Текст книги "Revival"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

“I don’t like it.” Now she was rubbing her temples.

My father spoke up at last. “Let him do it, Laura. I know you’re worried, but it’s what he’s good at.”

She sighed. “All right. I guess.”

“Thanks, Mom! Thanks, Dad!”

My mother picked up her fork, then put it down. “Promise me that you won’t smoke cigarettes or marijuana, and that you won’t drink.”

“I promise,” I said, and that was a promise I kept for two years.

Or thereabouts.

 • • •

What I remember best about that first gig at Eureka Grange No. 7 was the stench of my own sweat as the four of us trooped onto the bandstand. When it comes to sweat, nobody can beat an adolescent of fourteen. I had showered for twenty minutes before my maiden show—until the hot water ran out—but when I bent to pick up my borrowed guitar, I reeked of fear. The Kay seemed to weigh at least two hundred pounds when I slung it over my shoulder. I had good reason to be scared. Even taking the inherent simplicity of rock and roll into account, the task Norm Irving set me—learning thirty songs between Thursday afternoon and Saturday night—was impossible, and I told him so.

He shrugged and offered me the most useful advice I ever got as a musician: When in doubt, lay out. “Besides,” he said, baring his decaying teeth in a fiendish grin, “I’m gonna be turned up so loud they won’t hear what you’re doing, anyway.”

Paul rolled a short riff on his drums to get the crowd’s attention, finishing with a cymbal-clang. There was a brief spatter of anticipatory applause. There were all those eyes (millions, it seemed to me) looking up at the little stage where we were crowded together under the lights. I remember feeling incredibly stupid in my rhinestone-studded vest (the vests were holdovers from the brief period when Chrome Roses had been the Gunslingers), and wondering if I was going to vomit. It hardly seemed possible, since I’d only picked at lunch and hadn’t been able to eat any supper at all, but it sure felt that way. Then I thought, Not vomit. Faint. That’s what I’m going to do, faint.

I really might have, but Norm didn’t give me time. “We’re Chrome Roses, okay? You guys get up and dance.” Then, to us: “One . . . two . . . you-know-what-to-do.”

Paul Bouchard laid down the tomtom drumbeat that opens “Hang On Sloopy,” and we were off. Norm sang lead; except for a couple of songs when Kenny took over, he always did. Paul and I did backing vocals. I was terribly shy about that at first, but the feeling passed when I heard how different my amplified voice sounded—how adult. Later on I realized that no one pays much attention to the backup singers anyway . . . although they’d miss those voices if they were gone.

I watched the couples move onto the floor and start to dance. It was what they’d come for, but in my deepest heart I hadn’t believed they would—not to music I was a part of. When it became clear to me that we weren’t going to be booed off the stage, I felt a rising euphoria that was close to ecstasy. I’ve taken enough drugs to sink a battleship since then, but not even the best of them could equal that first rush. We were playing. They were dancing.

We played from seven until ten thirty, with a twenty-minute break around nine, when Norm and Kenny dropped their instruments, turned off their amps, and dashed outside to smoke. For me those hours passed in a dream, so I wasn’t surprised when during one of the slower numbers—I think it was “Who’ll Stop the Rain”—my mother and father waltzed by.

Mom’s head was on Dad’s shoulder. Her eyes were closed and there was a dreamy little smile on her face. My dad’s eyes were open, and he gave me a wink as they passed the bandstand. There was no need to be embarrassed by their presence; although the high school dances and the PAL hops at the Lewiston Roller Rink were strictly for kids, there were always a lot of adults when we played at the Eureka Grange, or the Elks and Amvets in Gates. The only thing wrong with that first gig was that, although some of Astrid’s friends were there, she wasn’t.

My folks left early, and Norm drove me home in the old microbus. We were all high on our success, laughing and reliving the show, and when Norm held out a ten-dollar bill to me, I didn’t understand what it was for.

“Your cut,” he said. “We got fifty for the gig. Twenty for me—because it’s my ’bus and I play lead—ten for each of you guys.”

I took it, still feeling like a boy in a dream, and slid open the side door with my aching left hand.

“Rehearsal this Thursday,” Norm said. “Band Room after school this time. I can’t take you home, though. My dad needs me to help paint a house over in Castle Rock.”

I said that was okay. If Con couldn’t give me a ride home, I’d hitch. Most of the people who used Route 9 between Gates Falls and Harlow knew me and would pick me up.

“You need to work on ‘Brown-Eyed Girl.’ You were way behind.”

I said I would.

