Black Light (9 page)

But I thought he looked decadent and faintly sinister, perched there on the old Seeburg. The music rattled on; he continued to stare at me. When the song ended, he raised himself up slightly on his hands, then abruptly sat down, hard, on top of the jukebox. There was the scrape of a needle on vinyl, and “Born to Be Wild” started again.

“LIT?”
From across the bar Jim Charterbury yelled. “What the fuck are you
doing
?”

I mouthed
Sorry!
Hillary and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. The boy on the jukebox tipped his head to one side and regarded me through slanted eyes.

“I’m Jamie Casson.” It sounded like a challenge. “What the hell kind of name is Lit?”

“Her name’s Charlotte, that’s what everyone calls her,” Hillary explained, then added conspiratorially,

“She is the madhouse nurse who tends on me, It is a piteous office.”

“Don’t mess with her, man,” warned Hillary. “She’s got a temper, she’ll clock you if you mess with her—”

“Right,” I said, pretending to swing as Hillary pulled me close in a bear hug.

“—
and
she’s crazy,” he yelled.

“Crazy like a fox.” Someone poked me from behind and I turned to see Ali. She raised her eyebrows quizzically to Jamie Casson. “Umm…?”

“This is Jamie,” I started to say; but then I saw the two of them
looking
at each other. Like that Aubrey Beardsley black light poster Ali had up above her bed, “How Sir Tristam Drank of the Love Drink.” Two beautiful children etched in violet and dead-white, so intent upon each other that the air between them all but glowed; heavy stage curtain drawn at their backs but you already suspected what lay behind it.

“Well, hey, Jamie,” Ali repeated. “How’s it goin’?”

I shifted and knocked up against a table. Bottles rattled; Hillary rolled his eyes.

“Sasquatch,” he said, looking at my boots. I blushed, but no one else had noticed. Beside me Ali had drawn back into the shadows. Her amber eyes were half-closed, but already I could see the faint glister of desire there like a burgeoning tear. I looked away, embarrassed.

“Jamie Casson,” Hillary went on, leaning over to drape an arm around Ali. “He just moved up from the city. His father’s doing something up at Kern’s place.”

“Oh yeah?” said Ali throatily. “So you want a beer, or—something?”

I glanced at Hillary, to see if he was taking this in. Because this was nothing like witnessing love at first sight; more like watching a pair of cars approaching each other way too fast on a lonely stretch of old Route 22, and being too paralyzed with fear to yell for help.

“Great,” I muttered. I edged toward Hillary, wanting his opinion on this. There was a
thunk
as I bumped against a chair, and with a clatter it toppled onto Hillary’s feet.

“Ow—god
damn
it, Lit!”

Ali laughed. “Man, you are such a klutz!”

Only Jamie said nothing; just looked up and for a long moment held my gaze. Light blazed from the jukebox, making him seem washed-out and insubstantial, the shadow of another figure I couldn’t quite see. There was something odd about the way he looked at me. His pale eyes were questioning, almost pleading, as though he was waiting for me to speak. But I felt awkward and ugly in my heavy boots and Hillary’s old jacket. So I just stared back, challenging him to recognize me as something besides Hillary’s clumsy best friend.

Finally, “I got to get back,” Jamie said. He swung off the jukebox, ambled to a table and hooked a worn suede windbreaker onto his thumb. “I’m broke, anyway…”

I felt a pang, until Hillary nodded. “I’ll give you a lift. Lit? You want to come? Ali?”

I nodded, hurrying to the jukebox and sliding in the quarters Jim had given me. “Yeah—I’ll meet you at the car—” I punched in a half-dozen songs, downed a beer that had been abandoned on the old Seeburg, and went to join them in the parking lot.

The rain had stopped. The sun was going down in a smear of orange and black, and a small crowd had gathered on the steps, passing joints and bantering. Duncan Forrester and his girlfriend Leenie, Christie Smith, Alysa Redmond: the usual suspects lowlighting with bikers and trying to score. If the cops ever decided to bust up Deer Park, the papers would have a field day; there were enough Famous Children at that dive to fill an inch of column.

“Charlotte!” Duncan shrieked, throwing his arms around me. “Don’t say you’re
leaving
—”

“Ouch!”
I cried, wriggling free. Duncan was skinny and lank-haired, with a hatchet face that was so enormously improved by stage makeup he’d taken to wearing it on weekends, whether or not he was in a show. Even more incongruous was Duncan’s voice, a rich baritone that (in my father’s words) could charm the teeth from a snarling Doberman. When he’d played Billy Bigelow in
Carousel
last year, entire busloads of cheerleaders had wept during his death scene. “Dammit, Dunc, that
hurts.
I got to catch a ride with Hillary.”

