Tom is the new boy at school. Tom Fenton. Thomas. T. F. Tom and Lou. T. F. and L. F. Lou writes variations everywhere, on all her notebooks, on the soles of her running shoes, backwards on her eraser to make a stamp. On her wrist with a needle: T. F. in dots of blood, and one night, in a frenzy of ardour, a i, on her stomach in two razor lines. Of all the girls who think they love him, she believes that she is the only one who sees beyond his John Lennon face, wire-rimmed glasses and British accent. What she sees, what thrills her, is the cold look in his eye. She has that look, too, she thinks.
He’s in her English class. He calls Robert Frost, whom the teacher reveres, a third-rate poet. He says that “Acquainted with the Night” is not about man’s inhumanity to man but about the void in man. In the corridors he strides alone and scowling, usually reading a library book.
“Ten bucks says he’s a homo,” is Sherry’s reaction when Lou tells her he hasn’t asked any girl out. Sherry has quit school, lied about her age and got a job as a cocktail waitress at The Nineteenth Hole, the golf-and-country-club restaurant. Sherry says that English guys are either completely homo or half and half. “Take it from me,” she says.
For once Lou doesn’t want to hear the sordid proof. “Not Tom,” she says. She has the idea that homosexuals are flamboyant and happy. Also rare.
Sherry makes a circle with her thumb and forefinger and pokes her other forefinger in and out. “There’s only one way to know for sure,” she says.
“Give me time,” Lou says.
She tries to impress him by faking his interests. All the advice (she lowers herself to seeking it in Sandy’s fashion magazines, and she’s influenced by what Jean Peters did to catch Louis Jourdan in Three Coins in the Fountain) seems to boil down to Fake His Interests. She takes out of the library the books she sees him carrying: Siddhartha, The Fountainhead, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. She reads them walking. She buys wire-rimmed glasses. After seeing him smoking a cigarette on his way home from school, she smokes right out in the corridors.
She clings to two straws. One, that he doesn’t seem to be noticing any of her competitors either. Two, that none of her competitors is as smart and reckless as she is. She will do anything to win him. Anything.
Stella for star, as everyone who has seen A Streetcar Named Desire (and Norma has seen it three times) knows.
Did Stella’s parents name her after the girl in the movie, or was she born dazzling? Norma wonders and daydreams. Stella is her dream girl. Probably she’s the dream girl of half the boys at school, too, but no boy has the nerve to ask her out. Stella is over six feet tall and has white-blond waist-long hair and a face as sweet as a baby’s. You can understand why her parents didn’t press their luck. (Stella is an only child.) Her parents adore her. They take her to the Caribbean on holidays. Everything there is to know about Stella from a distance, Norma knows.
The first day after the Thanksgiving holiday Norma manages to stand behind Stella in the cafeteria line. This is all the heaven Norma feels she wants and deserves. Although she daydreams, she never hopes.
Stella has been away for a week, to Jamaica, and she has a bad sunburn. Her long hand reaching for a carton of milk is blistered, and when Norma sees this, she gasps, which makes Stella turn around and look at her.
Norma feels herself blush. She hasn’t blushed in months; she thought she’d outgrown it. “You should put calamine lotion on your hand,” she murmurs.
“Pardon me?” Stella says. She tosses her hair back.
“Calamine lotion.”
Stella waits.
“It takes away the burn and stops some of the peeling,” Norma says. She shrugs, mortified now. “It’s just a suggestion.”
But Stella is supremely interested. Inclining her head, she asks if you can buy calamine lotion with a prescription. She asks how much it costs. Then she says,“Gee, thanks a lot,” and offers Norma such a sweet, gorgeous smile that Norma feels an old stirring of sadness connected with her desire to serve a paragon, and she offers to bring Stella a bottle of calamine lotion from home.
“Oh, no,” Stella says. “I mean, thanks anyway, but I wouldn’t want to use all yours up.” Her slender, burned hand taps Norma’s. “I know,” she says. “Why don’t we walk home together and go to the drugstore on the way?”
