by Robert Clark
William had a transistor radio in the rucksack and he turned it on, very low, and laid it down next to him. Then he took what appeared to be a cigarette out, a hand-rolled cigarette, wrinkled and tapered at the ends, and looking a little the worse for wear. In truth, William had gotten it from Jim Donnelly some time ago and had saved it under the floorboard in his closet where he kept his money and his adult magazines. He showed it to Emily and Emily said, “Oh. Grass.”
She said this unremarkably, but with a slight tone of intrigue, and certainly with no alarm. She had seen it before and smoked it a few times, without having a precise sense of what effect it really had upon her, beyond noting its swarthy, raunchy aroma and the tarred and gummy taste it had left in her mouth. There were kids for whom smoking grass was a complete vocation, but for Emily, as for William, it was a diversion rather than a compulsion, belonging in the same category as the alcoholic beverages (beer, sweet wine) they had on occasion imbibed. All were illegal and, for various reasons not exclusively having to do with adult disapproval or hysteria, were most of the time more trouble than they were worth. With anyone else, it would have been kind of a disreputable joke. With each other, it was a lark; it might even take on purity and beauty, sanctified by its being another of their secrets.
William lit the cigarette, inhaled, and passed it to Emily, who did the same. The cigarette sputtered and popped, and then the coal at the lit end fell off, and William had to relight it, and then they both drew on it again. William laid his head down in the tall grass next to Emily and they passed the cigarette back and forth and looked up as though they were watching the stars, although it was barely dusk and the stars hadn’t come out yet.
After a time, Emily turned her head toward William and said, “So tell me a story.”
“I don’t know any stories. Not any good ones.”
“Sure you do. Or tell me what stories you liked when you were a kid.”
“I liked Winnie the Pooh and then later I liked My Side of the Mountain.”
“My Side of the Mountain. I loved that one.”
“Really?” said William, and propped himself up on his elbows. “That’s cool. I didn’t really think it was a girl’s story.”
“So why isn’t it?”
“Well, I mean living off the land, hunting and fishing, dressing in buckskin, making a house in a hollow tree—that’s guy stuff.”
“Girls love to make houses. Especially in a hollow tree.” Emily laughed and then so did William, and he laid his head back down in the grass next to Emily’s. They faced each other and kissed a few times, smelling and tasting the raw smoke in each other’s mouth. Then, having dispensed with the cigarette, whose butt William nonchalantly ate, they looked back up at the sky and listened to the radio softly playing just above and behind their heads.
“So tell me about . . . tell me about all your other girlfriends,” Emily said.
“All my other girlfriends?” William laughed. “Like all one and a half of them?”
“So just tell me about the ones you kissed. Or did more than that with.”
“That makes about one-half. Excluding playing spin the bottle and stuff like that. Which doesn’t count, right?”
“I suppose not. But what about Sarah Jacobsen?”
“Jeez. I am so tired of hearing about her, like we went together or anything.”
“So you made out with her?”
“Not really.”
“But you kissed her?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“On the mouth? Deep, like you do with me?”
“I don’t remember,” William said. “You sure are curious.”
“So did you? Make out with her?”
“Maybe a little. After the dance, just in the way you would after you’ve gone to a dance with somebody. It didn’t mean anything.”
“She has kind of . . . big breasts. Did you . . .” Emily trailed off.
“I don’t know anything about them.”
“Really?”
“Really,” William said.
“So do you want to know about me?”
“About what?”
“Me and guys.”
“What guys?”
“Just one, really. Roger.”
“Roger Ericksen?”
“Yeah. Do you know him?”
“Not really. Just that he’s kind of a jock.”
“Yeah, I guess he is. It was a long time ago.”
“So what did . . . you guys do?”
“You mean making out?” Emily laughed.
“Well, yeah.”
“Well, we did. Yeah. But I didn’t like it like I do with you.”
“Did you do . . . more?”
“More than we do?” Emily asked. “I’m not going to lie,” she added and looked up.
“So maybe I’m not sure I want to know.”
“It’s okay. It wasn’t anything. It didn’t mean anything.”
“So you didn’t . . .”
“No. Not nearly. Like I said, it wasn’t—” Emily put her finger to her lips. “Listen. To the radio. It’s us. Where I work.”
The radio buzzed with a woman’s whispered voice chanting repeatedly over an innocuous rhythm track:
New Wave
New Rave
Fashions for fall
Jumpers in plaid and cord
New Wave
New Rave
Fashions for fall
Minneapolis, 700 The Mall
Cedar Level, St. Paul.
The jingle stopped and another ad began. Emily grinned. “Wow. That’s where I work. I mean, it’s a stupid ad, but that’s where I work. Like we’re famous.”
“I hope you didn’t write that poem.”
“No. They do all that over in Minneapolis. Or someplace. I don’t know.”
They turned again to face each other and kissed. Then they kissed some more and they ran their hands up and down each other’s back. William could feel Emily’s bottom against her jeans. Emily could feel William’s erection through his pants where their stomachs and waists were pressed together.
Emily pulled away, not abruptly or as if she wished to stop what they were doing, but as if they had all the time in the world. “Hey, can I turn off that radio?” she said.