Duncan looked stricken.
“C’est terrible,”
he cried. “How will we have
any fun
without you?” Last summer, someone had told Duncan he looked like Marc Bolan. Since then, he’d affected a ridiculous accent along with Yardley midnight blue eyeliner.
“C’est impossible
—”

“Oh, try.” I licked my finger and wiped a blue smudge from his cheek. “God, you’re a mess, Dunc. See you—”

I hurried to where Hillary’s decrepit car was parked beneath a tree. Ali and Jamie stood sharing a cigarette, while Hillary swiped yellow leaves from the windshield.

“You always lived here?” Jamie dropped the cigarette. We all nodded. “Man, I don’t know how you can stand it.”

“It’s not so bad.” Hillary slid into the front seat and began sorting through a pile of eight-tracks, adding, “You just need the right
attitude.
”

“And a ton of money,” said Ali as she swung in beside Hillary. “And good teeth.”

“Fuck that. This place creeps me out.”

Ali looked bemused. “Deer Park?”

“No. This
town
—” Jamie got into the back, rolled down his window and stared to where Muscanth Mountain rose above us, mist lifting slowly from its slopes. “It’s weird. I don’t like it.”

I clambered in beside Jamie, pushing empty beer cans onto the floor. The eight-track roared on with considerably more power than the car, blasting Slade as we bellied slowly out of the lot.

“You’re up at Kern’s place, right?” yelled Hillary.

Jamie hunched down in the seat. “Yeah.”

We drove back into town, turning off Kinnicutt and onto the labyrinthine road that wove through the village and then up Muscanth Mountain. The dying sun cast a milky haze over the rough contours of the surrounding hills and forest. A kind of light I have only ever seen in Kamensic in autumn, light like powder shaken onto the landscape, mingled gold and green and a very pale opalescent blue. The air smelled sweet and slightly rotten. The old houses and ramshackle mansions took on a detached glamour, their stones and clapboards softened by a golden haze of oak leaves, the neglected lawns smoothed by distance. Pumpkins sat at the end of driveways alongside sheaves of corn, and on the front doors appeared those idiosyncratic emblems of Halloween in Kamensic—ugly little terra-cotta masks with gaping eyes and mouths, hung by bits of coarse twine. Crude versions of the traditional masks of comedy and tragedy, they appeared every year at the end of September in the Scotts Corners Market, along with jugs of cider and ornamental gourds and coils of hempen rope. Cub Scouts and the League of Women Voters sold the masks and donated the money to the volunteer fire department. I never knew where the masks came from. They were heavy lumpen things, with dried clay coils for hair and clumsy, almost primitive features—a tiny depression to indicate the nose, hollow eyes, gashed mouths. I hated them. They embarrassed me, and in some strange way they frightened me, too. Once at the Courthouse Museum I asked Mrs. Langford what they were for—

“Well, they’re for Halloween,” she said, frowning. She reached for her thermos of black currant tea spiked with sloe gin, poured herself a cupful, and sipped. “Just a local custom, that’s all. To show our allegiance to the gods, you know.”

And she fingered the brooch she wore on her breast, a pair of beautifully figured masks of gold. One mouth curved into a delicate smile; the other was less a frown than a grimace. No one would ever tell me more than that, nor why the masks were never saved from one year to the next but instead were broken.

“That is an
idiotic
superstition,” Hillary yelled once at his mother. This was a year or two earlier, when we were fifteen and Hillary facetiously wore a
NIXON’S THE ONE!
button to school every day. Natty stood in their backyard wielding a hammer and a mask wrapped in a tea towel, surrounded by neatly raked piles of leaves and burlap sacks.

“Oh, hush, Hillary,” she said impatiently. “Oooh, I
hate
this—” She winced and brought the hammer down. There was a muted
crunch.
The towel opened like a blossom, spilling shards of broken terra-cotta.

“Then why do you
do
it?” Hillary demanded.

“It’s good for the soil. Good drainage.” She began gathering the pieces into the towel, humming. “Hand me that basket, will you, dear?”

“Not until you tell me why,” Hillary insisted. “You don’t go to church, you don’t even
vote
—why do you mess around with those stupid masks?”

