In a Glass House (21 page)

In the spring the arcade grew more popular, groups of boys beginning to drift in from the high school, slowly taking it over with their noisy playing and talk. Some understanding between Vince and me seemed to break, Vince growing canny again,
conscious once more of an audience, always finding his subtle means of drawing attention to himself, seeming to create at each instant the person he wanted to be seen as. His confidence then was like a weapon, something I could only stand in the shadow of, like his stories a kind of pretence yet still working for him, winning people over, enviable not so much for its truth as for his ability to carry it off.

At some point Johnny Elias began to come into the arcade, my old nemesis from St. Michael’s, he and his friends playing pool for four dollars a game at the table at back, Johnny dressed always in the same slim jeans and the same boots with their three-inch heels, his hair grown out to an Afro now to crown the long lean trunk of his body like an exotic bush.

“Vic-tore, my son, how’s the
zubbrah
.”

But he seemed to invest no special energy in me, only his usual offhand indifference.

He came over once after he’d finished a game to where Vince and I were playing pinball, casual, seeking distraction, propping his pool cue against a machine to watch me play.

“Victor, my boy, you’ve gotta put more English on the ball.” Almost friendly, paternal. But he began to jiggle the machine as I played, trying to force the ball up to the extra-points hole at the top.

“Come on, Vic, push it up there.”

The ball dropped in.

“All right, rack ’em up there, buddy,” Vince said.

The scoreboard clicked upward and the ball popped back into play, Johnny beginning to work the machine again.

“Just leave it,” I said.

“Come on, buddy, we’re hot.”

It seemed for an instant that things could go either way, that if I could just bring myself to go along then what was happening could almost pass as if there were no humiliation in it.

“I said just leave it.”

I’d made the choice; Johnny gave the machine a final shove and tilted it.

“Too bad, my son, game over.”

Vince was still standing to one side of me. I expected some sign from him but he seemed perfectly neutral, unreadable.

“Fucking asshole,” I said, under my breath.

“Eh, buddy?” Johnny flicked the back of his hand hard against my cheek. “Did you say something?”

I was trapped now, wished for some easy return to the dull normalcy of a few moments before but there was no going back.

“Tell me again what you said, buddy, I didn’t hear you.”

“Asshole,” I said.

He shoved me hard against the corner of a machine, my back crunching up against metal. But my eye had gone to his pool cue: I reached for it and wrapped my hands around it, all instinct suddenly, swung out. For an instant as the cue arced toward him, sank finally into the cushion of his hair as he tried to duck away from it, I felt a delicious power surge in me, the fullness of my anger, its drunken single-mindedness. But then the cue hit bone and all my will to fight seemed to drain from me like some stranger that had fled, and it was a kind of surprise afterwards to see Johnny loom up still large with his resolve, still intent on prosecuting this violence I’d given licence to by striking him. In an instant his foot had swung up hard into my groin; then the searing pain, its slow sudden blooming like an explosion in me. I fell, screaming perhaps, my mind emptied, felt
another blow on my face like a dull aftershock and then voices, Vince’s and Johnny’s, George’s shouts.

“Bums! Get out of here, all of you. Like animals!”

Afterwards I found myself sitting on the toilet in the arcade’s tiny washroom, still dazed with the memory of pain. Vince was holding a bloodied paper towel to my nose, a warm trickle seeping into it almost pleasant somehow, reassuring.

“You all right?”

It took an instant to find my voice.

“I think so.”

“I guess you must’ve passed out.”

I took the towel from him and we remained a few moments in awkward silence, crammed close in the washroom’s smallness.

“Fucking asshole,” Vince said finally. “You got him good, though, that first hit.”

We skipped class for the rest of the day, wandering into town through spring sun and then down greening sidestreets to the lake. What had happened seemed strangely distant already, a kind of role I’d played, my mind emptied now as after a fever. I wanted only to guard the stillness in me, felt far from any sense of grievance or hurt but was content to let my silence encourage Vince’s solicitude.

