Wendy made a face. “I don’t believe it. You’re just being nice to me.”
“It’s true,” Marcus said. “I didn’t make it up.” But what he didn’t say were some of the other things Alec had said. He had guessed Wendy was the one Marcus had fallen on. “Go after it,” Alec said. “That’s stuff.” Marcus had insisted that he and Wendy were friends, but Alec said there was no such thing between male and female. “They’re either relatives or they’re stuff.” Marcus wasn’t going to say that to Wendy.
He felt like saying, Don’t get your hopes up. But why should he? Let Alec say it. Why should he make excuses for Alec? “What do you say to a Baskin-Robbins and some talk,” he said, changing the subject. “Do you have time?”
She nodded and managed a smile. “I’m doing supper for my aunt, but I’ve got at least an hour free.”
In the mall they sat on a bench eating their ice-cream cones, watching people pass in their bulky winter coats. “They look so tired,” Wendy said. “Look at those mannikins, in the summer outfits, then look at the people. People can be so sad.”
Marcus nodded, but his mind was elsewhere. He was remembering the way he’d acted Monday when he’d handed in his paper to Sweeny, carrying on like an ass, raving about what an incredible piece of writing he’d done. Three days had passed and Sweeny hadn’t said a word. He knew just what Sweeny was going to say when he handed him back his paper. Rosenbloom, he’d say, a flea’s ass has more talent than you.
He was a blowhard! Telling everybody he was a writer, walking around with a notebook sticking out of his pocket. How could he be a writer? Where did he get the nerve to say he was anything? If he said he was a writer because he kept a notebook, than he could also say he was a lawyer because he liked to argue, or a doctor because he pulled splinters out of his skin.
“What’s the matter, Marcus?”
“I’m worried about the paper I handed in to Sweeny.”
“I’m sure it’s good.”
“You haven’t read it,” he said gloomily.
“Oh, what’s the matter with us?” Wendy nudged him. “These gloom sessions. I think sometimes we just love groveling in the gloom.”
“Do the grovel,” Marcus said. He snapped his fingers. “When you’re blue and out of sorts, do the grovel.” He snapped his fingers, then took a bite out of the bottom of his cone.
“You’re in trouble now,” Wendy said. “It’s all going to come out the bottom.”
“That’s life,” Marcus said. “The bottom’s always falling out.”
“But keep smiling,” Wendy said.
“Hang in there,” Marcus said. The cliches were flying thick and fast. “Don’t let trouble get you down.”
“Every cloud has its silver lining.”
“Smile,” Marcus said, and Wendy smiled. “Cry”—Wendy pulled down the corners of her mouth—“and you cry alone.”
“It’s been beautiful,” Wendy said getting up. “I have to go.”
“I’ll walk with you.” Strange things were happening. They were talking, he was enjoying himself, and he wasn’t thinking about sex every second. Sometimes he felt his preoccupation with sex distorted his life. He didn’t want to be looking at a girl’s breasts all the time, but that’s where his eyes led him. If he caught a glimpse of skin, his heart jumped. Even sex jokes he thought were stupid got a response from him that he couldn’t control.
“What should we talk about now?” Wendy said. “We’ve covered the sad world.”
“And cliches,” Marcus said.
“And how good Alec’s memory is. Almost as good as his eyesight. Oh, I don’t know why it bothers me. I suppose I’m not the sort of girl guys remember.”
“Here come the glooms.” Marcus snapped his fingers. “Time to do the grovel.”
Wendy struck herself. “Oh, no, am I doing it again? Let’s talk about something cheerful, like sex.”
“What’s cheerful about that?”
“You sound like a jaded old pervert. Tell me what kind of girl Alec likes?”
“Big, blond, and California.”
“Great, that leaves me out.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your looks.”
“Thanks, friend. Marcus, when you look at a girl, what do you notice? What do you like particularly? Personality? Sense of humor? What?”
“What is this? TV? ‘The Marriage Game’?”
“Answer the question.”
“Knees,” he said.
