Walking Dunes (19 page)

“That sounds boring,” he said softly. She was wiggling, moving in as close as she could get. He realized that he was as eager as she was. He stepped out of the shower, locked the bathroom door, and stepped back in. She had already pulled off her panties.

“You kids in here?” they heard the salesman calling. Glee was giggly and nervous, and happy. David leaned back against the cold shower tile; he turned his face to let his cheek cool for a moment. He closed his eyes.

“Always someone dropping in,” Glee whispered. She was tugging and rearranging herself, laughing. He stepped out of the shower. Her eyes were shining. For a moment he felt sealed in the fancy model bathroom, trapped in Glee's fantasy.

18.

He often found himself staring at Patsy. She was a puzzle he wanted to unlock. She intrigued him; on stage, she mesmerized him. She might listen to the director intently, leaning slightly into the pool of light, and the act of listening was suddenly fascinating. She spoke with such clarity and resonance, you could hear her perfectly anywhere in the theatre. He asked her about her voice; he knew his own was weaker, that he strained to match her. It's all in the breath, she told him. She showed him how you have to breathe from deep in the cavity of your body, how your diaphragm is a floor. She put her warm hands flat against his ribs. He caught on fast. She said, “Of course you would, any athlete has learned something about breathing!” The strain in his throat went away. He could hear the difference, and so could Mr. Turnbow. “You've relaxed, David,” he said. “You've started really acting.”

The acting had seemed easy at the beginning, like playing dress-up. It was only as he got better—Patsy told him so many things—that he saw how much work it was to get it right. He learned lines easily, he learned how to turn, stand, walk across stage. He learned to keep his body “open,” for the audience to see. Derek was a big Dr. Sloper, and David enjoyed the feeling of taking him on, standing up to him. He thought their scenes worked fine. Derek had a big voice and lacked subtlety, so David tried to be especially smooth in his scenes with him. With Patsy, something else was happening. There was a fine wire between them, a tension he could almost reach out to touch in the air. She could have taken every scene from him, but what mattered was that they were a team. What they made together made the play work. “Lucky me,” she told him. “I thought Mr. T. would cast Jerry McCain, Morris straight off the ranch.” He realized she considered it her play.

He took her home after rehearsal each night and stayed a little while. They talked about their scenes. She told him about parts she wanted to play some day: Nora in “A Doll's House,” Antigone, Lady Bracknell in “Earnest,” Gittel in “Two for the Seesaw.” They talked about what it would be like to move to New York. You would be poor, you would have to find work as a waiter or a clerk or who knows what, but you would be in the heart of the heart of the world, where everything was happening, where there was everything to learn. She thought about going there and taking acting classes on Bank Street (he wondered how she knew about these things); she said, “You could, too, you're talented,” but it was unimaginable. He said he wanted to go to college, and as he said it he wanted it more than anything. College was how you climbed up out of the hole your parents were in. It put you in the running.

“Do you need college?” she asked.

He began to think of the future more clearly. “Maybe,” he said, and his voice shook, trying out the idea, “I should study literature, and go on to graduate school. If I want to write, wouldn't I learn from the masters?”

“You'd learn old things!” she said. “Things you could learn reading on your own.” She seemed to find the idea disappointing and unimaginative, but he was caught up in the notion. He saw himself at a podium, talking about Keats. He would have a tiny office with a window looking out on green lawns. “Maybe I could be a college professor.” How many times had he said “maybe” in the last five minutes? She made him want things more than ever, but she made him wonder if what he wanted was the right thing. She acted so sure of herself, though her plans were more ghostly than his own. Get out of town: was that a career?

“In a tweed jacket, with a pipe? You'd look good like that,” she said. He could not tell what the tone meant. Was she making fun of him? Was she seeing his vision?

He never stayed long. They were exhausted after rehearsal, and often there was schoolwork still to do. He met her father, a congenial man who did not have much to say.

The night of the first dress rehearsal, the scenes with Patsy were magic. She wore her hair pulled up high and tight on her head, and wisps escaped around her face. The sight of those cranky red hairs made him realize how vulnerable she was—Catherine, the spinster heiress, the object of his suit—and at one moment he lifted his hand to touch her face. He almost touched her, and did not, and he saw that she sensed both his impulse and his withdrawal, and suffered for his failure to follow through. He felt such power over her.

