Since You Ask

by Louise Wareham

  ‘Come on, I’ll make it up to you.’

  He took my hand in the street. He held it firmly walking me the way a man walks a child, thinking of something else. Upstairs, dusk gave the wood floor a pinkish sheen. Frank turned my back to the river. ‘Christ,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Christ. Christ is the most beautiful word in the English language. Say it.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘That’s how beautiful you are.’

  ‘I am not.’

  He laughed. He took off his jacket. ‘I’m glad you called.’

  ‘Are you?’

  He took off his sweater. ‘Come here,’ he said.

  His sheets had no scent. They were ivory the color of parchment paper, with crimson flowers. He kissed me like he owned me, the way I knew he would.

  Then he was taking off my shirt. ‘Have you thought about me?’

  ‘Yes.’ My stomach felt bad. I had to get up suddenly. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said and went to the bathroom.

  ‘You’re nervous.’ He took my cold hands when I came back. He pulled me to him, stroking my hair. I could feel my heart in my chest, rapid as a bird’s. ‘Betsy, Betsy,’ he said, kissing me hard suddenly and then I was helping him with my corduroys, helping him with my underpants.

  The hair on his chest was thick and half gray. He was thinner than Beck, wiry and lean. He moved straight into me, kissing me too hard. I held onto his arms, wanting him to stop. He didn’t, though, and I said nothing. There was no going back once a man was inside you.

  Finally he came, his hands on the headboard.

  I started to cry.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, getting off me, going to the bathroom.

  ‘Why not?’

  He came back with a washcloth, rubbing me clean. “Cause I can hear you.’

  Later, in the kitchen drinking seltzer water, he watched me, leaning back against the sink. ‘It’ll get better,’ he said. He had his pants back on and a fresh white T-shirt. ‘I’m going to take you out. Would you like that?’

  He didn’t get it. He didn’t get it at all. I wasn’t going to see him again. I wasn’t going to talk to him, ever. My finger was cold and wet, drawing a B on his windowpane for Beck, Betsy.

  ‘Can you get away? For a night?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  After France, after Raymond and Eric had their picture taken at L’Hotel Oiseau, after Brussels and Luxembourg and the ferry to England, Raymond went back to Antigua with packets of heroin sewn into his jacket. They found it at the airport and for a moment, because my father was behind Raymond in line, because he saw what was happening, my father hung back. It was the surprise, he said later, the need for a moment to prepare, to plan a defense. Raymond claimed Dad would have climbed back onto the plane if he could have, gone out the back door, if there were one. Still, it was my father who went with Raymond to the police station. It was my father’s name that appeared first in the Antigua newspapers. Raymond’s picture was grainy and indistinct. My father’s was a government headshot that had appeared in the paper many times before: a picture showing his intelligence and gravity, his lean features and smooth forehead. There was also a photograph of my mother and Eric and Raymond and me taken the summer before at the pool. My mother’s honeysuckle hair was shorter than usual, just to the shoulders, and her legs were in the water, feet extended so the tips of her toes showed, and her eyes were made up, even poolside, to be deep and almost sorrowful. ‘Happier times for Mrs. Scott,’said the caption. ‘Raymond, 18, Betsy, 12, Eric, 11.’

  Frank put me in a cab. I felt bad, and also afraid. What if Beck found out?

  Beck picked me up from school the next day and all the blood went out of my face when I saw him. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, and it was awful, the way he backed away a little.

  ‘Nothing.’

  It was windy and clear. We walked around the corner, stopping beside a stoop. ‘What is it?’ he asked, me in the corner and him in front of me, his hand against the wall. The wind rattled a can in the gutter and I started to cry.

  ‘Betsy, are you sick? What is it?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, and then I saw it light into him: the truth. I saw it cross his face.

  ‘No, don’t fucking tell me, ‘cause I know.’ He didn’t even raise his voice, but it was as if he did. I wanted to put my arms around him. ‘And you know what? You know what?’ He raised his hands in the air. ‘I’m not even going to go there. Not now. I’ll see you later.’

