“Are you all right? If you’d rather not—”
“I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
“I wasn’t saying anything. We were just walking, but you were looking so sad, it made my heart hurt. What is it, David? Tell me! What do you think about when you get the dark look—when those grim, bruised clouds pass over you?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing.” She tightened her grip on my fingers. “Oh you do need somebody to keep an eye on you. It was the first thing I ever felt toward you. Don’t you agree that you need someone to watch out for you?”
“So that I won’t hurt myself?”
“Yes. If you get the urge, you can think of me, all right?”
“So that I can hurt you instead?”
Her arms were around me, her head against my chest. “Of course not. I’m not like that. I don’t believe in martyrdom. It’s just that I want you to like yourself more, that’s all. Why? Because then you’ll be able to like me. That’s one of Gail Kogan’s theories: that people can’t give of themselves to others often because they’re afraid they have nothing of value to give. If people liked themselves more, they’d feel that when they liked another, they were giving a precious gift to that person, see? Q.E.D. Am I logical?”
I touched the back of her head, ran my hand over her dark curls. We were hidden from the street, standing over a large iron grating in an alcove at the side of the building.
“We used to come here on our lunch hours in the sixth grade. To do things,” she said. “And at night later on, when we were in junior high. Until our parents formed patrols to check on us.”
“To do what things?”
“Smoke. Neck. Pet. We were a most progressive bunch. We stole cigarettes and pills from our parents. We found the sexy passages in books and read them to each other by flashlight. Would you like to kiss me?”
“What?”
“I thought I’d ask, in case you were interested but too shy to begin.”
I thought of things falling through the grating—pennies and nickels and dimes, pens and pencils and erasers, bobby pins and baseball cards and candy and marbles and tie clips and jackknives. I thought of Beau Jack’s stories, about the children who lived below the city, and I was glad I hadn’t given him my father’s old clothes, that I’d simply stuffed them in the garbage. I hadn’t seen Beau Jack since my father’s death. Was he afraid to be with me? Was he too shy to say anything, afraid he might say the wrong thing? Gail put her hands to my face, touched my eyes, traced their shapes with her index finger, then brushed my mouth lightly with her fingertips. I pulled her closer and wondered if, through her coat, she could feel how hard I was below.
“I—”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think your eyes bulge so much. Not at all right now.”
“Yes. Because I’m calm. See how good you are for me?”
“I’m not poison then?”
She drew back, baffled. “Why should you think such a thing? Why should you use such a word?”
“I don’t know. I just feel sometimes that there’s this vial of the stuff inside me, ready to leak out onto anyone who touches me, who becomes involved with me.”
She took my face between her hands, drew me down to her. We kissed and her mouth opened to me at once. I was so surprised that I almost pulled back. For a split-second, my brain whirled. I saw Jackie Robinson, his teeth gleaming like stars in a black night. Was I crazy? Why was I seeing Jackie when I was kissing Gail? I tried to push his face from my mind. Gail’s lips were large and warm—“nigger lips” the guys would have called them. I imagined Rachel rubbing Jackie’s back at night, telling him that everything would be all right. I thought of Beau Jack, digging up bodies in France, burying them again. When Jackie married Rachel, Karl Downs, his minister, paid his own way to Los Angeles, to officiate. A few days later, Karl Downs, forced to wait in the corridor of a segregated hospital for an operation he needed and never received, died. Jackie knew that Karl Downs would not have died had his skin been white. Gail pressed against me, moving her head in small circles, varying the pressure, stroking my face, the back of my head, flicking my tongue with hers. I couldn’t tell how long we held to that first kiss. When we parted, she backed away, smiled, leaned up and kissed me quickly on the nose, then hugged me.
“Wow!” she said.
“Wow?”
“Wow.”
She didn’t speak for a while. I reached down, lifted her chin, kissed her again. I loved the feel of her lips against mine—I couldn’t believe how much I liked feeling them, how astonished I was at their softness and warmth, how wild I felt when she touched the inside of my mouth with her tongue, when she nibbled at my lips, my chin, my ears.
“Oh I should probably act very cool at a time like this,” she said, her head on my chest, her fingers moving across my lips as if she were reading them. “And not let you know how I feel, how incredible this all is, but I can’t not tell you, David. Is that all right?” We kissed again. “Only I’m worried that you won’t desire me if I don’t play hard to get. That you’ll throw me over for some shapely young blonde with ponytail and Ipana smile.”
“And what about the college guys you go out with? Don’t you go to their colleges for those fancy weekends? What about all the actors you work with—?”
“You care?”
“I suppose. I don’t know. I’m just saying back to you what you said to me. I mean, I never imagined kissing you before tonight. I never imagined what it would make me feel.”
I pushed against her, so that her back was pressed to the brick wall. I thought of the times I’d necked with girls on Rogers Avenue, in the doorways of Mr. Lipsky’s butcher shop and Lee’s luncheonette, and of how the taste of cigarettes in their mouths always excited me. Don’t you trust me? I’d say it again and again. Trust me. Trust me. Gail slipped her lips by mine, to my ear.
