Precarious

by Al Riske

  “And will you stay with it if Curt decides to go to Regis?”

  “Why? Is he getting a scholarship from your friend?”

  His old rowing partner was now the coach.

  “I spoke to Chris last night, as a matter of fact, and he’s most impressed with Curt’s progress.”

  “So there’s something in the works.”

  “I think that’s a fair assumption. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Will I try out for the team at Orland, you mean? It wouldn’t be the same but, yeah, I suppose so.”

  “You suppose?”

  “Excuse me if I’m not all gung-ho. I feel like I’m having the rug pulled out from under me, you know.”

  “You can be a good rower if you want to be.”

  I gave him a look that I hoped would say what I was too reticent to say out loud: Yeah. Right. But not as good as Curt. Not good enough for your alma mater.

  Mr. Alt continued: “I’ve known other rowers just like you, Dean. Very smooth—like they were born with an oar in each hand. But they would never push themselves beyond a certain point. Curt is different. He doesn’t have great technique, but he has something else. He has guts, and—”

  “And I don’t. Is that it?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t think you know. I don’t think you’ve ever tested yourself.”

  “What am I supposed to do? What do you want from me?”

  “I think you have to decide what you really want and then go after it.”

  I said, “Let’s row.” That’s what Curt would have said.

  THERE WERE HALF a dozen cars parked along the south bank of the jetty, and the people in them—including me and Smiley in Curt’s Mustang—were eating take-out lunches. It was a nice day, not too windy, and of course we had the top down.

  “I come out here a lot on my lunch hour,” Smiley said.

  “Great idea.”

  I bit into my bacon cheeseburger, Smiley stabbed her taco salad with a plastic fork, and we both watched a small powerboat cross the bar, its bow slapping the waves loud and hard.

  “Heard any more from Curt?” I asked.

  “No, he said he was going to call me again, but he hasn’t so far. You?”

  “Not so much as a postcard.”

  Smiley, trying the words on for size, said: “You know, I don’t think I even want him to come back.”

  I knew better, or thought I did.

  “You don’t mean that,” I said.

  “Maybe I do.”

  I remembered the flushed look on her face when she opened the door that night I came down to drive Curt home so I’d have his car while he was gone, and I remembered the way she blushed on the phone with him.

  “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” I said. “I mean, for all we know—”

  “Right. What do we know? He’s not telling us anything.”

  I tried to shrug it off, but obviously I wanted to know more than I did.

  Smiley poked around in her salad for a moment, lost in thought. Then she said, “I don’t get it, Dean. Sometimes he treats me like I don’t even matter to him. And the stupid thing of it is it just makes me want him all the more.” She paused, and I could see the frustration in her knit eyebrows. “It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “Not to me,” I said.

  “Me either.”

  Even though I wasn’t too happy with Curt myself at that moment, my first impulse was to come to his defense somehow. He had his reasons for everything he did, and I could understand them, most of the time; I just couldn’t explain them very well. I wondered if he could. But then I suppose if he could explain, he wouldn’t … ah, who knows?

  “I want someone who—who puts me first. You know? Who thinks of me as the most important person in his life.” She stopped herself. “That sounds kind of self-centered, doesn’t it?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “I’m getting damn tired of waiting around for him to call. I want to get out—do something. Have some fun.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. I’d like to go somewhere. I’m tired of the bank, my apartment, this town.”

  I reached for my blackberry milk shake and pulled a sip through the straw.

  “We should go somewhere,” she said. “This weekend.”

  “I’ve got the Mustang. Might as well take advantage of it.”

  “You want to?”

  “Why not?”

  Her eyes had a brightness in them I hadn’t seen for some time.

  “Where should we go?” she asked.

  “Wherever you want.”

  “Really?”

  “Within reason.”

  “Well, that narrows it down some.”

  She smiled and I no longer cared if it was reasonable or not, but in the next instant I was having second thoughts.

  “Curt’d probably call as soon as we left,” I said.

  “Tough. Let him wonder what’s going on for a change.”

  “Well, I’ve always wanted to go to San Francisco—”

  “San Francisco would be fun.”

  “That’s a long trip for one day.”

  “We wouldn’t have to do it in one day,” Smiley said, a bit tentatively. “We could stay in a hotel.”

  I sucked hard to pull more ice cream though my straw.

  “I guess that’d be the only way to do it, wouldn’t it?” I said finally.

  Smiley put one hand on her hip and said, “Don’t make it sound like Chinese water torture!”

  “Oh, no, no …”

  I smiled. She made me feel light and innocent somehow.

  “I don’t snore or anything. At least I don’t think so.”

  Thinking out loud, I said, “I should be able to get George to cover for me at the restaurant so we could leave Saturday …”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  IT WAS EASY to pick Smiley up early Saturday morning—we lived in the same apartment complex. I just went downstairs and knocked on her door.

