanted to say: you understand this stuff, you have a knack for it. A way with words.”

“Well, thank you.”

“I can’t imagine what good it’s going to do you. I mean, look at me. Seduced by language, and the next thing you know you’re dumped in some English classroom, reading Shakespeare to the sheep. Present company, of course, excepted from that description, but wouldn’t you agree?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do,” she said. “That’s why you left. I’m going to go get a drink, now, Kenny. It’s probably better if you didn’t come along. I’d probably be in plenty of trouble anyway if somebody came in and saw us here. On the other hand, maybe not. You want this?” She pushed the anthology across the table toward him, saying, “I don’t need it anymore.”

Kenny opened the fat paperback to her place mark, a paperclip over the page. There was the O’Hara poem. “Do you mind?” he asked. “I didn’t get a chance to finish it.”

“Read it out loud,” she said. “You’ll never hear it otherwise. Besides, I’d like to hear it. Loudly, slowly, and clearly.”

Kenny looked to the left and to the right before he started, afraid of what? Maybe he was gay after all. Reading poetry out loud in Bennigan’s was certainly suspicious. He read it to her, loudly, slowly, and clearly, trying to imitate the colorlessness of her voice:
Chez Jane
, he said.

She listened with her eyes closed; and afterward, said “That’s so nice” to Kenny, like he had written it himself, still with her eyes closed. Kenny closed the book on the poem and opened the front cover.
Kathryn Ann Connolly
it said, in a careful colorless hand, and below it was written her telephone number: 555-3519. The pages were dogeared, worn with reading. What was she giving him?

“I’ll take the book,” Kenny said, “if you’re done with it.”

“OK,” she said, “it’s yours. Now go. I’m just going to move over into the bar over there.”

“Well …,” he said, standing up awkwardly.

“Two things,” she said. “First: thanks for following me out. That was the one thing I was afraid of, that we wouldn’t get a chance to talk. I mean, I wish we’d started months ago, talking.”

She held her hand for him to shake, official once again, a teacher, if only for a moment; and Kenny took it, and felt how small the bones of her hand were, how delicate.

“And what’s the other?” he asked.

“Oh, God,” she said, and dropped his hand. “Today is my day to say anything and everything. Just that lifeguard thing, Kenny—that bleached-out hair and the good tan, it’s dangerous, Kenny. I mean, you have no idea. A word to the wise.”

“Not me,” said Kenny.

“Not me, either,” Mrs. Connolly said. “I’ll see you.”

Kenny left. The last glimpse of her, looking back, she set her big leather bag next to one of the barstools, all alone. Full cold daylight out. He stood there blinking; thought of going back but his own fake ID was bad and she would throw him out anyway. Today was not the day, whatever she meant. He had her phone number, hot in his pocket, sleeping between the covers of her book.

Unfaithful
, Kenny thought, remembering Junie for the first time in hours. He was blue, disconsolate. He was not taking care the way he should; she was already going, almost gone, there was no point to it. A vista of parking lots, gas stations under a gray sky promising rain. The cars scuttling forward in ragged rows; crabs on some blind seafloor, moving against the hard bodies of the others. My fault, he thought. My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault. He moved off blindly toward her, forgetting she was still in class.

He went looking for Junie at the art school later that evening. Her class was going to have an exhibit of their photographs and she was
trying to get ready; if Kenny wanted to see her, he would have to find her in the darkroom. He felt himself drifting, needed to touch her. Downtown the streets were dark, windblown, but there was still that first note of spring he had noticed earlier. The air felt unnaturally warm, and he drove with the windows down. Twice he heard laughter.

The institute was around the back of the art museum, growing out of a little courtyard; the doors opening inward to a blank white wall, a set of stairs, the faceless facade of a spy headquarters. The smell of turpentine was immediate. He climbed the stairs, watched by a series of security cameras, and went looking for her on the third floor, where he thought the darkroom was. Paint was dripped and splattered everywhere, sawdust, plaster, chips of limestone. A boom box played the Talking Heads (of course) from one of the side rooms. It was easy to get lost: no two of the rooms were the same shape, and in fact it didn’t seem like there were two of anything here: a row of regular metal school lockers—once blue, now various colors averaging to gray—stood next to a set of retired bus-station coin-op lockers, stood next to a pile of ductwork and heating machinery, stood next to an almost complete front end from a ’52 Studebaker, the kind that looked almost the same coming or going.

Kenny thought he knew where the darkroom door was but he was wrong; by the time he discovered this, he’d lost the stairway, too, and drifted derelict for a while, taking in the assortment: bad paintings of every description, sculptures made from auto-body parts and ambiguous rusting piles of junk, a flat-black water fountain, the smell of welding in the air. It was pleasant to imagine that he belonged here, if only by proxy. What was it? A feeling of play, of nonsense; also the enterprise, the serious work of manufacturing. Kenny liked the two things at once, light/dark, serious/play.

Deciding that he needed directions, he followed a radio back into one of the studios, where he discovered Junie and somebody else.

