“Me too,” I said.
“Well then,” she said. She held her drink aloft. “To friendship.”
I STARTED FOR HOME quickly until I began to realize that I’d become short of breath and had begun to list leftward as I made my way up the hill. I staggered slowly downward, breathing deeply, trying to calm the thrumming in my limbs and the blur of sensations in my brain.
I managed to slip into the house undetected. I stole upstairs and into Paul’s room, hoping I could sober up enough to get through the rest of the evening without my parents’ discovering what I’d been up to that afternoon.
I put on the Beatles’ White Album. I remembered how once, when we were listening to it together, Paul had leaped up off the bed after the gibberish between “I’m So Tired” and “Blackbird” to stop the needle on the vinyl.
“Listen to this,” he had said.
He turned the record counterclockwise with his finger. In reverse, we heard the distorted voice of John Lennon:
Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him.
“Far out, right?” Paul said.
Far out, I thought.
I lifted my head and peered out the window up at the glowing windows of Twin Oaks. I thought of Patricia in her tight tan pants and knee-high leather boots. How her eyes warmed when she was a little drunk. How the sweat of her nape had dampened and darkened her green T-shirt, drawing a faint inverted triangle descending toward her lovely breasts.
Remembering all of this, I turned over onto my back and dreamed about Patricia Culver for the first of many times.
7
I WAS MOSTLY ALONE when I worked at Twin Oaks, trimming the grass around the fences, steering the zero-turn lawn mower up and down the pasture, cleaning the stalls and hauling hay bales in and out of the loft. Whenever I could, however, I watched Patricia with Reggie in the ring, practicing jumping and dressage. Dressage! It was one of those terms, like cotillion or noblesse oblige, that seemed drenched with privilege.
When we crossed paths at the stables, Leigh Bowman made no effort to mask her discomfort with my presence. I returned her awkwardness with a sneering, almost taunting surliness. After Leigh left, Patricia and I would gossip about her over drinks in the tack room. I sensed that Patricia understood what I was up to. In all likelihood, she grasped my motives better than I did.
“Do you know what Leigh said to me?” Patricia asked one afternoon.
“What?” I asked.
“She told me I should stop toying with you. Do you think I’m toying with you, Richard?”
“No,” I said.
Not nearly enough, I thought.
One afternoon while I was alone mucking out the stalls, I heard a car approach and come to a halt, followed by the opening and closing of the driver’s side door. A moment later, Leigh appeared in the barn, dressed in slacks and open-toed pumps and a pressed linen blouse.
“Hi,” she said.
“You planning to ride dressed like that?” I asked.
“I’m not here to ride,” she said. “I came to see you.”
I leaned the shovel against the wall and turned to face her, trying to act the way I remembered Paul behaving toward my mother.
Leigh’s face looked troubled. I noticed a slight tremor in her hands as they hung at her side. Again, I thought of my mother, with her bird-like hands, fluttering about when she was upset.
“Say,” I said, “whatever became of ole Barton?”
“Who?”
“Barton,” I repeated. “The guy you were studying with when Paul and I showed up that day in Charlottesville.”
For a moment she looked lost, as if she’d forgotten where she was or why she’d come there.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Did he tell you what I said to him?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“I told him he didn’t stand a chance.”
“You were right about that.”
We stared tensely at each other, as if we were on the verge of drawing pistols at twenty paces.
“Do you remember what I made Paul promise me that day?” she asked. “I made him promise to take you home.”
“He didn’t mention it,” I said.
“I told him that if he took you home,” she said, “I would go with him.”
“That was awful good of you,” I said.
I didn’t grasp what this recollection was designed to convey. What did she want me to say? Was she looking for a thank-you?
“Well,” I said, “he took me home, all right. Eventually.”
“I know,” she said. “I was so angry at him when he told me what he had done. But I loved him. And I loved you too. I still do.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“I want you to be happy.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“And I want you to be happy for me.”
“I know. You told me. And I am so very happy for you, Leigh,” I said, with as much sarcasm as I could manage to convey.
Again we were left staring at each other, Leigh standing there in her grown-up costume, her arms folded across her chest, trying to settle those fluttering hands.
“Was there something you wanted to say to me?” I asked. “I’ve got work to do, you know.”
I gestured to the pile of muck and the shovel I’d left leaning against the wall.
She bit her lip. She wasn’t crying yet, but I sensed I wouldn’t need to push her much further. It felt oddly thrilling to be so cruel.
“This was a mistake,” she said.
She turned to leave. Too late, the remorse overcame me.
“I’m sorry,” I called out.
She stopped, her silhouette framed in the open door of the stable.
“What did you want to say to me, Leigh?” I asked, in a tone I hoped she would recognize as sincere.
“I changed my mind,” she said.
I CAME HOME to a quiet house. My mother was back in the Royal Chamber, decked out in her spandex, burning her buns with Jane Fonda. The Old Man was in his study with the afternoon edition of the Wall Street Journal open on his lap to the stock pages, staring at the television news in disbelief. The date was October 19, 1987. The market had just closed, and the talking heads were already calling it Black Monday.
