Once, in Lourdes

by Sharon Solwitz

  “Wait.”

  “What?”

  He walks over. Stands close. “I didn’t tell Dad about you. I swear. But there’s stuff I could say. That I could have said—”

  Her cry rises to where only a dog could hear it. “Is this some weird blackmail? Don’t be a psycho!” She takes his hand in both of hers, kisses it tenderly, then gives it a shake. His face looks so much older and wiser than anyone else’s face. But he is crazy. Or what he is saying sounds crazy to her. She pushes away from him, shuts his door as quietly as she can. Back at last in her own room, she quickly stuffs the gun and its single bullet into a thick wool sock and stows it at the bottom of her backpack, which she puts in the closet between two quilts. Then she lies down and tries not to think about Garth or Saint or anyone.

  15

  Saint

  The boy was seventeen, Saint hears on the radio. He was Saint’s age, and he had a name, Dean Johnson, and he was a Sioux from South Dakota. Or maybe he wasn’t a Sioux, he was just from Sioux Falls. The facts get murkier as they accrue. He was with a friend; he was alone. He’d come for the convention; he’d come for work. He was shot three times; Saint heard only one shot. But did he have a gun? That he pointed at a cop? All Saint saw was the kid raising his arms in surrender, although “according to police, Johnson’s gun misfired….”

  Saint dislikes conflicting information. He is further unsettled by the one fact the reporters agree upon, that Dean Johnson is dead. The death seems indisputably wrong. The whole saga makes him feel muddled and stupid about himself. But at the same time he is happy this morning, intensely. So he is bopping along country roads in the dawn’s early light, riding to the Haight before his friends will be there. After a week of trying in vain to expunge from his brain the “thing” with CJ (the lapse; craziness?)—after meditating long and hard to ban any trace of a naked male from his brain (even as he knows that banning an image is the best way to summon it), suddenly, blam! the worry is gone. Vera might have kissed him last night as a joke or a taunt, but it aroused him. He was aroused by a girl, and he still is; he wants a girl! He feels only compassion for CJ, whose feelings he has hurt, though unintentionally. He must find a way to make it up to him.

  The Pledge will come due in eight days, but it’s nothing he has to think about now, as he enters the park. After circling the empty field, he parks his bike by the pay phone near the restrooms and calls Vera, so happy at the prospect of the sound of her voice he doesn’t even plan out what he’ll say. Unfortunately he gets the old man, who recognizes his voice at the first stammer. “You go anywhere near my girl I’ll have your balls, do you hear me? I’ll cut them off and hang them from my rearview mirror—” The threat follows Saint back to his scooter.

  He rides to Vera’s street, chains his bike to a tree around the corner, sits and watches the sun rise. People pass—a boy on a bike, an old man with a carved wooden cane, a woman with three tiny dogs on one leash. The sky is brightening, with heat on the edges of things. He’s about to head back to the park to wait when he feels a flicker at the base of his skull like an electrical charge. He doesn’t even have to look to know it’s her.

  She turns in the opposite direction without seeing him. He calls her name, but too softly. He stumbles to his feet like a drunk and follows her, a block or so behind, reluctant now to make his presence known. Is this a weird thing to do? Well, he’s doing it. At the Haight, instead of crossing toward their spot by the bluff she turns south into the woods, moving fast, and now he wishes he had his bike. Still he continues along the groomed path through the trees to the narrow sandy trail along the bluff. The trail moves downhill as it goes south, the drop to the beach lessening. He thought she was going to CJ’s, but he passes the wall at the edge of the property without a glimpse of her. He follows the path, quickening his pace till he comes to the flight of railroad ties that descend to the beach.

  He has lost her. The lake stretches below, almost white against the blue sky. Patches of fog lie on the water. The lake is still, except for its regular slow, foamless swells, a gentle rise and fall like the chest of someone sleeping. Perhaps she jumped CJ’s wall and is back there hiding from him? It makes no sense, but then Vera doesn’t always make sense. With a deep breath, slowing his heart like a yogi, he makes a choice and starts down to the beach.

