The Books of Fell (7 page)

On the way to the Surf Club Monday night, Delia Tremble said she wanted a frozen custard. I stopped at Frosty’s, and she passed two dollars to me and said, “Get yourself one, too, Hunk!” I took the money.

I said, “This doesn’t mean you can have your way with me later.”

She had that lilting laugh I’d grown to love in just forty-eight hours. The sky was deep blue with an orange ball up in it, and a thousand stars. We were headed down to the club to dance outside under them. She smelled of roses, or she reminded me of how roses smell. I didn’t know which.

When I came back with two chocolate frozen custards dripping down my fingers, she said, “Why do you carry a gun?”

“Why do you snoop into my glove compartment?”

“You go first,” she said.

“It’s my dad’s gun.”

It was his.38 Smith & Wesson, never loaded, with ivory butt plates and an owl carved into it, the eyes made of two real rubies. Years ago some Mafia character’d given it to him as thanks for following his wife around.

She said, “But he’s dead, you said.”

I got behind the wheel. “I can’t throw it out or turn it in.”

“So you keep it in your car?”

“My dad did, too. He said you should never keep a gun in the house. A lot of accidents with guns happen in policemen’s houses, did you know that?”

“No.” She was licking the frozen custard off the side of the cone. It was sexy the way she did that.

“A lot of homicides happen in policemen’s homes, too,” I said. “Their guns are always there.” I put a napkin around the bottom of my cone. It wasn’t going to do any good. It was a hot night. I was glad to be with her.

“Now your turn,” I said. “What were you looking for in my glove compartment?”

“Any evidence I could find of you.”

“Why?”

“I’m curious about you.”

“Are you glad I’m not the preppy you thought I was?”

“I like preppies.”

“What do you like about them?”

“I like the ones who go to all-male schools.”

“Why them?”

“They’re starved for women, so they’re eager to please and shyer, but they have more dignity than other guys.” She bit into the tip of the chocolate custard. “I like all three traits.”

“You like eager to please, shy, and dignified?”

“Yes. Are you any of those?”

“I’m eager to please, and I’m dignified.”

“I’ll make you shy,” she said.

I laughed painfully. “It’s worth a try.” I managed to sound my idea of suave. Maybe not hers. I started the car.

“Could you ever use that gun?”

“I could. I know how to shoot. I learned to shoot when I was thirteen.”

“Guns scare me,” she said, “but they fascinate me, too. This is awful. When I saw that gun in there, it turned me on.”

“This
is awful,” I said. “It turns me on that it turned you on.”

We both laughed. I took her left hand with my right.

I wished I had a convertible. We should have been speeding down toward the sea in a convertible. I’d never had that kind of thought with Keats. I suppose that was because there was only one thing I could do with Keats that Daddy and she hadn’t already done, including speed along Ocean Road in a little blue Benz, top down. But with Delia Tremble I felt there were things I could show her, maybe not then and there, but there was the feeling she hadn’t seen it all. She’d already said she hadn’t been many places. Keats had been to Europe three times, India, the Orient, even China. I couldn’t begin to name all the islands in the Caribbean she’d carried her tube of Bain de Soleil down to and come back bronze from.

Delia let go of my hand and reached into her pocket for a cigarette. I pushed in the lighter. She had on a bright-blue cotton blazer with the sleeves rolled up, over a dress with big blue and white flowers all over it. The same hoop earrings; the same gold rings. She had white low-heeled sandals on, so she was shorter than I was this time.

I had on some khaki stone-washed pants that Keats had given me last summer. It seemed like way back last summer with Delia beside me and something new starting. Something good.

When the lighter popped out, I held it up for her.

“Thanks,” she said. “Fell? Do you miss anyone now?”

“No. Do you?”

“Not now. Thanks for taking me dancing, Fell.”

I couldn’t remember any girl ever thanking me for taking her somewhere, on the way there.

She shifted her cigarette to her right hand and held my right hand again.

I looked over at her. I decided to try out my father’s old imitation of Humphrey Bogart. I sucked down my lower lip and said, “This is just the beginning of our travels, kid.”

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Do the Bogie bit. I don’t like bits. I always think men pull that stuff when they’re afraid to show any emotion.”

So
there,
Dad.

I said, “Why shouldn’t we be afraid to show emotion? Show emotion and die.”

“No. That’s see Naples. See Naples and die.” She laughed. “Show emotion and take your chances.”

• • •

Delia Tremble was a real good dancer. When you danced with her, people watched. Not you. Her. Some people watched her and danced. A few couples stopped to watch her.

