Boys and Girls Together: A Novel

  “My God, why? Things weren’t bad enough?”

  “Well, I thought maybe it might cool me down. I was so angry by then and I began getting afraid I might hit her when I saw her and I didn’t want to do that. A man can’t hit a woman. It’s inexcusable, just like what she was doing was inexcusable and if I hit her I’d be as bad as she was; I’d be sullying myself and that’s the worst thing in the world. Besides, I just had to make sure I didn’t miss her when she came back.”

  “You couldn’t have waited in the living room just as well?”

  “Look, that’s not the point. I already said it was crazy, didn’t I? I don’t know exactly why I did it but I did it; that’s the point. I spent the whole night sitting outside and then going inside and getting nice and dry and then going outside again. I couldn’t stop me from doing what I did any more than I could have stopped her from doing what she did. I tried. I’d say to myself, ‘What, are you cracking up, are you crazy?’ but that didn’t stop me; once people get something in their heads you can’t stop them.

  That’s the truth. And it’s easier to think in the rain, for me anyway, and I thought about our marriage and all the little incidents that led up to her taking off from the dance, things I would have seen if I’d been sharper, but I’m not Peter Perceptive and it’s easier to ignore things when they happen, unpleasant things. We never had too great of a marriage, not from the very beginning; I guess it stunk, you might say, but that still didn’t excuse her telling me about it before she did it. If she’d just gone ahead and sacked with some guy, well, that happens, but telling me, I couldn’t excuse that, especially when it was unfair on account of I’d never touched Imogene. It was just the most unfair thing ... and you’d think she would have said something about that when she came back, at least admitted that it was unfair, but she didn’t, not a word. I thought sure she would, as soon as I heard the car door close and then footsteps on the walk. I was sitting there on the steps—I don’t know what time it was, six, maybe seven; it was dark but not so dark as it had been—but the rain was just as strong as ever, and the footsteps came closer and they stopped and I stood up and there she was, just a few feet away from me, the both of us there in the rain and she looked at me and I waited for her to say something because I sure didn’t see how it was my place to say anything but she didn’t, she just looked at me in a way that made me start to think that maybe I wasn’t there at all, maybe I was safe upstairs in bed, and she kept on looking at me that way and I hit her and she didn’t say anything and I hit her again and she stood there in the rain while I hit her and after a while I stopped and she took a few things from inside and left and we got divorced and I spent a lot of time around the house until I packed up and came here and ...” Walt looked at Tony’s body, visible through the white nylon negligee. “And ... now, when I tell you what I realized tonight out there—” he gestured at the window—“now you’ll believe it. It won’t sound so crazy when I tell you ... It’s not worth it, so why don’t you stop? You don’t have to say any more. There’s no law. Quit!

  “All right; tell me.”

  Walt turned toward the rain.

  “What did you realize?”

  Silence from Walt.

  “Tell me.”

  “I think I love you,” Walt whispered.

  Silence from Tony.

  “I love you.”

  Silence.

  “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “Of course it does, my God.”

  “A boy tells a girl he loves her, she ought to say something. Is it that you don’t believe me? I swear it’s true. I never lie. You know that.”

  “Just give me a chance to think.”

  “About what? I’m not asking if you love me. Right this second I don’t even want to know that answer. I love you; that’s all that matters now.” He sat beside her on the couch and took her in his arms. “Christ, I’m happy,” Walt said. Then he kissed her on the mouth.

  “Are you? I’m glad.” They lay back on the couch.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy before. I want to say the craziest things to you.” He kissed her again. Again. “If you hadn’t had me leave tonight, this might never have happened. Thank God you did it. Just thank God.”

  “Say something crazy to me.”

  “You might laugh and if you did I’d die, but you could care for me couldn’t you? I’m not talking about love, understand. But I’m not so awful that you couldn’t someday care?”

  “I care for you now.”

  “I’m gonna burst!” Walt cried and he ran his hand over her negligee until it rested on her breast.

  “Crazy Kirkaby,” Tony whispered.

  “You just can’t know how I’m feeling right now.”

  “Tell me. Try.”

  “All I can tell you is that when I realized it, see, what you did, having me leave, that was so great, so ... I don’t know, just so goddam decent. And then I remembered what Blake did that night and I understood all of a sudden that they were completely the opposite. And then I understood that you were completely the opposite from her. I thought she was decent, and that was important to me because I’ve got this crazy overworked sense of morality and she wasn’t but you are and I love you, I love you,” and he began lifting her negligee.

  “Can I say—”

  “No. Hush.”

  “But it’s im—”

  “Hush, I said.”

  “You have got to listen to—”

  “God, I love you. Raise your arms.”

  “Then will you listen to me?”

  “Yes.”

  Tony raised her arms.

  “I love you so.” He tossed the negligee aside.

  “Then—”

  Walt kissed her. “Mon petite Antoinette.”

  “This is very important.”

  He pulled her close. “You’re so perfect.”

  “You’re not listening.”

  “Of course I am. Oh God, I love—where you going?”

  “Over to the chair,” Tony said, and she did.

