Since You Ask

by Louise Wareham

  When I got home, Raymond’s plane was taking off. My mother came to her door, her face swollen from crying.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked.

  ‘Nowhere.’

  I smelled of Beck and the park and cigarette smoke.

  ‘Nowhere?’

  ‘No.’

  She waved her hand and closed her door, starting to cry again.

  Besides my hair, my mouth is a good feature. My upper lip is arced like a crescent. My body is angular and thin. My favorite part is the hipbone when one leg crosses the other on the bed, the bone under my skin rounded and smooth. I have a soft stomach, also, like the insides of my thighs. My feet are a size too big, as are my hands. My breasts are not large, but not flat; they are rounded. I like large shirts. Dad likes to take photographs of me, and in most of them my shoulders are hunched forward. I am laughing, because Dad likes me most when I laugh, my hair combed straight and sleek across my back.

  My mother started volunteering at the Whitney Museum, every afternoon from three until six. My father went to his club and Eric was always at school at one of his clubs or games.

  Each day, Beck left for school at 6:51 a.m. on the MetroNorth train from Grand Central. His school was called Hawthorne and was somewhere near Peekskill. He came back at 3:05, took the express to 86th Street, and waited for me outside Houghton. He stood out the way some street kid would, tough and a little awkward, arms on his chest. He smoked a cigarette, maybe, or drank an orange soda, not smiling at anyone but me.

  We went to the schoolyard, Tommy and Seth and their friends on the court. Beck pulled me to his chest from behind, his arm around my shoulders. ‘I love you baby,’hek sang in my ear, ‘and if it’s quite all right, I need you baby.’ He got down on his knees, so I laughed. ‘You kill me,’ he said, putting his fist to his chest. ‘Right in here.’

  On Sheep’s Meadow, the lawn smooth and cool, we went into the middle and lay out. ‘Look.’ He dangled his keys in the air before me, on a metal ring.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We could go to my house.’ His sweater was blue wool, crewnecked. ‘You want to?’

  ’No.’

  ‘Don’t you trust me?’

  I didn’t know.

  ‘Here,’ he said. He took a photograph from his wallet. It was a woman, her hair brown and parted in the middle. ‘This is my mother.’ He showed me an old picture, creased and grayed and grimy at the edges. ‘My dad.’ He didn’t look like Beck. He was tall and slim and smiling, standing in front of a plane.

  ‘Was he a pilot?’

  ‘He was just standing there.’

  He had this great smile, a fake all-out smile, his shirt white and open at the neck.

  ‘Now you know everything.’ He flipped the keys on the ring.

  ‘Trust me now?’

  ‘Why did they put you in Correctional?’

  “Cause I was bad.

  ‘Cause I did some shit.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means, like, I was bad news. I kind of was bad news, Betsy.’

  ‘What’s the worst thing you did?’

  ‘Oh shit, I don’t know.’

  His sweater had a loose thread at the cuff. I pulled at it.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s a new sweater.’

  Over by the high trees, a man was playing a harmonica. His jacket was down, cobalt blue and puffy. My father played the harmonica. He played the guitar, also. He played ‘Stewball’ and ‘Mack the Knife’ and ‘Banks of the Ohio.’

  ‘What’s your favorite song?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I like that song—what’s it called? “Ain’t No Use in Crying.’” He took out his cigarettes. ‘We should go to my house.’

  ‘No.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Betsy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Betsy, Betsy.’

  ‘Stop saying that.’ I lay back on the grass. It was cool and soft. When he kissed me, his mouth was warm.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You.’

  He put his finger in my mouth. It was dry and salty.

  The man with the harmonica was using his jacket as a big blue pillow.

  ‘You want to know my favorite song?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Old Stewball was a racehorse, and I wish he were mine. He never drank water, he always drank wine.’

  ‘Stewball? What kind of name is that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a song. My Dad used to play it.’

  Beck and Tommy went to Correctional, Seth was out of school, and Sharon went to Wagner High. I spoke to her once. Her earrings had tiny Jesuses crucified. She had dark eye shadow and told me she liked the way I spoke. ‘You’re so quiet,’ she said.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Don’t people tell you that?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  She picked at a cuticle with a fingernail. ‘Well, you are.’

  The schoolyard was empty at dusk, streetlamps blurred yellow at the edges, dust on the green benches. Tommy sat in his army jacket, his knees up. His eyes were like great shiny pools of water, the pale blue of marbles. He lived in Queens, Beck said, his mother was on welfare, and their place was ‘the worst in the world.’ Seth was eating french fries and wiped the grease on his leather jacket.

  ‘Hey,’ Beck said. ‘Don’t fucking do that.’

  Seth stopped with his hand in the box. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s disgusting, wiping that shit on yourself.’

  Seth put more french fries in his mouth. ‘Where’d you get her?’ he asked, his fingers greasy. ‘I mean it. Where’d you find her?’

  Tommy laughed, dropping his head in his lap, wrists hanging loose over his knees.

