Once, in Lourdes

by Sharon Solwitz

  16

  Vera

  The following morning, she arrives at the Haight in a pair of her mother’s old Bermuda shorts and an extra-large T-shirt from a package her father hasn’t opened yet. The shirt swallows her hips, the shorts hang past her knees; she’s done with looking good. In seven days her thinking will stop once and for all, and the point now is for time to pass. She has brought the blanket from her bed for people to sit on. She will babble and riff with her friends and play contract bridge with them on the blanket. She plays well when she puts her mind to it. Partnerships rotate, and they are keeping personal scores; she is close behind Kay.

  Today she is Kay’s partner, and CJ and Saint have just bid an unmakeable slam. With four trumps headed by the queen/jack, and seated behind the declarer, Vera has resisted doubling for penalty, though she’s not sure whether it’s from care for Saint, who made the wild bid, or fear of alerting CJ, about to play the hand, to a situation he might be able to handle if he expected it. CJ eyes the dummy and openly glowers at Saint. “You talk about the Clear Light—what all you Buddhists are questing for!—but right now you’re lost in the fog. Are you high by chance?”

  Saint flushes easily; his freckled face is bright pink in the shade of the tree they are seated under. Kay is laughing, and even Saint joins in. Vera puts her hands under her big shirt and hugs her midriff. Who said truth will set you free? Even when her sins were venial—a creepier word than “mortal”—confession was a joke, since in pure and simple truth she hated the sin less than the sound of the priest’s absolving voice, not to mention her own voice in false acquiescence. She remembers a hideous gap in the flow of Father Guston’s words, in which he was no doubt picturing exactly what it meant when she said she had touched herself under the covers. After which she bypassed that particular sin, along with others so subtle or complicated they were hard to describe. She would tell him she had disobeyed her mother but not that she hated her mother for being someone she was supposed to love but in truth despised and, worse, was afraid she’d turn into, which felt like the real sin. All of this she has kept to herself until yesterday, when she made the mistake of telling Saint a few seamy truths. Oh God. She could have blabbed on till everything came gushing out.

  She casts a glance out of the corner of her eye at Saint, handsome and awkward amid people’s laughter, trying to be a good sport. Her heart squeezes. He loves her, or so he said, tempting her to confess what could never be told, as if he could grant absolution.

  Is he looking at her? She’s afraid to lift her head.

  Yesterday was so…“uncomfortable” doesn’t hit it. Freakish. His “I love you” offered absolution without penance. It could heal nothing. He may have meant it; he doesn’t speak idly. But in her experience, and in her own heart, love can come and love can go.

  Inside the casing of her big shirt, she tries to take in the love he declared without pushing it past its capacity to succor. But how to gauge the sturdiness of someone’s love? She needs the heavy-duty kind that will surround her like padding, swathes and swathes of durable love, to hold her aloft like a bird or cushion her fall from a height. She’s actually not sure it exists, but she has known its close cousin exactly twice in her life, with Garth on acid and once long ago at a performance of The Nutcracker when the tiny ballerina leaped into the air and her mother whispered in her ear, “You can do that too.” She named it “white wonder,” the closest description of the experience that she could find. For a moment she felt the world and herself as one entity, free of boundaries, a vision so intense and encompassing that she couldn’t imagine anything outside it. She couldn’t even imagine an end, though of course there was one. Protecting her fragile psyche with the one simple policy: not to need. She must float above the hard ground of need, for love or any other thing.

  “Earth to Vera,” says Kay. “Time to play a card?”

  They play the hand, which Vera allows CJ to make by offering her jack to his king, her queen to his ace. Kay stares openmouthed at the lapse of mind, which cannot be accidental. “I mean, Vee! It’s like you want them to win?” Vera begins to apologize. Then Saint is looking at her as he did in their cave, and it’s like a light all around her.

