The Last Good Night (16 page)

“How do you know? You don't know me yet.”

“I know that you're different from the other girls around here.”

He leaned over to kiss me.

I felt his lips, soft and salty, and then his tongue, tentative at first, and then bolder, drifting through my mouth, more intimate than all the harsh invasions of the past.

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
I was carrying a stack of freshly laundered towels through the courtyard when I saw Jack drive up in his convertible. His arm, sinewy, perfectly proportioned, rested casually on the door. He was smiling as I walked over to him. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought you might want to go for a ride.”

I ran my fingers through my hair, glancing back at the motel. I had fourteen rooms to clean, and the laundry to do. I turned back to him. There were pale purple rings, soft and puffy, beneath his eyes. I smiled. “Just give me a minute.”

I hurriedly dumped the towels in the laundry room, keeping an eye out for Garner and Astrid. I didn't dare go back inside the apartment to get my swimsuit.

I sat a few inches closer to Jack than I had the night before as he drove. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“You'll see.”

“I hate surprises,” I said.

“You do?” He looked at me solemnly, gathering information.

“Yes.”

“I'm taking you to a place I know. A spoil island.”

“What's a spoil island?”

“They were made when the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the intracoastal so boats could have easier access between the river and the ocean. They dumped these huge loads of sand and silt in piles just to get them out of the way and they became islands. Trees grew, shrubs. I don't know, somehow they just took. You can't keep things from growing here.”

We pulled up onto an embankment and got out of the car. A rowboat was hidden beneath a large cluster of mangrove, and Jack pulled it out and threw the canvas bag he was carrying onto
the seat. He launched the dinghy onto the water, held it while I climbed in, and then jumped in after me.

He began to row upriver. We were going against the tide and I watched the muscles in his arms bulging in a steady sinuous rhythm with his efforts.

“Is this your boat?” I asked.

“No. It belongs to this old black guy who lives in the trailer park out on Dohenny Drive. He doesn't use it much anymore because of his arthritis. He just fishes on the bridge over the intracoastal instead.” He smiled shyly. “Sometimes I bring him coffee, or worms. That's how we met, buying worms one day. Anyway, he doesn't mind if I use his boat.”

We passed a few tiny islands before we got to the one Jack had in mind. “This is it,” he said.

He jumped out of the boat a few yards from the island's ragged shore, and began to pull it the rest of the way. I followed his lead and helped pull from the other side as the sludge of the riverbed seeped between my toes.

The air was suddenly still as we sat down on the white sand, heavy with the scent of heat and algae. Behind us, the center of the island was a compression of pines, dark and humming with mosquitoes. The only other sound was a far-off motorboat, cutting through the water and then waning. Jack reached into the striped canvas bag and pulled out a bottle of Mateus rosé, what we were all drinking that year. He nestled it into the sand at water's edge where the river would keep it cold.

“You knew I'd come?” I asked.

“I hoped.”

We looked at each other.

“Do you want to swim?” he asked. “I'm pretty hot.”

“I didn't bring a suit.”

“Oh.”

We stood facing each other awkwardly.

I shrugged, smiled. “What the hell.” I quickly slid out of my
shorts and shirt while Jack stared at a broken shell by his feet. I never wore a bra and I stood for a moment in my cotton panties, but that seemed silly, so I took them off too. Jack was wearing baggy green trunks, but he stepped out of them, smiling with a shy complicity at our daring.

We waded through the silt on the far side of the island and then we both dove in at once.

My hair streamed out behind me and my nipples hardened as I navigated through circles of warm and then icy water. I heard Jack break the surface, gasping, and still I stayed beneath.

After a half hour of swimming, we went onshore, running to our towels, both of us embarrassed to be naked in the open air. Jack held up his shirt to me. “Do you want this?”

“Thanks.” I slipped into it, and the smell of him enwrapped me.

When we had both pulled on our shorts, our backs to each other, we sat down on the sand, hugging our knees to our chests while we passed the bottle of cold sweet wine back and forth.

“I've never brought anyone here before,” he said. “I just want you to know that.” He took a long gulp of wine. “Usually I just come here to get away from people. Do you ever want to do that? Just get completely away from everyone?”

“Yeah.” I lay back, and felt the sand sink beneath my body. The sun and the wine were making everything warm and hazy. “There was a place I used to go in Germany,” I said so softly that he had to lean closer to hear. “There was this building on our street that had burned down. It was just a shell, with rats and all. I used to climb inside the rubble and make a little fortress out of some of the loose bricks. Sometimes I'd stay there all afternoon, just reading or, you know, thinking. No one could find me there.” I remembered the straggles of sun that would creep in through the cracks, carrying with it the distant voices of our street in Dortmarr, the women and the children hurrying about in the afternoon, and someplace out there Astrid, Astrid in her tight
dresses and low necks, Astrid and her men. “I haven't found a place in Florida,” I added quietly.

“You can come here,” he said. “I mean, if you want to.”

“Thanks.” I took a swig of wine and wiped the dribble from my chin.

Jack propped himself up on his elbow, touching my neck with his fingertips. “Mosquito,” he said.

He ran his fingertips down the side of my neck, my shoulder, my arm.

My back arched and I bit my lip, suddenly terrified in a way I hadn't been with the others.

I rose quickly and, running, dove into the water, still wearing my shorts and his shirt.

 

I
T WAS LATE
afternoon when we rowed back. Jack dropped me off a block from the Breezeway, as I requested. He reached over and when he kissed me, he tasted of wine and sand and sun. “Why can't I come in?” he asked.

“It's just better this way,” I said.

He nodded and kissed me one last time.

Already, I knew I had to keep them separate, Jack and the motel, the others.