  ‘Fuck you, man,’ Beck said. ‘Both of you. Come on,’ he then said to me, getting up.

  We bought coffee with milk and sugar and took it to the steps of the Met. The museum was still open, people going up and down the steps in their high-heeled boots and their rubber soles. The sky was navy blue, the lights on the fountain white.

  ‘What do you want to do,’ I asked, ‘after school?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t write. I can hardly read. What am I going to do? Be a doctor? A lawyer?’ It was the first time I’d heard him that way bitter.

  ‘You can read.’

  ‘I read like a nine-year-old. That’s what they told me.’

  ‘You’re smart.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter.

  ‘Cause I already know. I’m going to join the Marines.’

  I didn’t know anyone who wanted to be a Marine.

  ‘If they’ll take me,’ he said, ‘which they won’t because of my record.’

  ‘Will they take you if you graduate?’

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘The Marines? They’re the best. The toughest, the strongest, the first to fight. And—I could get out of here. I’ve never been anywhere. I’ve never been out of New York.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’ve never been overseas?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘To the ocean?’

  ‘No.’

  I picked at the seam on my leather glove.

  ‘Can you swim?’

  ‘After the Marines, I’ll be able to swim.’

  ‘What does your dad do?’

  ‘My dad.’ He laughed.

  ‘He never even married my mother.’

  ‘But he lives here?’

  ‘They met in Iceland. He was on business or something.

  Then she followed him over.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that he wanted her to.’

  He came to school, and it was a clear bright day with cold sliding in like currents. He stood below the windows, Tommy beside him in his loose green army coat. ‘Yo, Betsy!’ Beck called out. ‘Betsy!’ I was in En
glish class.

  Miss Porter went to the window. ‘Is that for you, Betsy?’ she asked me.

  I got up and went to look and so did everyone else, and Beck had his arms crossed, his head thrown back and looking up.

  ‘Impatient, isn’t he?’

  Then the headmaster went outside and I saw Beck step away from Tommy over to the headmaster, so he shook his hand, the two of them talking, and then the bell went for the end of the day and Miss Porter laughed at me because she liked me and I took off into the hallway and down six flights of steps to the sidewalk where Beck was.

  ‘What did you say to him?’ I asked.

  He had his hand in my hair. ‘I said I had the impression that school got out at three.’

  ‘Charming men are the worst kind,’ Sylvia said. ‘My dad told me. At the investment bank, he said, they’re the ones that get the best of you—so you don’t even notice.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Henry said. His hair was brown and so were his eyes and nothing about him was remarkable except that it was all perfect, not a flaw on him.

  ‘He’s mean. Then when she comes along he’s Mr. Nice and Sweet.’

  ‘He doesn’t know anyone.’

  ‘He’s seen me with you.’

  ‘You’re just upset,’ Henry said, ‘because he doesn’t speak to you.’

  ‘He’d speak to me, if I wanted him to.’

  Henry laughed, so Sylvia went inside to get more wine. Henry lived on Gracie Square, above the East River. His mother was a jazz singer, Miss Beth Rule Peake, and his father owned newspapers. He knew everything, Henry said, except about singing, which was why his mother could marry him.

  It was cold on the terrace, the wind tumbling across the water and the moon almost full.

  ‘What do you see in Beck anyway?’ Henry asked, leaning over the railing in his long black scarf. ‘Besides the obvious.’

  ‘What’s the obvious?’

  ‘The way he looks.’

  ‘He’s nice.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isn’t he in reform school?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His face was pretty like a girl’s, soft lips and clear skin.

  ‘So what do you talk about?’

  I laughed. We didn’t need to talk—Beck and I—the way he always saw me coming, the way he ran down the sidewalk and across the street, grinning and picking me up, kissing my throat, my lips, my neck.

  ‘With her killer graces, ‘Beck sang, ‘and her secret places, that no boy can fill… You know who that is?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘With her hands on her hips and that smile on her lips because she knows that it kills me.’

  ‘Stop it,’ I said.

  He kissed my temple. ‘Springsteen. “She’s The One.’”

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  He pushed my hair aside. He smelled of smoke.

  ‘Let’s go to my house.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You kill me, you know that?’

  ‘We could go to mine.’ He put his arm around me.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Are your parents home?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  The sky was infused with light, the way it is at dusk or the peak of the day. People looked at us as we walked, or at Beck. You’re good looking, too, Sylvia told me. But not like Beck I wasn’t. Inside the house it was dark. The hallway smelled of freesia. In the kitchen, I poured Beck a soda, and everything looked different with him there. He looked different, sipping from a glass with cubes of ice.

  ‘Nice,’ he said in the living room, setting his glass on the coffee table.

  I wasn’t supposed to have anyone over. It was the first time we’d been alone in a room. Everything was quiet. Beck looked at the paintings and the blue couch and the silver candlesticks. He picked up a photo from the fireplace mantel. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘She’s pretty—and this?’

  ‘Our house in Antigua.’

  ‘It’s on the sea?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that your pool?’

  ‘Yes.’

