Роберт Паркер - Love and Glory

“Where’s Nick?” I said.

She sipped a little of the beer from the big cup. A wisp of foam stayed on the bridge of her nose when she lowered the cup. I reached over and wiped it away.

“He went to Bowdoin this weekend,” Jennifer said. “I came with Bruce Walter.” Behind us the sounds of the party were clear. Laughter in two octaves, the sound of splashing as people dove into the lake; somebody honked the horn on their car in shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits rhythm.

Jennifer said, “I think there’s something wrong with him.” Her lipstick looked slightly smudged and her mouth had that slightly red look around it that it always got when she’d been doing a lot of kissing.

“Bruce? Why do you think there’s something wrong with him?” I wasn’t drunk yet, but I would be in a while.

“He’s so aggressive,” she said. “It’s not natural. He’s grabbing and, you know, shunting and... he tried to put my hand on it and he’s...” She shook her head. “He’s sick.”

There was a tree down and we leaned our backs against it and drank our beer. The lake glistened through the trees. The sounds of the party off to our left. In the trees around us the movement of squirrels and birds. “My love,” I said, “Bruce isn’t sick, he’s horny. He’s normal. All guys are like that. Some of them just inhibit it more, you know?” We were side by side against the tree, our feet pointed out before us, Jennifer’s loafers exactly side by side, toes straight.

“I know, I mean I expect guys to try. I don’t blame them for trying, but he’s so... so persistent and he gets so excited. In him it’s not affection. It’s his needs and it doesn’t take account of what I want.” Jennifer didn’t know the dates of the Civil War. But she knew what she needed to know. Maybe better than I did.

“You want to stay with me?” I said. She nodded.

I worked that summer loading trucks in a Coca-Cola plant out on Kempton Street in New Bedford. Every day from ten in the morning till seven at night I took cases off the roller track and heaved them into a truck. The top of the truck always had broken glass on it and when you loaded tops and shoved the cases across you usually scraped your forearms. I had cuts on both arms all summer. One weekend I borrowed a car and went up to Marblehead and visited Jennifer. Sarah Vaughan was singing at a club in Magnolia and we went down in the warm evening, just she and I. Her friend couldn’t go and it was almost like a date. I had on my summer dress-up — white linen jacket, white oxford-weave shirt, button-down collar, black knit tie, gray slacks, loafers, no socks. Jennifer had on a full skirt and a peasant blouse. She sat easily and poised in the front seat with me and talked as we drove north through Salem and Beverly. Settling darkness, people still out, a lot of them on front steps, the radio on. Vaughn Monroe, “Dance Ballerina Dance,” Larry Clinton, Bea Wain, “Deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls.” “She’s married to André Baruch,” I said. Jennifer was never aware peripherally. Her alertness was always concentrated on one thing. “Bea Wain,” I said. “The girl singing. She’s married to an announcer named André Baruch who sounds sort of like Basil Rathbone and did play-by-play on the Dodgers for a little while.” Jennifer smiled. It was as if I’d explained E=mc 2. The road curved, nearly empty, along the seacoast and the summer trees were deep green and placid.

Jennifer said she loved Nick. She loved everyone she went steady with.

“That’s not love,” I would say, “that’s convenience. You can’t be in love with two or three people a year.”

And she would smile that aching smile and say I could love my way and she could love her way. “What fun would it be,” she would say, “to go out with someone without being in love?”

“You got it backwards,” I would say, and she would nod and think on it, but I always had a sense that she wouldn’t be different because I said she should be.

I was in Onie’s with Billy Murphy and Guze drinking beer on a December night when she called me.

“Come and get me,” she said. “I need you to come and get me.”

“Where?”

“Student Union.”

“I’ll be up.”

I borrowed Dave Herman’s Chrysler convertible and drove up rubbing the frost off the inside of the windshield until the heater took hold. Electricity buzzed in the pit of my stomach. Come and get me , she had said. I need you to come and get me . I was half drunk and tense with excitement and frightened. Both hands on the wheel, I took in a big lungful of smoke without taking the cigarette from my mouth. Nineteen years old, I felt that something was about to happen, something that would fix me forever like an insect caught in amber, something that would commit me beyond deviation or retraction or even regret. God was about to put his mark on me and I knew it and it scared hell out of me. Now, looking back with the forgiving, solicitous, but lordly wisdom of adulthood, I have no quarrel with what I felt then. I was right.

She was sitting alone in the empty Student Union in a big leather armchair near the console radio that stood at the far end of the lounge. It was 8:30 on a Saturday night. But that made no difference. The Student Union was always empty. Rugs, upholstered furniture, piano, card tables, magazines, space, always empty, just like the lounges in Boys’ Clubs and YMCAs. Later I would see similar lounges in USOs and military day rooms, always empty, and in their emptiness, a symbol of the echoing void between the young and those who administered them.

She had on a black cashmere cardigan sweater and a plaid skirt. She got right up when she saw me.

“I got my white charger outside,” I said. “Want to get up behind and ride off?”

“Yes.”

“Where you want to go?”

“I don’t care. I just had to get away from Nick.”

I held her camel’s-hair coat and she slipped into it and I smelled her perfume, and barely, beneath the musk, the scent of her, which was a little like the scent of crushed bittersweet leaves that my father had taught me to chew when I was very small.

In Herman’s Chrysler again we drove slowly downtown.

“Nick wanted to get engaged,” Jennifer said.

“And you didn’t want to?”

“No.”

“Probably thought you loved him,” I said.

“Well, I...” She stopped and looked over at me. I couldn’t see her face in the dark car, but I felt bad. It was an easy point and she didn’t need to be scored on right now.

“What I felt was affection — what he wants is ownership,” she said.

“Sometimes,” I said, “it almost seems that you’re even smarter than I am.”

She smiled at me.

I could feel the tension shivering along my arms. I felt as if I were trembling internally.

“Want to go to Bill’s Café?” I said. “No one ever goes there. We’ll be alone.”

She nodded. I thought about Nick at the frat party looking for his date, full of himself and his surprise, the ring in his pocket, looking for Jennifer and slowly realizing something and feeling the sickness in his stomach and the humiliation and feeling alone.

Bill’s served draft beer in steins for thirty cents. We each had one. Across from me Jennifer’s face was almost gaudy with possibility, serious and grateful, full of relief, intensely interested in me, affectionate, gorgeous, and electric with personality, dense with contained animation, beautiful beyond correlative, desirable beyond speech. I was numb with desire, terrified with epiphany, barely able to breathe.

“I’m sorry to break up your Saturday night, Boonie,” she said.

My throat was nearly closed. I took a shallow breath and said, “You didn’t.” My voice was hoarse, I could hear it shaking. “I would rather be with you than do anything else on earth.”