by Chuck Kinder
Lindsay’s father had walked her onto the train that early morning she had first departed for Vassar, put up her carry-on luggage, and at the last moment had hugged her goodbye, the first time Lindsay could remember him hugging her since childhood. Lindsay’s father had then told her out of the blue that if she slept with a boy he would know it. That night, somewhere in the darkness, hours east of her father, Lindsay had worked up enough nerve to go out and smoke on the open platform between cars like an adult, the first time she had smoked like that, a real grownup puffing in public. The vague sweep of the Western landscape felt so distant and dark, and Lindsay imagined herself a mysterious, daring woman in a veiled hat smuggling her life east. Lindsay’s cigarette smoke trailed that train moving away from her father, like a ghost too thin to haunt.
Lindsay’s acned face had rubbed raw against the train seat as she stared at endless, oily horizons, or tried to sleep, and by the time her train pulled into Poughkeepsie days later, her face was a bloody mess. Lindsay’s roommate in Davidson Hall was tall, thin, blond, and as beautiful as the pale girls whose pictures Lindsay stared at in Vogue magazine. Lindsay’s beautiful roommate wore a pastel-print McMillan blouse, a wraparound skirt, loafers, and a clunky bracelet of gold charms depicting crowning achievements in her life. As she felt her beautiful roommate giving her the once-over, Lindsay had tried to smooth her straight, bright-red, corduroy skirt over her bulging hips.
As the months passed, Lindsay would sit for hours at her darkened window overlooking Davidson Hall’s front door and watch the endless moonlight French kissing of girls and the boys who loved them with all their hearts.
Rolf was Lindsay’s first true love. A dark, handsome, German boy, he was a Yale student Lindsay had hired her freshman year to tutor her in German. Soon she dreamed of doing anything Rolf asked of her. She dreamed of his hands on her breasts, her nipples rolled gently between a thumb and forefinger while being licked like her one and only high-school boyfriend used to do, that pimply, big-hipped boy who was the marching band’s drum major and always stuttered when aroused. One spring Saturday afternoon when Rolf came to campus to tutor Lindsay, he caught sight of Lindsay’s beautiful roommate and fell head over heels in love with that blond vision. The beautiful roommate took a fancy to Rolf; such a dark, intense, handsome boy, he amused her. One weekend the roommate announced to Lindsay she planned on shacking up with Rolf in an apartment he had borrowed near the Yale campus. She was curious to see if he was as full of fire as he appeared. The beautiful roommate modeled her new blue nylon nightgown for Lindsay. The beautiful roommate danced a slow bump and grind about the room while Lindsay stared through that soft, flowing film at erect nipples red as blood. A few weeks later the beautiful roommate swore Lindsay to secrecy, then announced that their old friend Rolfie boy was full of fire all right, for she was knocked up.
What was Rolf to do? A scholarship exchange student, he had little money, but Rolf did the honorable thing, just as Lindsay had expected him to do. He begged the beautiful roommate to marry him. They could quit school, find jobs of some sort, manage somehow to make a future for themselves and for their son. When the beautiful roommate told Rolf she might abort, he begged her to bear his baby for the sake of the future, if nothing else. The beautiful roommate quit taking Rolf’s calls. She began leaving campus early on Fridays for weekends in New York with other boys. Rolf began coming to campus during the week, lurking about, following the beautiful roommate around between classes, begging, begging her. She threatened to tell authorities. Lindsay would sit in her darkened window and watch Rolf pace below, smoking. He was growing so thin. Even Lindsay was losing weight with worry. Why wasn’t she the one knocked up? It should have been her knocked up. She would carry Rolf’s child, his son, his baby boy, under her heart gladly. Even if Rolf didn’t love her at first. Rolf would learn to love her.
Perhaps Lindsay could talk the beautiful roommate out of the abortion! Perhaps if she offered to take the baby herself! Even if Rolf would not want the baby that way, without the beautiful roommate in the bargain, Lindsay didn’t care. She would adopt the little baby as her very own, give it some beautiful name. Lindsay hated Vassar. She would leave Vassar in a heartbeat, get a job, disappear somewhere nobody would dream to look, Hoboken, say, and hide out there until her boy was a fully grown man.
