The Palace Thief (9 page)

She stood before me in a yellow halter top and a spangled, maroon skirt that went to the floor, narrowing at the knees and spreading again at the ankles so that it looked like the bottom
half of a mermaid; the halter showed a cream-colored slice of her waist. Things were wrong at her house, I knew.

“Well, nosy,” she said, “now you know.” She sat down on the cot.

“Were you watching me?” I asked.

“A little.”

“I didn’t do anything weird, did I?”

“Nope.”

“Sometimes I do,” I said.

“Well, you didn’t this time.” She smiled. “You’re so cute,” she said finally. “You’re so serious.” She touched her earrings, one, then the other. Then she said, “Come here, little brother,” and slid over on the cot. She lowered her voice. “I
had
to move here,” she said. “It was my only choice.”

I nodded. “I hear you,” I said. This was a phrase of Clive’s.

She looked at me. “You do, don’t you?”

I nodded again. Her skirt was threadbare at the knees, and I remembered that her parents were divorced.

“You know,” she said. “I’ll tell you a secret.” She pulled back her hair, then let it fall again. “I like you, little brother.” She smiled at me. “That’s the secret. You and me, we have this connection, because you know more than everybody thinks.”

“I can bring you food, Sandra.”

She let out her breath. “That would be really cool,” she said. “You know?” She stood, slid open the small, clouded window next to her, shook a Virginia Slims from the pack and lit it. “I wish Clive was as cool as you.” She set the cigarette in an ashtray on the sill so that the smoke lifted out into the yard. “I wish,” she said.

“I’m not that cool.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Maybe,” I said.

She dragged on the cigarette again. “Question,” she said. She exhaled. “Does Elliot ever bug you?”

“Me?”

She looked around. “Who did you think I was talking to?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Not really. Sometimes.”

“Well, he bugs
me
.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, Clive is so superior to him. Clive’s a genius, and Elliot’s the last thing from one.” She thought for a moment. “There’s probably a word for what Elliot is.”

“I hear you,” I said.

She dragged on her cigarette and offered it to me. “By the way,” she said, exhaling, “Did Clive ever tell you about us?”

I pretended to inhale. “About who?”

“About he and I.”

“No.”

“He didn’t?”

I exhaled. “No.”

“You’re not going to tell your parents about me, right?”

“No way.”

“All right,” she said, “then I’ll tell you.” She met my eyes. Then she blew a smoke ring, and as it rose above her, she pierced it with another, smaller, whirling one. “I’m Clive’s lover,” she whispered. The smoke rings spun up toward the ceiling like galaxies. “It’s a big secret,” she whispered, “but now you know.”

It was the year the Vietnam War ended, Spiro Agnew resigned, and the Indians took over Wounded Knee. It was the year lines formed at gas stations and Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was the year our parents forsook their religion,
the designated hitter stepped up to the plate, abortion became legal, and our father wore bell-bottoms and purple ties. It was the year my brother spoke in his own language, won championship after championship, and began drifting away from us, until we began to fear that one day, like a branch in a storm, he would snap off completely.

Our parents were now Quakers. Our father came from a line of conservative Jews in Chicago, and our mother from Zionist farmers emigrated to Cleveland from the Negev desert, but now they went together two nights a week to Friends’ meetings. They had spent a good deal of time that year adapting to the changes that were coming at them from every quarter, so that at home sometimes the world seemed utterly different from what it had been a few years before. They had forbidden Clive and me to watch anything on television but the news, and one night that summer when they returned home after a peace march and found us watching
Mannix
instead, they took us both downtown and made Clive get out of the car and hand the television set to a bum in a doorwell.

From then on we listened to radio news. That year it was bad. Gunmen with black stockings over their faces appeared at the Olympic Games. Israel was invaded. George McGovern, for whom our parents canvassed door to door, won in Massachusetts and nowhere else. In Paris there was a long debate over the shape of the peace-negotiations table. The day the negotiations started, Vincent Jump, one of the vocational students from our school, punched Clive in the ear and made him bleed, and our mother, who kept a map of Vietnam on her dresser, invited Vincent over to have our own peace conference. It was the third time Clive had been beaten up, and she wanted to know why. Clive and Vincent sat at our rectangular kitchen table, glasses of grapefruit juice and a bowl of whole wheat
pretzels between them, while our mother and Mrs. Jump watched them from the living room. “I can’t figure out what he does to them,” she said to me that night, sitting at the edge of my bed again. “Why do Americans hate a boy just for being smart?”

