by Nino Ricci
XVI
In the summer our nights out took on new dimension, bars in Windsor and Detroit, house parties Vince heard about, late-night drunks with other groups of Vince’s friends along deserted sideroads or on the Seacliff beach. We ran car races sometimes on the town line, terror pressing down on me the whole time like the darkness our cars hurtled through; there was nothing in me that was true to the sort of bravado we put on then and yet the fear seemed to hone a violence in me, focusing it like a pinpoint on that single sudden rush through the dark.
At the end of these evenings I felt always the same recoiling, the numbness and self-disgust; and then the following day there’d be my father’s useless unspoken anger at how late I’d come in, at the signs of drunkenness, at all the contempt toward him he imagined in me in our silent unknowing. In one of his odd, sudden gestures of veiled generosity he’d bought a new car and turned his old one over to me and Aunt Teresa; but now I took it out at the smallest opportunity, to go to school, to smoke, for my joyless evenings out, felt the resentment in him at my abuse of it, at the endless tanks of gas I used from our pump, and yet was somehow unable to make any concession to him. I seemed to be playing some pointless game, stubbornly resisting him, always doing the thing that was most an affront, and then punishing myself for it afterwards with his silent anger.
We stopped in at Diana’s sometimes at the end of a night out. There was a waitress there who began to be friendly with us, just the noncommittal disdain of recognition at first but then each time lingering an instant longer at our table when she served us.
“So what do you guys do every night anyways, coming in here at one o’clock in the morning.”
“Oh, you know. Drink, look for women.”
“Well I guess you’re still looking.” Then an instant’s pause and her laugh, as if she were laughing at someone else’s joke.
She’d somehow picked us out as being Italian, seeming to see something strangely exotic or amusing in that.
“That’s right, nice Italian boys,” Vince said, playing her up. “That’s Vittorio and Antonio over there and I’m Vincenzo.”
“Vittorio, that’s nice,” she said, slurring the name back into twangy English. “I seen you sometimes at school.”
But her picking me out like that brought out a strange aggression in me.
“That’s funny,” I said, “I’ve never seen you.”
Vince and Tony laughed.
“We only just moved down from Michigan last spring.” Matter-of-fact, speaking directly to me. Then, as she was leaving: “My name’s Crystal, since no one’s going to ask.”
“Hey, Crystal,” Vince called after her. “Nice name.”
“Migna, she’s a big one,” Tony said.
“Victor, my boy,” Vince said, “I think she’s got the hots for you.”
“Yeah, right.”
There had been that, the energy that had passed from her for an instant like a code, though some kind of mistake, some wrong impression she’d formed of me that she’d see through in an instant. But then the next time we came in she seemed to brighten at the sight of us, coming over to our table with an unabashed familiarity.
“I was wondering when you guys would come in again.”
“Did you miss us?” Vince said.
“Not you.”
“Maybe Victor then.”
“Victor? Who’s that?”
“My good friend Vittorio, don’t you remember him?”
She laughed.
“Victor, yuk, Vittorio’s much nicer.”
I was surprised how her laughter cut me, how much I’d invested in the possibility she might like me. But Vince seemed certain of her.
“She’s yours Victor, I tell you.”
“She doesn’t even know me.”
“What’s there to know? In the dark we all look the same.”
Crystal came back with our orders.
“You must get kind of bored working here,” Vince said.
“Talking to guys like you, sure.”
“What about Victor here, you seem to like him all right. Maybe the two of you should get together some time.”
Tony laughed. I ought to have made some remark then, something funny and sharp, dismissive, but merely sat there in flushed silence.
“I gotta go,” Crystal said finally.
But when she brought us our bill she’d written a phone number on the back of it.
“I’m off tomorrow night,” she said, then was gone.
Outside, both Vince and Tony seemed infected by my own euphoria.
“All right, Victor!” Tony shouted, strangely energized, then put two fingers into his mouth and whistled loud and long into the empty street.
I called the next day from the phone in my father’s office. Now that the thing was before me I felt only the dread of it, its nagging reminder of how wretched I was: I was nearly eighteen, had never dated a girl, made love to one.
“I didn’t think you’d call,” Crystal said, disarmingly frank.
“Well here I am.”
We made arrangements to go to a drive-in in Windsor. But already I felt something go dead in me, the conversation perfunctory and strained as after some argument.
“I guess I’ll see you around eight,” I said.
“Sure.”
She lived at the town limits, her house part of a last straggling row that stretched out past St. Michael’s before the town gave way to open country. The house had the look of an old farmhouse that had been slowly hemmed in by the encroaching town, narrow and ramshackle and tall, its Insulbrick siding warping from the walls and its porch leaning precariously. A painted wind toy, a cartoon-faced fireman with revolving legs, stood endlessly running at the foot of the driveway, oddly hopeful and bright there against the house’s fading red.
