The Love Children Page 14

  We said the polite things and left. We’d taken action and it had been successful: at last we knew what had happened. Bishop had blamed his father for his disgrace and the ruination of the family. And there had been a terrible family fight and he had stalked off and hitched to Massachusetts to join a guy he’d met at the dude ranch a couple of years ago. Brad d’Alessio was an idealist, a philosophy student who had dropped out of UCLA and started a commune in the mountains near Becket, Massachusetts, where his mother’s parents had lived a generation ago. We remembered Bishop saying what a great idea the commune was, people living together in an egalitarian community in a big old house in the mountains. They could turn their backs on the hideous world and create an ideal world of their own, where everybody was equal, where nature was respected, where the power of money and social status were irrelevant. The commune had horses. The commune members trained them for show, boarded them for rich folks in the area, and rented them out for rides by the hour. The members raised soy and corn. They had no electricity and no phone and refused to pay taxes.

  We had sighed over the thought of it, back when Bishop told us about it. And now, it made sense that after the family catastrophe he’d run there; Bishop was safe and in a place he ought to be, no matter how his mother felt about it. We knew we’d find him again someday.

  Sandy did stay in town that summer, but after that I barely saw her. She was always working or with Sarah. They were caught up in each other and rarely thought to invite me along. Sarah was staying in Beacon Hill, in an apartment owned by her cousin Polly, who was in England studying art. She and Sandy had Polly’s small but luxurious apartment all to themselves. They invited me one Saturday night for dinner. Neither of them knew how to cook. They got takeout from Legal Sea Foods and we gorged ourselves on shrimp cocktail and cherrystone clams and lobsters and salad.

  The two of them were always laughing—everything struck them as funny. They told me that the previous weekend they’d driven up to Marblehead to go to the beach, but it was a strain because Sarah’s parents were wary of Sandy, acting as if she came from a different race. They kept asking if she could eat certain things, then served lobster—which Jews who keep kosher do not eat—without any apology. Sandy’s family did not keep kosher. Sarah’s mother seemed to expect that Sandy would wear a wig.

  Sarah insisted that once her family actually got to know Sandy, they would be impressed. Sandy looked unsure at this. Sarah laughed and started to describe what they expected a Jew to look and act like, but Sandy looked even more uncomfortable and Sarah stopped.

  Physically, Sarah was like another Sandy: tallish and slim, with long, curly hair and a long, pale face. She wasn’t as restrained and not nearly as smart as Sandy. She was cute and funny; she had a deep gurgling laugh. She didn’t know about art and literature and politics, like Sandy, but she was very athletic—she was a championship swimmer and a tennis ace, and she played volleyball and golf. Sandy was very proud of Sarah’s tennis cups and her golf and swimming prizes.

  A couple of weekends, Sarah came over to Belmont and stayed at Sandy’s house, and once the three of us went out together. It was almost like old times with Bishop and Dolores. It saved the summer from total misery. I loved their relationship. Sandy lent Sarah books and showed her prints and taught her about books and art; and Sarah taught Sandy to play tennis. I thought that that was the ideal—two people who made each other larger, better. That’s what I wanted too.

  I tried to find Dolores, but she was gone, we didn’t know where. We couldn’t get information from her family; when we called and reached her father, he shouted that she wasn’t there and hung up on us. Her mother sounded just as angry, saying that Dolores was “away.” None of our friends knew where Dolores had gone, only that she had dropped out of UMass.

  I couldn’t find Steve, either. Breaking his taboo, I went into Monaghan’s and asked about him. The place was grungy, and the guys who hung out there seemed to belong to gangs. The man behind the counter said Steve didn’t work there anymore and he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. I thought of driving to the building where Steve had lived and seeing if his grandmother was still there, but just thinking of her desolate face was enough to stop me. Even if I found her, she wouldn’t tell me where Steve was. She didn’t want me in his life.