  Walt followed her. “I love that chair.”

  “Stay in it, then,” Tony said and she moved back to the sofa. “Because there’s something you’ve got to know about me and it’s this—stay, sit, that’s better—I’m not perfect, Walt. I’m twenty-five years old and I have more than my share of flaws and less than my share of pride but there’s something I’m proud of, and I don’t care if you laugh, I don’t care how Victorian it sounds. You don’t lie. Well, I don’t lie either, and I’m twenty-five and these days that’s pretty close to old-maid country, and I’m a girl with what I hope are healthy passions and God knows you’re attractive, and when I get married and I pray at night someone will have me, I won’t have much in the way of dowry. But, goddammit, on my wedding night I’m going to look at him with pride and say ‘You are the first. The first. I—am—a—virgin!’ ”

  She wasn’t, of course.

  Nor had she been since her nineteenth summer, her first as a counselor at the girls’ camp in Maine, when Clarkey White’s brother had paid a visit. Clarkey White was a gawky little twelve-year-old with eyes that had a tendency to cross whenever she got excited and more money than ninety percent of the rest of the camp put together. She also had a brother. And he had visited her the year before, on her birthday. He had stayed for three nights, dated three girls.

  None of them ever admitted to being the same again.

  So when Clarkey reported, one hot July noon, that her brother was going to pay another birthday visit, this coming weekend, some of the counselors nodded, a few perhaps flushed, but that was all. When the meal was over, however, the camp store sold out of cleansing cream in fifteen minutes, hair curlers in twenty, and by mid-afternoon there was a going black market in mascara.

  Tony, herself, remained unconvinced.

  She was, to begin with, no kid anymore (so what if he went to Princeton; wasn’t she at Sarah Lawrence?). Besides, she knew how girls were nat
urally addicted to exaggeration. Finally, among all the boys she had dated—bright boys, college boys, pretty boys, nice boys—she had yet to meet one who was her equal.

  She did not change her mind until she saw him.

  From a distance. His first morning. She dressed carefully for lunch, choosing white walking shorts and a plain white tee shirt, tucked in tight, and halfway through the meal she excused herself from her campers and walked to the table where Clarkey sat with her brother, and she stood very straight, and she smiled and said “Happy birthday, Clarkey,” and as she spoke she felt his eyes, so when he approached her after the meal she was not in the least dumfounded.

  “I take it you’re not busy tonight.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Well, you’re wrong.”

  “It’s happened before,” and he turned away.

  “I wonder something.”

  “What?”

  “Would you be so confident if you weren’t so rich?”

  “No,” he muttered. “Of course not.”

  “That’s better,” Tony said. “Now I’ll go out with you.”

  And she did. It was a perfect Maine night. They talked and had a soda in town and then they walked through the dark woods and before they sat down he spread his jacket for her. She knew he was working up to a pass; she was prepared for that. What she was not prepared for was wanting him. She accepted his kisses, fended off the rest. For a while. But it was such a splendid night and he was such a splendid creature that she finally tired of fending and thought, What the hell. She was nineteen and she’d read her Hemingway: the sooner the earth moved, the better.

  It didn’t even tremble.

  The whole thing was, in fact, so niggling that she didn’t feel guilty that she didn’t feel guilty. But that night, as she lay in bed, staring out, hands clasped behind her neck, she shook her head and said, “You weren’t a good brownie.”

  Brownies were little elves that helped the shoemaker, who was a nice man, a craftsman too, but his wife was very sick, his children very small, so he had to spend all of his time taking care of his family, cleaning and tidying, and that left little time for shoemaking, and his business got worse and worse until there was almost no money at all. But then the brownies came. Down the chimney and under the door and through the window and they worked all night, doing the cleaning and tidying, and after that was done they began stitching shoes, and so wondrous was their skill that the King heard of the shoemaker and he ordered a pair of shoes and they were so fine that he ordered more shoes, and more, and the little shoemaker became the King’s shoemaker and his wife got better and everyone lived happily, of course, ever after, and as soon as her kindergarten teacher finished telling the story Tony knew that that was what she was going to be, and that night, when she told her parents, her mother said only, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  But her father smiled.

  So she woke at four the next morning and made her bed and dressed herself and dusted her whole room before going downstairs. And even though it didn’t need it, she dusted the living room and fluffed the sofa cushions and would have scoured the entire kitchen except that everything had been done the night before. She crept back upstairs, pausing outside her mother’s bedroom, but her mother was asleep, and since brownies never woke anyone, there was nothing she could do, so she hurried down the hall to her father’s bedroom and peeked inside. He was snoring, but as she sadly trudged back to the stairs, she heard him snort and sputter, and then he was making his way heavily toward the bathroom.

  As the bathroom door closed, Tony darted into the bedroom and made his bed. She tucked it in all the way around and then she was about to start dusting but she heard him returning, so she fled into his closet and half closed the door, holding her breath, peeking out.

