I watched Bethany fold into another woman and disappear. Chris was just staring at me. I shrugged.
“You rode from Rhode Island?”
“Yes.”
And I told her. In the middle of my story, I excused myself to go to the men’s room, but Chris just walked with me and waited by the truck. It didn’t make me uncomfortable at all that this lovely and, as I say, apple-breasted young woman linked her arm in mine and clung to me and my words. She cried easily. The Red Bridge. Carl. Bill. Norma. I liked that these things could bring up tears in her. In people. I felt kind of right. I didn’t feel as if I had to apologize. I think the only part of my story she didn’t believe was the 279-pound part. The big part. That it was me and my gasp for air and smoke and booze. I miss nothing, but I miss it all. I told her that, too. It was a lot like listening to my heart at poolside. It was good, and it made me refreshed.
When we got back to the cot, her friends Joanie and Rosie were there, already in their flannel longjohns. They were so pretty and regular in a way that I suppose I never thought girls could be. Of course, they weren’t girls. They were women with a business and everything. Partners, really. But I felt, somehow, easy with them. We all talked for a while. Not about me, because I think that Chris liked the idea that I shared that with just her, like a secret, even though it wasn’t a secret. After a while I lay on my cot and read more Suzanne. Kate was right. I think I was enjoying this book the most.
When the overhead lights went out, some flashlights popped on here and there. I spread out my bag and got in. It was warm inside the tennis club. I slipped off my sweatpants and sweatshirt and slept in my undies. Man, I was pooped. The second I curled up, I was out cold.
I’m not sure how much longer I slept or what exactly woke me, but when I opened my eyes into the darkness, I felt her body against me. She was sleeping, so she must have been there for a while. I reached my arms over slowly, and my fingers realized she was naked. Her face was between my chin and my chest. I could feel her apples pressing against my T-shirt, expanding with each breath. She threw her top leg around me and raised her head up to my eyes.
“Hi,” she whispered, “I just unzipped you and climbed in.”
When she kissed me, I felt my heart race out of its area and into my lips. She licked my cheek, my nose. She pushed away for a fuller look at my astonishment, and her breasts, her beautiful orchard (I really felt that), popped away from my chest and pointed up at me. I made no bones about it. I liked them. I looked at them. After a moment I touched them. She closed her eyes and smiled. The back of her hand brushed the front of my shorts, and I guess my excitement began to rise.
“I just climbed in with you,” she whispered. “I don’t want to bother you.”
“You . . .bother . . .no bother . . .no . . .uhh . . .”
“I just . . .”
She pushed me over and was on top of me. A bag of man and woman. A hard and a soft bag. She moved against me. Her smoothness. Her amazing body that couldn’t climb the mountain, on me. She pulled at my T-shirt. We took it off. Me and this young and beautiful woman, taking off my T-shirt. I remembered then that we were in cot city. Some flashlights still glinted on and off in the distance. My hands ran down the muscles of her back and followed her spine up to her shoulders once more. One of her friends rolled in her sleep, and I turned, startled, to her cot. Bethany lay still, her curls falling sideways on the pillow. Her twelve-year-old eyes wide and flat. I turned away, but when I looked again, she still watched me. A sad watch. A sad little girl. I put my hands down to my sides.
“Smithson?” Chris whispered. “What?”
I looked from my fragile sister to Chris above me in a way that would never leave me and be in my thoughts maybe always. Her mouth a bit open. Her eyes a lot green. Her black hair pressed down over the milky forehead. My God, I thought, I love the girls so much.
“What?” she asked again.
I couldn’t explain how I had lifted that heavy wheelchair. How I couldn’t look at those closed venetian blinds after the visits stopped. How the letters came every day to Smithy Ide in many pieces. Letters I never read.
“It’s not you,” I said finally. “You’re so wonderful. You’re so beautiful. It’s me, really. It’s me, Chris, that’s all.”
She looked at my eyes and then looked away. A tiny sigh, and when she turned back, she had a smile.
“I don’t usually do this, you know.”
“I know.”
“I don’t, really.”
“I know you don’t.”
