The Vagabonds (17 page)

They smoked cigarettes and sang. George was a fast driver, and they made their way through Fort Edward and Hudson Falls and Glens Falls and up to Huletts Landing on the lake she teased him he was named for; she wasn’t hungry yet, she told him when he asked, but anyhow he bought her a hot dog with the fixings and helped himself to a bottle of beer. He asked if she felt like a spin on the lake, a little excursion in a canoe, and she said yes, why not. His politeness pleased her, and his formality—as though he was practicing being an adult and expecting she would too. They rented a birch bark canoe at the Huletts Landing slip—two dollars for the afternoon, with a five-dollar deposit in case of loss or damage—and George held the gunwale for her and, balancing, shoved off.

The water was deep blue and cold, and they were alone on the lake. He told her to take off her sandals; she complied. He had removed his shoes and socks and rolled his flannels up to the knee and knew what he was doing with the paddles and canoe. He told her ever since he was ten his family had sent him to summer camp in Maine, a place called Camp Androscoggin, and before he went to college he had been a lifeguard there. He talked about what it felt like to be a junior counselor, with eight kids sleeping together in a bunk at night. He liked to sail and fish but most of all he liked canoes; he feathered his paddle and smiled at her and asked if she wanted a turn? She shook her head. Because his parents were divorcing they sent him out of Manhattan, and the divorce took forever; each year he went to camp his mother and father had trial separations and then trial reconciliations; he was an only child. She was an only child also, she said, and George said he knew, he could tell.

“How did you know?”

“We have that in common, don’t we? It takes one to recog- nize one.”

He kept them close to shore, and she watched the pine trees and the maples jostling, shaking, and the shuttered cabins they passed. The wind increased. Two white-tailed deer, startled, ran off. She pointed at them, turning to see if he had also seen the deer, and he smiled and nodded yes. There was a campsite and a large flat rock and she was turning back again when suddenly the canoe tipped, tilted, and Alice fell overboard. She was not so much frightened as gulping the cold water, shocked, embarrassed, trying to laugh, and he was shouting “Are you all right? God, God, hold on, OK?” Then he was close beside her in the upright canoe and holding out a paddle, saying, “Easy, easy.” Her teeth were chattering, her hair astream, and she flailed her arms and legs, holding to the paddle’s tip he thrust at her and then the gunwale as he dug hard for shore. They reached land in less than a minute, and by that time he too was wet, standing knee-deep in the water, lifting her to the large rock and uncoiling the painter and fastening it to the exposed roots of a stunted pine and clambering up. Her clothes were soaked, and she had never been so cold in her life and George did jumping jacks and made her do jumping jacks also to get the circulation going and when that did not work he told her to take off her clothes.

“B-but you?” she asked.

“What about me?”

“Aren’t you, are you c-c-cold?”

He handed her a towel from the picnic hamper and then unscrewed a flask and told her to take a large swallow; she did. She gagged and coughed and drank again; the brandy warmed her and she closed her eyes while George was rubbing at her hair, her neck and shoulders, then her breasts. He did not kiss her, however, not yet; he continued to work down her body and dried her thighs beneath her upraised skirt, her knees, her calves and then her ankles and toes. In years to come she asked him if he had planned it all this way and tipped the canoe on purpose; “Plain dumb luck” he said. But he was smiling as he said it, and she asked him if he’d done this before, done it often, tipping his dates into water and making them take off their clothes. “What a good idea,” he said. “Why didn’t I think of it before?”

“It isn’t funny,” Alice said. “It never was funny. I could have drowned.”

“In three feet of water?”

“I
felt
like I was drowning.”

“No. Not till I kissed you,” he said.

They kissed. The brandy and the sunshine and the second towel he dried her with were working all together, and the shock of the cold water and the startled leaping deer; she rested her head on his neck. She liked the way it fit there, just above the collarbone, and she started to laugh about the accident and then she started to cry. He held her, his arms strong. He rubbed at her shoulders and neck. The canoe bobbed placidly behind them, and across the lake she heard a motorboat, and he spread the blanket out on a patch of grass and pulled her down to the ground and they began kissing in earnest and he took off his pants. She would remember it, always, the way he spread her legs and closed her eyelids with his fingertips and kissed the nipples of her breasts and how she held his erection and helped to guide him in. She would remember the pine trees and grass and how the blood was coursing through her, warming her, and how the flesh of his face distended, a little, because he was working above her and his mouth was open and his cheeks hung down. He was saying “Oh, oh, oh,” and it was over quickly but Alice would remember how he pulled away, ejaculating, and spilled himself over her stomach, the semen pooling there. Then she was cold once more, the shadows lengthening, the seduction finished, and they stood up not facing each other; she gathered her wet clothes and dressed.

