The Obstacle Course (28 page)

“A big day, Chloe. You must be proud.” Admiral Wells had joined us. He put a hand on my shoulder. It made me feel a lot more comfortable.

“Yes,” Mrs. Prescott answered. “Melanie’s worked very hard.”

“You’ve met Roy, I see,” the admiral said.

“Oh, yes. Melanie has talked of nothing else all week. One would have thought this entire affair had been arranged solely for his benefit.”

Man, did my ears burn at that. She smiled at me, about the phoniest smile I’ve ever seen in my life.

“I don’t see Horace,” Admiral Wells said to her.

The smile vanished from Mrs. Prescott’s lips. “He wasn’t invited. He doesn’t even know his daughter
plays
the goddamn piano.”

“He’s Melanie’s father, Chloe. You can’t arbitrarily cut him out of her life.”

“Sorry,” she said, “but he’s a lousy father. I’m not going to gild the lily on his behalf. He cut himself out.”

Boy, you could see how bitter she was.

“I’m going to borrow Roy for a minute,” the admiral said. He wanted to get away from her as much as I did, I knew him well enough by now to know that.

“As long as you promise to return him,” Mrs. Prescott said, turning her smile back on. It was like a skeleton smiling. She gave me the chills, this lady. I was going to have to be careful around her.

“Surviving?” Admiral Wells asked as we walked away.

I shrugged. I can survive most anything, including Melanie’s mother.

“God didn’t intend for every woman to be a mother, and Chloe Prescott is living proof. Thank heavens Melanie has her grandparents. They’ve raised her almost from infancy. Salt of the earth, those two.”

He really liked old Admiral Prescott and Mrs. Prescott, I could tell, not just because Admiral Prescott had helped him out early in his career, but because of who they were as people, the way they were with their granddaughter.

We walked around the room, Admiral Wells introducing me to some of the other guests—he knew just about everyone there. It was an important group of people, and not because some ninth-grade girl was going to show off her stuff on the piano. For one thing, Melanie’s piano teacher was famous. She was a tiny old lady with a thick German accent, dressed all in black with two bright red rouge spots on her sunken cheeks. She had one of those faces that looks like she’s sucked lemons all her life.

But the main reason for all these important people being here was that Melanie’s grandfather was a big deal in Washington, even though he was an old retired guy now. A rich big deal. One thing I do understand—even though I don’t know much about the life people like this live—once you’re a wheel it stays with you for life, and if you’re rich to boot everyone wants to kiss your ass.

“What was the Prescotts’ gift to the symphony this year?” I overheard one old biddy ask another as the admiral worked the crowd, with me in tow.

“Ten thousand,” was the reply.

Shit! Melanie’s grandparents had donated ten grand to an orchestra! No wonder it was a star-studded recital. Even the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, a slick-looking gray-haired man named Howard Mitchell, who rambled on to me for about three minutes about my own upcoming piano recital, which he unfortunately wouldn’t be able to attend because he would be in New York at a recording session—he’d obviously mistaken me for another student of the old piano teacher’s, and Admiral Wells didn’t correct him, either because he thought it was funny or he didn’t want to insult the guy, or both—was here to pay his respects, like he didn’t have anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon.

A bunch of colored servants came out and set up folding chairs in rows. The shiny black piano was in front of the French windows, facing the room and catching the rays off the afternoon sun. It was the biggest piano I’ve ever seen, even bigger than the one Liberace plays on television.

I sat in the front row. Melanie’s mother was on one side of me and the Wellses were on the other. Then Melanie walked out, and everybody got quiet as she sat down to play.

She was good. I don’t know fuck-all about this kind of music, but a deaf man could tell she was playing the shit out of that piano.

You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody even coughed. She sat straight as an arrow at that piano. Her shoes were kicked off like she’d told me she was going to, her stockinged feet pumping the pedals in rhythm to the notes and chords she was playing.

I glanced over at her mother, sitting next to me. Mrs. Prescott was sitting rigid in her chair, not moving a muscle. She was actually holding her breath, she was so tensed up. I could feel her tension in my own body.

