The Last Good Night (17 page)

T
HERE WERE NONE
of the feints and parries of dating. We understood from the very beginning that the first and only thing that had ever really made sense was each other. Why should we pretend otherwise?

It was not easy to find time to be together, though. Jack worked most weekdays from three-thirty to six-thirty and all day on Saturdays at the store, helping customers, ordering stock, balancing the register at the end of the day. Afterwards, he was expected to drive home with his father for dinner. He had never done otherwise. And I had the motel.

We stole moments together before and after school.

We talked on the phone for hours.

Some evenings we met at the Carter campaign headquarters downtown, a tiny storefront behind the Five-and-Dime crammed with boxes of bumper stickers, buttons, and leaflets. We sat on the dusty linoleum floor beneath a tri-colored poster of the governor's toothy grinning face, stuffing leaflets into envelopes.

The windowless room was hot from lack of air conditioning and our faces quickly grew a shiny film of sweat as we stole glances at each other when the other volunteers weren't looking, our knees touching, our arms brushing up against each other, all our righteousness and sense of mission mixing with our hormones so it was impossible to tell one from the other, and we had to sneak off to the hallway, kissing until our lips grew sore.

 

O
N THE LAST
Saturday night in February, I sat on the Breezeway's gate, swinging my legs impatiently back and forth as I had the first time Jack had come. It was almost nine when he drove up. The crescent moon was smudged with fog and I nestled close to him in the car.

“You've really never been to a fair?” he asked.

“Shocking but true. I'm not going to have to wrestle a hog, am I?”

“Absolutely. And rope a steer.”

“That's okay, I've wrestled worse. And roped more.”

Jack laughed and gave my hand a squeeze.

When we got to the site, we were directed by volunteers from the Jaycees wielding flashlights like batons to the makeshift parking lot across the road. We paid the two-dollar entrance fee and walked onto the muddy grounds. The fair swelled around us and we clasped hands tightly, adjusting to the crowds, the rides that made swooping arcs of light against the dark sky, the gongs of the nickel games, the cries of overexcited children, and the burnt sugary smell of cotton candy. I nudged Jack with the corner of my elbow. “Look.”

A few yards away, we saw Mr. Dryer, Flagerty High's assistant principal, walking with a giant red balloon in one hand, and a half-eaten vanilla ice-cream cone dripping down the other. Jack pulled me quickly away before Mr. Dryer could spot us and we dodged behind a tent set up for prize pigs, enclosed in our game of hide-and-seek. We huddled behind a pole, assaulted by the smell of animal shit. “Did he see us?” Jack whispered.

“I don't think so.”

We laughed, spies, thieves—momentarily safe.

“Let's go on the Ferris wheel,” I suggested, and we wove through the crowd, ducking our heads so no one would recognize us.

We took our place in one of the seats and an old man with a deeply pockmarked face buckled us in. “No standing up,” he muttered apathetically.

The wheel lurched forward and we circled once and then stopped almost at the top, the fair below us an intricate network of bodies moving in and out of the green-and-white-striped tents, clustered about food stands and games, greedy for pleasure, for prizes. Jack put his arm around me and we kissed, our
tongues lost in each other's mouths as we swung back and forth, suspended in the night.

It took a moment for our feet to adjust to the ground when we disembarked.

“Are you hungry?” Jack asked.

“Not really.” I turned to him. “Aren't you going to win me something?”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Anything.”

He smiled and stepped up to a rifle range with three rows of moving tin ducks. Above, pastel teddy bears hung from a rope, waiting to be claimed. He handed over a quarter and took his position beside the other shooters. As soon as the gong sounded, the ducks started moving quickly by as Jack aimed and fired, aimed and fired, slower, more deliberately than his fellow players. When the gong sounded again and the ducks stopped moving, he had lost. He turned around to me. “Sorry.”

“That's okay.”

He looked at me for a second and then decided to try again. This time, he fired faster, and won a small teddy bear with coarse blue fur and a red bow tie. He handed it to me with a flourish.