On the drive back to Saratoga Springs he said, “Will I see you next weekend?” She was trying not to cry. She had expected he would drop her at the dorm and wave and drive away. “Do you want to?” Alice asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Of course I do.”

“You don’t need to say that,” she said. She was wearing the blanket over her shoulders, and it smelled of dirt and blood and beer.

“I
do
want to see you again.”

“I don’t always fall in the water, you know. It’s not, I mean, a habit . . .”

“Don’t be angry. Are you angry?”

She considered his question. “Yes. No.”

He had the heater on full blast, and by now her skirt was dry. “Next weekend’s Memorial Day,” he said. “I bet there’s a parade.”

“And?”

“Do you want to go?”

“What? Marching? No thank you,” she said.

He pulled into a parking lot where there was a burned-out abandoned storefront and turned off the engine; cooling, it ticked. Alice bit her lip. He offered her a beer, a sack of radishes, a waterlogged pretzel; she refused. In the middle distance, a dog barked. While she stared out the window George repeated earnestly he
did
want to see her next weekend, because what had happened was special between them, not something he had planned. He said she was beautiful, Elizabeth Taylor-beautiful, and he had felt that way ever since the first minute he saw her, at their first dance. If he’d hurt her he was sorry and sorry she fell overboard; he had been busy balancing the boat and keeping it from capsizing and making things worse. He talked on and on about the accident, not talking about what
did
matter and what had happened afterward, until she wondered if he too was feeling shy. She said, “I want another cigarette, I could
really
use a smoke.” They smoked. Staring out the window at an Esso sign and the ruined boarded-up store she rested her hand on his knee. Then she let it rise to his cock. He flushed, he breathed “Oh, oh,” and now Alice had the advantage; she felt him harden in her palm and understood the power she would have with him, would use for years, and said, “All right, OK, let’s meet on Memorial Day.”

On Memorial Day George did arrive, and this time they met in Congress Park; he drove a Chevrolet. “What happened to the dark blue car?” she asked. “It isn’t mine,” he said. This time his jacket and shirt seemed brand-new, but he was wearing dungarees and sneakers and no hat; he confessed the cars belonged to his fraternity brothers and he didn’t own one himself. “Were you trying to snow me?” she asked. Mr. Atkinson was walking by, and he smiled at Alice, and she smiled and waved back. “Who’s that?” asked George. “My teacher,” she said. “He’s got the hots for you, I bet,” said George, and she said, “I bet not.”

“Oh?”

“He’s got the hots for Charles Darwin,” she said. “He wants us to memorize the ports of call of the SS
Beagle
and the names of the ship’s doctor and the crew. He wants us to read Sigmund Freud.”

Then Alison appeared, and they shook hands all around. Alison was long-legged, blonde and dating a medical student called Bill; the four of them drove across town to Union Avenue and found a parking place and settled in to watch the Memorial Day Parade. There were firemen and men with flags and drums and piccolos and guns. There was an ambulance and a fire engine and policemen riding motorcycles and a horse-drawn cannon from the Civil War. She asked Bill what kind of doctor he wanted to be, and he said, “I’m going overseas. Just as soon as I get certified I’ll be in the army. Germany, maybe, Korea; I’ll be in the Medical Corps.”

The day was muggy and windless and hot. In the press of celebrants George and Alison edged up ahead. She watched her date watching her roommate, the way he leaned forward to Alison’s ear and whispered something about horses and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and how he made Alison laugh. In years to come she told herself she should have
known
that afternoon, she should have understood already how he would be a Casanova, unstoppably unfaithful, and should have left him there with his hair slicked back with Wildroot Cream Oil and his glad wandering eye. She should have married Bill instead, or somebody like him—boring, predictable—and been a doctor’s wife. But then George turned back to her and circled her waist with his arm and said, “Remember where we were last Saturday, what we were doing just a week ago?” and she forced herself to smile, and then the smile was real, unforced, because he was her Romeo, her one true love once more.

