The elevator bell.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It is nearly 1:00 A.M., and neither one of us can sleep.
Miss Lessing returned home just after midnight. On her phone machine was a message from her friend Anne Keltner. Anne called from the Roosevelt Hotel, to brag in advance of a conquest. “You will not believe what I’m about to do,” she said. Miss Lessing played her message three times, then began to pace.
For almost thirty minutes I listened to the soft sounds of her steps on the living-room floor. Then I heard the phone lifted from its cradle. She pressed four digits, then cut off the call. She pressed five digits and cut off the call again. And then she undressed. Not in her bedroom, as she usually does. Usually she hangs each article carefully in her closet. Tonight she shed her clothes in the living room — onto the floor, by the sound of it — and then stepped into a steaming shower. After fifteen minutes I heard the water shut off and the glass shower door slide open, and moments later Miss Lessing walked to the phone again. She pressed three digits and killed the call.
It was music that finally calmed her. The Kreisler Album, Joshua Bell on violin. It is an album that I sent her six months ago, in the guise of a radio station giveaway. The fourth track is her favorite. “Caprice Viennois.” She plays it more than any other, and there is a moment, one minute and twelve seconds into it, that she loves especially. The aching violin refrain, which will find its mark in any heart receptive to beauty. She has learned precisely when it comes, and no matter what she is doing — dressing, bathing, preparing dinner — she stops and quiets. Tonight it worked again. Just before the refrain came, her slippers stopped sounding. And though I was twenty blocks away, I could picture her, standing quietly in her living room, her eyes closed. I stared into my black speakers, and together we listened to the pure violin notes.
And now minutes later, as the song ends, I listen to Miss Lessing cross to her stereo, take out the compact disc, and snap it into its case. I wait for her pacing to start again, but instead her steps fade away. I silence the living-room Øre and activate the one in her bedroom, in time to hear her footsteps and now the click of her bed lamp. And now the soft give of her bed as she climbs into it. Most nights she will read before sleep, but now I hear the bed lamp click off. Sometimes she will play a song on her cassette player. A minute passes, and now two, and the only sound is her breathing, calm and even.
It is late but I pour myself a small glass of wine and walk to the chair by the window. I sit down and look out, west into the dark night. Anne Keltner’s phone message was not the only one this evening. Miss Lessing’s fiancé called as well. He was sorry she would be stuck at the office all night, he said. She should think of tomorrow, and of the Caribbean, and be happy.
I take a sip of wine. Miss Lessing was home by 7:30. She went for a run, showered, dressed, and went out again. Without ever calling her fiancé.
I look up suddenly into the speakers. Her breathing — it is different. Deeper. I hear other sounds. The rustle of her comforter. I lean forward in my chair. Her breathing, so smooth a moment ago, is shortening now. Quickening. I set my wineglass on the windowsill. Not once in a year have I heard this. With her fiancé, yes. But not this.
Her breathing quickens further. And still further. And now a soft gasp. A soft cry. And again. And again. And again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nina Torring was a Delaware beauty with thin Scandinavian legs and hair like the noon sun. She was our dorm adviser freshman year, and she made you want to tank a midterm or get caught in the lounge with liquor — anything to be called to her room for a talk. She was the lone senior in the dorm, a woman among girls, but her delicate build fired all of us first-year men with aching notions of purity. Just maybe, we imagined, nothing had ever been done to her.
From my top bunk I could see out the big window to the clearing in front of the dorm. The library closed at eleven, and night after winter night I watched Nina come up the packed snow path at 11:15, hand in hand with Nick Simms. Nick was a senior, too, and a tough Jersey kid whose steady play at shooting guard was keeping me out of the starting five. I’d see their breath in the lamplight before they passed from sight, and then minutes later I’d see Nick start back down the path alone. If he didn’t, I’d stare out at the falling snow, at the salt scattered along the empty walkway, and then up into the dark cement ceiling above me.
