Swim Back to Me (8 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought—”

“We farmed the kids out tonight, Richard Appleby,” he said. “Married couples need time alone.”

“Dan, for God’s sake.” Joanie tucked her hair behind her ear, then untucked it and spiraled a lock around her finger. “Sorry, Richard. How was the fishing trip? Did you catch a lot of fish?”

“Oh, that’s right,” Dan said. “This was the great fishing weekend. Don’t you have a speckled trout for us or something?”

I wanted to ask him about what my father had said. And “by mutual agreement”—did that mean he and Joanie both thought he should leave? Or he and the University? That would be embarrassing, the University wanting him to leave. Though Yale had.

He was holding the towel between his thumb and forefinger, and now he pinched it tighter, gathering the material into his fist. “No speckled trout, then,” he said. “Too bad.”

“I’ll bet you had a nice time, though,” Joanie said. “You and your dad.”

I looked past them, saw empty wineglasses on the coffee table, discarded clothing on the couch. “Where
is
Sasha?”

“They’re both with the Wilsons,” Joanie said. “They’ll be home tomorrow morning.”

Sasha hated the Wilson kids, fifteen-year-old twin girls who attended a private school and played field hockey.

“Come back tomorrow,” Dan said. “We like having you around—you know that, don’t you?”

I mumbled something and got out of there, running down their driveway and out into the street, and then running all the way to my house for no good reason.

I took the Band-Aid box over to Sasha’s the next day, and I had my first taste of marijuana in a tiny park near our houses, the two of us sitting on adjacent swings that creaked every time we moved. I coughed, of course, and didn’t feel a thing, but, unlike fishing, smoking pot turned out to be something I was very good at, and each encounter with a joint told me exactly who I was, a guy who preferred the dazed-out float of a good high over everything else.

“
Now
do you get it?” Sasha said one hot afternoon when we’d gotten stoned and were on our bikes in search of food. “It took you long enough.”

“Give me a break,” I said. “You loved being the only one. Well, no more, sister.”

She laughed at this and then couldn’t stop laughing and had to get off her bike. We were headed for JJ&F, a little grocery store on the far edge of College Terrace, but she was laughing so hard I got off my bike, too.

“Well, no more, sister,” she sang, and now we both cracked up, laying our bikes on the sidewalk and crouching next to them, laughing the ocean-wave laughter of the stoned, up and down and down and up, and it was incredibly intense and at the same time locked away from the real world, safe behind a wall of glass.

At last we got back on our bikes and continued. In the store we walked back and forth between the ice cream display and the shelves of chips, finally settling on an enormous bag of Cheetos. Once we’d paid, we walked our bikes down College Avenue, taking turns holding the bag open so the other person could scoop out a giant handful.

“Beware the orange fingers,” she said at one point, waving her stained fingers in my face, and we cracked up again, Sasha laughing so hard this time that she had to cross one leg in front of the other.

“OK,” she said after a time, standing normally again but shaking her hands as if she were trying to air-dry them. “I have to maintain.” She ran her fingers through her hair, leaving a trace of Cheetos dust on the edge of her face. “Let’s go. Just don’t say anything funny.”

We walked half a block in silence.

“I didn’t say don’t say
anything,
” she said, and a giggle edged its way into her voice.

I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t laugh and set her off. I thought for some reason of my father, chuckling a little the previous night as he glanced at the comics page. “I like Beetle Bailey,” he’d said, looking up at me. “Do you?”

She was a little ahead of me. She wore a halter top, and on her bare back there was a sunburn line from the string of her bathing suit. I wondered if she’d been lying out. Joanie liked to sun herself on the patio, recline on one of the lounge chairs with the
New York Review of Books
and an iced coffee. I pictured the contours of Joanie’s wide belly, the bits of pubic hair that escaped from the leg holes of her bathing suit, making me want to look and not look at the same time. That sunny patio: soon it would belong to the Levines again.

“So when are you moving?” I said. “Where are you going to live next year, anyway?”

Sasha was licking her fingers, washing off the orange dust. “College Terrace.”

I stopped walking. The whole of College Terrace was just College Avenue and the dozen or so streets that crossed it, each only two blocks long. We had just passed Princeton Street and were on our way to Oberlin. Wherever their new place was, it couldn’t be far away. “You mean you found a house?”

