Asa, as I Knew Him Read online

  “Pole,” said Parker.

  Roberto beat on, unheeding.

  “Pole, you asshole!” Parker yelled. One moment later he grabbed the handle and flipped Roberto into the pool by jerking it from his hands. And then there was nothing to prevent everybody else from going in—the water was cool, dancing was hot, midnight had struck on the church clock up the street, and they were all young.

  Asa, in his capacity of ghost, sat in a deck chair and waited to hear the car doors shut. He wanted a specific thing: Jo coming to him in the dark and kissing him. He imagined it with words—“Why are you sitting here in the dark? Why aren’t you swimming?”—and without: her hands on his shoulders, her thigh pressing against his arm, which rested on the arm of the chair, the smell of her hair as it fell around his face; her two rather small lips pushing against his, tasting of lipstick and Luckys and her own secret taste, which would be peppermint; the instant when he pushed beyond her lips and into the heat of her mouth. Perhaps she would push her way into him first? The way her skirt would slip under his hands when he put them around her knees to hold her steady through their kiss. How they would, without having to walk or discuss it, be lying in grass hip to hip and be warm up and down from each other’s heat. Her fingers undoing his buttons. Their shoes paired like sentries on the ground. A small pile of clothes, crickets singing to them, silk and silk, wet silk and dry of her stretched out for him.

  When she did come, things happened so quickly he barely caught the details. She stood behind him, put one hand on his neck, and pulled his head backwards by his chin. She kissed him upside down, so he didn’t know if her eyes were open or shut. It was a professional kiss; her tongue was in and out of him and the whole thing was over in ten seconds. She stood briefly behind him, still holding him on the shoulder, and they breathed together. Asa put his tongue between his lips to taste her again; she tasted, naturally enough, of Reuben—beery, yeasty, slightly tart from chlorine and sweat, a taste that, translated into smell, Asa could have identified anywhere.

  “Do that again,” he said, arching his neck back to her. His voice was low and thick, but he was pleading, not commanding. And Jo, with her excitable red skirt, was not a girl to be pleaded with. He knew that the instant the sentence was out. Overcoming centuries of inertia and miles of internal boundaries, Asa rose from his chair and turned around to embrace her. She wasn’t there. He couldn’t even see her disappearing into the garage.

  He sat back in his chair. Was she now kissing Reuben, who was tasting Asa’s taste in her? Or was she moving from Parker to Roberto to Harrison Grey, who always wore a seersucker suit to the party? Was she sitting next to Clem in his Ford while he pumped the gas pedal and hoped the car would start? If he waited for her again as intently as he had, would she reappear? He tried. This time he supplied himself with her breasts, whose dimensions he could guess from the moment when she had pressed herself against his shoulders, trying to reach the rims of his upper teeth with her tongue. But the taste, the Reuben-taste, which remained vivid in his mouth and mind, confused his image of her, so that her honey hair kept bleaching into Reuben’s pale hair, and her small bony face, which looked, now that he thought of it, a little like Reuben’s, kept looking exactly like Reuben’s. Brandy and fury at being peripheral had him confused; a creature with a boy’s face, breasts, and wearing something white—a ghost hermaphrodite—was what he had created for his fantasies. That sort of thing would never appear on the Solas’ terrace to kiss him.

  Beyond his outstretched feet the party sang the last verse of its song. The pool was empty and unruffled again. Those who had been in it were standing beside it with damp patches on their clothes saying good-bye to ones they had kissed or wished they’d kissed. Cars and bicycles were crunching the gravel of the driveway. The lanterns were pale, as though shining all evening had exhausted their pigment, and the table where ginger ale and orange juice (mixers for the vodka carried in silver flasks in back pockets) had been ranked like ninepins now held one bottle of beer with two cigarette butts in it. Roberto was sweeping up the broken glass surrounding the table by kicking it into a paper bag; the shards he trod on, exclaiming “Ping,” as each one cracked. People leaving clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Wonderful, terrific, thanks,” they said.

  “Don’t mention it,” he growled. “Come tomorrow night, same time, same place.” Crack of glass, jingle of a piece that made it into the bag with the others.