Between acts, they took a break. He stood at the back of the stage, where the door was propped open a couple of feet. Wearing a stiff collar and jacket, he felt hot and confined, and his chest ached. He leaned against the wall and tried not to think, tried to relax his chest.

Patsy appeared next to him. “She thinks she will die if she does not have Morris,” she whispered. He thought she was excited. Although she was dressed exactly the same, she looked like Patsy and not Catherine. Catherine was timid and careful in her speech; Patsy was reckless, outspoken.

He took her hand and pulled her outside the door. It was a blustery cold night. He had never wanted to kiss a girl so much. She leaned against the building. Her chin was high, the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. He did not want to rush. He had always known that there would be tremendous pleasure in this moment, between the intention and the act.

Her lips were stiff. He kissed her gently, and put his hand on her cheek. “You're cold,” he said.

“I'm scared of you,” she answered, and put her face hard into his shoulder.

She said it was her father's night off, and she could call for a ride. “Of course you won't,” he said. The wind had died. He drove around to the other side of the tennis courts and parked beside a giant elm. “Are you cold now?” he asked. His father's station wagon had a faulty heater. It took ten minutes to warm up, then it roasted you. There hadn't been time for it to work very well.

“A little.” She sat rather primly, her legs together, her hands in her lap.

“Come here.” He took one hand and tugged her toward him. “You're like a board.” He felt her stiffen more. “What's wrong with you?”

“I'm surprised.”

It seemed so natural to be with her, it seemed inevitable. “You haven't wanted to kiss me?” All those nights, looking at one another across that crummy little room, talking pie in the sky.

“We were friends.”

“We
are
friends! Patsy—”
He
was surprised. She seemed so bold, yet here she was skittish and silly. “We are friends,” he said again, his voice low. He thought his voice sounded nice. He tried to think of other things to say. He felt her relax a little; he could see her shoulders lower, the tension in her face ease.

“I feel so stupid,” she said. “Like we've gone off-book and I don't know my lines.”

“Ad-lib,” he said. When he kissed her, she kissed him back. Her awkwardness, her reticence, thrilled him. Sex wasn't supposed to be an easy game, it was supposed to mean something. Gently, he touched her face and neck and arms. Her arms were still at her side. She trembled.

“Oh Patsy,” he gushed, overcome by his desire for her. He drew her onto him and leaned back against the car door. He stuck his legs out on the seat so that he could feel her long body on his own.

“I don't know what to do.”

“Just feel,” he whispered back. It took a long time to rearrange their bodies, small, gradual moves, until she was beneath him.

It was as he had imagined, this long act of love. She was passive, but slowly she responded to his touch. He felt her bloom inside his embrace. He reached up inside her shirt to caress her breasts, but it was too cold to undress. They both wore jeans, a terrible awkwardness, but she did whatever his hands told her to do. She brought her knees up when he tapped them with his fingers.

He took so much time, he was so tender. But when he moved his penis against her, she began to whimper, and when he pressed into her—there was resistance—she cried out and pulled away. “I'm not ready!” she said. “I'm sorry, David, I can't, I can't.”

“Shh,” he soothed. He stroked her, then touched her again, restraining himself from the incredible urge to push into her. It was such a cruelty, to feel himself at her door, and to be shoved away like an interloper. What had she thought they were doing?

He pressed, murmuring her name; if she would just relax, if he could just get inside her, he knew she would love him, she would be glad. She was the girl who wanted to live life!

“You have to stop!” she said, pulling her legs, knocking him aside. “I tell you, not now!”

“What do you mean, not now!” He was up on his knees, his own pants ridiculous around his ankles, his penis swollen, pulsing, pointing right at her.

She burst into a ridiculous nervous giggle. “It's looking at me!” she laughed.

He wanted to slap her. He grabbed at his trousers, yanked the car door, scrambled outside. He dressed, aching horribly, and pounded his fist against the hood of the car. He knew it would frighten her, he wanted her to be frightened. She was a fake, a girl who liked to appear so strong and sure of himself, and she was what you, would expect from—from a freshman! From a girl like Sissy!