I turned my attention back to Melanie. Her eyes were half closed now as she swayed to the rhythms she was creating. An older woman was sitting next to her, flipping the pages of music as Melanie played, but it was as if Melanie wasn’t even looking at the music, she was playing it from some place inside of her, like it was a part of her that was coming out the ends of her fingers. I closed my eyes, too, just listening to the music. It was like her body was coming into my body through the music, from her heart to her fingers to my ears to my heart. It was what her note on the invitation had said: she was playing this music for me alone.

It was a great feeling, knowing that. I opened my eyes and watched her.

A thin line of sweat had formed on her upper lip, making the red lipstick glow. It was a turn-on. Everything about this was turning me on. Melanie was playing this beautiful music just for me and using it to tell me she wanted to fuck me. And it was working, because I wanted to fuck her back.

I closed my eyes again and it was like I was alone, just her and me in this big room together, her playing and me listening. I could feel my heart beating in time to the music, and I knew her heart was beating at the same time, the same way.

She played three pieces. The last one was real long, a good fifteen minutes. After she finished, there was a moment of silence, then the whole place started applauding, people yelling “bravo, bravo,” standing up, everything. I was, too, not yelling “bravo,” but standing and clapping.

Melanie looked around the room. Her face was flushed and wet, and she was panting to beat the band. It’s tough work, playing that stuff, I could tell. I was smiling like an idiot I was so proud of her.

Then our eyes met, and it was like it had been while she was playing—just her and me, alone in this big room by ourselves. She smiled hard at me, as if she was saying “what do you think of me now, I’ll bet I look pretty damn good to you now.” She did, too. She’d already been looking good, but now she was pure beauty. I smiled back at her. I knew she felt better and prouder than anyone else in the room, but I had to feel second-most proud.

We were making out like bandits, like there was no tomorrow. Melanie and me, alone.

Everybody had milled around after she finished—congratulating her, congratulating her teacher, her mother, her grandparents, the works. The colored helpers moved through the crowd, carrying silver trays of caviar on crackers and other kinds of stuff like that, a whole mess of strange things I’ve never eaten in my life, and serving punch out of a big cut-glass bowl that probably cost as much as my old man’s car. It was a real party atmosphere, with Melanie the center of all the attention, it was probably the most attention she’d ever gotten in her entire life. I hung around on the sidelines, taking it all in, feeling happy for her.

Some of her girlfriends, the cuter ones, came over and talked to me a little. What my name was, what their names were, what schools we went to, the usual shit. When I said “Ravensburg” they gave me the once-over, like I’d said “Mars.” A couple, the ones that’d had some experience, came on to me like girls will, as if they couldn’t believe I was there for Melanie. I let them know right off that I was, though, and made sure that if Melanie was looking in my direction I had my attention on her, not one of her friends, especially not one of the pretty ones.

“They all want to know …” She squirmed around a little, giving out a low moan. We were in her bedroom. Everybody had cleared out except for her grandparents and the Wellses and a few others, who were downstairs.

“I’m going to show Roy my room,” she’d told her mother. She had her own room at her grandparents’ she was there so much of the time.

Her mother didn’t care. Now that the recital was over she didn’t have to play-act around Melanie anymore. If anybody noticed they didn’t let on when I followed Melanie up the stairs to the third floor and into her room.

I was sitting on her bed while she laid in my lap. Our mouths were all over each other, my free hand working its way up the side of her leg, along her stocking. When I got to her bare leg and started for her underpants, she grabbed my hand.

“No,” she said, “that’s too fast. I’ve never done this before. Here, up here.” She put my hand on her tit, over her bra. The front of her dress was down and her bra was out, a dark-blue bra like her dress. It was stiff and shiny, I knew she’d never worn it before, like everything else she was wearing. Even though she was sucking on my tongue like a fiend, I also knew that she’d never had a boy put his hand on her tit either. She sure was liking it, though, she was squirming all over me, I could feel her ass pressing down on my dick through the material. This girl was hot as a pistol, it was like she had an entire life of stored-up sexual desire inside of her and now it was exploding out.

