Into the Great Wide Open (18 page)

There’s a note, a souvenir. He found it on the driver’s seat of the Reliant, parked in the high school lot, after school the next day—and here’s another thing that won’t add up: how could he be out till three and back at school in the morning? Wasn’t anyone watching? But Kenny’s still got the note. It says this:

Baby steps, Kenny thinks, reading it now. Those first, tentative … but this is wrong, an underestimation, he knows it. Nobody knows what to do with love. Sometimes he believes, as he did when he was seventeen, that all adult life is a fiction: that the settled or sedate quality of adult life is only due to insulation, emotional distance. The familiar house, the familiar wife, the familiar children. Coloring inside the lines, staying there. Adults: when love strikes them, it’s like an illness. Kenny has seen this in men he knows. Experience doesn’t make them any better at it. Love makes them blind, love makes them
strange to themselves.
Adult
: twisted around old injuries, like the apple tree in his grandmother’s backyard, growing around the wire clothesline …

But he was seventeen, he was clumsy, because he didn’t know what to do. He would get older, he would get better at love. He thought that what he felt for Junie was a kind of practice love, a first attempt that would lead to something better later; later, when he acquired the bitter wisdom that characters always seemed to have at the ends of novels. Tempered by the fires of life, etc. That
carelessness
—it bothers him now, looking back, that casual devaluation. Kenny has learned nothing in the meantime that would have helped him,
nothing
.

He hasn’t even learned to stop himself. He’s always on the way to somewhere else, always becoming, always leaving; so that things become real only at the moment he leaves them. The present is a formless fog, a blur of bright lights noises and a few concrete certainties: I’m afraid, I’m hungry, I want to see you, I’m lonely. Then he departs, and through the rearview mirror he can see the outlines snap into shape: I should have, I could have, I
didn’t
. Junie, he thinks. She was alive inside him, sleeping, taking shape through every waking and sleeping hour. He could feel the memory of her anytime on the surface of his skin; he still can. Junie, he thinks. He was in love; she loved him. It should have been enough.

They went out to dinner and then to Kim’s house. The bones of the event. And it felt like it was after Christmas, although he’s never been able to exactly place where Christmas went that year. He got nothing memorable: a book from Junie’s mother, a book from Junie—what? He can’t remember. He has two books of hers still, but he stole both of them:
Letters to a Young Poet
, by Rainer Maria Rilke, and an illustrated version of
The Walrus and the Carpenter
.

They went to a French place in Georgetown, anyway, name
forgotten. Junie was known there as her father’s daughter; certainly a fuss was made over her, and Kenny, too, though he wished for less. He was wearing a green sport jacket that he found at Value Village and Junie’s mother altered to fit him—dark green, almost black, but a green sport jacket nevertheless. His black shoes, shined, were worn-down at the heel, and his necktie wasn’t fooling anybody. Fake! Imposter! He could feel them, the people who belonged here, staring at him around the corners of their menus.

“Relax!” Junie whispered when they were seated.

“Yeah, right,” he said.

“You look like you’re going for a probation hearing or something.”

“Dentist’s office,” Kenny said. “Assistant principal.”

“Ssshhh,” Junie said. “Not so loud.”

The captain came around and poured them each a half glass of wine. Now this was criminal. He fidgeted in his seat until they were alone again.

“It comes with the meal,” Junie whispered. “You get these different courses, and a different wine comes with each one.”

The captain returned, and set between them a plate with a dozen oysters resting on ice, a pattern of lemons around the edge of the plate, two tiny forks and the inevitable parsley. “Read what it says,” June told him, picking up the card next to her forks. Kenny saw that he had one too; a menu of some kind.

“Belon and Kumamoto oysters on the half shell,” he read. “You can’t even read that?”

“Not without my glasses. I left them in the car.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to concentrate,” Junie said; selecting one of the darker, smaller oysters from the plate. The other kind were a bit fatter and pearl gray throughout, without the black lips of the small ones. She tipped her head back and slid the oyster into her mouth; Kenny watching the fine workings of her throat. She kept her eyes
closed for a moment, then opened them and said, “A Kumamoto, I believe.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Taste them, it isn’t hard to tell one from the other. I can’t remember which is which, is all.”