  “Almost ready,” she said.

  I was stowing my suitcase in the trunk of the convertible when she came out. Her hair had been cut since I’d seen her last, and it was now very short, almost boyish.

  “You look like a different person,” I said.

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I put her suitcase in the trunk with mine.

  “I’m still trying to get used to it myself,” she said.

  My mother came down the stairs then, her car keys in one hand, a sack lunch in the other, on her way to work at the cannery. She waved.

  “I really appreciate this,” Smiley said, a little louder than absolutely necessary.

  “No problem,” I said, turning up the volume a bit myself. “It’s right on the way.”

  I had told my mother I would be dropping Smiley off in Brookings to visit her parents—she couldn’t drive herself, I pointed out, because her Riviera had been acting up. Which was true, conveniently enough. Then I’d pick her up and bring her home on my way back.

  “My parents never would have bought a story like that when I was at home,” Smiley said as we drove down the hill.

  “My mother trusts me. I’ve never given her any reason not to.”

  “Until now,” Smiley said.

  “It’s not like we’re doing anything wrong.”

  “You lied to her,” Smiley reminded me.

  “It was easier than trying to explain.”

  “It does look pretty risqué, doesn’t it?”

  She sounded rather pleased.

  WE CAME INTO San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge, and by then the sun was high and the sky was pure blue—not a trace of fog anywhere. Smiley had a guidebook with a map of the downtown, thank God. The hills were every bit as steep as they say and kind of scary to drive on for the first time, especially in a car with a
clutch. Traffic was crazy. There were trucks double parked on every other block, it seemed, and I always managed to get stuck behind them. But I think I managed to appear calm. I just turned wherever Smiley told me to turn.

  We’d been in the car for something like seven hours already, so as soon as we could we parked and just walked around Fisherman’s Wharf and the Marina for the rest of the afternoon. I had on jeans and a T-shirt, the same clothes I’d been wearing all summer, but now the shirt felt tight across the chest and the pants were a bit loose around the waist—the effects of rowing, I suppose. Finally, I took the shirt off—the high that day must have been eighty degrees or more—and spread it on the grass so Smiley could sit down. She had on a pair of white shorts and was afraid of staining them. I wasn’t worried about my jeans, but she shared the T-shirt with me anyway, and I remember our hips touching while we talked.

  “What made you decide to cut your hair?”

  “I don’t know, I’d been thinking about it a long time, and finally I just did it.”

  “I like it. It’s cute.”

  “I don’t think Curt’s going to think so.”

  “No?”

  “He wanted me to grow it longer.”

  “He’ll change his mind once he sees it. Well, once he gets used to it.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  There were more than a dozen boats on the bay and their sails were puffed with wind but you had to watch closely to see that they were moving.

  Smiley said, “I’m glad you brought me here. Curt never would have. He hates big cities.”

  “You’ve been finding fault with him a lot lately.”

  “Have I?”

  I shrugged.

  “We’re always competing,” she conceded.

  “In what way?”

  “Well … whenever we’re alone together, we … each of us tries to see who can get the other one more, you know … excited.”

  I said, “I know who I’d put my money on.”

  She had on dark glasses that slid down her nose as we talked, and she looked at me now over the rims.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t underestimate Curt,” she said. “He can definitely get me hot.”

  She nudged the glasses back into place on the bridge of her nose, and dimples formed at the corners of her lips. Her cheeks flushed. I never understood how she could be so knowing and so easily embarrassed at the same time.

  “From the very beginning he had this sort of reserve about him when it came to that, and it was always sort of a challenge to break through that,” she said. “He liked to be in control.”

  As she looked out across the bay, a gust of wind blew her hair around and then it all fell back into place just as before.

  I said nothing, and after a moment she continued.

  “Sometimes I felt like he was Samson and I was Delilah.” She laughed through her nose. “That was one of the few Bible stories I could really relate to—in a perverse way.”

  I said, “Samson doesn’t, uh, come out too well in that story, as I recall.”

  “It wasn’t like I was going to hand him over to the Babylonians or whoever.”

  “The Philistines.”

  “I just wanted to think I could make him lose control once in a while.”

  I raised my eyebrows and waited.

  “I succeeded a few times,” she said. “And don’t look so surprised!”

  WE FINALLY FOUND a hotel we could afford in the Pacific Heights district. Our room was on the first floor and it wasn’t much, but it had everything it was supposed to have—a queen-sized bed, color television, two vinyl chairs, a small round table by the window that looked out on the parking lot. It was already dark out.

  “Oh, well,” Smiley said. “I’m starved. Let’s go get some dinner.”

  WE DROVE AROUND North Beach getting hungrier and hungrier just trying to find a place to park, and when a space finally opened up—“Over there! They’re just pulling out”—we were no longer near any of the restaurants mentioned in Smiley’s guidebook. So we just started walking, hoping to come across a place that was nice, but not too nice. Finally, in a little alley, we spotted a red neon sign saying Culinaria Italiana. We had to wait longer than I had ever waited in my life for a table: forty-five minutes.