They were married two years later, in the spring. By then she knew how much of him was self-invented, self-proclaimed, how little he had told her that was true. It was true he went to camp in Maine and true his parents had divorced but only after his father ran off with a woman from the next apartment, who had two children of her own and had returned to L.A. He was a scholarship student at Williams, he was flat cold stony broke. Why didn’t you tell me, she asked him, and George said he was ashamed. Ashamed of what, she asked him, and he said, the way my mother drinks. The way my parents argue with each other and I can’t invite them to the wedding, and Alice said it’s fine, it isn’t a problem, I don’t want a formal wedding and in case you haven’t noticed my own father’s not an expert in the field. I like your father, said George. I
love
him, Alice said, but that doesn’t mean he could manage a wedding; let’s do it with a justice of the peace.

Aaron approved. “That’s just how I married your mother,” he said, “that’s the apple—or is it acorn,
acorn
!—falling just beside the tree.” A county clerk called Arthur Wheelock performed the ceremony in his office, and he insisted on kissing the bride and putting his tongue in her mouth. “He’s senile,” Alice told her father, “he’s completely creepy and disgusting,” but George said, “Can you blame him?” and kissed her the same way. He was wearing a white jacket and black bow tie and loafers with no socks. This had become his signature: a conscious contrariety, a stylish opposition to the uniform in style.

Alison had married Bill, and he had gone to Korea and been wounded there on his first tour of duty and lost the use of his legs. Mr. Atkinson was caught in a police raid on a parlor where the men of Saratoga drank and danced together and the entertainers were boys. He resigned from Skidmore College but continued to live with his mother and was doing research, he told Alice when they ran into each other on Broadway, on a book about Darwin and Marx. George worked his way through D and E—
dentist, dancer, engineer
—but still had not decided on the choice of a profession; he would do so, he insisted, when they needed to be serious but not when he was twenty-three, not yet. “Let’s take a canoe trip,” he said, “let’s explore Saranac Lake.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Let’s do.”

They remained in Saratoga, and he worked in a real estate office. It was, he told her, temporary, a way of making friends and influencing people. He had the gift of salesmanship; he liked residential real estate and sizing up prospective buyers and deciding what they’d want. Sometimes she went along for the ride while he was scouting locations and had the keys for country properties; sometimes they made love together in the bedrooms of strange houses in Schuylerville and Malta and once on the porch of a farmhouse he would be showing in ten minutes to a couple from New York. They were giddy together and daring and in the first years of their marriage Alice had been happy all the time. For nothing could be boring now, nothing could be dumb or dull except she wished her mother could have known this man who was her husband and wondered what her mother would have thought.

X

1972

A
aron was sitting on the porch, and the porch was warm. He liked it best in springtime and best of all in May and June, and this was sweet May’s merry month and the rocker and blankets were warm. Nurse Betty in her uniform made a white shape at his elbow, an acrid looming presence, and he could not hear her at all. Nevertheless she was talking; she was moving her lips and hips and gesticulating happily and it behooved him to smile. He smiled. The motion of the rocking chair was predictable, familiar, and he cradled his teacup and rocked. His left eye was no use today and his right eye not what it should be, and therefore the forsythia seemed a yellow streaming band of light, the blue of the sky a bright blur. Yet waiting for a car to come was—the word for it was—
tedious,
the driveway glinting at his feet, the traffic and laughter beyond.

Beyond the porch the driveway with its gravel ribbon led to the wrapped present of the road. The road had been a cart track and then a wide packed lane and then a paved road with a paint stripe down the middle, and he had traveled them all. His daughter Alice would arrive; she was coming to pay him a visit, and therefore he prepared himself and tried to stay awake. He could remember and would tell her how in 1935 when she was three he bought a Model A from Mr. Ford’s car dealership and sported up and down the lanes, repairing the tires or the gas line when it leaked or clogged, which was in those days often, and always in his checkered scarf and brown cloth cap. She had been his sunshine girl, his princess, and he remembered how she would leap from the running board into his arms. “Here,
here,
” he’d tell her and hold out his arms, and she would take a breath and close her eyes and jump.