The Virgin Suicides (8 page)

They had the most lustrous father-and-son tans in the city. Even Italian contractors, working in the sun day after day, couldn't achieve their mahogany hue. At dusk, Mr. Fontaine's and Trip's skins appeared almost bluish, and, putting on their towel turbans, they looked like twin Krishnas. The small, circular, above-ground pool abutted the backyard fence, its swells sometimes dousing the neighbors' dog. Marinated in baby oil, Mr. Fontaine and Trip boarded their air mattresses equipped with back rests and drink holders, and drifted beneath our tepid northern sky as though it were the Costa del Sol. We watched them, in stages, turning the color of shoe polish. We suspected Mr. Fontaine of lightening his hair, and the brightness of their teeth grew painful to look at. At parties, wild-eyed girls would clutch us just because we knew Trip, and after a while we saw that they were as distraught at the hands of love as we were. Mark Peters, going out to his car one night, felt someone grab his leg. Looking down, he saw Sarah Sheed, who confessed she had such a huge crush on Trip she couldn't walk. He still remembers the panicstricken way she looked up at him, a big healthy girl renowned for her chest size, lying lame as a cripple in the dewy grass.

No one knew how Trip and Lux had met, or what they had said to each other, or whether the attraction was mutual. Even years later, Trip was reticent on the subject, in accord with his vows of faithfulness to the four hundred and eighteen girls and women he had made love to during his long career. He would only tell us, "I've never gotten over that girl, man.

Never." In the desert, with the shakes, he had sicklylooking wads of yellow skin under his eyes, but the eyes themselves clearly looked back to a verdant time. Gradually, through incessant coaxing, and owing in large part to the recovering substance abuser's need to talk nonstop, we managed to cobble together the story of their love.

It began on a day when Trip Fontaine attended the wrong history class.

During fifth-period study hall, as was his custom, Trip Fontaine had gone out to his car to smoke the marijuana he took as regularly as Peter Petrovich, the diabetic kid, took insulin. Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.

Likewise, Trip Fontaine went to his car three times a day, at ten-fifteen, twelvefifteen, and three-fifteen, as though he wore a wristwatch like Petrovich's that beeped at dose time. He always parked his Trans Am at the lot's far end, facing the school to spot any approaching teachers. The car's raked hood, sleek roof, and sloping rear end gave it the look of an aerodynamic scarab. Though signs of age had begun to mar its golden finish, Trip had repainted the black racing stripes and shined the spiky hubcaps that looked like weapons. Inside, the leather bucket seats retained idiosyncratic perspiration marksyou could see where Mr. Fontaine had rested his head in traffic jams, the chemicals in his hair spray turning the brown leather a light purple.

The faint aroma of his "Boots and Saddle" air freshener still clung to the air, though by that time the car was permeated more with the smell of Trip's musk and reefer. The racing-car doors shut with a hermetic seal, and Trip used to say you could get higher in his car than anywhere because you kept breathing in the captured smoke. Every juice break, lunch, and study hall, Trip Fontaine sauntered out to his car and submerged himself in the steam bath. Fifteen minutes later, when he opened the door, the smoke would churn out as though from a chimney, dispersing and curling to the music-usually Pink Floyd or Yeswhich Trip kept playing as he went about checking his engine and polishing his hood (the ostensible reasons for his trips to the parking lot). After shutting up his car, Trip walked behind the school to air out his clothes. He kept a spare box of mints hidden in the knothole of one memorial tree (planted for Samuel 0. Hastings, graduate of the class of 1918). From classroom windows girls watched him, out under the trees, alone and irresistible, sitting cross-legged like an Indian, and even before he got up they could picture the light dirt stains on each buttock. It was always the same: Trip Fontaine rose to full height, adjusted the frames of his aviator sunglasses, flicked back his hair, zipped the breast pocket of his brown leather jacket, and started forward on the juggernaut of his boots. He came down the corridor of memorial trees, across the back green, past the beds of ivy, and into the school's rear door.

