Maybe the kids who started showing up at the cottage were there to offer comfort to someone who had suffered a loss — though their visits were awfully loud for sympathy calls. By August, the place was full of high school kids, some who knew James well and some who’d never spoken to him. The few boys who’d toughed out the Scouts to make eagle — boys you’d expect to be polite — were the ones most likely to laugh too loud and smell of smoke mixed with chlorine from the swimming pool. It was a mean, petty smell.
They always came in groups. I watched them tour the cottage sometimes, each teenager clearly thinking that if only it were him — if only his parents agreed to build him a house in the backyard — his life would be perfect.
I stopped by the cottage every day after work. I brought books, small gifts — cookies from the bakery, or a marbled composition book, or a new pack of cards. James sometimes spent hours shuffling; when you talked to him, you got used to the steady noise of the deck meeting itself. His hands seemed to double over themselves to manage it. He shuffled several packs at a time.
“That’s quite a nervous habit you have there,” I said.
“Not nervous.” He cut the cards several times. “Trying to keep my fingers limber.”
Work piled up at the library. I was as thorough as I could be during the day, but I’d stopped staying late evenings to read reviews and do the statistics and balance the budget.
“Are you having an affair?” Astoria asked me.
I looked at her. “Would I tell you if I were?” I said. But then I saw the delight in her face and had to own up. No, no affair, no intrigue. Just helping some friends. I wondered who she thought the affair would be with.
Soon others came to the cottage. I’d forgotten what an odd place it was, the high ceilings, the oversize furniture. On one side of the room the builders had set windows into the wall in two rows, because specially made proportional windows were too expensive, but the ordinary number of ordinary windows would have looked as strange and dismal as submarine portholes. People loved to sit in the big armchair, let their legs dangle off the edge. Teachers came, and neighbors. Astoria asked me if I’d take her with me one day.
“Why do you need to come with me?” I asked.
“You know me, Peggy. I’m not so good with idle chitchat.”
“Astoria. You do nothing all day but chitchat idly.”
She twisted her wedding ring around. “I’m not so good with sick people. With sick young people, I mean. I get sad easily.”
“He’s not sick,” I said. “He’s tall, and you can’t catch that.”
“I’m just curious. I just want to see.”
“See what?” When she wouldn’t answer, I said, “I can’t stop you from visiting, but do it yourself. We’re not here to satisfy your curiosity.”
For a while there were almost always a few kids loitering when I arrived. They brought records for the player; sometimes they even danced in the middle of the room, in the pleased, measured way you dance for someone else’s benefit. James sat in his chair; a visitor balanced on the arm, which was big enough to be a chair itself. I tried to like the music. Mostly I lurked by the door, feeling like the oldest person in the world. Some nights I could not bear all that youth and possibility: I’d hear laughter through the door, and I’d turn around and leave.
One night as I came up the walk, I saw through the window a boy and girl dancing — or should I say, embracing while revolving in tandem. The music was slow treacle. Boys sat on the floor or the bed, looking up at the couple every now and then, not talking. Other people’s happiness is always a fascinating bore. It sucks the oxygen out of the room; you’re left gasping, greedy, amazed by a deficit in yourself you hadn’t ever noticed.
The song was just ending as I walked in; the couple parted, and the girl clapped her hands three times, as though she believed she would hurt the singer’s feelings if she did not acknowledge him.
The boy looked at his watch, then at the girl.
“I know,” she said.
She had dark wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her tight sweater rode up in creases above her bustline. Her lipstick was a bit smudged; I located some of it on the boy’s cheek.
“We have to go,” he said to James.
“Us, too,” said one of the boys on the bed.
“Okay,” said James. “Tomorrow?”
The dancing boy pulled his record off the player. “It’s Friday,” he said. “There’s a dance in Brewster. You should come, Jimmy.”
“Oh,” said James. He kicked at his cane, which he’d set down at the foot of the chair. “I’m not much for dancing.”
“I’ll dance with you,” said the girl. She obviously thought that this promise — not even the dance itself, but the promise of a dance — would solve anything, and she was the type of girl who might convince a boy it could. I will save you from being a wallflower, she’d say, I will cure your life, and a boy, looking at her face, the line of delicate beauty marks on her neck, would think he was the only boy who’d ever been promised such a thing.
“Maybe the next dance,” said James. “When my leg is better.”
“Swear you’ll dance with me sometime,” said the girl.
“I swear.”
She looked at me and smiled. I was happy to see there was something a little wrong with her teeth, a faint chalky discoloration.
“Good night,” she said, and then she walked out, followed by first her dance partner, then the whole line of boys who had watched them.
“You have a lot of friends,” I said to James.
“I don’t really know some of them. I know Ben—” He patted the arm of the chair to indicate the heavy boy who’d been sitting there. “And I know Stella.”
“She’s pretty,” I said, which was what I said as soon as I could about any pretty girl. I wanted people to know I saw it, too.
He nodded, then kicked the cane up with his foot and caught it. He twirled it in one hand; his card exercises were paying off. “I can’t dance,” he said.
“Neither can I.”
“You could,” he said. He spun the cane faster, and I could tell he wished he’d thought to try this trick while Stella was in the room. Then he missed, and the cane fell to the floor. “Maybe in a while I can. When the braces come off.”
“The braces are coming off?” I asked.
“They might,” he said, the way you say things that you have made yourself believe, other evidence to the contrary. “I mean, I won’t ever be a dancer.” He moved his feet across the floor nervously, knocking into the cane. “But that. What they were doing. I could dance like that, maybe. Slowly. If I had someone to lean on.”
“Maybe so,” I said. No girl in the world was tall enough for James to lean on. That girl was just a usual height; taller than me, but not tall. I handed James the book I had under my arm. “William the Conqueror,” I said. “It’s a new one.”
She knew he couldn’t dance. He could barely walk.
Still, she was one person who could offer him things I could not. Let’s face it: a girl his own age.
When I was in eighth grade, there was a girl all the boys called Hickey Vickie. Whether she’d realized at a young age that the neat rhyme made the practice inevitable, or whether it was a coincidence, she was a master at this teenage art, and boys proudly wore her work. Some advanced girls delivered orderly hickeys, circumspect enough to be mistaken for some other adolescent skin problem. Vickie was the Rocky Graziano of kisses; necks left her mouth nothing short of mauled.