She pushed his hand away quickly from the crotch of the panties. “Don’t,” she said softly, “please, Tommy. I don’t go that far.”
He took his hand away without protest. But she kissed him again dreamily, and he was confused again and almost angry. Did she or didn’t she, and was it so different for girls anyway? And how could you tell? The tight ache across his loins was like a crimson spike driven into him. He pressed close to her, his hand flattened in the taut arch of her back. It soothed the ache a little. He whispered, “Can’t you see how I am? Don’t you get—get excited, too?”
“Y-yes. That’s why it scares me.”
“But there isn’t anything to be scared of.”
“But I am. Please, Tommy, it isn’t smart to go so far we just can’t stop.”
This confused him worse than ever. He was almost lying on top of her now, his hand drawn again, as if by a powerful magnet, between her thighs. “But why do we have to stop?” he whispered. “It seems sort of silly to want everything else except just that. Please, honey?”
“Oh, Tommy, don’t,” she said, and for a minute he thought she was crying. “I never let any boy go even this far. I like you better than anybody else I know, but I just don’t want to go all the way.”
He felt as if he had held his breath too long; he let it out, feeling the thudding ache behind his eyes. The girl’s eyelashes tasted salt with tears as he kissed them. “Ann, don’t cry. honey. Honest. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to—I never would.” Carefully he untangled himself from her.
“Are you mad at me, Tommy? I didn’t mean to—to let you get all worked up. I know how it is with boys—I ought to have stopped quicker.”
Nervously he started clowning again. “It’s that cherry-flavored lipstick. Just can’t get enough of that cherry-flavored lipstick. It’s like dynamite.”
Her giggle seemed to release the tension in him, too. He said, “Hey, I’m thirsty. Want another cold drink?”
“Love it. You better wipe off the lipstick, though.”
He realized with relief that the most acute signs of his excitement had subsided, leaving only a dull ache. He slid toward the car door and opened it. He went toward the men’s room; the extreme tension and erection had gone down, but the ache remained through his body, no longer localized. He went into the snack bar and got the drinks, and as he returned to the car he saw Ann coming back from the women’s side of the concession stand. Does that happen to girls, too? I wish I could get up nerve enough to ask somebody. Not her. He sat juggling the paper cups unhandily on his lap while she smoothed her skirt over her knees. They had both hopelessly lost the thread of the movie and were relieved when it ended. They sat laughing like children at the Donald Duck cartoon, only more boisterously, their hands, cold from the icy paper cups, just lying in each other’s.
Except for the single spot pole at the center, the lot was dark when they returned. He parked the car and walked with Ann to her trailer.
“Look, there’s a light inside. Is Aunt Marge still up?”
“Maybe she left it so I could see to get undressed.”
“I’d like to see that,” he said audaciously.
She laid her hand on his wrist, a very light, hard little hand, callused across the palm and dry with resin, like his own. An aerialist’s hand. She said very gravely, “Tom, I like you a lot better than any boy I know. If I was going to do that stuff with any boy at all, it would be you. And probably some girls would, just because you’re so special, in the flying act and all, and they’d like to have you pay special attention to them. I think you’re special, too. I always did. But—Tommy—some girls start letting boys do all that with them, and they can’t stop, and pretty soon they’re doing it all the time with everybody, even boys they don’t really like a lot.” Her voice was shaking. “Even if it wasn’t a mortal sin, and it is, I still wouldn’t want to get so I was doing it in corners with all the boys in the show.”
Tommy looked down at the smudged little red mouth. He curled his hand around hers. It was so much like his own hand, callused from the bars. Like his own, or Mario’s, or Stella’s. “I guess I wouldn’t want you to be like that, either, Ann. Not really.”
She whispered, “You want to kiss me good night?”
He leaned down and kissed her. Her lips felt soft and cool. He felt the congested ache again, diffused through his whole body—his chest, his head, his sex, the backs of his thigh.
“Thanks a lot, Tom. It was a wonderful movie.”
He laughed, a little soundless whisper. “What was it about, anyhow?”
