Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

  She doesn’t answer. She is on the fainting bed.

  “Because you don’t sing,” he whispers. “And yet I love you.”

  Spooned together in one of the twin beds, they gaze at the castle on the rocky highlands. “You think,” he says, “that the archduke built Miramare on a peninsula thrust into the sea, so that his bride could have an incomparable view of Trieste and Croatia on one side and Grado and Venice on the other. But what you don’t know from where we lie, is that you can stand on a hill anywhere on the lower Adriatic and see our miraculous castello in the hazy distance. Anywhere. The view is of the castle, not the other way around.” He lowers his voice to a husk. “The view is of us.”

  He promised her he would show her the famed castle grounds, that they would walk amid the rows of juniper and spruce. Reluctantly she dons her Polish coral love dress, finally less absurd, and they head out past the lemon trees to the temperamental sea, blue one minute like a robin’s egg, malachite green the next.

  There is a café in the lush but unkempt garden. It serves speck-filled baguettes, pasta with sauce, and giant cannoli. It has tables by the seaside under the overgrown trellis gazebo. The thousands of cats living in the garden are underfoot begging for food. Chloe and Johnny eat quickly. They want to go swim. And other things. But she has to admit, it’s nice to sit out here with him, al fresco, just the two of them, holding hands, making small talk, giggling in post-coital embarrassment (her not him).

  “Tell me,” Johnny says, “is Mason the first boy you’ve been with?”

  “Yes, of course,” she says, and hesitates, which he catches because he catches everything. She doesn’t want to tell him the truth, how naïve she is, how unsullied. It wasn’t for lack of trying. She was afraid of getting caught in the back seat of Mason’s mother’s car like they were that one time behind Subway when they almost went all the way but not quite, and there was never a bed, because Burt was never out of the house, and neither was Lang. She wants Johnny to think she is not a child. That she’s done things, knows things.

  “First boy for everything?”

  “Not the first boy I’ve kissed,” she says, a little bristly even though she’s eating the cannoli cream he’s feeding her with his fingers.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. There’ve been others. I’m not a neophyte.”

  Leaning forward he licks a bit of cream from the corner of her mouth. “You think I want you to have more experience?”

  That is a stumbling block. She certainly thinks so, but from his expression she guesses the answer is no.

  “Who else was there?”

  “Nobody.” She starts to clean up their mess, feeding scraps to the begging cats. She wants to go. She tries to change the subject, but Johnny won’t let her.

  “Why so secretive, princess? Divulge away.” They pull in their metal chairs. “What does it matter to me who it was? I don’t know anybody from your high school. Do I?” Why is he smiling like that?

  She divulges nothing as she throws their garbage into the trash. She doesn’t even breathe, in case her breathing gives her away. He relents, has mercy on her. Pursues her in other ways, lets this one drop. “Do you want to go swimming?”

  “God, yes.”

  They giggle about waiting an hour after eating, an old wives’ tale. When she asks where the beach is, he laughs. “Right here.” He points to the pedestrian path off the highway, and she repeats her question, and he points again. “We plunge into the sea straight from the road. That’s the Italian way.”

  And they do, in a secluded spot under a ginkgo biloba and a palm tree, because Chloe has brought no bathing suit. He swims in his boxer briefs and she dives into the mild Adriatic in her red bra and blue polka dot underwear, almost like a bikini, and the way Johnny gazes at her in the water, and grabs her, and kisses her, she might as well be not wearing anything.

  Later, when he is briefly unconscious during a break between very late and very early, Chloe flies back down the years, to one June night with music and “She Will Be Loved” and dashboard lights and picnic tables hidden under awnings, and all the other kids doing something else, laughing somewhere else, and only Chloe and Blake by the barbecue grill near Hastings. He had been in charge of the grill, so they had gone together to clean it and close it up for the night and when they were done, they plopped down on the picnic bench and shared a beer in secret. They giggled, chewing mint gum to hide the smell of alcohol; they had to share the gum too, because Chloe only had one stick.

