Asa, as I Knew Him (5 page)

By the time she was doing this I felt safe, because Asa was guilty too, and that restrained her from overstepping all the bounds. She might, in a sanctimonious panic, have called Fay and started babbling, but the fact that Asa was compromising himself stopped her. He had failed her by becoming susceptible to me. Earlier I had feared her. When I lay on my sofa and thought about him on short February afternoons, I thought also of Adrian Françoise and how she was sniffing out my passion, how she would sniff it out before he did and tattle to him and jinx my chances. I could see her standing beside him, in his swivel chair, smoothing and smoothing her straight
skirt, saying I was unprofessional, I was using sexual tactics to improve my position at the magazine. And you see, I didn’t know what he was feeling then. I didn’t know he was as infected as I. She terrified me.

Yet, with all the fear—and I feared not only Adrian Françoise but Fay, and Roger, and everybody on the street who could surely read my lunatic passion in my face—and the certainty that he would not acquiesce, I had just the opposite of these, and I was happy. I had a thousand moments of contact and exchange to fondle every evening, and I had the secret of his nascent soul. That was a secret even he didn’t know. I knew it was the key to him. I knew I’d press against him and warm his soul into being, and I knew nobody could resist an opportunity of such hot, cosmic dimensions, not even Asa.

The Angel of Monadnock I

I
n 1955 Asa Thayer, a sixteen-year-old in the limbo between junior and senior years at Choate, spent his first summer in a decade at home in Cambridge rather than on his paternal grandparents’ farm outside Concord, New Hampshire. Staying had been a triumph over his parents’ insistence that he continue to help his grandfather chase chickens and turn, with large, corroded forks, the piles of compost at the bottom of the vegetable garden. Instead he was pumping gas at the edge of Harvard Square, in a station that issued inspection stickers without bothering to inspect. He made twenty-two dollars a week; he paid his mother ten, of which she banked five for his future and put five toward his board. “We cannot,” she said at the start of June, “simply carry you as part of the household while you waste your time.” He ate the eggs she cooked him every morning off blue Chinese plates plundered by a sea captain forebear; his bed, mahogany, with intricate and dusty pineapples on each post, had been the resting place for an infrequently remembered signer of the Declaration of Independence; when he walked down the stairs ancestors with noses and eyes like his watched from gilt frames. And the twelve dollars remaining to him on Fridays was the largest sum he had ever held in his back pocket.

The house was at the far end of Brattle Street. Asa’s father, a doctor, could not afford to live the four or five blocks closer to the center of town that would have been appropriate to his lineage. But the rooms were large, high-ceilinged, and many. Better, even in mid-July they maintained a dim, cool atmosphere perfumed with oils rubbed into wood, dust settled on books, and died-down fires of hard, slow-burning, sweet branches. It was a house that in no way admitted to
the extreme seasonal changes of Massachusetts, as its inhabitants also ignored the fabulous February cold, the equally fabulous August doldrums. Its furnishings suggested a permanent early winter, and in this it reflected the climate of the three people who moved across the parquet floors.

It was a hot summer; the hoses ran all day on the lawns along Brattle Street, and Asa biked through the black pools collected at the curbs on his way to and from work. The hiss of his tires toward evening, when the sun was still high, was the whisper of the real evening, the dark evening coming, when he would move to the edge of his chair and say, “May I be excused?” His parents were propped like dolls at either end of the table, silent with incomprehension. They knew where he was going, they knew how he was spending his time, yet his life had become mysterious to them.

“Be home by ten-thirty,” his father ordered every night.

“Yes, sir,” Asa answered. He came back at one or three, when the stairs were a minefield of creaks and rattles.

“Going swimming at the Solas’?” his mother asked every night.

“Yes.”

But it didn’t satisfy them. They were unappeased. Sometimes his father telephoned there—“We’ll be at a movie when you get home”—and sounded piqued when Asa came to the phone. It would have been better to catch him out, drinking illegally in Central Square, busy on a sofa with a girl whose parents weren’t home. He was there. It was irrefutable. But what was he doing?

