With Mom’s help, Sabrina and Jamie organized a screening in the school theater of Incubus, a movie filmed entirely in Esperanto—a horror movie in which the hero, played by William Shatner, drags his demon lover to a cathedral to deprogram her with images of Christ and the Apostles. I went only because Alex thought it would be a hoot, and it was: eleven-year-old Peter yelled “Kie estas Spock?” (Where is Mr. Spock?) at the screen whenever Shatner appeared, and my mother hated the actors’ terrible Esperanto pronunciations.
I know I’ve written earlier that I started feeling like an adult the summer I turned sixteen, and then even more so the summer I turned seventeen. But in the spring of 1967, as I raced toward eighteen, I realized those earlier coming-of-age seasons had been wishful prefaces to the real thing, that now my life was finally and dramatically taking shape.
“Karen?” It was a boy’s voice on the phone, but not Alex or Chuck, who almost never used my first name. “It’s Scott Norquist. Hey—Radcliffe! Way to go.”
I’d gotten the acceptance letter only the day before, but at New Trier Township High School, the news of who’d gotten into which college traveled on some mysterious instant-communications network.
“Thanks!” But why was he calling? Scott and I had spoken on the phone exactly twice before, once about an English assignment and once concerning his three-dollar contribution to the twelve-dollar ounce of grass Flip Macallister bought for us. “And you’re going to … Cornell?”
“My old man’s pushing hard for Northwestern.”
“He wants you close to home?”
“He wants me to play Big Ten football.” He paused. “So Alex and Chuck and you are gonna be all together in Cambridge!” Chuck and Alex had been admitted to Harvard. “You get to stay the three musketeers, huh?” That was the kind thing people at New Trier sometimes called us, the three musketeers. We were also known as Wendy (me), Peter Pan (Chuck) and Tinker Bell (Alex).
“Yeah. I’m excited.” Actually, I had mixed feelings.
There was a long silence, then a throat-clearing. “So, I was wondering …” he said. Scott must want my help buying some marijuana. “Do you want to go to prom? With me?”
This was the most unexpected and shocking moment of my life since Alex’s cap gun went off at the Lake Shore Club in 1962. Tall, blond, handsome Scott Norquist, the football and pole-vaulting star, the vice president of the senior class, the boy on whom I’d had an almost secret and essentially theoretical crush from age twelve on, was asking me out—asking me to senior prom. Several supercharged emotions erupted and collided in the instant after his question: surprise, deeply flattered pleasure, lust, embarrassment, a taste of heartbreaking impossibility, then a quick flip-flop of terror and—when I reminded myself he couldn’t know I’d lost my virginity—relief. I was dumbstruck.
“Karen?” Scott said.
“I’ll be right there, Mom!” I shouted, half covering the mouthpiece. My mother wasn’t at home. “Sorry. Anyhow—that’s really, really nice of you. But I can’t.”
“Oh. Okay. Too bad.”
“Yeah, Chuck and I are going out that night. But we’re not going to prom.” It was true that Chuck and I had made fun of Alex the month before for asking Patti to prom, which had turned into a critique of the prom as a hateful, anachronistic symbol of suburban American backwardness. And which delighted me because it meant Chuck wasn’t taking Wendy Reichman or anyone else. However, it was certainly not true that Chuck had asked me out for prom night.
“Right. Okay. Some other time, maybe.”
Jesus. I was turning down a prom date with Scott Norquist partly because prom was square but mainly because I didn’t have the guts to make my imaginary boyfriend jealous. I was pathetic. And now that Chuck and I were going to attend college together, my pathetic fantasy wouldn’t even have the chance to die a normal, graceful natural death after we graduated high school.
A few afternoons later, I drove Chuck home from our SDS chapter meeting. Alex was still at school, rehearsing the spring play.
“You doing anything for your birthday?” I asked. Chuck was turning eighteen the next day. I’d bought him a pair of Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses as a combination birthday-graduation gift.