Crystal was waiting in a weather-greyed chair on the porch, springing up at once when I drove up the lane and coming toward the car with a lumbering girlishness. She was dressed in a short, sleeveless sun-dress that seemed incongruous over her big-boned shoulders and hips after the trim fullness of her uniform. Her hand went down instinctively to pull her hem toward her knees when she settled into the car.
“Hello, Victor.”
“I thought you didn’t like that name.”
“Oh, that, I was just making fun.”
She laughed, this time her laughter seeming to betray a vulnerability like a window into her, something in me brightening at the sound of it.
We drove through the town, the wind swirling warmly through the open windows, blowing Crystal’s hair back into a tousled fullness. There was a quality in the air, a peculiar, late-summer mellowing though it was only early August, that filled me suddenly with a sense of promise like the first pleasant haze of drunkenness or half-sleep; we sat several moments without speaking, seeming joined in that mood, Crystal murmuring along with the lyrics of a Dylan song on the radio.
“Do you like Dylan?” I said.
“Oh, is that who that is?”
But then once we’d passed through town to open highway and the wind forced us to close the windows the world seemed to fall back, leave us stranded there together in the car’s intimacy.
“So how was it you ended up moving here from Michigan?”
Though I had the sense now I’d missed some opportunity, that the moment when the right tone might have been struck between us had already passed.
“I dunno, my mum’s sister’s down here and my folks are getting divorced and all that.”
“Oh. I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s all right, it’s not your fault.”
She laughed but I couldn’t seem to pick up on her humour.
“I guess it was kind of hard moving here and everything.”
“I dunno, it’s all right.”
And already a panic had started to build in me, a heaviness I took for boredom beginning to creep into her voice.
Less than halfway to Windsor we had lapsed into unbroken sil
ence. In the thickening gloom of nightfall the silence seemed a pit we’d fallen into, drawing us in more deeply each moment it went on. I thought of the long evening still stretching before us in the car’s silence-poisoned closeness, how impossible things would be, of the vision I’d had of some better self, light-hearted and full of confidence and grace, who might have slipped an arm casually round Crystal’s shoulders, kissed her, won her over.
At the drive-in I asked if she wanted popcorn, desperate to free myself from the pressure of our silence.
“Sure.”
But when I returned from the concession she’d moved perceptibly toward the centre of the seat. I didn’t understand, our date already ruined in my mind, didn’t see how she could continue on in the charade of it.
“Are you angry or anything?”
The question jolted me.
“No, do I seem like it?” But she was right: something in me was hard with anger, my jaw stiff with the tension of it.
“I dunno,” Crystal said, awkward. “You just seem so quiet and everything.”
Her candour seemed to strip some veil from between us: I felt aware of her suddenly, human and real beside me, as if for the first time.
“I’m just shy, that’s all,” I said, though the word left a taste in my mouth like bile. “I’m always quiet.”
“Yeah, I thought so,” Crystal said. “That’s how come I noticed you when you came into the restaurant and everything, because you seemed different like that.”
And though her compliment only seemed to point up what I most disliked in myself still I was glad to have it, to be able to protect myself in this image she had of me.
The film came on. It was a trashy horror film but Crystal seemed drawn by it, growing animated now, making fun but also oddly involved. There was a character, a detective of some sort, punctilious and sceptical and cold, who made her bristle with animosity.
“God, he’s such an asshole, he’s such an asshole!”
I sat during the whole film in my own corner of the seat, never felt there was a moment when I’d earned any intimacies. But on the trip home Crystal remained squarely in the seat’s centre, the heat of her tangible there beside me. In her driveway she leaned toward me suddenly and grazed my lips with her own.
“I’m off work tomorrow too, if you want to call or anything.”
We began to see each other regularly, within a few weeks moving almost imperceptibly from the awkwardness of our first date into a kind of habitualness, one date simply leading on to another until it seemed hard to remember when things had been any different between us. I spent two or three evenings a week at her house watching TV with her in the comfortable clutter of her living room, her mother and sisters, Rocky and Kate, seeming to accept me there with an odd indulgence, Crystal locking her arm in mine on the sagging couch as if displaying me before them like a prize.
“It looks like Crystal’s got her hooks on a handsome one this time,” Kate, the eldest, said. “You should have seen some of the ones she dragged in back home.”
There was always this sense of being held in esteem there, in the tired, sad pleasure Crystal’s mother appeared to take in me, in Rocky’s tomboyish lingering near me as if to await some moment to bask in my attention; and I seemed to have entered there as by a kind of inevitability, this house of women I’d somehow become the man of, there to complete its half-familyness with my own.
