Lone Star (52 page)

“It is actual love,” he says when she remarks upon this. “I've been trying to seduce you with song since the first moment I opened my mouth.”

That can't be. First time he opened his mouth was on the smelly train.

He says nothing.

“You didn't sing.”

“I thought you'd call for the conductor, have me thrown out. I wooed you in other ways.”

“Wooed me? Hardly.”

“Are you here with me now, or aren't you?”

She laughs at him as if he's the main act at the Comedy Store. “You think I'm here because of the things you said to me on the Liepaja train?”

“Did you abandon your life and come with me to Miramare, a thousand miles away from dumb Barcelona, or didn't you?”

They nestle, marry, join, conjoin, smelt and melt, solids, liquids, air, all material things, all ephemeral things, the spirit and the flesh in the hillside hotel with the castle outside their open door, the rippling sea, the marble clouds, and inside, their enraptured entwined bodies.

If I didn't sing, he asks, would you still love me?

She is half-conscious, her heart fractured, her mouth parched;
she doesn't answer, not because she doesn't know, but because she can't speak.

I think you would, he says. Do you know how I know? His fingers trace the outline of her breasts, circle her raw nipples, caress her neck, her hips, her lips.

She doesn't answer. She is on the fainting bed.

“Because you don't sing,” he whispers. “And yet I love you.”

Spooned together in one of the twin beds, they gaze at the castle on the rocky highlands. “You think,” he says, “that the archduke built Miramare on a peninsula thrust into the sea, so that his bride could have an incomparable view of Trieste and Croatia on one side and Grado and Venice on the other. But what you don't know from where we lie, is that you can stand on a hill anywhere on the lower Adriatic and see our miraculous castello in the hazy distance. Anywhere. The view is of the castle, not the other way around.” He lowers his voice to a husk. “The view is of us.”

He promised her he would show her the famed castle grounds, that they would walk amid the rows of juniper and spruce. Reluctantly she dons her Polish coral love dress, finally less absurd, and they head out past the lemon trees to the temperamental sea, blue one minute like a robin's egg, malachite green the next.

There is a café in the lush but unkempt garden. It serves speck-filled baguettes, pasta with sauce, and giant cannoli. It has tables by the seaside under the overgrown trellis gazebo. The thousands of cats living in the garden are underfoot begging for food. Chloe and Johnny eat quickly. They want to go swim. And other things. But she has to admit, it's nice to sit out here with him, al fresco, just the two of them, holding hands, making small talk, giggling in postcoital embarrassment (her not him).

“Tell me,” Johnny says, “is Mason the first boy you've been with?”

“Yes, of course,” she says, and hesitates, which he catches because he catches everything. She doesn't want to tell him the truth, how naïve she is, how unsullied. It wasn't for lack of trying. She was afraid of getting caught in the backseat of Mason's mother's car like they were that one time behind Subway when they almost went all the way but not quite, and there was never a bed, because Burt was never out of the house, and neither was Lang. She wants Johnny to think she is not a child. That she's done things, knows things.

“First boy for everything?”

“Not the first boy I've kissed,” she says, a little bristly even though she's eating the cannoli cream he's feeding her with his fingers.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. There've been others. I'm not a neophyte.”

Leaning forward he licks a bit of cream from the corner of her mouth. “You think I want you to have more experience?”

That is a stumbling block. She certainly thinks so, but from his expression she guesses the answer is no.

“Who else was there?”

“Nobody.” She starts to clean up their mess, feeding scraps to the begging cats. She wants to go. She tries to change the subject, but Johnny won't let her.

“Why so secretive, princess? Divulge away.” They pull in their metal chairs. “What does it matter to me who it was? I don't know anybody from your high school. Do I?” Why is he smiling like that?

She divulges nothing as she throws their garbage into the trash. She doesn't even breathe, in case her breathing gives her away. He relents, has mercy on her. Pursues her in other ways, lets this one drop. “Do you want to go swimming?”

“God, yes.”

They giggle about waiting an hour after eating, an old
wives' tale. When she asks where the beach is, he laughs. “Right here.” He points to the pedestrian path off the highway, and she repeats her question, and he points again. “We plunge into the sea straight from the road. That's the Italian way.”

And they do, in a secluded spot under a ginkgo biloba and a palm tree, because Chloe has brought no bathing suit. He swims in his boxer briefs and she dives into the mild Adriatic in her red bra and blue polka-dot underwear, almost like a bikini, and the way Johnny gazes at her in the water, and grabs her, and kisses her, she might as well be not wearing anything.

Later, when he is briefly unconscious during a break between very late and very early, Chloe flies back down the years, to one June night with music and “She Will Be Loved” and dashboard lights and picnic tables hidden under awnings, and all the other kids doing something else, laughing somewhere else, and only Chloe and Blake by the barbecue grill near Hastings. He had been in charge of the grill, so they had gone together to clean it and close it up for the night and when they were done, they plopped down on the picnic bench and shared a beer in secret. They giggled, chewing mint gum to hide the smell of alcohol; they had to share the gum, too, because Chloe only had one stick.