Natty ran a hand across her face, leaving a trail of dirt. “Oh, Hillary.” She turned and set the broken mask on the stone wall. “Look at Lit,
she’s
not complaining—”

“Yes I am.” I nodded emphatically, walked over to inspect the bits of terra-cotta. “They give me the creeps. I hate those things.”

“Really?” Natty looked genuinely surprised. She wiped her palms on the front of her baggy jeans, set her hammer on the wall, and started for the house. “Why ever would you hate them?”

We followed her into the kitchen. Natty heated some cider and we drank it, warming ourselves as she washed up at the sink. “You shouldn’t be afraid of the masks, Charlotte. You of all people.”

“Why? Because my father is scary Uncle Cosmo?”

“Noooo…” Natty dried her hands, looking very English with her sturdy pink face and pink Shetland sweater, her pants smudged with dirt. “Because you’re an actor, darling!” she said in her plummy voice. “Because you were born to it—”

“
I
wasn’t born to it,” I snapped. Only a week before I’d made a fool of myself in
Arsenic and Old Lace.
“I
hate
it, and I hate those things—”

“Oh, don’t say that, Lit.” Natty’s gaze widened. “It’s what we all
live
for—”

“It’s a job, Mom. It’s just a stupid job.” Hillary hunched over his cider and stared at her balefully. “I mean,
you’re
not doing Shakespeare—”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” said Natty. “Besides which, Lit’s parents, and your father and I,
have
done Shakespeare—”

“Oh, come on! Unk is starring in an
Addams Family
ripoff and you guys are—”

“It doesn’t matter.”
Natty’s cheeks glowed bright red. “‘No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en, In brief, sir, study what you most affect.’”

Hillary sneered, “I’m not going to waste my life on goddam sitcoms—”

“Don’t you swear at me!”

“—and all this superstitious bullshit.”

Natty stood with her back to the counter, head thrown back. She looked as though she was about to burst into tears. I put my hand placatingly on Hillary’s and said, “Those masks just seem so tacky, that’s all, Mrs. Weller.”

“Tacky!”
She sounded like Lady Bracknell contemplating a handbag. “Tacky? You children grew
up
on them.”

“Give me a break, Mom!” Hillary said, exasperated; but his fury was gone. “We grew up on takeout from Red Lotus—”

But Natty was already striding out of the kitchen. I slid off my chair and trailed behind her, and after a moment Hillary followed. We found her in a small, narrow, very cold room that had been the old farmhouse’s pantry, but which now housed Natty and Edmund’s books and theatrical memorabilia—tattered broadsheets, yellowed newspaper clippings in dusty frames, dogeaten scripts.

And plays, of course: the entire Oxford Shakespeare and all of Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde, as well as numerous lesser lights that had quickly burned out—
A Sun for the Sunless, From Arcadia to New Rochelle, Madame Levinskey’s Hat.
Except for the absence of certain titles, and the obviously British slant, the collection could have belonged to my own parents.

“Oh god, Mom,” Hillary moaned. “Look, you don’t have to—”

“Hush,” commanded Natty. She began squinting at titles. “Where
is
it…?”

I wandered to one corner and picked up an ancient publicity photo of Hillary’s father, playing the lead in a Manchester production of
Charlie’s Aunt.
I was always torn between embarrassment and sentiment by this old stuff, as though it had been our parents’ baby shoes. I stared at the photo, trying to find some resemblance to Hillary in the white-faced, pie-eyed performer wearing full matronly drag.

“You know,” I began thoughtfully, “you really do sort of look like—”

“Lit! Cut it out—”

“Here it is!” Natty crowed, and held up a book. “
The Mask of Apollo.
Your father gave me this for our anniversary, oh, almost ten years ago…”

She thumbed through it, raised an admonitory finger and began to read.

“‘ It is hard to make actors’ children take masks seriously, even the most dreadful; they see them too soon, too near. My mother used to say that at two weeks old, to keep me from the draught, she tucked me inside an old gorgon, and found me sucking the snakes.’”

She finished triumphantly. Hillary and I looked at each other, then burst out laughing.

“Oh,
right,
Mom! So where’re the snakes?”

Natty frowned, with a sniff replaced the book on its shelf. “Obviously you two are not old enough yet to appreciate the subtleties of our profession,” she said, and headed for the door. “Tell your father I’m going up to the market for some more milk.”