by Noah Gordon
Did he ever ride in it when he was a kid? Of course not. Your mother keeps it locked so you won’t fall in and kill yourself.
Did he like opera? No.
Did he like ballet? He had never seen one.
Who was his favorite writer? Stephen Crane.
Were New York girls really fast? Not the ones he met.
Had he ever been in love? Not till now.
“Don’t be a wise guy,” she said. “I couldn’t stand it. I mean it.”
“I’m not a wise guy.” Maybe it was shock, but she stopped asking questions and by mutual agreement they left their ocean. The beach was almost deserted. The sun was setting and the air had turned chill enough to raise goose bumps on their arms and legs. When they started to run in an attempt to warm up, the stones made a little pogrom for the benefit of their soles.
She lifted a foot and bit her lip as she examined a stone bruise. “Damn rock quarry,” she said. “Give me the beach at the hotel anytime. The sand feels like silk.”
“You’re joking,” he said. The hotel beach was reserved for guests. They were told constantly that if they were discovered using it the consequence would be instant dismissal.
“I swim there at night. When the hotel and the rest of the world is asleep.”
His skin prickled. “Can I join you sometime?”
She looked at him and then grinned. “You think I’m crazy? I wouldn’t go within miles of the hotel beach.” She picked up her towel and began to rub herself dry. Her face was very sunburned.
“Give me your lotion,” he said. She submitted while he spread the stuff on her forehead and cheeks and neck. Her flesh was warm and resilient and he rubbed it with his fingertips long after the lotion had disappeared.
They walked back to The Sands slowly, getting there with dusk. At the grove she gave him her hand. “It was a wonderful afternoon, Mike.”
“Can I see you tonight? Maybe for a movie in town?”
“I have to be up early in the morning.”
“Then we can just take a walk.”
“Not tonight.”
“Tomorrow night.”
“No night dates,” she said firmly. She hesitated. “I’m off again next Tuesday. I’d love to go back to the beach with you.”
“It’s a date.” He stood and watched her walk up the path until he couldn’t see her any longer. She had a wonderful walk.
He couldn’t wait a week. On Wednesday he asked her out again and received a firm refusal. On Thursday, when she gave him a short “No!” that had tears as well as anger in it, he went away and sulked like a child. That night he couldn’t sleep. Something she had said two days before—about swimming at the hotel beach when everyone else was asleep—kept returning to claw at his imagination. He tried to dismiss the thought by remembering that she had turned the remark into a meaningless joke, but that bothered him even more. The joke had no meaning, and Ellen Trowbridge wasn’t the kind of girl who babbled.
About one o’clock he got out of bed and put on a pair of jeans and some sneakers. He left the bunkhouse and walked down the path, past the hotel to the dark beach. At the edge of the beach he pushed off his sneakers and carried them. She was right; the sand was like silk.
The night was overcast but very hot and muggy. If she comes, he thought, it will be to the far end of the beach, away from the hotel. He walked to the lifeguard stand in that area and sat down in the soft sand behind it.
The Sands was a family hotel with a minimum of night people. There were still a few lights showing yellow through the hotel’s windows, but as he watched they blinked out, one by one, like eyes closing in sleep. He sat and listened to the water hissing on the sand and wondering what he was doing there. He wanted a cigarette badly but he didn’t want anyone to see the match or the glowing tip. A couple of times he fell asleep, only to jerk himself into annoyed wakefulness.
Pretty soon he stopped being impatient. It was pleasant there, digging into the silken sand with his toes. It was the kind of night when the air was silken, too, and he knew the water would feel the same way. He thought a lot, not about specific things, but about life and himself and New York and Columbia and the family and sex and books he had read and pictures he had seen, in a relaxed way that was peaceful and pleasing. It was very dark. After he had been sitting there a long, long time he heard a small noise at the water’s edge and he was afraid that she was there and he didn’t know it. He got up and walked toward the noise and almost stepped on three sand crabs. He curled in his toes, but they were more disturbed by his presence than he was by theirs, and they scuttled into the blackness.
