Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter

by Michael J. White

  “You’ve got a point there. It isn’t right. But it isn’t right that you didn’t read it, either. I told you about Meghan, right? She’s the extra I sat next to the whole time. She said she was planning to show up to Othello, but I haven’t seen her yet.”

  “You really think you got cut out?”

  “It’s very possible.”

  “If you’re not in it, I’m going to storm out of the theater halfway through.”

  “What if I show up in the movie after that?”

  “Touché.”

  “Please never say that word again. It’s very un-George.”

  “All right.”

  “Nice shirt.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s not ironed, I see.”

  “Thanks for noticing,” I said, feeling very well attended to. For most of the rest of the ride we were content just to cruise along appreciating the night’s possibilities. It was my first time to Winterset and its Main Street of brick two-story buildings with narrow alleyways between every fourth or fifth shop. When we arrived one block from the main square a police officer directed us to the side streets. “Hey you, Polk County,” an elderly woman shouted from her lawn, just as I was reaching for the keys to cut the engine. “You get any farther from the curb and I’d think that car was parked on the other side of the street.” That was just the beginning. Almost every older couple we passed on the way to the theater shot us a suspicious stare, or turned and whispered, apparently emboldened by their suddenly valuable small-town sense of right and wrong.

  First thing after stepping into the main square, we passed the Northside Café, the location we’d likely see Emily if she ended up in the movie. Situated on a patch of prim lawn at the center of the square was a modest but graceful courthouse with a Victorian steeple and long gaunt stairways. The Iowa Theatre Winterset stood opposite the café with its old-fashioned triangular marquee and every bulb shining bright. Cameramen were already lined up beneath it, primed to provide a thick buffer between the commoners and the stars. At least half the town was milling around the square, the men mostly in clean work boots and collared shirts tucked into jeans, their wives painted thick with mascara, many of them with big frozen bangs and long menthol cigarettes, reminding me of the Veterans Day events at the American Legion back in Davenport. When the limousines arrived the teens all sprinted for the curb directly in front of the theater, where they were immediately ushered to the sides. Emily and I squeezed in near the entrance as close as we could get to the velvet ropes. Soon enough we were cheering a dark-haired Meryl Streep stepping out onto the red carpet. A frizzy-haired girl next to us explained the whole story behind the actress deciding to rent her house during the shooting. Meryl Streep waved at the girl and even paused at the ropes to tell her what a treat it had been living in a farmhouse. “Good luck, Miss Streep,” Emily said, just as she was turning away. Among the various other shouts and salutations, Emily’s words came off with a hint of Old World respect, like she’d found the simplest, classiest way of saying, You’re my hero. For a brief moment, while everyone else was staring goggle-eyed at Meryl Streep, she was gazing at Emily, tilting her head, her pale cheeks rising as she smiled. A hundred lightning bolts flashed. I hardly noticed Clint Eastwood and the other actors passing by as Emily gushed and her warm hand found mine. We shuffled in behind the stars. Emily was still squeezing my hand as we wound our way up the steep stairway to the balcony.

  The movie started without any special introduction, the only highlight being Clint Eastwood’s little salute to the upper balcony on his way to his reserved row. The anticipation of the extras was overwhelming and seemed to harbor its own unique scent, something akin to the combination of overripe apples and dry ice. When the opening credits ended and the chatter died down you could feel their nervousness—men, women, and children impatiently searching for themselves on screen, eager for their big moment. In distinct patches the audience cheered minor glimpses of their historic houses and classic cars, signature storefronts, familiar pedestrians crossing the frame. Emily stiffened at first sight of her cinematic self swirling a glass of orange juice at the breakfast booth. As the philandering Lucy Redfield entered the café, Emily’s character folded her arms and whispered something nasty to her on-screen sister. It was a small movement but specific and revelatory, her character instantly revealed as a snotty older sister who knew just exactly how to make life more difficult than it really was. Emily appeared a second time as Robert Kincaid (Clint Eastwood) was walking out, this time on the receiving end of a whisper, even if she was too busy eyeing the stranger to fully register the message.

