by John Manning
Billy liked that. Call him old-fashioned maybe. But he’d always felt pressure to measure up with Heidi. To be the cock of the walk. Sometimes she’d insist on making out—and to be honest, Billy really would have preferred to be watching the Yankees on television. Not that he didn’t like sex—not that he didn’t often initiate it himself—always making sure to reassure Heidi that he loved her—but sometimes he didn’t want her around, would have preferred she and her big breasts stayed out of his sight for a while. Heidi, of course, could always tell when he wasn’t really into it, and she’d flee from the room in tears, wailing that he didn’t love her anymore. Billy would be forced to follow her and profess his undying love.
It was such a relief not to have to go through all that charade anymore.
Heidi hadn’t taken the breakup well. “You’ve been lying all along, Billy Honeycutt!” she charged. “You’ve been stringing me along and lying about loving me and using me only for sex!”
Billy just sighed. None of that kind of drama with Sue, thank God.
He looked at his watch again. 5:01. Where was she?
He hoped she hadn’t gotten another one of those headaches. When she’d described it to him, Billy had been really worried. “That’s just not normal, Sue,” he told her. She agreed, but the campus doctor, when she went in to see him, had given her a clean bill of health. So maybe the headache had just been a fluke.
Sue was smart. She was fun. She made Billy feel like a grown-up. He didn’t have to preen or pose. He didn’t need to put on a show for her. She seemed to like him just for who he was. They talked about movies, and politics, and where they hoped to travel someday. Sue never made Billy feel stupid when he mixed up cities, states, and countries. (He thought Oregon was a city and San Diego was in Mexico, and he got all mixed up when it came to European countries.) Heidi would have laughed at him and called him a dolt. But Sue just explained the difference, and told him one day she’d really enjoy showing him Paris. Especially something she called the Shomp Deelasay. Billy smiled thinking about it, about walking hand-in-hand with Sue down the streets of Paris.
“Well, hello, Billy.”
He jumped. Behind him, arms akimbo, was Heidi.
“Oh, hey,” he said, danger signs flashing in his mind.
“Waiting for your new girl? Or is she standing you up?”
He frowned. “She is not standing me up.”
“I came by half an hour ago and saw you sitting here. And you’re still here now.”
“So? A guy can’t sit on a bench on a nice day?”
Heidi made a face. “Not a guy like you. Why aren’t you at football practice?”
“It’s a day off. Besides, it’s none of your business.”
Suddenly, Heidi broke out into tears. “Oh, Billy,” she cried, throwing her arms around him. “This is such a mistake! We should be together!”
Her bouncy breasts, barely covered by a seersucker top, pressed up into Billy’s face. Heidi clung to him, her long blond hair tickling his ear.
“Let go, Heidi,” Billy told her.
He pushed her arms away from him, but she moved in closer, trying to kiss him on the lips. Her perfume filled up his nostrils.
“Jesus, Heidi,” Billy said, managing to finally push her away. And just as he did so, he saw Sue sitting in her car across the street, watching the whole scene.
“Fuck,” he said, standing up.
Heidi saw Sue as well. “Is that her? Is that Miss Fucking Wilbourne?”
Billy watched as the two girls made eye contact. Sue seemed to be glaring at Heidi as she sat behind the wheel of her white Lexus. She seemed to be in no hurry to get out. She didn’t seem the least bit upset, or eager to interrupt this little scene. She seemed intensely interested. Of course Sue was far too cool, far too sophisticated, far too Manhattan to react, to act like a spoiled, provincial little girl. She just kept glaring at Heidi until Heidi stamped her foot, shouted “Fuck you both!” and hurried off down the street.
Only then did Sue get out of the car.
32
Sue felt a strange emotion watching Billy with that girl.
Jealousy.
She’d never felt jealous over a boy before. Sure, she’d felt jealous of friends who got to vacation in some exotic place her grandparents refused to take her, and sometimes she’d be jealous of a girl’s new shoes or really fabulous bag. But those were momentary feelings—they’d passed in a few minutes. This was raw. This was intense. Sue felt like scratching the girl’s eyes out.
Stop acting like a stereotypical female, she scolded herself as she got out of the car. The girl was rushing away down the street. Billy clearly wasn’t interested in her.
Or maybe he was.
Maybe he was, until he saw me.
Sue struggled to keep her emotions in check as she crossed the street.
Who the hell was that girl anyway?
“Hey, pretty lady,” Billy called.
Sue smiled and let him kiss her on the cheek. “What was all that about?”
Billy scowled. “Ex-girlfriend.”
Sue looked down the street to where Heidi was now just a small, pitiful figure in the distance. She was trying to get Billy back, Sue thought. She was trying to take him away from me!
And despite herself, she felt a surge of jealous anger. Once again, she couldn’t take her eyes off the girl.
“Sue,” Billy said, touching her shoulder. “Don’t worry. She means nothing to me now.”
Sue turned back to look him in the eye. “Just how many broken hearts have you left in your wake, Billy Honeycutt?”
“Not that many.” He winked at her. “I know, hard to believe, given how good-looking I am.”
