Night Kites (12 page)

Mom said, “Take me right home.”

I said, “Let me off in the village. I don’t want to go home. I had my arm around Jack because he’s breaking up with Nicki!”

“Don’t bother to explain anything to him,” Mom said.

“That’s right!” said Dad. “Keep me in the dark, where I’ve been all the while
you
raised the family!”

“I’m getting out right now!” I said.

“Not in the pouring rain, Erick!” Mom said.

But I was out the door before she finished the sentence.

I could hear Dad shout, “Let him go!”

I went.

“Y
OU’RE SOAKING WET,” NICKI
said.

“I hitchhiked here.”

“Through a driving rain just to be at my side?”

“Something like that.”

There was a cigarette dangling from her lips, and behind her, down a long hall, I could see the bar, and a red neon sign that said “This Bud’s For You!” … A couple of Siamese cats scurried past me.

“Come this way,” she said. “That’s Three, Six, and Nine who just went by. They were Mom’s cats. My Siamese is named Scatter.”

We made a right turn down the lobby, past Annabel’s Resale Shop, Nicki walking ahead of me. She had on a pair of black stirrup pants and a huge gold sweater the color of her hair, black Capezios, and in her right ear two black plastic circle earrings.

“I’ll dry your hair in my room,” she said. “They’re about to watch the game in the bar.”

“My hair will dry.”

“I want to dry it with my blower. You’ll look less like a water rat. Do you ever blow-dry your hair?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course not,” she said. “You don’t know what to do with yourself. You’ll like yourself, you’ll see.”

She led me up some spiral stairs past the front desk, saying, “Everything in this place is named after something of Edgar Allan Poe’s. My mother? She believed she was a reincarnation of him, only she told most people she was just related to him way back.”

“Once I memorized ‘The Raven’ for English,” I said. “‘Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.’”

“‘Once upon a midnight dreary,’” she said.

“‘While I wandered, weak and weary,’” I said.

“It’s
pondered,
not wandered. I
do
know my Poe!” she said. “I live right down here in the Dream Within A Dream suite…. Where were you, at church or something? You’re so dressed up.”

“St. Luke’s, with my family.”

“Welcome to my home,” she said. “Forget the rest of this place—this is where I hang out.”

To the left of the door there was a tarnished brass plaque that read:
All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.

“Bells, Bells, Bells is down the hall,” she said, “and The Raven is next to that.” She went ahead of me, turned around, and said, “Well, come on!” still smoking no hands.

The first thing I saw as I turned inside was an enormous poster of David Lee Roth. There were other, smaller posters covering all the walls: U2, David Byrne, Sting, Duran Duran, Wham!, Bruce Springsteen.

“Coat off!” she said, leaning over to grind out her cigarette in a seashell ashtray.

I took off my coat and she hung it over the back of a white wicker chair. A fat Siamese cat opened her crossed eyes to stare at me.

“Shirt off!” she said. “That’s Scatter on the chair.”

“My shirt’s not that wet,” I said.

“It’s soaking wet. Off!” she said.

I hated taking off my shirt. I felt like the “Before” picture in a Nautilus ad. I never had the build Jack had, or the muscles. I had freckles on my shoulders. Jack was like Dill, always tan from summer, way into fall. God knows what I had on my back besides freckles, too.

She hung my shirt and tie on a wire hanger over the doorknob of her closet.

“Kick your shoes off, too,” she said. “Shoes and socks.”

“What are
you
going to take off?” I said.

“Anything you say,” she said, and she took a small Gillette hand drier from the top of her bureau.

She pointed to an old brass bed with a white bedspread, “Sit down. I’m going to plug this in over here.”

Everything in the room was white—scatter rugs, table, desk, chairs, blinds, all white, and outside a thick white fog hovered against the windows, hiding the ocean, though you could hear its sounds. The room itself smelled the way things close to the sea do, sort of a salty, damp, and musty odor.

Right before she turned on the drier, I said, “Dill’s in Norton, Massachusetts, this weekend looking over the Wheaton campus.” I had no idea what made me say that.

