“I never did that for any boy,” she said against his shoulder. “That’s the first time I ever touched… you know. I did it because I wanted to. Because I wanted to, that’s all.”
“Then what is it?”
“I can’t… here.” The words came out slowly and painfully, one at a time, with an almost awful reluctance.
“The Embankment?” Arnie said. gazing around, thinking stupidly that maybe she thought he had really brought them up here so they would watch F.I.S.T free.
“In this car!” she shouted at him suddenly. “I can’t make love to you in this car!”
“Huh?” He stared at her, thunderstruck. “What are you talking about? Why not?”
“Because. because… I don’t know!” She struggled to say something else and then burst into fresh tears. Arnie held her again until she quieted.
“It’s just that I don’t know which you love more,” Leigh said when she was able.
“That’s… “Arnie paused, shook his head, smiled. “Leigh, that’s crazy.”
“Is it?” she asked, searching his face. “Which of us do you spend more time with? Me… or her?”
“You mean Christine?” He looked around him, smiling that puzzled smile that she could find either lovely and lovable or horridly hateful—sometimes both at once.
“Yes,” she said tonelessly. “I do.” She looked down at her hands, lying lifelessly on her blue woollen slacks. “I suppose it’s stupid.”
“I spend a lot more time with you,” Arnie said. He shook his head. “This is crazy. Or maybe it’s normal— maybe it just seems crazy to me because I never had a girl before.” He reached out and touched the fall of her hair where it spilled over one shoulder of her open coat. The T-shirt beneath read GIVE ME LIBERTYVILLE OR GIVE ME DEATH, and her nipples poked at the thin cotton cloth in a sexy way that made Arnie feel a little delirious.
“I thought girls were supposed to be jealous of other girls. Not cars.”
Leigh laughed shortly. “You’re right. It must be because you’ve never had a girl before. Cars are girls. Didn’t you know that?”
“Oh, come, on—”
“Then why don’t you call this Christopher?” And she suddenly slammed her open palm down on the seat, hard. Arnie winced.
“Come on, Leigh. Don’t.”
“Don’t like me slapping your girl? she asked with sudden and unexpected venom. Then she saw the hurt look in his eyes. “Arnie, I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” he asked, looking at her expressionlessly. “Seems like nobody likes my car these days—you, my dad and mom, even Dennis. I worked my ass off on it, and it means zero to everybody.”
“It means something to me,” she said softly. “The effort it took.”
“Yeah,” he said morosely. The passion, the heat, had fled. He felt cold and a little sick to his stomach. “Look, we better get going. I don’t have any snow tyres. Your folks’d think it was cute, us going bowling and then getting racked up on Stanson Road.”
She giggled. “They don’t know where Stanson Road ends up.
He cocked an eyebrow at her, some of his good humour returning. “That’s what you think,” he said.
He drove back down toward town slowly, and Christine managed the twisting, steeply descending road with easy surefootedness. The sprinkle of earth-stars that was Libertyville and Monroeville grew larger and drew closer together and then ceased to have any pattern at all. Leigh watched this a little sadly, feeling that the best part of potentially wondei7ful evening had somehow slipped away. She felt irritated, chafed, out of sorts with herself— unfulfilled, she supposed. There was a dull ache in her breasts. She didn’t know if she had meant to let him go what was euphemistically known as “all the way” or not, but after things had reached a certain point, nothing had gone as she had hoped… all because she had to open her big fat mouth.
Her body was in a mess, and her thoughts were the same way. Again and again on the mostly silent drive back down she opened her mouth to try to clarify how she felt… and then closed it again, afraid of being misunderstood, because she didn’t understand how she felt herself.
She didn’t feel jealous of Christine… and yet she did. About that Arnie hadn’t told the truth. She had a good idea of how much time he spent tinkering on the car, but was that so wrong? He was good with his hands, he liked to work on it, and it ran like a watch… except for that funny little glitch with the milometer numbers running backward.
Cars are girls, she had said. She hadn’t been thinking of what she was saying; it had just popped out of her mouth. And it certainly wasn’t always true; she didn’t think of their family sedan as having any particular gender; it was just a Ford.
But—
Forget it, jet rid of all the hocus-pocus and phony stuff. The truth was much more brutal and even crazier, wasn’t it? She couldn’t make love to him, couldn’t touch him in that intimate way, much less think about bringing him to a climax that way (or the other, the real way—she had turned that over and over in her mind as she lay in her narrow bed, feeling a new and nearly amazing excitement steal over her), in the car.
Not in the car.
Because the realty crazy part was that she felt Christine was watching them. That she was jealous, disapproving, maybe hating. Because there were times (like tonight, as Arnie skated the Plymouth so smoothly and delicately across the building scales of sleet) when she felt that the two of them—Arnie and Christine—were welded together in a disturbing parody of the-act of love. Because Leigh did not feel that she rode in Christine; when she got in to go somewhere with Arnie she felt swallowed in Christine. And the act of kissing him, making love to him, seemed a perversion worse than voyeurism or exhibitionism—it was like making love inside the body of her rival.
The really crazy part of it was that she hated Christine.
Hated her and feared her. She had developed a vague dislike of walking in front of the new grille, or closely behind the boot; she had vague thoughts of the emergency brake letting go or the gearstick popping out of park and into neutral for some reason. Thoughts she had never had about the family sedan.
But mostly it was not wanting to do anything in the car… or even go anywhere in the car, if she could help it. Arnie seemed somehow different in the car, a person she didn’t really know. She loved the feel of his hands on her body—her breasts, her thighs (she had not yet allowed him to touch the centre of her, but she wanted his hands there; she thought if he touched her there she would probably just melt). His touch always brought a coppery taste of excitement to her mouth, a feeling that every sense was alive and deliciously attuned. But in the car that feeling seemed blunted… maybe because in the car Arnie seemed less honestly passionate and somehow more lecherous.
She opened her mouth again as they turned onto her street, wanting to explain some of this, and again nothing would come. Why should it? There was really nothing to explain—it was all vapours. Nothing but vague burnouts.
Well… there was one thing. But she couldn’t tell him that; it would hurt him too badly. She didn’t want to hurt him because she thought she was beginning to love him.
But it was there.
The smell—a rotten, thick smell under the aromas of new seat covers and the cleaning fluid he had used on the floormats. It was there, faint but terribly unpleasant. Almost stomach-turning.
As if, at some time, something had crawled into the car and died there.
He kissed her good night on her doorstep, the sleet shining silver in the cone of yellow light thrown by the carriage lamp at the foot of the porch steps. It shone in her dark blond hair like jewels. He would have liked to have really kissed her, but the fact that her parents might be watching from the living room—probably were, in fact—forced him to kiss her almost formally, as you might kiss a dear cousin.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was silly.”
“No,” Arnie said, obviously meaning yes.
“It’s just that'—and her mind supplied her with something that was a curious hybrid of the truth and a lie —'that it doesn’t seem right in the car. Any car. I want us to be together, but not parked in the dark at the end of a dead-end road. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said. Up at the Embankment, in the car, he had felt a little angry with her… well, to be honest, he