He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he said, “So I hear Norquist asked you to prom.”
As a swimmer, Chuck was wired in to the jock grapevine. “Yeah. It was sweet, actually.” Had Chuck also heard the details of the excuse I’d given? Should I apologize for the fib or lie again? I thought of my mother’s annoying line whenever she discovered any of her children engaged in a cover-up: Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
“I was surprised you turned him down. Actually, I was impressed. I mean—Scott Norquist.”
“Yeah, but—prom.” I glanced over at him. Maybe Chuck didn’t know about my fabricated prom-night plans. “If I’d gone, it would’ve given Alex way too much satisfaction.”
“Why don’t we do something that night?”
That probably meant watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and eating a frozen pizza in my basement.
“I mean,” he said, “go out.”
I had learned my lesson well over the last three years. That didn’t necessarily mean anything.
“Just you and I,” he said. “It’s about time, right?”
Being asked to prom by Scott Norquist had shocked me. Being asked out on an actual date by Chuck Levy should have been flabbergasting, too, but it wasn’t. I’d spent so much time over so many years pining for and daydreaming about and discounting and dismissing the possibility of romantic involvement, when the moment arrived, it had come to seem equally impossible and inevitable. Does that make sense? It was the way I’d thought about nuclear war since I was little: both unthinkable and thinkable, surprised if it did happen, surprised if it didn’t.
But with this, going out on prom night and Chuck as my potential boyfriend, I did feel almost as if I’d acquired the magic power to make my fondest wish—that is, my lies—come true.
“That’s my birthday,” I said, grateful that I was driving, which made it easier to sound nonchalant, “May nineteenth.”
“I know.”
He knows. “Then sure. That sounds great.”
It’s about time, he’d said. No shit, I thought. I was trembling. I felt like laughing and crying. And did both as soon as I dropped Chuck off.
My GPA wound up being second highest in the class—in part, as the valedictorian, Jimmy Graham, informed me, because I hadn’t taken advanced calculus. In any case, being salutatorian meant that I’d give a speech at commencement. When Chuck suggested that my speech should be a collage of lyrics from our favorite songs of the last four years, I said, loudly and fake-earnestly, “Fellow graduates of the class of sixty-seven, you make my heart sing—you make everything … groovy.”
I thought I might begin by talking about how sad it was that the birthplace of democracy had been taken over by right-wing colonels in a coup last month—Greece—and argue that the birthplace of modern democracy, America, wasn’t immune from such a takeover.
“Maybe,” Alex said, “although no one gives a shit about Greece.” But he offered what I took to be a brilliant piece of advice. He said to write my speech way in advance and with short sentences, then learn to half-read and half-recite it as if I were making it up on the spot.
“You have to learn to perform a slightly fake, more lovable version of yourself,” he said. “That’s the only way to seem real and get everyone to pay attention. You have to learn to lie.”
“Karen doesn’t lie,” Chuck said.
Oh, Chuck Levy, you think I’m better than I am. I wanted to press myself against him, to kiss him. I wanted him on me. The sexual hunger I experienced during the month between proposed date and date was ferocious, and the secrecy made it all the more intense. It was like five weeks of chaste foreplay, the most joyful pain and painful joy of my life.
“Not about what she’s saying,” Alex ex
plained, “but how she’s saying it. And you have to fool yourself so it doesn’t even feel like lying. Be Kennedy, not Johnson.”
Alex was a skilled actor by senior year. In May he played the title role in Henry V and was billed on the program as codirector with the drama teacher, Mr. Hendricks. I’d never seen a more moving piece of theater. The actors wore contemporary military uniforms and camo, and the score alternated between Sousa marches and Asian lute-and-zither music. Over the two and a half hours Prince Hal and his men changed from prancing imperialists into ragged and noble guerrillas fighting the arrogant French in Vietnam, the Battle of Agincourt 1415 transformed to Dien Bien Phu 1954. Neither Chuck nor I had read or seen the play before. In Act 3, when Alex said, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” we turned to look at each other—we knew it as one of James Bond’s lines in From Russia with Love. And when Alex, his face covered in fake dirt, delivered the St. Crispin’s Day speech—
If we are marked to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour …
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother …
—I choked up and turned to Chuck. In the dark he touched my cheeks and wiped away the tears. My insides shook. It was as if we’d kissed already.
