by Bill Rowe
“How’s your swimming coming along, old chap,” asked Rothesay.
“I only swam recreationally this summer. The competitive swimming will start again this fall.”
“You have a real talent for that. I saw your times in the sports section of the paper last year. I hope you keep it up. I’ll be watching for great things.”
“There’s only a small pool of serious swimmers here my age—no pun intended,” I said.
Rothesay looked at me and chortled at my silly pun.
“So there’s not a lot of competition. This year we’ll be trying to get in on some swim meets on the mainland, so that will be better—if the team can raise the money for travel costs.”
“Count me in for a donation. You’ll do well up there. Your times in freestyle for your age group are already among the best.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. What was there not to love about this guy?
That night in the entertainment room alone with Rosie, to estimate the possible extent of our grappling over the following hour, I asked if there was any risk of Rothesay coming down. None whatsoever, she said with a kiss. He knew better than that. He was as happy as a pig in poop up there in his study with his book on Nietzsche and his glass full of single-malt scotch.
“How come you’re so pissed off with him all the time? Did you and he have a fight or something? The two of you don’t seem to communicate much these days.”
She paused, with a look on her face indicating that she didn’t really want to talk about this. Then she resigned herself to replying and said, “I wouldn’t say, fight, as such. I told him to get it out of his effin’ head that he was my lord and effin’ master.”
“Jesus. How old were you when you said that?”
Rosie removed my arm from around her shoulders and got up to change the channel, apparently forgetting about the newfangled remote control on the coffee table. “Oh, I don’t know. I said it to him three or four times. Thirteen, I suppose.”
“Thirteen when you kept telling your stepfather to eff off. Wild guess here, but that might explain the slight strain.” I smiled.
Rosie showed no sign of amusement. She fiddled with the channel changer for a minute, and when she came back she sat down a foot from me and said, “Can we watch this for a while?” It was an oft-repeated Bonanza rerun.
In ten minutes, though, she shuffled over close to me, draped her arms around me, and said, “I-love-you,” voicing the words fast and close together as usual, as if she was afraid she might lose one. She had on a light, billowy, long skirt. I reached inside and caressed her bare lower legs, on which there was noticeable stubble. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Shave day is tomorrow.”
“Well, I’ll just have to go further up.”
“Yes, that might be best.” Further up, it was hard not to notice that again she had no panties on. She took her mouth off mine and said, “Why waste time putting them on when they’re coming right off again?” Putting her hand inside my underwear, she went on, “You know, with the Momrisk gone, we can have a ‘full cuddle’ down here tonight. Oh, frig.” She sat up. “I forgot the safes.”
She bounced off the sofa and bounded up the stairs in her bare feet with no effort to quiet her steps. I didn’t hear any words exchanged on the floor above as she was going up or as she flew back down. “That was a good little warm-up,” she said, tossing one condom on the coffee table, handing me the other, and dropping her long skirt to the floor, which she then knelt on.
“I love you, Rosie,” I said, after a minute.
She took my penis out of her mouth, held it against her cheek, and looked up at me and asked, “Yes, but are you happy?”
My laugh came out in a snort. “I think so,” I said. “Yes, I do believe I am.”
She rose and rolled the opened condom on me with alacrity, climbed onto my lap, and slowly sat down with her eyes closed and a heartbreaking smile on her lips. “Same here,” she whispered.
LATE IN THE FALL, I was leafing through the sports section of the big Saturday edition of the St. John’s Evening Telegram when I saw a picture of Rosie and one of me on the very same page. She was headlined at the top for her winning ways at tennis and was touted by coaches here and in Ontario as a potential Canadian champion in a matter of years, if, said the Ontarian, “she arranges again to compete against the best girls that North America has to offer. Rosie’s height is not a negative factor. At five foot six, she’s the same height as the brilliant American Chris Evert.”
I was featured in a brief story at the bottom for winning the one-hun-dred-metre freestyle at a local high school swimming competition. My coach thought I was going places.
