My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  “A fin until next Thursday!”

  “And I wanted a take a girl out.” I didn’t tell him who it was. I didn’t want him to know that I had met her at the pool. “I could use about thirty bucks.”

  “I know where you can make an easy twenty-five.” He was eating a meatball sandwich and just then a meatball fell out of one end as he bit into the other. He was chewing and picking up the loose meatball as he said, “Over at the hospital. We can go after lunch. It’s a tit.”

  “And just pick up twenty-five bucks?”

  “That’s what they pay for a pint of blood,” he said. He was still eating, chewing the meatballs, so I knew he was serious.

  * * *

  We were still wearing our bathing suits and our red T-shirts lettered LIFEGUARD, but no one took any notice of us. We walked through the hospital, went up to the third floor in an elevator that held a whimpering woman in a wheelchair, and then down a corridor to a waiting room with posters saying BE A BLOOD DONOR. A nurse at a desk recognized Larry and began talking to him. She was about twenty and had dark eyes. She was pretty but had hairy arms.

  “Loretta, this is Andre Parent,” Larry said. “He wants to give blood, and so do I.”

  “As long as it doesn’t hurt,” I said.

  “Not a bit. Ask Larry. He’s been here lots of times.”

  “It’s nothing,” Larry said. “It might even be good for you. Like I noticed this strange thing. The more times you give the easier it is. The first time your blood is sort of thick and ketchuppy. But after a few times it gets thinner.”

  “How do you know, if it’s in a bottle?”

  “It gushes out faster.”

  His saying gushes out made me nervous. I said, “We have to get back to the pool.”

  “Muzzaroll’s on the chair,” Larry said. “And you covered for him this morning.” He turned to Loretta and said, “We went to the parade. Saw Kennedy. He was about as far away as I am from you. He is definitely going to win. He has class. I mean, he’s Irish. And his wife’s a piece of ass.”

  “Please watch your language,” Loretta said. She was smiling, but she became brisk. She stood up and said, “This won’t take long.”

  “It’s a business proposition,” Larry said.

  “If you want to be paid we’ll give you twenty-five dollars afterwards. And a cup of coffee.” She smiled. “But some people do it for nothing.”

  Larry said, “You charge patients for it, so why shouldn’t we cash in.”

  “Step inside,” Loretta said.

  It amazed me that we were talking about bottles of blood.

  Loretta pricked my finger and tested it on a glass slide. She said, “You’re B-negative. We always need that group.”

  I lay down on a high-legged bed and she suspended an empty bottle beside me. I looked away when she poked the needle into my arm, but I saw her connect it to a tube that led to the bottle. I started to perspire, so I concentrated on staring at a machine at the far end of the room. A sign over an opening said DO NOT INSERT ANY PART OF YOUR BODY INTO THIS MACHINE. I could only think of one part, and that gave me a twinge.

  Loretta gave me a rubber ball to hold. It was black and a bit smaller than a baseball. “Squeeze it slowly and watch what happens.”

  I gave the ball a squeeze and a plop of blackish blood ran down the side of the clear glass bottle. I looked at the machine and kept squeezing.

  After she connected Larry, he said, “I’ll race you.”

  When my bottle was full I stood up and felt weak and lightheaded. I had a coffee and collected the money and we went back to the pool. I still felt woozy, and so I climbed the lifeguard’s chair and stayed there without reading for the rest of the afternoon. I hoped the feeling would pass. I was also watching for Lucy.

  At closing time—still no sign of Lucy—Larry said, “Want to try something great? After you give blood it’s very easy to get drunk, because there’s less of it. Let’s go over to the Gardens.”

  I had money in my pocket and nothing else to do. And Larry was right. After one beer I felt drunk, but I had another one just the same. Then I began to miss Lucy, and got sad because I couldn’t tell any of it to Larry. Eventually I was too drunk to go home.

  We staggered outside and Larry said, “Let’s get something to eat. What do you feel like?”

  I said, “Whale steaks,” and imagined chewing one.

