Authors: Nino Ricci
Though I had the sense now I’d missed some opportunity, that the moment when the right tone might have been struck between us had already passed.
“I dunno, my mum’s sister’s down here and my folks are getting divorced and all that.”
“Oh. I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s all right, it’s not your fault.”
She laughed but I couldn’t seem to pick up on her humour.
“I guess it was kind of hard moving here and everything.”
“I dunno, it’s all right.”
And already a panic had started to build in me, a heaviness I took for boredom beginning to creep into her voice.
Less than halfway to Windsor we had lapsed into unbroken silence. In the thickening gloom of nightfall the silence seemed a pit we’d fallen into, drawing us in more deeply each moment it went on. I thought of the long evening still stretching before us in the car’s silence-poisoned closeness, how impossible things would be, of the vision I’d had of some better self, light-hearted and full of confidence and grace, who might have slipped an arm casually round Crystal’s shoulders, kissed her, won her over.
At the drive-in I asked if she wanted popcorn, desperate to free myself from the pressure of our silence.
“Sure.”
But when I returned from the concession she’d moved perceptibly toward the centre of the seat. I didn’t understand, our date already ruined in my mind, didn’t see how she could continue on in the charade of it.
“Are you angry or anything?”
The question jolted me.
“No, do I seem like it?” But she was right: something in me was hard with anger, my jaw stiff with the tension of it.
“I dunno,” Crystal said, awkward. “You just seem so quiet and everything.”
Her candour seemed to strip some veil from between us: I felt aware of her suddenly, human and real beside me, as if for the first time.
“I’m just shy, that’s all,” I said, though the word left a taste in my mouth like bile. “I’m always quiet.”
“Yeah, I thought so,” Crystal said. “That’s how come I noticed you when you came into the restaurant and everything, because you seemed different like that.”
And though her compliment only seemed to point up what I most disliked in myself still I was glad to have it, to be able to protect myself in this image she had of me.
The film came on. It was a trashy horror film but Crystal seemed drawn by it, growing animated now, making fun but also oddly involved. There was a character, a detective of some sort, punctilious and sceptical and cold, who made her bristle with animosity.
“God, he’s such an asshole, he’s such an asshole!”
I sat during the whole film in my own corner of the seat, never felt there was a moment when I’d earned any intimacies. But on the trip home Crystal remained squarely in the seat’s centre, the heat of her tangible there beside me. In her driveway she leaned toward me suddenly and grazed my lips with her own.
“I’m off work tomorrow too, if you want to call or anything.”
We began to see each other regularly, within a few weeks moving almost imperceptibly from the awkwardness of our first date into a kind of habitualness, one date simply leading on to another until it seemed hard to remember when things had been any different between us. I spent two or three evenings a week at her house watching TV with her in the comfortable clutter of her living room, her mother and sisters, Rocky and Kate, seeming to accept me there with an odd indulgence, Crystal
locking her arm in mine on the sagging couch as if displaying me before them like a prize.
“It looks like Crystal’s got her hooks on a handsome one this time,” Kate, the eldest, said. “You should have seen some of the ones she dragged in back home.”
There was always this sense of being held in esteem there, in the tired, sad pleasure Crystal’s mother appeared to take in me, in Rocky’s tomboyish lingering near me as if to await some moment to bask in my attention; and I seemed to have entered there as by a kind of inevitability, this house of women I’d somehow become the man of, there to complete its half-familyness with my own.