He laughed, but she didn’t return his levity. There was a voice whispering inside her head, They slept together.
She swallowed and closed her eyes. Images began flashing through her mind, horrible snapshots she didn’t want to see.
A warm summer night, with the moonlight shining into the backseat of Billy’s mother’s Toyota. Billy and that girl—Heidi, that’s her name—are making out. They are parked on a dirt road, and the scent of apples is in the air. On either side of the road, branches hang heavy with the unripened fruit. Both Billy and Heidi are shirtless. His head is down, nuzzling at one of the girl’s large breasts. Her head is tilted back, her eyes are closed, and soft moans are coming from low in her throat. With his hands, Billy is working the clasp of her shorts. Just as the shorts come open, she reaches down and pushes his hands away from her.
“What’s the matter?” Billy asks.
“I—I’m not ready for that yet.”
“Aw, come on, Heidi.” He grabs one of her hands and places it on the swollen crotch of his jean shorts. “You feel that?”
She pulls her hand away and sits up. “Billy—”
“I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“The big deal is you don’t love me.”
“Of course I love you, Heidi.” He’s lying to her, he doesn’t love her, but his need is so powerful, his desire for release is so urgent, that he will say anything, do anything, to get inside of her and relieve his need.
She turns to him. She’s a virgin. Not because of a deep commitment to saving herself, to keeping her purity, but because she’s never felt in love enough to give herself so completely to any boy she’s ever dated. But Billy—Billy is different.
“Do you really love me, Billy?” she asks.
He takes both of her hands in his and looks deep into her eyes. “Of course I love you, Heidi. I never say anything I don’t mean.” And then he kisses her.
And she stops resisting him.
“Sue? Are you okay?”
She shook her head and came back into herself. She gave Billy a weak smile. “Sorry.” She glanced back over at Heidi, who she could barely make out now down the street. Poor girl, she thought. I shouldn’t have been thinking such bad thoughts about her.
“You okay?” Billy asked.
He slipped his right hand over hers. “About me, I hope.”
He’s never tried to get me to sleep with him, Sue thought.
Why? Is there something wrong with me?
They walked hand in hand for a while without speaking. They passed the drugstore and the A&P, and rounded the corner in front of the post office.
“I was afraid you weren’t going to show up,” Billy said finally.
“Oh. Right.” Sue was struggling to get her thoughts under control, to yank them away from images of Billy and Heidi. “I’m sorry I was so late.” She brightened. “But I finally heard from Joyce Davenport.”
Billy stopped walking. “Well, awesome. Did she tell you anything about your mother?”
Sue shook her head. “It was just a short e-mail, responding to mine from weeks ago. She said she was sorry it took her so long to get back to me, that she’s been on tour, but said she would call and we’d set up a time to talk.”
“Cool.”
Sue sighed. “Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, I was late because I wanted to write her back right away, and I told her I’d been reading her book…” Sue laughed. “And you know what? She must have been online, because this time, she e-mailed me right back! And she was thrilled, of course, that I was reading Smear.”
“Obviously, you didn’t tell her what you thought of it,” Billy said, laughing.
Sue had filled Billy in on what she perceived to be Joyce’s prejudices. But she hadn’t told him that she had been starting to revise her opinion, at least a little.
“You know,” Sue admitted, “I can’t figure her out. On the one hand, I think she’s horrible. And the other…” Her words trailed off.
“What?” Billy asked.
“On the other,” Sue said, “some of what she wrote makes a lot of sense to me. And I told her that, too, in my next e-mail to her. And she e-mailed right back again, saying she couldn’t wait to talk to me!”
“Looks like she’s found another follower,” Billy said.
Sue smiled. Billy was sweet and he was cute, but he just wasn’t very bright. He couldn’t explain the difference between conservative and liberal to save his life. Completely apolitical. “Well,” she said, “I’m not sure I’m a follower. But I just feel maybe…maybe she speaks for some people, and maybe I should listen to what she has to say.”
“Sounds reasonable to me.”
“That’s just it. I can see where Joyce and people like her can be unreasonable. But people on the left can be just as narrow-minded.” Sue stopped walking again to make her point. “Take my roommate, for example.”
“Malika? But I thought you liked her…”
“I do, but…” Sue’s words trailed off again. “Well, you finally met her the other night. What did you think, Billy?”
“She seemed nice.”
“No, come on, really.”
Billy laughed uncomfortably. “Okay, maybe she was a little…I don’t know…my Mom calls it ‘crunchy.’”
Sue looked at him intently. “Crunchy?”
“Yeah, you know, like crunchy granola. The type who eats granola and thinks killing animals for food is murder.” Billy smirked. “She was wearing those Birkenstock sandals, and she had a that pin on her jacket that read STOP GLOBAL WARMING NOW.”
Sue was nodding. “Yeah. That’s Malika.”
Malika was so damn serious. Their conversations always seemed to veer into world politics. Malika had very little interest in any viewpoint other than her own. Her own way of thinking was the only correct one. Isn’t that what she said about Joyce Davenport?
“Americans are so insular,” Malika would explain whenever Sue disagreed with her. “You never look at the big picture, because no matter what may happen in the rest of the world, to Americans, it is only of interest if it directly affects your country.”