  I held my tongue, deciding it a greater compliment to regard the scene as a natural flowing element of a narrative that had my full attention. Emily remained tense for the entire movie, gripping the armrests like we were about to take a roller-coaster plunge. It seemed that half the audience had already cried and dried their eyes at least once, only to lose it again when Francesca and her husband pulled up behind Robert Kincaid on his way out of town. As the credits rolled we all stood and clapped for a good fifteen minutes. We waved at the exiting stars as though it was their final public appearance, marking pinnacle performances that they wouldn’t dare attempt to outshine. For some the action of cheering was so emotional as to appear desperate, as though they believed that the moment they stopped clapping the crew would immediately board their plane, the spell would be broken, and they’d all be left to grind forward with lives that now seemed trivial and undaring and obscure. It was Emily’s idea to take a walk around town, to stay in Winterset a little longer, which made me think that the locals weren’t the only ones who would’ve preferred that the story had never ended.

  We didn’t talk much as we strolled along under streetlights in the shadows of trees whose roots, in places, had burst open the sidewalk. There were a lot of reasons to love Emily Schell, and while I was ashamed of my cowardly desire to see her detained in Des Moines, I couldn’t understand why she didn’t apply to at least one college I could afford, what she was waiting for, why I was a virgin, and what she expected me to do about it all. We passed Roland’s Barber Shop and Shelly’s Express Subs. We passed houses with front lawns lit by the trance blue light of TV screens through living room windows. Aside from the advertisements for the famous bridges or the John Wayne Museum, I discovered Winterset a town no different from all the small places I’d traveled for weekend wrestling tournaments.

  Eventually the street we were following dead-ended. We continued through a grassy meadow and along the edge of a cornfield. I missed the eeriness of the country that I’d known so well on my grandfather’s farm. Emily kept pacing ahead with her hands folded behind her back, avoiding my eyes, occasionally looking up or off into the distance. Corn tassels swayed in the breeze like a community of willowy worshippers bowing to the white moon. It wasn’t until we’d fully separated ourselves from the neighborhood and its streetlights that Emily finally spoke up.

  “I sort of hate Robert James Waller,” she said. “How could he put Francesca in such an impossible situation? Why couldn’t her husband at least have been a bit of a jerk, or having an affair of his own? It just kills me. Even the way it was raining in that last scene, so Robert and Francesca could hardly see each other through the window. I don’t think I could do that to a character. It’s too cruel.”

  I thought about it, wondering if the author ever viewed the situation in such terms, acknowledging himself as the cause of the tragedy. “So it would’ve been better if Robert never showed up?”

  “Oh, God. It hurts too much to think about it. I wish someone would’ve just pulled the fire alarm ten minutes before the movie ended.”

  Emily stepped closer to the nearest row of stalks, brushing her hand over them as we passed. There was something heartbreaking about the gesture. Our walk wasn’t the amorous saunter I’d imagined, but revealed itself as the bittersweet culmination of a hundred indefinably tender moments that might have ended in starry-eye
d embraces and never did. Watching her tromp stubbornly over the clumped earth, a flexing siren in sandals, lifting her skirt as she bobbed along left and right—I braced myself for the decision to once and for all desist.

  “It’s even worse that her kids were so rotten,” she said. “Those actors didn’t even sound Iowan.”

  “Iowegian.”

  “Is that how you say Iowan in Davenport?”

  “According to Katie, Iowegian is more correct than Iowan. She said some newspaperman from Missouri bought the Daily Iowegian and changed it to the Daily Iowan without consulting anyone.”

  “I wouldn’t believe everything Katie says about people from Missouri. A couple of years ago she went there for a camp for sick kids and ended up coming home after three days. She kept complaining that the counselors were all speaking in double negatives. And just so you know, she doesn’t bother asking me anymore why we’re only friends. I’m pretty sure she’s decided to keep you for herself.”

  Emily laughed (“Take five!”), but so nervy and unnaturally that I could have mistaken it for the laughter of one of the teen characters in the movie. Then she spun around as though suddenly sensing that we were being followed. Of course there was no one there, but she saw the action all the way through, holding a hand out to keep me quiet as she listened for the source of her alarm.