All season long I gained on Nick in practice. By March I was torching him daily, blowing past him when he crowded me and knocking down the jumper when he gave me room. Coach hated to trust freshmen, especially guards, but I knew that when the tournament came, and it was win or go home, he’d put his best five out there on the floor.
A week before the tourney, I was lying in bed with a beer when I heard low whispers in the hallway and the sharp click of a lighter. I dropped from the bunk, grabbed a towel, and stuffed it into the crack beneath the door. On the other side, I knew, were Pardo and Reeder, drunk on stolen fraternity beer and armed with the fireworks we’d bought in South Carolina over break. I heard the fizz of the fuses as I went for my own stash, and then one! two! three! sonic booms as the cherry bombs exploded in the narrow hallway. I lit the fuse on my bottle rocket, waited three seconds, and pulled open the door.
I could hardly see through the smoke bombs they’d laid down to cover their retreat, but I took aim and held the bottle steady, realizing a split second too late that the moving target at the end of the hall wasn’t one of my pledge buddies but Suzie Carr, scared from her room by the blasts and racing for the safety of the lounge. My low tracer caught her right in the ass. She grabbed her singed pants with both hands and screamed and screamed, and as her screams mixed with the din of the smoke alarm and the shouts of angry students jarred awake, I knew Pardo and Reeder were halfway across the quad. Nina Torring stepped into the hallway seconds later, catching me dead to rights, a pile of spent fireworks at my feet and a smoking beer bottle in my hands.
“Please clean all of this up,” she said quietly, her blond hair spilling down the long T-shirt she’d been sleeping in. I nodded, and she turned and walked away.
Three things could get a player suspended from the team — bad grades, bad behavior, and alcohol. The next day after classes I sat in my room, turning a basketball in my hands and waiting for the call to come. At five the phone rang, but it was Grandpa, calling to tell me he’d be driving up for the tournament. I stared at the wall in front of me. He wouldn’t stay over, I knew, but would drive four hours home after the game and, if we won, four hours back for the next one. I was still staring at the wall when Nina Torring called. Could I please come to her room? I walked past the sulfur stains I’d tried to scrub out of the rug, then through the lounge, where Suzie Carr sat, pretending to study.
Nina closed the door behind me and turned a wooden desk chair toward her bed. A blue sweatshirt hid her pliant body, but her gray tights ended at her calves, and as she sat down cross-legged on her covers, I could see her golden ankles, see the small medallion scar on her left one. I sat down on the chair just a few feet away from her.
“Somebody could have been badly hurt, Jake.”
“I know.”
“I have to turn you in.”
I looked down at the floor. I thought of Grandpa, of the silence on the line when I’d tell him.
“Nick put in his two cents, I’ll bet,” I said.
Her blue eyes flashed. “Actions have consequences, Jake. I’m sorry you had to learn this way.”
“Did Nick tell you Coach named me the starter in practice this morning?” I watched her eyes. “I didn’t think so.” I stood to go. “More power to him,” I said quietly, walking to the door and from her room.
The next morning at 5:30 I crossed the silent white campus to the gym, my boots sinking deep into the crystalline snow. The janitor was just opening the door, and I dressed alone in the locker room in the cold quiet, breathing in the smell of rubber bath mats and tile. I laced up my sneakers and took to the c
ourt, rolling the ball racks into place and then moving hard from station to station, firing jumpers from the corner, the elbow, the top of the key, the elbow, the corner, and then back around the circle the other way. I shot for half an hour, finding my release point, repeating, repeating, moving and shooting even as I saw Coach in the doorway, even as he walked over to me, even as I waited for him to ask me into his office. “Hold your follow-through, Teller,” he said. “One-thousand one, one-thousand two.” A few minutes later, in practice, he put me with the first team, and all morning the offense seemed to run itself. Every time I came hard off a screen, the ball was there, and if I wasn’t rising over Nick Simms to knock down a jumper, I was feeding one of the big men at the rim.
