The Dark Side of Innocence

by Terri Cheney

  Oh, fuck the car, I wanted to say. But I nodded. “Here, I’ll show you.” I reached over and took his hand and placed it on the stick shift. Then I switched on the engine, and that inimitable growl filled the evening air, drowning out Art Garfunkel. As it settled into a sexy rumble, I put my hand on top of Bob’s and guided him through the motions of shifting.

  “It’s a really short bridge,” he said. Again, not quite sure what this meant, I nodded and said, “It’s the best.”

  For the first time since we’d got in the car, Bob looked at me directly. “You know, you’ve got really pretty hair,” he said. He reached out and brushed it back from my face. “Soft, too.”

  I flushed, not with embarrassment but with victory. The Black Beast urged me to lean over and plant a big kiss on Bob’s lips, and it took all the self-control I could muster to keep my body still. Boys liked to pursue and conquer, I knew. But I also knew that at this rate, I’d never be kissed. I’d die an old maid, like my great-aunt Bessie, all covered in afghans and cat hair and Liberty prints.

  “But what about Elisa?” I suddenly thought.

  “To hell with Elisa,” the Black Beast hissed. “She just made junior varsity cheerleader. She doesn’t need Bob Greene to make her popular. Whereas you, on the other hand . . .”

  The Beast was right. Besides, there was no loyalty left in my body, only nerve endings. When Bob’s fingers gently touched my cheek, time turned a somersault. On the one hand, it took an eternity for Art Garfunkel to sing the last note. On the other, my heart was beating faster than a dragonfly’s wings, and I hovered over the moment, drinking it all in: the night, Bob’s touch, the delicate vibrations of the engine. I looked around quickly, to make sure no one was listening. Then I whispered, “If you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll let you take it for a spin someday.”

  He whispered back, “How’s Friday night? My parents are gone until Saturday, so we can just hang out at my house. I can barbecue, if you’d like.”

  A date! An actual date! The Black Beast was so exhilarated, I couldn’t hold him back. I leaned over boldly in Bob’s direction, and finally, his lips met mine: my first authentic French kiss. For an instant, the image of Elisa’s face flashed through my mind, but it was quickly flooded by a sea of sensory input. Bob’s lips melted into my own. His tongue was in my mouth, warm and probing, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do. But he was gentle, if insistent, and my body got the hang of it long before my mind knew how to respond. I put my hand against the nape of his neck and pulled him closer to me.

  We’d rounded second base before I finally pulled away—not out of any sense of modesty or discretion but because a police car pulled up alongside us and flashed its lights. “Take it inside,” the officer said. I was annoyed by the interruption and was about to say something acerbic back, when Bob put his hand on mine. “I think we’d better go back to the party,” he said. “They’ll be wondering what happened to us.”

  “They,” of course, meant Elisa, and I was crushed that Bob would still care. A bit huffily, I said, “Maybe I should just go home,” and to my surprise, Bob said, “Yeah, maybe that would be best. But I’ll see you Friday night. Seven sharp.” He kissed me quickly on the cheek and said, “But for now, it’s just our secret, right?” And he left.

  As I drove home—taking all the side streets, hyperconscious of that cop car patrolling nearby—I pondered the subtext of Bob’s words. Maybe he wanted to keep our date a secret until he could tell Elisa that they were through. That would be the gentlemanly thing to do, and it was clear that Bob was a gentleman. (I would probably have let him get to third base, but he didn’t press his advantage.) Maybe he wanted to start our relationship fresh, without any encumbrances hanging over it. Yeah, that must be it. For all of a block, I basked in this thought, until I heard the Black Beast snicker.

  “You’re such a child,” he said.

  “You call what I was doing just now childish? Hardly,” I replied.

  “He wants to keep it a secret because you’re the other woman.”

  I was so disturbed by this I almost ran a stop sign. “You’re wrong,” I said. “Bob really likes me.”

  “Sure, he likes you when you’re like this.”

  I knew what the Black Beast meant. Had Bob seen me this same time last Saturday night, in rumpled old syrup-stained pajamas, stuffing my face with raw pancake mix . . .

