Oscy sat back and enjoyed the whole scene, smiling his big smile and nudging Miriam to get her attention. He got it. Miriam turned to see what new and infantile mischief Oscy was up to. He merely pointed to Hermie’s hand, up to its wrist in Aggie’s half sleeve, burrowing like a mole under a lawn.
Miriam got the message immediately, and her fist flew to her mouth so as to stifle the laugh that must surely escape. In that small moment, with her defenses down, Oscy sensed a chink in Miriam’s considerable armor. So, with both hands opened like falcon claws, he swooped his arms about her and came up with each hand filled with a good portion of breast of Miriam. She struggled for a moment, as befit a nice middle-class girl. But then she relaxed with a deep exhalation, and Oscy fully expected to look and find that it was her boobs deflating in a protective move that nature had granted her when under attack from wolves. But her boobs remained the same size, and Oscy took his pleasure with both hands, massaging her well, his ten mercurial fingers playing a melody of love on her breastworks. Miriam emitted a few squeals of protesting delight as Oscy, a true two-fisted performer, left no breast unturned. In the process of being sexually aroused, Oscy inadvertently knocked his knee, the one next to Aggie, against Aggie’s knee, the one next to him.
It caused Aggie to turn to see what was going on over there. Plenty was going on over there. From Aggie’s point of view Miriam’s breasts looked like two indoor baseballs trying to escape. It bothered Aggie to see so much blatant sex going on so close to her own stagnating situation. She looked down at Hermie’s moronic hand, which seemed utterly content to pinch her arm purple. She was at a loss. What to do?
Hermie was in a period of extreme bafflement. His hand had groped all about but…Aggie had no nipple. He knew that nipples came in various shapes and sizes, but how could Aggie’s be so small as to escape detection? He went over the area, again and again, like a boat looking for survivors, but still no nipple. He wondered if Aggie wasn’t deformed. And the thought of that possibility turned him icy stiff.
Aggie could feel the hand in her sleeve freeze up. And she came to a decision. With her free hand she untied the little lace in her blouse so that her panting breasts could be more readily arrived at, even by a nincompoop, which she was beginning to suspect was what she was dealing with. Then she took that same hand, and reaching across her pulsating bosom, she placed it gently upon Hermie’s errant hand. Her objective was to guide Hermie’s crosseyed fingers to their true target—and be done with it.
Hermie jolted at her touch. It brought him out of ecstasy and back to reality. Thinking that Aggie was signaling that that was it for tonight, folks, he quickly pulled his hand out of her sleeve, causing the elastic therein to snap so loudly that Bette Davis’ kiss sounded like a suction pump. No wonder Paul Henreid wouldn’t marry her. Quickly Hermie pulled his hand all the way around Aggie’s back and deposited it, still throbbing with passion, into his lap. He looked sheepishly at Aggie and smiled his apology. “Please excuse me. I was carried away.”
Aggie could only smile dumbly because what else was left to her? What manner of man was this who would lavish so much attention on her arm? Was there something about arms that she had yet to discover? Were arms “erogenous zones”? They had never been so described in the hygienic sex books she had managed to sneak looks at. She turned back to the movie which made little more sense than her life. She would have some searing questions for her older sister.
Hermie, too, turned his attention back to the screen, but he felt pretty damned exalted about things. He’d had a big, long feel of a nice, warm breast. He was on his way. So what if he missed up on the nipple? There were other nipples. There was a whole world of nipples out there, if not Aggie’s, then somebody else’s. He smiled to himself because, even two seats away, he could see Oscy making Miriam jump. Dumb Oscy, so crass. Really crass. The trick was to be subtle and gentle. You don’t treat a girl like a greased pig. You stroke her sweetly, with feeling. Dumb, stupid, crass Oscy. Hermie watched the film draw to a close, and he was very touched by the last few words. “Why ask for the moon? We already have the stars.” That was great stuff. Great moviemaking. Bravo, Warner Brothers. The houselights came up. They pulled themselves together.