He stared down at the glistening, pearly oyster flesh, each arrayed for sea-burial in the little boat of its shell. They looked immaculate, chilly, sanitary, but Kenny had to work up his nerve. “You left your glasses in the car on purpose?” he asked.

“Quit stalling,” Junie said. “You’ve never eaten an oyster before?”

“Never a naked one.”

“Naked oysters are the best,” she said. “Go ahead.”

For his first oyster, Kenny picked out one of the plumper, all-gray jobs; it looked safer, friendlier. He held it in midair, staring at it. Was this alive? He couldn’t remember.

“Go for it,” Junie said.

She had her teasing face on; wolfish, grinning. Her hair had started to grow out by then, just past a crew cut. Kenny was suddenly angry with her: for bringing him here, for teasing him, a public joke in a public place. They were all staring at him, trying to eat this ridiculous food. It wasn’t meant for him; but he had to eat it anyway, like it or not. Do or die or both.

Then slipped it into his mouth and tasted—nothing. Not at first. Then gradually some delicate, concentrated essence of cold sea-water, a faint something else. Not sweet exactly but balanced.

“That’s not so bad, is it?” Junie asked.

He felt like a fool for feeling like a fool. Before he tried to answer, he took a sip of wine, some stone-flavored aftertaste that went exactly with the oysters. A table full of surprises. A science of taste, unsuspected.

“You didn’t bring your glasses,” Kenny said.

“Didn’t you ever notice, when you’re driving at night and it starts to rain or something, you turn the radio off?”

“I do,” he admitted.

“I don’t want any interference,” Junie said; and he felt her own knee pressed against his, under the tablecloth. He drew away, looking half-frantically around to see who was watching; but nobody was watching. Junie knew already. They were public, anonymous lovers.

“I thought you were anti-pleasure,” Kenny said.

“These are the
domestic arts
,” she said. “There’s a difference.”

Just then he saw her mother reflected in Junie’s face; her severity, pride of distinction. Despite the glasses, Junie caught him.

“What?” she asked him.

“Nothing.”

“Try the other oysters,” Junie said; and Kenny did, letting the small, dark oyster slide into his mouth, holding it there for a moment. This one had a coppery, metallic edge that the other one lacked; a little stranger, a little more dangerous taste. Kenny liked it all right but he was glad he had started with the other.

“What’s next?” Junie asked.

Kenny envied her blindness; though the other diners were starting to recede into the background, the blurred faces in the grandstand behind home plate. He looked at her face in the candlelight and saw that she was wearing a little lipstick, something with her eyes, some small trickery that he approved of totally. He said, “We aren’t done with the appetizers yet.”

“I want to know what comes next,” she said.

He picked up the card, thinking lipstick, perfume, at last I understand; thinking of his mother, who wore dime-store cologne by the tablespoon, who missed her mouth with lipstick. Kenny read the card for her: “Sweetbreads.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“What?”

“That’s like,
lymph node
or something. I can’t eat that.”

“Maybe you could ask for something else,” he said. “A substitute.”

Now it was her turn to look nervously around the restaurant, like the Fraud Police were on their way to send them back to the nursery section. “That’s all right,” she said.

“I don’t see why they’d mind,” Kenny said. “I assume they’ve got some food back there somewhere. Maybe they could make you a soft-boiled egg.”

“I just won’t eat it,” Junie said.

“Have an oyster,” Kenny said.

“No, thanks.”

“What?”

She was twisting the corner of her napkin into a hard little cord; pressing hard enough to turn the skin behind her fingernails white.

“What is it?” Kenny asked.

“My
anti-pleasure
instincts, as you call it.”

“I’m sorry,” Kenny said. “I didn’t mean …”

“No, you’re right. I mean, it bothers me that so much time and energy and money are going into one dinner. People are sleeping on the streets outside. And then I think about how much film and paper I could buy with the money that this dinner is going to cost.”

