Patty belonged to a different crowd at Meadow. They were rougher than the Coate people, but the two groups were friendly. Patty was a strange, still presence within her group, with her hip thrust out and a cigarette always bleeding smoke from her hand. She was loose even by seventies standards; she had a dirty sense of humor, and she wore pants so tight you could see the swollen outline of her genitals. She was also shy. When she talked she pawed the ground with her foot and pulled her hair over her mouth; she looked away from you and then snuck a look back to see what you thought of her. She was accepted by the Thorold people the way you accept what you’ve always known. The stiffness of her face and body contradicting her loose reputation, her coarse language expressed in her timid voice and shy manners, her beauty and her ordinariness, all gave her a disconnected sexiness that was aggravating.
But he liked her. They were often a team at work, and he enjoyed having her next to him, her golden-haired arms plunged in greasy black dishwater or flecked with garbage as she plucked silverware from vile plates on their way to the dishwasher. She spooned out quivering red Jell-O or drew long bland snakes of soft ice cream from the stainless-steel machine, she smoked, wiped her nose, and muttered about a fight with her mother or a bad date. Her movements were resigned and bitter, yet her eyes and her nasty humor peeked impishly from under this weight. There was something pleasing in this combination, something congruent with her spoiled beauty.
It was a long time before he realized she had a crush on him. All her conversation was braided together with a fly strip of different boys she had been with or was involved with, and she talked of all of them with the same tone of fondness and resentment. He thought nothing of it when she followed him outside to the field behind the union, where they would walk along the narrow wet ditch, smoking pot and talking. It was early spring; dark, naked trees pressed intensely against the horizon, wet weeds clung to their jeans, and her small voice bobbed assertively on the vibrant air. The cold wind gave her lips a swollen raw look and made her young skin grainy and bleached. “So why do you let him treat you like that?” “Ah, I get back at him. It’s not really him, you know, I’m just fixated on him. I’m working out something through him. Besides, he’s a great lay.” He never noticed how often she came up behind him to walk him to class or sat on the edge of his chair as he lounged in the union. Then one day she missed work, and a buddy of his said, “Hey, where’s your little puppy dog today?” and he knew.
“Did you like Thorold?” he asked the girl next to him.
“No, I didn’t.” She turned toward him, her face a staccato burst of candor. “I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was a practicing alcoholic. I kept trying to fit in and I couldn’t.”
“That doesn’t sound good.” He smiled. How like Patty to answer a polite question from a stranger with this emotional nakedness, this urgent excess of information. She was always doing that, especially after the job at the cafeteria ended. He’d see her in a hallway or the union lounge, where normal life was happening all around them, and she’d swoop into a compressed communication, intently twining her hair around her finger as she quickly muttered that she’d had the strangest dream about this guy David, in which a nuclear war was going on, and he, John, was in it too, and—
“What did you do after Redford?” he asked the girl next to him.
“Screwed around, basically. I went to New York pretty soon after that and did the same things I was doing in Thorold. Except I was trying to be a singer.”
“Yeah?” He felt buoyed by her ambition. He pictured her in a tight black dress, lips parted, eyes closed, bathed in cheap, sexy stage light.
“Didja ever do anything with it?”
“Not much.” She abruptly changed expression, as though she’d just remembered not to put herself down. “Well, some stuff. I had a good band once, we played the club circuit in L.A. for a while six years ago.” She paused. “But I’m mostly a paralegal now.”
“Well, that’s not bad, either. Do you ever sing now?”
“I haven’t for a long time. But I was thinking of trying again.” Just like Patty, she looked away and quickly looked back as if to check his reaction. “I’ve been auditioning. Even though . . . I don’t know.”
“It sounds great to me,” he said. “At least you’re trying. It sounds better than what I do.” His self-deprecation annoyed him, and he bulled his way through an explanation of what he did, making it sound more interesting than selling software.
A stewardess with a small pink face asked if they’d like anything to drink, and he ordered two little bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Patty’s shadow had a compressed can of orange juice and an unsavory packet of nuts; their silent companion by the window had vodka straight. He thought of asking her if she was married, but he bet the answer was no, and he didn’t want to make her admit her loneliness. Of course, not every single person was lonely, but he guessed that she was. She seemed in need of comfort and care, like a stray animal that gets fed by various kindly people but never held.
“Will you get some mothering while you’re at home?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. My mother will make things I like to eat and. . . stuff like that.”
He thought of telling her that she reminded him of someone he’d known in Coate, but he didn’t. He sat silently, knocking back his whiskey and watching her roll a greasy peanut between two fingers.
Out in the field, they were sitting on a fallen branch, sharing a wet stub of pot. “I don’t usually say stuff like this,” said Patty. “I know you think I do, because of the way I talk, but I don’t. But I’m really attracted to you, John.” The wind blew a piece of hair across her cheek, and its texture contrasted acutely with her cold-bleached skin.
“Yeah, I was beginning to notice.”
“I guess it was kind of obvious, huh?” She looked down and drew her curtain of hair. “And I’ve been getting these mixed signals from you. I can’t tell if you’re attracted to me or not.” She paused. “But I guess you’re not, huh?”
Her humility embarrassed and touched him. “Well, I am attracted to you. Sort of. I mean, you’re beautiful and everything. I’m just not attracted enough to do anything. Besides, there’s Susan.”
“Oh. I thought you didn’t like her that much.” She sniffed and dropped the roach on the raw grass; her lipstick had congealed into little chapped bumps on her lower lip. “Well, I’m really disappointed. I thought you liked me.”
“I do like you, Patty.”
“You know what I meant.” Pause. “I’m more attracted to you than I’ve been to anybody for two years. Since Paul.”
A flattered giggle escaped him.
“Well, I hope we can be friends,” she said. “We can still talk and stuff, can’t we?”
“Patty LaForge? I wouldn’t touch her, man. The smell alone.”
He was driving around with a carload of drunk boys who were filled with a tangle of goodwill and aggression.
“Ah, LaForge is okay.”
He was indignant for Patty, but he laughed anyway.
“Were you really an alcoholic when you lived in Thorold?” he asked.
“I still am, I just don’t drink now. But then I did. Yeah.”
He had stepped into a conversation that had looked nice and solid, and his foot had gone through the floor and into the basement. But he couldn’t stop. “I guess I drank too much then too. But it wasn’t a problem. We just had a lot of fun.”
She smiled with tight, terse mystery.
“How come you told me that about yourself? It seems kind of personal.” He attached his gaze to hers as he said this; sometimes women said personal things to you as a way of coming on.