Louisa Meets Bear (7 page)

A week later, you let yourself into my room with the extra key we had made for you. It's early morning, not quite light, and I am still asleep. I open my eyes and look at your face. I haven't seen you since you punched the wall. Already I have slept with Andrew.

You're wearing a green sweater and in the gray light it looks as though the muscles have wilted from your face. Your mouth is loose and your eyes are drooping. You look post-operative, like someone whose chest has been torn open so a surgeon can tamper with his heart.

You sit on the edge of my bed, and I take your hand. For a long time, we don't talk. I stroke your hand over and over. Then you lay your head on my chest and I stroke the angel wings in your back.

I kiss your hair. You sob, wetting the sheets and my skin. I pull you into the bed with me, shoes and all. I am crying too. When we make love, it is hard to tell which of us is making what kind of sound.

Afterward, you prop yourself on an elbow and study my face. “Your eyes are crooked,” you say.

“Thanks for telling me.”

“They are. And you have a pimple on your chin.” You stare at me as though you are studying a map. “There are a dozen other girls on this campus who'd take up with me in two minutes, a lot of them a hell of a lot less morose than you.”

I run my hands over your enormous arms. All you'd have to do to end your misery is press your thumb to my windpipe and snuff out my breath.

“Don't cut me off,” you say. “Do what you have to do, but don't cut me off.”

I draw you into my arms, spider and prey.

*   *   *

It's a hot May day when my father calls to explain about the conference in Helsinki and the paper he's presenting on variations in the architecture of the genetic code and how he must have completely overlooked my graduation when he promised to attend. I hold the phone from my ear as he gives me the details. Outside, everything is a Technicolor green. Two bare-chested boys throw a yellow Frisbee on the lawn. A girl in an apple-red T-shirt reads with her back against a tree. My father has never visited me here, never met you. Listen, you brat, I say to myself. He paid for your four years here. It's too late for a pity party.

I place the phone closer to my ear and wait for a break in my father's stream of words. “Fine, Dad, no problem, no big deal.”

“I sent you a little present in the mail. It's not much, but it's the best I can swing for now.”

Although you think Andrew buys me the car, I buy it with my father's check, which arrives two days later. On a bulletin board at the Wawa market, I see a file card for a used Datsun wagon, $650. Because I do not want to ask either you or Andrew to drive me to the owner's house eight miles outside of town, I buy the car sight unseen.

The week before graduation, I mail my books and three cartons of winter clothes to Corrine. I call the dean's office and arrange for my diploma to be sent to my father's address. I leave you a note that I am going to Ocean City, Maryland, to look for a job.
Please believe me
, I write.
I am going alone. I hear it's easy to get a job if you get there before Memorial Day. My father canceled coming to graduation and everything has turned so complicated that I no longer want to wear robes and go through the ceremony.
I add,
I love you. I know that sounds crazy but I do
. Then I telephone Andrew, who I think is in Martinique for the week, to leave a message on his machine.

A girl answers the phone. “I'm housesitting for Andy,” she says and then giggles. “Is there a message?”

*   *   *

I remember only a few things from the three weeks I spend in Ocean City before you arrive. I remember driving in from the north that first night, past the white high-rise condominiums, past the seafood restaurants that line the highway in the center of town, into the original resort of peeling clapboard houses, little stores with umbrellas and beach towels and suntan lotions, and then, at the south side of town, a honky-tonk boardwalk with rides and haunted houses and, at the end, a pier.

I don't remember how I find the room in Mrs. Ford's boardinghouse, whether there is a vacancy sign in the window or an ad in the paper, only that Mrs. Ford is wearing nylon support knee-highs under her sandals, her white hair so wiry you can see each strand. “I'm not going to lie,” she says about the room, “it gets hot up here. But then you get the best view in the house.” I peer out the small window. In the dark, I can't tell what I am looking at.

“My Harry loved this room the best,” Mrs. Ford says. “He'd always say, ‘Don't rent that attic one.' Mornings, I'd find him sitting up here staring out, he'd say, at the blue, blue sea.”

