She's Not There (5 page)

“Onion,” I said.

“You got it,” she said. She fell forward across the threshold. Onion was very drunk. I could see that her car was parked half off the driveway. One of my mother's azaleas lay crushed beneath the tires of her Camaro. Snow had dusted the front porch.

“I'm glad you're here,” I said. My heart was pounding in my shirt. “I didn't know if you were going to make it.”

“Sure I'm going to make it,” Onion said, annoyed. “Why wouldn't I make it?” She took off her orange down coat and dropped it onto a chair in the living room. She sized things up. “Jeez what a place you got here. Gives me the fuckin' creeps.”

“It's creepy all right,” I said. I was still looking at her. She had long blond hair. Onion was wearing blue jeans and a tight black top. It was definitely something I'd have looked good in.

“Was that you playing?” she said. She was looking at the piano.

“Yeah,” I said. The fruit juice and bourbon was sitting on the windowsill.

“Sounded good,” she said. “It's good to play something.”

Onion walked over to the piano and let her hands fall on the keys with a tremendous clang. The noise was startling, and I was annoyed at her careless disregard for the instrument.

“Ha ha ha,” said Onion. “What a hoot.”

She banged the keys again, letting her fingers skitter randomly up and down the keyboard.

“Can I get you something?” I said, trying to move her away from the piano. “Are you thirsty?”

“Yeah, sure,” Onion said. She got up again. “What do you got?”

We walked into my parents' kitchen. “I'm drinking bourbon,” I said.

“Whoa,” said Onion. “Hard-core.” She looked at me as if for the first time. There was more light in the kitchen. “Hey, you're cute,” she said. “You look like my sister.”

I thought about this for a while. “Thank you,” I said.

“You know how to make a daiquiri?” Onion said. “Here, I'll do it.”

A moment later she was getting out bottles of rum and gin and pouring them into the blender. She opened the refrigerator, got out some strawberries and a banana. She got ice out of the freezer. It didn't take her long to set things in motion.

While her drink was grinding away in the blender, Onion got out a package of Newports, stuck one on her lip Jerry Lewis style, and lit it. She did a French inhale. She held the pack toward me and said, “Smoke?”

I took a cigarette from her. After I got it lit she blew smoke in my face, then laughed.

“Hey,” I said.

“Well, what do you think, Boylan, you want to do it?”

“I don't know,” I said. I couldn't believe she'd just come out and say it. I figured she was talking about something else.

Onion leaned toward me, clamped her mouth down on mine, and injected her tongue into my throat. She sucked on me like a vacuum cleaner. With one hand she reached out and grabbed one of mine and placed it on her breast. It was soft.

“Well, all right,” Onion said, leaning back. She took another drag off her cigarette.
“Now
do you want to do it?”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

She lifted the pitcher off the blender and poured it into one of my mother's Waterford tumblers. “Cool,” she said. “Then let's go. Lead on.”

We clomped up the back stairs. As we ascended she said, “I heard you're a nice guy, Boylan.”

“I guess,” I said.

“Nice but shy.” She paused, out of breath, dizzy. “Man, you got a lot of stairs in this house.”

I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just nodded and blew smoke that I had not inhaled toward her. She smiled at something that seemed to be known only to herself.

We reached the top of the stairs and passed the door of the room that had the fingernail scratches on the other side. Earlier in the evening I'd sat on a chair in that room, wearing a bra and reading
Lord
of the Rings.

“Yeah, I'm shy, I guess,” I said finally.

As we walked down the second-floor hallway, she slowed again. Onion was scraping against one wall.

“You okay?” I said.

“Sure I'm okay,” she said. “Long day, that's all. You're my last stop.” She drank her daiquiri. I started up the steps to the third floor.

“Oh man, not more stairs,” Onion said. She looked into my parents' room. “What about in here?”

I thought about it.

“Okay,” I said. “This is a better room anyway. Mine doesn't have any wallpaper right now. Just plaster.” I stubbed out my cigarette on an ashtray on my mother's bureau.

