Drowning Lessons (15 page)

“Colin sent me that. From St. Croix. He has relatives down there.”

“Really? I didn't know that.” I held the postcard in my lap.

“You can read it, if you like.”

I read the card.
Having a wonderful time, though physical condition appears to be getting worse. Wish you were here. Love, Colin.

“What exactly is wrong with him, anyway?”

“No one knows. Something to do with a missing vertebra. I think he was born that way. Sometimes it keeps him up all night. He's almost always in pain.”

Gloria's car smells like a ham sandwich. Also on the dashboard: one of those plastic nose-and-eyeglass masks, the kind with big, bushy eyebrows.

“I use that to freak out truck drivers who stare at me,” says Gloria.

I put it on.

“Think Stephen will recognize me?”

“Of course
Colin
will recognize you; you have such a distinctive face.”

By the time we pulled into the driveway it was late afternoon. The cottage was smaller than I remembered, no bigger than a one-car garage. Two big willow trees leaned over it, one on either side. Out back, I could see the lake gleaming. I heard a powerboat go by.

Colin stepped out and stood in the doorway. Wearing the
mask, whistling “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” I walked right past him, into the cottage.

“Jaysus!” said Stephen/Colin. “Jaysus!” He threw his arms around me. “How the hell are you?” I still had the weird mask on. He seemed different, frailer. He'd gone balder and grown a beard. The beard was full of gray hairs. “Jaysus!”

The cottage seemed larger inside. One room, with a loft and a kitchen. The temperature fell. Colin lit the kerosene stove, and we sat together, by its ghostly yellow glow, having drinks and exchanging summer tales of woe and glory. I told them how I'd hooked up with a jazz band out in Oregon, but me and Lester, the bassist, kept fighting, and then — having done his best to keep the peace for months — the drummer quit, and then everything turned to shit. Gloria had gotten her divorce. And Colin — well, except for having legally changed his name, he didn't have much to report.

“Ah, it's still the same me,” he said. “A few more gray hairs, a few more aches and pains, a few more pills. Now you, on the other hand — you've changed.”

“You seem more relaxed,” said Gloria.

“That's it. More at peace with yourself,” said Colin. “More open and honest. Wouldn't you say, Glo —” His face suddenly contorted with pain. He took a vial of pills from his pocket — he still owned the fisherman's vest full of pockets — and swallowed three with his wine. Gloria and I looked at each other. She shrugged as if to say that this was routine, nothing to be alarmed over. Having emerged from the pain, Colin saw my notebook lying next to me on the floor. “Still lugging that thing around?” he said. “Jaysus! Some things never change!”

“It's only been nine months,” I said.

“That's where you're mistaken,” said Colin. “Half a year can make all the difference in the world. It can change everything. A day can change everything! Right, Gloria?”

Gloria ran a thin, nicotine-stained fingertip around the rim of her wineglass, making it sing. We laughed. Colin ordered pizza by phone and asked me to go with him to pick it up. He took Gloria's car. He drove terribly; he couldn't shift. I asked him what had happened to his car. “Aye, the fuckin' bank got it, that's what.”

On the way home, with the pizza scalding my lap, Colin reached over to open the glove compartment. He took a stapled sheaf of paper from it and put it on the pizza box. “It just came spilling out of me,” he said. The story was three pages long, typed single spaced on stained, buckled yellow paper. It looked as if it had been used repeatedly as a saucer. “It's the story of my life, so to speak,” said Colin. “Go on,” he said. “Read it!”

I started reading. The title of the story was “The Story of My Life.”

“It's a love story,” said Colin, grinding gears.

“Are you in love again?”

“Am I in love again? Jaysus! Was I ever not in love?”

“Who's the lucky girl this time?”

“The most beautiful girl in the world. A living miracle. Read, read.”