“And Jamie?”

I looked at him.

“Otherwise you did okay.”

“Better than Snuffy,” Paul said.

“Way better than that hoser,” Kenny added.

That almost made up for Astrid’s not being at the dance.

Dad had gone to bed, but Mom was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. She had changed into a flannel nightgown, but she still had her makeup on, and I thought she looked very pretty. When she smiled, I saw her eyes were full of tears.

“Mom? Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m just happy for you, Jamie. And a little scared.”

“Don’t be,” I said, and hugged her.

“You won’t start smoking with those boys, will you? Promise me.”

“I already promised, Mom.”

“Promise me again.”

I did. Making promises when you’re fourteen is even easier than working up a sweat.

Upstairs, Con was lying on his bed, reading a science book. It was hard for me to believe anyone would read such books for pleasure (especially a big-shot football player), but Connie did. He put it down and said, “You were pretty good.”

“How would you know?”

He smiled. “I peeked in. Just for a minute. You were playing that asshole song.”

“Wild Thing.” I didn’t even have to ask.

 • • •

We played at the Amvets the following Friday night, and the high school dance on Saturday. At that one, Norm changed the words to ‘I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore’ to ‘I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Girl Anymore.’ The chaperones didn’t notice, they never noticed any of the lyrics, but the kids did, and loved it. The Gates gym was big enough to act as its own amplifier, and the sound we made, especially on really loud tunes like “Good Lovin’,” was tremendous. If I may misquote Slade, us boyz made big noize. During the break, Kenny went along with Norm and Paul to the smoking area, so I did, too.

There were several girls there, including Hattie Greer, the one who’d patted Norm’s butt on the day I auditioned. She put her arms around his neck and pressed her body against his. He put his hands in her back pockets to pull her closer. I tried not to stare.

A timid little voice came from behind me. “Jamie?”

I turned. It was Astrid. She was wearing a straight white skirt and a blue sleeveless blouse. Her hair had been released from its prim school ponytail and framed her face.

“Hi,” I said. And because that didn’t seem like enough: “Hi, Astrid. I didn’t see you inside.”

“I came late, because I had to ride with Bonnie and Bonnie’s dad. You guys are really good.”

“Thanks.”

Norm and Hattie were kissing strenuously. Norm was a noisy kisser, and the sound was a bit like my Mom’s Electrolux. There was other, quieter, making out going on as well, but Astrid didn’t seem to notice. Those luminous eyes never left my face. She was wearing frog earrings. Blue frogs that matched her blouse. You notice everything at times like that.

Meanwhile, she seemed to be waiting for me to say something else, so I amplified my previous remark: “Thanks a lot.”

“Are you going to have a cigarette?”

“Me?” It crossed my mind that she was spying for my mom. “I don’t smoke.”

“Walk me back, then?”

I walked her back. It was four hundred yards between the smoking area and the back door of the gym. I wished it had been four miles.

“Are you here with anybody?” I asked.

“Just Bonnie and Carla,” she said. “Not a guy, or anything. Mom and Dad won’t let me go out with guys until I’m fifteen.”

Then, as if to show me what she thought of such a silly idea, she took my hand. When we got to the back door, she looked up at me. I almost kissed her then, but lost my courage.

Boys can be dopes.

 • • •

When we were loading Paul’s drumkit into the back of the microbus after the dance, Norm spoke to me in a stern, almost paternal voice. “After the break, you were off on everything. What was that about?”

“Dunno,” I said. “Sorry. I’ll do better next time.”

“I hope so. If we’re good, we get gigs. If we’re not, we don’t.” He patted the rusty side of the microbus. “Betsy here don’t run on air bubbles, and neither do I.”

“It was that girl,” Kenny said. “Pretty little blondie in a white skirt.”

Norm looked enlightened. He put his hands on my shoulders and gave me a fatherly little shake to go with the fatherly voice. “Get with her, little buddy. Soon as you can. You’ll play better.”

Then he gave me fifteen dollars.

 • • •

We played the Grange on New Year’s Eve. It was snowing. Astrid was there. She was wearing a parka with a fur-lined hood. I led her under the fire escape and kissed her. She was wearing lipstick that tasted like strawberries. When I pulled back, she looked at me with those big eyes of hers.

“I thought you never would,” she said, then giggled.

“Was it all right?”

“Do it again and I’ll tell you.”

We stood kissing under the fire escape until Norm tapped me on the shoulder. “Break it up, kids. Time to play some music.”