  Asa stayed in his chair. He could have taken the broom that rested at the far edge of the garage and swept the butts from the edge of the pool, but he didn’t. He could have joined Roberto and saved the remaining pieces of glass from being crushed into sand, but he didn’t do that either. There was no point to Roberto’s cleaning. In the morning Lolly, their pale servant, would clean everything. Roberto only started to clean when he wanted the party to end.

  “Roberto, cut out the cleaning,” said Parker, who had walked Amy to the end of the driveway and kissed her until they were both out of breath, and returned with a hot face and a happy self-absorption.

  “Why don’t you clean something up, Whiting,” Roberto said. “Sweep up the butts.”

  “Oh, let Lolly do it,” Parker said. He yawned and flopped onto the deck chair next to Asa’s. “Sulking?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m sulking,” said Asa.

  “Did you find Lydia?”

  “I didn’t look for her.”

  “Who’s Lydia?” asked Roberto.

  “Never mind. Forget it.” Asa got out of his chair. It felt strange to be standing up. The blood whizzed up and down his legs in a peculiar way that made him queasy.

  “Great party,” said Parker, after a minute of silence. “Don’t you think?”

  “I thought it stunk,” said Roberto.

  “How about you, Asa?”

  “Fine,” said Asa.

  “Lively bunch here.” Parker sank back in the chair and went to sleep.

  Roberto had finished with the glass and was walking around the pool picking up cigarette butts. Parker wheezed and opened his mouth, but kept sleeping. Asa stood on his tingling legs in the shadows and hated everything. He hated Parker for being able to sleep and for being able to find a girl who would kiss him more than once. He hated Roberto for making everyone feel guilty by cleaning up. He hated himself for sulking, for wanting what he couldn’t have, and for not being dignified enough to have punched Roberto when he called him a ghost. He hated the party for being over and for having ever begun, and the night for its thick, cricket-crazy air, and the pool for its imperturbable surface, which he envied, and Professor Sola for his secret Grace, and Reuben—Reuben who wasn’t even there to be hated—he hated simply for being himself, that self which, in its blare and blaze of assurance, could draw all eyes and hands as a fire.

  Suddenly the four spotlights on the garage roof came on. The terrace, the pool, and half the lawn were under their white auspices. They were so bright that they gave all objects a vibrating aura—metal in particular changed its character. The legs of chairs and the three-step ladder leading into the shallow end of the pool quivered and shot out white-green penumbras, as though the light were a new element that had altered their composition and transformed them into slices of comets or stars—something, at any rate, that burned hot and fierce. The light made confusion out of living things, isolating each movement, so that Roberto, bending down to gather trash, was kin to a time-lapse photograph of a ballet dancer, a series of postures living in ghostly yet vivid sequence, dozens of Robertos shimmering around the real Roberto hidden in the middle of his duplicates. Even Parker asleep had twenty rising and falling chests.

  “For Chrissake, turn the lights off!” yelled Roberto. “You’ll scare the neighborhood.”

  Reuben, wearing nothing at all, burst out of the garage and into the pool. He was a huge white fish underwater for the whole length of it. At the deep end he darted up, pulling his torso out of the water, and yelled, “Fuck the neighborhood!” He
went down again, he turned somersaults, he splashed Roberto on purpose. After five minutes of this, satisfied, he catapulted over the ladder and stood on the flagstones, shaking himself like a dog while the water ran down him in green and ash-white streams. “I’m going to be seventeen,” he cried, raising his arms to the night sky. “Seventeen.”

  Asa took his bike from the bushes and rode home.

  The Angel of Monadnock II

  The rest of the summer passed uneventfully; there were no more parties, and Jo took Reuben sailing on the weekends, leaving Parker, Asa, and Roberto to sit by the pool during the dog days. The second tall building remained a hole in the ground and Reuben’s plan for the four of them to make a big climb remained just a plan. By September all of them were ready for a change. Their sweaters and scarves looked like Christmas presents—new and unusual—when they came out of the cedar trunks where they’d been laid in April. Dr. Thayer took Asa to Brooks Brothers and bought him a dark blue cashmere coat that came to his knees and had a flap to hide the buttons; it was his first overcoat and, according to his father, his last. Standing at his mirror late at night he tried it on and pretended he was a playboy, with his suntanned skin against the heavy, deeply colored collar. In St. Moritz for the day, back from the Bahamas—he walked back and forth in front of the mirror hoping to catch himself unawares in it and find himself also new and unusual.