When I wake, sunshine is splattered over the bed, across the little desk at the window and around the pile of my typewriter, suitcases, satchels, and book bag. In the morning light, I can see that the floor, scrubbed until the wood is almost white, slopes toward the door. It's like being on a ship. From the bed, I can hear the gulls and smell the salt air and the residue of things being fried. Standing at the window, I can see Harry's blue, blue sea.

By noon, I have a job at Mattie's Schnitzel Haus, a German restaurant twelve blocks to the north. Arlene, the hostess, interviews me. “Ever waitressed before?” she asks.

“No,” I admit. Arlene looks me over and then smiles. “Well, at least you're honest. Most girls come in here with baloney stories about having worked for some uncle in his French restaurant in Baltimore.” She wets her lips and then pulls them back to check in her reflection on the chrome cash register that she has no lipstick on her teeth. “I'll give you a try. Just remember, mornings and lunches, this is a family place—pancakes, eggs, burgers, and Monte Cristos. Lots of kids, lots of spilled Aunt Jemima's. After dark, we get the middle-aged crowd. Then we do steaks and seafood and the German theme stuff: Mattie's Wiener schnitzel, apple dumplings, that kind of thing. Thursdays through Sundays, there's a three-piece cha-cha band and Mattie's wife sometimes sings. Dinner's served till twelve, but you don't get out till two since you got to do the breakfast setup. Night's the good money, but if you're fast on your feet you'll do all right on the seven-to-three too. And don't tell anyone I hired you without experience.”

The first night, I spill ice water in someone's lap and keep two tables waiting over an hour for their dinners. The cook, an old albino guy with skin so pale it hurts to look at, yells at me, and when a lady asks, “What exactly is the Wiener schnitzel?” I realize I have no idea. The second night, a man with an open shirt and lots of gold displayed against his chest hairs pinches my butt and a woman screams when I serve her a lobster platter with a cigarette butt smashed in the claw. A few days later, they give me the breakfast-lunch shift, and I slip in the kitchen, the plates crashing around me, egg yolks running yellow down my calves and blood from my palms staining the white uniform.

I want to cry, everything hurts so much, but I feel too humiliated to let the tears come. “What did I slip on?” I whisper as Arlene peels a butter pat from the bottom of my shoe and Mattie starts to yell, “Who the fuck is dropping butter? What you trying to do, kill this gal?” One of the other waitresses wipes syrup off my knees with a warm damp cloth, and the cook hands me a plastic cup with some whiskey in it and says, “All right, kid. Just take it easy.” I swig. My heartbeat slows.

“You're christened, love,” Arlene says. “A bona fide waitress.”

*   *   *

Then, one lunchtime, I look up and you are there, sitting big and beaming in a T-shirt and shorts at one of my tables. You're suntanned and your arms look like tree trunks. For a moment, I feel irritated that you've just arrived without giving me any notice, but then you wink at me, raising your eyebrows in mock appreciation of my legs, and I smile.

I pretend you're one of my customers and bring you coffee and a menu. “How'd you find me?” I ask.

“You said a German place. Lots of Wiener schnitzel in Cincinnati.” And so we resume, without the bother of words or discussion about the terms of our arrangement: why you, who should be beginning a training program at a Wall Street bank, are running a beach stand; why I, who should be, well, I don't know quite what but something other than carting platters of sauerbraten. Nor do we mention Andrew (off somewhere, Peru would be my closest guess), Andrew by then mostly an idea, an idea linked with a fantasy of exotic adventure: the medina in Tangier, the casino on Lido, a train cutting through the Andean clouds.

You move in with the younger brother of an Ivy Club friend, a skier and party kid from the University of Colorado who through a college buddy of his own landed a job at a fancy restaurant, the kind of place you hate, with a circular drive and valet parking,
JACKET AND TIE REQUIRED FOR OUR GENTLEMEN GUESTS.
The apartment is a summer version of a fraternity house, with girlie posters on the walls, the bathroom a swamp of wet towels, the refrigerator empty except for beer and packets of sweet-and-sour sauce. When I stay with you, which is most nights, I bring my own towel and carry a roll of toilet paper.

