Sway (10 page)

It occurred to me that Carter would be the person to understand, the only person I spoke to on such a personal level other than Joey. So I asked him, “Have you ever been in love, Carter?”

“Sure,” he said with his easy smile.

“What does it feel like?”

“Feel like?” he asked.

“Yeah, what did you feel like when you were in love?”

“Well, I suppose I felt the same way I do when I jack myself off, but ten times better. You know,” he said with a shrug, even that simple gesture an impressive feat of physical strength. “I'm surprised to find you still got your V-card, Sway.”

“I don't,” I said. “I'm not talking about whether you've ever been laid. I mean have you ever been in love?”

“Oh. I guess if they aren't the same thing, then, no, I've never been in love. Not love like the way you love that guitar of yours.”

“I don't play guitar anymore,” I said.

“No? I guess that's right. Now that you mention it, I haven't seen you play guitar in … a while.”

“I'm just wondering,” I said, “because I'm not sure what it's supposed to feel like. Love. With a girl, I mean.”

“I guess it's like coming,” he said. “Until you do, you can't know what it feels like.”

“Yeah,” I said with a nod, “maybe. But you come, you know what it is. You're in love with a girl, there's no way to know it since you don't know what love feels like.”

“I love this kind of bud,” he said with a smile as he tucked an arm behind his head and settled back on the couch. “Leads to all sorts of interesting speculation.”

 

THIRTEEN

David Cohen was waiting outside the door to the library as I was leaving after fourth-period lunch. He looked stressed and uptight, as was his usual. “Jesse, I need to talk to you.”

“It can't wait until after school?” I asked with a casual glance at my six to see who might be listening.

“This will only take a second,” he said, so I assented with a nod and he fell into step beside me. “Heather agreed to go out with me. I need to know what I should do. Where should I take her?”

“I would suggest Paolo's,” I said. “Anytime a guy spends that much money, it puts her in a good mood.”

“I'm taking her out this Friday night. There's no way I'll be able to get a reservation on such short notice unless we eat at five thirty with the geriatrics.”

I sighed. For a kid who was supposed to have a genius IQ, he wasn't very enterprising. “I'll get you a reservation for eight o'clock,” I said.

His face broke into a grin and he said, “You're the best, Jesse.”

“Yeah, well, you remember that when it comes time to get your work done.”

“I'm on top of it,” he called over his shoulder as he walked away.

When I turned around, Joey was blocking my path. “Ken's looking for you,” she said as she fell into step beside me.

“I'm doing great, Joe, how are you?”

“I'd be doing a lot better if I didn't have to talk to Ken Foster.” A shudder went through her body and she shook her head, as if clearing away a terrible thought. “He's so gross. How do girls find that guy attractive?”

“Tell him to meet me at the bleachers after school. I'll be at practice.”

“I'm not your fucking secretary,” she said, which I took for acknowledgment of my request. Joey's attitude didn't usually get under my skin, but the past week I had been on edge and couldn't really put my finger on a reason. I chalked it up to being busy, preoccupied with everything going on.

*   *   *

Girls' lacrosse offers the kind of raw aggressiveness that is rarely seen in young women, a display that is both sexy and viscerally satisfying. I tried to catch at least a few games during the season and whenever possible took my business meetings on the bleachers during practice.

Ken arrived with his posse in tow, but he told them to wait down by the practice field, then climbed the bleachers to come and sit beside me.

“Why are we meeting here?” Ken asked.

“I like to watch,” I said with a nod toward the field. “I think better when I'm watching.”

Ken's lip curled in distaste as he surveyed the thick thighs and broad shoulders of the athletic girls on the field. He didn't appreciate the power of their toned bodies, power that was more significant than any fleeting beauty.

“What did you find out?” he asked.

