Out of the Blue (5 page)

I shut my mouth. Unheard of. I like to think it was because I was learning to respect a certain fatalistic inclination in Joe, but actually I was in kind of a hurry to see him in swim trunks. “Don’t we have to wait an hour?” I asked.

“That’s an old wives’ tale.”

I got up to retrieve my bag. “Well, I’m not an old wife, so let’s go. Do they have towels?”

“Everything we need.”

There were small locker rooms on the top floor. I changed into my swim suit and surveyed myself in the mirror. I didn’t look the same as I did before I got sick. My left leg wasn’t hanging quite straight and there was a softening in my limbs, a thickening particularly in my neck and around my waist, I suppose on account of the steroids. I once had an athlete’s body. I wished Joe could have seen me then. I turned my back on myself, grabbed a towel from the neat pile by the door and shoved against the heavy door that said
TO THE POOL
.

Joe had left the lights off, and a full moon, blurred at the edges by a film of condensation, shone through the skylight onto the water. On my way over on the bus, a cold rain was still spitting down. I felt as if Joe had banished the clouds and trotted out this glorious moon just for me.

Alone in the empty pool, he was doing laps with long slow strokes. His progress shivered the surface into a million fragments of light. Grateful for the chance to slip into the water before displaying myself so close to naked, I walked to the shallow end and gripped both sides of the ladder. When I do my pool-exercise classes at the “Y,” I always wear special rubber shoes, but I was damned if I’d bring them tonight. Better I crack my head open than look like a complete dork. This decision had prompted Ma, as I tossed the offending booties back in the closet, to point out my resemblance to the adolescents I’d presumably been providing with a sensible role model.

Oh, but the water felt good. It was cool, thank God, not that tepid brew that makes me light-headed, or worse, sometimes sends my legs into spasms. Gravity is my enemy, but in the pool I’m suspended. In time, too, as if the years of pain and disease are simply washed away.

I started for the other end where Joe had just come up. I swam toward him through liquid moonlight. I felt supple as a mermaid. He caught me as I touched the edge. It was shallow enough to stand, and with his hair slicked back and his face flickering with reflections, he looked elemental, exposed. We stood there for a moment, up to our shoulders in moonlight, staring at one another. Simultaneously, we reached out. Our kisses were long and deep. The muscles of his back slipped sleek under my fingers, and between my legs there was an urgency that seemed separate from the rest of me. As our kisses grew more demanding, he whispered, “Anna, Anna.” But I had lost myself and became simply a ferocious need. He helped me pull off my suit. My breasts slid bare against his chest, my mouth was greedy on his, my legs parted for him, and when I felt him drive deep inside, I heard myself say his name in a voice I didn’t recognize.

Then I was shuddering against him, and suddenly very cold. He picked me up and carried me to the edge, set me down there and retrieved my suit. He stood before me in the water for a moment, just looking up at me where I sat naked and trembling. He hoisted himself up, the sculpted planes of his face and body pale blue in the moonlight. He found our towels and wrapped us in them, leaving our feet to dangle in the water as if reluctant to make the inevitable retreat to dry land.

He got to his feet and pulled me up. With our arms around one another, we walked to the lockers, then separated to re-enter our dry clothing and perhaps some semblance of sanity.

We took the elevator in silence. Inside the apartment, Joe sat me down on his couch in the dark and went to get more towels. Then he dried my hair and watched me comb it straight.

“Mermaid,” he whispered.

I gave him a tiny ironic smile. “There was so much wrong with what we just did.”

He kissed me very gently.

“I have to go home,” I said.

“I’ll take you in a cab.”

I shook my head. “No.” It was my turn to kiss him. We kept our eyes open, looking into one another. “I can die now, Joe,” I told him. “You understand?”

He nodded and held me for a moment. Then I slipped out of his arms. When I left the building, I stood for a moment and stared up at the moon. It was perfectly round and glassy, like the monocle of some vast intelligence peering down at me. Not with judgment, merely curiosity, as if to say,
What were you thinking?

Well, I wasn’t, and that was about the only thing that seemed clear.

