The Brutal Language of Love (9 page)

Now Mother wanted to know everyone's plans for the day, saying her caterer and the maid would not appreciate stragglers underfoot. “I'm painting,” Carl said, downing his third cup of tea.

“We're writing,” Niall said, nodding toward Shayna.

Mother, who was still wearing her cooking apron, raised an eyebrow. “Is that so, missus? You're a writer now, too?”

Shayna shook her head.

“Of course not,” Mother said. “You're the muse, I gather. You
inspire.
”

“Does she inspire you, Da?” Carl asked his father.

“She types,” Niall said. “She's a brilliant typist, and she catches all my mistakes. If that isn't inspiration, I don't know what is.”

“Then I guess you don't know what is,” Carl said, pushing his chair away from the table.

“She's quiet anyway,” Mother said warily.

“No, she's not,” Carl and Niall said at the same time, and it was embarrassing to them all that Shayna should have become the center of attention.

Later in his study, Niall and Shayna stood side by side looking out the window at the shore. The water was gray from nearby harbor traffic but the sun shone down on it nonetheless, as if to assure them that even the polluted was worthy of a little beauty.

All at once Shayna's fatigue struck, and she leaned into Niall, who made no immediate move for her in return. Instead he spoke quietly, asking which pub she had gone to the night before, how she had found Carl's mates, did she know she still carried the sea in her hair? She answered him carefully, thoroughly, relieved that she was capable of doing so after her silence at breakfast. When he too was satisfied that the girl he liked best had not vanished, he suggested they get out of Mother's way and go swimming. Did she know how, he wondered? Did she have togs, healthy lungs, the appropriate amount of body fat to protect her from the chill of the Irish Sea? She let him pinch her waist gently, then hug her, then pull her onto his lap. There he petted and kissed her, murmuring over how soft she was, how tidily she fit across his legs. She could feel him beneath her but he seemed disinterested in garnering any personal attention, catching her wrist as she reached for his trousers. “Never mind that,” he whispered, as if he had become a nuisance to himself, as if right and wrong still existed between them.

The Peugeot curved along the Vico Road, bordered
on one side by rocky cliffs leading down to the sea, and on the other by higher cliffs into which pale, glass-fronted homes were intermittently pressed. At the top of a rise, Niall pulled onto the shoulder beside a pea-green sign reading
NO SWIMMING
. The wind forced tall weeds against his and Shayna's bare legs as they stepped from the car, and flattened their T-shirts against their chests. “Here?” she asked him, unsure of how they would make their way down to the water, while Niall offered his hand.

They helped each other over a waist-high concrete barrier once designed to keep people from irradiating themselves in the contaminated sea (though Niall assured Shayna the danger had long since passed), and descended rocks so civilized as to hint at being stairs. They dug the heels of their tennis shoes into slippery patches of peat, braved the odd crevasse, and, when all else failed, encouraged each other to jump. Always Niall went first, testing each step, instructing Shayna on how to avoid the scratches and bruises he had sustained at the helm. They traveled too slowly, too cautiously. It was a journey fraught with the minor yet repeated heartache of having to drop hands each time the terrain forced them more than an arm's length apart.

At last they reached a plateau littered with towels, apple cores, and a few sleeping sunbathers. To their right was a small cave painted thick with graffiti—a changing room, Niall informed Shayna—while farther below, an old metal diving board jutted out over water so wrongfully green that surely it must still hold chemicals.

“Niall Meara!” a man with a silver schnauzer called out.

Niall waved but did not approach the man. “Do you know him?” Shayna asked.

He shrugged and dropped her hand. “It's possible.”

On a nearby rock, they laid out the towels they had been carrying around their necks. Niall stripped down to a yellow Speedo with a small black emblem, then removed a pair of doughy-looking plugs from his shorts and stuffed them in his ears.

“Take them out,” Shayna said, worried he would not be able to hear her should she decide to speak, and after briefly considering this request, he did.

