“The gift is speaking the words as if they were written just for you. Some preachers have it, most don’t. My daddy calls it ‘magnetism.’ He says only God can put it on your tongue.”
She switched the joint to her other hand, blew its ash into the night, and relit it with a silver lighter.
“Wasn’t the ocean nice today? I liked being out in there with you,” she said. “I liked kissing and floating, the currents spinning us slow.”
“I never kissed in the ocean before …”
“Bet you never saw a girl’s breasts in the ocean before, either.”
She laughed. I blushed, but it was night and Alice couldn’t see. I took the joint.
“I didn’t really see them. The water obscured the detail.”
“I could take that as an insult if I knew what obscured meant. You ever think how you’ll die?”
“No.”
“I do sometimes. I think it’s church. Preachers make you feel like there’s so much out there. Like the world is full of tiny, invisible traps of darkness. If I could choose how I’d die, I’d choose the ocean. Being swept out gently by the currents, the water turning colder and colder and my body going numb, slowly filling, all the time having the sensation of floating, like a sea angel flying on the tide toward God.”
Her voice was a little cracked from the smoke; it was huskier, but soothing. I closed my eyes and listened. She was a radio in the night, talking into the ether, making shapes with sounds in the scratchy distance. I wasn’t high. I was simply peaceful. Vera’s hand was off the trigger and all seemed quiet in 501, while in 503 a girl with breasts, a lighter, and a bag of her brother’s marijuana talked and talked, a merry-go-round of words, raspy against the waves. I heard a crinkle.
“You want half? Milky Way. I got it from the box we stock the vending machines with.”
“You must have a lot of stuff like that, supplies I mean.”
“A truck is always dropping something off. One time we had three deliveries of soap in one day. It was a screwup, but we had all this soap and Daddy said it was enough to wash every soldier in the entire US Army. It was in winter and there were hardly any guests, so you know what we did? We lined the soap up like dominoes, setting them up in the shape of a Tilt-A-Whirl, you know, a spiral tightening. And then we let ’em fall. It was beautiful. They fell so fast and they made a kind of soft clattery music.”
“Do you like the Beatles?”
“Didn’t they break up?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m still hungry. I got another candy bar. Want half?”
“Sure.”
“Almond Joy. Shit. I meant to get Mounds. You can have my almond.”
Alice flicked the joint over the railing. We ate in silence, Alice handing me her almond. When she was done, she stepped over to where I was leaning and kissed me. We tasted almost the same. She kissed me the way she did in the water. Soft. I felt her back, bare in her halter top, and it was warm, as if her skin had stored up the day’s sun. Her hair smelled of dope and the sea, a little perfume on her neck. She pressed against me and lifted a hand to my cheek and then another, holding my face as if it were something delicate, like crystal or the blown glass of a Christmas ornament.
She kissed me again. Brief. Her tongue traced my chocolate lips and I felt that somehow she was older, older in the way that girls are in elementary school, when they are better than the boys in penmanship and arithmetic. Maybe she was a little scared like I was, but I didn’t think so, she seemed to know about skin and kisses, and how to blow a breath across a neck. She took my hand and led me through the curtains into the dark room and onto the bed. We lay like fallen wood, side by side, pressed together, but then, like we did in the ocean, we seemed to float. I opened my eyes and in the bits of gray and dark I saw her looking at me, not like Vera with her gun, not scared and waiting, but looking at me like I was her own private mystery, a boy on a bed in her daddy’s hotel, floating with her above the waves in the warm stillness of her breathing. I stroked her hair.
“You still checking out day after tomorrow? Your daddy and that woman he’s with haven’t changed the reservation.”
“I don’t know what we’re doing.”
She kissed me again, then sat up and took off her halter top. She lifted off my shirt, and we lay back down. I didn’t know what to do; boys pretend but they don’t know, and I didn’t know. She took my hand and put it on her breast. Nothing was blurry like it had been in the ocean. Even though it was gray-dark, her breasts were white, blooms of white, a girl’s unfinished white, rising from her tanned body.
“Can you feel my heart?”
