In a Glass House

by Nino Ricci

  “So you’re Crystal’s young man, is that it?” His speech was pure as glass, had none of the twang of Crystal’s. “She’s said some very fine things about you. That’s a pretty high recommendation as far as I’m concerned, Crystal’s always been very fussy about her men.”

  “I guess he’ll do for now,” Crystal said.

  But she seemed so vulnerable before him, so awkward and adoring, seemed to miss entirely the edge of forced enthusiasm in him. I saw him dancing later with Kate, Kate distant and independent and cool and he with the same grimness he’d had in church, more himself somehow, more defeated; and it was suddenly clear to me that Kate was the daughter he cared about, something crumbling in me then at the thought of all Crystal’s innocent need.

  Crystal and I danced. Through the fabric of her dress I felt her hips sway beneath my hands. For a few moments there amidst the loud rough exuberance of the other guests we seemed to form an island, held safe in our aloneness as we danced out of rhythm in drunken slowness.

  When we left, around two in the morning, there was a mood of pleasant relinquishment between us. In the truck, which I’d had to take because my aunt had needed the car, Crystal slipped her legs under the gearshift with a low hiss of nylon and pressed up against me, her breath like steam in the cab’s damp cold. For the first time I felt my body give itself over to her. I began to kiss her, leisurely and deep, moved a hand over her belly and hips, between the warmth of her thighs.

  “That feels nice,” she said, beery and guileless, and it seemed the first time there’d been this acknowledgement that what we did was somehow intended for pleasure.

  For a moment my desire for her seemed to reach an absolute fullness. I tried to ease myself around on the seat but the cramped closeness of the cab made any comfortable position impossible. A car drove by on the highway, its flash of headlights casting up for an instant the cab’s farm-engendered squalor, the dust on the dashboard, the paper scraps, the ragged wad of bills and receipts my father clipped to the visor.

  “We should go somewhere,” I said, wanting some sign from her of common intent. But she settled away without speaking, squeezing back past the gearshift to give me room to work it.

  I pulled onto the highway, struggling to formulate some plausible scenario for bringing the evening to what had seemed for a moment its inevitable conclusion, the small mundane steps that would lead us there. But already my desire seemed debased, made unsavoury, in my having to plan its fulfilment.

  We began to come up toward Mersea. At the last instant I flicked my signal and turned down my concession.

  “Where’re we going?” Crystal said.

  “I just wanted to show you something,” I said, wanting to make a joke of it but hearing the words come out awkward and flat.

  At the driveway to the farm I put out the headlights and downshifted only to third before turning in to keep the sound of the engine low. The house lights were out, my aunt’s car parked at the side of the kiln; but the garage door was closed. It was possible my father hadn’t come in from the club yet, but I didn’t have the nerve to stop to check, driving on to the boiler room and then cringing at the rumble of the overhead door as its tiny motor slowly rolled it up to let us in and then down again. I felt panicked now at having brought Crystal here, and yet some compulsion pushed me on, the sense that there was some line I had to cross, some burden I needed to free myself of, wouldn’t let me simply back the truck up again, take Crystal home.

  Crystal and I had climbed down from the cab. In the darkness the boiler room was all dim shapes and cavernous shadow. A single pin of orange light shone out from the boiler’s tiny viewing hole, bright in the dark like a cat’s eye.

  “Where are we?” Crystal whispered.

  I realized suddenly that she’d never been to the farm before, knew as little of my life here as my family did of my life beyond it.

  “I live here,” I said, awkward. But Crystal laughed.

  “Nice place you got,” she said. “Pretty big.”

  Her laughter seemed to dispel for an instant the strangeness between us.

  “At least it’s warm,” I said.

  In darkness I led her toward the door that opened into the greenhouses. I’d thought of grabbing a blanket or some old clothes from my father’s office to lay on the ground yet still couldn’t bring myself to make obvious my intentions.

  Inside the greenhouses moonlight dappled the plants like frost, luminous as in some magic place.

  “This is wild,” Crystal said. “It’s like Africa or something.”

  But it occurred to me that she might have taken me at my word earlier, thought now I’d brought her here merely to share this with her, this other life I led. I’d handled things so badly, bringing her here, trying both to hide my intentions and gain her approval of them. The moment of feeling between us in the truck seemed already impossibly distant, Crystal merely a sort of impediment now, at once infuriatingly passive, appearing ready to follow my lead without resistance, and yet still stolidly herself, living out her own version of what was happening between us, refusing simply to dissolve into the fantasy version of her that I’d reserved for this moment.

  I led her up into the darkness of one of the rows, thinking we might lie on the straw there. But I couldn’t muster the deliberateness it would have taken to have us stretch out there in our good clothes on the straw’s spongy dampness.

  “Where’re we going?” Crystal whispered, amused or merely bewildered.

  We stood hemmed in now by the wall of plants around us, the air musty with the stable smell of manure and straw.

  “Just here.”