She pointed the drier at me like someone holding a gun to my head.

“I don’t care where Marian Dilberto is this weekend,” she said flatly.

I laughed painfully. David Lee Roth gave me the eye from the wall.

I heard the sudden whir of the drier, felt her fingers in my scalp, and smelled that same perfume. First.

When she was finished, she handed me a small mirror from her dressing table and said, “Do you like yourself now?”

I nodded
yes.
I had to admit to myself I liked what I saw.

“Are you going to get stuck up now?” she said.

We were both grinning hard at each other. I was doing it the way you do it when you can’t stop yourself.

“You want me to take you on a tour of this place?” she said.

“Sure!”

“You want to follow me?” she said. “No, you don’t need your shoes or your shirt.”

“I’m half naked,” I said. “Don’t you have any guests?”

“Guests? Guests? What are guests?”

“Customers?”

“What are customers?” she said.

She reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet.

“You know how this place got its name? ‘I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea,’” she said; “‘But we loved with a love that was more than love—’”

“‘I and my Annabel Lee,’” I finished it for her. “I remember that from English too.”

“What would you do without English?” she said.

We were smiling at each other that same way again.

Smiling … but I was thinking what the hell am I even doing here?

If that question was on her mind, she never asked it.

Tacky, shabby, shitty, going to rack and ruin—those were the only words to describe Kingdom By The Sea, yet I could imagine that once it had been a crazy, fantastic place: mysterious and silly and rare. All the suites, like hers and Bells, Bells, Bells; The Raven; Helen; and The Black Cat, faced the ocean, while ordinary rooms with baths faced the Montauk Highway, with a courtyard separating them. In the center of the courtyard there was an old fountain Nicki said hadn’t worked in years, “But when it did, it was lucky, and people tossed pennies into it and made wishes. I loved that thing! I threw my whole allowance into it! When Daddy cleaned it out, I never took my pennies back because I thought my wishes wouldn’t come true if I did.” We were looking down on the fountain from a window in the hall on the third floor.

“What were your wishes?” I asked her.

“Oh, you know how kids are, what kids wish for.”

“I don’t know what kids like you wished for.”

“Kids like me? I wasn’t any different then.”

“So what’d you wish for?”

“Things. A doll. A bicycle. What I wished for and never got was a white horse. I got that from ‘Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross, To see a fine lady upon a white horse.’ See, I was her. Rings on her fingers, bells on her toes, et cetera.”

“‘She shall have music wherever she goes.’”

“English again?” She laughed.

Then she said, “If it wasn’t pouring out, I’d take you down there so we could read the inscription on the fountain. My mother was into inscriptions, among other flawed things. The inscription reads
Thou wast that all to me, love, For which my soul did pine
—
A green isle in the sea, love, A fountain and a shrine.
… My mother and Daddy had this thing between them where the earth moves? She was a lot younger than he was, a good fifteen years younger…. Want to go swimming?”

“Swimming?”

“Inside,” she said. “We’ve got a heated saltwater pool down the hall.”

It was called City By The Sea. There was a mural of New York’s skyline going all the way around the room, with this huge pear-shaped pool in the center. There were a lot of white wooden chairs with the paint peeling, minus their cushions, set around the pool, on a tile floor. Nicki went into the control room to get the filter and heat going, and I wondered if they’d added any chlorine to it lately; it looked a little too green.

“Is it going?” she shouted out to me. “I don’t want to turn it up too high, because it makes the TV in the bar jump when the power’s up.”

“It’s going!”

She came out and said, “See, they’re all watching the Colts in the bar.”

“I don’t follow football. Just local football.” I thought of Jack. I thought, Jesus, what the shit am I doing here with Jack’s girl?

“Daddy doesn’t have any bonds to cash in even if I did want to go to college, which I don’t. I just made that up. We’re practically bankrupt here.”

“A lot of people don’t go to college.”

“I made all that up about Daddy wanting to meet all of you before we all went into New York City, too.”

“Okay.”

We were both standing there staring down at the pool. The water was beginning to move.

“I knew that was what you all expected, that Daddy’d want to look you over.”