Shayna's own swimsuit was a plain black one-piece with thin straps that crisscrossed in the back. Before meeting Carl she had swum almost every day at an indoor pool in London, dizzying herself both from exercise and routine collisions with the concrete at either end of her lane.

“There it is,” Niall said, pointing. “That's where we're headed.” Shayna followed his index finger out across the water until she saw the peninsula, a cliff crumbling bit by bit into the sea. “Think you can make it?” he asked.

She nodded. It was no more than an hour's swim away.

“Mother never had any trouble,” he said.

“What's Mother's name?” Shayna asked.

Niall looked at her, confused. “Kathleen,” he said, turning back to the peninsula now, scanning it from left to right as he would a line of text. “Kathleen Sleeth,” he added.

“Oh,” she said.

“My God,” he said, shaking his head sadly as he walked off toward the diving board. “I'd nearly forgotten.”

Once there he tested the spring, shook his arms out like a competitor, and reached down to touch his hands to his toes. There was not a wrinkle on him, Shayna noted, though he was easily sixty. The casual atrophy of his muscles hinted gracefully at his former physique. Shayna couldn't see the bathers beneath him, but their calls of
Niall Meara! Brace yourself, Niall Meara! The water's bloody freezing!
rang in clearly at the shore.

He looked back at her once before executing a clean dive. Shayna then made her way toward a mossy rock beneath the diving board from which she planned to push off, all the while listening to scattered applause for Niall's performance. When she reached the rock, she saw him treading water near a small group of young women. “What's your latest book about then?” one of them asked him. She pronounced
book
to rhyme with
spook
.

“It's a romance,” Niall told her, fixing his gaze on Shayna, who had yet to submerge herself. “Something for the ladies.”

“Well, that's grand,” the woman said, following Niall's eyes to the shore when he failed to make polite eye contact with her.

“My daughter-in-law,” he explained.

The woman nodded, then quickly rejoined her friends. Niall began swimming backward then, away from the shore, away from Shayna. She panicked and quickly thrust herself forward into the water.

It was very, very cold. Immediately Shayna felt injured and in need of medical care, but she pushed on toward Niall, who was putting greater and greater distance between them. She thought of the parents in the swimming pool in London, always moving backward through the water with their arms extended, in an effort to get their kids to swim just a little bit farther. And soon she began to feel grateful, for her desperate strokes had begun to warm first her extremities, then the cushy parts of her that were less temperature sensitive. She had still not caught up to Niall, but was satisfied to have at least cut his lead.

All the while he kept his eyes on her as they swam, smiling sometimes, or spouting water from his lips. Shayna alternated strokes, showing off, silently daring him not to compliment her abilities when they reached the peninsula. Fish slithered between her feet and she did not scream. Her swimsuit abandoned her in several places, and she didn't bother to fix it.

Niall reached the shore first, but by the time he had calculated the sequence of rocks that would lead them out of the water, Shayna was beside him, pinching mucus from her nose. “Most impressive,” he told her before heaving himself onto land. He then turned and offered his hand, pulling her up with a rush of ocean. It was afternoon and she understood they would find a place to be private.

Niall led Shayna carefully over fallen boulders, continuing to warn her that he had just stubbed his toe, or to mind any particularly large gaps. They traveled partway up the jagged ramp of the cliff, then down again into a hollow of geometric stone, a place where the sun still reached, but not likely the human eye. It was clearly a popular place—filled with bottles, cans, wrappers, cigarette butts, used condoms—and Niall breathed a sigh of relief to find it empty. He declared with utter certainty that the closest person to them right now was at least an hour away.

Here, on a flat rock made smooth by previous visitors—including, Shayna supposed, Niall and Mother—he was comfortable kissing her, holding her in his lap, rearranging her bathing suit so that it covered the delicate parts of her. “No,” she said, not wanting to be covered, but he insisted, and she knew this was as close as he would allow himself to get.

Later he found the scar on her shoulder, the one her summer dresses sometimes revealed: a slim, raised sickle. “Who made this?” he asked again, running his fingers over it carefully. “I did,” she said, and before he could tell her she was lying, she described an aftermath on a fraternity-room floor, a broken bottle she had rolled onto as she patted the rug for her blouse.