“Knees! I should have known. You are a pervert. Do you like my knees? On a scale of one to ten, how do my knees rate?”
“I can’t really tell with those jeans on.”
“I can’t take them off here, sweetie. Oh, you’re blushing. I made you blush.”
Was he blushing? His hand went to his cheek. He hadn’t meant to blush. “Boys don’t blush,” he said. “Girls blush, Barrett. Boys merely redden.”
“Seriously, Marcus, what do you like in girls?”
“The three B’s: bones, boobs, and butts.”
“You guys are all alike. Such an emphasis on parts, as if you were talking about a car. ‘Great headlights!’ ‘Great taillights!’ ‘Great bumpers!’ Now if you asked me what I liked in a guy, I wouldn’t talk about his separate parts. What I respond to is the total person.”
“So what do you like about Alec?”
“Oh, I like his eyes.”
“Come on, Wendy, more details, or I kick you off the panel.”
“Well, I admit I noticed he had a cute tush.”
“No separate parts, huh?”
They looked at each other and smiled. “Do you have fantasies about girls?” Wendy said. “I’m really curious about the kinds of things guys think of.”
“You sound like a sociologist. Sure I have fantasies. Not like yours, though.”
“What makes you think you know what goes on in my head?”
“Put that way, I take it back.” But he couldn’t believe anyone else could dream up some of the stuff that he did.
“I suppose your disgusting fantasies make you horny?” she said.
Marcus felt himself redden again. He didn’t know how much experience Wendy had had, but from the way she talked, he had the feeling she was experienced. When had he ever talked to a girl like this before? He might have been talking to Alec, except that he’d never even described his fantasies to Alec. “My fantasies are off limits,” he said. “Strictly confidential. Not for public consumption.”
“Oh, come on,” she coaxed. “What could my friend tell me that I wouldn’t understand?”
“You’d be surprised. I have a nasty, low-down imagination.”
“Here’s another question for the panel. Are you hung up on a girl being a virgin?”
So his guess was right. She wasn’t a virgin, and wanted him to know that interesting detail.
“Or do you think girls should have experience?”
“Either way,” he said, more embarrassed than he wanted to show. “Just give me a girl.” Now that was smart. That showed real intelligence.
“What about the girls you’ve gone out with?”
“Come on, knock it off.” Was she going to get out her scorecard now, and regale him with her triumphs?”
“What’s the matter?” Wendy said.
“Nothing!” He wasn’t enjoying this. Now girls were bragging about how they’d scored.
“I can’t understand why you’re getting so mad. Did I say something? I know I talk too much. Am I talking too much?”
“Look—” and then at a loss for what to say, wanting to end it, but feeling himself getting in deeper and deeper, he said, “I haven’t had that much experience.” That should settle it. Let her think what she wanted.
“But you’ve had some?”
“Not that much,” he said grudgingly.
“Well, how much?”
“How much have you had?”
“It’s personal,” she said.
“Same here.”
Wend
y looked at him. “We’re both scared to say, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, I’ll say it. My experience is zilch. Don’t look so shocked, Marcus. Things don’t happen in Buffalo the way they do everywhere else. I’ve made out. You’re not impressed. I’m not either.”
“Buffalo isn’t the only place that’s a desert,” he said. She got the meaning right away.
“Truthfully?”
“Why is it so hard to believe? You think every guy’s an expert?”
“I don’t know. Just, you guys, I sort of thought … I look at guys and I think they all know. Alec comes on so, you know, sophisticated.” She laughed.
“It so happens that Alec is sophisticated, if you know what I mean.”
“Well, here we are.” They were at her house. Did she catch that about Alec’s sophistication?
“Sex isn’t all that important,” she said. “Don’t misunderstand me, I know it is, but there’s more to it than just sex. I’ve had my chances—not that many, but the guys made me mad, they were so stupid about it. You need someone special, don’t you think so? Someone really close. Sometimes I feel I’ll never find that person, and that’s sad.”
“You will,” Marcus said. “I think if you want something enough it will happen.” Then why hadn’t it happened to him?
