The Last Time They Met

by Anita Shreve

  “You don’t know?”

  “No, why?”

  “He deals.”

  She has an image of a deck of cards. And then she realizes. “Drugs, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Marijuana?”

  “That,” he says. “And then some.”

  “Why do you hang around with him?” Linda asks.

  “We’ve been friends since first grade.” He pauses. “Do you think it’s immoral to deal drugs?” A slight challenge in his voice.

  “I don’t know,” she says. She hasn’t thought about this much.

  “He doesn’t deal to kids,” Thomas says.

  “Aren’t we kids?” she asks.

  ______

  In increments, Thomas kisses her mouth and her face and her neck. He opens the top two buttons of her blouse. He gives her a back rub, lifting up her blouse from the waistband of her skirt. Once, his hand lightly brushes her breast. This takes two and a half months.

  ______

  They are in the car in back of the cottage at the beach. It seems a good place to park: the beach is deserted, and the car is mostly hidden by the dunes. Though it is just before Christmas, the windows are steamed. The top four buttons of Linda’s blouse are opened. Thomas has his hand on the smooth skin of her collarbone, inching his way down. She feels nervous, breathless, the way she did on the roller coaster. A sense that once she reaches the top, she will have no choice but to go down the other side. That there will be nothing she can do about it.

  He brings her hand to himself. She is surprised and not surprised — boys betrayed so visibly by their bodies. She wants to touch him and to please him, but something putrid hovers at the edges of her consciousness.

  He feels her resistance and lets her go.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says.

  A light swings wildly through the car. It bounces off the rearview mirror and blinds Thomas, who looks up quickly.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he says, as the other light, the flashing light, reveals itself.

  Linda and Thomas are frantic in the front seat, a kind of comedy routine. Thomas gets his shirt buttoned and his trousers zipped, and Linda pulls her peacoat around herself. Impossible not to be reminded of the aunt shouting whore and then slut. Flailing her arms.

  The cop bangs hard on the window. Thomas rolls it down.

  A flashlight explodes in Linda’s face, and for a moment, she thinks: it isn’t the police; it’s someone who will kill us. So that when the cop swings the flashlight away and asks to see Thomas’s license, she is nearly relieved.

  “You folks know this is private property?” the policeman asks.

  “No, I didn’t, Officer,” Thomas says in a voice she’s never heard before — exaggeratedly polite, verging on parody. Of course Thomas knew it was private property.

  The policeman studies the license, and it seems to take an age.

  “You Peter Janes’s boy?” the cop asks finally.

  Thomas has to nod.

  The cop bends down and peers in at Linda, as though trying to place her. “You all right, Miss?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she answers, mortified.

  The policeman straightens. “Move along,” he says brusquely to Thomas. “You need to be getting on home.”

  Parental now, which she knows will annoy Thomas no end. She wills him to hold his tongue. Thomas rolls the window as the cop walks to his car.

  In the Skylark, Thomas and Linda are silent, waiting for the cruiser to drive away. When it has, Thomas leans his head back against the seat and puts his hands over his face. “Shit,” he says, but she can see that he is smiling.

  “It was bound to happen,” she offers.

  “I can’t believe he knows my father!” Thomas says, a high hysterical giggle beginning.

  “You were awfully polite,” Linda says.

  ______

  Passing by her aunt on the way to the bathroom, Linda thinks of Thomas. Sitting in the classroom or handing a menu to a customer, Linda thinks of Thomas. Between classes, they exchange notes or turn corners and kiss. He is waiting for her every morning when she walks down her street, and when she gets into the Skylark, she sits as close to Thomas as she can, the ocean of space on the other side now. They shave minutes from the rest of life and are always late.

  ______

  Linda,

  Can you meet me after school?

  Thomas,

  I was reading O’Neill again. There’s this passage: “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”

  Linda,

  I like O’Neill, but that’s crap. Of course we can help the things life has done to us. I prefer this passage: “I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself — actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!”

  Better, no?

  Jesus, this class is boring.

  Linda,

  I really like the sweater you have on today. You were driving me crazy in fourth period.

  Thomas,

  Thank you. It’s Eileen’s.

  Linda,

  What are you doing this weekend? I have to go skiing at Killington. I don’t want to go because it will mean four days away from you. What’s happening to me anyway?

  Thomas,

  I have to work all weekend. I’ve never been on skis.

  Linda,

  There’s a hockey game tonight. Will you come?

  ______

  Linda thinks the hockey game is brutal. The rink reeks of sweat and beer. There is slush underfoot. She sits on the bleachers in her peacoat with a sweater underneath, her hands in her pockets, shivering all the same.

  The din is deafening. The shouts and calls, the drunken patter, the thwack of the puck, and the blades shushing on the ice echo through the cavernous hockey rink. The imagination provides sound effects for the bits they cannot hear: a stick thrust against the back of a leg; the thud of a hipbone as a player’s skates go out from under him; the crack of a helmet snapping to the ice with the force of a whip. She flinches and then flinches again. The crowd eats it up.

