David looks at the penis he has drawn on the yellow lined pad, a woman’s lips parted above it.
His mind snaps back to:
Veronica is telling her brother for the eight hundred and thirty-second time about the young man who took her to the synagogue dance that night, the very same dance Arthur K had attended, but which he’d left early so he could “make out” — Arthur K’s language — with a brown-eyed, black-haired girl named Shirley in the backseat of his father’s Pontiac sedan. Shirley, coincidentally, is also Arthur K’s mother’s name. Should David’s notation be amended to read Tarts = Veronica + Mother + Shirley?
“My father was a car salesman,” he says now. “He sold Pontiacs. I always drove new Pontiacs.”
He never fails to interject these words at this point in the story, a voice-over narrator in a movie David knows by heart. Years later, Veronica will be killed driving a Chevy Camaro. Perhaps this is why Arthur K insistently mentions that he himself has always driven Pontiacs, would drive a Pontiac today, in fact, except that he is scared to death of getting behind the wheel of any car.
In Arthur K’s movie, his sister is saying “Howard Kaplan told me...”
No names, please, but the damage is already done. A thousand times over, in fact.
“...I don’t know how to kiss!”
And bursts into tears again.
“Come on, Sis, stop it,” Arthur K says. “You don’t have to cry over somebody like Howard Kaplan.”
There is a close shot of his face, solemn, sincere... pimply, too, as a matter of fact... his dark eyes intent behind the thick glasses he is wearing even as a youth.
“What the hell does he know about kissing, anyway?” Arthur K says soothingly, his arm around his sister, patting her shoulder, the blue robe slightly open to show...
Wait a minute, David thinks.
...her luminous pearls.
Wait a minute, what happened to the pink angora sweater and the pleated blue skirt? How’d she get in a blue robe all of a sudden? Did the costume designer...?
“Jackass could use a few kissing lessons himself,” Arthur K says.
“I wish somebody would give me lessons,” Veronica says, her eyes brimming with tears, which the camera catches rolling down her flushed cheeks in extreme close-up.
The key words in the movie.
I wish somebody would give me lessons.
The essential words in Arthur K’s retelling of a steamy Bronx interlude fifty years ago, almost missed this time around but for the fact that David has memorized every frame, every line, every word, every inflection in this saga of adolescent lust and desire.
I wish somebody would give me lessons.
In a blue robe this time around.
Slightly open, no less.
To show luminous pearls.
David is drawing a pair of breasts on a fresh page in his notebook when Arthur K suddenly stops his narrative.
Perhaps he, too, has recognized that he’s changed his sister’s long-ago attire, has put her in a robe instead of a pink angora sweater and a pleated blue skirt. Perhaps he is realizing that a slightly open robe lends sexual intensity to the kiss that inevitably follows in this well-remembered story, the kiss he teaches her at her request. Perhaps he is discovering that what they have here is a young girl ardently kissing her brother at midnight while wearing what now turns out to have been a robe, slightly open to show the luminous pearls around her neck. “Just part your lips, Veronica,” he has repeated in previous retellings of the tale, after which he proceeds innocently to teach her — like the dutiful older brother he is — how to kiss, a calling for which she demonstrates tremendous natural aptitude, by the way. At midnight. In a merely slightly open robe.
But the film has stopped.
The projectionist has gone home.
“Isn’t it time?” Arthur K asks.
“We have a few more minutes.”
“Well,” Arthur K says and falls silent.
He remains silent as the minutes tick away.
And finally David says, “I think our time is up now.”
They both rise simultaneously, David from his black leather chair behind the desk, Arthur K from the black leather sofa at right angles to it. Before he leaves the office, Arthur K hurls a glare of pure hatred at him.
David leafs back through his lined yellow pages.
Sure enough, the first time he ever heard of Veronica eating chocolate pudding, he drew a picture of a girl with long straight hair, wearing a shaggy sweater and a pleated skirt, pearls around her neck.
Now she’s in an open robe that shows those luminous pearls.
We’re making progress, he thinks, and is almost sorry he will be flying up to Martha’s Vineyard tonight, and will not see Arthur K again until after the long Fourth of July weekend. He glances again at the breasts he’d started to draw in his notebook. Two smallish globes, a dot in the center of each.
All at once, he remembers the sharp outline of the girl’s nipples...
Hey! My name is Kate.
...Kate’s nipples against the thin sweaty fabric of the orange top.
Remembers, too, the way he turned away.
And closes the spiral notebook.
Helen and the children are all wearing white T-shirts, the two girls in matching white cutoff shorts, Helen in a long wraparound skirt in a printed blue fabric. He spots them the instant he begins crossing the tarmac to the terminal building, such as it is. They all look even browner than they did last weekend, each the butternut color of the sandals they’re wearing, each grinning, their teeth seeming too glisteningly white against their faces.
The kids have inherited Helen’s ash-blond hair, thank God, and not his “drab” brown, he guesses you might call it, although “mousy” brown seems to be the pejorative adjective of choice for women’s hair of that color. The girls’ hair is cut short and somewhat ragged for the summer months. Helen wears hers falling sleek and straight to the shoulders, bangs on her forehead ending just a touch above the eyebrows. She is an extravagantly beautiful woman, and he is stunned each time he discovers this anew. David is the only one in the family who doesn’t have blue eyes. His are brown to match the drab hair. Helen insists her eyes are gray, even though no one has gray eyes except in novels. David calls the kids the Blue-Eyed Monsters. They burst into giggles whenever he quavers the words and backs away from them in mock fright; it is easy to delight daughters of their age.
Annie, the six-year-old, begins telling him at once and excitedly all about the shark they’d seen off Chilmark, and Jenny, her elder by three years, immediately puts her down, telling David it was only a sand shark and a small one at that.
“Yeah, but it was a shark, anyway,” Annie says, “wasn’t it, Mommy?”
“Oh, it most certainly was,” Helen says, and squeezes David’s hand.
“I nicknamed him Jaws,” Annie says.
“How original,” her sister says.
Chattering, hopping from foot to foot in front of him, walking backward, squeezing in to hug him every now and then, they make their disorderly way toward where Helen has parked the station wagon. A sharp wind blows in suddenly off the field, puffing up under the wraparound skirt, opening it at the slit to reveal long slender legs splendidly tanned by the sun. So damn beautiful, David thinks, and she catches his glance, and seemingly his inner observation as well, for she smiles over the heads of the little girls and winks in wicked promise as she flattens the skirt with the palm of her left hand, her golden wedding band bright against her tan.