Both articles contained pictures. Rosie’s was large and showed her seated in the front row of an official group at an award ceremony, gazing directly at the camera, but smiling unassumingly, almost shyly. Her lower legs and feet, pressed together below her skirt, were perfect. I thought I must write Margaret Mead and ask her to investigate my theory that the aesthetic form and proportions of a woman’s calves, ankles, and feet anywhere in the world were all you needed to assess the evolutionary excellence of any human female. Rosie’s unruly hair, barely tamed for the occasion, framing her fresh-faced, appealing looks, stabbed at my heart. This girl was my love and I was her love. It started to well up in me that such blessedness had to end. I beat that down quick and looked at my photo near the bottom of the page.
It was small and showed only my face glancing to the side with the look of good-natured humour that Rosie often said made her want to tousle my hair or buddy-punch me in the arm. I wondered what feelings would go through her when she looked at this little snap, though, poked way down there at the bottom of the page. Would she remark to herself the contrast in our athletic prowess?
When I figured my parents had finished the newspaper, I cut out both stories and slipped them between the pages of the book I’d bought in a second-hand bookstore last month for thirty cents and kept in the drawer of my bedside table, Paradoxes of Passion by Joyce O’Dell.
“Nice story on you in the sports section today,” Mom said to me in the kitchen before supper. “Do you know where the paper is? I wanted to clip it out for the scrapbook.”
“I already cut it out myself. I can get it for you if you want.”
“No, you keep it.” She smiled. “I have to go to the drugstore anyway tonight, and I’ll buy another paper there. It must be unusual for three classmates to be on the front page of the sports section on the same day.”
“Three classmates?” I looked at her.
“You and Rosie and Brent?”
Brent? On the same page? I hadn’t even noticed a story on Brent, so preoccupied had I been with Rosie’s and my own. “Oh yeah, sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” As soon as Mom was out of the kitchen I dug the remnants of the paper out of the garbage and, sure enough, there it was, a picture and an article next to Rosie’s featuring Brent Anstey’s citation as Most Valuable Player in his league last year and detailing the attempt to allow him to play in the age group above his own this year because of his strength and skills and ice-smarts.
It was a good thing Mom had mentioned that article on Brent in the paper. How embarrassed would I have been to talk to him this weekend and not mention it to him, and find out afterwards? I phoned his house. His father answered. Brent wasn’t home, so I told his dad that I was calling to congratulate him on the piece in the Evening Telegram. “Yeah, he’s starting to come along, finally,” said his father. “I see you won another swimming tournament. That was good.”
“Thanks, Mr. Anstey, but it was only one race. Could you ask—”
“I see where the little one O’Dell is thriving at her tennis.”
“Yes, Rosie is really good at it. Could you—”
“She’s the smart one too, isn’t she? She certainly looks like she could teach a guy a thing or two.”
“Could you ask Brent to call me, please?” I couldn’t help trying to be sarcastic as a resul
t of his remark about Rosie. “He’s probably at a hockey practice right now, is he, trying to learn how to play?”
“You think? Is a bear Catholic? Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
As usual I had to laugh at the obnoxious bastard before hanging up. I sat there unsettled for a few minutes before calling Rosie to arrange a get-together tonight. Then Pagan came into my mind, perhaps because all the sports page attention to us reminded me of her running. I got out my big book of sports statistics and looked up Doris Brown, to whom her coach had compared her: first woman (1966) to run the indoor mile under five minutes (at 4: 52); had held every women’s national and world record from 440 yards through one mile; five victories in the International Cross Country Championships (1967-1971); had represented the U. S. at the Olympics games (1968 and 1972). I was stunned. What a comparison. Little Pagan. I had no idea. I’d find out all about it from Rosie tonight.
At Rosie’s house, she told me that, although Rothesay was in Ottawa at a medical association meeting, her mother was upstairs and wandering around. We’d have to be content with a partial cuddle tonight. She kissed me and whispered in my ear, “How does a blow job sound?”
“Outstanding. And what did you have in mind for yourself?”
