The History of Now

by Daniel Klein

  “She’s good,” Stephanie says.

  “Bunny? Oh, she’s good all right. Too good,” Mark replies, not looking away from the court as the girl named Bunny prepares to serve.

  “Did you ever play with her?” Stephanie asks, even as she wishes she would just shut up.

  “Only my whole life,” Mark says with laugh. “She’s my sister.”

  Stephanie smiles softly, relieved. “I bet if they paired the two of you together, nobody would stand a chance.”

  “Could be,” Mark says. He watches his sister take another point with a perfect bounce into the grille before he adds, “God knows that’s what Harvard is counting on.”

  “Bunny’s at Harvard too?”

  “Not yet.”

  “She’s still in high school?” Even as Stephanie asks this— as offhandedly as she can muster—she senses what is coming.

  “Yes, well, at Andover. She still has a year and a half to go, so we’ll only get to team up for one year. When I’m a senior.”

  The match on Court A suddenly comes to a standstill as all four players gaze up at the gallery windows in search of the source of shattering laughter showering down on them. But they cannot see Stephanie Cyzinski because she has sat down, dizzy to the point of faintness from the rush of her laughter and from the realization that set it off.

  Stephanie’s spot on Harvard’s royal tennis team is already taken! Bunny Saunders is not only a Harvard legacy, but a royal tennis legacy. And on top of that, she is a champ at the game. It’s a done deal, folks, signed and sealed. Bunny is the female player Harvard is signing up for the upcoming sole vacant spot on the team!

  Poor, ridiculous, overreaching Dad was misinformed. Possibly even lied to, the way places like Harvard undoubtedly lie to guidance counselors at insignificant public high schools in an attempt to mask their elitist biases. God knows, Dad would be ripe for a lie like that.

  It was hilarious, really. After all the time she and Dad had spent, this whole campaign was an utter bust. After all the money Dad had invested in his preposterous dream. After all the effort she had put in—the twenty hours a week in the gym working on her hip adductors because—Don’t you see, Stephanie?—hip adductors are the ultimate key to getting into Harvard!

  Oh yeah, it was hilarious, all right.

  Returning from Boston, Terry Cyzinski always crosses the Charles River on the Longfellow Bridge so they can take Memorial Drive to the Turnpike. In this way, they cruise past Harvard College’s red brick dorms that face the river— Dunster House, Leverett House, Winthrop House, Eliot House. They look so solid and majestic, even if their crowning bell towers remind Stephanie of the cupola that used to top the old Friendly’s in town. Terry never says a word as they pass by Harvard. He does not need to; his look of consummate delight says it all.

  As they glide by this evening, the last rays of winter sun make the buildings iridescent. The dorms throw off sharp-edged shadows as if they are spot-lit dioramas in an historical museum. It is here and now that Stephanie planned to tell her father what she learned that afternoon above Court A, but she gazes at the glowing Harvard houses in silence. This is not because she has suddenly decided to spare her father a terrible disappointment and the anger that would surely follow from it. In fact, at this moment Stephanie believes he deserves that and more. No, Stephanie says nothing because of her newfound pleasure in devious spins and cunning drop volleys. She is going to play this game out to the end.

  * * *

  As an experiment, Lila has decided to fuck Flip Morris. Although she hardly thinks of herself as an intellectual, she has a skeptical cast of mind along with just enough deVries Dutch pragmatism to appreciate that she cannot continue with her web debate about sex if she has no experience in the subject. Ipso facto, the experiment.

  Like a methodical researcher, she has assembled all her motives and expectations in her mind, beginning with the concession that it is actually more than just her daily exchanges with ShitStopper that prompt her project, even if they are what tipped the balance. Lila has simply concluded that she is too old to be a virgin. Virginity smacks of immaturity, and immaturity, above all, is unacceptable to her. If that was not obvious to her before she met Daphne Dowd, it is now. The diminutive sixteen-year-old, with her quaint, silk hair bows and plaid pinafores concealing her skimpily-developed physique, keeps a list tucked in her backpack of what she calls her ‘conquests.’ They total six and include, she says, a Hotchkiss groundskeeper and a bartender at a Salisbury, Connecticut country inn. Even as Lila suspects there is something compulsive, even bitter, about Daphne’s sexual adventures—not to mention her list-keeping—she finds the girl inspiring. Daphne Dowd definitely has balls.