  He said, “You’re shitfaced,” and laughed in an unfunny drunken way, and in the Chinese restaurant—I could not remember how we got there—he was still laughing.

  I said, with my brain buzzing in my head, “See, it’s not Jonah inside the whale. It’s the whale inside me. That’s what I want my life to be like.”

  He said, “God, are you shitfaced.”

  This Chinese place was supposed to be cheap, but it cost us seven dollars each, and an ice-cream sundae was another dollar, and afterwards I threw up at the bus stop. Larry said, “Put your head between your legs” and left me there. Thinking it was a police car I waved my arms, and when I realized it was a taxi I took it home—another seven dollars.

  “You look sick,” my mother said.

  I didn’t say anything about giving blood, or the Chinese food or the taxi—she would have asked me where I got the money.

  “Where have you been?” she said.

  “Nowhere.”

  That was my Fourth of July.

  In the morning I felt fine, but I only had ten dollars left and that wasn’t enough for a date with Lucy. But where was she?

  4.

  “There was someone looking for you, Andre,” Muzzaroll said one morning. “She was kind of disappointed.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That you’re late for work.”

  I said the bus was late. But he wasn’t angry. He didn’t care.

  He said, “When I see a pretty girl waiting for a bus I always get horny, because I know that all I have to do is stop and she’ll get into my car. I can plank her, because she wants a ride.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t,” I said. “Maybe that’s why she’s waiting for the bus.”

  It was a lovely day. Norman was writing a letter—probably to Eisenhower, or maybe Khrushchev. I steered myself away from him and reflected on how typical it was that he was sitting against the fence scribbling. Weirdos never went into the water, except to yank down kids’ bathing suits, or fondle them underwater. They lurked, they lingered, they stared and muttered. Public swimming pools attracted the strangest people. Mrs. Mirsky wore a corset under her old-fashioned bathing suit and used to sing; Mr. Schickel ate his lunch in the changing room and said, “I’m still very hungry” to naked boys; the boy who stood outside the fence holding his radio against his head; the man who swam in sunglasses and wearing a baseball hat.

  The normal ones screamed and splashed, and went home with wet hair. They were mostly kids. The rest were mental cases, or else very lonely. The pool was for everybody, which was why I found it interesting.

  Just as I was leaving that day, Lucy stopped by the office.

  “I’ve been tied up at the bookstore,” she said. “I just wanted to say that I’m free at the moment if you wanted to do anything.”

  We immediately went to her room and made love. Afterwards I felt very shy, because she seemed shy. It was so odd to make love to her like that in her bed. We had hardly spoken before then, and so there was not much to say afterwards. Just a moment ago she had been gasping and saying Oh God! and showing the whites of her eyes. I felt I owed her something.

  “Maybe we could go to a movie sometime,” I said.

  “There’s a French movie called Breathless that I want to see. Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.”

  They were always the expensive ones; and a meal after the show. I would have to wait until payday.

  “Let’s go next week,” I said.

  “Can’t we meet and do something before then?”

  Do something meant one specific thing to me now.


  “Sure,” I said, and picking up her copy of On the Road I said, “Can I borrow this?”

  It was also my way of telling her that I was going home.

  I stopped at the pool to pick up my bag. Muzzaroll and McGinnis were playing cards in the office.

  “That wasn’t her,” Muzzaroll said.

  I stared at him.

  “The woman who came looking for you this morning. That wasn’t her.”

  I was in the lifeguard chair reading Lucy’s copy of On the Road, and liking the book. I thought: I’ll hitchhike home tonight instead of taking the bus. And next year I’ll go out west. When I thought of travel I remembered the sentence I had underlined in Baudelaire, Anywhere out of this world. But Kerouac was familiar—he came from Lowell. My aunt Eva was from Lowell! Sometimes his writing was truly terrible, and that gave me hope for myself. Again and again, I read the same line about “the charging restless mute invoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power” and I could not make up my mind whether it was baloney or genius. It was probably a little bit of both.

