The Carlton Club (18 page)

Leslie was confident that James had never practiced smoking in front of a mirror. His relationship with the cigarette was natural. And sexy.

“Haven’t you ever even tried a cigarette?” he asked.

Leslie shook her head.
Silly little goody-goody me.

“Want to?”

“Sure,” she said bravely.

James took the cigarette from his mouth and handed it to her.

“It’s easier to start with one that’s already lighted,” he explained. “Just inhale. Slowly and not too deep a breath.”

Leslie felt the warmth inside her—it felt good—then the irrepressible instinct to cough. Then a warm dizzy feeling.

“Oh. Oh. Wow.”

“Light-headed?”

“Yes. It’s passing now. It felt sort of nice. What’s that from?”

“Your brain was deprived of oxygen.” “Nor

“No. I guess it’s the nicotine.”

“It feels good. Is that why you smoke?” Leslie asked, deciding to take a second puff on the cigarette she held, non-sexily, in her hand.

“No. I don’t even feel that anymore. I just smoke because I smoke. Are you planning to keep my cigarette?”

“Yes.”

“Great,” James said, lighting a new one for himself. “This will make your parents like me even more than they already do.”

“They like you!”

“Yeah. About as much as your girlfriends do.”

Probably more than my girlfriends do, Leslie thought. It angered her that her friends didn’t even try to conceal their contempt. She had always hoped that James hadn’t noticed; but of course, he had, and it bothered him.

“They just don’t understand you,” Leslie said finally, weakly. She wondered if she should add, Not that I do either, of course. She didn’t want to sound presumptuous.

“They understand that I am not one of their special elite group.”

“But you are!”

“As a token. I fit in under that one all-important category. I do very well on exams.”

“You set the curve,” Leslie said quietly. “You’re very smart.”

“There are a lot of very smart people who don’t do well on exams. There are a lot of people who are smart in ways that exams never test, but to your friends exams are the gold standard, the only measurement of worth and success.”

Leslie watched the smoke curl up from her cigarette. Her second and third puffs had given her the same dizzy rush. She still felt a little lightheaded. Or was the dizziness because of being with James? she wondered as she listened to him talk in long, articulate sentences, not the short phrases he used at school. Which one was the real James, she mused. James, fearless leader of the James gang? Or James, the reluctant but legitimate member of her group? Or was either the real James?

“That’s not the only measurement of worth and success,” she protested finally, weakly, knowing that it was a minimum requirement. Any other accomplishments, and most of her friends had other accomplishments, were added to the firm, essential base of academic excellence.

“Let’s say we all had no food, we were surrounded by deer and all we had were bows and arrows.”

“I don’t use academic success as a measurement of worth!”

“I know. Emotionally, you may, a little, but rationally, you don’t. But your friends do.”

“They are your friends, too. The guys are. They envy you. They admire you. They can’t believe how well you do without studying.”

“I study,” James said seriously, thinking about how he studied, or tried to study, in the afternoon between school and dinner. Before his father got home. Before the drinking and the fighting started. Before it became impossible to study. Then James would leave. Sometimes he would go to the library at the university to study in the silence there. Sometimes his parents’ screams disturbed him too much to study. Then he would go find a party or a girl. Or drive ninety miles an hour on his motorcycle.

James studied when he could. It explained his late, unpredictable arrival at parties. Everyone assumed he had been with his other friends, his gang, but usually, he had been studying, somewhere. Or with a girl, somewhere. Or alone, somewhere.

James was aware that Leslie was watching him. He leveled his cougar eyes at her and said, “Anyway, your girlfriends are hypocrites. They prance around celebrating sweetness and light and goodness, but they cannot personally accept anyone who is the least bit different. They keep me away from you.”

They keep me away from you.
His words thundered in her slightly dizzy head and made her heart pound.

“Whaaaat?”

“Whenever I walk toward you, they close in around you. I feel like the
Titanic
heading into a field of icebergs.”

Leslie smiled. “They’d just
love
being called icebergs. But you’re unsinkable, aren’t you?” she asked, inwardly furious with her friends.

“No,” James said, standing up. “Let’s walk farther. Beyond the clearing, about a mile, there’s a nice view of the mountains. Here, give me your cigarette butt.”