The Santelli trailer was dark, silent except for Papa Tony’s soft snores. Mario had made up Tommy’s bed. He was sleeping on his back, an arm folded across his face. Tommy undressed in the dark, confused to the point of pain. He had thought he knew what he was, and he thought he had managed to come to terms with it: irrevocably queer, so much so that it was both bliss and torment. Yet tonight he had been roused by Little Ann, even more so because he had known there was no hope of satisfying it. He had known all along that Little Ann wasn’t that kind of girl. The hard throb twisted in him again as he remembered, with a sharp and almost tactile image, the damp silk feel of her. Was he going to be one of these sex fiends you heard about, who couldn’t touch anybody, man or woman, without getting all worked up?
Mario turned over sleepily.
“That you, Tom? Have a good time?”
Tommy came impulsively and fell on his knees beside Mario’s bed. He kissed him, feeling the recoil pluck a thread of anguish and desire in his spine. Mario yawned and patted his shoulder sleepily.
“Take it easy, kid. Get some sleep.”
Tommy got into his own bed. The ache was no longer a physical thing at all. He just felt miserable. As always, last thing, Mario stretched out his hand between their beds, and after a moment Tommy gripped it. Mario whispered, “Buon’ notte,” and was instantly. fast asleep again.
Jeez, Tommy thought, how low can you get, anyway, Tom Junior? He could still feel the taut misery, centered in his neck and forehead. He would have a headache tomorrow.
He lay grimly staring into the darkness for some time before he fell into an uneasy, dream-ridden sleep.
CHAPTER 17
It was early August when, as they were setting up one morning, Tommy saw a familiar long orange-and-gray trailer pull into line with the others and take the empty place next to Margot’s. He was at the top of the rigging with Buck, checking the alignment of the brace wires with a level and steel tape, but as he saw it something turned a somersault inside him, and he had to shut his eyes for a minute to get back his control.
Angelo called him from the foot of the rigging, and Tommy swung down the ladder. “Your folks drove up just now,” Angelo said. “You saw? Go on, I’ll finish up here. Go say hello to your mother and dad.”
Tommy handed Angelo the level and ran. The electrician was hooking up power cables to the house trailers from the generator truck, and there was all kinds of domesticity spilling out the doors: women stringing wash lines and hanging clothes and children riding scooters and feeding dogs. Tommy burst in at the door of the orange trailer. His father appeared in the folding doors at the center, and Tommy, forgetting that he was past fifteen, flung himself against him and hugged his father like a small boy.
His father took him by the shoulders and held him off a little to look him over. Tom Zane looked older; there was more gray in the sandy hair, the eyelid of his right eye was shiny with scar tissue, and the eyebrow was gone, a thick grainy ridge running through it. Tommy felt his throat tighten with pain and a sick feeling that was not quite revulsion.
“You okay now, Dad?”
“Sure,” his father said unsteadily. “How you getting along, son? The Santellis been good to you? I thought for a while I was never going to see you again.”
Tommy said, almost choking, “Dad, that eye sure is a mess. Can you see out of it at all?”
“Some. Not an awful lot, but
I can get along all right. Everything else healed up just fine. How about you, son? Your mother told me you went on like a veteran, that night.”
Tommy swallowed. “I wouldn’t have, only Mario sort of slapped me out of it and then I was okay.”
His father gave his shoulder a brief squeeze. “That happens. The thing is, you kept going.” He released him and said, “I’ve got to see how Cardiff’s been treating my cats. I can’t work them yet—have to have some more work done on my wrist. But I can get them used to me again.” He turned to the door. “Your mother went out hunting for you. I told her to stick around, you’d be here, but she went anyway, couldn’t wait. That’s her coming back now.” And the next minute, Tommy was in his mother’s arms.