We had been due for a hard dose of comeuppance, I suppose, ever since the ascension of Reagan, the kindly old grandfather, who had spoiled us with federal deregulation and unsustainably low tax and interest rates. There we were in Boone’s Ferry, the prettiest, safest part of the prettiest, safest little town in the world, living our lives of unspoiled comfort. We were willing to go along with anything so long as we still had our German luxury cars, our country clubs, our private schools, and our ballooning stock portfolios. So we deserved what we got on Black Monday, when the market plummeted while everyone stood by helplessly as $500 billion vanished before our eyes.
If I’d been less absorbed with my own affairs, I might have noticed the horror and disbelief on the Old Man’s face—an expression of incredulous panic that couldn’t have looked much different from the one Frank Cherry wore before he went out with that pistol to his front porch rocking chair at Twin Oaks back in 1929. But it meant very little to me at the time. Nothing was the end of the world, until it was.
I would have to wait to discover the depth of the catastrophe that befell the Old Man that day. I left the room oblivious to his anguish and went upstairs, where I put on Joni Mitchell’s Blue and fell on the bed to daydream. I wondered what Patricia was doing—whether she thought about me as often as I thought about her, in the way I thought about her. I imagined myself and Patricia as a conspiracy of romantic resistance against the cynicism of Leigh’s impending marriage to Charles Culver.
I’m not sure when I fell asleep—somewhere after the beginning of “River.” I woke up in darkness. It wasn’t like my mother to let me miss dinner. Maybe she thought I was tired because I had been working so hard.
I turned to look out
the window. The lights were still on at Twin Oaks. The digital alarm clock on my bedside table read 1:34 a.m.
Paul used to sneak out all the time; it was easy to do with our parents asleep way back in the Royal Chamber. Why not? I thought. So I slipped down the stairs and out the door and across the lawn to Brad Culver’s fence, the white paint of which seemed almost to glow in the blue moonlight.
As I reached the crest of the hill, I saw the small gold rectangle of the tack room window at the center of the stable’s black shadow. I clutched my jacket around my waist and treaded toward the light, slowing my pace as I drew closer. Inside the stable, the horses snorted restlessly. I moved to the window. Before I could peer in, I was startled by the sound of a voice behind me.
“Trespassing must run in your blood, boy,” the voice said.
I started and spun around, my back against the stable wall. Before me stood Brad Culver, teetering on his feet, dressed not unlike he had been all those years before, when I mistook him for a ghost.
Even from ten feet off, I could smell the booze on his breath. He peered at me through heavy-lidded eyes and made a soft grunting noise before lurching and weaving his way over to the open stable door. His whole back, from the close-cropped silver of his skull to the heels of his boots, was covered with a thin layer of wet sand.
As he reached the stable door, Culver grasped its handle and, misjudging its weight, pitched forward. He appeared to lack the strength even to get up from the ground. There he remained, facedown, mumbling into the ground as the horses stamped and snorted.
I stood over Culver for what seemed like a long time, contemplating what I might do to him. How hard would it be, I wondered, to press his face into the soft, sandy dirt until he stopped breathing?
As far as anyone else knew, I was asleep in my bed. I could get away with it, I thought. I could kill this man. Later I would often wonder how different all our lives might have been if I had.
“Come on, Mr. Culver,” I said.
“Putrid fuck,” he muttered.
I helped him up onto his feet and pulled his arm around my shoulder. The path up to the house was long and steep. We had to stop several times along the way when Culver’s knees buckled beneath him. I would wait a moment for him to catch his breath before resuming our slow, staggering walk up toward Twin Oaks.
When we reached the house, I sat down beside him and eased him back onto that old porch where long ago Frank Cherry had ended his own life. Was the blood still there, I wondered, beneath layer after layer of paint, soaked into the grain of the aging wood?
I stepped over Culver and up to the door and rang the bell. I heard a soft peal ring out within. A shadow passed across a window. I took off running back down the hill from where we’d come, slowing as I reached the stable, heaving cold, wet breaths that shot out in visible bursts of steam before me. Patricia appeared in the faint light of the glowing window to the tack room.
“That was kind of you, Rocky,” she said.
“I thought you might be here,” I said.
She leaned up against the doorframe with her hands behind her back. Instead of boots and riding pants and a T-shirt, she wore jeans and a black crewneck sweater, her brown hair hanging down around her shoulders. I’d never seen her without her hair pinned up before. It was longer than I expected and made her seem younger and more feminine. She looked at once familiar and startlingly changed, as if I were seeing her for the first time after she’d returned from a long journey.
“I should have come out,” she said, “but I prefer not to deal with him when he’s like that.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” I said.
Again I felt my heart quicken. This time, however, I wasn’t drunk. And this time, I understood what was happening—what I wanted, what I had come out to the barn for. I didn’t bother asking what she was doing there at that time of night. It seemed she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?” I asked.
“I know why you’re here,” she said.
She held out her hand.
“Come along,” she said.
