Til the Real Thing Comes Along (43 page)

“I totally despise P.D.A.,” is what it sounded as if Alison said softly as she eased her body away from his hold that night
at the club. It was the first time they had ever danced.

“Despise what?” he asked, loving the way her hair smelled and wondering what time they could elude the chaperones, sneak away
to the parking lot, climb into the back of her car, and make out. The thought of that made him pull her against him again,
and now he realized something was wrong. She strained to pull away, and this time she stopped dancing, even though the band
was still playing. Now she stood with her hands on her hips, looking hard at his face. Ali, my God. What was wrong?

“Public display of affection,” she said. David looked quickly around the floor at the seven or eight other couples who were
dancing, to make certain none of them had heard her. None of them seemed to.

“It’s not right,” she said, looking at him as if to say “If you don’t agree, I’ll walk right off this dance floor.”

“All right,” he said to get her to start dancing again, for God’s sake. What did she mean? He hadn’t kissed her hair or, instead
of holding her hand in his in the classic dance position they’d both learned at Miss Beckworth’s Cotillion, put his aims around
her waist so she would put her arms around his neck. Nothing like that. And two of the other couples were dancing that way.
He guessed that just pulling her tight, feeling her breasts pressed against him, was P.D.A., and he hadn’t known. God. He
never imagined it would upset her this much. When they were alone she always let him undo her bra.

“What we do when we’re alone is no one’s business, David,” she said, knowing exactly what he was thinking.

“You’re right,” he said. Lying. Lying to get her to dance again before everyone saw they were having what looked like a fight.
But the music ended and Ali turned coolly and walked to the buffet table with David following. After dinner,
when he asked her to dance again, she said no, she didn’t feel like it.

Later, in the driveway of his house with the rain pouring all around them, an unseasonable time for rain, she let him go a
little further than last time, and the windows of her GTO were steamy, and he told her: “I’m crazy about you,” because he
wanted to save saying
I love you
for a little longer. But all she said was, “Oh, yikes, it’s eleven. My father will kill me.” Then she sat up, hooked her
bra, adjusted her dress, gave him a quick kiss, and kind of nudged him out into the rainy night, where he stood for a long
time without going inside, because he needed the pounding wet rain to cool himself off.

“Oh, my God. Oh, no, please. I can’t stand it. No.” He heard the cries coming from the kitchen when he unlocked the front
door. “Ohhh, God.” It was Yona. Moaning. Maybe she and Rico were fighting and he should stay out of it and go upstairs, but
it wasn’t a fight, because now Rico’s voice came gently. “Don’t cry,
mi amore.
It is the way things must be.” And then Yona sobbing again, so he went to the door that separated the kitchen from the dining
room and looked through the glass square that the servants used to make sure they didn’t collide with one another when they
served and cleared the table. He was about to push it open when he realized he was barging in on an intimacy. Yona was kneeling
on the kitchen floor weeping, and Rico sat on the floor next to her, a loving aim moving up and down on her back. David could
see wet spots on the floor where Yona’s tears had fallen, and another and another as they continued to fall. As Yona took
a deep breath in between sobs, Rico put his face next to her neck.

“Cara,
it wasn’t so important,” Rico said gently.

“No,” Yona protested. “It was a life, like you and me. A creature of God and now it’s gone. Maybe it was a mother or a daddy
of a baby, and the baby will look for it and long for it.”

David followed Yona’s gaze, and realized now she was talking about the tiny mouse lying pinioned to one of Rico’s traps. Dead.

He pushed the door open. Yona looked up at him with wide tear-filled eyes.

“Davey, see,” she said. “Isn’t there a way? There must be a way to catch them and send them away someplace instead of doing
this to them. Without killing the poor little things.” Then she looked down sadly again at the tiny brown field mouse pinned
to the wood trap. “Isn’t there?”

She looked so beautiful, sitting there so sad-eyed and trembling.

“I don’t know,” he said, then turned to Rico. “There might be more humane traps. I mean, traps that don’t kill them.”

