Chapter 4
‘I’ve been thinking about whether long-lasting change can happen without revolution. Have some Turkish Delight,’ Wilder had said to her the previous night.
‘No, thank you, Mr Wilder.’ Alice slid the plump, rosy square back across the desk toward him; it left a line of icing sugar, a sugar-snail trail.
‘Go on. My publisher sends them to me. His driver buys them for me in Queens. He knows I love the stuff. Taste it. Cardamom and rose. Sweet as anything.’ He took a bite, his eyes rolling. ‘Taste it.’
She laughed, enchanted despite herself, as he rolled his tongue around the candy, brushing sugar off his chin.
‘You see?’ he said. ‘Delicious.’ As Wilder swivelled back around to face his desk, she snatched up a piece and took a small bite, swiftly swallowing the toffee-like sweet jelly.
She didn’t want him to see her taking pleasure in it.
At first, he had offered her candy, little treats, and she had taken them eagerly, for during those initial months she had wanted to please him, to give up good information, to be worth the exchange. But, about a year in, something had changed.
Perhaps it was the general senior year mood; perhaps it was the war; perhaps it was Alice herself.
She had quickly grown tired of going to the house every week, tired of lying to her mom about college – she had no idea how they’d pay for it, and she knew she wasn’t smart enough, not now.
Since Bob’s death mud seemed to have silted up her brain, and – though she grew taller and filled out her clothes, and her mom was kind of more cheerful while making no notable plans for the future, and boys asked her out and she even said yes sometimes, sitting in movie houses and Mackie’s with other seniors she didn’t care for – she was tired of it all.
She was truly relaxed only with Dolores.
So coming to Valhalla to talk to Wilder Kynaston – to watch him sometimes gaze into the distance if something bored him, sometimes write intently if what she delivered was good – was a slow, degrading kind of march into soullessness, and still no one, apart from Dolores, knew.
The candy stuck in her mouth, the sweetness cloying but delicious.
He glanced up at her again. ‘Let’s begin. Sit down, if you can fit yourself into the chair – you look like Cinderella in that skirt.’
‘Okay. Thanks.’ Lately she had moved away a little from the neat pinafore-and-loafers, early Dusty look and taken to wearing long, floral fabrics, skirts that skimmed her ankles that she bought at the thrift store or found at a church sale.
She was coming up for eighteen, self-conscious about her height, and somehow long skirts seemed the best way to hide – everything.
Her mother hated them – out of all proportion, Alice thought.
Betsy dared not say the ‘h’ word (‘hippie’), for to say it might conjure up something demonic, so she settled for ‘drifter’.
(That morning at breakfast: ‘You’re dressed like a drifter. A – a folk singer with a guitar.’)
‘What’s new today?’ Wilder said. ‘Oh, by the way, I saw Elizabeth Finkelstein; she’s my cousin, you know. She said there were four seniors now who’ve dropped out.’
‘Five, if you count Tag Martin. He didn’t exactly drop out, though.’
‘What happened to Tag Martin?’
Alice spread out her skirts, trying to decide what to tell him and what to leave out. ‘He ran away.’
‘Reverend Martin’s boy, that right?’
‘Yep. He’s in Vietnam.’ Alice took another piece of Turkish Delight. ‘Tag’s a real nice kid but he’s – he was real lost.’
That was what Dolores had said a couple years ago about Jack, actually. It was true of Tag too, and all of them maybe.
‘What happened to him? I forget.’
She hated him then, sitting there with his pen, ready to scribble down what she said.
‘Oh, it started with what happened the end of the last school year. Back in May. Jack Maynard and Tag Martin were given detention, because of disrespect in English class. But really they were tripping.’
Alice had stopped by the classroom, seeing Jack in there. She knew Tag of old too.
‘The Maynard boy – he’s older than you, yes?’
‘Two years. He repeated his senior year last year.’
‘Did you used to talk to them? What did you talk about that day?’
‘We talked about poetry. They were both flunking English. They couldn’t graduate without it.’ And Jack hadn’t graduated, even though he’d repeated the year. ‘I guess that was the last time I saw Tag. Yeah. I helped them with the poem.’
Wilder looked at her over his glasses. ‘What poem?’
‘“To His Coy Mistress”.’
‘Of course,’ he said.
She hated his verbal smirks. The way he hinted that he knew her better than she knew herself. ‘ Had we but world enough and time ,’ he said softly, ‘ this coyness, lady, were no crime .’