She had all sorts of moves, and she’d heard every song whether it was a hard rock disco song or the softer kind that came rarely and only at the end of a set. She did things with herself that were graceful and hot and new to me. New to a lot of us. What I liked was she didn’t dance for them, and she didn’t dance for herself like some girls do. Some girls dance in a way you could go down to the corner and back and they wouldn’t know you’d been gone. Delia danced for me, and with me, smiling at me, her eyes always coming back to me.

We danced out on the big deck, without sitting down, for about an hour.

Then we went into the bar, got some cherry Cokes, and took them outside to the little deck and talked for another hour.

She told me she was from Atlantic City. Her father had once managed a big hotel there when Atlantic City was still pretty much a summer resort.

“When I was a kid,” she said, “I used to wait for winter, when all the tourists would be gone. Then my mom and my sisters and I could move into one of the big suites that looked out on the ocean. That’s why the ocean here affects me so. It reminds me of when I was little.”

A red-faced, crew-cut older guy began playing piano on the little deck.

Delia said, “Let’s dance here. On the lawn. It’s slow. We can take off our shoes. It’s wet on the grass.”

We did.

I knew the song the fellow began singing. It was an old, old Billy Joel one, from before he’d met Christie Brinkley. It was one he wrote to his first wife about not changing, and it used to get Mom mad. It said he didn’t need clever conversation, he wanted her to stay the way she was. Mom would say, “Stay dumb, huh? Is that the message, Billy Joel?”

But it sounded really romantic with this old saloon singer doing it. He sounded as if he were an inch away from having lung cancer. He was smoking, no hands, the way Pingree often did. He was singing “Don’t go changing.”

We were dancing out there on the wet grass by ourselves, in the dark. I kissed her near the end of the song. She kissed me back.

I think we both felt changed, never mind don’t go changing, because we didn’t smile or joke as we walked back toward the deck. You could cut the tension with a knife. It was sex. It was this great physical thirst that had come over us, and that we knew was coming, but weren’t sure what to do with after its arrival.

We sat down on the steps and picked up our cherry Cokes.

Delia said, “I have a chance to go around the world in the fall. On a ship. I’m going to take it.”

“Will you be an au pair?”

“Not for the Stileses.”

“Did you just decide?”

“Not just About a month ago. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go away for such a long time.”

“How long?”

“A year at least.”

I let out a low whistle instead of a wail. “I wanted to tell you,” she said. “I was going to wait to tell you, but now I think you should know.”

“A year?”

“Yes.”

She put her hand over mine. “I feel things, too, Fell. The way you dance.”

“The way I dance,” I said.

She took her hand away and reached for a cigarette.

“Thanks for not being mean about my smoking, too.”

I smelled her light up. She smoked those long brown Mores.

I finally said, “I might go away myself.”

“Really? Where?”

“I told you. Switzerland. Prep school.”

“Oh, Fell, you’d be a preppy after all.”

“Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not. I told you. I like that.” “I like you,” I said, “and I think I know what you’re saying.”

“What am I saying?”

“You’re saying we both feel something.
But.”
I took her hand and brought it up to my lips, and let my tongue play lightly between her fingers. Then I put her hand back. “You’re saying we can’t help feeling it, but we can’t expect to make anything out of it. Nothing permanent for now.”

“Nothing permanent. Exactly. Because I’ll be away a long time.”

“I will be, too,” I said.

I decided then and there to go to Gardner.

We danced an hour longer. I never danced that way before with anyone, never felt that way with anyone while I was dancing.

Then we drove down to the beach. We were still there when the sun started coming up.

Tuesday was her day off.

I said, “Come home with me. I’ll make us breakfast. You can meet my mother and Jazzy.”

She ran her finger down my lips, then pressed them together with it. “Hush, Fell.”

She had the collar of the blue blazer turned up and my aqua sweater wrapped around her neck like a scarf.

For once, I wasn’t at all cold.

“I don’t want to meet your family, or get to know your friends. I don’t want ties. I don’t want us to be a couple.”

“What are we then?” I wasn’t whining around as I used to with Keats. I was asking her to see what she’d come up with, after what had just happened between us.

“We’re what we are, Fell.” She smiled. She looked sleepy. “We don’t have to define it or label it … and I want our memories to be just of the two of us.”

I kept trying to keep myself from making some kind of wisecrack, or doing a Bogie imitation, or all the other jazz. She’d taught me that.

She took my hand. “I like what we are,” she said. “It’s good enough, isn’t it?”

“It’s better than that,” I said.

We left the beach, and I dropped her off at the Stileses’.

When I got home, I called Woodrow Pingree and told him I’d decided to do it.

“You won’t be sorry, Fell,” he said.

The first thing I found out was that no one going to Gardner School ever called it that. They called it The Hill. The school sat on a hill in the middle of farm country. That was all I saw, once I got off the train at Trenton, New Jersey, and into the school bus. Ten of us new boys were bound for the little town of Cottersville, Pennsylvania.

