Robert B. Parker (12 page)

She said she would and we did. Her name was Patti Wyman. After that I saw her at least two nights a week. Sometimes Roy would get a date and we’d go to a
Dodger game. Sunday afternoons Patti and I would go to the L.A. County Art Museum and then we’d walk up Fairfax afterward and snack at the Farmers Market.

On the Fourth of July Patti borrowed her father’s car and we drove over Mulholland Drive into Griffith Park. We found a place with no one around and spread out our blanket and took out our cooler and our portable radio and the big picnic basket that belonged to Patti’s mother that Patti and her mother had packed. There was a shrimp and avocado salad, assorted finger sandwiches, cheese and fruit, and sangria and Mexican beer in the cooler. We listened to the radio and ate and drank and washed up with little scented towelettes packed in foil that Patti’s mother saved from whenever she went to restaurants that gave them out.

The Dodgers were playing a doubleheader and we listened to three innings of it lying quietly under a tree when Patti said, “We’ve gone out about twelve times now and you haven’t even kissed me.”

“I’m shy with girls,” I said. “Should I do it now?”

“Yes.”

Her breath smelled of wine as I leaned over her and her mouth was open as I kissed her. The kiss got longer and her body arched up toward me a little. I heard myself groan a little. Not pain, not joy either. Relief almost, a knot being loosened. I slid my hand under her blouse and she pulled away from me. I took my hand away quickly.

“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice was hoarse. “I shouldn’t have put my hand on you.”

“No,” she said. Her face was serious. “That’s all right. I just think we ought to undress.”

“Here?”

She nodded.

“What if someone sees us?”

“Boonie,” she smiled, “it’s nineteen sixty-two. People do make love.”

I was startled at her body. Naked, it was much more than I had expected. She was as slim as she looked clothed, but her breasts seemed bigger, and her buttocks rounder. As we lay together she traced the muscle line in my chest. “You’re very strong-looking,” she said. “Are you?”

“I’m getting stronger,” I said. We moved our hands gently over each other. There was passion, but there was an air of investigation too.

“Have you done this very often, Boonie?”

“No, not very often,” I said. “I’m almost thirty and I haven’t had much sex for that age. Whores and stuff in the army mostly.”

“I’ve only done it with one other person before,” Patti said.

“Often?”

“Nearly every day for maybe six months,” she said. With her arms around me, she rubbed my lower back gently with both hands. “Then we broke up.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right. It happens. There will be someone else.”

I kissed her right breast. “I am not him, Patti,” I said.

“I know. That’s okay too. This is fun. It doesn’t have to be more.”

“You should know that,” I said. My voice was getting
hoarser. “This doesn’t lead anywhere. It can’t. It means nothing but what it means now.”

“Yes,” she said, and kissed me quietly. “I have always known that. It’s okay.” She leaned back and her thighs relaxed and her mouth opened slightly. She slid her hands up my back and pulled my head down toward her.

We made love for a long time, and it was a great pleasure for both of us. We were slick with sweat and gasping for breath when we finished. I lay still on top of her for a long while and finally rolled off and lay beside her holding her hand. There was a little breeze and it felt cool on my wet body. My eyes felt wet, but I didn’t cry except to blink a few tears out so they’d dry.

Patti raised on one elbow and looked at me and smiled. “Unpracticed,” she said. “But frolicsome.”

“That’s the first sex I’ve ever had that was simply pleasure and without complications.”

She ran a forefinger over my forehead and the bridge of my nose. “You seem a little sad,” she said.

“I wish it could have been you,” I said. “I like you.”

“Why don’t you tell me about who it is,” Patti said.

“First let’s get dressed,” I said.

“Shy,” she said, “prudish maybe.”

When we were dressed again I sat with my arm around her and my back against a tree and talked about Jennifer, and me, and the last eight years. I had spoken of it to no one, had organized it, had tried to give it shape only in my journal entries. As I talked to Patti I was often quoting my journal entries. I talked much of the afternoon. Patti listened. The cooler was empty by the time I finished. So was the basket.

