“Gross,” Ariel said.
The interior of the house reminded her of her own, but there was a difference and it did not take her long to realize what the difference was. This house had been occupied by the same family for fifty years or more, and it had a settled air about it, the feeling a house develops as a result of continual occupancy by the same people. Her own house had the same sense of age, but the rugs and furniture, the pictures on the walls, all had been placed there too recently to have become part and parcel of the house that contained them.
She liked her house better than Erskine’s. But she preferred the way his house felt.
Of course she didn’t mention any of this. When you said things like that all you got was funny looks.
His room was on the third floor. They went up the stairs to the second floor together, then walked along a hallway to a door that opened onto the attic staircase. Erskine flung open the door and tore up the steep flight of stairs as if something were pursuing him. She stared after him, then followed him at a deliberately leisurely pace. He was still panting furiously by the time she reached the top.
She looked at him, thinking again what a weird kid he was. She was growing to like him more, the more time she spent with him, but he did not seem any more normal than he had at first. If anything she was simply discovering new ways in which he was weird.
The other day, for example, he had dropped the license numbers on her.
“Your mother drove past our house yesterday afternoon,” he said. She had nodded, unimpressed. “I could tell by the license number,” he went on. “664-AQT. The Datsun. Your father has the Ford Torino. LJK-914.”
She had stared at him.
“When I’m interested in a person,” he said, “I make it my business to know things. I just do a little research. That’s all. Your father’s in the traffic department at Ashley-Cooper Home Products. Do you happen to know his number at work?”
“His number?”
“His telephone number. It’s 787-5645. His personal extension is 342.”
She had been dumbfounded. Why, she had demanded, was he calling her father?
“I didn’t call him. Why would I call him?”
“Then how come you know his number?”
“I know the license numbers, too, Ariel, but that doesn’t mean I’m planning to steal the cars. It’s just mental exercise. You stimulate the brain by giving it tasks to do, the same as exercising a muscle. I just memorized those numbers because I’m interested in you. I have taken an interest, as they say.”
“What kind of an interest?”
“I’m interested in fucking you,” he’d said. “I like to think about your body when I can’t sleep at night.”
“God, you’re gross.”
Except that his obscenities — and this was hardly the first time he’d spoken like that to her — were somehow not really disgusting. Because she had sensed early on that his words served some special function. He might very well have sex on the brain, it seemed to her that most boys his age did. The words, though, served as some sort of shield between himself and the world.
Well, she could understand that. She had enough shields of her own. Her music, her books and the private worlds she could slip off into when she wanted.
Now, as he was catching his breath, she asked him what was the matter.
“Nothing.”
“The way you tore up the stairs.”
“It’s something I like to do. I used to have my room on the second floor. Then I was exploring the attic and I found this room up here. I never even knew it existed. The attic’s mostly junk. My grandfather was a lawyer and all those boxes are old papers and lawbooks and different garbage. My mother keeps saying how she’s going to get rid of them someday but I guess she never will. You know how old books and papers smell? Especially in a house like this where the damp gets into everything?”
Ariel wrinkled her nose.
“Anyway, I found this room. It used to be a maid’s room and there were even some old True Confessions magazines from the forties. It’s a shame the maid wasn’t hooked on science fiction or something interesting. Comic books, for instance. They’d be worth a fortune, but what kind of a nerd collects old True Confessions magazines?”
“What did you do with them?”
“Put ’em in a box. Nothing ever gets thrown out in this house. It’s against their religion or something. Do you have a religion?”
“I guess we’re Protestant, but we don’t go to church.”
“I thought that was your minister at the funeral.”
“No, he just came with the service.”
“Yeah. Well, my mother was Catholic and my father was Jewish, so we’re nothing. It’s like breeding cats. You take a purebred Persian and a purebred Siamese and cross them and you get an alley cat. So that’s what I am. Anyway, I wanted the room and they didn’t want me to have it.”
“Were they afraid the maid was coming back?”
It was the sort of line she thought of often and usually I didn’t say because all she would get would be the funny looks, or else no reaction at all, but Erskine gave her a look and then started to giggle. He let the giggle build into a laugh and then they both came up with some lines on the idea of the maid coming back for her magazines, and when it had run its course he said, “No, see, what it was is they thought I would be lonesome by myself. You know with a whole floor separating me from my darling parents.” He blinked, his eyes huge behind the thick lenses, and then he turned his eyes aside. “Plus they thought it would be a lot of stairs to climb. Up to the second floor and all the way up to the third, as if it was the Washington Monument or something.” He looked at her. “So I make it a point to run up the last flight,” he said. “That’s all. Come on, I’ll show you the room.”
The minute she saw the room she knew why he liked it. It was small and incompletely finished, the walls squares of unpainted fiberboard inexpertly nailed in place. There was one small window which looked out on the street. Erskine’s bed was a very narrow one. There was a chest of drawers at the foot of it and, along one entire wall, a bookshelf overflowing with magazines and paperbacks.
“Science fiction,” he said. “It’s about the only thing I read. I still will look at a comic book once in a while, but I’m not really interested in them.”
“I never got into comic books.”
“They’re a waste of time. You read much science fiction?” She shook her head. “I guess girls mostly don’t,” he said.
There were a few dozen postcards tacked to the wall over his bed, some of them showing scenes but the majority consisting of combinations of numbers and letters. She remembered how he had memorized the license numbers and asked if the cards were related to license plates.
He laughed at the idea. “They’re QSL cards,” he said. “Whenever I hear a shortwave station I haven’t heard before I send them a postcard saying what I heard and the strength of their signal and all, and they send one of these back. If they want to take the trouble. The foreign stations send you all kinds of things, their schedules and different propaganda. Here, let me show you.”
He showed her some of the cards and a whole folder of material from Radio Moscow, and then they listened to the radio while he showed her his logbook and explained how he had run an antenna wire from his window and grounded it to a telephone pole in the back yard. She had to admit that the whole radio operation was pretty impressive. What you actually heard wasn’t terribly interesting, but doing it, getting involved in it as a hobby, that was more interesting than she would have thought.
At four-thirty he turned off the radio. “We could have some milk and cookies,” he said. “There’s usually something downstairs if you’re hungry.”