The Tall Boy

by Jess Gregg

  She was, herself, an odd combination of exotic and household. Her feet were sturdy, but bare in flat sandals, and though her body had begun to thicken, the portrait of a young girl was painted over her face. Her eyes looked out of black encirclement, and a shaved pencil point had been twirled high on her cheekbone, leaving a neat, almost imperceptible dot. It suggested that flirtation was an old habit, and yet there was nothing coquettish in her manner: her glance was direct, her mouth ironic.

  Since she was wearing a hat, it didn’t seem likely she was my hostess, and yet she had a proprietary way about everything in the apartment, smoothing dust from the plants with her thumb, testing the soil for moisture. Pausing significantly by the shaggy, almost simian trunk of a tree fern, she crouched slightly, and with an ape-like grimace, strummed her ribs.

  Even as I laughed, I thought of my father, who depended almost exclusively on pantomime to communicate with the French. It made me wonder if my new friend also had a language problem, and tactfully, I asked her the parlez-vous question. She replied in voluble French, but with a foreign accent so robust that even I could discern it. The moment I realized she was in the same boat as myself, I lost my fear, and found I could understand her, the same as I had the Dutch tourists or Sebastian. We were like the lame among the lame, suddenly finding a freedom to dance.

  She knew the wisdom of keeping a man busy with questions. What did one call such shoes as I wore? (Saddle.) Did Americans think there would be a war? (No.) How old was I? (Twenty, I said, but she smiled knowingly.) Her French faltered occasionally while she searched for a word, but if I did the same, she brusquely prompted me to parle up, drum-rolling her R’s.

  From time to time, I glimpsed M. de Chatillon and Sebastian in the crowd, but not until my new friend had gone did I rejoin them. M. de Chatillon tossed my drawings to me, and led me to the elevator. As we returned to the ground floor, he made no effort to hide his mortification at having sponsored me. His eyes were cold, his voice crisp, his words so swift and incessant that I had to remind him again that I could not understand Frenchmen’s French. “What nonsense!” he countered, irritably and in English. “You and Madame were jabbering away, and you understood her clearly enough.”

  I tried to explain that it was because we were both foreigners and our bad accents compatible, but this only aggravated him more. “The accent of Burgundy is not foreign,” he cried. “There is nothing foreign about her, in all this country she writes the French most pure.” He reeled off the names of her novels, measured the height of her fame, and added, as if in defense of the tricoleur, “Do not dare to mock our great Colette!”

  Her name was not known to me at the time, but I gathered from M. de Chatillon’s outrage that I had earned a permanent place beside Big-Feets Bertha. Very little more was said as they drove me back to my hotel. Not much to my surprise, I rode in the rumble seat.

  7

  FULL-TIME HOPSCOTCH

  It was dark on the beach except for the bonfire, but I could see the scar on his face as he came rushing up. It was by his right sideburn, white against his suntan, and even in that split second, made me think of a young swordsman in some romantic novel. Then I hit the sand. Touch football is what we were supposed to be playing, but for some reason, he had tackled me. “No, dammit, touch!” a bossy blonde dyke yelled at him. “You’re only allowed to touch!” So that’s what he did the next time he tackled me—slid his hand over my fly and touched me. I began to like the game rather better.

  When I could do so inconspicuously, I asked the blonde who he was. “Oh, that’s Briney,” she said. “Brian Barlow. Works at the Laguna Hotel, you must’ve seen him on the beach there.”

  “Lifeguard?”

  “Probably that too,” she said. “He’s everything else—bellboy, elevator operator, bottle-washer. Summer job stuff.”

  The picnic broke up around eleven. As I started walking back to the beach house where I was visiting relatives, an old Chevy pulled up, and Briney looked out. He was driving one of the girls home, and offered to give me a lift too. Actually, my destination was nearer than hers, but he took her home first, then headed back through the center of town. “Turn here,” I told him; but he didn’t. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “My place,” he said. “Okay?”

