The Bell Tower

by Walter Blum

  They strapped the picnic basket to the back of her bike and pedaled slowly west out of town to the county park, which he had visited only once before. A hint of rain hovered in the air, but not enough of it to discourage the day’s outing. For a while, the road paralleled the Canelius River, a wide, lazy stream said to hold huge bottom fish that repaid the efforts of anglers willing to sit on its banks for hours at a stretch, waiting for that elusive tug on the line. The river finally slithered under a bridge and veered away, heading in a southwest direction toward the mountains from which it gained its strength.

  There were few cars on the road to watch out for. They rode single file, the two of them on their skinny bikes, he in the lead most of the way. At first, he was afraid to look at her, afraid she might disappear, afraid her very presence was a dream or an illusion, and yet, he knew it had to be real. How could he be imagining this? Everything he had ever wanted was there behind him, no more than four or five feet away. Everything he had ever imagined was wrapped up in this day. He was overwhelmed with love and, although he avoided admitting it to himself, lust.

  The park was spread out over several acres, and the best part required one to crawl up a rather steep hill. From here the valley and in the distance the houses and buildings of Canelius spread out below them, a miniature doll city. They walked their bikes several yards to a grassy knoll. Fortunately, he’d had the foresight to bring along a blanket. She pried open the wicker picnic basket, and emptied its contents.

  There was enough for two or three meals—pieces of roast chicken, coleslaw, a loaf of French bread, grapes and peaches and half a chocolate cake, coffee in a thermos. He was amused by her extravagance. They couldn’t possibly finish all that food. They ate and talked, although it seemed to him the words were coming from a distance, the way the music in the Bell Tower sounded when he turned down the speaker, but it didn’t matter because she was there beside him, sitting on the wool blanket with him, smiling, even laughing at times.

  He tried not to stare, but everything about her claimed his attention. She had on a green plaid skirt, very similar to the one she wore that day in Johnson’s Drug Store, but with an orange blouse cut low so that when she bent to unload the picnic basket, every inch of inviting flesh was revealed to him. Could she have dressed that way on purpose? His knowledge of women might be limited, but he was already aware that they rarely did anything casually, even those as young as Susan. Things had a purpose. She had let down her hair, and it streamed in a flow of shining blond to her breasts. Her dark eyebrows contrasted vividly with the light hair and skin, and her eyes seemed to change from brown to black and even, at times, what seemed to be a pale green, depending on the light.

  He had never been so close to anyone so beautiful, nor experienced the sensations he was tasting today. Could anything be more wonderful than this? Over the rooftops of Canelius, across the tobacco fields, all the way to the smoky blue foothills, he wanted to sing his happiness. He wanted to tell everyone what a miracle had been bestowed on him. The only thing that stopped him was fear of making a fool of himself in her presence, and even more than that, a persistent suspicion that he didn’t deserve her, that he hadn’t earned his good fortune.

  It was like being drugged. Just being here with her, sharing a blanket, taking in the dazzling power of her perfume, touching her hand, swimming in the soft rapture of her voice—all this overwhelmed him. He stared at her so often, so deeply, that at one point she felt compelled to rebuke him.

  “Is this how you behave with all your girlfriends?”

  “I don’t have any girlfriends.”

  “You must have had other girls before me,” she said. “I don’t mean you collect them like postage stamps, but I’m sure you must have dated. There had to be other girls. What were they like?”

  “I can’t remember any other girls.”

  “None at all?” she teased.

  “No one who meant anything,” he tried to explain.

  She shook her head. “I’ll bet there have been dozens of girls ready to throw themselves at your feet, you probably didn’t notice, that’s all. You men are all like that. You sit on top of a mountain, staring at the sky, and you don’t even realize that someone’s climbing up the other side, trying to get to you, until they lose their grip and land in the snow.”

  “That’s not the way it is.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “I don’t go mountain climbing.”

  “You don’t have to. You bring your own mountain with you, but the air’s so thin up there, sometimes it makes you a little dizzy. You have trouble catching your breath, and that’s why you don’t think clearly, the way you should. Maybe you should buy an oxygen mask.”

  “You’re the one who’s on a mountain,” he blurted. “You’re the one who’s sitting up there, waiting.”

  “And you’d like to try some mountain climbing?”

  He blushed wildly. He’d been blindsided, and now she’d never take him seriously. Trying desperately to divert her attention, he reached into the basket and inadvertently drew out a banana. “Please,” he begged. “This isn’t what you think…”

  “I’ll take that on face value,” she said demurely. “Tell me, what is it you want from me?”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  “Of course you do. We probably both want the same thing, but we can’t have it, not as long as we’re single. Someday, when we’re old and feeble, people will be up front with each other, they’ll ask and get what they ask for, they won’t have to go through this song and dance, this stupid ritual the way we do. But by that time, we’ll both be too ancient to enjoy it.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “You know very well what I’m trying to say.”