“Whoo-hoo,” Onion said, sitting on the far side of the bed. She put her drink on a table, set her cigarette in an ashtray, and pulled her top off over her head. The straps of her bra traversed her broad, tanned back.

I sat on my side of the bed and took off all my clothes except for my socks because it was cold. I got under the covers. Onion stood to take off her jeans. She took a diaphragm case out of her purse and put it on my parents' bedside table, next to a tube of Ortho jelly—a tube, I noticed, that was rolled neatly from the bottom like a tube of toothpaste.

I saw Onion from the back, looking at her lovely round buttocks, her smooth shoulders, the hair falling down her spine. She picked up her daiquiri and downed the whole thing in a single shot. Then she turned to me and lay down upon the sheets.

On her right shoulder was a blue-and-green bruise the size of a man's fist. I stared at it.

“Jeez,” I said. “How'd you get that?”

“Never you mind,” Onion said. She looked over at a picture of my father that stood upon my mother's bureau and said, “Some asshole.” For a moment I thought she meant my dad.

She took a final drag off her cigarette, then stubbed it out in the ashtray. “Okay,” she said then. “It's clobberin' time.”

She lowered her face onto my own again. I felt her fingers trace my ribs. Onion was forceful. It was a little scary, being swept along by her, like standing in some very strong gale.

Her fingernails scratched softly down the front of my bony chest. The hand that was missing the pinkie clasped me like a golf club. “Whoo-hoo,” she said. “That's the way.”

She paused for a moment, looked at me. “So what do you think?” she said. “Am I pretty?”

I was still thinking about the bruise she had, was trying not to look at it. “Yes,” I said. “You're pretty.”

“Whoo-hoo,” she said, and kissed me again. This is great, I thought. So far, sex was turning out to be pretty interesting. I
definitely
wasn't going to keep wanting to be a girl after this!

I guess this too was
immersion learning.

“Whups,” Onion said, pausing.

“You okay?” I said.

“Yeah, just give me a second.” She let go of me, sat up in the bed.

Her breasts lay there before me, veined and amazing. The nipples were a soft pink. Her hair fell over one shoulder. For a moment I wished that Onion were a mirror instead of a human. It was too bad.

“I could really fall in love with you,” I said in a dreamlike voice. Onion wasn't listening. “Are you all right?” I said.

“Yeah, I'm fine. You got a bathroom around here?” she said. “I'm just a little woozy.”

“Woozy?” I said. “Yeah. Right in the hallway.”

“Okay,” Onion said. “I'll be right back, okay?”

I saw the nude girl walk out of my parents' bedroom and heard her going into the bathroom. I lay there alone for a moment, filled with wonder. A moment later I heard the sound of Onion puking.

“Hey,” I said. “Are you okay?”

It happened again.

“Onion?”

I waited for what seemed like a while. All was silent. Then, maybe ten minutes after she'd first excused herself, I heard a soft clunk. The sound of a body hitting the floor.

“Onion?” I said. I went into the bathroom and opened the door. She was lying on the floor. There was puke all around her.

“Oh man,” I said. “Shit.”

I tried shaking her, but all she did was moan once, then nothing. She was breathing heavily. The smell of liquor rose from her like a vapor.

I got some washcloths and got most of the puke off her, then wiped the floor. I tried to wake her up again. “Oh man,” she mumbled. “I don't feel good.”

She couldn't just stay there on the floor, so I picked her up in my arms and carried her up the stairs to one of the guest rooms. I put her in an old bed that Gammie and Mrs. Watson slept in when they visited and covered her with a quilt. Onion looked very peaceful there.

Then I went back to the bathroom and collected all the washcloths and towels, carried them to the laundry room, and put them in the washer. After this I walked into my parents' bedroom, made the bed, and picked up my clothes off the floor.

