Old Sins (52 page)

‘Oh,’ said Miles.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Miles. Miles Wilburn.’

‘Joanna. Joanna Tyler.’

‘It’s been real nice to meet you, Joanna.’

‘And nice to meet you too. Are you hurrying off somewhere?’

‘No. But I guess your parents might not like you to be talking to a poor orphan from Malibu.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly. My parents believe in democracy. My father is a socialist. That’s why they don’t send me to boarding school, and that’s why we’re here on the public beach and not on one of the snotty private ones, owned by half of Hollywood.’

‘So where do you go to school?’

‘Marymount High.’

It was several cuts above Samo, but it was still a public school. Miles felt bolder.

‘Will you be coming here again?’

‘I don’t know. Depends how my brother gets on pretending to surf. Oh, he’s coming now. Tigs! Tigs! How’d you get on?’

Tigs, thought Miles. What a bloody silly name. He smiled earnestly at the boy who was approaching them, carrying a brand-new surfboard awkwardly.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s not as easy as it looks.’

‘I told you it wouldn’t be,’ she said. ‘Tigs, this is Miles. Miles, Tigs, Short for Tigger, short for Thomas.’

Miles couldn’t see how Tigger could possibly be short for Thomas, but didn’t like to say so. He shook Tigs’ outstretched hand.

‘Hi.’

‘Miles can really surf, Tigs. He could give you a few tips, I expect.’

Tigs looked at Miles longingly. ‘Could you really? I’d be extremely grateful.’

He sounded a bit like the Creep, Miles thought, or maybe it was the accent. He sounded East Coast, it was different from his sister’s. Anyway, he didn’t seem too bad, and ifit was going to make him a friend of Joanna’s, he would spend all day and all night teaching Tigs to surf.

‘Sure. Any time. Want to try now?’

‘In a minute maybe. When I get my breath back.’

‘Miles lives right here,’ said Joanna. ‘In the mountains. Wouldn’t that be great, Tigs? Tigs is a year older than me,’ she went on. ‘He’s at college now. Or nearly. Next year.’

‘Where are you going?’ said Miles.

‘Colorado.’

‘Ah.’

‘Tigs loves to ski,’ said Joanna ‘and it’s not too far away from here, you see. Not like New York. So it seemed like a good idea.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to college?’ asked Tigs.

‘I guess so.’

‘Which one?’

‘Oh, I guess Santa Monica College. That’s not too far away from here either.’ He grinned at them both. ‘Shall we try the surf now?’

‘Sure.’

There were several things Miles was sure he could do better than Tigs; surfing was only one of them.

If this was love, Miles thought, it was very uncomfortable. What he had felt for Donna had been much nicer. He had been able to concentrate on other things, and had never worried about what he ought to say or wear or do when he was with her; life with Joanna was initially one big anxiety.

But it was worth it. Every time he looked at her exquisite little golden-brown face, her freckle-spangled nose, her surprised blue eyes, he discovered afresh where his heart was, for it turned right over, not just once but several times.

What was quite amazing was that she obviously liked him back. Very much. Probably she didn’t love him, Miles couldn’t in his wildest, most self-confident dreams think that, but liking him was enough for now. He could tell she liked him because she was so friendly; that very first day she had insisted on him being introduced to her parents, and they were really nice too; her father was a tall, gentle man with golden hair and a shaggy beard, and her mother was small and sparkly like Joanna, with dark curly hair and a body that certainly didn’t look like it had borne two children. They had been terribly nice to Miles and talked to him for a while, and then insisted he came and joined them for a drink in Alice’s, and when Tigs had asked him if he would maybe give him another surfing lesson soon and Miles had said ‘Yes, sure,’ they had said Tigs must bring Miles back afterwards for supper or a barbecue or something. Tigs was absolutely hopeless in the surf; he simply had no feeling for the
sca, no concept how to even catch a wave, never mind get up on the board, but Miles didn’t care; indeed, the longer Tigs took to master the whole thing – and from where Miles was sitting, it looked like a lifetime – the longer he would need to ask Miles for help. So that was all right.