Lindsay sat at her darkened window and imagined a brand-new love story. It was full of rescue and escape, and it had a happy ending. She would somehow rescue her baby boy and escape with him into a lifetime full of love, beyond worry, free from regret and guilt. Lindsay imagined the features of her son’s handsome face, its shape, his lean, perfect, maturing body, his tender feelings and thoughts for her, his love for her, the words he would come to speak to her full of gratitude. One night, as Lindsay gazed out her window, a beautiful, dreaming baby appeared before her. It floated in midair, luminous among the dark leaves of the trees. Lindsay realized that dreaming baby’s life was her mission on earth.
2
The night the beautiful roommate told Rolf the whole thing had been a dumb hoax, that she had never really been knocked up at all, that it was simply a dumb, bad joke (even she had to admit that!) which had gone too far, Rolf beat his fists bloody against Davidson Hall’s front door and ran off into the dark. Lindsay went searching for him. Hours later she found him in a Poughkeepsie bar drunk. While Rolf wept quietly, Lindsay downed three Brandy Alexanders and two Pink Squirrels to catch up. Lindsay got drunk as quickly as she could, and she mourned along with Rolf for the loss of their son. A hoax, Rolf cried, and looked up at Lindsay through his tears. A detestable lie! Why would she tell a story like that? Somebody that beautiful.
That night would be like no other for Lindsay, full of events so new she would alternately attempt to reimagine or forget them all the rest of her life. In a drunken delirium Lindsay and her beautiful German boy circled back to a campus transformed in moonlight, whose old stone, ivy-covered buildings loomed lovely to Lindsay for the very first time. They found themselves lost on some dark path in the heart of Shakespeare Gardens, a park on campus containing every plant mentioned anywhere in Shakespeare’s poems or plays. Rolf stumbled off the path. He pulled Lindsay down beside him, into a secret chamber beneath an oak.
That night the air of Shakespeare Gardens was like spice, thick with things nearly forgotten, faint melodies, lights in the leaves, a flickering lantern of moonlight over Rolf’s dark, handsome face. If Rolf fell asleep, Lindsay would cross his lids with love’s oil, and he would wake charmed with her in his mind. She would pluck the wings of butterflies, and she would fan moonbeams into his dark eyes. Hiding in this palace wood, she would carry his changeling under her heart. She would. She would. She would run away with Rolf. Anywhere. Hoboken. Germany. Marry him in a heartbeat, take his name as her own. Would she be worthy?
Rolf unbuttoned Lindsay’s blouse, lifted her bra. Rolf took Lindsay’s left breast in his hand, kneaded it a bit, rolled her nipple between his thumb and fingers just the way she had hoped he would, but then he suddenly just squeezed her nipple as though it were a zit. Ouch, Lindsay said, jerking back and banging her head against the oak. I beg your pardon, Rolf said. He unzipped his pants and pulled out his penis, which, even through the gloom, Lindsay could see was limp as a worm.
Look what she did to me, Rolf said, wagging his limp member for emphasis. —This tragedy is all her work. Touch it, Rolf said, and wagged it again. —Please touch it. Help me. Please help me.
Sure, Rolf, Lindsay said, and took Rolf’s limp penis in her hand. It sure didn’t feel like any of the other three members she had held before.
That awful blond bitch, Rolf said. —I am a ruin now. Now I can father no children for the future. There is no future for me now.
Sure you can, Rolf, Lindsay said. —You’ll see.
Nothing can ever make it work again, Rolf said, and sobbed once. —I can never be a father now thanks to that blond bitch and what she did to me.
Sure you can,
Rolf, honey, darling, Lindsay said, and wagged Rolf’s limp member for him. —Really, you will. You just don’t feel like yourself right now, honey, darling.
Did I ever tell you about how I was wounded seriously during the war? Rolf said. —Well, I was. I was just a little boy, but no matter. In Diisseldorf. One hundred yards from the Rhine. I have this scar. If you wish, I will let you look at it sometime. I let the blond bitch see it, for all she cared. My own grandmother was killed in the war. Well, she died. An uncle was killed by a bomb. I know history firsthand. Please pull on it a little more, please. There. See what I told you. Nothing will ever make it work right again.