  On September 15, the group went down to the Back Bay Station together—except Roberto, who was staying in Cambridge to redo his final year at a cram house called Manter Hall. More than Reuben, Roberto was incapable of putting his heart into school; he had been dismissed from Andover in the middle of his senior year for cheating on a Latin test. Like mother and money, this was not a topic for discussion. In fact, the first Asa heard of it was at the beginning of September, when Roberto started classes. Manter Hall was in the middle of Harvard Square and was filled with “problem” boys whose parents were determined that they go to acceptable colleges. The school offered facts and numbers and topic sentences; there was no pretense of inspiring the students, much less making gentlemen of them. Roberto rode Reuben’s ten-speed in the mornings and sat on the Eliot House lawn to eat his lunch in isolation. At week’s end he was quizzed by his adviser and, after dinner, by his troubled father, who concluded each session by asking how he had produced two dullards and what he was going to do about them.

  So Roberto, now in a permanent sulk, was cramming the binomial theorem at ten-fifteen in the morning when Reuben, Parker, and Asa stood in a knot amid hundreds of others heading north and south to school.

  Asa wore his coat despite the balmy amber weather. Reuben was wearing a white T-shirt against all regulations (“Andover students are expected to wear jackets and ties at all times when school is in session except in their private rooms”). Parker wore Clem’s outgrown Harris tweed sportcoat, which was baggy but sophisticated. They didn’t speak much. Reuben fiddled with his racquet press and wondered aloud if the Spaniard with the terrific serve would be returning. “You’re such a jock,” snapped Asa, who hated tennis and was tired of watching Reuben dash off to games with Jo, practice his backhand off the garage, and buy five pairs of white shorts and white socks in a ten-minute trip to J. August, Clothiers to Gentlemen. He had dragged Asa along. Reuben had taken large bills from his wallet and handed them to the cashier without looking, the way Asa’s father paid for dinner when he and Asa’s mother came for Parents’ Weekend at Choate; it made Asa nervous to watch Reuben flipping twenties in and out of his pocket. The differences between their lives seemed to be growing. And yet, here in the station, where the sun streaked the floor with dust-infused stripes, where the pigeons who roosted in the painted plaster ceiling swooped down after a dropped piece of raisin bun, where all the young men of good family in the Boston area stood stiff in new khakis, Reuben was everything familiar and comfortable, and Asa hated leaving him and their wonderful, pointless, seemingly endless but now ending summer.

  Asa and Parker had taken up smoking during the heat spell when Reuben was off on the Bay in Jo’s boats, and they now lighted their last Pall Malls of the season with Parker’s Zippo, which he’d “clipped” (his new word) from his father’s bureau. Reuben was scornful. “You guys are idiots,” he said. He had stopped smoking because he didn’t want to impair his lung capacity. This reason, repeated whenever they lit up, made the smokers giggle each time they heard it. “Oh, stop it,” Reuben said.

  “What? Smoking?” Parker blew some rings; he was good at it.

  “You know, your father’s the one who told me it impairs your lung capacity.” Reuben put his hand on Asa’s cashmere arm.

  “Yes, it sounds just like him,” said Asa. He inhaled and felt the dusty rasp of tobacco traveling down his throat. He loved smoking. It made him aware of every breath, of the dimensions of his insides, of the taste of his mouth and lips, of the way his hand held and moved objects. He put a cloud of smoke between himself and Reuben. Reuben could be anybody, a stick figure in a drawing, a fifth former he didn’t know.… The train to Wallingford was called.

  The Choate-bound boys grabbed their suitcases and ran for the stairs, turning at the top to wave to Reuben, who had to wait for the shuttle to North Station. He was standing alone in the space the three of them had carved out, between two sunbeams. He put his tennis racquet up in front of his face so he looked like a dog in a pound, or a prisoner pressing on his bars. “Live it up!” he yelled. “Give ’em hell!” Then he raised the racquet high and served an imaginary ball in their direction. The crowd pressed them down the stairs to the track, where the air smelled of steam and hot metal and winter was on the heels of the breeze that funneled into the tunnel.

