The Sea of Light (28 page)

And everybody laughed.

I follow Emma out into the restaurant. Understanding that, in this particular wilderness, I am sadly lost. She alone knows the rules of survival, and—if I do as she does—I will learn them too, and get along, and probably wash on in with the tide. I don’t even like her. But I certainly don’t pity her any more. And, somehow, I trust her.

Mike and Jeff are sitting at the table, heads slightly bowed, not really talking. They’ve ordered another round of drinks for us all, and are chowing down on antipasto. Jeff looks up.

“Well, Ems. Did you ladies gossip away?”

“Sure.” She winks at me, sits. “All about you guys. But I will never tell.”

“Right,” I say. And I sit, too.

Jeff chuckles warmly, puts an arm around Emma’s chair and glances her way with real affection.

Mike looks across the table at me with a kind of delight, and relief; like he wasn’t quite sure of what to do about me before, but suddenly recognizes something familiar in me, and—now that I am familiar—he can invite me into his club.

Our dinners arrive. We drink, and laugh.

*

After dinner all four of us pile into Mike’s car, and he drives along dark wintry streets, hugging the contours, making the wheels screech sometimes, running one red light and a stop sign. Dead leaves blow against the windshield. In the headlights they look like enormous winged night bugs, flying right toward us.

Jeff and Emma are quiet, cuddled together in the back seat. They seem really relaxed now, at peace, her head resting on his chest. Mike drops them off at his place, which he shares with Jeff and another guy on the team, and some other guy who used to throw discus but is now in business school. I watch them walk, arm in arm, to the front door, their dark-coated backs to us. For a minute, I want them to turn around and come back and stay awhile—not because I want
them
to be with me, but I don’t want to be alone—or, at any rate, alone with Mike, which feels like kind of the same thing. But he turns to me, looking a little shy, trying to cover it up with a sure, harsh tone of voice, shrugs and says, Well, where to now?

Oh, I tell him, take me home.

Thinking that, if we’re going to do it tonight, at least the sheets are clean. And I will definitely make him wear a rubber.

I more or less hope we don’t.

At the same time, though, I’m curious.

He parks in a side street near central campus, right around the corner from the dorm. I turn to him, wave a hand the way Emma did. Thanks, I tell him, I had a good time.

Me too, he says. Then he says he’ll walk me to my room, it’s pretty late and girls have been raped on campus walking alone at night; there are a lot of creeps in the world.

In the elevator he takes off one of his gloves and one of my gloves, too, and holds my hand. I don’t really mind. He presses my palm with his thumb, lightly caressing. Then, in the cracked dim light as we squeak past floors, he turns my hand palm up and examines it.

“Weird.”

“What?”

“Your life-line. It’s really strong. But short. I mean, there’s this break in it—here—a definite break—and then it’s like it continues again. Very firm. Very long. Sort of like you died, you know? then came back to life.”

“Where’d you learn to read palms?”

“This great-aunt on my father’s side, She was sort of a witch—you know, from the old country, believed in spirits.”

“What old country?”

“Italy. My dad’s grandparents were from northern Italy.”

I tell him my dad is from Cuba, and I have this aunt who is into the spirits, too, though she does not read palms.

The elevator stops and he keeps holding my hand on our way down the hall. Somewhere, a door slams. There’s the far-off sound of a toilet flushing, stereos and CD’s roaring behind walls, beer cans opening, someone giggling. There is the pseudo-revolutionary mural on one of the walls. He stops to gaze at it. Saying, What is this, some kind of Commie shit?

Yeah, I tell him, probably.

I don’t tell him the rest of what I know, which is basically stuff that Ellie told me: how Communism was once this really honorable thing to be in America, back in the thirties; how her own dad was a Communist or Socialist or something in Poland, and believed in the rights of the working class, and of all people, to a decent life; and how it was just as much for being a political radical or liberal or whatever, as it was for being a Jew, that the Nazis wanted him dead.

Mike hasn’t let go of my hand, and I pause at the door. His fingers lace with mine. It feels okay. Not particularly thrilling, but not bad either. This makes me hopeful. He smiles, and then for a moment seems anxious. Finally he blurts: “Look, Babe, can I come in?”

