Cold Spring Harbor (5 page)

Evan found a bargain in a much-used, nine-year-old car a few days later; then he telephoned Rachel Drake for a carefully planned, oddly breathless little talk, and a day or two after that he was back at her door.

“Oh, hello,” she said. “Come on in.”

There was the reek of catshit again, and the grubby upholstery, and the torrentially talking mother—“Well, how nice to
see
you again, Evan; is your father well?”—and the frail, moody boy. But Rachel looked lovely in a fresh blue dress that she might have bought especially for this evening. Evan knew everything would be okay in a minute, if he could only get her out of here fast, and it was.

“… Well, you certainly are a good driver,” she told him far uptown as he headed for the George Washington
Bridge. “You’re never nervous, are you. There’s such—authority in everything you do. Everything you do with the car, I mean.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve always liked to drive,” he said.

He was planning to take her to a place he knew along the Palisades where you could walk out into a little field and have a spectacular view of Manhattan in the colors of the setting sun. Then they’d go to a certain restaurant he thought he’d be able to afford, on the outskirts of Teaneck, and what happened after that would depend on how well they were getting along.

With the car parked behind them at the roadside, he led her through tall grass and laurel shrubs until they came to a flat rock of the right height and size for sitting, and he laid down his folded jacket to protect the seat of her dress.

“Oh,” she said when they were settled there together. “Oh, that’s really something, isn’t it.”

“Well, I’ve always thought so, yes.”

It was something, all right. The unimaginable skyline of New York, seen from this cliff across the Hudson, was more than enough to take your breath away. It let you know at once that all those yellow- and orange- and red-struck towers, with their numberless blazing windows, were there for better reasons than commerce; they were there for you, as if you’d wished them into being, and their higher purpose was to enhance your aspirations and accommodate your dreams.

Evan knew he could probably put his arm around her and kiss her now, but thought it might be better to wait. Instead he took hold of one pale, delicate hand on the rock, as gently as if it were a bird, and the funny thing was she pretended not to notice. Her dead-serious face remained in profile to him, fixed on the extravagant sight across the river, though a heavy blush had come into her neck and cheek. Shyness could be nice in a girl, but this one might
have a tendency to take it a little too far. If he were to make a lunge and kiss her now, would she pretend not to notice that either? Well, damn; she probably would. And what if he were to run his hand up the inside of her leg?

“You’re very shy, aren’t you,” he said.

“Yes, I am.”

But at least she looked at him when she said that; she seemed to be examining his face as though she couldn’t yet believe the perfection of it. Then it occurred to him that “Yes, I am” was a better and braver answer than if she’d said “No, I’m not,” or “Depends what you mean by shy,” so he kissed her quickly and lightly on the mouth.

“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet, and he reached down to help her up. “Let’s go.”

It wasn’t only Evan Shepard’s face that Rachel found hard to believe; it was everything else about him. The broad-shouldered, meaty, graceful way he moved and turned was an unconscious performance that she thought she would never tire of watching. Some twenty-three-year-olds retained a boyish quality in their stance and bearing, and she guessed that could be attractive too, in its own style, but Evan always looked like a man.

And he knew so much! His unfailing poise, his easy flow of talk and his flawless handling of the car had only been overtures, and so had the neat surprise of his stolen kiss. She kept thinking about that kiss as he guided her down a suburban sidewalk and into what turned out to be an extremely nice, quiet restaurant: no other boy or man she’d met could have brought off a charming little kiss like that. If he’d held it a moment longer they might both have been too embarrassed for words, but he’d known just how to dart in, get it, and pull back again with the right kind of smile. And the best part was that now there would be no shyness at all when the time came, later tonight, for the real kissing to begin.

Seated across from him in this well-appointed place and waiting for further enchanting things about him to unfold, Rachel ordered a dry martini for the third time in her life. Evan’s voice took on just the right blend of courtesy and command in addressing the waiter—that in itself was a fairly enchanting thing—then sometime later, over a dinner that proved remarkable for conversational ease on both sides of the table, he told her he’d been married and divorced and had a daughter of six.

She knew it would take a little while to sort out all the implications of that startling news. The very words “divorced” and “daughter” were too resonant of maturity to be absorbed right away.

“Where is she now?” she asked.

“My daughter?”

“Well, of course, her too; but I meant your wife. Your former wife.”

“Oh, she’ll be graduating from college this year, if I’m not mistaken,” he said. “Or no, wait; I guess that was last year—but I don’t really know what she plans to do next; her parents don’t tell me much. It’s her parents who look after the little girl, you see—they bring her over to the house sometimes, or I go over there—but they don’t tell me much about Mary, and I don’t ask questions.”

So that was her name. A very young Long Island girl named Mary had fallen in love with Evan Shepard years ago, when he was very young too; there had been raptures of the flesh and of the spirit; she had given birth to his child, and now he didn’t really know what she planned to do next.

“Is she pretty?”

“Who, Mary?” he said, and looked down at his plate. “Yeah; oh, yeah, she’s very pretty.”

On the way back to New York that night, riding silent in the car beside him, Rachel began to suspect that Evan Shepard could do anything he wanted with her. Her main
constraint arose in a vision of her mother’s anxious face, and in knowing her mother would be appalled if she were to “go too far,” even with a man like this, let alone if she were ever to “go all the way” with him.