She rolled off me and sat on the side of my cot, facing away. Her hair still to one side. Her naked body catching goose bumps from the stale tennis-court air. I wanted to touch her, let my hand rest on her, anywhere on her, but I knew that wasn’t possible. She stood and walked softly to her cot. I should have closed my eyes, I think, but I would keep this picture of beautiful Chris. She pulled on her green plaid nightshirt and then her white athletic socks. She got into her sleeping bag and rolled onto her side. Dim fluorescent night lights on either side of the tennis club lit us like the moon.
“Good night,” I said finally. Tortured. Stupid.
She pulled the bag up to her ears.
58
The big day for Bethany and Jeff Greene was less than a week away. I had made the decision to forget about the “bow-wow” call. After all, Dr. Glass had assured me that Bethany was perfectly harmless, and, in truth, her behavior, in this particularly tense time in a girl’s life, was the picture of calm. Now, Mom, on the other hand, was the one causing problems. Once she got it into her head that Bethany should have a wedding train, nothing could stop her from pushing the idea. Bethany held firm to her hopes of “simplicity.” She said, “Mom, I don’t want a wedding train. I really don’t.” And Mom would say, “Please.” And “Please” and “Oh, please,” until, finally and maturely, Bethany gave in. It was this kind of compromise that helped me put Wiggy in perspective for a while.
Jeff’s best man, Dave Stone, his college roommate, came down from Nashua, New Hampshire, to help him with the stuff a guy needs help with when he’s getting married. Jeff’s dad was dead, and his mom had become a more or less permanent resident at Bradley Hospital. Dave also had come down to plan and execute the all-important bachelor party. I didn’t like Dave. He didn’t like me either, but we’d smile and pretend we did for everybody’s sake. But now I can say that Dave Stone had an attitude that he was much smarter and cooler than you. When he said something, I always had the feeling that you were supposed to consider his words and nod and agree. What really pissed me was how wonderful he felt the Baltimore Orioles were. I mean, it’s true they had a couple of great players, but he was from New Hampshire. What about the Red Sox?
Dave scheduled the bachelor party at the F.E.I. Club in Pawtucket. It was a striptease place where bad old comedians introduced old dancers who would dance and take their clothes off all the way down to a kind of shiny bikini. I had been to strip places when I was in the army where the dancers would have actual sex with themselves on the stage. The F.E.I. Club was tame stuff, I guess. I was glad, because of course my pop was going to go, and I didn’t think Dave was the kind of guy to take the older men into consideration. Anyway, we all met up there, and we brought silly gifts. They put us at two tables down at the end of an elevated runway bar. The place smelled of old beer and a sour mop. Dave ordered pitchers of beer. There were fourteen of us. Dave and Jeff’s pals, and me, my pop and the Count. Pop and Count had on their Sunday suits. I had on a sports jacket that wouldn’t button.
“I hope everybody’s heart is good, because these girls are hot!” yelled Dave over the loud three-piece orchestra.
“I could go any second!” yelled Count.
“What?” yelled Dave.
“My ticker’s shot. I could go like that.” Count snapped his fingers. My pop shook his head and chuckled.
“You’ll outlive me, Count.”
“Only if you get hit by a truck,” Count
guffawed.
The beer arrived, served by dancers from a later show, and the drumbeat pounded a slow, dirty introduction to Brigitte Bardoni, the opening salvo of entertainment. A checkered-suited man with a bad toupee did the honors.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Won’t you meet and greet a young lady who has brought modern dance to a new high. All the way from Florence, Italy, the one, the only, Miss Brigitte Bardoni.” It’s been a while, but I’m guessing Brigitte was somewhere in her forties. She wore a sparkly white fancy dress that cut over her large chest at the nipples and flowed bumpily to the ground. The high heels made it difficult for much modern dancing, but that was okay, because she seemed too drunk to even balance on them. She had her blond-white hair piled high onto her head, and she wore a benign, knowing snarl, which she shared with everyone. After a tentative strut from one end of the runway to the other, she did a little kick and nimbly tore off one of her long black gloves. She twirled it at the faces of the men barside and snarled again. Then the other glove. With a flourish she tossed them into a safe pile behind the bar.
