Kip, don’t die resounded in my conscience, I might have said it aloud. More than ever it felt to me like he was something, and I was next to nothing. No, it was worse than that. I knew for sure in my callow, panicked soul that, compared to Kip, I was nothing, nothing at all. If he had been able to read my thoughts, he would have been disgusted.
By dubious serendipity, we have fallen in love with the same woman more than once.
Charlea Hughes first, then Mary Bendel, and, finally, Jessica.
Our devotion toward Charlea, the fondness of young boys, was offered up from the base of her polished white, immaculate pedestal, which we erected without her knowledge and upon which we placed her so that we could stand in its and therefore her shadow, not daring to look up and see what was hidden under her skirt. Toward Mary Bendel, a married woman some years senior to our gawky not-quite teens, we felt the warmth of a more developed, unsavory passion, of bees intrigued by flowers for the first time. Mary Bendel awakened us mind and body without ever having meant so much as to disturb our thick pubescent sleep, and so was as innocent of our fervor as Charlea before her. Where Charlea might come to laugh at us, Mary Bendel, had she known, would have been enraged. And Jessica? Jessica was never much for pedestals. The thought of one would give her vertigo. Jess bore back toward us more ardor than we knew might exist in a woman toward a man, or men. Where Charlea was a girl, and Mary Bendel a young wife about thirty or so, Jessica, when we first met her, stood at the restive gateway between youth and womanhood, and was too young not to take risks, but old enough to know that risk is risk and can bring disaster as easily as it does any glimmer of joy.
They could not have been more different, at least physically. Charlea, agate-eyed with masses of wavy blue-black hair, olive skin, and full lips, her mother’s Mediterranean characteristics coming through strong, a thick-limbed girl who stood resolute, content, smiling with her arms crossed on what she considered a stable earth, precocious, canny beyond her years. Mary we knew best by the smell of her clothing, her pillow, her rooms. Pale as eggshell, slender though not delicate, hair not so much flame red as the many-red embers in the hearth after the fire has blazed, reds of apricot and apple, her eyes the most bright blue, her lips a paler pink than the inside of a conch shell. A few fragmented details about her, this is all I can piece together because it was more the idea of Mary than Mary herself we loved, the mature sexuality of nonvirgin Mary. Jessica on the other hand we knew, and I know well. As well as one person can know another. My beautiful Jessica who refuses to cower before time’s persistence. Jessica who was, I had always thought, the love of both our lives.
Each we loved in conspicuously different ways, but as sure as we knew them we did love them.
First, Charlea Hughes.
Part of the postwar wave—a changing of the guards, as it were, when many of the scientists who’d worked on the Project left for academic jobs around the country, and were replaced by others come to refine and advance what had already been accomplished, move forward into the age of thermonuclear capability, toy some more with apocalypse—her father had brought his family from Berkeley up to the Hill. Kip and I, who’d never seen the ocean, who’d never been west of dusty downtown Flagstaff, who knew little unto nothing about life, saw her and our heads spun. She was, to us, so sophisticated, a girl of the world. She was a superior being. A dark, desirable angel, she made us crazy with longing, vague, fuzzy longing, but longing nevertheless. We made a pact at once that since we couldn’t both have Charlea neither of us would, and showed up one afternoon at Charlea’s house, two lank and foolish boys in white button-down shirts and white trousers, virginal to a fault, to make our mutual confession of love and inform her of our decision that we were fated by a solemn brotherly bond never to do anything that would bring pain or shame on the other and that, therefore, although we both did truly love her, neither of us could express that affection by ever taking her out on a date lest we cause the other to feel jealous. Charlea burst not into tears but began to bite her lip and soon broke out into gales of laughter. Friendly but forthright laughter.
Her mother came into the room and said, —I believe you boys had better go on home now.
—But they haven’t finished their iced tea yet, Mom.
—Still and all, I think it’s time for the boys to get along, before their mother starts to worry.
After a pause of what I deemed to be an appropriate length, I said, correcting her in as gentle and genial a manner possible, —We have two mothers, Mrs. Hughes.
—Two mothers, she said and looked at Charlea.
—Two different mothers, I said.
—They’re not real brothers, Mother, Charlea laughed.
Her mother straightened up, and said, —Either way, I still think it is time for the boys to head back home now.
Oafs that we were, we’d actually begun to join in Charlea’s laughter, but now that we saw Mrs. Hughes was unhappy with us our levity began to level off.
—Bye Kip, bye Brice, Charlea smiled without missing a beat.
—Bye Charlea, we said. Though we were not mature enough at the time to understand it, this was surely one of the most embarrassing moments in our young lives. How earnest, how pensive, how sober—like stolid vaudevillians who’d got lost on their way to the show—we must have looked wearing our selfish honesty and adolescent pride on our sleeves, as we turned, no doubt in tandem, to make our exit. Charlea was, on the other hand, both self-possessed and not without a sense of humor. She was, furthermore, forgiving. The next day in school, she acted as if nothing had happened. No doubt she is now happily married and raising a family of mature daughters and sons, or maybe running a corporation with the same deft touch she showed that afternoon. Meantime, Kip and I proceeded, purblind soul brothers, arm in arm through our youth, pretty much oblivious to the world beyond our thick skins.
