Red Earth and Pouring Rain (27 page)

“Don’t be bitchy, Ling,” I say. “She’s nice.”

“Uh-huh, and one of these days she’ll be doing one of those cheerleader leaps and it’ll all fly off and she’ll come down bald,”
Ling says, so I punch her on the arm, but I’m laughing, and all the way home we make up this story about a bald cheerleader
who lives in the Appalachians and kills innocent hiking teenagers by strangling them with her incredibly muscular thighs.

We go to Ling’s house, walking through the shady avenues —Elm, Green —standard American upper-middle-class suburbia, in this
case a few miles from Cincinnati, but indistinguishable really from a thousand
other places anywhere on the continent. In Ling’s living room, her father is seated in front of the television, a just-opened
bottle of Johnnie Walker Black by his side. When we come out later that night, he’ll be sitting there, his wife next to him,
and the bottle will be half empty. They both wear gray suits and tend to get quieter as the evening goes on.

So Ling and I walk past him, and he smiles politely at me, and we get ourselves some soda and some cheese stuff and go into
Ling’s room and settle down in front of the VCR. Now Ling and I, despite our grades and our good schools and our obvious precocious
eighties sophistication, share a ravening taste for bad movies. We had our own grading system and we kept records —we would
joke about writing a book someday —and according to our system some grindingly pretentious crap like
Paris, Texas
would get a 2, out of a possible 10, while our all-time high was a movie called
The Snow Beast
. The Snow Beast was this guy in a jazzed-up gorilla suit who terrorized a ski resort, only I guess they couldn’t afford to
hire a whole gorilla suit, so for the whole movie you saw what can only be described as Buxom Babes being massacred by a gorilla
hand or a gorilla head that descended on them from out of frame.
The Snow Beast
also got two whole extra points because its blond Aryan hero was named “Yar.” The first time somebody said, “Yar, there’s
a durn snow beast out there on that there mountain, Yar!” Ling and I fell off the couch and made ourselves almost sick laughing.

So now we load up
Afterwards
and Ling punches the right buttons and immediately we are in a post–nuclear-holocaust, post–ozone-depletion, post–polar-cap-meltdown,
post–chemical-disaster, post–raging-sexual-disease shopping mall. Scabby radiation-burned zombies, hair falling from cracking
scalps, fight over food and designer fashions and wigs and lipstick and base, while the normal leads, unscarred and golden-fleshed,
blow them away with full-automatic combat shotguns and worry if any of their small, trusty band is really a zombie in deep
Elizabeth Arden disguise. It is quite calculatedly gory and awful, but we don’t enjoy it as much as we’d thought we would,
maybe because I sit there, a little absent and distracted, not laughing at the proper cues. I say good night and walk home,
skipping a little in the darkness. That night I dream of thighs pressing my ears into my head, and my tongue dipping into
gold and pink. I wake up laughing.

So now you’re thinking I have a normal adolescent crush on the school sweetheart, but the truth is I find this ridiculous.
The truth is that the woman is boring: in the next few days I talk to her and discover that she is “bright,” which is to say
that she is capable of putting a sentence together and that Mrs. Christiansen litters the margins of her papers with “Good!”
and “Exactly!” which is all very well, but I have absolutely nothing to say to her after “How’re you today?” and “What’s the
reading for Friday?” Worse, she thinks Third World poverty is “sad,” that a strong defense posture is “necessary,” and Hawthorne
is a “depressing” writer, and me, I’m the kid who sits at the back of the History class and insists,
insists
, that we use the word
genocide
when we talk about the Dakota and the Cherokee. I write turgid poetry, after Svetayeva and Pavese, which the editors of the
Hilltop High Viewpoint
accept for publication in a sort of cowed, abject manner just reeking of incomprehension. When I was nine, my father gave
me the facts on sex, then turned back, adjusted his gray English cardigan, and said, “And another thing. The three greatest
monsters of this century have been Joseph Stalin, Joseph McCarthy, and Margaret Mitchell.”

So, okay, you say, so she’s not exactly Mercy Sontag Cunningham, but she never pretended to be, and what you really want is
her sweet jaunty bottom, her breasts like taut young fruit, her —what other way to describe it? —her magnificent mane, her
baby–Billy Budd eyes. And I, too, consider this, consider each item, the sum of, and the greater than the sum of, but am left
mystified: qua bottoms, I like the full and rounded; of breasts, the generous; hair, dark and silky; the whole package —I
know, I know, the sexist language, this whole odious analysis, but fuck that for now, let’s be blunt —the whole object ripe,
mysterious, and a little sulky.