“Sure.”
Emily turned the radio off and laid her head back down next to William’s so they were breathing each other’s breath. William smiled and said, “So now you’ll have to sing to me. Since we don’t have any music.”
“Sing what?” Emily laughed. “I don’t know anything.”
“Sure you do. Just anything at all.”
Emily paused and said, “Okay. Anything at all. She opened her mouth and sang in a whisper, “ ‘I’m walking my cat named dog. I’m walking my cat named dog.’” And then she laughed.
“Come on,” said William. “More.”
“That’s all I know.”
“So more. Of that.”
Emily said, “Okay,” and sang again and then said, “Now you.”
“I don’t think I know anything either.”
“Come on.”
“Okay.” William stopped and put his lips very close to Emily’s ear and his voice came out a little broken, breathy and deep and rhythmic, like waves. “ ‘What’s your name? Who’s your daddy? Is he rich like me? Has he taken any time to show you what you need to live? Tell it to me slowly. Tell you why, I really want to know.’”
“That’s nice. It’s cool,” Emily said. “Where’d you hear it?”
“I’m not sure. I’m not even sure I have heard it. Not yet. Does that make sense?” William asked. “I guess I’m stoned.”
“I guess.”
William and Emily went back to what they had been doing, and after a time Emily took William’s hand and kissed it on the palm and guided it inside her jacket, under her blouse. William let his hand rest there and kissed her and said, “Hey. Wow. You’re not wearing a . . .”
“I don’t really need on
e. Not like that Sarah. So I didn’t. Not tonight.”
“That’s nice,” William said. He kissed her again and feathered her breast with his fingers, with his palm. After a time, he slid his head down a little bit and pushed the layers of fabric upward and looked at it. The light had gone toward full dusk and the evening rose up around them, but he could still see. Emily’s breast was very white where it wasn’t grading off into pink and the nipple was red, like a tiny strawberry. Then he brushed his hand over the nipple and the breast again, and his hand was quaking and also giving and taking something that seemed to him very precious and rare. He did that for a while, breathing deep across her chest, into and under her clothes.
Emily cradled the back of his head with her palm and said, “You can do . . . more. If you want. We can. Do more.”
William didn’t look up, and her chin was resting on his head and his face was resting on her chest with his hand on her breast. He said, “That’s okay. I don’t need to. This is everything I could want, just for now, just . . . perfect.”
It is so rare that we do the right thing, and rarer still that we say it, words being dull and clumsy tools indeed. We live our lives at cross-purposes to our intentions; we injure where we would heal; we abjure and insult what we mean purely to love. The peace among us depends on equivocation, guesswork, revisionism and reinterpretation, and brevity of memory. Yet William had stumbled across exactly the right thing and said it. And for his having said it, Emily then and there would have let him go—would have gone eagerly with him—as far as he might ever want to go.
They didn’t, although they did a little more, but precisely where it took them and what it meant must remain just between the two of them. Because you had to be there to understand it: how the stars did indeed come up, and how wonderful that was. But you would have had to have been there, or graced with the kind of words William was able to speak that night. Otherwise, you might think it was nothing special, no big deal, or even that it was corny or silly. But if you had been there, you would have felt it was like watching the very first sunrise on the first day of creation.
15
AT THE END OF THE DAY THAT FRIDAY, EDWARD paid his customary visit to Dr. Fields. Since it was nearly five o’clock (or at least demonstrably after four-thirty), Dr. Fields sent the nurse home and fetched an ice tray from the refrigerator that housed his vaccines and specimens. He put the ice into a beaker and fetched two Dixie cups from the water cooler and set them on his desk, from whose bottom drawer he then extracted a bottle of scotch whisky. He dropped an ice cube into each cup and poured from a great height so the liquor slopped and lapped into the cups.
“Like water with that?” Fields asked. “Pneumanol?”
“Pneumanol would be redundant. And water’s always contraindicated.”
“Exactly my counsel, too.” Fields took an ashtray from a drawer, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his lab coat pocket, and lit one, dragging deeply. “Can’t smoke in front of the patients anymore. It wouldn’t do, not nowadays.”
“I ’ve given it up. Mostly. I didn’t want my kids to start.”
“Well, of course you don’t. All things being equal.” He drew again, and both he and Edward drank. “And of course, all things being equal, you will die. On account of something you did. Or didn’t do. On account of your history. On account of having lived. If it happens to be specifically because of this, that doesn’t change the outcome.”
“It might hasten it.”
“That’s an imponderable that can’t be calculated.”
“Actually, it’s a probability.”
“You’re going to start, aren’t you? You can’t help yourself, I suppose.” Fields refilled his cup and motioned with the neck of the bottle over Edward’s and Edward nodded. “Anyway, what is a fact rather than a probability is that tobacco has been one of the great consolations of my life. And that is that.” He drank again and so did Edward. Then Fields said, “So, by the by, how are those children of yours?”
“Well enough. Susan’s finished her first year at the U. Now she’s working all summer as a camp counselor. Emily has a job at Dayton’s. And a boyfriend.” Edward took a sip from his cup and coughed lightly.