“Mrs. Eleanor,” Rico said. David noticed that neither of them could bring themselves to call Eleanor “Mrs. Malcolm.” “She
wants them killed.”

Yona began to sniffle as if she was going to cry again, and Rico promised to think of a way, to find some way of not having
to kill any more of the little mice. David said goodnight, and as he closed the door and walked back into the dining room
he took one glance back through the glass panel and saw Yona, still seated on the floor, and Rico, who was on his knees next
to her, his arms around her, rocking her back and forth while she wept some more.

“I may just decide to keep this,” Ali said, grinning at David and then looking down again at his Hollingsworth ring. Although
it was much too big for her, she slid it up and down on the ring finger of her left hand. They had just been to the polo match
in Montecito to watch Ali’s cousin Robin play, and now they were having lunch at a restaurant in Santa Barbara. “And I don’t
just mean for the summer,” she said, her eyes dancing. She was so pretty and the only real girlfriend he’d ever had. And this
wasn’t the first time she’d taken his hand, held it for a while, then licked his finger and wriggled his ring off the way
she had a few minutes ago in the car, before the valet-parking boy had walked up and opened the car door and welcomed them
to the restaurant. She “borrowed” it a lot, and he knew she wanted him to give it to her. To ask her to go steady with him.
Come to Hollingsworth to visit next year. Be waiting for him at home when he arrived for school vacations. And he didn’t know
what to do.

To begin with, it was rare for him to be in Los Angeles
during any given school vacation, and his presence always depended on his father’s plans. Probably he couldn’t even promise
her that he’d be here for Thanksgiving, and that was in a few months. He thought he’d heard Eleanor say that they’d all be
in London in November, and New York for Christmas. Or maybe it was the other way around. He had stopped thinking about those
logistics a long time ago. Always a week or two before the vacation he would get a call from Fred Samuels, who would laugh
and say, “Guess where you get to spend this lovely holiday, David!” Like the announcer on a game show. If it was Gstaad, someone
would make certain that his skis, poles, and clothes were in his room when he arrived. If it was the Caribbean, his snorkel
mask, fins, and wet suit were waiting. The sameness of school had made travel exciting to him again, and now he arrived at
each place eager for adventure.

“You could spend Thanksgiving with my family,” Ali offered. “Christmas too.”

“That’s a nice thought,” he said. But there was something wrong. Cloying. Too eager, and he wasn’t sure how nice it was. But
still he was with her every day and night, and another time when she took the ring he let her keep it overnight. The next
day she said, “Um, listen, I’ll tell you what about the ring—I’ll just keep it until it’s time to go back to school. Okay?”
And he said okay. But he was glad she had asked him that on the telephone and not in person, because if it had been in person
she might have been able to tell that he was confused.

He knew the summer was over when he actually started missing Hollingsworth. God, he
must
be bored if he was missing
that
rat’s nest Not the classes, and certainly not the disgusto food, but his room and the friends he’d made in the dorm, and
the football games. He was finally thriving among his peers for the first time in his life and he loved it.

Late one night—he remembered it was very late, because Johnny Carson had been over for a few hours—he lay in bed in the silence
of the big old house, thinking about how much he wanted to get back there, when the phone rang. He sat up, trying to imagine
who it would be. Ali. Neither of them had their own phone numbers, and once in the heat of a kiss they had made a pact that
at exactly two
A.M.
the next morning he would call her, and she would grab the phone quickly and they would talk all night. It had
been hot to be under the covers and to taunt each other from far away. Maybe this was… It rang again, and then somewhere in
the house, someone else answered it.

In the darkness he felt around until he found the phone on his night stand and he grabbed the receiver. A man’s voice was
talking very seriously, but it wasn’t his father, and it wasn’t Rico. “Don’t know if it was a change in track conditions because
of the weather or a tire problem or exactly what, but we’re investigating all the possibilities, and in the meantime I extend
my deepest sympathies and if there’s anything any of us can do, please know that we will….” Benning. A
brain fade
is what David once heard race-car drivers call it when their concentration broke just long enough for them to lose it, get
reckless, and crash. Benning was always in a state of brain fade. And now he was dead. David heard Eleanor Benning Malcolm’s
voice say thank you, and he hung up the phone. Now he could hear Eleanor and his father talking, and by the way the lights
were lighting up under the phone lines, he could see that phone calls were being made. Probably to the pilots to let them
know they had to get the plane ready to take his father and Eleanor to pick up Douglas’s body.