  Earlier the kids had bellowed songs that didn’t sound like music, screaming, mangling the words. Chloe pretended she knew the words to “Billy, Don’t be a Hero,” and Hannah and Blake sang “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and Mason sang “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad,” prophetic in retrospect, since there ain’t no way he was ever gonna love her. It was nothing but screeching fun of fifteen-year-olds with little adult supervision, and a cooler full of beer that someone smuggled in and covered with Cokes, and they all drank and then sang even louder, and Blake was the one who had sung “She Will Be Loved.”

  Chloe almost forgot that part, Blake singing it, wanting to make her feel beautiful. She has tried hard to forget. It is not even a memory anymore, but part of her identity: the smell of oak and cut grass, warm beer, mosquitoes feasting on her bare legs, and Blake on top of the picnic table as the chorus went around and around and around in the core of her soul. Back then, she didn’t belong to someone else yet.

  “She Will Be Loved.”

  “She Will Be Loved.”

  And later, after singing and cleaning the grill and polishing off a can of Bud, they were sitting at the table arguing like always, debating the construction of verbals or the best way to catch a bass, or the perfection of roses. There was no one nearby, it was dark. The multi-colored string lights draped over the tent sparkled like dim stars. They were straddling the bench in the furthest edge of the common, snug between the Hastings wall, the corner of the lit-up tent and the narrow passageway that led to the rear gate. Chloe might have said something like you and Hannah looked so cute together singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” … when Blake said turn around, bright eyes, leaned forward, head bent, and kissed her lingeringly on the mouth. He hardly even had to lean forward. She blamed it on sitting too close and that wicked half-can of beer. They had been nearly chest to chest, face to face, forearms touching on the table, casual, intimate, laughing, arguing and close, and the kiss was drunken and long and open. His hands went in her hair. Her body went weak.

  Someone dropped a tray of cups a few feet away, there was a drum roll, a loud saxophone, a mob of cackling taunting teenagers. He pulled away. There was barely a blink exchanged between them after the open lips and tilted faces.

  One long slow blink, maybe. But that was all.

  He got up to go help, and she tottered over to the clearing to find the others, Hannah, and Taylor and Mackenzie and Mason, and Madison and Megan. Hannah said what were you doing over there alone with Blake, and Chloe said I don’t know what you mean. They started playing capture the flag, as if it hadn’t already been captured.

  As it turned out, no it had not, because a few minutes later Hannah dragged Blake away with her under the trees, and Chloe was left alone. That’s when Mason took her hand. That summer, the four of them fell into another rhythm, one where the tall slender blonde beauty made time with the brawny, scruffy, completely dear giant, and the mousy girl with the bangs, the breasts and the silent passions ended up with the unexpected prize of the jock, the all-star and the tri-county batting champion.

  Chloe and Blake never spoke of that night, and he never looked at her like that again, or sat close to her, or paused between sentences, or tilted his head, or anything. She was his brother’s girl, and that was that. Talk about a heavy castle door falling shut in the distance across the moat.

  After many months the image faded: stumbling around the commons by herself after Hannah had pulled Blake away to the distant birches, Chloe�
��s mouth swollen from the bruising of his open crazy kiss. Stumbling around until Mason took her hand.

  Why didn’t she want to confess any of this to Johnny in the violet silence?

  Maybe because she didn’t want him to say, the wrong guy took your hand. Because it wasn’t true. It had been just an impulse, a kid thing, not real. Mason was real. Hannah was real.

  When he is up, Johnny never stops talking, joking, humming, strumming, moon gazing, navel too, philosophizing, proselytizing, copying, originating, prophesying. He keeps calling himself her eternal footman. He keeps saying their carnal love has been attained.

  There are caresses, kisses, embraces. There is whistling, madness in the bed, there is anguish and weeping into sleeves and bare arms and handkerchiefs. Awake, he is the strongest most full-bodied, scarlet wine, all day and night, all the transitory minutes, a parade of rhythmic rhyming battalions, a million men in one boy body with incense and flame at the altar of her, as if Chloe is the one who makes Johnny holy.

