She ran out of the room.
Beth Ann scooped black jelly onto a cracker. “You’ll like it better with sour cream,” she said, and added some. She held the cracker as he bit into it. The taste was salty, sharp, fishy. “You have to cultivate a taste for it,” Beth Ann said.
“I like it fine.” He took another. They snacked from the trays of elaborately arranged foods and then returned to the dance floor. He could not have named half of what he had eaten, and he had not honestly liked much of it, but he was acutely conscious of what it meant to eat caviar at a party, instead of popcorn. Beth Ann was beautiful, in a long straight-skirted dress of deep rose silk. All the girls at the prom had worn crinkly dresses with big skirts, but here he saw elegant dresses, probably bought in Dallas on special shopping trips. The singer, who wasn’t bad, was singing “Chances Are.” David had begun to lose his stiffness, but he did not hold Beth Ann close. He held her in what he hoped was a courtly manner, as if he were a visiting knight. He had been careful not to assume too much. He was a guest; he did not belong. Yet the other kids he knew from school greeted him warmly. “Beth Ann! David!” they said, as if it were the most natural thing for him to be there. Such was the power of invitation. The club was lavishly decorated and lighted. It was Fitzgerald territory. The young couples looked more relaxed than anybody had at the prom. Kids he knew from school were wildly unfamiliar in their finery, as if they wore saris or carried Mau Mau shields. They seemed to be their real selves here, older and more beautiful, far removed from the world of Basin High and its hysterical social machinery. A sudden thought pierced him: They have always had this world to go to. They have always been visiting the world where I was living. None of it has ever mattered to them.
Beth Ann’s cool fingers lay lightly on his neck. “This is going to be the most exciting new year, isn’t it?” she said. “When I think about going away, pledging a sorority, it makes me just tingle.”
He pressed his hand into her back. She let her chin rest on his shoulder.
They were at the table with the Kimbroughs and another adult couple when the band began the drum roll that led to a moment of loud horns. Confetti poured over them as if by magic, the room was filled with the cheers and cries of the assembled. Both of the older couples kissed. David did not know what to do. Beth Ann smiled up at him. “Happy New Year, David,” she said, and raised her face. He kissed her lightly on the lips. “Happy New Year, Beth Ann.”
The four of them went back to the Kimbrough home and ate scrambled eggs and toast off pretty china dishes. Laurel Kimbrough wore a long embroidered apron over her evening gown. She smiled at David and said, “I hope you can eat, after all the food at the club. We always have a New Year’s breakfast. It wouldn’t seem right not to.” He settled comfortably at the round table in their nook. Windows looked out on a garden, now bare except for scraggly bushes, and, farther on, onto a wall of stone or brick, now deep in night shadows. He tried to see the picture they would make to someone from outside, clustered around the table under a light that hung from the ceiling, but of course no one could see them, because they were at the back of the house, and there was the wall. The Kimbroughs chatted cozily, swapping observations of their friends, the food, the band, taking pleasure in recollection. They reminded him of Glee after a ball game or a dance, wanting to catalog everything she had seen, everything they had done. “Such a nice salmon paté!” Laurel said. “Didn’t Carl Bentley look smug with his pretty new wife?” Hayden said. “I liked all the slow tunes,” Beth Ann said dreamily. They did not seem to expect comment from their guest, did not seem to mind his presence or expect anything from him. They had allowed him into their “tradition” to make an odd number even. David thought, this must be what Cinderella felt like. He longed for his own room, his bed, he wanted to take off his formal clothes. He would want to think about the night, but suddenly there was too much of it. He felt foolish in his pink shirt. He wanted to be home.
Beth Ann took him there in her mother’s station wagon. In front of his house she said, “I’m so glad you could come.” The motor was running and she had her hands on the steering wheel. She had thrown a long cashmere scarf around her head, giving her the mysterious air of an older woman.
“I had a wonderful time,” he replied. There was nothing else to say. He stood on the edge of the yard and watched her drive away. He saw her glance into the rear-view mirror and wave her gloved hand. The station wagon did not look anything like a royal coach, but as it disappeared it was easy to imagine that if he ran after it, he would find a pumpkin.