  Lila settled on Flip because, God knows, he would be a willing subject, not requiring any sloppy, extraneous preliminaries. Plus, he does not go to Grandville High, which means she would not have to deal with him afterwards in the school’s hallways or classrooms. Finally, Lila has decided to go through with the experiment totally sober. She knows too well how Pato’s pot can embroider experience with phantom feelings and she wants this one to be absolutely pure.

  Lila’s cool calculations fortify her. When she thinks about her mother—which is usually only when Wendell talks about her—Lila is repelled by Franny’s fragility. Lila’s prescription for survival is to be the very opposite of her mother, and for a teenager as tender and remote as Lila, personal survival is an ongoing struggle, one that does not promote charity. In Lila’s view, her mother always put on a big show of her emotions as if her loud, girlish laughs and teary-eyed sulks made her bigger than life, when in the end they only made her more vulnerable. Lila is not even convinced that her mother actually suffered a nervous breakdown so much as got carried away by one of her over-the-top self-dramatizations.

  Ever since Wendell asked Archie Morris to have a word with his son about Lila, Flip has been wilier in his pursuit of the girl. Instead of dogging Lila in his cruiser or waiting for her at her bus stop, Flip has taken to leaving mash notes in her locker, slipped through the grate in the locker door before school opens for business. As a town cop, he has keys to every public building in Grandville.

  Flip’s notes are pathetic, veering from what he must think of as poetry (“Your hair looks so slippery and nice”) to natural, heartfelt smut (“A hottie like you needs a real man to make you scream.”) She never answered them. But now the man’s stupidity and juvenile vanity figure in Lila’s experiment: He is so simple he can be depended upon to be a predictable constant. That way Lila can focus entirely on her own reactions.

  On a Wednesday afternoon in late January after the last school bus has departed, Lila tapes a folded piece of paper to her locker door. On the outside, it says, “F.M.”; inside it says, “Meet me at Wright Mt. path Thurs. 3PM. L.” The next morning, the note inside her locker says, “I’ll be there, babe. Flip.”

  For the occasion, in lieu of wearing her standard high school uniform—worn jeans and a sweatshirt—Lila opts for primness, her getup inspired by Daphne Dowd’s straight-laced wardrobe. Lila does not, of course, own a pinafore and would not think of wearing a skirt, but she does put on the pressed black chinos and short-collared white blouse she wears as a waitress, and she pulls her blonde mane back under the pink headband Esther’s daughter, Kaela, bought her for Christmas. Lila wants to personify innocence; making her inexperience an ironic pose helps her handle the fact that it is real. Honest as Lila tries to be with herself, she does not realize just how much this bit of theatrical self-mockery makes her similar to her mother.

  But she cannot trick her nerves. As she crosses the highway to the access road that leads to the Wright Mountain path, a riot of fear erupts in her guts. The acrid taste of barely-checked vomit stings her throat. She feels drained, unstable. It strikes her for the first time that while she was convinced this entire enterprise was coolly conceived, it actually came to her under the influence of three-weeks-running daily doses of marijuana. And on this, her fir
st pot-free day in that period, she plainly sees the peril in mixing heady fantasy with physical fact.

  She could easily enough turn around and head back toward town. No one other than Flip knows about the rendezvous and even Flip does not know the scenario she has planned. He certainly would be angry if she failed to show up, but what could he do? He was already on notice for stalking her.

  Lila stops. The granite peak of Wright Mountain looms above her, swirls of windswept snow circling it. For a moment, she takes in its celebrated beauty, but an instant later she once again feels its overbearingness, a stone sentry guarding against her escape. Lila continues on to where the path meets the road.

  Flip is leaning against the driver’s door of his cruiser, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, a short-billed, black cap tilted back on his crew cut dome, one hand on his hip. Seeing him before he sees her, Lila has to stifle a laugh. So Flip, too, has assumed a role for their encounter and it is none other than Elvis. Lila even knows the poster photograph he is aping—it is in Wendell’s collection: Elvis leaning against his Harley in black leather jacket and motorcycle cap, he, himself, aping Marlon Brando. Flip is a copy of a copy, and, thus diminished, he renews Lila’s courage.