“So how was your date?” Ma asked. She always left the bakery in her assistant’s hands for an hour so she could bring me something hot from the oven for breakfast. Along with a steaming muffin, she shoved my vitamin C capsules at me. I take a thousand milligrams four times a day to keep my urine acidified. One bout with a catheter was enough to make a believer out of me, but this morning I truly almost forgot.

To my disgust and disbelief, I felt myself redden. Just like senior year in high school when I lost my virginity to Phil Massey. She’d taken one look at me the morning after the Senior Prom and said, “Anything you want to tell me?” I had tried to look baffled but my face only turned a deeper shade of crimson.

“Anna, there’s nothing wrong with sex,” she had said. “But there’s a lot wrong with stupidity.”

“I’m not in love with Phil,” I said.

“I know that. Is it going to happen again?”

I was quiet. I could have denied it, I suppose, but the fact was, I had enjoyed myself with Phil and wanted more.

“We’d better make an appointment with Dr. Bernini,” she said. Just a statement, no judgment.

On the day of my appointment, she asked me if I wanted her to come with me. I nodded. She sat in the waiting room while Dr. Bernini examined me, and when I came out with a six-month supply of birth control pills, her eyes welled up. I had to hand the package to her because it wouldn’t fit in my little purse. In those days, we always took the bus or the subway, but that day she sprung for a cab. I clutched her hand in the backseat.

“Are you angry with me?” I asked.

She shook her head, but the tears lingered. I wanted to crawl onto her lap and shrink into the girl whose feet didn’t yet touch the ground when she held me. But there was no going back and we both knew it.

“I saw your bathing suit in the john,” Ma was saying. “So I guess you had a swim. Remember the pool party when you almost drowned Penny Edmonds?” She turned away, ostensibly to rinse the breakfast dishes, but in fact she was offering me some privacy.

“Penny was a brat,” I answered, as I thought: (a) we could have been caught, we should have been caught, two naked lunatics in the pool. Where was everybody anyhow? (b) never a thought about condoms, and I mean, not a glimmer, not a fleeting moment after which I could at least have said to myself, Oh hell, it’s worth getting some fatal STD to do it with this man; (c) there was always that faint chance I could get pregnant. Not likely two days after I’d finished my period, but nonetheless. Nonetheless. And (d) what we did to the pool environmentally is grounds for legal prosecution. One always expects those warm spots where little kids pee, but my God.

When I thought of the lectures I gave my homeroom teen-agers about safe sex, I was beyond ashamed of myself. They should revive the stocks and put me out on the traffic island, Eighty-sixth and Park, so everybody could throw rocks. Furthermore, I was so absurdly, sickeningly happy that I could have burst into song, but that would only punish everyone within earshot.

I attempted a self-possessed smile. “Are there any more muffins? I’m starving.” Ma loves it when I ask for seconds.

“I’ve always encouraged you to swim more,” she said. “It loosens up your shoulders.” She plunked another cranberry-banana muffin on my plate and watched as I broke it open and slathered butter on it. I took a bite and started to laugh.

“What?” she asked.

“Raindrops keep falling on my head,”
I warbled, giving in to song though I use the term loosely. It’s the tune I always sang to myself when I flew down a ski slope. The perfect rhythm.

“I think I’d better meet this guy,” she said.

So I told her the same thing I had told Joe. “Oh no. Not yet.”

My unconscionably good mood came to a crashing halt when I got to school. I had an e-mail to visit the headmaster as soon as classes started, and I assumed I’d be confronted with the issue of Jennifer’s lost model. Furthermore, Rudy Steinberger met me outside the entrance of my homeroom. When I put my hand on his arm, I could feel it trembling.

“Rudy, what is it?” He was scaring me.

“There’s something wrong with Michelle Cross.”

“Is she ill? Where is she?”

“Inside. She keeps on crying. Maybe she’s sick. She got so thin lately. I don’t know.” The immense brown eyes were filled with pain. I saw how it was with poor Rudy and I grieved for him. He’d wisely kept his crush a secret, realizing that Sukey Marks and the other girls would have only one comment about such a match:
Puh-leeze!