  My parents had had the first swimming pool in Antigua. It took months to dig, workers grinding their jackhammers into the yellow earth of the dry hillside, pouring concrete from great trucks, sanding it and painting it blue, gluing on the white and blue porcelain tiles my mother had shipped from Italy. They had had the first pool party except for the club at Mill Reef, all the staff in uniforms serving drinks and hors d’oeurves of oyster and tinned meat.

  ‘What does your dad do?’

  ‘He’s a lawyer.’

  ‘No shit. You never told me that.’ He sat on the couch, propping himself on the edge, holding his hands between his knees.

  ‘I didn’t?’

  ‘Lawyers fucking hate me, Betsy. They hate me.’

  ‘Why would they?’

  ’I don’t know. They just look at me. They hate me. Where’s your room?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know how big our place is?’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘As big as this room—the whole place.’

  He fished out a cube of ice from his glass. ‘You know what my father did? When I was nine? We went to court in this paternity suit, right? Because he wouldn’t pay child support. We had to take these tests, to prove he was my dad, and even after the tests said he was—even then—he said I wasn’t. He looked me right in the eye and said, “That’s not my son.’”

  I felt bad for him when he said that. I felt bad mostly because he did, because he carried that picture in his wallet.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yeah—well.’ He set down his glass. ‘My mother was fucking sorry. I tell you that.’

  ‘Now?’ Beck asked, pulling my hips into his, against a car by the playground. ‘Now?’ he asked, fingers in my long hair. We crossed the baseball diamonds, walking down to Dog Hill where it began to rain, the sky pale gray and misty Beck balling up his jacket beneath my head so everything ran with water—the rain and his cheekbones and his hands.

  ‘People are watching.’

  ‘No, they’re not.’

  ‘They could be.’

  He laughed. His mouth was wet with rain.

  ‘Come on,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll go with you. To your house.’

  ‘You will?’

  He smirked and smiled at the same time, not wanting to look too pleased, I could tell, but pleased anyway practically blushing, taking my hand and kissing it. All right,’ he said, and we ran, all the way down Fifth Avenue, past the Pierre Hotel and Trump Plaza, left onto 53rd, where Beck hailed a cab, both of us out of breath, slamming the door and laughing. He lived on 32nd Street, in a tenement building. The hallway was dark chocolate brown, the stone steps worn down.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ I asked as Beck stood behind me at his door, dark door with no light in the hall.

  ‘Working.’

  ‘Is she coming home?’

  ‘No.’

  The hallway was narrow, the carpet thick and blue. On the right was the kitchen, a bottle of Crisco oil in the sink. The living room was on the street, with a view of a bare tree. I could smell cigarettes and something old, like flower water.

  ‘Sit down.’

  He turned on a glass lamp. The couch was blue velour like a sweater Eric had in Antigua. When I sat, it sank beneath me.

  ‘Beck,’ I said, wanting him to sit next to me.

  ‘What?’

  There was a big TV and a porcelain dog and a painting that looked like it had been done on black velvet, the kind of painting you see in dime stores.

  ‘You want to see my room?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows at me.

  My palms made print marks on the coffee table.

  It wasn’t like a real room. There
was no window. He had a bedside lamp, but didn’t turn it on. The light came from the hallway from its fluorescent bulb.

  His carpet was strewn with clothes. ‘Come here,’ he said, sitting on his bed. I stood before him. He put his hands on my waist. His fingers where they touched my skin were cool.

  ‘Are you nervous?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t want to fuck you up.’

  I put my arms around his neck.

  ‘You don’t?’ I laughed.

  We lay back on the sheets, which were dark green and flannel.

  He had one pillow, thin and flat.

  ‘I don’t like pillows,’ I said.

  ‘Everyone likes pillows.’

  His skin was pale in the white light.

  ‘Is your mother coming home?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you close the door?’

  ‘No.’

  He kissed my mouth. His chest lay heavy on mine.

  ‘Beck.’

  ‘What?’

  I moved my hands under his T-shirt. His skin was smooth.

  ‘You have a nice mouth.’

  When he kissed me, it was like I became him. It was a relief, like going into the ocean after you’ve been looking at it for a long time, wanting to.

  He took off his T-shirt and then his pants were undone. He started rubbing himself, the way Raymond did. He moved his hand fast, not even looking at me. He pushed up my shirt and held onto my breast.

  As when a storm comes, the sky empty one minute, dark the next, so a chill came over me. He came onto my stomach. His breath was hard and raspy the sound of moths. I listened to him breathing. Then he wiped me off with his T-shirt.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  I wasn’t, actually.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said.

  ‘Right now?’

  It was the way it was with Raymond, the same exact way once things were over.

  At the door, he took hold of my shoulder, standing with his pants done back up but his chest still bare.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t get fucking weird on me.’

  He should have walked me out. He should have walked me home or put me in a cab. I wouldn’t have let him, though, not even if he tried.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ he asked the next day, stepping in beside me after school, from the black gates to Lexington and down the street. ‘Are you angry at me?’