  Suddenly without any falling, there is a leap into sleep, one minute reciting the classics, singing Byron and Pope, the next on his back in the lilac petals of lullabies, gentle, peaceful, not a collapse, just off. OFF.

  Like a switch of life.

  One moment a spectacle, an orgy, the next pale silence. Barely even breathing.

  He is tough to awaken.

  Up all the livelong hours of the insane night, then lifeless. Mute lips, dull eyes, candle wax drying and cold.

  When he wakes, his hands tremble. Pale of face he rises and vanishes, down the corridor, behind another door away from her, outside, he says, to smoke. Animation increases by degrees upon his return.

  I don’t do well when I first wake up, he tells her when she asks, and she does ask.

  She can’t sleep. If someone threw her off a cliff into the sea it would feel less like fear. She hasn’t been able to close her eyes to oblivion since the rain the night before. She stares either into his peaceful face or the highway outside. The bleached Miramare is so close, she can pitch a paper airplane into one of its open windows. The bed creaks. Probably everyone at the small inn has heard their unrestrained coupling. She doesn’t care. That’s what she’s become. From three shirts to hide the curves of her flesh to the Twickenham nude at the football stadium, running and shouting his name naked from the field. Johnny, Johnny …

  JOHNNY!

  He bolts upright in the red bed.

  “Oh, thank God, you’re awake.” She jostles him. “Come on, what’s your actual name?”

  He falls back. “Johnny.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Me too.”

  Then why didn’t you turn around in Trieste when I called your name, she wants to ask, but doesn’t want to draw attention to the washed-out Johnny that wasn’t him.

  “Come on. What are you hiding?”

  “Nothing.” A teasing smile plays on his face. “Maybe I’m a descendant of the Founding Fathers. Or of the Pilgrims.”

  “Are you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Be serious. Why can’t you tell me your name?”

  “Tell me yours.”

  “Chloe Divine.”

  “Divine indeed,” he murmurs, his hands gliding up her thighs. A panting swallow. “Well, I’m like a rainbow.”

  “Let me see proof. I can show you proof. Let’s see yours.”

  “Chloe,” he says solemnly, “sometimes you have to have faith even if you don’t have proof. Especially if you don’t.”

  “I want to make sure my faith is not misplaced, that’s all,” she says. “I just want to know who you are.”

  He shows her his ID. On this ID card, issued by—he flashes it too fast, she doesn’t catch it—is his name. Johnny Rainbow. It’s probably fake. She’s heard of that. People getting fake IDs to get liquor. Hard to acquire in little Fryeburg, but some kids in North Conway had gone to Boston once and returned with laminated plastic. On Saturday nights they would show it off to all the squares.

  “You’re telling me your name is Johnny Rainbow?”

  “For realsies.”

  “So if I marry you, I’ll be Chloe Rainbow?”

  He laughs with joy, pounding his Lone Star tattoo, pulling her down on himself embracing her. “Chloe Divine Rainbow. The greatest name in all the world! I want to marry you just so you can carry that name for a long time.”

  “That’s why you want to marry me.”

  Tickling her, he rolls her over on her stomach and caresses her spine. He kisses her shoulder blades, the nape of her neck, the nape of her everything. I want life and bliss, he murmurs, your dizzying breasts reanimating my loins and lungs.

  In between pleading and singing they are vised together as Chloe has never imagined a vise: she is the plaything between an acetylene torch and a jackhammer. Gentler, gentler, she begs him. To him who loves me and washes me from my sin, gentler, gentler.

  Gentler what? Gentler hands, softer mouth, less …

  Gentler mouth, like you’re kissing me to the beat of your excited heart, one and two, and one and two, and one and two, gentle, rhythmic, soft, yes, like that, now a little faster, a little faster, Johnny, be less gentle, be more, more, more …

  More of everything. Who ever touched her like that? Who ever will again? More of him who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. The mystery of all the stars is in your golden mouth, Johnny. You hold the sun in your voice, a drumbeat of life in the gifts placed upon your lips. I want to recite you with my blood. I want to engrave you on my body.

  I want to kneel before you.