She was half-sitting, half-leaning against a heavy worktable, looking long and tall and dark black in her outline. She was resting back on the palms of her hands, offering her body like a display; or that’s how it felt to Kenny. Junie was in a discussion with a man who was cleaning brushes in a metal industrial sink; a painter, apparently, and an ironical one—the worst kind, Kenny thought. The canvas on the wall was twelve or fifteen feet long, a filthy gray fog like the smoke from an oil fire, out of which loomed the individual body parts of five or six clowns and a sinister gridwork in darker black, like the pipes of a refinery. More geometry, Kenny thought; she has a weakness for it. The painter himself was somewhere in his twenties or early thirties, sneakers and paint-stained khakis, a black t-shirt, curly brown hair that flopped down over his shoulders in a seventies style, like he had escaped from a Peter Frampton album. He was listening intently to her, paying no attention to the brushes in his hand. Brown hair, brown eyes: he looked like an intelligent spaniel.

Junie was talking loudly over the sound of the water, and when he shut it off her voice boomed in the empty room: “It just seems like THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS …”

Then she saw Kenny, and she didn’t know what to do with herself for a moment. She shut up, and then she folded her body into a more modest shape. She put her body away. “Hello,” she said eventually. “What are you doing here?”

She was unfriendly; he was unwelcome. He was high school, and she was trying to impress this Older Guy, and even that was the best he could make out of it. Worse possibilities suggested themselves.

“I was downtown,” he said, tonguetied, lame. “I was, urn—thought I’d say hello, I don’t know, if you’re busy.”

“I’ve got to meet Roland anyway,” the painter said. “I was supposed to be there twenty minutes ago. It’s good to see you.”

“Thanks,” Junie said; and the painter turned back toward the
sink and both of them disappeared, the children. She had been dismissed, which could only make things worse. It might have been better if he had just gone home, but he had come all the way downtown to see her … He followed her out, across the maze of hallways and through the inconspicuous door of the darkroom. “Who was that?” he asked.

“None of your business,” she said. She stood with her back to him, stirring a tray full of pictures of herself with a pair of long-handled tongs. It was a big darkroom, well ventilated and bright with orange safelights. The pictures were the nakeds, the ones with the sleeper’s mask over her face. Kenny saw with a little lurch of the heart that she meant to exhibit them;
my
body, he thought,
my
secret,
my
love. Possession; but it was hers to give away as she wanted.

“Don’t spy on me,” she said.

“I wasn’t.”

“You’ve done it before, sneaking up on Kim and me. I can’t stand it, Kenny, I
won’t
.”

All without looking at him, without giving him her face, which he could see clearly in the orange moonlight of the room: a sleepwalker’s face, betraying nothing. She went to the enlarging stand, stepping around him, not touching, and focused the negative—the same image, or some small variant. Then she drew a sheet of paper from the safe and burned the exposure, her hands dancing in the faint light of the enlarger, holding the light back from the edges of the page.
Dodging and burning
, he remembered.

“Excuse me,” Junie said, on her way to the developing trays, holding the blank exposed photograph (the magic hidden, latent in the white gloss of the surface).

“I didn’t come to spy on you,” he said again. “I just wanted to see you. Sometimes I just do.”

“It’s just like
every corner
of my life,” she said, and dipped the print into the tray, gently rocking it under. “I’m just not used to it. I
don’t know if I want to
get
used to it. You’re at school, and then at my house, and then you’re down here all of a sudden.”

“I thought you didn’t mind it.”

“I’m not trying to break up with you,” Junie said. “It’s just, I don’t know. There are some parts of my life that are just
mine
.”

The image swam into focus, faint at first and then more definite; an everyday miracle, Kenny thought, let us praise St. Kodak. He saw the outlines of her body and then fill in with a cold gray texture, a translation of her flesh, and Kenny saw her body like it was something he was leaving behind, the last lights of a familiar city disappearing in the rearview mirror; and for the first time he saw that they could fuck this up. Until then he assumed that love would make them bulletproof.

“I love you,” Kenny said, trying to call her back to him.

She held the dripping print over the developer, examined it, then plunged it into the stop bath and then the fix, setting the stopwatch that dangled from a string around her neck before she answered him.

“I wasn’t talking about that,” she said. “I’m not talking about whether I love you or not, or whether you love me”—a good long ways from a ringing declaration, Kenny noticed right away. She said, “I just want to have a life, Kenny, a regular life like everybody else. Mike Stack, the one you saw me talking to? He was my
teacher
from last year, Kenny, from before I even met you.”

“I didn’t say you shouldn’t talk to him.”

“No,” she said. “You just walked in there. I could tell how much you liked it.”

“I don’t have to like it,” he said.

“But there’s nothing to be jealous of,” she said. “If I’m not around you all the time, it doesn’t mean I’m off fucking somebody else, do you get that, Kenny?”

“I never thought so,” Kenny said.

“You should have seen your face,” she said. “I mean you walked in there and it was like we were both naked on the table or something, Kenny.”

“I’m sorry.”