Now he pushed away the yearning before it could overpower him. In chorus all his teachers’ remembered voices said to him: To have such feelings is natural: only in yielding to them do you do wrong.
With determination he set his mind on lust. Right over there stood his parents, proud of him. And this was the prom. He slid his hand down Glory’s bare side and gently snapped the elastic of her G-string.
Like a nice girl, all remoteness gone, she turned her head to him at once and asked him: “Do you want to go again?” He made his voice properly regretful. “I just came back.” Side by side they watched the dancers, whose pelvic movements were still too chill and slow, hinting at chastity; Bill knew without looking that his father would be wearing a frown, watching this performance.
. . . and still, over and over, Bill’s thoughts turned back to Glory. Had he, after all, made a fool of himself by bringing her to the prom. She was no Ann Lohmann, of course. Her reputation was not nearly that bad. But the brutal truth was that a couple of the guys at school had in Bill’s hearing come close to saying plainly that Gloriana Chang had done it with them.
“. . . I’ve seen Glory with some sublimatin’ ice in those blue eyes of hers . . .”
“. . . that li’l female knows all about the little specks o’ starlight, lemme tell you . . .”
After the dancers’ performance ended, to applause, Bill danced again with Glory. Then they went to the banquet car for a sandwich, and then they went together to the toilet.
He couldn’t mark exactly when it had started, but now Glory was falling into little spells of silence. Each silence seemed a bit longer than the one before. He watched her closely, and kept talking to fill in the times when she was quiet. It didn’t seem to him that she was being drawn to anyone else, or that she was angry with him about anything. He supposed it could be that she was just bored—but then she didn’t seem restless. It must be something more than that.
It might be—but he didn’t let himself go any further with that line of thought. Not here; not tonight. He fought temptation.
He asked: “You gettin’ tired, Glory?”
“No.”
But then in the next moment her eyes would be almost glazed again. Just for an instant looking like eyes focused on something far away, something that might be huge and bright. And her hand, that like a nice girl’s had been stroking him or feeling him, would fall still, just touching him, while there passed what seemed a long count of seconds. He made sure to keep on fondling her. He hoped none of the chaperones would look at them closely and see how Glory was acting. And he sure hoped that none of the other kids would notice. What could he do, if she went on with it, and got more obvious about it?
And then again, for a little while, she would kiss him and feel him and behave with great propriety, and he told himself he was imaging things. But he just didn’t know. He couldn’t be sure.
He wished it was true, what he let on sometimes to other guys, that he had had girls go all the way with him to sublimation. If he had any real experience he would know now what Glory was up to, and what he should do about it. All the dirty daydreams were not a bit of help, nor were all the pornographic books, when it came to facing the real thing.
Sometimes it seemed to Bill that there could be no real thing, that it was too marvelous to be real, that people must have invented it just so they could have a perfect thing to hope for.
“I’m kind of tired, Glory. What say we take a nap?”
In one of the doorless bedchambers, pink and mirrored, they turned down the lights and stretched out to sleep. The train swayed. It wasn’t completely dark, of course—the chaperones spent more time in this car than in any of the others. The adults just walked through, trying not to appear to be prying into what was going on, but making their presence felt, and keeping an eye out to make sure that people who were still and silent were really just resting or asleep.
He had fallen asleep all tangled up with Glory. Waking, they worked themselves into a mutual orgasm before either of them was entirely awake. Then, when he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes, there was still that distance to be seen in hers.
“What is it, Glory? Come on, tell me if there’s something wrong.”
Her voice was tense, not quite angry. “I just wish I could have a little fun, that’s all. Don’t you ever want to?”
“No,” he said automatically, answering not her words but her tone, and the way she was looking at him. Then when what she had said sank in, he wasn’t even sure that he had heard her right, it sounded like such an open and blatant invitation. “What?”
“Nothing.”
When they had freshened up and had begun circulating through the party again, a kid told them that the Lohmanns had finished their tour of duty as chaperones and gone home. Their daughter Ann still hadn’t shown up, and no one was expecting now that she would.
It wasn’t long after Bill and Glory rejoined the party that a fight started. Then the train had to make an extra stop at Beverly Hills so a boy and a girl could be taken off for medical treatment; hopefully they would be able to rejoin the prom a few hours later, when the train came ’round again. Other kids stood around on the dance floor for some time, arguing how the fight had started. It had started right in the middle of the crowd on the little dance floor, and someone else’s blood had gotten all over Glory. Bill went with her to the lavatory to help her get cleaned up. He stood with her in the shower, caressing her front with one hand while with the other he washed her back. Not far outside the clear glass door of the shower stood a chaperone, not staring in or anything, but standing there. When people stripped completely bare for some nonsexual purpose, it sometimes made them a little forgetful of their lust.
The big lavatory with showers was in the bedroom car, halfway down the long pink oval aisle. Glory was silent while they dried and dressed. Then after they had started on their way back to the dance car, she came to a sudden halt, leaning against the open doorway of a vacant bedchamber. Bill, who had been following a step behind her in the swaying aisle, took this as a signal that she wanted to go in, and stopped beside her and began stroking her body.