  Larry said, “You’re going to ruin your eyes, Andre.”

  The little Puerto Rican kids were screaming and jumping into the deep end. Above me, the Mass General was like a fortress, with the faces of patients looking out. I saw myself as a Kerouac character who was capable of feeling a holiness in this confusion: holy children, holy sick people, holy weirdos.

  Then Lucy’s voice said, “What are you having for lunch?”

  She was smiling at the fence, still in the pretty dress she wore to work.

  “I’ve got my mother’s meatloaf sandwiches,” I said, climbing down from the chair.

  “Why don’t you eat them in my room, in style?”

  Larry asked me where I was going. I said, “I’ve got to take a wicked leak.” I didn’t want to tell him about Lucy. “I’ll be right back.”

  At her room, I showed her how the meatloaf just dropped out of the sandwich if I tilted the bread. A crumbly hunk of wet hamburg slid into a pool of ketchup on the plate.

  Lucy said jokingly, “Some people think it’s more polite to say catsup.”

  “It’s a Chinese word, so it doesn’t matter.”

  The room was too small to hold a table. It was a little cube for living in. She told me it was perfect for one person.

  “This is my garden,” she said, showing me the flowerpots on the windowsill—African violets, and geraniums, and herbs such as mint and thyme. “This is my bed—as you know,” she said. “And this is my library”—a bookshelf with about fifty paperbacks jammed onto it. She showed me where she kept her letters (“My extensive files”) and where she hid her money (“My bank”). Her kitchen was a shelf with a hot plate and some cans of soup, and her clothes were in a shallow closet. All these things she showed me by stretching out her hand. It was such a tiny room I could not move without knocking something over. Just being there with her was like a sexual act.

  When she said all these things in her sweet funny voice, I realized I knew nothing about her. I felt sorry, because she was a good person, and intelligent, and she liked me. I knew also that it was a risk for her to have me here. I suspected her of being a bit desperate, but I was grateful because so was I.

  “I love that Kerouac book,” I said.

  “He’s almost forty, did you know that?”

  “God, he’s old,” I said. “I thought he was young.”

  Lucy said, “He was born in nineteen twenty-two. My favorite is The Subterraneans. Want to borrow it?”

  But leaning over for the book I brushed against her, and kissed her, and then there was no going back.

  “Oh, God,” she said, when I entered her, and she threw her head back and gasped. I felt like a bystander until she got her breath; and then she was whispering and encouraging me, until my last gasp.

  The room was very warm. Even though the window was open, there was no breeze. We lay there, stuck together, and she said, “I like you. I like being with you. I was dreading this summer, but it’s turned out really nice.”

  “What year are you in?”

  “I’m a junior.”

  That meant she was at least twenty, and probably twenty-one. I said, “Me too,” which was a lie, because I didn’t want her to know how young I was.

  She put on a silky robe, which I found sexier than her nakedness.

  “I’ve got the afternoon off,” she said.

  “I’m supposed to be back at the pool at one, so the other guys can have their lunch.”

  “Don’t go away,” she said, and held me. She hung on. “I want you to stay here.”

  A loud noise made me jump. It was a knocking at the door, and it was twice as hard as it should have been, because it was Miss Murphy the landlady, and she was deaf. I realized that I had banged my knee when I had jumped.

  “Just a minute!” Lucy said, and held the door shut.

  “Are you in there?” Miss Murphy said, rapping again.

  Lucy pulled open the closet door and motioned me to get in. She threw our clothes in after me and tied her robe and brushed the bed. Then she shut the closet door. I crouched in a woolen darkness of Lucy’s coats, with her clothes in my hand. The dress she wore was still warm from her body and smelled of her skin.

  “Do you have a minute?” Miss Murphy asked.

  “I have to go pretty soon,” Lucy said.

  But Miss Murphy didn’t hear her. She simply saw the girl wearing a bathrobe and figured there was no hurry.

  “I want to show you something,” the woman said.

