Once, in Lourdes

by Sharon Solwitz

  He opened his door. The world stayed black but in poured a stream of insect-hum, an occasional small cry or rustle. He went around and opened my door. “Here’s a good place to puke. Blend with nature.”

  I tried but produced nothing.

  He lit another joint, offered it to me.

  “Not now.”

  He led me through brush toward thinner darkness, talking for my sake. If you don’t sweat, you won’t attract mosquitoes. If you wear a scarf over your mouth, you can live months without water. We reached a cornfield and open sky and he pointed out constellations, though he might have been making them up. Two weeks ago we’d have seen swarms of shooting stars, the Perseids, named for Perseus, who saved Andromeda from the sea monster. I gazed obediently upward. The stars stayed put and had nothing to do with me. I was panicky, a feeling that might not even lift when the joint wore off; the thought made it worse. I felt myself falling under the weight of the Pledge and my family and my superfluous flesh, compounded with the weight of my helplessness in the face of despair. Man, woman, birth, death, infinity. Infinity was the quintessence of pointless. And death? It might not even bring an end to the sensation of falling.

  I was staring at nothing when CJ put his arm around me. He was humming to himself, and I thought how different we were. When he was depressed, he got silly or nasty; me, I ate. But there was nothing in the car to eat, no food for miles and miles. Then it occurred to me: What was there to lose? Giddily, recklessly, I said to him in a husky voice that came from God knows where, “Let’s go back to the car and have sex, okay?” His theatrical shriek cut the night, but I took his hand; I tugged him back along the lane. “I’ve never made it with a girlfriend, and you’re my girlfriend, right, CJ?”

  He opened the door but didn’t get in. He was nervous but worked to sound amused. “Let me call the men in the white coats. I’ll visit you on weekends.”

  “Am I too fat for you?” I spoke not plaintively but as a challenge. “Come on, boy, in the dark we all look alike. Pretend I’m Marilyn Monroe. Brigitte Bardot.”

  “You’re being weird, Kay.”

  “I know that!”

  In the dark I felt the heat from his face. He was embarrassed, frightened. But I was too, and when I rethought the idea of having sex with him, I reached the same conclusion. My virginity was a door to be opened. It was useless to me except as an offering to the god of self-transcendence. “Come on, man. As a favor. As my best friend on earth?”

  He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no, but he got in the car. We tried the radio again: static. The clock said 1:15, gleaming along with other familiar lighted dials, the 1 2 D N R P of the gearshift. The clock said 1:16, with 13,287 miles on the odometer and God knows how many more to go.

  He lowered his seat to match mine and we lit another joint. Thoughts passed without stopping to deposit their loads. Past and future lifted off like helium balloons. There was no space but the space of the car, no time but now, nothing required but breathing, which ensued without effort or will. We took off everything but our underpants, separately, like children. We kissed with dry lips, like children.

  Then I was shaking. I was Katherine Elizabeth Campion, who believed in God and had gone with Mom and sometimes Dad to St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, though once when Mom was out of the house, I picked up the upstairs phone to call my friend Cynthia and heard my father say to someone who probably wasn’t Mom, “I want to be inside you,” violin-sweet and smooth, and I hung up before I heard who it was. And once, longer ago, on my mother’s nightstand I found a paperback with a pretty red-haired woman on the cover, her eyes closed, lipsticked mouth half-open, and thumbing through, lackadaisically seeking what I know now was my mother’s spirit or soul, I came upon: “She held up her breasts for him to kiss.” Sick, I thought, whatever drove the woman to make this sort of offering. The image penetrated to my nine-year-old marrow, and here it was again, warping the image of my own maturing breasts, open to the air now, and large enough to be held in my hands.

  “Kay, methinks thou art having second thoughts?”

  Was I? My thoughts were coming crazy fast, one after the other. Before we went through with this there was a story I had to tell him.

  He and our other friends knew my suspicions about Arlyn and my father, but I recapped the seamy details for him. She had been Dad’s accountant, and sometimes she came to our house to bring him work or pick it up. One night, from my bedroom window, I saw him walking her to her car. He opened the door for her, like a gentleman, and I watched, waiting for her to drive away so I could get back into bed. Then he leaned into the car and kissed her mouth—I could see it in the overhead light. It was winter, snow on the ground. He wasn’t wearing a coat.

