Ed Gorman - Serpent's kiss

A new director was appointed. Hastings House spent the next three years staging a variety of public relations events. On Christmas Eve, for instance, they had the most docile patients dress up like elves to serve dinner to two hundred orphans. There was a lot of TV coverage.

Gus was eager to tell everybody what he'd seen. Especially the part about how her eyes became just like the snake's and how she'd taken the entire snake inside her. But nobody paid much attention to him, of course.

If he wasn't talking about Sally and the serpent, then he was talking about this nice man he'd once met from Uranus. Somehow, most of Gus's words ran together. About the only other guy who'd believe him was a janitor named Telfair, whom Gus knew had also been to the tower at least a few times.

It wasn't really a date, of course, but it was a sort of pretend date…

From her bedroom window Marie saw Richie's car coming down the driveway and stopping at her apartment complex. Picking up her red jacket, she walked out into the living room where her mother was watching the last of the local news.

"Night, Mom," Marie said.

Her mother looked up. "Don't forget this is a school night."

"I won't."

"And-" Her mother paused, as if afraid to speak her mind. "And be careful."

"I know it's not a good neighbourhood, Mom. That's why I'm always careful.'"

Her mother's gaze did not leave Marie's face. "I don't mean just the neighbourhood. I mean that boy, too." She hesitated again. "I don't want to see you just-disappointed over anything."

I don't want to see you get your heart broken . That's what her mother was really saying. No doubt about that.

Marie leaned over and kissed her mother tenderly on the forehead. Her mother meant well. There was no meanness or mendacity in her heart.

She went to the door, waved goodbye, and went out.

In the hall she saw Mrs. Rubens. The older lady, who always wore the same sparkly rhinestone eyeglasses and the same shade of dire red lipstick, looked her over and whistled. "You must have a date tonight!"

And then it happened: a giggle. An honest-to-God giggle issuing from the otherwise mature mouth of Marie Fane. Marie couldn't believe it. She felt her cheeks bum.

Mrs. Rubens, whom Marie liked very much, winked and said, "So I was right. You do have a date tonight."

"Well, not really, I guess. Or not exactly, Mrs. Rubens."

"Not exactly?" Mrs. Rubens smiled. "Now what could that mean?"

By now they had reached the front door. Mrs. Rubens held it open for her. At such times Marie was always reminded of people's kindness. People always held doors for Marie. Given her crippled walk, they probably always would. On some paranoid occasions, she resented them. There was such a thing as being too kind; kind to the point of being patronising. But then she always realised that she was being unfair-that people only meant to show her that they liked her and were concerned for her.

The early evening was an explosion of wonderful aroma- everything in urgent bloom-and lovely, vital sounds.

"You have a good time tonight," Mrs. Rubens said, taking her lone sack of garbage out to the big Dumpster discreetly kept on the other side of the nearest garage.

Marie walked over to the car, aware that Richie was watching her. He'd changed into a white shirt and a blue jacket. With the collar up and his dark hair piled high, he resembled a teen idol from the fifties. Especially with his slightly petulant mouth and sad dark eyes. She thought again: Richie must have a secret otherwise he wouldn't always look so melancholy.

The car was five years old, an Oldsmobile, the kind of vehicle that was ideal for families but that teenage boys looked a little awkward driving. It had 'Daddy's Car' stamped all over it. As if to compensate for this, Richie had the radio up loud, playing some very punky dance music.

He surprised her suddenly by bolting from the car, running around to her door, and opening it for her.

"Why thanks, Richie."

He smiled. "My pleasure."

When he got her safely ensconced, he walked around the rear of the car and got in.

So here it is, she thought. My first actual date. Or sort-of-date, anyway. She'd been waiting the better part of five years for this, constantly shaping and reshaping this moment to make it into the maximum thrill.

As she sat there watching him put the car in gear, watching him glance out the back window as he started moving in reverse, she wondered if she weren't at least a tad disappointed. In her fantasies, her first date had always had a gauzy unreality to it. Mere glances carried searing meaning; his few muttered words had inspired rhapsodies in her heart. Whoever it was in her dreams (and the boy changed from time to time, blond now, now dark; short sometimes, tall others) didn't look quite as young as Richie nor did he sink down in the seat quite as much as Richie, nor did he smell of excessive aftershave lotion as did Richie, nor had his voice risen an octave and a half out of sheer plain nervousness.

She strapped on her seat belt as Richie pulled out into traffic.

"You get off at nine-thirty, right?"

"Right," she said, feeling kind of sorry for him that he had to struggle to make conversation. In the cafeteria, he had always seemed so self possessed and self confident. He knew very well that she got off at nine-thirty.

"Well, maybe around nine or so I'll go get us some Dairy Queens."

"Dairy Queens? Are they open already?"

And here he looked younger than ever. Not the dark teen idol despite his calculated appearance, but rather the kid brother got up to look like the teen idol.

In that moment something came to her-something that was better than all the gauzy unreal fantasy first dates could ever offer-she liked Richie and liked him lots and thought he was really cute and clean and appealing.

"Boy, that sounds great," she said, wanting her own enthusiasm to match his.

"You like Blizzards?"

"I love Blizzards," she said.

He glanced over at her and grinned. "Great," he said. "Great."

Ten blocks from the bookstore you started seeing winos and homeless people. They clung to the shadows of crumbling buildings and rambled listlessly down the cracked sidewalks amid the garbage and wind-pushed litter. There were homeless dogs and cats, too, and they roamed after their human counterparts. Dirty children belonging to some of the people who lived and worked in the neighbourhood played in the gutters, too far from their parents, too close to traffic. Nobody seemed to notice or care.

Towering over all this in the near distance were the spires of the university, great Gothic structures built at the turn of the century. While the university itself had not been touched by the poverty and hopelessness and shambling violence of the streets, everything around it had been.

The Alice B. Toklas Bookshop was situated in an aged two-storey brick building that sat on an alley. Across the alley was a pizza place that seemed to do business twenty-four hours a day.

Marie showed Richie where they could park in the rear-in a shadowy cove next to a Dumpster that always smelled of rotting meat from the pizza place-and then they went inside.

They walked in on a familiar scene-a customer at the cash register buying a book and Brewster giving his opinion of the book to the customer. Arnold Brewster looked like Maynard G. Krebs on the old Dobie Gillis show. Except this was Maynard at fifty years of age. Round, bald, stoop-shouldered, he wore a wine-coloured beret, a little tuft of grey goatee on his chin, and a FUGS T-shirt. Marie wasn't even sure who the FUGS were exactly-just some kind of musical group that had prospered briefly during the hippie era.

The customer-a proper looking man, probably a professor, in a tweedy sports jacket and a white button-down shirt and a narrow dark necktie-looked as if he wanted badly to get out of here. Every time he pulled to go away, Brewster started telling him how bad a writer Sartre (the man had bought a copy of Nausea ) really was.