“It’s going fast.”
“I feel it, too. We can’t do no more than this, Jim. Just this kissing and touching.”
“That’s okay.”
“You taste like a big candy bar.”
She laughed and rolled on top of me, her hair fell around me, and she lifted and dipped, like a kite, on my breathing. I didn’t know what to say. I said nothing. I was glad we weren’t going further, to a place I didn’t know. Part of me wanted to, but most of me didn’t. I wasn’t an altar boy. I wasn’t gay, but I wasn’t a Beatles’ White Album song, either. Alice made me feel like a boy sensing his manhood out there a dozen waves from shore, gathering but not yet arrived. Her voice made me imagine I was kissing Lizabeth Scott. The tone vulnerable, a voice of hurt or waiting to be hurt; Alice’s voice invited you in, wrapped you up like you were her conspirator, but then it held you at bay. She sat up and straddled me.
“Trace me.”
“What?”
“Trace me with your fingers. Trace me and you’ll never forget me.”
I traced her. It seemed I was cutting her from the night. Neck, shoulders, down the arms, elbows, hands; skimming her waist, up her stomach to her breasts and around them, moving to her collarbone and slipping over her chin, like slipping over a dune, to her face, her forehead, my fingers disappearing into her hair. I did it twice. She lay beside me, the way Mom used to lie beside Kurt on the couch after a long day.
“Let’s sleep,” said Alice. “When you wake I’ll be gone, and you’ll wonder if this all ever happened.”
“I traced you. I’ll remember.”
I closed my eyes. I could feel Alice’s heart beating beside mine. I wondered what we would look like in Nut Johnson’s telescope. Two specks of flesh in the night — a boy and a girl — tangled together by kisses and arms, and sleeping in a room by the sea below the great constellations and the ghosts of old sailors who charted the stars toward doom or fortune. I could talk to Nut like that. He would understand. He would see me through his telescope and know that something had happened, that I was the same, but somehow changed; that seeing a girl’s breasts, touching them, having them press against you was wonderful, but not in the way a boy expects in his mind before it actually happens. It’s different. Better. But somehow you feel tricked in the nicest kind of way. Nut would know this without my having to explain, just like he knew, when peering at Mrs. Romano’s silhouette through her lighted shade, the splendor of shadows that spin before us.
The morning light glared harsh. I turned and squinted. Alice was gone. She left me the nub of a joint in the ashtray and an Almond Joy wrapper on the TV. She had been here. It was real. I closed my eyes and retraced her once more in my mind. I wanted it etched deeply. A knock and the door flew open.
“There are strange goings-on, Jim. I need to play tennis. Let’s go.”
“I’m a little rusty.”
“You’ll be fine today.”
Kurt handed me a Jack Kramer racquet, a towel, and a can of balls.
“Where’s Vera?”
“We’ll talk about Vera later. We need to find a court.”
Down the elevator to the lobby; Slim, a raggedly thin, aptly named man, a man without the preacher’s gift, without God’s blessings on his tongue, sat where Alice usually sat, looking over the ledger at the front desk while the gimpy uncle sipped coffe
e. Slim gave us directions to a high school with good courts about five miles away.
“Have a wonderful game, gentlemen,” he said.
Kurt and I dropped the top on the Impala and took off with a roar through sparse Sunday-morning traffic. Kurt popped in Walter Jackson and that big, deep voice filled the air like its own kind of church. The sun was warm, but the breeze was cool, and as we drove the ocean’s stickiness thinned. Nobody was on the courts. They were smooth with evaporating dew, the white lines bold, the green uncracked, like a gardener’s lawn on the Philly Main Line. Kurt opened a can, a snap and a whoosh of air and the gluey locked-up smell of new balls.
“Swing easy like I taught you.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Just easy long strokes, don’t hurry, just glide to the ball.”
