The Last Worthless Evening (20 page)

“Oh shit,” she said. “You told me you wouldn't.”

“No I didn't. You asked me not to.”

“That's true. Well. I guess I can't tell you not to, while I'm sitting here smoking.”

“You could. I could keep hiding it.”

“How long have you hidden it?”

“Just this summer.”

“Why didn't you tell me? When you started.”

“I don't know. I guess because I wasn't a teenager yet.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“I don't know.” She watched Molly smoke. “I started at thirteen. But it was before the Surgeon General's report.”

“Thirteen?”

“It was different. We did it in attics. In basements. We chewed gum so our parents wouldn't know. Cleaned our fingers with lemon juice.”

“Would you rather that?”

“No. Aren't you even a little afraid of cancer?”

“No. Are you?”

“I don't think about it. Are you just smoking to look sexy?”

Molly shrugged. “I like it.”

Claire did not want to see the cigarette moving again to Molly's lips, but she forced herself to watch. Then she said: “Oh shit. You don't look thirteen anymore.”

She pretended not to see Molly's hand coming across the table to touch hers, and she quickly rose with her plate and glass, and her cigarette like steel between her fingers, and hurried to the kitchen before her eyes brimmed and tears trickled on her cheeks. With a dishcloth she dried her face, and when Molly came in with her cigarette and plate and glass, Claire took the plate and glass from her, put them in the sink, and hugged Molly tightly, and rubbed her back, and stroked her hair.

And that was it, the reason for her sorrow; she realized this more deeply at the party that night: Molly did not look thirteen anymore. And it seemed to Claire that all she had shared with Molly until now had been mere words spoken to a child who was still little Molly, lovely Molly, her little girl she loved so much, and wanted to teach as well. Now a simple burning white cylinder between Molly's fingers and lips gave Claire a sense of dread she did not understand. But there it was, each time she looked in on the party of girls and boys in the living room, most of the girls smoking, only two of the boys, and she knew that Molly was the only child who could smoke at home, with her mother, and so now the others could smoke here too. Why so many of the girls, and so few boys? It was becoming a female vice.

She told herself that the dread and sorrow she felt were irrational. Hadn't Molly said she would never smoke dope? She was an intelligent girl, wise enough to see and scornfully avoid the stoned and perhaps forever ruined lives of the classmates she had talked about with Claire. But when the party ended and she and Molly picked up the soft-drink bottles, and emptied ashtrays, and vacuumed pieces and crumbs of cake and cookies and potato chips, and filled the dishwasher with glasses and plates, and bowls for dips, and the cake plate, and wistfully dropped the thirteen candles into the garbage, she felt that Molly working beside her was more like a grown daughter visiting home than the girl she had come home to from work, and had, with love and pride, watched grow: her young body assuming grace, her mind becoming perceptive and singular, moving toward a character all her own in its intellectual and moral solidity. But she knew that, with time, this sad distance would pass. A night and a day. Two or three days. And she was able, without willing it, to smile at Molly when their cleaning was done and they stood in the kitchen, in the sound of the dishwasher, and to hand Molly a clay ashtray for her room. And at the top of the stairs, when they kissed goodnight, and Molly went down the hall, with the ashtray and her Marlboros and red disposable lighter, and opened her bedroom door, Claire said: “Don't smoke in bed, sweetie. We could do without a fire.”

Molly turned and blew her a kiss. Then Claire went to bed and lay awake and tried to clear her mind, to empty it so it could receive, and finally when nothing came she turned on the bedside lamp and got out of bed and crouched before a bookshelf at one wall. It held her books from college, and among the Fs she found the novel she had read twice more since graduation, and brought it to her bed. It was
The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford. She knew the passage was near the end of the book, and that she had long ago underlined it in ink, and she found it and read it:
Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?