Leslie handed the smashed cigarette butt to James. He put it, and his, in his pocket to dispose of somewhere else but not here.

“Smokey is my friend,” James explained a little sheepishly.

Nice, Leslie thought. She was learning that tough wild James was really nice sensitive James, but she had always known that, hadn’t she?

They walked for two miles. James led the way along the narrow fern-lined path through the woods. They stopped once to examine deer hoof-prints.

“These are pretty fresh. A doe and a fawn. Probably heading toward the lake,” he said.

Leslie nodded.

“Watch this,” he said. He flexed the index and middle fingers of his hand and pressed them into the soft dirt, making an imprint that was almost identical to the deer prints. “Can you tell the difference?”

Leslie looked closely. There were subtle differences, but on casual inspection of the prints, the real and the fake looked the same.

“We make prints like these when we’re hunting with people who think they have all the answers,” James said, smiling wryly.

Like my friends, Leslie thought.

“We do? We trick them on purpose?”

“Yes we do.”

Nice, James.

They reached another clearing, a large meadow with a close enough to touch view of the Cascade Mountains, a range of jagged peaks of green, brown and granite, snowcapped in autumn just at the summit.

“Wow,” Leslie said softly. Wow. Silly. It was so beautiful. Too beautiful for words.

She watched James light a cigarette and extended her hand toward him.

“You want another one?”

“Yes!” she said, watching as he extracted one for her. He eyed her skeptically. She interpreted his look as concern about her parents’ disapproval and said, “My mother likes you.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell. And my father would like you if he knew you.”

“Not if I turn his daughter into a chain smoker.”

“You’re a chain smoker.”

“I know. It’s a terrible habit,” he said lightly. “Anyway, you’re not the smoking type.”

James held the match for Leslie as she inhaled, in puffs, imitating the way she had watched him light his cigarettes. The coughing followed immediately, along with the warmth and the dizziness. It made her feel a little bold.

“Does your girlfriend smoke?”

“My girlfriend?” James’s surprise was genuine. “Who can you possibly mean?”

“Sophomore year. The rumor was that you had a girlfriend who was still at Addams,” Leslie said carefully.
A fourteen year old with whom you were sleeping.

“Oh. She wasn’t my girlfriend,” he said. Then he added, “I’ve never had a girlfriend.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Are you going to, ever?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. If I do it won’t be a silly public event. Or a game.”

Silly. That word again.

“Unlike the relationships I have? And my friends have? Is that what you mean?” She knew that was what he meant and that he was right, but it wasn’t a major indictment. All they could be accused of was wanting to fall in love, and they changed partners frequently because they didn’t fall in love. Because there was no magic. Because they were all just good friends.

They could only be accused of being silly. And of wanting something more.

“Who is your current boyfriend, Leslie?” James asked in an I rest my case tone of voice.

“No one,” she said defiantly, then inhaled clumsily on her cigarette. It was close to the truth. Her relationship with David had fizzled out quickly. They had nothing to say to each other and weren’t, they discovered, sexually attracted to each other, either. But something was beginning with Alan. He was captain of the swim team and, of course, an honor student.

“Right.”

“Why don’t you want to have a girlfriend, James?”

“It’s not necessary,” he said automatically. He had no trouble finding girls when he wanted or needed them. James realized that he had shocked Leslie and regretted it. He added seriously, “It doesn’t seem right to get involved with someone else, to involve them in your life, until you know yourself what you’re going to do.”

A long silence followed. Leslie watched the smoke curl slowly, gracefully out of her cigarette. She felt lightheaded; but she was thinking clearly, and her thoughts made her dizzy.

All her boyfriends. She used them and they used her. They were all searching for something exciting. Taking not sharing. Wanting not giving. Greedy. Directed by their fine minds and not their hearts. They knew love was out there. They had heard about it, read about it, talked about it and never felt it.

Then there was James. He wasn’t going to play the game, because it wasn’t a game.

It wouldn’t be a game, Leslie thought. Not with you and me.

James felt her stare and met her startled blue eyes with his cool green ones.

“What are you going to do?” Leslie asked, flustered, vaguely remembering what she had meant to ask before they had both fallen silent. “Where are you going to college?”