He had been up to their house on Beverly Glen several times now; Joanna had been right, it hadn’t been one of the mega mansions, but it was still about five times bigger than any house Miles had ever been inside: a charming colonial style white house, with God knows how many bedrooms, every one with its own bathroom and Jacuzzi, and a sunken hall and living room with marble floorings, and what was obviously antique furniture, and a coloured maid who opened the door in a uniform, and a kitchen that looked straight out of
House and Garden
, and an enormous yard and a massive pool, and a tennis-court and three garages. Both Joanna and Tigs had cars: twin VW Convertible Rabbits.

But the Tylers, for all their money, were just the nicest people Miles thought he had ever met; friendly, chatty, unsnobby, and so welcoming and generous.

His grandmother had been very sniffy about the friendship: ‘People like that think they’re doing you a real favour,’ she said, ‘letting you into their homes. Don’t you get taken in, you’ll end up hurt and patronized.’

But Miles didn’t see he could possibly end up hurt; the Tylers just seemed to like having him there. The house was always full of people anyway, friends and neighbours. He very quickly learnt where Joanna got her friendliness and charm; it came from growing up in a household that was one long party. He found himself there more and more, and not just after he had given Tigs a surfing lesson; they invited him over every Sunday for barbecue lunch, and Joanna very often asked him to come and play tennis; he had never learnt the game, but he was naturally gifted at all sports and in weeks was playing better than a lot of the other kids who were there.

Not all of them were as nice to him as Joanna and Tigs; they clearly regarded him as an upstart, an intruder in their golden world. Miles didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything at all as long as he could be close to Joanna. And besides, he learnt fast. He had a surprisingly acute social sense, and charming
manners when he put his mind to them; he swiftly absorbed the small differences of behaviour between himself and Tigs: the way you stood up when an adult came in the room. Called older men sir (but not older women ma’am), let girls go in front of you through doorways, pushed their chairs in for them at table, used a linen napkin, and ate a little less as if your life depended on it. He learnt to keep quiet about Samo High, or at least when he could, and talked vaguely about maybe Berkeley when people asked him about college. He found Malibu was a usefully neutral address; a house in Latego Canyon was much better than downtown Santa Monica. Moreover he found, somewhat to his own discomfort, that he felt more and more at home, more comfortable with the Tylers and their friends; he did not feel an intruder, a cuckoo in the nest, but as if he was actually a fledgling from Beverly Glen and its environs himself. He began, not so much to look down on his old friends and his grandmother, but to regard them with the same kind of detached interest he had originally given the Tylers, as if they were different from him in some way.

It had all meant breaking up with Donna, and that had been perfectly awful; she had looked at him with infinite scorn in her dark eyes and said, ‘OK, Miles, if that’s how you want it, go and learn to be a rich girl’s pet. Only when she gets tired of you, don’t come running back to me, that’s all. And she will.’ And she had left him, then and there, slammed out of the car, not upset at all as far as he could see, just angry and contemptuous, which had been worse in a way.

He had been with Donna for a long time; everything he knew about girls and their bodies he had learnt from her. How soon you could kiss them, how to make them want you to do a bit more, how to stroke their breasts gently, not maul them about and put them off; what a vagina felt like, how to find the bit that got them excited, when to approach it; how to know when they had their periods and to show you knew without actually saying anything; how to reassure them that you weren’t going to try and force them to go all the way, while actually trying like mad to persuade them. He owed Donna a lot and he knew it, and he felt terrible about leaving her; but love was love, and what he felt for Joanna was utterly different and he had to be free to pursue her – and it.

Miles at seventeen was not only good-looking and attractive; he had a certain confidence about him, a kind of subtlety to his sexuality that persuaded girls he knew his way around more than he did. Girls who didn’t know him always imagined that he had been to bed, gone all the way, lots of times; he seemed so much more sophisticated than most of the sweaty, fumbling boys in his year. Donna of course put them right, because she didn’t want anyone thinking she was a tart and been to bed with him, and nor was she having people thinking anyone else had been to bed with him either. But nevertheless the initial impression was one of experience.