  Toward the end of October, when the days had been truncated by the turning back of the clocks, Asa returned to his triple after European history to find a letter from Reuben. It was a four-line note that read:

  Dear Asa, I’m taking five courses and playing soccer. I’m flunking four of them but still counting on you as my Harvard roommate. Come up and cheer for me next weekend when we play Exeter. I’ll meet 11:20 train on Saturday.

  R.

  How like him to assume I’ll come, thought Asa, but already he’d begun to tally up his clean socks and consider what books he’d take to study on the train. He rummaged on top of Parker’s desk to see if he had also gotten an invitation, and was happy to find he hadn’t. Parker was wearing a bit thin on Asa. He insisted on smoking in their rooms, which was grounds for expulsion, he made piles of clothes at the foot of his bed, which smelled long before he got around to taking them to the laundry, and he was under the spell of Baudelaire, whom he quoted unceasingly in French. Harrison Grey, the other roommate, had exchanged his seersucker suit for gray flannel but was as dull as ever. He was dull-witted as well, and had to study hard; every evening he sat with a straight back at his desk and read while Parker tried to distract him.

  “Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie n’a bougé,” Parker would intone, flinging open the windows that gave onto the peaceful Connecticut fields. Then, standing behind Harrison’s flannel back, “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère.” None of this had any effect on Harrison, who took German not French, but it drove Asa to the library for peace.

  In the library Asa daydreamed. He preferred to read lying down, and to write his papers late at night, so there was little for him to do in the library. He thought about Reuben. At first it seemed he was thinking about the summer; he remembered the glittering water and the feel of the canvas chair against the backs of his knees, and contrasted it with the beige spiky trees clustered outside the long library windows and the mahogany chair where he sat and watched those trees lose their leaves. But in his thoughts Reuben was always sitting in a deck chair beside him, and they were planning escapades, or parties, exchanging stories about girls (something they never did in reality), getting to know each other. For Asa had realized that they didn’t know each other. Friendship in his little gang consisted
of Parker and Asa vying for Reuben’s attention and thinking of subtle ways to exclude Roberto. Asa wondered: Did Reuben know he was the focus and that this kept the others divided? Asa decided that Reuben might not only know this but have manufactured it himself. On the other hand, it was possible that he was oblivious, as he pretended to be. But didn’t that oblivion contain a sort of natural arrogance and pride, which took for granted rivalries and jealousy? Perhaps that was why Reuben had gravitated to Jo; he could have conversations with her. But Reuben lying blond and warm on the deck of a boat with Jo had not been seeking a conversation. Asa remembered Jo’s hand on Reuben’s bony wrist in the car, and the mixed-up taste of Jo’s mouth—the conversations those two had were silent, also of a sort Reuben couldn’t have with Asa.

  Asa tipped his chair back and watched rain moving in over the tops of trees. He wanted someone to talk to about how he felt watching trees in the rain, which was sad and delighted and hollow, as if his insides had become a receptacle for emotions that floated in the air, looking for a resting place. Parker looking at trees felt he was Baudelaire; what Asa wondered was how Reuben felt. Did he ever stop to look at trees?

  So the invitation was opportune, because Asa needed to know more about Reuben. He packed his changes of socks and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, put The Mayor of Casterbridge in the pocket of his cashmere coat, and set out early on Saturday morning by train, which sped along the flat, frost-encrusted lower New England seashore stirring flocks of small gray gulls with its approach. At the Back Bay Station he was a tourist waiting for the shuttle to North Station and another train to take him further up. This train passed through still mill towns where long, black factories with broken windows hunched empty. Asa had enough history to know that only fifty years before, cousins of his had overseen cousins of Reuben’s as they bent over looms in these mills. Or was he mistaken, and did Jews not have cousins? His impression of Jews was that like his own class they were a small group given to marrying each other and avoiding outsiders; such behavior led to a multitude of cousins. He decided to ask Reuben about the family arrangements of Jews.