  I had never seen her, but I imagined wiry hair and dark circles under her eyes, because she sounded like Miss Sharkey, an old teacher of mine from the fourth grade. As Miss Sharkey bawled me out I used to cringe and look down, but I was equally terrified by the sight of her cruel shoes. I imagined them on Miss Murphy’s feet.

  I heard Lucy’s bedsprings creak as the old lady sat down. I put my face in my hands and sweated. I tried not to breathe.

  “These are the albums I was telling you about,” Miss Murphy said, and in a monotonous reading voice went on, “Nineteen ten. Nahant Beach. Memorial Day.”

  “Very nice,” Lucy said.

  “My father always said that you should take your first swim of the year on Memorial Day. My uncle had a lovely house in Nahant. You can just see the roof in the background—and that window with the shutters. That’s me with my little pail. And that’s my brother Patrick—”

  “Miss Murphy, I have to go.”

  “And that’s my mother. Isn’t she beautiful? They all wore bathing suits like that.”

  “Miss Murphy—”

  But Miss Murphy was deaf. She droned on, talking too loud and turning pages, describing pictures. A cramp in my leg came and went, a desire to cough passed through me. I sneezed but she didn’t hear me—didn’t even pause.

  She went through the entire album—it must have taken half an hour.

  “Nineteen eleven,” she said. “Wait until you see the snow—”

  She kept talking. It was the worst kind of snapshot monologue, giving the background of each blurred person and each indistinct object; and describing, in minute detail, things that weren’t shown in the pictures.

  After a while (“There’s Patrick again—”), she said, suddenly, “What’s wrong?”

  “I have to go,” Lucy said very loudly.

  “I’ll come back some other time,” the lonely woman said.

  But all this while I was considering in the darkness how much I liked Lucy, and when Miss Murphy had gone and I stepped out of the closet and kissed her I knew that something had happened in me. In that space of time, while I crouched beneath her dresses and she was outside murmuring, I fell in love with her.

  “Not so hard!” she said, when I hugged her. But I didn’t want to let go.

  No one seemed to mind that I was late for work.

  “She was here again,” Muzzaroll said. “That woman. With the hat.”

  I said, “I was
taking a leak.”

  “Who are you trying to kid?” Larry said. “You’ve probably been in the saddle.”

  I hated that, and it wasn’t true; but I couldn’t tell him about Lucy, or that I’d been stuck in her closet.

  When we closed the pool that day, I went over to the Mass General and up to the Blood Donor department. Seeing Loretta I wondered whether the girls I desired could be put into different categories: the Nurse, the Whore, the Child, the Cheerleader. But, no, it didn’t work, because Lucy wasn’t any of these. She was someone like me. Or was that another category: the girl who resembled me?

  Loretta was nodding. She said, “B-negative, right?”

  “That’s me,” I said. I wasn’t surprised that she remembered. My father, who sold shoes, knew people by their shoe size. He’s an eight e, he’d say, or sometimes using a shoe-man’s jargon, He’s an eight Eddie.

  “You look great,” Loretta said. “You and Larry are so lucky to be working at the pool. You’ve got a fantastic tan. You just sit there and get the rays.”

  “It’s brainless work, and there’s no money in it. Anyway, I’m trying to save for school. That’s why I’m here.”

  She just smiled at me.

  “I want to sell you another pint.”

  “You’re a stitch!” She shook her head and was laughing as she said, “You have to wait at least six weeks before you can give it again.”

  I said I didn’t know that.

  “You can’t keep taking blood out of your system. You’d get anemic. You’d probably die.”

  “I feel all right. I’m broke, that’s all.”

  “Come back in a month or so. I could probably take you then. Gee, if I had any extra money I’d loan it to you.”

  I told her that was a very nice thing to say; but even so I wouldn’t have borrowed it. What I wanted to do with it was walk into a restaurant with Lucy and order whale steaks for us both, and afterwards tell her I loved her.

  When I left the hospital I became very self-conscious imagining Loretta telling the other nurses how I had come back less than a week after giving blood and said Want another pint?