  He walked to his bed and he started to get in. Then he stopped. Then he squinted. He looked away. He looked back. He lifted the spread. He dropped the spread. He scratched his head, he shook his head. And then he was laughing, laughing and running toward the closet, and then he had her in his arms, tight in his arms, saying “That’s a good brownie. That’s a good brownie,” as he whirled her around and around and around.

  This happened on Marlborough Street, in Boston, in the old brick house set close by the Common and the Charles. Tony’s father, Roger Last, was a doctor, “one of the more successful young pediatricians,” or so her mother used to say. He had a baby face, sweet and fat, and although it undoubtedly looked incongruous, perched as it was on his thin body, Tony thought it perfect. She also thought her mother beautiful, perhaps too strong an adjective for dark Diana; “sultry” was probably closer to the truth. In any case, they were a popular couple, always off to concerts or parties or the tryouts of the plays. And they were a happy couple too, arguing infrequently and then only about money, or, rather, Diana’s spending of it.

  Then came the war.

  Roger was called up early. Diana worried about him, but not Tony. Not when he was stationed in Rhode Island or later, when he was sent to Europe or after that, when he was shifted to the Pacific. Tony had faith. She knew he’d come back. And he did.

  But it took five years.

  And when he reopened his office he found that the babies he had treated were no longer babies, and they had other doctors. In the almost eleven months he kept his practice going, it seemed that everyone in the entire city of Boston had other doctors.

  Roger went back in the Navy.

  Diana was not particularly pleased with the decision. She wept and threatened and swore and started taking lengthy cocktail hours because, she said, she “had to get in training to be an officer’s wife.” Roger kept her company during the cocktail time, drink for drink, but for the most part he said nothing.

  Tony didn’t see why it mattered much, one way or the other, just so he was happy. He was, after all, still a doctor, except that now, when people asked her what her father did, she got to add that he was a lieutenant commander, and they were good words to roll off your tongue, words with a rhythm all their own, “lieutenant commander.” And he looked wonderfully smart in his uniform. And being so important, it wasn’t hard for him to pull strings and get himself stationed right in Boston, at the Charlestown Navy Yard, so he actually, if anything, got to spend more time around the house. When they moved from their house, Tony was momentarily unhappy, but they moved only a few blocks, up Marlborough Street toward Massachusetts Avenue, so even if the apartment was smallish, the address was still practically the same.

  And besides, she was getting ready for high school. Being a success in eighth grade was one thing; high school had her scared. She used to lie awake nights envisioning herself—slip showing, books dropping, boys laughing, teachers scolding—moving from one humiliation to another.

  They never materialized. She was a bigger success in high school than she had ever been in eighth grade. She loved the work and her grades and the teachers. She wasn’t that pretty but she knew how to dress; she had, she told herself, flair, and the boys loved her. Her first weeks in school it was the shy boys she dated, fellow freshmen, mumbling and stoop-shouldered, acne-ridden. But before the initial grading period ended, the shoulders had straightened, the complexions cleared—she was dating juniors, seniors before the first year ended. Sophomore year she continued with seniors until a freshman math major from M.I.T. spotted her at a basketball game. He lasted almost a month before being replaced by a Harvard poet. By the time she graduated she had, according to her diary, gone out with one hundred and seventeen different boys, sixty-four of whom swore they loved her. Of these, eleven had proposed. Of these, she had kissed five, accepted none.

  Summers she worked, often at the Navy Yard, once as a counselor in Maine, her best summer, probably, marred only by the fact that she submitted nightly, for three nights, to the Princeton boy. She continued to submit to him for a while; whenever he called her down to New Jersey, she always obeyed. And there were
others too, until one night she stopped submitting, for reasons she chose not to think about.

  Sarah Lawrence did not begin well. At first, the other girls troubled her. Not because they were so bright; she was more than willing to compete on that score. But there were so many what she called “phony dilettantes.” Tony hated the phony dilettantes. They seemed so confident, so everlastingly smug. Eventually, she saw through them, and then they didn’t trouble her anymore. She began to enjoy college. For a time she thought of becoming a modern dancer. She was graceful and the movements came naturally to her, but when she saw the limitations inherent in the field she turned to musical composition; she had taken years of piano lessons and could sight-read like a professional. She could paint too and well, but well enough? She wasn’t sure. In the end she chose literature. She had a way with words, and besides, she loved to read.

  She moved to New York after graduation. Her father would have preferred her settling in Boston, and she might have, except that he and her mother were getting on so much better by that time that there really wasn’t any need. She got a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village and a secretarial job with an advertising agency. But the agency, in grateful recognition of her potential and skill, quickly advanced her to the position of assistant copywriter. The week of her promotion she moved into a new apartment in a new red-brick building off Lexington Avenue. It was far too expensive, so she took a roommate. A series of roommates, actually; one after another they got married or moved to San Francisco, but so long as they paid the rent until a replacement could be found, Tony didn’t care. Her social life was busy as ever. She went to all the hit plays, some of them twice, and the good foreign movies, and she ate in the best restaurants and bought her clothes from Jax. So everything was going well, everything was going wonderfully, except every so often, just from time to time, she burst into unaccountable tears.