«What's a squeeny?»
«Hey, just walk into any Singles' Bar and take your pick. Computer dating. The New York Review of Books Classified Section: 'Docile Virgo seeking intrepid Lion to run through the dunes with.' After some time in that world, 'Pay-ter' seemed like Clark Gable.»
A big silence followed. I was beginning to worry that once again I'd somehow put my foot in my big mouth, when Danny finally spoke.
«Cullen, there's no Drew Conrad!»
«_What?_»
«Just what I said. She's what you might call a figment of my perverse imagination.»
«Danny, what _are_ you talking about?»
«Nothing. It's just that there's no Drew Conrad. I made her up. _Basta_. That's all!»
My spirit hoisted five flags. «But why? Whatever for?»
«Whatever for, Cullen? Because the truth of the matter is, I'm scared to death of you!»
«Of me? James, are you cracked? Look at me, damn it!»
He sighed and looked at me with the saddest expression in town. «It's very simple, don't you see? If I had a woman like Drew to tell you about, then we would be on safe ground. You wouldn't have to worry about someone else being forward with you. And if I pretended convincingly enough that she _did_ exist, then I was hoping you wouldn't see how gone I am for you. See, Cullen, I had it all figured out: I would just rhapsodize about you, but call you Drew Conrad, and I'd be all set.»
His face had the calmness of truth in it. He looked me in the eye while he spoke and after a while _I_ was the one who began to feel uncomfortable.
«When you wrote me about your abortion, I realized I had been in love with you for a long time. Maybe even when we were in college, right at the end of senior year! Anyway, when I got your letter over there and I started imagining you alone in that hospital bed having to go through such an ordeal . . .»
I was a few feet away from him but I could plainly see there were tears in his eyes. Tears for me! Who had ever cried for me? What man had ever cared so much?
My heart turned in my chest, but the tears and obvious depth of his emotion scared me and made me want to be alone so I could catch my breath and think all this over for a minute, an hour, a few days.
«I'm sorry, Cullen. I _really_ don't want to create any more problems for you. I promised myself I wouldn't tell you any of this.» He got up tiredly from the table and walked into the bedroom, closing the door behind him.
Loving someone is easy. It's your car and all you have to do is start the engine, give her a little gas and point the thing wherever you want to go. But being loved is like being taken for a ride in someone else's car. Even if you think they'll be a good driver, you always have the innate fear they might do something wrong: in an instant you'll both be flying through the windshield toward imminent disaster. Being loved can be the most frightening thing of all. Because love means good-bye to control; and what happens if halfway or three-quarters of the way through the trip you decide you want to go back, or in a different direction, and you're only the codriver?
DUMB! You wanted to be loved, Cullen? Loved by a special, wonderful man? Okay, here you are – right in your hand. What happens? What's your reaction? You get scared. Dumb!
I rubbed my face with both hands and snorted at my stupidity.
«Danny?»
No answer.
«Danny!»
The door opened slowly and reluctantly. He stood there stooped in his dandy green pajamas, vulnerable and from the look on his face, expecting the worst.
«Please don't say anything sweet, Cullen. Don't be sweet or pitying; I couldn't take that.»
«Come in here and finish your breakfast.»
His . . . I don't know what you would call it . . . declaration? Anyway, it did funny things to us. Made us shy of each other, but very intimate at the same time. When we were walking down the street a few hours later, he took my hand, which sent a bolt of flaming orange lightning across my brain. What courage it must have taken for him to do that! To reach right over and take my hand, after what he had said with no response from me one way or the other . . . I'd wanted to grab hold of his hand too, but hadn't had the guts to do it in that still, tense interval in our relationship between nothing and everything.
We did too many things that day. Walked everywhere, saw this, saw that, ate everything. Both of us knew the whole time that if we kept good and busy, we could temporarily skirt the issue at hand. I think that's what we both wanted.