Rachel’s mother had never been a reliable source of information about sex; her unspoken view seemed to be that nice people didn’t find it necessary to discuss things like that. She could evade almost any question with her little shuddering laugh, or by saying there’d be plenty of time for Rachel to learn whatever she might need to know—and the troubling thing about this attitude was that it seemed always to come from carelessness, or laziness, rather than from any kind of principle. When Rachel was thirteen her mother had neglected even to tell her about menstruation until it was too late—until Rachel, at home alone on the day it began, had run bleeding and terrified to a stranger’s apartment, where a kindly woman explained everything (“This just means you’re a woman now, dear …”) while a kindly man went around the corner to buy her a box of Kotex and a little pink elastic belt.

Even now, at nineteen, she felt heavily handicapped by ignorance. She could count nine boys or men who had taken her out alone on “dates,” over spans of time that ranged from one or two evenings to half a year or more, and she knew there must be girls who wouldn’t consider nine too meager a total (there were even retrospective moments when nine could be made to seem a pleasing abundance); still, some of the boys on her list had revealed by the way they used their hands, if not by the very way they breathed, that they were as heavily handicapped as she was; and a few of the men had made cold, smiling, frightening remarks that spoiled everything.

Not long ago a national weekly magazine had given surprisingly prominent space to an article on sexual relations before marriage. Rachel had started to read it with quickening
interest, not even minding the author’s overuse of words like “realistic” and “sensible,” but then her mother came into the room and said “Oh, I wouldn’t bother with that if I were you, dear. They only publish those things to be—you know—to be sensational.” And when Rachel looked around for the magazine the next day, wanting to finish the article in privacy, she found that her mother had thrown it away.

Was there really any reason, then, to be cautioned by thoughts of her mother at a time like this? How could her mother be hurt by what she wouldn’t know and couldn’t find out?

Well, but even so—and there was no denying it—even so, Rachel was afraid. The palms of her hands were moist in her lap as Evan’s car brought her back into the dark and intricate swarm of Manhattan, and she was very much aware of the pump of her heart. Maybe all virgins were afraid, or maybe fear afflicted only those virgins who’d been tyrannized by their mothers; in any case, the worst part of it now was that she couldn’t imagine a respectable way of saying no to Evan Shepard. He would laugh at her; he would think her a child and a fool; he would dismiss her as if with a snap of the fingers, and she’d never see him again.

But the remarkable thing, as they sat talking softly with the car parked snug and silent at the curb near her house, was that Evan didn’t try to overwhelm her. He didn’t even make a pass at her breasts or her thighs—two moves she had learned to fend off in fairly agreeable ways but would probably have let him accomplish. All he wanted tonight, it seemed, were kisses—long, embracing, Hollywood kisses with open mouths and a sweet mingling of tongues. It was almost as if he were saying Listen, I can wait for all the rest of it, can’t you? Oh, listen, I know an awful lot more about this than you do, dear, and I know it’s going to be better if we take our time.

When he said goodnight to her in the vestibule at last, after waiting just long enough to make sure she’d found the door keys in her purse, she was faint and dizzy with hating to let him go.

“Will you call me?” she asked helplessly. “Will you call me again, Evan?”

“Well, of course I will,” he said, looking back to smile at her in a way that would soon become habitual: a mixture of pity, fond teasing, and readiness for love.

On the road home to Cold Spring Harbor that night, knowing he’d made a good impression, Evan allowed himself to fool around with the idea of getting married again—but this time of having it come about in a better way, and for better reasons.

It wasn’t until he was getting ready for bed, with a very few hours left before he’d have to be up for work, that a disconcerting question came into his mind: if he got married again, what about the mechanical engineering? Just before he fell asleep, though, it occurred to him that marriage and college wouldn’t necessarily have to rule each other out. Ways could be found; arrangements could be made. When you were twenty-three and in command of your life, you could do anything.

Throughout the summer and into the fall of that year it became increasingly clear to Evan and Rachel, and to both their families, that they might as well consider themselves engaged.

Gloria Drake supposed it was all very nice, though it would certainly have been nicer if Evan had ever brought his father to the apartment again, but she felt unprepared and ill-equipped for this kind of thing. Most of the time she couldn’t even believe her daughter was old enough to be in love; she still thought of Rachel as a little girl meticulously lining up half a dozen dolls for display on her bedroom floor, or breaking down in tears over matters as small as the denial of an ice-cream cone.

On nights when Gloria stayed up late enough to see
Rachel come dreamily home she was always unsettled by the girl’s appearance: clothes crushed and hair awry, eyes dazed and mouth swollen, with the lipstick eaten away. Love was often said to be torment, but Rachel could make it seem like punishment as well.

Another thing: Gloria had come to suspect that Evan wasn’t entirely to be trusted—wasn’t, perhaps, to be trusted at all. There was a little too much of the devil in that handsome face. Sometimes, as when he narrowed his sparkling eyes to give you a sidelong glance, he looked like the kind of boy who might seduce and abandon a girl without a moment’s remorse.

“Rachel, I think we ought to have a talk,” Gloria said one afternoon in the living room, where Rachel had set up the ironing board to press the pleats of a sexy-looking white skirt she planned to wear that night. “I don’t think Evan’s being very considerate of you in this long, aimless courtship. If you’re engaged there ought to be a wedding date, and it ought to be soon.”

“Oh, mother.” And Rachel looked up impatiently in the steam of the electric iron. “Can’t you see how unfair that would be to Evan? He has a career to think about. He’s going to be an engineer, as I’ve told you and told you, and he’s going to need—”

“All right, but how long does engineering school take?”

“Well, it’s four years, but the point is—”

“You want to be engaged for four
years?
”

“
No!
Will you please let me finish, mother? The point is, a great many college students
are
married. We may be able to get married after Evan’s first or second year, because by then I’ll probably’ve been working long enough to build up our savings. I’ll have a steady job, you see.”