Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Twenty-five

It was the first warm day of spring. We were a half block, and three minutes, from where she would turn for her apartment and I toward the laundry.

Suddenly, she took a couple of giant strides to get in front of me, turned, and stopped. “So what about it, Vlodek?” She grinned. One of her eyeteeth was slightly crooked. It was enchanting.

“What about what?”

“Taking me to the Spring Dance.”

“I don’t go to proms,” I said, hoping that the blush warming my face didn’t betray me. I wanted, more than anything I’d ever wanted, anytime, anywhere, to hold Maris Mays, to make contact, flesh-to-cloth-to-cloth-to-flesh.

But I didn’t dance. I had never danced. I believed fervently that were I to try, my legs would knot themselves twice or three times over, and I would collapse into a lumpy, gnarled skein of limbs and elbows and knees and pointy head, a pathetic pretzel.

“I don’t have a suit,” the stuttering idiot who managed my mouth said.

“I’ll find you a suit.”

“Leo,” I stammered. Leo and I barely spoke anymore. I told myself it was because there was no time. We passed in the halls, smiled, flashed a thumbs-up like always, but it was a charade. He knew that Maris and I had been hanging back, every afternoon, just enough to be alone. He knew about me and the girl who had caught his heart.

“Leo?” she asked.

“He loved you first.” Baboons were loose in my mouth now, throwing pots and pans out with the words.

Her eyes, always as blue as the best of skies, widened in surprise. She leaned closer, and I could smell Ivory soap and roses and spring and a moment that might never come again.

“Take me to the dance, Vlodek,” she breathed.

Dina’s house was like most I’d seen along Shell Drive. It was a two-story white-sided box with shallow balconies and dark windows, set up high on cinder-block piers. Noah wouldn’t have gotten any ark-building assignments from the folks who lived in such places, for they knew that when the floods did come, they’d be safe enough, high up in their stilt houses, to sip mai tais and eat Oreos and watch, with impunity, as streams of donkeys and geese, coconut palms and yachts and Wal-Mart trucks, got washed away to oblivion right beneath their very own verandas.

I parked on the crushed shell driveway and walked around to the back.

A week before the dance, Maris found me a four-dollar suit. It was an itchy brown wool thing with big lapels, and it stank so badly of mothballs that the tea-sipping lady at the resale shop threw in a wrinkled floral necktie and a yellowed shirt with a long, pointy collar.

“Twenty-three skiddoo,” I said, copping a line from an old gangster movie, as we walked out. Maris laughed. I’d gotten far wittier in the weeks since I’d been walking with Maris.

I climbed the outside staircase that led up the two flights to her apartment. A clutch of yellow flowers bloomed in a red clay pot on the second-floor landing. I bent to sniff them, but they didn’t smell of anything.

The key turned easily in the lock, and I stepped inside.

The night of the dance was warm, scented with the lilacs that blossomed, mostly untended, in old bushes in many of the backyards in Rivertown. Maris was waiting for me on the sidewalk, which meant her father was still upstairs, splashing on cheap cologne, before he set off for another night of groping for love in the tonks on Thompson Avenue. I’d only met Herman Mays twice, and then only at the base of their stairs. We’d disliked each other instantly; he, I thought, because he saw me as unmarked, yet to live the disappointments he cried about, Maris said, even in his sleep. My dislike was simpler. I despised him for the rage he directed at Maris.

Maris wore a blue and green leaf-patterned dress of thick brocade-like my suit, too heavy for the warm evening-and tiny sparkling earrings.

We walked to the high school, both of us dressed for winter, because it would have been unthinkable to ask my aunt Rosemary-one of the bad aunts-for the use of her Ford. She’d barely looked up as I cut through her apartment in my big-lapel brown suit and razzmatazz necktie, trailing my musk of mothballs, as though it were usual for me to go out dressed as a junior-grade gangster.

As Maris and I stepped into the gymnasium, I saw, to my horror, that most of the girls were wearing corsages. Embarrassment heated my face; I had not thought to buy one for Maris. “It doesn’t matter, Vlodek,” she said, squeezing my hand.

The dance passed in a blur. There was a punch bowl, filled with some fruity red mix that I joked would never be noticed if spilled on the riot of flowers that was my necktie. There were bright overhead lights, excellent for spotting basketball fouls, just as good for spotting hands rising for social fouls. The music was fast, dialed up on the treble to shut out the bass, lest something primal be aroused. And everywhere there was a teacher, eyes darting like a falcon’s, making sure minimum intervals, flesh-to-cloth-to-air-to-cloth-to-flesh, were being maintained by all the couples on the gymnasium floor. There was nothing for them to worry about with Maris and me. We danced awkwardly, as stiff as back patients recovering from surgery.