“I’d like to believe that everything turns out right in the end, but it doesn’t for everyone.” She was being serious again. “There’s a loneliness in some people.”
“You’ll find someone,” Marcus said. “It’s going to happen to you. It happens to everyone.” Kindly Dr. Fraud. “If I say any more I’ll have to charge you, and sexologists don’t come cheap.”
“What I felt in the mall. Some people are sad all their lives. They cover up, but it’s always there. In my sane moods I know that’s why my mother keeps running from man to man. Well, I’d better go. Thanks for talking to me, Marcus.”
He turned down Allen, then up Euclid toward home. Talking to Wendy was a surprise a minute. She hardly seemed to register what he had revealed about himself, something he’d never told anyone in the world before. He’d admitted that he was a virgin. It wasn’t the kind of news he passed out routinely.
7
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Sweeny said, “I’ve gone through each of your papers at least twice. You’ve introduced me to a number of interesting characters. I didn’t know we had so much character around.” Sweeny’s little joke. “I’ll read first a section of Miss Kruger’s paper—one of the best.”
Marcus doodled ferociously at the edge of his paper. Which one was his? Where was it, top or bottom? Today Sweeny was starting off with the best papers, handing out his praise, saving the losers for last.
Bev had written about her sister who had scoliosis, curvature of the spine, and who was in a full body cast. “Gayle has spent the last six months in the hospital,” Sweeny read. “She does homework every day and delivers the newspapers to the other patients even though she is flat on her back. Her whole head is wrapped in bandages. She got tired of people thinking she was a boy, so she made a sign for the cart she wheels herself around on. The sign says, ‘Hey, you guys, I’m a girl!’”
As he listened, Marcus felt envious, because he had had nothing so good to write about, nothing as real. And ashamed too, because he’d never credited Bev with anything but being sexy.
“Miss Kruger has written about a subject she knows. She has used good detail. She has us caring about her sister.” High praise. Marcus sank down in his seat.
Mr. Sweeny went on to say something about several other papers. One belonged to a girl named Helen Wing. “Miss Wing wrote about her cousin Bovis, a lady who loves to fish and talks like a truck driver, if that’s the way truck drivers still talk. Mr. Katz, your paper was also very good. Your aunt sounds like an interesting person.”
Marcus returned to his scribbling, working the pen back and forth so hard it went through the paper. It was all downhill from here. In his despair he decided that Sweeny knew nothing about writing. Why should Marcus even listen to him? Whatever Sweeny said, it wasn’t going to influence him.
Sweeny discussed each paper, taking his time, walking around the room, handing the paper back as he finished with it. Marcus knew his paper was on the bottom of the pile, so far down Sweeny couldn’t even find it.
“Now I want to read you the last paper. What the author of this paper has done is create an interesting amalgam of truth and fiction, a melding of the memorable character with a person you really come to feel something for in an odd sort of way. Victor Gorman is self-centered, egotistical, not terribly bright, but so utterly sincere. Perhaps that’s the clue.” He picked up Marcus’s paper. Marcus wanted to get up and leave the room. His stomach felt watery. He didn’t want to listen to this.
“‘Hey, I bet you think I talk a lot about myself,’” Mr. Sweeny read. The sound of his own words sent a shiver of fear down Marcus’s back. But, god, it was good to hear his own words being read as if they mattered. “‘A lot of people say, hey, that Victor Gorman has a very big head …’”
Was it good? Had he written that? The class was laughing. Was it funny? What were they laughing at?
“‘I know people talk behind my back. People are very jealous of success and I have been very successful with the ladies.…’”
Did they know it was his? Maybe it was good.
Outside, at the end of the class, Marcus tried to read Sweeny’s scrawl at the bottom of his paper. “If you are willing to work, this may be publishable. See me for a conference.”
Publishable—to be published. To have his name in print. It was something he’d dreamed about, but to be taken seriously … It was real and it was unreal. What Sweeny had written both scared and excited him. Marcus told everyone he was a writer, but underneath, he didn’t know what he was. He looked around for someone to tell, saw Wendy through the library window, and went in. He dropped into the seat next to her and pushed the paper with Sweeny’s comment toward her.