  “Hmm,” said CJ, “that is kind of a turn-on.”

  I winced, but I had more to say. Lowering my voice, though there was no one for miles around: “I told her, CJ. I told my mom what they did. So she could stop it. Make them stop. And she…you know.”

  He shuddered, and I almost loved him then. He pushed his hair off his forehead, and I liked his face that way, framed but not intruded upon. He said, “Did you think it was your fault?”

  A deep groan formed in my stomach, but it came out of my mouth high and thin. “Why would it be my fault?”

  He shook his head back and forth. “Kay, it wasn’t your fault!”

  It was strange. Now all of a sudden I wanted to kiss him, this boy who was trying to be nice. Who was nice. And maybe he felt the same, because our mouths came together. Our bare chests came together. Our tongues slid across each other. We kissed and touched for a few minutes, softly, almost apologetically. Is this nice? Do you like this? Then he stopped.

  “Kay, I should tell you about this, a crush that I have…that I used to have….”

  I hid my breasts against his chest, my hot face on his shoulder. “You don’t have to tell me unless you want to.”

  “The thing is,” he said, “I keep obsessing about…”

  He didn’t say the name but I knew who he meant. “Me too,” I said. “All the time. Useless.”

  He looked so relieved I started to laugh. Tenderly I took hold of his face, fragile and beautiful. Under his mother’s perfume I inhaled the metallic smell of boy. “To be continued?” I said.

  “Yes, for sure,” he said.

  We put our clothes back on, and he told me what had happened between him and Saint, and I felt good with him, comfortable, like he was my brother. He was crying. Tears sprang to my eyes as well, and I looked for a tissue, found nothing except a pair of socks on the floor. I held one sock in my hand. “We can make a puppet out of it. We used to do that, sew on little buttons for the eyes.” I sounded demented. I put the sock on my hand and bobbed the puppet head up and down. In a high puppet voice I said, “I seem to be demented!” Then, in my own voice: “Why do we both love him so much? He’s just some guy.”

  He put the other sock on his own hand. We touched sock-puppet heads. “If I had any power over anything, I’d give you what you deserve, which is everything you want in the world.”

  “Enough. Please.”

  He shook his head no, then took my hands and held them to his face. “That’s the great thing about you.”

  I stared. His face was still wet. It’s hard to do irony well while you’re crying.

  “You don’t have the faintest idea how great you are.”

  “Shut up!”

  “I mean it.”

  “Please,” I said, aware of my many deficits, any one of which would blight a person’s interest in me.

  “Kay, dig. I’m a faggot. If I weren’t you’d be first on my list.”

  I wanted to laugh. How to adjust to this new, open-hearted CJ? “Okay, you’re a…well, got it. Now what?”

  If I sounded brusque he didn’t seem to mind. We kissed again, awkwardly, then we were back on the road. When reception returned we found a lively deejay, heard “Blowin’ in the Wind,” then news:

  “It’s fairly q
uiet tonight at the Amphitheatre but things may be livelier elsewhere in Chicago. So far over sixty people have been treated at local hospitals for bruises and concussions, and the numbers are rising. In Lincoln Park, Black Panther party chairman Bobby Seale urged the crowd to defend themselves from the police by any means necessary. Mayor Daley’s widely reported remark seems to capture the general mood: ‘The police aren’t here to create disorder, they’re here to preserve disorder.’ This is Ralph Donleavy reporting live from Grant Park, where the sweet voices of Peter, Paul and Mary are calming things down. Go, Mary.”

  They segued into the middle of “The Cruel War” and we sang along. Happiness seemed, if not ours, at least imaginable. The plan now was to stop in Chicago, where CJ might find his fellow queers and we could get a taste of tear gas. “Hippies are our people,” he said. “Wouldn’t you like to join a larger group?”

  “I was fine with four,” I said. I sang it out the window. I bellowed it out into the night.

  25

  The Cruel War

  Vera sits on the sparse sandy grass by the bluff, tending to her feet, which are sore from her run. Moonlight trembles on the lake’s dark surface, a band of shifting broken bits. Should she worry about Garth? One day, he will pull free of her; he will be happy without her. The thought brings a certain kind of relief, like setting down a heavy pack she has carried so long she forgot she had it.