  Dazzled by irrational joy, she puts her arms around Kay’s waist, pulls her up, and tries to swing her around. Kay shrieks, “So now you’re Supergirl!” Kay is laughing, having forgotten the botched game, and Vera laughs too. Wind blows their hair. Wind blows through the pores of Vera’s skin, in and around the striations of her muscles, between the slats of her ribs, over and under the tattoo between her breasts. She’s beyond the sexual fray, the wheel (as Saint says) of desire and temporary, limited satisfaction, of birth and rebirth. She’s high on chastity like a virgin priestess, and she loves Kay, dear Kay. “Kay,” she cries, “it looks like you’ve lost a huge amount of weight. Do you know that?”

  With a last surge of whatever has filled her, she lifts Kay a foot off the ground and sets her down softly, then flops back onto the blanket under the tree. Saint lies on the far side of the group, his eyes closed. She looks up at the dark underside of the maple leaves, the bits of sky between them. CJ turns up the radio. “Mr. Tambourine Man” pours across the field onto the playground, the tennis courts, the lake beyond.

  It’s one of Saint’s favorite songs. Riding home after a night shift he’ll sing it at the top of his lungs over the engine roar. Vera listens and tries to hear it as he does. But her radiant energy is gone now. Feeling cut off and weary, she changes the station. “Do you mind? Let’s hear something more upbeat?”

  The others object. With uncharacteristic compliance she returns to the station. “The group rules,” she says.

  But she’s a mess now. As soon as she gets a good feeling it collapses. Pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain. The wheel of dharma, of death and rebirth. She waits for the song to end, the ache to lift. I love you, she says to herself. Which Saint said to her—she reminds herself!—yesterday afternoon but hasn’t repeated. Has she made him angry? Without wanting to, she sometimes makes people angry, she knows that. She shuffles the deck. Praise God for bridge, and hallelujah for Kay and CJ, four so much better than two. But the game has stalled in the magnetic field of the Dylan song, which seems to her excessively long. CJ’s mouth moves with the lyrics. Saint says, “I’ve heard it a hundred times and it still gets to me.”

  Vera is careful not to look at Saint, but she looks in his direction. Even if he loves her as she wants to be loved, she’s not sure she loves him. As a friend, yes, but not romantically. Sexual doesn’t mean romantic. She considers whether to tell him that but hopes she won’t need to say anything. No law says she has to feel what he feels. Someone’s rich, someone else is poor; someone goes nuts, another sits in control and comfort—so it goes.

  Without looking at Saint, however, she hears him in conversation with CJ, his voice steady and sure and unaware of her, and now she isn’t at all certain of him. She is, in fact, a little frightened of him, because, even though she doesn’t love him, she would feel bad if his mind changed about her. It isn’t fair, of course, or reasonable. But if he decided that he loved someone else (unlikely as it seems) she wouldn’t like it. At all. The others are sprawled on their backs. She moves closer to where Saint is lying.

  Suddenly she thinks of a joke. Not a great joke—just something she heard somewhere. She rarely tells jokes. She’s crappy at it, rushes the buildup, mistimes the punch line. But this one is just a question and answer. “Hey, compadres. Why do guys have bigger brains than dogs?” With an eye on Saint, she waits the appropriate beat. “So they won’t hump your leg in the cafeteria!”

  There’s a general hoot, with Kay the loudest. Kay and CJ proffer jokes of their own, but Saint makes no comment, lying on his back with an arm over his eyes. Was he even listening? She nudges him with her knee. “Hey, asshole?”

  He opens his eyes. They’re blank, not even perplexed. He smiles as if he’s forcing it. As if he feels sorry for her. A sprout of fear
pushes up from her heart. She lifts her chin, presents him her profile to reawaken his dignified, subdued longing for her, sorry now that she’s dressed like a bag lady. Of course, she reminds herself, nothing has happened between them that she can’t retreat from or cast into the void of insignificance. She wants to get up and walk away from them, to a picnic table or home; fuck them all. She thinks of the day seven days from now that they call P-Day, which went unmentioned today. As if it didn’t matter to anyone but her. Not that she needs company.

  As usual, at dinnertime CJ and Kay depart. But Saint remains, though his job starts at four, doesn’t it? He loves me, she says to herself. Though what a person said yesterday doesn’t guarantee now and maybe not even then. The connection between words and feelings shifts even as you speak, and again as the other person looks back at you, she reminds herself, while Saint lies still on the blanket with his eyes half-closed, his hands folded under his head like a surfer boy’s.