She came up to the water’s edge only twelve or fifteen feet from where he was kneeling and watching the crabs go away. The sand had muffled her footsteps so that he hadn’t heard her until she had crossed nearly the entire beach. He was afraid to call out for fear of startling her, and then when he made up his mind to, it was too late.
He heard the sound of a zipper, and then the rustle of clothing. In only a couple of seconds there was the whisper of the clothing hitting the sand and he could see the faint white blur of her. He heard the rasp-rasp of her nails on her skin as she scratched herself; he couldn’t see where she was scratching but it was an intensely personal sound and he knew that if Ellen Trowbridge were to discover him now, kneeling in the sand like some filthy peeping tom, she would never speak to him again.
She went into the water with a splash like a dropped rock. After that there wasn’t a sound. It was then that he should have gone, as quickly and as quietly as possible. But he grew afraid for her. Even the best of swimmers don’t jump into the ocean alone in the middle of the night. He thought of cramps and undertows and even of the sharks that every couple of years are reported to attack swimmers. He was about to call out to her when he heard her splashing in and saw her whiteness as she left the water. Guiltily, he took advantage of the sound of an incoming wave to drop prone, his face in his arms and his stomach in the sand, while the sea hissed along his legs, wetting his jeans to his crotch.
He could no longer see her when he looked up. She must have been standing not far away, letting the warm breeze dry her body. It was very dark and very quiet except for the Atlantic Ocean. Suddenly she slapped herself on the buttock. Then he could hear her running and jumping, running and jumping. A couple of times she came dangerously close to where he lay, a white shape that rose in the air and dropped like a playful seagull. Although he had never seen a ballet on the stage, he knew that she was dancing to music that played only in her mind. He listened to the quick pant-pant of her breathing as she leaped, and he wanted to be able to throw a switch that would turn on bright lights, so he could see her in her dance, her face, her body, the jiggling of her breasts as she jumped, the place she had slapped and the places she hadn’t. But there was no switch to throw and soon she grew tired and stopped leaping. She stood for another minute or two, breathing hard, and then she picked up her clothing and walked naked back where she had come from. There was an open shower just off the beach where guests could wash off the sand and salt. He heard the serpent’s hiss as she stood under it and pulled the cord, and then the night was quiet.
He waited for another little while, just to make sure she was gone, and then he went back to the lifeguard stand and picked up his sneakers. When he returned to the bunkhouse he took off his wet jeans and hung them up to dry. By the light of a match his watch said ten minutes after four. He lay down on his bunk and listened to the ugly snores of too many males sleeping under the same roof. His eyelids burned but he was desperately awake.
Dear God, he thought, please help me. I’m in love with a shickseh.
9
The following Tuesday it rained. He awoke that morning and listened to the drumming on the tarpaper roof with a sense of doomed resignation. He hadn’t tried to see his blonde pigeon, his naked Amazon, his dancer in the dark—his Ellen—since he had spied on her at the beach. Instead he had spent his time dreaming about what Tuesday afternoon would be like.
And now he knew: wet.
Bobby Lee looked at him for a long moment when he asked if he could have a picnic lunch.
“Where are you going to picnic today?”
“Maybe it’ll stop.”
“Not stop.” But he packed the lunch. When Michael got through at noon the rain had changed in character, turned finer and gentler, but it fell with discouraging regularity and the skies were a uniform heavy gray.
He had planned to pick her up at two. But there seemed to be no point. There was no place to take her. “To hell with it,” he told the spider, and reached for Aristotle. It was quiet in the bunkhouse. There was only the spider and he and Jim Ducketts, the gray-haired old driver who lay on his bunk near the door looking at the pictures in a girlie magazine. Ducketts was on call, and when the knock sounded about three o’clock he jumped up and answered the door. A second later he dropped down on his bunk again.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s for you.”
