Into Thin Air (12 page)

“It's late,” Jim said. He spread a blanket on the floor, “We'll buy a real bed tomorrow,” he said.

She felt queasy. She had never really let Jim touch her, and when he approached her she stepped back. “What?” he said.

“Everyone can see us,” she said. Behind her, the picture window looked out on the deserted parking lot.

“No, they can't,” he said. “And anyway, it's after midnight. Who's going to see?” Shyly he slid his hand down her side. “You're so pretty,” he said, untucking her blouse.

She let him sink her down toward the blanket. She kept remembering a conversation she had overheard in the girls' room at school one day. Two voices from behind two separate gray stalls were discussing whether smart boys were better lovers. “A smart guy may look like a dufus, but at least he knows what to do,” one voice said.

“That's shit,” said the other girl. “You can know all you want, but if you can't
do
, what good is that?”

Jim nipped kisses along her shoulder, He shaped her shoulders with his palms, She didn't believe he had ever slept with a girl before. His whole body was trembling.

They were out of synch. She rushed toward him, and he drew back, taking his time with her, stretching out his pleasure. She drew herself over him, her hair tented over his face, and he rolled her back down, and the one time she opened her eyes, she saw him watching her, pinning her in his sight. “Shut your eyes,” she said, drawing the blanket over her breasts. “No, no, I don't want to miss this,” he said. “Okay, okay.” His lids flickered and then swam with sight.

In the end she pulled him inside of her; she quickened his pleasure so he couldn't pull back, “Shut your eyes,” she repeated, planting kisses on his pulsing lids. His sight glazed, he closed his lids only so she could kiss them. Once she had rendered him sightless, she began to relax and then, to her surprise, she began to turn liquid, greedy with her own pleasure. Her arms stretched out, pinning the edge of the blanket. She rocked against him, and when she cried out, he held her to him.

Outside, a siren whined. Police, she thought. Any moment there might be a knock on the door. Tensed, she waited, half-hopeful, but the sound faded. She was used to just getting up now, putting on her clothes, going home, bringing herself back to herself, but now the only place to go was here. Jim steered her toward him, lacing his fingers into her hair, swabbing her cheek with his tongue. She wanted to get up and make a bed for herself in the bathtub, shut the door, and be alone. She wanted to ask Jim to go out and get her doughnuts and then lock the door behind him, pretending she didn't hear when he came back. She'd never sleep with him lying so close beside her, staking so much claim. This was terrible. “This is wonderful,” Jim said, content. “This is the stuff of forever.”

Lee, in the dark, opened her eyes.

They bought wedding bands the next day. “Why can't we wait until I'm eighteen?” Lee said. “I'll be legal then.”

“It's an act of faith,” Jim said,

“We don't have to spend money on rings,” she said.

“If you spread the cost out across the years, it's nothing,” he said. “Besides, I like the idea of rings.”

He chose a band that was so wide and clumsy, he could barely flex his knuckle. She couldn't bear to touch any of the rings. On her finger they felt dishonest. She was sure the gold would stain her finger green, branding her with a mark as telling as a scarlet letter. “Here, let me help,” Jim said, sliding a ring on her finger. Hers was the thinnest gold she could find, barely a wire across her finger and almost a half size too big. “You can get that tightened, you know,” the salesman told her. “You don't want to lose it.”

“It fits fine,” Lee said, and when she flexed her fingers, the ring slid toward her nail.

She kept thinking of television drama. Or movies. Her life in Technicolor, spliced into manageable scenes, fast-forwarded when it got messy. Lovely last minute escapes. Dustin Hoffman pounding at the door of a church and stopping Katharine Ross from getting married. A winning lottery ticket found in the pocket of her jeans and toodle-loo, she'd be off to Paris. The police must be looking for her by now. Detectives or maybe Frank himself, showing up to jerk backward through time. “Stay away from my daughter,” he had said, but here was Jim about to get as close to her as anyone could, and Frank was nowhere around.

