Golden States

by Michael Cunningham

  “Will you be okay out here alone?” she asked him. “Mother will be terribly upset if she comes out here tomorrow morning and finds you floating face down.”

  “I’ll be okay,” he said.

  “Maybe I’ll stay and watch you anyway,” she said.

  “No. Go inside. I mean, I’m really okay. I’ll get out in just a minute.” He wanted her gone now. He was afraid of losing the moment by saying something stupid. “Really,” he added.

  “Well, okay. Knock on my door when you come up, all right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She bent over, patted his cheek, and got up, the water running off her legs. She picked up her towel, which David knew to be yellow though it looked white. She rubbed herself with it, and David thought he could feel its bristle on his own skin. “Good night,” she whispered.

  “Janet?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on,” she said.

  “I forgot what I was going to say.”

  “Well, tell me at breakfast if you remember it. Night.” “Night.”

  “I’ll leave you the towel.”

  “Okay.”

  As she walked across the grass to the house, David’s belly took on its queasy lilt again, the sensation of joyful nervousness. Once she was safely inside he floated on his back again, in gentle circles, scooping the water with his cupped hands as if blindly hunting its subtle shapes. The stars were beautiful in their usual way, cool and remote. Though he tried to melt up again he stayed where he was, inside his own body. He wondered if Janet had been the crucial element, if her presence had somehow charged the water with an electricity he himself lacked.

  When he got out he took the towel from the lawn chair Janet had hung it on, and checked it for her scent. All he could smell was the chlorine and the laundered odor of the terry cloth. He dried off carefully, as if he was using the towel to cover himself with paint. Then he picked up his wadded jeans and walked back through the kitchen, past the blue lights of the stove.

  When he reached Janet’s door he hesitated a moment, and rapped with the knuckle of his index finger. “Okay. Good night,” she whispered from inside. He had hoped she’d open the door.

  “Good night,” he whispered, and in case she hadn’t heard said, “Good night” again, a little louder. Then he was embarrassed at having said it twice.

  David sat in homeroom class not looking at Billy, who he knew was shooting him from the back of the room. By alphabetical arrangement David sat in a front seat, a vulnerable position. He kept his eyes fixed on the teacher in a show of attention so intense he couldn’t distinguish a word she said. The teacher’s name was Miss Mullin. The class called her Moons Mullin for her enormous breasts. David watched her write the names of Spanish explorers on the blackboard. She called the class people. “Listen up, people,” she said, and David’s attention glazed over as he watched her with bright-eyed enthusiasm.

  Miss Mullin’s skin was pitted in the hollows of her cheeks, and the fever-colored powder she wore caught there in little orange flakes. The powder ended at the top of her white neck, which made her look as though she had invented her own head. As far as David knew, he was the only person in school who liked her. She was ridiculous, no doubt about it, but he could see the sorrow in her small brown eyes. Every now and then somebody called up to say there was a bomb hidden at school, and when the bell rang three times, the bomb code, Miss Mullin would roll her eyes, throw the chalk down, and say, “Okay, people, line up.” They’d all go stand in the playground waiting for the school to explode while Miss Mullin stood at the head of the line, unafraid, talking to Miss Linden, who was her friend. Sometimes David imagined grabbing her and pulling her out of range, shielding her with his own body while bombs rained down on the building.

  Miss Mullin wiped the names off the blackboard and put more names in their place. History moved forward toward the present. When the bell rang, David bolted out of his seat. In art class he’d be temporarily safe from Billy, who went during art period to a special class for people with low marks in cooperation.

  Art was the finest, most dangerous class. The teacher, a squat, hook-nosed woman named Mrs. Pilegi (Mrs.: someone was married to her), kept after everybody to let himself go. When she said the word go she made a snap-wristed, clawing gesture from her breast to the class, as if she were tossing them a ball.