I hadn’t played tennis with Kurt in two years. He hit softly so I could find a rhythm. It took a while. I sent balls streaming over the fence and skidding across other courts. Kurt kept saying: “Relax … Long strokes … Get your racquet back … You’re hitting too late … You’re hitting too early … Topspin … Roll the wrist … Relax.” One good thing about Kurt — he seldom got mad, rarely raised his voice. Tennis was his passion, and he did not like to see it played poorly, but he was patient, knowing that this game of mathematics and art needed time and humor; otherwise a man would throw tantrums and smash a lot of Jack Kramers.
This was the Kurt I knew from Philly. The Kurt of Mom and me. Lately, with his uncombed hair and tan, and his unconcern for detail, like having a clean white T-shirt or stiff, newly washed jeans, Kurt, who even let slip his meticulous care of the Impala, a sandy rolling box of crumbs and soda stains, was a different shade of himself. Vera had done it, which when it first happened was good, watching Kurt, like a snail peeking out after a rainstorm, come back to the light after Mom’s death. She drew me out, too. She enchanted.
Kurt was out too far, though. He wanted the cover of his shell again, he wanted to paint ships gray and hang from rope ladders. I didn’t ask him about this. I saw it. Vera, the one who drew him into the light, was losing herself, reaching for a gun and scrunching up scared in the night; she could no longer keep Kurt in her fairy tale. That sounds strange, but I think it was a fairy tale. I wanted there to be a man from Marrakesh clawing outside the fortress walls, not for the danger or a boy’s adventure, but so Kurt and I could have faith.
Faith was a never-ending work in progress. I wished I had more of it, but I often felt faith was a trick on the spirit. Was Christ really on your tongue at communion? Did His body and blood dissolve into yours and flow through your veins to make the impure holy? Faith and mystery were twins. That’s what Fr. Heaney preached; that’s what made a tiny moon of unleavened bread the body of God’s son. You could doubt that, even as you knelt while Fr. Heaney rummaged his stubby fingers in the gold chalice and plucked up your Christ and held Him before you as you uttered “Amen” and crossed yourself and walked to your pew with the Lord sliding down your throat and into your soul. Kurt believed in God and communion but the tennis court was what he most trusted, the place that no matter where he went was the same divine rectangle of familiarity protected by a fence that held back parking lots, tall grass, and other annoyances seen and imagined. I watched him on the other side. He was beautiful when he moved. His body born for the game; bone and reflex synchronized to the swoop of his racquet, an arc of symmetrical perfection as precise as the twitch of a swan’s wing. The ball lifting off the strings and finding the invisible weight of topspin as it accelerated and dipped over the net like a piece of light. He kept me running, side to side, up to the net, back-footing it to the baseline. I wasn’t beautiful. I breathed hard and played with abandon, and I could hear Kurt laugh across the net, not making fun of me but admiring, maybe it was admiring, the strange, gangly theater of my game.
“You’ve got your own style,” he said walking to the net to pick up balls.
“Looks funny.”
“No, Jim, it doesn’t. It’s unique and there’s nothing wrong with that. A man needs uniqueness in his life. It sets him apart, you know. Nothing wrong with that. Keep being unique, Jim. The world has a way of wanting to take that away from you.”
“You feel unique?”
“In moments.”
“Vera’s unique.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“This girl Alice at the front desk, she’s unique.”
“What’s going on with her? I saw you two swimming beyond the waves the other day.”
“We’re just friends.”
“Women are unique by nature.”
“Maybe.”
He slipped a ball into his pocket and looked at the late-morning sun. Sweat shone on his face and beaded at the tips of his long hair. His white shirt was drenched. It was a moment he wanted to keep in a bottle and twist shut. You can tell when a man feels that way; there’s a smile, but not a full one, the shoulders slump a bit, and the legs seem balanced on oiled springs; a man is quiet at this moment; feeling like the speck he is in the world is brightened, made known. To speak would wipe it away; to make a sound would be to lose the true, unpronounceable thing that gives him the measure of who he is. I wasn’t a man, but I studied men. I studied Kurt, and while a lot of him had changed since we met Vera, his pose of contentment, like the way he sipped a beer on the summer stoop or how he used to look at Mom when she pulled something sweet from the oven, had not changed, although it had become harder to find.
“Alice wears mostly halter tops, doesn’t she, Jim?”
