Asa, as I Knew Him Read online

  “Hey, Thayer,” she said suddenly, in a normal tone of voice, as though he were standing beside her. Asa dashed from the washroom, pulling from his pocket the matches he had found that morning after a long search through the shelves of oil filters, spark plugs, wrenches, and gray rags. When he reached her she had lighted her cigarette.

  “Let’s eat,” he said. He hoped if he said it firmly a pleasant sandwich shop would spring up on the sidewalk around the corner. But in the end they took a red booth and waited for their grinders (Asa’s meatball, Jo’s Italian cold cuts with everything) to arrive.

  It was a $1.70 lunch, $2.10 with two iced teas and tip. Jo’s paper plate glistened with fallen chips of onion and green pepper. Asa was fearful of getting tomato sauce on his face.

  “How come you didn’t go sailing this weekend?” Asa ventured, after a few difficult bites of meatball.

  “God, you don’t forget a thing, do you?” said Jo. She folded a thick slice of salami in half and popped it in her mouth. A trickle of oil was left on her chin. “I thought it would be more fun to go to the party.”

  “Reuben’s party?”

  “Yes. Is there another one?”

  “I don’t think so.” As other parties would not be worth going to, he hadn’t listened for news of them. “Have you ever been to one?”

  “A Sola party? No, but I’ve heard about them. I’ve heard people end up swimming with nothing on and, well, absolute orgies.”

  Asa had never been at an orgy; had he been uninvited? “Not quite orgies,” he said, “but it gets pretty wild.” It hadn’t. The pleasure lay in the space—the pool, the long, lovely lawn, the knowledge that Professor Sola could patrol only one area at a time, the idea of possible wildness.

  “Clemmy’s going to take me.” Having announced this, Jo filled herself up with a large installment of cold cuts. Asa was disappointed; he had reckoned on asking her to go with him—offering himself as her escort. It occurred to him that she was tormenting him, and he wondered why she had turned up. Surely not just to bother him. If he’d been twenty he might have had the wit to say, “I’m so delighted you came to have lunch with me,” and watched her face for clues, but all he could think of was the way she might taste, if he were able to lean across the Formica and put his mouth on hers. Or her cheek, or the bone near her eye, where her lashes made a shadow trellis.

  “Tell me about Reuben,” Jo said.

  “Why do you want to know about him?”

  “He seems interesting. All you boys hang around with him—he must be interesting. Tell me some things about him.”

  “All who?” asked Asa, postponing. “Just me and Parker.”

  “Oh, Clem goes over there, doesn’t he? And I know some other people …” But she wasn’t going to say who. She looked at Asa as if the information he wasn’t giving out were a match he wasn’t striking for her cigarette.

  “He’s not very good at school,” said Asa. “He’s at Andover, you know, and he was on academic probation all last year. I don’t think he studies. He’s very smart.”

  “How do you know he’s smart?”

  “Well, you just know.”

  “And you are good at school?” Jo put her elbows on the back of the booth, so her shirt pressed against her breasts and her collarbone made a half-circle of white against her skin.

  “No, but I’m better than he is. He doesn’t even write papers—at least he says he only writes the papers that interest him.”

  “What interests him?”

  “He likes dissecting things. Frogs.”

  “Ugh!” Jo put her arms down and held hands with herself.

  “And he likes American history. He says it’s a string of disasters and it cheers him up.”

  “Huh? I don’t get it. What’s he like, I mean, what’s it like to be with him?”

  “It’s fun,” said Asa. “He’s always thinking of something new to do.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Why don’t you talk to him yourself?”

  “Jealous?” She smiled. “I’ve heard that he climbs things. Buildings. Is that true?”