  Halfway down the slope, he sees a swimmer out in the lake, hair fanning behind like a trail of seaweed. Now he’s hurtling down, almost falling. He lands on his knees and ignores the pain; he flies across pebbly sand and—no time to undress—flings himself into the water, clothes and all.

  He’s not a great swimmer; he didn’t learn till he moved here. And it’s slow going in sodden jeans. A few more brain cells and he’d have taken his shoes off. He pulls them off now, jeans too, and hurls them backward over his shoulder without turning to see what hits the shore. The water is cold and it gets colder the farther out he goes, but he can move now. Then the sandbar falls away and he’s swimming forcefully toward where he thinks she is, though with his eyes full of water he can only guess, and he’s splashing too hard to hear anything but himself.

  At that thought he stops, treads water, and there she is, ahead but not far. Her crawl is steady, efficient, not frantic; he can’t tell what’s on her mind except that she’s resolutely swimming away from the beach. With a dozen laboring strokes he’s past her and circling, in the way of wherever she means to go. He has strength, if not skill. No harm will befall her on his watch, even if it makes her angry. He tries to keep his head above the swells, to keep her in sight. Then she ducks under a wave and suddenly vanishes. When he sees her again she is yards away, swimming toward shore.

  He follows, not unhappily. His surge of energy is depleted, and he concentrates on moving one arm, then the other, lifting his head only to keep her in view. On the sandbar, where the water comes to his waist and her chest, she regards him without pleasure. A horsefly lands on her forehead; she swats it; it plunks between them. He feels her disgust with the insect body, its heft, its mere and purposeless (to her lights) existence. Her small breasts bob in the surf. She was smart enough to take off her clothes. The bandage over his tattoo has loosened; he pulls it out from under his shirtsleeve and watches it float away, then start to sink. There’s a sting on his arm that he hasn’t noticed till now. His gaze moves to the mark between her breasts, 4EVER; he’s glad for the link between them. She says, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Christ,” he says, “I thought you were…”

  “What?”

  His eyebrows scrunch stupidly together. “I was afraid…Shit. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” Quickly, as if her mere speaking is a favor to him, she says, “I know what you thought. You thought I was going to drown myself.” Her face is so cold upon him, it makes him dizzy. “You don’t know the faintest thing about me.”

  He finds his jeans rising and falling with the shoreline waves. Back on the sand, he wrings them out and pulls them, dripping, up his legs quickly, before she finishes dressing. He wants to feel her wet body against him, but it’s not an option. He tries a joke. “I thought you were swimming back to Chicago.” She doesn’t laugh or even smile. “Knock knock?”

  “I can’t relate to you, Saint.”

  “But would you like to? Relate to me?”

  Her look is pure ire.

  “Yesterday we related, didn’t we? You keep changing on me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  With her hair flattened to her head, her features are sharp and terrible in the light of morning: her brow, the high ridge of her nose. It hurts his eyes—her beautiful, skeletal face with the day swelling open. “Nothing happened yesterday,” she says. “Nothing between us. Why is everyone following me?”

  The thing he loves and hates most about her is how she changes on a dime, for nothing. Her flickering moods emit a kind of iridescence. He has gone blank; there are no words in his mind, nothing to hold on to. He’s about to fall into the hole
of his weakness and idiocy; then for no good reason she wraps her arms around his arm. He’s afraid to move. She kisses his shoulder, touches his cheek, then smooths her hair behind her ears and looks around. It’s blue toward the Haight, bright and hot. Southward is fog. “Thank you for trying to save my life, Saint. For wanting to. Really.” She picks up her pack and sets off south along the sandy beach, leaving a buzzy spot on his shoulder where her lips touched.

  He stands still, inside his chest a cup of water that he mustn’t spill. He respects her need to be alone. He scans the beach for his sneakers—there’s no money in the house for a new pair—and finds them so clogged with sand he has to rinse them off in the waves. No time to put them on. By now Vera has shrunk with distance and almost vanished into the fog. Like an idiot he starts after her again, barefoot, far enough away so as not to intrude.