They become best friends. It’s the most amazing thing that has ever happened to Norma. At the end of classes, there is this glorious girl waiting at her locker, looking around anxiously as if Norma might go home without her. As if!
Stella’s nature and colouring and beauty remind Norma of Sandy. “I love you so much,” Sandy used to say. “I think you’re so great,” Stella says when Norma figures out some math problem, when she throws the discus farther than anyone else in gym class. Stella feels the muscles in Norma’s arm and squeals with admiration. Shrugging off her own breathtaking hair as tangly and always in the way, she says that Norma’s hair is practical and that she wishes her mother would allow her to get the same cut.
“Don’t you dare!” Norma says.
When she and Stella walk together, Stella sometimes holds her hand.
At the beginning of the second feature, in the front seat of Dave’s father’s car (the back seat being filled with boxes of Waring blenders), Sandy and Dave go all the way.
Sandy squeezes her vagina tight (Dave isn’t as big as she expected from how tall he is) and makes noises of pain. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry. Sorry.” She watches the movie. It’s about a monster baby that preys on milkmen.
In the few moments it takes for the baby to be born and to escape out of an air vent, Dave has entered her and come. The car is washed in screen light (the baby emerging into the day) just as he opens his eyes. He gazes down at her with such thankfulness that she’s tempted to own up then and there.
But she doesn’t. Feeling herself drip onto the seat, she reaches for the pile of napkins. They arrived prepared. The big night has been planned to coincide with their three-month anniversary of going out together. Also with the first day of her period, although Dave doesn’t know this part.
“That’s life,” has been Dave’s summing up of all her secrets, including Niagara Falls. She bets she could tell him she went around shooting people, and he’d wrap his eighteen-inch-bicep arm around her and say it was life. But she can’t see him calling her affairs with balding, married men whose names begin with R life. His secret is that he fainted once, giving blood, and that’s what she imagines, a crash like a falling tree. Anyway, she asks herself, why hurt him sooner than she has to?
He assumes they’re going to be married. He has it arranged that after graduation they’ll live in the apartment above the appliance store, him working in the service department, and her working as a cashier until she gets pregnant. He assumes this despite knowing about her ambition to leave school at the end of the year and use the money she’s saved to go to college and study fashion design. Despite having seen some of the drawings she intends to send in with her application. Either he thinks that the college won’t accept her or that she won’t go when it comes down to it. Or maybe he really doesn’t understand what her being accepted will mean. “We’ll save money with you sewing your own clothes,” is all he says when she shows him the drawings. She decides then not to straighten him out. Soon enough she’ll be breaking his heart. Whether she’s accepted or not, she can’t marry somebody she doesn’t love. In the meantime the least she can do for a boy who loves her enough to want to live with her for the rest of his life (no married man wanted that) is to let him go all the way.
“Look at all the blood,” he says, holding the napkins up to the light. He sounds both worried and gratified.
Sandy is watching the movie. A slow close-up is in progress, the first sight of the baby. From a distance the baby seems cute. Then, as you get nearer, you see that it has deranged eyes. The camera travels right into its howling mouth, to its tonsils and down a black-and-red tunnel—the route that the swallowed milkmen take.
/> Dave turns his attention back to the screen. “The birth canal,” he says authoritatively.
Sandy bursts out laughing.
“What?” he says. She shakes her head, unable to speak. “C’mon,” he laughs,“what’s so funny?”
She can’t tell him. She’s laughing too hard, and, besides, she doesn’t know what’s so funny. She points to the screen, where in a few minutes he’ll figure out his mistake.
The vice-principal catches Lou smoking in the corridors and threatens her with suspension. Later that day, in English class, Tom says that Charlotte Corday was a saint, so the next day Lou brings in a bread knife and lets it be known she intends to use it if the vice-principal threatens her again. Feeling a terrifying exhilaration, she rises to a dare and smokes a cigarette right outside the closed door of the vice-principal’s office.
She doesn’t see Tom come up behind her. When his hand reaches around and snatches the cigarette out of her mouth, she thinks he’s the vice-principal. “It’s not worth it,” he says.
