"Well, fuck it. Just fuck it, that's all. She's out of her head. Why the shit did you make us come over here and go through this crap then?"
Her face watery with tears, Beanie looked up at the three men who loomed over her around the dinner table. She began to gather their silverware.
"Oh, Beanie, just leave it," her husband said. "For God's sake, just leave it."
"No. I'm all right. Please go on, I'm all right." She stood and took the dishes to the kitchen for the more than thirty thousandth time in her married life.
chapter 42
The night was right, sweet smells of pink and plum flowers stirred in a warm wind, and in the looking glass of the Ransoms' heated pool the lights were bright. Boxes tacked to tree trunks made music.
Desire twanged across Elizabeth Circle. The afterglow of charcoal smoldered in the grill while from kegs and carafes drink tumbled at a touch into glasses. At the shallow end of the pool, Joy Strummer rippled small waves with her feet. From time to time she leaned forward to trail her hand in the darker water. The shimmer of her face floated there uneasily. Joy wore her black bikini for the first time and her hair loosely pinned. Coils of gold curled down to her neck. She had seen men notice her tonight. Among them was Sidney Blossom, who was thinking that the only achievement one can bring to a swimming party is the body. Maturity, wealth, talent, degrees, none, he noted (hiding his thin arms against his thin chest), can be worn on the flesh.
Earlier, while Joy tried to pretend to eat all her steak, she had overheard Kate whisper to Lance: "Are you out of your gourd? That's Bobby Strummer's little sister!" But Lance had replied, "So? Big deal."
And even if the other guests had left her alone, still the place was the most beautiful she had ever seen, and Lance was better looking than anyone else there could be in the world. Suddenly his head burst up out of the wet darkness at her feet. On his lashes water drops sparkled.
She saw what he saw—that she was more beautiful than anyone else there could be in the world. "Hey, you! How you doing? Listen, I'm sorry I kept you waiting so late. And I was in a lousy mood, too, wasn't I? Okay? How you doing? I was driving like a nut, wasn't I?"
"That's all right." She had never doubted, while she had stood at the end of the lane waiting secretly, never once doubted that he would come in the crimson chariot and sweep her away. She had set aside his mood as irrelevant to her and him. "Oh, that's all right."
She smiled.
"It was a nuthouse at home. Well. Hey. Now look. I'm going to show off for you. Let's see if I can still cut it." By his hands he sprang out of the pool. She watched him walk to the other end. Water ran down the curls of his hair, down the small of his back, down his legs.
From the top of the ladder he waved at her. There was nothing else for either of them to notice but the other's mysterious beauty.
To this party Kate Ransom had invited not only old childhood friends stuck in Dingley Falls between spring term and summer plans, but several young couples sharing rented cabins on Lake Pissinowno whom she'd met at the marina. Near nudity hastened acquaintanceship among the guests. Several, clustered in the middle of the pool, chased a volleyball. A wave splashed Arthur Abernathy's trousers as he sat in a lounge chair next to Emerald and gazed glumly at his twin brother, Lance, who now walked on his hands the length of the diving board. Having known Lance for thirty-one years, Arthur was no longer surprised to see him in a mood so radically different from the one he'd been in only two hours earlier. No longer surprised, but still indignant.
Kate swam along the floor of the pool, grabbed Sidney's trunks from behind, and tugged. When he wrenched around, she kissed a spray of water into his mouth. "You're too aggressive." He grinned.
"Men don't like it."
The accusation made Kate hostile, as she sometimes thought it might be true. "You ought to get a tan. Like that." She pointed up at Lance.
The librarian, though hurt, laughed. "I'd have to get a body like that first, wouldn't you say?" They watched Lance fly backwards off the board. Grinning, Kate floated against Blossom, pressed her hand against his crotch, and wound her legs around his. "I like your body better," she told him. It was a way of saying, "I like you better," which was true, though she did find preferable, as bodies go, Lance's. "I like feeling your hand there," he told her, which was true, though he would have preferred her slightly less rigorously athletic in her amorousness. Neither thought the other was (utterly) perfect, and each was beginning to look forward to telling each other so as the years went by.