I hurried inside to find three of Michelle’s friends hovering, plying her with Kleenex. Sukey was sobbing almost as loudly as Michelle and was clearly relishing the drama. My other kids hung around trying to polish off homework assignments or flipping paper clips against the chalkboard. I went over to Michelle and gestured to her friends to leave us. Then I put my arm around the weeping girl and led her to the Retreat, which is what we called the niche between some file cabinets that was just wide enough for two chairs. The bell rang and everybody else clattered out, with Sukey pausing long enough to shoot me a look of profound tragedy.

“What’s going on?” I asked Michelle.

When she was upset, Michelle turned scarlet, with the exception of her nose which remained a pale chip frozen to her face. A bizarre remnant of her rhinoplasty, I suppose. She reeked of nicotine. A lot of the girls turned to smoking as a diet aid.

Michelle looked at me for a moment through swollen eyes, then buried her face in her hands. “I hate my life!” she wailed. Her rings hung loose on her fingers. What had happened to the healthy solidity of only two months ago?

“Is it the physics quiz?” She’d flunked another one yesterday, and the rest of her grades were pretty dismal.

That only set her off on another paroxysm of weeping. I handed her a bunch of tissues. “Come on, Michelle, wipe your face and take a deep breath.”

I waited. She gave me a pitiful shudder, but it was a start. At least her color returned to normal.

“Okay, good girl. Want a Coke?”

She nodded.

“Don’t move,” I said, and fetched one from the little refrigerator I stashed under my bookcase. Then I locked the door so that nobody would interrupt us. The way Michelle was sitting, with her bony knees jammed together and her feet splayed out, she could have been ten years old, never mind the three-hundred-dollar shoes. She gulped at the soda and choked.

I patted her on the back until she stopped. “What provoked all this?”

“I can’t
believe
you don’t know, Ms. Bolles.
Everybody
knows. The whole school’s staring at me.”

In my peculiar state perched halfway between guilt and ecstasy, I hadn’t stopped by the teachers’ lounge or even spoken to anyone on my way to homeroom. “You’d better fill me in,” I said.

“My father married that person last night, that Dakota Blue. It was on TV this morning.”

“Dakota Blue, the singer?”

She nodded.

“And that’s how you found out, on the news?” I was incredulous.

She wiped her nose. “Mom saw it. She went ballistic and beeped my dad on his emergency cell phone and he said it was true.” The tears started up again but it was hard to blame her. Dakota Blue was barely twenty, “barely” being the operative word in that the clothing she wore in any photograph I’d ever seen was comprised of two Post-Its and a cocktail napkin. Well, perhaps a slight exaggeration. So this was Michelle’s new step-mom, a pseudo-Native American by way of Bayonne, New Jersey, pop singer.

“What did I do?” Michelle asked in a whisper.

“What?”

She looked at me as if I were functioning with half a brain. “Well, I must have done
something.
To make him want to leave.”

I felt as though a slab of granite had just fallen on my heart. “Michelle, don’t start thinking that way.”

“You can say that. You don’t know.” And she was off again. “I thought him and Mom were going to get back together. I so feel like
killing
myself.”

I wasn’t one of those teachers who’s pals with their students. But Michelle’s anguish struck a resounding chord. I took a deep breath with shudders of its own, getting ready.

“I do know, Michelle. My father left, too.”

Her head snapped up and her mouth fell open. There’s misery and there’s a scoop, and this was a tough contest for her. As I had hoped, the investigative reporter won out.

“Really? He left? When?” This was worth several days’ rumination over frappaccinos at Starbucks.

“I was only six, but I remember how it felt. I blamed myself, too.”

“Oh, Ms. Bolles, you poor
thing!
Was he having an affair?” No good deed goes unpunished, of course. I was going to have to pay with all the nitty gritty.

“Yes. With a woman much younger than my mother.”

“Did he marry her?”

I nodded. “And divorced her, and married again.”

“Oh my
God.
How did you ever get through it?”

I didn’t want to tell her what a pillar Ma had been, given Filona Cross’s dubious maternal skills. “Sometimes I think it bothered me more when I got to be your age. I felt as if I were different from everybody else. It didn’t matter that half the kids I knew also had divorced parents.”

She was listening attentively. Tears still oozed out, but at least she was thinking now.

“Did you hate him a lot?”

“Sure.” The granite slab pressed against my lungs, making it hard to breathe. If she asked how I felt about him now, I knew I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to answer. “One of the things I learned to do was to concentrate on myself instead of him.”