  I walked home by myself, shivery as if from the cold, but it wasn’t the cold. The whole time I was walking, I was thinking maybe Frank would show up, in his car beside me. When I got home, I went up to my room, and at dinner I hardly ate, so my mother asked if I was sick and I said no. Then I called Beck at his house but his mother answered. She had an accent. It sounded German. She told me Beck wasn’t home and wouldn’t be until late.

  I knew Beck wouldn’t come to school to break up with me, so when I saw him the next day, relief came over me in a hot wave. ‘Come here,’ he said, his face all closed and impassive, the way it usually was, I guess, the way Sylvia and Henry complained about.

  We went back around the corner, to the same stoop, and I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ covering my face with my hands and crying again so Beck said, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Betsy. Stop it.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to. I don’t even—’

  ‘Stop it.’ He took my wrist. ‘I mean it.’ People were walking by looking at us, so I turned my face. Beck moved in closer and lowered his voice. ‘I know what’s going on. But I can’t completely blame you. I kind of let it happen—not because I wanted to, but because that’s the way it is.’

  ‘The way what is?’

  ‘The way it is with Frank.’

  What did he mean, he let it happen? It would have happened with Frank or with someone else because that’s the way I was.

  ‘Can we go?’ I asked. ‘Can we not stand here?’

  He shook his head. Maybe he was finished with me.

  ‘Can we go to your house?’ I asked.

  ‘Now? I don’t know about now, Betsy.’ I rubbed my face and my head with my hands, the way he always did, so he said, ‘Come on.’

  Then, in his room, we lay on his bed and Beck looked up at the ceiling, hands on his chest. ‘Of course, you have fucked it up. Between us.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You should go.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go on. Get out of here.’

  ‘Beck.’

  ‘Go on.’

  I put on my clothes, starting to cry again. ‘You shouldn’t pick me up at school,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll pick you up when I want to.’

  Frank called the school. The message was taped to my locker. ‘Frank. Four o’ clock, Park Avenue.’ I told myself I wouldn’t go. I told myself Beck would come instead, at three-thirty, and we would leave together. Beck didn’t come, though, and Frank was already there, double-parked in his silver Mercedes. He was on his cell phone and closed it up when he saw me.

  ‘Get in.’ He turned on the ignition, looking at the rearview mirror as he pulled out. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘You look stirred up.’

  ‘Why do I like you?’

  ‘You don’t have to like me, Betsy.’ His face was hard, yet interesting to me. His cold blue eyes, Atlantic and deep. We took the FDR Drive all the way down the island. I had made Beck wait so long and then Frank just moved his hand inside my shirt and touched my breast, like he had a right to.

  The sun in March was weak, like light at the beginning of day its rays long and flat. Frank came on Fridays, waiting in his car on the corner. Maybe Beck knew about this and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was acting the way I had with Ray letting things happen and then pretending I hadn’t.

  We walked downtown, and Beck wanted us to go to the playground, but I wouldn’t. ‘Why not?’ he asked me, his eyes all

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t know,’he mimi
cked.

  I was tired of sitting on the bench watching him play ball. I was tired of Tommy winking at me as if he knew something. ‘I should go,’ I told Beck, and he nodded at me, hardly even holding my gaze, wiping his forehead with his T-shirt.

  I sat on the cool edge of Frank’s Jacuzzi turning over his blue glass ashtray. It was the blue of a hazy morning in Antigua, a blue washed through with cloud, blue of my uniform and the flower at the edge of the road, of my mother’s eyes behind her sunglasses and Eric’s in the late afternoon as we dragged through the white dust after school, dirt in our brown leather sandals, eating hard candies from the general store: mint and vanilla and butterscotch.

  ‘Can I stay at Sylvia’s tonight?’ I asked when she picked up the phone. She never did suspect me. Sylvia had Frank’s cell phone number, in case my mother looked for me, but she didn’t. Frank and I went to dinner at Raoul’s and Match and Express. He liked steak frites and filet mignon and mussels. He liked bistros: the lights dim yellow, the tables dark wood, the napkins cloth. Frank slipped his hand under the table to my knee. He didn’t like to touch me in public. It was disrespectful, he said.