“This might not work out,” Lee said abruptly. She would say it to him again, months later, in a freezing February just minutes before they were to be married by a justice of the peace. She grabbed at his arm. She was wearing a long-sleeved white wool dress she had bought at Zayre's for ten dollars. White Leatherette shoes with stiletto heels. “I'm just being honest with you,” she said. They were sitting in a dark parlor that smelled of lemon wax and slightly stale flowers. On a desk was a white statue of a grinning Cupid, poised to shoot. The walls were lined with couples, some of them in wedding dress, one in jeans and T-shirts. There was a colored photo of a tropical beach, and across it someone had scribbled in blue ink: “Having a wonderful time, thanks to you!
Don't
wish you were here! Ha Ha. The Myers.” Lee glanced at Jim, who was staring at her, which made her so flustered, she stood up. “You look beautiful,” he said.

There was rustling behind the door. Jim stood up, brushing off his suit, “It might not work out with us,” Lee repeated. Her breathing was shallow, her skin faintly flushed. “Listen, I'm just being honest with you,” she said.

He took her hands, turning the palms up as if he were reading her future. “Everybody knows you can't be honest if you tried,” he said.

She had never gotten used to the neighborhood, although Jim had instantly fallen in love with it. It seemed fairly close-knit. People were raising families here, planning to stay. There seemed to be an order that Jim found intoxicatingly adult. Mornings the men got into their cars or waited at the bus stop to go to work. At night they played badminton in each other's backyards. He saw the women moving casually from house to house, sometimes sitting on chaise longues on the lawns, talking. The women watched one another's kids and worked part-time or not at all if their kids were young enough, “It's like our parents' lives,” he told Lee, exulting.

“No,” she said. “No, it won't be.”

Maureen Reardon, a middle-aged schoolteacher who lived next door, came over as soon as Jim and Lee's moving van had left. She brought over her home-baked brownies and a brimming basket of the vegetables her husband, Mel, grew in his backyard garden. She later told Jim that she had had no idea what kind of people this young couple might be, but the truth of it was, no matter what kind of woman the wife was, she sure as hell hoped that the husband wasn't a gardener. She knew how much time Mel spent in the garden he had dug up in the backyard, how much time he and his buddies in the neighborhood spent comparing notes about peat moss and the best way to get rid of woodchucks.

The fights she had with Mel were always about his garden. The last argument had been over forty dollars he had spent sending away for a praying mantis.

She loved Mel, but he could photograph his tomatoes and frame them for all she cared. She hated everything about gardening. There were always too many peaches from the trees. There was just so much broccoli she could sneak into the trash rather than trying to disguise it in another meat loaf, another pot of soup. She walked the aisles of the supermarkets and felt drawn to all the shiny canned vegetables, the frozen peas. She yearned toward the TV dinners with carrots all in one tin compartment.

She rang the bell of Lee and Jim's new house and waited. Lee in bared dirty feet and cutoffs, her hair shored back with a red ribbon, lazily pulled open the door. Her face was scrubbed and open. Maureen glanced back at her uncertainly. Surely she couldn't be this young. “Are you a niece?” she said finally. Lee scrunched up her brow.

“A niece?” she said. She rubbed one bare foot against her calf, scratching a slow circle, Her toenails were painted a chipping lavender. “Do you have the right house?” she said. “I'm Lee Archer. We just moved here.”

Maureen switched the basket to her other hip, “Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said lamely. Lee smiled. She poked a sudden small hand into the basket, dousing out the sweet crusty brownies, her rough skin handling the smooth, glossy tomatoes that Maureen's husband had once gotten up in the middle of a chilly night to cover lovingly with cheesecloth. “Jim,” Lee called in a high, shiny voice, and then Jim had wandered out, looking even paler and younger than Lee had. He had a comma of white paint on his smooth cheek, and his hands were hidden in baggy khaki pockets. His hair was much too long, his face much too innocent, and she looked at his hands, but he was wearing a wedding band, wider than his wife's, She worried for a minute about wild parties, and then Jim picked up a tomato and started genuinely admiring it, and that made her worry even more.

“You garden,” she said dully.

Jim shook his head. “My father's in supermarkets,” he said. “This is a good one. I can tell.”

“Ah,” Maureen said, relieved. She waited for an invitation inside. She was curious about how kids so young might furnish a perfectly good house, She tried to peer around Lee, but all she saw were poorly wrapped boxes. “If you need anything, I'm right next door,” she said.