“Oh, let me see now. How about a little of that cunnilingual interaction you excel at?”
“A muff dive—check. Your wish is my command.” We sat in silence for a minute watching the television screen. Then I asked what had been on my mind since my talk with Brent’s father: “Rosie, where did you learn so much about sex at fourteen?”
“I’ve had a good teacher.” She snuggled against me and kissed my ear.
“No, right at the beginning, looking back, you seemed to have everything down pat.”
“I guess I’m just a natural. Everything I do with you just seems to come natural.” When I didn’t say anything, she went on. “Also, I read a lot, and of course girls talk a lot.”
“Suzy?”
“Partly, and others too. How about you? You’re no slouch yourself.”
How would she know if I was a slouch or not? “The same, I guess. Boys bullshit a lot about it in the locker room, and everywhere else, for that matter. I didn’t realize that girls did that too.”
We sat silently again side by side. I could sense that she was thinking hard. Then she put her hand on mine. “Tom, there was something else, too. I didn’t want to tell you about it, but I will, now that you are wondering. I was snooping around Mom’s and his bedroom when they were out one Saturday, as thirteen-year-old girls do. Actually, I was trying to see what intimate undies a grown-up woman might keep around. Instead, I found a film hidden away under stuff on a shelf in their closet. I had my suspicions about it, so I put it on the projector and had a look. Sure enough, it was a dirty movie, a hard-core pornographic movie. It was grainy, and black and white, and absolutely disgusting, I thought, what they were doing to each other, men and women.”
“You watched it right through?”
“Yes, I couldn’t help myself. I was fascinated and disgusted at the same time by what was going on. But I must have picked up a few techniques by osmosis. And they don’t seem bad with you, only good, very, very good.”
“How long was it?”
“I dunno, twenty minutes?”
“Where is it now? Can we watch it when we get the chance?”
“It’s gone. When I went to show it to Suzy a little later, it wasn’t there. He must have suspected someone had found it.”
“Someone? Do you figure little Pagan might have discovered it and watched it, too?”
“Jesus, I hope not. No, she couldn’t have. She wasn’t home by herself at all during that time.”
“Pagan told me she is doing pretty well in cross-country at school. I didn’t realize that, not until she beat me in the Tely Ten and won hands down in her age group. Did you know?”
“That’s a drastic change of subject. Well, yes… I was aware of it. More or less. But she’s been pretty nonchalant about it. It slipped my mind. I should have told you.”
We sat in silence again. We had the television turned down low for security. Off in the distance upstairs, I heard a telephone ringing barely audibly. There was a telephone down here in the entertainment room, but it wasn’t ringing. The one upstairs rang on and on. I’d never heard it before. Rosie and I must have talked over it in the past or were concentrating on each other to the point where I hadn’t noticed it. “Is your mother going to answer that telephone?” I asked.
“No, that’s his private line in his study. We’re not supposed to answer it. If we do, we only get in a tangle with a patient at the other end who needs a doctor, and we’re not equipped to deal with that. If it’s not answered, the patients know they have to call elsewhere. He even had to get rid of his answering machine because a patient left a message for him to call urgently, and by the time he got back a day later, the patient was dead. It was an awful…”
I tuned out. My mind had reverted back to the porno film. Rosie had watched a guy’s big hard cock doing its damnedest for a half an hour. In my naïveté, I had thought that mine was the only one she’d ever seen, let alone in action. In the way that teenaged boys react to the realization that a girl may have had intimate experience of other males, if only by sight, I felt extremely negative sensations welling up—jealousy and insecurity— although over what, if a psychiatrist had asked me, I would not have been able to say.
We looked at the television screen for fifteen minutes. We didn’t move towards each other, but Rosie kept hold of my hand very tight. The telephone upstairs gave a dozen rings and stopped, and then rang again ten times and stopped, over and over incessantly while we sat there. “That’s really weird,” said Rosie. “I’ve never heard his phone go on and on like that before.” Her voice sounded strangely brittle.