  I shrugged. Not that I was indifferent—quite the opposite—but I kept feeling out of my league with him. I had never had any luck with guys this good-looking. Even his flaws were attractive. Crew cuts were so obligatory that summer that curly hair looked freakish. But not on him. The old sweatshirt he wore was shapeless, and his trousers were baggy. What redeemed them was the way his lithe body thrust against the loose folds in graphic outline. And then there was that scar! It looked like an H— H for Handsome. H for Heartbreaker. H for Humpy.

  “Go to college?” he was asking me. I smiled glassily and nodded. “Sophomore,” he guessed. But I couldn’t even claim that. I was still just a freshman, having only entered Rollins after spring break. “I went to UCLA,” he said. “Oh, just for a year—had to drop out and earn a living. But I’ll be going back for my degree any time now.”

  He talked so much about returning to school, I suddenly wondered if he was afraid I thought he was just a bellboy. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that, for all his conspicuous assets, he might be feeling inadequate too. The possibility seemed to ease my resistance to him. Gradually, I began to settle back and relax, even to kid with him.

  We turned down a dirt road and drove through a field, finally pulling up by a little plywood house. I followed him inside. The room was dark, smelling of kerosene and oilcloth. When he lit the oil lamp, a hundred moths outside began to tap against the window screens. He held up a bottle of scotch. “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Rather have something soft?”

  It got me laughing: in this increasingly intimate circumstance, what would I do with anything soft? He laughed too, and we began to get rid of our clothes.

  Even when he blew out the lamp, I continued to see his body in the dark—the broad shoulders, the suntan that made his white flanks look even more naked. He was better-looking than me, I reflected, but I was better hung, and this gave me a moment of self-confidence. Then the excitement swallowed up everything.

  When I awoke the next morning, I was alone in bed with sun in my eyes. Eggs were sizzling in a frying pan, and Briney was calling from the kitchen, “Get up, I’ve got to be at work in ten minutes.”

  He drove me back to my relatives’ house, getting me there before my overnight absence had been noticed. We did not mention meeting again when we said goodbye, but later, on the bus trip back to Los Angeles, I began wishing I had given him my address in case he ever came into town. The restlessness I felt persisted when I got home. An odd loneliness followed me up to my room. One-night stands were not supposed to feel like this. I went to bed early, only to be awakened by my sister calling up the stairs: someone named Briney was on the phone. Somehow I kept my voice level when I picked up the receiver. “How’d you get my number?” I asked.

  “I went back to see your relatives,” he said. We talked for twenty minutes. We talked even longer the next night, and on the third afternoon, I took the bus back to Laguna. I told my parents I was going to stay with friends for a few days, but secrectly, I was thinking in terms of forever. Our first week together tested that idea rigorously. For one thing, I had very little money. For another, he was at the hotel all day. This was no summer job as I had been told, but his year-round work. While he was on duty bell-hopping, I killed time at the beach, waiting for him to be free. He was popular with the summer crowd, and introduced me to everyone he knew, mostly college students. Yet this scene wasn’t for me. The only alternative to volleyball was cruising, and I was afraid of losing the focus of my feeling for him. I began to spend more time at the summer shack, exploring and glorying in this broad back-acreage. The far end tipped up into a hill, from which I could see miles of tall grass, burned blond and hazardous by the July
sun. There was little breeze, and no sound except for the singing of insects, one note sustained so insistently, it passed for silence. I hiked about in hacked-off dungarees and some Mexican sandals that stank when they got wet. In a few days, I was so brown, Briney claimed I looked like a knotted leather thong.

  There was nothing to do there, yet no day was long enough. The plywood house needed paint and got it. I planted tomato seedlings and dug irrigation trenches. At six, I walked through the field, and was waiting by the mailbox when Briney turned off the highway. Our conversation instantly picked up where it had left off that morning, and rushed through the long twilight, changing into another kind of communication after the lamp was blown out. Mosquitoes whined in the darkness, forcing us to smear our bodies with citronella. I hated the smell of it then, but now if I catch a whiff, it flashes a ghost-happiness through me that is almost like pain.