I clutched the teddy bear as we wandered away from the booth. For a moment, I was a different girl, the kind of girl boys won teddy bears at state fairs for, and everything else just fell away. I gave his arm a squeeze.

We walked past a tent where the deeply guttural crooning of a country singer reverberated within, a Belgian waffle stand clustered with children wiping pink strawberry streaks from their sated chins, a picture booth with cutouts of a bride and groom. When we came to a fortune-teller's booth, Jack slowed. A gypsy with long skirts and large discs of gold earrings, a turban, and painted crimson lips called out to us in an indistinguishable accent, “Read your palms. See your future. Love, wealth, health, learn what's in store for you. Find out if your love is true.”

“C'mon. Let's go in,” Jack said.

I looked over at the woman with her heavily lined eyes beckoning us. There were pointy stars about her booth, and hearts, and dollar signs. The gypsy crooked her finger, Come in, come in. “The tarot can answer any question,” she promised.

Jack began to reach into his pocket for the price of a reading.

“No,” I said. “Why do you want to bother with that crap?” I took a few quick strides away.

He looked at me, puzzled, and then hurried to my side.

We wended through the crowds milling about, the tired parents searching for lost children, the groups of teenage girls and boys, the bored state troopers.

“Let's go,” I said.

We drove with the top down, despite the cold, turning the heat on so that our feet grew hot while our faces remained chilled by the wind. It was close to eleven, but we weren't ready to go home. “Do you want to go to the island?” Jack asked.

“Now?”

He nodded.

“Okay. Sure.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence, knowing where we were going, knowing why.

The boat was where we had left it hidden in the sea grape, and we pulled it out and launched it onto the river.

The sky, the water, were black, empty.

We heard the distant sounds of cars going over the intracoastal on their way home from the fair, and the ripple of the oars dipping into the water, pulling, withdrawing, dipping. We did not speak.

When we neared the island, we took off our sneakers, rolled up our jeans, and waded through the cold water to the shore, pulling the boat along.

“Are you okay?” he asked as we settled onto the beach.

I nodded.

He spread his jacket on the sand and we sat huddled on it, kissing. He slipped his hand beneath my sweater, touching my clammy skin, the knobs of my spine, the curve of my waist. I did not protest. I sank down into the soft sand. I felt his hair tickle the base of my throat.

He stopped, raised his eyes to me. “Are you a virgin?” he asked.

My elbow scraped against a shell as I dug it deep into the sand. “Yes,” I whispered.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, smiling gently.

He kissed my breasts, tasting them, absorbing them, releasing them. We paused only long enough to slide out of our jeans, rushing now, rushing to it.

For a single fearsome moment, I wondered if he would feel something in me, an openness where he was expecting resistance, wondered if he would somehow feel the other men. I shut my eyes, willing the thought away. It was another girl in those dark afternoons, those rooms.

I wanted suddenly to feel Jack all the way up to my belly, my heart, my lungs, wanted him to wash out everything that had gone before. I was certain that he could.

When he came, he called out my name and his eyes rolled back into his head.

I felt the heat like circles in the water, spreading ever wider until that was all there was, and I let out one sharp cry.

We both lay completely still.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He pulled me closer into his embrace, protective and warm.

We lay quietly in the dark, holding each other, staring up at the blurry slivered moon. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.” I did not fear saying it because it was so soon, I simply said it, repeated it, “I love you,” my voice cracking with it, giddy with it, transformed by the revelation of it, because I knew that it was true.

He leaned up on his elbow and looked directly into my eyes. “I mean it.”

“Me too.”

Much later, he drove me home in the stillness, the absolute stillness of Flagerty at three
A.M.