Mary Bendel; Mrs. Bendel.
You remember, Kip, as well as I, how we broke into her house again and again. We were brash and brazen. Your mention of it in your letter stirred sparks in the ash of memory. How could either of us ever forget? We will always be linked in what must be our most private secret, our presence there in someone else’s privileged and intimate sanctum, giggling at first from nervousness, then giving ourselves over gradually to the deep, visceral pleasure of invading someone else’s life in the most blatant way. But even if we’d been caught in the act, nothing we were doing, or more important, nothing we would have been perceived to have been doing, could possibly’ve been deemed serious enough to warrant our being arrested. It would have been glossed as harmless—as boys will be boys—and we undoubtedly would have played along with their presumptuous assessment in order to evade our punishment. After all, isn’t it true we never damaged let alone destroyed or stole anything? We trespassed. Nothing more. No, I sense they wouldn’t have done much had they caught us. But they would have made a mistake letting us off easy, they’d have been wrong not to punish us, and punish us good. And you know as well as I that they’d have been wrong not to do so, had they the wits or luck to trap us, because of the pleasure we derived from our trespasses, our visits as we liked to call them, flippant prudes that we were.
Kip, remember how it went? We were all of twelve, no older, and these were our first encounters with what could be described as the exquisite. Sure, we’d had many pleasurable experiences together before that (not to mention grim, unhappy ones), but they were all in one way or another purified by naivete.
The visits bespoke another nature. Part of their glamour lay precisely in their impurity. “Let the punishment fit the crime,” isn’t that the line you sang when you played the title role in our school production of The Mikado, warbling like some castrato before your voice cracked and your days as a caroling soprano came to an end? Well, if what you sang is true—and you certainly sang it as if you did believe it was, up there on stage in your imperial robes—it would be hard to think up an agony that would fit the plain, perverse joy we experience
d those months of nights during which we made our visits.
Should I admit that I still get faint when I think about the process of it? How I loved not merely the execution of the plan, but the agreeing on what time we’d meet and where, loved the coming to a decision about whom we were going to “visit” after having thought about it, each of us alone, for hours on end? I do; it is shameful, but I would be lying were I to deny that it makes me giddy to remember saying goodnight to my parents, and how I went to bed with my jeans on, and my socks and shoes, how good I was at pretending to be adrift in sleep (the very slow, very shallow breathing, innocently deep and with the long pause before inhaling, I can still do this when the adult world forces me into a pretense of sleep) and how, after my mother’d checked in on me for the last time—bad habit of hers, she kept it up far too long into what I thought were my postyouth years—how I’d wait until everything was quiet before easing myself out of bed, and escaping through my window into the night. There was sex in the air. Every footfall was gravid, ripe with promise. My shoulders hunched up, my hands dug down into my pockets, each gesture made was grand as the movies.
First time we did it, we didn’t know what exactly we were going to do once we’d broken into the house, but we did know what—that is, who—compelled us. The days of the peppers game were behind, the night of Chimayó several years ahead. Whose idea was it, yours or mine? It may have occurred without one or the other of us acting as the initiator, may have just come into being, as naturally as breathing, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that the moonlight glazed the summer streets and yards with such brilliance, it looked like it had snowed. There was a mild breeze twisting up the canyons, switching back and forth across the mesa. We met behind a town barn. You were there before I, and I got there before I was supposed to. As in all small towns, in Los Alamos it was everyone’s business to know everyone’s business, and so we knew who was and wasn’t invited to a wee-hours midsummer party. Your parents and mine, to be sure, but also the Bendels.
Our obsession with Mary Bendel was embryonic, so to speak, and yet it had taken a serious turn a couple of weeks before when we found ourselves crouching in the shadows behind some aromatic juniper, there in the late dusk, watching her in her kitchen, as she moved back and forth in the yellow-brown light, cleaning up the day’s dishes. Her husband, we knew, often worked at night, though by no apparent schedule, just sporadic, and was said to be one of the more solid theoreticians at the lab. After Mary Bendel had finished with her dishes, she took off her apron and set out for her evening walk, and it was then, I think without any words said between us, just one step encouraging the next, we took it upon ourselves to sneak up to the Bendels’ kitchen window and look in. We’d visited this kitchen half a dozen times in the past, for though they didn’t have any children themselves (not yet, at least: —Mary Bendel’s very young yet, my mother’d said once, —they’re wise to bide their time), they sometimes invited us kids over. So you and I were peering in on a familiar scene, but our eyes were different eyes gazing in over the sill. The kitchen table was still damp from the sponge. The plates and glasses stood in the rack, glistening. The yellow light shone on the wall clock.
One of us must have said, —Let’s go inside.
The other must have said, —What’re you, touched?