  So most of the time I was alone. I was feeling pretty abandoned and wishing I was back at Andrews. Then, one Wednesday at the end of July, I was walking home after work—I never drove to work, there was no place to park—and I saw someone, a male, unwind himself from our front doorstep. He stood, stretching, for a moment, and I stopped, my mouth falling open. It was Christopher Hurley! He had come down to Cambridge to see me! So he did like me! I was so excited I could hardly talk. I invited him for dinner and when Mom came in—she was teaching summer school—introduced him enthusiastically as the poet I’d told her about. But Mom, who usually liked my other friends, disliked him on sight. I could see that. I didn’t know why, but I suspected she was being bourgeois and judgmental. He didn’t bathe too often. But Mom supposedly knew things like that weren’t important; she wasn’t usually so narrow. I had told her what a wonderful poet he was—you’d think that alone would make her like him. That he came all the way to Cambridge just to see me was important to me. But she never relented.

  He slept on our couch that night; Mom said he couldn’t stay permanently. I made him shower the next morning, but his clothes still smelled. I took him into work with me anyway. Sonny gave him a job in the restaurant, but ordered him to wash his clothes. I was pissed that Sonny was going to pay him more per hour than he paid me. I complained, but he said Christopher needed it; he was a guy.

  I tried to understand that.

  Sonny said, “Listen, when you go out with a guy, who pays?”

  “Both of us,” I said.

  “Bah!” he responded. “The man pays. Always. The man pays. He needs more!”

  That was the end of it. In my mind, I argued with Sonny. I wanted to tell him that my mother supported me and that she usually paid for her and Philo. But Sonny didn’t know my mother, and besides, I’d seen him blow up at other girls and was a little afraid of him. And I knew Sonny was a Greek American, like Christopher.

  We found a laundromat and Chris washed some of his clothes, but the ones he was wearing were still unpleasantly fragrant. He found a bed in a student hostel. He couldn’t leave his stuff there during the day, so he had to carry everything he owned around in his backpack, a huge unwieldy canvas sack on an aluminum frame. I would sneak him into our house when Mom was out and let him have a shower and do his laundry in our machines. Once in a while I asked him to stay to dinner.

  The hostel wouldn’t allow me to stay with him there, so there was no way for us to get together, which both of us really, really wanted to do. So on the afternoons we both had off, I would drive us out to the beach at Revere. It was fun driving there in my cute little red Fiat with the top down. I could tell Christopher was really impressed by it. I would park under some trees, isolated from the other cars, and we’d put the top up and Christopher and I would make out. It was tight quarters in that little car, and sometimes we got out and threw a blanket on the grass between the car and the trees, where we felt hidden.

  That summer I was convinced that Chris was it for me. He was handsome, in his unwashed way—long black curls, a chin that never looked fully shaved. He was very tall and thin and although his name sounded Irish, it was an anglicized form of a Greek name. That gave him a certain cachet at Waspy Andrews. His hands were El Greco hands. He always hung back, looking at life from a distance. This aloofness made him glamorous. The Andrews girls thought he was the coolest thing. The only thing that upset me about him was he didn’t want to read my poetry, and when I read it to him, he seemed not to listen. My heart sank each time this happened. It hurt so much that I stopped trying. But I loved to listen to him read his poems, which he constantly revised. He enjoyed reading them to me each time he changed
them and I was honored that he cared about my opinion. I loved his metaphors.

  We hung out together just about every day, because Sonny started him working days. If he stayed long enough, Sonny would give him nights and then we’d never see each other. But I didn’t want to think about that. We wandered through Cambridge or went to the movies or for rides in my car. I introduced him to Sandy. She didn’t seem to respond to him. She wasn’t into men just then. I understood that Sandy was distracted, but that wasn’t Mom’s trouble. She was just being negative. I wondered if she was jealous that I had a lover. She could have made things so much better if she’d let him live at our house, but she absolutely refused.

  Still, the summer had soared after all, and I was riding high.