Outside the movie house the audience was breaking up into the small dribs and drabs they had arrived as, heading home, or for coffee, or whatever. Oscy, Hermie, Miriam, and Aggie were in their own little group, and Oscy was ready for more action. “What say we go down to the beach and watch the surf roll in?”
Miriam’s boobs were as tired as Miriam was. Only they didn’t yawn as Miriam did; they just hung there, still advertising. “It’s very late. We have to go home.”
“Oh, please,” said Oscy, weirdly dramatic, “tell me that you’re only teasing.”
Miriam nodded no. “Maybe we’ll see you on the beach tomorrow. Will you be on the beach tomorrow?”
“Well, I ain’t gonna be on a mountain.” Nobody knew what that meant. Nor did anybody really care.
“Then we’ll see you. G’night. Thanks for the popcorn.” With that, Miriam hooked her arm through Aggie’s, and the two girls disappeared like everyone else.
Oscy and Hermie started walking home, with Oscy studying Hermie carefully in the dark. He could not fail to see the triumphant smirk on Hermie’s face. But he knew something that Hermie didn’t. The trick was to be very careful with such information. “How’d you make out, Hermie?”
“Pretty good.”
“Yeah? What’d you do?” Oscy was magnificent.
“Held her breast.”
“You didn’t!”
“Yep.”
“Jesus…whew…held her breast. Wow.”
“For almost eleven minutes.” Hermie was a vision of controlled delirium.
“Fantastic.” Oscy was on his way to an Academy Award.
“Yeah. Eleven full minutes.”
“You timed it. Wow.”
“Yeah. Longest I ever got was eight minutes with Lila Harrison. And that was with hands on top. This was with hands underneath.”
“Bare boob.”
“Right.”
“And you broke your record.”
“By three minutes.”
“What’d it feel like?”
That kind of stopped Hermie. “Whaddya mean what’d it feel like? It felt like a boob.”
“Didn’t feel like an arm?”
“An arm?”
“Yeah. You know—an arm.”
“No. It felt like a boob.”
“I’ll bet it felt like an arm.”
“Why the hell should it feel like an arm?”
“Because it was an arm.” Oscy tossed it off casually and kept walking as if he had nothing on his mind.
But Hermie stopped. “What’s the matter with you, Oscy? Jesus!”
Oscy stopped and faced him. He spoke as softly as he could. No sense in getting excited over a little misunderstanding. “You were feeling an arm, Hermie. I was looking. That’s what I was trying to tell you. You were squeezing an arm for eleven minutes.” And he added, “You schmuck.”
“Listen, Oscy—” He was getting sore.
Oscy was going to finish his thought, which he did, from behind the biggest smile he ever had. “Therefore, officially, the eight-minute record with Lila Harrison still stands.”
Hermie was beginning to get a message he didn’t care for. “Oscy, I know you a long time and—”
“I wouldn’t lie about an arm.” He was certainly having a good time.
The truth was beginning to sink in cruelly. Winter was coming with it. The trees turned bare for Hermie. Life was ending, and in a whimper. “An arm. Jesus—no wonder that—I was passing out and…it was an arm.”
“Yes. A very lovely arm.” Lord, was Oscy enjoying himself!
“No wonder she had no nipple.”
“What?”
“I couldn’t find her nipple.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t find her elbow.”
H
ermie grew suddenly furious. “You son of a bitch!”
“What?”
“Why didn’t you just let me go on thinking it was a boob?”
“Shit. I thought you should know the truth. I thought you should know so that you wouldn’t make a mistake like that again.”
“You just wanted to ruin my memory of it, you son of a bitch bastard!”
Oscy wasn’t going to stand for that kind of language. “Fuck you! What do I care if you spend your whole stupid life squeezing arms! I just thought you oughta face reality! Especially if you’re puttin’ a clock on it and goin’ for records!”