There was an after-dance party, a rec room affair in the basement of a two-flat, five blocks off of Thompson Avenue. A friend of Maris’s, another junior, invited a dozen couples. There were fluorescents in the ceiling there, too-strong and white, like in the gym, and quite overpowering a low lamp with a straw shade-switched on by the girl’s mother, switched off as soon as she climbed the stairs.

The music was vinyl and old, slow love songs of the fifties and sixties, played on a portable record player. It wasn’t listening music, it was rubbing music. And it was there, in that two-flat basement, lit softly by pale light from a straw-shaded lamp, that itchy brown wool at last met heavy blue and green brocade. At the end of the first dance, a blessedly interminable Johnny Mathis swoon, I looked down, Maris looked up, and the orbiting at last was complete. We kissed, nervous lips on soft lips, her smelling of Ivory soap and roses, me of mothballs and wonder.

And from somewhere behind the straw-shaded lamp, the vinyl band played on.

The second-floor rooms were hot, at least a hundred and ten degrees. I stood by the opened door for a minute, to let the scorching air rush to the lesser heat outside. Hoping, I suppose, to inhale some scent, some trace of Maris. There was only old air, trapped in the heat.

The tiny apartment combined a living room with a kitchen setup. An open door offered a glimpse of a bedroom and, beyond that, a bathroom.

All the walls were a pale yellow, and completely blank. The vinyl tile floor was a bright, clean white, free of heel scuffs or scratches. They were rooms that had been decorated and then never marked, rooms occupied by someone who’d been careful to leave nothing of herself behind.

Everywhere, there was sun, lots of sun.

I walked through the living room to open one of the windows that faced Shell Drive. The soft white curtains stirred for an instant, then collapsed back against the screen.

It was good that everywhere, in those rooms, there was the sun, the bright yellow-white sun.

Maris liked the sun. She liked that it was the color of her hair.

For the first days following the Spring Dance, we were tentative, fellow adventurers who shared a secret but were afraid to put a name to it, for fear its magic would disappear if we spoke of it aloud. Passing each other in the halls at school, we smiled but then quickly averted our eyes. Walking after school, it took us two or three blocks to say anything at all, and then our words were careful, of assignments and tests and term papers, things that neither of us heard. It was prelude.

On Monday and Tuesday, we kissed on the sidewalk in front of the door that led up to her apartment, a quick, furtive brushing of lips. On Wednesday, we stepped just inside the street door, into the dark at the foot of the stairs.

The weekend was interminable. Her father was home, not about to allow his daughter to slip out to see some boy. He had need of her. There was cleaning to do, and ironing. Things a wife would have done.

On Wednesday of the following week, we went upstairs to the landing outside the door that opened to her father’s apartment. Not that many days later, we moved inside that door, to the nubby orange couch in her father’s front room.

No longer did we find reasons to stay after class. There was no time. From the last bell until I had to be at the laundry, we had a narrow window, seventy-five minutes, and we learned to manage them with the cunning of museum robbers. We met outside the southwest door of the high school at three eighteen. By three twenty-one we had passed the parking lot, walking purposefully, not saying much for fear it would slow us down. We crossed to Thompson Avenue at three thirty-one if the truck traffic was light; three thirty-two if it was heavy. By three thirty-seven we were up the stairs to her landing, and she was fumbling with her key. A second or two later, she’d have the door open, our books would drop, and we would be on the nubby orange couch, daring only to touch each other’s face.

I moved through the tiny apartment, trying not to place the girl I’d known on the beige upholstered chair, hear her lifting a Coke or a lemonade from the kitchen counter, or see her picking up a book of poetry from the lamp table.

In the far back corner, by the stove, refrigerator, and sink, there was a yellow kitchen table and a white ladder-back chair. She’d sat on that chair, eaten at that table, alone, for over a decade. The boy I’d been the summer of high school graduation wanted to rejoice; she’d shared her meals with no one. The man that boy had become wanted to cry at the loss of it.

From the doorway to the bedroom, I looked at the twin bed, made up with a white bedspread pulled tight. Next to it was a night table with a frilly-shaded lamp, and across the room, a painted four-drawer dresser. It was the bedroom of a woman alone. Or that of a young girl.

People called Lillian, my mother’s youngest sister, flighty and scatterbrained. Perhaps that was true. She was easily overwhelmed and took care to lead a spinster’s ordered life, taking the train downtown to Chicago to work in the ladies’ coats department of Marshall Field’s.

She was the kindest of my mother’s three sisters. She was the one who fussed over my clothes, made sure the sheets for the sofa were clean, and kept meals warm for me for when I came home at midnight from the laundry. I looked forward to every third month, when I could stay at her apartment.