“Oh, Tommy, Tommy—you’re so thin, so much taller! You look all grown up—you’re not my little boy anymore—”
No. I’m not. The final thread had snapped. It had thinned before, drawn almost to nothing, but in these last weeks, and the drastic upheavals that had descended on him, he had clung to one illusion: Mother and Dad will come back and I’ll be like I was before; things will be the same. Now he knew that had been only a daydream. Nothing would ever be the way it was before. Some things remained: affection, admiration, love. Yes, and pain—a desperate anguish for the man with the terrible white scar over his eye, an aching pity for the woman smiling and weeping and hugging him so hard. But he knew the awful loneliness that stretched between generations. He didn’t really belong here at all. They weren’t just Mother and Dad, two people wholly centered on him, but Tom and Beth Zane, a couple whose lives had been complete before he came into it and would be complete even after he went out of it.
Controlled again, Beth Zane gave him a gentle, brisk tap on the arm. “You better go along and collect your things,” she said. “Did you get along with the Santellis all right? Were they nice to you?”
“Sure, fine,” he muttered, and went to fetch his clothes.
Mario was in the front room of the trailer, pulling sheets of their beds, bundling them up for the laundry. He said, “I’m going to look around town before the matinee, get me a pair of those cowboy boots. Want to come along?”
“I don’t think I can.” He went to the built-in drawer where his undershorts and polo shirts were tumbled in beside Mario’s, and started hunting out his own. “My folks just came back and I guess they’re going to want me to stick around this afternoon.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Mario said. “They’ve probably been missing you.”
Tommy looked up and stared, his last certainty broken. Mario looked at the boy’s white face and said gently, “Tom, what’s the matter?”
He said, dry-mouthed, “I forgot you might be glad to get rid of me.”
Mario put down the bundle of laundry and got up. He said, “Hey, hey, kid—” and came to put a hand on his head, gently tousling his curly hair. It was something he had done a lot when Tommy was younger, not so much lately. “Look, Lucky, you knew this was going to happen sooner or later. Come on, fella, I’ll help you get your stuff together.”
“Don’t bother. I been enough trouble already.”
Mario grabbed him by the arms. The desperation in Tommy’s eyes made him brutal. “Now, you look here, Tom. We’ve been a lot luckier than we had any right to be. We got away with bluffing Angelo, but I’m not taking any chances on bluffing your father and mother. We’ve got to be a damn sight more careful.”
Tommy twisted away. “Yeah. It’s always got to be just the way you say, doesn’t it? When you think it’s okay, when you want it—”
“Tom, damn it, keep your voice down, will you?” Mario sounded desperate, too, but Tommy completely mistook the reason for it. “That’s all we need, for your mother or Papa Tony to walk in on us and get a load of that kind of talk!”
“Right now I don’t give a damn,” Tommy said, and his voice caught, but he steadied it quickly. “Okay, okay, quit worrying, I’m not going to get you in any trouble. Go do your laundry before somebody comes around checking up on you.”
With his arms full of clothes, he walked out of the trailer. Mario said behind him, “Hey, listen, kid—” but he did not turn. When he went back for a second load, Mario was gone; Tommy did not see him again until the show. Tommy, buttoning up his jacket to go on with the men who held the webs for the aerial ballet, saw him walking across the backyard, tall and swaggering in the high-heeled cowboy boots and a brightly piped western shirt with pearl studs.
While he was laying out the flying costumes for the second half of the show, Mario came to the rigging truck. “You get settled all right?”
“Yeah, sure.” Tommy did not turn to look up at him.
Mario said in a low voice, “Look, I know you’re sore at me. But we promised each other something. Remember?”
Whatever happens, let’s never let it mess up our work again. Let’s keep it off the platform. Tommy swallowed hard, looked up, and made himself smile. “Okay,” he said, “don’t worry. I remember, all right.”
“Good kid.” Mario would have said something more, but Angelo came in, kicking off his muddy shoes.
“You get your boots okay, Matt? Hey!” he said, picking one up admiringly. “You going to ride in the Wild West Show next year? What kind of money you have to pay for these?”
“Thirty-nine fifty.”
Angelo whistled. “You better not tell Papa Tony! He still thinks you can get a good pair of shoes for five bucks!”
