If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go

by Judy Chicurel

  I began walking with her and turned back once to see Luke standing at the end of the bar near the patio, surrounded by people. It would have been easy enough to join the crowd, sidle toward the center at some point and catch his eye. I saw them all raise their mugs of beer and heard Raven say, “Welcome back, man. We missed the shit out of you.” Luke didn’t smile. He seemed wiry and edgy, like he was coiled inside himself, away from everyone. He raised his glass but didn’t drink.

  I followed Nanny into the alley between the hotel and the summer apartments on the corner. Over Nanny’s shoulder the moon hung low, slinging a white path across the ocean. Nanny put her hand on my arm and tried looking up at me. Whenever she was fucked up, her eyes looked like crooked stars.

  “I have to tell you something and you can’t tell anyone, not even Liz,” she said, her voice soft and slurry. “Especially not Liz.”

  “My sisters,” we heard, and there was Ginger, coming out of the alley.

  “Shit,” Nanny murmured.

  Ginger was wearing cutoffs and a tight tee shirt that hugged the weight she hadn’t lost since the baby. She smelled of stale smoke and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine.

  “I missed you guys so much,” she said, putting her arms around us. “Soooo much, man. Missed trucking with yas.” She backed up and looked at us, her eyes woozy. “I really love you guys,” she said. “You know, like when you came and visited me and the baby? That was, that was so far out, man. Like, far fucking out. I mean, I’m just glad it’s over, you know? I mean, dig it, can you picture me with a kid?”

  “Love you, too, Ginge,” I said, kissing her cheek, while Nanny swayed on her flip-flops, silent as stone.

  “What’s a matter, bitch, you don’t love me anymore?” Ginger turned to Nanny, who she’d known for the longest.

  “You know it,” Nanny said. “You know I do, man. I’m just, I’m really stoned, Ginge. Really, really stoned. Even my tongue’s like, tired, man.”

  Ginger laughed. “The tired tongue,” she said. “Outasight.” She kissed each of us wetly on the cheek and walked around the corner, into the lounge. We watched the door swing open and then close. I turned back to Nanny.

  “So what’s the big secret I can’t tell Liz?” I asked.

  “Me and Voodoo did it the other night.”

  “Wow,” I said. I meant it; it wasn’t just something to say.

  “He saw the hickeys,” she said, her voice dipping. “We were fooling around, you know, bullshitting in the sand, and I turned my head the wrong way. I forgot to put on foundation and he saw them.”

  Nanny really liked Voodoo. We all liked Voodoo because he was kind and easygoing and fun and affectionate. His real name was Dennis Kelly, but he was a Jimi Hendrix freak whose favorite song was “Voodoo Chile,” which he listened to every morning before leaving the house and when he smoked a joint before going to bed. He wanted Len, the bartender, to put it in the jukebox, but Len refused; he thought Hendrix was nothing but empty noise. Voodoo wore a blue bandanna around his albino curls, which he’d trained into a white-boy Afro. It was a hard thing to pull off, but somehow he did it. Nanny really liked him, but she was crazy about Tony Furimonte—we called him Tony Fury—who was not kind or easygoing or fun and had a temper that stretched and snapped equally over big and little things. He’d been thrown out of school three weeks before graduation for punching Mr. Diamond, the history teacher, for giving him a failing grade for the quarter, even though he rarely went to class and frankly wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier. To punish him, his parents had sent him to live with his aunt and uncle in Providence, Rhode Island, to work construction and finish his senior year. They thought his chances were better in a place where nobody knew him. The night before Tony left, he and Nanny did everything-but in the attic of his parents’ house, and still he wouldn’t call her his girlfriend. He’d been home the first week in July because his grandmother had died, hence the hickeys on Nanny’s neck. It was like he had to leave his mark on Nanny for Voodoo and everyone to see. Since Tony left, she’d been covering the hickeys with Max Factor makeup.

  “So did he, like, freak out?” I asked.