  Today they were making collages, with string and scraps of felt and dyed rice. David sat on a stool near the window, as far as possible from the notice of others, and stuck grains of rice to his drawing, a man catching a woman on a trapeze. As he worked he tried to keep people from looking at him and tried to keep his tongue from creeping out the side of his mouth. He carefully glued grain after grain of blue rice to the woman’s leotard. Then he came to her skin. The only flesh-colored rice was too pink, and he debated over whether to make her skin plain white or the gaudy pink. He favored white, but without any coloring it looked too much like rice. He realized his tongue had inched its way out between his clenched lips. He pulled it back in again. Mrs. Pilegi, who had been circling the room in her orange-and-pink flowered smock, came up behind him and crowed, “My, what cautious work. Why don’t you make the skin purple, David? Go a little wild.”

  “Well, okay,” he said. He placed a few purple grains along the woman’s cheek.

  “See? She doesn’t have to look real. You can have fun with her. See?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. When Mrs. Pilegi had moved on, he dug the purple rice out with his thumbnail. Mrs. Pilegi was the only one of his teachers who seemed to notice him, and to take an interest in him. She was the only one he didn’t like.

  Lunch came next. The lunch yard was open territory. David and Billy had always sat together in a far corner, where the chain-link fence ran into the rippled aluminum flank of the Quonset hut where art classes were held. The two of them would sit eating their sack lunches on the warm, mica-flecked dirt, making up stories. David supplied the plots, with Billy putting in action sequences whenever David let things get too bogged down with lovers and fancy sentiments. They traded their lunches nearly every day, Billy taking David’s peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and giving him the peculiar sandwiches his mother made. Billy’s mother would put anything between two slices of white bread: shreds of gristly gray meat, orange cheese from a tube, sometimes just potato salad. David had pretended for so long to like the sandwiches that at some indeterminable point he really did start liking them. At least they were always surprising.

  Today, he couldn’t decide where to go. He didn’t want to sit in the old corner, but every other area was somebody’s province, and it would be strange to just sit down among a group of friends like he was one of them. Holding the limp, rolled top of his paper sack, he stood in the doorway to the yard and scanned for Billy. The cafeteria, which smelled of green beans and disinfectant, was only for people who bought their lunches; sack lunches went into the yard. David was surprised at how few places there were to hide. In his mind the world was full of gullies and caves and mountain peaks which would shelter you if only you could elude your enemies longenough to reach them. The stories he told himself almost always hinged on a secret safety zone. At the moment, though, he stood facing the fenced-in yard, and there was no possibility of sneaking off anywhere else.

  He went back to the old corner because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He sat himself down with his back against the fence, its links biting him through his shirt. He opened the sack and pulled out the expected contents. A sandwich, a warm speckled banana, three cookies in a Baggie.

  He was halfway through the sandwich when he saw Billy walking around the border of the yard. Billy had on his fatigues and his camouflage jacket. He carried a lunch sack and walked with quick gliding steps, like a stalking cat. Other people fell out of his way, because Billy had that kind of reputation. He turned briskly at the corner and came straight for David, his head hunched down low as his shoulders
. David forced himself to keep on eating his sandwich. Billy passed by and stared at David as if he were an unpleasant surprise. He moved along and did another circuit of the yard. David watched him the way he’d watch a zoo animal with strange, insistent habits. Billy paced around the yard and on his second circle he stopped just short of the place where David sat and squatted down, his arms rigid between his knees, his fingers splayed on the dirt. He stayed there, ten feet away, watching David with narrowed, shining eyes. David ate his sandwich. He thought of offering some to Billy, but knew it would be stupid. Billy rocked slightly on the balls of his feet. His body pulsed like an engine revving. David thought about getting up and going elsewhere, but he had no place to go. He peeled his banana with elaborate care, as if he was demonstrating the correct procedure. It’s Billy, he told himself. My best friend. It seemed to him there must be something for him to do or say, a sentence or two that would make things normal again. Billy was waiting. David felt like a boy in a story; a boy who meets up with a monster that asks him a riddle, and will tear him to pieces if he gets the answerwrong. It’s Billy, he reminded himself. To keep calm, he focused his mind on small details of Billy’s life. Billy carried a 1929 silver dollar in his pocket, David’s gift. Billy worried that his cock would never grow to a decent length, and was now checking the mail every day for the enlarging device he’d sent for from one of his brother’s magazines. Billy always claimed he’d kill anybody who hurt a friend of his.

