My Secret History (17 page)

At her room, I showed her how the meatloaf just dropped out of the sandwich if I tilted the bread. A crumbly hunk of wet hamburg slid into a pool of ketchup on the plate.

Lucy said jokingly, “Some people think it’s more polite to say catsup.”

“It’s a Chinese word, so it doesn’t matter.”

The room was too small to hold a table. It was a little cube for living in. She told me it was perfect for one person.

“This is my garden,” she said, showing me the flowerpots on the windowsill—African violets, and geraniums, and herbs such as mint and thyme. “This is my bed—as you know,” she said. “And this is my library”—a bookshelf with about fifty paperbacks jammed onto it. She showed me where she kept her letters (“My extensive files”) and where she hid her money (“My bank”). Her kitchen was a shelf with a hot plate and some cans of soup, and her clothes were in a shallow closet. All these things she showed me by stretching out her hand. It was such a tiny room I could not move without knocking something over. Just being there with her was like a sexual act.

When she said all these things in her sweet funny voice, I realized I knew nothing about her. I felt sorry, because she was
a good person, and intelligent, and she liked me. I knew also that it was a risk for her to have me here. I suspected her of being a bit desperate, but I was grateful because so was I.

“I love that Kerouac book,” I said.

“He’s almost forty, did you know that?”

“God, he’s old,” I said. “I thought he was young.”

Lucy said, “He was born in nineteen twenty-two. My favorite is
The Subterraneans
. Want to borrow it?”

But leaning over for the book I brushed against her, and kissed her, and then there was no going back.

“Oh, God,” she said, when I entered her, and she threw her head back and gasped. I felt like a bystander until she got her breath; and then she was whispering and encouraging me, until my last gasp.

The room was very warm. Even though the window was open, there was no breeze. We lay there, stuck together, and she said, “I like you. I like being with you. I was dreading this summer, but it’s turned out really nice.”

“What year are you in?”

“I’m a junior.”

That meant she was at least twenty, and probably twenty-one. I said, “Me too,” which was a lie, because I didn’t want her to know how young I was.

She put on a silky robe, which I found sexier than her nakedness.

“I’ve got the afternoon off,” she said.

“I’m supposed to be back at the pool at one, so the other guys can have their lunch.”

“Don’t go away,” she said, and held me. She hung on. “I want you to stay here.”

A loud noise made me jump. It was a knocking at the door, and it was twice as hard as it should have been, because it was Miss Murphy the landlady, and she was deaf. I realized that I had banged my knee when I had jumped.

“Just a minute!” Lucy said, and held the door shut.

“Are you in there?” Miss Murphy said, rapping again.

Lucy pulled open the closet door and motioned me to get in. She threw our clothes in after me and tied her robe and brushed the bed. Then she shut the closet door. I crouched in a woolen darkness of Lucy’s coats, with her clothes in my hand. The dress she wore was still warm from her body and smelled of her skin.

“Do you have a minute?” Miss Murphy asked.

“I have to go pretty soon,” Lucy said.

But Miss Murphy didn’t hear her. She simply saw the girl wearing a bathrobe and figured there was no hurry.

“I want to show you something,” the woman said.

I had never seen her, but I imagined wiry hair and dark circles under her eyes, because she sounded like Miss Sharkey, an old teacher of mine from the fourth grade. As Miss Sharkey bawled me out I used to cringe and look down, but I was equally terrified by the sight of her cruel shoes. I imagined them on Miss Murphy’s feet.

I heard Lucy’s bedsprings creak as the old lady sat down. I put my face in my hands and sweated. I tried not to breathe.

“These are the albums I was telling you about,” Miss Murphy said, and in a monotonous reading voice went on, “Nineteen ten. Nahant Beach. Memorial Day.”

“Very nice,” Lucy said.

“My father always said that you should take your first swim of the year on Memorial Day. My uncle had a lovely house in Nahant. You can just see the roof in the background—and that window with the shutters. That’s me with my little pail. And that’s my brother Patrick—”

“Miss Murphy, I have to go.”

“And that’s my mother. Isn’t she beautiful? They all wore bathing suits like that.”