I’m sure it will work again, honey, Lindsay said. —Darling. Sweetheart, you just don’t feel well right now. Who would! Put your faith in us, Rolf, darling. I am German, too. Did I tell you that? Before it was shortened to Wolfe, my grandmother’s maiden name was Wolfesburgher, which means people of the wolf in German, Lindsay said.
That is nice, Rolf said. —See there, nothing doing.
Lindsay pulled Rolf's limp penis up and down as rapidly, albeit gently, as she possibly could. Then she tried wagging it gently side to side.
It is no use, Rolf said, and sighed deeply. —I am the only child. I don’t have any brothers. My brothers are all dead. All killed in that war.
That’s awful, Lindsay said, as she alternately rotated Rolf’s limp appendage clockwise and then counterclockwise. —How many brothers did you lose, precious, baby?
Eight, Rolf said. —Do that next thing for me, please. Please for me.
What next thing, darling? Lindsay said.
The next base, Rolf said. —Please for me. Go to the next base, please.
What next base, Rolf? Lindsay said. —Sweetheart, darling?
More like this please, Rolf said, and he pressed the back of Lindsay’s head, his fingers in her hair. Had she washed her hair that morning? The night before? Rolf slowly pressed Lindsay’s face down toward the limp penis she was currendy whipping about in a path that vaguely resembled a figure eight.
I don’t know, Lindsay said. —I’ve never done that before.
Please more for me, Rolf said. —The blond bitch would never. Not once even. For all she cared.
She wouldn’t? Lindsay said.
Please for me, Rolf said. —Oh, see! Look! There. Look, it is working almost again. Please. Yes. Oh, thank you. Thank you for the sake of my future, darling. Please. Thank you, yes. Please. Yes, honey. Please. Oh, please, darling.
Rolfs damp crotch smelled like wet leaves. Lindsay had thought of rain, how it smelled, and how it might sound in the oak tree’s leaves above the secret chamber. From somewhere in Shakespeare Gardens a cat yowled, and for all the world it sounded to Lindsay like the painful cry of a baby. And then, in Lindsay’s mind’s eye, the bald little heads of babies pressed up out of the earth in slow motion like mushroom caps after a rain.
The Garden City of the Northwest
1
Jim Stark had never set foot before in the garden city of the Northwest, but from the moment he stepped off the bus late one spring night he knew he was home again. Due to a dumb little fracas Jim had foolishly gotten into at a dive near the Spokane bus station during a long layover the evening before, he was wearing shades to hide black eyes, and the knuckles of both his hands were covered with goofy-looking Band-Aids. Who was that mysterious, dangerous-looking, but dashing stranger, anyway? the drunken, late-night, riffraff, bus-station denizens must have surely wondered. What does he want in this town?
Jim took a third-floor corner room at the Palace Hotel, which overlooked Higgins Avenue, the main drag, and collapsed fully clothed onto a creaky old bed for his first dreamless sleep in years. The first thing Jim did the next morning was pour a finger of Jack Daniel’s into a cloudy glass, and with a hearty gulp swallow a half hit of windowpane acid. Jim didn’t even brush his teeth. Jim could do this with impunity now that he was out on his own. He could let his teeth rot and fry his brain at will now, with nobody around to boss him. Jim pulled a chair up to the window and positioned his feet on the sill. He fired up a fat joint and puffed on it like a tycoon. Soon he felt that magical old-timey light. It washed over him like water.
Jim had spent that whole first day fried but cool and relatively calm at that window, and then lingered there into the evening and the night, never even pulling himself away for nourishment, as best he could later recall. Jim had studied the native life on Higgins, the dangerous, drunken cowboys cruising their gaudy pickups; the peaceful, drunken Native Americans leaning about the landscape below, reddish-yellow with liver failure, glowing on corners like streetlamps. When they coughed, burped, or even laughed, they blinked as leisurely as caution lights. Higgins Avenue was aglow with neon. Every building front in town seemed to be trimmed with neon. What churches were still standing had been trimmed with neon, too, and transformed into bars, whose thin, blinking neon names seemed to change often, not unusually several times in the course of a single night.