 

G
ARNER WAS EMPTYING
the garbage by the pool when I walked by. “Where have you been all day?” he demanded.

“Out.” I strode quickly to the office.

“Out,” Garner muttered as he followed me. “Out. Well, we'd all like to go out, wouldn't we? But some of us actually have things to do. Some of us actually have duties.”

In the kitchen, Astrid was humming along with Olivia
Newton-John's “Have You Never Been Mellow” while she drenched a celery root salad with oil. She did not turn around.

I turned to Garner and found him looking at me straight in the eyes, and I looked back, emboldened by the day, by the very thought of Jack.

He left the kitchen without saying another word.

 

O
N
M
ONDAY MORNING,
Jack was waiting for me on the school steps. His face broadened to a smile when he saw me. He did not kiss me hello, or reach to touch me amid the swirl of the other kids rushing past us. We only stood there for a moment, facing each other, flushed.

“Well,” he said, “I guess we should go in.”

“I guess.”

“I have practice this afternoon but we could meet later,” he said, as we went through the door.

“Okay.”

All day, I felt him moving through the hallways, densely fleshed, full-blooded, where everything and everyone else was suddenly reduced to shadows.

At three o'clock, I sat in the school library reading the
Flagerty Record
and the
Miami Herald
about the upcoming presidential election. The Florida primary was three weeks away and I studied the articles about the Democratic field, crowded with names I had been hearing on the radio: Henry Jackson, George Wallace, Jimmy Carter. The words were suffused with an almost erotic vibrancy simply because I knew they were of interest to Jack.

I glanced out of the second-floor window at the track field below. A dozen boys in blue shorts and numbered tank tops were running, their legs suspended in midair as they flew over the hurdles. I got up and moved closer to the window, pressing my hands against it, looking for Jack.

When I spotted him, he was just finishing a heat. He turned around with his hand on his belly as he walked back to the coach. My heart quickened, certain that he would feel me watching him and look up, but he didn't. I gathered my books and hurried from the library.

I was standing by the bleachers, away from the few other spectators, when he noticed me and came jogging over.

His breath was stilted when he reached my side. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

There was a film of sweat across his shoulders. “I'm almost done.”

I nodded.

We stood six inches apart. Behind us, there was the steady sound of feet hitting the track. Jack reached over and slowly hooked his forefinger through mine.

We leaned in closer without speaking until our fingers were fully entwined, the heat gathering in our palms.

In the distance, the coach's whistle blew once, and then again, long and shrill. “You coming, Pierce, or are you too busy courting?”

Jack gradually pulled his fingers away. “I have to go.” He took a few steps and then came back. “I'll meet you out front in half an hour.”

I nodded and then watched him trot away from me across the near-empty field.

We did not go to the Hamburger Haven downtown or to the public beach where the other kids went, walking in couples or groups of three and four on the jetty, watching the late day surfers waiting in clumps for a wave,
the
wave. We didn't discuss it, discard it. We both understood the habit of solitude, I because I had been so much alone, Jack because he felt so much alone, so that now, together, we had a perfect excuse to indulge in what came naturally to us both.

We wanted only each other. Already.

Jack bought us Cokes, and we took them back to the track field and sat behind the empty bleachers.

The slats of the seats above us formed triangular shadows across the ground, where the scrupulously groomed lawns petered out and sand poked through, even here, miles from the shore.

“I'll miss the beach,” Jack remarked with the sad sweet air of one who is wavering on the brink of leaving but has gone no place yet, testing out the nostalgia before it has any real teeth.

“You mean when you go to college?”

“Afterwards. I think I'll have to live in cities. Washington, maybe.” He smiled at me. “Or New York. If I do well in law school, who knows?” He took another sip of his soda.

“Oh, I'm sure you'll do well. You do well at everything, don't you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“You just seem the type.”

“What type is that?”

“Your type,” I said. “Anyway, cities are better. No one will know you're the Pierces' only son and heir. Isn't that what you want?”

“No,” he answered. “That's not why I want to go away. I want to go away because I have to if I'm going to do anything that matters.”

“Oh.” Chastened, I felt my face flush.

“Were you serious when you said you didn't know what you wanted to be?” he asked.

I made rings in the dirt with the bottom of my Coke bottle. “Do you promise you won't laugh?”

“I promise.”

“Well, I don't know exactly, but…See, I listen to the radio.”

He waited for me to go on, to explain what I had only the haziest notion of myself.

“Not music,” I said, “but the news. Maybe I'd like to do something like that.”

“You mean journalism?”

“I don't know.” I'd never actually defined it that way before. I only knew that the voices in the dark came from a different hemisphere, one that I longed to escape to. “It's nothing. It was just an idea.”

He regarded me seriously and then smiled. “It's a good idea.”

“You think so?”

“Sure.”

That's how simply it became accepted between us, my future profession, his, secret dreams that we elaborated only with each other, turning them this way and that, expanding them, filling them in, until they began to feel like fact. How anxious we were to believe in each other, how young we were, how hungry.

I looked away, embarrassed, and noticed the Jimmy Carter button on Jack's knapsack. “He's got a lot of competition,” I remarked.

“I know. But what are our choices, huh? Wallace, the fucking racist? At least Carter's talking about the right things. What does Ford care about, besides pardoning Nixon and getting in a good game of golf? The thing is, I think Carter is good,” he said. “Maybe it's childish to divide people into good and bad, but I really think you can.” He paused. “You must think I'm awfully naïve.”

“I don't think that.”

“What do you think?”

“About what?” I asked.

“About me.”

“You're all right, if you like the knight-in-shining-armor type.”

“And do you?”

“It depends what's underneath the armor.”

He smiled and leaned over to kiss me, and we fell to the sandy ground, pressing, stroking, hurrying to learn each other's shape and taste.