She was wearing a red raincoat and a floppy rainhat and rubbers. Her cheeks were wet with rain and there were tiny drops on her eyelashes and brows.
“I waited and waited,” she said.
“The beach would be pretty wet.” He felt foolish but very glad that she had come to him.
“We could go for a walk. Do you own a raincoat?”
He nodded.
“Put it on.”
He did, and grabbed the lunch on his way out. They walked along in silence.
“You’re angry,” she said.
“No, Im not.”
They turned down a path leading through the grove to the forest. Unable to help himself, he said, “Aren’t you afraid?”
“Of what?”
“To come in here alone? With me?”
She looked at him sadly. “Don’t be angry. Try to understand how things are.”
They were stopped in the middle of the path. Water from overhanging limbs dripped on their heads. “I’m going to kiss you,” he said.
“I want you to.”
It was strange. Her face was wet and slightly cold, the flesh firm and clean-tasting when he put his mouth to her cheek. Her mouth was soft and slightly open. She kissed him back.
“I may be in love,” he said. It was the first time he had ever said that to a girl.
“Aren’t you sure?”
“No. But—it scares me a little. I never felt this way before. I don’t even know you.”
“I know. I feel the same way.” She put her hand into his as if she were giving him something and he held it even in places where the path narrowed so they had to walk single file. They came to an enormous pine tree whose branches made an umbrella. The needles under it were thick-fallen and dry, and they sat there and ate their lunch. They talked very little. After lunch she lay back in the needles and closed her eyes.
“I’d love to put my head in your lap.”
She undid the hooks of her raincoat and threw it open. She wore shorts and a jersey. He put his head down cautiously.
“Too heavy?”
“No.” Her hand came down and began to stroke his hair. Her lap was warm and yielding. Around them the world dripped. When he rolled his head his cheek fell on the incredible skin of her thigh.
“You aren’t cold?” he asked guiltily. Her hand left his hair and gently covered his mouth. It was slightly salty to his tongue.
All during the next morning as he made his juice and cut and sliced his fruits and vegetables he sat so he faced the swinging doors in order to catch a glimpse of her. The first time she came through the doors she smiled, for him alone. After that she didn’t have time to notice him. The waitresses worked like frantic slaves, practically roller-skating through the swinging doors with their order and then, tray held high above their heads on the fingertips of one hand, using their hips as bumpers to open the doors the other way and roller-skate out again.
She came into the pantry from time to time and, while she picked up salads or grapefruit, he managed to get in a few words.
“Tonight?”
“I can’t,” she said. “I go to sleep right after dinner.” She bustled away again, leaving him there like a pot on the stove.
He began to simmer. What the hell is this, he thought. Yesterday we were talking about love, and today she’s worried about sleep.
He was sullen next time she came in. She leaned over him as he sat and sliced lemons. There was a soft line of what looked like the last of her baby fat under her chin.
“I go to sleep early so I can get up before dawn and go swimming at the hotel beach. Want to come?” Her eyes were excited with the secret.
He could have eaten her up.
“I guess so,” he said.
There was an insect buzzing in his ear and no matter where he moved his head it wouldn’t go away. He opened his eyes. The bunkhouse was dark. He slipped his hand under the pillow. The alarm clock was wrapped in two undershirts and a towel and its buzz had been muffled by several pounds of feathers, but after he silenced it he lay and listened to see if it had awakened anyone else. There were only sleep-noises.
He slipped out of bed. He had hung his bathing trunks over the front rail of his cot and he found them in the dark and carried them outside before putting them on. It was very quiet.
Ellen was waiting for him at the grove. They held hands and ran toward the water.
“Don’t splash too much or shout,” she said in a half-whisper.
They went in like thieves, making the Atlantic Ocean their private swimming pool, nobody else allowed. They swam straight out, side by side, then he turned on his back and so did she and they floated and held hands and looked at the dark sky and the quarter moon that had about an hour to live.
