by Alex Witchel
After a halfhearted greeting, Elaine kept on talking while fingering her thick gold necklace. I pretended to listen and glanced around. A big Egyptian tomb dominated the room, and a few tables were set up as bars in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Not a rose in sight. The client must have blown all its dough on Rodin.
I plotted my departure. Was there no one else here I knew? Where were the other people on Bucky’s account? They must all have gone to Minneapolis.
I did notice one girl who seemed to be moving against the general traffic toward the bars. She was tall, surfer-girl blond, and beautiful, and dressed mostly in black with a skirt short enough to show some impressive legs and a top low enough to show an even more impressive chest. Maybe someone had paid for her company, I thought as Elaine prattled on about reupholstering her couch. I kept nodding, though certainly not knowingly. Next to art, I knew nothing about decorating most.
“Do you want to escape and get some dinner?” I asked Ed when he returned with a couple of white wine spritzers that he set on a nearby table.
“No, I really have to stay,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Clients.”
“Too bad. Bucky and I would love to see you soon. Did you know we got engaged?”
“Yes, I did, as a matter of fact. Have I kissed you yet, you sweet thing?”
He put his arms around me and bent me backward. This apparently was too much for Elaine, who turned her attention to another woman who seemed to better appreciate the subtleties of damask.
Then Jeffrey appeared, a nice guy who was always glad to see me. We talked for a while, and across the room I saw JT, another of Bucky’s friends, whom I must say I never liked. He was the kind of person who seemed incapable of making eye contact, speaking to my shoulder instead.
After Jeffrey moved on, I put my drink down and was getting ready to leave when I spotted the blonde again. She was too attractive to look so cheap, I noted absently, thinking of the piece for that month’s issue I had been assigned to edit, “Posture and the Miniskirt.” At least hers was good. She had probably been tall from a young age.
I raised my glance from her hemline and noticed that she was looking directly at me, as if she knew me.
Suddenly she was standing in front of me.
“Are you Sandy?” she asked. Her voice was friendly and somewhat familiar. Oh, of course! She must be one of the assistants who sometimes answered Bucky’s phone. I wondered which one she was. Patty? Lucy? My eyes went again to her cleavage. Bunny?
“Yes,” I said, smiling broadly. “I’m Sandy.”
“You’re engaged to Bucky Ross, aren’t you.” It was less a question than a statement of fact.
My smile grew even broader. It was a smile of pride at my new identity. I remember it being one of the most effortless smiles of my life. “Yes,” I said. “I am.”
I was aware then that I was standing in the middle of a circle that hadn’t been there a moment before. I saw that Ed and JT and Jeffrey had come together, like a little blood clot, ruining the perfect line of the arc. Ed looked stricken, but JT raised his glass—in victory, it seemed—and laughed.
“So am I,” she said.
2
The first time I ever saw Buck Ross, he was wearing a skirt and kissing another girl.
We were both in eighth grade—he at Green Hills Junior High, I at the Rolling Ridge School. He was playing Charlie Dalrymple in Brigadoon and sang “Come to Me, Bend to Me” in the most beautiful voice. Later in the play, when he got married, he grabbed Christy O’Connell, who had the kind of limp blond hair I would have killed for on a summer’s day, and kissed her on the mouth while all the girls from Rolling Ridge went Oooooooh, because none of us had ever kissed anyone before, much less onstage.
I was mesmerized. My friends and I had spent hours trying to figure out just which way our heads should move when the time would come to kiss a boy. To the right? To the left? Did our arms go up around his neck? Or down around his waist? We were certain that there was a right answer and a wrong answer to these questions and passed many afternoons practicing on the posts of my canopy bed. But Buck knew exactly what to do, and—his kilt aside—I was impressed.
Buck Ross, we all soon discovered, played baseball and the guitar and had actually made out at a party with a girl named Bambi right in front of everyone. He was something, that guy.