Sue had grown impatient with such talk. Joyce Davenport had several paragraphs lambasting those foreign students who came to this country, took advantage of our great educational system, and then bashed America in turn. In fact, Malika’s beliefs could be boiled down to one common denominator: America is bad—America is very, very bad. And if Sue challenged her, or asked her a question she couldn’t answer, she became very superior. “That is just wrong,” she’d reply.
Malika was, as Sue’s grandfather said, the epitome of the “limousine liberal.” Her parents were wealthy, and when they came to this country, they acted like those uppity blacks—
Sue stopped in mid-thought.
Uppity blacks? How racist can I be?
She was stunned that such a thought could cross her mind. It was exactly the kind of thing that her grandfather would say—and the kind of thing Joyce Davenport would imply. Joyce was far too smart to put it in so many words, but it was there, between the lines of much of what she wrote.
Just because I might find some value in Joyce’s work, Sue thought, I don’t want to become like her.
Or—Sue shuddered—like Granpa.
She’d Googled Joyce’s name the night before, and found dozens of Web sites about her. Some were worshipful—but a far greater number attacked her and what they called her “lies.” One site was actually called “JoyceLies.” There were cartoons with Joyce’s face superimposed on an animated jackass or onto the body of a leather-clad SS guard. All of her extreme views came under attack. She opposed any rights for gay people. She thought most women had proven they didn’t deserve the right to vote. And she said that if other races felt discriminated against here in the United States, they were always welcome to migrate back to their ancestral homelands.
That would certainly show them, Sue found herself thinking again. Really. Like some black person would be better off in Rwanda than here.
“It’s just so difficult,” Sue said.
They had been walking in silence again. Billy looked down at her. “What’s difficult?”
“Figuring out how I feel,” Sue said. “About Joyce, about her writings, about…myself…”
Part of me believes one thing, Sue thought, and another part of me—a more emotional part—thinks maybe Joyce and Granpa are on to something. It’s almost as if my brain is torn in half…
And then she remembered her headache—when it had felt exactly and literally like that, her brain being ripped in half.
“You know what I think it is?” Billy asked. “I think because Joyce was your mother’s friend, you want to really like her. That’s what it is. You want to like her and find good things about her.”
Sue nodded. Billy was right. Maybe he wasn’t so dimwitted after all. She smiled up at him, cupped his cheek in her hand.
“I’m glad we met, Billy,” she said.
He beamed. “Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”
An image once again of him and Heidi flashed through Sue’s mind. She pushed it away. But not before she felt the stab of jealousy again.
“You want to go over to the Yellow Bird for a Coke?” Billy asked, bringing her hand up to his lips and kissing it. “I told Mike we might stop by.”
Mike. Billy’s best friend, Mike deSalis. Sue’s twinge of jealousy faded into one of sadness. She’d only met Mike twice, and briefly. “I don’t think Mike likes me,” Sue said. “I can just tell.”
“Sure he does.” Billy made a face. “You two just don’t know each other very well yet. That’s all.”
He’s lying, Sue thought to herself. Mike doesn’t like me and he’s told Billy so.
“Mike doesn’t like me, Billy.” Sue was adamant about it.
“He’s just going through some family stuff. His sister is sick.”
“Bernadette?”
Billy looked surprised. “Yeah. How’d you know her name?”
“He must have mentioned it…”
Billy shook his head. “No. He won’t even say her name anymore.”
“Well, then, I don’t know how I could possibly know his sister’s name,” Sue said. “I mean, I barely know Mi
ke.”
“Well, come on, let’s go. He’ll be in a better mood if I buy him a chili burger and fries. Once you guys get to know each other, you’ll be best of friends.”
Billy was tugging at her hand to get a move on, but Sue stood her ground.
“Did he like Heidi?”
Billy sighed. “Sue, please…”
“He did, didn’t he?” Sue asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Once again, jealousy rose up from Sue’s belly like bile.
“Please, Sue, let’s go,” Billy pleaded. Finally, she relented, traipsing alongside him down the street toward the Yellow Bird.
It didn’t occur to either of them that Billy had never told Sue his ex-girlfriend’s name.
33
Heidi Swettenham burst through the doors of Martine’s Boutique looking as white as a sheet.
“Heidi!” Martine gasped, standing over Rachel Muir, whose head was tipped back into the sink, peroxide cooking away on her gray roots.
“Can I sit down for a minute?” Heidi asked, gripping the back of a chair.
“Yeah, sure, honey. You sick?”
Heidi sat down hard. “I felt like…like I was getting these sharp pains…”
Martine walked around Rachel Muir’s outstretched legs. “Here, honey, drink some water.” She filled a small conical cup from the cooler and handed it to the girl. “You look pale.”
The hairdresser saw that she’d been crying, too. The girl’s eyes were red.
“You been having boy problems, I think,” Martine said, taking back the empty cup and tossing it into the trash can. “Aren’t you dating Billy Honeycutt?”
“I…was…”
“Well, you just sit there, honey, and if you don’t feel better, I’ll call your mama. She’s due in for a cut and curl anyway.”