I knew then what had been bothering me, that I didn't really want to tell Ken anything about Bridget I had discovered during my weeks of reconnaissance. It was like capturing a wild animal and putting it in a cage—there was pleasure in the idea of owning the animal, making it tame, but Ken would never appreciate the beauty of the caged bird. After a while, he would forget to care for it properly, would lose interest in preserving what had originally made the pet attractive to him.

My gut tightened as I rattled through my report—filling him in on her brother and his condition, her volunteer work at the Siegel Center—not needing to refer to my written notes. “She's into theater and impressionist art—” I stopped as I saw his eyes start to glaze over. Ken was a stupid clod, the equivalent of pond scum in intellect, and the thought of his sweaty, jockstrap-wearing, buffoon body pressed against Bridget made a sick feeling rise in my gut.

“Wednesday after school, she'll be at the Impressionists in Winter exhibition at the campus gallery,” I continued as my head started to hum with a dull ache.

“The what?” he asked with predictable ignorance.

“The impressionists. It's a group of painters from the nineteenth century—you know, Monet, Degas, Renoir,” I said as I handed him my report, carefully typed and edited by Kwang, who took dictation over the phone. “I suggest you show up there, accidentally run into her. And I would go alone,” I said, cutting my eyes meaningfully at the goon squad as they loitered on the track, shouting rude comments to the girls on the field and laughing at their own jokes. “Put her at ease instead of making her feel like she's about to be gang-raped. You'll just happen to be there, taking in the exhibit. Ask her out for a coffee. She'll say yes.”

“How do you know she'll say yes?”

“You pay me to know these things. Just ask her. But look, and this is important, no matter how well your coffee date goes, don't ask her out for a real date.”

“Why not?” he asked, exasperated.

“Because that's what she'll be expecting you to do. Hold back. Let her have a few days to think about you and we'll follow it up with the coup de grâce.”

“The what?”

“Nothing,” I said, suppressing a weary sigh. “Just keep it simple. Leave her wanting more. Got it?”

He nodded as he glanced through the notes on the page. “So, that's it?” Ken asked as he stood to go.

“One more thing,” I said. “It's in the report but it's important that you remember it. If you could have one superpower for a day, you would want it to be the ability to heal people with a touch.”

“What?”

I repeated myself, slowly, so that even Ken could understand.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked.

“Just remember it,” I said, weary with his idiocy. “It's just her thing. She's going to ask you, so remember it.”

“Is this really going to work?”

“She's a nice person. If you show an interest in the things that interest her and are moderately charming, it ought to do the trick. Use the line about healing people with a touch and she'll be putty in your hands.”

“What do I owe you?” he asked.

“Two hundred,” I said, just throwing out the random figure. Normally it would be in my best interest to negotiate a favor from someone like Ken, but I let it go.

After my meeting with Ken, I needed to do something to deaden all self-awareness.

When I got home, I turned to the anesthetic my father relied on. Four shots of whiskey later and I had made up my mind what I would do. Our house, built in the late 1800s, was one of the original houses in town, built at the same time as the university. It was an easy walk to the historic downtown and the collection of restaurants and bars that stayed open long after the shops had closed.

Dad was playing with a trio that evening—one of several bands that he practiced with on a regular basis—at a small club. The doorman recognized me and let me in though it was a twenty-one-and-older crowd after the dinner rush. I sat in the back, hidden in a dark corner, and watched my father as a stranger would. Tonight he played the piano, one of several instruments he could play before he ever learned to read music.

By the time I was thirteen, I had accompanied him at small, intimate shows like this one, and large concert venues where ours was one of many bands. At first I had played only rhythm guitar, backing up his group, but after a while he would give me lead on some pieces, stepping back to hand over the spotlight, though careful always to announce to everyone I was his son. He couldn't stand the thought of letting me take an accomplishment for myself, wanted everyone to know my God-given talent had come from his genes.