Earlier the kids had bellowed songs that didn't sound like music, screaming, mangling the words. Chloe pretended she knew the words to “Billy, Don't be a Hero,” and Hannah and Blake sang “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and Mason sang “Two Out of Three Ain't Bad,” prophetic in retrospect, since there ain't no way he was ever gonna love her. It was nothing but screeching fun of fifteen-year-olds with little adult supervision, and a cooler full of beer that someone smuggled in and covered with Cokes, and they all drank and then sang even louder, and Blake was the one who had sung “She Will Be Loved.”

Chloe almost forgot that part, Blake singing it, wanting to make her feel beautiful. She has tried hard to forget. It is not even a memory anymore, but part of her identity: the smell of oak and cut grass, warm beer, mosquitoes feasting on her bare legs, and Blake on top of the picnic table as the chorus went around and around and around in the core of her soul. Back then, she didn't belong to someone else yet.

“She Will Be Loved.”

“She Will Be Loved.”

And later, after singing and cleaning the grill and polishing off a can of Bud, they were sitting at the table arguing like always, debating the construction of verbals or the best way to catch a bass, or the perfection of roses. There was no one nearby, it was dark. The multicolored string lights draped over the tent sparkled like dim stars. They were straddling the bench in the furthest edge of the common, snug between the Hastings wall, the corner of the lit-up tent and the narrow passageway that led to the rear gate. Chloe might have said something like you and Hannah looked so cute together singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” . . . when Blake said turn around, bright eyes, leaned forward, head bent, and kissed her lingeringly on the mouth. He hardly even had to lean forward. She blamed it on sitting too close and that wicked half can of beer. They had been nearly chest to chest, face-to-face, forearms touching on the table, casual, intimate, laughing, arguing, and close, and the kiss was drunken and long and open. His hands went in her hair. Her body went weak.

Someone dropped a tray of cups a few feet away, there was a drumroll, a loud saxophone, a mob of cackling taunting teenagers. He pulled away. There was barely a blink exchanged between them after the open lips and tilted faces.

One long slow blink, maybe. But that was all.

He got up to go help, and she tottered over to the clearing to find the others, Hannah, and Taylor and Mackenzie and Mason, and Madison and Megan. Hannah said what were you doing
over there alone with Blake, and Chloe said I don't know what you mean. They started playing capture the flag, as if it hadn't already been captured.

As it turned out, no it had not, because a few minutes later Hannah dragged Blake away with her under the trees, and Chloe was left alone. That's when Mason took her hand. That summer, the four of them fell into another rhythm, one where the tall slender blonde beauty made time with the brawny, scruffy, completely dear giant, and the mousy girl with the bangs, the breasts, and the silent passions ended up with the unexpected prize of the jock, the all-star, and the tri-county batting champion.

Chloe and Blake never spoke of that night, and he never looked at her like that again, or sat close to her, or paused between sentences, or tilted his head, or anything. She was his brother's girl, and that was that. Talk about a heavy castle door falling shut in the distance across the moat.

After many months the image faded: stumbling around the commons by herself after Hannah had pulled Blake away to the distant birches, Chloe's mouth swollen from the bruising of his open crazy kiss. Stumbling around until Mason took her hand.

Why didn't she want to confess any of this to Johnny in the violet silence?

Maybe because she didn't want him to say, the wrong guy took your hand. Because it wasn't true. It had been just an impulse, a kid thing, not real. Mason was real. Hannah was real.

When he is up, Johnny never stops talking, joking, humming, strumming, moon gazing, navel too, philosophizing, proselytizing, copying, originating, prophesying. He keeps calling himself her eternal footman. He keeps saying their carnal love has been attained.

There are caresses, kisses, embraces. There is whistling, madness in the bed, there is anguish and weeping into sleeves and bare arms and handkerchiefs. Awake, he is the strongest most full-bodied, scarlet wine, all day and night, all the transitory minutes, a parade of rhythmic rhyming battalions, a million men in one boy body with incense and flame at the altar of her, as if Chloe is the one who makes Johnny holy, not the other way around.

Suddenly without any falling, there is a leap into sleep, one minute reciting the classics, singing Byron and Pope, the next on his back in the lilac petals of lullabies, gentle, peaceful, not a collapse, just off. OFF.

Like a switch of life.

One moment a spectacle, an orgy, the next pale silence. Barely even breathing.

He is tough to awaken.

Up all the livelong hours of the insane night, then lifeless. Mute lips, dull eyes, candle wax drying and cold.

When he wakes, his hands tremble. Pale of face he rises and vanishes, down the corridor, behind another door away from her, outside, he says, to smoke. Animation increases by degrees upon his return.