TWO

Belinda was blond and her cheeks were pink, her blue eyes glistening, and she was laughing and calling to Molly that she was smoking two cigarettes. Belinda was three feet away, across the long coffee table, sitting on the couch, laughing and pointing at her, and Molly looked at the cigarette between her fingers and then down at the one resting in the ashtray on the table, both of them just lit, and she shrugged and smiled but did not miss a note. She was in love with her voice. Like a precious discovery she had not been looking for, it rose from her diaphragm to her cheekbones, and they tingled; her mouth opened widely and the sound from it was beautiful. She was fifteen and she had sung in the chorale at school. She had sung alone at home, or with her mother, but softly. She had sung loudly with her friends. She had never sung loudly, alone, in front of anyone; and now, though she could hear rock music from the record player across the large basement room, her voice was louder and there were twenty people in the room, and on the couch with Belinda were Dotty and Wanda and Belinda's brother Bruce, a senior, and others were gathering around her: senior girls and boys, and her sophomore friends. And she knew the songs. She had not known she knew them. She spread her hands outward from her uplifted face, her eyes leaving their faces to focus on the top of the wall, where it joined the ceiling, to focus there on the images of the song: the sad lady alone in her apartment high above a city, holding a drink in a stemmed glass, staring across the darkened room at the window, and beyond it at the lights blinking like a heartbeat:

“Maybe I won't find someone

As lovely as youuu

I should care

And I dooooo—”

They shouted and clapped and without a pause, her eyes closed now, she swayed and sang:

“I used to visit all the very gay places

Those come what may places

Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life

To get the feel of life

from jazz and cocktails—”

She was in their center, yet somewhere above them; beyond her closed eyes she felt their bodies, but as a snake senses body heat; and she felt their spirits drawn into hers, and hers leaving her body, moving in song out of her mouth:

“I know that if

I took even one sniff—”

She opened her eyes to their laughter, flipped a hand downward and gestured with upturned palm at the mirror on the table, the razor blade, the straws—

“It would bore me

Terrif-ically too—”

She did not want to stop and she could not stop; she danced backward away from the table and couch, spun into the center of the room, spreading her arms. Someone put a can of Budweiser in her hand.

“—just one of those fabulous flights

a trip to the moon on gossamer wings—”

She looked at the can, frowned with disdain, held it out and someone took it and gave her a bottle of Dos Equis. She nodded, drank from it, and sang. Bruce was holding her; tall Bruce. He was at her side, his arm around her waist, moving with her, his body with hers, swaying with her melody, his feet moving with hers and her rhythm. She sang “Something Cool” and “Laura” and “Autumn Leaves” and “Moonlight in Vermont.” And she kept singing: these songs she had heard on the evenings and nights and weekend mornings and afternoons of her childhood, and she saw her mother's pretty face with the faces in the songs, for all the songs had faces, and Molly's was in them too. Her body was weightless as music and had boundless energy; and everything—the summer night, the party, the people there and herself there, Molly in the basement room and on the earth and in her breath of eternity—was as clear and lovely as a long high note on a trumpet.

She stopped when the songs did. They simply stopped rising inside her. She was not tired. And she did not care whether people had heard too much of her; she did not even consider it. She ended with “It Could Happen to You” and took a cold Dos Equis from an extended hand, a girl's hand, a senior's, and moved with Bruce, his arm at her waist, her body weightless still, her heart racing, through applause and shouts of surprise and delight, to the coffee table, to Belinda beaming at her from the couch, pretty Belinda holding out her arms, standing now, and coming around the coffee table, losing her balance and snatching it back with a quick shift of feet, Belinda hugging her tightly, prying Bruce away, saying at her ear: “God
damn
, Molly.”

Belinda moved back, looked at her eyes, kissed her lips.

“You're beautiful. Where did you get those
songs?
”

“My mother's songbook.”

“Songbook?” Bruce said. His hand was on her hip, his arm resting across the back of her waist.

“You know. Her records.”

“She's a great mom,” Belinda said to Bruce.