The story takes place at a table in the university snack bar. In it, the “most beautiful, sophisticated, intelligent woman in the world,” who is an organic chemistry major and whose name is Andrea Laestrygones, tells Coleman Winston McGuinness,
the protagonist, that she has had a dream about him. “I had a dream,” she says to him, “and in the dream there was this little red-headed leprechaun, and the little red-headed leprechaun was you.” The protagonist, who is seated, slumps back in his chair, the words “little red-headed leprechaun” “echoing in his brain.” The second single-spaced page of the story is devoted to describing the protagonist's multiple, incurable, and mysterious physical ailments and how he is haunted and tortured by them. “Suicide,” Coleman explains gamely to the others at the table, “is not always an unreasonable solution.” The others seated around the table disagree vehemently, saying there's no excuse for suicide. Only one other student agrees with Coleman, a guy named Henry, who wears a beret and plays the saxophone. This, I recognize, is supposed to be me. “What do you know of constant pain, of eternal torment?” Coleman, on his feet, clutching a plastic fork and shaking it in the air, challenges the others. “What do you know of being an invisible cripple, suffering invisible torture? They have wheelchairs for the visibly handicapped, crutches for the lame, white canes for the blind, padded rooms for the insane. But what have they got for the likes of me? Cortisone! Tylenol! Codeine! Who are you all to tell me suicide's a cop-out, you who have no reason to try it!” When one of the others laughs at this remark, Coleman lunges, attacking him with the plastic fork. Henry pulls them apart. But in the end it's the pain of a broken heart that finally defeats the protagonist, who, one night, sets fire to his lakeside cottage and, in his underwear, “with the flames painting the eastern sky orange behind him” walks across the frozen lake, never to be seen or heard from again.

I lay the story down on the still-hot pizza box.

“Sound familiar?” said Colin.

By midnight the temperature had fallen well below freezing. We huddled in blankets around the kerosene stove. Gloria was the first to yawn. We all started yawning. “Time for bed,” said Colin. They argued then over who should sleep where. Colin said we should all sleep in the loft. “It'll be warmer,” he said. There was only one bed. “You sleep in the bed,” said Gloria. “Nonsense,” said Colin. “I prefer the floor; it's better for my back. You take the bed.” I wondered why they hadn't worked all this out before. I sat downstairs, by the stove, with a felt-tipped pen, drawing dislocated hands and faces in my notebook, between the pages of which I had tucked the sand-dollar postcard from Gloria's dashboard. When they had stopped arguing, I switched off the lamp, put my notebook away, and climbed up the ladder to the loft, where they were both lying — Gloria in the bed and Colin in a sleeping bag next to it. On the other side of the bed was another sleeping bag. I undressed quietly and got into it. After a while Colin spoke, whispering, describing the bubbles in ginger ale. “You're making me thirsty,” said Gloria. “No problem,” said Colin, who got up and went downstairs. As we heard the sound of ice cracking, Gloria slipped her arm out from under the covers; her nicotine-stained fingers hovered in the air over my chest. I reached out and held the longest finger, stroking it, squeezing it in my fist, milking it. Colin climbed up the ladder with three glasses of ginger ale. When we'd finished drinking, he took the glasses from us and put them aside. And then all of us went to sleep, or pretended to.

In the dark, later, I reached up and found Gloria's hand still
there, her fingers wavering like sea-anemone tentacles. I stroked them, then reached up and found her shoulder. From the sound of his breathing, I assumed Stephen — Colin — was fast asleep. I had an erection and was dying for Gloria to touch it. The night went on with us exploring each other silently with our hands. I felt Gloria's breasts, the moist insides of her thighs. She stroked my chest. My fingers found her clitoris and rubbed it, and she let out an almost but not entirely imperceptible sigh. I brought my wet fingers to her lips for her to suck on, then raised my midsection off the floor so she could reach my cock with her fingers. Then she bent over and used her mouth, and I came. She played with the stuff, drawing little ringlets around my navel, taking her dripping, nicotine-stained fingers to her lips as I settled back down, trying not to breathe. I heard Colin roll over. He gave a little groan, unzipped his sleeping bag, and flipped the top back.
He's getting up!
I closed my eyes, rolled over, pretended to be asleep. I felt my stuff leaking and melting into my sleeping bag. I heard Gloria say,

“Colin, are you all right?”

He started down the ladder.

“Colin?”

I pretended to be asleep.

“Colin?”

I kept pretending.

A door slammed. Gloria shook me.

“Wake up!”