  “Oh.” Asa didn’t know what to say, because it was a secret. Reuben had a policy of climbing the scaffolding of every building under construction in Cambridge. There were not many of these, and they were usually lower than six stories, but in June a ten-story apartment was going up in North Cambridge and he had, in the middle of the night, scaled it alone, lighted only by the beams from passing cars and the hissing street lamp forty feet away. At least he claimed to have done this. He made them promise to keep it a secret. “Next time,” he’d said to Parker and Asa, “you’ll come along. It’s wonderful up at the top. They’re going to build something around the corner from this apartment building—I saw them digging up the ground. Let’s hope it’s fifteen stories.” Asa hoped it wouldn’t be.

  “Where did you get that idea?” he asked her.

  Jo smiled again. “You know he’s very rich. I mean, he’s got his own money, and when he’s twenty-one he’ll have more. Not rich the way you and I are—”

  Are we? thought Asa.

  “—but like movie stars. He’s sixteen, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. But he’ll be seventeen next week. This is an advance birthday party. His birthday’s on Tuesday.”

  “You watch, he’ll buy a car on his birthday. His own—you see? I can’t do that. My parents will give me a car, but I don’t have my own money to get one.”

  “What sort of a car?” Asa thought of a wonderful car, a tapered, bottle-green Chevy with the softest backseat in the Northeast, long enough to stretch Jo out on while he skillfully undid the buttons of her blouse.

  “And because they’re Jews,” Jo continued, “he’ll get the fanciest car he can find.”

  “Why? Why does that mean …” He put his finger in the cooling puddle of tomato sauce on his plate and drew a circle in it.

  “Oh you! You don’t understand anything!” Jo laughed at him, and it was not a pleasant laugh. “We’re cousins, aren’t we? Aren’t you and Clemmy cousins?”

  “Not first cousins. Second, I think.”

  “And I’m Clemmy’s cousin—”

  “He said third. That’s barely cousins. That means we’re fifth cousins.”

  “Well, you know what I mean. We’re related.”

  “So what?” said Asa. He stared at her eyes, which were yellow again. “Does that mean I can’t kiss you?” He blushed. Jo, however, did not blush.

  “Try it,” she said. It was a dare.

  “I have to get back to work,” said Asa, and he made a pile of nickels on the table.

  “You are a responsible little fellow.”

  “How old are you?” Asa was standing up, and angry. “You’re my age, aren’t you?”

  “Sure,” said Jo. “Or maybe just a bit younger. It’s good for the girl to be younger, isn’t it?”

  Then she stood up as well, and came near him, so he could smell her and feel the warmth of her limbs. She smelled of onions and smoke. He moved away. “I’m late,” he said. “I’m sorry, I must get back.”

  “I’m coming, stop rushing me.”

  Walking down the block to the gas station they were silent. Asa’s hand brushed hers for a second, but she neither flinched nor turned her palm toward his. The air smelled of hot rubber and gasoline. The night to come, which earlier had seemed a chilly-blue oasis—the water in the pool, the music soaring out of the speakers that hung off the garage, the fellowship of himself and Reuben and Parker contrasted with the dozens of strangers in whose company, bolstered by his friends, he would be at ease—now might be as steamy and restless and incomprehensible as the day, all because of Jo.

  “So you’re coming tonight,” he asked, as she got into her car.

  “Oh yes,” she said. She looked at herself in the rearview mirror and blew herself, or maybe him, a kiss. “I’ll be there, looking great.”

  “Okay,” said Asa. Okay, what? he asked himself. Okay, sh
e can look great? Okay, she can come tonight? He wished that she would break her arm playing tennis or that Clem would whisk her off to a fancy restaurant in Boston where they wouldn’t eat dinner until ten. He wanted—was it privacy with Reuben? Perhaps relief from her attractiveness. “See you later, then.”

  She left, in her slow, deliberate way, and gave a honk as she turned the corner.