  “Sorry,” she finally said. “Thought it might’ve been ol’ Bubba from Dark Night of the Scarecrow.” She hopped over a muddy patch and continued along. I looked back a few times toward the road, like I might’ve heard something, too.

  “What would you say when Katie used to ask you about that?”

  “Ask about what?” she said, placing a hand on her forehead, feigning embarrassment at forgetting what we’d been talking about. She was acting now, further convincing me that our night would only end in a nerve-racked rejection. I walked faster, raising my knees higher, marching along as I begged myself just to get it out of the way.

  “When she used to ask you why we’re only friends, what did you say?”

  Emily sped up for a few paces, then thought better of it and suddenly stopped. She searched the stars like a chess player trying to read a chessboard with many more pieces than she knew how to play. She finally sighed and faced me.

  “Just promise not to marry my sister, okay? At least not until she’s eighteen.”

  “You want me to marry your sister?”

  “I was joking,” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I don’t want to marry your sister.”

  “Relax.”

  “If you ever wanted to kiss me, but you didn’t because you were afraid of what Katie would think . . . well, I don’t know what I would think. Tell me this, if that was me driving out of town, and if you didn’t do something fast, you’d never see me again, what would you do? Just tell me, so I won’t have to spend the rest of my life wondering.”

  While Emily’s hands were already hanging at her sides, at that moment they seemed to fall even further. Next she raised them to her hips and glared at me through the same stern secretary eyes that she’d employed in the St. Pius hallway the second time I met her. But this time she was genuinely speechless, and in the window of her perplexity I nearly jumped the gap between us and kissed her. Then a strange thing happened, which was that I was marching over to her and she wasn’t backing away even as I combed my hands into her hair and pressed her mouth against mine to thieve a five-second kiss. When I stepped back Emily was already wide-eyed on her tiptoes, covering her cheeks and then her lips where my lips had finally tasted them.

  “I love you,” I said, perfectly timed to a tornado siren whaling off in the distance. “If you want to go, we can go, but you were the most beautiful girl in the movie, and I’m not saying that because you’re my favorite actor and I love you. Now please stop covering your cheeks. I know you’re blushing, so there’s no point trying to hide it.”

  Emily stopped covering her cheeks, which is when I detected them pooling in hot crimson that spread to her forehead and neck, and even heated her eyes so that they were soon protecting themselves with a thin layer of watery reflection. With every word I knew I was pushing her closer to losing the control she was attempting to establish with her jaw locked, her brow flexed, her shoulders pulled back against the desperate urge to cower.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you say that?”

  “I love you.”

  “Shit,” she shouted, throwing her hands into the sky. She turned a circle and slapped her side, then stepped forward to hit me open-handed in the chest. “That’s my line,” she said, placing her hands on my shoulders and raising on her tiptoes again to be kissed.

  Sixteen

  Like a prison guard on the scent of a detainee who’s had enough, who can’t take another prison meal or group shower, or lay awake for another long deafening night of profane shouts and makeshift drumsticks banging against metal beds, Maureen Schell knew that her elder daughter was about to fly the proverbial coop. I was convinced that bad luck had nothing to do with her announcement the morning following the premiere that Emily would be taking the SAT exam a third time in an effort to sway the Yale admissions board. For two weeks following our first kiss Emily had to attend a Princeton Review cram course that met every weeknight from eight to eleven. Given her extracurricular activities, there was suddenly and literally no time for fooling around. Then, as a reward for Emily’s efforts, the following weekend Mrs. Schell took Emily and Katie on a shopping trip to Chicago. Completely fed up, I called late one night, probably waking the whole house.

  “This new schedule isn’t working. What is this? Some new kind of Catholic torture?”

  “Trust me, I don’t like it, either, but keep it together, George. Meet me tomorrow morning at the park and we’ll hook up before school.”

  “What about now? What I am supposed to do right now?”

  “Write me a poem. Or a song.”

  “Write you a what? Or a what?”

  “A poem or a song.”