Yet even in that first flush of acceptance there was already the doubt. It was the quickness of things I couldn’t understand, how I’d earned this ready entry when I’d shown them all so little, remained forever awkward and inarticulate with them for fear of contradicting whatever image it was they had of me; and then the longer things went on the more I felt torn between my relief at the effortlessness of it all and my unease at how much appeared already taken for granted. For Crystal it seemed that whatever it was that had formed between us had become already immutable: she talked often of the future, of the things we would do, the next week, the next month, the next year, obliviously constant in her affection for me even through my own moods and silences, silences that more and more became charged with an unfocused resentment. But for my part I seemed never to have reached the point where I’d made a choice, had somehow merely given in to her own attraction to me as if it were something I had no right to oppose. We usually ended our evenings now necking in the car or on the couch, some grim urgency underlying this contact for me, pushing me on like a
separate will; and yet the further it took me the more the rest of me withdrew, refusing to give itself over, seeming then the proof of the wrongness between me and Crystal, this sense I was furthest from her when I should be most close. Rubbing up through our clothes once against the hard muscle of her thigh I came suddenly, for an instant all my insides seeming to liquefy and flow out of me; but even in that instant there was the same withholding in me, not so much shame as a failure of emotion, and afterwards it was that failure that I seemed most anxious to hide from her in keeping from her what had happened.
School began. In that context we seemed so unlikely suddenly, with our different worlds and interests and friends. I’d formed a life at school now outside of Vince and his group in which she seemed incongruous; and slowly a kind of partitioning began, a turning from her there as if to hold intact the different images of myself I’d splintered into. I imagined at first that Crystal didn’t notice this tension in me and yet gradually an understanding developed that things were somehow different between us at school; she stopped waiting for me outside my classes, stopped coming up behind me in the halls to slip an arm silently into mine. I couldn’t see her there now without feeling a mix of shame and contempt, for what I was doing to her, what she let me get away with, her sudden brightening at the sight of me and then her instinctive restraint. Yet somehow we went on in that way as if there was nothing unnatural or strange in it, though outside school we’d meet and at once revert to our other selves.
Weekends Crystal had off we went out sometimes with Vince and Tony. The group of us formed an odd, ill-sorted family in our differences and incompatibilities, Crystal already beginning to seem more a part of Vince’s and Tony’s world than of mine,
perhaps simply because I’d met her with them or because together they formed now this separate, other life I led, my real life in a way yet provisional, leading nowhere. Away from Vince, Crystal spoke of him with a disdain that secretly pleased me, doing mocking imitations of his walk, in her version of it a strutting swagger.
“He think’s he’s such a big man.”
But then I’d be envious of the way they played off one another when they were together, Vince bringing out an energy in her that made her seem oddly strong-willed and desirable. It must have appeared then from a distance that she was merely part of a casual foursome we formed that Vince was the leader of.
“Yeah, I seen you guys the other night with that American girl, what’s her name,” one of his friends said once, asking after her as if she were some common property we shared. “I had a little thing with her last spring at the show, eh, not too bad.”
A leaden pause.
“Victor here’s been going out with her a few months,” Vince said.
“Oh, Christ, man, sorry about that. It was no big deal, eh, just necking and shit, no offence.”
The incident left a residue in me like grit. I never thought of Crystal this way, had to twist my mind to imagine her as part of this teenage delinquency, this quick furtive contact in the dark. I felt a kind of protectiveness toward her but also something else, the need to hold this thing against her in some way, to break her with it, as if in breaking her I could somehow prove my right to be free of her.
“What’re you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re sure giving nothing a lot of thought. I can hear the wheels turning up there in that big brain of yours.”
But though I could see that I was the one, that she held herself out to me like some fragile thing I’d been entrusted with, still I couldn’t find the way to stop the quiet seething in me when I was with her.
It seemed in the end that I was no different from Vince and his friends, no better, had wanted only my stories to tell, the groping in theatres, the normalcy of that, the conquests, had wanted some relinquishing in me of the fever my body was; and what seemed to keep me from these things wasn’t choice but simply that I lacked some lightness necessary to carry them off. At home I lay in the bathtub sometimes envisioning Crystal spread naked before me, her imperfections strangely arousing then, the bulk of her hips, the pale dwarfed insufficiency of her breasts, every flaw a kind of sanction of my freedom from her; and stroking myself beneath the water I’d imagine sinking into the liquid heat of her until I came, bleeding into her then in the safe intensity of imagination what I could find no place for between us, my cold loveless desire.