That night I sat in my room again, staring at the phone. It never rang, and at 11:15 I watched Nina Torring walk up the path. She walked alone, her blond hair tucked inside a wool cap, her flushed face framed for a second by the lamplight. I waited twenty minutes and then went to her room and knocked on the door. She opened it a little, saw me, and opened it wide. The heat was up all the way, and she wore shorts and a long pink T-shirt that she pulled down over her knees when she sat down on the edge of her bed. I turned the desk chair toward her and sat down.
“Thank you,” I said.
She smiled. “If there’s a next time, I’ll call the dean at home.”
“There won’t be.”
“Write Suzie a nice letter of apology.”
“Sure. Nick was pissed, wasn’t he?”
“I’ll make it up to him.”
We sat quietly for a few seconds. On the shelf above her bed was a row of stuffed animals.
“He says you’ll cost us in a close game,” she said.
“He’ll have a pretty good view of it.”
She laughed. Her T-shirt slipped off her knee, and she pulled it back down.
“You watch me come up the walk, don’t you?” she asked.
“Every night.”
She drew a pillow from behind her and held it in her lap.
“Tell me, Jake Teller. When the boys talk — in the locker rooms, on the buses. What do they say?”
I looked at the flower bedspread, at the shape of her knees through her shirt.
“They brag about how much wood they’re giving their girls. About how many days it takes them to walk right again.”
“Nick doesn’t say those things.”
I paused. “No.”
I reached out, slipped her T-shirt off her leg, and pressed my hand to her small knee. Her leg tensed, and she covered my hand with both of hers, but her eyes, on mine, were calm. I tried to slide my hand up her leg. “No, Jake,” she said, and I stopped. She lifted her hands from mine, and I left it on her knee a few electric seconds, looking into her eyes, my heart racing, and then took it away and stood, trying not to shake as I walked to the door. “Jake,” she said evenly. I turned around. “Shoot well — it’s tournament time.”
We swept through the field and took the trophy. I scored twenty-two in the final, and Nick, sent in to play the point when our starter fouled out, hit four big free throws down the stretch and found me in the corner for the long jumper that put them away. Grandpa took me to dinner after the game, then dropped me off behind the chapel, where Pardo and Reeder waited with sixteen-ounce Coors and a Psi U brother who, for five bucks a man, led us down an icy path to the back of the old fraternity house. He pointed to the window he’d jimmied open, and we climbed through, up a set of back stairs, and stood, magically, at the keg, dizzy at the thought of free beer and dazzled by the sight of the coeds dancing in the dark to “Rosalita.” The old wooden floor shook as they answered the call to “jump a little higher,” their arms above them, their jeweled wrists shimmering in the dark. We pounded down plastic cups of beer, then high-fived one another and headed into the swarm. I cut in on a girl in a black leather mini who didn’t run when the music slowed but held my hand to her waist and pressed against me, her neck smelling of some forgotten spice, her fingers in my hair as I brushed at the glitter on her cheek. She was pulling me in for a kiss when the shrill burst of the sentry’s whistle cut through the music.
I looked to the front door and, sure enough, there came the goon squad, the team of campus cops and turncoat students that raided frat parties to check IDs. I kissed the girl once, hard; said, “Sorry — freshman”; and then slipped down the stairs and out the same window I’d come in, pulling myself up into the snow in time to see two more cops slip-sliding toward me down the icy path. I escaped into the glen, starting the long way home across campus as, through the open windows of the frat house, the piano and harp intro started up and then, clear and strong, Bruce:
The screen door slams
Mary’s dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch
As the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey that’s me and I want you only
Don’t turn me home again…
The words faded as I walked deeper into the pristine glen, over the icy footbridge, the bark glittering on the white trees all around me. I felt vital, invincible, the cold air sharp in my lungs, the future stretching before me like a runway. I was still a month from my first fuck, but I could sense it now, had seen the possibility of it in the eyes of the girl on the dance floor. And tomorrow morning the school paper would lead with the story of the game. Twenty-two points. Ten of thirteen from the field. I closed my eyes and remembered the shots. The beauty of them, the purity. The way I’d known they were going in before they ever left my hand.
