Paul Theroux: My Secret History

I had sometimes seen sand trucks here, but there were none today. It was very hot. I could see small dusty birds and all around us was the screech of grasshoppers. Being there alone with Tina aroused me, and made me nervous, and gave me the idea of feeling her up — squeezing her breasts. The most I had ever done was kiss her, in the dark, at a party.

I arranged a row of beer bottles on a log and told Tina to stand behind me, and started to shoot.

At the first shot, Tina said, “Hey! My eardrums!”

She was startled and afraid. That gave me confidence. I kept firing and emptied the chamber, then filled the tube again.

“Your turn.”

“I’m not touching that thing!”

“You’re afraid,” I said.

She said, “My mother would kill me if she knew.”

There was something about the way she said it that made me want to impress her; and her fear steadied me, because I knew there was nothing dangerous about my Mossberg as long as you followed the rules. I broke six bottles apart — six shots — and then went back to where Tina was squatting under a sandy cliff.

“So you’re afraid,” I said.

Her elbows were pressed to her sides, and her face was squeezed between her hands. I sat beside her, holding the Mossberg.

“Huh? Afraid?” I pretended to adjust something on the gun and pushed closer to her.

She took a ball of Kleenex out of her sleeve and pinched it over her nose, and blew and twisted. The end of her nose was red.

“I’m not afraid.”

I stood up and raised the Mossberg and fired three shots. Bits of the broken bottles were flung aside with puffs of dust.

Tina blew her nose again.

I put the gun down. I did not know what to say. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to know what she was thinking, and I wanted it to be: Kiss me, touch me, do anything you like.

She said, “I’m going to have to wash my hair when I get back home.”

While she was saying this I put my arms around her. She closed her eyes and let me kiss her, and she kept her eyes closed, so I kissed her again. Her lips softened and still she did not open her eyes. That encouraged me; it was as if by keeping her eyes shut she was being obedient.

Kissing her harder and closing my eyes I moved my hand onto the stiff cone of her breast, feeling the seams on her bra and rows and rows of stitches.

“Don’t,” she murmured into my lips.

When I tried it again she snatched my hand away hard and said, “Quit it!” That was tormenting: kissing her soft lips and at the same time feeling her quick fingers snagging my hand. Finally, I stopped kissing her, and then she opened her eyes.

“If I don’t get home pretty soon my mother’s going to yell at me.”

But I felt frustrated, so I delayed by shooting the remainder of my cartridges, finishing the box of fifty, while she pouted into the mirror in her wallet and put on more pink lipstick.

On the bus she said, “Hey, what was the funeral like? Don’t tell me!”

I thought a moment. She was teasing. But the funeral and its aftermath was very vivid to me, and it seemed to have a meaning I did not yet understand.

“The priest got sick.”

“Oh, they’re always getting sick,” she said.

We did not speak about the kissing or my trying to feel her up. But we had never talked about it. The other time I had kissed her she had been worried about her history project — The Louisiana Purchase. Kissing was unmentionable; it was something we did with our eyes shut. If she had said something I would have been embarrassed. As it was, saying nothing, I felt older and experienced.

As for the other thing — touching her breast — I was relieved now that she hadn’t let me, because I did not know how to tell it in confession.

That night at supper — meatloaf — my father said, “Where were you today?”

“Nowhere,” I said.

“What did you do with yourself?”

“Nothing.”

“He had a funeral this morning,” Louie said.

Louie had stopped being an altar boy the previous year, when I started — later than most boys. He had coached me on my Latin.

“Charlie Plotke,” my mother said.

Saying his name like that made it seem as though he were still alive; but I knew the body in the coffin was dead and empty — like Hogan’s uncle. I had imagined the pale dummy head in the bunches of ruffles and thought: Nothing — no one.

“Charlie was a daily communicant,” my father said. He always used these Catholic expressions, like Shrovetide and Septuagesima and Lenten and Triduum and, always solemnly, ejaculation. He jerked his head at me and said, “Who celebrated mass?”

“Father Furty.”

No one said anything.

“He’s new,” I said. “He’s not from Boston.”

Everyone looked at me.

“He says ‘anny.’ For aunty.”

Now my parents began staring at each other in a querying way.

“He lives in Holy Name House,” I said.

As soon as I had said that I sensed something go back and forth between my mother and father — over my head. It was like a beam of heat, but it was a certain pressure too, shooting right and then left, just touching the ends of the strands of hair in my crew cut. It was an inaudible buzz, and then a hovering bubble of suspense that broke and left a hum; and I realized that I had made it happen. What about that house? What about Father Furty?

“If you pray very hard,” my mother had always said, “God might choose you to be a priest.”

Before, I had always thought of the Pastor, or Father Ed Skerrit, and being a priest meant stepping out of life and standing on the sidelines — just waiting there with skinny ankles and a big Adam’s apple, and red hands sticking out of a black cassock. But now “priest” meant Father Furty, and that did not seem bad. They seemed to know something about him, but they would not tell me — they never told me secrets.

“Two more funerals and you get a wedding,” Louie said.

My part-time job that summer was at Wright’s Pond: locker-room attendant, three days a week. I sat at the entrance to the tin building next to the parking lot and read Dante’s Inferno . When people said, “What are you reading that for?” I said, “Listen to this.”

Between his legs all of his red guts hung

With the heart, the lungs, the liver, the gallbladder ,

And the shrivelled sac that passes shit to the bung .

Not many people used the locker room. It was dark, the lockers were rusty, the floor was always wet — I hosed it down in the morning and it stayed wet all day. I had the only key — one key for three hundred lockers. No job could have been easier. I sat in the sun, I played whist with the lifeguard and the policeman, I rowed the boat, I read Dante. Now and then someone said, “Hey, lockerboy,” and I locked his clothes in a rusty box. That was the Men’s; the Women’s was attended by a fat tearful woman named Mrs. Boushay who used to sit with her arms folded and staring at her new Buick and saying, “I wish I’d never seen it.”

There was a rumor that you could get polio at Wright’s Pond. It had been closed the previous summer for a week, while they tested the water; and even this summer the inspector visited regularly and took a jar of water away. People said Wright’s was dangerous and dirty, and laughed when I said I worked there. Tina’s mother wouldn’t let her go there, and in fact I had never seen Tina wearing a bathing suit. In some ways I was glad that Tina didn’t swim at Wright’s. We had a rough crowd, always swearing and yelling, and she was so pretty the boys would have teased her and splashed her.

I was at Wright’s a few days after I had served the funeral — it was a Friday — when I saw the girl we called Magoo walking through the parking lot. She was with her younger brother, who was a smaller version of her. They had very white freckled skin, buck teeth, and limp brown hair that lay very flat against their heads. Their noses were pink and peeling, and their ankle socks were very dirty. They both walked in the same sulky way; they were pigeon-toed. Magoo was my age, the brother about ten or eleven, although he had the face of an old man.