  “WhaddayouthinkI’msomekindasicko? I want to kiss your lips. I’m not a singer and I’m sure as hell not interested in pervy poetry. I respect you a lot more than that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And maybe I want to brush my hands against your breasts, with the outside of my hands. That way I won’t really be able to feel anything, but you will. Let’s not rush things. But I want to say that pretty soon these things won’t be pervy at all, and you’ll want me to use the front of my hands.”

  “I agree,” she said, completely serious. “These things are not pervy, but it’s a good idea to start with only the backs of our hands and the bottoms of our feet.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Good.”

  “Great.”

  “See you in the morning,” she said, which turned out a bright quiet morning rocking gently on a swing set getting to know the lips I’d longed for from every angle. Emily didn’t kiss at all like a prude. Her mouth fell open soft and supple as her neck heated up. She was graceful in her tender desire but urgent to be held, recognized, understood in every way. Her proud girlish body was a kettle quaking at a near boil. We raised up and tasted each other’s tongues, biting the tips, slowly searching along the ridges of teeth, really tasting and feeling until our mouths were synchronized in pliability, wetness, temperature, and coiling movement, our pressing bodies bursting beneath corduroys and thick schoolgirl bras, the blossoming fire below her belt, my own sex seeking out that heat, reaching desperately to be smothered by it. We drove to school together, then entered the building from opposite wings, enjoying the secret that we knew would only last for so long.

  It came as no surprise that our stealthy new demeanor only drew more attention from Smitty and the rest of our friends, who kept bugging us for details about our big night in Winterset. Emily told them we got towed after double-parking and blocking i
n Clint Eastwood, who gave us the finger. I returned all Smitty’s questions by whistling old Irish tunes taught to me by my sly grandpa George. I refused to say anything to jinx my sensuous new life that swelled as big as the Mississippi River, spilling muddy brown east and west to both seas. Emily and I made excuses to leave an hour earlier for school, then met up at the rear parking lots of strip malls, on covered dugout benches, and in any number of woodsy settings along the greenbelt bike trail between Urbandale and Clive. Each time we advanced our romantic cause and hardly marked the same territory twice. Several times that week she pulled me into the courtyard with its tall wrought-iron fence, rusty and grand, still preaching the days of clerics and caged puberty that we now felt destined to destroy. Her hair fell in front of her face like a nymphet veil and I brushed it back while we kissed, not caring at all about the grumpy hags judging us from the attendance office window. As we had been warned all along that it would, the last few weeks of high school blurred by trancelike, well flavored by expectations of newborn independence. With every touch and word passed between the inch of space from my lips to hers, Emily and I celebrated our own graduation into adulthood by way of a secret romance lorded over by larger events that had yet to articulate their imminence. I was never so restless or so sated by such little sleep. In the hours of her absence the Emily Schell of my imagination became braver, more charming, as wise as a black diva princess on dusty vinyl belting out the whole beautiful, decrepit truth.

  Seventeen

  The last weeks of school were marked by several dramatic episodes worth mentioning as a means of painting a more holistic portrait of our budding affair and the many emotions in its near periphery. Around this time Des Moines was introduced to its first group of resettled Sudanese who’d spent most of their lives in refugee camps in Kenya. There was talk of a major banking merger that would result in twenty thousand Wells Fargo workers’ losing their jobs, though in the end the deal didn’t go through. Mr. Schell was busy making arrangements on a second Schell’s Shirtworks store in Iowa City. Emily committed to attending Northwestern in Chicago. Katie’s symptoms were beginning to act up again, but she hadn’t spent a night in the hospital in months and was now memorizing “Song of Myself” just for kicks. As far as school was concerned, in our final few days of secondary education my fellow classmates succumbed to hysterical farewells, overdue apologies, breakups, reunions, and raw attempts at last-minute hookups. Sam Traxler and Jacob Evans, who’d been rivals their whole lives, decided to finally duke it out in the cafeteria. It was an epic brawl featuring smashed tables, ancillary injuries, and nose blood splattered on potatoes and pork cutlets. (The lunch ladies who were being replaced by a cheaper food service company did nothing to stop it.) On the last day of high school, according to tradition, all the seniors skipped.