  His heart was pounding, and he cursed the fact that he had been blessed with neither the wisdom nor courage to climb to the next level. Instead of the mountain he pictured, he was being carried along on a river, a wild, frothing, angry cataract that hurled him from one bank to another. When he needed to lead the way, he was helpless. When he needed to say the words that would bring them safely to shore, he couldn’t find them.

  “I saw you in the hospital.”

  “Did you? When was this?”

  “Back in March. I’d broken my arm, and they gave me a semi-private room. I was talking to my friend Larry when you passed by. You had something in your arms, it looked like flowers.”

  “I was visiting my friend Gwen. She came down with hepatitis.”

  “I wanted to call out to you, but I didn’t know if you’d be interested.”

  “I wish you had.”

  “What?”

  “Called out to me.”

  He tried to conceal his pleasure, but he didn’t want her to see how happy he was with everything she said. The game had to be played out a little longer. His hands were resting in hers, and it wasn’t until later that he realized his fingers were digging into her palms.

  “All right,” he said. “Why don’t we talk about ourselves? What would you like to know about me?”

  “What you’re like. Is there some invisible person you make love to when you talk on the radio? How do you pick the music you play? What is it you want to do with your life?”

  “I want to be an announcer.”

  “I know, but I’m talking about ambitions. Everyone’s a little bit ambitious. What do you hope to be—rich, powerful, famous?”

  “I think I’m famous enough in Canelius.”

  She released his hand. “No, that’s not good enough. Not good enough for someone like you.”

  “I’m no one.”

  “That’s not true! It’s ridiculous not to take advantage of what you are. There’s a whole universe out there waiting to hear you, Adam. Canelius is just a dot on the map. You can’t stay here forever. Canelius is like a prison. If you stay long enough, you may never want to leave, and that’s wrong—” she pointed toward the view below, “because you’re never going to be a part of thi
s world.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “I know.” She stopped abruptly. He could feel her eyes playing over him, pattering like drops of rain over the edges of his soul. Slowly she resumed. “I grew up here. I went to school in this town, and I know just about everyone my age and all the older people as well.”

  “And this is where you belong.”

  “But I don’t. It just seems that way. I never belonged. I was always the outsider. Do you know what it’s like to live in a place and be constantly surrounded by people, and yet—” She was silent for the longest time, and then she said, “I’m not sure what it is. It’s a kind of deep-down loneliness that comes over you even when you’re surrounded by people.”

  She licked her upper lip. “I don’t know why I feel like that or where it comes from. Maybe if had a mother when I was growing up. People talk about fathers and daughters, and how important that is, but it isn’t the same. A mother lets you see yourself the way you’ll be when you grow up. I had aunts and I had cousins, but it’s not the same, and of course there’s my dad, but that’s not the same, either. Something’s missing. It’s like having a phantom arm, or going through life without an eye. You can feel the pain, even if it isn’t there.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “My mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “She had cancer.”

  “Was she like you?”

  “I don’t really remember that much about her. She was just one of those plump, jolly little women with a wonderful outlook on life, never at a loss for words, always ready to entertain. She’d roast a chicken and make up a story about how the butcher chopped off its head right in front of her, and then the chicken would race around the shop, no head, making clucking noises from inside its stomach. She’d tell stories like that with a perfectly straight face, and that only made it funnier. She insisted that my grandfather, who I never met, was a cowboy at one time in Wyoming, some place out West. We all knew it wasn’t true, but I was only five or six years old, and I believed every word of it.”

  “So, your grandfather wasn’t a cowboy?”

  “Of course not. Later, when I was grown, I learned he’d had been a hardware salesman who never spent more than two days away from Canelius.”

  “I thought your family came from New York.”

  “That was my father’s family, but it was my mother I felt closest to, the one person I loved more than anything in the world. I was seven years old when she died. The cancer spread slowly, too slowly, and it seemed as though every time I looked at her, she was in pain. She refused to go to the hospital, and she spent most of the day in bed, upstairs, curled up like a doll. When the end came, she couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds. I don’t think my father ever got over it. They say that’s why he spoiled me, but I really don’t think I’ve been spoiled. I know I get what I want from him, but it’s only because he turned all his affections on me, and I guess there are times when I still take advantage of him. But I’m not like that, deep down.”

  “Do you still miss her?”

  “Very much.”

  “And since then, you and your father have been alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like me,” he said.

  She reached forward and put a finger on his lips. “No. You can’t compare it. It’s not the same for you. People look at you as a stranger, and they figure you’re going to leave any day, so why should they commit themselves to you? But they try to be nice. They’re not mean, they just don’t take to outsiders. Anyway, we have each other now.”

  “Yes.”

  “You and I—we’re not strangers, are we?”

  “Not at all.” Suddenly, words sprang to his lips that he hadn’t meant to say, but he couldn’t put a halt to them. “Susan, I’m sorry. You probably think I’m crazy for saying this—I don’t talk this way ordinarily, I know, but—damn it—please try to understand when I say I can’t live without you.”

  “Of course you can,” she smiled. “You have to go on living, whether you like it or not.”