  She stands groggily, puts a steadying hand on the tree trunk. Across the field some middle school girls are playing softball. Beyond the chain-link fence the sun is sinking into the lake. Splats of red and gold dance on the blue water. There’s a little rainstorm in her brain, then a narrow blade of light, a pain that flares and refuses to die away, and it occurs to her that she loves Saint. The insight isn’t joyful or even agreeable. She walks to the fence, looks through it and down, considers jumping, and doesn’t want to. Not now. She is in pain, but all of a sudden she doesn’t want it to end.

  On the edge of the blanket she finds a place as far as she can get from Saint and sits, hands in her lap, her brain pulsing like a small dying sun. She is burning out while Saint, at rest, is fully alive, his freckled skin and even the red hairs that grow from the top of his lip. Then, without volition, she has uncurled, she is snaking toward him, aligning herself with the length of him. His arm gathers her in. His lips are moist on her forehead. She feels the kiss, takes a cautious breath of him. In her mind she says, Wait a little; wait till I want you more. Overhead the darkening bones of the branches arc into a filigreed dome. A bird calls out. The tree is full of birds twittering. The air is cooler, the sky a deep, luminous blue. She touches the tufts of his eyebrows, the soft skin of his eyelids and temples. She places her palms, large and small, on the flats of his cheeks.

  His body is vibrating as if it were connected to what generates the turning of the earth, and he pulls her toward him. “Not yet,” she whispers, though all of a sudden she wants him so much she could cry or die. On the tennis court a hundred yards away someone is riding a bicycle, around and around. “Time to go, Jamie. Okay, once more, but that’s it!” The picnic area is empty, and so is the playground, and at last the baseball diamond: no one to see or care. She rubs a bare sole over the hairs of his leg, hides her face in his neck while her body simultaneously clings to him and pushes away.

  Darkness gathers; a thumbnail moon rises over the lake. Mosquitoes and sand fleas dart, attack, and Saint and Vera hold on to each other. They kiss each other’s faces any which where. Sometimes as their intensity mounts, to slow their hearts and their breathing they talk. He tells her about the girls he loved before her. Thought he loved, in the wasteland before he met her. No one came close.

  The wind is cool, and they talk to keep warm. She tells him about her prior—not loves, never loves—but amusing or crazy-wild or gross fucks, condensing for the sake of brevity. One she leaves out. It can’t be said now, with her legs wrapped around his leg, her soles pressing his bare calves. It can be contained like Garth’s gun, in a little storage box in her brain.

  He might have felt the small lurch of her thought. At any rate, he moves back a little. “Now you know everything about me,” he says.

  “Do I?”

  “Everything that’s important.”

  “Is that a good thing?” She feels him seeing her, and herself being seen. The sensation is not entirely pleasant. But she is careful not to impede what is running between them. “Two people can’t know everything about each other. And even if they could, who says it’s good?”

  He snorts. “You’re doing that weasel thing.”

  “So?” With both hands together she touches his cheeks, his lips.

  “You can be a bitch, Vera. You always have to have the upper hand.”

  “True.”

  “Vera.” His voice trembles. He asks for the truth once again. Why she wanted to jump. It will bring them closer, which is a good thing.

  “I’ll tell you, but not today,” she says.

  “Do you still want to?”

  “Don’t you?” she says. Though she already knows what he’ll say.

  “I might have done it before,” he says. “But now, Vee, I swear to God, if you get anywhere near the bluff, I’m going to tackle you. I’ll bring you down.”

  Her lips reach for his mouth; he holds her off. “Now tell me your secret.” She wants to kiss him but he won’t let her. “Tell me,” he says. “Be brave. Do it and see what happens. I dare you.”

  “Saint, you are such a goofball.” He lets go of her; she refuses to feel bad. “Can’t I be mysterious?”

  “You’re plenty mysterious,” he says. Then: “Will you tell me tomorrow? Swear to it?”

  Her long sigh fills the spot where she is supposed to swear. “I love your tongue.”