It had never been clear if I was a true prodigy, born with some gene that gave me a gift for playing guitar, or if my father had simply made it so through uncompromising expectation and exposure to the broad possibilities of all music. Like my dad, usually if I heard a song once, I could play it back without ever seeing a sheet of music.

Listening to my father play, if my eyes were shut, I could focus on the feeling of the music, the swell of it rolling through my seat like a wave and traveling up my spine, filling my core. I sat in the worn, vinyl booth, the ghost of my mother occupying the seat beside me. I felt her presence the way you can sense another person in your house, even if you can't see or hear them—the groan of a floorboard, the movement of air, the vibration of breath on a heartbeat.

When I was a kid, I had spent many nights like this, watching my dad perform with my mom beside me. I used to resent the gazes of the men around us as their eyes stole my mother's quiet beauty, her willowy figure and thick black curls, for their own fantasies. She was my mother, they saw me with her, but it didn't stop their minds from wandering from her slender wrists to her full lips and mentally undressing her.

And even though he was a dickhead, my dad had always deeply loved my mom. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at her, his complete and total disbelief that this beautiful, soulful woman had chosen him above thousands of other options. I'm sure it had come as a major shock and disappointment when he realized that behind those brown eyes flecked with gold was a broken brain. Yet still he loved her, even after she had made it impossible to live with her.

When Dad stood to take his bow, I was already gone, my hands and face burning with the cold. At home I smoked a joint, then lay on my bed, naked and flat on my back with Weezer playing loudly enough that I wouldn't hear Dad arrive home.

 

FOURTEEN

Mr. Dunkelman and I were playing a hand of rummy in the rec room of the old folks' home late one afternoon. I studied the discard pile and made up my mind to lift the entire pile for a forty-five-point play. He was holding only four cards, so it was a risky move on my part, but I liked watching him get pissed about me making a risky play more than I liked winning.

“It's crazy to me,” Mr. D was saying. “They can draft you and send you off to fight in a foreign war when you're eighteen, but they won't let you buy a beer or a bottle of whiskey.”

His outrage was not inspired by sympathy for the plight of youth, but by his desire to have beer and whiskey delivered to him in Hell's Waiting Room—his nickname for the place he called home.

“They haven't drafted anyone since Vietnam,” I said as I sat back and tried to wait patiently for him to make his move.

“Twenty-one to buy alcohol is absurd,” he said, and I covertly rolled my eyes. At the rate this game was going, I'd be an old fart myself before either of us reached five hundred points. “By the time I was twenty-one, I had a wife and a job at a glass-cutting shop. And I sure as hell was drinking before that. That's how I ended up with a damn kid in the first place.”

“I told you,” I said, “if you want me to bring you some beer and whiskey I will, but I'm not going down to that damn VFW hall again. Those guys in the funny hats creeped me out. Why can't you drink at a normal place—like an Applebee's or something?”

“First of all,” he said as he studied the cards already in play on the table while I drummed my fingers with impatience, “I'm not letting you bring me beer and whiskey here. If you got caught, we'd both get in trouble. Second of all, I wouldn't be caught dead in some place called Applebee's. Sounds like some damn queer joint.” Mr. Dunkelman's social sense had halted development sometime during WWII.

“You sound like an old fart,” I said, and he swore under his breath as I put down another thirty points' worth of cards.

My phone buzzed with a call from Joey so I answered it while Mr. D swore at me again for distracting him from the game. “What's up?” I said into the phone.

“Where are you?” Joey asked, her voice tight with strain.

“I'm at the Sunrise Assisted Living place.”

“The what?”

I enunciated clearly: “Sunrise Assisted Living.”

“What
the hell
are you doing there?” she asked.

“It's a long story.” I was having a difficult time managing my oversized hand of cards as I pressed the phone to my ear with my shoulder. “What's up?”

“I need you to come and get me,” she said, and from the muffled sound of her voice, I knew she was chewing her thumbnail with worry. Her voice had a strange echoing quality to it, as if she were calling from inside a well.