  On weekend nights, we played. Briney loved good times, and had a child’s gift of creating them out of nothing. “There’ll be three of us,” he told Mona, the head waitress at a local restaurant, one night. “We’re having Katherine Hepburn to dinner.” Mona, part of the secret life in Laguna, knew his ways, and smiled as she led us to a table in the patio. He took out a two-color picture of the actress, which he had torn from the Sunday paper, and pinned it to a chair. “She’ll have a martini, and so will my friend,” he told Mona. “Just an olive for me.” He carried the whole thing off with great charm, including Hepburn in every discussion, and easing away from questions she might not choose to answer. Although he was twenty-four, this kind of make-believe still played a great part in his life. Yet some core of practicality that was almost a warning seemed to tell him that games and daydreams would never give him the kind of future he wanted. At night, we would sit at the kitchen table until bedtime, discussing his return to school. What did I think of Berkeley, he wanted to know? Had I ever heard of Antioch? How much was the tuition at Rollins? Why had I decided to study there?

  I explained that it was because of my father. Every fall, he interrupted his work, and went to this little Southern campus to teach a seminar on practical business experience. Briney took in every word of this: his mother’s early divorce had left him with a continuing curiosity about fathers. What was my dad’s first name, he wanted to know? What did he look like? Had he found out about me? Everything I told him set off a comparison with a college professor he knew, who came to the hotel every August. “It’s him who keeps pushing me,” he explained.

  “Pushing you?”

  “To go back to college. He thinks I could make something of my life. Y’know—something fine!”

  Abruptly, he scrambled over to the bureau, and pulled a pack of letters from under his tumble of socks and shorts. “He taught at Oberlin till he retired,” he told me reverently. “History. He says the past is the greatest teacher in the world.”

  His name was Daniel C. Ellison, but Briney always called him “the Prof.” The excerpts he read from his letters had a fatherly ring, even when they got a bit testy about Briney’s happy-go-lucky life-style—“full-time hopscotch,” the Prof called it. “Don’t put off your education any further, Brian, damn it,” he wrote. “Youth isn’t forever. Suddenly you’ll be forty, and still trying to live off your tips.” Briney and I smiled at each other. We knew what he said was true. We just didn’t believe it.

  Even now, Briney was getting ready for him and his wife to arrive at the hotel; he read ten pages of Douglas Southall Freeman every day; neatened up his white service jackets, saw to it that the Ellisons would get a room that faced the ocean. I asked him how the Prof could swing such expense on a teacher’s pension. Briney shrugged. “Probably has money of his own.”

  “Then why not ask him to help you out with some tuition?”

  Briney drew himself up loftily. “I’d never ask him for money.”

  “But if he secretly saw to it that the tuition was paid?”

  He laughed. “You sound just like my mother!”

  “How come?”

  “Oh, y’know—she’s always looking for someone to stand treat.” He joked about her often, but adored her. Her name was Helene, but she was called Tikki, short for Rikki Tikki Tavi. She sounded like great fun to me, sort of the madcap heiress type. There had been lots of money in the family, but it was gone now, and she had never gotten used to it. She lived on a sportsman-friend’s yacht off nearby Newport Beach, but used Briney’s rural mailbox as her address. This way, her creditors would be out of luck if they came here looking for her.

  But nobody much came to the plywood house. That’s why I thought it was Briney, home for lunch, when I heard the car door slam one noon. I was taking a shower, and hollered, “I’m in here!” A moment later, a smartly dressed woman peered into the shower stall. I turned away convulsively, trying to hide my nakedness behind my hand. “Well, hello!” she cried. “You are a long drink of water, aren’t you!” She looked me up and down, then disappeared.

  I wrapped a towel around me, and followed after her. She was good-looking in the same way Briney was, only more sleek, a brunette of a certain age, with the shoulder-length glamour-bob so popular just then with debutantes and divorcees. “You must be Briney’s new boyfriend,” she said.

  I tensed up, afraid that this was going to be one of those confrontations; but she had already gone on to more important matters. “Darling, you wouldn’t have anything like a big-brimmed hat around here, would you?” she asked. “Mine just blew off in the convertible. I’ve miles to drive yet, and the sun does just hateful things to hair-coloring.” I found an old straw hat for her. “Well, you’re a dream and a darling,” she said, trying it on. “I’d probably snatch you away for my own use, if that weren’t some kind of incest.”