“And that quote from Fitzgerald just appeared in my
head,” I said. “In context it didn’t even mean what I remembered it to mean. But it was what I started back with. ‘Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes.’ I had to care about something. I had to have a goal. I had to …” I gestured with my free hand. After spending so long a time in relative silence, I still had trouble talking.

“What you are doing,” Patti said after a small silence, “is really quite remarkable. It is the most committed act of will I’ve ever seen. What you’re doing, whether you think of it this way or not”—her nice face was very serious and she was looking right at me, leaning forward a little and turning her head—“is you’re becoming worthy of her. You’ve set out to create a man she deserves.”

There were birds moving in the trees above us, and the scent of something flowering on the breeze. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“My God,” Patti said, “she is a lucky woman. I hope she finds it out.”

One of the things I did regularly was review the Boston papers in the periodical room at the main library, downtown. I had a sense that I ought to stay in touch with things back there, where I assumed she was. She might have moved, of course, but if she had, I had no way to know where, and maybe she hadn’t. It was a way of keeping in touch, like the journal.

In the Living section of
The Boston Globe
for August 11, 1962, was a picture of Archibald MacLeish drinking a glass of wine and talking with Professor John Merchent. The name clamored along my nervous system. It was him, and behind him, smiling at someone out of the picture … the clamor stilled. Everything stilled. The life in me suspended as I looked at her picture after eight years. I was, I thought afterward, like one of those prey animals, run down by a predator, whose last moments are catatonic as shock obscures both fear and pain. Had a tree fallen, it would have made no sound. Perhaps no movement.

When time began again I read the story. It was short. MacLeish had read poetry at Taft University in Walford, Mass. Merchent was a member of the University Forum Committee. With him was Mrs. Merchent. They were shown at a reception in the faculty club. “Okay,” I said out loud. “Okay.” No one in the periodical room paid any attention.

It had taken me seven years to get to the West Coast. It took me ten hours to go back east with a year’s savings in my pocket. I landed in Boston on a bright thick August morning. And went straight from the airport to Taft. I got a catalogue from the admissions office and read it. Merchent was an assistant professor in the English department. I went back to admissions. It was too late to apply for regular admission. School began in a month, but I could certainly enroll as a special student for the fall semester and meanwhile apply for regular admission in January.

Taft University was suburban Boston. It sat on a tree-shaded campus and looked, in fact, like most colleges look in the catalogue pictures: vines, bricks, grass, paths, fraternity row, the student commons, a chapel with a white spire. I was thirty years and two days old when I walked across the campus at nine in the morning to go to my first class. I was three thousand miles and one year distant from the morning when I woke up in despair on the edge of the Pacific. I was aware of the distance I’d traveled.

By January I was enrolled as a second-semester sophomore at Taft; and in early February the V.A., encouraged by a congressman from my district, restored my G.I. Bill. I did a paper on Eugene O’Neill that got an A
(“You write with easy mastery,” the professor had commented in red ink at the end), a close reading of Marvell’s poem “Bermudas” which got an A− (“Clearly you know how to read, and read ingeniously, perhaps, in this case, a bit too ingeniously”), and a long, seminar paper in Shakespeare’s use of comic elements in the tragedies and histories (“You have given yourself, and us, a splendid course, and some genuine insights. A+). I still didn’t enjoy school and I still found most of the professors annoying, but my powers of concentration and my ability at self-discipline had enlarged through the years and I took some real pleasure in getting myself into an organized and active relationship with literature and with the past. After school I worked out at the Taft gym, ran the track, and worked three nights a week tending bar at the Holiday Inn on Mass. Avenue in Cambridge.

I had avoided taking Merchent’s course, and I had not seen Jennifer. I would do both, I knew, but I approached things in a kind of intuitive sequence, like a recovering heart patient, whose body somehow whispers to him,
This, not that. You’re not ready for that
. I saw Merchent several times in the hall, between classes, and looked at him carefully. Still tall, and blond, he had developed a small paunch. The paunch was something you probably noticed more quickly if you felt about him as I did. The eyes were a little pouchy, too, and his tan looked superficial, as if the pallor beneath were enduring, and the outdoor color an affectation. His clothes were splendid, and probably cost more than I had earned all told since last I saw him. And he seemed the darling of the female English majors who often gathered about him as he strolled from class. The graduate students closest
to him, the younger women in a descending hierarchy of admirers, on the fringes looking on. The male students in my observation paid him very little heed.