  She stretches and turns and looks back where she came from. The woods are thick overhead, the ground choked with brush; a few feet in, there is darkness, a clotted web between where she is and where she wants to be. She thinks of the Pledge, as she has been doing lately—this door she has shut and locked on her future, and that of her friends as well. The image of a heavy iron door, to a jail or a dungeon, wavers under her scrutiny. Could it be opened? The thought frightens her, but she can’t shoo it away.

  Then into the weave of her thinking and of the many small, repeated night sounds comes something sharp, like a gunshot. Some creep offing a squirrel, she thinks. Still, her heartbeat has quickened. She stumbles up, wipes sand off her legs, shakes out a foot that has gone to sleep, tries to figure the time that has passed. She must get back to Saint.

  The breeze has stiffened; she enters the woods, shivering, wanting her T-shirt. The moon is down or behind a cloud, or it might be the air, thick like water, that keeps her from moving fast enough to get warm. But her body knows where to go. She imagines Saint on the blanket where she left him, the soon-warmth of his arms around her. In thirty hours or so the Pledge will come due; should she ask to rescind it? Would they despise her?

  Not far from her destination, another concern squeezes her chest: that Saint got sick of waiting and left. Tomorrow he’ll be pissed, remote. Or he won’t show up. She increases her speed. A bead of sweat rolls into a corner of her eye. Something might have happened between Saint and her father, who can do some crazy things, and Saint too. She thinks of the gunshot, then blots it out, scanning the slithery darkness. “Saint?” Her voice quavers as if she has become younger suddenly or decades older. Her father is perfectly capable of starting a fight with Saint, then carting him off to jail feeling righteous about it. She pushes into the small clear space where their blanket was, and her breathing is loud in the silence. “St. John?”

  It’s lighter here at the edge of the woods. She can see her feet on the ground and the trunks of trees. But the blanket is gone, if it ever was here—the plaid wool on which, hours or years ago, she and Saint fell to their knees and, even before it settled, sprang at each other. Her gaze moves over the pebbly grass, the mat of old leaves, and finds his scooter close to where they left it, though now it’s propped against a tree and the carryall is open. Into the blank dark of earth and bark and branches, the indifferent shushing of leaves, she calls out, “Saint!” then snaps her mouth shut on whatever else she might conjure up.

  —

  A dozen steps away but hidden by night and close-growing trees, Saint sits with the empty gun in his hand. Every so often he puts it to his temple, pulls the trigger, unflinching at the hollow click. Bugs bite the backs of his hands. At each new injection of hot, numbing insect poison, he thinks, Go for it! I’m all yours! If a wild animal went for his throat he would stay put. He’d offer himself to it.

  Then the sound of his name sweeps into the enclosure and falls upon him, light and sticky as spider silk. He begins trembling. It comes again louder. He drops the gun, or rather he has forgotten that he was holding it. Rising, with the mindless will of someone approaching his execution, he moves toward the sound.

  —

  Miraculously, it seems, Saint is standing before her. With an involuntary cry she opens her arms. His body warms her skin. Shaking with joyful relief she kisses his shoulder, his hands. “I was scared, can you believe it!” She presses his hand to her cheek. “I ran into my brother. No, actually, he found me. And I told him to stop creeping around. He was…oh, I don’t know. Forget it.” She looks up at his face but has trouble seeing it. “Say something, Saintly! Was Dad his normal turd self? I was afraid he’d start something and take you in. Seriously.” She shimmies against him, loving how safe he makes her feel. Like he could carry her in his hand. She looks around for her shirt. Her teeth are chattering, but she feels unaccountably happy. She wants—she admits it now—release from the Pledge, which seems to belong to a distant epoch, when she was young and arrogant enough to believe herself in charge of her life. “You know, Saint, maybe tomorrow when we see Kay and CJ, we should talk about the Pledge. Reconsider? What do you think? I hope they’re not too mad at us. What time is it now?”

  He remains still for a moment, straight and tall and unengaged as a tree. Then he takes her hand and leads her a few steps into deeper woods. Here she finds their packs, her shirt, and her sandals neatly side by side. She laughs, dresses. “Thank you, my responsible friend.” When her eyes adjust to the new darkness she sees her blanket rolled around what looks like a wide, flat log. Her mouth opens slightly while the image expands to fill her mind. With a mental jeté she thrusts herself toward the next thought, the next picture, but nothing comes; her mind is filled with log. She looks up at Saint, who seems to have grown inches taller.