“You already have all the film and paper you need,” Kenny said.

“What do you mean?”

It’s self-indulgence, he wanted to say; you belong here; it’s stupidity to pretend you don’t. It isn’t like you. He picked up an oyster and examined it, a Belon, pearly flesh in the candlelight. Some part of this was its mouth and some part its asshole, presumably. Organs. He slid the oyster down his throat, undifferentiated.

“Don’t make speeches,” Kenny said.

“What do you mean?” she said; a warning.

“We’re having a good time.”

“Thank you, Dad.” She wouldn’t look at him; the waiter came, and took away the plate of ice, the empty shells and two or three remaining oysters that they were suddenly too busy fighting to eat. In front of each of them, the waiter sat a small earthenware dish (a
ramekin
, he remembered; the word came to him like a gift) in which three or four small bland-looking objects were simmering in some kind of dark brown sauce. The way the sauce smelled was amazing; and Kenny thought maybe she was right, maybe there was an art to this. He tore off a corner of a roll and sampled the sauce with it and it was amazing. What—butter and garlic and something else, dark brown. Quickly, while he was still hungry, he tried one of the sweetbreads, and it tasted like what? Not too much. Mostly it tasted like the sauce, which was fine with Kenny. “I like lymph node,” he announced.

“Don’t,” she said.

The waiter brought tiny lamb chops in a complicated mustard sauce; the smallest carrots that Kenny had ever seen; a salad of Dr. Seuss greenery, tendrils and petals; a Roquefort soufflé; a fresh half-glass of wine with every change in the food. A kiwi sorbet. A poached peach. A demitasse of espresso apiece, to speed them home.

The alchemy of food and wine, comfort on a winter night and lulled conversation from the tables around them—intelligent, profound, as long as you couldn’t make out the words—eventually brought Junie around again, though the ghost of her bad mood lingered in the air over the table. You should start a magazine, Kenny thought:
Bad Mood
. Who would subscribe? (I would, he thought, I just did.) She ate about half, all the vegetables and none of the meat. Kenny finished the baby lamb chops for her, naturally, a big hungry boy (exactly her size). He felt delicate and gross all at once, sucking
the meat from the tiny bones. What next? Eel pie, mackerel, a plate of robins … Junie was staring, off in the distance somewhere.

“What?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’m just sad,” she said, “a little.”

“Why?”

“A year from now …,” she said. “I don’t know. I got into college today, Kenny, the one I want to go to anyway. Out in Oregon.”

“That’s great,” he said, not trusting himself to look at her. They were both almost whispering; somewhere near dessert, they were enjoying themselves in adult-world; neither of them wanted to be thrown back down to the nursery for talking about college. At the same time Kenny felt the news. He was losing her. He had known it all along but he forgot most times. They could live without remembering it, they could fight and fuck and go for walks, but the basic idea was always there: Junie was leaving, Kenny was staying behind.

“Oregon,” Kenny said. “I hear it rains.”

“It actually rains less there than it does here,” she said. “It rains less
inches
but more
days
.”

Kenny tried to figure if this was a good deal or not and then gave up; it didn’t matter to him, one way or the other. He let himself look at her and there she was in the candlelight, going, gone. A sadness overtook him, not at this specifically, just in general. The part that nobody talks about: it’s not bad being depressed, the blue tinge around the world. If there’s nothing you can do anyway, nothing that will help. She was going, off into adult-world for good, and Kenny was going where? Somewhere else. Little humans. He wondered if this was part of the secret world of adults, that somewhere between the dessert and the last sip of coffee they all looked up and saw that it was no use, the cold world waiting for them outside despite this temporary comfort. He smiled for Junie, resignation, a performance. She shook her head. She was
helpless
. Kenny was
blue.
He lifted the last sip of the last glass of wine toward Junie and said, “The future.”

“The future,” she said, and raised her glass and touched his with it and they both drank. Others were watching them, Kenny could sense it: two beautiful young people, sentimental. Everybody saw themselves reflected in them. Kenny wanted to tell them: you were never like this.