  I was something delicate when I was with Frank. Everything around was in a quiet hush. He winked at me and he was like this gold light inside me, a secret burning thread.

  Some nights, we ordered in: the same dishes from the same restaurants, which I slipped, as my mother would, onto china plates already warmed in the oven. Frank poured us wine, and when we were finished I cleared the table and Frank smoked a cigarette.

  I was another person altogether with Frank. I was more serious, and not just because Frank was serious, but because Frank didn’t think of me as a girl, he told me, but as a young woman. He told me this as if he was complimenting me, sitting with his legs up on his couch, smoking a cigar and regarding me as if I pleased him. I wasn’t dumb, though.

  ‘What difference does it make?’ I asked, carrying the dishes to the sink.

  ‘You’re mature.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘You’re flaky of course. Anyone hanging out with Beck has to be flaky. You won’t fall apart, though, if something bad happens.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m mature at all.’ He smiled.

  ‘You’re just telling me to be mature so I don’t get you into trouble.’

  ‘That’s my girl.’

  I watched him dressing one Saturday morning, looking at himself in the full-length mirrors inside his closet door. He had a meeting in Queens and put himself on the way most people put on outfits.

  ‘What did you look like at my age?’ I asked, sitting on the edge of his bed, waiting for him.

  ‘Better,’ he said, so we laughed.

  ‘Would you have liked me?’

  ‘Oh yes. I would have zeroed right in.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I would have married you.’

  ‘But not now.’

  ‘Now you’re too young.’ He put on a metallic blue tie. ‘And I’m fucked up.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He liked French cuffs. He liked gold cufflinks, or sometimes black.

  ‘Maybe I’ll marry Beck.’

  He shook out his sleeve so the cuff link settled beneath his wrist bone. He lifted my chin in his hand, on his way to the kitchen. ‘You will never marry Beck.’

  I followed him to the kitchen, where he took a bag of ground coffee from the fridge, scooped some into his espresso maker. ‘Were you married?’

  ‘Sure, I was.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Long enough.’

  ‘You don’t want to talk about it?’

  ‘I’m not the kind that looks back.’

  ‘I wish I could be like that.’

  ‘Why can’t you?’

  ‘I just feel like it’s there all the time—the past, things that happened.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Things.’

  He crossed his legs at the ankles. He looked so arrogant sometimes. ‘Something happened,’ he said, draining his cup, putting it behind him in the sink. ‘Or you wouldn’t be with me.’

  I smiled. That was why I liked him. I liked him the first moment, because he saw me for who I was, he saw I had been through something. And it was something that would serve him. He wanted me for that. I was so glad for this. That he valued this. It made my eyes tingle as if I was going to cry. Around his pale blue iris was a dark blue circle.

  ‘Don’t cry about it, though.’ He put his hand on my neck. ‘Go on. Keep going.’

  I wanted to tell him what it was. I wanted to tell him right then. I turned to him, but his face had closed. He had this slight smile on his lips, distant now, his hand pushing me away. ‘Go on

  Beck raised his chin when he saw me. He was leaning against a car outside school, acknowledging me but just barely. I didn’t know why he picked me up if he was going to act that way.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, and he rolled his eyes. He was so cold. He should have been cold, though, because of what I was doing. I wanted to apologize, but how could I, if I was going to see Frank again?

  We walked to Central Park and kicked around the dirty snow and he said, ‘Don’t think I don’t care, ‘cause I do. I care about everything, every tiny fucking little thing with you, but you know, I can’t deal.’

  We were on a bench at the boat pond and he pulled me onto his lap. He never wore a hat or gloves or even a scarf, so I tried to warm him up, moving my hands in my leather gloves on his arms in his peacoat, and then I held onto him like something terrible was happening to us, when it was just me, really, me and what I was doing with Frank. We went home to Beck’s, and maybe Beck wasn’t saying how angry he was at me, but I could feel it, the way he pinned my wrists to the sheets in his bed, the way he moved hard into me. I got tears in my eyes and I hated him. Then a moment later I felt bad for him, as if I loved him, as if I wanted to stay with him always.