Asa biked back down Brattle through the puddles for a third time, accompanied by a thick slice of yellow moon. The trees leaned toward him, waving their soft leaves. It was a gauntlet he had to run. Seductive patches of gold windows held scenes
of family life. Above, the sky was gashed by every color in the long, straight lines of summer sunset. He was headed for the intersection of five streets, a pentacle as potent as one drawn in chalk on a tiled floor in sixteenth-century Spain.

Overseeing this junction, but set back behind a wrought-iron fence and a stand of Colonial elms, was the Solas’ house. Fourteen black-framed windows dared a passerby to look in, but there was nothing to see. It was a most ungiving façade, entirely folded in upon itself; a hundred windows wouldn’t have changed that. Boxwood hedges crept up on it; wisteria as knotted as beech-tree roots veiled the porch that extended the length of the front. Someone, though not, surely, Professor Sola, had planted daylilies below the box, and their wrinkled orange heads fell on the lawn at dusk like falling stars. Hanging over everything was the rigorous unavailability of the house. It was absolutely a façade, because nothing could be like it. There was the echoing vacancy of a stage set: a twinkle of secrets from a light in a third-story room; a trill of curtains moving as a body made a breeze passing the long windows in front.

Asa slid his old black Raleigh behind the rhododendrons that flanked the door. It was his spot. Reuben’s Peugeot, as young as the summer, leaned against a laurel bush now past blooming. Further down the drive two other bikes sprawled on the gravel. These belonged to Parker, a classmate of Asa’s at Choate, and Roberto, Reuben’s older brother. Asa, with the care that comes of relative poverty, checked that no glint of metal showed through the gloss of leaves, then rang the doorbell.

He felt the lightening of his blood that followed the far-off, clocklike dongs of the bell. He was sixteen, and for the first time he loved someone. New muscles in his arms quivered, his back became alert, and his stomach pushed against
his diaphragm, nauseating him slightly with anticipation. He wondered who would answer the bell. It was Roberto.

“We’re upstairs,” he said, and turned down the hall, leaving Asa to shut the door. From the back he resembled Reuben. They shared a beautiful posture, womanly in its grace and length. Asa followed him up the back stairs. On the second floor Roberto began to whistle. This annoyed Asa, but he knew it was to cover their footsteps for the father who was behind one of the twelve closed doors that ringed the stairs. Roberto whistled constantly, breathily, to interject himself into events, to protest his position. Suddenly he stopped and turned his fox face over his shoulder.

“Did you get them?”

“Not yet. I have to wait for the weekend, when my father brings his bag home.”

“Doesn’t he keep a cabinet? I thought doctors kept cabinets of emergency medicine at home.”

“It’s locked.”

“Break in.”

That was it, thought Asa, that was the difference, the reason he felt himself always lacking and yearning. They lived in a simple universe. Their desires dictated their actions, so that their lives had the quality of purity, unreflection, unswerving faithfulness—to themselves. He had lived so long for responsibility, consideration, and compromise that beside the Solas he felt polluted and deflected. For whose pleasure was his life? Roberto’s tapered hand opened the door. Haziness from cigarettes and young sweat interfered with the view. But Asa could see some bare legs and the beaming box of the television. This door Roberto was willing to close, and as he did, the gust of cooler, clearer air from the hall lifted the atmosphere a little, revealing a bed, with an obscured occupant, and the torso belonging to the legs, which were
kneeling in front of the television. It was Parker, fiddling with the dials, wearing white boxer shorts and a waterproof Rolex on an alligator (and not waterproof) band. Asa thought the alligator ostentatious; he sported a flat gold pocket watch when dressed for school and not, as now, dressed in farm-faded denim and a T-shirt. His eyes were adjusting; the bed rumbled and he saw Reuben rise from the foaming white of the sheets, naked, a cigarette between his thin, pale lips.