Within days, you have fallen into a routine. You paint your nose with zinc oxide, grab your fins from under the bed, and then walk to the corner, where you buy a pile of newspapers, two carry-out coffees, black and sweet, and three cherry Danish. You blow up the rafts, lay out the beach chairs, and stack the umbrellas. After the flurry of morning customers, you settle into whichever of the rental chairs is left to read the papers and have your breakfast. Midday, you get someone to watch the stand while you bodysurf for an hour: in and out of the water, your arms flung straight before you, your concentration as complete as the hour when you study the stock pages. Days that I work the dinner shift, I man the stand for you—watch you skim the waves, sometimes thirty yards or more before you crash into the sand, picking yourself up, shaking the stones out of your swim trunks, pushing your hair from your eyes, squinting to see if I am watching, and then grinning at me before you head back into the sea.

The night you arrive, we make love. For me, it is as it has always been between us since that first morning in your dorm room: languorous, satisfying in a more reverent way than Corrine and I had imagined sex might be. Afterward, you lie on your back with an arm stretched out as a bolster for me. You stare at the ceiling while you talk. “I feel like an animal with you,” you say.

I turn on my stomach so I can see your face. I touch your cowlick. “Why is that?”

“Because I want you in this primal way. You're pining after some other guy. And yet here I am. It's like eating the leftovers off somebody's plate.”

You crinkle your nose in disgust. “It's amazing, fucking amazing. Laney's old man has offered me a training position at Lehman Brothers as a trader starting whenever I'm ready. Those guys are making eighty, ninety grand their first year, upwards of two hundred by the second. Carrie Carston, who's probably sitting on ten million just from her trust fund, has been chasing me all spring, inviting me to visit her at her family's place outside of Rome, sending me perfumed letters, and yet here I am in Ocean City, Maryland, with no money, no plans, blowing up rafts just to have some crumbs of your time.”

You laugh. It's a cruel laugh, mocking of both of us. In that moment, I can see that you hate me as much as you love me. I think of Carrie Carston, who was in my sophomore English class, always dressed in a pastel cardigan and a white turtleneck, little pearls in her earlobes, always, it seemed, in tandem with some other similar-looking girl. Carrie was considered a catch—a rich, popular, cute girl, petite with big breasts and hair cut like Dorothy Hamill—but I know that for you, she seems shallow and somehow ordinary, that what you are smitten with in me is my foreignness to you, that you don't know the authors I read or the painters I admire or the places I've traveled with my father. You say it's the length of my limbs, that I am, you say, “a long, cool drink of water I can't get to the bottom of,” and although it sounds both vain and simpleminded, I have to admit to thinking that you are right, that something about my arms and legs makes me elusive, that the nineteenth-century physiognomists understood but then overstated something true about how our bodies form the outlines of our selves—that with my kind of fingers and neck I had to aspire to a certain kind of thought, just as you, with your towering height and bouldering shoulders, had to find a trail and blaze your way through, that my body would no more allow me to giggle like Carrie Carston than yours would permit you the footnoted shuffle of James.

You want what is at the bottom of the glass but I want what you have, what my father had in his youth: a belief that one can find a path and fashion a life by sticking to it. I long for your faith in an order to the world, the analog to my father's faith in science. My father's faith was born and bred in his skin—not shared by his father, not passed on to me. Now my father complains that science has become no more than a cog in the technocratic machine—the romance of Crick and Watson buried under anxiety about grant applications, the degree of specialization having reached such absurd proportions that a developmental embryologist will look at my father, now classified in the annals as a theoretical geneticist, as though he were talking Urdu.

After this, after you paint us as the cruel mistress and her dog, you sleep curled around me but we don't make love. Each night you climb into bed in a pair of clean gym shorts; I keep on my bikini underwear. You breathe with deep even sounds, your arms folded over my breasts. Often, I lie awake, staring out the window, listening to the sound of the waves hitting the shore. I think we could be Hansel and Gretel huddled under a tree. I think I am the wicked witch and you are Hansel trapped in my garden. Bound in the lock of your arms, I think you are the wicked witch and I am Gretel caught in your cage.