She pulled away from him a centimeter, actually pulled away, and his heart gave a twisty leap. He realized there was no one else around at the moment; the music from the dance car was faintly audible here. He said: “That’s right, it must be almost time for the Grand March. We oughta save our sex for that.”
Glory shook her head. Or maybe she was just looking up and down the passage, wondering which way to go. Her long blonde hair fell so he couldn’t see her face.
He said: “The dance car’s this way.”
“I know.” She straightened up from her slumped, leaning pose in the doorway. She stretched, not at all like anyone tired or sick; and then she began walking the other way, away from the faint music.
“Glory?”
She didn’t stop walking, only turned her head halfway back toward him. “Are you coming or not?”
He felt that twisty leap inside him once again, and this time all his guts seemed to move with it, as if they knew what was coming, before his brain was willing to recognize it. But no, it couldn’t really be that. She wouldn’t. She was a nice girl. He had asked her here.
Swaying, walking slowly against the racing motion of the train, he followed her, a step behind. The banquet car also appeared to be empty of people when they entered it. Everyone would be gathering on and around the dance floor, for the orgy of the Grand March.
At the rear of the banquet car, Hashbury workers, bearded begrimed-looking, were dozing in the galley, swaying in their chairs before the electronic kitchen consoles. Glory hesitated only a moment, then pushed open the door at the rear of the banquet car. This time, as they passed between cars, they were outside in a dim gray twilight, in a whistling roar of air.
In the last car of the train they found no Hashbury, no decorations of any kind. There were rows of bins and lockers, with aisles between, and stacks of ca
ses and crates and drums, making something like a maze. Clear electric light glowed down from panels in the ceiling, but here the gray outdoor light was coming in also, flowing around the corners of stacks of boxes and cartons, from windows hidden some where in the maze.
With a rising of her shoulders Glory drew in a long breath, then she let it out in something between a shudder and a sigh. “I was suffocating,” she said loudly.
He wanted to ask, like an idiot, why she had brought him here. But he wasn’t quite able to say anything aloud.
“But I don’t wanna be alone,” she added. She gave him a look he found unreadable, then turned away to follow the indirect gray daylight to its source. She led him around stacks of storage to a window.
“I don’t either,” he said. Outside the heavy, sealed window, the lines of the seacoast and its eternally nodding oil derricks made a rushing Hashbury pattern at three hundred kilometers an hour; the nearer part of the earth was a streaking incomprehensibility. Farther out, the vagueness of the sea blended with the obscurity of fog.
Above the fog, the sky was clear, tempting the eyes and mind to soar.
The train rushed on.
The sun was not in sight, so it must be behind them in the east, and this must be the half-light of dawn, not dusk. The sky pulled at him, trying to draw him from his flesh, tear him free from his body and his lust. He could still stop, he could still fight it off, but he did not. Beyond the sky would be the bright bitter purity of the stars. Space and its fire and vacuum, remote and mighty and healing, beckoned him on.
Glory was walking away from him, but he knew by her slow steady movement that she was not going far and would be right back. The stars in his mind did not yet have him utterly, he was still able to hold back and control himself a little, and he turned his head to watch her. He saw her go to an open half-empty crate. He saw her take from it two plastic tablecloths. When she unfolded the sheets and he saw they were opaque, long and wide enough to cover banquet tables, he gave a little groaning sound, knowing that this was it, he was going to get the real thing here and now, here and now with a real girl.
And away off in one comer of his mind he was thinking how funny it was, that after all the years of effort that people had put in trying to teach him to be good, he wasn’t trying at all now to be good, he was thinking only of getting what he was going to get.
Working without fumbling, like someone who had done this tremendous thing before, Glory tore head-sized holes in the centers of the opaque plastic tablecloths. When that was done, she put down the cloths for a moment and held out her arms to Bill. He went to her solemnly, and pressed himself against her body, and his lust mounted reflexively, like an urge to cough.
“Now,” she said, voice breaking with the weight of that single syllable. Her eyes, fixed on him now, were enormous, and he had the impression that her face had grown larger than life. Rapidly she was pulling off her respectably transparent clothes, and the stimulus of her corsage, and the black emphasis of her G-string; and then she had to help him shed his clothes, because his hands were shaking so. As soon as both of them had been stripped of sex-symbols she took up one of the tablecloths and pulled it over her head, her blonde head coming like a sudden-blooming flower through the clumsy hole in the middle. He took up the other plastic sheet and did the same, for the first time hiding himself obscenely before a girl, and though his hands were still shaky, he did it easily and without embarrassment.
The need inside him, tortured and compressed so desperately for so long, burst out. With deliberate humble triumph he strangled that last small lust-reflex.
He repressed it.
He sublimated.
No, not he; they did it. Glory was not only beside him, but with him, interpenetrating. Standing two meters apart, bodies shrouded from each other’s sight, they were at last together, in a way that he had never known could be.
Out of her plastic wrap her hand and arm came groping, to find his hand and touch it—not a sex-touch, but a life-touch. Through his own tears he saw that her eyes had turned away, going outward to the window and the sea and sky.
