Trust Exercise(37)
“‘Dating’?” Karen smirked. “We’re just hanging out.”
“Your mom must love you hanging out with some forty-year-old guy from England,” Sarah said, hoping to shock Karen with Martin’s shocking age, as Liam had shocked her.
But Karen only said, “She does. That’s why we’re not hanging out at my house anymore.” With that Karen turned her back and crossed the lawn.
As soon as Karen had passed out of sight Sarah clambered out of the car on the curb side, averting her gaze from David’s car as if it would blind her to actually see it. She stood so near the hood of David’s car she could have laid her palm on it. She was seized with the wild conviction that David was sitting in his car, just an arm’s length away, watching her, and that this had been the reason for Karen’s cold gaze. Then Sarah understood that it wasn’t just David sitting in David’s car, watching her, but David and the new girl who rode in the passenger seat. English Lilly, ambient gossip reported. David and Lilly sat quietly watching Sarah smote by the thought of David’s car, unable to even look at it—Sarah wheeled on them, her lips compressed in scorn. The car was empty. As if she’d meant to all along, Sarah pulled the door to David’s car open and slipped inside. He never locked it; locking it would suggest that he might care about it. The car, once so clean and new-smelling, was now a squalid vessel for abuse. The passenger seat and footwell were heaped with books and refuse, empty bottles, empty cigarette packs, the twisted wraiths of soiled cotton T-shirts. The pull-out ashtray overflowed and propagated smears of gray, foul ash in every direction. The car phone lay strangled in its cord, its light-up buttons extinguished. Until recently, Sarah knew, that phone had worked. David had boasted so much about it, handing out the number to so many people, even Sarah had learned what it was. It had been a schoolwide pastime to call David’s car. The phone appeared to have been beaten to death perhaps against the cracked dashboard. The one time Sarah rode in the car, its interior hadn’t even been marked by a boy’s carelessness. Now it overflowed with a grown man’s despair. Sarah reached for the seat lever and lowered the seat all the way, and herself. The hushed night disappeared from view and she saw only the interior skin of this filthy armor of the boy she had loved.
Her face pressed into one of the leather seat’s stitched crevices, she crushed her fist in the vise of her thighs, the car so vibrating with her lust, or her grief, its movement should have been visible from the outside. But, “Sarah?” called Liam’s slightly too high-pitched voice, trailing off forlornly. He would be somewhere near the front of the house, seeing Karen’s gaping convertible, top down and obviously empty, and David’s car, also apparently empty. Surely he would not cross the lawn to make sure Sarah wasn’t crushing her clitoris over a white-knuckled fist in the passenger seat of her ex-boyfriend’s car, in the hope of the sort of orgasm that feels like one’s pleasure torn out by the root: a punishment for the pleasure as well as a final end of it.
Still Sarah froze, heart racing in her chest, skull, and crotch. The scent of her lonely exertion wound into the car like an unwilled and shameful secretion, fear’s trickle of urine or mystery’s trickle of blood from the nose.
He didn’t call her name again. A muffled sound, perhaps the door closing again, and then silence. David’s car’s clock said 7:42. When it said 7:48 Sarah raised the seat back to its previous position and left the car as if leaving the scene of a crime.
Mr. Kingsley’s front door was unlocked. No Liam or anyone else stood in Mr. Kingsley’s foyer, with its terra-cotta tiles and its bizarre human-size doll that was supposed to be called a “soft sculpture” and its rusty Mobil sign, with a winged horse, ostentatiously hung underneath its own spotlight. Quickly Sarah took the front stairs to the second-floor hall, the plushly carpeted one lined with posters and photos; she locked herself into the bathroom, washed her hands and her face, and redid her eyeliner and lipstick. When she came out again, there was Liam at the end of the hall, standing in an attitude of indecision. He seemed to be slightly tipped forward, hands dangling at his sides, wrists too long for the sleeves. This impression of infirmity passed when he saw her, and once again he looked handsome and young and his striking eyes flashed with charisma.
“You’re mysterious, aren’t you!”
“I went to buy smokes,” she lied.
The smile remained on Liam’s face but now it had been there too long. He was acting, she realized, and wanting direction but not getting it. This was the strange quality that hung around his handsomeness, a blur or a warp where he seemed to be lagging behind his own actions and wondering how they had gone.
“Isn’t this house crazy?” she offered.
His gratitude seemed to cohere him. “It’s a bloody fucking castle, isn’t it! Let’s hide—I hear the others.” Grabbing her hand he hauled her up the steep attic stairs—half serious, as if their lives depended on it, half ridiculous, as if “let’s hide” were an improv they’d just been assigned. The gleamingly beautiful attic room Sarah remembered from the night she’d discovered Manuel was now as squalid as—what? It took her a moment to understand the famil iarity of the squalor. The room was as squalid as David’s car which she had just left. The stately expanse of the varnished floor, the expensive charm of the low-angled ceiling and dormers, were made unrecognizable by trailing heaps of pungent laundry, scudding piles of takeout garbage, countless fallen soldiers of the armies of Miller and Coors. Retaining her hand Liam pulled her through the cluttered filth with no more compunction than a goat would show crossing its native terrain. Then they were standing at the window on the far side of the room next to one of the beds. Letting go her hand, Liam opened the window with exaggerated care, making almost no sound, and cupped a hand by his ear to indicate that they were eavesdropping. A murmur of voices entered with the damp evening air: composite talk and laughter, muffled by distance and leaves. A party concealed in the manicured jungle of Mr. Kingsley’s backyard. From the height of the attic the party’s constituent parts, its outlines, its individual words were as impossible to parse as were the individual leaves of all the shrubs and trees that loosely filled the air outside the window like a mound of black feathers. Peering out Sarah could see, here and there, bright glints from the small outdoor lights. They disappeared, then flashed again, whether from the movement of the breeze through the leaves, or from the movements of people, she didn’t know. And then David’s voice reached her, as clearly as if he and not Liam were standing beside her. David’s low, sardonic voice made some sort of wisecrack, was answered by jagged laughter. In the instant of hearing his voice Sarah’s chest seemed to fill with the same feathered darkness into which she was gazing: a mass crushing and weightless of pain and desire. Across that distance she hadn’t deciphered the words he had spoken, yet it took her an instant to realize she hadn’t; his voice by itself seemed so sharp she had almost flinched from it.