“They all want to know what?” I asked.

She kissed me some more, her hands all over my neck, my hair, inside my shirt. Her mouth was soft—big soft lips, soft tongue. A born makeout queen, breaking free from inside that prissy old-fashioned life she’d been living for fourteen years.

“Know what?” I repeated. I worked my hand under her bra, onto her bare tit, onto her nipple, which was standing up erect. I started massaging it gently and that really got her moving all over me, her legs sliding around, her toes curling and uncurling in her stockings.

“Know what?”

“How I … oh God, oh God, I’ve never felt anything like this before!” She grabbed me by the hair and looked me serious in the face. She had a wild look in her eye.

“How I got you!”

I sat back, my hand resting on her breast. Jesus, what a bitch! Here she was, the nicest girl I’d ever met, definitely the
hottest
girl I’d ever been with, in ten minutes I’d be finger-fucking her, she’d stop me and stop me and then she’d let me because she wanted to all along but had to play the game, here all this was happening and she was feeling shitty about herself. I hate that kind of garbage, it made me think about poor old Vernice and other kids I know, boys too, who think that because they’re a little bit fat or not so pretty in the face they’re doomed forever.

“Roy,” she said, putting her hand on top of mine and moving it around on her tit again, “don’t stop.”

I started up again, real gentle. Her eyes closed and she started moaning softly.

“That’s their problem,” I told her. Theirs and her mother’s and everybody else who only saw what she looked like on the surface.

She smiled up at me, her eyes still closed.

“I love you, Roy.” She pulled my mouth down to hers and frenched me so deep I could practically feel her tongue stroking my tonsils. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

I kissed her back and slid my hand inside her panties. She didn’t even mock-protest that she was trying to stop me.

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Me, too,” Melanie said. “I’m sticky all over from you.” She was grinning like crazy, like Eve must have the first time she ate the forbidden fruit.

“Where’d you learn to talk that kind of trash?” I teased her.

“Other girls. But I know it’s mostly lies, I know that much.”

No shit, I thought. Ninth-grade girls are just like ninth-grade boys.

I’d been finger-fucking her for about ten minutes. She had sucked her breath in hard when I first put a finger in, just one index finger, she was plenty wet but she was tight as a drum, obviously she was a virgin, she probably had never had anything in there in her life, not even her own fingers. It took me a good five minutes to squeeze a second one in there, but that’s all she was going to take. I thought about Ruby, my colored hooker. I could’ve put my whole fist inside of her if I’d wanted to. Forget that shit now, this girl was going to give me all the loving I could handle and then some, she’d do anything I wanted.

“Next time,” she’d said breathlessly. “You can come to my house, my mother’s hardly ever there.”

“When?” I had panted, so horny I thought I’d shoot my load right in my drawers.

“Next weekend?”

“Yeah.” I’d do it on my way over to the admiral’s, and on my way home, too. I thought about Burt and all those guys who were always talking about getting it. The difference was, they all
talked
about it, while I was
going
to, the real thing, and for free, not with some hooker, although I’d liked it fine with Ruby, she’d taught me more that one time than I could’ve learned from doing it a thousand times with girls my age. The only problem was, I wouldn’t be able to tell them about Melanie, not her actual name. She was too nice a girl; I could never do that to her. They wouldn’t understand anyway, if they saw her they’d just think she was a plain girl, certainly not worth writing home about.

The only thing was, which I have to admit was eating at me even as I was thinking about it, was that I didn’t know if I actually would fuck Melanie next weekend, even if she let me. It didn’t feel right somehow—she was too inexperienced, she’d never even kissed a boy, practically. Fucking Melanie this early on would be like taking candy from a baby.

Maybe I’d change my mind when the time actually came, but next week seemed too early. We could make out like crazy for a whole bunch of times, until I was sure in my own mind I wasn’t going to do a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am on her and then never see her again. Once I was sure of that, then we could fuck all day and night and I wouldn’t have any guilty pangs about it.

We got off the bed. She looked at herself in the dresser mirror.