  At ten o’clock the party was rising to its crest. The fifty or so guests had passed through the stages of entry, huddling with three friends, scouting the crowd for romance, and dancing with unknowns, and had started to form a mass, a crowd with its own mood. It wasn’t clear where the mood came from; it wasn’t even clear what the mood was—but Asa felt the change. The mood existed independently of any particular person and had come over the moist patio like an ether, piped through the speakers with Chuck Berry. Asa felt turbulent, like a hurricane day in September, thick and changeable and poised on the edge of novelty. And he knew, from the faces around him, especially Roberto’s, that everyone shared his sensations. Roberto’s characteristic expression, which was petulance overlaid with a brash and false indifference, had shifted to anticipation. Girls who earlier had kept their dancing partners an arm’s length away now pressed their cheeks on white broadcloth, leaving faint dabs of powder there at the end of the song. Boys who had arrived in ties (Asa had not) had pocketed them. Professor Sola had made his round, gin in hand, at nine-thirty, greeted Asa and Parker, whispered a few words to Reuben, and left. But before leaving he had done something that startled Asa into wondering about him. He was a tall bony man who usually wore a black suit, and he moved in an awkward, bony way, as if he consisted only of joints and cartilage. He scuffed along floors, so the boys always knew when he was coming. Tonight he had paused on his way back to the house and turned around, facing the lines of bobbing dancers, and stood watching for a while. Then he had walked, without scuffing, back to the edge of the pool and knelt, swiftly and easily, beside it. Folded up near the ground he looked to Asa more jagged and bloodless than usual. How odd, thought Asa, that Reuben is so unlike him. Professor Sola dipped his hand in the turquoise water and drew it toward him, cupped in his palm. The image of the simply colored paper lanterns strung above the terrace, pink and yellow, swayed on the surface of the pool. Again his hand slid through the water, and he swept his arm along with the ease that Reuben curled his arm to throw a ball. “Grace,” he said. Then he did leave.

  “Grace,” repeated Asa. Was that a name or an idea? He couldn’t decide which would be stranger. If a name, whose? And why was Professor Sola whispering it by the edge of the pool? Grace as an idea was something Asa associated with Bible studies, the story of the Good Samaritan, the drowsiness he felt after lunch, which was when the class was held. It was a puzzle.

  Also puzzling was Jo, who hadn’t arrived. Asa hunted down Parker, who was clasped in beige linen arms at the far corner of the terrace, and coughed.

  “Hey, Parker,” he said.

  Parker lifted his head up and frowned. “I’m busy,” he said, then turned the girl around and introduced her to Asa. She was about fifteen, her hair was the color of her dress, and her eyes were still shut, looking in at the memory of Parker’s mouth. Her name was Amy.

  “Sorry, but I wonder if your brother’s coming.”

  “Clem? I don’t know. Why should I know? Why don’t you dance? He’ll be here, if he’s coming.” Parker saw Asa wince at this string of rudeness and pulled a flask from his pocket. “Have a shot. Have a few shots and ask Lydia to dance.”

  “Who’s Lydia?”

  “There must be somebody here named Lydia. Find her and ask her to dance.”

  This was an assignment only Parker could have thought up or carried out. Asa couldn’t go from girl to girl asking if her name was Lydia. Did Parker offer challenges like this just to make him, Asa, feel weak? He stomped into the garage, where Reuben had hidden beer in a cooler behind some snow tires, and stood in the gloom drinking. And in the gloom he saw something new in the garage: Reuben’s car, predicted by Jo.

  It was low, stout, white, and entirely novel to Asa. Its snub-nosed hood said PORSCHE. He walked around it once, looking at its handles and its single strip of chrome before peering through the glass to inspect the dashboard and seats. On the seats—red leather, bucket, ample—sat Reuben at the steering wheel and Jo on the right. His hand lay on her thigh; she was wearing the red skirt again. And her hand with its bitten nails grasped his wrist like a handcuff, as if it would never let go.

  Asa stepped out of the garage into the pools of light cast by the paper lanterns on the driveway. His bicycle was leaning against a bush, and he wanted more than anything to be on it, riding down a dark country road without a thought for Reuben or any of them. No side street in all of Cambridge would do; he needed blackness, the hum and strum of a thousand animals poised at the edge of the woods watching him pass, the living, soft country night all around him, to erase what he wanted to erase. Therefore he walked back to the party.

