David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 2

George Burton was going on seventeen, and he had heard that Lynette was almost two years older. But because he was as tall and nearly as grown-up looking as she was, he hoped nobody had told her how young he was. The fellows she hung around with were all her own age and pretty sophisticated, which was why he didn’t like to talk with her in their presence — their snappy line always showed him up — and this was also why he avoided joining the little group around her now. But suddenly, to his astonishment, thrill, and a funny feeling in his stomach something like stage fright, Lynette called out to him in the dark: “Why Georgie Burton, what are you doing skulking around in the shadows like a — like I don’t know what?” And while the fellows laughed, she added: “Come on over here where you belong!”

It was wonderful. Lynette McCaffrey had said it herself; and as he went over and stood beside her, he felt that maybe he did belong. Then the music started up, Lynette reached out a hand toward Hank Van Duser, and let herself be pulled to her feet. “I promised Van this one, but Georgie, will you dance the next one with me? I haven’t danced with you once all summer. Not once! Here, take my cigarette...” George Burton took her cigarette between thumb and forefinger and Lynette moved off toward the lighted dance floor arm in arm with Van.

The small orchestra was playing Oh Gee, Say Gee, and George stood there on the dark wharf holding the cigarette. Everybody else had gone in. He looked at the cigarette. It was a gold-tipped Violet Milo rapidly getting shorter and shorter, now, as it burned down to the end. In a few seconds he would have to throw it away, and he didn’t want to do that. Of course he didn’t expect it to last all through the dance, till Lynette and Hank came back out again, but he wanted to keep it as long as he could. Finally he held it up to his lips, took a small short puff, then dropped it over the side of the pier into the water. Because of the music, he did not hear the tiny hiss it must have made as it hit the water.

The moon, rising higher over the Bluff at the far end of the bay, was getting smaller now, and it was also paler, whiter, no longer the color that Lynette had said it was — said in a way that nobody else on earth, certainly no other girl, would have described it. Her word had almost taken his breath away, but it had been exactly right, and he was filled with admiration for her originality and daring. The thought of dancing with her, actually holding her in his arms at last, right in front of all the other fellows, was a thought almost too much to bear; and he hoped he could bring it off in a casual fashion, or at least that it would look that way.

He stood there listening, waiting, and now the piano was going it alone, accompanied for the moment only by the drummer, who slapped the big drum softly with a pair of wire flyswatters which gave off a whispering, swishing sound, just right for the piano solo. He looked through the open door into the brightly-lighted Clubhouse and saw Lynette, her head in its silver straw bonnet resting on Hank Van Duser’s shoulder, gazing up into Van’s face as they moved slowly around the floor. He could have watched her forever. It was almost as good as the dream that was to be realized any minute now.

The tune came to an end and Van and Lynette and a bunch of others sauntered out onto the dark pier again.

She looked for and found him sitting on the iron post where she had sat. She came up to him at once and placed her two hands on his shoulders in the friendliest, the most affectionate gesture in the world. His heart swelled with pride as he saw how the other fellows noticed. She said, her voice a breathless thrilling stage-whisper, so personal, so intimate, almost like a kind of lovemaking: “Georgie honey, I’ve made a ghastly mistake. I could simply kill myself. Van reminded me that I promised the next dance to that fool of a Freddie Vincent, and then after that it’s Art Wallace again, and then Van, and — that’s the way it goes, kid. So listen, honey, why don’t we do this? Next Saturday night I promise to save you two dances for just you and me alone. I’m just as sorry as I can be, I’m simply crushed and heartbroken. But I’ll make it up to you next time, Georgie, honest and true.”

The word honey struck him to the heart, but he said, “Why sure, that’s okay, I understand, don’t give it another thought.” He avoided looking at the other fellows standing around, and concentrated on Lynette’s face alone, giving her a smile that he hoped looked all right and that she could see, and the others could see too, in the half-dark of the wharf. Immediately, then, Lynette fell into an animated conversation with the fellows standing around, and he heard her make fun of that silly little orchestra from the so-called city — (“Do they actually have the gall to call themselves a dance orchestra, and my word, why don’t they play something that isn’t about a thousand years old!”) — and he heard the fellows laugh. It was so like Lynette; it was all part of that wonderful outside world she came from, the great world of the future, far away from Arcadia and Parsons Point.

There was more than two hours to wait before the dance would be over at twelve and the Wrinkle would take them back home across the bay to the Bluff. When Freddie Vincent came and took her off to the dance floor, George Burton got up and went back along the weather-beaten planks beside the Clubhouse to the dirt road in back. He walked slowly down the dark lane to the brightly-lighted street where the bowling alley was, and the hot dog stand and the cheap dance hall that the nicer people didn’t go to. He bought himself a hot dog and stood outside the dance hall looking in. It was one of those ten-cents-a-dance places, where you could go, girls as well as men, without escorts or a proper date. He watched the couples toddling around the floor. Some of the girls were pretty enough, but they were working girls for the most part, and there wasn’t one of them in the whole place who had what Lynette McCaffrey had. What that was, he couldn’t have said. It was a mysterious something that he had never before found in anyone else, and he knew it was love, all the more so because of his hurt.

Keenly he felt his unhappiness, and he knew that all these strangers in the street, all these callous people who never felt anything, could not possibly know what he was feeling, or, if they did know, understand. It was something he himself had not felt before, ever, and he believed that there could not be many others in this world who had ever felt it, either. It was special and delicious and painful all at once, he knew that it set him apart, and he felt both lonelier and bigger, more capable of feelings, than anybody else had ever felt.

It was life, in short. Oh, there was no fun in being so vulnerable, so much more sensitive than other fellows, but wasn’t that part of love, didn’t it go with falling in love, could a man have one without the other — didn’t it come from being more aware and susceptible to life than the common herd? He turned away from the dancing gay throng so ignorant of the deeper finer things, and wandered off alone toward the upper end of the Point, hugging his misery to himself...

Finally he heard the three deep notes of the Wrinkle whistle, which meant that the boat was leaving for the Bluff in five minutes. He hurried back.

The lights on the pier had been turned on, and a dozen or more couples who had been at the Yacht Club dance were crowding around for the trip home. The Wrinkle was a small narrow steamer, hardly bigger than a big launch, with a brightly-lighted cabin lined on both sides with a continuous leather-cushioned bench and an open deck above with a single bench athwart the steamer just in front of the small glassed-in place where the pilot stood at the wheel. By the time the final whistle blew, everybody was on board, the engines started up with a deep whine, the propeller churned the water at the stern into a noisy swirling foam, and they were off.