  “Love,” he says, calling it into being and at the same time naming what’s there, what maybe (they both consider the possibility) has always been there.

  17

  Tennis Game

  By the tenth day of the Final Fortnight, my waistbands were loose and my skirts sagged around my hips, though I hadn’t attended a single Slimnastics class. The physics final came and went without me. I found this funny, along with the fact that I’d dropped ten pounds. Ten in ten days. It sounded like a diet scam. Maybe without physics I’d turn into Einstein?

  Lighter of foot, burning with the intensity of our four remaining days, four days to walk, breathe, smell, think, twenty-four hours times four, I arrived at the Haight just after dawn. I was alone, the ground wet and sweet-smelling. I walked to the chain-link fence and started to climb—not to jump prematurely, just to see if I could haul myself up and over. Last night the others had done it, as a preview or dress rehearsal. “No thanks!” I said lightly. “I don’t want to collapse it!” Mocking myself so no one else would.

  Of course no one did. A joint was rolled and passed to me through the chain-link. On the lake side they gave one another pretend shoves toward the brink, while I played Anxious Mom: “Stop, children, you’ll give me a heart attack!” I leaned against the fence, my back to Saint’s with only the mesh between us. I wasn’t jealous; in our presence, at least, he gave Vera no special attention. He smelled of sweat, soap, and deodorant, and I breathed him in while Vera and CJ dangled their legs in oblivion, superior to other people who didn’t live their lives poised above death.

  Now alone in early daylight I tucked my skirt between my legs and into my waistband and climbed—without fear or superhuman effort—to the barbed top of the fence. Westward, pure and clear, was the tender junction of water and sky. The lake had separated into two colors, emerald at the horizon turning khaki toward the shadowed shore. An occasional curl of water frothed high enough to catch the light, though mostly the waves broke gray and hushed. Before fear could overtake me, with a sharp breath blanking out thought, I gripped the crown of a post with both hands, hoisted a leg over, and shifted my weight onto a toehold on the lake side. Then my skirt came loose, my sneaker slipped, a barb caught the back of my thigh. With all the strength in my underused arms I held on to the post long enough to free my leg and dropped.

  For a second it was like enacting the Pledge four days early and all by myself (a terrible accident!). The ledge was flat and wider than it looked, with room to lie down and even walk a few steps to either side. But with nothing between me and it, the lake pulled at me. I clung to the chain-link and kept my gaze inland. The tennis courts were empty
, the tops of the trees sunlit, the sky heartbreakingly blue, while behind me and down, down, down, waves broke on the shore, and my leg throbbed with their breaking. I couldn’t look at the injured spot. Skin was an organ, we’d learned in biology. I asked the members of my imaginary jury, which was always in session, Is it right or wrong to inflict on my body the mayhem that will result from my jump? I’d signed the Pledge on the crest of something that was hard to recall now. Because excommunication had seemed worse than death. And because, I must have been hoping, in the two intervening weeks something would divert us.

  There were still four days.

  With my pulsing wound and the distinct sensation of blood running down the back of my leg, I was gathering strength for my return climb when two girls I knew arrived at the courts, Lynda Miller and Susie Epton, who had never talked to me and never would, for whom I was beneath even taunts. Their bright yellow balls skimmed the net and landed near the baseline. Then CJ was crossing the field. I shook the fence, and he started running my way. “Bad girl,” he said upon arrival. “You want to do the deed all by yourself? Do you always have to be first in everything?”

  “I’m just a born leader?”

  He laughed. I sat down on the lake side of the fence while he squatted on the park side, nonstop rapping to me about soap operas, which he considered brilliant satires of midcentury America. He could talk about anything without instigation. I had no views on the essential nature of soap operas, but I liked the sound of his nasal, insinuating voice and wondered what he’d be like to kiss (the first time the thought crossed my mind). I liked his face of a merry sprite, his thick-lashed dark eyes. Gone was the pain in my leg. Until he turned to look back across the field. “Have you been wondering,” he said, “where our friends are?” Then I was wondering. It was ten o’clock by the Mickey Mouse watch he’d bought me. Four hours had passed with me in dreamland. “What do you think?” I said.