“‘This may be publishable,’” she read. “That’s wonderful, Marcus. I bet you’re walking on air.”
“Sweeny’s gone overboard.”
“No, he hasn’t. Read what Sweeny’s said. It’s good. You said yourself you thought it was good. Sweeny read it and knew.”
“There’s a lot of work to be done yet,” the author said modestly.
“Where do you think you’ll publish it?”
“Playboy.”
“You don’t read Playboy, do you?”
Marcus took his story from her. “Do you think I would look at those filthy pictures?”
“Oh, Marcus, you lie so adorably. Wouldn’t it be a riot, though, if they published your story?”
His mind took a leap: the editorial offices of Playboy … beautiful women … a telephone call from Hefner … invitation to the promising new writer … a swim in the Playboy pool …
“They’ll probably throw me out of school, but I’d quit first. Actually I’m thinking about it: quitting school and just writing.” He took a ballpoint pen and stuck it into the corner of his mouth. Marcus Rosenbloom Hemingway.
“It would take guts to do that,” Wendy said, “to believe in yourself that much.”
“I know it,” he said. Something had happened that he hadn’t fully absorbed yet. Somebody—no, Sweeny—had read what he’d written and said “what you have written is publishable.” It meant that what he wrote was of interest to other people. It meant that he should write more.
“I’m going to write,” he said to Wendy. His whole life would be reorganized around writing. No more screwing around panting after girls, wasting his life. He had purpose. School was irrelevant, the courses he was taking, trig, chemistry, even the diploma—all irrelevant. “If you know where you’re going you go there. Everything else is irrelevant.”
The idea grew as he talked. If his mother put up too much of a fuss, he’d leave home. He only needed
a room to sleep and write in. He’d get a job as a counterman, a dishwasher; he’d live as simply as a grocery clerk. In his mind he’d already moved out. He was independent, working and writing. Everything would fall into place. Women would flock around him, the struggling genius.
It was only when he was alone that his feet touched the ground. He was being carried away. Would Playboy take his piece? Did he dare leave school? But despite everything, the idea stuck.
“You know the paper I had to do for Sweeny?” Marcus met his mother downtown for supper and told her what Sweeny had said, and what he had written on the bottom of his paper. “What do you think of that?”
Sally sipped her soup. “I think it’s wonderful. You must have gotten an A on that paper.”
Wasn’t that like his mother not to get the point. “The A is irrelevant.” He paused, took a swallow of water. “It’s more than an A. I should be writing more, not wasting my time in school.”
“You are writing. You’re taking an interesting course. You were so enthusiastic about your teacher.”
“Sweeny’s great, but he’s only one teacher.” He was anxious for her approval and resentful that he needed it. “I’m ready to drop out.”
That stopped her eating. “I can’t believe you’re serious. You’ve always liked school.”
“I’m going to write every day,” he said. “Every day, all day.”
“Write all day? Be realistic,” Sally said. “It’s impossible for you to sit still for thirty seconds.”
“Jesus.” Couldn’t she see him as anything but a snotty, squirmy kid? “I want to get started on my life, can’t you understand?”
“You keep talking about life,” his mother said, “as if it’s something that only you know anything about. Don’t you think I know a little about life?”
“No comment,” Marcus said.
“Marcus, only three more months and you graduate. Then college, that’s the next step. You can’t go anyplace in the world of work without those diplomas.”
“College. Is that the only thing left to do in the world? Where’s adventure? Where’s just sailing out and seeing where you land? What about going out and getting my lumps and finding out if I can take it or not? Look, Sally—” He could see she wasn’t getting it, and he was beginning to bounce up and down. Calm down, he told himself, act normal. He tasted his soup. “How’s your soup, Sally?” He spoke softly. “Mine’s delicious.” He tasted a spoonful. “I want to talk about this calmly. Writing is work, Sally. I’m not leaving school to bum around. I’m going to be working night and day.”
I Love You, Stupid! Page 4
