A Fool's Alphabet

  Laura said, ‘That’s what people do here. They don’t eat much for lunch, though.’ She fought to find the gear as they passed the snow-covered bandstand in the park.

  ‘Why don’t you pull in and let me drive?’

  ‘Do you have a driver’s licence?’

  ‘Sure. It’s a British one, but it’s all right. At least I learned on a car with gears.’

  They changed sides, but before he restarted the car, he put both hands on the steering wheel. ‘Laura, I’ve got to tell you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m crazy about you. You know that, don’t you? Right from the start I have been. The first day I walked into the classroom and saw you I thought you were the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen. You did know that, didn’t you?’

  Laura looked confused.

  ‘You don’t have to pretend with me. And you don’t have to worry. I won’t embarrass you. Don’t look so crestfallen. It can’t be the first time a boy has fallen in love with you.’

  Laura’s confusion of modesty and embarrassment resolved itself in indignant laughter. ‘No. Of course it isn’t. Of course it isn’t.’

  ‘Well then.’ He started the car. He found that by being a little aggressive he could in some way stay on top of the conversation. He located the gear and let the clutch in violently, so that the car shot forward. ‘But you needn’t worry. I won’t get heavy about it. I’ll never mention it again. I just wanted you to know.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘Right-hand side of the road.’

  ‘Good. Right-hand side. No problem.’

  They drove together most days, the station wagon rattling through covered wooden bridges and up snowy roads beside which at regular intervals was the bleak announcement: ‘Frost Heaves’. Laura did not like to be shut in the house for too long, and showing Pietro around gave her an excuse to be out. She enjoyed his pleasure when he saw things that were familiar to her, like a shop in some remote village that sold Guns, Clocks and Music Boxes. ‘Hey son, you got a licence for that music box?’ she muttered as Pietro pointed out the sign.

  On Christmas morning they gave each other presents, then went to the Congregational church in Lyndonville. Afterwards Pietro was told to go for a walk with Sally, Laura’s sister, as their help was not required in preparing dinner. Sally talked enthusiastically about the college she would be going to the following year. The air was brilliant and alive as they walked up into the hills. It seemed strange that this so lavishly favoured countryside had been known in the West for so short a time. Yet it was also well suited to its present inhabitants: it seemed to need its telegraph poles, its railway lines and its discreet automobiles hidden by the side of the houses. However much the people lived from the land and allowed the wilderness to lower over them, its beauty profited from the closeness of modern life.

  On their return Pietro went to fetch some logs for the fire. He had to walk across a snow-covered yard to a white door indicated by Laura’s father. The floor was plain concrete, illuminated by an unshaded bulb. All round the walls the logs were neatly stacked. Each armful was dry and fragrant. Pietro noticed two long radiators on the wall. A centrally heated wood store, he thought; not much was left to chance. He returned to the main house through the double back doors. The inner glass door gave a pneumatic hiss as it sealed the interior.

  Mr Heasman offered them drinks – beer or Bloody Mary or punch. Pietro, who wanted a Bloody Mary, asked for punch, in the way that he always asked for coffee mousse at dinner because everyone preferred orange. He didn’t realise when he accepted a second glass that they wouldn’t have lunch until four o’clock. By the time they sat down to a milky fish soup, in which a wave of crustaceans lapped against the brim, he was irrepressible. Mr Heasman carved two geese while his wife fussed over the different kinds of stuffing and the gravy, which was Laura’s contribution. Everyone therefore pretended not to want any, though no one dared tease the large woman with the bun when she piled their plates with vegetables.

  Laura had not shown much emotion when she left the school. She hugged Pietro, and Harry, and, unfortunately, Dave Snyder, and she cried a little as they all separated on the last day, but she didn’t swear devotion and give out signed photographs as Gloria Katz did. She had submitted herself to the final exams in her own way. Unrevised and garrulous, she was rebuked by the invigilator for talking to Gloria, but on the strength of her results she was offered a place at Harvard, her father’s old university. His spell in London had ended and he was returning to New York; he had been anxious for Laura to find a place at an American college, and for once she had done what he told her.