Lance shot like a dolphin out of the pool, then crouched on the concrete beside his brother's lounge chair. "Hey, what went down after I left the house? Hi, Emerald, you're looking good. What's mom up to?"
"She left."
"Are you kidding? Where?"
"Tracy Canopy's. She couldn't very well stay overnight with Dad now, could she? In the morning she's going back to New York."
"The hell you say."
Arthur helped his fiancée out of her chair. "I'll talk to you about this tomorrow, Lance, all right?" Emerald swirled her sweater in a perfect farol de rodillas so that it settled softly upon her bare shoulders.
"Very good," Walter Saar was saying to Priss Ransom, who had just compared the music coming at them from tree trunks in ever louder grunts to a recording of natural childbirth. Priss had sufficiently removed from her mind the sight of those horrible eyes spying through the bamboo shades to manage a brief appearance at the pool in order to greet her daughter's guests and check on the supply of refreshments. She was pleased to see the headmaster there, though surprised. She had thought of him as a member of her circle, and therefore anathema to Kate. "You're not swimming, Walter?"
"My dear, I prefer liquid down my throat, not up my nose."
"Refurbish your drink?" asked Mr. Ransom.
"Oh, thanks, Ernest. Besides, at our age, the most aesthetic thing we can do is keep our clothes on."
"Our age? How gallant." Priss smirked.
He knew he should offer her now a bite of candied wit, he even thought of a sentence, but he just didn't want to say it. "Priss, would you excuse me? Jonathan there looks a little lost." Father Fields, a sky-blue sweater over his clerical collar, stood, wineglass in hand, off by himself near the flowering azalea. He stared up at the stars.
"Is he praying?" asked Mrs. Ransom. "Don't tell me. You expect imminent death and keep a priest constantly at your side to sneak you into Paradise." She raised the arms of her white caftan in a parody of prayer.
He knew she was offering him another chance, but he didn't want it. He wanted very much to say, "No, he's my lover," just to see her face, but he didn't dare, and besides, it was not, technically, true.
"I like him," Saar said. "He's very nice," and thought, that has to be the dullest remark I've made in years. "Ah. Thank you, Ernest; looks…very nice." (What was the matter with his tongue? Could it articulate nothing but "very nice"?)
"Bien sur." Mrs. Ransom smiled. "I'm sure he is very nice, and even if he weren't, il est très beau, très beau. Est-ce que c'est vrai, monsieur?" Her eyes looked at his for one interminable second, then Saar smiled, bowed, and walked away. (Hell. Goddamn her. But, all right, fair was fair, she'd let him know she knew and done it so that crystallized clone of the Successful American Male had no idea what she was talking about. If anything had "turned him queer," why not say it was the possibility of turning, instead, into Ernest Ransom?) Now, what was she going to do with the knowledge that the headmaster of her son's school was "that way"? Discounting its possible consequences (one word from her and he would be fired tomorrow, with scant likelihood of flattering recommendations), the question of her power fascinated him, almost theoretically. Suddenly Saar felt wonderfully free, triumphant over shame. "Bored, Jonathan?"
"Oh, hi. No, not at all. It's a beautiful night."
Saar looked up at the sky from the curate's perspective. "Yes. It makes life down here look rather temporary, and generally silly." Light winked at him thr
ough his ice cube. "'Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art,' and et cetera. Yes, it's beautiful. However, somehow that," he pointed at a throbbing speaker on a nearby willow, "does not sound capable of turning the heavens in their spheres. Or, for that matter, soothing the savage breast. Which calls to mind the choir rehearsal.
I think you did very well with that phalanx of savage breasts."
"Really? I thought I was doing an awful job. I just don't have enough authority. No matter what I said, I couldn't seem to keep them in line. What's so funny?"
"My dear man, Attila couldn't keep those little Huns in line the last week of school. Maybe if you'd simply shot every tenth tenor, the rest would have paused to consider. But, in the end, they outnumber us. Ah, Jonathan, Rome always falls to the barbarian, and the old to the young." Saar put his hand on the curate's, on the pretext of removing his glass. "Now. I've done my scrapes and curtsies here.
Why don't we leave?"