“Yeah. It’s going to be great.”

“Where is it?”

She was silent for a moment. “Dartmouth. Have we passed Dartmouth yet?”

“Duh.”

“What?”

“We’re at Oberlin. They’re in alphabetical order. It’s like five more blocks.”

“They’re in alphabetical order?”

“Well, not completely. Cornell is between Wellesley and Princeton, so—”

“So the person who named the streets was a stoner,” she said, and we both laughed again, though not so hard this time.

“Well, let’s go see it,” I said.

“What?”

“Your new house.”

“Oh. We can’t. Other people still live there.”

“The outside.”

She seemed to give it more thought than it needed—torturing me a little, I thought. “OK,” she said at last, and we continued down College, across Oberlin and Harvard. Dartmouth was the weird one: you couldn’t drive through because there was a little park right in the middle; the street stopped and then started up again after the park. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of park you could smoke in; it was open to all the houses surrounding it, nothing like the private park near our houses.

We got to Dartmouth Street, and Sasha stopped in front of a one-story stucco house with a huge palm tree in the front yard and several terra cotta pots of cactus sitting on the front stoop. “Voilà,” she said.

It looked small, but I could see why they’d chosen it. The sand-colored stucco, the terra cotta, the palm—it was as Western as you could get. I wondered if there’d be a band of light on the floor for Dan to lie in.

“There are only two bedrooms,” she said, “but I’m going to take the garage. See?” She pointed at a small structure at the end of the cracked concrete driveway. “Daddy says it’ll be hot in the summer and freezing in the winter, but that makes it better, don’t you think? I’m going to have a ceiling fan and mosquito netting, and a woodstove for when it’s cold.” She glanced at me and then looked away again, trying to suppress a smile. “And a separate entrance.”

I didn’t really want to think about Cal or how much easier it was going to be for her to see him, so I said we should go, and we got onto our bikes and rode home.

Cal, I learned, was a dealer, though he preferred “supplier,” as in “I’m a supplier of goods and services,” the services being delivery and, where indicated, co-consumption. He’d met Eric Rumsen and Kevin Cottrell at a party at Lake Lagunita, on the edge of the Stanford campus; the night Sasha and I saw them in the field behind SCRA was the night of his first sale to Eric and the others, two ounces of pot homegrown by a friend of his on a small farm up near Cloverdale. Two ounces was all he’d sell them at a time. “He’s concerned about them,” Sasha said about this, and I thought: Yeah, concerned they’ll turn around and start selling it themselves and he’ll get none of the profit.

I also found out, during those early weeks of the summer, why Sasha and Cal had been unable to have sex. “It hurt too much.” This wasn’t unusual for a fourteen-year-old girl, she told me with confidence. They were going to try again sometime soon.

And there was this: they’d used my house that Sunday afternoon because Cal couldn’t wait. They were hanging out at the Union, and they decided yes, they should, they should do it; and Sasha only had an hour before she had to be home, which wasn’t nearly enough time to get all the way to his apartment and back, given what had to happen in between. My house was perfect: nearby and empty.

This information came to me slowly, in bits and pieces, usually when Sasha and I were high. Days when she wasn’t with Cal, we rode our bikes into the hills: we lay around under giant oak trees, smoking and laughing and sometimes falling asleep in the heat, so that we might wake in the late afternoon with our skin marked by the twigs and bits of dried grass we’d lain on. Gladys always wanted to know where I was going, and so I invented a friend in Los Altos Hills with a swimming pool in his backyard. That I never brought home a wet suit or towel seemed not to occur to her—or maybe she felt she was carrying out her part of things just asking the question. Sasha told her parents the same story, and so we had to name this friend, and we came up with Harry Henry. Saying “Harry Henry’s house” over and over again was quite a sport for us when we were stoned. Harry Henry’s parents kept a mini-fridge in their cabana, and there were Cokes available all day, and cookies and chips galore. Hillary Henry was Harry’s magnificent older sister, who could often be seen sunning herself on a lounge chair.

One afternoon we leaned against the rough trunk of our favorite oak, passing a pipe back and forth and talking about how sad it was that Harry Henry’s pet iguana had died.

“Hillary planned the funeral,” Sasha said. “She wrote an elegy. ‘What ocean contains water enough to feed our tears this day?’ ”

I snorted. “That’s terrible.”