“In Italy the water would be hot enough to swim in by now,” he said. It was the first time Italy had come up like this between us, had assumed a physical presence and shape. “Our place was right by the beach, eh – the people who stayed are making a shit-load now from the tourists, my old man would be rolling in it by now if we’d stayed there.”

I had an image of his village in Sicily, the fishing boats and narrow streets, the stone houses rolling down to the sea, of some
other person he might have been there if he’d stayed, the incarnation somehow of his village’s sun-bleached familiarity.

“It was different there,” he added strangely. “Everyone knew each other. Here they’re just in their own little groups.”

We were walking along the beach, picking our way through the winter flotsam built up there, the reeds and driftwood and rotting fish. For an instant a single mood seemed to wash over us, pull back.

“I guess we better get going,” Vince said finally.

And it was only now that I began to regret my fight, what it would cost me, that our friendship wouldn’t be strong enough to erase the residue it would leave between us after these moments of grace though Vince was merely alone and vulnerable like I was, trying to make his own way.

It was odd that for all the hours Vince and I spent together in the elusive pursuit of our adolescence the times that most lingered with me were the ones at his home, after school or invited in if I came to pick him up for an evening out, left then with a beer to wait while he dressed, or simply sitting with him for a time in the placid intimacy of his living room. Some distance between us seemed clearer then, what our obligations were, what respect we owed each other; and I’d feel a quiet status settle around me there as a guest, his parents and brothers soberly attentive in the background, the whole house seeming to adjust itself to allow me a place in it. A different person came out in Vince then, adult, secure in his role, the eldest son, exercising an unthinking authority over his brothers, left free to smoke in the house; he might have been some aging gentleman inviting me into his home, his life, like a cherished friend, saying come, come, all things are possible between us here. What
seemed to wreck us in the end was the world, our need to fit it, what we sought there and what we missed in the seeking, who we might have been to each other if we could have allowed in ourselves some unfolding of what seemed merely a waiting, these islanded moments alone, their small respectful calm.

In the summer our nights out took on new dimension, bars in Windsor and Detroit, house parties Vince heard about, late-night drunks with other groups of Vince’s friends along deserted sideroads or on the Seacliff beach. We ran car races sometimes on the town line, terror pressing down on me the whole time like the darkness our cars hurtled through; there was nothing in me that was true to the sort of bravado we put on then and yet the fear seemed to hone a violence in me, focusing it like a pinpoint on that single sudden rush through the dark.

At the end of these evenings I felt always the same recoiling, the numbness and self-disgust; and then the following day there’d be my father’s useless unspoken anger at how late I’d come in, at the signs of drunkenness, at all the contempt toward him he imagined in me in our silent unknowing. In one of his odd, sudden gestures of veiled generosity he’d bought a new car and turned his old one over to me and Aunt Teresa; but now I took it out at the smallest opportunity, to go to school, to
smoke, for my joyless evenings out, felt the resentment in him at my abuse of it, at the endless tanks of gas I used from our pump, and yet was somehow unable to make any concession to him. I seemed to be playing some pointless game, stubbornly resisting him, always doing the thing that was most an affront, and then punishing myself for it afterwards with his silent anger.

We stopped in at Diana’s sometimes at the end of a night out. There was a waitress there who began to be friendly with us, just the noncommittal disdain of recognition at first but then each time lingering an instant longer at our table when she served us.

“So what do you guys do every night anyways, coming in here at one o’clock in the morning.”

“Oh, you know. Drink, look for women.”

“Well I guess you’re still looking.” Then an instant’s pause and her laugh, as if she were laughing at someone else’s joke.

She’d somehow picked us out as being Italian, seeming to see something strangely exotic or amusing in that.

“That’s right, nice Italian boys,” Vince said, playing her up. “That’s Vittorio and Antonio over there and I’m Vincenzo.”

“Vittorio, that’s nice,” she said, slurring the name back into twangy English. “I seen you sometimes at school.”

But her picking me out like that brought out a strange aggression in me.

“That’s funny,” I said, “I’ve never seen you.”