Every morning for the next month, I woke up happy. However, there was nobody with whom I could revel and squeal. I had girlfriends, but since I’d never revealed to anyone the extent of my crush, I couldn’t reveal the full extent of my delight. After all, it was just another night out with Chuck Levy, on the surface nothing very special. My mother understood it was a big deal, however, and I was secretly grateful for her irritating excitement on my behalf.
Neither Chuck nor I had uttered the D-word, but our first date was the date-iest of my life, before or since. When he picked me up around two in the afternoon, he presented me with a corsage—a parody of a corsage, really, five white daisies, the antiwar flower, bundled together with a pink ribbon and a peace button to pin it to my dress, which I did for my mother to take a Polaroid and then promptly removed.
We could’ve driven into Chicago in an hour, but instead, we drove to his flying club’s hangar.
Chuck had always been mechanically fluent—he’d used a power saw to build a tree house in sixth grade, he’d made the silencer for his jazz-club Luger, he’d helped his uncle build a duck-hunting blind, he replaced tubes in his guitar amplifier—but as I sat next to him in his rented Piper Cherokee, I was in awe of his competence. He wasn’t playing a character on a mission when he said, “Magnetos, check,” or that he was flying at “sixty knots.” He was actually piloting an airplane. As he talked on the radio (“Affirmative, taxi four, Piper seven three niner”) and stepped on the rudder pedals and steered and throttled and checked all those dials, he was completely adult, a man.
We flew to Miegs Field, the tiny downtown airport on an island in Lake Michigan, aiming for the planetarium dome as we landed. It was a five-minute walk to Shedd Aquarium, our first stop because, Chuck said, I’d wanted to go there four years ago on the evening of our last, best, scariest Bond mission. As we strolled between the sharks and the otters, Chuck took my hand in his, and I jumped as if I’d gotten an electric shock, which made him smile.
Holding hands with Chuck Levy. Chuck Levy acting like my boyfriend. Chuck Levy was my boyfriend.
We went to a movie, the Bond parody Casino Royale, with Peter Sellers and Woody Allen; we went to a comedy show at Second City on North Wells Street; and I had my first dinner ever at a Mexican restaurant, where they didn’t card us when we ordered Pabst Blue Ribbons. As we wandered the miles back toward Miegs Field though Old Town, pretending not to stare at the hippies, he put his arm around my waist. I made us stop twice to buy Cokes and go to the bathroom.
Near the end of our walk, Chuck stopped, took a box of stick matches from the pocket of his leather jacket, struck one on the zipper of his jeans, and lit his cigarette, a move I’d never seen. I literally throbbed with desire.
I jacked up my courage. “Why,” I asked, “is this finally happening?”
“I’ve always liked you. I mean, definitely since eighth grade. Remember the last mission, at Riverview, I wanted to go through Helter Skelter with you but Alex wouldn’t let us? I thought the tilting floors and rolling barrels and all that would be my chance to, you know, accidentally get physical.”
“But is this also because Scott Norquist asked me out?”
“No. I mean, that got my attention, for sure, but no. I’ve been planning this a long time. The whole thing.” He said that in order to fly at night, he was required to take off and land several times in the dark, which he’d gone out to Palwaukee to do once a month since February.
“But why now? Why not last year or sophomore year?”
“Because real life is starting now. Because we’re definitely going to college together. I always felt like if we went out in high school, it’d be this high school thing. It wouldn’t be serious. And after graduation, poof, that’d be it.”
“I think I get that.” In all the analyses I’d conducted and scenarios I’d run since we were thirteen, that logic had never once occurred to me. Hearing it made me feel superficial. “Like we’d have been doomed? And now we have … a future?”