"All right. Where shall we go?"
Saar very much wanted to say, "You could come home with me."
So he did, and watched the blue eyes hurry back to the stars, pause there, then finally turn toward his.
"I'd like to," Jonathan replied, his heart awed at his own bravery.
"But let me say good-bye to Joy first."
Saar laughed. "Good-bye to joy? My God, if you think the prospect that gloomy, by all means let's stay here instead and watch that man, who, out of motives that I could never grasp, is repeatedly plunging backwards off that high board into that hard water."
"No, no." The curate grinned, relieved by levity. "It's a girl. Joy Strummer. I've gotten to know her parents a little because her older brother, Bobby, their son, has been reported missing in Vietnam for about two years now, and, well, I've tried to help them keep in touch with the government and, you know, see if we could learn anything about where he is."
"Don't you assume he's dead?"
"Oh, no. We assume he's alive. That's Joy over there in the pool.
I'm kind of surprised she's here; she's awfully young. Over there."
Saar followed the line of the curate's arm to a girl who stood, her hand raised in greeting, in the dark shallow water; a girl who looked, the headmaster said out loud, "Good God, like Aphrodite! Really!"
But strangely, her beauty made him sad. He felt he wanted to wrap her in a warm covering, to cover such beauty and keep it safe. Such paternal impulses were new to him. And yet, of course, there was no shield behind which to preserve human beauty. No shield was strong enough. Keats ran in the teacher's mind still. "And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu; And aching pleasure nigh, / Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips."
Cecil Hedgerow kissed his sleeping daughter; she brushed her hand across her face and turned to the side. Alone downstairs he opened the violin case that sat atop Pauline's old upright piano, but before he could begin his evening practice, someone knocked at the kitchen door.
Jack Strummer wanted to know if Joy was upstairs with Polly.
She had sneaked out of her room apparently, after her mother had forbidden her to get out of bed. "Jesus, Peggy's mad as a hornet. But I say, what the hell, let the kid have some fun. Just starting her vacation and all. You know Peggy. Not here, right? Bet you anything a bunch of them went up to the lake and all just like we used to."
Hedgerow was walking his neighbor across the backyard when his foot hit something thick and soft. Even as he was saying, "What in the world?" he had seen what it was. The little cocker spaniel's flybuzzed body was lying in the unmown grass just where he had seen it this morning. "Jack, I'm afraid that's Joy's little dog."
"Oh, Jesus! Look there. Donny! Oh, Jesus, what happened? Poor little fellow. Joy's heart's going to be broken in two over this. You know how she loves Donny. Poor little princess. Look, I'll go get a box or something. Oh, Jesus. Sorry to bother you with this, Cecil."
At midnight the party had a great idea. It would go to the Ransoms' beach house on Lake Pissinowno, where it would not disturb Kate's parents, who had retired to their den—or their neighbors, Mr. Smalter had called twice. The party would go where it could build a fire, smoke pot, race naked into the glacial lake water, do whatever it wanted to do. What Kate wanted to do was make love on the pebbly beach. Sid didn't want to: "I'm not interested in anything that resembles pain," he told her. "Not even pleasure?" she asked and grinned. "You don't understand. Orgasm is death's doppelganger. Coming . And going. See?"
"Sounds Swedish to me." He grimaced. "Is it Ingmar Bergman?"
"Yeah. She says it to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Ha, ha.
What's the matter with this car?"
"It's on orgasm's doorstep."
Behind Blossom's faltering VW, the party in a caravan of cars crawled up High Street toward the lake. It passed the Bredforets' house, where Ruth Deeds lay awake, annoyed with herself for caring whether she was alone or not. Angrily she rustled her research notes on the harmful side effects of defoliants. The car passed the headmaster's house at Alexander Hamilton Academy, where Jonathan Fields was discovering that human communion could be fully as terrifying and as blissful as the divine, and where Walter Saar was discovering that in the awkward efforts of human communion there could be that same rush of divinity there was in music.
