The Unknowns (18 page)

“Oh, it was this game we had when we were little,” Hannah said. “We just—we made up this pretend world. It was really dumb.”

“We were both princesses,” said Cindy, who didn’t seem
embarrassed. “I was Princess Gloriana and she was Princess Paladine, and we ruled over the whole kingdom.”

“Wouldn’t the king have ruled over it, if it was a kingdom?” I asked.

Cindy rolled her eyes. “We weren’t going for realisticness,” she said. “We were going for being princesses.”

“I can’t believe you told them about that,” Hannah said.

“The other thing I used to pretend is, I wanted to be a mermaid,” Cindy said. “I’d pray that God would turn me into a mermaid in the night. But I was always worried that he would, and then I wouldn’t be able to breathe outside the water and I’d die.”

Danny shook his head at her tenderly. “You’re such a freak,” he said.

The two of them went to play pinball, and without Danny to steer the conversation there was a lull. Paul suggested a game of pool, and something about the too-casual way he raised the possibility indicated that he was good at pool. “You guys play, I’ll watch,” Hannah said. “I don’t play pool.”

My own billiards skills were untested. I hoped that my first game would reveal a natural aptitude, but whatever advantage my understanding of geometry and physics conferred was outweighed by my clumsiness. When Paul sank something he gave a tight-lipped little grunt of satisfaction and glanced over at Hannah, who perched on the back of the couch, legs dangling.

How should one act when one is losing? As my first shots sped off at errant angles I said “Damn!” and “Eucchh,” as though I was playing below my usual skill level. After ten minutes of consistent failure, though, it was hard to sustain the pretense of disappointment. When the red I was trying to sink caromed off the cushion and tipped Paul’s green stripe into a corner pocket I said, “All right!” as though I’d just done something of great skill. Hannah smiled.

My assist meant Paul was down to the eight ball. He tapped the
far pocket with his stick to call it. After he made the shot he said, “And
that’s
how the game is played.”

I turned to Hannah. “Here’s what he doesn’t realize,” I said, nodding slyly at Paul. “That game was just the first step in an elaborate hustle.”

“So does that mean you want to put down the big money now?” Paul said.

I gave Hannah a dramatic wink, as though this was all part of my plan, and as I did I understood that this was how to wink at a girl: you make a joke of it; it still counts. “Not money,” I said. “We’re going to play for something more valuable than money—honor!” I wasn’t sure what I was talking about, but I was going to keep driving forward until I went off the road or hit a tree. “I’m going to hustle him out of his honor!” I said, and Hannah laughed, and an unfamiliar kind of power made my knees buckle.

Paul saw what was happening, I think, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He racked up the balls and broke again, and sank two on his first turn. I made an elaborate show of chalking my cue, then sent the cue ball off the blue into a side pocket. Leaning over the table I looked up at Hannah and said, “He has no idea what’s coming.”

Paul cleared the table as efficiently as he could. “So hand over your honor,” he said, and I said, “Oh, foul dishonor!” and did a little tearing-at-my-breast routine.

Danny and Cindy had emerged from the laundry room and were examining the videotapes in the cabinet under the TV. “What’s good in here?” Danny asked. The collection was heavy on westerns and war films, all home-recorded, with handwritten labels identifying the movie by title and year of release. I thought of her father dying and his movies sitting here unwatched.

Hannah made an apologetic face. “We’ve got
Splash
,” she said.

The couch only fit four, and there was a little unspoken drama
about seating arrangements. Cindy and Hannah went for the floor, in one of those self-sacrifice contests girls get into when there are boys around, and Cindy won by perching between Danny’s legs. So Hannah and Paul and I had to arrange ourselves. After some wordless three-way strategizing Hannah wound up between us.

Ten minutes into the movie, Paul actually did the thing where you pretend to yawn and then lower your arm onto the couch behind the girl. I had seen people do this as a joke, and I was astonished that he would be so bold and ignorant as to try it for real. Hannah didn’t flinch, but a minute later she leaned forward and cupped her chin in her hands, her elbows on her knees, leaving Paul’s arm lying uselessly on the back of the couch. After a reasonable interval, he withdrew it.