Well, Sarah Nussenbaum, as head of the Hilltop English Society, had organized the first ever Annual Hilltop Poetry Reading,
and of course Mrs. Christiansen required attendance by all APs. And me, I brush down my hair as well as I can, wear black
and black, shirt open at the collar, think about a hat but decide against, wonder if I can grow a beard or at least a respectable
stubble, stand next to the podium and shoot my hip to one side, one hand in pocket and the other carelessly on waist, and
rip into my epic poem
Me, Her, Bosch Landscape, and I, and I
. I refuse to reveal any more of this poem on the grounds that it
might incriminate me straight into some special hell reserved for bad poets. Anyway, after, I lean over in the hallway, gulping
water from a fountain, still sweaty from my impassioned delivery. I am thinking, of course, of Mercy Fuller Cunningham and
my incredibly stupid thing for her, and I think at this point I am resigned to letting it go, to accepting that it would never
happen, to accepting who I am and who she is. I straighten up, my lips cool from the water, and then suddenly there are arms
around my neck, breasts sliding across my back, and she is leaning over and there are lips, warm and wet, touching me briefly,
her saying, “Oh, Tom, that was great. I really liked it.” Then she is down the corridor, and I can still feel her breath in
my ear. And I know I am lost.

So now, dear listener, begins the period, the day and season of my madness. I spend that whole night —by that I mean from
dusk to dawn, and I swear this is true —writing down “Oh, Tom, that was great. I really liked it” on a thousand different
pieces of paper, in a million different ways. I examine every nuance of those words, there is no linguist on the planet who
knows those nine as I do, their texture and rhythms, their meaning and derivations, their abundant connotations, and by the
time the sun rises I am convinced that Mercy Fuller Cunningham is in love with me. By nine I am crushed, despondent, and full
of self-loathing —I see her in the parking lot with her hip buddies, her smart set, her jet-setters, her in-crowd, and with
a bare “Hi, Tom” the bitch brushes past, and not a glance more. So then I’m in English, going, fine, Tom, all the poor girl
wants to do is be friendly, be nice, platonic, and here you are in some weird woman-as-destructive-other frenzy, but then
she dances in, bright and unbearably perky, leans over my desk and kisses me on the nose, the very end of my nose, “Hi, you
incredible poet you.” And then Mrs. Christiansen has started on
Moby Dick
and I am simultaneously, at the very same time, you understand, calling down on Mercy all the pain and hatred accumulated
by every teased-and-tormented male in history, and am seeing again radiant visions of me and her and am appalled by my own
anger, the wish-to-do-violence of my own reaction. Poor Ahab. Poor Claggart. Life sucks.

I spend the next few days learning up her schedule and dodging down hallways and up stairs, and then trying not to breathe
hard, walk casually past her, pleasant smile, nod. Then one day she says, as I take the most intricate route to History the
school has ever seen, “Oh, Tom,
there you are again.” It’s said with a smile, but that night I spend two hours looking at myself in the mirror and decide
to go cold turkey. I skip English three times in a row, spend every spare moment in the library, and hand in my History paper
on the Cultural Revolution two weeks early. Now I feel disciplined and strong, scoured and empty, confident that nothing can
break me, but right before English I get that same old dropping-helplessly feeling again. So I cut, and read Poe behind the
gym, and that afternoon I withdraw four hundred ninety-eight dollars and twenty-three cents from my savings account. I call
Sarah Nussenbaum, and pick her up that evening in a stretch limousine.

So I take Sarah Nussenbaum to L’Auberge, where she whispers that she feels underdressed and I suppress my urgent desire to
tell her to stop whining and instead ply her freely with expensive red wine. After a while her cheeks get flushed and she
starts talking about how it’s great that Ling and she and I are friends, how much it means to her and we should always keep
in touch. I murmur, “Anything for you, Sarah,” and narrow my eyes at her above the rim of my glass. Then she talks about something
else and I nod and feed her pastry from my plate. In the limo on the way home she turns eagerly to me when I put a hand on
her neck, and she runs her hands over my forehead and ears as we kiss, and her mouth tastes of wine but I break away suddenly,
saying “I don’t think this is such a good idea, Sarah.” She shrinks away to her corner, and I can see that she wants to ask,
then why all this? but she’s way too smart and proud. “I’m sorry” I say.