Yet even in that first flush of acceptance there was already the doubt. It was the quickness of things I couldn’t understand, how I’d earned this ready entry when I’d shown them all so little, remained forever awkward and inarticulate with them for fear of contradicting whatever image it was they had of me; and then the longer things went on the more I felt torn between my relief at the effortlessness of it all and my unease at how much appeared already taken for granted. For Crystal it seemed that whatever it was that had formed between us had become already immutable: she talked often of the future, of the things we would do, the next week, the next month, the next year, obliviously constant in her affection for me even through my own moods and silences, silences that more and more became charged with an unfocused resentment. But for my part I seemed never to have reached the point where I’d made a choice, had somehow merely given in to her own attraction to me as if it were something I had no right to oppose. We usually ended our evenings now necking in the car or on the couch, some grim urgency underlying this contact for me, pushing me on like a separate will; and yet the further it took me the more the rest of me withdrew, refusing to give itself over, seeming then the proof of the wrongness between me and Crystal, this sense I was furthest from her when I should be most close. Rubbing up through our clothes once against the hard muscle of her thigh I came suddenly, for an instant all my insides seeming to liquefy and flow out of me; but even in that instant there was the same withholding in me, not so much shame as a failure of emotion, and afterwards it was that failure that I seemed most anxious to hide from her in keeping from her what had happened.
School began. In that context we seemed so unlikely suddenly, with our different worlds and interests and friends. I’d formed a life at school now outside of Vince and his group in which she seemed incongruous; and slowly a kind of partitioning began, a turning from her there as if to hold intact the different images of myself I’d splintered into. I imagined at first that Crystal didn’t notice this tension in me and yet gradually an understanding developed that things were somehow different between us at school; she stopped waiting for me outside my classes, stopped coming up behind me in the halls to slip an arm silently into mine. I couldn’t see her there now without feeling a mix of shame and contempt, for what I was doing to her, what she let me get away with, her sudden brightening at the sight of me and then her instinctive restraint. Yet somehow we went on in that way as if there was nothing unnatural or strange in it, though outside school we’d meet and at once revert to our other selves.
Weekends Crystal had off we went out sometimes with Vince and Tony. The group of us formed an odd, ill-sorted family in our differences and incompatibilities, Crystal already beginning to seem more a part of Vince’s and Tony’s world than of mine, perhaps simply because I’d met her with them or because together they formed now this separate, other life I led, my real life in a way yet provisional, leading nowhere. Away from Vince, Crystal spoke of him with a disdain that secretly pleased me, doing mocking imitations of his walk, in her version of it a strutting swagger.
“He think’s he’s such a big man.”
But then I’d be envious of the way they played off one another when they were together, Vince bringing out an energy in her that made her seem oddly strong-willed and desirable. It must have appeared then from a distance that she was merely part of a casual foursome we formed that Vince was the leader of.
“Yeah, I seen you guys the other night with that American girl, what’s her name,” one of his friends said once, asking after her as if she were some common property we shared. “I had a little thing with her last spring at the show, eh, not too bad.”
A leaden pause.
“Victor here’s been going out with her a few months,” Vince said.
“Oh, Christ, man, sorry about that. It was no big deal, eh, just necking and shit, no offence.”
The incident left a residue in me like grit. I never thought of Crystal this way, had to twist my mind to imagine her as part of this teenage delinquency, this quick furtive contact in the dark. I felt a kind of protectiveness toward her but also something else, the need to hold this thing against her in some way, to break her with it, as if in breaking her I could somehow prove my right to be free of her.
“What’re you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re sure giving nothing a lot of thought. I can hear the wheels turning up there in that big brain of yours.”
But though I could see that I was the one, that she held herself out to me like some fragile thing I’d been entrusted wi
th, still I couldn’t find the way to stop the quiet seething in me when I was with her.
It seemed in the end that I was no different from Vince and his friends, no better, had wanted only my stories to tell, the groping in theatres, the normalcy of that, the conquests, had wanted some relinquishing in me of the fever my body was; and what seemed to keep me from these things wasn’t choice but simply that I lacked some lightness necessary to carry them off. At home I lay in the bathtub sometimes envisioning Crystal spread naked before me, her imperfections strangely arousing then, the bulk of her hips, the pale dwarfed insufficiency of her breasts, every flaw a kind of sanction of my freedom from her; and stroking myself beneath the water I’d imagine sinking into the liquid heat of her until I came, bleeding into her then in the safe intensity of imagination what I could find no place for between us, my cold loveless desire.
In March, Crystal’s sister Kate got married. The wedding seemed oddly impromptu to me after Italian ones, with its single bridesmaid and usher, Kate’s simple trainless dress, the quick ceremony at the church; and then the reception at the Moose Lodge in Goldsmith, the hall tawdry and domestic and close as a living room, the food served in one quick onrush of vegetables and meat and the bar offering only soft drinks and beer. After the meal a young ruddy-faced disk jockey set out rock and country songs on a scratchy phonograph.
“This one’s for the young folks, let’s see you shaking it out there.”
Crystal’s father had come down from Michigan. At the church he’d towered over Kate with a grim composure as he’d led her down the aisle, his face creased with fatigue like something chiselled out of stone. But at the reception he grew animated, a small crowd lingering at the bar in the circle of energy he seemed to have formed there. He took my hand with a smooth, reassuring aggressiveness when Crystal introduced us.