  She doesn’t recognize Thomas when he comes out onto the ice. His shoulders and legs are gargantuan in the pads. His teeth are blotted out by the mouth guard. The contours of his head have been erased by the helmet. This is a side of Thomas she has never seen before and couldn’t have imagined: bent forward, stick outstretched, thighs pumping, his movements as fluid as a ballerina’s, as deft as a tap dancer’s. Thomas plays aggressively. She has trouble following the game, doesn’t know the rules. Sometimes she doesn’t even know a goal has been scored until she hears the crowd roar.

  That night, inevitably, there is a brawl. This one over an intentional tripping that sends Thomas sprawling, spinning belly down on the ice. He is up in a flash, gathering himself like a spider, digging the tips of his skates into the ice, and then he is all over the player who has done this to him. Linda, who has gone to school with girls and nuns, has never seen a physical fight before, never seen the blows that land, the ricocheting of the limbs, the tugging at the jerseys, the vicious kicks. The fight takes only seconds, but the scene evokes centuries and seems more like gladiatorial combat than anything she has ever witnessed. Thomas shrugs off the referee and heads for the box to serve out his penalty, his helmet in his arm, his hair stiffened upward. He executes a neat stop just before the wire fencing, takes his punishment as his due.

  Not contrite. Not contrite at all.

  ______

  On the morning of Christmas Eve, Linda fails to meet Thomas at the
bottom of her street as planned. Eileen has just walked in the door, back from New York for the holiday, and Linda cannot bring herself to leave, particularly since it seems to be Linda whom Eileen most wants to see. Though, in truth, they are strangers. Linda has been careful that day not to wear anything that once belonged to Eileen (not wishing to seem a diminished model of the older cousin) and has dressed in clothes bought from her tips: a slim gray woolen skirt and a black cardigan, the sleeves rolled. She is saving up to buy a pair of leather boots.

  Linda needn’t have worried. Eileen comes home in tie-dye, fresh from Greenwich Village, where she now lives. She doesn’t wear a bra and has on long leather boots like the ones Linda wants. There are beads around her neck and not a trace of makeup on her face. Linda, with her hair curled for the holiday, looks her cousin over carefully after they embrace.

  In the privacy of the girls’ room, Eileen speaks of head shops and sensual massage. Of a band called “The Mamas and the Papas.” Of hash brownies and a job with a project called Upward Bound. She has a boyfriend who plays harmonica for a blues band, and she likes the music of Sonny and Cher. She talks about why women shouldn’t use mascara and why hair is a political statement. Why Linda and Patty and Erin also shouldn’t wear a bra.

  “Don’t be ashamed of your past,” Eileen says privately to Linda when the others have left the room. “It was just your body acting, and you should never be ashamed of your body.”

  Linda appreciates the kindness inherent in the advice but is more than a little worried about what Eileen thinks she knows.

  ______

  During Christmas Eve dinner, Jack bounces back from the door to the apartment to say that Linda has a visitor. She freezes in her chair at the kitchen table, knowing who it is.

  “You’d better see to it,” the aunt says after a time.

  Thomas stands outside in the hallway, a small package in his hand. The box is inexpertly wrapped with a noose of Scotch tape. He has his overcoat on, the collar up, his ears reddened from the cold.

  She is embarrassed at the thought that she has nothing for him.

  “I couldn’t get away,” she says. “Eileen had just come.”

  He looks hurt all the same. She has hardly ever seen him look hurt, and the knowledge that she has caused this squeezes her chest.

  He holds the box out. “This is for you,” he says.

  Embarrassment and remorse make her forget manners. She opens the package in the hallway while he stands awkwardly, his hands in his pockets. It takes an age to excavate the package through the noose of tape. Inside the box is a gold cross with a tiny diamond in its center. A gold cross on a chain. A note reads, “For Magdalene.”

  She shuts her eyes.

  “Turn around,” he says. “I’ll put it on for you.”

  At the nape of her neck, she feels his fingers — too large for the delicate clasp. “I’ll do it,” she says, when Jack, whose curiosity can’t contain itself, opens the door to get another look at the mysterious stranger. Linda has no choice then but to invite Thomas in.

  ______

  She sees it all from Thomas’s eyes: the wallpaper, water-stained in the corner. The Christmas Eve dinner table next to the sink full of dishes. The counter littered with pie crust and potato skins, crusted fish in a frying pan. The lamp hanging over the center of the table, knocked so often the shade has split.

  They walk into the den with the plaid sofa. The smell of cigarette smoke is a pall in the air. The TV is on, a Christmas special.

  Linda introduces Thomas to the cousins and the aunt, the cross like a beacon at her throat. The aunt is reserved and wary, taking in the good overcoat and the Brooks Brothers shirt, the leather gloves and the best shoes. Jack is levitating from excitement: here is an older boy who talks to him, winks at him. Thomas nods to Michael, then sits, still in his overcoat, on the plaid sofa answering questions put to him by intrepid Eileen. The aunt, in red lipstick and tight curls, watches all the while. Giving no quarter.

