Trust Exercise(5)

Strange, appropriate disruptions and traumas foretold summer’s end. Hurricane Clem crawled toward them from the Caribbean, turning his wheel on the nightly newscast. Sarah’s mother took her week’s vacation, and sat home regarding Sarah with weary suspicion and making her put masking-tape X’s on the windows and fill up the spare water jugs. Sarah only got away by claiming she needed to use the library, on the campus of the college very near David’s house. She and David got themselves dropped off far apart from each other and both mistakenly far from the library, and even once they had found each other, felt somehow misused. They walked in the dizzying heat, end to end of the summer-struck campus, hopelessly looking for somewhere to be, too hot and upset to link hands. Periodically, a grounds worker in a golf cart piled with tarps and sandbags would drive past and throw them a look. There were no college students on campus. The whole campus including the library was closed. Crossing an ocean of parking-lot asphalt they came upon the football stadium, like a ruin of Rome standing silent and bleached in the heat. They squeezed through a bent scissor gate. Behind a snack bar, at the base of a popcorn machine, on a pair of flattened boxes that smelled of stale grease, Sarah let David fuck her, her mouth crushed in his ear, her legs looping his waist, her hands struggling to hold his sweat-slippery back. His rhythmically agonized exhalations scorched the side of her neck when he came. For the first time she didn’t, and felt an aloneness. They hunched away from each other to get dressed again. David didn’t brush off the bits of junk stuck to her legs, or make some comment that let Sarah feel it was all right to laugh. David, fighting with the laces of his sneakers, wished he hadn’t come without her. He wished he hadn’t felt her so rigid beneath him on a bed of cardboard. It had been very different from the times in her apartment when they’d had all her bed and her carpeted floor and the hallway and even the living room couch and armchair across which to spread their desire, when they sometimes would surface as if from a dream, and laugh to find themselves in a new room, and he’d touched every inch of her skin with his lips, and pushed his tongue in her cunt, and seized hold of her hands when she bucked and cried out, both of them startled and thrilled by her pleasure.

After dressing, they walked off the campus, having wound up so close to its edge, and found they were at the same plaza where Sarah’s French bakery was. In a store Sarah liked, David watched her try on jewelry, weird handcrafted stuff made with unpolished rocks. When Sarah’s mother’s Toyota appeared outside the shop window, Sarah rushed away without letting him kiss her in front of the clerk. David stayed longer, and left with a ribbon-tied box.



* * *



REMEMBER THE IMPOSSIBLE eventfulness of time, transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days. Theirs were endless; lives flowered and died between waking and noon. Hurricane Clem made landfall, and turned the boulevard David had crossed at midsummer into a raging brown river that sucked cars from the curbs and turned trees upside down. The first day of school was delayed for a week, confirming their suspicion that a lifetime, not a summer, had passed. They couldn’t possibly still be fifteen. They took the natural ambition, at that age, to shock the peer group with a summer metamorphosis to greater extremes, being actors. Chantal returned to school with an Afro. Norbert tried, with uncertain success, to conceal himself under a beard. The most passionate female friendships had somehow expired. Sarah did not know why, as she came back through the doors to the Black Box, her whole body grew rigid when Joelle Cruz came shrieking her way. The previous spring she had practically lived with Joelle. Joelle had an older sister, Martine, at the school, and Sarah had spent fewer nights at home than with Joelle, in the back seat of Martine’s grimy car, as they drove around in quest of liquor, or drugs, or a bouncer who’d fall for their cheap fake IDs. Joelle had introduced Sarah to coke, Rocky Horror, and wearing ballet flats with jeans; now her very flesh repulsed Sarah. It was too damp and pink. Sarah could smell Joelle’s pits. Sarah felt that she did nothing different; she only was different. She didn’t blow Joelle off. She didn’t speak coldly to her. But no; she had changed. She was not Joelle’s friend anymore. It felt so ordained, so engrained in the utterly new circumstances of sophomore year she was sure Joelle knew it as well, even willed it, perhaps, an overt act to which Sarah only responded.

But Joelle’s irrelevance was irrelevant to Sarah, even as Joelle stood there talking to her. Everything was irrelevant to Sarah apart from David. She imagined his acknowledgment flashing toward her like a mirror. She and David had traveled so far ahead, just the two of them; they’d disappeared past a horizon, discarding their school selves behind. If they kept the shucked skins it was just for the sake of disguise. For Sarah it went without saying that their summer would be their secret, like a Mount Olympus (had she known what this was at the time) where they whispered together like gods. She had not even thought to explain this to David. She assumed that he already knew.

David burst into the Black Box not as a winking mirror but a spotlight, bearing down bright and hot, and swinging his arms in a slightly hitched way. He was hiding something he exposed by his very attempt to conceal it, flanked by a dozen of their classmates who clung to his charisma like lint. Sarah found herself holding a tiny gift box with a bow while they all stared at her.

Colin crowed, “David’s gonna get down on one knee!”