Hermie’s attitude softened. The truth, unpleasant, unbearable, had to be faced. In his jeans he felt his penis shrivel up and fall off. It dropped to the ground. If he ever found it again, he’d discover that it had been dragged off by an ant. “God…how can I ever face her again?”
“Make sure she’s wearing long sleeves.” That was Oscy’s idea of hilarity.
The two boys looked at each other for the longest of moments. Then they simultaneously went into their laughing banshee act. And they whacked each other hard in masculine good fellowship, with maybe Hermie whacking Oscy a little harder than he should have and Oscy allowing it because he understood human behavior.
They resumed the long journey home, laughing and whacking and generally screaming into the night such observations as: “It was an arm!” “An eleven-minute arm!” “Lila Harrison, your record is safe!” Their voices trailed in and out of opened windows, and some of the people beyond them didn’t even know who Lila Harrison was.
Hermie lay in bed that night torturing himself with worry, wondering if he’d ever get things right. He told himself that all men went through adolescence and came out the better for it. But he questioned just how long his would last. At the rate he was going, twenty years was a fair guess. Adolescence. It had never really concerned him before, mostly because his face had never been ravaged by pimples like other guys. He figured that that was because his pimples were on his brain. He convinced himself that he didn’t have to feel like a jerk on Aggie’s account because he had no intentions of ever even bumping into her accidentally again. And good riddance to her and her two elusive tits. Then he thought how lucky indeed he had been not to reach her elbow. A nipple with a funny bone in it could set a guy back quite a few years. He fell asleep with his radio on, but the magic mother must have come in and turned it off without waking him. He liked his mother in spite of the cutlet shit. He liked his father, too, and wished he could spend more time with him and get a few sex questions out of the way. He knew not to ask any sex questions of his sister because she was forever in the throes of her own woes and had a few pimples on her face that not even Max Factor could hide. No, when it came to sex, a guy was on his own, Columbus without a road map, Jack Armstrong lost in the Hall of Mirrors, Hermie in thin air, riding the wind on his own inflated scrotum, being careful lest the needle-nosed nutcracker puncture all his dreams, looking out for the full-of-shit sea gull. Here a shit. There a shit. Everywhere a shit-shit. He fell asleep eighty-three times that night. The last time in the arms of the wonderful woman whose face had been sifting in and out of all his thoughts, a lighthouse beam coming around, coming around, coming around…
13
Thursday finally came, but it had taken its own sweet time. Don’t ask Hermie what happened in the time between Now Voyager and Thursday morning. It was a blank, a big zero. Voluntary amnesia. Or was it involuntary? Or did it matter? Who cared? He stood in the bathroom in front of the medicine chest mirror, combing his hair. In moments of stress he would think about Penny Singleton because somehow she was a trusted friend as well as a phantom lover. She was no stranger to his desires, for he had confided in her often. And many wet kisses had he bestowed on her photographic countenance, stealing the shine from more than one autographed eight-by-ten glossy. He kept making new parts in his hair, never quite satisfied that it looked correct and flattering, always wondering why nature hadn’t given him the kind of hair he’d always wanted, kind of Richard Denning with a touch of William Lundigan and a smidgeon of Gilbert Roland. He had lavished so much water on his hair that he figured he might just as well take another shower, which he did because he had succeeded in getting himself all sweated up in anticipation. In the shower and out he sang “As Time Goes By” as only he could.
You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss;
A guy is just a guy.
The fundamental things apply
As time flies by.
Play it again, Sam.
And when two lovers, woo, they still say I love you,
A guy is just a guy.
The world will always welcome lovers,
As time flies by.
Sing it again, Rick.
Moonlight and love songs, jealousy and hate,
Hearts full of passion, lovers need a mate;
His sister was knocking at the door. Fuck her. Big finish.
Woman needs man and man must have a date…
On that you can rely.