“Well, we’re not put into this world to live up to other people’s expectations,” I said. I’d seen that on some poster somewhere.

She put out the cigarette she was smoking in another seashell. “College would be more of the same. More pom-pom girls, more dumb crowds going everywhere together. Why does everyone travel around in packs?”

I was thinking, What the hell am I going to wear if we go swimming? I had jockeys on, and I knew what jockeys would look like wet.

“I don’t know why everyone travels around in packs,” I said.

“Like animals or something,” she said.

“Like packs of dogs. Dog packs.” I could just jump in in my pants.

“Like herds. Sheep.”

“Its security or something,” I said.

“Security. Is that what it is?” She reached down and pulled her sweater over her head.

I just stood there.

She didn’t have a bra on.

“Come on,” she said. “I’m not doing a striptease for your benefit. We’re going swimming, aren’t we?”

So we went swimming, naked, and after we swam around for a while, staying as far away from each other as possible, she swam underwater surfacing a heart-beat away from me, then putting her arms up around my neck, and I could feel her breasts against my chest.

“You’re going to drown me,” I said.

“Am I ever going to drown you!” she said. “Don’t you want me to?”

Somehow we got down to the shallow end, where we could touch, and that was what we did. We touched.

I could feel the softness of her lips and her body, and hear the sound of the rain on the sunroof over us.

“I forgot to turn on the music,” she said at one point. “I can flood this place with music.”

“Well, I’m hearing something that sounds like music,” I said.

“I’ll put the real music on later,” she said. “Much later … after I’m tired of you.”

I don’t remember it getting dark. It was just dark finally.

We sneaked through the halls carrying our clothes, shivering, running for her bed when we got down to her room, jumping under the covers wet, giggling, talking very softly to each other, though there was no reason to, almost whispering: It’s so late, it’s gotten so dark, nothing sentences said almost solemnly in low, gentle voices.

“What about your dad?” I said finally. I was thinking about my own, about Mom, too.

“Let me put a light on,” she said. “Let me buzz down and tell him I’ll be down soon.”

“What if he finds me here?”

“He won’t come up. He’s on the bar.” She snapped on a lamp. Scatter was sitting on the bureau, watching us with light-blue crossed eyes.

“Have you got a phone I can use?”

She pointed to it on the table beside the bed. “Come here first.”

Then she said, “I’m going to have to change those wet sheets. Oh, don’t go away, Erick. Not yet … not yet.”

I finally said I’d better make a phone call. Yes, she said.

I knew Mom would be worried.

Nicki got up and threw on a robe, and shouted something through a speaker on the wall about being hungry enough to eat a horse. “Oh, that’s what’s on the menu tonight? Horsemeat? Well, good!” She laughed…. She said, “Who’s been calling?
Who
?” and laughed again. Jack, I thought.

She said, “Make your call. Then I’ll walk you down.”

I pulled on my jockeys and my pants, and got into my shirt.

She brought my shoes and socks over to me, leaned down, and kissed me on the mouth.

I was trembling as I dialed.

Dad answered the phone.

“Erick? I’m sorry about my behavior.” I was light years away from his behavior. “There’s no excuse for it,” he said. Then he came up with one. “This whole business is more upsetting to me than I care to admit to myself…. The Neanderthal Man called several times.” He tried laughing it off.

“He probably just misses me,” I said. “You know how it is, Dad.”

“All right. I deserve that.”

“Tell Mom I’ll be there shortly.”

Nicki put my tie around my neck, slapped my hands away from it, and said, “Let me tie it.”

After she had it tied, she said, “Do you have to go?

“I have to go.”

We walked out into the hall and down the spiral staircase about as slowly as two people could walk. She asked me how I’d get home and I said I’d get home, not to worry.

In front of the door, I turned around and faced her. She had slippers on and the white robe, and I reached inside the robe and touched her.

“You want to get home, don’t you? You won’t get home that way.”

I started to say something about Jack, something about how I didn’t know how I could have let myself do what I did to Jack, but she shook her head no and put one finger to my lips, to hush me.

I caught her hand and then I let it go.