They sat together for a long time after that, until their swimsuits dried and their skin temperatures elevated. Beneath her, Niall hardened and softened, and she felt unsure of who she was if she wasn't there to relieve him. But she did not try, instead studying him closely: the sleepy eyes, the slightly barreled chest, the old-man fingernails splayed across her legs.

As the sun began its descent into the west, Niall jerked awake. “I can't go back in,” he suddenly confessed to her, his ears alert to the encroaching tide. “I've lost my tolerance and I can't go back in.” He was calm again in an instant, but for the dark moment that had just passed she whispered assurances of warm water, and kissed him everywhere she could think that was decent.

It was summer, as I suppose it tended to be. I was
living with my mother, who had taken a job as a secretary with the city's minor league baseball team. She was a high school teacher by trade, so money was nonexistent during the summer months. For the rest of the year, she complained about how much she hated teenagers.

I had enrolled in community college after graduating high school, then dropped out after the first year to work. Now, a year after dropping out, I was on the verge of leaving home for a state school a couple of hours away. I had found a room with an attached porch in a house with three other transfers, and my father had reluctantly agreed to pay rent. He and my mother had been divorced for several years, and he had a lot of concerns about the two of us living high on the hog. “What kind of mansion are we talking about here?” he asked me, and I assured him it was really just an old, sagging house with an attached porch.

But I still had three weeks left of work at the mall, in a lingerie store called Angelina's Whisper, a rip-off of Victoria's Secret. All the same, if you worked at Angelina's, the other mall employees seemed to think you were really something—that you had a lot of sex, that your underpants were always wet, that your skirt slid across your ass so smoothly because you were wearing something satiny underneath. Maybe this was true of my co-workers, Evelyn and Mina, but I wasn't interested in lingerie. I tried it on once and it made me look like an idiot.

In particular, the guys at the pizza place across from Angelina's seemed to pay a lot of attention to us. They flirted more with Evelyn and Mina, who were both married and knew what they were doing, but also with me sometimes, if the mood struck them. I wasn't all that good at flirting. Renaldo, who owned the pizza place, told me I should smile more—that my smile was
bella,
and that boys no like no smile. So I would smile at him and he'd say, “Thatsa good!” which I didn't get, since when I duplicated the smile at home in the mirror I thought I looked tense and miserable. One day I said, “Renaldo, isn't it possible that a person who isn't smiling could feel fine on the inside?” He shook his head, and seemed extremely disappointed in me.

Every day we went to the pizza shop for coffee, Coke, pizza, and salads. Evelyn and Mina flirted with Renaldo and his son Bert, while I went after the new part-time guy who didn't look Italian at all. He had blond hair and icy green eyes that were spaced a little too far apart. He was well-built, and I pitied him the plastic food-handling gloves that cut off the circulation in his meaty hands. Whenever he waited on me, he removed them and handled my food personally, which I took to be a sign of intimacy. Though Evelyn and Mina agreed he was handsome, they ignored him out of respect for me, as I had set my sights on losing my virginity to him before heading off to school.

“I just saw your boyfriend,” Evelyn said one afternoon, returning from the pizza place with a cup of coffee. She was short and slim, though when she looked in the mirror, seemed only to see a big butt. “I told him you wanted him,” she added solemnly.

“You did not,” I said. We were standing behind a glass display case, on top of which sat the cash register and the pale blue tissue paper we used to wrap purchases.

She laughed. “Of course I didn't.”

Part of me wished she had been serious. “So what do I do?” I said. “How do I get him to ask me out?”

She shrugged. “Just keep going over there, I guess.”

Mina, who had been straightening the racks, came over carrying a black teddy on a hanger. She was stout and had long brown hair she vowed never to cut. “What do you think?” she asked us, holding the teddy up in front of her.

“Cute,” Evelyn said, then turned her attention to a list of markdowns we planned to tackle that afternoon. Mina had recently lost favor with Evelyn after attending a party at Evelyn's house and showing off how her husband could remove her bra through her shirt-sleeve. “I must've accidentally sent out the wrong invitations,” Evelyn had grumbled the next day.
“You're invited to an orgy!”