She had waited, but neither Lee nor Jim ever came over, though Jim would sometimes wave hello on his rush to class.

A few more neighbors dropped by, especially as more and more of the summer vegetables from their own makeshift gardens came in. Jim was always grateful for the food. It depressed him to shop in supermarkets. He couldn't walk down an aisle or hold a can without thinking of his father and missing him. Every time he saw a grocer in a white coat, his heart bumped and lurched.

There were barbecues that first summer. Someone strung up a badminton net for the adults to bat a birdie back and forth before they sat down to icy gin and tonics, to salads and burgers. Although Jim and Lee were invited, they never showed. Jim was always at class, and Lee kept to herself.

Jim meant to be sociable. He thought about taking up golf, about walking across the street one night and offering to play the winner in the nightly badminton game. But he woke at six, and by the time he got home all he wanted was to be with Lee. He meant to, but he saw the way Lee would sometimes stare at the women chatting in the street nights, watching their kids play, and the one time he saw her in conversation with a woman, she came home vaguely upset. “What's wrong?” he said, Lee gave him a blank stare. “She wanted to know if I wanted to go food shopping with her. She said she had recipes she could give me, too.”

“But that's nice,” Jim said.

He told her she didn't have to, but almost immediately Lee got a job waitressing at a small cafe called the Silver Spoon. Nights when Lee had to work, he got so lonely for her that he went to where she was. He brought a textbook with him to the restaurant. He could study, knowing she was there, a wisp in the corner of his eye. He loved watching her like that, as if he were seeing for the first time how surprisingly lovely she was, how quickly she moved. Her hair was twisted on the top of her head. At night she would pluck out the pins, complaining that the weight of all the yellow hair gave her headaches. She wore white sneakers and a short white dress starched like paper. He came into the restaurant, happy and embarrassed, but the look Lee sometimes flashed him was not always one of welcome. He settled into a blue vinyl booth, fiddling with the menu, settling his books, and when Lee came by she frowned. “You can't just sit there,” she whispered. “You have to order something.” So he ordered a steak sandwich he didn't really want, a dessert cake dewy with butter. He cut things up and rearranged them on his plate. He kept ordering, making the time stretch out.

The Silver Spoon filled up gradually. One night he saw people waiting, watching his table with hard angry eyes, and he flagged Lee down, about to order something else, but then she fluttered his bill on the table. “Please go,” she said wearily. “It makes me too nervous having you here.”

“Nervous, why?” he said.

“Nobody else's boyfriend's waiting on them.”

He looked at the three other waitresses. None of them was paying him any attention. One held a length of dirty dishes along one arm, She smiled down at her shoes.

“Am I a boyfriend?” he said.

“Well, you know what I mean,” Lee said. “None of them are married, that's why I said that.”

He took out some bills. “I'll come get you at closing time,” he told her, He scattered two dollars too much for her tip. When he left, one of the people waiting for his table, a young girl in a glittered pink sweatshirt and jeans, hoisted out a haughty hip and glared at him.

Perhaps it was because they were so young themselves, but their connection to the neighborhood would be with the kids. It was Jim the kids noticed first. They watched him. One night a few young boys were sitting on the dusty curb, stamping down on caps, waiting for the sharp lightning pops of electricity, the thread of acrid smoke. They saw Jim come out onto his porch with his telescope.

“You want to take a look here?” Jim called. One of the boys dug a disgusted toe into the dirt, as if Jim had suggested he eat one of the pale translucent worms roiling up the dirt in Mel's vegetable garden. The kids disbanded, disappearing back into the night.

One night, though, Jim saw a boy staring at him. Jim stared back. He had seen this kid before, a small scrappy redhead dressed like a little old man. He swam out of red plaid bermudas, his short-sleeved white shirt was carefully buttoned to the throat, and most curious of all were the tiny wingtips he had on. He couldn't be more than ten. David. That was his name. Jim remembered hearing it one day when some kids on the street were teasing him. David was slower than the other kids, His speech sometimes slurred, and when he ran, his legs tangled him into a heap.