New York is good for that. It has everything to show you and never enough time in any day to do it all. We took a subway to the Brooklyn Bridge and walked along the Promenade, looking at the harbor. We were holding hands by then and both of us held on tight, but made as little eye contact as possible. We were acting like fourteen-year-old jerks, and since both of us were suddenly so shy with each other, it reminded me of how people must have courted back in _Friendly Persuasion_ times.
For the first time, I asked Danny about his family. His father was dead, but his mother and sister lived in North Carolina. This was surprising, because he spoke with no southern accent at all. When I mentioned this, he said he had lived in New Jersey until he was fifteen. Then his father – who was a furniture designer – was offered a job in North Carolina at one of those big furniture firms down there. The family moved to a small town named Hickory which was the home of the factory. Nine months later, Mr. James had a cerebral hemorrhage at work and that was that.
Mrs. James got a job teaching at a local private school and her income – along with her husband's lite insurance money – enabled the family to settle into a comfortable, sad way of life. Danny went to college on a basketball scholarship.
The boats in New York harbor shuffled and steamed and chuffed from side to side in the open water and in their dark berths. Boats that had been on the high seas for months, loaded down with enough bananas or Spanish shoes or Japanese watercolor sets to keep the city going forever. I looked on those boats and realized for the zillionth time that I had never been anywhere in the world outside of Chicago, New Brunswick, New Jersey and New York City. The only Greece I knew was _souvlaki_ and posters of the Parthenon in a tired Greek restaurant I liked on 46th Street. I had never owned a passport, never needed a visa. The only Europe I had ever known was through sleeping with a European. The only adventure I had ever had was an abortion.
«Danny, what's it like living over there?»
«Like? Well, you always find odd coins in your pockets. You'll be looking for a hundred lira and you'll find five francs in there instead. You think you're giving a guy five schillings for a newspaper and it turns out to be five drachma.»
«_Drachma_. Have you been to Greece too? God, I hate you. What's it like?»
«Athens is loud and messy. But the islands are exactly what you'd hoped for.»
«And London?»
«Dirty.»
«Vienna?»
«Very clean and very gray. Are we playing 'Twenty Questions'?»
We were sitting on a bench watching the day's traffic float by: those boats in the harbor, parents with baby strollers, old men moving slowly and complaining to the air.
«No, but Danny, what's it _like_? Is it all that different? Is the world really different over there?»
«Why? What's the matter, Cullen?»
«Oh, I don't know. I want things to change, Danny. You know? I want to look out of my window in the morning and see . . . and see orange streetcars!»
«Those are in Milan.» He smiled and took my hand in both of his.
«All right, see, they do exist! I want orange streetcars, or booksellers along the river selling books in Italian or Hungarian or some other language I can't understand. I want to sit in a cafй with marble tables and eat a real croissant. Oh Danny, I know I'm being a big brat, but I'd do anything to see those things. I really would!»
«Then why don't you go to Europe?»
«Because I'm a chicken, that's why! I don't want to be disappointed. And I never had anyon
e I wanted to go with, but basically because I'm a chicken.»
He licked his lips and then pressed them tightly together. Whatever he was about to say was going to be hard for him.
«Come and stay with me in Italy, Cullen. We'll do all the things you want, together. You keep saying you don't like your job or living in New York. So come to Milan for as long as you want and I'll treat you to as many rides as you want on orange streetcars.»
«Things sure happen fast sometimes, don't they?»
«Uh-huh. But you know, I'm totally serious about this. I want you to come, if _you_ want!»
I took hold of him and hugged him, right there on that park bench. Hugged him with all of the strength I had. Not because it was the end of the movie and we were about to live happily ever after. And not because it was his way of proposing to me and both of us knew it. Mostly it was because he had reaffirmed to me that there _were_ such things as orange streetcars in the world and some time soon, no matter what finally happened between us, we would be seeing those things together.