Merchent didn’t notice me. He had no reason to. He’d seen me once, eight years ago. I hadn’t mattered to him much then. I didn’t now. But he mattered to me. Next semester I’d take his course.

The day after Washington’s Birthday the English department held a reception for its majors and faculty in the department lounge in Munson Hall. I went and Jennifer was there.

I knew since I came to Taft that I would see her eventually. It was, after all, why I had come. I had steadily developing confidence in my self-control. So I was in some sense ready when it happened.

The room was crowded. There were a lot of students and most of the English faculty. Many of both were smoking and the air was close. People were sipping sherry and eating potato chips with some kind of sour cream dip. There were many more women than men in the student body and about the reverse ratio in the faculty. I got a glass of sherry and sipped it sparingly as I glanced around the room. I always looked for her. I had begun looking for her the moment I got off the plane in Boston. I was where she lived. I might see her anytime. A young woman in a loose blue dress was urging her interpretation of “Sunday Morning” upon a professor wearing a khaki shirt and a flowered tie under his dark gray double-breasted suit. There were cat hairs on the suit, his brown shoes were unshined, and he needed a haircut.

“I would suggest,” he was saying, “that the ‘ambiguous undulations’ which those pigeons make at the end of the poem can be seen to suggest Stevens’s own stance.”

“But,” she said, leaning toward him with her sherry clamped unthought of in her intense fist, “didn’t the Holy Ghost appear as a dove?”

“Certainly,” he said, and smiled as kindly as he could, “but that doesn’t mean …”

I moved on. Merchent was there with a number of young women gathered about him. “Wisconsin is excellent,” he was saying, “and the University of North Carolina, surprisingly, has a very fine graduate program.” All the young women nodded. “Of course,” he went on, “Yale is unequaled for its eighteenth-century program. Fred Pottle has done some really fine work down there.” The young women nodded again, just as if they knew who Fred Pottle was. I knew that behind the nod most of them were trying to figure out if the eighteenth century was the seventeen hundreds or the eighteen hundreds.

Jennifer was near him but faced away, talking to the chairman of the department. She wore a knit dress of burnt orange, tied at the waist with a soft thin cord. Her hair was done in a French twist, her engagement diamond flashed on her hand as she talked, and her face was as brilliant with animation and life as it had been when I met her. I felt as if I would sink to my knees.

I did not. I stood as motionless and still as I had the first time I had seen her, twelve years before, and let the impact of her wash over me … the golden girl … the king’s daughter … the slickness of silk beneath cloth … lipstick. The room and people seemed to coalesce around her like one of those children’s toys where you
look through a viewer and turn the knob and endless patterns form and re-form … a jar in Tennessee … a magic lantern on the wall … I inhaled as deeply as I could and got steadier. The chairman was smiling as he listened, and nodding. He threw back his head to laugh. I moved carefully, as if on a slippery surface, toward them and stood so that when she was through speaking to the chairman she would see me. She wouldn’t see me before. I remembered her concentration, and she did but one thing at a time.

I waited with a feeling of trembly exhaustion moving along my arms and legs. It was the same feeling I got when I’d finished squeezing out an extra repetition on the bench, one final shuddering dip on the parallel bars. I took in another deep breath.
Control
, I said to myself,
control
. The word helped me. I clung to it, fixing on it the way I used to fix on a light in the dark when I was drunk and the room spun.
Control
.

The chairman said something about more sherry and turned from her. She moved, as I knew she would, to find someone else. She would never stand alone in a social circumstance. Her eyes passed over my face and on. And stopped. And came back. They looked at me. They got wider. Her mouth opened and shut. And opened slightly and I saw her take a sharp breath.