Chapter 45
Forty-Five
The others scattered after finals, leaving Gwen and Arthur to each other.
Van and Donna went back to the panhandle to work for their father, Van at the old man’s newspaper, Donna at his TV station.
Van caught the thankless job of covering local town meetings, sitting in stuffy hearing rooms while selectmen debated budget
amendments and sewage repair. Donna interned with makeup for a while, but by the middle of the summer was sometimes doing
on-camera fluff pieces on slow nights: a local family offering children rides on their pet ostrich, an elderly woman who would
clean houses topless for twenty dollars an hour.
It peeves me something good to know my sister is going to get famous before I do, Van wrote Arthur.
Just because she has tits and no shame. The thing holding me back right now is my general lack of a work ethic and any discernible
talents. My poor prospects for the future have left me depressed. My gloom has driven me to the bottle. I’m drunk most days
by lunch. Fortunately I’m a high-functioning drunk. Shit. I guess that’s my talent. How do you like that, old son?
Donna wrote Arthur too.
I’m hoping Van will pull out of it before Allie comes to visit for July 4th.
He smells like feet and has started chewing tobacco and getting brown spittle on his shirt.
Also he’s learned how to play the A chord on the guitar and he sits at the dinner table playing it over and over and staring at everyone with bloodshot eyes.
If it keeps up, I’m going to garrote him with a guitar string.
Oh, I had my third TV spot yesterday! I wore a light summery emerald top and didn’t realize the lighting made it as transparent as green cling wrap, so basically I did a live report in my bra. I looked damn good though.
Allie sent postcards from Martha’s Vineyard, Rome, Houston, and Panama City, where she stayed with the McBrides for two weeks
in July. Her cards usually contained at least one interesting statistical observation.
I have told Van I will consider a kiss (w/tongue) if he can give up chewing tobacco, he has cut his usage by 70% in three
days, so I am getting my tonsils ready.
And:
Donna and I are shopping for miniskirts that are 30% shorter, she has noted a correlation between hem length and invitations
to appear onscreen. This is a foul, fallen world, isn’t it? On the other hand, she has SUCH great legs it is a shame to hide
them.
And:
I can’t believe you won’t be in Maine this fall, I am going to miss you 100% of the time.
She was returning in the fall for her junior year; Donna and Van would be back at Rackham as seniors. Only Colin and Arthur
had graduated.
Colin also left Maine behind for the summer, after he concluded his grandfather wasn’t going to die on him in the next few months.
He took a ten-week internship in New York City with a company called America Online.
People who signed up could send letters electronically.
They were called emails and they were delivered instantly, anywhere in the world, for free.
You would’ve received this letter days ago if you had a computer, you beautiful, silly luddite, Colin wrote him. They’re learning how to play chess, you know—the computers. Someday they’ll be even better at thrashing you than I am.
Gwen read that letter aloud to Arthur while they were in his bed together, the windows open so the cross-breeze cooled the
sweat on their bare bodies. She laughed and said, “Colin Wren is the sort of patient, reasonable scientist who invents teleportation
and accidentally turns himself into a big fly.”
His ground-floor apartment, a few blocks from Rackham, had no air-conditioning, and that summer it was oppressively hot inside—a
humid, smothering swelter that made the idea of wearing clothes ridiculous. He had never imagined he could adore another human
body as much as he adored Gwen’s, as much as he adored the slope of her hip and the dimples in the small of her back and her
sweet little round tum. They had eight weeks that summer, both of them boiling for each other in his bedroom, the smell of
hot blacktop and fresh-cut grass seeping in around the drapes, from the open windows. The slight airlessness of the place
made orgasms keener—when Arthur first read about autoerotic asphyxiation, he got it right away, because that summer it was
sometimes hard to breathe, it was so hot in his little bedroom.
Every life has to have a best part, and later he understood that was his. They spent a long weekend in Vermont, helping his
mother move out of the halfway house and into a cottage in Montpelier, a one-floor, two-bedroom place with blue siding and
white trim, and roses growing in beds along the foundation. It was a forty-five-minute drive from Black Cricket, and fifteen
minutes from an Episcopalian retreat where Erin would offer workshops on counseling the incarcerated.
There were skylights in Erin’s bedroom. The ex-convict stood on her bed and opened them, then climbed out onto the roof.
She shouted for Arthur to get the iced tea.
All three of them finished the day sprawled on the hot tar paper shingles of the roof, beneath a cloudless, intensely blue sky.
The White Mountains were mounded up on the horizon, so pale, so faded, they were like ghosts of mountains.
Arthur sat up on his elbows, ice clinking softly in his glass, and looked sidelong, over Gwen, at his mother, who was flat on her back, eyes shut.
“How do you feel?” he asked her.
“I’ve had ten thousand showers since I got out of Black Cricket,” Erin said, “but this is the first time I’ve felt like I
washed it off me. Turns out I didn’t need a shower. I just needed this sun.”
They shared a bottle of pinot grigio that night, the wine so bright and clear, it was as if someone had distilled the afternoon
sunlight instead of grapes. They drank a little too much and laughed a little too hard and ate a homemade macaroni and cheese
that Gwen had brought from Maine. When Gwen’s hand stole into Arthur’s, Erin noticed, and she narrowed her eyes with pleasure
and gentle approval. Gwen and Arthur made love that night in the guest room with the curtains pushed back and the sky still
faintly glowing a pale shade of peach, the color of her prom dress—even at 10:00 p.m., the sun refused to entirely quit the
earth.
“I hate that it’s going to get dark and we have to go to sleep and tomorrow there’ll be one day less,” Arthur said.
“But tomorrow,” Gwen said, her lips close to his ear, “we also get one day more.”