Astrid pecked me on the cheek. “Do ‘Wild Thing,’ I love that one,” she said, and ran toward the back door, slipping around in her dancing shoes.

Norm and I followed. “Blue balls much?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. We’re gonna play her song first. You know how it works, right?”

I did, because the band played plenty of requests. And I was happy to do it, because now I felt more confident when I had the Kay in front of me, an electric shield plugged in and ready to drive.

We walked onto the stand. Paul hit the customary drum-riff to signal that the band was back and ready to rock. Norm gave me a nod as he adjusted a guitar strap that didn’t need adjusting. I stepped to the center mike and bellowed, “This one is for Astrid, by request, and because . . . wild thing, I think I LOVE you!” And although it was ordinarily Norm’s job—his prerogative, as leader of the band—I counted the song off: One, two, you-know-what-to-do. On the floor, Astrid’s friends were pummeling her and shrieking. Her cheeks were bright red. She blew me a kiss.

Astrid Soderberg blew me a kiss.

 • • •

So the boys in Chrome Roses had girlfriends. Or maybe they were groupies. Or maybe they were both. When you’re in a band, it’s not always easy to tell where the line is. Norm had Hattie. Paul had Suzanne Fournier. Kenny had Carol Plummer. And I had Astrid.

Hattie, Suzanne, and Carol sometimes crammed into the microbus with us when we went to our gigs. Astrid wasn’t allowed to do that, but when Suzanne was able to borrow her parents’ car, Astrid was permitted to ride with the girls.

Sometimes they got out on the floor and danced with each other; mostly they just stood in their own tight little clique and watched. Astrid and I spent most of the breaks kissing, and I began to taste cigarettes on her breath. I didn’t mind. When she saw that (girls have ways of knowing), she started to smoke around me, and a couple of times she’d blow a little into my mouth while we were kissing. It gave me a hard-on I could have broken concrete with.

A week after her fifteenth birthday, Astrid was allowed to go with us in the microbus to the PAL hop in Lewiston. We kissed all the way home, and when I slipped my hand inside her coat to cup a breast that was now quite a bit more than a nubbin, she didn’t push it away as she always had before.

“That feels good,” she whispered in my ear. “I know it’s wrong, but it feels good.”

“Maybe that’s why,” I said. Sometimes boys aren’t dopes.

It was another month before she allowed my hand in her bra, and two before I was allowed to explore all the way up her skirt, but when I eventually got there, she admitted that also felt good. But beyond that she would not go.

“I know I’d get pregnant the first time,” she whispered in my ear one night when we were parking and things had gotten especially hot.

“I can get something at the drugstore. I could go to Lewiston, where they don’t know me.”

“Carol says sometimes those things break. That’s what happened one time when she was with Kenny, and she was scared for a month. She said she thought her period would never come. But there are other things we can do. She told me.”

The other things were pretty good.

 • • •

I got my license when I was sixteen, the only one of my siblings to succeed the first time I took the road test. I owed that partly to Driver’s Ed and mostly to Cicero Irving. Norm lived with his mother, a goodhearted bottle blonde with a house in Gates Falls, but he spent most weekends with his dad, who lived in a scuzzy trailer park across the Harlow line in Motton.

If we had a gig on Saturday night, the band—along with our girlfriends—often got together at Cicero’s trailer on Saturday afternoon for pizza. Joints were rolled and smoked, and after saying no for almost a year, I gave in and tried it. I found it hard to hold the smoke in at first, but—as many of my readers will know for themselves—it gets easier. I never smoked much dope in those days; just enough to get loose for the show. I played better when I had a little residual buzz on, and we always laughed a lot in that old trailer.

When I told Cicero I was going for my license the following week, he asked me if my appointment was in Castle Rock or up-the-city, meaning Lewiston-Auburn. When I said it was L-A, he nodded sagely. “That means you’ll get Joe Cafferty. He’s been doing that job for twenty years. I used to drink with him at the Mellow Tiger in Castle Rock, when I was a constable there. This was before the Rock got big enough to have a regular PD, you know.”

It was hard to imagine Cicero Irving—grizzled, red-eyed, rail-thin, rarely dressed in anything but old khakis and strappy tee-shirts—being in the law enforcement biz, but people change; sometimes they go up the ladder and sometimes they go down. Those descending are frequently aided by various substances, such as the one he was so adept at rolling and sharing with his son’s teenage compadres.

“Ole Joey hardly ever gives anyone their license first crack out of the basket,” Cicero said. “As a rule, he don’t believe in it.”