No boy was ever so cool and aloof. Fontaine gave off the sense of having graduated to the next stage of life, of having his hands thrust into the heart of the real world, whereas the rest of us were still memorizing quotations and grade-grubbing. Though he retrieved his books from his locker, we knew they were only props and that he was destined for capitalism and not scholarship, as his drug deals already augured. On that day he would always remember, however, a September afternoon when the leaves had just begun turning, Trip Fontaine came in to see Mr.

Woodhouse the headmaster approaching down the hall. Trip was used to running into figures of authority while stoned, and he told us he never suffered from paranoia. He couldn't explain why the sight of our headmaster, with his flood pants and canary yellow socks, caused his pulse to rise and a light sweat to break out on the back of his neck just then. Nevertheless, in one nonchalant motion, Trip entered the nearest classroom to escape.

He didn't notice a single face as he took a seat. He saw neither teacher nor students, and was aware only of the heavenly light in the room, an orange glow from the autumnal foliage outside. The room seemed full of a sweet viscous liquid, a honey nearly light as air, which he breathed in.

Time slowed down, and in his left ear the ringing of the cosmic Om started up clear as a telephone. When we suggested these details had been laced with the same THC in his blood, Trip Fontaine thrust a finger into the air, the only time his hands stopped shaking during the entire interview. "I know what it's like to be high," he said. "This was different." In the orange light the students' heads looked like sea anemones, undulating quietly, and the silence of the room was that of the ocean floor. "Every second is eternal," Trip told us, describing how as he sat in his desk the girl in front of him, for no apparent reason, had turned around and looked at him. He couldn't say she was beautiful because all he could see were her eyes. The rest of her face the pulpy lips, the blond sideburn fuzz, the nose with its candy-pink translucent nostrils-registered dimly as the two blue eyes lifted him on a sea wave and held him suspended. "She was the still point of the turning world,"

he told us, quoting Eliot, whose Collected Poems he had found on the shelf of the detoxification center. For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. "You never know what'll set the memory off," he told us.

"A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything."

They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in sensible school shoes she shuffled as though barefoot, and the baggy apparel Mrs. Lisbon bought for her only increased her appeal, as though after undressing she had put on whatever was handy. In corduroys her thighs rubbed together, buzzing, and there was always at least one untidy marvel to unravel him: an untucked shirttail, a sock with a hole, a ripped scam showing underarm hair. She carted her books from class to class but never opened them. Her pens and pencils looked as temporary as Cinderella's broom.

When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one.

He didn't know the first step in pursuing her because he'd always been the one pursued. Little by little, from the girls who came up to his bedroom, he learned where Lux lived, though he had to be discreet in his questions in order to avoid provoking their jealousy. He began driving by the Lisbon house in hopes of getting a glimpse of her, or the consolation prize of a sister. Unlike us, Trip Fontaine never mixed up the Lisbon girls, but from the outset saw Lux as their shining pinnacle.

He opened the windows of his Trans Am as he drove by, turning up his eight-track so that she might hear his favorite song in her bedroom.

Other times, unable to control the riot in his gut, he floored the accelerator, leaving behind as a love token only the smell of burning rubber.

He didn't understand how she had bewitched him, nor why having done so she promptly forgot his existence, and in desperate moods he asked his mirror why the only girl he was crazy about was the only girl not crazy about him. For a long time he resorted to his time-tested methods of attracting girls, brushing his hair back as Lux passed, or clomping his boots up on the desktop, and once he even lowered his tinted glasses to give her the boon of his eyes. But she didn't look.