The following fall, when Green Hills Junior High and Rolling Ridge sent all their eighth-grade graduates to the same local high school, Buck and I did not have classes together. We were both in the choir, though, and I noticed him every now and then, tall and skinny and pimply where he wasn’t pale. I was much more interested in Doug Civecchio, who unfortunately was much more interested in Jane Streit, who was thin as a stick and had the same kind of hair as Christy O’Connell. Doug and Jane used to make out in the hallways and the cafeteria and the parking lot. If I had known then that years later, Jane Streit would be featured in a New York Times story about gay pride, I would have felt ever so much better.
High school anywhere can be a horror, but in Green Hills it had a horror all its own. Everything was about money—who had it, who didn’t, and what kind was it. There was Jewish money, new and loud, and WASPy money, old and hidden. WASP families belonged to the riding club, their children joined the social-dancing class when they turned twelve, and the girls’ wardrobes included short white gloves to wear to weddings. These families belonged to the Green Hills Golf Club, where Jews were not allowed, and their mothers presided at the Green Hills Women’s Club, a grand old mansion with vast lawns where they gathered for afternoon lectures on the world’s great gardens and a glass, or five, of sherry.
The WASP lifestyle was a complete mystery to me. Most of my friends were Jewish, and while some of them were rich and belonged to the fanciest Jewish country clubs, that particular life never enticed me. At lunches, we would order iced tea and sandwiches and the mother would write on a card with a little red pencil that entitled her to not pay the check. There were pools and tennis courts and golf courses, even martinis.
But despite the attempted trappings, it never felt much different from being in temple—especially at dinner, when the fathers were there. Everyone nodded and waved at the other tables before commenting sotto voce on how poorly the son was doing at school or how the daughter’s nose job wasn’t good enough for the money they spent on it. Or how the other daughter clearly had an eating disorder—look at her, leaving the lamb chops on the plate—but with a mother like that, who could blame her?
In my mind, the WASPs had it better. No one said an unkind word, and everyone danced up a storm. They sipped cocktails and wore white tie (which they owned) and rode horses into the sunset.
Never underestimate the power of a good imagination.
With all my efforts to survive socially in school, I didn’t think about Buck Ross again until the fall of junior year. He went through one of those metamorphoses possible only during a high school summer, then appeared covered with muscles and clear skin, and turned up—alone—at the drama-club productions on the weekends. He still played the guitar and he obviously liked the theater and now he was also suddenly a football hero, which didn’t mean that he was even that good a player (he wasn’t), but which did mean that every Friday he and the rest of the team could wear their jerseys to school, advertising their elite athletic status. The girls who were cheerleaders wore their outfits, too, and the uncoordinated rest of us sat in class staring at those silver-and-navy getups feeling the glare of adolescent inadequacy in all its blinding glory.
But Bucky was an athlete with an artist’s sensibility—or at least that’s what I decided he was. He kissed me one night at a party, which according to the rules at Green Hills meant that we were officially going out. I was his date at the football dinner. At George Lowell’s New Year’s Eve party, Bucky kissed me at midnight in front of everyone. But once the baseball season began—Bucky’s true passion—he virtually disappeared. He said he would call, and didn’t. He
said he’d be at parties, and never showed up.
“How can you do this?” I wailed one day in the high school parking lot. (I was the one with the car at that point, so that I could do Mom’s errands after school while she stayed in the lab with the rodents. The Rosses were building Bucky’s character by making him work for a car even though they owned two Jaguar sedans.) “I thought we were going out,” I said tearfully. “What happened?”
He considered the question carefully.
“You know the song ‘The Wanderer’?” he said at last. “Just think of me like that. I’m not the kind of guy who wants to settle down.”
So after a week of crying and sighing (when I wasn’t eating an Entenmann’s cake whole in the front seat of the car, listening to the radio in case they played a song that we had ever slow-danced to), I got over it. I went to camp that summer and fell madly in love with Bobby Levine, who played basketball and whose musical taste tended more to the Grateful Dead than to Dion. He was literally tall, dark, and handsome, and in truth, he was a much better kisser than Bucky.