This I knew; Claire, Andy, and Con had all fallen afoul of Joe Cafferty. Terry drew someone else (perhaps Officer Cafferty was sick that day), and although he was an excellent driver from the first time he got behind the wheel, Terry was a bundle of nerves that day and managed to back into a fire hydrant when he tried to parallel-park.

“Three things if you want to pass,” Cicero said, handing the joint he had just rolled to Paul Bouchard. “Number one, stay off this shit until after your road test.”

“Okay.” That was actually something of a relief. I enjoyed the bud, but with every toke I remembered the promise I’d made to my mother and was now breaking . . . although I consoled myself with the fact that I still wasn’t smoking cigarettes or drinking, which meant I was batting .666.

“Second, call him sir. Thank you sir when you get in the car and thank you sir when you get out. He likes that. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Third and most important, cut your fucking hair. Joe Cafferty hates hippies.”

I didn’t like that idea one bit. I had shot up three inches since joining the band, but when it came to hair, I was a slowpoke. It had taken me a year to get it almost down to my shoulders. There had also been a lot of hair arguments with my parents, who told me I looked like a bum. Andy’s verdict was even blunter: “If you want to look like a girl, Jamie, why don’t you put on a dress?” Gosh, there’s nothing like reasoned Christian discourse, is there?

“Oh, man, if I cut my hair I’ll look like a nerd!”

“You look like a nerd already,” Kenny said, and everyone laughed. Even Astrid laughed (then put a hand on my thigh to take the sting out of it).

“Yeah,” Cicero Irving said, “you’ll look like a nerd with a driver’s license. Paulie, are you going to fire up that joint or just sit there and admire it?”

 • • •

I laid off the bud. I called Officer Cafferty sir. I got a Mr. Businessman haircut, which broke my heart and lifted my mother’s. When I parallel-parked, I tapped the bumper of the car behind me, but Officer Cafferty gave me my license, anyway.

“I’m trusting you, son,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I won’t let you down.”

 • • •

When I turned seventeen, there was a birthday party for me at our house, which now stood on a paved road—the march of progress. Astrid was invited, of course, and she gave me a sweater she had knitted herself. I pulled it on at once, although it was August and the day was hot.

Mom gave me a hardbound set of Kenneth Roberts historical novels (which I actually read). Andy gave me a leatherbound Bible (which I also read, mostly to spite him) with my name stamped in gold on the front. The inscription on the flyleaf was from Revelation 3: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him.” The implication—that I had Fallen Away—was not exactly unwarranted.

From Claire—now twenty-five and teaching school in New Hampshire—I got a spiffy sportcoat. Con, always something of a cheapie, gave me six sets of guitar strings. Oh well, at least they were Dollar Slicks.

Mom brought in the birthday cake, and everyone sang the traditional song. If Norm had been there, he probably would have blown the candles out with his rock-and-roll voice, but he wasn’t, so I blew them out myself. As Mom was passing the plates around, I realized I hadn’t gotten anything from Dad or Terry—not so much as a Flower Power tie.

After the cake and ice cream (van-choc-straw, of course), I saw Terry flash Dad a glance. Dad looked at Mom and she gave him a nervous little smile. It is only in retrospect that I realized how often I saw that nervous smile on my mother’s face as her children grew up and went into the world.

“Come on out to the barn, Jamie,” my dad said, standing up. “Terence and I have got a little something for you.”

The “little something” turned out to be a 1966 Ford Galaxie. It was washed, waxed, and as white as moonlight on snow.

“Oh my God,” I said in a faint voice, and everyone laughed.

“The body was good, but the engine needed some work,” Terry said. “Me n Dad reground the valves, replaced the plugs, stuck in a new battery . . . the works.”

“New tires,” Dad said, pointing to them. “Just blackwalls, but those are not recaps. Do you like it, Son?”

I hugged him. I hugged them both.

“Just promise me and your mother that you’ll never get behind the wheel if you’ve taken a drink. Don’t make us have to look at each other someday and say we gave you something you used to hurt yourself or someone else.”

“I promise,” I said.

Astrid—with whom I would share the last inch or so of a joint when I took her home in my new car—squeezed my arm. “And I’ll make him keep it.”

After driving down to Harry’s Pond twice (I had to make two trips so I could give everyone a ride), history repeated itself. I felt a tug on my hand. It was Claire. She led me into the mudroom just as she had on the day Reverend Jacobs used his Electrical Nerve Stimulator to give Connie back his voice.

“Mom wants another promise from you,” she said, “but she was too embarrassed to ask. So I said I’d do it for her.”

