Robert B. Parker (4 page)

“How many times?”

“Once, Father.”

“Say t’ree Hail Mary and t’ree Our Father and make good act of contrition,” the presence said, and began to murmur in Latin the prayer I said in English. Our lowered voices murmured in unison. He finished before I did. Priests always did. I took my time on the prayer so I wouldn’t seem to take it lightly. Then it was over and I
was in a pew kneeling to say my penance, relief tingling along the edges of my body. My hands were damp. But I was safe.
I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell
. How could those few red rushing moments be worth an eternity of damnation? What a fool I had been, and yet, in the whispering cool church with its flickering candles burning for the dead, I knew that I would do it again. I knew that if I got the chance, that rage would sweep over me and I would plunge ahead though the pit gaped sulphurously beneath us. I tried to think of God, of the Virgin. The feeling kept its claim on my soul even as I prayed. Could I be forgiven for something I knew I’d do again? Jennifer. I’d like her to know I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I wished I knew her well enough to tell her. She’d look at me so interested, so fully concentrated on what I was saying, and I knew she’d think it was good. It wasn’t just the feeling, it was the pleasure of being one of those who had and I knew she’d think that was nice and she’d laugh when I told her about it and color the way she did when she laughed.

The vaulted ceiling of the church darkened toward the peak and you couldn’t see where the arching rafters met beneath them. I still knelt alone in the pew toward the front of the church and smiled. Jennifer would like it. I couldn’t wait to tell her, if only I knew her better.

She’d laugh about hell. I knew she wasn’t Catholic. I’d barely talked to her, yet I paid such close attention to her, to everything she said and did in my presence, to everything I heard, to everything I imagined about her, that I felt sure of her as if I knew her best of all. I knew she wouldn’t disapprove of me screwing some townie. I knew she’d be delighted.

And I thought about her in the limpid stillness of the dim church while I knelt, and I thought of Barb on her back with her legs apart and as I felt the surge of desire in my belly, I tried to think of the Virgin. For a moment Jennifer and Barb and the Holy Mother all blended in my imagination and for a moment my passion was multiple and two-thirds holy.

Oh my God
, I said,
Oh dear God make her love me
. Then I stood and walked, trembly and thick with passion, from the silent church.

The library reading room, deal tables, bright lights, maps and reference books, the low buzz of talk, sharp outbursts of male laughter and female squeal. “Nick said you could help me with
Hamlet
, Boonie,” Jennifer said. Black sweater, simple string of pearls. “My professor said Hamlet’s tragic flaw was original sin.” Her breath smelled of cigarette smoke, her hair of perfume as she bent toward me.

“Sure, sit down.” The rustle of her wide gray skirt. Her elbow touched me. More perfume. Her knee touched mine briefly. “He means sort of nobody’s perfect,” I said. “He means that because the world’s not perfect you can’t control it and the best anybody can do is be ready, you know?”

Cigarette smoke on her breath again and hint of Colgate, her mouth wide and smiling, her eyes the shape of almonds but much larger. “What in hell has that got to do with original sin?”

I leaned back a little in my chair. Expansive. “I
didn’t say it was a swell answer, your professor is kind of vague, but you know the theory of original sin?”

Her smile again and the laugh lines deepening around her mouth; a tiny shadow formed beneath her lower lip when she smiled. “I believe it involves fucking,” she said. And both of us burst into laughter in the quiet hall.

Jennifer never drank much beer. Everyone said she did, but she didn’t. “I hate it,” she told me. “Never tell, because if you’re going to date, you have to drink beer. Nobody drinks anything else.”

“Except in hotels they don’t serve anything else in this state.” She hadn’t known that. She didn’t know a million things. I drank my beer and got two more. Hers was half finished. I drank it. I didn’t care if she knew anything or everything, but it was hard to figure how someone so wonderful could know so little. She didn’t know where Omaha was. She didn’t know that Benny Goodman had given a concert in Carnegie Hall in 1938. She cared nothing about the Brooklyn Dodgers. She’d never seen a play. Her feet on the seat under her, ballerina slippers. A white blazer.

“Why do you know so much, Boonie?” Her nails were glossy and slightly pointed. Her hands looked strong. A red pack of Pall Malls, Teresa Brewer on the jukebox, smoke and maybe the faint smell of clean sweat in the crowded bar.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it must be I’m very smart.”