“Right, exactly.”
Dreams do come true. And this I hadn’t dared dream. But wait.
“What if you hadn’t gotten into Harvard or I hadn’t gotten into Radcliffe?”
“Why do you think I only applied where you applied?”
“Plus Amherst.” Amherst didn’t admit girls.
“Amherst only in case you went to Smith! So I’d be next door! It was all part of my plan. I wanted to tell you so bad. Let’s never lie to each other again. Okay? Not even just not lie—hold back nothing.”
I put one hand on his leather sleeve, and we kissed on the lips, but only for a couple of seconds. I looked at him. He was beautiful.
I thought of the Wordsworth poem I’d memorized a few months before: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
And then we kissed again, our first serious kiss, the kind where you start losing track of whose tongue and whose breath is whose.
I felt radioactive. As we continued walking in blissful silence, I found myself thinking about physics. Last year we’d learned about half-lifes, the time it takes for radioactive material to decay 50 percent. Love must have a half-life, right? But if it’s long enough, like uranium-232’s, sixty-nine years, who cares? I also thought of the transformations that happen on the molecular level, on the atomic level, at the instant a piece of matter changes from solid to liquid or liquid to gas or gas to plasma—the “phase transition point,” they call it. Ever since I’d learned about phase changes, I’d thought something analogous was happening to the whole world. And now, I thought, Chuck and I had unquestionably experienced our own phase change.
I had to find a place to pee yet again, so we didn’t get back to the airfield until almost midnight, after which the control tower would close and we wouldn’t be able to take off until morning. The deadline added to the perfect Cinderella glamour of the evening, and the chance of missing it, of being stuck in Chicago until morning, added to the sense of reckless bohemian romance. We took off at 11:58 P.M.
Having made our political point by skipping prom, we decided it wouldn’t be a dignity violation to attend the Crawford twins’ after-party in Kenilworth. I was also eager to show our classmates that Chuck and I were together. However, given that he and Alex and I had been inseparable forever, the new permutation proved difficult to signal.
Except to Alex. For the last month we’d dissembled with him about our plans for the night, Guinevere and Lancelot concealing their love from Arthur. His defensiveness about attending prom—”Spare me any more of your too-cool-for-school crap,” he’d said when Chuck mentioned our Sec
ond City reservation—had prevented him from sniffing out the musky new aromas. A week before, when we’d all gone to see Buffalo Springfield at the Cellar, the converted warehouse in Arlington Heights, Chuck and I danced together, which we never did, but since Alex had brought Patti along, he’d assumed our togetherness was just old-friendly pre-graduation double-date symmetry.
But as soon as Chuck and I arrived at the Crawfords’ after-party, Alex locked his arm around Patti’s waist, mingling like someone playing a married man, and glanced at me again and again for a beat too long, stiffly smiling and silent. Sometime around three A.M., after I’d been reduced to drinking a Scotch and Mountain Dew and gone to the bathroom for the millionth time, I rejoined Chuck and Alex in the Crawfords’ backyard. Patti was indoors, and the two boys had lit up a joint. They weren’t saying anything, just smoking and staring at the moon and stars.
Finally, I spoke. “Want to go see Blow-Up tomorrow at the Wilmette? I mean today?”
“Who,” the fully inhaled Alex croaked, then deliberately exhaled straight into my face, “are you asking? Both of us or just the boyfriend?”
“Don’t be a jerk, Alex,” I said.
“Me?”
“Really,” Chuck said, “don’t get all weird and uptight.”
“ ‘Jerk’? ‘Weird’? ‘Uptight’? I’m not the one who’s been sneaking around keeping this secret for months.”
“ ‘Sneaking around’?” I said. “ ‘Months’? And there was no ‘secret’ to ‘keep.’ That’s so unfair.”
“Oh, really—’unfair’? How about betraying their supposed best friend? That’s fair, I suppose.”
True Believers Page 23