I waited.

“Astrid is a nice girl,” Claire said. “She smokes, I can smell it on her breath, but that doesn’t make her bad. And she’s a girl with good taste. Going with you for three years proves that.”

I waited.

“She’s a smart girl, too. She’s got college ahead of her. So here’s the promise, Jamie: don’t you get her pregnant in the backseat of that car. Can you promise that?”

I almost smiled. If I had, it would have been fifty percent amused and fifty percent pained. For the last two years, Astrid and I had had a code word: recess. It meant mutual masturbation. I had mentioned condoms to her on several occasions after the first time, had even gone so far as to purchase a three-pack of Trojans (one kept in my wallet, the other two secreted behind the baseboard in my bedroom), but she was positive that the first one we tried would either break or leak. So . . . recess.

“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” Claire asked.

“No,” I said. “Never mad at you, Claire-Bear.” And I never was. That anger was waiting for the monster she married, and it never abated.

I hugged her and promised I would not get Astrid pregnant. It was a promise I kept, although we got close before that day in the cabin near Skytop.

 • • •

In those years I sometimes dreamed of Charles Jacobs—I’d see him poking his fingers into my pretend mountain to make caves, or preaching the Terrible Sermon with blue fire circling his head like an electric diadem—but he pretty much slipped from my conscious mind until one day in June of 1974. I was eighteen. So was Astrid.

School was out. Chrome Roses had gigs lined up all summer (including a couple in bars, where my parents had given me reluctant written permission to perform), and during the days I’d be working at the Marstellars’ farmstand, as I had the year before. Morton Fuel Oil was doing well, and my parents could afford tuition at the University of Maine, but I was expected to do my share. I had a week before reporting for farmstead duty, though, so Astrid and I had a lot of time together. Sometimes we went to my house; sometimes we were at hers. On a lot of afternoons we cruised the back roads in my Galaxie. We’d find a place to park and then . . . recess.

That afternoon we were in a disused gravel pit on Route 9, swapping a joint of not-very-good local grass back and forth. It was sultry, and stormclouds were forming in the west. Thunder rumbled, and there must have been lightning. I didn’t see it, but static crackled from the dashboard radio speaker, momentarily blotting out “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room,” a song the Roses played at every show that year.

That was when Reverend Jacobs returned to my mind like a long absent guest, and I started the car. “Snuff that jay,” I said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

“Where?”

“A place someone told me about a long time ago. If it’s still there.”

Astrid put the remains of the joint in a Sucrets box and tucked it under the seat. I drove a mile or two down Route 9, then turned west on Goat Mountain Road. Here the trees bulked close on either side, and the last of that day’s hazy sunshine disappeared as the stormclouds rolled in.

“If you’re thinking about the resort, they won’t let us in,” Astrid said. “My folks gave up their membership. They said they had to economize if I’m going to college in Boston.” She wrinkled her nose.

“Not the resort,” I said.

We passed Longmeadow, where the MYF used to have its annual wienie-roast. People were throwing nervous glances at the sky as they gathered up their blankets and coolers and hurried to their cars. The thunder was louder now, loaded wagons rolling across the sky, and I saw a bolt of lightning hit somewhere on the other side of Skytop. I started to feel excited. Beautiful, Charles Jacobs had said that last day. Beautiful and terrifying.

We passed a sign reading GOAT MTN GATEHOUSE 1 MILE PLEASE SHOW MEMBERSHIP CARD.

“Jamie—”

“There’s supposed to be a spur that goes to Skytop,” I said. “Maybe it’s gone, but . . .”

It wasn’t gone, and it was still gravel. I turned into it a little too fast, and the Galaxie’s rear end wagged first one way, then the other.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Astrid said. She didn’t sound frightened to be driving straight toward a summer thunderstorm; she sounded interested and a little excited.

“I hope so, too.”

The grade steepened. The Galaxie’s rear end flirted on the loose gravel from time to time, but mostly it held steady. Two and a half miles beyond the turnoff, the trees pulled back and there was Skytop. Astrid gasped and sat up straight in her seat. I hit the brake and brought my car to a crunching stop.

On our right was an old cabin with a mossy, sagging roof and crashed-out windows. Graffiti, most of it too faded to be legible, danced in tangles across the gray, paintless sides. Ahead and above us was a great bulging forehead of granite. At the summit, just as Jacobs had told me half my life ago, was an iron pole jutting toward the clouds, which were now black and seemingly low enough to touch. To our left, where Astrid was looking, hills and fields and gray-green miles of woods stretched toward the ocean. In that direction the sun was still shining, making the world glow.