  As if it were the logical sum of these facts, David thought, He loves me. The idea came to him in a foreign voice, like someone whispering inside his head. He looked at Billy. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out of it. Billy watched him with avid eyes that were not like Billy’s at all. After a while he opened his own lunch and ate it in huge, rending bites. David wondered what kind of sandwich his mother had made today.

  The two of them stayed where they were until the bell rang to signal the end of lunch. David got up, dusted off the seat of his pants, and joined the others who were obediently heading back inside for the afternoon’s classes. At the doorway he glanced back and saw Billy still crouched in the same spot, his neck craned to watch David’s departure. He loves me, said the voice inside David’s head. David thought he should have come up with a way to bring Billy around. He could have told him— what? It was too late now anyway. Science class started in four minutes. Today the science teacher was bringing in a life-size rubber man, with organs you could take out and put back in again.

  To get home from school, David walked down the Vista Arcadia, a wide boulevard that led to his part of the neighborhood. Vista Arcadia was lined with blue-gray pine trees so big their branches intertwined and made a tunnel of the street, admitting only dimmed, sluggish sunlight. Like the tree in the Starks’ backyard, they were left over from the old estate, the ranch of a movie mogul whose girlfriend, according to the stories, crashed her plane through the roof of his house. The man had raised peacocks, and the peacocks dispersed into the hills when the land was sold to developers. The birds had long since died off. Although Mom said it wasn’t possible, David swore he remembered seeing a peacock land in the backyard once when he was very young. It had been evening, and the bird flapped down out of the dusky sky, stood for a while on the grass, and opened its tail, showing off its galaxy of brilliant blind eyes. David thought that was his first memory.

  As he passed under the trees, he heard a sputtering sound from above. He looked up and saw Billy high in a pine, straddling the crotch of a branch, shooting him. David could see the black waffled soles of Billy’s shoes, and the bill of his army cap. David stood gaping, unable to decide what to do. Billy stopped shooting him, and pulled a pine cone from the branch closest to him. The cone came loose only after some effort, and David could hear the feathery sound of needles falling to the pavement around him.

  “Hey Billy,” he said, too softly. He called again, “Billy,” in a louder voice. “Come on down,” he called. “We don’t have to be enemies. Let’s forget it ”

  Billy bit at the top of the pine cone, as if he were pulling the pin of a grenade. He lobbed it down at David, who jumped out of the way. The pine cone bounced toward him as if in pursuit. Each time it hit the concrete it made a hollow wooden sound, like the plock of a Ping-Pong ball. Billy started counting. “One two three ...”

  “We don’t have anything to fight about,” David said.

  “Four five six..

  “I’m not mad at you ”

  “Seven eight...”

  David ran. He was barely out from under the tree when Billy reached ten, and hollered, “Ka-boom.” Billy shook the branches of the tree, and a shower of needles fell.

  Janet was swimming when David got home. He stood in the kitchen, watching her, drinking milk from the carton. Mom didn’t get back from work for another hour, and Lizzie had Brownies today, although she was likely to get kicked out any time for swearing at the other girls. David stood with his belly pressed hard against the edge of the sink, feeling the comforting rise and fall of his own gut as he sucked in deep swallows of milk.

  He expected the telephone to ring and it did, so soon after the idea came to him that he thought he’d picked up vibrations the bell gave off at the first microsecond’s contact with an impulse coming through the wire. He got it in the middle of the first ring.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, David?”

