Lost Between Houses (19 page)

All in all, I had a pretty good time at dinner, these guys talking about girls and God and Matthew Arnold in the same sentence. And then we did that thing where everybody goes for coffee and tea down the hall. Sort of formal and old-fashioned, but I dug it. I thought to myself, man if I went here, I’d be completely happy. I just liked the feel of the place. It was like you were in the house of God where you just knew to behave.

Anyway we went back to Harper’s room. We were sitting around listening to the stereo when the divinity guy came by. He started rolling a joint.

“I don’t know,” Harper said, sort of frowning.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m a big boy.”

So we lit up a big joint. First time ever. Smoke drifting around the room, smelling like hay. Course to tell you the truth, nothing
happened. I mean like we smoked the whole thing, right down to burning my fingers and then I sat back, the other two going pretty quiet on me, so much so I was reluctant to speak.

“Like am I supposed to feel anything yet?” I asked.

At which the divinity student laughed. But they didn’t have a whole lot to say.

So I stared at the candle flame and waited for something to happen. And nothing did. So since it looked like nobody was going to say fuck-all and nobody was going to get up and do fuck-all either, I stretched out in my chair, my head going about two hundred miles a minute, and rubbed my eyeballs. You rub your eyeballs and some pretty wild geometric stuff starts happening, like exploding triangles and pentangles coming out of other pentangles and I thought to myself, boy, somebody should invent a camera that would project this stuff onto a screen because there’s no way I’m going to be able to
describe
this to anybody. Which I was about to comment on when I started thinking about something else. Problem is, no matter what I thought about, it always ended up sort of a bummer, like it always landed on the wrong foot. Like I was thinking about our summer cottage. I was thinking about Sandy Hunter walking along the street that first day we drove through Huntsville, this pretty girl at the side of the road, her blond hair moving just a bit in the wind. And then I started to miss it, like miss that very moment of me and my mom and Harper driving through town, like it was gone forever, like I could never have it back again. And it hurt me so much, I mean I could feel it, like a sinking in my stomach. Quite involuntarily I let out a groan.

“What is it?” Harper said.

“Nothing,” I said and then I moved onto some other stuff. But it didn’t matter where I went that night, it always hurt me,
and after awhile I sat up in this room full of fucking zombies and said, “I have to split.”

There was this kind of stoned laughter from across the room. I got to my feet, which took a long time indeed, and then I got to the door, which took about a summer and half too.

Harper walked me downstairs to the main door. We shook hands, which was a bit solemn but seemed like the right thing to do. And then I was out in the night air, the stars very bright over my head, going up through Philosophers’ Walk. I just walked and walked, I had this terrible ache in my heart, it was like I was so unhappy I could just burst. Everything seemed so sad and everything I’d ever done had fucked up and I just felt like I was a tiny, squeaking mouse in a big cold house.

I walked up onto Bloor Street and I went west, under the high walls of Varsity Stadium, university kids bouncing along the sidewalk toward me, all noisy and scary and extremely insensitive. Me hoping that some pretty girl would come along, she would see in my eyes all the wonderful things I am, she would just
know.
And she’d take me to a cottage in the woods, a small wooden cottage with a stone chimney where she lived with her father and I’d go inside, you could smell the wood burning in the fireplace, and I’d sit down by the fire and I’d be warm and safe forever and ever.

Instead of which I suddenly realized I was famished. It was like I hadn’t eaten for fucking days. I was so hungry, so desperate for a hamburger that my heart just leapt with excitement when I realized I had enough money to get one. I hurried across the street into Harvey’s. There was a guy in front of me wearing one of those team baseball jackets. Had his girlfriend with him. A real hairdresser. Teased hair, fuzzy blue sweater. Excellent at a drive-in with her jeans around her ankles but you don’t want
her writing your law boards. Anyway I was too fucking hungry to wait my turn so I sort of threw my order over this guy’s shoulder just as he got to the counter.

“A cheeseburger and a glass of milk!” I hollered.