8
TO THE FEW people I’ve told about Patricia over the years, I have described her as a mysterious older woman who, through chance and circumstance, took me to bed and stole my innocence. To men, I would treat the whole experience as a naughty little conquest. To women, I would relate it as a dark secret that had marked me with a lingering, melancholy vulnerability. The truth was something more complicated.
Up in the hayloft, Patricia spread out a couple of quilted plaid horse blankets across a square of hay bales. Given my complete lack of experience, I had no expectations or plans for what was about to happen. I assumed at least that she’d make me work my way around the bases. Instead, Patricia simply pulled her sweater over her head, unfastened her bra, and unbuttoned the top of her jeans while I looked on, agape. In a series of deft movements, she stepped out of her slip-on ankle boots, pushed her jeans and panties to the floor, and spread herself out on the blankets. The skin of Patricia’s face and arms and neck was darkened somewhat by the amount of time she spent in the sun, but the rest of her flesh was almost alarmingly pale. In the faint light from the open window, her skin seemed blue, like the color of a robin’s egg. My eyes traveled up along her legs and past her knees, pausing at the predictable places. She let me study her there for a moment before pulling one of the blankets up to her chin.
“I hate my breasts,” she said, in a surprisingly coy and vulnerable tone.
“I think your breasts are perfect,” I said. It was true—I did.
“Come along, darling,” she said.
Darling! My heart swelled with ardor. I undressed hurriedly, afraid that, if I hesitated any further, she might change her mind.
When I was ready, she lifted the blanket so I could crawl underneath with her. She let me kiss her, whispering instructions on how she preferred the movement of tongues. I grasped at her breasts clumsily but with a fervor she must have found touching, if not flattering.
“You brought something, didn’t you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“A condom,” she said. “You brought one, didn’t you?”
Of course I hadn’t brought one. The idea that I might need one had never occurred to me. My fantasies about riding the waves of bliss with Patricia had never included the practical step of unwrapping and applying a prophylactic. The irony was, back in Paul’s room, at home, I had a whole box of them: a twenty-four-pack the Old Man had unceremoniously dumped on my desk not long after I started at Macon.
“What do you expect me to do with these?” I had said to the Old Man, holding the box as if it contained radioactive material. I couldn’t remember whether I was aware of Paul’s having needed rubbers at the beginning of the ninth grade. Perhaps he had.
“If you need any more,” he said, “just ask.”
A year later, when I might actually have made use of one of those rubbers, they were back across the field in my closet, stashed away under a stack of baseball cards in an old shoe box.
“I can go get one,” I said. “It’ll take me five minutes. Ten tops.”
“Oh, Rocky,” she said, with a greater measure of whimsy than exasperation.
“Please,” I said, almost whining, my unrelenting hard-on throbbing against her leg.
“There will be another time,” she said. “For now, we’ll just have to make do.”
Before I could speak, she had me in her hand, and then her mouth. I had just long enough to be astonished. Patricia was surpassingly gracious.
“Control comes with practice,” she said.
Rolling on to her back, she took my hand and guided my fingers into her, helping me to find her rhythm.
“There,” she said.
Her movements quickened; she threw her head back onto the blanket and bucked her hips into the air, holding them there trembling for a moment before she gasped and fell back to the bed
of blankets beneath her.
“Oh, my,” she said with a sigh.
The next time, I didn’t forget the rubbers.
The weeks that followed were a prolonged, exquisite torture. Even before we started sleeping with each other, I had felt both the pull of deep longing and a not-so-subtle uneasiness toward Patricia. Quite abruptly I had gone from having never so much as kissed a girl to doing everything, and with an older, experienced partner—every adolescent male’s fantasy fulfilled. But I also knew how horrified my mother would be by what I was doing in that barn when I snuck out at night or, sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon, when Patricia felt confident we wouldn’t be interrupted or was tipsy enough to be a little reckless. I vacillated between regarding the whole business as a secret stain on my soul and thinking it was the greatest, most thrilling thing that would ever happen to me.
It wasn’t just the sex either. Patricia listened to me in a way no one ever had. She confessed her own vulnerabilities in a manner I took to be truthful and sincere. I began to believe that we were in love: that we were soul mates, destined for each other, even if only for a short while. Some of these delusions were due to Patricia’s constant talk of tragic literary love stories from the likes of Shakespeare and the Brontë sisters and D. H. Lawrence and Kate Chopin. Quite a bit of it came from the notion that she was herself wounded and thwarted by her circumstances—namely, the misfortune of being Brad Culver’s daughter.
Indeed, our pillow talk consisted almost exclusively of complaints against the people who were supposed to love us most. Through Patricia, I discovered a theretofore untapped contempt for my parents: The Old Man’s mindless pursuit of money and his constant sucking up to those who had it, the way he never stopped grinding for the next big deal, the way he loved Paul more than he did me. My mother’s prudery and moral hypocrisy. Who was she to act so righteous, I thought, marrying an old man for his money and driving off his first son? And what about Paul? He’d ditched us, after all—didn’t I deserve to hate him too?
Would I ever have felt this way about my family without Patricia’s encouragement? Probably. But a shared sense of indignation seemed to be the one thing Patricia and I truly had in common.
Only Love Can Break Your Heart Page 9