  Laura wrote to Pietro telling him she was having a good time at Harvard. He scanned the letters for any hints about men. It was hard to tell. There were phrases like ‘a few of us went to a movie’, or ‘I’m going to Boston with a couple of guys’, but no names and no way of telling what they were like. He worried that she was rushing ahead. Things seemed to happen so easily for her. University wouldn’t be dull or disappointing or hard work; it would be a breeze and she would at once take to her fellow students. By the time he next saw her she would have outgrown him again, just when he had at last begun to catch up.

  She sent Christmas cards and postcards (‘We’re on vacation in Mexico. The food is disgusting’) and always answered his long and elaborate letters, in which he tried to make his own life, a science course in London, sound romantic, as he teased out the laws of the universe. ‘When are you going to come and visit me?’ Laura wrote at the end of most of her letters. One day. When I’ve saved up the money, Pietro thought. ‘As soon as I can afford it,’ he wrote back. ‘But aren’t you coming to London some time?’ Pietro made friends with his contemporaries, but felt his mind was always in America.

  Laura stayed another year at Harvard and Pietro finally saved the money he needed for the flight. ‘Come for Christmas,’ she at once replied, when he told her he was free. ‘Come and stay with my family in Lyndonville.’

  He stayed on until the New Year and returned to London in January. London. What was the problem with it? For once, the answer was obvious. After all, Harry Freeman was enjoying it enough. He had been to New York, Chicago, Rome and Tokyo, but he reckoned London was the best of all. He had a job as a reporter on a radio station. He had borrowed a large sum of money and bought himself a flat in Bayswater; he had become a hero of the discothèques and late-night bars. The last trace of blazerdom had left him.

  In April Pietro had a letter from Laura asking him if he would like to go over again and stay for a couple of weeks in the summer. She would have graduated by then and would be spending some time in Vermont. Pietro pored over her letter like a biblical exegete at work on a hermetic text. What were the implications of her asking him? Was the relaxed fluency of her prose (no wonder she had got all those exam passes) indicative of a new beginning in her feelings? Was the invitation a statement of intent, or just an invitation? And how much did she mean by ‘lots of love’?

  He worked nights in a restaurant to save up enough money for the air fare. This time he flew from New York to Lebanon, the nearest airport, just over the border in New Hampshire, and this time Laura was there to meet him.

  Vermont in summer was as well provided as Vermont at Christmas. When it had been cold, the central heating had pumped thermal currents through the rooms; now it was hot, the fridge produced ice by the sack. If there was a big game on, they didn’t make you wait until the next day to see it on television. They didn’t seem ashamed of gratifying their desires. Pietro would have felt guilty if he could have gone into a shop in London and found everything he wanted.

  Laura took all this for granted, but she wasn’t spoiled. She was a model daughter in some ways: Pietro saw her father look at her proudly and listened to him tell his friends how Laura was going to choose between a number of jobs she’d been offered. But she was also untamed and hard to understand. Pietro hated to think what her father would have said if he could
have heard some of the stories not granted a certificate of parental suitability.

  One night they sat up late talking seriously in her room, drinking beer. She told him that she wasn’t seeing Al at all any more. Pietro nodded calmly and asked why not.

  ‘He got kind of possessive. Even after we’d stopped going out together.’ She grimaced, then laughed. ‘He got to be a real pain. I can’t think what I saw in him in the first place.’

  She rolled back on the bed and laughed as if a burden had been taken off her. Pietro, who had prepared himself to be earnest and sympathetic about Al was wrong-footed by Laura’s change of mood. He laughed gamely, but not too much, for fear of tempting providence.

  It grew very hot the following week.

  ‘This is kind of unusual,’ said Jack, the yard man, who was a weather expert. He drove a heavy pick-up truck which had a variety of guns stuffed down by the handbrake, like clubs in a disorganised golf bag. You couldn’t be sure, as Pietro remarked, whether he was going to change gear or blow the roof off. He spent much of the winter digging people’s cars out of snowdrifts. In the summer he had more time for hunting.

  ‘It’s as hot as the Mediterranean,’ said Pietro.