Nothing happened for a second, but then the guy turned around with an expression on his face like he’d just stepped in a dog turd.

“Fuck you,” he said. And waited for me to say something back.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t notice you there.”

A bit feeble, I know, but better than a punch in the mouth, which was just around the corner.

He stared at me for a second longer, just to be sure I got the message, and then cooled it. But I’ll tell you, it rattled me good. Made me feel sort of sordid, like I’d done something really bad, worse, like I
was
somebody really bad, some kind of creep covered in dog poo and spider webs. I mean that was the thing about that night, after I smoked that shit. It felt like everything I’d ever done in my life was like completely insane, like some guy going across a checkerboard and every other fucking square except the one he’s on is just nuts. Like how could I have been such an asshole for so many years? Jesus, it was too much. I ended up back at the dorm holding my head, rocking myself back and forth, just wanting the whole fucking thing to stop.

T
HANKSGIVING
I went up north to the cottage. You could feel the snow in the air, the leaves had fallen off the trees, summer looked like it was never coming back. There was a strawberry bush out back all bare and shivering in the wind. It was really something.

I got the same cab driver I had that time I came home from Scarlet’s. That sort of set me off because I burst into tears when I got in the front door of the house. My mother put her arms around me and I sobbed away, bubbles coming out of my mouth like I was a little baby.

“I’m going to kill myself,” I said, “I’m going to take a big piece of glass and cut my throat with it, I am,” which was definitely not a cool thing to say to my mother, things being what they were.

“Promise me,” she said, sitting me down at the kitchen table and looking right into my eyes, even holding my chin to be sure I looked at her, “Promise me that if you ever even think of doing something like that, you’ll call me. Promise me.”

“I will,” I said.

“No, promise. Cross your heart. Let me see you.”

“I will,” I said, sort of weary and worried that I’d upset her. I mean she had her own problems up there with the old man, who stayed in the living room, by the way, reading a book.

So we sat around in the kitchen and talked about Scarlet. Sometimes I felt really good, like all the poison was gone from my body and I’d say, “I feel a lot better now,” and my mother sort of smiled, but carefully like she was holding onto something, and about twenty minutes later I’d start feeling shitty again. It was like dirty water seeping back into the tub. And then I’d start all over again, going around and around in my head until I thought I’d turn into butter just like those tigers I read about when I was a kid.

Once I went for a walk down by the ravine, all the grass grey and flattened. I went down to our little creek, I stood there for a moment looking down into the water thinking about Scarlet, thinking about her coming back to me and when I did, I felt this gust of exhilaration. It just went straight up through me.

That night when I went to bed, I lay there for a long time in my room, the blue one with the cowboys on the wall, listening to the floors crack and squirrels and mice running around behind the walls. It was like a great big living thing, this house. And then the furnace went on. You could hear it go click and then it was like the whole place was breathing, breathing and looking after me. When I was little my mother never wanted me to go to sleep unhappy, even if we’d had a fight, and sometimes, even behind my father’s back, she’d creep up into my room and give me a kiss and tuck me in. Which is what she did that night. I rolled over and looked at her in the dark. She stroked my face.

“My darling,” she said, “if there was only something I could do. Something to help you.”

She looked at me for a moment.

“I love you so much,” she said. “I love you so much it scares me.”

I took the train back to school on Monday night. I was in the
compartment alone. Opposite me was a photograph but for a long time I didn’t notice it. I was kind of wandering around in my head as if there was a problem I could solve, if I just looked at it the right way. But it was the same old maze, same old rat track and I never got anywhere new. Scarlet was gone, that’s as far as my thinking ever got me.

Anyway, you know how you can look at something without seeing it? I was thinking about that time when Scarlet stood on her tippy-toes and her shirt came out. I should have kissed her stomach, I thought, I should have done more with Scarlet, kissed her more, felt her up more. I mean I thought she was going to be around forever, so there was no hurry. If I had her now, boy the stuff I’d do to her.