  I began to kiss her where we stood, moving my hands over her awkwardly, trying to regain my earlier arousal but wanting only to be past this moment now, away, outside and driving or already home in bed and alone. I heard a sound like a distant engine, had an image suddenly of my father opening the greenhouse door, flicking on the lights, coming to stand there at the end of our row; but then everything happened very quickly. Somehow in the darkness I managed to draw Crystal’s panties to her knees, to drop my own pants as well; and then in a confusion of hands and flesh I tried to enter her and came almost at once, not certain whether I’d withdrawn from her before the first throb of my coming or whether I’d entered her at all.

  Then at once the familiar failure in me, the awkwardness as we pulled up our clothes, our silence. I felt the sinking hopelessness of dreams I’d committed murder in, the sense of no going back.

  “Are you all right?”

  Her voice in the dark, the whole of me turning from her at the sound of it, needing to blot her out.

  “I’m fine.” A dead pause. “What about you?”

  “Yeah. I guess I wasn’t expecting that.”

  We didn’t speak again until I dropped her off at her house.

  “You’re kind of quiet,” she said. I could hear the question in her voice, the need to know more about what had happened.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “That’s all right.”

  She leaned toward me to kiss me but our lips met awkwardly.

  “Will you call me tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  But I awoke the next day with the same hollowness in me, what had happened eclipsing my thoughts like a haemorrhage at the centre of them. From bed I heard my father preparing for mass, the dull sound of his movement, the clink of pots and cups as Aunt Teresa prepared his coffee.

  “Where’s Vittorio?” Leaden, accusing.

  “I don’t know, he’s in bed, go see for yourself.”

  “We’ll see how long this goes on, out every night until three.”

  Though when he came back from mass he said nothing to me.

  Around one o’clock Crystal phoned.

  “Hi, stranger.”

  She sounded oddly lighthearted, some version of the previous night different from my own seeming to be playing out in her.

  “I guess Kate must’ve got to sleep around
the same time we did,” she said, then her laugh.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You’re a big talker today.”

  “Sorry. I guess I’m just hung over or something.”

  “Out drinking again last night?”

  A pause, then her voice dipped.

  “That was the first time for me.”

  I felt my heart sink, knew she was telling the truth though I’d assumed all along there’d been others.

  “For me too,” I said dully.

  “Yeah, right,” she said, laughing. “I know you Eye-ties.”

  Another pause.

  “I guess it wasn’t very safe,” I said.

  But Crystal seemed unconcerned.

  “I think it’s all right.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, a girl knows, that’s all.”

  She laughed again. I gave myself over to her own unconcern as to a kind of magic, afraid to question it lest its protective spell be broken; but my first thought was that I was free now to break with her.

  “Why don’t we go for a drive or something,” she said. “I’d like to see you.”

  When I came by for her she leaned into me in the car to kiss me and take my arm, content and proprietorial like a bride though my whole body screamed at her touch.

  “I feel so close to you today.”

  I drove out to the dock. It was cold out, the dock and the boardwalk beyond it deserted; though out on the lake the ice had begun to clear, heaved up into great jagged mounds like frozen waves near the shore but giving way beyond the breakwater to open blue.

  I couldn’t find the way to break the silence burgeoning between us.

  “Is anything wrong?” Crystal said.

  “I dunno.”

  “What is it? You’re so quiet.”

  But my thoughts seemed to crackle in my head like static.

  “I dunno. I guess I feel a little weird, that’s all.”

  “About what?”

  “I dunno. About us, I guess.”

  Then an awkward silence.

  “What’re you saying?” And already there was an edge in her voice, a retreat. My mind strained for a response but I couldn’t find the right way to avoid the truth.

  “I guess things don’t feel right between us for me.”

  “What’re you saying?” The edge, harder. “What do you mean, they don’t feel right?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. It’s just a feeling, I don’t know.”

  A strangeness had fallen over us. Outside, the lake, the white rocks of the breakwater, the snowy heaps of ice near the shore, had a hard, sun-brightened clarity, reassuringly real and inhuman; next to them we seemed anomalies, amorphous, on the brink of dissolving into this shapelessness we were drifting in.

  “You’re such an asshole,” she said finally, and already she seemed transformed, completely outside me now, my enemy. “You think you’re so much better than me, don’t you. It kills me that everyone thinks you’re such a nice guy. You’re not like that at all, you’re just an asshole.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to answer her. Her hatred seemed so certain and hard; I felt ruined in the face of it, saw the sum of me reduced to the simple truths she’d seen into.

  Crystal’s eyes were bright with tears but she wouldn’t give in to them.

  “What a fucking asshole.”

  We sat silent for several minutes. It had taken so little to strip away her mistaken impression of me: I couldn’t imagine now how we’d gone on so long, what had kept her attracted to me. I wanted to offer some reparation, wanted both to hold this sudden clarity between us yet somehow make things better again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what.”

  “For everything, I guess.”

  A silence.

  “So I guess you’re sorry you ever got involved with me, is that what you mean?”