We dressed and climbed down the ladder. Gloria looked inside the kitchen. “He's out there,” she said. With blankets over our shoulders, we went outside and stood by the lake. The lake was frozen. We heard loud
thwunks
and looked out and saw the silhouette receding on the ice. As it kept receding more
thwunking
sounds swept across the lake. The ice couldn't possibly be thick enough to hold anyone.

“My God,” said Gloria.

I took a step onto the ice; she held me back. “Don't,” she said. “It's too dangerous.” I took another step, broke through, and plunged in up to my knees. “Jesus!” I said, getting out.

“I warned you,” said Gloria.

“What about him?”

“Colin doesn't need ice.”

Except for “the flames painting the eastern sky orange,” it was just like in the story. The word “destiny” popped into my mind. I tried to convince myself that it was all meant to be, that it was somehow necessary, that we were all acting out parts that had been written for us, and so we weren't responsible, really — it was God's will, or the devil's, or the will of an unlucky leprechaun.

“It's my fault,” I said, sitting in front of the stove.

“Don't blame yourself,” said Gloria. “We're all to blame. Colin, too. He doesn't understand lust. It's not a part of him. He only understands love. That doesn't make him good, and it doesn't make us evil.”

“But I made it happen.”

“You responded to a stimulus. We both did.”

I had to ask her: “That story Colin wrote, the one in your glove compartment? The girl in it, is that supposed to be you?”

Gloria nodded.

In the morning Gloria wrote a phone number down on the sand-dollar postcard. “It's the number of some people who own a cottage on the far side of the lake,” said Gloria. “He goes there sometimes when he's upset.”

I hitchhiked back to the university. I didn't want Gloria to take me. The German smoke-alarm salesman who picked me up said that unless America returned to its old way of educating the young it was headed for trouble. “Zee abbrennezhip zystem is ze only vey to go.” I agreed with him all the way to campus. At the snack bar I found a pay phone and dialed the number on the sand-dollar card. With the number ringing I imagined several possible exchanges taking place.

Phone Conversation no. 1:

Seven rings. A groggy voice answers.

“Stephen?”

“The name is Colin David McDoogle.”

Click.

Phone Conversation no. 2:

Four rings. An old Irish woman's wheedling voice answers.

“Is Colin there?”

“Nope. Dead. Fished him frozen out of the lake early this morning. Poor fellow. Say it was a broken heart did him in.”

Phone Conversation no. 3:

Eleven rings
.

“Is Colin there?”

“This is he.”

“Colin, it's me.”

Silence
.

“Colin, I'm very sorry.”

“Sure.”

“I want to see you.”

“I'm in bed. I'm sleeping.”

“
I just want to
—”

The line goes dead. This last exchange is real. As I hang up, I
can feel Colin's hatred seeping into my bones. I can't stand being hated; it drives me crazy. I look around; I don't know what to do; I have no idea. The snack bar is crowded. Why did I come here? I don't belong here. God, get me out.

I find my sports car. The top is still down. The leather seats are moist with dew. There's a parking ticket tucked under the windshield wiper. I'm not sure this life has anything to do with me, or me with it. I put the ticket in my pocket and get in the car. I don't bother wiping the seat. There's frost on the windshield. I pull out into traffic, cut off another car. The driver blasts his horn. I blast mine back. I get on the highway, headed north, past hills looking like bowls of Trix cereal, thinking: Claudette. I've lost her this time; I've really lost her; I've lost her for good.

SHE WAS THE LAST PERSON
off the bus. Clarke stood across the street in the zocalo, watching it unload its cargo of brown-skinned passengers, when she appeared, wearing a flowing dress of pale parchment-colored fabric. Except for the tops of her feet, suntanned between the straps of her white sandals, and her shoulders (visible through a scrim of blonde hair and likewise suntanned), her skin was very pale, as pale as her dress: as pale as the sand Clarke had slept on during the night.

She opened a small parasol that also matched her dress and stepped into the pall of dust raised by the bus, oblivious to it and to the screams of children begging their mothers to buy them ice-cream bars from the stand a dozen yards away. Standing in the oval shadow cast by her parasol, she spoke with the bus driver, who leaned against the bus's front fender smiling and worrying his set of rosary beads. Though she obviously spoke Spanish, Clarke refused to believe that she was a local.