“Miss Murphy—”

But Miss Murphy was deaf. She droned on, talking too loud and turning pages, describing pictures. A cramp in my leg came and went, a desire to cough passed through me. I sneezed but she didn’t hear me—didn’t even pause.

She went through the entire album—it must have taken half an hour.

“Nineteen eleven,” she said. “Wait until you see the snow—”

She kept talking. It was the worst kind of snapshot monologue, giving the background of each blurred person and each indistinct object; and describing, in minute detail, things that weren’t shown in the pictures.

After a while (“There’s Patrick again—”), she said, suddenly, “What’s wrong?”

“I have to go,” Lucy said very loudly.

“I’ll come back some other time,” the lonely woman said.

But all this while I was considering in the darkness how much I liked Lucy, and when Miss Murphy had gone and I stepped out of the closet and kissed her I knew that something had happened in me. In that space of time, while I crouched beneath her dresses and she was outside murmuring, I fell in love with her.

“Not so hard!” she said, when I hugged her. But I didn’t want to let go.

No one seemed to mind that I was late for work.

“She was here again,” Muzzaroll said. “That woman. With the hat.”

I said, “I was taking a leak.”

“Who are you trying to kid?” Larry said. “You’ve probably been in the saddle.”

I hated that, and it wasn’t true; but I couldn’t tell him about Lucy, or that I’d been stuck in her closet.

When we closed the pool that day, I went over to the Mass General and up to the Blood Donor department. Seeing Loretta I wondered whether the girls I desired could be put into different categories: the Nurse, the Whore, the Child, the Cheerleader. But, no, it didn’t work, because Lucy wasn’t any of these. She was someone like me. Or was that another category: the girl who resembled me?

Loretta was nodding. She said, “B-negative, right?”

“That’s me,” I said. I wasn’t surprised that she remembered. My father, who sold shoes, knew people by their shoe size.
He’s an eight e
, he’d say, or sometimes using a shoe-man’s jargon,
He’s an eight Eddie
.

“You look great,” Loretta said. “You and Larry are so lucky to be working at the pool. You’ve got a fantastic tan. You just sit there and get the rays.”

“It’s brainless work, and there’s no money in it. Anyway, I’m trying to save for school. That’s why I’m here.”

She just smiled at me.

“I want to sell you another pint.”

“You’re a stitch!” She shook her head and was laughing as she said, “You have to wait at least six weeks before you can give it again.”

I said I didn’t know that.

“You can’t keep taking blood out of your system. You’d get anemic. You’d probably die.”

“I feel all right. I’m broke, that’s all.”

“Come back in a month or so. I could probably take you then. Gee, if I had any extra money I’d loan it to you.”

I told her that was a very nice thing to say; but even so I wouldn’t have borrowed it. What I wanted to do with it was walk into a restaurant with Lucy and order whale steaks for us both, and afterwards tell her I loved her.

When I left the hospital I became very self-conscious imagining Loretta telling the other nurses how I had come back less than a week after giving blood and said
Want another pint?

It was raining, the pool was empty, and we were playing whist in the office—Vinny, Larry, and the janitor we called Speedo—this was about two days later.

I said, “I’d like to give blood again—I mean, sell it. But you can only do it every six or eight weeks.”

“What else is new?” Larry said, and put a card down. He had a cardshark’s way of snapping them onto the table. Then he said that he had heard of places where you could sell sperm—they injected it into women who wanted kids.

“Hey, I could do that,” Muzzaroll said.

Speedo grinned, thinking the same thing.

“They’d turn you assholes down,” Larry said. “They don’t want a bananaman. They want class. You gotta take tests.”

“Jerk-off tests,” Speedo said.

“Psychological tests, to make sure you’re not crazy. Intelligence tests. The whole bit. You think it’s just a hand-job. It’s not. It’s science. After you get the okay, you jerk off into a test tube and they give you about twenty bucks. You think I’m shitting you. The place is right here in Boston.”

“You can sell your body,” Muzzaroll said. “For science. For experiments and shit like that. You can get about three hundred bucks for it.”

That sounded like a fortune to me.

“Or in Speedo’s case, about thirty clams,” Larry said.

“What happens?” I said.

“Andy’s interested,” Larry said. “It’s like this. You sign something and they give you the money, and when you die they claim your bawd. Then they cut you into hamburg for their experiments.”