We didn’t go in that night, but we did sneak around to the back where we knew their bedroom must be, and peered into the windows and saw their bed, and the open closet in which Mary Bendel’s dresses—peach, mint, plum, black—hung alongside her husband’s suits, and it was there that the meaning of our activities must have come into sharp, however inarticulate, focus.
—Let’s move back over there, I might have said.
—Where?
—Back over there, pointing up the slight rise.
We moved away from the house maybe thirty feet to where there were some low crab apples, and waited.
What we had waited for and what we were given, finally, may not have been the same, but the glimpse of Mary Bendel coming back from her walk was mesmerizing to us. She entered by the side door, and we watched breathless as she moved from room to room in the Sundt house, turning a lamp off in the kitchen and on in the sitting room she had converted into a workroom for her many specimens of, and books on, butterflies—her obsession: she was an accomplished lepidopterist, and her workroom was furnished with big flat boxes with glass tops, like display cases for jewels, in which she’d pinned her specimens, each labeled in a neat hand, black ink on white tabs beneath the suspended colorful corpses. We crept closer, and watched her push her defiant hair away from her forehead with the back of her hand. She read, sitting at a table, and we crouched outside in the dark and watched her. It was exotic beyond anything you and I had ever done, Kip. And it must have been when she glanced up, from time to time, to stare out the window, stare right at us in the ink-black night, before going back to her reading, that inspired us to feel invisible.
Little creeps, how heartened we were by our bold behavior. We didn’t know who Mary Bendel loved better, you or me, but we knew she loved us. It was like a queer game of hide-and-seek, where we who were hiding were really the seekers, and she who was the seeker had every reason to hide.
Two weeks later the visits came to pass. The Bendels were off at the midsummer party. That empty house solicited us, and we succumbed.
Though the time of absolute trust between Hill neighbors had passed with the end of the war, the gates had not yet been lifted; that was to come one day in February of 1957, a memorable day in that the Hill did not see it as an event to celebrate, but fear. We had to change our way of living, we knew the riffraff of the world was going to descend—that is, ascend—upon us. Before that day no one locked a door. You and I felt welcome, shrouded in the warm dark, confident on the quiet block. We might have paused, Kip, to think for a moment about what we were doing, but we didn’t, and I believe that if we had, we’d quite easily have been able to cobble up some boyish justification that would have quelled our doubts. The night sky poured syrupy light over us, and we were daring. We might have showed some old-fashioned shame and entered by an open window in the back, but instead we looked around and, seeing no one, walked up the several wooden steps at the side of the house and entered by the kitchen door.
Is this how the insanely criminal feel? Welcomed because their desires are so comprehensive as to seem like needs? Confident that needs, like laws, must be upheld? Justified because so clearly embraced by circumstances they had only the subtlest hand in bringing into being? I mean to say, it did feel as if the house solicited us, that Mary Bendel’s recent presence in it provoked our presence, too.
Whatever the answers to such questions might be, we moved through the Bendels’ house slowly, deliberately. We felt strangely proprietary but not so much so that our hearts weren’t heaving, in quick pumping bursts like those of a rabbit’s heart when you hold him in your arms and pet him and place your palm on his breast. The moon lit the rooms enough so we didn’t stumble into furniture, and soon we found ourselves in their bedroom, her bedroom, where we discovered the drawers in the chest that held her clothes, the soft cottons and dangerous bits of lace. That first time we hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight, but I remember you so carefully lifting something of hers to your face and breathing in and how I said, —Bring it over here, boy, and you carried it to the window where we looked at it, a chemise, Mary’s chemise, satin with narrow lace trim, a perplexity of fragile straps and fluid margins, looked at it rapt, smelled its trifle of perfume merged with a recognizable human scent, its Maryness. We must have been in the house for half an hour, maybe longer, touching and smelling and, yes, even kissing her woolen dresses in the closet, her sweaters arranged in piles on the shelf above, careful as we could be not to disturb how they were hung or folded, our heads in a swim—but a drowner’s swim, slow-motion and learning to love the warmth of the water in our lungs. To anybody but us the scene we’d created for ourselves here would
have been either ludicrous or disgusting; but Kip, for us it was a real passage. And after we’d done it once, there was no way for us not to do it again.
And so we did. And it didn’t stop with touching and smelling and kissing Mary’s things, it went a ways beyond just that. And it didn’t stop with Mary, either. There were others. We learned a lot about many houses, and the wives and daughters who lived in them, how they lived, what some of their secrets were. But as the visits got more elaborate they became less struck by mystery. The clothes, these inanimate reminiscences of their wearers, became the point of the exercise—to touch, smell, and sometimes actually wear them for the dizzy minutes we dared to—rather than pushing ourselves into the private lives of those who’d chosen them at some shop, brought them home, worn them. We began to lose track of the meaning of what we were doing, and half a year after we’d first trespassed Mary Bendel’s home we were done with our visits. We’d fallen in and out of love for the second time, virgins still, but now gratefully sullied ones.
Trinity Fields Page 8