Halfway through the movie we heard the door open at the top of the stairs, and a straggly-haired silhouette in a dressing gown appeared. I felt Hannah tense up. “Hannah, it’s time for your friends to leave,” her mother said.

“Oh, God, I’m really sorry,” Hannah said to us. She walked us to the top of the stairs and hugged each of us in turn. I knew that something more was required, something that would cement whatever bond existed between us, and so I brushed my fingers against the side of her neck, and she gripped my forearm and squeezed.

And then the four of us were cramming into the car, Cindy and I in the back seat. I hated forcing everyone to make a detour, but it was past midnight and there was no other way for me to get to Sheridan. As a nondriver I could only calculate routes that took in familiar landmarks like school or my dad’s apartment, so we spent forty-five minutes rolling through empty streets until we came to the body shops and strip-mall restaurants of my neighborhood. Driving through the darkness we nursed a mood of grown-up seriousness, breaking the silence occasionally to say things like “God” or “Poor Hannah!” while my heart thrummed with astonished joy.

Cindy approached me at my locker on Monday morning, which she had never done before. “That was fun Saturday,” she said, with a smile that advertised secret knowledge. “Hannah thought you were really cool.” My heart and stomach began spinning in different directions along multiple axes.

“Oh yeah?” I said. It seemed important to convey indifference, in order to suggest that I found out girls thought I was cool every day. Fortunately Cindy would not be deterred.

“Don’t you think she’s totally pretty?” she said. I didn’t realize at the time that this is a trick girls use to make you think other girls are pretty. It still works on me now.

“Yeah, definitely!” I said, and Cindy, seeing that I was in the bag, smiled. She leaned against the row of lockers and took a notebook and pen from her backpack. Danny was watching us from down the hall. Cindy wrote Hannah’s name and phone number, from memory, on a corner of a page, tore it off, and handed it to me. We didn’t say anything else about it.

At home that night I stared at the number and wondered what I could possibly do with it. Would a girl think about romance while her father was dying? I imagined him clinging to life, wanting only to see her graduate high school, unwittingly wrecking my one chance at love. Or he would die and Hannah would retreat from the world into a protracted period of mourning. I brought the phone from the kitchen into my room. Even with the cord stretched to its full extent I had to sit on the ground by the door. What could I say when she answered? I considered various opening lines and tried to imagine all the possible replies to each, so that I could construct a flowchart with responses to each of her responses, but the project quickly became unmanageable. I had no idea what boys and girls said to each other on the telephone, or indeed anywhere. I returned the phone to the kitchen.

The next day I found Cindy and Danny standing in the school hallway, his arm around her shoulder. She looked unslept and bedraggled. Cindy never wore visible makeup, but she must have had some kind of cosmetic regimen, because today it was evident by its absence.

She let Danny speak for her. “Hannah’s dad died,” he said quietly, like a messenger in a play delivering his only line.

I phoned that night. “Hannah, it’s Eric,” I said. There was no response. “I just—Cindy told me about your dad, and I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“Oh—oh,
Eric
!” she said. “Oh, wow, thanks for calling!”

“Sure,” I said. “Cindy told me about your dad, your father, today.”

“Yes, it’s really sad,” she said. “But I have my whole family here, and everyone’s been praying for him, and I know it’s going to be OK.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “Yeah. It
is
going to be OK.”

“I mean, it’s not up to me, it’s up to God,” she said. “It’s going to be hard, not getting to see him. But it’s not—it’s not something I’m meant to understand.”

“No, right,” I said. Everything she was saying was alien to me—I didn’t think about death that way—but I wasn’t going to argue.

“I should go,” she said easily, as though we’d been talking about school. “Everybody’s downstairs.”

“Oh, OK,” I said. I had failed to get my balance, and now my time was up.

“Would you—would you call me tomorrow?” she said.

“Sure, yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll call you tomorrow!”

“Great,” she said, like a normal teenager. “Talk to you then, Eric.” We said goodbye and hung up, and I sat there on the floor of my room, my back against the door, wondering what had just happened.