“And this gives you pause?”
“The boyfriend? Oh, some, I suppose. Emily’s only sixteen.”
“More than nubile, though. I suspect you had a girlfriend by that age. I suspect your wife—”
“Virginia.”
“Virginia. Wonderful name. And with such a name surely she had boyfriends by that age too.”
“I suspect,” Edward said.
“You suspect? Surely you know all about each other in that regard. After all this time.”
“Yes, I do. And she did. But with Emily, it’s different. With kids today, it’s different.”
“I doubt it,” Dr. Fields said, and ground out his cigarette in the ashtray.
“I’m also not sure if I like the kid she’s seeing.”
“He’s a thug? Or a lout?”
“He’s not a thug. Too mild. Mild but determined, somehow.”
“Determined to ravish your daughter?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think Emily would let herself be ravished.”
“So she’s rather determined too.”
“I suppose. He’s been over. Twice. Just last night, in fact. And it’s as if he still hasn’t come through the front door. Like he’s watching us without being observed.”
“He’s probably just shy. Or very nervous. After all, he knows that you know what he’s come for.”
“Which is?”
“To ravish your daughter.”
“That’s a little extreme. And anyway, there’s nothing knowing about him. That’s part of what’s odd.”
“And what do they do?”
“They just sit. On the lawn. Or last night, on the porch steps. Doing nothing in particular.” Edward looked into his cup and saw it was empty. “And sometimes—I said this to Virginia—you have to remind yourself that they’re not just playing together.” Dr. Fields poured for them both again. “Because that’s all they would have been doing a couple of years ago, and I wouldn’t have had the slightest concern if they’d been down in the basement or up a tree or in the bedroom together.”
“Whereas now . . .”
“I’d be a little alarmed. I mean, they seem young—Emily seems a little younger than other girls, than her friends—but of course they’re fully capable of . . .”
“Reproduction?” Fields asked.
“Reproducing themselves. Yes. I guess,” Edward said. “Although it’s hard to think they’d even know what to do. Not technically, I suppose. But to go from playing house to—”
“Playing doctor. I’ve been doing it for years.”
“—or jacks or whatever, and then to imagine them . . .”
“Making the beast with two backs?”
“Yes. More or less,” Edward said.
“But really, the knowledge is already there. Built into the species. Surely no one needed to tell you what to do.”
“On my wedding night? Or . . . whatever.” Edward seemed to sigh. “I’d had other experiences. Before. While I was in the service. But as far as my own kind were concerned, I was rather a virgin when Virginia and I got married.”
“With your own kind. That’s a charming distinction. The others were . . . marsupials?” Fields coughed into his fist. “Never mind. I won’t ask—since we’re gentlemen.” He lit another cigarette. “As regards your daughter, the point is, they don’t simply know how, any more than they know how to breathe. It’s much more elemental—more of the essence. They could find each other, blind, one hundred miles apart, in total darkness, and manage it.”
“Because it’s instinctive . . .”
“Because it’s the end for which we are made. Not that I’m all that Darwinian. I think I’m more Pavlovian,” Fields said, and let the smoke drift from his mouth in a languorous stream. “I don’t think it’s all constan
t sex and survival, screwing and fighting. I really do believe we can address ourselves to other things. Finding food. Study. Even truth and beauty. We can really quite totally concentrate on them. But then a bell rings, and we are called to this other business.”
“Salivating.”
“Yes, but it’s not that crude. Because I think it’s not just one bell, but a series of cues that fall together, like a very particular chord one hears. And it might be formed of previous memories and associations. Or it might be there from birth, and we’re simply waiting—completely unwittingly—for the signal, to hear it. I don’t know. But anyway, there you are, doing what you ordinarily do, and, say, a girl comes down the street on a bicycle with her hair behind her, wearing a skirt of a certain color, and there’s the whir of the bicycle and maybe the sun at a certain angle to her and the smell of lilies and there you go. You would pretty much follow that girl to the ends of the earth, that particular one, for no particularly apparent reason.”
“Powerless against it.”
“Nearly. You can thwart it, but oh the misery involved—madness, tears, murders, war. Years of pining and second-guessing and melancholy.”
Edward had finished his drink and was conscious of feeling his liquor. He held his hand over the top of the cup when Fields started to pour him another.
“Oh, that won’t help,” Fields said. “Abstinence. Trying to look the other way.”
“I was just thinking of trying to drive home in one piece. To avoid temptation and trouble.”
“That you might do. But this other thing is irresistible. Irresistible, yet voluntary.”
“How so?”
“I can’t say. It’s only a theory. But surely it is something we want, something we desire. We’re waiting for it, listening for it, even while we think we’re doing other things. That sounds like volition to me.” Fields tamped out his cigarette.
“This irresistible, preordained thing?”
“Well, no one wants to be born, never mind to die. But, as I said, that—along with this—is the end for which we are made.”
“I think you lost me back there during the second drink,” Edward said. “And as a practical matter”—he was trying to think what point he was attempting to put his finger on—“I see . . . seven or eight nurses a day, and maybe three of them are quite pretty. And in fifteen years on this job I have never felt the least bit . . . compuncted . . . ?”