Hearts in Atlantis(99)

'Hey, Pete, eat more Maine beans,' Carol said, and laughed.

'Yeah.' I lit my cigarette. Then, without thinking about it much one way or the other, I said: 'There's a couple of Bogart movies playing at Hauck tonight. They start at seven. We've got time to walk over. Want to go?'

She smoked, not answering me for a moment, but she was still smiling and I knew she was going to say yes. Earlier, all I'd wanted was to get back to the third-floor lounge and play Hearts. Now that I was away from the game, however, the game seemed a lot less important. Had I been hot enough to say something about beating the snot out of Ronnie Malenfant? It seemed I had - the memory was clear enough - but standing out here in the cool air with Carol, it was hard for me to understand why.

'I've got a boyfriend back home,' she said at last.

'Is that a no?'

She shook her head, still with the little smile. The smoke from her cigarette drifted across her face. Her hair, free of the net the girls had to wear on the dishline, blew lightly across her brow. 'That's information. Remember that show The Prisoner? "Number Six, we want . . . information."'

'I've got a girlfriend back home,' I said. 'More information.'

'I've got another job, tutoring math. I promised to spend an hour tonight with this girl on the second floor. Calculus. Ag. She's hopeless and she whines, but it's six dollars an hour.' Carol laughed. 'This is getting good, we're exchanging information like mad.'

'It doesn't look good for Bogie, though,' I said. I wasn't worried. I knew we were going to see Bogie. I think I also knew there was romance in our future. It gave me an oddly light feeling, a lifting-off sensation in my midsection.

'I could call Esther from Hauck and tell her calc at ten o'clock instead of nine,' Carol said. 'Esther's a sad case. She never goes out. What she does mostly is sit around with her hair in curlers and write letters home about how hard college is. We could see the first movie, at least.'

'That sounds good,' I said.

We started walking toward Hauck. Those were the days, all right; you didn't have to hire a babysitter, put out the dog, feed the cat, or set the burglar alarm. You just went.

'Is this like a date?' she asked after a little bit.

'Well,' I said, 'I guess it could be.' We were walking past East Annex by then, and other kids were filling up the paths, heading toward the auditorium.

'Good,' she said, 'because I left my purse back in my room. I can't go dutch.'

'Don't worry, I'm rich. Won big playing cards today.'

'Poker?'

'Hearts. Do you know it?'

'Are you kidding? I spent three weeks at Camp Winiwinaia on Lake George the summer I was twelve. YMCA camp - poor kids' camp, my mom called it. It rained practically every day and all we did was play Hearts and hunt The Bitch.' Her eyes had gone far away, the way people's eyes do when they trip over some memory like a shoe in the dark. 'Find the lady in black. Cherchez la femme noire.'

'That's the game, all right,' I said, knowing that for a moment I wasn't there for her at all. Then she came back, gave me a grin, and took her cigarettes out of her jeans pocket. We smoked a lot back then. All of us. Back then you could smoke in hospital waiting rooms. I told my daughter that and at first she didn't believe me.

I took out my own cigarettes and lit us both. It was a good moment, the two of us looking at each other in the Zippo's flame. Not as sweet as a kiss, but nice. I felt that lightness inside me again, that sense of lifting off. Sometimes your view widens and grows hopeful. Sometimes you think you can see around corners, and maybe you can. Those are good moments. I snapped my lighter shut and we walked on, smoking, the backs of our hands close but not quite brushing.

'How much money are we talking about?' she asked. 'Enough to run away to California on, or maybe not quite that much?'

'Nine dollars.'

She laughed and took my hand. 'It's a date, all right,' she said. 'You can buy me popcorn, too.'

'All right. Do you care which movie plays first?'

She shook her head. 'Bogie's Bogie.'

'That's true,' I said, but I hoped it would be The Maltese Falcon.

It was. Halfway through it, while Peter Lorre was doing his rather ominous g*y turn and Bogie was gazing at him with polite, amused incredulity, I looked at Carol. She was looking at me. I bent and kissed her popcorn-buttery mouth by the black-and-white moonlight of John Huston's inspired first film. Her lips were sweet and responsive. I pulled back a little. She was still looking at me. The little smile was back. Then she offered me her bag of popcorn, I reciprocated with my box of Dots, and we watched the rest of the movie.

11

Walking back to the Chamberlain-King-Franklin complex of dorms, I took her hand almost without thinking about it. She curled her fingers through mine naturally enough, but I thought I could feel a reserve now.

'Are you going to go back for The Caine Mutiny?' she asked. 'You could, if you've still got your ticket stub. Or I could give you mine.'

'Nah, I've got geology to study.'

'Bet you wind up playing cards all night instead.'

'I can't afford to,' I said. And I meant it; I meant to go back and study. I really did.