  I kneel before you.

  Wide-eyed he gazes at her afterward, kisses her under the endless thunder of the ice floes breaking up in the turbulent spring rivers. Every minute awake is poured out like this, drenched in lava, overflowed in seas.

  Through the convulsions, the spasms of the dying night, he sings by the open windows, plays his guitar naked in their uncovered bed. Someone below yells encore, encore. He has enraptured the crowds. Chloe is almost sure it’s not she who moans encore, encore. He has been singing, kneeling behind her on the floor, his drumming hands keeping immobile her arching hips. She stifles her desperate moans, he holds back nothing, and obligingly there is an encore, a rout, panting lovers, fools, kings, nectar and poison all at once. How could anything else ever be like this, feel like this, and all the while, he sings into her quivering shoulder blades and into the night air, he sings save me from the dark before I utterly perish.

  Save me from the dark before I come undone.

  Very soon dawn. Very soon gone. They make stupid promises all the young make. Of course we’ll write. Of course we’ll call. Keeping in touch is easier than ever. This isn’t Little House on the Prairie. We don’t need the Rural Free Delivery Route of 1903. And I’m not overseas forever. I’ll be back. My first tour is only twelve months. Then I’m back. Yes, I’ll train with the Rangers, but we’ll write letters. I’ll get furlough next summer. We’ll meet up. I promise. I’ll meet you in San Diego. Give me your address there. Give me your address in Maine too. Don’t worry. I won’t lose it. I never lose anything, or forget anything. I promise I’ll get in touch. One day, Chloe Divine, you will see me walking down your country road, returning for you. I promise. On and on and on and on and on.

  He kisses the bliss and sorrow from her eyes.

  Don’t cry, beautiful girl. Love does break your heart, don’t it? Do you want me to tell you whose heart you’ve broken?

  No, she says. Do you know why I cry? Because even as I live it with you so happy, I fear it will never come again.

  To be fair, he says, right now you don’t seem that happy.

  Covering them both with one damp sheet, he pulls her out onto the balcony and shows her the Adriatic, still and crystal, the distant shores of Croatia, the blue sunrise mist over Trieste, the white limestone walls of the medieval castle for princes and princesses.

  We are at Lover’s Fortress. Nothing can
touch us here, nothing can hurt us.

  Tell me about the duke and duchess, about Max and Charlotte, she says. Please tell me they lived happily ever after.

  He hesitates as they stare out onto the leafy firs partially obstructing the view of Miramare.

  Oh no. What happened to them?

  Maximillian was tried for treason and shot, and Charlotte of Belgium went mad and was committed to a sanatorium where she eventually died.

  Chloe never wants less for the sun to rise.

  Don’t weep, Johnny says. Life is beautiful.

  34

  My Rags of Heart

  “ONWARD, MY BRIDE,” HE SAYS IN THE EARLY MORNING. “I have only one mother, and I have to see her today before I fly.”

  “Do you have to?”

  “To see my mother?”

  “To fly.”

  He smiles. She doesn’t.

  “You don’t have to come with me,” Johnny says. “You haven’t slept. I can go by myself. Stay here. I’ll be back late tonight.” He takes his duffel and his guitar. In other words, everything but her.

  “Yeah, famous last words,” she says, springing out of bed. “Of course I’m going with you. Into the mountains, right? To get lost in the Alps, where no one will ever find us?”

  He smiles again, as if she is ever so funny!

  Castello di Miramare not only has a boat dock and a bus stop but also a rail station. It has everything. They catch a train to Gemona, and from there a train to Tarcento. The trains are pristine, quiet, and a little Italian lady wheels a shiny cart around, selling espresso and Napoleons. They load up on both plus a bagful of biscotti. “Shouldn’t we bring something for your mom?” Chloe asks. “Not good to arrive empty-handed.”

  “The only thing she craves we can’t bring her,” says Johnny. “But if we have any left, we’ll give her some of our biscotti.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Over a year ago,” he replies. He is next to the window. He asked and she let him. She’d let him take her in an open car if that’s what he wanted. She huddles next to his arm.