Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said.

“What time?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to see her.

“How are you going?”

“Bus.”

After I hung up I was annoyed that I hadn’t said anything to her, and when my mother said, “What do you mean you can’t find your pen? It didn’t just walk away!” I screamed at her.

“What’s got into you?” she said.

“I wish I weren’t going back to school.”

“Where do you wish you were going?” she said, and her tone was that smug stumping one, as if I didn’t have an answer.

“California,” I said. “Or Africa.”

“With your attitude you’ll never go anywhere.”

You don’t know me, Ma, I thought. My secrets were safe.

There was only one bus to Amherst, and I was early because I had a duffel bag full of old clothes and a suitcase stuffed full of books. It was a hot Friday in mid-September and I had dragged all this luggage from Medford, bumping people on the bus. I saw other college students with suitcases, and looking happy and hopeful. I wanted to tell them I was a communist and watch their faces harden. But I didn’t believe it anymore. Maybe it was better to say nothing and just go away. But was there any point in going if no one missed you?

I got a shock when I saw Lucy standing by herself, staring at me near the ticket window, like a ghost that’s turned into a person.

“Do you have a minute?” she said.

She had always seemed pale, and I had found it attractive. But today she seemed plumper, her face a bit fuller and a little blotchy from overdoing it — pink hot-spots on her face and arms. She was wearing a yellow dress. Her sunglasses had white frames — new ones.

I realized that I was afraid of her as I was afraid of Mrs. Mamalujian.

“I’m really glad to see you,” I said.

We found an Irish-looking bar in Park Square. What a summer it had been for going into bars! The television was on — Kennedy making a speech: more promises, more rhetoric. His campaign was all promises about starting over again, doing good in the world, lots of work to do. But he was not going to roll up his sleeves and dig in — we were. He would be sailing off Hyannisport and the rest of us were going to backward countries to show them how to raise chickens.

“He looks so smug,” Lucy said.

“I thought you were stuffing envelopes for him.”

“No. I’m doing that for the Young Republicans. What’s wrong?”

“Becoming a Republican is like becoming a protestant.”

“I am a protestant,” she said.

“I mean, it’s not like believing in something. It’s like putting on a hat.”

“You think you have all the answers, don’t you?” she said, and she sounded so much like Mrs. Mamalujian that I began talking fast to change the subject.

“Kennedy’s going to be the next president,” I said. “Nothing bad ever happens to him. He lives a charmed life. We’re going to be stuck with him for eight years.”

“So you’re a Republican, too.”

“I’m an anarchist,” I said.

“God, you say some stupid things,” she said, and sighed.

A man next to her said to the bartender, “Did you just fart?”

The bartender said no.

“It must have been me,” the man said, and frowned and raised his glass.

“Let’s sit over there,” I said.

Kennedy was saying We will go forward like a man reciting blank verse.

In the booth, Lucy said, “I owe you some money.”

“That’s okay,” I said, but I was also thinking how much I would like to have three hundred dollars. It was hard for me to brush it aside: that was a motorcycle. “I don’t want it. Hey, are you feeling all right?”

We both knew what that was a euphemism for.

She said, “I’m fine.”

She wasn’t pregnant, that was for sure, or it would have shown.

“I want to repay you,” she said.

She seemed very tense. Was it what I had said about Republicans and protestants? She was a different person from the one who had walked along Pinckney Street with me last July — even different from the person who had shown me where the whale had washed up at Manomet. She was like someone I had known a long time ago that I was still forgetting.

“I really do want to give it back,” she said. “Don’t you want it?”

It was dark in the bar but she didn’t take her sunglasses off.

I tried not to be tempted by the thought of her giving me the money back. But I was.

I said, “I don’t care,” and hated myself for not having the guts to say no.

Lucy said, “You’re just going to get on the bus and ride away, as if nothing’s happened. Just turn your back on everything and everyone. Just vanish.”

I said nothing; I glared at her, because that was exactly what I wanted to do, and that she had nailed me down like that left me nothing more to say.

“You probably have a girlfriend in Amherst.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t even have a place to live.”

“Know what I think?” she said — and her voice was nastier than I had ever known it, not her voice at all—“I think you’re going to be all right. Better than all right. I can see it. You’re going to be a success. I don’t know what it will be, but it’s going to happen.”

It was the opposite of what I thought, and hearing her say that was like mockery.

She said, “And I know you want the money back.”

I shook my head, but it was too vague a way of refusing, and she could tell that I was weakening.

She took her glasses off and wiped them with a napkin. She was either smiling or else on the verge of tears — it was that same look, an expression of hers that I now knew well. She put the glasses back on and faced me.

“Someone gave me a phone number,” she said. “I called, and a man answered. He sounded grumpy, the way old people do. But he said he’d do it. I was to meet him in a certain bar in Brockton. I borrowed my aunt’s car and drove there. He was fifty or more and looked like a tramp. He wore old clothes. He hadn’t shaved. As soon as I saw him I wanted to go home and forget it. But I knew I couldn’t — it would be worse at home. He asked to see the money. But he wouldn’t leave the bar. He kept saying, ‘Just one more,’ and trying to get me to drink. I actually had one I was so nervous. And then, when I had just about given up hope, he said, ‘Let’s go.’ We went in his car. I think he had been waiting for it to get dark. It was all back roads. I lost track of where we were and I thought What if he kills me? He slowed down in the darkness and turned into a dirt road — so small I hadn’t seen it. I really felt lost but I was too frightened to cry. He stopped the car in front of a derelict house. I could see the broken windows in the headlights. He lit a candle inside. It was one of those places where kids go to start fires and smoke and scribble on the walls. There was a mattress on the floor and we had to be careful where we stepped because of the broken glass. He took my money and then said—”

There were tears running from beneath her sunglasses.

“Lucy, please,” I said.

When she saw that I wanted her to stop she set her face at me and continued.

“ ‘Take your skirt off,’ he said. And then he began swearing at me and pushed his pants down and just forced himself into me. I hated him too much to cry. He smelled, and I knew he was drunk. Now he’s going to kill me , I thought. But he didn’t. He fussed around and took some metal tools out of a paper bag. He had had that bag in the bar. I had wondered what was in it. His tools. Then he did it, flicking one of them into me. He told me that it would take about six or eight hours to work. He drove me back to my car.”