The secretary put her right through.
“I thought you were in Arrowhead,” Philip said.
“It was fun. Father, remember the trip to Europe you gave me for graduation?”
“The one you never took?”
“That’s the one. Is it the same fare to Hawaii?”
“Much less.”
“Ronni Bolt’s parents have a condominium, and Sharon Stein’s going.”
“This summer?”
“No-no. This day.”
Philip laughed.
“Father?”
“If it’s what you want,” he said. Alix had known he would say that. “Do you have enough in your account?”
“Six hundred?”
“That should be plenty. But if you need more, call me collect. Alix, buy traveler’s checks.”
“This’ll make two Sundays in a row. Father, I miss you.” Alix should have known better, but she waited for Philip to reply he’d missed her terribly. (Her mother, too, had waited for this handsome, cold—and decent—man to utter words he was incapable of.)
“I have an appointment,” he said. “Alix, hon, enjoy yourself.”
“Daddy—”
But the phone had clicked.
Sharon’s pretty, empty eyes glowed as she described her previous trips to Hawaii. Alix nodded, bemused. With a wonderful sense of unreality she was speeding at seven hundred miles an hour. She was a small appliance disconnecting herself. Far below, a ship lay like a pin in the endless blue curve.
“Alix,” Sharon was repeating, “what’s wrong?”
“Wrong?”
Sharon’s forehead went through a repertory of questioning wrinkles. “You haven’t said one thing.”
“Oh, you mean wrong,” Alix said. “Sharon, ever let a guy in on the fact you’re sort of hung up on him?” She spoke wryly, with a trace of self-derision. This wasn’t soul baring, but a fine joke on herself.
“I don’t believe it! I—do—not! Alix most beautiful, Alix most cool, Alix most popular.” Alix had been voted these by their graduating class. “Alix in love? Impossible!”
“Possible.”
“My God—at this late age, it can be fatal.”
Alix shivered.
Sharon had had her moment of vindictiveness. She put her hand on Alix’s. “Hey, you’re ice,” she said, her plump little body twisting in the awkward half stoop that plane design requires, turning off the air nozzle, pulling down a blanket. “Here.”
Alix clasped her freezing hands under acrylic. “Have you?” she asked. “Told any guy that? First?”
“Everybody has,” Sharon replied. “Who?”
“Nobody you know. I’ve been dating his brother.”
“Oh that one. The Safeway twins.”
“Van Vliet’s,” Alix said. “He’s a really beautiful person. Very idealistic and strong. He’s at Hopkins, too. Sharon, he saved this little girl’s life. He’s very stable.”
“But he hasn’t said he’s hung up on you?”
“You’ve hit the teensy problem. He isn’t,” Alix said. “Now what?”
“Oh, keep coming at him. Make excuses to phone him, see him. Be subtle, but keep pushing, know what I mean? The important thing is to keep his attention.”
“Does it work?”
“Either it does or it doesn’t.”
“But it’s the only way?”
“You’d know it is,” Sharon said, “if you were human like the rest of us.”
At Hawaii International, Ronni, a pert redhead, greeted Alix with hugs and kisses and cries of delight. Alix responded in kind. Ronni had a couple of men in tow, the short one, deeply tanned, Alix didn’t quite catch his name, took her mother’s blue overnight case, and Alix must have made the right responses at the right times, because he was laughing. They walked miles through the terminal, at one point mingling with a planeful of Japanese tourists. They crowded around the baggage slide.
“Alix,” said Sharon, sweet, dumb Sharon, “Alix, let’s go to the john.”
Alix realized she was crying.
“Got change?” she asked, wiping her eyes.
“For the john?”
“For the phone.”
Sharon, Ronni Bolt, and the two men donated silver.
Alix direct-dialed the Reeds’ number. On the first ring Roger answered.
“Where are you?” His voice was subdued and not by distance.
“Hawaii.”
“So your mother said.”
“There’s a flight back in two hours. Pan Am Eight Thirty. It lands at seven fifteen A.M.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Roger?”
“Yes.”
“You sound strange.”
“I’m not exactly alone.”
“My car’s at the airport, but Roger, will you meet me?”
“What? I can’t hear you. We’ve got a rotten connection.”
“It’s because I’m crying.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I said, will you meet me? Please? Roger, this is pushy and not very subtle. But I love you.”
“I feel the same.”
“You do?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“No-no. I’m very insecure.”
“I am, too,” he said, his voice lapsing into its normal huskiness. “Tell you about it at seven thirty.”
6
Laguna is forty miles south of Los Angeles, and the Nautical Motel is a mile and a half south of Laguna. The original ship-fronted building, circa 1938, is level with Pacific Coast Highway. The white cabins, which ramble down a cliff planted with pink Martha Washington geraniums, become newer and more expensive as they approach the beach. On every door hangs a life preserver with a red-painted name. Roger and Alix picked the First Mate’s Bunk, it was on the street, cheap, and had a kitchen area: Alix wanted to fix their meals—“Play house,” she said. As far as her family knew, she was in Ronni Bolt’s Hawaiian condominium. Roger had told his parents he was visiting a friend for the six days until he must fly back to Baltimore. Neither considered telling the truth. Couples their age lived together, God knows. But Roger and Alix were middle-of-the-roaders—imprinted by previous bourgeois generations, they were what their elders referred to as good kids. Their evasions were not hypocrisy but form to assuage parental mores.