  Nanny tried to widen her eyes but her lids were like little logs, rolling downward. She stood there for a minute, nodding, her eyes closed. “No,” she said. Her voice sounded broken. “He just turned my head this way and that, and then he dropped his hand and he looked at me with those big, droopy eyes. And then he said, ‘You know, you are one sweet little heartbreaker, foxy lady.’ Made me feel like shit.”

  I could hear laughter from inside The Starlight Hotel. The jukebox was playing “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos. It was the song I listened to under my headphones late at night when I got home from Comanche Street. It was the song I’d always imagined would be playing while Luke and I made love.

  “What was it like?” I asked her. I wanted to know what it was like to make love to someone you weren’t in love with.

  Nanny kept swaying. She put a hand on my arm to steady herself. “Katie, man, swear to God, it was about as exciting as drinking an ice-cream soda,” she said. She had always loved kissing Voodoo. She said he was a great kisser. They liked walking with their arms around each other, Voodoo’s arm hooked around Nanny’s neck, hugging her close. They’d be walking down Comanche Street, bumping into people coming from the other direction, because they were too busy laughing into each other’s eyes to notice.

  “Like maybe a strawberry ice-cream soda, not even a black-and-white,” she added. “With no whipped cream.”

  “Were you high?” I asked.

  Nanny tried rolling her eyes but they were too heavy, so she closed them again. It was a pretty stupid question. “What do you think?” she said. “We were in his room, no one was home. The sheets were dirty, I could smell them. I didn’t think my first time would be on dirty sheets.”

  She hiccupped a sob. “What am I going to do, Katie? What am I going to tell Tony? What if Voodoo tells him first?”

  “Didn’t you feel anything? With Voodoo, like, didn’t you—”

  “I just told you,” she said, frowning, impatient. “Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I’m talking about Tony now.”

  “You think Tony hasn’t been with other girls?”

  “It’s different with guys,” she said. “You know it is.”

  “Besides,” I said, picking my words delicately, “it’s not like Tony—like you and Tony—”

  “I love him, Katie,” she whimpered. “The night before he went back, he stood outside my house throwing little rocks at my window. Like we were kids, right? And when I opened the window, he just looked up at me. Didn’t say a word. Just kept looking up at me. Then he went back to his car, and he turned around and lifted his hand in this, like, wave. It was so romantic.” She closed her eyes again and began nodding. “He never said, ‘I love you.’ But I know what was in his heart.”

  “Let’s go back inside,” I said, taking her arm. But Nanny stayed surprisingly firm against my grip. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait one fucking minute. Just tell me the truth, Katie, that’s all I want. Do you think Tony will think I’m a slut if he finds out?”

  I’d seen Tony go ballistic when someone sat in the seat he wanted on the early bus going home from school. He would have beaten Porter Jacobs, the poor kid sitting in it, to a pulp if the bus driver hadn’t pulled over and thrown Tony off the bus. They didn’t call him Tony Fury for nothing.

  “How is Tony going to find out?” I asked, making my voice strong. “You aren’t going to tell him—”

  “I have to tell him,” Nanny said, sounding sorrowful, like someone had died.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “You don’t have to tell him a thing. Voodoo isn’t going to say anything. I mean, what, you think he’s going to write him a letter? And Tony won’t be home until Christmas, right? Leave it alone till then, man. L
eave it alone, Nanny babe.” That was what her mother called her. Nanny babe.

  Suddenly her eyes swung open, like rolled-up shades that snapped. “Should I confess?” she whispered. “Maybe I should go to confession. Not with Father Donnelly, but maybe Father Tom—”

  “Nanny,” I said. Confession was supposed to be anonymous, but the priests at St. Timothy’s had known most of us since birth and now knew even our footfalls by heart.

  “I’m so scared,” Nanny said. “Katie, I’m so fucking scared. What if I’m pregnant? All he did was pull out, he always says he’s sterile because he never knocked anybody up, but what if I’m—”

  “It’s not time to worry yet,” I said, firmly. That’s what Atticus Finch used to tell Jem and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Sometimes I said it to myself, inside. I found the words comforting.

  “I wish,” she said haltingly. “I wish . . .” Nanny’s eyes closed again. She began rocking on the heels of her flip-flops. I looked toward the lighted windows of the lounge at The Starlight Hotel. The door was open and I could hear Bobby Darin singing “Mack the Knife.”