She socked my shoulder. “No, it’s not. Hillary writes beautiful poetry.”

“Harry hates her for it.”

“Harry adores her for it. He illustrates her poems. Didn’t he show you the pictures?” She said the last word with a slight English accent: the
picshuhs
?

“No,” I said.

“No? That sad sketch of poor Iggy with his head on the ground?” She upped the accent. “When she goes away to collidg next year, he’ll be desolate. Fortunately, she’ll cut off a lock of her heh for him to braid into a wristbaund.”

“A ‘lock,’ ” I said. “Don’t you think that’s weird? And talk normal.”

“It should be a key of heh,” she said.

“Talk normal,” I said, “and give me that.” I took the pipe and sucked in a burning throatful of spicy Cloverdale dope. I held it in my lungs, keeping the pipe in my far hand so she couldn’t take it from me.

“A key of heh,” she said again. And then, dropping the accent, “God, I just realized, I sound like Daddy.”

“ ‘If you don’t go to Muir Woods with us, your mum will be the only bud along.’ ”

Sasha laughed. “Very good. Hey, what are you doing, give me the pipe.”

I took another toke and handed it to her.

“Speaking of birds,” she said, “do you have a crush on her?”

“Who?”

“Hillary.”

My picture of Hillary was mostly a picture of the girl I’d seen when we were stopped at Mile Ten of the Walk for Mankind, the braless girl in the purple tank top. Hillary had that girl’s breasts and her long, smooth legs, but in truth she had Sasha’s hair.

“Does the pope shit in the woods?”

Sasha snorted and said, “Yes, and all bears are Catholic.”

I sang: “ ‘Get down on your knees and genuflect, genuflect, genuflect, genuflect.’ ” This was from the Tom Lehrer song “The Vatican Rag”; the Horowitzes were great fans, and I had learned the lyrics to all of his songs.

“Think of a bear kneeling,” she said.

“Don’t think of an elephant,” I said, and she laughed harder.

She sucked on the pipe and then handed it to me, saying, “Anyway, do you?”

It took me a moment to figure out what she was asking. “I want to bed her,” I said, and she bent forward at the waist and shrieked, her shoulders shaking with laughter; and then, in a moment, she was on my lap, her shins on the ground outside my thighs, her face inches from mine.

And so I kissed her. A quick lean in, my lips pressed against hers for an instant, and then I pulled back again.

I looked into her face. Saw her long nose and pale eyelashes and pink-rimmed eyes. I had an urge to put my tongue on her eyelid. I cupped my free hand behind her head and pulled her close again, keeping my mouth on hers, lips moving, until I needed to break away for air.

She was smiling. “Look at this,” she said, and she leaned in with her mouth just open and ran her tongue across my upper lip.

The next day was the Fourth of July. For a week or more we’d been trying to figure out how to watch the fireworks stoned, and at last we’d come up with a plan. Rather than riding our bikes to the spot where most Stanford families watched, we would meet Cal on campus and have him drive us into the hills, where we’d get privacy—and a better view.

But we hadn’t planned on having kissed the day before. I woke up that morning thinking I couldn’t go anywhere with Sasha and Cal, and then that I had to see her right away, and then that I had to make sure she never saw Cal again, and then that I should go along with the original plan because otherwise it would all be so obvious. What would be obvious? I started to wonder, but then I was off chasing pictures: Sasha’s face, that glimpse I’d gotten of her nipple a few weeks back, the sight of her butt as I pedaled home behind her at the end of the day yesterday.

I hung around the kitchen with my father for a while, agreeing with him that I’d be really careful tonight, saying yes, I’d checked my bike lights, they worked. He was going to a barbecue, and he said again that I was welcome, and I said again that I thought I’d just go ahead with my original plan.

The phone rang late in the morning, and I leapt to answer it, but it was just the barbecue people, asking my father if he had any extra lighter fluid he could bring.

I ate lunch, lay on my bed for a while, went back to the kitchen and found a Popsicle. At last, I called her.

And: Of course we were still going. Why would I ask? She was so nonchalant I wondered for a moment if it had even happened. But it had—I knew it had. I remembered the faint lime taste of her mouth, flavored by the candy she’d eaten earlier. I remembered how her tank top revealed the shapes of her breasts.