  Then, one day in mid-August, I came out of the restaurant at the end of my shift to see Steve standing outside. He was clearly waiting for me—he had probably spotted me through the big front window of Sonny’s restaurant. I screamed and ran to him and we grabbed each other in a huge hug.

  I wanted to know everything about him, and he wanted to know everything about me. We stood there jabbering wildly for a long time, and finally Steve said, “Hey, why don’t we go grab a cup of coffee?”

  We went back inside. Sonny had moved Chris to the male-dominated night shift; two to ten. Steve and I sat at a booth in front, talking. When I spotted Chris serving in the back, I waved to him to come over. When he finally approached us, I introduced him and Steve. I told Chris that Steve was an old friend and Steve that Chris was a new friend. Steve smiled at me with love in his eyes. Chris seemed absent; he had to go back to work.

  Steve was nervous about something, and finally it burst out: he had not gone to Harvard after all. He didn’t know why. “Jess, it was too much for me, I wasn’t up to it, I knew I wasn’t, I knew I’d be miserable.”

  I had no trouble understanding that. I felt the same way about Harvard and Yale and Smith and Vassar. I admired people who went to them, but I knew I couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t be comfortable there.

  “I understand that, I’m the same way. I know, I really know, Steve. That’s why I went to Andrews. I didn’t even apply to those places. I knew I wasn’t up to it.”

  It seemed really important to Steve that I understood. He took my hand in two of his and told me he loved me as much as ever.

  Then he said, “So I applied to UMass.”

  “That’s great!” I exclaimed. I realized that I had had a secret nightmare about Steve. I knew how easy it would be for him to just start dealing drugs after working at Monaghan’s; I knew he could slide into a life that would sink him. I’d never let myself fully envision it, but it was curled up at the bottom of my fears along with a lot of other things I’d never let myself think about.

  Instead, he was doing well in college: during his freshman year, he got A’s and B’s and was on the dean’s list. He’d had to move out of his grandma’s house, because once he was eighteen, the state no longer paid her to keep him and she could not afford to. She had to get another young boy. He felt bad about that.

  “I worry about the boys, you know. Gram is old, she doesn’t know how to control them. When I lived there, I always knew what they were up to; I made sure to keep them out of trouble. But now . . .”

  He went back to see them occasionally, and as far as he knew, they were still okay.

  Steve still got some assistance from the state, and he could afford to rent a room in Boston near the campus. He had a job in a copy shop near the school to earn spending money. And he had a girlfriend, Lila.

  “Oh,” I said.

  He’d looked happy for me when I introduced Chris. Why couldn’t I be happy for him about Lila?

  Who was pregnant.

  Oh.

  They were planning to get married one of these days.

  My voice was stiff when I asked about her, but Steve either didn’t notice or preferred to ignore it. He said she was twenty, his age (Steve was a little older than me), and beautiful, creamy colored and skinny, with tight little cornrows in her hair. She was at UMass too, studying media. She wanted to be a television producer. I was awed. I couldn’t even imagine wanting something like that.

  Then Steve changed the subject, a little abruptly, I thought, to ask about me. He listened with such attention that I felt myself unfold and expand. I chattered the way I used to, about Andrews and Sheri and Patsy and Gail and Donny and Christopher and my lit class and Fridays at Four and the campus and my father’s remarriage and Philo’s getting his PhD and Mom’s book getting published and Philo publishing an article on Marvell in this really important academic journal, and Dad buying me a car and . . .

  It was like a faucet had opened after months of being turned off.

  At the end, I tried to take Steve home with me. “Mom will be thrilled to see you. She always asks about where you are and how you are.”

  He looked a little shamefaced. “Aw, I’d be embarrassed, Jess.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t go to Harvard.”

  “Mom will understand.”

  He shook his head. “Not today. I got things to do. Lila’s expecting me.”

  We were standing in the street outside the restaurant, and I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Don’t get lost on me again! Keep in touch!”

  He laughed and hugged me. He promised. He gave me his phone number. He said he’d catch me another day. Then he left.