  ‘Beck.’ I put my arm across his chest.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t be mad.’

  His muscles stiffened as if he was going to get up. He ran his fingers along my leg. I kissed his shoulder and he tasted of salt, and he was the one that cared about me; he was the one that would do anything for me and with me and because of me. I will not see Frank again, I told myself.

  Then I went to school and I got a phone message from Frank again.

  ‘4 o’clock, Park Avenue,’ and I pictured his great empty blue eyes and the way he gazed at me, half pleased and half amused, so it made me sick at myself and disgusted.

  Frank examined his face in the bathroom mirror: his long lashes, round eyes, taut skin. ‘I look old,’ he said.

  He had lines beside his mouth. He had a crease on his high forehead. His chest hair was turning gray from the divorce, he said, the death of his daughter.

  He made popcorn and opened bottles of mineral water. He smoked brown cigarettes called Nat Shermans. ‘Better than Queens?’ he asked me.

  ‘I’m not from Queens.’

  He watched stupid movies, the kind of movies I would never watch usually.

  ‘You hang out there.’

  ‘Why don’t you watch anything serious?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘You’re smart.’

  ‘I see serious stuff all day.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘What do you think? I see things you couldn’t imagine.’

  ‘Bad things?’

  He smiled, draining his mineral water. ‘You’re not such a saint yourself. Not even seventeen and fucking over your boyfriend.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  He laughed. ‘It’s true.’

  I didn’t know what to say when people were mean that way. I could be mean, too, but not that bad. Raymond had been the meanest.

  I went to his bedroom and lay on my back on the bed. I kept thinking he would get up and come in to see me. He didn’t, though. He had li
ved in the loft for a year, but it still smelled new. The walls and the carpet and the bed smelled new. Even the pillows and the sheets smelled new They smelled of fabric right from the store, not even washed. The floor smelled of wood and plastic. I should have been at home. I should have been with Beck or with Sylvia. I got tears in my eyes, not from sadness but from frustration, the way I wanted so much to leave, kept urging myself to leave, but just didn’t do it, just didn’t, ever, do it.

  When I woke, the sky was empty gray and vague, a four a.m. sky, the clouds like sheets hung out to dry. The television was off and Frank was on the bed, naked but for his cotton pajama pants. ‘Get up,’ he said. His voice was cold. He took me to the bathroom and ran the shower. ‘Wash,’ he said, so I did. Then he held out a towel. He kissed my mouth.

  He held my jaw between his fingers, which smelled of smoke. From the bed, the sky outside the windows moved from gray to white, not the faint misty cloud slipping down the rivers to the sea, but white the color of smoke and as dense, pressing at the windows with a kind of glare. It was easy for him to hurt me. Easy because he was strong. Easy because I would not let on that he was hurting me. Maybe, I even thought, I wanted him to hurt me—because if he hurt me, really hurt me, I might leave.

  Beck walked without speaking, grasping my hand. ‘He acts like he’s French or something,’ he said, drinking from his can of orange soda. ‘But I’ve seen his house. I’ve seen where he grew up.’

  ‘In Queens?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. Fucking garden gnomes and shit. Real impressive.’

  In his bed, I cupped myself with my hand, my flesh sore and swollen.

  ‘What is it?’ Beck asked and I shook my head.

  Frank gave me jelly, clear and cool so it didn’t hurt after that. Grass appeared in the pavement cracks and the sun shone sleek on the tops of cars. Frank and I went to West Broadway, art in the windows and bright fantastic clothes. He bought me a crimson dress, long and smooth and cool, that he hung in a garment bag alongside his suits.

  I watched, sitting on his bed. ‘Do you go out with people your own age?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you have photographs?’

  ‘I don’t keep photographs.’

  ‘Here,’ I said and handed him one of me.