She got out of the car on her side and ran around to him. He flung off her touch. “God, I'm sorry!” she said. “It's the car, I think. The cold. I wasn't expecting—” She kept moving, she wouldn't let him not look at her. She looked like she was dancing on hot rocks. “We weren't ready, I can't get pregnant—”

“I'm not stupid!” he yelled. “I had what we needed, I wanted to feel you first.”

“Getting pregnant would be the worst thing that could happen to me.”

“You weren't afraid of getting pregnant,” he said. “You were afraid of making love.”

“It hurt. I'm cold, I couldn't relax.”

He shook her off.

“Listen!” she said, her voice stronger. “I didn't want to make love in your car! I have a right to decide.”

“Then you shouldn't have let me start. Don't you know anything? Don't you know what that does to a man?”

She reached inside his car for her jacket. She held it up against her, as if he might take it away. “A man? I don't think that's what you are, David,” she said, and marched off across the tennis courts.

He could not sleep. He had been such a fool, swept along in some romantic fantasy. Why? Because she scribbled foolish poems and talked abut big cities! Because she had a little more experience than he did, acting. Because he was bored with Glee, and Patsy was there, like something you stumbled across in the alley. She was there.

He ground his teeth and cursed her. She was a smart-aleck, a coward, a cock-tease. She wasn't even pretty. And he, he was a fool with a prick for a brain. He tossed half the night, falling asleep so late it was midmorning when he woke, and nearly noon when he got to school. The attendance counselor hardly looked up; David always went to school, like a sheep with a herd.

He had nearly made a terrible mistake, one that would have embroiled him with a girl who cleaned motel rooms and built fantasies about being an actress, one that would have brought all hell down on his head from Glee, a perfectly nice girl, and scorn from Leland, who thought being in a play had made David a little crazy. He had been under a spell, the spell of the play. He had nearly come too close to a girl who was not in any way the kind of girl he wanted, a girl with nothing going for her except enough talent to look good on a Basin High stage. He felt enormous relief, reconsidering the night's disaster. He was glad not to have made such a giant step in the wrong direction.

It was easier than he had dreaded, there was only the week to get through, and, strangely, what had happened between David and Patsy did not seem to matter at all when they were on stage. If anything, the electricity between them was better. Off-stage, they did not exchange a word. The play was a great success. He took Glee to the cast party at Mr. Turnbow's house, but it was boring, and they only stayed a little while.

The following Saturday morning, some of the student council kids gathered on the football field. There was one last task before the game: the goal post needed to be wrapped in crepe paper. They stared up at the post in awe. It was so high.

Beth Ann Kimbrough said, “Last year Bobby Adams shinnied up the pole.” They all looked at her. You're kidding, somebody said.

There were only girls there, and David, and one sophomore boy wearing glasses with a safety cord. Circumstances made David a knight. Adrenalin gushed through him like a cascade. Here was something he could do, something the whole world would see, and all it took was a little nerve. Nothing could have stopped him from ascending that height, though his heart pounded in his chest so hard he thought they must hear it on the ground, where they all stood, mouths gaping, as he worked his way up, trailing green and white paper. He had to do the climb twice. When he came down, his legs were shaking so hard he thought he might fall over. “Our hero!” one of the girls said, laughing in a nice way. He turned and looked for Beth Ann. She was smiling. A trick of the light made her seem to glow.

When Glee heard what he had done, she was so thrilled she said she would do anything for him, anything at all. She giggled and twittered, in case he didn't know what she meant. He said he had in mind something girls didn't like to do, or so he had heard. “You don't have to if you don't like it,” he said. He thought it would hurt her feelings if he did not come up with something. They had been together nine months, like a baby in the womb. “I could try,” Glee said. She wore her green dress to the dance, and the white orchid he had bought for her. She only ate a shrimp salad at dinner. She was so pretty, so nice to him. If she was giddy, wasn't it only that she was young? She was generous and honest; everybody liked her. It was a perfect Homecoming night. Basin High won by one point. Glee tried what he wanted, and did not mind. He liked her a lot, he had been crazy, all that was over now.