They awoke at the same time, on their backs, naked, her left calf under his right, his arm across her stomach.
“Alix?”
“Mmmm?”
“You awake?”
“No-no.” She was stroking his shoulders. “You’ve got a bump.”
He felt. “Yes,” he said. He traced her collarbones. “You’re totally different.”
“From what? A zit?”
“You look tall and sort of … sort of.…”
“Horsy,” she supplied.
“Awe-inspiring. But you feel small. Soft. Like a little kid.”
“Ahh, flat-chested?”
“Let me—No, sweet, not at all.”
“Now you’d have a terrific bod if you could clear up that postadolescent acne.”
“My diagnosis is too many Hersheys,” he said. “What do you weigh?”
“One sixteen.”
“Five-seven?” he asked.
“Eight and a half. Why? Is this a complete physical?”
“I’m trying to understand you.”
“Maybe it’s best if you don’t,” she sighed.
“Hey, don’t shut me out.”
At the same moment they rolled toward one another.
“I never realized you’d be so fragile. Breakable.” He finger-walked her spine, cupping her shoulders. “Sweet, you did break there, sort of, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“The second time,” he said. “Not the first.”
She tugged his moustache.
“Right?” he asked.
“It’s embarrassing.”
“I’m the one with anxieties.”
“It never happened before.”
/>
“That you didn’t?”
“You do have anxieties,” she said. “The other way round.”
“Seriously?” he asked.
“I have this major problem.”
“You don’t.”
“I can cross it off my list?”
“Yes.”
“Roger.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I like the sound of it. Roger. Roger.”
“When your mother told me you’d gone to Hawaii, I wanted to cry.”
“Did you?”
“Some.”
Her lips touched his eyelids in turn. “I’d never’ve guessed on the phone. You were very suave.”
“One thing you never can accuse me of.”
They chuckled into the darkness.
“Where’d you get the money?” he asked.
She rubbed her cheek in his neck.
“I want to know everything about you,” he said.
“My father. It’s a graduation gift.” Moving her palms down his sides, she whispered, “Was I okay?”
“A postmortem?”
“You know, on a scale of one to ten?”
“You’re really asking, aren’t you?”
“But you don’t have to answer,” she said.
“At the end I was sort of out of my head. I never imagined it could be like this.”
She whispered, “Me, either.”
“But being with you, holding you now, is as important.”
They listened to the sea, small waves sucking at a foggy night, and after a while he held her hand to his chest. “If I had one moment,” he said, “one out of my whole life, this would be it.”
They walked downhill to Laguna. She needed groceries. Ralphs’ was closer, but she insisted on Van Vliet’s. A tremendous number of men (and quite a few women) turned to look at her. But how could drivers in a resort town gauge Alix from the rear? Roger, lagging back in the spirit of research, decided it was her walk. Long-legged, free and easy. Catching up with her, he dropped an arm around her shoulders, saying, “You’re a Maserati.”
“What?”
“The guys all look at you.”
“That, let me explain, is a sport. It is called girl-watching. Every girl is watched by every male under ninety and over nine.”
“We don’t spot the Chevies,” Roger laughed.
Before, she had turned him heavy. Now, she made him light. He had brought his Bloom and Fawcett to bone up on histology. For the first time in his life he was unmotivated and the book stayed shut.
They would walk hours on the empty, iodine-odored beach, talking. Pleasure rippled through him each time he uncovered a similarity. Oddly, there were quite a few. They both strove after perfection and grades, they delighted in physical action, enjoying sports as fierce competitors. They used Pepsodent and favored the sourest green pippins. They were intelligent, full of vitality, and both had suffered childhood allergies. When Alix told of her asthma, they were sitting on the sand in front of the Laguna Hotel, but he held his ear to her breasts to find out if she still had rales. Jealous of and guilty toward Vliet, he avoided mentioning his brother. When he told her about his old girls—there were three—she fired questions, afterward demolishing each of them with the facts. He protested that they were nice girls. She threw a rock at him, the rock was gray and had holes from a species of boring seaworm. He ducked. “Jesus, Alix! That could’ve been a concussion.” “What’s the matter? Haven’t you learned how to treat one?” He saved the stone in his pocket. Thursday it rained, and after lunch they went back to bed. He could hold off no longer. Through taut lips he asked if his brother were the first. “The only,” she sighed. Rain anointed the roof. He put his arms and legs around her.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked.
“No-no,” she said.
And with uncharacteristic hesitancy, began to. As an adolescent, kissing didn’t repel her, she said, it scared her to death. How come she never got those hot little urges to move on to phase two, three, and etcetera? After, uhh, well after, she had been really terrified. She had fantasized a hush-hush trip to learn intercourse in the clinical St. Louis clinic of Masters and Johnson. She had to fake it.