“Who are we talking about?” Muzzaroll said.

“Students,” Larry said. “Harvard students.”

Speedo said, “How do they know when you die?”

“They find out. See, when they give you the money they put a tattoo on the sole of your foot. It stays there. No matter when or where you die, your body gets shipped to Harvard Medical School.”

“I’d do that,” I said. And I imagined showing someone like Mimi Hardwick, or Lucy, or any girl, the tattoo on my foot that said
This body is the property of Harvard Medical School.
“What difference would it make? I’d be dead.”

“What if your foot got chopped off?” Speedo said. “Like you got run over or something—”

“Play the fucking game,” Muzzaroll said, scraping up the deck of cards and dealing.

Then Larry said, “Here she comes.”

It was Mrs. Mamalujian, in a big cartwheel hat and a flower-printed dress. She looked very stylish and out of place, carrying a blue umbrella and walking up the path to the MDC pool. She lifted her sunglasses and looked at me.

I had put my cards down and run out to intercept her. I didn’t want the others to hear anything.

“Where have you been hiding?”

I wanted to tell her that I didn’t have any money, and with no money I felt I did not exist.

“I’ve been here. How did you find me?”

And I walked over to the fence so that she would follow me and so that the others wouldn’t see us.

“Your mother told me,” she said. “This is my third visit, for crying out loud. I’m glad to see you. We miss you up at the Maldwyn Country Club.”

“They can come down and swim here. This is for everybody. Only they probably wouldn’t want to. It’s all maniacs here.”

There was laughter in the office. They couldn’t play whist with three people, so they were horsing around, and I could hear Speedo shouting and protesting.

Mrs. Mamalujian said, “I thought we were going out to lunch.”

“We were, but I ran out of money.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ve got lots of money.”

That made me feel sick with envy and confusion.

She said, “God, you’re funny,” and looked past me at the pool.

Vinny and Larry were carrying Speedo through the rain to the pool. Speedo was wearing his janitor’s blue overalls, and he was yelling and struggling. They propped him up at the edge of the pool, tormented him for a while, and they pushed him in.

“Who are they?”

“My colleagues,” I said.

Mrs. Mamalujian laughed. She had a good, deep, appreciative laugh that was somehow improved by her heavy smoking.

“I have to go back to work,” I said.

“Some work,” she said, sarcastically. “When’s your day off?”

“Saturday.”

“We’ll have lunch then. Do you know the Copley Plaza? Peacock Alley? I’ll meet you there Saturday at noon.”

That night after work I went back to Medford Square, not so much to buy a sub as to talk to Mr. Balinieri again.

But there was a new man behind the counter.

“I was looking for Mr. Balinieri.”

“He don’t work here no more.”

And I knew he had been fired by this ignorant procrustean guinea wop, because he didn’t fit.

I brought my copy of
Moby Dick
so that I would have something to talk about with Mrs. Mamalujian. I had underlined the paragraphs in chapters 64 and 65 that were about eating whale meat, which was what I wanted to have for lunch. I was very nervous.

Coming out of the Boston Public Library I had often looked across the square they called the plaza, and marveled at the grand hotel on the south side, and wondered what the rooms were like. I had never felt that it was forbidden to go in, only that it was better to have a reason, and an inkling that you needed an invitation of some kind. The idea of going into any Boston hotel seemed strange to me. They were for businessmen and
honeymooners; for strangers, for people from out-of-town. I had a notion that hotels were for people who did not quite belong: they had nowhere else to go.

It was a mystery to me. I was nineteen years old and had never traveled anywhere; had never stayed overnight in any hotel. That took money and I didn’t have any.

Another reason for my nervousness was I had told Lucy I would call her. But I was hesitant. I didn’t know what time I would be free, and I felt guilty about making her wait.

I thought fondly of her watering her flowerpots.
This is my garden
, she had said.
This is my library
.

And I thought it might frighten her if I told her I loved her. It seemed simpler for things to remain as they were—for us to be passionate when we were in bed, and in between times be close friends. I was also afraid myself that she would depend on me, and I imagined every time I turned around I would see her and she would say,
What shall we do now?