  But beneath the edge of sarcasm in her voice there was the invitation to contradict her, as if she were still offering, even though she’d seen through to the truth of us, a way out, a way back.

  “That’s not it.” And already I could feel myself retreating. “I just meant I was sorry if I hurt you or anything.”

  Crystal didn’t respond.

  “I guess I was just nervous, that’s all, with last night and everything. I feel like everything’s happened too fast, that’s all.”

  “It was your idea,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She shifted, still stony but seeming buoyed for an instant by the point she’d won against me.

  “Maybe I made a mistake,” I said. “Maybe we should go more slowly for a while.”

  But I was merely spinning words out now, was surprised when Crystal responded to them as if they’d had meaning.

  “If that’s what you want I guess I don’t have much choice, do I?”

  We drove back to Crystal’s house in silence.

  “Do I still get to call you? Or is that too fast for you?”

  I went home with my mind in a haze, uncertain what had been decided between us. There had been the moment of terror, of exhilaration, during her anger when it had seemed some certainty had crystallized between us; but it had flashed and then gone, untenable like an unstable element, had left merely this bad feeling between us without gain.

  But then at school the next day Crystal came up behind me in the hall as if nothing had happened.

  “Hi, stranger.”

  And she smiled at me so instinctively that all the awkwardness of the previous day seemed an aberration suddenly.

  “You must’ve had a rough weekend, you look kind of hung-over,” she said, and laughed.

  We seemed to return for a few weeks then to the first timid stages of our dating, careful and courteous and attentive, our argument like a shadow looming at the limit of us that we didn’t dare approach again. But some difference between us had been made clear now, both of us seeming slowly to slip back into our separate lives even as we carried on in the pretence that nothing had changed; and it was only now that I seemed to see her with any clarity, as someone separate from me and our relationship, made poignant already in my memory of her through this quiet giving her up, in her small, familiar gestures, the life she lived there in her house on the edge of town. From the window of an upper classroom I saw her once after school walking away from the front exit toward town, alone but oddly buoyant, heartbreaking, lost in her thoughts, swaying her shoulders as she walked with a girlish exaggeration; and I felt a closeness to her then in this fleeting secret glimpse of her without me like some darkness I’d touched at the bottom of myself.

  The end of the school year approached. I seemed to be concluding some phase in my life, still a year of high school remaining for me but unspoken decisions having been made now, in how we’d been streamed, about who we were, what was possible for us. Weekends I continued to go out with Vince and Tony but they seemed now like some vestige I was no longer sure of the use of; and the less I made Crystal a part of our evenings together the more separate from them I felt, become merely an observer among them, a guest.

  “So what’s happening with you and Crystal, are you guys still together?”

  And for all Vince’s own stories of girls he’d met or picked up it was the first time since I’d started seeing Crystal that the subject of her had ever come up between us.

  “It’s just casual I guess, we sort of broke up.”

  “Just casual,” Tony said, laughing suggestively, but I let the matter drop.

  But that summer it fell out by chance once in the last-minute rush of filling a Friday night that Vince and Crystal and I went up to Windsor together to see a film, the group of us seeming joined like fragments from different pictures and yet oddly intimate for that, somehow put on the same level for once by our mutual abandonment.

  “Long time no see, big shot,” Crystal said, mussing Vince’s hair as she climbed in between us in the front seat of Vince’s car.

 
“I guess you must’ve missed me.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Then on the way home Vince took a short cut through some of the back roads and came out on Highway 76 just above my concession.

  “I might as well drop you first, eh, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure.”

  I had the premonition of some betrayal as he dropped me off, even took a certain righteous pleasure in the thought, and yet the next day felt as if a fist had struck up against me when Vince recounted this fantasy of mine to me as fact.

  “She started rubbing my leg and shit, eh, but I figured you guys had broken up and it was no big deal.”

  I could hardly make sense of this story, that it had happened or that Vince would tell it to me now, with his usual subtly boastful tone, as if it had nothing to do with me, that he’d be so foolish as to grant me this clear grudge against him. But then suddenly he seemed to twig.

  “No offence, eh, I mean it was no big deal. If I’d thought you guys were still together I wouldn’t have gone for it.”

  “No offence,” I said, muted, accusing.

  The following day Crystal called.

  “Maybe we could go out or something tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno, do I have to have a reason?”

  In her driveway I killed the engine and waited for her to come out, uncertain yet what to do with this knowledge against her, this need in me to feel betrayed.

  “Hello, Mister Victor.”

  We sat in the car a moment in silence.

  “Is there anything wrong?”

  “Should there be?” I said.

  I could go on or not, felt the falseness in my tone yet couldn’t bring myself to let the matter drop.

  “What do you mean?”

  A silence.

  “What happened when Vince brought you home on Friday?”

  “What’re you talking about? Nothing happened.” But there was an edge, an instant’s hesitation.

  “That’s not what Vince told me.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “I dunno, you tell me.”

  “What did he tell you? I can’t believe it, what did he tell you? He’s a fucking liar.”