We’d lie there catching our breath, cooling off as much as we could, with the old fan huffing to pull a hot breeze across our reddened, sticky-slick skin, and then we’d dress, turn off the fan, lock up, get into the car. I’d drop her off at her parents’ house, and drive to my parents’ house. I would go inside, speak to my parents and my brothers, if they were home. Then we would all sit down to supper. Or if I was late, I would sit down by myself at the kitchen table and eat some of what was left, and maybe my mom would sit there and talk to me while I ate, if she had a minute. Then I would go to the bedroom I shared with my little brother, maybe listen to the radio for a while, and then I would go to bed.
I WAS UNDER A SPELL, those days. I had been ever since I’d first seen her.
I was with my friend Wendell Sparrow, that day, skulking about the pool at the local run-down country club my parents managed to belong to. Sparrow and I sat in the oak shade between the pool and the tennis courts, smoking cigarettes and waiting for girls to enter the dressing rooms to change for a swim.
We did this because we knew there had been, at some unrecorded time in this old pool’s history, peepholes drilled in the wall between the men’s dressing room and the women’s. The holes were artfully hidden beneath metal soap dishes attached to the shower’s water pipes that ran from the ceiling down this wall, ending in the hot and cold handles. Just below the handles were the little soap trays. And just beneath the soap trays, so that you wouldn’t notice as you stood there taking your shower, someone had drilled single peepholes about a half-inch in diameter that went through to the other side of the wall, which was the wall inside the women’s dressing room. If you held on to the water pipes and leaned down, peered just below the soap dishes, you could look through the peepholes into the dressing stalls there. It was ingenious and simple. Most people who weren’t in the know never noticed the peepholes, since you’d have to bend down in the shower to see them, and as these were mostly rinsing showers, few ever did. Those who did guarded the secret as if they were the only ones who knew it, for fear of such fantastic information getting out to the authorities, who — being at an age and level of respectability that it would never do for anyone to catch them peeping into the women’s dressing room — would probably plug the holes with concrete from sheer jealous outrage against youth and the effrontery of its prancing, tawdry, exuberant libido.
So, as Sparrow and I were sitting in the lawn chairs beneath the oak outside the dressing rooms, around three o’clock, the pool all but deserted, no one on the tennis courts, who should walk past us in her street clothes, holding a little bundle of swimwear, smiling a little half-shy smile, but Olivia Coltrane, on her way to the women’s side. We smiled and nodded to her. As soon as she’d cleared the door into the dressing room we shot out of our chairs and ran into the men’s dressing room and took up stations, Sparrow at the left showerhead peephole, me on the right.
She was in my stall already.
“You see anything?” Sparrow said.
“No, not yet.”
“Me, neither.”
Olivia had such a playful, placidly languorous look on her face through the peephole, I couldn’t imagine she didn’t know we were there.
She bent over, out of view. Then she straightened up. She raised her arms and slipped off her blouse. I could see everything from her beautiful rib cage up: her brassiere, her long, pale neck, her coy expression. I was trembling just a little bit.
“See anything?” Sparrow stage-whispered. He sounded desperate.
“Nothing yet.”
“Shit. Where the hell is she?”
She took off her brassiere. My God. Her little breasts were beautifuclass="underline" small, a little heavy on the bottom, sloping down and then up to what looked to be a pair of hard, erect, hazelnut nipples. I was shivering, my body was all but bucking against my grip on the pipes against the wall above my head.
“See anyth — You son of a bitch!” Sparrow said, and he was on me. “Let me see, goddammit!”
But I was stronger and in fact I could not let go of the pipes. Sparrow pummeled me and made far too much noise. Through the peephole, Olivia’s face seemed to register just the slightest increase in some kind of strange satisfaction as she slipped the bikini top over her beautiful little breasts, roughed up her hair, turned, and walked out of the dressing stall, its door slapping shut against my eyes. I let go and sat down heavily on the shower floor. Sparrow grabbed the pipes and jammed his forehead against the soap dish.
“Shit! Son of a bitch. Goddamn you son of a bitch!” and so on for a good five or ten minutes, as he slammed things around the dressing room, lit a Marlboro, and smoked it in that way he had, sucking the life from it, his long scrawny neck flaring ten-dons, the bony Adam’s apple bobbing. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead where he’d jammed it against the soap tray. He stopped pacing and glared at me. One eye twitched at the little drop of blood leaking into it from his brow. He took off one of his tennis shoes and hurled it through the high window of the dressing room. It crashed through, sending glass shards out into the grass beside the pool apron. He stood there, his breath heaving in and out. He stomped over to one of the toilets and threw his cigarette into it and banged out through the dressing room door.
I sat there on the shower floor, entirely unfazed by Sparrow’s tantrum. You could not have shaken me from what I was feeling, not with the strength of a hundred men. That was when, pretty much, I knew that I had to have Olivia Coltrane. I was just about dying for her, right then.
SHE WAS SLIM, TALLISH, with a thick clump of short black hair that framed her small, delicate face, black bangs against her milky forehead. She was pale and pretty, if not conventionally so. Her teeth were a little too big for her mouth, so she may not have been smiling so often as she appeared to’ve been. She was a little nearsighted, but vain about wearing her glasses, so the crinkling around her eyes may have been more of a squint than the mirth you might have taken it for. You wouldn’t have put her in a magazine to model clothes or makeup. But you might have put her in an ad for some other product, say a snappy new red convertible, because she had a wholesome natural beauty in her, hard to say just what it was except maybe happiness. I think it was that sense of her natural happiness, really, that attracted me to her. I was never a very happy or contented person, and people like Olivia tended to ignite in me a secret, almost feverish desire to absorb whatever it was that made them so different from me. So at ease with the world and themselves in it.
She had a way of looking at me, straight-on, and seemed incapable of the usual emotional evasion, as if she had nothing to fear. It didn’t bother me in the least that she wasn’t the smartest girl around. She struggled in English, was competent in math. If you drew her as partner in biology lab, you would surely do most if not all of the work. She was a little bit lazy. She tended to spend her spare time reading ridiculous magazine articles like big spreads on the lavish lifestyle and strange marital relations of Jackie and Aristotle Onassis. But I really didn’t care. Most people thought me a little dim, too. I was ridiculously earnest and deliberate. I wasn’t the handsomest boy she could have dated, either, but I had a kind of appealing, homely kindness in my features, or so people would note from time to time, in one awkward way or another.