As he stood beside Mario later on the platform, listening to the applause that followed their duo routine, Tommy wondered what he had been worrying about. What did anything else matter, as long as they still had this?
“What are you staring at?” Mario muttered roughly. “Get going, ragazzo.” Tommy took the bar, and swung out. He felt completely happy again.
After the night show, Margot Clane gave a midnight supper to welcome the Zanes back to the circus. It was a noisy, rowdy party, and it went on till four in the morning. Margot had brought sandwiches and cake, and Jim Lambeth and the bandmaster and the Santellis carried in a case of beer and another of assorted soda pop. Virtually everyone with the show dropped in. Tommy found himself monopolized between Little Ann and Ellen Brady, but he was aware, while he sat drinking soda pop and eating potato chips and talking with the girls, as if he had eyes in the back of his head, of Mario drinking beer with a cluster of girls from the show and later squeezing into a single chair with the new girl in the web act on his lap. She did look like Liss, he thought, and the resemblance was all the stronger next to Mario. She had the same silky-dark hair pulled back from her temples and curling just a little, the same kind of heart-shaped face. Liss had looked just so, small and frail in the curve of her brother’s arm.
Later she made a joke about it, when Tommy came to join them, and her voice broke the illusion of resemblance. Liss’s voice was light and feminine, soprano, high but not shrill, while Sue-Lynn’s voice was a husky drawl. The kind they call a sexy voice, Tommy thought.
“Tommy, this Mario he’s the only man I ever knew compliments a girl by sayin’ she looks like his sister!”
“Ah,” Tommy said, “but you ought to see his sister!” He felt somehow appeased; He’s lonesome for Liss, is all. But when the party broke up and Tommy fell sleepily into his own now-unfamiliar bed, he was angry, and ashamed of his own misery, and tormented by the picture of Sue-Lynn in Mario’s lap, their heads close together, the girl drinking from his glass. He had known from the beginning that in the very nature of this relationship there could be no promises or permanences, and now he was seeing the really thorny side of it.
Nor was it easy, after living with the Santellis, who combined rough discipline in working hours and almost total indifference to what he did outside them, to get used to his mother’s total indifference to his work and her strictures on his personal activities. He was used to being his own boss except on the flying rig, and it bothered him.
There was one compensation. After a talk with A
ngelo, Tom Zane had given Tommy a set of keys to their family car and allowed him to drive it as much as he wanted to. His father’s eyes were not up to much driving. Tommy got used to driving with the heavy trailer hitched on behind, and began to tolerate the slow speeds required for the trailer hitch. Sometimes Little Ann joined them in their car on the runs between towns. His mother had known Ann since she was a toddler and accepted her readily as Tommy’s girl; she sometimes spoke of her that way, and Tommy too began to take it for granted. Between shows he and Ann went together to do the marketing for their respective families. In the towns near large cities, where the clowns and the big theatrical acts replenished their supplies of makeup and small expendable costume items, both Tommy and Ann, experienced in wardrobe and costume work, often found themselves charged with many commissions at theatrical-supply houses. On most of those August Sundays, he took her to movies on the Sunday layovers, but while he held her hand and enjoyed putting his arm around her firm bare shoulders, the terrible tension did not return; he kissed her good night at her door and felt only affection and goodwill.
The Lambeth Circus finished its swing through Arkansas and began the return swing through Louisiana and Texas. Little Ann had her sixteenth birthday and Ellen Brady her fifteenth during the second week in August, and Beth Zane gave them a combined birthday party. It turned out to be a childish party to which all the performers’ children came, including the three-year-olds, but Tommy enjoyed it anyway.
Before the night show they were sitting on the trailer steps, finishing up the cake. “Mother said next year I could have a grown-up party instead,” Little Ann said. “Will you come as my date, Tommy?”
“I don’t even know if we’ll be with Lambeth next year.”
“I keep forgetting you belong to the Santellis now,” Little Ann said. “Mother will probably stay with Lambeth now, but she said when I was eighteen I could try for one of the big shows. She really wants me to stay with Lambeth, though. She says the big shows are too rough for a young girl on her own.”
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