Her funeral was five days before my graduation. It was afine day late in May, heavy with the scents of flowers and beginnings, a day too bright and alive for burying a woman who’d lived quietly and demanded nothing of anyone. I rode with her two remaining sisters and their husbands and children from the funeral home west on Thompson Avenue to the cemetery but stood apart from them, at the back of the small cluster of people, as the minister mouthed words that made no sense on such a beautiful day. When he was done, Lillian’s sisters dropped roses onto the coffin that rested on low metal poles, and everyone began walking away from the opening that had been ripped into the ground.

My skin was tingling. Crazily, every breath I took went deeper into my lungs than ever before. The sky was bluer than I’d ever seen it, the smells of spring stronger. Time raced. No matter where I looked-the dash clock on the funeral home Cadillac, the Timex Lillian had given me for Christmas-minutes were disappearing, fast and forever, like petals thrown to a gusting spring windstorm.

Still in my Spring Dance wool suit, I ran to the high school, waited for Maris outside our door. When she stepped into the bright sunshine, agonizing minutes later, I grabbed her books, then her hand, and half-pulled her across the grass, toward the parking lot.

“Vlodek! Where’s the fire?”

I had no words and no time to tell her that the flames were all around me. The whole world was ablaze with life and death and vanishing minutes.

Inside her apartment, I tugged her past the nubby couch. She put her hand to my chest at the door to her bedroom, bright from the sun at the window. Never before had I touched anything except her face, her arms, her hands. She paused, trying to see what was raging behind my eyes, but it was only for an instant. Then we were inside, and I was pulling at her clothes, ripping at my own, and we were naked on her narrow twin bed.

I was somewhere else, then, looking down at her, at me. I saw her face change from acceptance to need and then to something that I didn’t understand. She started to cry. I saw myself stop. She shook her head. “No,” I heard her whisper. And I saw myself start again. I was not that boy slowly moving on the bed; I was watching, detached, entirely accepting the inevitability that I was seeing down below. When the boy who was me at last stopped, she continued to hold me against her, her hands clenched around my back, her face wet against my shoulder, until we started again, and later, again. I left at six o’clock, late for the laundry. In all that time at Maris’s, I had not uttered one word. I didn’t know what I could possibly say.

I walked around the bed, to the door to the bath, and stood for a moment, holding on to the jamb. There was nothing of her left in that heat, of course. Nothing at all.

My cell phone rang, echoing loudly off the tiled walls of the empty, hard room. I almost dropped it, fumbling it out of my pocket.

“Where are you, Dek?” Amanda’s voice, light and trusting.

My hand shook as I pressed the phone tight against my ear, guilty of being caught in another woman’s place, in another woman’s time. I walked quickly out of the bath and through the bedroom to sit on the white chair at the yellow kitchen table in the sun. “Still in Florida,” I said.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

“You sound a little…unsure.”

I made a laugh that sounded like a cough. “Maybe a little preoccupied.”

“I was hoping you’d call me last night, when you got settled.” It was a soft rebuke, and though mild, it was unusual for her.

“Sorry. I checked into a motel-a dump, but affordable-then went out for something to eat. I had a crab cake sandwich, a couple of gin and tonics, and watched the sun set.”

“And thought of me?” There was doubt in her playful question, realization that something was wrong.

“That, too,” I said after a beat.

She inhaled sharply, as if she’d been struck. I’d taken too long, and spoken too flatly.

“Of course I thought of you,” I added, but that sounded even clumsier. I am not inexperienced at lying. Mostly, however, I lie to myself. With Amanda, I’d always blundered ahead with the truth. That day, though, in that kitchen, I was spewing deceit-and Amanda had heard it.

She said something. I missed the words. My eyes had quit searching the room, stopped by some discolorations on the kitchen table in front of me. There were four little circular rub smudges, spaced evenly in a square pattern.

“Dek?” Amanda’s voice cut through.

“Sorry. What?”

“I asked when you’re coming back.”

“I don’t know.” I knew what those little smudges on the table were from.

“You’re making progress?” Her voice was far away, from another place.

“I’m trying,” I heard myself say.

She said something that I didn’t catch. I said that sounded fine, and I’d call her soon. It was only after I clicked off that I realized she’d told me she loved me.

The little circles on the kitchen table had come from old rubber typewriter feet.

I went down to the car, came back up with the tissue-thin car rental agreement, and used it to trace the markings on the table. I knew the pattern on the laminate would match the footprint of the typewriter, right down to the little wedge-shaped piece missing from one pad that had caused the one irregular smudge on the table. I didn’t need the tracing to be absolutely certain that this had been Maris’s apartment; I needed it to preserve the one mark she’d left in those rooms.

Perhaps an hour later, I stood up from the yellow table. My shirt was soaked from the heat. My eyes burned from the sweat coming off my forehead. I closed the window, locked the door, and walked down the long stairs.