Wanda and Dotty appeared from behind her. They stood on either side of Belinda. They wanted to know where Molly learned all those songs, and how come they never knew she could sing like that. Wanda was drunk, and the color was leaving her face; she weaved and stared and drank from her bottle of beer, and Molly knew she would be in the bathroom soon, on her knees, hugging the bowl, riding the porcelain bus. Dotty said she had heard that Janis Joplin got started at a party, just like this; Janis hadn't known till then she was such a good singer.

“Me and Southern Comfort,” Molly said.

“Smack and death,” Bruce said.

“Somebody change the subject,” Belinda said.

“Dos Equis,” Molly said, and turned away from Bruce to get one, but he said he would, and he left for the ice chest across the room. Time stopped, or sped. She was leaning against a wall with Dotty, and Bruce stood facing them, talking, and Molly saw that he only remembered now and then to look at Dotty; and Wanda had been in the bathroom since she first hurried there a cigarette ago, or two, or an hour. A girl kneeled at the coffee table, bent over the mirror, holding a straw in her nostril and bending farther, following the straw as the white line vanished into it.

“Vanished,” Molly said.

“What?” Bruce said.

Molly shrugged. Somehow she knew people were upstairs, in bedrooms. She remembered a girl and boy going up the stairs. Then another girl and boy. And others. In her mind she saw them as clearly as if she were watching them now, across the room, holding each other and climbing the stairs, their faces flushed, their eyes bright and glazed. But she could not place them among her images of the party, could not establish a sequence. The entire night seemed to be in the present, moving in concentric circles. But she felt them up there in the many bedrooms of this house and on the sunporch couch and living-room couch, her spirit cringing yet fascinated as she watched them, her spirit up there in the enchanted forest where demons made vicious love, their faces neither soothed nor ecstatic: they hissed through clamped teeth, and their eyes shone with the vengeful and raging hate of lust. Belinda came from dancing, sweat dripping on her face, as Molly heard her mother's moans through the wall and down the hall to her bedroom door and through it to her ears, her face on her satin-covered pillow; saw her mother's face next morning, lovelier in a different way, private but not secret, as though her cheeks and eyes were nourished by lovemaking, as a flower by the sun. Her lovers' faces looked only comfortable, contented. Belinda said, “My parents should stay in Maine all week. Think of it. Think of the party we'd have.”

“Is Wanda still throwing up?” Molly said.

“Wanda? Is she sick?”

Bruce pointed at the end of the room where it became L-shaped; in that leg with the ping-pong table was the bathroom. Belinda said she would go check on her and Molly said Maybe she's upstairs and Bruce smiled and shook his head and said he didn't think so.

“A lot of people upstairs,” Molly said to Belinda.

“Wicked,” Belinda said, and left them, walked between clustered people, walked slowly, swaying when she had to change direction to skirt a dancing couple or a group standing and drinking. It was strange for Molly to be so drunk yet to see clearly how drunk Belinda was, how much effort she expended on controlling the balance of each step.

“Let's go upstairs,” she said to Bruce, and felt in her purse for cigarettes. He leaned to kiss her but she lowered her face, looked into the open box: two cigarettes. “I can't believe this. I came with one open pack and another whole one and I still ran out and Belinda gave me these. Look. I must have smoked fifty cigarettes.”

“It's the cocaine.”

“What is?”

“You smoke a lot. And you can drink all night.”

“No more of that shit.”

“You sang too.”

“Yes. I sang.” He took the cigarette from her and lit it and put it between her lips. “Come on,” she said.

She took his hand and, bumped by dancers, led him through the room; she climbed the stairs, pulling him behind her. They would always follow you. She knew that. Their cocks got hard and their faces looked helpless, no matter how they tried to disguise it, and they would follow you anywhere. She had never let any of them follow her to nakedness. No. And she was not a tease. She simply had not let any of them follow her to where they thought they were leading. She emerged from the stairs into the dark kitchen and turned into the living room, dark too; Bruce was beside her now, holding her hand between them. She went down a hall to the stairs, and stopped. Her fingers flicked ashes before she could tell it not to, and with the sole of her shoe she rubbed the carpet and hoped her foot had found the ashes.