The truth was, even the wimpiest boys were more adept than Trip at asking girls out, because their sparrows' chests and knockknees had taught them perseverance, whereas Trip had never even had to dial a girl's phone number. It was all new to him: the memorization of strategic speeches, the trial runs of possible conversations, the yogic deep breathing, all leading up to the blind, headlong dive into the staticky sea of telephone lines. He hadn't suffered the eternity of the ring about to be picked up, didn't know the heart rush of hearing that incomparable voice suddenly linked with his own, the sense it gave of being too close to even see her, of being actually inside her ear. He had never felt the pain of lackluster responses, the dread of "Oh .. .

hi," or the quick annihilation of "Who?" His beauty had left him without cunning, and so in despair he confessed his passion to his father and Donald. They understood his predicament, and after calming him with a snifter of Sambuca, gave him advice only two people experienced with the burden of secret love could have given. First of all, they told him on no account to call Lux on the telephone. "It's so all subtlety," Donald said. "It's all nuance." Rather than making overt declarations, they suggested that Trip speak to Lux only about the most mundane things, the weather, school assignments, anything that gave him an opportunity to communicate with the silent but unerring language of eye contact. They made him get rid of his tinted lenses, and keep his hair out of his face with hair spray. The next day Trip Fontaine took a seat in the Science Wing and waited for Lux to pass by on the way to her locker. The rising sun turned the honeycomb panels the color of a blush. Each time the ramp doors opened, Trip saw Lux's face float forward, before her eyes, nose, and mouth rearranged into the face of some other girl. He took this as a bad omen, as though Lux were continually disguising herself in order to evade him. He feared she would never come, or, worse, that she would.

After a week without seeing her, he decided to take extraordinary measures. The next Friday afternoon he left his carrel in the Science Wing to go to assembly. It was the first assembly he had attended in three years, because skipping assembly was easier than skipping any other period, and Trip preferred to spend the time smoking the hookah pipe running from his glove compartment. He had no idea where Lux would sit, and lingered at the drinking fountain, intending to follow her in.

Against the advice of his father and Donald, he put on sunglasses to conceal his staring down the hall. Three times his heart jumped at the decoys of Lux's sisters, but Mr. Woodhouse had already introduced the day's speaker-a local television at meteorologist-by the time Lux came out of the girls' bathroom. Trip Fontaine saw her with a concentration so focused he ceased to exist. The world at that moment contained only Lux. A fuzzy aura surrounded her, a shimmering as of atoms breaking apart, brought on, we later decided, from so much blood draining out of Trip's head. She passed right by him without noticing, and in that instant he smelled not cigarettes as he expected, but watermelon gum.

He followed her into the colonial clarity of the auditorium with its Monticello dome, Doric pilasters, and imitation gas lanterns we used to fill with milk. He sat next to her in the last row, and though he avoided looking at her, it was no use: with organs of sense he hadn't realized he possessed, Trip Fontaine felt Lux beside him, registered her body temperature, heartbeat, respiration rate, all the pumping and flow of her body. The auditorium lights dimmed as the weatherman began showing slides, and soon they were in the dark together, alone despite four hundred students and forty-five teachers. Paralyzed by love, Trip didn't move once as tornadoes flashed on the screen, and it was fifteen minutes before he got up the courage to place a sliver of forearm along the armrest. Once he did, an inch of space still separated them, so over the next twenty minutes, with infinitesimal advances that made his whole body sweat, Trip Fontaine moved his arm toward hers. As all other eyes watched Hurricane Zelda tear toward a coastal Caribbean town, the hairs on Trip's arm brushed Lux's, and electricity surged through the new circuit. Without turning, without breathing, Lux responded with equal pressure, then Trip applied more, she responded, and so on and so on, until they were joined at the elbow. Right then, it happened: a prankster in front, cupping his hands over his mouth, made a farting noise, and the room rippled with laughter. Lux blanched, pulling her arm away, but Trip Fontaine took the opportunity to whisper the first words he had ever spoken in her ear: "That must've been Conley," he said. "His ass is grass."

In response, she didn't so much as nod. But Trip, still leaning toward her, continued: "I'm going to ask your old man if I can take you out."

"Fat chance," said Lux, not looking at him. The lights came up, and all around them students began clapping. Trip waited for the applause to peak before he spoke again. Then he said, "First I'm going to come over and watch the tube at your house. This Sunday. Then I'm going to ask you out."