I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying
The closest I came, straining to sound casual, was “It turns out it was pretty valuable.”
“That’s wonderful,” she said vaguely. “Alice, I was having some trouble with hornworms feeding on the tomatoes, and Mrs. Falke told me to plant marigolds, and they’ve worked beautifully. Mrs. Falke’s very modest, but she has quite a green thumb.”
I closed my eyes, and briefly, the house on McKinley, the porch and the window seats and the secret cupboard, appeared in my mind, but then I opened my eyes, and my mother was pulling weeds from the soil, my steadfast and kindhearted mother in her white terry-cloth hat, and the house went away. The check was for seventy-one hundred dollars—a great deal less than my mother had given to Pete Imhof, and exactly the amount I’d have put toward a down payment.
IT WAS AFTER
midnight by the time Charlie and I left the Terrace. His friends, it turned out, were a lot like the crowd at the Hickens’ barbecue, and in fact there was some overlap: Will Werden, who was Frank Werden’s first cousin, was there with his wife, Gayle, and as soon as Charlie introduced me to everyone two of the other women and I realized we’d met a few years before at a baby shower. Ten of us were there in total, all couples, and the other couples all were married except for Charlie’s stockbroker friend Howard and his girlfriend, Petal, a twenty-one-year-old who’d graduated from the university two months before. “How long ago do you think she made
name up?” one of the baby-shower women—her own name was Anne—whispered to me, rolling her eyes. “We don’t know where Howard gets them.” This was an extension of friendship on Anne’s part that I gratefully accepted, though later, I talked to Petal (it wasn’t her fault that she was a decade younger than the rest of us), and she was perfectly intelligent; she’d double-majored in art history and Italian. At the end of the night, Anne pulled me aside and said, “Charlie is
with you.” I laughed, because it was easier than saying anything. Even Will Werden nudged me at one point and said, “I didn’t know you and Blackwell there were an item.” Again,I only smiled.
There’d been a bit of shifting over the course of the night, people getting up to use the restroom or the parents in the group checking in by pay phone with their babysitters, but most of the time Charlie and I had sat side by side, and even when we were both talking to other people, I felt his attention: his hand on my knee or at the small of my back, the quickness with which he’d turn if I said his name or tapped his arm. Every so often he’d lean in and say, “You okay?” Or “Hanging in there?” It was probably seventy degrees, a perfect summer night, and Lake Mendota was mostly blackness with a few wavering reflected lights.
And then we were bidding everyone goodbye—another couple left at the same time we did—and as we walked around Memorial Union to where Charlie had parked on Gilman Street, he took my hand. As if our fingers were acting independently of us, down there far below the conversation, we adjusted them so they were interlocked. “Your friends are nice,” I said.
We reached Charlie’s car, a gray Chevy Nova hatchback, and I said, “How about if I drive?” I had carefully nursed one glass of beer.
Charlie passed me the keys, and as I was turning on the ignition, he said, “Look over here.” When I did, he leaned forward and kissed me. Then he said, “I’ve been wanting to do that all night.” I turned the ignition back off, tilting my head toward his, and we kissed some more, we wrapped our arms around each other, and I was happy that we were alone, just us, holding each other tight. It wasn’t that I hadn’t enjoyed being on the Terrace—I had— but suddenly, it was as if all the talk had been the part we had to get through in order to arrive at this reward.
Charlie pulled back an inch. “So I haven’t forgotten about what I owe you. Let’s go to my place.”
Confused, I said, “You don’t owe me anything.” And then I understood—he was grinning—and I said, “Oh, that.”
“I’m not taking no for an answer. You’ve got to claim what’s rightfully yours.”
And even though, as I drove, I felt stirrings of nervous anticipation, I also wanted to just stay forever in this limbo; I’d have been content to drive all the way to Canada, knowing that something wonderful would happen when we got there.
It was the first time I’d been to Charlie’s apartment, and what I noticed immediately was that he’d left nearly all his lights on. His place was both smaller and less furnished than mine, and the living room seemed mostly like a repository for sports equipment: a brown leather bag of golf clubs leaning against one wall and, in a messy pile, a baseball bat, gloves, tennis racquets, a soccer ball, and the first lacrosse stick I’d ever seen. There was a large television set, a sizable stereo, a black bean bag, and a French baroque sofa complete with cabriole legs and covered in burgundy mohair. (I would learn that he’d acquired the sofa by raiding his parents’ basement in Milwaukee, which was where his paternal grandmother’s belongings had been stored untouched since her death seventeen years before.) Nothing hung on the walls, and a five-ledge bookshelf had two empty ledges. Of the remaining three, one contained books, one contained gewgaws, and one contained photos in frames: his father in a tuxedo and his mother in a sparkly red gown, looking into each other’s eyes; Charlie and three men I assumed to be his brothers, standing in a row in blazers; him and another guy in plaid jackets, crouched over the body of a dead buck with blood trickling from its mouth, Charlie grinning as the other man bent his head to kiss the buck’s antlers; Charlie at twenty or twenty-one clutching a
BLACKWELL FOR PRESIDENT
sign. On the next ledge, the one holding books, were a dictionary, a biography of Willie Mays, best-sellers such as Peter Benchley’s
and, yes,
and a smattering of the sort of titles one reads in undergraduate literature courses:
