Page 108 of Playworld

When I answered, itwasAmanda, who said, “Where have you been all summer?”

And then she asked me out.

It was her birthday, she explained, and she didn’t want to spend it alone. As if anticipating my question, she said, “Rob decided to go with some of his friends to the Cape this week.” There were two women from school he was close with, Andrea and Sophie, did I know them? When I told her only by sight, she said they were having a final precollege bash—Rob was off to Princeton in the fall. Which she reported in a tone somewhere between disappointment and resignation—they’d probably break up by summer’s end—a statement to which I simply listened. Registering her pain and determined to cheer her up, I said, “Well, more Amandafor me”—not, I realized, a bad line, which was confirmed when Amanda replied, “I amallyours.” Which made the blood hammer in my ears.

“How about dinner and a movie?” I suggested.

“Mom’s ordering in Chinese and making me a cake.”

“How about a movie after,” I said. And then my father spoke through me. “I hear the performances inEye of the Needleare exceptional.”

She agreed, and I told her I’d call her back with the time and place.

After we wrapped for the day, I went to see Alison in wardrobe. As I changed out of Peter Proton’s capri pants and suspenders, after I handed her the same pocket protector I’d worn for the past four years, I told her I had a big date tonight. She kept her eyes on her book. “Lucky you,” she said.

“I was wondering,” I said, and then paused again because I was afraid to ask, “if you might consider helping me pick out something to wear.”

She looked up and then blinked at me several times. She laid her book on her chest, lit a cigarette, then smiled and said, “Sure.” The hangers clacked on the poles of the wardrobe racks as she considered and rejected shirt after shirt. After holding a few of them up to my chest, she picked out a short-sleeved button-down—“This blue,” she said, “brings out your pretty eyes,” which no one except Naomi had ever told me were anything, much less pretty—black jeans and black Converses, neither of which I’d have ever chosen on my own. “Snappy,” Alison said, stepping back from me to get a good look, “but not trying too hard.” I surprised both of us by hugging her. It was overly enthusiastic, and she tensed up at first when I gathered her into the embrace, her arms out as if she were going to be frisked. I forgot, for a moment, that she was a grown-up and figured she must’ve forgotten too, because I was taller than her now, filled out from weight training with Vince; but then she uncoiled, relaxed, and became heavy. Settling, she pressed her ear to my shoulder and rocked ever so slightly, allowing me to feel, albeit briefly, the loneliness I now recognize she always seemed to carry. “You’re welcome,” she said.

Later that evening, standing before the cinema’s entrance, I spied Amanda as she emerged from the street’s comparative darkness into the theater awning’s lights. She had knotted a Clash T-shirt above her belly button, and she had rolled up the cuffs of a too-large gray blazer. Her hair was in a bow. She took a moment to appraise me, her eyebrowsraised ever so slightly, as if she did not recognize me or as if I had, in some way she could not quite pinpoint, become unfamiliar to her, and in me this elicited a feeling of auspiciousness about tonight’s possibilities that I feared to trust. It had been several weeks since we’d last seen each other, after all, and whatever difference she noticed went beyond the physical, seemed to put us on a different footing.

“Happy birthday,” I said, and produced the bowed present I’d bought her on the trip home from the studio.

She considered the small box. “Can I open it now?” she asked. She managed not to tear the wrapping, a trick every woman I knew could somehow manage, pulling the tape from the paper and then handing the latter back to me, as if it were failed origami. “L’Air du Temps!” she said. Then she hugged my neck with one arm and held me, so that her cheek pressed to mine, and comparing it with the one Alison and I had shared earlier, it was different in kind: if the former was a respite from isolation, this felt like an invitation—to what I was not sure. She removed the bottle from its packaging, unscrewed the ornate top—its fogged, abstract glass in the shape of a bird—then sprayed some perfume behind each ear; and when she lifted her chin for me to smell, I allowed myself to press my face into her soft hair, and she allowed me to remain thus poised long enough to enjoy it.

In the theater, when the lights went down, I kept my arm still on the rest we shared. I was so hyperalert to our elbows’ lightest touch I could have taken her pulse. Her nearness was so distracting the movie’s plot was mostly lost on me, her proximity something I dare not acknowledge, lest like some forest animal I might startle her and she bolt. And yet my stillness also freed her to move, to press her shoulder to mine before asking a question, to tap my wrist to signal I tilt the bucket of popcorn toward her, or to lay her fingers on my arm, so that I bent my ear to her lips, before making a comment. “They’re going tocrash,” she whispered of Kate Nelligan and the actor playing her husband as they drive down the narrow road on their wedding day. “She’s so lonely,” Amanda said, when, years later, Nelligan’s crippled husband rejects her advances in bed. “She’s inlovewith him,” she murmured of Donald Sutherland, the Nazi spy, when he accidentally opens Nelligan’s bathroom door and pauses at the sight of her naked in the mirror’s reflection. During the love scenes, I tried toswallow as quietly as was possible. And when, at the film’s conclusion, Sutherland is foiled, killed at Nelligan’s hand, his stolen intelligence will never make it to the German high command, and D-Day can successfully commence—when the credits rolled but before the lights came up and there was that feeling of release that made you want to clap or cry or sprint down the aisles, I sensed Amanda turn and then stare at my profile. She leaned over to kiss my cheek forcefully, gratefully, as if to confirm this had already been a lovely birthday, and then she waited. How many times have I time traveled back to that moment? Have I, on take after take, kissed her in return? Only to understand how ill-equipped I was then to accept a direct invitation, being so adept at seeing around people, at watching their true selves peek out from behind their masks, that I could not match such spontaneous ardor? Sing, Muse, of a boy’s lack of know-how.I’d been so trained in dissembling I didn’t simply distrust directness, I was paralyzed by it, no matter how blissed out I was, and did not dare turn to face her. At least not yet.