We didn't make love until the night before he left. We kissed a lot and touched and _slept_ together, but none of the big stuff until we only had a few hours left. That fact – notwithstanding the happiness and excitement (and speed!) of our new bond – scared us into the final, ultimate act of affirmation.
There's no reason to go into any detail about that night, but there were a few things he did that knocked me for a loop.
The first was that he didn't actually enter me for ages. For the longest time he seemed content just to touch and kiss and, true to his word, look at me. I wasn't used to the slowness of everything. Peter and my other horizontal acquaintances were always hurrying. Hurrying to get undressed, hurrying to get hot, hurrying to begin the «Main Event.» But beside the fact that hurrying often hurt me physically because I wasn't ready for them, I kept thinking that there ought to be some subtlety in it; subtlety and gentleness, and many minutes invested in an act that _could_ mean a very great deal if you really worked at it, rather than just bounced on it. Too often I had spent my time staring at designs on different ceilings while a hot little human locomotive pounded his way inside me toward . . . who knows where?
Danny was not the best lover I had ever had, but he was by far the most generous. He touched and stroked me until I was slick with sweat and hope. And when he finally did enter me, I had to urge him to do it. As he did, he asked me two or three times if he was hurting me. The expression on his face said he was very concerned about that. I touched his cheek and said it felt great.
He put his head next to mine and whispered in my ear, «'It' doesn't feel great. _You_ feel great!»
When he came, he arched his back like a driver going off a high board. But he was looking right at me and I don't think he took his eyes off me the whole time. As he moved very hard up and through me he said, he hissed with a smile on his face a mile wide, «It's a _song_, Cullen!»
The next morning he was leaning up on one elbow and smiling at me when I opened my eyes. I smiled back and reached out my arms for him. He came over and I took hold of him and rocked him back and forth. He was twice as big as me, but right then he felt weightless; as if I could hold all of him in one hand.
«How do you feel, Cul?»
«Terrific. I'm only sad that you're going.»
«And last night?»
«Sleeping together? It was lovely.»
«You're sure?»
«Absolutely.»
We lazed around for a while and then he got up. «Stay where you are. I have a surprise.»
A half hour later he came in with a tray full of fresh croissants, fruit, hard-boiled eggs, and coffee in two ceramic mugs I had never seen before. One was red, the other green. Best of all, there was an old book of Italian fairy tales – in Italian.
«See, you don't even have to go to Europe to get the croissants and books in Italian! The mugs are a going-away present. You get the green and I get the red. If you let anyone else drink from my mug, I'll poke you in the nose!» His voice was playful, but the expression on his face was the first and last hint he ever gave that said he fully expected me to remain faithful to him. Not faithful so much in body, although that was part of it, but faithful more to the idea of what had been growing between us since he had arrived.
«I know what you're saying, Danny, but please don't make little veiled threats like that. They're not necessary and you make me feel sleazy. I'm not _that_ bad.»
He put the tray beside me on the bed and sat himself down on the floor. We ate in an uncomfortable silence that made me quickly lose my appetite.
He shouldn't have threatened and I shouldn't have snapped. The sound of a spoon stirring coffee never rang so loudly as it did in those few long minutes of grim silence. Happiness, contentment, peace: all three of those things balance perched on the point of the thinnest pin. The slightest movement of the earth knocks them off – and boy, how they crash when they hit!
«Cullen, I want to tell you a story because the last thing I want is for you to misunderstand what I'm getting at.
«When I was a little boy, my father took me for a ride in the country one day, just the two of us. We drove alongside a lake for a few miles and then suddenly, out of nowhere, a bunch of ducks flew low out of the trees by the side of the road. My father hit the whole bunch, square on . . . all of them.»
Both of us had our hands wrapped around the coffee mugs. I looked down at Danny to see what this story had to do with the argument of a minute ago. But he was looking off into space and the steam from his coffee was being blown here and there by the strength of his breath.