But Mina was oblivious. She took the teddy into the back room, where we hid things we didn't want the customers to lay their hands on.

“Okay,” I said finally. “I'll go over there and get a Coke.” I opened my purse and took out my wallet.

“Ask him his name!” Evelyn called after me as I made my way past the racks of teddies and bustiers, the tables stacked with jewel-toned underwear and velvet slippers.

Directly in front of me, as I entered the mall, was
the shoe repairman. He was a tough-looking guy who had a crush on Evelyn, and to whom she brought all manner of pumps, whether or not they needed fixing. Her visits to him increased when she and her husband were fighting, though she denied any emotional attachment on her part. To the right of the shoe repair was the toy store. I had had a brief fling with one of the sales associates there, Doug, in July, but ultimately it had come to nothing. It seemed to Evelyn that he must be gay, and that this was why he had broken it off with me. She had a lot of faith in me, Evelyn did, so I said nothing about having called Doug incessantly once it was over, crying and howling even though he told me to leave him alone.

To the left, on the other side of the shoe repair, was the pizza place. It was an old mall, and so far no one had taken the time to establish a food court; there was just Renaldo's Pizzeria and a sub shop farther down. As I approached the service counter, which faced onto the mall, I saw Green Eyes waiting on someone at a second counter inside the restaurant. I waited patiently for him, playing with the snap on my wallet. Green Eyes saw me but acted like he didn't. This was just another aspect of our intimacy; he would wait on everyone else in line before me so that at last we could be alone.

Renaldo popped out of the kitchen for a moment and told me to smile, but I ignored him. He went back in and as the door swung open, I caught a glimpse of Bert, wearing a white paper hat and stretching out pizza dough with two fists. He winked at me and I winked back, which was probably not what Evelyn would've done, though Mina might have.

“Hey,” Green Eyes said, ripping off his food-service gloves. His fingers were blue and he kneaded invisible dough to get the blood flowing again. I watched him and thought that if we ever went on a date, I'd want him to dress exactly like this: khakis, a white T-shirt, and a white apron around his neck.

“Hi,” I said.

He turned his body sideways to the counter and leaned toward me on one elbow. We were very intimate now. He touched my wallet. “What can I get you?” he asked.

I said he could get me a Coke. He nodded, but made no move for the drink machine.

“You like working over there?” he asked me, glancing toward Angelina's.

I shrugged. I had no idea how to act with men. From what I could gather you were supposed to be alternately rude and mocking. Never nice. “Yes,” I said, managing something closer to shell-shocked.

“Make you horny?” he asked.

I laughed. You were definitely supposed to laugh a lot. “No!” And protest loudly.

“Really?” he said. He seemed sincere.

I was at a loss. “It would make me horny if it was Victoria's Secret,” I said finally.

He laughed. “Yeah, well. Either one works for me.”

“Could I get that Coke?” I said, suddenly hitting my stride.

He went and got me a Coke. I paid him and he tickled my palm with his fingers as he returned my change. “What's your name?” he asked.

“Gilda,” I said.

He nodded.

“What's yours?”

“I'm Jonathan,” he said. Then he added, “I'm thinking of asking you out. I'll let you know what I decide.”

As I had proven with Doug, I was not so easily thrown off the scent. “Just hurry up,” I told him, zipping my change purse shut. “I leave for college at the end of the month.”

At home that night, I told my mother about Jonathan
. We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating cereal for dinner. “He's after me,” I said casually. Never in my life had I discussed boys with her, probably because there had been so few to discuss.

My mother, who had had a bouncy Dorothy Hamill haircut since the 1976 Olympics, shrugged her shoulders. Her own boyfriend, Roscoe, was twenty years older than she was. She had met him through a single-parent group, and had selected him as her steady because he was the thinnest man there. Roscoe had several grown children who seemed to like my mother better than him, and he owned a sailboat, which had capsized earlier that summer. My mother, an avid swimmer, had had to save his life, though she seemed irritated about this. In her diary she confessed that he was impotent.