There we were met by a dozen fellows in light-blue blazers and navy-blue pants. All the blazers had gold 7’s over the blue-and-white Gardner insignias. The group formed a seven around us and sang the Gardner song.

A fellow behind me said, “Now we have to plant trees.”

“We have to what?”

“We each have to plant a tree. It’s the first thing you do when you get here, even before you get your room assigned. You get a little evergreen handed to you. You have to give it a name.”

“What kind of a name?”

“Any name. A name. By the way, I’m Sidney Dibble. Dib.”

“I’m Thompson Pingree. Tom.”

He was the basketball player type, all legs and arms, skinny, so tall I had to look way up at him. He was blond like me. He had on a tan suit with a beige T-shirt and Reeboks.

I’d worn the only suit that had been mine in my other life: the dark-blue one. I felt like Georgette after her real family had come to claim her. Pingree had driven me into New York City one August afternoon and taken me to Brooks Brothers. I had a whole trunkful of new stuff.

I asked Dib if he was sure about this tree thing. That was one detail Pingree’d left out. Dib said he was positive. His brother’d just graduated from Gardner. Dib said he was the world’s foremost authority on Gardner — ”Except when it comes to Sevens,” he added.

The words weren’t even out of his mouth a half second before a member of Sevens began barking orders at us. He was a tall skinhead, with vintage thrift-shop zoot-suit pants, and two earrings in his left ear. He had on a pair of black Converse sneakers.

“My name is Creery! Leave your luggage on the ground! It will be in your room when you get there! We will now walk back to Gardner Woods for the tree-planting ceremony! Think of a name for your tree on the way. Whatever you wish to call it. After you have planted your tree, you will line up to receive your room assignments in The Tower!”

“Who’s the punk rocker?” I asked Dib. “I thought Sevens was this exclusive club?”

“He just told you. His name is Cyril Creery.”

“And
he’s
a Sevens?”

“There’s no predicting who’ll make Sevens. But he’s easy. It’s a guy named Lasher you don’t want on your case … unless
you
make Sevens. Then he can’t touch you. Creery and Lasher hate each other. When Creery first got here, Lasher hated the sight of him. Creery had hair then. Purple hair. Lasher was out to get him. You know, Creery’s the kind that named his tree Up Yours! Lasher would have made his life hell here, but Creery made Sevens.”

“Don’t the other members have a say in who makes Sevens?”

“I don’t know how it works. No one does.”

“Maybe you need three blackballs, like in a fraternity.”

“Nobody knows,” Dib said.

Besides the ten of us who’d gotten off the train in Trenton, there were ten other new boys already at The Hill. Now there were twenty of us walking to Gardner Woods.

There we found twenty holes in two rows, with twenty shovels beside them, and twenty mounds of dirt.

There was a line forming to receive the evergreens.

“You tell Creery the name of your tree, then stick it in the ground and throw the dirt over it,” Dib said, “I’m going to name mine after my dog, Thor.”

“Are all those trees in the background from classes ahead of us?”

“You’ve got it. What are you naming yours?” “I’m not sure yet.”

“You better have a name ready when we get up there.”

I thought of naming mine Delia. But that wouldn’t have been the way we’d agreed to be. Nothing permanent. A tree was pretty permanent. I thought of all the names people called their houses down on Dune Road in Seaville. I thought of Adieu. I thought of Keats’s saying on Labor Day, “Daddy says you can come here as long as you’ve come to say good-bye.” I told her she could tell Daddy to shove it! Keats said, “Oh, my, my, my. Aren’t we arrogant now that we’re going abroad to school. Do you kiss arrogantly now, too?” I didn’t kiss her good-bye arrogantly, but I did try to get something simulating emotion into it. Nothing. Delia’d have laughed. She’d have said, “What did you think, Fell, that you could forget me?” She was already gone by the time Keats came back from Four Winds. But Delia was never going to be gone.

I said to Dib, “I may name mine Adieu.”

“Oh, oui?” He laughed.

I thought of how I’d razzed Keats because Adieu had sounded pretentious. Why not just good-bye? I’d said. Why the French?

“No, not Adieu,” I said. “Good-bye.”

“Your tree’s going to be called Good-bye?”

“It’s as good as Thor, isn’t it?”

“Sure. Call it anything. You know this guy Lasher I told you about? My brother says he puts on this big act. He wants to be a playwright. He writes these plays with characters in them named Death and Destruction, like he thinks he’s profound, but it’s all a lot of bullticky crap! I mean, he’s a vegetarian, and he works out, and he’s this big hypochondriac, but he’s always playing with nooses and pretending he’s being called to the grave. Well, he named his tree Suicide.”