I wasn't sure what to do next. About all I could think of was trying to make up a good story for my parents to believe, once they got home. I could say Onion was a friend of a friend, which was the truth. I could say I didn't know her very well, also the truth. I could say she'd had too much to drink. And she had called from some party down the street given by these people I did not know and said she needed a safe place to sleep it off because it was dangerous for her to drive like this. I thought about this story for a while, and it seemed pretty good. Not airtight, but pretty good. As long as Onion didn't wake up suddenly and start talking, they might go for it.

It was at this point that I realized I still had the rest of the night free. My mother's optimism lifted me up. It wasn't too late to make the best of things.

I went back to my parents' bedroom. Onion's bra and T-shirt were lying right there. I sat on the bed and picked up the bra. I held it in my lap for a moment. It was warm, the bra.

I closed my eyes, thinking. If you have breasts, I thought, they go right in here. If you're a girl, you wear one of these and you probably don't even think about it, it's just what you do.

I thought about it for a while. I definitely liked Onion's taste in clothes better than my mother's and sister's. It would have been a great relief to have been a person in life whose body fitted into them. There was no reason I shouldn't put on her stuff—heck, she was passed out upstairs. But I didn't do it. It would be too creepy and, quite frankly, a little bit rude. I owed Onion a certain respect, even if she had passed out naked in her own puke in my parents' bathroom, and it wouldn't be polite to wear her shirt. So I picked up the bra and the T-shirt and carried them up to the room where Onion was lying unconscious and laid them on the bed next to her. I stroked her hair.

“You're going to be okay,” I whispered to her, then kissed her lightly on the cheek.

I went back downstairs and sat at the piano bench. The second half of my Hi-C and bourbon was still there, the ice cubes melted. “Good evening,” I said. “It's great to be back in Philadelphia.”

I started up with “Mrs. Robinson” again, seeing as how I hadn't even got to the chorus last time. I was still in the key of G, back in a crazy jam. I was a sixteen-year-old transsexual, high on fruit juice, and I had a naked girl passed out in my grandmother's bed upstairs. Life is a mysterious thing, was my conclusion.

The doorbell rang, and I stopped playing. “Jesus,” I said. “It's like Grand Central Station in here.” I finished the bourbon in one gulp, went to the front door, and opened it wide.

A guy in a Santa Claus suit was standing there. He held a bottle of Jack Daniel's in one hand.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

“Are you St. George?” he asked.

This question wasn't quite as insane as it might sound at first, because St. George was actually the name of one of the Hunt boys. I wasn't him, though.

“Are you Bill?”

Another Hunt sibling. I shook my head.

“Well,” Santa said. “Are you Hoops?”

Hoops Hunt was the oldest of the boys. His real name was Al, and Al Hunt later grew up to be a famous journalist with
The Wall Street
Journal.
He's also a regular on
Capital Gang
, one of those shows where reporters shout at one another. He's married to Judy Woodruff, the CNN newswoman.

“Well, I don't know,” Santa said, annoyed. “Who in hell are you, then?”

“I'm Jim Boylan,” I said. “We live here now. The Hunts moved. Dr. Hunt died.”

“Oh,” Santa said. He felt stupid now. “I been away. Vietnam and all.”

I nodded.

“Well, jeez,” I said. “You want to come in?”

“Maybe just for a second,” Santa said. “It's freezin' out here.”

He stomped across the threshold. Cold rain was falling on Onion's car. “You want something?” I said. “A drink, or whatever?”

“Nah,” Santa said. “I just figured I'd stop in. They been having this party for twenty-five years.”

“I know,” I said.

“I thought about this party a lot when I was over in 'Nam and all. Thought about it a lot.”

It suddenly seemed very sad to me, this guy in his rented Santa suit, thinking about coming home all those years for the Hunts' party and finding only me.

“So you were in Vietnam?” I said.

“Yeah.” Santa sat on a chair by the fire, warmed himself.

“Marines. Since Tet.” He shook his head as if the words should mean something to me. “After I got back I lived in California for a while. Man, some wild times out
there
!”

A small puddle formed around Santa's boots.

“Should have called first, I guess,” he said.

He looked around, examining our furniture, which didn't really fill the place. His eyes fell on the piano.