  Jack looked at him suspiciously. ‘I ain’t been there,’ he said. ‘I’m going to Maine in the fall. Apart from that, I don’t leave the state.’

  ‘Have you never been abroad?’

  ‘Yeah. I went once. Never again.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘Vietnam. Never again. Boy, was that place scary.’

  ‘But you could try somewhere else, like –’

  ‘Picked you up and put you down out of some goddamn plane. Didn’t know where the hell you were.’

  ‘But maybe somewhere in Europe . . .’

  ‘No, sir, that was enough for me.’ Jack looked up at the sky. ‘Reckon this weather’s come all the way up from Virginia.’

  They arranged to go swimming in a nearby lake with two friends of Laura’s. There was a man called Steve who had a moustache that came out of his nostrils and covered both his lips, and a waif-like girl of about nineteen called Jesse, with tousled hair and old, patched jeans cut off at the thigh. She said she knew of a good spot where no one ever disturbed you. Maybe they could catch some fish for lunch and build a fire. No day in Vermont, it seemed, was complete without taking life.

  They found a clearing in the forest with a still, cold lake in the middle of it. Someone had left a rowing boat pulled up by the water’s edge near a wooden hut. After some discussion about the propriety of borrowing the boat without the owner’s permission, Steve and Laura went fishing in it while Pietro and Jesse, who were supposed to build a fire, drank some beer and sunbathed in a patch of chequered light.

  ‘Are you in love with Laura or what?’ said Jesse conversationally.

  Pietro looked up from his book. Jesse had taken off her shirt and was wearing only her cut-off jeans. She had small, pointed breasts with quite large, brownish nipples, around each of which were half a dozen brown hairs.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose I am.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jesse.

  ‘What about you and Steve?’ said Pietro.

  ‘Steve? No, Steve’s just a friend. Wanna cigarette?’

  Eventually they decided to gather the wood for the fire. Even if the fishing trip was unsuccessful there was plenty of food in the car. Pietro had watched Mrs Heasman chopping Spanish onions and putting them with vast, orange yolks of egg and minced steak for hamburgers. Steve and Laura returned with one small trout and a long story from Laura about how it had been caught. Steve nodded a few times. He didn’t talk much. While Laura chattered over lunch, he nodded some more and wiped a few bits of food from his moustache. At one stage he said, ‘I really love pawsta.’ ‘What?’ said Pietro. ‘Pawsta. You know, fettucine, linguine.’ ‘Oh, I see. Yes.’ ‘Pietro’s half Italian,’ said Laura. ‘Right,’ said Steve.

  Laura was wearing a white cotton shirt and scarlet earrings. Her hair lay coiled on her shoulders where the shirt was loose at the top. She looked up at Pietro and smiled over half a hamburger she had burned on the fire. He smiled back, opened another beer, and settled back on the pine-needle floor against the bole of a tree.

  The atmosphere closed in and thick clouds formed above the forest. They finished the beer, put out the fire, and lay down to sleep for a while. Jesse smoked a cigarette and read her book. She hadn’t put her shirt on again.

  Pietro was awoken by the sound of thunder, rolling in from behind the mountains. He sat up and looked over to where Laura was lying. She stretched her arms in the air and yawned. Fat drops of rain began to pierce the canopy of trees.

  ‘Shit,’ said Steve.

  Jesse stood up and stubbed out her cigarette beneath her bare heel. ‘I’m going for a swim,’ she said, and peeled down her denim shorts. She stood naked in front of the others, like a witch doctor or a guardian spirit. She had bony hips and a big tuft of brown pubic hair. ‘Come on, you guys,’ she called out and started laughing. ‘Shit,’ said Steve, ‘I’m going back to the car.’

  Laura Heasman stood up, and with her back to Pietro and Steve, undid the waistband of her skirt. She dropped it to her ankles, revealing a pair of white underpants. Then she pulled off her shirt and unhooked her bra. Finally she peeled the white pants slowly down her legs, kicked them away with her foot and ran after Jesse into the water. Pietro’s head was blowing fuses, as though the pathways in his brain had been incorrectly wired and now the rain was getting in. He began to pull and tear at his clothes, his hands snagging on the buttons and the zips. At last he was down to his underpants. He paused for a moment, then whipped them off and sprinted for the lake, not feeling the pine needles, sticks and small stones that scored the soles of his feet.