Her eyes were blue. Jennifer said, “Maybe it’s not such an asset. Maybe it’s better to know what you need to.”

“Once more,” Olivier said, “into the breech, dear friends.” The theater half empty, Jennifer and I had our feet dangled over the backs of the chairs in front of us. Jujyfruits, Black Crows, the smell of popcorn, the smell of damp woolen coats, darkness, and the ray of projected light from the back to the screen.

“They’re not talking Shakespeare,” Jennifer whispered. Her lipstick smelled a little like raspberry Jell-O as she leaned toward me to whisper.

“Yes, they are,” I said. “They’re just saying it right.”

Snow from our boots melted in small puddles under the seats. We sat together without touching.

At the door of her dormitory at ten o’clock she was kissing Nick good night. The collar of her camel’s-hair coat was up, she was on her toes, white socks, penny loafers, her face up toward Nick. Me she could have kissed flatfooted. Nick’s left hand was on her backside. There was some snow, not heavy, big flakes, drifting in the lights in front of the dorms. I said good night to my date, who seemed in a hurry to go in. Jennifer stopped kissing Nick and turned her head against his chest and saw me. She winked. I took Nick’s hand and moved it up to the small of her back. “I don’t want you getting more than I did,” I said.

“Nobody could get less, Boonie,” Nick said. We
laughed. Walking away from them I felt short of breath and my eyes stung in the crystal-flaked darkness.

We were in a booth in the spa; most people were in class and it was quiet in the spa. Jennifer gave me one of her Pall Malls. Each of us sat sideways on our side of the booth, feet out along the rest of the booth seat. Jennifer had on saddle shoes. “What’s a cockteaser, Boonie?” Her face was somewhat oval. On one cheek was an almost imperceptible scar. Scraped it as a small child, she’d told me. I was the only one, she said, who’d ever noticed it.

“A cockteaser is a girl who makes you think she’ll come across and doesn’t,” I said.

Her face was serious. She nodded. “I figured something like that because of the
teaser
part. But what’s a cock?”

I grinned. “Jesus Christ,” I said, “doesn’t Marblehead have a bad element? Didn’t they teach you anything?”

I was thrilled to explain things to her. There was so much she didn’t know. I could tell her things forever.

“No, no, no,” she said with that thrilling lilt in her voice that she had, “no making fun. If I can’t ask you, Boonie, who can I ask?” Her face was serious now. “Everyone else I have to pretend with.”

I wasn’t sure I could talk; my throat was constricted. It was hard to swallow. As I breathed I felt as if my breath trembled in and out. “A cock is another name for a penis. Originally it meant a spigot, or faucet, and by, you know, analogy, it became slang for the other thing.”

She seemed pleased to know that. She made me feel
I’d pleased her. It was years before I understood that she made everyone feel that way.

In a skin-tight one-piece black Lastex bathing suit a girl named Fritzi swam slowly past the dock in an expert Australian crawl, her long white arms stretching out fully, her breast arching out of the water with each reaching stroke. Six or eight of us watched her. Keg beer in big paper cups, chino pants, white shirts with button-down collars, the cuffs turned up, somebody’s camp at the lake, I never knew whose. Among the trees charcoal smoke and the smell of grilling meat. Feeny the Narragansett beer salesman used to get us the keg and tap it for us. He often stayed at the party, only a couple years out of college, not much older than we were, stocky and full of laughter. The beer came mostly foam at first until it settled down from the trip out from town. I had to keep the paper cup tilted so the beer slid down the side and even then it took a while to fill.

“Want to take a walk, Boonie?” Jennifer was wearing gray flannel Bermuda shorts and a man’s white shirt with the tails tied in front. Her thick white socks were halfway up her tan calves. I handed her the beer I had drawn and took another cup and got a second one full. I didn’t want to make her wait, so it was mostly foam. Didn’t matter. I could come back. It was still May and the summer homes around the lake were empty. We walked on the thick pine carpet under the high-branched long-bodied white pines. Pines high enough and thick enough to have suppressed the underbrush. It was mostly clear going on the thick needle carpet.

“Where’s Nick?” I said.

She sipped a little of the beer from the big cup. A wisp of foam stayed on the bridge of her nose when she lowered the cup. I reached over and wiped it away.

