Little Casino

Imbecile and slave

THE NIGHT BEFORE, HE HAD WALKED HER to her house down by the lake. Thick sweet darkness of the July night. He kissed her, leaning against the cool metal of her father’s powder-blue Buick. She said that she’d see him down at the lake the next day. I’ve seen you there, a lot, she said, last year.

And there she was the next day, lying on a blanket some twenty-five yards from the pavilion, with a girlfriend. She looked up at him and smiled. Do I know you? she said. He felt like a shambling moron in the face of that candid, girlish smile, and the girlfriend was giving him the once-over. Do you, like a, want a, like a want to have Coke? he said. She laughed and got up on her knees and patted the blanket with a hand so golden that her fingernails glowed as pearls. Here, she said. Sit here. He looked at her cool lips and felt them again in the moonless night.

The jukebox in the pavilion was playing a cheap song that would become ludicrously and unimpeachably beautiful in years to come, and the girlfriend left. Lie down, she said. I had a bad feeling that you weren’t going to say hello. What? What? Wasn’t it obvious from his stricken and stupid face that his very self had become her imbecile and slave? He saw that her eyes were hazel.

For heaven’s sake, it’s too soon to know. But it’s magic, tenderly. So said Claude Thornhill, Fran Warren, Dinah Washington, Doris Day, Sarah Vaughan.

She wore a white, one-piece strapless bathing suit.

Complexity of the simplest things, e.g., young men and women, or this young man and this young woman.

It doesn’t matter what lake in New Jersey this was. They were all alike. It doesn’t matter what the girl’s name was. They were all lovely.

Hopatcong, Ellen, Budd, Natalie, Hiawatha, Carole.

“I’ll close my eyes and she’ll just disappear, I know it, I know it,” the idiot says. To himself, at least.