The part in his hair was the best he was able to do under the circumstances, because his sister was still knocking on the door and the bathroom was so steamed up that by the time he’d wipe the mirror and put a new part in his hair, the steam would return and he couldn’t see what he’d done. He stuck a finger into his sister’s jar of Mum and rubbed the goo under both his arms. Then he washed his hands of the stuff, which was close to impossible, and he massaged his face with a few drops of his father’s Lilac Vegetal, probably French and a good thing to have around. He opened the window to let the steam out and then wiped the mirror so he could see himself in total splendor. He stepped back and rehearsed a few poetic sayings he’d worked out for the morning. “Good morning, there, and is the coffee perking?” “And where are these heavy objects?” “Ah, no, no, no. I couldn’t take any money.” “Ah, laughter becomes you.” That last line he knew he’d have to work hard to fit into the conversation smoothly. But it was so typically him, so much in keeping with the image he knew she had of him— He tried it again. “Laughter becomes you.” As he said it, he quickly tossed his head sideways in an effort to catch a view of his profile before it knew he was looking. He failed. He’d probably go through life not knowing what he looked like from the side. He left the bathroom before his sister began screaming for help from her mother to get him out. Before leaving, he had to make certain he wouldn’t have to go back for three hours, because that’s how long his sister would be in there. Sometimes that could be hard on his bladder. Once even, he had to take a pee in the kitchen sink, but no one was the wiser.
He dressed but not in his best clothes because that would be too obvious. Still, they were clean clothes, and logically, he selected a brown checked shirt in case he spilled the coffee again. He wore sneakers rather than go barefoot as most of the islanders did. It seemed more mature. Besides, who needed a splinter on the road to love? He wore short pants for mobility and dexterity. They were clean and freshly ironed by his mother, who ironed everything she found lying around the house. Once she ironed his oilcloth raincoat and that was the end of that. But he figured there was a method to her stupidity. He had that raincoat for six years, and it was too small, but his father said there was no budget for a new raincoat. By ironing his raincoat, she did away with it very neatly in a shower of smelly steam. She told his father it was an accident, but he seemed to know better, and he kissed her, and Hermie got a new coat. The great thing about his mother was she was so obvious about the way she went about fooling people that she always got away with it.
He walked down the stairs on tiptoe, carefully avoiding the squeaky stair because he didn’t want to get into a political discussion with his mother over where he was going and had he eaten? And he was beautifully careful with the screen door. He was so quiet he could hear the sky.
“Hermie? Is that you?”
“No!”
“Where are you going?”
“To London to see the queen!”
“Be back by noon. Your Uncle Charlie is coming for lunch.”
“Bully!” He was by then out of earshot and away from the mundane, shedding his mother’s words even before they reached him.
The clear day unfolded before him like pages in a pop-up book. Each house he passed snapped to all freshly painted and pretty. Judy Garland was singing “Over the Rainbow,” accompanied by Elmo Tanner, the blind whistler who saw only the beautiful things of life because that’s the way it was with blind people if one cared to believe that crap. The lilting harmonica lured him the rest of the way to her house, which stood in the distance on a rim of sand, looking like Camelot. He continued to rehearse as he walked. “The coffee is exquisite, exquisite.” “Ah, laughter becomes you.” “Nothing is too heavy when love is in the air.” “Your voice is like a soft cloud of pink cotton.” “Laughter certainly does become you.”
Then he was at the house and stopped being silly. He removed the metal hand mirror from his back pocket. It had a hole in it at the top so you could hang it on a nail. But there was no time for that, nor was there a nail or a tree. He held the mirror to his face to check out his appearance and was immediately confronted by nine thousand of his own fingerprints. He wiped the mirror on his pants and looked again. Looking back was an eight-year-old boy with a cowlick on the back of his head like the business end of a worn-down broom. He jammed the mirror back into his pocket and pretended he never looked. It was important to his life that he look mature and handsome, and the mirror hadn’t helped. He walked the couple of steps to the porch, opened the screen door, and walked farther. He strongly considered running away because that was, by far, much smarter than going ahead and showing up like a dumb kid. The issue was very much in doubt when her voice came gliding out of every crack in the house. It came as a song of love. “Is that you, Hermie?”
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