Hannah Pronovost was a virgin, as I was, but that didn’t make the playing field level. She had investigated the gamut of non-penetrative options with Ryan from Christian Youth Fellowship, who played the
acoustic guitar and had big soft eyes and no evident sense of humor. They had broken up, for complicated and melodramatic reasons, but the possibility of a reunion was an immovable feature of the landscape of our relationship. It would never have occurred to me not to tolerate this.

Astonishingly, less than a month after Hannah’s father’s funeral, with no negotiation or warning, we began to have sex. This could only have taken place within the atmosphere of neglect that overcame the Pronovost home in the wake of the patriarch’s death. Judging from the photographic portraits that appeared like mushrooms on every surface in the house, Stan Pronovost, a man of unnaturally upright bearing, would never have allowed us so many hours behind the closed door of Hannah’s bedroom, but his widow, sitting slouched and glassy-eyed at the kitchen table, scarcely noticed my presence. There was something unhinged, too, in Hannah herself. The guards had left their posts, and no one was left to check her loneliest impulses. With no basis for comparison, I didn’t recognize that normal rules had been suspended; instead I came to assume that any girl, in the right mood, could be seized by the white wildness that appeared in Hannah Pronovost’s eyes.

As an unspoken condition of the sex I went with her to Friday night teen services. Hannah squeezed my forearm encouragingly whenever I joined the singing or said
amen
. I hated the obvious techniques by which my feelings were manipulated: the rousing songs, the energetic junior pastor, the gentle aerobic lift of all that standing and sitting and standing again. (Who could respect a God who would trick his followers in such mechanical ways?) But we learned how to have sex, and we said
I love you
, and from then on the barriers to entry—the improbability of that strange moment when two people start kissing for the first time—no longer seemed insurmountable. For a while Hannah Pronovost needed someone, and I made myself into the person that she needed, and while it wouldn’t scale it was at least a proof of concept.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH MY
mother’s request, I buy a ticket to Denver for three weeks from now. It will be my first visit since she moved into her new house, and I’m hopeful that a certain amount of hometown-boy-made-good triumph will accrue. I fantasize about taking my mom out to an expensive restaurant and being waited on by Graham Neale, although the fantasy loses some luster when I realize that in it I am twenty-four years old and still having dinner with my mom.

During the interim between the purchase of the ticket and the flight, Maya and I entrench certain small routines that gently downgrade the time we spend together from Event status to Normal status. We figure out all the basic stage-two stuff—minor arguments, watching television—until being with her starts to feel almost easy, apart from when we’re having sex. When she straddles me in the darkness, her diminutive silhouette transforms from that of an adult woman to that of a child and back again. I conceal her behind looped mental footage of anonymous copulation. My performance, assessed on metrics both intrinsic (stamina, turnaround time) and extrinsic
(partner satisfaction), is more than adequate, perhaps a personal best. Afterward she becomes giggly and playful, and I try to join in the fun. The wave of guilt that threatens to suffocate me usually dissipates after about forty-five minutes.

Until, huddled under her blankets one freezing night, we fall into the spoon position, which maximizes body contact and preserves our pocket of warm air. I slide my hand under her T-shirt, brush it against her nipples.

“How does that feel?” I say. She murmurs something soft. “Is that OK? Can I touch you there?”

“Yes, you can,” she says. She doesn’t sound surprised that I’m asking permission to do something I’ve been doing for weeks.

I ask again and slide my hand between her legs. “Yes,” she says again. This ritualized exchange—permission requested and granted, requested and granted—overrides my internal monologue. I remember something Lauren said: “I’m so scared I make it like I’m not even there at all.” Speaking to each other keeps us conscious, and this consciousness rescues me from Maya’s father’s lingering presence. “Can I fuck you?” I ask her, when the moment seems right, and she says, “Yes, fuck me,” and it’s everything her first forced couplings were not: mature, consensual, mutual. At the end I’m filled with all three of nature’s greatest satisfactions—love, orgasm, and the discovery of a solution to a difficult problem.