  “I’m going back inside,” I said. It was making me too sad, standing in the alley with Nanny. Luke barely knew I was alive, Tony Fury had never even bought Nanny a Coke. It felt like we were living in some kind of half-love twilight where everything was possible but nothing ever happened. I wanted to get back inside where there was light and music and Luke. By now, maybe the crowd around him had dispersed to play the jukebox or go out on the piazza to get high, and I could catch him alone, maybe grab the seat next to him at the bar and start a conversation that didn’t sound stupid.

  “Am I a slut, Katie?” Nanny asked again, her eyelids flinching. “Tell me the truth. Do you think I am?”

  “No,” I said quickly.

  “Don’t tell Liz,” she said again. “She has a big fucking mouth, you know she does.”

  “I won’t,” I promised. Liz was at work, probably waiting for Cory to take her for another Thursday-night test drive. So far, they’d done it in a Chevy Monte Carlo, a Ford Mustang and a Cadillac Sedan DeVille. But he’d still never taken her to the movies or to the Sunrise Diner for coffee, or for a ride in his own car, a Triumph TR6 that he’d bought secondhand. Liz wanted to marry him, even though she said it still hurt sometimes when he balled her, that she’d lie awake all night, throbbing, afterward. Even when there was love involved, something always seemed to hurt.

  “Come on, man,” I said, growing impatient. It was late now. I took Nanny’s arm again and guided her through the moonlit alley. Once, she missed a step and caused us both to stumble in the darkness.

  • • •

  When we got back inside, Luke and Mitch were sitting in the far corner of the bar near the jukebox, both of them smoking like chimneys, talking so intently I didn’t dare go over. I went to play the jukebox instead, which was already buzzing with quarters, so I could listen to what they were saying. But between the music and the stoned babble all around me, it was hard to hear anything. I was turning to leave when I heard Mitch say, “You know how it is over there, the flowers?” I stopped to listen. He went on: “How sometimes you’d be walking and you’d forget for a minute why you were there? Because all around, man, so much damned beauty! All these exotic blooms, growing on top of each other! Orchids, right? You’d touch the petals and they gave off this scent, different from the flowers here, more delicate, but . . . pungent, that’s the word. Delicately pungent. Like a—a psychedelic garden. But it never lasted because of all the, you know, the smoke, the . . . you know, right? Yeah . . . so we’re walking, marching, by the river . . . the Mekong River . . . and we’re stoned out of our tits, man, the weed was, like, tripping weed over there, un-fucking-believable. Like the dope, man, everything so pure . . . and I see this, like . . . this giant . . . blossom, the biggest blossom I’ve ever seen, right on the river, like this unbelievably beautiful flower just floating on the river, getting bigger and bigger, like it was taking over the river, right? Like the river was a big, fucking, flowing flower! I was just blown away, man. Blown the fuck away. So I went down by the riverbank, so I can, like, touch it, pick a piece of it to take with me, for, I don’t know, luck or something, maybe give it to one of the girls to put in her hair or something. So . . . I start leaning in, to, like, pick a part of this river flower, and my buddy, Tang, he comes over and pulls me back, he’s like, ‘What the fuck you doing, man?’ And I’m like, ‘Get off me, man, I want to pick part of this flower, you ever seen anything so beautiful? You ever seen anything like it in your life?’ And he looks at me, and he says, ‘Asshole, that ain’t no flower.’ And I say, ‘Sure it is, just look at it, motherfucker! If that’s not a flower, then what the fuck is it?’ And he gets pissed, right, he shoves me so I’m almost in the river, and he says, ‘You look at it, motherfucker.’ And I turn and I put my hands on it, I plunge my hands right in it, and he’s right, man. It ain’t no fucking flower. It’s blood. Blood on the water. Spreading as far as the eye could see.” Mitch laughed. He laughed like he’d heard a really funny joke. I didn’t want to turn around, to seem as though I was eavesdropping. I didn’t hear Luke laughing. I hadn’t heard him say a word the entire time I’d been standing at the jukebox. I saw from the corner of my eye Len putting a twin set of shots in front of Mitch and Luke. Mitch downed his right away. “Anytime anyone asks me, ‘What was it like over in Nam?’ I tell them that story. Whole country full of flowers, everywhere you look. All those flowers, drowning in blood. Hey, little darling!”

