In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (54 page)

“Look, girls, why don’t you grab that booth back there?” Carter said. “We’ll get some Cokes and be right there with you.”

The girls dipped their heads in agreement and walked away. Carter whispered, “I think you just screwed up, Bobo.”

“What?”

“With Amy. She was pissed. I could tell.”

“Why?”

“I was wrong, Bobo. I hate to say it, but I was,” Carter sighed. “She’s got a thing for you.”

“Me?”

We were at the counter of the soda fountain. Carter said to Jeannie Ellis, who was Arch’s daughter and occasional counter girl, “Four Cokes, Jeannie, and a pack of Marlboros. Put it on Harry Burger’s bill.”

“Sure,” Jeannie replied. “He was in earlier. Said to give you whatever you wanted.”

“Make it a carton of Marlboros,” Carter said, “but, Jeannie, do me a favor: make it show up as sandwiches or something.”

Jeannie smiled. “Sure.” She reached for the glasses on a rack behind her.

“What do you mean, she has a thing for me?” I said to Carter.

Carter looked at me sadly. “You stupid, dumb redneck hick. The most beautiful woman you’ll ever see is dragging around like she’s got lead in her ass because of you, and you’re out with Miss Ugly of Nineteen Fifty-five.”

“It was your idea, not mine,” I reminded him.

“So, I was wrong again,” Carter said. “Sue me. Jesus, Bobo, it’s been a year since I saw them. I thought they might improve.” He took the carton of cigarettes from Jeannie and tucked them under his arm and then he picked up two of the Cokes. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

It was a night I remember only in pain. In a private whisper as we were getting into his car to drive to Margaretville, Carter offered me his twenty dollars to kiss Charlotte—fifty if I would touch her breasts. I told him. “If there’s any kissing going on, you can do it, and you know where you can start.” He laughed maniacally.

We attended a movie in Margaretville, then drove to the base of the ski lift at Belleayre Mountain and walked in the cool air under a full moon that was like a lamp dimmed for sleeping. Carter told absurd stories about me—that Harry had almost persuaded me to convert to Judaism, that I was a great-grandson of a Confederate general who had fought at Gettysburg and lost his leg, and that my ambition in life was to be a country music star like the great Little Jimmy Dickens. He begged me to sing for them. I refused. “He’s shy,” Carter explained to the girls. “He knows nobody can understand him, so he doesn’t say much.” He looked at me and winked and he added, “You’d think his mind was somewhere else, wouldn’t you?”

Carter knew.

I was thinking of Amy Lourie.

Amy did not appear for breakfast the following morning. Her parents said she had not slept well. I asked if I could prepare a plate for them to take to her, some muffins or cheese or fruit. “If she wants something, she’ll come down,” Evelyn Lourie said gently. “But thank you for offering, Bobo.” I knew she was watching me carefully. When I served Harry and Charlotte and Erin, suffering Harry’s jesting about his nieces being in love with me, I could again sense Evelyn Lourie’s eyes, which were as beautiful as Amy’s.

At midmorning, I looked from the back window of the kitchen and saw Amy. She was walking alone on the mountain behind the Inn, climbing toward a birch tree where I would often go at night to be alone. I had found the birch on advice from Avrum not long after meeting him. He had said, “Look up to the hill and find you a place, and go to it. Make it yours. Get a tree. A tree is best.” I had selected the birch because I could look down on the village and up to the stars. For some reason, it was not so lonely to be there, at the birch, between the village and the stars.

I told Carter, “I need to get away for a few minutes. Can you cover for me?”

“Sure,” Carter said. He glanced around the kitchen. Nora Dowling was not there. “I saw her, too,” he added. “I don’t blame you.”

Amy was at the birch, under the canopy of its limbs. I knew she had seen me approaching, but she looked away, as though something in the valley, something far off, had captivated her.

I said, “Hi.”

She turned to me. Her face was calm, controlled. “Hello.”

“You missed breakfast,” I said.

“I wasn’t hungry.”

I waited for her to say something else, but she did not.

“I like this tree,” I told her. “Sometimes at night I come up here and look at the stars.”

“I know,” she said.

I was surprised. “You do? How?”

“I’ve watched you.”

“You have?”

She said nothing. She sat on the soft grass beside the tree.

“Mind if I sit with you a couple of minutes?” I asked.

“It’s your tree,” she said.

I sat near her, but not near enough to touch. “It’s pretty up here,” I said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Are you—well, mad at me, or something?” I asked.

“No. Why should I be?”