“Where?” he asked. His tone implied that a more pertinent question would have been, Are you going to college? “I have applied to the University of Washington. I’ll get in because of my grade point average. So I’ll go there if I decide to go. I’ll go for sure if we’re still in Vietnam. I don’t want to get drafted. My brother’s in Vietnam.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“Not the place to be.”

“No.” Not for someone who hunts for deer the way he hunts for Easter eggs. Not for anyone, Leslie thought. “What if you don’t have to go to college?”

“I’ll probably come back here to the logging camp. I could work my way up to foreman. I’m pretty smart. I do well on exams,” he said wryly.

“Forever? Would you be a foreman of a logging camp for the rest of your life?” Leslie asked, trying to conceal her alarm and to suppress the thought that roared in her brain: What a waste! Leslie tried to suppress the thought because it was exactly what James resented so much about all of them. They had only one way of measuring worth and success.

“Life could be worse than being a planter of pines,” James said firmly. “To rework Robert Frost a little.”

Leslie’s eyes widened. A planter of pines. Not a cutter of pines. Not a killer of pines.

“Don’t look so surprised. We read some Frost last spring in English.”

“We picked
Mending Wall
apart stone by stone.”

“So I did a little outside reading. I like Frost,” James said almost defensively. Then quickly steering the conversation away from himself, he asked, “Where are you going to college?”

“Radcliffe, if I get in.”

“You will.”

“I don’t know. It’s awfully competitive.”

“So are you. Did you tell them you were a Rosemaiden?”

“I haven’t told them anything yet. I’m mentally working on my personal statement. I have to decide pretty soon, though, because the application deadline is in a few weeks.”

“Do you tell them what you plan to be when you grow up?”

Leslie shrugged.

“What do you plan to be? An English professor?”

Leslie looked at him for a moment. She hadn’t told anyone. Not even her mother. It was just the beginning of an idea, because she had always preferred science classes to English or history or art. She had been a volunteer, a candy-striper, at a local hospital for two years, and she loved it.

“A doctor,” she said quietly.

“You’ll be a good doctor,” James said immediately.

“Thanks!” Leslie said, relieved, happy that James didn’t seem disapproving or threatened. She added quietly, “I hope so.”

Leslie expected things to be different with James after their day of deer hunting—a stronger bond, a new closeness—but as the weeks of autumn quarter passed, Leslie realized that nothing had changed. Nothing noticeable. The only change was the way she felt inside. Each day she left for school eager to see him, hoping for even a cryptic exchange and dreaming that someday there would be more.

Leslie could not forget the feel of her body against his. Each time she saw him, the memory that was always with her—as a muted, hazy warmth—became vivid, urgent, demanding. Uncomfortable.

Leslie wondered if James knew. She wondered if she should tell him.

She wondered if she would be able to suppress the urge to ask him to take her for another ride on his motorcycle. She wanted to wrap her arms around him, press against him and feel his strength.

It made Leslie uneasy to think that she might actually ask him. What if she wasn’t able to resist? What if she really did ask him for a date? Unthinkable. Except she thought about it all the time.

That fall Leslie and James had the same study hall. James’s assigned seat was behind hers, five rows back and three rows over. Still, Leslie managed to watch him in brief, surreptitious glances. Usually James spent study period staring out the window. Occasionally he flipped halfheartedly through his textbooks.

One day in November, James spent the entire hour working on a sheet of paper that lay on his desk. His concentration was intense. He didn’t look up or pause. Leslie watched him work, watched him peer at the paper, writing quickly, frowning occasionally, erasing something, then writing again. Now she understood how he could get the best grades without apparently studying.

He did study. He studied like this, in brief, intense, energetic spurts with absolute concentration.

Finally, shamed by her own staring—unnoticed by James but detected by several of her friends who arched skeptical eyebrows—and shamed by James’s obvious diligence, Leslie began to work in earnest on an assignment for her honors French class.

When the bell sounded signaling the end of study hall, James and Leslie were both still working. The rest of the class had predictably stacked books and returned sheets of paper to inside pockets of folders a full three minutes before the bell was scheduled to sound. They wanted to waste no part of the five-minute break between classes with anything as mundane as reorganizing their school work.

Leslie was still neatly putting away her almost completed French assignment when James reached her desk.

“Here,” he said, “this is for you.”

He handed her a manila folder as he walked by her desk and out of the study hall.

