The Brutal Language of Love (10 page)

Fast I needed. It was the high school part that surprised me. I thanked her for the advice nonetheless.

When it was my turn to order—when Jonathan had stripped off his plastic gloves and taken his sideways, leaning posture against the counter—I said, “So you're in high school.”

He turned red.

“What grade?” I asked.

He straightened up and fetched me a drink from the machine. “I'll be a junior this year,” he said.

“So, a sophomore,” I said, mulling it over.

“No,” he corrected me. “A junior.”

“Until school starts, you're technically a sophomore.” I had just made that up, but he seemed to believe it.

“So?” he said, giving me change for my drink. He always undercharged me about twenty cents.

I shrugged. “It's cute.”

He leaned in again, bringing his face close to mine. “Hey,” he said, very softly, as if neither of us was wearing clothes. “The thing is, I was lying to those people. I've already decided. I decided a long time ago. I want to take you out.”

I thought about the baseball in my purse. It seemed all wrong now.

“I want to take you out before you leave for college,” he persisted. Then he picked up my Coke, which had a clear straw sticking out of it, and took a sip. He handed it back to me and, when I wouldn't take it, set it down on the counter. “If you can drink from this, you can sure as hell kiss me, right?”

“Get me another one,” I demanded. He was really bringing out the best in me.

“No,” he said, his breath oddly fruity.

We exchanged phone numbers then, and agreed he would pick me up at seven-thirty that night.

When Jonathan arrived at my house, I was waiting
on the front steps in a black tubular skirt and an army surplus V-neck—the lowest-cut T-shirt I owned. Underneath I wore a bra from Angelina's that Evelyn and Mina had insisted I buy in order to improve my
décolletage,
as Mina called it. As much as I had bucked against this purchase, I couldn't keep from looking down and admiring its astounding effect. My hair, a nondescript brown, was apparently the envy of many of Angelina's customers due to its curl. “Is that natural?” they'd ask me. When I nodded my head they'd say, “I hate you,” then quickly pat my hand to reassure me this wasn't true. Otherwise, I didn't seem to have anything anyone else wanted. Or if I did, they hadn't mentioned it.

“I would've rung your doorbell,” Jonathan said once I had let myself into his car. I ignored him and made a sophisticated production of locating the seat belt in a Buick (my mother always bought foreign). The truth was, I'd never been picked up for a date before and wasn't exactly sure of where to wait. Also, my mother was out having dinner with Roscoe, and I worried that without her as chaperone, I'd begin the date backward and lose my virginity in the first five minutes. Technically, I felt there was nothing wrong with this. But there was something of the john in me that night. I wanted to pretend for at least a little while that I didn't know how the evening was going to turn out. “It's okay,” I said finally, clicking my buckle in place. “The house is a mess.”

I watched Jonathan as he backed out of my gravel driveway, disappointed in his choice of ensemble: a sporty polo shirt and pleated, pressed trousers. At last I could see the high-schooler in him, when it was really the greasy mall worker I wanted. But there was some comfort to be taken from the glare he shot me when I laughed at the orange fuzzy dice hanging from his rearview mirror. He popped the song “Feel Like Makin' Love” into his cassette deck, and that wasn't a joke either. Jonathan was as serious tonight as he had ever been at the pizza place. I suspected he really did feel like making love.

“So,” I said, raising my voice above Bad Company, “you're still in high school?”

“Could you stop bringing that up?” Jonathan asked me.

“Sorry,” I said. It was just that I didn't have anything else on him, and I really felt I needed the upper hand.

We were passing through the suburbs now, heading for the city, where any self-respecting date would take place. Silently I cursed all the chain restaurants and prefab banks, though I had not known until that particular moment that I even resented them.

“My parents aren't home this weekend,” Jonathan offered.

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

He drove like someone who had just gotten his driver's license and was in no hurry to lose it, keeping his hands strictly at ten and two on the wheel and glancing my way only when he hit a stoplight. His old Skylark was slightly jacked up in the back, and I wondered when he would loosen up and start driving it accordingly. At the same time, he clearly wasn't afraid of the road. It hit me then that we drove somewhat similarly, and might've shared the same driver's ed teacher in school. I opened my mouth to ask him about this, then remembered my promise to keep quiet on the subject.

“What?” Jonathan asked me.

“Nothing,” I said, the beginning of my question still hanging in the air.

He shrugged. “Must've been something.”

“It was,” I confirmed.

He laughed. “So what do you want to do tonight? Where do you want to go?”

“We'll see the new James Bond movie.” Suddenly I had all the confidence of a drunk, except I was sober.

He nodded. Then without looking at me he said, “You look really nice tonight. Even sexier than at work.”

“Thanks,” I said. “To be honest, I actually prefer your work clothes on you.”

He couldn't believe this. He pulled into an empty bank parking lot, looked down at himself, and said, “For real?”

“Let's go back to your house so you can change,” I suggested, suddenly thrilled at the prospect of this.

“You're kidding or you're serious?” he asked me.

“Serious,” I said. “How far is it?”

He smiled and turned the car around. “Not that far.” He was excited, too, I could tell.

Jonathan lived in a development of two-story ranch houses that I imagined were all pastel-colored in daylight. At night they only looked to be varying shades of white. “I'll wait here,” I said, when he pulled up in front of his place. Again I feared losing control of myself while alone with him in a space larger than the front seat of his car.