“A different color every day.”
“Like pulling flags from a drawer.”
“She’s a Baptist.”
“Not many of them in Philly. Nuns and girls in plaid pleated skirts. When I’m late for work and stuck in traffic, I see all those Catholic girls, holding books to their chests and hurrying in packs to school. When I see them it’s like being young and being old at the same time.”
“You’re not old.”
“Some of those girls will marry men like me and move into row houses and raise families. Others will move to Rittenhouse Square and be secretaries and accountants. A few will leave and won’t come back.”
Kurt took the ball from his pocket and bounced it on his racquet as he spoke. He didn’t look at it; he just kept it bouncing like a thing with its own life.
“Your mom and I knew a girl who left. She was from St. Thomas’s and she was a genius. Her father was a cripple and her mother had run off. The girl raised herself and cared for her broken old man. He drank too much but he was a gentle drunk. I was in her house a few times. It smelled like Pledge. Her name was Mary and man, could she do math. Whole pages of numbers and graphs and squiggles I couldn’t even begin to understand. She was communicating with a whole other world. The nuns didn’t know what to do. They couldn’t keep up with her. They brought in college professors. I felt sorry for her. She was this quiet thing no one could figure out. Our neighborhood mystery. It was the first time in my life that I really understood how different people are. You grow up in a tight neighborhood of alleys and brick homes and everyone knows everyone from the shipyards and the factories, everyone’s connected and you feel that they’re all like you. But they’re not. The ones like Mary let you know that. I asked a nun about Mary and she said, ‘God dispenses His gifts in different quantities.’ I’ll never forget that.”
Kurt’s voice was low and soft.
“Mary disappeared after graduation. She went to schools in New England and sometimes her dad would mix her into his drunken stories. ‘Mary was working on something for the government.’ ‘Mary was splitting atoms.’ Mary never came home. Not for Christmas. Not for anything. Not even for her father’s funeral. One day I was reading the Inquirer and saw a headline: BRILLIANT PHILLY-BORN SCIENTIST DROWNS. There was a picture of Mary. She had kept those same pointy-framed glasses and that funny sideways part in her hair. But she was gone, leaving behind, the paper said, a three-ro
om apartment and unfinished theories. She drowned in Walden Pond outside Boston. Fell through thawing winter ice. I thought, How could that be? How could a girl so smart not know the dangers of thawing ice? All that math and all those numbers in her head. She must have felt the temperature. She must have seen the sheen of water on top of the ice. But she fell through. The smartest person I ever knew drowned like a child or a fool not paying attention.”
“Maybe it was suicide.”
“There was no note. No inkling of it. Her scientist friends said she was excited, that she was about to solve an unsolvable equation, or some scientific thing.”
“Maybe in the end she couldn’t solve it.”
“No, Jim. It didn’t feel that way. You don’t kill yourself in a half-frozen pond. Mary was too smart. She would have thought of a better way. But if she was that smart, why did she fall through? I keep thinking about that. It’s strange. The way your mom died is not strange to me. A car slides on the snow, jumps a sidewalk, and hits someone. That’s freakish, but I can see it in my mind. The puzzle of it solved. Witnesses said the car went out of control in bad weather. But Mary through the ice I can’t get.”
“But Mom’s puzzle is not solved. We never found out who was driving that car. No one ever got a license plate number, or they were too scared to come forward with it.”
“You know who was driving that car.”
“A numbers collector for the mob.”
“That’s the kind of car it was. A black Fleetwood.”
“How do we live with that, Kurt?”
“We put it away. Store it deep somewhere. I figure it like this. Whoever hit her, hit her by accident. The crime was in driving away. That’s what I hold to, Jim. It gets me through. But one day, and you know how Philly is, I’ll be working at the shipyards and someone’ll whisper into my ear the name of the man who was driving that car. Then, I think, real quiet I’ll go see that man one night. You can’t act on anger. You got to let things settle. Let them harden so you can see clearly. Waiting can kill a man, but waiting, my dad used to call it ‘biding time,’ is what you have to do sometimes.”
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