“Oh my God, was this here all the time? And you never took me?”

“I never took myself,” I said. “My old minister told me—”

That was as far as I got. A brilliant bolt of lightning came down from the sky. Astrid screamed and put her hands over her head. For a moment—strange, terrible, wonderful—it seemed to me that the air had been replaced by electric oil. I felt the hair all over my body, even the fine ones in my nose and ears, go stiff. Then came the click, as if an invisible giant had snapped his fingers. A second bolt flashed down and hit the iron rod, turning it the same bright blue I had seen dancing around Charles Jacobs’s head in my dreams. I had to shut my eyes to keep from going blind. When I opened them again, the pole was glowing cherry red. Like a horseshoe in a forge, he’d said, and that was just what it was like. Follow-thunder bellowed.

“Do you want to get out of here?” I was shouting. I had to, in order to hear myself over the ringing in my ears.

“No!” she shouted back. “In there!” And pointed at the slumping remains of the cabin.

I thought of telling her we’d be safer in the car—some vaguely remembered adage about how rubber tires could ground you and protect you from lightning—but there had been thousands of storms on Skytop, and the old cabin was still standing. As we ran toward it, hand in hand, I realized there was a good reason for that. The iron rod drew the lightning. At least it had so far.

It began to hail as we reached the open door, pebble-size chunks of ice that struck the granite with a rattling sound. “Ouch, ouch, ouch!” Astrid yelled . . . but she was laughing at the same time. She darted in. I followed just as the lightning flashed again, artillery on some apocalyptic battlefield. This time it was preceded by a snap instead of a click.

Astrid seized my shoulder. “Look!”

I’d missed the storm’s second swipe at the iron rod, but I clearly saw what followed. Balls of St. Elmo’s fire bounced and rolled down the scree-littered slope. There were half a dozen. One by one they popped out of existence.

Astrid hugged me, but that wasn’t enough. She locked her hands around my neck and climbed me, her thighs locked around my hips. “This is fantastic!” she screamed.

The hail turned to rain, and it came in a deluge. Skytop was blotted out, but we never lost sight of the iron rod, because it was struck repeatedly. It would glow blue or purple, then red, then fade, only to be struck again.

Rain like that rarely lasts long. As it lessened, we saw that the granite slope below the iron rod had turned into a river. The thunder continued to rumble, but it was losing its fury and subsiding into sulks. We heard running water everywhere, as if the earth were whispering. The sun was still shining to the east, over Brunswick and Freeport and Jerusalem’s Lot, where we saw not one or two rainbows but half a dozen, interlocking like Olympic rings.

Astrid turned me toward her. “I have to tell you something,” she said. Her voice was low.

“What?” I was suddenly sure that she would destroy this transcendent moment by telling me we had to break up.

“Last month my mother took me to the doctor. She said she didn’t want to know how serious we were about each other, that it wasn’t her business, but she needed to know I was taking care of myself. That was how she put it. ‘All you have to say is that you want it because your periods are painful and irregular,’ she said. ‘When he sees that I brought you myself, that will do.’”

I was a little slow, I guess, so she punched me in the chest.

“Birth control pills, dummy. Ovral. It’s safe now, because I had a period since I started taking them. I’ve been waiting for the right time, and if this isn’t it, there won’t ever be one.”

Those luminous eyes on mine. Then she dropped them, and began biting her lip.

“Just don’t . . . don’t get carried away, all right? Think of me and be gentle. Because I’m scared. Carol said her first time hurt like hell.”

We undressed each other—all the way, at last—while the clouds unraveled overhead and the sun shone through and the whisper of running water began to die away. Her arms and legs were already tanned. The rest of her was as white as snow. Her pubic hair was fine gold, accentuating her sex rather than obscuring it. There was an old mattress in the corner, where the roof was still whole—we weren’t the first to use that cabin for what it was used for that day.

She guided me in, then made me stop. I asked her if it was all right. She said it was, but that she wanted to do it herself. “Hold still, honey. Just hold still.”

I held still. It was agony to hold still, but it was also wonderful to hold still. She raised her hips. I slid in a little deeper. She did it again and I slipped in a little more. I remember looking at the mattress and seeing its old faded pattern, and smudges of dirt, and a single trundling ant. That she raised her hips again. I slid in all the way and she gasped.

“Oh my God!”

“Does it hurt? Astrid, does it—”

“No, it’s wonderful. I think . . . you can do it now.”