“Hey—”
“Shh.”
She pushed me away for a second, to unbutton her coat. I ran my hands around her back, felt heat coming off her body through her sweater. We kissed again. I felt the shapes of her breasts against my chest.
“Do you mind?”
“Mind?”
“If I kind of take the lead sometimes. I mean, most boys believe they have to be the ones to think of everything, to be in charge—”
I stopped her mouth with another kiss. It was the only thing I wanted to do—to keep kissing her, to never stop, to feel her lips against my own. I thought of the way I would move the hands of the girls on Rogers Avenue down to my fly when we necked, and how they would play with me, protesting the whole time and asking me what kind of girl I thought they were, but being sure I had my handkerchief ready in time so they didn’t stain their clothes. Did I want Gail to touch me there? Or was I frightened somehow that if I tried to move her hand she might resist, she might get angry with me, that it might ruin everything. But I was aching and throbbing so terribly it was almost as if I could hear my heartbeat thumping away in my groin. Slowly, tentatively, I pressed in, rubbed myself against her. She hummed with pleasure. She held to me fiercely, reached up, tugged on my ears, half-laughed and half-moaned, then moved against me.
“I know I’m not as pretty as a lot of girls, in the popular sense.” We were walking again, on the street. “But I am pretty inside. Still, if you were to visit a museum, say, and look at great-beauties-through-the-ages, you would see at once that the current ideal of a woman’s body in the United States of America is a dreadful anomaly. Do you go to museums much? If you did you would notice that as far back as the Greeks and Romans, most artists have preferred to sculpt and paint women who were built like me. Ample. I thought I would mention the fact, in case you feel cheated. You know what I mean? Handsomest boy gets prettiest girl. Smartest boy gets smartest girl. Star athlete gets—”
“I used to go to museums a lot.”
“Yes?”
“I liked to draw when I was younger. I even used to think that I
might want to become an artist someday. When I grew up.”
“When you grew up. Can we go to museums together, do you think? When you grow up?”
“Sure.”
“What else can we do?”
“This,” I said, and I kissed her.
“Ummm. Good. How about the the-a-ter then? Do you like the the-a-ter David? Hey—” She stopped. “You’re like the main character in Golden Boy then, aren’t you?”
“Golden Boy?”
“He was dark, too, the way you are. Italian, though. It was a play by Clifford Odets my mother took me to see in the Village last year. She and my father saw it together on one of their first dates, during the Depression. It’s about a young boy who grows up to be both a great boxer and a concert violinist, if you can believe that. And he has to choose one or the other, you see—”
“Is that one of the plays your group put on?”
“My group?”
“That all-city theater thing you organized.”
“Dis-organized would be more like it.” She laughed. “Oh, we may yet get a production mounted before the end of the year—the Brooklyn Academy of Music will let us use their stage and equipment—but you try creating a working ensemble out of several dozen teenagers drunk on Stanislavsky. Mostly, see, I’ve been concentrating on designing a crest for us—a coat of arms that we can put on jackets and blazers—like your team jacket, right? Narcissism rampant on a field of ego…”
We kissed again, and I opened my eyes this time. She did too, and when she saw that mine were open, we both laughed.
“In Paris, young lovers kiss on the street all the time and people hardly notice. Our family went there last summer.”
She looked at me very intently, very steadily. Neither of us moved. There were no questions in her eyes.
“I like you too,” I said.
“You do?”
“Is it all right for me to say so?”
“Oh David!”
She hugged me, kissed me once on each eye, tenderly, then on my nose, my cheeks, my mouth, my chin. She was smiling at me so happily that I had the urge to swear to her that we would be friends forever, that I would never do anything to cause her unhappiness, to take away what she was feeling right then. But I said nothing. I thought of how my mother’s lips would curl in disgust when my father tried to kiss her. I pulled Gail to me, to kiss her again—it was the only thing I wanted to do, the only thing that could stop the pictures and questions and voices from flooding my mind.
“Don’t be so rough,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I—”
“It’s okay. It happens. It’s just that, with the cold air and all, my lips are beginning to get a little raw. No wonder, right?”
“I suppose.”
She leaned back against a tree.
“Come here,” she said softly. I moved to her. “Did I hurt your feelings?
“A little.”
“Will you forgive me?”
“Sure.”
“I do love kissing you.”
She touched her lips to mine in the gentlest way then, so that I could hardly feel them, so that, holding to each other that way for as long as we could, I ached with pleasure—so that, tickling one another with our tongues and lips and then with our fingers, it was as if we showed the depth of our passion for one another by the way in which we could restrain it.
When we walked again, she carried my gym bag, swinging it at her side as if it were a pail of berries.
“Can we be together a lot, do you think?”
“Sure.”
“Sure.” She paused. “I’m asking because you are in mourning. I’m trying to remember that. Will you have to go back to sitting shiva tomorrow, for example, or could we meet after school?”