“Yeah,” I say, “okay.”

I unlock the door, switch on a light. Bed made. Drawers shut. Posters intact on walls. The small refrigerator hums softly. Tiny red CD light glows on a shelf, between speakers.

This is great, he says, like a whole little suite. I mean, you’ve got a bathroom and kitchen space and everything. Free ride?

I nod.

Well sure, he says, what else
would it be.

We take off our coats and lay them on a chair. He looks nice, sort of—polished shoes, good brown sweater over his dress shirt, nice pants. The handsome face, strong chin and blunt nose, big forehead; golden eyebrows and hair cut very, very close, with the dyed-ebony little pigtail in back—it’s good, it’s nice. When he gets over himself he’ll be a manly man. Succeed in business. Father children. Fool around on his wife, but in between bad times make her happy. They will have a nice house. On some winter nights he’ll make his kids sit around him near the fire and he’ll show them all his age grouper trophies from the glass case on the wall. U.S. Swimming, he’ll boom proudly. Qualified for Senior Nationals in high school, went down to Industry Hills to fight it out with the best but I blew it big-time—too lazy to practice, that was my problem. Wound up in Division II. Sure had a blast, though. Had a car, had some credit cards, spent some time drinking and chasing pus—chasing girls. Me and my good pal Brader. Yeah, I was best man at his first wedding, when he married Emma. And after she left him for that fucking Cuban restaurant owner—greasy nigger spic bastard—I was best man at his second, third, fourth, and fifth weddings, too. Poor slob. The alimony and child support’s killing him. Who’d have thought we would turn out this way? There’s a lesson in this, kids: If you want to succeed in life, you’ve got to make the right goddamned choices
early.

Ho-NEY, his wife will say, don’t SWEAR in front of the KIDS.

The kids will look up at him and he’ll wink, sharing a private joke, silently making a pact with them to continue swearing but not when she’s within earshot. They giggle, happily. Loving him.

Not knowing that he’s a double-dealing handsome bastard who steps out on her—and on them—all the time. Knowing only that he is their funny, playful, powerful father. And the mother is not funny, or playful, or powerful at all. So they stare up, adoring.

There are four of them. Two girls, two boys. They all have his hair, his eyes. His name.

“Do you want something like—I don’t know, tea or something?”

“Nah. Come here. I didn’t finish your palm.”

I sit next to him on the couch with about a cushion’s space between us, extend my hand and he turns it palm up again, presses various lines and curves with his fingertips.

“Well, after that weirdness, that break, you’re probably going to live to be about a hundred. No kidding. I see a little confusion early on, some messing around, you know? But then one relationship. I mean, you mate for life. No children, though. Wait. There’s one. Just one.”

He explains what all the lines mean, points out where they are. Then offers his own hand, palm up.

“Go ahead. You can read mine, if you want.”

“No thanks, Mike. I already know your future.”

“Oh yeah? What are you, some kind of prophet or something? Tell me.”

Oh, I say, Why spoil things? I’ll just let you live it.

“Well then. Why don’t you just tell me what the near future holds in store—”

“Near?”

“Yeah. Like the next hour or so.”

He’s grinning, half mischievous, half serious, a little nervous. Trying to cover up the nervousness with the right mix of eager humor and bravado. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. Then I feel bad for him, and for me. And these other dark things well up inside: self-revulsion, worthlessness.

“Whatever,” I say. “I don’t really care.”

He leans back, confused. “You don’t?”

Oh
, I want to say,
sure I do, but it’s really not worth going into, let’s just do it and get it over with, okay?

Instead, though, I start to cry.

“Hey, Babe. What’d I do?”

“Nothing,” I blurt. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

He scoots across the cushion between us, puts his arms around me kind of clumsily. I cry against the front of his good brown sweater, smearing it with mascara and rouge. Pressing my palm, his hands were graceful and knowing; now, patting my back and hair, they feel openly fumbling, young, insecure.

Hey, he keeps saying, hey, hey.

“You know,” I sob, “I’ve got scars all over.”