  When the big rocks start, she clambers up without slowing, leaping from boulder to boulder like a goat, while he’s a lumbering zoo rhinoceros, a flapping seal. His wet jeans rub against his legs but he pushes on, along the spill of boulders, shifting, slippery, sometimes sharp under his feet—and soon he’s farther down the beach than he has ever been. Looking up to see how far away she is, he steps on something; blood is seeping. The skin of his thighs is burning and so is the tattoo on his arm. He shoves his feet into his dripping shoes. When he checks for her again, she’s gone.

  Anger clogs his throat. Saint the victim. This is the story of his life, it seems, though it’s only two or three years that he’s been chasing girls who treat him like shit. But he pushes on over the boulders, om namah shivaya, till he comes to a wide, flat rock that tilts so steeply he has to make his way around it. On the lake side he finds an opening. A shallow bunker has been formed by the convergence of four boulders, wider at the bottom than at the top, like a flask. And inside, sprawled on the sandy floor, Vera is looking up at him as if she has been waiting way too long.

  “Yes, I followed you, so what? So I’m a stalker.” He lowers himself down. The temperature drops; the air feels wet. Dismissing a shiver, he sits across from her. The place is almost entirely enclosed, a hideaway out of a solitary child’s dream. “Just talk to me. After we dropped you off, was it okay? Did anyone hear you come in?”

  She shrugs. Her eyes are closed. “I was quiet as a little mousie.”

  He moves closer. “Vera? You said your dad can be a real…” He trails off, picturing the mouse bones of her rib cage going in and out. He thinks of Lennie, the retarded guy in that novel they read last year who accidentally kills someone. All he wants is to pet soft things. The line is all he remembers, though it made him queasy then and still does. But on the damp sand in the murky grotto, she’s a little fairy light, and he wants to keep it alive. He sits on his hands so that he won’t accidentally damage anything and tells her what he has been thinking. Her quick, shallow breaths scrape his heart.

  “I want to be with you,” he says. “I’ll even play by your rules. When we’re not together you can screw whoever, just don’t tell me about it.”

  “Is that what you think I want?”

  His brain floods as if with a caustic liquid that burns away the delicate connections. “I thought you thought I was too possessive.”

  She rolls her eyes.

  “Honestly, I don’t want to control you or anything,” he says, feeling his cheeks heat up. It’s so hard, with her, to say what he means. Sometimes he doesn’t even know what he means, he’s like a worm or a mole, blindly pushing its way through dark earth. “Sometimes I think you want me to…I don’t know, be more of a bruiser? More forceful, does that make any sense?” She regards him fiercely. “Vera? I mean, what do you want?”

  Her skin is perfectly clear and white, without discolorations or freckles. How can skin look like that? He wants to lick her like a dog, her eyelids and down the side of her nose. He should leave before he gets even more pathetic. He clambers to his feet. “Okay. Well. See you later.”

  “Where are you going?” She’s rooting through her backpack.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want to bug you.”

  “What is wrong with you? Don’t go—do you hear me!” He blinks. She’s pointing a gun at him.

  After the shock it’s instinctive. He ducks, lunges at her, and in a moment he has the gun. But he’s shaking. Sweat is pouring out of him. His palms, his underarms, are soaking wet. She’s rolling her eyes again. “Saint, it was a joke!”

  He stands, gulping deep, enraged breaths of air. Saint the victim. She is smoke, ungraspable; how come he never saw that before? “You have a problem, Vera. How could anyone be with you?”

  She explains where the gun came from. Her brother’s a mess. She doesn’t know what to do about him. She’s telling the truth, he imagines, but something doesn’t jibe. “Don’t change the subject,” he says.

  She apologizes for screwing around with the gun. It wasn’t loaded. But it was stupid, a bad joke. Not funny. She shouldn’t have done it. “I am truly sorry,” she says.

  She might still be mocking; how would he know? “You apologize so easily, Vera.”

  “It’s not easy. I hate apologizing.” They look at each other, trying to understand what underlies each other’s words. “Here’s another truth,” she says. “I really don’t want you to leave. Do you believe me?”

  Now it’s hard for them to pull their gazes apart. They seat themselves again, face-to-face, in the flask-shaped haven from which it’s hard to depart with any panache. He isn’t cold anymore. Talk is easier. She predicts that he won’t keep the Pledge. He’ll marry a good Catholic girl and take their kids to church on Sunday. He loves looking at her. “I like bad Catholic girls,” he says, and takes her hand.