“Maybe you should answer it and put the poor bastard out of his misery. Or her. Whatever.”
“He said not to, under any circumstances. We’d only do more damage than good in an emergency.”
“Does that make any sense to you? I mean, in a case like this, where it won’t stop?”
“He’s the fucking doctor.” Her voice was so harsh, I looked at her. But she was staring at the TV screen.
We sat quietly again for five minutes. The telephone started up once more—fifteen rings and then a long, eerie silence. It did not ring again. I put my arm around Rosie and kissed her. She seemed rigid.
“I don’t think I feel very well tonight,” I said.
“Me neither,” said Rosie.
“I think I’ll go home and go to bed.” I stood up.
Rosie followed me up the stairs. “I don’t guess you want a bite to eat before you go?”
I shook my head. At the door, I put both arms around her and she did the same to me. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I should be feeling better by tomorrow night.”
Rosie squeezed me with all her might and murmured, “I-love-you.” I went home and straight to my room.
After a restless, broken night, pitching about in my bed, I dropped off around seven o’clock and slept till mid-morning. I thought I should call Rosie, but there was a message by the phone in the kitchen that Brent had called me last night, so I was happy to phone him back instead. We had a good gab, exchanging news on hockey and swimming, and Brent reported with enthusiasm that the girl at school he’d had his eye on was responding favourably. He wondered how Rosie and I were getting on.
“Swimmingly,” I said with a laugh.
“You sounded just like that Dr. Rothesay, then,” said Brent.
When we said goodbye and hung up, the telephone rang immediately. It was Suzy. Rosie had tried to get me, she said, but my line was busy. Now she and her mother were trying to keep their line free for calls from Ontario. “Pagan seems to be missing,” said Suzy. “She left her school yesterday afternoon by taxi, saying she was meeting with her mother and stepfather in Toronto for some shopping and dinner, but she didn�
��t come back last night. The school called her home number here, only to find that her mother wasn’t in Toronto at all. Nina called Rothesay in Ottawa, and he was still at his hotel there waiting to get his flight back home today. He knew nothing about meeting Pagan in Toronto.”
“The school let a thirteen-year-old girl get aboard a taxi to Toronto on her say-so that she was meeting her mother and stepfather?”
“Yeah. That sounded weird. But when Rosie pinned them down on it, they said that that’s what often happened. Sometimes her mother and stepfather would pick her up. More often Dr. Rothesay would get her, or if he was too busy to come, she would leave in a taxi to meet them. He had authorized the school to let Pagan do that and he would meet her at the other end. It’s a sixty-dollar taxi ride to downtown Toronto, and the doctor told them he had an arrangement with the taxi company to pay for the trips and for Pagan’s safety. This was the first time Rosie has heard of any such arrangements, and Nina wasn’t sure what arrangements they had made with any of them up there.”
“So what does everyone figure is going on? That Pagan used the arrangement for cover to sneak off to meet a secret boyfriend or something? She was kind of moony here last summer over someone, I thought.”
There was a long silence at the other end. Then Suzy said, “Nobody knows what to think. And Rosie says she’s almost afraid to think. She has a very bad feeling about all this, Tom. Maybe you should go over.”
“Oh, absolutely. I will. But what’s she so upset about? I’m sure Pagan will turn up safe and sound and embarrassed over some foolishness she’s been up to.”
“I hope you’re right. See you at Rosie’s.”
I was in the shower wondering why Rosie and Suzy seemed so pessimistic, alarmed even, about Pagan’s girlish misbehaviour, when the phone rang again. I jumped out wet, grabbed a towel, and answered it. And again it was Suzy: “I’m at Rosie’s. I’m on the doctor’s line. Rosie is waiting for calls from Ontario by the other phone. She wants to make sure she takes them rather than Nina, if you get my drift. They just got a call from the school. Her roommate found a note under Pagan’s pillow. It says: ‘Goodbye everyone. I love you all, but not everyone loves me. Pagan.’ The school has already called the police.”