  I almost flew down the street, a smile pasted across my idiot face. I knew Mom would be happy to hear that I’d seen Steve and to know he was okay. And she was. All my anger at her vanished; I chattered all through dinner. I watched television afterward because Chris was working that night. It was after eleven; I had gone to bed and was reading when a shower of pebbles hit my window. I leaped up and looked out: Chris was standing downstairs.

  I ran down smiling and opened the door. What a surprise! I felt so loved! First Steve, now Chris! Chris slipped in the door. Mom had heard something and was coming downstairs in her robe. When she saw who it was, she said stiffly, “Oh, hi, Chris.” He could tell she didn’t like him; he’d known for a while. She turned around and went back upstairs but left her door open.

  I was still grinning, expecting Chris to embrace me or something, but he stood like a ramrod, hardly moving his lips.

  “Who was that guy?” he asked accusingly.

  “Steve? I told you. He was my friend in high school. I’ve known him for years. I haven’t seen him in a whole year, and he found me today! It was so great . . .”

  “He kissed you!”

  “Of course he kissed me. He’s an old friend. I kissed him too.”

  “I can’t believe you did that. I can’t believe it.”

  “What?”

  He stared at me from a foot above me, his eyes icy green. “You’re a slut!” he hissed. “I thought you were my girl!” He turned and walked out the door, leaving it open.

  I stood there, my heart pounding. What had he called me? I couldn’t believe it. My mind clutched at words, trying to frame my wondering. I considered running after him and dragging him back, but I was too shocked. After a while, I went upstairs. Mom heard and called me from her room. “Jess?”

  I pushed her door farther open and stood in the doorway.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Is Christopher gone?”

  “Yes.”

  She gazed at me for a minute. “What happened? Why did he come here so late at night? It’s nearly midnight.”

  “I know. He just finished his shift. He was upset about Steve. Jealous.”

  “Oh,” she said, gazing at me. “Are you upset?”

  “No. I’m going to bed.”

  “Okay. Good night, honey.”

  I barely mumbled good night. It was all her fault. She had pushed him away from me.

  9

  I went back to school that fall feeling older and a little shopworn. I drove myself up, unpacked by mys
elf, and arranged my room quickly, an old salt used to keeping things shipshape. This semester I was rooming with Melanie; Sheri had transferred to Sarah Lawrence to study drama, and Patsy was in France for the year. I missed them, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about Melanie. Before we parted in May, she’d said she didn’t want to be lovers anymore. She wasn’t sure she was really a lesbian. Well, I wasn’t either, so it was okay with me. We’d talked on the phone over the summer, but I hadn’t seen her. She’d been in South Carolina with her mother all summer.

  When she appeared, she was the same old Melanie, and I felt okay toward her, but something in me was distant, was holding back real affection. I just felt cool toward her, toward everybody. I couldn’t get over the scene with Chris. Nothing quite so bad had ever happened to me. Things that happen to you take time to digest. You have to process things that cut your heart to ribbons. I was angry with Chris for walking out on me, and for the way he did it. But I couldn’t get over the feeling it was really Mom’s fault, and I was furious at her irrational dislike of him. If she’d welcomed him and let him live with us, maybe he wouldn’t have been so jealous.

  Melanie and I slept in separate beds that semester. Sleeping with Melanie had been nice because we always brought each other to orgasm, but in some other way, it repelled me. I don’t know why. As soon as the semester began, she started hanging out with Luke Burden, a skinny French major with bad skin. I thought she must not have cared very much about me if she could replace me with such a jerk. I saw Chris around the campus, but he would not speak to me. After a few tries at being friendly, I gave up, telling myself he was neurotic. He dominated the Poetry Club, and when he refused to speak to me, the others stopped too. That was really unpleasant, and I stopped going. I missed it, though, and I missed Sheri and Patsy. Once Melanie was involved with Luke, I missed her too. I missed Chris. I felt I was sinking in a swamp of misery. All that was left was Fridays at Four.