I took her to Baskin-Robbins afterward for ice cream. It was only a couple of blocks from her apartment. After we were served, we stood on the sidewalk, brightened by the store’s interior light, watching each other eat as if each other’s eating was to be studied. We finished our cones, and Amanda wrapped her arms around my waist and then leaned back, an embrace I copied, and we rocked from side to side, almost dancing. She was beaming; she bit her lower lip and swept her eyes across mine, and once again this attention—this outright affection—made me bashful. It was as impossible to believe as it was delightful, and in response to my hesitance she finally said, “Well?” and when I did not reply, she asked, “Are you going to watch the royal wedding tomorrow?”

Because of the time difference, it started at six a.m., she explained. She and her mother were going to set an alarm and have tea and English muffins with marmalade and not miss a minute of it. Amanda assured me it was going to be the most romantic thing ever. She was dying to see Diana’s dress, and when I asked what she wanted to do next, she demanded I come back to the apartment with her, even though her mother was home.

In Amanda’s room, I sat across from her, on her brother’s bed, the space between the frames narrow enough that our knees touched. Sheleaned over to place a forty-five on her small turntable and, once she lowered the needle, adjusted the volume so that it was loud enough that we could speak privately but low enough that we could still hear her mother in the living room.

Miss West was talking on her ham radio, and when she spoke into the microphone, the sound of her voice was clear and insistent and unimaginably friendly. She said, “Pointer-Cook-Seven-Zed-Zed, this is Patricia at Victor-Three-Five-Alpha-Bravo, calling from New York City, the Big Apple, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nice to make contact with you, Tucker, it’s a very strong signal, over.” The caller’s Australian accent was closer to a gurgled buzz. The man said, “Victor-Three-Five-Alpha-Bravo, I’m coming to you at twenty meters. Your signal’s very strong too, Patricia. Tell me all about your fine summer weather, please, because we’re smack dab in the middle of winter here in Melbourne, over.”

Amanda leaned back on her bed, propped on her elbows, listening. She swayed her knees side to side, which in turn swiveled mine. She asked me what the rest of my summer looked like. I said I was doingThe Nuclear Family,it was six-to-six Monday through Friday, though I might get a Wednesday or Thursday off here and there, sometimes even a three-day weekend if I was lucky. She said, “I’m going to my father’s house in Westhampton next week and then staying for most of August. You should come visit. When you have a break.”

“I will,” I said, astounded at the invitation, already dreaming on it, and just as we noticed the music had stopped—that the needle was sounding the dead wax—it occurred to us Miss West had also gone silent, and she appeared at Amanda’s door. She wore a consternated expression, so we both sat up straight. She asked Amanda, “Have you seen my screwdriver?”

When Amanda replied, “No, why?” Miss West said, “I have a transistor I need to replace and can’t remove the radio’s panel without a Phillips head.”

“It’s not in the junk drawer?”

Miss West shook her head. “Are you sure you haven’t misplaced it?”

“Swear to God, hope to die,” Amanda said.

Her mother squinted and then shot me a look of annoyance, a triangulated lie detector test: Was I an accomplice? When she disappeared,Amanda placed her index finger to her lips, then got up and walked over to her bookcase. She took from its top shelf a tiny toy safe and sat down again, facing its combination lock toward me. I could see that its metal door was damaged, like a swollen lip, bent outward from where the lock’s wheel engaged. She reached in and removed the broken tool her mother sought, its small red handle bright as blood, the shank sheared off where she’d clearly snapped it trying to pry open the safe’s door. Grimacing, mock guilty, she placed both pieces back in the safe.

Miss West reappeared from the kitchen, holding a very long letter opener, and said, “Not a clue?” And when Amanda shook her head again, Miss West glanced at me and asked, “Don’t you have to go soon?” to which I replied, “At eleven,” and Miss West said, “It’s ten after,” and I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and then she disappeared once more.

I stood, but Amanda remained seated, watching me rise to go. She placed her safe near her pillow. She said, “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

“It was my pleasure,” I said, and did not move.

Amanda’s eyes scanned mine. Her expression I would best describe as suspicious—in fact it closely resembled her mother’s, as if I too were keeping a secret from her that she was waiting for me to divulge. Iknewwhat this was now, and even though I was still assailed by doubt there was nothing else to do. I bent toward her, resting my hands on my knees so that our faces were within inches of each other’s, and mustering all my courage said, “I’m going to kiss you goodbye.” To which Amanda replied, “Okay.”

And then I leaned in and kissed her. It was barely more than a peck on her mouth, dry and quick, and afterward I withdrew ever so slightly. I could not at first gauge her reaction because I remained so close to her, but she didn’t move. I saw that her eyes were closed, that she was waiting, so I kissed her again. It was awkward, fearful, and unassertive, my lips resting against hers inertly until, moving mine as she spoke, she said, “You can keep going, you know.” And trying and failing to be cool, I said, “I can?” And she said, “Yes,” thesall smooshed between us. I tilted my head and she tilted hers. Her lips parted ever so slightly and, before they touched, so did mine. At first the pressure was so gentle that I could feel the soft down above her top lip. As we kissed each other, her tongue’s tip pressed delicately toward mine. We parted, and I sat on the bed next toher and was about to kiss her, I imagined, forforever,when from the living room there came an agonized scream.