“I don’t get it,” Michelle said.

“Well, there were some things I was good at. I decided I was going to get even better at them. Not to show my father, just to make me feel better about myself.” This had all been Ma’s doing, of course.

“I guess you were a real brain,” Michelle said wistfully.

“Actually, it was sports I loved. Tennis, especially. I started taking lessons every week and playing on weekends. And if I had a rotten day, I’d put in some extra time on the court. It was a way to balance out the bad stuff. But it could have been something academic, too, I guess. Why not?”

“Not me. I only got into Cameron because my father’s donating all this money to the new science lab. I’m the stupidest person in the whole school.”

“You’re a wonderful dancer, Michelle.” I’d seen her in the recitals and it was true. When she was moving across the stage, she shed the self-conscious concerns about her hair and her clothing and just flew, her face enraptured.

“Oh, I’m only okay. Jennifer’s much better than I am.”

“Just think about how you feel when you’re dancing.”

She was silent.

“Do you want me to talk to Mrs. Phillips?” I asked her. “I’m sure she’d let you have access to the dance studio whenever it’s free.”

“I guess so. Yeah, I’d like that a lot,” Michelle said. We smiled at one another. There’s that feeling you get when you’re around a fellow foot soldier who’s been wounded in the same war. Michelle and I were foxhole buddies from now on. It was going to be tough on her with such public exposure. There might even be news people and photographers outside the school today, lying in wait to capture her reaction for the gossip-hungry. I would have to talk with the headmaster.

Michelle spilled her Coke when I yelped and leaped to my feet. I had completely forgotten that I had an appointment with Duncan Reese. I glanced at my watch. Nine forty-five. I was already late.

“I’m so sorry, Michelle. I forgot I have to see Dr. Reese.”

“That’s okay.” She stood and swiped at the drops of soda on her suede skirt. “Thanks, Ms. Bolles. Really. Thanks. God, I can’t believe we share the same sorrow.” I figured that had to be straight from the latest rock lyric. “God, I must look
awful”
, she went on, but before she could reach for her makeup kit and mirror. I grabbed her in a swift hug, something else I wasn’t prone to do. She was a bag of bones, an issue for another day. Then I dashed off to find out if I was fired.

Duncan Reese was a large rumpled man with a ruddy face and straw-colored hair. There was something of the aged preppy about him, and his politician’s smile and wrap-around handshake inspired knee-jerk mistrust. A lot of people disliked him, but I would probably kill for the man and this is why.

Before my father made all his money out in California, I was a scholarship student at Cameron. Granted, I made straight A’s, but I was also a pain in the butt, and my mother was worse. She was always protesting something—Cameron’s emphasis on standardized tests, lack of support for students of color, poor nutrition in the cafeteria—the culmination being her one-woman picket line decrying the ouster of my favorite chemistry teacher. He was busted in Central Park one weekend with a couple of ounces of marijuana. Since Ma always likened the criminality of drugs to Prohibition, i.e., that such restrictions were both futile and dangerous, she crayoned a sign and paraded back and forth in front of the school. I was thirteen at the time, and let me say, those were three bad days. I’ve even blocked out what she wrote on that sign—I think something about gifted teachers being an endangered species. The thing was, it was late November and freezing cold. Every day that she was out there, Duncan would hand Ma a hot chocolate on his way into the building.

I’ve also noticed over the years that Duncan liked to promote rabble-rousers into the administration. In fact, he did it with Grant who was always running his mouth off about this or that and allying himself with the student body against the faculty. Duncan appointed him Assistant to the High School Dean. It’s tough to work up a head of steam against the power structure when you’re suddenly a part of it, and furthermore, Grant brought a lot of valuable new ideas and energy into the system.

Then there was the issue of my own annoying career as a Cameron student. When I got elected president of the student government, I lobbied hard for the distribution of condoms in school. Duncan didn’t like it for a lot of reasons, particularly when I stole slides of venereal diseases from the Science department and exhibited them at the PTA meeting. Won over by visions of their children with green vaginas or wart-encrusted penises, not to mention languishing on their deathbeds from AIDS, the PTA proceeded to pressure the board and Duncan Reese until I got my condom machines in all the rest rooms.