“I’m going to call mine Good-bye.”

Good-bye to John Fell and his life, but not good-bye to Delia Tremble. We were going to write. “Promise,” she’d said, “and if you don’t like to write letters, or if you think you probably won’t write me once you get there, tell me right now. I don’t want false expectations.”

I said I’d write. I promised.

Keats’d said,

“Are we going to write ever?”

“I don’t know,” I’d said.

“Do you know you’ve changed since June? I’m going to think you’ve met someone else.”

I couldn’t tell her about it.

I was afraid I’d jinx it if I told anyone about Delia. “Jinx
what?”
my mother’d said. “She’s going away for a year and all July and August you never knew when you were going to see her.”

“Men! Plant your trees!” Creery shouted after we’d all been given an evergreen.

Men?
The last time I’d ever been in on a tree planting was back in grade school in Brooklyn one Arbor Day. We’d all sung “This Land Is Your Land!” and walked around this little cherry tree holding hands.

Something about being one of ten boys in line with silver shovels and our holes already dug for us, with ten of the same behind us, reminded me of third grade.

But later, what happened in The Tower, didn’t.

• • •

He said Sevens were always called by their last names, so I would call him Lasher. Everyone else on The Hill, except for faculty, was called by their first name. Good, I thought! No Pingree.

He said I’d been assigned to him. I was in his group. If I ever needed anything, I’d ask him if I could have it.

He had very thick glasses, like Ping’s. He had thick, coal-black hair like Delia’s, but his was cut very short. He had one of those almost beards — stubble, really — and a stubble mustache. A smile that tipped to one side.

How much older than me? A year maybe. Maybe my age. Seventeen. But I was sixteen at Gardner School. I wasn’t a Gemini anymore, either. I was a horny Scorpio. Don’t ask me how Ping could be a Scorpio with all the sex appeal of a can opener, but he was. So was I, now.

Lasher said, “What’d you name your tree?”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye’s its name or are you a smartass?” “That’s its name.”

We were way up in The Tower. We had to go up one at a time, alphabetically. One hundred and twenty steps. The stairs were stone ones on the outside. Even if you didn’t have a fear of heights it wasn’t a climb that set your heart to singing.

In the top of The Tower was this one stone-walled room, lit by a single candle on the table. Lasher sat at the table. There was nowhere for me to sit. I stood. Lasher had on a white tank top under his blazer.

“Thompson, I want to tell you something. Don’t screw up! You’ve been assigned to me. I hate having scumbags who come here and can’t take it or can’t make it! I happen to hate legacies, too — types like Creery, whose father
and
grandfather went here, and miraculously all got to be Sevens! I happen to love this place …
and
Sevens! It’s a privilege to be here, not a right! Act like you wanted to come here more than you wanted to get laid the first time, and we’ll get along.”

“I’ll do that.”

“You have gotten yourself laid by now, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Good. I won’t have to cart you out to Willing Wanda’s to get laid. I don’t like virgins under my charge. Virgins are vulnerable. I don’t like vulnerable scumbags under my charge!
Latet anguis in herba,
Thompson! Do you know your Latin?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s from Virgil. It means the snake hides in the grass. It’s my motto.”

“Okay,” I said.

I could see that the gold buttons on his blazer had little 7’s on them.

Then he said, “Seven Seas: the Arctic and the Antarctic. North and South Pacific. North and South Atlantic. The Indian Ocean.”

I didn’t know what that meant. I stood there.

“If a Sevens meets you he might ask you to name seven things that go together. If you can’t think of seven things that go together, he might ask you to clean all the toilets in Hull House, where you’ll be living. He might ask you to do anything, if you can’t come up with seven things, and you’ll have to do it!”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll find seven things for an answer.”

“Find a lot of seven things. You can’t repeat.” “All right.”

“Your roommate is sixteen. He’s from New Hope, Pennsylvania. He’s a legacy, too.”

“Okay,” I said.

Lasher took off his thick glasses while he continued and talked with his eyes shut, as though he was bored out of his gourd but he had to get through this.

“Your roommate is a virgin. Your roommate called me sir all through his interview. Your roommate named his tree after his puppy dog. He lets people call him Dib, a boy’s nickname. He’s obviously still on Pablum, so grow him up, Thompson, because your roommate’s a vulnerable scumbag who doesn’t realize
latet anguis —
finish it, Thompson!” He opened his eyes and looked up at me.

“In the grass … in
herba.”

So I was rooming with Sidney Dibble.

Lasher gave me this smile that was as beautiful as he was, without those thick glasses.

“Welcome to The Hill!” Lasher said.