  Roberto sidled up to him and offered him a swig of something golden in a glass. Asa took it; it burned and stank like nothing he had ever drunk.

  “What is that?” he asked. “Kerosene?”

  “Special old brandy I stole from Papa. Where’s Reuben?”

  “Sitting in his car.”

  “All by himself?” When Asa didn’t answer, Roberto asked again.

  “No,” said Asa after a while, “he’s sitting with a girl.”

  Roberto did something unusual then. He put his arm around Asa’s shoulders. They stood together, sharing the nasty brandy in silence. And because Roberto was making a special effort for him, Asa was comforted. At the same time he knew it was his sense of injury that let him accept Roberto; in the normal course of things Roberto was an extra, a cranky appendage he and Parker tolerated from loyalty to Reuben, who felt loyalty to his brother.

  “We’re both outsiders, aren’t we,” said Roberto suddenly. It wasn’t a question. “I organized this damn party—all these parties, in fact. Did you know that? Reuben says, ‘Let’s have a party,’ and then I call people up, I arrange for the beer, I spread the word around town, I even hang these stupid lanterns. But they look nice, don’t they? I like the lanterns reflected in the pool. I do everything, and then I stand around watching it, while Reuben and Parker smooch with ninth graders in the bushes. I do attic patrol—you know what that is? Checking the upstairs bedrooms to make sure there aren’t any couples in them. I even make sure Papa has a fresh drink every hour on my way downstairs from attic patrol.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “Oh, why not? I like a party too. Anyhow, it’s what I do. Then I watch it. I watch people making fools of themselves, falling in the pool, getting lipstick on their cheeks, puking on a deck chair. I’m sort of the guardian of the party.” He laughed and looked at Asa sideways. “And you’re sort of the ghost of the party.”

  “What are you talking about?” Asa moved out from the shelter of Roberto’s arm.

  “You’re never in the bushes smooching, you’re always trailing around after them, jealous because they’re smooching or they’re drunker than you are and they’re having more fun.”

  “The hell I am,” said Asa. But Roberto wasn’t listening to him.

  “And you do what you have to do to pass—you know, to look as though you’re part of the party. You dance a few rounds, and you carry a beer bottle, and you know enough not to arrive in a jacket and tie. But you’re as out of it as I am. More. I live here, for Chrissake. I can tell everybody to go home. It’s my house. Shall I do that? This isn’t much of a party. The one in May was a lot better.”

  “No, oh, no,” said Asa. Roberto, standing in the glare of his lanterns, seemed flooded with a sudden power, and Asa half believed that a snap of his fingers would cause the crowd to evaporate. But he also knew himself to be just suffering from the inconsistency of life: Jo was in the new car with Reuben, and he was a ghost, and he hadn’t expected either o
f these events. So why shouldn’t Roberto turn out to be a sorcerer? There was also the question of “Grace.” Roberto had begun to whistle and tap his foot, signs that he was about to move away and make trouble elsewhere. “What was your mother’s name?” asked Asa.

  “We don’t talk about her,” Roberto said.

  Asa knew that already. She was more unmentionable than the source of the Solas’ money, which was variously reported, by Asa’s parents, Parker, and Clem, to be from a drugstore chain, the Rothschilds (cousins, maybe?), or smuggled from Europe at the start of the war in the form of diamonds. Professor Sola’s wife had been: blonde and bad—and this Asa knew from deduction.

  Roberto was on the other side of the pool, jostling the dancers at the edge in the hope that some were unsteady enough to fall in. None did. Then he took up his skimming pole and cleaned the surface of the water, moving, with his net, the lanterns’ garish daubs that like a new constellation ringed themselves in that liquid sky. He stirred the water and made little whirlpools and whistled and splashed. The long pole’s end was interfering with Parker and Amy, who had come out of the shadows to dance. Roberto had managed to insert it between them, and every time he stirred, the pole described an unpredictable ellipse at the level of their knees.