Alice was silent, remembering the scene in the classroom, though it was months ago.
How she had drunk in Jack’s appearance, his kind, careful smile for her, even as they both sat quite helpless, watching Tag sway from side to side, licking his lips like they were dry, staring intently at his outstretched hand.
‘So, like, this is some guy trying to persuade his girlfriend to put out,’ Jack had said eventually, looking back at the textbook.
‘It is,’ she’d said. ‘It’s beautiful, really. I always think he’ll show her a good time.’
She’d answered so frankly, her mind elsewhere, that he’d met her eyes, then rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. ‘Okay, thank you, Alice.’
‘Hey,’ she’d said, smiling back at him, refusing to be embarrassed. She didn’t care any more, not about some things. ‘It means what it means. I like it.’
‘Alice Jansen,’ he had said admiringly. ‘Where’d you go learning poems like that?’
‘ But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near ,’ Alice said. She’d slung her bag over her shoulder again and left, nodding at him with a secret little smile in the doorway.
‘What are you smiling about?’ Wilder said to her now.
‘Nothing. Anyway, to finish my story about Tag. The headmaster realized he was high and kicked him out of school. He dropped out the week after that. Ran away to the Village.’
‘The Village?’
‘The East Village,’ said Alice. ‘That’s where it’s all going down –’
‘Jesus, Alice. I know about the East Village.’
‘Okay. His family found out and his dad went down there. They shipped him off to the army. They made him enlist. He’s been in Vietnam since September.
He writes these letters to Jack saying how they smoke weed all day and shoot Vietcong when they feel like it.
They go into villages, choose someone and pick them off.
Tag is, like, only two years older than me. He’s nineteen. He’s a kid.’
She was acting cool but in reality found it hard to think of Tag Martin, whom she’d known all her life, who loved The Addams Family and Joan Baez like she did, and Bob Dylan more than anything, but who most of all wanted to be free.
The idea of him in Vietnam, in uniform, was crazy.
It was frightening, that a gentle boy from a normal family could be forced into a war on the other side of the world.
‘He’ll die out there,’ she said softly, but Wilder wasn’t listening – he was writing.
Eventually he stopped and said, ‘That’s good. What else?’
‘So today, our first class was History –’ she went on, recalling herself to the present.
‘History. Is that with Elizabeth Finkelstein?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
Wilder put his hands flat on his chest: ‘My apologies: Please continue.’
Please continue . As if it was normal, sitting here on this spring evening when she could be with Dolores, or paddling at the edge of the river, or lying on her bed listening to music.
‘Right. We learned about Elizabeth the First and Drake today. Because later we’re doing the Pilgrim Fathers.’
‘Yes. Tell me more.’
‘And I got to thinking about the people who left England and sailed to the New World. You know the Mayflower couldn’t dock for weeks because of the weather.
What was that like? To sail in a wooden ship for months and months across the vast ocean, without any radio signal or any mail, not knowing a thing about what was on the other side.
’ She paused and closed her eyes. ‘I can’t imagine it, can you?
And then they did the same, to all the people they stole from Africa. Did exactly the same to them.’
‘Not them, exactly, Alice.’
‘It’s a general point.’
At first, she’d been shy, so shy the sessions had not gone well. Gradually, she had understood that it would be over more quickly if she gave him what he wanted, despising herself at first for doing so. Lately, though, she had realized something else: she liked it.
She liked to tell him stories.
She liked someone finding her important, worth listening to.
At school, the jocks ruled everything – their whims, their fitness, their choice of girl, or lunch, or car, all picked over.
The cheerleaders had clout too, but not as much.
And, once Alice had started to see that, she realized how fake the system was, loaded against others. Girls, mostly.
She’d said this to him early on and he had laughed.
When she made him laugh, he rocked backward and forward, his hands on his knees, giving in to it, his eyes locking with hers, then throwing back his head – and she liked it, liked the feeling.
Normally, boys didn’t laugh at girls, unless you counted the time some sophomore, on a bet, pulled Carly Gianotti’s T-shirt over her head during lunch break and everyone saw her bra.
‘That’s interesting,’ Wilder said, when he’d stopped writing. He wrote down everything she said in his own version of shorthand. ‘We are a nation founded on those who travelled across the sea. Who braved great hardships to get here. How does that change your outlook, I wonder.’
‘There were already people here, though. The Indians.’
‘Sure. But they didn’t found the nation, did they? It’s not relevant.’