“I’m not religious. We don’t do any of that stuff.”
“You seem angry with me for asking. Are you? I see those dark, bruised clouds—”
“Stop.”
I thought of the time my father locked me in the bathroom with him when he’d lost five envelopes and one of his account books, having left them somewhere along his route. He sat on the closed toilet seat and screamed at me to beat him up. C’mon, c’mon. Hit your stupid father and get it over with. Do your uncle’s dirty work and then he can finish the job. C’mon already. Beat me up so maybe I’ll learn to have some sense in my dumb head. I refused. He wept. I was thirteen years old.
Somebody was trying to do him in, my father said. But why? Somebody was setting him up so that Abe would do a job on him. Abe would kill him, poke out his good eye, so why shouldn’t I get started first? He took off his belt, handed it to me. I dropped it. He flushed his cigarette down the toilet, closed the lid, sat again. Each time I tried to leave he grabbed my wrists, pleaded with me to beat him up.
“It’s just that I keep seeing pictures of my father,” I said. “He didn’t leave much. I mean, when I die I want people to feel I did more than take up space.”
“What pictures do you see, David? How do you remember him?”
I shrugged. “You don’t know much about me,” I said.
“I know enough.”
“No you don’t. I won’t be good for you. You’re making a mistake.”
“Look,” she said, pressing close. “I know about your uncle and about what your father’s job was. You’re not your uncle and you’re not your father. I know what my parents will think about my being with you, all right? But I also know you. I know that you’re a good person, no matter what you think. I—”
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. I’m just getting sloppy all of a sudden. I do that sometimes. I’m just so damned happy to be with you is all, and I guess I don’t want to think about anything else—your family or mine or what other people will think of us or any of that Romeo and Juliet stuff, even if it’s the script we seem to be living in.” She sniffed, kept talking. “And I guess for a second I had my doubts too. When you talked of your father I could see mine, puffing on his damned pipe in our living room, and how much pleasure I’d get standing up to him and my mother about seeing you, and how they would take it as a typical act of rebellion on my part, of how I need to oppose their values, and of how I’ll have to go into a whole song-and-dance with my therapist, and oh God, David, but it all seems so lousy and boring in prospect that all I want to do is cry.”
And she did. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just let her nuzzle her wet face against me. I led her to a dark spot, under a different tree, away from the streetlights.
Maybe Abe would go easier on him, my father said, if he found out I’d beaten him up first. But when Abe came, my father let me out of the bathroom without any fuss. Abe was gentle. He told my father he wouldn’t do anything to him for losing the envelopes and the book. He told my father to unlock the door and come out so that they could talk together reasonably. If I hadn’t met Gail, I wondered, would I be angrier with Abe? Would I have spent the evening hating him? It wasn’t his fault that other men were cowards. Sure. But what was I going to do about the fact that for the rest of my life the only basketball I would ever play would probably be in the schoolyard? What happened to people over a lifetime if they couldn’t do the things they loved? Because I agreed with what Abe had once said to me, that he was my uncle and that there was no way I would ever be free of that fact—that it was nobody’s fault, but it was so—did that mean that I would be able to give up my hopes and my dreams? Would I ever be able to think only of the life I would actually have, of things the way they were? The questions tumbled through my head, one after the other, and I wanted to give them to Gail—to voice them—to have her comfort me and tell me that it was all right to be confused and frightened, that it was all right for me to hope and to dream and to wonder.
“Thanks,” she said, when I handed her my handkerchief. “We can be good friends too, don’t you think? If—”
“If what?”
“I don’t know. I’m just talking. I’m just very upset
.”
I kissed her eyes, her mouth. I licked salt from her cheeks. We walked to her home without saying anything else. At her door she said she wouldn’t invite me in because she didn’t want to ruin things. I wouldn’t think she was ashamed of me, would I? It was just that she wanted what had been ours to remain ours. She didn’t want it smothered under a bunch of introductions and false small-talk.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Really. I’d do the same, if you were walking me to my door.”
She laughed, kissed her fingertips, touched them to my lips. I heard a clicking sound and turned sideways, imagined that Ellen was walking along the street, tapping a long white cane in front of her. I closed my eyes, tried to recall what she had looked like. The clicking faded, stopped.
“What is it?”
“I was thinking of your sister—wondering what I’d feel if we met now. Do you mind?”
“You’re lovely, David.” She held to me. “Do I mind? Sure I mind. But I’m glad you told me. Only listen. Would you promise me something?”
“Yes.”
“Would you promise to try never thinking that there’s poison inside you?”
“I’ll try.”
“And could you do one other thing for me?”
“Yes.”
“Would you call me in the morning, before school?”
“If you want.”
“Just so I’ll be sure this all happened. I won’t keep you on long. All you have to do is say hello. It would be important to me.”
“I’ll call.”
We heard sounds, from behind the door. Ellen? Gail grabbed me and kissed me very quickly, very hard, then shoved me away.
“Go now. Hurry—”
Before My Life Began Page 20