Vince and Tony laughed.

“We only just moved down from Michigan last spring.” Matter-of-fact, speaking directly to me. Then, as she was leaving: “My name’s Crystal, since no one’s going to ask.”

“Hey, Crystal,” Vince called after her. “Nice name.”

“
Migna
, she’s a big one,” Tony said.

“Victor, my boy,” Vince said, “I think she’s got the hots for you.”

“Yeah, right.”

There had been that, the energy that had passed from her for an instant like a code, though some kind of mistake, some wrong impression she’d formed of me that she’d see through in an instant. But then the next time we came in she seemed to brighten at the sight of us, coming over to our table with an unabashed familiarity.

“I was wondering when you guys would come in again.”

“Did you miss us?” Vince said.

“Not you.”

“Maybe Victor then.”

“Victor? Who’s that?”

“My good friend Vittorio, don’t you remember him?”

She laughed.

“Victor, yuk, Vittorio’s much nicer.”

I was surprised how her laughter cut me, how much I’d invested in the possibility she might like me. But Vince seemed certain of her.

“She’s yours Victor, I tell you.”

“She doesn’t even know me.”

“What’s there to know? In the dark we all look the same.”

Crystal came back with our orders.

“You must get kind of bored working here,” Vince said.

“Talking to guys like you, sure.”

“What about Victor here, you seem to like him all right. Maybe the two of you should get together some time.”

Tony laughed. I ought to have made some remark then, something funny and sharp, dismissive, but merely sat there in flushed silence.

“I gotta go,” Crystal said finally.

But when she brought us our bill she’d written a phone number on the back of it.

“I’m off tomorrow night,” she said, then was gone.

Outside, both Vince and Tony seemed infected by my own euphoria.

“All right, Victor!” Tony shouted, strangely energized, then put two fingers into his mouth and whistled loud and long into the empty street.

I called the next day from the phone in my father’s office. Now that the thing was before me I felt only the dread of it, its nagging reminder of how wretched I was: I was nearly eighteen, had never dated a girl, made love to one.

“I didn’t think you’d call,” Crystal said, disarmingly frank.

“Well here I am.”

We made arrangements to go to a drive-in in Windsor. But already I felt something go dead in me, the conversation perfunctory and strained as after some argument.

“I guess I’ll see you around eight,” I said.

“Sure.”

She lived at the town limits, her house part of a last straggling row that stretched out past St. Michael’s before the town gave way to open country. The house had the look of an old farmhouse that had been slowly hemmed in by the encroaching town, narrow and ramshackle and tall, its Insulbrick siding warping from the walls and its porch leaning precariously. A painted wind toy, a cartoon-faced fireman with revolving legs, stood endlessly running at the foot of the driveway, oddly hopeful and bright there against the house’s fading red.

Crystal was waiting in a weather-greyed chair on the porch,
springing up at once when I drove up the lane and coming toward the car with a lumbering girlishness. She was dressed in a short, sleeveless sun-dress that seemed incongruous over her big-boned shoulders and hips after the trim fullness of her uniform. Her hand went down instinctively to pull her hem toward her knees when she settled into the car.

“Hello, Victor.”

“I thought you didn’t like that name.”

“Oh, that, I was just making fun.”

She laughed, this time her laughter seeming to betray a vulnerability like a window into her, something in me brightening at the sound of it.

We drove through the town, the wind swirling warmly through the open windows, blowing Crystal’s hair back into a tousled fullness. There was a quality in the air, a peculiar, late-summer mellowing though it was only early August, that filled me suddenly with a sense of promise like the first pleasant haze of drunkenness or half-sleep; we sat several moments without speaking, seeming joined in that mood, Crystal murmuring along with the lyrics of a Dylan song on the radio.

“Do you like Dylan?” I said.

“Oh, is that who that is?”

But then once we’d passed through town to open highway and the wind forced us to close the windows the world seemed to fall back, leave us stranded there together in the car’s intimacy.

“So how was it you ended up moving here from Michigan?”