  Saying whatever came to her head, she chattered on, trimming the hat with Briney’s only necktie, and suddenly remembering she was overdue at some house party down the coast. Only after she had roared off through the field in her long, open car did I realize she had left the straw hat behind.

  Mona, our waitress friend, rolled up her eyes when I told her about Tikki’s visit. “I’m surprised she didn’t forget Brian’s perambulator as well,” she said.

  “Perambulator?”

  “The way she keeps him such a child,” she said. “He’ll probably never grow up now—just stay a thing of beauty and a boy forever.”

  Whenever Tikki passed through Laguna after that, she would dart in to say hello, borrow some money, or use the chair-chair, as she called it. I didn’t notice that Briney seemed unusually dependent on her, or anyway, no more than she was upon him. She kept him on the phone a lot, and got almost frantic when he wasn’t immediately available. “Where is he?” she cried, bursting into the house, one afternoon. “He’s not at the hotel, I can’t find him anywhere.” I explained it was his day off, and he had driven to the airport to pick up Prof Ellison and his wife. “Oh, God,” she groaned. “Don’t tell me we’re back to that.”

  “Back to what?”

  “The college thing,” she said. “That old man keeps stirring him up about it. Which is ridiculous, because Briney’ll never go back to school.”

  I looked at her in surprise. “What makes you think so?”

  “Because I know Bri,” she said. “He’s just like me—always settles for a good time. And—” She shrugged. “—why not? With his good looks?”

  The more I saw of Tikki, the more I felt we were on opposite sides, me pulling for the Prof’s values, and Tikki defending hers. I never said anything to Briney about it, but sometimes when I suspected his mother might drop by, I simply slipped away to the Sisters.

  That’s what Briney called the two towering rocks down the shore from the hotel. They stood close together, interrupting the incoming waves, hurling great sprays of water into the air. Surfers hated them, but I’d sprawl on the sand nearby, and read, scribble in my journal, or sketch. Artists often came to paint here, and the one they called Madge, a gray-haired lady with a tote-bag of water
color equipment, turned out to be Mrs. Ellison. I realized this one day as I passed the hotel on my way home, and saw her sitting on the terrace beside an old man who had to be the Prof. Briney was standing beside him with a keen expression on his face. “What were you talking about?” I asked later.

  “A scholarship to Oberlin,” he said. “Prof has this old friend there who could be a terrific help to me if I apply now.”

  A few days later, I saw Tikki up on the terrace with them, along with her yachtsman and some fashionable ladies in big sun hats. She called to me, and when I went up, could not have been more charming—presented me to her friends and the Ellisons, and urged me to have a glass of iced tea with them. I hesitated, not really wanting to get involved in their undercover tug-of-war; but Briney brought up a chair and sat me right next to the Prof.

  The old man quickly put me at ease. He was older than I had thought he would be—his panama hat was a little too large for him now, resting almost on the rims of his glasses—but his voice still crackled with opinion. Briney had mentioned that his passion was the Civil War, so I told him how my Grandfather Nimocks had been wounded in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg when he was no older than I. As I spoke, my bare legs and arms went all gooseflesh, and the Prof smiled. “I do the same thing,” he confided. “I’ll mention Shiloh or Appomattox in a lecture, and my flesh will stand up all over my body.”

  He showed me some of his wife’s watercolors. A few were of the shore here, with titles like Pacific Nocturne # 6, but most were of the Ohio farmlands. The Prof took great pride in her work. He kept looking at me for my reaction, and I didn’t know how to hide it from him. It was not that her paintings were bad—the barns were conventional, if a bit slap-dash, but the silos looming against the sky were nothing short of pornographic. I murmured something about her “fine sense of atmosphere,” and passed the pictures on to Tikki’s yachtsman. He stared at them with incredulous eyes, then handed them to Tikki, his polite comment drowned out by the sudden uproar of a volleyball game on the beach. Tikki’s inspection was quick, but the cheering broke off unexpectedly, leaving her surreptitious opinion for all to hear. “They look like big dick to me!”