“With you I never fake it—I can’t. It’s always nice, very nice, but …” A long silence before she whispered, “Darling,” in a voice so inaudible that even though they were wrapped around one another he had to strain to hear, “it doesn’t always work, only sometimes.”
Here was a truth very few women would dare confess. And Roger appreciated—overwhelmingly—that Alix trusted him enough to tell him what he already knew. When it worked, this delicate, squirming passion of girl with her high coital cries shook his entire being. He held her, just held her, until the rain stopped, several hours.
She was protective of her mother, her father, her brothers—alive and dead—even Dan, and when he mentioned this loyalty, she jammed him with hip, brittle Beverly Hills chatter. Her own goodness humiliated her.
Roger felt as if he existed in a rising point of discovery, and while he ached to learn more, he didn’t want the point to move in time. He hated her small gold watch, which was their only clock. How can a man with a scientific background hate time?
7
Friday, their last full day, was cold, with a sharp north wind. After breakfast they walked along the beach to a huge outcropping of rocks. The tidepools. Heads close, they knelt to examine tiny sea creatures in the impermanent pools.
Roger said, “I’m transferring to USC.”
Surprised, she blinked. “Oh?” she said. “Well, there’s a goof. For the MCAT you only scored above the ninety-five percentile in all four categories. How do you expect to hack it in one of our really phenomenal West Coast medical schools?”
“Alix, I know it’s not as good as Hopkins,” he said. “But I’ve been thinking a lot. About us.”
“Me, too,” she said. “And I bet there’s even an undergraduate school in Baltimore.”
A gust of wind snapped her hair onto both their faces.
“In Baltimore,” Roger said, “there’s Vliet.”
“Vliet. Let’s see. Isn’t he the one you didn’t go to Harvard Med School because of? And you could’ve gotten in with only three years of premed?” Tenderly she held his face between hands that were orange and purple with cold. “I already messed it up between you. I want to make it right.”
“How’ll your coming to Baltimore do that?”
“Here, you’ll be separated.”
“Someday the umbilicuses have to be unwound.”
“I don’t want to be the responsible party.”
“Alix,” he said, looking at her, putting his hand in icy water. He let the fleshed petals of a sea anemone close around his finger.
“As symbolism goes,” she asked, “isn’t that a mite heavy?”
“I’m the one who brought up the subject,” he said. His tone, perversely, was filled with gloom.
She gave him a sharp look. “Oh, the prognosis isn’t all that rough.” Her tone, too light. “We’ll both make a satisfactory recovery.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Take a peek outside Hopkins. Real life can turn you cynical.”
Her voice remained light. From the set of her mouth, though, he knew she was thinking of her parents’ divorce, of her mother’s separation from Dan. Love is a highly perishable commodity, she was thinking.
“I’m nothing,” he said, “if not steadfast.”
“Steadfast. Let’s see. That means six months.”
“You really can be a bitch.”
“We who play it cool, we are the survivors.” She gave him that dazzling smile.
Roger pushed himself up. On cautious feet they clambered over barnacled rocks. More than barnacles lacerated Roger. She had every right to be bitchy, he decided. He should be insisting he come out here, not let her move to Baltimore. Yet his dilemma involved not only the quality of medical education but also his brother, so he said
nothing. When they came to the edge of rocks, he jumped six feet into sand that stung his ankles. He reached a hand to her. Ignoring his help, she landed easily.
“When,” he asked, “are you going to tell your parents?”
“About the transfer? Tomorrow. I have to move fast to get enrolled someplace this semester.”
“You’ll get reactions.”
“Roger, face it.” Alix used that infuriating tone of banter. “So long as the sex is decently under the blankets, nobody’ll say a word.”
Tell her you’ll come back here where it’ll be even more decently hidden. “Your father—” he started earnestly.
“He pays. He’ll tell himself he’s putting in for a better school. And Mother—well, she gave me The Pill.”
“When?”
“Last summer. To save me from making the same mistake she did. To let me make my own mistakes.”
Roger somberly considered her use of the plural before he asked, “Dan?”
“Screw Dan.”
It never occurred to Roger that any problem might come from his parents: he was a male, and even as far as his mother was concerned, sex was permissible to males. Who she thought they were meant to have it with, Roger never had ascertained.
“And nobody’s going to say anything that we’re—what’s their expression? Shacking up?”
“Dummy. We’re playing it their way. Separate addresses, the same bed.”
“For as long as a week or two,” he said with a painful degree of cruelty.
“Oh, give it a semester,” she said. Suddenly she laughed. “Shacking up! There’s a terrific description. I mean, a lean-to and lots of grunting. No wonder you don’t sound all that eager.” And she punched his arm. Hard.
He feinted, as if to hit back, she dodged, hitting again, he feinted again, and she started to run. He put his arm around her, forcing her into a hard trot. He could hear her jagged breathing at his side, but he didn’t slacken his pace. Climbing steps, they counted in unison, gasping out fifty-three. They fell, panting and sweaty, across the unmade double bed. Their minds exhilarated and clear from running, they began to make love, violently at first, becoming more and more tender.
“Always been such a stud, Roger?”
“There’s a loaded question.”
“Know something? You don’t believe it when people are rotten.”
“What’s that got to do with being a—”
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