I was what is known as a late bloomer — though I am not sure I’ve bloomed yet — and years away from the crude puberty that would visit me late my senior year of high school. I didn’t understand. I knew what a hickey was, technically, but I’d seen movies and believed that passionate kisses were strictly a mouth-to-mouth transaction. Occasionally a leading man would tenderly apply his lips to a forehead or cheek, but his lady would only close her eyes, clearly unbitten.
No amount of prepubescent contemplation could explain it. I did my best. I tried to imagine a situation in which I would be willing to receive (delivering was out of the question) a kiss on the neck at all, never mind a forceful, capillary-busting buss. And though I was able — had long been able, as a matter of fact — to imagine myself with some handsome man who curled his fingers beneath my chin, tilting my lips toward him, these pictures might well have been movies themselves, so devoid were they of any physical nuance. I knew what a kiss looked like, but I had no idea of what one felt like and, being an unimaginative child (as I am now an unimaginative woman), was unable or unwilling to speculate.
Which did not stop me from picturing those kisses. I needed them. I hoarded them. Still, I would not have confessed them, even to girlfriends who, assaulted already by puberty, confessed to much more. In eighth grade it seemed that puberty was a campaign whose soldiers could not find me — I was down the hall and around the corner, or already in a nook in the library, while puberty, like polio, struck the kids who hung around in crowds by the swimming pool or punch bowl. By the time puberty located me, I was sixteen and so frightened of boys I’d given up my dreams of kisses. I’m not sure what I was afraid of. It wasn’t exactly sex, which I’d read up on, eager to understand my still-dreaming and sometimes treacherous friends. Maybe it was too much contemplation, maybe I was finally certain that, left alone with me, a boy would surely try to sink his teeth into my neck.
Now, with James, I was in eighth grade again, curious, not yet frightened. I longed for something physical, but what that would be I could not feature; could not even speculate.
There is his hand on the tabletop.
There are his shoes, still warm from his feet, worn down on either side from where the brace buckles around.
There is his chair, and look, he’s still in it.
There, behind me, retreating, is his window, and his light is on, he’s still awake, just as he was thirty seconds ago when I closed the door.
It’s sex you’re thinking of, Peggy, people will say, you are being naive on purpose or by nature, but anyone else can see it plainly.
Well, perhaps. But those seeing people, those who have in their lives fallen in love without impediment, cannot understand. Nowadays sex is the guest you should always expect, because it’s supposed to knock down your door without an invitation: you might as well be prepared. If you haven’t set a place at the table, you are called naive or repressed.
But sometimes, honestly, the mind makes calibrations, but not for sex, because sex is not coming to you, sex is down the street wrecking your neighbor’s house, sex has — for any number of reasons — washed its hands of you, even if you are not done with it, even if the breakup is not mutual. In which case, if you are lucky and you work very hard, you learn not only to be satisfied by other things, you start to long for them. And you don’t feel starved; you find your hungers are simply different, as if you’ve dropped your Western upbringing for a childhood in a country where ice cream was unheard of, available only in books.
And so I stared at the hand on the tabletop, wanting it to come toward me even if I wasn’t sure for what. I wanted to stick my own feet in his recently occupied shoes to sop up that warmth. I wanted to turn back at night, open the door and say, I think I’ll stay awhile—not the way they do in movies, no meaning or implied unspeakable verb, just to stay, just to be there, just to stay.
James’s ambition — besides dancing — was to attend one of the twice-yearly shoe conventions in New York. Perhaps he thought of New York as a city of size, avenues and skyscrapers and noise. Would the tallest boy in the world be such a sight on those streets? Wouldn’t he be able to walk them, plenty to look up at, thinking, this place is so big? All his life he’d taken pleasure in the smallest tricks: sleight of hand, a camera, what made one bird different from another. He looked for a patch of red beneath a wing, or made a visitor wonder where a card had gone to, or shrank the world into a snapshot.
Finally, though, these things were small, in theory and in fact, and they were no longer enough. He could not shrink himself by loving smallness, though he tried; perhaps he could manage it by courting things even larger than himself. His books on magic taught him that you can convince people of anything if you just direct their attention where you want it, distract them from the matter at hand. Plenty of distraction in Manhattan.
He wrote away for train schedules.
“We could drive,” I said. I still hadn’t convinced James to get in the Nash with me. After all those years of avoiding them, cars made him nervous. They seemed an easy way to break a bone.
“I like trains,” he said.
He bought a map of Manhattan and stuck it to the wall by his bed. I brought him books about the city’s history, the stories of O. Henry, Knickerbocker Tales.
“I had a dream about New York City,” he said sometimes.
“What about it?”
“I was there,” he said. “That’s all.” I waited for him to say, You were there, too. But he didn’t.
As the summer progressed, something changed. He still spoke of New York, but it was something he’d see in years, not months. He scorned his physical therapy.
“No point,” he said. “I can’t feel it working.”
“Well, you wouldn’t,” I said. If he didn’t feel his legs, how would he feel improvement? “The doctors know best.”
“The doctors don’t live with it.”
The only place he ever went was the front house, and then only to eat, to take advantage of their more extensive plumbing. In the fall he’d be a junior at the high school, but he decided not to go back.
“You could just go some of the time,” said Caroline. “They won’t care. Show up when you feel like it.”
“No,” he said. “If I can’t do it right I don’t want to do it at all.”
“Right?” she said. “What’s right? They’ll be glad to see you whenever you show up. You always do well. Isn’t that right enough?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Jim—”
“I don’t want to fall,” he said. “Those floors are slick. I can do the work at home.”
When he wanted to quiet us, he talked about his health, and we thought, at least he’s being sensible. This was something we — Caroline and I — had in common: a passion for the practicals. Yes, that’s right, he could fall, he could break a leg or worse. Sometimes we worked hard to believe it, because otherwise we’d fret too much. Best to stay home.
Best to hold court in his own house, imagine himself a bachelor with a dance floor and a juke. If he fell at school, he’d be helpless in front of everyone he knew; at home he sat in his chair, did the schoolwork a tutor brought over, and waited for three o’clock, when his friends came by and Caroline brought refreshments and maybe — not that he cared or anything — maybe Stella would show up, too. Because she did show up sometimes, and danced, or flirted, or combed her hair. Her boyfriend, whose name was Sean, didn’t seem to mind that she flirted with every single boy there, and I wanted to take him aside, say, Doesn’t this bother you? Don’t you worry?