  “And the only reason that you like him is because he’s Elisa’s boyfriend. Forbidden fruit is always sweeter to you.”

  I suddenly felt stone-cold sober. It sounded harsh, but it was true. I’d liked the maneuverings, the danger of being caught, the illicit thrill of our encounter, even better than I’d liked being kissed. Who was Bob Greene to me, anyway? A total stranger who knew nothing about my life. Whereas secrecy and I were old flames.

  “Don’t worry,” the Black Beast said in a soothing, conciliatory tone. “You’ll make an excellent other woman.”

  I’m glad that at sixteen I didn’t know how true this statement would prove to be. All I knew at that moment was that my first real kiss had been stolen, and I adored the taste of theft.

  Big events sometimes turn on little things: my mother had a bad case of the sniffles. Which meant that she didn’t go in to work; which meant that she was home all week, watching TV in the kitchen; which meant that I couldn’t access the liquor cabinet. Without the elixir of alcohol to fuel his exhilaration, the Black Beast quickly settled back into the doldrums. They weren’t quite as bad as the twenty-one days of hell from which I had just emerged, but still I felt (and no doubt looked) quite awful, so I avoided Bob on campus. Miss Miller let me stay in her classroom to read during lunch, and I spent breaks holed up in the girls’ bathroom.

  Once again, the days turned long and dull, and I grew weary of life. It was all I could do just to get up, get dressed, and drive myself to school. By Friday night—date night—I was a wreck. I needed to be witty, pretty, and sexy, but all I could think of was how empty and meaningless the universe was, how leaden the air felt against my skin. Panicked, I called up Rhonda.

  “I can’t go,” I said as soon as she answered the phone.

  “You have to. It’s Bob Greene, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I know, I know. Quit pressuring me.”

  “What did you finally decide to wear?”

  I surveyed the contents of my closet, which were strewn about the room. “Nothing.”

  “That’ll make an impression.”

  “I’m serious. Nothing I own looks good on me.” The truth was, nothing fit. I’d been doing my usual late-night eating all week, and I must have gained at least five pounds.

  “Then you’d better go with something black. Black is always sexy.”

  Except when your skin was as sickly pale as a sliver of new moon. But Rhonda was right: when in doubt, grab black.

  “Whatever you do, you’d better hurry,” she said. “It’s already six thirty-five. Aren’t you supposed to be there by seven?”

  “Oh shit. I’ve got to go.” I hung up and faced myself in the mirror, hands on my hips like a gunslinger getting ready to draw. No doubt about it: that perky, flushed girl that Bob had kissed only a week ago was nowhere to be seen. In her place was a blob of blue-white flesh with a slash of crimson lips. My mother had lent me her lipstick for the evening. What bloomed like cherries against her tanned skin looked like vampire’s blood on me.

  My body felt heavy and so, so slow. I pulled on a pair of black drawstring pants and a thick black turtleneck sweater. I looked, from various angles, like a beatnik, a ninja, or a refugee from the Vietcong. But it would have to do. I couldn’t muster the energy to try on another blessed thing.

  I dreaded the moment when Bob answered his door, but he was well-behaved. There was just the slightest pause between beats when he said, “You look . . . great.” He leaned down to kiss me on the lips, but I was in no mood to be touched. I turned my head at the very last moment, so his lips just grazed my ear. He led me into the
living room (lavish with chintz; I couldn’t stand chintz), and I slumped down on the overstuffed sofa.

  “So how was your week? Haven’t seen you around,” he said, sitting down next to me. Close. Too close. I inched away.

  “So-so,” I said.

  “Did anything good happen?”

  “No.”

  “Did anything bad happen?”

  “No.”

  We sat there in awkward silence, the space between us quivering with question marks.

  “You seem a little, um, different tonight,” he finally said. “Is everything okay?”

  I felt my armpits begin to sweat, but I didn’t know what to say. I just nodded.

  “I guess I should go out and check on the steaks,” Bob said, standing up. “How do you like yours cooked?”

  For the life of me, I couldn’t answer him. Rare, medium, well-done—what difference did it make? The meat was dead and getting deader by the second. I felt like I was going to cry. I shook my head. “I don’t care.”

  “Can I get you a glass of wine while we wait?”