My pop looked around the room, pretending to be interested in anything except Miss Bardoni, who by now had unzipped the side of her gown and was attempting to shimmy it to the ground. I know for sure that Pop was embarrassed because he was there with his son. I respected that. I was embarrassed also.
Miss Bardoni’s dress bunched up at her knees. Apparently some of the sparkles had gotten tangled up in her stockings.
She struggled to undo them for a second, then lost her balance and crashed to the floor. “Fuck!” she said, to the heavy backbeat of the drum. Brigitte Bardoni rolled over into a sitting position and sensually detached the dress. She stood triumphantly and snarled at the room in general. She resumed her strut. Our tables at the south end of the runway watched in a relative silence. Maybe the whole table had picked up on Pop’s discomfort, I’m not sure. She pulled her slip over her head and twirled that also. Brigitte Bardoni was now down to the essence of the F.E.I. strip: a too-small, sky blue, shiny bikini set of underwear with black stockings attached by a garter belt. It had been a struggle for her, but she had taken her clothes off.
“Take it off, baby!” Count yelled.
Everybody looked at my uncle with a kind of shock and disbelief.
“Take it all off!” he yelled again. Count drained his beer and poured another.
“Va-va-voom,” he said, shaking his hand at Miss Bardoni as if she were something that had just burned his fingers.
“Settle down, old-timer,” Dave said in that squirrelly voice I still remember. “They’ll throw us out.”
“This is neat,” said Jeff. What a nice person he was. That was his way of telling his best man to leave Count alone. Count ignored them both. Brigitte Bardoni was strutting down to the south end.
“Va-va-voom,” he said again at each heavy stride.
This time the dancer did not snarl. Her face softened, and her eyes became sort of kind. She had bluish liner all around her eyes. In a snarl, it made them seem dangerous, but without the snarl they became like Mrs. Harry’s eyes, who was my kindergarten teacher and was probably the kindest person I had ever met. Anyway, Brigitte’s snarl left, and she focused in on the supportive Count. She stopped in front of him and, elevated there on the runway, pushed her pelvis out and around to the annoying beat.
“Yeah!” yelled Count.
“Hey,” countered Dave.
“Baby, you’re the greatest!” Count yelled, holding up his beer to Miss Bardoni in a toast. Dave was coming unhinged. He had delivered a direct command to my Uncle Count, and he was being ignored.
“That’s enough, goddamn it,” Dave said, standing up.
My pop stood up, too, and got between the asshole and my uncle, who saw only Brigitte and heard only the downbeat.
“Ahhhooooooooh!” he howled in his best wolf call.
“You better knock it off!” screamed Dave.
Now, if we had all drawn guns and begun shooting each other, the other patrons would continue to sip their beverages and Miss Bardoni would finish her number. This essential fact of the F.E.I. was lost on Dave. He had planned the event but somehow had skewed the reality of honest down-and-dirty, with fraternity-house down-and-dirty. Dave was the complete jerk. No college diploma could change that.
“He’s not bothering anyone,” said Pop kindly.
“Sit down, Dave,” said Jeff. “This is neat.”
“Oh, baby! You know what I like!” yelled Count.
“Stop shouting,” Dave commanded.
But Count was not under orders, and Brigitte Bardoni had made the decision to cross the Pawtucket fire code. In an instant she had stripped off the top of her underwear, exposing her impossible, unmanageable breasts. She bent at the waist and happily held them out to Count.
“Hubba, hubba, hubba!” yelled my uncle, who by now was clapping like a seal.
They were water balloons about to burst. They were liquid gold, and I stared with an open mouth.
“I’m disgusted!” cried Dave. “Look at him! Look at him clapping!”
“Beautiful, baby, beautiful!” yelled Count squeezing his fingers into thin air.
“Ugh!” cried Dave.
“This is neat,” said Jeff, his face fire-engine red under the heavy balls of flesh hanging inches above his head. “This is really, really neat.”
