I think it’s evil for anyone to say they know what God said or did, just because they read a bunch of old books. If we’re all sinners like they claim, if we’re all imperfect, then who’s to say they know for sure what a particular passage in the Koran or Bible means?
And it’s all part of the smokescreen created by parents and teachers and priests and ministers and rabbis—the smokescreen that hides the truth and makes people think that there’s more to life than simply being happy. Because once a person thinks there’s more to life than being happy—not making tons of money, not being a “success,” not being a good Catholic or Jew or Muslim—then he’ll seek a path toward an imaginary ideal. And it’s when you seek such an ideal that other people, the people who claim to have already reached it, begin to control you. It’s a tragedy, really. And yet it persists.
With those thoughts in my heart, I was determined to never let Maria go. I remember thinking after we made love, I’ve found my religion. It’s Maria. And Maria’s WEFT. That’s how I knew I loved her. Because I’d shunned religion and my family for my whole love, but in Maria there was something I could believe in.
But even though I loved her dearly, I couldn’t help but get a little jealous now and then.
It’s amazing, you know, how you can want something so badly, and even visualize it or whatever, but still act so differently than you need to. What I mean is, I knew that my jealousy was against my desire to live in the here and now. After all, what is jealousy besides obsessing over what has happened, or what could happen, rather than what is?
It was so weird that I don’t know how to describe it. See, I wanted Maria all to myself. The way I saw it, her father and friends had screwed up her past, and she had no future to speak of when I met here. So she was mine.
It started so innocently. Maria would tell me that she was going to her grandmother’s house, for example, and I would feel left out. Or sometimes a guy would call her house—usually a guy that wanted to talk to her sister—and I would ask Maria, “Did you speak to him? Did he flirt with you?” This would make her very angry.
One night, I remember, we were talking on the phone for three and a half hours, and finally, at midnight, she said, “I gotta go do my math homework.” I looked at the clock. It was 12:01, and we both had to be up by six. But I didn’t care. I was actually jealous of her homework.
And this feeling only got worse. One day she told me that her and her mom talked about a problem she had in school. I went ballistic. “Why were you talking to your mom about school?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I thought you confided in me about that stuff.”
“A.J., I tell my mom things, too.”
“Yeah, but who’s your best friend?”
“My best friend? I don’t know. My mother is, I guess”
“What do you mean? I think you’re my best friend. Not my mother. I’d take you over my mother any day. So, am I your best friend, or what?”
“A.J., what’s your problem?”
“I’m just saying that a girl can’t be best friends with her mother. I mean, your mother has to be your best friend, because she’s your mother.”
“Huh? You’re acting really weird, A.J. What’s wrong with you?”
What’s wrong with you? As those words echo in my mind, it’s hard to believe that they came from Maria’s lips, long before the shit hit the fan. She asked me that a lot, now that I think about it. I never bothered answering. I felt bad that I was barraging Maria with my questions. I really did. At the same time, it was almost as though she didn’t remember what had happened between us, and how much we’d shared. Maybe she did and I just didn’t notice it. I don’t know. I just changed the subject, hoping the feelings I had within me would just go away.
Chapter 11
Venial Sins
As always, for Labor Day Weekend, my parents and I drove down to my grandmother’s timeshare in Virginia. It was sort of my family’s house, meaning that my grandmother and my parents and sister, as well as my father’s entire family, all shared the place year-round. One time we went down there for Christmas, but we couldn’t go in the water because it was too damn cold. It was cool, though, to look out the window and see the waves crashing ashore as we sat around the fireplace.
But that summer we went down to the shore right before school began. I begged my parents to let me stay home, but they said no. Unlike previous summers, they’d decided to stay in a hotel room to avoid causing my grandmother too much trouble.
We left New York early Friday morning and drove straight down. We arrived in Virginia at about two p.m. I sat in the back seat of the car, staring at a book, Romeo and Juliet, which Maria had given me before I left. She said it was her favorite Shakespeare play. I know the basic story—a young couple’s in love and they kill themselves at the end—so I thought it would be easy to read. But all that old English was pretty tough to digest. It was so difficult, in fact, that I stopped reading it at about the seventh page. Instead, I just listened to my CD player.
I’d brought The Long and Winding Road with me, and I’d planned on listening to it on the balcony of our hotel room. I figured it would be a boring vacation, and I’d probably be sitting there sucking down butts the whole week. The previous summer my family and I had gone to Virginia, too. That summer I didn’t have a girlfriend or anything. I met a few girls down the shore, but I didn’t hook up with anyone. It was sort of pathetic, actually. Because once I got home, I realized that I probably could of hooked up if I really wanted to. The problem was that I didn’t have the confidence to do it.
Before we even got out of the car, I spotted seven or eight girls around my age, giggling and walking from the clubhouse to the pool. They were gorgeous; but, then again, all thin girls look sexy in bikinis. They weren’t like the girls in New York. Most of the girls in the city that I knew had black or brown hair, but all the beach chicks were blondes or redheads.
The first few night in Virginia was pretty dull. But on Sunday, two days before we left, Tracey made friends with some kids from Missouri. One of them was a girl named Lee Anne, a blonde bombshell from St. Louis. I usually didn’t care for that type, but for some reason I was attracted to Lee Anne.
Until I met Lee Anne, I never understood the term “jailbait.” I didn’t get how older men could lust after teenage girls. She was only fifteen, but Lee Anne could have easily passed for twenty-one or older. She must have been at least my height, with straight golden hair and a bronzed body. With tits like cantaloupes, and long slender legs, there was nothing adolescent about her. Like a Baywatch babe, she trotted along the beach in a red bikini, sun tan oil dripped off her arms and thighs, smelling like coconuts. She wore a pair of blue mirrory sunglasses that blinded me when I looked at them. They gave Lee Anne a mysterious air. I felt challenged to hook up with her.
Behind those sunglasses Lee Anne was a ditz, a stupid hick who probably had never read a book in her life. I was bored with her personality five minutes after meeting her. But she was someone to hang out with, to pass the time with, to smoke with as the summer days dwindled away. We splashed each other in the ocean all day Sunday and Monday, and went for walks on the beach as the sun set. Whenever a sea plane passed overhead, I’d tell her about it, and about my love of planes and jets. She didn’t seem to give a shit, but at least she didn’t interrupt.