So I instead drew a loose portrait of myself, how strange and also strangely happy I was, waiting for something to happen, knowing it would. How I grew into my big rangy handsome body that attracted so much notice from my school’s coaches, and how it attracted so much notice from girls and women after it had finished disappointing the coaches. I wasn’t interested in or gifted at sports at all, which to others might have seemed the only thing to do with the problem of me. I probably should have been homosexual but wasn’t-then I could have been a mascot of the girls, or a dodgy runaway, of whom everyone could say they’d seen it coming. Instead I was good and big and straight and something of a chameleon. I wanted and tried to be funny, and sometimes was, but my curious formality, diction borrowed from P. G. Wodehouse and Cary Grant instead of from my peers, was funnier without trying. I was like a thing born for something else. Tolerated and teased in school, but dreamily destined, and unafraid. Destined to be adored. Destined for sex. I waited for someone to put me to right use, and when I was fourteen the talent agent did that, an old story, like someone discovering Kim Novak in a cornfield. So I set it up by painting this picture of myself and then I told Richard a particular story of a moment from just before my emancipation and my first journey to Manhattan.
Bloomington kids, the good and bad ones, the professors’ children and the ten-generations-in-the-same-house kids, the athletes and the losers and those who would get away and even those who we all knew were secretly homosexual, we all of us did the same thing in the summer months, together and apart, in groups that overlapped and broke apart as much as our cliques in junior high during the school months: that was to swim in the abandoned granite quarries scattered in the fields and forests outside of the town. The kids who wanted to be ruffians would swim in the most dangerous and most forbidden, those farthest into the woods and with the deepest cuts, where the water was black with legends of drownings. The losers puttered in a wretched shallow quarry where a kitten couldn’t drown. And the popular kids swam in a clean high-walled pit known as Turtles. I was, after all, a part of the popular crowd-I was the not-gay unathletic daft handsome mystery among them. Turtles, named for creatures often sighted there, lay hidden in overgrown fields whose owner trimmed thistles from the worn path and made us welcome as long as we carried out our Strohs empties, was also outfitted with a raft, a bobbing wooden platform anchored by some method to the center of the water, and ladderless, so one had to clutch with both arms as it tilted and then haul a leg over one side, or be helped by someone standing above. One tumbled crevice led to easy entrance to the water, and this was where we gathered to swim, though sometimes a show-off, a diver on our high-school team, would plunge in from elsewhere on the rim-the water was clear and deep enough to make it safe. All who swam eventually congregated out on the raft, which might have been ten or fifteen yards from the crevice’s entry point. All but me.
It began as a matter of fear, then a prideful obstinacy. I began as a poor swimmer, though I got better. (Slipping my body through water seemed to me more like sex than athletics; I had an instinct for it, but like masturbation it felt private, and I hid my improvements.) The more I was ruthlessly mocked for not joining the laughing throng that teetered atop that raft (and frequently cleared itself in a paroxysm of shoving), the more I distinguished myself in the calm of my own mind for not caring to join it. The raft was where everything eventful was transacted, all the famous gropes and shames and confidences, somehow hidden in plain sight, secreted within the mob, or just at that moment when everyone else was in the water to miss them. So I’d exiled myself from society, shunning that artificial island. It made me who I was, the act of not going there. I attached a certain feeling of irreversibility to the choice, as if those who’d gone that mere distance of strokes to clamber aboard had in a sense never returned, or not completely. Perhaps after I overcame my swimmer’s fear I was still afraid of the disappointment that awaited me if I joined them there. Somehow I was patient enough to have another island in mind for me.
The part I didn’t tell Richard was this: the summer before I began high school-my last year in Bloomington, it would turn out-and had begun to draw the attention of the high-school girls, even the graduated seniors with their college destinies turning them into forms drifting out of reach before our eyes, the most extraordinary and fierce and unforgettable of those girls was one named Janice Trumbull. She was leaving Bloomington forever three or four weeks after the day she acknowledged me, though later I’d know that she’d been aware of me a while before.
At the time I thought it was by not swimming to the raft that I’d gotten Janice Trumbull’s attention. Turtles was well behind her by then. She’d been goaded to swim there that day by two of her friends for whom it was an ironic act of instant nostalgia. Their future was more real than their present and they shone with it, most particularly Janice Trumbull, who had won a scholarship to MIT and none of us had any idea what that meant, not the sun-blazed afternoon they came through the crevice and began swimming among us with their insane bodies, these girls who were more like floating hallowed names than real persons in the life of the high school I was supposed to attend.
They weren’t going to board the raft, they certainly weren’t going to do that. Janice’s two friends swam out and around it, performed mocking leg splits and whirlies to an awed contingent, and Janice came back to where I paddled at the sheer granite wall, sole member of my refusal society. She asked me my name and I told her, and then she said in so many words that I was in a quiet hell here in Bloomington and I should know to get out. She told me I looked as if I knew but she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t say so. I didn’t explain what I couldn’t have, my dreams and certainties, of which this encounter with her made a perfect harbinger. Was struck dumb by even my own dumb standards. Janice Trumbull then told me where to meet her that night. It was a few months into my freshman autumn that I’d learn, through the younger-sister grapevine, how Janice had told her friends she’d have me before she left for college, and that they’d brought her to Turtles that day partly or even largely to call her bluff, which was no bluff. For the last weeks of that summer she taught me how to swim to the raft of a woman’s body and what to do there. Then she went to Massachusetts and eventually into space, to die. I never met her after that summer, though I did watch her triumphant launch to join the Russian crew, on television. In fact, I’m almost certain-as certain as I can be of anything-that Janice Trumbull was killed, with all her compatriots, within a few hours of the distribution of the Chinese mines into their orbit path, rather than living on for so many months, and doing space walks, tending gardens, writing letters.
The day after meeting with Claire Carter I’d done as she suggested, and traced the origin of the surplus flooding my checking account. The signatory was the treasurer of the Manhattan Reification Society, that shadowy philanthropic trust appointed to enact the city’s little Gnuppet shows. I suppose the callow producers who’d long ago enlisted me to play the part of myself as astronaut-fiancé were on their payroll, too, and Oona Laszlo, the writer. When it had been decided to give the remote and perished astronaut a lease on life-to take the cruel and stunted tale of the space station’s collision with the Chinese mines and distend it into an enthralling melodrama of foot cancer and orbital decay-they elected also to humanize Janice Trumbull by awarding her a mopey earthbound boyfriend. (It took a lot of melodrama to keep the War Free edition from seeming a tad thin, I guess.)