She is speechless.
He takes a puff of her cigarette. “If you have to do somebody in,” he says,“go to Washington. Pick off Nixon.” He drops the cigarette to the floor and extinguishes it under the high heel of his brown suede boot. “Get into heaven.”
“No chance,” she says, meaning about heaven. Her laugh is shrill, crazy-sounding. “Anyway,” she says, infuriated by the laugh,“I need some target practice first,” and she draws the knife out of her purse and stabs it into the wood alongside the vice-principal’s door. She stares at it, awed.
Tom grabs her arm. “Let’s go,” he says quietly. He pulls her down the hall, running with her to the side exit. Still holding her arm, although she isn’t resisting, he leads her through the parking lot to a beat-up red Volkswagen in the corner. He opens the passenger door. “Climb in,” he says, then strides around, opens the driver’s door, throws his books on the back seat and gets in.
“Is this yours?” she asks, surprised.
“No.” He glowers, pushing in the lighter.
“Whose is it?”
“I don’t know. It was unlocked.”
“Ha!” she says happily. She kicks off her shoes and puts her feet up on the dash. Her skirt rises up her bare thighs. She feels more relief that she shaved her legs last night than that she didn’t have to stab the vice-principal.
Tom lights a cigarette from the lighter and another from the lit cigarette. She wants him to direct hers between her lips but isn’t disappointed by the way he hands it over without glancing at her, as if they do this all the time.
As the keys have been left in the ignition, she suggests stealing the car, stopping off at her house for their father’s gun and driving to Washington. He calls her a weird bird. She detects admiration in his voice. “You should meet my mother,” she says, her greatest extravagance so far.
He turns on the engine but only for the heater, not to drive anywhere. He goes back to talking about Nixon. Nixon could end the Vietnam War tomorrow, he says, but doesn’t want to because of his Mafia mentality. He calls Nixon a fucking asshole. He sucks on his cigarette, looking murderous with rage, and she is dizzy with love. All her rage is personal, directed against their father and her own unjust circumstances. She decides that from now on she’ll be angry about Nixon and Vietnam. About war. “There never was a good war,” Tom says. “Benjamin Franklin.”
She luxuriates in being able to look at him up close as he looks out the window. She studies his right ear that is pointed like an elf’s, his sideburn that has red hair in it, his noble nose. She accepts all she sees as the highest standard. At the same time she ransacks her brain for war facts and remembers the first two lines of a poem they studied last year in English—Wilfred Owen’s “Arms and the Boy.” She recites.
Let the boy try along this bayonet blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood.
But most of her attention is devoted to wondering if Tom will touch her, kiss her. Ask her out.
When the three-fifteen bell rings and they have to leave the car, Tom says offhandedly,“Why don’t you pop round to my house this evening? The old man and lady are out. We’ll have the place to ourselves.”
She hurries home. On the way she sees a one-armed man walking a lame dog. It’s the dog she feels sorry for. She suspects the man of having kicked it lame. Because the man is missing an arm, she assumes he’s developed a twisted personality. Tom, she thinks, is perfect, and therefore she trusts him, not to be kind, that’s for sure, but to be much more than that, much better: to be intelligent, to have elevated scope.
She has a bath and shaves her legs again. Then she has a shower and washes her hair and fills the tub and has another bath in Sandy’s jasmine-scented oil, which she didn’t notice before. Then she washes her hair again in water that has gone cold.
She can’t tell if she is happy and terrified or just terrified. Extreme happiness and terror have always felt the same to her. She knows she is making herself very clean as some meagre compensation for her complete sexual inexperience. Until today being a virgin has been a vague affliction. Now it is the excruciating crux of her life. For all the porn she’s read and all that Sherry has told her, she doesn’t even know how to kiss.
What does Tom expect of her? She is frantic that she’s misled him with her slutty vocabulary and the bread knife. She tries to picture his face so that she can examine it for signs of intent, but she can only conjure up Lennon’s face from her Revolver album.
But it’s him she loves. Tom. To confirm it she looks down at the scab of the cross she cut on her stomach with the razor. If he acts like he loves her, she’ll tell him what the cross stands for.