He was gone before Leslie could recover from her surprise enough to say something. Not that she would know what to say until she saw the contents of the folder anyway.

Her hands trembled as she opened it.

James had not been writing an essay on the meaning of the moral wilderness in Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
. Nor had he been solving an equation for the advanced mathematics class. Instead, James had been drawing a picture. For her.

It was a picture, a perfect picture, of the meadow

he had shown her. Every detail was exactly as she remembered it: the tall pines, the long dew-covered grass, the fallen stump and the deer, across the meadow, looking startled and curious and regal. James had drawn it in pencil, in perfect, careful detail, perfect proportion and perfect shading. Even in black and white, the warmth of the autumn sun, the exquisite beauty of the deer and the towering majesty of the pines were eloquently, colorfully, conveyed.

James was an artist! Even through her untrained and prejudiced eyes, Leslie recognized James’s talent.

He was a talented artist whose picture precisely captured a wonderful memory—the wonderful memory—that they had shared. James had preserved the memory for her.

James wanted her to remember.

Leslie’s hands trembled even more as she carefully returned the picture to its folder and placed the folder inside her notebook. Then she rushed to her final class of the day.

Leslie did not hear one word of the lecture her history teacher gave on William Jennings Bryan although she feigned an expression of rapt attention. She resisted the almost irresistible urge to open her notebook and look at the picture.

She appeared calm and serious, but her mind raced. Why had he given it to her? Did anyone else know that he could draw? How could she thank him? When could she thank him? She had swim team practice as soon as school was out. She couldn’t even try to find James because Alan was meeting her after class and walking with her to the pool. If only she would see James first, she could ask him to give her a ride to practice on his motorcycle.

Leslie didn’t have a chance to look at the picture again until she got home that evening, after swim practice and after agreeing to go to the Homecoming Dance with Alan. When she finally looked at it again, in the privacy of her own bedroom, it was even more beautiful and more perfect.

Leslie decided to show it to her mother, her best friend. Even though she hadn’t discussed James with Susan—what was there to discuss?—since the day she and James had gone deer hunting, Leslie sensed that Susan understood about James. Not that there was anything to understand. James was there. A presence. Undefined but important to Leslie. Susan seemed to know that.

Susan was making garlic butter.

“Mother, look at this,” Leslie said, carefully holding the picture so that her mother could see it but away from the butter.

Susan said nothing, but she quickly washed her hands in hot water and after they were clean and dry took the precious picture for closer scrutiny.

“This is very good, Leslie. What a beautiful scene. Even in black and white you feel the color and the life. Who did it?” Susan asked. She knew that Leslie hadn’t drawn it but wondered who among her friends had this surprising talent.

“James,” Leslie said softly. “It’s where we went that day to look for deer. The three deer in the picture are the ones we saw.”

Susan frowned slightly. She remembered how happy Leslie had been after the deer-hunting expedition and how, over the ensuing weeks, the happiness and excitement had begrudgingly faded. Susan knew that James hadn’t called, that he hadn’t asked Leslie out again. Leslie’s disappointment was painfully obvious. It was obvious despite the fact that unlike all the other boys she had dated, had wanted to date, Leslie didn’t talk about James.

Now her daughter’s face was radiant again.

“Did he just give this to you?”

“Today. He drew it—or at least finished drawing it—in study hall. It is good, isn’t it?” Leslie asked. Not that it mattered.

“Really very good.”

“I thought I should frame it. To protect it.”

“There’s a good frame shop a mile from campus on University Avenue. We can take it there. I think a cream-colored mat with a forest green border might look good,” Susan said, knowing that her own sense of color and art was excellent unlike Leslie’s and that Leslie wanted her advice on this important project.

“Great. Maybe we could go there this evening? It’s Thursday night. They might be open.”

“We can’t have it framed yet. There is something missing from the picture,” Susan said shaking her head.

“What?”

“His signature.”

“Oh,” Leslie said quietly. “Do you think he will sign it?”

“Of course,” Susan said confidently. He had better sign it, she thought. He had better not be playing games with my daughter’s heart. Susan’s brief glimpse of James made her understand

Leslie’s attraction. James was different. Complicated. Sensual.

Susan understood it, but it made her uneasy as she thought about her uncomplicated and naive daughter.

“Of course he will sign it,” she repeated firmly.

