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Page 10.

Chapter 4

Oaa Baa Baa Baa Baaaaa, Barbra AAAAAAnnnn…” Jon and Merile sang. The radio in his Pontiac blared oldies but goodies.

Merile stretched slowly and deliciously in the passenger seat beside him. Her crook’d arms made brackets above her head, while her palms nearly touched the fluttering rag ceiling of the dark blue car. Her eyes were half-closed and her lips widened in a shuddering sense of satisfaction. The windshield wipers throbbed in rhythm with the music beat. The wipers’ back and forth arcs scattered emerald buds and vegetal granules to the edges of the windshield. Her coat fell open, revealing a blue shirt budding with promise.

He felt entirely right, having her at his side like this. “Let’s play Teeny and the Boppers,” he suggested.

“Hokay,” she yawned, then suddenly unyawned with a wet-dog shake of the head. She curled up to rest her head on his leg. Her arms stole around his waist. Her fingers stole nervously over his skin, fluttering here and there in little electric motions testing the muscles of his peritoneum. It was the first time she’d put both arms around him. He hadn’t done that to her yet.

Newly spring-greened trees loomed on either side of the road. The windshield wipers thudded rhythmically against the chrome molding of the windshield. Spatters of water glanced before his eyes, filled with refracted light. He glanced down. A spill of blonde hair filled his lap. Her raincoat half-covered her long legs in a sprawl under the dashboard.

“Good Good Good GOOOOOOD Vahbrahtions!” the radio crackled.

The familiar local disc jockey burbled, “In case you haven’t guessed it, tonight’s California night and we have for you the Beach Boys and surfers in a solid hour of oldies but goodies not so moldy and pretty darn goldy and if you’re told you’re old just grab a hold, be bold, hang ten and you’ll be sold…”

“I’ll fold,” Merile said with a laugh.

“Anything but cold,” he said.

The Pontiac’s tires hummed amid tea-like deposits of new blossoms. The car rolled into the wet brightness radiant around the Burger Barn near the Hamden Mart.

Merile sat sensibly upright, combing out her long hair, a couple of hair pins clamped in her lips and eyes wide as she sought to adjust her hair in the reflections inside the windshield. She turned the rearview mirror to point at herself.

Her arm linked into his, and her hip pressed against his hip. He didn’t need to force it. She was giving herself to him if he would take her. He took her by the waist and pulled her close, claiming her. Her waist was slender, her figure fluid, her skin sinuous in his hand.

Animal love. Give me everything.

She whispered in his ear, “Our first date. Oh god you drive me crazy. I want you.”

He pulled her close, filled with wonder at how her body molded into any shape he needed her to assume to please him, and she could not give him enough of her gyrations. Good vibrations. He had a rod on, torch flaming at the muzzle already. No woman had made him feel this way in years or ever.

The cash register rattled and chained continuously, and blue-aproned figures darted about behind the plate glass, scooping French fries, bagging burgers, tapping colas, squirreling out spiral deposits of ice cream. White paper hats rode jauntily askew over teenage eyebrows.

…First gear I’M ALRIGHT, second gear UPTIGHT, third gear, HANG ON TIGHT, faster, faster, faster, FAAAASSSTTTEEEERRRR… echoed a timeless carollade by the Beach Boys—or was it the Hondells?

Spring air was mild. Rain had stopped. The line moved slowly. Children bawled. A ruddy pot-bellied duck pin bowler in a red nylon jacket stared at Merile. A tall, skinny high school boy with spider legs and pimply face arced high to drop-shoot a plastic bag of trash into a ditzy dumpster.

“Plebeian,” Jon murmured into her blonde hair, which smelled of bubble gum and shampoo and car exhaust and Parisian perfume in the lively nocturnal air.

She avidly chewed. “Aw, not much different from Westport. What’s missing is the air of everyone being hipper than everyone else.” She blew a bubble, and popped it with a smacking sound. “Maybe even hipper than hip.”

“Hipper about what?”

“The big cigar, of course,” she said. She rolled her eyes up and smacked her gum loudly. The tip of her tongue flicked out to lick pink off of her lips. He silenced her gnashing with his mouth. She succumbed breathlessly; their teeth touched. Their lips worked frantically and savoringly together.

“Hey up front!” cried a beardless face possessed of a paper hat, pimples, and sarcastic mouth.

“Lots of onions!” Jon cried, disentangling himself.

“Please,” Merile said.

“Skip the onions,” Jon amended, bending to be heard through the aperture over the counter.

“No onions,” echoed the boy, slapping a cardboard tray bull of bulging, drippy white baglets on the counter. “A buck ninety.”

“Hu, hu, hu,” laughed the man with the red jacket and beer belly, yellowishly devouring a mustard sandwich (or something Plebeian) nearby. He raked Merile with dirty, greasy onion eyes like the skin on a cheap hot dog.

Merile clung to Jon as he paid.

“Hu Hu Hu yourself,” Jon said, spiriting Merile and the cardboard tray back to the car.

“IF EVERYBODY HAD AN OCEAN…” the parking lot resounded.

Air smelled of rain, blossoms, motor oil, beef, ketchup.