“Come in and watch me change,” he said, cutting the engine and lowering his voice.

“Nah,” I said.

He didn't move. He was staring at me, and this was making me a little bit shy. I kept my eyes glued to the street in front of me, Persimmon Place. “You're really—” he began, but he didn't finish. He started over again and said, “I'm feeling really lucky to be here with you.”

“Why?” I asked. “I thought you had to think so hard about asking me out.”

Jonathan laughed. “That was Renaldo's idea,” he said. “Renaldo said he could tell you wanted me, and to take things nice and slow.”

“Meanwhile, I leave for college at the end of the month,” I reminded him.

He struck his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Fucking Renaldo!” he said. Then he said, “Be right back.”

While he was gone I decided I loved him. I envisioned the two of us on my attached back porch at college, where I might even think about putting my bed. Me with a boyfriend from home! He would come and my roommates would tease me about robbing the cradle, though secretly they would covet him. Jonathan might give them the once-over, but because they would all have straight hair and bras that could not perform miracles, he would never succumb. And the more Jonathan saw of the world, the more his focus upon me would narrow, until finally, in an odd twist of fate, I would suddenly become traditional and marry the first man I had slept with.

He emerged from the house moments later in a snug white T-shirt, frayed khakis, and a pair of no-frills basketball shoes. When he got in the car, I mussed his blond hair until he was the picture of an employee.

“You want a slice of pizza?” he asked me.

We laughed as he started the car, and I rewound the tape to the beginning.

We got to the movie theater during previews. It was
hard to see in the dark, but we managed with Jonathan leading the way. The seats were the tall kind, like in an airplane, and we sat in them without touching for several minutes. The movie opened with men jumping out of planes, then chasing each other through the air. Teeth were gritted against G forces; parachutes were engaged in the nick of time. At the sight of the first attractive woman with whom Bond would surely make love, I leaned over and kissed Jonathan full on the mouth.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

We kissed again. I touched his thigh through his khakis, and imagined the intramural sports he must have played to get the muscles feeling that way. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered again, and suddenly I liked that he was in high school, so appreciative, so grateful for the feverish pace of my seduction. I imagined he thought this was the real world talking to him now, and that surely he would be the one to learn new tricks tonight, and not the other way around.

We stopped kissing and tried to return to the movie, but it was impractical. I had missed several scenes and felt disoriented. “Who's that?” I asked Jonathan when a new character appeared on-screen, and he put his tongue in my mouth for an answer. “Should we go?” I whispered in his ear.

“Maybe we'd better,” he said.

I was all over him in the car on the way home. I confessed I was a virgin and he laughed and called me a liar. “Liar!” he said again, having a terrible time keeping his hands on the wheel. He wanted at least one down my shirt or under my skirt at all times, and I eventually pulled away, worried for the trips to my college he wouldn't be able to make without a car or his driver's license. I left him alone like that, shirt un-tucked, pants unbelted and unzipped, erection peeking out from beneath the waistband of his shorts, reaching impressively toward me in the passenger seat.

But Jonathan had abandoned all safety. “Come back!” he yelled frantically. “Get the hell back over here!”

I was all over him.

We went back to his house, where he said we could
drink from his parents' liquor cabinet and roll around on their water bed. I might've felt more comfortable at my house, but there was always the chance my mother and Roscoe had ended up there. They slept together even though he was impotent, and my assumption was that he still did things for her. I thought briefly about how my mother had not wanted me to sneak around, but as liberal as she was, that probably just applied to smoking cigarettes.

Jonathan's house was sort of typical, and he seemed embarrassed about this, eyeing me nervously as I scanned the family portraits lining the living room wall. He stood behind a small bar in the corner of the room, cracking ice trays and fumbling the cubes into highballs. “Look at you,” I said, marveling over a group shot that included a longer-haired, bespectacled Jonathan, two sedate-looking parents, and a couple of little boys. I couldn't imagine my mother hanging such things on our walls. Her idea was to rent original art from the library for six months at a time.

“No,” Jonathan said. “Don't look at those.”

“What else am I supposed to look at?” I asked him. There they all were, lined up in front of me.

“Over there,” he said, pointing to the brick mantel. “Look at that.”

I followed his finger, which led to a bronze trophy of a young man dressed in a football uniform. “Wow,” I said, noting his name engraved at the bottom.

“It's stupid,” he admitted.

I shrugged and moved on to another family portrait. The older ones had been taken in front of autumn-scapes and fake bookcases, while the newer ones were backed with the same cloudy blue as a school picture. It seemed the portraits were arranged chronologically, so that the more I moved to the right, the better-looking Jonathan got. He resembled his mother more than his father, though unlike Jonathan, her features did not add up to beauty. It struck me then that it was this that embarrassed him.

“Don't look at those,” he told me again. He was opening and closing cupboards, clinking bottles, stirring drinks with his index finger.

I sighed and turned my attention to the various bouquets of dried flowers dotting the room, the homespun knickknacks his mother had either made or picked out. And while it seemed clear that I would never meet this woman—Jonathan would see to that—I still believed her son and I could get married.

“Here,” Jonathan said, coming up behind me.

I took the drink from him and we stood in the middle of the room, guzzling gin and tonics.

“Too strong?” he asked me.

“God no.”

“That's right,” he said, taking my experience into account. “You're nineteen? Twenty?”