  With a sour smile, she withdraws that hand and offers the other, the small one. Her eyes are glittery hard. But tenderly, as if gathering up the petals of a damaged flower, he draws the hand to his lip and kisses the back, then the palm, trembling. “Would you mind now—you don’t have to, really, but would you mind,” she whispers, “kissing my short fingers? Sucking would be acceptable too. If it’s not too disgusting?” She looks frightened by her own request, but he is humble and eager, the way he felt touching a girl for the first time, thrilled and desperate with wanting. He uncurls the hand and, one by one, puts her nubs in his mouth and sucks hard like a calf. She’s shaking from the small of her back, violent waves of what might be pleasure. When he lets go she withdraws the hand to the shelter of her tube top. She says, “Was that disgusting?”

  “Nauseating. Revolting.” He reaches for her hand again. Failing that, he touches her knee. “I’m kidding, Vera. I learned it from you. It’s the opposite of disgusting.”

  Now, quickly, she pulls down her cutoffs. He’s ready to oblige. More than. He folds his jeans into a pillow for her head, apologizes for their dampness. But something is wrong. In the field beside Hamburger Heaven she was fierce with wanting, her skin hot, her body pushing toward his hands. Now only her voice moves, and her skin is cool and dry. She starts dirty-talking, but beneath him her body is inert. He rolls onto the sand beside her. “Do you want me to do something special?” She covers her face with the side of her arm. “Vera?”

  He puts his arms around her, not like John Steinbeck’s Lennie but carefully, gently. Then, precise and flat, as if she’s reading from a book, she tells him what happened with her father in the kitchen last night. The mind-fuck of it. He didn’t hit her hard. Saint says, “He should be locked up.”

  She rolls her eyes. It was nothing new. In a way she was asking for it.

  He feels simpleminded with her, as he often does, but he can’t accept her self-critique. He berates her father, and anyone who abuses their power, and though she might not accept his reasoning, she seems to accept his fury on her behalf. He wants to do battle for her. Martial images ride through his brain.

  When she starts to talk again, it’s flat and murmurous, as if she’s singing him to sleep, as if she wants him to fall asleep so he won’t hear what
she is compelled to say. But he’s listening harder than he has ever listened to anything. It wasn’t the slaps that fucked her up. They didn’t hurt. And she doesn’t mind pain; at times she craves it. “My brain is wired wrong,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut. “I don’t know how else to explain it. Sex and violence are mixed up in me. And even that’s not it, exactly.” She moves out of the haven of his arms. He shifts in order to accommodate her. “Last night at first I tried to avoid a fight. I tried to appease him. I played small and meek.” She squeezes her hands between her legs. “I have no control over anything. Oh God. Even that’s not it.” With a gasp of weary sadness so deep it seems to come from down in the earth, she heaves out, “The thing is, I wanted him to hurt me. I know it’s sick.”

  She sits on the sand like a featherless bird; he gathers words for her like worms. “All four of us are fucked up some way. And maybe everyone is?”

  She takes hold of his hands. “I’m not that scared of him, Saint. I’m scared of myself.” She swallows. “There are things I could do—that I’ve done….”

  He thinks he knows exactly what she means. “I love you,” he says, and he feels it (he is not queer). He is smiling like an idiot.

  A few minutes later they walk back, she to the Haight. He goes first to his scooter to lock up the gun, which she placed in his care along with the woolen sock and its single bullet. Then he rides to the Haight, awed by what he is coming to know about this girl, and exhilarated by her reliance on him.

  But all that day at the park with their friends it’s as if the events of the morning never occurred. She is sheathed in a giddy friendliness toward him that’s worse than nastiness, and he understands his terrible mistake. He has violated love’s rule number one. You have to stay on the brink. You must resist the State of the Heart Address, immediately after which (as your teeth come down on the v in “I love,” even before the “you”) you feel the bite of loss. While he—in the clutches of pity for her or his sublimated lust or just his usual pitiful self-abasement—threw himself on the mercy of a court he already knew was merciless.