Souped-up cars roared nearby, and the air had a sharp, intoxicating tinge of ether—almost a surgical ethyl breath.

Jon closed the car door, trapping Merile in an amber of his life, whose stagnant atmosphere was tinged with neglected upholstery, old newspapers, and unwashed clothing amid ghostly shadows. She didn’t seem to mind.

They turned the radio down low. Merile fussed daintily with the waxy paper wrappers on her lap. Jon munched hungrily on a Yack. “I could be Vito. You could be Donnalee. Your mouth looks like a piano.”

She was just raising a hamburger with both hands. Her teeth enclosed the hamburger, tearing an edge off. “Daf Fnark ‘n Foo,” she corrected, reminding him of Westport nomenclature. There was a soap opera about Clark and Sue, and an entire community of raptors who seemed to do nothing but screw each other—the men the women literally and viscerally; the men and men, or women and women, figuratively and sadistically while dollar bills twirled in air.

“Efcufe me,” he said, dabbing some French fries in ketchup. “Forry, hummot fum Wefpoht. Umfum Weft Haphen. We haph no fidarf here.”

She nudged him with her elbow, rollicking with puffed cheeks and spread mouth as she happily mauled her meal and the beach boys sang SURFERRRR GURRRRLLLL…

Later she curled up against his side in the car. They were parked outside her apartment on Everitt Street, about six blocks from St. Ronan Street. Realtors and ads in New Haven still described such buildings by how many Victorian worker families they held in a previous century, maybe a dozen persons per unit; today, the high-ceilinged antiques made for vast, echoing two-person apartments.

“You nife,” she aped with an empty mouth—no gum, no burger, no cigar.

“I fink I’m fo-fo,” he gimmicked. In the still, fresh night air, the hood of the car kept banging and pinging in a cooling-off music. Ignition keys hung under the dashboard.

“I fink fo too,” she said. “How about some tea?”

“I guess,” he said.

Car doors slammed in the evening stillness. He followed her lurching heels up a wind-flickering, honey-lit concrete path under weeping willow trees.

Call them weeping widow trees.

Her keys rattled, and soon the door stood open— colorful stained glass panels in a sturdy oak frame.

“I’m on the second floor,” she whispered. She put her finger over her lips for him to be quiet. “It’s what they used to call a four-family house. Now it’s four Yalie apartments where maybe four dozen working people used to live in Victorian times.”

He tiptoed behind her up a creaking, carpeted stairway. He longed to touch that rocking rear, those shapely legs, and the rest of her. He wanted to undress her slowly, enjoying her enjoying every moment of his attentions. It would be a matter of minutes now. He watched her head toward him as in a spinning, unavoidable slow-motion crash on a snowy winter street; both drivers are helpless and see each other coming, bracing silently for impact, dreading injury, and calculating fender repair costs.

On a shadowy second-story landing, she fumbled with more keys. The smell of her hair and skin drove away a musty carpet odor. Someone had a cat. The rain-dribbled window crawled with plant shadows. A door creaked, a shaft of light fell out, her sharp heels pounded over polished wood floors. Quickly she kicked her shoes off. For the first time that day she was shorter than he. She swung the door shut. “Here we are. Make yourself at home. I’ll get some tea water boiling.”

He was on his own. It was a spacious apartment. The doorway led into a small vestibule crowded with coats and umbrellas. A door led to a bathroom, another door to the bedroom, another door to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen, Jon found himself in the living room. Plants hung from the ceilings, a poster glowered in black and white on the wall, low and fluffy furniture glowered in the light from the kitchen. Books, a stereo, posters, plants, a chandelier, scattered rugs, a pile of record albums, a casually flung nylon stocking, his first impression. Multiple identical windows in a row looked black and curtainless, dappled with raindrops. A clockwork encased in brass chimed. It was ten o’clock.

“Don’t turn on any more lights,” Merile said.

“You haven’t needed curtains,” he commented.

She regarded the black windows, “No, not until now.”

You’ve been a modest girl, but that could change.

He sat on a black leather ottoman and brushed the stereo with his fingertips.

“How do you like your tea?” she asked.

He turned. Sitting before the stereo, he could reach out and touch her ankles. Which he did, feeling nylon over skin and bone.

She sank down and embraced him on the shaggy rug.

He kissed her while his hand explored the exact shape of her. He started to touch a button on her shirt.

She pulled away. “I’d better turn off the tea water and shut off the kitchen light.”

She was tall, walking into the halo of kitchen light while he lay on the thick carpet while the other man’s stereo glowed, and he pressed the off-switch.

Her shoes clattered on the hardwood floors until she kicked them off. Her footfalls were as quiet and pattersome on bare planks as raindrops outside.

The lights out, he heard the swish of clothes being removed. When a woman has long legs it takes longer for her to remove her underclothes—so he guessed.

She pattered on bare feet, closer. He watched her figure undulate in gloom for him.

“Do you like me?” she asked, echoing her own unanswered question about tea.

“Turn around slowly,” he said.

Silvery moonlight burnished the glossy wood floor. Her pale figure, singed with a bluish light from street light strained by budding tree branches, turned in a white archway.

She turned slowly on long, naked legs and the moonlight was egg-pale on oval buttocks, round breasts, her smile…