He made his way through the house in the dark to his room. As he switched on his light there was a pounding at the alley door. Glee stormed into the room. She was wearing a wool coat over a dress. “I’ve been waiting for two hours!” she cried.
He glared at her, embarrassed in his white jacket and fine pants.
“You’re a bastard! You lied to me! Where did you go?”
“It’s none of your business. You have no right to spy on me.”
“You lied to me.”
The door from the kitchen flew open. His father was standing there in his baggy robe. “What is going on out here?” David moved quickly to shove his father back into the kitchen. “Go to bed. This will be over in a minute.” He slammed the door and turned back to Glee, who was standing in the middle of the room. Her coat had swung open. She was wearing a dress he had never seen, something blue and shiny. On her high heels, her one ankle turned awkwardly, she looked dangerously off-balance. “You go home,” he said menacingly.
She began weeping loudly, making pig noises with her nose. “I thought you loved me!” she shouted. “We’ve slept together a thousand times!”
He despised her for catching him. “That’s because you’re a whore, Glee,” he said. He felt as if he had fallen through an elevator floor. His stomach jumped and his head throbbed.
Glee was wearing the pearl drop necklace he had given her. She tore it from her neck and threw it to the floor, screaming. “I’m a whore! A whore! Whores get paid, David. What did I ever get from you for putting out? What did I ever get from you?”
He hung up his clothes carefully, and draped a towel over the shoulders of his white jacket. He heard movement and voices in the kitchen, so he went in to see who was up. He was in time to see his sister disappear around the corner, back to bed. A lamp was on in the living room; he heard the groan of the easy chair as his father’s slight weight settled in it. Marge sat at the table, sipping a drink with no ice. It was a little after two-thirty in the morning.
David poured himself some whiskey, added half a glass of water, took ice out for both of them, and joined his mother. She drank slowly as he told her about the evening. Her nose crinkled when he described the strange food, but by the time he told her about his one o’clock breakfast at the Kimbroughs, she was too blank for expression. Still he was certain she listened to every word.
25.
He spent all of New Year’s Day with Patsy and her friends. They lay around on the floor on folded blankets, listening to Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck. All the music was new to David. “Sketches of Spain” reverberated straight up his spine. Patsy kept smiling at him, as if to say, I told you so. The two men, James and Ari, treated her affectionately, teasingly, but David could not see that neither one was especially attached to her. That made him feel better about them. Patsy was at ease, though she did not have much to say. There was plenty of Lone Star beer, and pretzels, Fritos, fat pickles, and a chicken Ari had roasted on a bed of onions. Patsy encouraged her friends to talk. James told about the beer and sausages in Germany, the easy feeling his blondness gave him there. Ari told about the Philippines, where he was stationed before Germany. He said he had eaten dog meat.
David got up to stretch, and walked around the room. Books lay in no order: Lawrence, Kerouac, Buber, Pound, and others. David picked up books, held them and riffled the pages, read a line or two in each. He would have liked to ask Ar
i what he thought, but about what? His reading? Basin? The world in general? He wanted, really, to ask him: How do I get where you are? How do I know to have these books, and where to get them?
He could not think why the New York Jew would want to spend half a year in a place like Basin, a place he only longed to leave. James he understood better. He had gone away, to the army, and he had grown up. He had seen things. He knew how to order in a restaurant in another language, maybe more than one; he knew how to ride cheap trains (he told about visiting Italy that way) and find a room not too close to the station. Coming back allowed him to see what he had left behind, and to be glad of it; David did not believe James would stay this time. He would not want to lead a boom and bust life dependent on the vicissitudes of the oilfields. He would find a kind of work that he could do in the greater world, the world Ari had come from; he was lucky, to have made a friend to show him the way.