Our mother never quite was an American. On weekends with her anti-Nixon placards rolled up in her hand, she would wait in long lines of activists for the Greyhound bus to take her to peace marches in Columbus; but when it came she would shove the protester in front of her to get on. She was damp-eyed, moral, and stubborn, and she felt the world deeply. Once, in the A&P, she browbeat a soldier in dress uniform, moving him up against the stand-up freezer and calling him
Chazer!
and
Gonef!
in a loud voice—a voice, I realized with embarrassment, that became accented with Hebrew when raised. I hid among the newspaper stands while the soldier, whom I pitied, stood blinking before her.

But she was devoted to my brother and me. In supermarket lines and at parent assemblies she called us her two geniuses to people she barely knew. Even later, when the evidence about me began to come in, she insisted. We were the only kids I knew who didn’t know the
Partridge Family
plots and the only ones who could distinguish Cambodia from Laos. There were bookshelves in both our bathrooms, a fact that embarrassed me, and Clive and I were required to read at least one magazine each week. I read
U.S. News & World Report
and on Saturday mornings talked with our mother about what I read, eating wheat germ while she tried—I see in retrospect—to show me the bias of the reporting. Clive read
High Times
, which contained advertisements for pipes and rolling papers, and long
articles about how to grow marijuana in the closet. He clipped the centerfolds, which were pictures of cubes of hashish or plates of diced-up psychedelic mushrooms, and kept them in his desk drawer with his guitar picks, his roach clips, and his collection of metal cigarette lighters. Our mother tried buying him a subscription to
Scientific American
, and sometimes she sat on the couch and watched him read it. Now and then while reading an article he would smile, and after a moment she would too. She liked to call him “cerebral” instead of “smart,” which to me made his intelligence sound like an overgrowth, like a vine that would one day pull down a tree.

That week I tried to forget about Sandra in our basement, but I felt a relentless force urging me to confession. So that I would not mention her, I told our mother instead about the malt liquor I had bought recently from the Sicilian grocer behind the Busy Bee market; I told our father about Kelly Reed, whom I had kissed in the leather backseat of the Cadillac De Ville we had taken one night from Billy DeSalz’s parents’ garage; Billy was in the front seat, his head lowered like a chauffeur, and later that night we taught ourselves to fishtail on the wide, unlit road around the lime quarry; I told Clive about the things I had stolen that semester, candy bars and beer, mostly, and now and then a record. But what I really wanted to say, what took all my discipline not to blurt out, was that I had found his girlfriend, dressed in glitter, hiding in the basement of our house.

Instead, I tried to get Clive to talk about it. He had always lived an entire secret life that he would never discuss, but I did my best to put him in a confessional mood. It was difficult. He never talked about anything, about the senior parties he went to or the bands he played with in his friends’ garages; he never
gave me advice, the way other brothers did, about girls or dressing or mixed drinks. Every night that week I washed the pots and pans with him after dinner, and every night, standing next to me with drooping shoulders and tapping, out-turned feet, he dried them without speaking; hunched over the sink next to him, I could feel the familiar ease that passed between us, like radar, and I tried to let it wash over us so that he would talk. Yet in him it only inspired silence. Between pots he would rest his knee against mine and tap out guitar fret-work on the towel, but he would not say anything; I would plunge my hands into the steaming water and tell the half-invented story of my friends training a telescope from the roof of the gym through the one unclouded window of the girls’ locker room into their shower, or about cheating on our multiple-choice geometry test by placing our feet on specific colored tiles on the floor of the math room. I told stories and looked into his eyes; I told them and looked out the window; but no matter what I did, no matter how much I talked or how silent I tried to keep myself, I could not entice him to talk about Sandra.