  I looked up. I felt Mitch’s hand on my arm. He pulled me so close I could smell how fucked up he was. His eyes were squinty and filled with light.

  “Mmm-mmm, you look good enough to eat,” he crooned, looking me up and down. I was wearing the new brown cotton peasant shirt with the hand-sewn blue silk roses at the collar that I’d bought at Heads Up, the local hippie head shop. I’d bought it thinking of Luke, thinking it would be the perfect thing to wear when I saw him. But then Mitch kissed the side of my face and hugged me tight so that my back was to Luke and I couldn’t see his face. I wondered what he was thinking.

  When I turned around again, his seat was empty.

  Mitch still had his arm around me and was banging on the bar with his other hand. “Service! Service!” he cried over Pat Whalen and the Country Whalers singing “The Wearin’ of the Green.” “A little service for the servicemen, Goddamnit!” I gently twisted out from under his arm and Mitch barely noticed, he just kept banging on the bar to get Len’s attention. I thought maybe Luke was in the bathroom and would be coming back. I glanced toward the men’s room, but when Billy came out and swung the door behind him, it looked empty. I waited a little longer, for the song to end, and then I was tired of waiting. I was ready to leave. I was out of cigarettes and I had to be at work early the next morning.

  I walked away from Mitch and his clamoring for a drink he didn’t need, looking around for Luke and not seeing him anywhere. I looked around for Nanny but couldn’t find her, either. I felt my blood quicken with this new impatience that had been stalking me lately, at home, standing on the corner by Eddy’s, at work, ringing things up on the cash register. Everything, everyone was moving too slowly for me. I was tired of waiting on people, on things to happen. That seemed like all I’d done for the past three years, since I’d first seen Luke coming off Comanche Street beach, carrying his surfboard, dripping and grinning and golden. And now I couldn’t escape the feeling that everyone had been at the party for a while but I was just getting there, in danger of being left behind. Even now it was later than I thought, too late to walk home alone, so I started up Comanche Street to catch the bus on Lighthouse Avenue. I heard someone call my name and turned around. It was Bennie Esposito. He was walking instead of stumbling, and his eyes were wide and clear.

  “Where you going so early, man?” And yet another surprise, he wasn’t slurring his words. “The night is young.” />
  “You okay, Bennie?” I asked.

  He slipped a sly arm around me and pulled me close. “I’d be better if you was to, say, take a little walk on the beach with me, maybe search for starfish, you know, it’s an outasight night, man.” He winked at me and I laughed. Bennie was one of the city boys. I liked him. I used to have a crush on him, when he first moved to the Beach. When he wasn’t on downs and his eyes were open, you could see how beautiful they really were.

  “Well, it would be too obvious if I asked you over to see my etchings,” he said. “Besides, my room’s a fucking mess.”

  “It’s late,” I said. “I have to be to work at nine tomorrow.”

  “Ouch,” he said, wincing. “That’s like the middle of the night for me, man.” His hands were working upward, resting on my rib cage. They felt hot against my skin. I looked up at the sky, crowded with stars, a fat, full moon staring down at us. I looked back at The Starlight Hotel. I wished I could have seen Luke’s face when Mitch was talking about the blood flowers. I wished I could see him now, just to know where he was. I wondered if he was walking the beach, or maybe hanging out with Christa Cutler on the lifeguard chair. The thought made my insides twist, as though my heart was lined with bruises.

  I looked back at Bennie for a long minute. Then I put my arms around his neck and kissed him, full on the lips. His eyes widened and then he laughed. “Man, this night’s just getting better and better,” he said. He held out his hand and turned toward the Comanche Beach entrance. I looked back one last time before twining Bennie’s outstretched fingers with my own. We crossed the entrance threshold and walked toward the abandoned lifeguard chair down by the water, the sand wet and cool as crushed flowers beneath my feet.