And this was certainly the impression Joanna got. She was totally inexperienced herself; apart from a few fumbles in cars after parties, or in the garden or maybe occasionally even a bedroom, and a lot of kissing of course, she had no idea what sex meant. She knew the theory, of course. Her mother was a liberated and civilized woman, and she had had all the right conversations with Joanna, and given her all the right books to read as well, but until she had met Miles, Joanna had never felt so much as a flicker of sexual desire. That had now, however, radically changed. She could scarcely these days think of anything else. The very first time he had kissed her, slowly, deliciously, confidently, she had felt hot, startled, charged; she had woken in the night, with all kinds of strange sensations in her body. Exploring it and them cautiously, she discovered vivid pleasures and sensations; she fell asleep dreaming of Miles, and awoke longing only to see him again, to be held by him, kissed by him.

Gradually he showed her all the things he had learnt with Donna; never pushing her, never worrying her, always reassuring her that he would never, ever do anything she didn’t want, or that would be dangerous. Through the summer, Joanna learnt a great deal about not only her own body, but Miles’, what she could do to excite him, how to get him to excite her, how to prolong the feeling until it was almost unendurable, and then how to relieve it, and the delicious explosions of pleasure they could give one another. Of course, in a way she could see it would be nice to do it properly, to end all this messiness and fumbling, and quite often she did wonder if she ought to go and see nice Doctor Schlesinger and ask her for the pill, and she
knew she would give it to her without lecturing her or anything; but she had always promised herself that she would only go to bed with a boy if she really loved him, and she wasn’t quite quite sure if she loved Miles yet. So she waited.

Tigs, she knew, mistrusted Miles; he thought he was a fortune hunter. This upset Joanna, because she found it insulting to both her and Miles; she worked very hard to make the two boys friends, but it never quite worked. Tigs despised Miles for his humble origins, and Miles despised Tigs for his incompetence at anything physical – including pulling the girls – and it was a gulf too big to bridge.

In September Tigs went off to college, and Joanna and Miles grew closer. He drove to see her not just at the weekends, but several evenings during the week; when both of them should have been studying. He would eat his meal and then get into the Mustang and drive out along the highway and drive all the long long way up Sunset, round and round the curving suburban roads, watching them get ritzier and ritzier, through Brentwood and Westwood, finally actually passing the ultimate landmark, bringing him close to Joanna, Marymount High, and thence into Paradise and the white house on Beverly Glen.

They were both now in their last year at high school; seriously distracted from their studies. They could think of very little but each other and of sex; where the one ended and the other began neither was certain. William and Jennifer Tyler watched them with a fairly benign anxiety; they liked Miles very much, they did not share Tigs’ view of him, but they were not happy with the fact that Joanna was doing virtually no work, and her grades were dropping steadily.

Finally they intervened, and told her she was not to see Miles except on Sundays until Christmas; if by then her grades had pulled up, they would review the situation. Joanna stormed and cried and accused them of being snobs and prejudiced; to no avail.

‘Darling, we love Miles. We really do. More than almost any of the boys who come here. But he is a serious distraction. And your work is important.’ Jennifer looked at her daughter shrewdly. ‘The last thing we want is to send you away to school now. But if these grades don’t improve, that’s what we’ll have to do.’

‘You wouldn’t be so cruel. You couldn’t!’ cried Joanna, her eyes big with fright.

‘We could. Now we’re not asking a lot. Only giving him up during the week. Get your head down and prove we can trust you.’

Joanna wondered how they would feel if they knew they couldn’t trust her in other ways too. In September she had made the trip to Doctor Schlesinger, and thence to bed proper with Miles; after a slightly difficult painful start, he had proved marvellously clever and skilful, and she sensual and responsive; they spent evening after evening in her little suite, enjoying the most triumphantly pleasing sex, relaxed in the knowledge that her parents, too sensitive and liberated to interfere, would merely walk past the closed doors and never dream of knocking or coming in.

And then they discovered a new pleasure. Accepting the disciplines, the limits set on their meeting, with fairly good grace, they began to experiment with drugs. Miles had been smoking pot for some time; it had been going round his crowd at school for years, regarded as something almost wholesome. ‘It’s organic,’ Donna had assured him earnestly, passing him his very first joint; and on one or two memorable occasions he and Joanna had tried LSD. Miles had found it at once terrifying and exhilarating; the way it invaded his senses, took him on a journey through colours and shapes and sensations, would have ensnared him very quickly had it not been for a (literally) sobering incident which frightened him more than he ever quite cared to admit.