I sat up in bed watching the dawn rising from my narrow window. The grass of the Breezeway's courtyard was just beginning to glisten with dew. In another couple of hours, I would have to rise, wipe down the white metal tables, already mottled with rust, and open up the large blue-and-white-striped umbrellas. I watched the progress of a spider outside the pane, spinning its fragile sticky web. The smell of the bulging garbage bags behind the apartment crept in, foul with rotting fish carcasses, citrus rinds, beer cans, the weekend's remains. I lay back, running my hand slowly over my naked chest, my stomach, running it where he had been.

For the first time since we had moved here, the motel held my body but no longer contained my mind.

 

J
ACK DROVE BY
at three o'clock that afternoon. I stood with my hands on the convertible's door, looking down, both of us smiling shyly, testing the new ground we found ourselves on, testing each other—are you there?

And we each found the other waiting there, at the beginning, when the promise of love is an evanescent secret to be held aloft, full of promise not yet caught or scratched.

“Can we meet later?” he asked.

“Yes.”

 

O
N THE NIGHT
that Carter won the Democratic primary by four percentage points, the first time George Wallace had ever lost in the South, I lay in bed listening to the radio.

It was ten o'clock when I heard a rapping on my window. Peering out, I saw Jack crouched in the path, grinning in the dark.

I opened the window carefully, but it squeaked loudly nevertheless.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Come on, let's go celebrate.”

I looked at him, with his disheveled hair and his grin, and I motioned for him to wait while I slid on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and slithered out the window.

We tiptoed down the path clutching hands, suppressing the laughter that erupted the moment we climbed into his waiting car.

“How did you know which room was mine?” I asked.

“I didn't. I think I gave an old lady two doors down a heart attack.”

He had picked up a six-pack of beer and we shared one as we drove along Route 1. We did not go to the island that night, but parked by the new state park that was under construction across the street from the ocean. Jack cut off the ignition and we sat in the front seat staring out at the sea and the lights far up the shore.

I reached down and opened another can and we toasted Carter's success.

“I have something for us,” Jack said. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a box of kitchen matches. Inside, there was a single skinny joint wrapped in yellow paper. He lit it up, narrowing his eyes as he inhaled, and the musky sweet scent filled the front seat.

By the time the joint was finished, we were both so stoned that our laced fingers entranced us for a full five minutes. When he managed to disengage his hand, Jack turned on the radio, swimming through the dial until he found a station out of Palm Beach that was playing Donna Summer, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Hot Chocolate, all the disco we usually despised. He got out of the car and went around to my door, opening it and offering me his hand. “Care to dance?”

The bass pounded from the tinny car stereo as we danced wildly about the tennis court, our arms and legs gyrating until, breathless, we came together, not quite dancing but swaying in a tight dizzying hug. I could feel Jack's erection grinding into me just above my pubic bone as we clutched each other, pressing in until neither of us could stand it and we ran to the edge of the woods, collapsing on a bed of fallen pine needles, diving, burrowing, carving into each other.

To this day, the dusky smell of pines still makes me weak and wet and sad.

 

W
E CONTINUED TO
avoid places where others went, and stole kisses in darkened stairwells, climbed out of bedroom windows to meet in the night, our desire lurking in corners and crevices, waiting only for the clandestine touch that claimed it. Sometimes, we just drove, the top down, the brilliant starry dome of the Florida sky above us as we talked about the thoughts and desires we kept hidden from all others—the future away from Flagerty, the law, journalism, each other, change. It all suddenly seemed so plausible now that there was someone else who believed it so.

We drove down Indian River Drive, with its newly built houses so large and imposing. We drove along Route 1 by the ocean. And we drove, most nights, to the boat hidden beneath
the sea grape and rowed in the dark, the thin skein of white lights behind us, to the spoil island.

Neither of us spoke of it, of each other, to anyone else.

When Rosie called I almost mentioned Jack, wanting at least to say his name out loud, but I didn't. It was too important, too overwhelming, and too new to share, to be reduced to words, neatly contained in sentences and conventions. It had nothing to do, after all, with teenage dating, holding hands in the hallway, ice-cream sundaes, proms. It had nothing to do with anything but us.