Then he was looking out there, too, and with her he was rising, breaking and shaking free. Beyond the brightening sky his mind’s eye saw the stars, points of ice and mathematics, set in an infinity of peace. His lust repressed and put behind him and forgotten, he leaped above himself and soared. He saw . . .
Beyond the stars, his goal. Bright as the sun, and greater. Fantastic, bitter, pure, demanding. Beyond what any man might know, or see, or even want . . .
The roaring arc he soared fell short. He failed and fell in clumsiness, in the too-quick release of his impelling need. His goal was gone, its loss for just a moment unendurable. He scrambled to find shelter.
And then he was back within his sweating flesh, spent, standing swaying in the train, sweating and foolish in the nasty plastic bag that she had gotten him to wallow in.
At once he was raked by the first pang of a guilt that he knew was going to be terrible. Never, never again! In panic, in agony, he threw himself abjectly, begging pardon, before his lust. With thrashing arms he swept and tore aside the shrouds of plastic, he groped and clutched for Glory’s body. Only after grappling her against him did he realize that she had not yet fallen back into her flesh. Her eyes were still fixed out the window on the sky, her face was still transformed, her body unresponsive.
In fright and horror he pulled away: let her go! Now that he himself was sheltered once more safe in lust, let him never think of leaving it again, Let him never even go near one who did such things. Never! He backed away, letting the plastic fall to once more conceal her flesh.
Now the sight of her standing there like that aroused nothing in him but a disgust so strong he couldn’t look at her. He turned way, hurrying and fumbling to get his codpiece on and then his other normal clothes. Chastity and repression, what if someone came in and found them here like this? How could they have done anything so crazy?
He took one quick glance at her face. Her eyes were moving now, but she was still somewhere among the stars.
If she was found out, he would not escape. “Glory, let’s get out of here.”
After what seemed a long time, during which he kept on dressing, she answered: “No.” He could barely hear the word, it was so soft.
Disgust and panic overcame him.
Lurching through the banquet car, that was no longer empty of people, he ran right into Marty Wood.
“Hey, Bill, where’s Glory? I didn’t see you two at the March.”
He said something, anything, and pushed on to the lavatory, got into a shower to wash away his sweat and filth. In a little while a girl, not Glory, came in, and without saying anything he went to her and began caressing her. She responded like a nice girl. Whether she was a little sick, or just tired, she had nothing to say either. He felt a pang of anxiety when the figure of the chaperone approached the door of the shower room. But the woman evidently knew nothing of what had happened in the baggage car, she was not coming to denounce him, she only nodded and smiled in an approving way at what Bill and the girl were doing now.
After that, Bill felt a little better for a while. But then, Glory did not show up in any of the three cars where kids were partying.
Soon, he overheard the word being passed around among some of the boys—Glory Chang was right back there in the baggage car, wrapped up in a gladrag and ready to stargaze with any male who came to her. A number of them were going, it seemed.
Pretty soon, half the guys at the prom were aiming funny looks at Bill, the guy who had brought her. In a little while the chaperones were bound to find out. For the first time in his life, Bill thought seriously of killing himself. He thought of leaping from the train, moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, but he did not leap.
Already the beckoning had begun again, and he could not want to die.
Bright as the sun, and greater . . .
2001
BOX NUMBER FIFTY
Carrie had been living on the London streets for a night and a day, plenty of time to learn that being taken in charge by the police was not the worst thing that could happen. But it would be bad enough. What she had heard of the conditions in which homeless children were confined made her ready to risk a lot in trying to stay free.
A huge dray drawn by two whipped and lathered horses rushed past, almost knocking her down, as she began to cross another street. Tightening her grip on the hand of nine-year-old Christopher as he stumbled in exhaustion, she struggled on through the London fog, wet air greasy with burning coal and wood. Around the children were a million strangers, all in a hurry amid an endless roar of traffic.
“Where we going to sleep tonight?” Her little brother sounded desperate, and no doubt he was. Last night they had had almost no sleep at all, huddled against the abutment of a railway bridge; but fortunately it had not been raining then as it was now. There had been only one episode of real adventure during the night, when Chris, on going a little way apart to answer a call of nature, had been set on and robbed of his shoes by several playful fellows not much bigger than he.
Their wanderings had brought them into Soho, where they attracted some unwelcome attention. Carrie thought that a pair of rough-looking youths had now begun to follow them.
She had to seek help somewhere, and none of the faces in her immediate vicinity looked promising. On impulse she turned from the pavement up a flight of stone steps to the front door of a house. It was a narrow building of gray stone, not particularly old or new, one of a row, wedged tightly against its neighbors on either side. Had Carrie been given time to think about it, she might have said that she chose this house because it bore a certain air of quiet and decency, in contrast to its neighbors, which at this early stage of evening were given to lights and raucous noise.
Across the street, a helmeted bobby was taking no interest in a girl and boy with nowhere to go. But he might at any moment. These were not true slums, not, by far, the worst part of London. Still, here and there, in out-of-the-way corners, a derelict or two lay drunk or dying.
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