  Now that the Black Beast could answer. “Yes, please,” I said, sitting up slightly straighter.

  Bob opened a bottle of Cabernet, poured me a big, full glass of it, and went outside to the barbecue. While he was gone, I took several serious slugs straight from the bottle. I didn’t particularly like the taste, but I loved how it felt going down my throat: warm, with a prickly tingle that made me (or at least, my esophagus) feel like I was alive again. I heard Bob slide the screen door open, and I took another quick swig. I barely managed to swallow it before he came back into the room.

  “You haven’t touched your wine,” he said, gesturing to my glass. “Don’t you like it?”

  “It’s fine.” I knew that a lady should only sip wine, but for once, I cared more about the way I felt than the way I must have looked. I took a long drink, then a second, then a third, almost emptying the glass. The Black Beast was starting to wake up again, to care about his surroundings. I looked around me. “You know, I really hate chintz.”

  Bob laughed and refilled my glass. “So do I.”

  I took another deep drink, then another. “This wine is delicious. At least you have good taste, even if your decorator doesn’t. Who’s responsible for this mess?”

  “Well, actually, my mother.”

  I buried my face in my glass, hoping to hide my embarrassed blush. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “No, it’s fine. Would you like some more wine?” I’d finished it without thinking.

  “Sure, if you don’t mind. I guess I was thirstier than I realized.”

  By now I was starting to feel relaxed—no, better than relaxed. Revivified. As if someone had injected adrenaline into my corpselike veins. I kicked off my shoes and swung my legs up onto the couch. “So, Bob, what’s it like being big man on campus?” I asked.

  He looked a little startled, then sat down next to me. “I don’t think I’m all that popular.”

  “Are you kidding? All the girls want to go out with you. You’ve got them on a string. They’re like yo-yos.” I liked the sound of that and repeated it. “Yeah, girls are just like yo-yos to you.”

  “Really?” He seemed pleased and put his hand on my knee. “I doubt that that’s the truth, and besides, I’m not really interested in what all the girls feel. Only one girl at the moment.” He leaned in to kiss me, but I wasn’t through talking.

  “I personally think popularity’s way overrated,” I said. “I mean, you get to hang out by the tiger. So what? You have to dress like everyone else, talk like everyone else, pretend to care that you’re really interested in what they all are saying, when it’s usually just trivial bullshit. You know what I mean?”

  “But you’re a Mauna Loa, aren’t you?”

  “So?” I took another drink.

  “So you’re one of them. The popular girls.”

  “I know. I think it’s a drag.”

  “Then why don’t you quit?”

  “Are you kidding? And not be popular?”

  “But you just said—”

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t listen to me. Let’s talk about you. What do you really think about me?” I started to laugh, and couldn’t stop.

  Bob looked a little nervous. “I think you’re smart, and you’re pretty, and—you’re out of wine. There’s another bottle in the fridge; just give me a minute.” He came back with a bottle of Chardonnay. “Sorry, no more red. Is white okay?”

  “A-Okay.” As I watched him pour the wine into my glass, a sudden overwhelming feeling of sorrow came over me. Tears welled up in my eyes. “Just think of all the poor little grapes that gave their lives for this one bottle of wine. I think everything has feelings, don’t you? Even this dumb old chintz sofa. Who knows, maybe it hurts when we sit on it.” I stood up, felt a rush of dizziness, and sat back down. “Then again, maybe it’s just too stupid to notice.”

  “Well, I’m not too stupid to notice you,” Bob said and gave the kiss another try.

  “That was a really clumsy transition,” I said. “Not worthy of your reputation. If you want to kiss me, just say so.”

  “Okay, I want to kiss you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re smart, and you’re pretty, and—”

  “You already said that.” I felt a drop of sweat trickle down the back of my neck, and I realized I was angry. “I’ll bet you give Elisa better reasons than that.”

  He pulled back. “Let’s leave Elisa out of this.” He put the cork back into the bottle. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good—”

  I grabbed him and kissed his mouth so hard that our front teeth clinked together. I pressed my body so tightly against his, I could feel his shirt buttons burning into my breasts, branding the tender skin. He moaned, and for a second I was ten years old again and back in Dan O’Leary’s bathroom. Now, as then, the sound frightened me. To my surprise, the Black Beast stepped in to rescue me. It was his game now.