  “Hey, girl,” Flip says as Lila approaches.

  “Flip,” Lila replies dully, looking past him.

  Flip ambles toward her with a rolling, Elvis-like gait. He places a fat, short-fingered hand on her shoulder and Lila reflexively steps back, causing it to slip off.

  “You’ve been getting my notes, I guess,” Flip says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s good,” Flip says.

  This close, Lila sees drops of ice in Flip’s blonde moustache. They are brown and shiny, reminding Lila of the frozen rabbit turds that dot the back steps of her house. For all her mental preparation, Lila has not reckoned on just how repulsive she finds Flip, even before he opens his mouth. God knows, there are more attractive men in town—even in school, for that matter—and it would not be that difficult to get them to participate in her experiment. Daphne says the one advantage of being a girl is all you have to do to get laid is make yourself available. But maybe, Lila thinks, her first instinct was right, maybe Flip’s repulsiveness makes her investigation purer, untainted by any sense remotely connected to the heart.

  “Cold, huh?” Flip says.

  “Kind of.”

  “Car’s warm.”

  Indeed, the police cruiser’s exhaust pipe is throwing off puffs of steamy smoke. At Grandville’s annual town meeting, there is invariably some citizen who cites a list of fiscal excesses by the town’s public servants, including gas squandered by idling school buses and police cars. No citizen, however, has ever openly complained about their public servants’ moral excesses.

  Flip opens the passenger door, waits for Lila to slip inside, then slams the door hard as if the better to contain her. Once he gets in on the other side, he leans back, planting a hand on the steering wheel. Like many men, he draws a buzz of virility merely from sitting in the driver’s seat. He reaches inside his jacket, pulls out a pint of Wild Turkey, unscrews the top, wipes the mouth of the bottle against his sleeve, and offers it to Lila. “Ice breaker,” he says.

  “No thanks,” Lila replies. A rumble of dread again churns her stomach. She feels like she could very easily throw up right in Flip Morris’s lap. She either has to get this thing over with fast or get the hell out of here right now. She draws in her breath. “Let’s do it,” she murmurs.

  “Huh?”

  “You want to fuck me, right? So let’s do it.” Saying the word ‘fuck’ out loud soothes Lila’s nerves. It is the word she has always used in her mind for the experiment. She and Shit-Stopper share a disdain for euphemisms like ‘having sex’ and ‘making love’ and the latest and most coy, ‘doing the nasty.’ “That’s like calling ‘murder,’ ‘doing the dead thing,’” Shit-Stopper wrote.

  “You bet,” Flip responds a beat later than Lila expected. She realizes that her directness confounds him, that he has his own mentally-rehearsed scenario for the event and he is not, of course, talented at improvising. This only emboldens Lila more.

  “Are you ready? Are you hard?” Lila says.

  “Yeah, are you?” Clearly, Flip tries to make his retort sound like a tough counter-challenge, but it comes out much too defensively for that; he sounds petulant.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” Lila says, and that is the truth.

  Flip grabs both her shoulders and pulls her toward him. Lila turns her face away from his. “I didn’t say I’d kiss you, for crissake!” she says. She feels Flip’s grasp momentarily weaken and takes it as an opportunity to pull away from him and add, “Just fuck.”

  Lila quickly disengages the fastener on her pants, unzips the fly and, lifting her bottom off the seat, shimmies her slacks to her knees. She loops her thumbs under the elastic of her panties, then decides to wait before pulling them down too. Flip gapes at her, flush with excitement and stupefaction.

  “Your turn,” Lila says. In spite of herself, she smiles at the juvenile, ‘I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours’ sound of her words.

  Flip unbuckles, unbuttons, and unzips, then pulls his pants down exactly as Lila has. He is indeed hard, his erection pushing through the slit in his boxers like a prize morel poking through the grass.

  Until this moment, Lila deVries has only seen drawings and photographs of stiff penises. This flesh one is far less daunting than the pictures. With its pulsing vein and purple-pink helmet, it looks like a wounded soldier lost from its regiment. Lila reaches out her hand to touch it.