When they left the water they stood and wrapped their arms around each other, shivering in the breeze. He began tugging at her head with his fingers.
“What are you doing?”
“Letting down your hair.” There was an incredible number of both hairpins and bobby pins. Some of them fell to the sand.
“Those things cost money,” Ellen said. He didn’t answer her. Soon the coiled braids were free. The thick blonde ropes fell and, when she shook her head, loosened into a mane that reached below her white shoulders. He held two handfuls of thick hair as he kissed her. Soon he let go of her hair. When he touched her she pulled her mouth away.
“Stop that,” she said. Her fingers closed around his hand.
“I wonder who’s going to say it first?”
“Say what?”
“I love you,” he said.
Her hands dropped to her sides. But only temporarily.
And so the days passed. He made mountains of fruit salad and oceans of juice. After supper they took walks into the woods and then went to bed early, to wake while the world slept and swim and kiss and caress and tease each other unmercifully with mutual desire that Ellen savagely refused to allow them to fulfill.
They saw Cape Cod on their days off. One Tuesday they hitchhiked all the way to the Canal and back, finishing the last leg of the trip in the back of a Portuguese vegetable peddler’s open horsedrawn cart, in a drenching rain, with Ellen huddled against him and his hand between her warm thighs underneath a tarpaulin that smelled of damp manure and the toilet water she wore.
They didn’t escape unnoticed. One evening as he exchanged his white work-ducks for jeans Al Jenkins stopped by his bunk for a neighborly chat.
“Hey, spider man. You actually makin’ it with that Radcliffe icicle?”
Michael just looked at him.
“Well,” he said loudly, “how is it?” One of the busboys dug another one in the ribs. Michael felt taut and ready. He hadn’t hit another human being since he was a small boy, but now he knew what he had been saving up for. He closed the top snap in the jeans and walked around the bunk.
“Just one more word,” he said.
Jenkins had started to grow a mustache, and Michael knew that he would hit him there, on the light blond fuzz between his nose
and the smirking lips. But Jenkins disappointed him.
“Shit,” he said as he walked away. “People around here are gettin’ mighty friggin’ sensitive.”
The busboys hooted, but there was no mistaking the fact that it was not Michael they were hooting at.
He should have felt fine, but a couple of minutes later he found himself walking in the direction of town in a black humor. The mood hadn’t dissipated by the time he got to the drugstore. There was a skinny, pimpled girl behind the counter, and a gray-haired man waiting on trade at the other end of the store.
“Can I help you?” the girl said.
“I’ll wait for him.”
She nodded coolly and walked away.
“Three or a dozen?” the man asked calmly.
The season still had three weeks to go. “A dozen,” he said.
That night when he went to meet Ellen he carried a small blue zipper bag.
“Do you plan to run away from home?”
He turned it over so she could hear the gurgle. “Sherry, my love. For thee and me. After the sea.”
“You are my genius.”
They swam and they stood in the water while they kissed and touched one another and murmured of their love; then they moved up onto the beach. He had counted on the wine, but he found himself removing her bathing suit without resistance and the zipper of the bag hadn’t been opened.
“No, Michael, don’t,” she said dreamily as the suit descended over her hips.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please.” Her hand stopped his. Her fingers were determined. She kissed him and the tips of her breasts touched his skin.
“Oh my God,” he said. He held one of her breasts, soft and warm. “Let’s just undress,” he said. “Nothing else. I just want to be naked with you.”
“Don’t beg me,” she said.
He grew angry. “What do you think I’m made of?” he said. “If you really loved me—”
“Don’t you dare put that kind of price on us.”
But she was doing something with her hands at her hips, and the bathing suit fell on the sand around her feet.
With numb fingers he pulled off his trunks. They sank together on the soft sand. In the darkness her body was full of tiny shocks and little surprises. Her buttocks sat in his hands, smooth and firm. They were much smaller than he had imagined. She flexed them and he gasped into her mouth.