Bobby Levine was from Brooklyn, but he hung out a lot in Manhattan, going to movies the very day they opened at Cinema 1 on the Upper East Side. He smoked pot and cigarettes and knew all the subway lines, which, coming from Green Hills, I found exotic. But the less great thing about Bobby was that he wanted us to eat together, sleep together, walk together, and breathe together. He wanted me to be with him all the time, a prospect that did not particularly appeal to me. I liked doing what I wanted, when I wanted. Bobby Levine couldn’t do something as basic as sitting down to listen to an album unless I was sitting there next to him.
By Christmas of senior year, I had had enough true love. Bobby didn’t know anyone I was talking about from my school, and I didn’t know anyone he was talking about ever. The Green Hills football dinner had come and gone, and I started to feel as if I was missing out on the most important year of high school. What was I doing, running to the city every two minutes? People had even stopped inviting me to parties, figuring I wouldn’t go.
About that time I heard that Bucky Ross, Green Hills High second-base star, had to have surgery on his shoulder. He had lifted too many weights bulking up for football and torn a rotator cuff, and now it seemed that all the colleges that had been scouting him might not offer scholarship money. Not that he needed it, but the Rosses never liked to spend money if they didn’t absolutely have to. This much they had in common with my parents.
Bucky had his surgery over Christmas vacation, and I trooped through his parents’ house to visit him along with everyone else. The Rosses lived in one of those Green Hills houses where the silver martini shaker and the ice bucket had pride of place on the mahogany bar smack in the middle of the overstuffed living room, and the sounds of a football game were eternally floating in from the den. Some flowered family china cachepots sat empty on the dining room table, and the heavy curtains kept the room dark. At the time I thought the house grand and landed, established in the way I wanted to be.
On one of those visits, after I’d made my way upstairs, past the den bookshelves filled with back issues of National Geographic, I found myself actually alone with Bucky and somehow I got close enough to him, propped up in bed, past the sling and the contraption holding it in place, to get another one of his kisses.
“You’ve been practicing,” I said, having noted a marked improvement in his technique.
He laughed, then took my hand and slid it down his stomach into his underwear.
“I don’t even want to know where you’ve been wandering since I saw you last,” I said, fancying myself quite the sophisticate, forgetting I had ever even met someone named Bobby Levine. He grinned, while his mother fussed out in the hallway and the dogs thumped around her on the carpet. Suddenly the new movie at Cinema 1 didn’t seem to matter. There was something so grounded and independent about these people. They had their own rules. They didn’t need to know the newest and the latest in the city. They golfed and played tennis and gardened and swam and never thought the water in the pool was too cold. They ate dessert but never seemed to gain weight, and Bucky called women “ma’am” and held doors open for them. My brother, Jerry, would rather die than do that. In our house, we ate in the kitchen with the television on and bolted as soon as we could, while my father chewed, jaws clicking intently as he listened to the Dow’s progress that day.
“I missed you, Sandra,” Bucky said softly. He reached for my hand, which was back in my own lap by this time. “Is it true you’ve been seeing some guy from the city?”
I nodded.
“I know I pretty much disappeared the last time.” He smiled tentatively. “But I’m ready now. I think you just scared me a little.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, with you, there’s a whole world out there,” he said slowly. “I mean, my parents don’t really like going to the theater or to concerts, and they don’t read books that much. I like that you do.” He blushed. “When I’m with you, I feel like I can be smart, too.”
“You know you’re smart, Bucky.” I shook my head. He was in good classes at school, and he got really good grades.
“Smart enough to know you mean a lot to me,” he said, as solemnly as if he were trying to convince a college admissions officer to sign him up. “Could you possibly find it in your heart to forgive me?”
I knew I shouldn’t, and I was still sort of hoping that I couldn’t, but of course I did.