“Hey, baby,” Reuben said.

Tracks of ice ran down Asa’s back and he turned from Reuben to the television. Unwatched, but knowing himself perceived, Reuben stretched his arms above his head and arched himself toward the ceiling. All four boys had the same coloring, but what was healthy, pink, and blond on Asa and Parker, and somewhat sallow on Roberto, on Reuben burned white and terrifying in clarity. His hair crested back in a triangle from his forehead in near-silver streaks. All the skin of his body, as Asa could plainly see were he to leave off watching a policeman chase a crook, was a pearly unmarked acreage stretched tight against his veins, which showed their purple mileage. His muscles and bones were prominent and his limbs were monkeylike, active and inquisitive-looking. This was especially true of his feet. Pointing to his left toe, his penis, pale and thin, lay with authority against his body. He was not naked, but a nude; in this he was different from his friends. They were unformed and uneasy enough to feel themselves exposed when stripped. He was finished, perfected, and above all, pleased.

“Get dressed, Sola,” said Parker, the only one brave enough to express their common embarrassment. “Get your pants on.” Turning to Asa, who sat dumbly staring at the screen, he asked, “Did you get them?”

“Jesus, why don’t you say hello first? Roberto asked me
the same thing. When I’ve got them, I’ll give them to you.”

“We want them,” said Reuben, “so get them.” He had put on his pants.

“I’ll get them. I’ll get them. Leave me alone.” But Asa was reluctant to get them and furious that they caught his reluctance. “I have to wait for the weekend, when Father brings his bag home, and then I have to wait for them to go out to dinner or something. But I’ll get them.”

Nobody said anything. Everybody looked at Asa. Reuben took the situation in hand. “Let’s swim,” he said, and opened the door.

It was beyond midsummer; the crickets made a wonderful racket in counterpoint with the plosh of the pool’s water. Parker dove in straight and vanished without bubbles, still wearing his boxers. Roberto began to skim the surface of the pool with a long-handled net and to whistle. Reuben took his pants off again and draped himself at the shallow end, his toes curling and uncurling around the water. Parker’s sleeked head, almost white in the queer luminescence of July (stars, lights they’d left burning on the third floor, the pink blur of Boston smeared on the southern rim of the sky), came up near Reuben’s feet. Roberto stood beside Reuben, armed with his net.

But Asa lingered on the flagstones, watching his friends. The night had pressed up to them and to him, confusing their shapes. They seemed to have lost their faces and become statues. Even, thought Asa, they were momentarily manifest gods. Reuben sat with a leg drawn up to his chest, his hands linked across the knee; Parker and Roberto flanked him like guards. Parker had leaned his head on Reuben’s calf to steady himself in the water. Their eyes, in the dark, were also dark. Asa had a sharp understanding of the future—that is, a time
when
this
would be the past. Time was rushing through and around him, he almost heard it whistling, and this awareness rounded the world somehow and made it sweet. Everything had a sweetness, a momentariness that captivated; behind him the rose trellis hummed with bees who were now asleep but would be there buzzing in the morning and so buzzed now. The circularity of things! He was safe in time, he was slung in a mesh of inevitability. And then his feeling of safety began to ebb. The whistle got sharper, almost hurt; it was a disinterested, determined sound, not made for his delight but the byproduct of gears as big as galaxies that turned for their own satisfaction. He—all of them—could be flung up anywhere, beached at misery, repetition, early death. The trio at the edge of the water was still fixed, as though they knew themselves to be well posed, but the glow of the perceived moment was gone; now they looked stuck. Nothing will stay the same, thought Asa, and this sad, simple idea calmed him. It returned him, somewhat battered, to his knowledge of the perishability of the present. He wanted to be rid of the whistling, the largeness. The present, with the promise of six more weeks of itself (the pool, the party Reuben would give on Saturday night, the twelve dollars he would pocket on Friday), was firm ground. He landed with relief.