The garden city of the Northwest Jim staggered around in those first fried days was mostly an imagined town for him. He stared at his haunted reflection in the blue-tinted mirrors behind bars, seeing a face he didn’t know anymore, with a continuous shock of recognition. Who was that ghostly dead ringer for himself in the smoky mirror, and what wrong turn had led that tragic-eyed, handsome stranger down the dubious path into this forlorn, loveless, lonesome, but essentially heroic, country-song sort of life?
Jim discovered that the garden city of the Northwest was landlocked, surrounded by ancient Indian nations, but there were lingering rumors of lost coastlines of forgotten enormous bodies of water. The drumbeats and constant howls from those surrounding bare hills were unlike any heard in any other town. Once in a while an animal thought extinct wandered into town from the dark hills. For a glass of Thunderbird any Indian in town would interpret the ancient petroglyphs painted on the older buildings by the river. For a hit off your pint, any old derelict cowpoke would interpret the television set perpetually playing in the Sears store window. For a round, anybody would trade memories with you, stories of lost love and distant, happy lifetimes, until they became the same as your own. After a time, nothing needed to be said, time saved for drinking. You could sit for days in contented silence, among strangers who remembered the color of your mother’s eyes.
The garden city of the Northwest was a town of patrons with hypothetical pasts. On certain nights, as you stumbled bar to bar, your past might gradually change. In some bars the foreignness of who you no longer were lay in wait. Sometimes you came upon evidence of a past you did not know you had. This happened to Jim one night at Eddie’s Club on South Higgins, an establishment which served also as the de facto city hall. Covering the walls of Eddie’s Club back in those days were row upon row of photographs of the honored town drunks. Each spring, when the snowbanks surrounding town melted, gold stars were pasted in the lower-right corners of the photographs of the revered drunks found frozen. One night on a dim back wall Jim found his own dusty photograph pasted with a celebratory star. Befuddled, Jim had asked the bartender for the story. Seems one spring they had sadly identified some stiff as Jim, the bartender related. The bartender offered to remove the star with a special ceremony conjured for just this situation. Leave it, Jim had told him, for luck.
There was no spot in the garden city of the Northwest safe from the possibility of memory, romance, or violence. One night Jim found himself drinking in the Flame Lounge on Front Street, a sort of fancy bar favored by the white-shoe crowd Jim could not recall entering. The realization had just swept over Jim that he was not a rich and famous author in town incognito, who was up in the Big Sky country as a sort of advance talent scout for the movie being made from his last bestselling novel, as he had confided to about a dozen folks over the course of that night, nor had his photograph once been featured on the cover of Life magazine, as he had intimated to one black-eyed bar babe.
When the tall woman with long, t
hick, fierce hair swept into the Flame, Jim recognized her in a heartbeat, and he knew exactly what was in store. Lindsay sat down at the for end of the bar, to be surrounded in moments by half the dipshit high-rollers of romance in the joint. Her mane of reddish-blond hair was lighter than in old Ralph’s snapshot, which hadn’t done this woman justice at all. This woman was a dead ringer for Lauren Bacall, back when she whisked Bogie in. Those slightly out-of- focus eyes, otherworldly gray and far apart. That moist, full lipped, wide, generous mouth. She had a laugh that rang the room, and this dazzling smile, with big, brilliant, white teeth that snapped the tails off sentences. She was wearing white short shorts and a tangerine halter top, and with his fedora pulled low over his shaded, outlaw-of-love eyes, Jim stared unabashedly at her golden shoulders and pretty, round arms and trim, tan midriff and long brown legs, and, yes, at her full breasts straining that skimpy halter top, her great tits, yes, and great ass, that, too, and her breathtaking loveliness made Jim ache with a jealous amazement that old, rotten Ralph had actually tasted that wide mouth, licked and sniffed that smooth, glowing skin. The image of Ralph rooting around sweet, secret places popped into Jim’s mind and ran amok.