  “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

  It abruptly oozes into her palm. Lila is fascinated by the impeccable whiteness of the fluid, its purity.

  “Fuck! That never happened to me before!” Flip yowls. His face, just a moment ago wrenched in a dumb grimace, is now flushed and fuming. And Lila, just a moment ago drenched with wonder, even mercy, pulls away from him anxiously.

  “It’s okay,” Lila murmurs. It is, in fact, more than okay—it is a relief. She has realized her experiment—at least, sort of— and without any damage to herself. She even felt something related—albeit distantly—to fondness for Flip: He was privy to her experiment’s denoument. But suddenly Lila’s experiment is not about what she intended; it is now a study in humiliation of the most venomous kind. Lila pulls up her slacks and reaches for the zipper, but Flip smacks her hand.

  “Just wait, goddamit!” Flip roars. “Just give me a minute and we’ll do this thing right!”

  Lila pulls back against the car door. She is trembling. Flip looks like he could kill her. Craving sex, he was vulnerable; spent, he is villainous. Lila’s experiment is producing counter-intuitive results.

  “Wendell’s expecting me,” Lila manages to say.

  “Just wait, you hear?” Flip barks. He raises his open hand threateningly.

  Lila nods, terrified. She darts her eyes around the interior of the cruiser. She imagines grabbing the nightstick hooked to Flip’s belt—now down at his knees—and slamming it against his skull. She imagines snatching up the microphone of the two-way radio and calling for help.

  Flip is holding his fallen dick in one hand. He pulls on it.

  “How long does it take, Flip?” Lila says. She does not know what put the question in her mouth or how she knew to ask it so demurely, but even as she asks it she senses the balance of power tilting back to her.

  “Fuck it, I don’t know,” Flip answers.

  “So why don’t we do it another time?” Lila says, sounding very much like her grandmother, Beatrice. She smiles politely at Flip’s penis. Lila knows, of course, that there will not be another time.

  Flip gives one vain, final pull, and says, “Yeah, right.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Long before Grandville Community College began offering evening courses in its continuing education program, townspeople could improve their minds and hone their skills in the B
ible study groups at Grandville Congregational Church, the farming workshops conducted by faculty members of the University of Massachusetts Agricultural School and held in the barn and fields of the Harry Thatcher spread out on what is now the south end of Mahaiwe Street (the 1951 series on contour plowing was so oversubscribed it needed to be repeated the following year), the appliqué ‘seminar’ conducted by and in the parlor of Madeline La Monte in the 1930s, and the acting and elocution classes presided over by Françoise deVries on the Phoenix’s stage way back in the early 1900s.

  But in the late 1980s, the influx of retirees with time on their hands, fear of mental atrophy in their hearts, and most importantly, money in their bank accounts, provided the opening for an entirely new level of adult instruction, one that the financially-struggling community college was eager to fill. Using his own faculty—along with some members of that tribe of nontenured professors who spend much of their time shuttling from one small college to another—GCC’s dean, Norm Ruprecht, cobbled together a catalogue of continuing education courses that included, Estate Planning, World Religions, Local Geology, Italian Cooking, Case Studies in Constitutional Law, and Indoor Gardening. It was an immediate success. As a result of the substantial extra income it provided for teachers, it created an ongoing competition among them for ‘saleable’ courses. Associate Professor of Philosophy, Herbert Blitzstein, joined these sweepstakes two years ago.

  Although Herb lives modestly in a two-room apartment over Digby’s Music Shop, he has a weakness for expensive books and CDs that keeps him in constant debt to the MasterCard Corporation, so he readily admits that his motive is more pecuniary than pedagogical. Dean Ruprecht warned Herb there was no call for philosophy classes in the questionnaire he regularly circulates to adult students at the end of each term, but Herb had an inspired idea for a course he promised Ruprecht would knock the socks off white-haired exurbanites. It was called ‘Philosophy in Film’ and consisted of screenings of select feature films followed by classroom discussions of their philosophical content. After considerable coaxing, the dean included it in the next catalogue with the proviso that if fewer than six people signed up, he would cancel it. Twenty-two signed up and the course, now carried every term, has even acquired a popular nickname, ‘Phil of Flicks.’