Now she pushed her cereal bowl aside, a few bloated Puffed Rice drifting aimlessly in the gray milk. “Well,” she said, “I guess it's nice to feel wanted.”

I nodded confidently. “Oh yeah.” I was eating Cap'n Crunch, which represented adulthood to me, as I had bought it with my own money. My mother didn't believe in sugar cereals.

She lit a cigarette and exhaled up toward the globe light that hung from the ceiling. In a fit of courage, I grabbed the pack of Kools and lit one myself. My mother laughed dismissively. “You don't smoke,” she said.

“Sure I do,” I said. “Watch.” I then demonstrated my inability to blow smoke rings, though clearly I could inhale without choking.

“I stand corrected,” my mother said at last. She herself blew a perfect smoke ring, then invited me to feel free to smoke in the house. “No use sneaking around,” she told me.

I felt we had solidified something in that moment—we had agreed that I was an adult with my cereal, my prospective boyfriend, and finally my vice. I don't know if my mother knew I was still a virgin; frankly, I don't think she gave it a second thought. In the sixties, she had started a fund for women to obtain safe abortions. She was liberal in that way; sugar cereals made a greater impression on her than sex. I was fortunate that she had passed some of this attitude on to me, though I had ultimately failed to become promiscuous. Instead I was halting and quiet, with a wit that only Evelyn really knew about. It was this highly ineffective combination of character traits—insecurity and sexual liberation—that had left me “intact,” as Mina called it, at the ripe old age of nineteen.

That night my mother, Roscoe, and I all went to see our hometown team play ball. My mother got free tickets for all the games, and they weren't nosebleed seats either. Tonight we sat behind home plate, Roscoe on the aisle, since the medicine he took for his heart made him pee a lot. I caught a foul ball with my old softball glove and, at the end of the game, had the guy who hit it autograph it to Jonathan.

It was slow at Angelina's the next day, so we all
joked around with the baseball, stuffing it down our shirts and walking around like we were really something, even though we were lopsided. “Just keep your bra on,” Evelyn warned Mina as she removed the baseball from beneath her blouse, and I could tell all had been forgiven concerning the party.

I took the ball from Mina and passed it back and forth between my hands. “It's warm,” I said.

Evelyn said, “Gross!” She didn't like anything to escape from her person, or to hear about how it had escaped from somebody else's: no sounds, no fluids, no smells, no temperatures. I think she wished she were invisible. Often I wanted to tell her she looked pretty, but I knew it would only make her mad.

“You gonna give Jonathan the ball?” Mina asked me. She winked.

I looked at Evelyn. “Do you think I should?”

She shrugged. “I can't tell you what to do.”

“I'll give it to him,” Mina offered. “I'll point out the autograph and tell him it's from you.”

“Excuse me!” Evelyn said. “She's about to leave for college, not high school. She has to give it to him herself.”

“So you
would
give it to him,” I concluded, though it came out more like a question.

Mina thought it over and said, “You know what? Yes!”

I wasn't talking to her and we all knew it, though no one said anything.

Finally Evelyn said, “It's up to you.”

“But what would you do if you were me?” I pressed her.

“Give it to the shoe guy,” Mina said.

Evelyn ignored her. “What have you got to lose?” she said.

We all laughed then, three women in the business of sex.

I carried the baseball in my purse. At the pizza
place, Jonathan had a line of customers three people deep. I waited a few minutes, then, when it seemed to be taking too long, made a move to leave. But Jonathan saw me and called out, “Wait! Gilda! It'll only be a few more minutes.” The people in line turned around to look at me, and I smiled. When they were facing the counter again, Jonathan announced, “I'm thinking of asking her out. I've just about decided.” He winked at me then, and I mumbled—quite involuntarily—“Idiot.” The woman in front of me, who was carrying a bag from the half-price shoe store, heard this and told me, “Follow your instincts. My son goes to high school with him and I'm telling you, he runs with a
fast
crowd.”