“Lover,” I said softly at the sink. Next to me, I sensed Clive’s little twists and nods. Of course, he and Sandra were boyfriend and girlfriend, but
lover
was a word I had never heard in conversation before, a word I could not imagine our parents, or my brother or anybody I knew ever using. It made it seem as if that was
all they
did. I let the hot water run until it steamed up the windows. Then I said it again,
lover
, with a little French accent, but Clive didn’t answer.

After dinner I watched our father drinking coffee, our mother leaning over the counter, and Clive pouring unfiltered apple juice, but these actions did not distract me; they only made my secret more exquisite. I felt my chest expanding, like helium, urging me to confess. Clive picked at some apple pie;
I almost told him then that I knew. Our mother read her
Friends’ News
on the living room couch; there, I almost told her. Our father went back to his office to check on his accounts. Our parents moved about the house, doing their chores, oblivious to Sandra hidden downstairs, like a body oblivious to its beating heart.

Finally, late that night, I went into our father’s office and asked him to play ping-pong. “I just feel like playing,” I said. We walked down to the basement, where he screwed in the light bulb, took the paddles from the bin where they’d lain for months, and dusted them on his pant leg. With the arm of his sweater, he dusted the ping-pong table.

“I’m not sure what’s got into you, sailor,” he said, patting me on the shoulder, “but I sure am glad to see it.”

Again I almost told him. Instead, I held the ball in my open palm for a moment, listening to the click of the furnace and the squeaks of the ceiling joists where our mother walked above us in the kitchen, and then I said, “Service.” I hit a slice that he slapped back hard into the corner for the point. The ball bounced underneath the stairs, and I retrieved it. “One–zero,” I said. “What do you think of Clive?” I asked.

“Zero
–one
, sailor. What do you mean, what do I think of Clive?”

“He’s been acting strange, that’s all.”

“Is that supposed to be a news flash?”

“I just thought I’d tell you.” I showed him the ball again. “Service.”

He laughed and returned it to the same spot in the corner for the point. “Thanks, sailor,” he said. Then he hit another past my backhand.

“What about Elliot?” I said.

“Elliot’s a fine kid, why? Is there something I should know about?”

I served while he was looking me in the eyes and surprised him. “No, I’m just talking. Three-one.”

“One–three.”

“What about Sandra?” I said.

“What about her?”

I waited a moment. “What do you think of her?”

He crouched to receive my serve, his paddle held from the back of his hand the way the Chinese players had held it that year in the Olympics, and behind the refrigerator box I heard the flex of Sandra’s cot. “She’s his belle,” he said as I served, “if that’s what you mean, but he’ll get over her.”

After he won the point the only sounds in the basement were our father’s breathing and the soft rush of the furnace pilot. “I’m not sure he will,” I said.

He laughed.

“I think she’s kind of pretty,” I said.

“Pretty, William?” He shook his head. “Maybe so, but it’s a cheap kind of pretty. It’s the kind of pretty that won’t last. I guarantee it, sailor. Serve.”

I waited a moment. Then I said loudly, “I’m sorry.”

“About what?” said our father.

Walking by Clive’s room one afternoon, I noticed a cold draft coming from beneath his door. There was no answer when I knocked, and when I entered I found him and Elliot sitting on the windowsill with the windows wide open. Their shirts and pants were off and they sat cross-legged in their underwear, like Indians, facing out into the snowy yard. Their faces were blank, and neither of them moved when I entered. Icicles hung from the eave.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Uh, Sitting Bull?”

Elliot looked at me, then turned to the open window again.
His chest and arms were pale from the cold, and the black hairs on his legs stood up.

“Um, is this a physics experiment?”

“Shhh,” Clive said. He didn’t move.

“I get it. You’re freeze-drying yourselves.”

Elliot raised his hand and examined it. It was yellow-white, as though all the blood had disappeared, and I could see the tendons contracted inside. He dropped it back into his lap, where it made a sound like wood.

Later they told me they were practicing what certain monks knew. These monks, Clive said, lived by discipline. They were capable of sitting like that in the Himalayan winter, expressionless, without clothing, until they froze to death.