Paul Theroux - My Secret History

We immediately went to her room and made love. Afterwards I felt very shy, because she seemed shy. It was so odd to make love to her like that in her bed. We had hardly spoken before then, and so there was not much to say afterwards. Just a moment ago she had been gasping and saying Oh God! and showing the whites of her eyes. I felt I owed her something.

“Maybe we could go to a movie sometime,” I said.

“There’s a French movie called Breathless that I want to see. Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.”

They were always the expensive ones; and a meal after the show. I would have to wait until payday.

“Let’s go next week,” I said.

“Can’t we meet and do something before then?”

Do something meant one specific thing to me now.

“Sure,” I said, and picking up her copy of On the Road I said, “Can I borrow this?”

It was also my way of telling her that I was going home.

I stopped at the pool to pick up my bag. Muzzaroll and McGinnis were playing cards in the office.

“That wasn’t her,” Muzzaroll said.

I stared at him.

“The woman who came looking for you this morning. That wasn’t her.”

I was in the lifeguard chair reading Lucy’s copy of On the Road , and liking the book. I thought: I’ll hitchhike home tonight instead of taking the bus. And next year I’ll go out west. When I thought of travel I remembered the sentence I had underlined in Baudelaire, Anywhere out of this world . But Kerouac was familiar — he came from Lowell. My aunt Eva was from Lowell! Sometimes his writing was truly terrible, and that gave me hope for myself. Again and again, I read the same line about “the charging restless mute invoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power” and I could not make up my mind whether it was baloney or genius. It was probably a little bit of both.

Larry said, “You’re going to ruin your eyes, Andre.”

The little Puerto Rican kids were screaming and jumping into the deep end. Above me, the Mass General was like a fortress, with the faces of patients looking out. I saw myself as a Kerouac character who was capable of feeling a holiness in this confusion: holy children, holy sick people, holy weirdos.

Then Lucy’s voice said, “What are you having for lunch?”

She was smiling at the fence, still in the pretty dress she wore to work.

“I’ve got my mother’s meatloaf sandwiches,” I said, climbing down from the chair.

“Why don’t you eat them in my room, in style?”

Larry asked me where I was going. I said, “I’ve got to take a wicked leak.” I didn’t want to tell him about Lucy. “I’ll be right back.”

At her room, I showed her how the meatloaf just dropped out of the sandwich if I tilted the bread. A crumbly hunk of wet hamburg slid into a pool of ketchup on the plate.

Lucy said jokingly, “Some people think it’s more polite to say catsup.”

“It’s a Chinese word, so it doesn’t matter.”

The room was too small to hold a table. It was a little cube for living in. She told me it was perfect for one person.

“This is my garden,” she said, showing me the flowerpots on the windowsill — African violets, and geraniums, and herbs such as mint and thyme. “This is my bed — as you know,” she said. “And this is my library”—a bookshelf with about fifty paperbacks jammed onto it. She showed me where she kept her letters (“My extensive files”) and where she hid her money (“My bank”). Her kitchen was a shelf with a hot plate and some cans of soup, and her clothes were in a shallow closet. All these things she showed me by stretching out her hand. It was such a tiny room I could not move without knocking something over. Just being there with her was like a sexual act.

When she said all these things in her sweet funny voice, I realized I knew nothing about her. I felt sorry, because she was a good person, and intelligent, and she liked me. I knew also that it was a risk for her to have me here. I suspected her of being a bit desperate, but I was grateful because so was I.

“I love that Kerouac book,” I said.

“He’s almost forty, did you know that?”

“God, he’s old,” I said. “I thought he was young.”

Lucy said, “He was born in nineteen twenty-two. My favorite is The Subterraneans . Want to borrow it?”

But leaning over for the book I brushed against her, and kissed her, and then there was no going back.

“Oh, God,” she said, when I entered her, and she threw her head back and gasped. I felt like a bystander until she got her breath; and then she was whispering and encouraging me, until my last gasp.

The room was very warm. Even though the window was open, there was no breeze. We lay there, stuck together, and she said, “I like you. I like being with you. I was dreading this summer, but it’s turned out really nice.”

“What year are you in?”

“I’m a junior.”

That meant she was at least twenty, and probably twenty-one. I said, “Me too,” which was a lie, because I didn’t want her to know how young I was.

She put on a silky robe, which I found sexier than her nakedness.

“I’ve got the afternoon off,” she said.

“I’m supposed to be back at the pool at one, so the other guys can have their lunch.”

“Don’t go away,” she said, and held me. She hung on. “I want you to stay here.”

A loud noise made me jump. It was a knocking at the door, and it was twice as hard as it should have been, because it was Miss Murphy the landlady, and she was deaf. I realized that I had banged my knee when I had jumped.

“Just a minute!” Lucy said, and held the door shut.

“Are you in there?” Miss Murphy said, rapping again.

Lucy pulled open the closet door and motioned me to get in. She threw our clothes in after me and tied her robe and brushed the bed. Then she shut the closet door. I crouched in a woolen darkness of Lucy’s coats, with her clothes in my hand. The dress she wore was still warm from her body and smelled of her skin.

“Do you have a minute?” Miss Murphy asked.

“I have to go pretty soon,” Lucy said.

But Miss Murphy didn’t hear her. She simply saw the girl wearing a bathrobe and figured there was no hurry.

“I want to show you something,” the woman said.

I had never seen her, but I imagined wiry hair and dark circles under her eyes, because she sounded like Miss Sharkey, an old teacher of mine from the fourth grade. As Miss Sharkey bawled me out I used to cringe and look down, but I was equally terrified by the sight of her cruel shoes. I imagined them on Miss Murphy’s feet.

I heard Lucy’s bedsprings creak as the old lady sat down. I put my face in my hands and sweated. I tried not to breathe.

“These are the albums I was telling you about,” Miss Murphy said, and in a monotonous reading voice went on, “Nineteen ten. Nahant Beach. Memorial Day.”

“Very nice,” Lucy said.

“My father always said that you should take your first swim of the year on Memorial Day. My uncle had a lovely house in Nahant. You can just see the roof in the background — and that window with the shutters. That’s me with my little pail. And that’s my brother Patrick—”

“Miss Murphy, I have to go.”

“And that’s my mother. Isn’t she beautiful? They all wore bathing suits like that.”

“Miss Murphy—”

But Miss Murphy was deaf. She droned on, talking too loud and turning pages, describing pictures. A cramp in my leg came and went, a desire to cough passed through me. I sneezed but she didn’t hear me — didn’t even pause.

She went through the entire album — it must have taken half an hour.