After I drop her off I let the limousine go and trudge through the empty streets, trying to remember the exact state of my
body and brain as we kissed, but all I can remember is my usual unbounded excitement when I’m anywhere near Sarah and an equally
strong anxiety, a nervousness that afflicts me so I shake. As I go from shadow into light, I seem to remember that my hands
shook through her hair, but I’m almost certain I’m inventing this as I try to see it again. Suddenly I’m in front of her house,
not Sarah’s, I mean, but the abode of Mercy Fuller Cunningham. In some hazy hour of self-deception, I’ve casually asked and
looked in phone books and maybe even followed her white Audi long enough to get a general idea of where she lives, and now
I’m there: “CUNNINGHAM,” a brass nameplate says. Nameplates are signs, I remember Ling saying, because they communicate one
sort of information,
while flags are symbols, because they stand for a host of things. What sort of flag would Mercy fly, I wonder, as I work my
way around the large white concrete house, through hedges and over grass. At the back, I find a window, high above me and
curtained, which I know instantly is hers. It is very late, and a few lights burn feverishly in the distance, throwing up
halos. I roll in the mud under her window, crushing little yellow flowers, and when I kneel finally, my arms clutched around
my belly, sweat and the liquid from plants pouring across my lips, I can feel the moon on my face. It hangs above me as I
totter from tree to tree on my way home.

The next day at breakfast, I said to my parents: “What are we?”

“What?” my mother says, putting down her newspaper. They’re both looking at me with a certain eagerness, we can deal with
this, we’re both psychiatrists. Existential questions are what they live for, and they’re especially partial to teenage angst.

“I mean, what are we? Are we German, or English, or Dutch, or what? Wasn’t Grandpa’s father from Germany?”

“Your great-grandfather spoke German, but I think he was born in New England,” my father says.

“Why this sudden interest?” my mother says.

They’re both a little puzzled and intrigued. The place of the human in the cosmos they can talk about, it’s how they make
their bread and butter, but ethnic stuff is a touch primitive and makes them uncomfortable.

“Oh, nothing,” I say, “I just wondered.”

“Mostly German, a little English, some Dutch, some French, I should think,” my father says.

“No Italian?” I ask.

“It’s possible,” my mother says. “My side spent a lot of time in New York.”

“Have to go,” I say. I walk to school feeling my body move, trying to see if there’s a little strut in it. The truth is that
in the sunshine of the day I’m a little ashamed and more than a little frightened by what I’d done the night before. Rolling
in the bushes is extreme for anyone, but me? In tenth grade I wrote a paper on the invention of romantic love in the court
of Eleanor of Aquitaine. So now I want a genetic reason for my behavior, some dimly remembered racial memory that had awakened
and pushed me headlong into lunacy.

In English, Mercy Fuller Cunningham is talking, in a breathless tone of horror, about some weird animal that rolled around
in her yard and smashed hedges.

“Be careful,” I say, as I walk to my desk. “It could be the Snow Beast.” Raising my hands over my head, back humped, fingers
hooked: “Arrrrrr. Ahhaarrr-aarrr.”

She looks at me, puzzled. I drop the Snow Beast, walk around her and swing into my desk in one fluid movement. As Mrs. Christiansen
walks in, Ling leans over to me. “
Why
are you walking like that?” I shrug.

That day, after class, I walk next to Mercy Fuller Cunningham in the hall, making conversation about movies. “Risky
Business
, yeah,” I say, “that was totally cool, but I liked
Top Gun
better.” I know, I know: I had an anxiety attack when I heard they were going to make a movie which featured jets, motorcycles,
and Tom Cruise. Ling said that the average teenage boy could get his hormone level maladjusted just from looking at the ad.
But now the situation was desperate, and I think I would have raved about John Wayne if Mercy Fuller Cunningham had given
me half an opening. So we casually walked into the cafeteria and I casually kept up my stream of carefully middle-to-just-above-middlebrow,
not-too-radical banter, and casually we stood in line and casually I got some milk and stuff, and we walked outside to the
patio, and she said, want to sit here? and we sat on red-and-green concrete picnic tables, and I casually opened my milk,
one-handed, and all around us heads turned.