In March, Crystal’s sister Kate got married. The wedding seemed oddly impromptu to me after Italian ones, with its single bridesmaid and usher, Kate’s simple trainless dress, the quick ceremony at the church; and then the reception at the Moose Lodge in Goldsmith, the hall tawdry and domestic and close as a living room, the food served in one quick onrush of vegetables and meat and the bar offering only soft drinks and beer. After the meal a young ruddy-faced disk jockey set out rock and country songs on a scratchy phonograph.
“This one’s for the young folks, let’s see you shaking it out there.”
Crystal’s father had come down from Michigan. At the church he’d towered over Kate with a grim composure as he’d led her down the aisle, his face creased with fatigue like something chiselled out of stone. But at the reception he grew animated, a small crowd lingering at the bar in the circle of energy he seemed to have formed there. He took my hand with a smooth, reassuring aggressiveness when Crystal introduced us.
“So you’re Crystal’s young man, is that it?” His speech was pure as glass, had none of the twang of Crystal’s. “She’s said some very fine things about you. That’s a pretty high recommendation as far as I’m concerned, Crystal’s always been very fussy about her men.”
“I guess he’ll do for now,” Crystal said.
But she seemed so vulnerable before him, so awkward and adoring, seemed to miss entirely the edge of forced enthusiasm in him. I saw him dancing later with Kate, Kate distant and independent and cool and he with the same grimness he’d had in church, more himself somehow, more defeated; and it was suddenly clear to me that Kate was the daughter he cared about, something crumbling in me then at the thought of all Crystal’s innocent need.
Crystal and I danced. Through the fabric of her dress I felt her hips sway beneath my hands. For a few moments there amidst the loud rough exuberance of the other guests we seemed to form an island, held safe in our aloneness as we danced out of rhythm in drunken slowness.
When we left, around two in the morning, there was a mood of pleasant relinquishment between us. In the truck, which I’d had to take because my aunt had needed the car, Crystal slipped
her legs under the gearshift with a low hiss of nylon and pressed up against me, her breath like steam in the cab’s damp cold. For the first time I felt my body give itself over to her. I began to kiss her, leisurely and deep, moved a hand over her belly and hips, between the warmth of her thighs.
“That feels nice,” she said, beery and guileless, and it seemed the first time there’d been this acknowledgement that what we did was somehow intended for pleasure.
For a moment my desire for her seemed to reach an absolute fullness. I tried to ease myself around on the seat but the cramped closeness of the cab made any comfortable position impossible. A car drove by on the highway, its flash of headlights casting up for an instant the cab’s farm-engendered squalor, the dust on the dashboard, the paper scraps, the ragged wad of bills and receipts my father clipped to the visor.
“We should go somewhere,” I said, wanting some sign from her of common intent. But she settled away without speaking, squeezing back past the gearshift to give me room to work it.
I pulled onto the highway, struggling to formulate some plausible scenario for bringing the evening to what had seemed for a moment its inevitable conclusion, the small mundane steps that would lead us there. But already my desire seemed debased, made unsavoury, in my having to plan its fulfilment.
We began to come up toward Mersea. At the last instant I flicked my signal and turned down my concession.
“Where’re we going?” Crystal said.
“I just wanted to show you something,” I said, wanting to make a joke of it but hearing the words come out awkward and flat.
At the driveway to the farm I put out the headlights and downshifted only to third before turning in to keep the sound of
the engine low. The house lights were out, my aunt’s car parked at the side of the kiln; but the garage door was closed. It was possible my father hadn’t come in from the club yet, but I didn’t have the nerve to stop to check, driving on to the boiler room and then cringing at the rumble of the overhead door as its tiny motor slowly rolled it up to let us in and then down again. I felt panicked now at having brought Crystal here, and yet some compulsion pushed me on, the sense that there was some line I had to cross, some burden I needed to free myself of, wouldn’t let me simply back the truck up again, take Crystal home.