“You’re not supposed to have your breasts exposed!” Dave screamed at Brigitte. She reached down and pulled the front of her panties a touch, so that a great tuft of pubic hair became exposed.
“She’s not supposed to do that!” Dave cried, pleading to Jeff.
“Va-va-va-voom!” Count countered.
“Maybe you boys ought to take off. I’ll stay here with Count,” Pop coolly said.
“But then the bachelor party would be ruined!” Dave cried, by now hysterical. Everywhere he looked, the sky was blocked by breasts.
“No, really. Let’s go over to my place. Watch the Celtics,” Jeff said.
Jeff stood up and joined the reluctant Dave. His loyal celebrants also rose, although I knew that most of them would rather stand in the rain than go with Dave. Jeff shook hands with Pop, and they filed past us and out the door.
“They are the best!” Count yelled, pointing to Brigitte’s peaks. “They are the very best!”
Pop turned to me and said, “Smithy, you don’t have to stay with us.”
“I want to.”
“I figured.”
Count had started accentuating the drummer’s downbeat on the wooden tabletop. Pop looked at him for a long moment. Like me, he wore the concerns of his life in deep, sad, heavy eyes that could have been the Narragansett Bay on a hot August night.
“Pop,” I called from across the table.
He turned and saw me and smiled.
“Bethany will sure be a beautiful bride, huh?”
Pop kept smiling and nodded, but I knew him as a man who had been places and seen things and who knew things for, I guess, what they were.
And the drum ended, and the saxophone, too. Brigitte Bardoni proudly strutted her wondrous chest off the ramp. The bass drum began again, and our host introduced Alberta Einstein, the “dean of the scientific strip.”
59
I lay there awake. The harder I concentrated on sleeping, the more impossible it became. Chris’s smell lingered around me, and Bethany’s face, now near the Seswan lunch table, glimmered under the fluorescent lights. About one-thirty I listened to my heart, moved it around in a sort of energy prayer, and slipped out of my sleeping bag. I packed my saddlebags tightly and quietly, stopping each time Chris or Rosie or Joanie stirred. I put the bags onto my bike, then used the men’s room, and finally, around two-thirty, I called Norma. “It’s two-thirty here, so it must be five-thirty there,” I said when she picked me up on the second ring.
“Smithy,” she said quietly, “wait a sec.”
I waited for a minute or more. The phone bank was under a light at the co
rner of the tennis club. There was a frost on the ground. I had on my sweats and longjohn top, but I still jogged in place to stay warm.
“Okay,” she said. “I had to splash water on my face.”
“Sorry.”
“Where?”
“Williams, Arizona.”
“Wow!”
“I’ve been in a bicycle-club ride, but now I have to leave.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. I think it’s best, though. Are you all right?”
“Well, I guess. I’m tired a lot with this boat-design drafting. I mean, I have to keep all my other accounts going and not short-change them, but the Blount boat thing is the biggest job I’ve ever had. Also . . . I don’t know. . . .”
“What?”
“Bea is sick again. She had a mastectomy about four years ago, and now she’s sick again. I took her to the doctor, and he thinks she has to go into the hospital for more tests, but she’s just so stubborn.”
I’m on a bike, I thought to myself. I’m riding to God knows where, and nobody knows why, and Norma lives in real time and real things. I felt shamed and dark. I felt a shadow of a person. I let the phone pause fill it all up.
Finally Norma said, “Smithy?”
“I’m here.”
“What?”
“Norma, I’m sorry. You got real things going on. Bea’s sick. You’re tired. I ought to be helping you, not calling you to help me.”
“You wouldn’t say that to me if I wasn’t a damn cripple. Would you?”
The wind rushed out of me as surely as if I’d been punched in the chest. “Norma . . .”
“If I were a person who felt sorry for myself, I’d say that all the time. ‘Poor me. Poor cripple.’ It’s ugly, isn’t it? It’s hateful. That’s why I don’t say it, and that’s why I don’t feel it. Okay, I’m tired. Okay, Bea’s sick. That’s life, Smithy, we can’t get away from that. We have to go on and be strong, and the best way to be strong is to rely on people and be brave enough to trust them.”