“Yeah? Like, where?”

“Like everywhere.” Thinking about them makes me want to throw up. Another sob gushes out, my nose running against his chest. “It’s really gross.”

“Well, look.” He clears his throat. “Everybody’s got problems, you know?”

“I know.”

“No, I mean—like, do you really? I mean, last summer I was really fucked up, I couldn’t even wipe my own ass.”

“What did you do?”

“Asked the nurses. Christ, it was fucking embarrassing! Sometimes my dad, or my brother. And sometimes”—he blushes a horrible red when I glance up at him with mascara and eyeliner dripping around my cheeks, making me look like a raccoon—“I’d be so fucking embarrassed that I wouldn’t ask anyone. I’d just walk around”—he laughs—“with my ass full of shit—”

Suddenly, we are both laughing. Loudly. With laughter that isn’t full of comedy, really, but of relief.

“Well,” I gasp, “that’s kind of where I’m at, I guess. Too fucking embarrassed, and my ass—”

“Yeah,” he grins, his eyes wet with tears. “Oh, God!” Then he laughs even harder, until his face starts to crack, and I hug him.

*

Which is sort of how it happens. His face against my chest, half-laughing, half-crying, both of us in this giddy emotional state—which feels confusing but also like release—and he presses me over onto my side on the couch, and lies there squashed up next to me, and we start to kiss.

It’s nice at first. He has soft lips; I like the firm, square feel of his neck and shoulders, and there is something endearing about his not-quite-gone pot belly, ballooning into mine. Fine, okay, I think. So far so good. There’s this moment when I think he really sees me, too, and wants to know me somehow. His eyes are shining and open, friendly, honest, wanting. But then they shut, and something harder settles over the face, something urgent, and I look inside myself for the same urgent thing but find only a warm-tinged, fuzzy-edged emptiness. Then, too, this borderline-mean determination: I will not let him see the scars, not any of them; we can do it if he wants, as long as he has a rubber, but it will be in the dark, with at least a few clothes on. Maybe, if I feel safely unseen like that, or if I can at least shut my eyes and pretend, I will even enjoy it this time.

I did, sometimes, with Kenny.

*

A week goes by like this. I fall farther behind in my classes. I concentrate hard during practice. First meet of the year is coming up—a home meet, thank God—and I’ll need every last ounce of guts just to show my face. Mike Canelli says he will, too. Coach McMullen convinced him not to redshirt. Which, if you ask me, is a dumb mistake—he’s still overweight, and his arms and shoulders can’t really take it yet; but nobody’s asking me—and, on the other hand, look who’s talking. Mike calls a lot, pestering. It’s not his fault. I mean, I like him. He’s just a guy, doing what guys do, trying to get laid; plus I think he probably likes spending time with me. But I can’t tell. Maybe he would be just as eager to spend time deep-sea diving, or parachuting. Something new and different. Delgado, she’s a challenge. Plane crash survivor. Swims okay. Even talks back sometimes. Never takes off all her clothes.

We do it a couple more times, actually, during the next few days. Always in my room, on the couch, in the dark. Afterwards I feel the warm, fuzzy, tender sensations inside. I like the feel of his hair and his flesh. I like all his muscles; I even think his flab is kind of cute. But the stuff he does to me feels so empty—and it’s not his fault, but mine; it just really does not move me, even though I try, shut my eyes and try, imagine, pretend. By the end of the week I am walking around tired and guilty. I mean, here I am, using him as a kind of experiment, and he doesn’t even know it.

Friday night I go over to his place after dinner. It’s one of those split-level apartment complexes filled with students. Their place is a mess. Not like Ellie’s place, though—this is more of an expensive mess, the kind of mess I am used to: VCR’s, CD’s, color TV, high-tech cameras, good clothes in unwashed piles, dirty Teflon pans and an encrusted Cuisinart cluttering up the kitchen, empty bottles of imported beer on tables, rugs, chairs.

Mike takes my coat.

Emma and Jeff are stretched out on the sofa looking stoned, watching MTV. They both turn, grin, wave. There’s some guy dancing around on the screen to this tune that is a cross between rap and heavy metal.