  In a sudden veer of mood, I pulled my tongue and body out of Bob’s grasp, and held him out at arm’s length.

  “What’s wrong—” he started to say, but I gently placed my forefinger on his lips. I’d read my share of romance novels, so I knew just what to try. I leaned in, until my mouth was nuzzled up against his ear.

  “Slowly,” I murmured. “Like this.”

  Then I delicately traced his earlobe with my tongue. Softly, like powder from a courtesan’s brush, I fell upon his face and neck: dozens of light little kisses barely ruffling the skin, each one building upon the last, until he was shivering with pleasure. As I started to unbutton his shirt—coolly, deliberately, as if each button were the last of its kind—he moaned again, but this time his moan didn’t frighten me. We were in control now, the Black Beast and I. Only God can make a man, or so the nuns had told me. But hey, I could make a man moan.

  I had absolute power, and all it once it bored me absolutely. I was sick of Bob’s buttons. I started to move on to his belt (another moan), but it was stubborn, and I quickly grew tired of tugging at it. I needed another drink, to make my motions more fluid, to dim the awfully bright lights, to get me back in the proper mood. I was suddenly sleepy; so very, very sleepy. I yawned and reached for my glass of wine.

  “No, don’t stop now,” Bob pleaded. “That felt amazing.”

  I took a deep swallow, but it went down the wrong way, and I choked. “Put your hands up over your head,” Bob said, and he started to thump on my back. I continued to sputter, and I could feel my face turning fiery red.

  “Try putting your head down between your knees,” Bob said.

  As long as I was moving slowly, everything had been fine. But all this frantic commotion stirred up something inside me, and that something wasn’t good. My mouth turned to acid, my stomach heaved, and without further warning, waves and waves of wine spewed out of me, all over Bob’s jeans and his mother’s faux Persian rug.

  Not surprisingly, that was the end of Bob and m
e. The only good thing about throwing up was that it got me sober enough to drive home. I poked my head in the den to tell my parents good night.

  “How did it go?” my mother asked.

  “Great. I just want to savor the moment, okay?” I slid the doors shut before they could see—or smell—me more closely.

  The next day, Saturday, was laundry day. My mother and I always split the chore. It was my job to pick out all my father’s shirts from the hamper, sniff them for perfume, and check the collars for lipstick. It was never exactly spelled out to me, but ever since I was a little girl, I’d known that the perfume I was sniffing for was not my mother’s Arpège, and the lipstick stains were not her signature shade of cherry blossom red.

  Searching for evidence of other women didn’t seem the slightest bit strange to me then. My mother was convinced that my father was unfaithful, and I naturally assumed from that that everyone cheats. Perhaps it explains why I was so willing to betray poor Elisa. In any event, I never found any proof of my father’s infidelity. But it was as much a part of our family mythology as the infamous baby blue Cadillac.

  Although I adored my father, I wasn’t in the mood that morning to smell his musty old shirts. A bit of nausea still lingered on, and I noticed my eyes wouldn’t focus quite right when I tried to examine the collars.

  “You didn’t smell that one thoroughly. Really bury your nose in it,” my mother scolded me, picking up a shirt I had just discarded and putting it back in the “unsniffed” pile.

  “So how did it go with Bob Greene last night?” she asked. “And what kind of name is Greene, anyway? Scottish? Irish?”

  I knew what she was really asking, and it annoyed the hell out of me, as always. “Don’t worry, Mom, he’s a WASP.”

  “I was just asking; you don’t have to get all huffy with me. I just want to make sure you’re associating with the right sort of people.”

  We’d had this argument so many times, I knew where it was heading. I was in no condition for a fight of that magnitude. “The right sort of people” meant white, middle class (or, preferably, upper), and American; no deviations whatsoever allowed. No matter how many times I encountered it, my mother’s staunch conservatism always came as a shock to me, especially given my father’s breezy liberal politics. It was just another conundrum of their coupling that I hoped to sort out one day when I was older, wiser, and more jaded.