Body. Dead. God. When somebody died, even if it was someone like Benning whom you couldn’t stand, it hit you like a train
running over your chest, because you had to think about all the things that person was going to miss out on by not being alive.
Like graduation and having your own place at college. It made you glad it wasn’t you who died, and guilty for being glad.

After a while he heard his father’s heavy footsteps walk downstairs, then Eleanor’s high heels. They would probably wake up
Rico to take them out to Clover Field Aviation. David realized now that the day was breaking, so he got up and put on his
navy terry-cloth robe and walked to the top of the steps. Afraid to see Eleanor’s face and yet with a feeling he would not
admit until years later was fascination to see her pain and grief. What could he say to her?

In the living room, he could see his father offering Eleanor a tiny snifter with brandy in it, but she gestured it away. She
was completely dressed in a fashionable black suit he had seen her wear before. His father was wearing a suit too. He was
holding his wife’s hand, in the consoling way a doctor does a patient’s. After a few silent moments
she opened the black purse she had placed on the table next to her, looked at herself in a little mirror she had inside, and
then closed it. His father held the brandy up to her lips again and offered it to her. This time she took a tiny sip. The
two of them were silent for a long time, and instead of announcing that he was standing on the landing, David just watched
them. He could hear Rico in the servants’ quarters hurrying around getting dressed.

“Well,” Eleanor said to his father, putting the glass of brandy down on the table. Then she sighed, shook her head, and said,
“At least now we have a guest room.”

And David turned, walked quietly into his bedroom, and went back to sleep, until noon. When he woke up he called Ali and asked
her to come over.

“And if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you to bring my ring with you, please,” he said. “Because I really would like to have
it back.”

1966

R
osie Jane Rabinowitz’s mother had an ailment as yet undiagnosed by doctors but diagnosed by herself as “a nerve pressing.”
It created a ringing in her ears that made her answer the doorbell when no one was there, and to say “huh” to people after
they’d asked her a question, making them have to ask the question again in a much louder voice.

“Ma?” R.J. asked. “Don’t you think I ought to take you to see a doctor about your hearing problem?”

“Huh?” Rifke answered, and R.J. repeated the question.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rifke said this time, lighting an L&M and inhaling deeply, a habit she’d taken up four years before,
when her husband, Louie, died. “It’s nothing but a nerve pressing.”

But when the headaches began, R.J. insisted they make an appointment at the University of Pittsburgh Hearing Center. It was
November, but the first appointment they could get was for January 8, because that was the first time the hearing clinic had
available. Twice Rifke had to call Pitt and cancel. The first time was because R.J. needed to attend the first rehearsal of
the senior play she’d written, and Rifke, who didn’t want to go to the doctor’s appointment alone, said, “Please, Rosele,
go to your rehearsal. We’ll change the doctor for another time. IIt’s only a nerve pressing.”

The second time they canceled the appointment it was because Uncle Shulke was having a hernia Operation and Rifke insisted
on staying by the telephone in the store all
day to make sure her brother was “out from the knife,” as she called it.

“Rifke, you’ll call me at the hospital from the Hearing Center,” her brother Shulke told her, flattered by her concern for
him and returning the favor.

“I’ll cancel,” Rifce insisted. “It’s a nerve pressing.”

The appointment was moved, this time to the fourteenth of February. Valentine’s Day. R.J. sat watching her mother, who was
wearing headphones which were attached to a machine with dials, raising a finger for the nurse every time she heard a tone,
then again every time she heard the sound of a tuning fork. After that, the mother and daughter were ushered into a small
examining room to wait for the doctor, and Rifke nervously smoked L&M after L&M, filling the tiny room with smoke.