“I’ve thought about this so much,” Bucky said on my next visit, a few days later. “I know how different we are. But I also know that I don’t want to just be like everyone else—play sports, get good grades and the right job, and do everything my parents expect me to do. I want my life to really mean something. I want to learn things, be a better person. You fight for what you get, and I admire that. You study hard, and you do all the drama-club stuff, and you’re such a good friend to so many of those jerky girls. You earn what you get. I want to fight, too.” He leaned forward, struggling against his cast. “For you.”
I stared. How was this happening? All these years of hard work—it was true—and someone had noticed? My parents never had. If a report card had four A’s and a B, the only comment was “Why the B?” If any one of the girls I knew who were “popular” ever called or came by with their boyfriend problems or their parents’ divorce problems, I dropped everything to listen. And not one of them seemed to remember it past the overblown goodbye hug after hours of spilling their guts on a weekend. By Monday morning, I always felt that I was back to square one. It never occurred to me to talk about problems of my own. I wasn’t sure I even had any. I was too busy paying attention to everyone else.
But Bucky had noticed.
He appreciated me.
So I kept visiting. And staying longer. Mrs. Ross would answer the door, hands filled with crochet hook and yarn, apparently in the process of making her son’s sling a silver-and-navy doily.
“How nice of you to come by!” she would say with her false cheer, as if I were there to fix the bathroom drain. She never bothered to remove the cigarette jammed into the side of her mouth. Somehow, its ashes miraculously missed her handiwork every time and fell instead on Copper, the Rosses’ rambunctious Irish setter, who never listened to one well-bred command she was given. Next to her crocheting, Mrs. Ross’s full-time project seemed to be keeping Copper from jumping on guests, a task at which she failed miserably. Beyond that, what she did with her days outside of rose season was anyone’s guess.
When school began again and Bucky was no longer bedridden, I started receiving Hallmark cards with beaches and sunsets on the covers. His childish scrawl inside promised his love forever. He waited for me outside my classrooms. Well, in short order, I was smitten. This was the answer to my toiling emptiness, my window onto the secret life of Green Hills: Bucky. He was strong, aristocratic, and sure, and I was the perfect complement, I decided. I was smart, hardworking, and knew a lot about the
culture he was interested in, as only the child of immigrants could—having grown up Sundays at museums, and most days at the public library, living in a house where the classical radio stations played continuous Mozart and Beethoven. Together he and I would live in a house with thick Persian rugs, crystal vases, and candlelight. Bucky would provide the bass notes of stability and continuity, while I would contribute the chirpy top notes of color and light.
That’s when I first came up with the idea of writing children’s books. I figured it would be a perfectly contained activity that didn’t require commuting, and because the books would be for kids, how hard could they be? Bucky started buying me blank books, writing SANNY’S STORIES on the title pages.
Our life-planning sessions had taken root—intoxicated as we were by posing as grown-ups—and he asked me to the prom. In exchange, I asked him to my house for dinner. He had met my parents, of course, but this was serious now. This was the prom.
He came one evening in early June, looking impossibly handsome, wearing a white Lacoste shirt and khakis, his blue eyes bright against his tan. My mom had risen to the occasion, coming home for dinner on time and forgoing frozen vegetables for an elaborate salad she made herself.
“What are you planning to do this summer, Buck?” she asked genially.
“Well, I have a job as a busboy near our cottage on Nantucket,” he said. “There’s this restaurant in town, and the tips there are supposed to be great.”
My father said nothing. While any discussion of tips would normally have perked him up almost as much as a mention of Stalin, what soured him was the word “cottage.” He knew it was a Christian code word that the Vanderbilts and Whitneys, say, might use to refer to their sixty-room Newport mansions by the sea. While I had been to the Rosses’ cottage and had assured Dad that it was nothing more than a small, ordinary house—albeit one with an ocean view—I knew that it was yet one more black mark in the Book of Bucky he had been compiling since the rise and fall of Bobby Levine.