“I don’t know. You act like it. I thought you were mad last night, in Arch’s.”

She moved her head and the wind caught the thick curl of her black-gold hair and made it flutter across her shoulder.

“How was your date?” she said after a moment.

“Date?” I said. “That wasn’t a date. We were with Mr. Burger’s nieces. You know that. He wanted us to take them to a movie.”

“I call that a date,” she said firmly.

“Well, I don’t,” I countered. “I’d consider it a job. He paid us.”

“He did what?”

“He paid us.”

“Do you know what that makes you?”

“No. What?”

“A gigolo,” she said.

“I don’t know what that is,” I confessed. “Is it a German word?”

“No, it’s not. It’s English. A gigolo is someone who gets paid to—to escort women,” she explained.

“Then I guess I am one,” I conceded.

Amy ducked her head. The sun coated her hair. Her lips puffed into a smile. She said softly, “Bobo, it’s not a compliment to be a gigolo, so don’t tell anyone you are.”

“I didn’t know what it was,” I said. “First time I’ve ever heard the word.”

She looked at me. The brightness was back in her eyes. She asked, “Are you really an artist?”

“Did Carter tell you that?” I replied.

“He said you were good. Really good, I mean.”

“I draw some. It’s something to do.”

“Will you draw a picture of me?” she asked.

I wondered if Carter, in his disregard for anyone’s privacy, had found the pictures I had been drawing of Amy—quick sketches penciled in moments of solitude and hidden away among my things. I wondered if he had told her about them.

“Will you?” she repeated.

“I’ll try,” I said. “But I’m not very good at faces. Not from memory.”

“I’ll pose for you,” she offered.

I thought of Carter, of the torment that Carter would heap on me. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“What about a photograph?” she asked. “Would that help?”

I shrugged uncomfortably. “I guess.”

“I’ll get one for you. It’s new, a school picture.”

“Okay,” I said, “but give it to me at Arch’s.”

Amy leaned toward me, almost close enough to touch. “You don’t want my parents to know, do you?”

I looked away, to the Inn. I could see the old people moving about on the lawn, ambling to tables with umbrellas cupped open against the sun. They would sit and play their games of cards until lunch.

“Do you?” Amy said again.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” I told her.

“They think you like me, you know,” Amy said quietly.

“Well, I—”

“They also think I like you,” she added.

I did not know what to say to her. I wanted to reach and touch her hand, to feel her hand living in my hand. I could hear the easy rhythm of her breathing.

“I do,” she said gently.

I looked at her. I could feel her mysteriously entering me, slipping past caution. I thought she could also feel it. She smiled at me.

“Would you take me to a movie if my father paid you?”

I could feel my heart rushing. “I wouldn’t do that. I’ll take you, but not for money.”

“I’m glad,” she said. There was a pause. “I feel better. Thank you.”

In the room next to me, the stockbroker and the judge’s wife were making love. She was begging, in a voice muted by the wall that separated us, “Please, please … Now, now … Oh, yes. Yes, yes yes.” There was a sudden, furious slapping of the headboard against the wall. The judge’s wife cried once. I could hear her inhale against the pouring from her body. The sudden, furious slapping of the headboard stopped.

I wondered if somewhere, nearby, Lila was smiling and breathing deeply, trying to catch the scent of sex.

I slept, finally, sensing that I was somehow more exhausted than the stockbroker and the judge’s wife. I believed I would dream of them, see them as a voyeur watching erotic movies in a dark room. I would peer at them as they caressed and moved over one another like powerful animals at sex play. I would see the oils of their skin shining in candlelight. I would watch their mouths at feast.

I did not dream of them. I dreamed, instead, of Amy Lourie. And in the way of dreams—surreal moments so startlingly clear you know they have happened or will happen or should happen—I was sitting with her in the Galli-Curci Theater in Margaretville and her hand was in my hand, milking my fingers with her fingers. It was two days after being with her at the birch tree on the mountain.

Carter had arranged it in the bold manner that was his personality. A group of us were going to the movies on Tuesday night, he had said to Amy in the presence of her parents as we served lunch. Would she like to go?

“Why don’t you?” urged Joel Lourie. “Get away from the old people for a night.”

“And who would be going?” Evelyn Lourie asked quietly.

“Just a group,” Carter replied. He glanced at me as I served coffee. “Me, two or three others who work at some of the other places around here. Bobo, I think. Are you still going, Bobo?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“We do it all the time,” Carter added casually and pleasantly. “We never know who’s going. Whoever shows up at Arch’s.”