Boy, Snow, Bird(9)

She glanced at me with a smile. “Mind if I hog this old man? He taught me history a million years ago, and I need to tell him all about how a guy called Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche and I finally split up for good.”

I said: “What do I care?” at the same time as he said: “Why would she mind?”

He found a table inside for the two of them, and a dish of ice cream just for her, and I took a sudden interest in “mingling,” passing them more often than was strictly necessary. “Do you want this ice cream?” he asked her, whisking the dish all around the tabletop. “I mean, do you truly want it? Would you fight for this ice cream? Would you bear a deep wound in order to possess this ice cream completely? How deep a wound? What if it was as deep as the grave? What does this ice cream really mean to you, Miss Cabrini?”

They looked good together. They were what society columnists called “a striking pair.” I don’t say this maliciously—at least, I don’t think I do—but it was only when I saw her with him that I fully realized I was younger than she was. She pulled a face and whacked him with her spoon. Not gently, either. “How’s Snow?” she asked.

I didn’t catch his answer. A few minutes later Dinah and Betty were back in circulation, and Mia and I were back on the coat-check desk. For almost an hour we hardly said a word to each other. Then she kicked off one of her shoes, placed her bare foot on the hem of my dress so I couldn’t move away from her, and said: “Say, what’s the meaning of this? Are we back at kindergarten?”

I said: “I don’t know.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t sound so sure.” She moved her heel in a slow circle, dragging the material along with it.

“Okay, okay. I’m sure.”

“Whitman and I are just good pals,” she said. “Goodish—whenever I catch a glimpse of him, anyway. And yeah, maybe . . . maybe we were almost something more once, but it would’ve been a complete disaster. I don’t know . . . he’s a nice guy, but there are thoughts he doesn’t allow himself to think. So you can’t think aloud around him . . . it’s too risky. You might accidentally hit a nerve. Did I already say he’s a nice guy? He is, but you just stumble across one of those thoughts he hates to think and—it ain’t pretty. When I die, they’ll make me the patron saint of lucky escapes. And that’s all there is to it.” She took her foot off the dress and we both checked for a print. Luckily there wasn’t one.

“I don’t know why you feel a need to tell me—”

“Because he says he can’t stand you and you act like you can’t stand him, and whenever a man and a woman behave like that toward each other, it usually means something’s going on. There’s a precious metal kind of gleam about you, and the man’s a jeweler, you know. So look out. And listen carefully, Boy—we’ve got to start right. I’m talking about you and me. Kiss me now, right this minute, and I’ll take it as a promise that the next time you get mad at me it’ll be a fight that’s actually worth having.”

I kissed her cheek, and she kissed mine. “He said he can’t stand me?”

She chuckled.

“What have you been writing in that notebook all evening?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you later.”

The boat docked at Drake Island and every one of us hired blondes temporarily became a coat-check girl. Afterward I stood on the middle deck and sipped a glass of water as I watched a crowd of fur coats with people in them tottering across the sand. I was one of the girls who had to stay on board with the guests who didn’t want to go ashore, and my interpretation of “exclusive yet accessible” was to offer a smiling side profile to anyone who spoke to me. If my conversation partner moved to try to face me directly, I just turned my head again, and if they made another attempt to adjust our interaction, then so did I, and it was a merry circle that we walked until my opponent was defeated and either went away or settled for a cozy chat with a silhouette. It got so Arturo was the only man on board who’d talk to me.

“What are you playing at?” he said, taking my glass of water from my hand and tasting it.

“Keep it,” I said, when he tried to hand the glass back. “I hear you can’t stand me.”

He didn’t reply.

“You feel you’ve seen a hundred of me. You know how my tiny mind works. But maybe it goes both ways.”

That tickled him. “I doubt it,” he said, when he was through laughing. He wiped tears from his eyes—that’s how tickled he was. “But Mia likes you, so . . .”

“I like Mia too.”

“She’s a sweet kid,” he said, and I thought: What? You didn’t have to talk to Mia for five minutes to get the message that she wasn’t any sweet kid.

“Why’d you quit teaching?”

I felt him look at me, but I gazed steadily into the pastel pink dawn.

“I’m just trying to look busy, Whitman. I’m throwing myself on your mercy here. If you don’t talk to me, I might not get paid.”

“Ha. All right, since you asked so nicely. Two reasons. First of all history got itchy. As a field of study, I mean.”

“Itchy?”

“Yeah. I’m telling you it itched. I figured it’d pass, but it didn’t. I’d sit in my office with my shirtsleeves rolled up, kind of clawing myself from wrist to elbow—my neck sometimes too. It got so bad I’d have to take my shirt off. I was terrified my wife would think they were love scratches, but . . . anyway, she didn’t think that. No, don’t look at me . . . stay just as you are, if you don’t mind. Talking to you like this reminds me of confession.”