It wasn’t till we surfaced I saw I was out of breath. But not Gail, whose mouth opened a little as I moved my hand down the small of her back and found myself. I heard a gasp, it was Al in the water with us, and as Gail with the minty spear of her tongue broke our kiss and turned toward him, that damned southeast wind rolled like occult frost right through my opening eyelids then my gelid white eyeballs, and before Al turned to swim for the rock he said, “What’re you doin’, screwin’?” Well, she moaned so complexly I don’t to this day know what it meant, and just then I felt her legs inadvertently still clamped round my hips. I was steadily treading water, the moles appeared for a second, each delicately raised.
I called to Al, “We were not,” but I’m sure he didn’t hear above his kick; anyway he was over ears trying to do the regular crawl. I said it again, when like a shot he had neatly levered himself up onto the ledge two feet above the water, and there were his dungarees on him dark—“We were not.” But he just squooshed a few steps in his sneakers up a couple of levels, as Gail, scissor-kicking backwards sweeping slowly with her arms, said to me — and I wished she had smiled—“How would you know?”
She looked around when Al cursed, he took off his sneakers and threw them down on the ledge he was on and one flopped down to the lower ledge and right to the edge two feet above the water. He picked up a 5-cent pack of peanut butter crackers Gail had saved for the trip home. Then he threw it down and started up around the rocks toward the bikes.
When we got home Al didn’t try to hide his dungarees, and when he mother asked, he said where we’d been, and went on upstairs. Looking at me standing on a flagstone outside, she may have understood something, whether worthwhile or not, and she let him alone. She had a plastic apron on.
“I guess you been up there too,” she said, and Gail said yes, and looked back at me.
And then Gail came back out of the house. To me. Through a corner of a downstairs window I saw Al’s father sitting with the paper, and for the first time wondered where he’d been at the long instant of the kiss. I didn’t say anything stupid to Gail; I raised my eyebrows wrinkling my patient, experienced forehead, and eased onto my bike and lounged off.
Past the “restored” stagecoach inn and the eight or nine shiny cars there, I became aware of Gail just as I became aware of something else I’d forgotten about. She overtook me as we were leaving the village about a hundred yards from my house—
to this day the Red Sox record for a consecutive game hitting streak is twenty-two shy of the Yankee Clipper’s all-time mark. “But which state gives condemned men a choice?” I asked Al right after he identified the lone corral of points within the Number Two’s U.S.A.—
So I stopped on the left shoulder by the ditch. Remembering that my father was again not coming this weekend made me mad at Gail but made me want to tell her any lie that would keep her here with me though I wasn’t at all clear what I would do. But she wasn’t really alone, for as she stopped beside me and seemed glad, I saw Al pedaling up the road in his drying dungarees and bare feet.
He said approaching, “I didn’t come after you. I come for my Keds.”
“There’s one,” said Gail dropping it out of her basket. Then laying her bike down she took the other sneaker.
“One down one to go,” said Al walking toward her as she backed away; but there way up the road behind Gail standing at our picket fence like one of the mind’s indelible spectators was my mother in a white sweater. “Give it here,” said Al and lunged, but Gail got it off in time and it hit my front fender, and holding my left handlebar I stretched down to pick it off the gravel.
Al didn’t say a thing. He walked toward me with his quick hands now out in front a bit, and when he was two thirds to me I underhanded the sneaker but ye gods underhanded it over his head right to Gail.
And when he ran at her she sweepingly backhanded it high into the cowfield and we saw so precisely where it had gone that it wasn’t till a lonely week later I visualized the Guernseys and Jerseys that had been there watching at a distance.
Through our rain tonight cars point tubes of light ahead from sealed-beam headlamps two by two.
From one of these twelfth-floor windows the arc of fall to a point in the street is the locus of which focus and directrix?
Looking into that enclosed field that we had more than once been told not to go in, and then at Al, I heard Gail lift her bike. A finger-tip in my rib, and I heard her ride away, but I continued to look at Al staring at the sneaker where it lay in bad taste near a brown Jersey cow.
A field-situation was what you called the moments of force at Santa Barbara. To go ahead into that sunny Think-Tank and be seated around a famous table would have finished the Anti-Abstraction March, not completed it. So you said a huge hoarse No into a fresh bullhorn and, not knowing that your daughter Lila was there with her husband, you used and kept (even better than you could actually see) your many distances. You stayed close to student supporters and within range of intrusible passers-by, and not so close to the prestige waiting seriously inside the gates as to suffer palpable neutralizing contact with those profoundly funded Fellows and end by being tabled. You maintained vector variety.
Al said, “I didn’t want that sneaker anyhow,” and I said, “What a lot of shit — you just bought them.” Again he was interrupting himself. A fight there then would have been terrible. I saw Al beat up Tony’s fat older brother, an unsuccessful bully. Al could not fight me over Gail, any more than she in her way I thought would fight me over what she thought I’d done to her father or his puzzles.
You said, through your Santa Barbara bullhorn, “Let’s fight the Center, not talk to it. I’d be selling you out if I accepted now what looks like their come-down and went on in there to the Center to discuss in realitsik” (sic, for you were tired) “dialogue even the true issue — not how classrooms or the family can be rewired, not how to defray the cost of generalized frankout, nor how to speed the processing of legislative packages, but the true issue, namely how pass from one space to another without wearing your own protective pressures, why retract from interruption into a quiet that’s divided (if at all) only in bisection by the coolest of cloisters. Oh, here at the Center they’re into a by-blow kind of onane teletaping, they’re into what doesn’t commit them to risking the next moment.” (Someone near me said, “He’s so abstract, I thought this was the Anti-Abstraction March,” and someone else said, “The March is over.”) You were saying, “Because they know all their well-funded moments can just be rerun, cut, spliced, fixed — look, we’ll come back to this—” but heckling began from a team of older tourists placarded as the first polar bear club in Coney Island “EUREKA, CALIF OR BUST,” but you hadn’t lost all your audience.
Your vector variety, Dom, is nothing so simple as the leaning Heatsburg triangles pyramidally sharing me as apex. You ask what are the base corners? They are Gail, Al, and their father (he now in undivided possession of his paper, soon to be drafted, ultimately to achieve membership in the Heatsburg Legion post); but who’s at the pyramid’s fourth corner? and if Al’s mother is not the only candidate left (yes, if (say) we include as other triangulating corners my parents (as one or separate) and even Bob), then unless I drop utterly my parabolic guard I’ll end up not with carnelian beads and unguent vases obsidian and gold, much less their probable, albeit mummied, owner the Twelfth Dynasty Princess Merit, but through some unspeakable mortuary labyrinth a pyramid of another water, some hopelessly polyfaced crystal. When in 1953 Bob came home from Europe with, after all, the bride of his late childhood, his mother and father invited thirty-four of Bob’s old friends, many inevitably also his bride’s. But Bob the morning of the party learned of the impending surprise through a phone call from one of the guests, and thereupon compelled his dark-braided bride to absent herself with him, leaving his poor parents and her “pappy” (as he was often called) to face all but the honored guests plus an evening through which with cheerful inventions I if I say so myself led the way adopting myself in effect host.