  “Hi, Rob.”

  “Hi. Let me speak to Janet, please.”

  “Well, she isn’t here.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Out.”

  “Out where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she go out by herself?”

  David let a good long pause go by; he counted silently to three. Then he said, “Urn, I don’t know.”

  “You do know, don’t you, David?”

  “Nope.”

  “Is it the same man she went out with yesterday?”

  This time he let the silence hang for a count of five.

  “Nope.”

  “I see. Did she happen to mention when she might be back?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “All right. Okay. Thank you for your help, David.”

  “You’re welcome,” David said. “Bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  After he had hung up, he returned to the window in time to see Janet lifting herself out of the pool. Her body glistened with water. David wondered how he’d be able to make her laugh this time, when she found out he’d done it again.

  Rob didn’t call that afternoon and didn’t call in the evening. David spent hours in edgy anticipation, listening for the tiny quickening of the silence that preceded the telephone’s bell. It rang only twice. Once for Mom, the doctor’s office, and once again during dinner. The second time it was a friend of Janet’s, calling from San Francisco. David caught as much as he could through the door, but between Mom’s talking about the various things that concerned her and Lizzie insisting over and over again that the other girls in Brownies were all assholes, he was able to pick up only fragments.

  Janet said, “...from you. Good. Oh, I’m okay. Holed up in ... you know. Of course he is. It kills me, it really does, but if a little ... no, none. Of course I have. I just know it’s the right... Uh-huh. Every day but today. I did. You know how he is, though... Mm-hm.... A lot of swimming. Well, it’s the next best thing for putting you to sleep. Really, you should try it... classes in the fall. No. But I’ve got to give (a shot? a shit?)... back to the fold. Right. Okay, thanks for calling. I’ll keep you posted. Okay. Bye.”

  After that, there were no more calls. The evening passed. Mom and Janet watched television, the smoke from their cigarettes drifting along the ceiling. Lizzie finished her homework in fifteen minutes, watched “The Muppets” with Mom and Janet, then danced to her Michael Jackson album until Mom made her go to bed. David passed nervously from his room to the kitchen to the living room and back again. He watched bits of television on the w
ing. Fonzie was adopting a juvenile delinquent. David went back up to his room and when he came down again the stupid blonde on “Three’s Company” had a date with her boss. David liked TV and welcomed even theworst shows with the same kind of grudging affection he’d have shown to feeble-minded, slightly embarrassing aunts and uncles.

  Before “Three’s Company” was over, he wandered back up to his room. He stood at the window, with the silent pool stretched out beneath him. Along the fence Mom’s row of white petunias blackened the bushes behind them the way flames deepened darkness. He listened for the sound of coyotes, but they weren’t out yet. Far away a car horn bleated. As David stared through the windowpane he began to think someone was out there, watching him. He couldn’t fix on any one point. But somewhere, in the thick blackness of the junipers or behind the tree, an intelligence sat outside looking in as surely as David was inside looking out. He peered another minute into the stillness, then went downstairs to the tune of a 7-Up commercial tinkling from the living room. He patrolled the kitchen and the dining room, checking to make sure the windows were locked. He checked the front door too. The living room was trickier. He had to check the window there without arousing suspicion.

  “What’s into you tonight?” Mom asked when he came and stood behind the sofa. “You haven’t stayed in one place more than two minutes all evening.”

  Sometimes it annoyed him that she kept such close track of his doings. She made him smaller by noticing him all the time. The irritation caught in his throat like a lump of dough. “I’m okay,” he told her.

  “There’s something in the air tonight,” Janet said. She was sitting compactly, with her knees hunched up to her chin. “I feel it too. Maybe it’s the full moon.”

  “The moon was full two weeks ago,” Mom said. “There can’t be more than a sliver tonight.”

  David went to the living-room window and, after a moment’s hesitation, parted the drapes. There was no leering face pressed to the glass.