Later in the afternoon, after a couple of desultory games of Hearts, Ari changed the music. He played The Midnighters (“Work with me, Annie;” “Sexy Ways”) and Chuck Berry, the Drifters, Little Richard. He had a trash bucket filled with 45’s. He played LaVern Baker singing the original “Tweedle Dee,” stolen by Georgia Gibbs. He talked on and on about the way R & B was changing the culture, how even though it had been ‘whited up’ we would all see that after Elvis, nothing would ever be the same. That made James remember that there was an Elvis movie, “King Creole,” at the downtown theatre. Patsy ran back to her rooms to cook supper for her father; afterwards, they would all go.
David used the bathroom and washed his face. He tucked his shirt into his chinos and pulled himself up tall. He thought he was better-looking than James or Ari, their advantage was only age. He felt like he had spent the day in a museum (which he had never done); he had learned about culture, hadn’t he?
Seated on the couch, his legs stretched out in front of him, he found himself telling his hosts about the fight he had seen a few days earlier. It was like scratching an itch and discovering a mass of bites. Once he started talking—he mentioned it casually, wondering what they would have to say—he grew more and more intense, searching for the right description, the right feeling for what had happened. “I felt like there was a glass wall between me and the fight. There was nothing I could do.”
James drawled, “Nobody wants interference in a fight. That’s for cops.”
Ari said, “I must have had two or three fights a week the years I was in junior high. I lived in the streets. Then I looked around; boys had shot up, put on weight. I was never going to catch up. I had to get by some other way. I learned to skirt a fracas. I learned how much it doesn’t matter. I’ve never had a fight since I was fourteen. Not in the army, either.”
James laughed. “Hell no, Finny. Men were too scared of your sharp tongue.”
David asked James, “What about you? In Basin? Did you fight?”
James yawned hugely. “I came very close one time and that was really it. I played football, there was plenty of bruising there. But this one time, I was in eighth grade. None of us could drive yet. There was a ruckus of some sort on the playground at school. I don’t remember what it was about. A smart remark I guess. Some stupid junior high insult. There were two big groups of us who stuck together. Sometimes at recess we threw rocks, that sort of crap. Only this day, somebody said, Let’s fight it out, shitheads. We agreed. As soon as school was out, we’d meet at the old windmill east of the school, out where the houses stopped and the prairie took over. I was scared to death, I wasn’t very big—I had a big spurt the next year, surprised me most of all—but I couldn’t not go when all my buddies would. The only thing was, I was wearing this brand new shirt my mama had bought me a few days before. I knew she’d kill me if I ripped it or got blood on it—this went across my mind and I was miserable at the idea. I was more scared of my mama than of the boys, so I said I had to go home and change first. My neighbor, Stevie, in my class, said if we ran home his brother would be home from high school and he would drive us out to the windmill. We ran off, I changed, then we had to wait maybe ten minutes for the car. When we finally got out near the windmill we could see all the boys in our class there, and as many more there to watch; we could hear shouting going on. Kids were shaking their fists and trying to menace one another, but nobody had had the nerve to start punching. And before I could get out of the car, we heard sirens coming from the other way. It wasn’t going to happen! I could go home unscathed but not a coward.”
Ari had enjoyed James’ tale. “It’s always like OK Corral with you Western boys,” he laughed. “We had skirmishes. They happened where they began, nobody ran off to get ready. There would be blood, and we’d scatter, knowing there was always another time to come.”
Suddenly David longed to tell them about LaVonne. There had always been girls like that. What did they do in cities? Duck into alleyways? Vacant lots? He would never have the nerve to ask Ari, but James was a local. David wanted to hear about Basin when James was still young and stupid enough to cruise with creeps, doing things he wouldn’t be proud of in the morning. Casually, testing the water, he said, “So, James. If there’s football, fights, and fucking, you’ve only told us about the first two. Were there girls to ride around with? Girls to—” He faltered, aware that James and Ari were looking at him with something very much like disgust. The laughs had all died away.
In a low casual voice, James said, “I didn’t start dating till late. I didn’t slum with girls, didn’t think of them that way. You see, with girls, by the time I’d changed my shirt, so to speak, the scene was breaking up. I joined the Army and went off to life like men live.” James and Ari exchanged looks.