  The rain pelted on to the surface of the lake so it looked like a grey milkshake. Jesse, who swam like an eel, wriggled and dived some way ahead. Laura was standing waist-high in the water shouting to her and laughing. Pietro put down his head and drove forward in a big Australian crawl. He turned round and looked back towards the shore. There was no sign of Steve.

  Laura laughed and splashed water at him. They both swam on to where Jesse was plunging up and down and banging her chest like a Red Indian. Laura dived and caught her legs under the water. They both disappeared. Pietro saw two white backsides periodically appear above the water, then vanish again, until both girls emerged spluttering. ‘Let’s get him,’ said Jesse, and Pietro felt her slippery body winding round his legs while Laura heaved herself on to his shoulders from behind. The thunder rumbled above them as though someone were shifting trunks in a giant lumber room. Jesse called out and danced in the water.

  When they were exhausted, Laura headed for the shore. Pietro and Jesse swam along behind. It was still raining hard as they emerged on to the muddy land. Laura shook her head like a dog, and Pietro smoothed back his hair with both hands. ‘OK,’ said Jesse, ‘catch me then!’ And she ran off through the woods. Laura looked after her, started for a moment, then stopped. Then she began to walk along by the side of the lake and Pietro watched the swing of her hips and legs and the white divide of her buttocks. When she reached the wooden hut she turned and called out, ‘Come in here and dry off.’ Pietro went with deliberate steps up into the cabin. Laura stood in front of him, and he was overwhelmed by the sight of this girl, whom he loved, holding out her arms to him. But he made no mistakes. He kissed her on the lips and felt them part and the hot flutter of her tongue inside his mouth. He took her head between his hands and stroked the enflamed golden hair he had gazed at for so long. It was wet and flat against her head, but it felt beautiful under his square hands. He dropped to his knees so he could touch the legs that had tormented him, all the way from the ankle to the hip, stroking and holding them both. The perfection of their shape was as he had known it would be. Then he stood up and held her tightly in his arms. She squeezed him in return, pulled back her head and smiled at him, allowing the full force
of her eyes to beam into his narrowed, concentrating gaze. Still he kept his head. Her hand trailed down his stomach and she seemed to give a small sigh of pleasure as she tugged at him. He put his hand on hers and she knelt on the floor of the hut, which was made from rough wooden boards. Then she lay back on the floor, circled his neck with her hands and pulled him on to her. When he entered her he felt the last icy drops of lake water give way to something scalding hot and smooth. Gradually, fearful of splinters, he manœuvred both their bodies into place and closed his eyes.

  To make love to an American girl was to occupy some of that endless country for himself. He inhaled the smell of her body, and from somewhere unknown the words Pasadena Rose Parade formed in his mind.

  He had the feeling he had sometimes had before when making love, though never as strongly as this, that he was in the right place; that this was the one spot on the turning globe that he was supposed to be. Although the nerve-endings of his body were crackling with delight, he felt a calmer sense of his proper location. Once, as he tried to contain the rising pleasure, he opened his eyes and found a wooden knot in the floor gazing back at him from an inch or so away. Laura squirmed beneath him and called him some name, some soft, endearing name that, in his passion for her, he didn’t register. He kissed her upturned face in which the brown eyes were closed as if in concentration, the wet lashes flat against her cheeks, and thanked whatever providence or deity had, against all the odds, allowed him this moment.

  Steve looked at them suspiciously when they sauntered back to the car where he had been listening to the radio while it rained. When Jesse returned and got dressed she looked at Pietro with big, interrogative eyebrows.

  For the next two weeks Pietro lived in a fever of desire. When he and Laura went for walks they could hardly wait until they were out of sight of the house before they would be kissing and fumbling at each other. As soon as Mrs Heasman left the house they were in each other’s arms, in her bedroom, in his bedroom, on the veranda and once on a kitchen chair when they heard the sound of the car unexpectedly returning.