“He went to Bowdoin this weekend,” Jennifer said. “I came with Bruce Walter.” Behind us the sounds of the party were clear. Laughter in two octaves, the sound of splashing as people dove into the lake; somebody honked the horn on their car in shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits rhythm.

Jennifer said, “I think there’s something wrong with him.” Her lipstick looked slightly smudged and her mouth had that slightly red look around it that it always got when she’d been doing a lot of kissing.

“Bruce? Why do you think there’s something wrong with him?” I wasn’t drunk yet, but I would be in a while.

“He’s so aggressive,” she said. “It’s not natural. He’s grabbing and, you know, shunting and … he tried to put my hand on it and he’s …” She shook her head. “He’s sick.”

There was a tree down and we leaned our backs against it and drank our beer. The lake glistened through the trees. The sounds of the party off to our left. In the trees around us the movement of squirrels and birds. “My love,” I said, “Bruce isn’t sick, he’s horny. He’s normal. All guys are like that. Some of them just inhibit it more, you know?” We were side by side against the tree, our feet pointed out before us, Jennifer’s loafers exactly side by side, toes straight.

“I know, I mean I expect guys to try. I don’t blame them for trying, but he’s so … so persistent and he gets
so excited. In him it’s not affection. It’s his needs and it doesn’t take account of what I want.” Jennifer didn’t know the dates of the Civil War. But she knew what she needed to know. Maybe better than I did.

“You want to stay with me?” I said. She nodded.

I worked that summer loading trucks in a Coca-Cola plant out on Kempton Street in New Bedford. Every day from ten in the morning till seven at night I took cases off the roller track and heaved them into a truck. The top of the truck always had broken glass on it and when you loaded tops and shoved the cases across you usually scraped your forearms. I had cuts on both arms all summer. One weekend I borrowed a car and went up to Marblehead and visited Jennifer. Sarah Vaughan was singing at a club in Magnolia and we went down in the warm evening, just she and I. Her friend couldn’t go and it was almost like a date. I had on my summer dress-up—white linen jacket, white oxford-weave shirt, button-down collar, black knit tie, gray slacks, loafers, no socks. Jennifer had on a full skirt and a peasant blouse. She sat easily and poised in the front seat with me and talked as we drove north through Salem and Beverly. Settling darkness, people still out, a lot of them on front steps, the radio on. Vaughn Monroe, “Dance Ballerina Dance,” Larry Clinton, Bea Wain, “Deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls.” “She’s married to André Baruch,” I said. Jennifer was never aware peripherally. Her alertness was always concentrated on one thing. “Bea Wain,” I said. “The girl singing. She’s married to an announcer named André Baruch who sounds sort of like Basil Rathbone and did
play-by-play on the Dodgers for a little while.” Jennifer smiled. It was as if I’d explained E=mc
²
. The road curved, nearly empty, along the seacoast and the summer trees were deep green and placid.

Jennifer said she loved Nick. She loved everyone she went steady with.

“That’s not love,” I would say, “that’s convenience. You can’t be in love with two or three people a year.”

And she would smile that aching smile and say I could love my way and she could love her way. “What fun would it be,” she would say, “to go out with someone without being in love?”

“You got it backwards,” I would say, and she would nod and think on it, but I always had a sense that she wouldn’t be different because I said she should be.

I was in Onie’s with Billy Murphy and Guze drinking beer on a December night when she called me.

“Come and get me,” she said. “I need you to come and get me.”

“Where?”

“Student Union.”

“I’ll be up.”

I borrowed Dave Herman’s Chrysler convertible and
drove up rubbing the frost off the inside of the windshield until the heater took hold. Electricity buzzed in the pit of my stomach.
Come and get me
, she had said.
I need you to come and get me
. I was half drunk and tense with excitement and frightened. Both hands on the wheel, I took in a big lungful of smoke without taking the cigarette from my mouth. Nineteen years old, I felt that something was about to happen, something that would fix me forever like an insect caught in amber, something that would commit me beyond deviation or retraction or even regret. God was about to put his mark on me and I knew it and it scared hell out of me. Now, looking back with the forgiving, solicitous, but lordly wisdom of adulthood, I have no quarrel with what I felt then. I was right.