Barely looking at her, Tom mumbles “You’re here” and strides away. Lou follows him down the hall, through the kitchen and down the basement stairs.
The only thing she spots looking like it’s from England is a pair of crossed swords displayed above the stairwell. When she touches them, they turn out to be plastic. She could be in a version of her own house except for the smell that’s often in other people’s places, a rotting smell, which she used to think was the odour of a normal household but which she now recognizes as the odour of cooked meat. In their house, except for hot dogs, they eat meat already cooked in the can.
At the bottom of the stairs Tom stops, extracts a key from his pants pocket and opens a door. She is reminded of Lance Nipper opening the door to the apartment-building laundry room, of the nail tearing her insides, and she shivers and is incredulous to think of her small young self so violated. Collusion, she thinks, is the difference between that time and this. She asks Tom why the door is locked. “Privacy,” he answers. He lights a match.
She sees the bed first. He is walking around lighting candles. They are in Coke and beer bottles on the desk and bookcase and window ledge. Candlelight is bomb-shelter light to her. It makes her claustrophobic. Tom squats in front of the bookcase and starts filing through the records on the bottom shelf. “Sit down, why don’t you?” he says.
There is only the bed. She takes her jacket off first, dropping it on the floor in an act of casualness. She sits on the end of the bed farthest from him and leans back against the woodpanelled wall, her legs in their skin-tight jeans (at the last minute she had Sandy take the jeans in) striking her as inhumanly long and thin. Will they turn him off? Who gives a shit, she thinks. She’s been feeling this way since she arrived, and she wonders if it’s typically virginal or only typical of her, or if she really has some sensible reason for wanting to back out. Right at this moment she couldn’t say she loves him.
He puts on a record, stands and turns to face her, leaning against the bookcase. It’s a Bob Dylan record—she recognizes the voice, not the song. “I wish he’d blow his nose,” she says.
“Listen,” Tom growls.
Her heart jumps. The candles flame up. Tom just stands there, arms folded, frowning into the space between them, all during that song and mo
st of the next. Finally he speaks, says,“Dylan is one of the few intelligent lyricists at work today,” then lights two cigarettes and hands one to her, and they start talking about songwriters. She praises Lennon and mentions the physical resemblance. “I don’t see it,” Tom says dismissively. He approves of Lennon, though—“a naive genius.” He proceeds to deliver a lecture about genius. He paces, spanning the room in three long strides, he sprawls on the other end of the bed, gets up, turns the record over, paces. Vigilant and reconciled and sweating from a mild fit of claustrophobia, she waits for him to make a pass. She notices a little pipe, like a bubble-blowing pipe, on the dresser, and presently she goes over and picks it up.
For the first time since she’s arrived, he looks right at her. “Do you want to smoke some grass?” he asks.
“Sure,” she says as if she has before.
Tom pushes up the window an inch. The cold draft blows out the candles on the ledge. He sits beside her on the bed, and their upper arms touch. She looks at him. In the cruel squint of his eye as he lights the pipe, she sees everything she wants. Now she could say she loves him. She is careful to do what he does. Inhale hard, hold in the smoke. She coughs, and he slaps her back.
Being so close to him, putting her lips where his lips have just been, breaking the law with him, feeling love and not feeling whatever it is—a blockage, a brick wall, a suspicion—that before has always alchemized love into something else (usually anger) makes this moment the most exquisite in her life so far. She goes into a trance of love. She lies against the pillows.
He gets up to put on another Bob Dylan record. He stays over at the bookcase and starts talking about Sigmund Freud, about women carrying purses because they have wombs. The candle flames thrash. He speaks in tongues. Her lungs shrink to the size of raisins, and not even the river of icy air streaming from the window to her mouth can inflate them. “You’re stoned,” she thinks to reassure herself. Untold minutes pass. She tries to retrace a mesh of thought back to its source, but the end of the thought, which is that he’s not going to fuck her tonight or even kiss her, keeps interfering with her concentration.
Falling Angels Page 15