  Linda, in a white noise of mortification, watches as from a distance. Watches Thomas shed his coat and bend over from the sofa to race tiny metal cars with Jack. Watches an eerily knowing glance pass between the aunt and Thomas. Watches as Patty and Erin, saddled with dish duty in the kitchen, peek in from time to time, clearly intrigued by the handsome boy.

  In an hour, Thomas has Jack on his knee, and they are listening to Bing Crosby.

  Thomas stays until the aunt begins ordering the cousins to dress for the cold. They will take the bus to church for midnight Mass, she says, Thomas pointedly uninvited.

  Before they all leave, Thomas and Linda kiss behind the kitchen door. “Merry Christmas,” Thomas whispers, a sentimental boy after all. Even for all the Lowell and the O’Neill.

  “Thank you for the cross,” she says. “I’ll always wear it.”

  “I like your cousins,” he says. “Jack especially.”

  She nods. “He’s a good boy.”

  “Your aunt doesn’t like me,” he says.

  “It has nothing to do with you,” she says.

  “Can you get away tomorrow?” he asks.

  She thinks. “In the afternoon, maybe.”

  “I’ll pick you up at one o’clock,” he says. “We’ll go to Boston.”

  “Boston?”

  “I love the city when it’s shut down,” he says.

  ______

  In the hallway, after Thomas has left, the aunt slips on her coat and says so that only Linda can hear, “He’s the type that’ll break your heart.”

  ______

  They walk empty streets, the rest of the world trapped inside by the cold that whistles in from the harbor and snakes through the narrow lanes of the North End. Christmas trees are lit in windows, even in the middle of the day. Linda imagines mountains of torn wrapping paper, toys hidden underfoot, a scene she’s just come from herself. Eileen gave her a tie-dye shirt; Michael a Beatles album; Erin a hat she knit herself. The aunt gave her sensible cotton underwear bought on discount at the department store and a missal with her name printed in gold letters in the lower right-hand corner. Linda M. Fallon. The M. for Marie, a confirmation name she never uses.

  Linda shivers, the peacoat hopelessly inadequate in the chill. She has on Erin’s hat, but her hair flies in the wind all the same. She has deliberately not worn a scarf so that the cross will show, but now she has to hold her coat closed with her hand. With her other hand, she holds Thomas’s. Glove to glove.

  The emptiness is strange and magnificent. Snow falls and sticks to eyelashes. The entire city is ensconced within a bubble of intense quiet, with only the odd, slow rolling of chains on the tires of the intermittent cabs. It’s not hard to imagine the city as a stage set, with all the shops shuttered, the cafés closed. People existing only in the imagination. All the bustle and the smell of coffee needing to be guessed at.

  “This is perfect,” Linda says to Thomas. “Absolutely perfect.” She means the sense of endless time, the promise of possibility, the clarity of the air.

  They walk up the back end of Beacon Hill and then down Beacon Street itself. They stroll along the tree belt on Commonwealth Avenue and imagine what it would be like to have an apartment in one of the townhouses. They have vivid imaginations and describe to each other the mantels, the covers on the bed, the books in the bookcase. They agree they will always be friends, no matter what happens to them. They walk along Boylston Street and up Tremont along the Common and stop in at the only place that is open, a Bickford’s across from the Park Street subway station.

  Stragglers and winos sit in chairs set apart from each other, their watch caps still on, the tips missing from their mittens. They have come in to get out of the cold, and one of them is drinking milk. The smell in the restaurant is of unwashed bodies, old bacon, and sadness. The bacon, doubtless cooked earlier in the day, lingers like a layer of air they might have to breathe. The sadness is thick in the atmosphere and cannot be ignored. The café feels to Linda oddly like church,
with the men sitting in their separate pews.

  Linda and Thomas take a table near the entrance, as far into the restaurant as Thomas is willing to go, an innate claustrophobia making him more comfortable near exits. They order hot chocolate and sit in the quiet, for the moment not speaking, the only sounds the clinking of silverware against china, the register drawer popping open. She watches Thomas watch the bums, and she has a clear sense that he knows more about what has happened to the men than she does, that he instinctively understands, that his skin might be more permeable than hers. There is something in the shape of his mouth that suggests that he contains within himself some great corruption, not related necessarily to sex or to alcohol, but to chaos and subversion.

  Beloved, she wants to say aloud, not knowing how or why the word has sprung to her lips.

  There is a duffel bag in the backseat of the Skylark, a tan bag with a zipper and a handle. It might be a sports bag, though it is made of such heavy and thick canvas, it reminds Linda of the army.

  “What’s in the bag?” she asks.

  Thomas has come back on the team bus, Linda on the spectator bus, hers skidding into the parking lot like a skier. Thomas’s hair, still wet from his shower, freezes before he can get the heat going in the Skylark. The storm came in fast from the ocean in the afternoon, and the roads are treacherous and slick. Thomas drives hunched against the steering wheel, peering through a small patch in the windshield that hasn’t yet iced over. The leather top of the convertible muffles the ping of the sleet.