  She is considered brave, she knows that. And she takes pride in the part of herself that can look square into the face of things. “Vera” means truth. She can handle truth. She can suffer disappointment, even shame, anything but this thrashing in the muck of uncertainty. Forcibly she directs her gaze to the blanket, which it’s clear to her now encases not a log (no log is so flat and lumpy) but a human body.

  It’s her father.

  The thought arrives, solitary, lucid, unsullied by feeling. Then there’s a shudder, the recognition of an emotional gap in herself. What might have been grief is just the residue of a loss she mourned a long time ago and made adjustments for and set aside as well as she could. She presses her fingers to her temples. Father. Our Father. Who art in heaven. Yeah, right, comes quickly to mind. She turns to Saint, who has been standing before her with his head down. “Saint, talk to me!” He shakes his head. Terrible laughter bubbles in her throat. “Shit. All right. Listen to me?” She tries to get him to look at her. He won’t give her his hand; she takes hold of his arm. “This is terrible, of course. But there are worse things. I mean it. You didn’t know him.” He stares. Her eyes burn; she blinks rapidly. “I shouldn’t say this, but in some ways—I don’t know—it’s an improvement in the world?” She shakes him, as if trying to wake him up. “We’ll get through this. I can imagine what happened. I’m not angry, I can easily imagine.” Tears come to her eyes. Her throat hurts. “I know I sound like a cold bitch. One day I might start to miss him, parts of him. But he was a shit to me. To Mom and everyone.” In the dark of the woods she tries to see Saint’s face. She feels the first squeeze of a fear without boundaries. “Saint, what? Do you hate me? Am I a cold bitch?”

  He stares at her, blank, empty.

  “God, I’m sorry. I’m no
t thinking right. Saint, don’t worry, you won’t have to go to jail or anything.” She tries to gaze back into his eyes. “Or not for long, I’m sure, because I’ll tell the truth about him. He hated you. Hated you with me. Please, don’t look like that!”

  A sound comes from Saint, but it’s not his voice or any human voice; she thinks of an old chair giving under someone’s weight. Then he bends over the blanket and pulls back a corner.

  It’s hard to see in the dark, and at first she seems to be looking at herself on the blanket, her own face, wide lower lip, narrow pixie chin, pale hair. She must shake herself awake from what logic would deem a nightmare. Then her hands rise to cover her face. She falls to her knees, but it isn’t low enough.

  Gently, lovingly, she touches her brother’s cheek. It’s how she woke him on Saturdays in second and third grade. Up, Garthie. Soccer time. “Hey, buddy,” she whispers as she whispered then. “Garth,” she says, a magician’s command. Open sesame. His lips are slightly parted, as if he wants to speak. He is achingly, preposterously beautiful. But his eyes stay closed. In his wool cocoon he is motionless.

  She looks at Saint, but his face explains nothing. Garth’s head seems loose on his neck. There’s no way not to see that her brother is dead, but it’s a state of affairs she cannot accept. She wants to shake him awake, or restore him with a kiss like the Prince with Sleeping Beauty. She takes hold of his hand. It’s cold, but so is her own hand. In a small voice, reasonably, she says to Saint, “He isn’t a fighter. He has a big mouth, he can shit-talk you, but he’s a softie. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.” She takes in air but not enough for additional words. On his knees beside her, Saint gazes out through his robot eye holes. Looking at nothing. Nothing at nothing.

  Then a wave of red passes through her brain. She backs away from Saint, whom she hates with every cell in her body. She growls, a sound that hurts her ears. Her hands curl into fists. Then she runs at him and hammers at his back, his head, his face—she has boundless energy to destroy. He sits motionless, making no move to protect himself, and she pounds at his blankness, daring him to hurt her, cut her—just whip out his Swiss Army knife. Or the gun! What’s the matter, asshole? She pounds his face till blood runs from his nose. “Come on! Kill me too! Do something, you piece of cowardly shit!” Eyes half-closed, he sits like a monk, worlds away from earthly fray. “Fuck that blank business! You’re nothing, St. John, nothing and nobody!”