«Dad pulled the car over and we got out to see wrhat had happened. It was a mess. Real carnage . . . blood and feathers were splattered across the whole front of the car. Even as a little boy I knew the sight upset him. He picked up the bodies – there were four of them – and threw them as far off the road and into the woods as he could. We were out in the middle of nowhere, so there was no way we could clean the car, which by then looked as if it had come through some kind of massacre. Our ride in the country was ruined, so Dad turned the car around and drove us straight home.
«But here's the real macabre part. As we drove up our driveway, my mother was coming out of the house with a load of washing under her arm to hang up on the line. She took one look at the front of the car and started screaming. And I mean _screaming_, Cul – not little 'ohs' and 'ahs' or something like that. These were screams and shouts, real hysteria! Dad and I were so shocked by it that we forgot for a moment what she was so obviously screaming about – the blood and guts that were still splattered across the front of the car! We simply thought she had flipped her lid.
«Dad slammed on the brakes and both of us jumped out. Mom started shouting, 'Who did you kill? Oh God, who did you kill?' Then she fell down on her knees and started moaning. Wow, I'll never forget that scene as long as I live! Sooner or later it dawned on us what she was raving about and we got her cooled down. But for a while it was frightening as hell. She was completely out of control.»
He sipped his coffee and silently I waited for him to go on. The picture of his mother down on her knees and the bloody, dripping car grille made me uneasy and trembly.
«The reason why I'm telling you this terrible story, Cullen, is because my father was a horrendous driver. Seeing all that blood on the car wasn't the only reason my mother had just gone crazy. For years she had been on at Dad in a nice way to be careful, because he was so bad behind the wheel. He never looked at the road, always drove too fast, never used his indicators. . . . Even as a kid I knew I was taking my life in my hands when I went out riding with him, although he loved to have us all in the car with him whenever he went somewhere.
«What happened this time was that my mother took one look at the front of the car and all of her years of fearing the worst came together in that one minute. He'd done it: she was sure he'd done what she'd been expecting him to do for years. She was sure he had kille
d someone. The blood told her everything she needed to know. Do you understand?»
I nodded slowly, still not seeing how all this connected to us.
«Cullen, everything you've been telling me these past few days adds up to your being confused and unsure of who you are in the world. The relationships you've had in the past – especially with that stupid Peter – have only made you _more_ unsure. Then the abortion thing topped it all off. Whatever self-esteem or conviction you had left went flying out of the window. You want everything to change now, like you said the other day, because you don't like where you are, either physically or . . . well, spiritually. Am I right?»
«I don't like hearing you say any ol this, but you're right.»
«Don't feel that way. I'm not trying to hurt you. If you come to Europe, things _will_ change. I promise you that. You'll have your streetcars and you'll have someone who'll take care of you. Me! But in the meantime, I don't want to be like my mother with my father, constantly worrying about you.»
«Worry? Why would you worry about me? What are you saying, Danny?»
«I'm saying that you have got to start knowing that you're good and smart and capable. You can't keep thinking you're a beautiful flunkey who only deserves another flunky like Peter. I'm not worried about your remaining true to _me_, Cullen; I'm worried about your remaining true to yourself. For God's sake, you're a wonderful woman. I don't know anybody else like you and that's why I love you. But I also know I think more of you than you do of yourself, and that's bad. It's dangerous.
«I don't think I need to say any more, do you?»
In April I flew to Athens and on the plane I met a Greek named Lillis, who invited me to visit him on the island of Skiathos. He described how the poppies were just coming into bloom now, and how he would love to take me to Koukounaries beach in his boat to swim in the Aegean. «Koukounaries» means pine cones in Greek and the Aegean _was_ Greece, and half an hour into the flight I realized I was flying to _Greece_! Greece, as in Plato and Sparta and Henry Miller's favorite country. Danny James would be there to meet me and after a two-week tour, we would fly to Milan and take life from there. I was so proud and excited to be doing this and I didn't even mind too much when Lillis got fresh during the movie a few hours later.
Bones of The Moon Page 3