David stood up and beat his chest like a monkey. “Jesus, we’ve been sitting around the whole damned day! I need to stretch my legs. I’ll go see what’s keeping Patsy.” He was getting no encouragement from the two men. “We still on for ‘King Creole?’”
“I never miss an Elvis flick,” Ari said.
James said, “Tell Patsy it’s my treat,” and instantly David knew he would not. James had meant some sort of insult. David would pay for Patsy. If he had not gone off and lived like men live, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean, he did know how to act in Basin, Texas, with a girl his own age.
He spent most of the few remaining days with Patsy, Ari and James. No more was said about fights and girls, certainly not in front of Patsy. It crossed David’s mind that it was odd, when he was alone with the men, that they never, even then, mentioned the women of Germany, Italy, the Philipines, New York. They asked no questions of David, as if he lived a general life, the details inconsequential, the broad outline available to anyone who looked out on the flat streets of Basin, and beyond, onto the dun prairie. They talked about books and music and politics. Occasionally, they politely entertained comments from David (he had very little to say on any of their topics, but sometimes he had read a pertinent article), then returned to their odd little duet of comments. Their sighs and glances arose out of two years’ shared company, the fortune of foreign travel, and the confidence of youth moved into adulthood, still unburdened by debt, ambition, and authority. They were a happy pair, and David envied them both their experience and their friendship.
26.
David attended an opera performance in the school auditorium. Not a whole opera, but pieces—what were they called? arias?—from “La Boheme,” “Madame Butterfly,” “La Traviata,” and others he had already forgotten. Five performers from the Houston Opera were going to Santa Fe, and a local music-lover had arranged for them to stop in Basin. Mrs. Schwelthelm told them about it in English and then Patsy called him and asked if he wanted to go with her and Ari.
The singers were an intriguing group. Two of them were Negroes, a woman and a man. The woman had a massive chest and a fascinatingly huge mouth. The white men wore their hair rather long, combed in an almost womanish way. All their voices were amazing. There were moments in the songs that gave David a
chill, but at other times he had to fight his desire to yawn and stretch. He had no idea what they were singing about, though the program summarized the selections. Sometimes he could see the singers’ throats trembling.
By the time the singing was over, he was starved. Ari had bought the tickets, and would not let David repay him, so David offered to treat the trio at the Stockman Cafe.
They were eating hamburgers when the five performers came in and took the big circle booth in the corner of the busy cafe. All the customers stared. At the counter, a couple of redneck types cawed, “Look what the cat drug in,” and then called out to Mick, the cook, “You gonna serve niggers in here?”
The pleasant clang and buzz of the cafe came to an abrupt halt. David could not remember ever seeing a Negro in the Stockman, though, technically, he believed Negroes were supposed to be able to eat where they wanted. In fact David could not remember being in the same room with a Negro in his whole life, unless you counted the times they were in the grocery store, or Sears, where they had their own water fountain in the back by the bathrooms. His heart was thudding. Patsy, seated beside him, took his hand. The waitress looked like a statue, her hands on the back edge of the counter. After several moments, a man in the back said, “Any chance of getting more coffee back here?” and the waitress jumped as if he had goosed her. David watched the performers speaking in low voices. The hicks at the counter started up again. “You smell something!” one of them said. The other coughed and gagged. A couple of good ole boys sitting two booths down from the performers got up and made a big show of skirting the corner booth. Patsy was squeezing David’s hand hard. Ari had a bland, interested look on his face; hadn’t he come, after all, to see the natives?
The performers stood and quietly eased their way out of the booth. All of them left except one, a tall white man, who went to the counter, near where David was sitting, and asked the waitress if he could get an order to go. One of the men at the counter said, “They don’t serve no collard greens here.” The waitress, red-eyed, fled into the kitchen. The man from the opera group turned and looked out at the customers, as if he were going to speak, then shook his head and left. David sighed, Patsy sighed, they smiled at one another nervously. At least there had not been a fight. The waitress came back from the kitchen with the cook.
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