I came up out of the glen into the field behind the dorm. I could see into the windows of the dark rooms, the blinds left up because there was only the empty field and then miles and miles of farmland rolling away to the Adirondacks. In the corner room on the first floor I saw, in profile, a girl sitting up in her bed, looking down on someone I couldn’t see, someone who lay beneath the window line but whose hands played with the buttons of the girl’s shirt.
The corner room, I knew, was Nina Torring’s, and the moon lit her like a soft candle as she pulled her shirt open and let it slip off her shoulders and down her arms. I walked closer to the window. The nipples were sharp and raised on her small breasts. I walked closer still. She took two of his fingers into her mouth and then put them on her breasts. I closed to within five feet of the window and dropped to a knee in the snow. She slid off the bed, sensually, stood beside it, pulled at the drawstring on her sweats, then looked out the window and into my eyes. For a full second we stared at each other. I waited for her to cry out, for Nick Simms’s head to appear in the window, but she simply looked away from me and back down at him, then pulled the knot out of the drawstring and let her sweats fall to the floor. I saw the tight vee of her panties, and then, her eyes still on Nick, she rolled them down her legs and stepped out of them.
She would reach for the blinds now. No. She climbed back into bed and lowered herself onto him. And then, as I watched through my breath in the cold, Nina Torring began to move. Not up and down, as I’d always imagined, but back and forth, as if on a rocker. Slowly, at first, her hands on his chest for lever-age, then, as she found her rhythm, moving those hands up her belly, to her breasts, squeezing them together.
I remember the taste of metal in my mouth as I watched. One minute, two. She rocked faster, then faster still, closing her eyes, grabbing her golden hair and shaking her head violently from side to side. Faster and faster she rocked, so fast that I wondered how he took it, and then she finished, not in one short collapse but easing to a stop, her spasms shortening, softening, her shoulders clenching and relaxing, clenching and relaxing, and relaxing, and relaxing, and then still, her eyes opening slowly as if from a dream, her hands settling onto her breasts and then finding, beneath them, her heart.
Without looking at me again, she vanished beneath the sill of the window, leaving me to stare at her empty desk, at the blue school flag that hung in the entrance to her closet.
I rose from the snow, my soaked knee burning from the cold, and walked around to the front of the dorm, the taste of metal still in my mouth as I walked inside and down the hall to my room. I stripped to my shorts, climbed up into my top bunk, and lay on my side in the dark, looking out the window at the clearing, where the snow had started to fall again. Pure and white and endless it fell, covering up the footprints along the path.
A year later I opened my box at the campus mail center to find a plain white envelope with no return address. Inside was a photograph of Nina Torring, in her wedding dress, smiling into the eyes of Nick Simms. Written on the back, in a feminine hand:
To Jake Teller — may you find happiness.
Last Sunday, the day after the Roosevelt Hotel, I drank too many vodkas at an alumni mixer and let a classmate rope me into a night of calls for a fund drive. Two nights ago I received my list. The first name on it was Nina Torring.
On the phone, when I told her my name, she was warm and personal. She runs an art gallery now on West Fourth Street. Yes, it is going well. In boom times, people can’t pay enough for beauty. She asked me sharp questions about accounting and the corporate climb.
“School seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it, Jake?” she said.
“It does. There are a few questions here they want me to ask, Nina. For the database.”
“Of course.”
“Married how many years?”
She paused. “Married four years,” she said. I sensed something in her voice, so I waited. “Divorced for two.”
Neither of us said anything for several seconds.
“Can I buy you a drink?” I asked. “Friday night?” I looked down at the bare kitchen table and listened to the soft buzz of the line.
Jake & Mimi Page 9