  Smiley wore a simple backless dress and bangles on her wrists, and I thought, not for the first time, that I could never get tired of looking at her. I was thinking, too, of Delilah: “Come now, tell me how you can be tied …” I had always thought that Samson had to be a complete dolt not to see what she was up to, but now I realized it didn’t matter.

  Our waiter, a distinguished gentleman with eyes for Smiley, asked if we would care for cocktails before dinner. Smiley and I exchanged glances.

  “Oh, I don’t know … Smiley?”

  She asked the waiter if she could have a rum and Coke. That sounded good to me, too, since I couldn’t recall the name of any other drink at the moment.

  “Very good,” the waiter said. “I will need to see some ID, however.”

  I tried to think of something face-saving to say.

  “Um, just the Coke then.”

  “Ginger ale, if you have it,” Smiley added.

  I waited until the waiter was gone and then said, “Why did he do that if he thought we were under age?”

  Smiley gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  “Maybe he wasn’t sure.”

  I took a sip from my water glass and said no more. I was sure he had done it to make me look small.

  Looking around, Smiley said, “I think we may be the youngest couple in the whole restaurant.”

  “You could be right.”

  “How old would you say she is?” Smiley nodded in the direction of a blond woman in a black cable-knit sweater. Her breasts stretched the yarn so far that you could see her pale skin through the loose weave.

  “Hard to say. Thirty-four, thirty-five.”

  Smiley lifted her water glass.

  “Do you think she’s attractive?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers.”

  Smiley choked back a laugh and barely managed to set her glass down without spilling it.

  “Haven’t you heard that before?” I said.

  She shook her head and tried to swallow.

  “It’s one of those things guys say to each other all the time.”

  “The way you said it was so matter-of-fact.”

  I shrugged.

  “What else do guys say to each other?”

  “About girls?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Nothing terribly enlightening, I’m afraid.”

  The waiter returned with our soft drinks and asked if we were ready to order.

  “I’d like to try the cioppino,” Smiley said.

  The waiter asked what kind of dressing she wanted with her salad, and Smiley kept looking into his eyes, studying his face as he described the house dressing for her. I felt sure that she was wondering what he would be like in bed.

  “I’ll have that,” she said.

  She seemed very sure of herself, very poised, and very sexy. I had to look back at the menu to remember what I wanted, a calzone.

  We gave our menus to the waiter, and he disappeared once more. Smiley was still full of questions.

  “What do you find attractive in a woman?” she asked.

  “Me? It depends.”

  “A big bust?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Or are you a leg man?”

  “I like nice legs, sure.”

  “I’ll bet you’re a butt man.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, an inexplicable gleam in her eye. “Are you?”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “Am I embarrassing you?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “I was just curious. Isn’t that the way guys talk when they get together?”

  “There’s a lot
of that.”

  “So, do you have a preference? Or don’t you want to tell me? You don’t have to.”

  “No, it’s okay. Legs, I suppose.” For some reason that seemed like the safest response.

  “I always wished I had nice legs,” she said.

  “You do.”

  “My thighs are too … thick.”

  “No, they’re not. They’re fine. I think you have very attractive legs.”

  “Do you really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. What else do you like?”

  “Your eyes.”

  “Not on me. I mean in general. What do you consider sexy?”

  “Eyes, definitely. A certain look in the eyes. And hands. Hands can be very sexy.”

  We paused while the waiter served our salads, using a long wooden pepper mill to grind pepper over them as we nodded our approval.

  “Go on,” Smiley said.

  “What do you consider sexy?”

  “In a man I like broad shoulders,” she said, watching the waiter walk away, “and narrow hips.”

  “Like his?”

  “Our waiter? He is pretty well proportioned, isn’t he?”

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t you think he’s good looking?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose he is,” I said, grudgingly. “What else do you find attractive—in general?”

  “The things you mentioned: bedroom eyes …”

  “Bedroom eyes?”

  “You know—a sort of sleepy, sensual look.”

  “Like this?”

  “Mmmm, yes, you’ve got the idea.” She cleared her throat. “The salad is good, isn’t it?”

  “Very tasty.” I imagined her draped across a big feather bed in just her nylons.

  “Stop that; you’ll make me blush.”

  She looked down at her salad, and I looked away, finally. I pretended to be taking in the décor, but all I could see was the image in my head. When I faced Smiley again her head was still down but she had raised her eyes and was looking at me steadily.

  OUTSIDE, THE AIR had turned chilly, and Smiley rubbed her bare arms as we stopped on the sidewalk to look around at the city lights, the slow-moving cars, the people passing in clusters of three and four.

  “So,” I said, “what should we do now?”

  “I can’t believe you still have any energy left.”