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “Of course you are.”

  He reached forward to touch her hand, and suddenly they were in each other’s arms. Had they been alone he would have pressed her to the ground, and he knew from the way she held him now that she wouldn’t have resisted, nothing could have stopped them from making love. But there were children only a few yards down the slope, as well as their parents. The high-pitched shrieks rose like steam from a mountain river, enveloping them, shaking sticks at them, and all they could do was hold on to each other, aching, feeling, wanting desperately what they couldn’t have.

  After a while she moved away, and they finished off the cake and drank the last of the coffee and packed the plates and thermos back in the basket.

  By now, the clouds were frowning angrily, their undersides black and threatening. Afraid that they might be caught in a deluge, they packed up the remains of the picnic, loaded the basket on the back of her bike and pedaled off down the road and through the humid countryside to her house. They made it back to the bicycle shop just as the heavens opened up with a roar. They transferred to the Chevy, which balked at first in protest to the wet weather, but finally allowed itself to be coaxed back to life.

  10

  After that, he saw her almost every day, mornings and afternoons, and late at night. When the tower closed down, he would stop by her house and meet her on the porch for a goodnight kiss. He was totally immersed in her—her lips, her shoulders, her hands, her perfume, that other fragrance that seemed to come from inside her like a song, her eyes in which he could lose himself for hours, if only there were time enough to make it possible. He heard her laugh in his sleep, and tried to commit to memory the little phrases she came out with, those odd, eccentric things that made no sense except to him. He kept a mental diary, much better than the kind you wrote in to record your thoughts. She was there on every page.

  What had he done to deserve such good fortune? Luck had never been his forte. He had once tried poker and found it beyond him. He had spent a summer at a resort with his parents where they had slot machines, and lost the few nickels they’d given him before he could enjoy it. No, he didn’t think of himself as being in any way fortunate. Not in a million years was he going to win the lottery or pick three winners in a sweepstakes, and yet here he was taking the pot, piling up the chips before anyone else had begun to play. He could not lose. It was as simple as that.

  Now, when he sat down at the microphone and made his intro, the words were addressed not to a vague, amorphous listener who just happened by the radio, but to her. He could picture her sitting in the studio, just beyond the glass, listening to him and nodding. Every record was dedicated to her, although he never actually said her name. Every time he drove the Chevy, the seat beside him was occupied. A hitchhiker would have no place to sit. He could feel her leaning against him as the old car chugged and wheezed, and underneath the wheezing he could hear her voice, feel the luster of it in the air, saying the words he always wanted to hear from her.

  “I fell in love with you that first day, Adam.”

  “When was that?”

  “At the country club. Don’t you remember?’

  A parking space was waiting for him, just up the street from the house under a spreading oak. It was the third time in the past two weeks that he had come by to see her, and it seemed that each occasion was more glorious than the one preceding it. He was floating, like the moon that followed him as he drove. He was being serenaded by a dozen voices he knew as well as his own—Tony Bennett and Patti Page and Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney. They had come along with him from the Bell Tower, and their songs jostled for space in his head.

  When she opened the door, the voices vanished, but only because they couldn’t compete. Nothing could. In all his life he had never seen anything so magnificent. Her pale skin, framed by long, silky blond hair, was on fire. Her green eyes, mat
ching the color of her shoes, were like the grasses of heaven. Or were they blue? It seemed as though they changed every day, depending on the weather or some other factors he couldn’t quite define. Today she had on a simple cotton dress in orange and white, her shoulders were bare and a dark green belt circled her waist. He had brought a small bouquet of carnations, but for a moment he was so stunned by the sight of her that he was unable to speak.

  “Shall we go?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He escorted her to the car. He wished it didn’t have to be his little green Chevy Bel Air with the streaks on the window and the rear fender dented by a careless motorcyclist, who clipped him one night on his way home from work. He’d made a point of bringing the Chevy in for a car wash, but nothing could hide the fact that it simply wasn’t good enough for an occasion as important as this.

  They were supposed to be celebrating her birthday. Actually, he knew that wasn’t true—just as he knew so many things—but it was a harmless lie he could afford to let pass. Much later he learned that her birthday was in March, but there was no reason why it couldn’t be changed to the summer to make this a special night, so they could have a reason for getting dressed up and going out to dinner.

  He had reserved a table at the Jefferson Davis Hotel, in the Palm Room, in the back where they would not be observed. All her charms were on display when they walked in the door. Watching her being seated by the maitre d’, he caught a glimpse of a stiff pink petticoat. Every motion of her body awakened new flashes of desire.

  They ordered the specialty of the day, curried chicken; the hotel chef liked to try out exotic dishes from time to time, to introduce the locals to something more interesting than the usual steak and roast beef. They ate a fruit salad first and Adam ordered wine. He had no idea what it was called, but red sounded right. The expense didn’t bother him. He’d paid a visit to the bank the day before and came away with a sizable sum, more than he could afford on his salary, but it didn’t matter. A night like this deserved it.