The next day Leslie found James during lunch period. He was leaning against the wall reading the school newspaper. During an almost sleepless night, Leslie had practiced a hundred ways to thank him and to ask him to sign the picture. No matter how she asked it he could always say no.

“James?”

“Hi, Leslie,” he said folding the paper.

“It’s beautiful!” she blurted out, completely forgetting all the carefully worded, sophisticated thank yous. She repeated, flustered, “Beautiful. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said seriously. He looked pleased.

“I had no idea you could draw,” she continued, frantically searching for lost lines, for a place in the carefully rehearsed script. But to no avail.

“It’s a hobby.”

“You’re really good.”

“Leslie, you’re not really an art critic.”

“I know,” she admitted. Then, because she was still not thinking clearly, she said, “But my mother knows. She works with lots of commercial artists, collaborating on articles and so on.”

“You showed it to your mother?”

“Yes!” Leslie said a little defensively. “And she thinks it’s very good.”

Leslie’s eyes iced over for a moment. James caught the glare, smiled, then shrugged his shoulders. The iciness melted into sparkling blue radiance.

“Here’s what else my mother says,” she began, watching James’s reaction. He looked curious. “She says we can’t frame it—and it
has
to be framed—until you sign it.”

“You want me to sign it?”

“Yes. Please,” Leslie said quietly.

“OK. Sure.”

Leslie took the picture, still protected in its folder, out of her notebook and handed it to James. She followed him into a classroom where he sat at a desk. In the lower right hand corner of the picture he wrote:
James
1971
.

“Thank you,” she whispered when he handed it back to her.

“You’re welcome.”

They walked back into the hall. Lunch period was almost over. The hall was getting crowded.

“Are you going to the Homecoming Dance?” James asked casually.

Leslie’s heart stopped. The Homecoming Dance was the mid-year prom. It was not like dances in the gym to which boys and girls went with their own groups. The Homecoming Dance was for couples only, with reservations in advance. A formal date. Was James asking her to go with him? Or was he just checking to see if she was going?

Leslie nodded slowly.

“With Alan?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

James nodded as if confirming his suspicion.

“Well, time for class. See ya, Leslie,” he said.

The only thing wrong with Alan, Leslie decided, was that he wasn’t James, and since James had withdrawn again in the weeks after he had given her the picture, Alan would have to do. It made Leslie angry with herself, and with James, to wait for him to call night after night. She was angry because she waited and because James didn’t call.

It was better to be busy.

Alan had transferred to Roosevelt from Lake Forest, Seattle’s exclusive boys’ school, during spring quarter of junior year. He had transferred because the Roosevelt swim team was the best high school swim team in the state. He wanted the visibility for college recruiters. Alan fit in perfectly with Leslie’s group because of his grades and accomplishments. He held the Pacific Northwest record in the two hundred meter free-style.

Like James, Alan brought interesting new blood to the group. But unlike James, all the girls wanted him. Alan dated most of them a few times. By fall of senior year, it was obvious to everyone that Alan was mainly interested in Leslie.

It was an inevitable match. In addition to the usual academic and environmental compatibilities—Alan’s father was on the faculty in anthropology at the university—Leslie and Alan even looked alike. They both had chestnut brown curls and large blue eyes. They both smiled a lot and laughed easily. Because life was easy and happy. They both did what was expected of them. They achieved, they accomplished, and they did it cheerfully because it felt right.

Alan and James were friends, as much as James was anyone’s friend. Alan had no idea about

Leslie’s feelings for James. It would never have occurred to him.

Leslie did not fall in love with Alan, but she liked being with him. It made her feel good that he cared so much about her. Alan told Leslie that he loved her. Leslie told him that they were too young to know what that even meant but that she liked him very much.

Leslie did like Alan very much. She liked everything about him: the way he looked, what he said, what he thought, the way he kissed her. Now, finally, after the groping, inept, insincere kissing and touching of previous relationships, Leslie actually wanted to be held and touched.

Sometimes when Alan kissed her, she pretended he was James.

On a Friday afternoon in mid February James caught up with Leslie after their English literature class.

“We have to leave right after school if we’re going to be on the ferry before the sun sets.”

“We do?” she asked.

“We do.”

“Why?” she asked, stalling for time, making decisions, thinking about repercussions.