Left behind by the party at the pool's edge, Joy sat wrapped in Lance's sweater; it was warm against her shivering skin. Just before the party had had its great idea, Lance had asked if she'd mind if he was gone for a few minutes. He just needed to run across the circle to where his mother was staying and talk to her for a minute. But soon afterwards everyone else had all of a sudden decided to go, and though some had offered her rides, she had declined them. "Thanks anyhow," she had said, as she'd said to Father Fields and his friend.
"I'm waiting for someone." She felt as if she might have been waiting a long time, but she was too intimidated to walk back to the enormous house that gleamed beyond the dark lawn in order to ask if Lance could be reached and brought to her. She'd wait here. The air felt too cold. She felt shaky and, hoping it would warm her, she slid back down into the pool water. Stupidly she'd forgotten to take off his sweater and was worried she had ruined it. Before he went, he had sat beside her and kissed her and said, "This sounds crazy, just these few days. I feel different looking at you. You know what I mean?"
"Yes."
"I mean, it makes me wonder about just flaking around. And you're just a baby, that's what gets me. I mean when you look at me like that, I don't know what I want to do, grab you, or push you away, or, Jesus God, what! It gives me the spooks. You know what I mean?"
"Yes."
Then he'd kissed her again and told her, "Don't listen to me, I sound like a jerk. Just stay here. Okay? How you doing?"
Yes, she would wait, because her body had chosen him, elected him to be the vehicle of her rebirth through new generations. She huddled down, shivering in the dark water.
Ernest Ransom shuddered awake on the couch in his library. Guests on a talk show had laughed into his nightmare of soldiers lying in the surf near Caen in Normandy. He turned off the television. Priss must have gone to bed. The music was gone, there was no noise at all coming from the pool. He looked at his watch, but it was only 12:30. In the living room he found Emerald and Arthur on the couch, examining a catalog of bedroom suites. They told him they thought the party had left together, not too long ago, to go do something somewhere else. They didn't know what, or where.
Closing the glass doors behind him, the banker stepped out into the now chilly night. He walked quickly along the flagstone path toward the trees that hid the pool. His foot kicked a glass. There among garden chairs lay plates, bottles, ashtrays, and records, all strewn everywhere. That Kate! Just to run off and leave this chaos!
Leave half the lights on! Ransom stepped around the pink flowering azalea and onto the concrete.
In the shadows of the shallow end, something luminous drifted against the side of the pool. He t
hought someone must have thrown in a lounge chair. Or a towel. He walked closer. Then he ran. He felt as if his body were on fire. He could hear his own scream as he jumped, already reaching for her in the water. His hand hit against her arm and the arm jerked and sank away from him. Not breathing, he bent under her floating body, lifted her up, away from the water.
Not breathing and his legs giving way uncontrollably so that he kept slipping under, Ransom turned her in his arms, turned her toward the light, and let her head fall back from his chest. Coils of wet hair sprayed across the face, and with strange whooping sounds that he didn't know he was making, in a panic he brushed the hair aside.
Ransom stood in the dark blue water, shaking, and rocked the dead girl in his arms. It wasn't Kate. It wasn't Kate.
chapter 43
"Get that boy out of here, Ernie. Get him home. Is Winslow there?
Goddamnit, just grab his arms!" Otto Scaper slammed shut the white ambulance doors into which two attendants had lifted the covered stretcher. Sirenless, it drove out of Elizabeth Circle, where lights now peered from house windows. "Hell! Okay, Lance! Okay, son! Okay!"
The doctor pinned the young man's arms from behind and in his huge bear hug lifted him away from the Jaguar, the frame of which Lance was beating with his fists. Scaper held him like that (thinking that at any second his own dry old bones would snap in two) until he felt the other's muscles unclench. Then he spoke loudly into his ear.
"You listen to me. You didn't do it. You didn't do it. Are you listening to me? Lance? There wasn't anything you could have done.
Now's the time to act like a man. You hear me? All right. All right then." The voice softened to a steady lull. "Okay. I'm going to let you go. There. Now I want you to go inside with Ernie here and let him give you a drink. Let me see those hands first. Goddamnit! Ernie, tell Priss to get this bleeding stopped and put something on the cuts. But this right one's gonna have to be X-rayed. Okay, go on. And get out of those wet clothes, Ernie."
Michael Malone Page 37