So there I was, wandering around in never-never land when the fog cleared and I found myself still staring eye level at this photograph. It was a picture of a beach with a yellow hotel way in the background. And something about it, the feel I guess, reminded me of that time when I went on a holiday to St Petersburg with my mother. We rented a house by the sea. Tall grass, sand dunes, sea gulls flying around overhead and there’s a picture of me, I don’t know who took it, I’m out on the beach and I’m feeding the seagulls, there’s a whole bunch of them around me, one just taking a piece of bread out of my hand and I’m kind of laughing and cowering all at the same time, my mother in the background, lying on a deck chair, sunglasses on, her shirt tied at the waist. And looking at that picture, it made me miss those times so much it was like the bottom of my stomach fell out. I was just aching for it all, to be back there, the sun on my head, feeding the gulls. And it seemed like such a long, long time ago, sort of cruel that it was all
so gone.
And I thought to myself, if I can just get back there, back to that beach and stand
out there again in the sand, I’ll be happy. I can have it all back again. And then it occurred to me that I could, that I could run away and go all the way down there. I could do it on my own. Just like that night when I came down to see Scarlet. And just thinking about it filled me with this sort of strange excitement. It gave me something to look forward to, something to stop me thinking about Scarlet the whole time.

By the time I got back to my dormitory that night, I knew what I was going to do.

“You know what?” I said to E.K.

He was reading in his bed, propping that small perfect head on his hand while he flipped through a
Life
magazine.

“What?” he said, not looking up. E.K. was getting used to me by now.

“I’m going to run away.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“Texas.”

I knew they’d shake him down when I left and he’d tell. That way I’d throw them off my trail.

“What are you going to do down there?” he asked, all casual, still flipping through his magazine.

“I’m going to get some family that’s lost a kid and get them to adopt me.”

“You’re going to get in a lot of shit.”

“I don’t care.”

“Easy to say now. They’ll probably expel you.”

“I don’t care. I’m leaving first.”

I have to admit, the notion of getting expelled slowed me down a bit. But I thought of that picture again, of me out there on the beach under that hot sun, and it sent tingles through my body.

“When are you going to go?” he asked.

“Soon,” I said, all mysterious. “Soon.”

So for the next three days, I walked around school with my big secret. It was like having a ball of sunshine in my head. Nothing mattered because I was leaving.

I had a problem in my chemistry class. Only got half a project done before the teacher, a tall, well-dressed queer, Mr Bonnyman, told me to hand it in.

“It’s not quite done, sir.” I said

“Hand it in now or you get zero.”

I thought for a second about that beach way down in Florida and a sort of smile came quite involuntarily over my face.

“I’ll take the zero, sir.”

That sure turned some heads, me sitting in the back, pretending not to notice, not wanting to further provoke the teacher, just doodling in my book, my insides just sparkling with sunshine, like it was bouncing off water.

I went down to announcements, Pyscho down there, going on about something, how to improve ourselves no doubt, this from a guy who stayed away exactly four years after he graduated and ran back here fast as he could. Guy’d crawl up his mother’s ass if she’d let him back in, all dressed up in his black gown, like he’s a don at a real English university, me thinking, none of this matters any more, doesn’t matter what this guy thinks of me, I’m free of it all.

And then it was time. I just knew it. I waited until ten o’clock, until lights out, I even got in bed. I lay there for awhile, and then when the place got real silent, I threw back the covers and turned on the bedside light.

“You going?” E.K. said, propped up on his hand again, naked shoulders with freckles, and white, white skin. Hair neatly combed. He combed it before he got into bed.

“Yeah.”

I pulled my suitcase from under the bed and started whipping things into it. All sorts of things, shirts, socks, two hairbrushes, two sports jackets, cufflinks, a school tie, three pairs of shoes, I mean just bullshit, I’d never been away from home, even my bronze broad-jumping medal, and then when the thing was fatter than a corned beef sandwich, Dick Ainsworth, the junior house master, walked in.

“What are you doing, Albright?” he said, looking at the suitcase.