His attention flickers on me and then off. He signs the sheet and goes into the locker room. I expect him to recognize me but of course he doesn’t. He walks with the gait of a dancer, a walk that looks simple but is a coordination of a hundred muscles that know and like each other pretty well. He’s a beautiful man, and it feels odd to think it, but this is who I am now.
I get up and set my book in my chair. Mrs. White, I say. I’m just in the bathroom, if someone comes in. She nods her dark head, the hair heavy.
Sure, she says.
Each beat of my heart seems to echo off the tiles. At first I think I imagined his entry because the locker room seems empty, it’s so quiet. What I tell myself is that I’m going to reintroduce myself to him. And then as I turn the corner for the bathroom, Bridey appears in front of me, his long hair in his face, tipped forward, like a flower after the sun has set. His eyes search through his bangs and he smiles. Hi, he says. He’s naked. There’s a flicker across my vision, as if someone has shut the light on and off quickly, correcting an accident.
Hi, I say. He’s just being friendly; he doesn’t remember me. And then I remember, with the bandanna on my head, I look pretty different. He heads back toward the locker rows, and I head in to the urinal, where I stand for a moment. Nothing comes out of me. I hike my bathing suit back up and flush, trying to act casual. Back at my seat, Mrs. White smiles as I sit down.
Everything okay, she says.
Yep, I say.
Bridey is a strong and sure swimmer, he swims quietly, with force, breathes symmetrically, his freestyle like an Australian crawl, a lot of it on the surface. Fee swims like a bull, head down so far it seems to disappear, so that there’s a flat space between the sprays of his arms as he goes.
He’s a good swimmer, Mrs. White says. Her head like a pointer, she watches him travel back and forth across the pool. A charming man, she says. Too pretty, really. It’s wasted.
What is, I say.
Beauty like that. In a man. Women always resent a beautiful man. Her eyes take me in, even as she bounces one of the twins on her leg. Don’t tell me you don’t know that.
How would I know that, I say. I don’t know anything.
What a lie, she says. Terrible of you. Boys are different, they don’t… and here she turns back to Bridey. I suppose, she adds, I shouldn’t talk to you this way.
You can, I say.
Everyone expects a boy to be beautiful. It’s allowed. A man has so much else to do. You don’t trust a beautiful man. It’s like he’s still a boy, somehow, in the important way.
You don’t trust boys then, I say.
Not for what women need from a man, she says, and she frowns here. I don’t.
Bridey swims across the middle distance, lane 4, still churning. He doesn’t care what we have to say about him, he doesn’t seem to care that we are here. It’s fine, it’s how it should be. Except preposterously I find myself cheered by Mrs. White’s assessment. I have a chance.
Do you know who that is, she asks me.
I don’t, I say.
He’s the partner of the new swim coach. I’m surprised you haven’t seen more of him.
Mr. Zhe’s not very social, I say, feeling a bird in my throat. As if it could peek out, as I open my mouth, to talk to Mrs. White. Its shiny eyes behind my teeth. The rumor, I add, and here the bird goes away, is that he’s the father of the art teacher’s baby.
Her pretty eyes get a little small, and she laughs in a pip. Oh my, she says. Children. He’s not, she says, and here she looks over to Mr. White, who is swimming lazily through the water in lane 2. He can’t father a child, I shouldn’t think. You understand, she says.
I think of my new friend, the hot-line operator. Yes, I say. I do.
And the subject shuts like a book. Bridey slides out of the water, sleek, walks around the edge of the pool. Mrs. White, he says. How charming you are there, with your children. She smiles at him, youthful. Women don’t hate beautiful men, I see as I watch her. They may envy them, but that isn’t hate. Hate is love on fire, set out to burn like a flare on the side of the road. It says, stop here. Something terrible has happened. Envy is like, the skin you’re in burns. And the salve is someone else’s skin.
Aphias. Bridey says, I know Fee is planning something for Labor Day, but I don’t know what. Probably a garden party with a tent. He pushes his hair back behind his ears. Hi, he says. I’m Albright Forrester. He holds his hand out. I shake it.
Hate. Envy. Hello, I say. No bird in the throat now. I am the bird, now. A raven? A sparrow. I say, I’m Edward. Edward Gorendt. He lets my hand drop and hitches at his suit.
Nice to meet you, he says. You’re on the swim team, I suppose.
I am, I say. Mrs. White’s gaze on me feels like a sunbeam, warm and from far away.
And all the day afterward fills with hours where the air evanesces like it will open and Mr. Zhe emerge from the sparkly hard center, a flightless angel slipping from God’s portal. Fee, Bridey had said. Fee.
Of course, years later, I will know, the bird in my throat was a crow.
I go through the days left before school like they are rooms along a corridor where I stop in, look around, to see if he is there, and leave after waiting. I walk the days with his name lying on my tongue, like a swallow of water that I can’t take down my throat. Bridey continues to come to the pool, on occasion. I do not go into the locker room while he is in there. Sometimes Mrs. White is there also, smiling, her twins on each of her knees.
18
The roses along the wall of the library disappear pretty regularly and soon it is discovered the problem is a Japanese beetle infestation, the roses being eaten the same day they open. In the morning, a flower. In the evening, not a petal.
So one evening on my way back from the pool I find Mr. Zhe standing in front of the rosebush, with what looks like a yellow Santa hat in his hand.
What’s that, I say.
Japanese beetle trap, he says. It’s got a synthetic hormone in it that attracts them, and then they go in here, get poisoned, and die.
They think they’re finding a mate, and instead, they die, I say.
I pluck at the yellow fabric. Huh.
He smiles at me. Doesn’t seem fair, does it.
Summer lasts forever, I say.
It won’t, he says. It only seems that way in August. He rubs a stem in his fingers. Pretty healthy, he says. You miss your friends, though, huh?
Yep, I say, though I hadn’t thought of it that way. I didn’t really know most of the students in this summer term. Didn’t want to. Mr. Zhe looks at me for a long minute. All I know is that all summer I’ve wanted to run into him, and now that I have, my stomach feels like it is kneeling on my guts, like I could burst into tears right here. I want to say, touch me. Please. And it seems for a moment that he’s going to put his hand on my shoulder.
You’ll be fine, he says. It’s really just two more weeks. I hear you have some stuff you’re dealing with, though, and if you need to talk about it, you can talk to me about it.
Rose-breath around us, faint. The dusk like a mist of the night, as if night evaporated at dawn, to collect and then rain down again, to make night again.
Were he to put his hand on me, I would be revealed as nothing more than a newspaper, erect. A screen on which is projected the image of a boy. How could he love me? There’s nothing to me except a place where the light resists moving forward. Okay, I say, instead. I will.