“Almond Roca, Nate!” he exulted. “Popcorn balls that are orange!”
“You can’t eat the ones that aren’t wrapped. Throw away the popcorn balls.”
“Why?”
“Razor blades,” said Nathan. He missed his brother so badly that it made him nervous to speak to Ricky on the phone. They talked to each other three times a week, but they could never generate any real silliness, and Nathan, in spite of himself, was always irritable and mocking, or stern.
“Yeah,” Ricky said excitedly. “Halloween razor blades. Oh, my God, Nate, someone gave me raisin bread! Raisin bread, Nate!”
“I don’t believe it,” said Nathan. “Ricky, guess what?”
“I bet it was Mrs. Gilette. Hey, what are you going to be? Galactus?”
Ricky had spent his entire life waiting for Nathan to dress as Galactus, the World Eater, for Halloween, which was something Nathan a long time ago had said he was going to do, not dreaming that Ricky would never forget it, and would even come to regard it as the greatest and most magical of all the magical promises that his older brother had ever broken. In this instance Nathan felt more guilty than usual about having to tell Ricky the sorry truth, and he swiveled around in his chair so that his mother wouldn’t be able to see his face.
“I’m going as a guy in the process of having a good idea for a costume,” he mumbled.
“Huh?”
“You wouldn’t understand it.”
“I don’t understand it because it’s dumb,” said Ricky. “I can tell it must be dumb.”
“Go to hell,” said Nathan.
“Nathan,” said Mrs. Shapiro.
“Go to hell you,” said Ricky.
“Guess what? I can see without my glasses.” Nathan spun around to face his mother, and she looked at him with mild amazement.
“You mean you never have to wear them ever again?” said Ricky. Absently he added, “Now you won’t be so ugly.”
This thought had not occurred to Nathan. He heard the sound of a plastic bag full of candy bars being rummaged around in and felt that he had exhausted Ricky’s attention span, just when he most needed to speak to him. This incompleteness was why Nathan had first come to hate talking on the telephone to his father, in the days of his parents’ trial separation. Ricky tore open a wrapper and began to chew. Bit-O-Honey, from the sound of it. Nathan pictured his brother surrounded by candy, lying in his fancy bedroom in Boston on his bed shaped like a racing car. It was a big bedroom, with a large, empty alcove at the back, which Ricky claimed to be afraid of entering. Nathan imagined the Boston Halloween night through the windows in the dark alcove as Ricky would see it from his speeding bed. “The big brother is always uglier,” Ricky said.
“I know you’re only teasing me,” said Nathan. As he had several times before, he felt very far away from his brother just then, as he felt far from Anne and his father and mother and everyone he knew, isolated in his love and anxiety, but for the first time the void around him seemed to offer a new perspective, as though he were standing safely on top of a house in the midst of a great flood. He had no desire to return Ricky’s insults. He looked at Mrs. Shapiro, who, although she didn’t know what Ricky had said, nodded her head. “I know I’m not ugly,” said Nathan.
“No,” said the sleepy little boy in Boston, flowing off away from Nathan on his bed of sweets. “You have nice shoulders.”
It was as Nathan walked with his mother through the woods to the Parnells’ house that he began to feel distinctly altered. These trees were going to be cut down soon, to make way for three new houses, and as he strode, barefaced, across the little wood, there seemed a particular clarity to the starlit Halloween air, a sharpness that hitherto he had only smelled, and the sight of the world struck him with the austere flavor of smoke and dead leaves. Up the street the beam of a child’s flashlight tumbled to the ground, igniting the red oak leaves that littered the Parnells’ lawn, and then flew upward, illuminating the bare tops of previously invisible trees.
“I can’t believe it,” said Nathan. “I must be cured.”
“You look very nice without your glasses,” said his mother. “You look like your father.”
“Dad wears glasses.”
“He didn’t always,” she said. She shivered in her coat, which was made from rabbits and had been the gift of Humberto, the Brazilian professional soccer player she had dated last winter.
“Do you think my concept is stupid, Mom?”
“I just don’t really understand it, Nathan,” said his mother. “I never really understand your jokes. I’m sure lots of people will think it’s hilarious.”
They came to the short incline of yellow lawn which rose to the cedar planks of the Parnells’ front porch, and which was transected by a crooked line of stepping-stones that led to the shallow goldfish pond beside the front door. Major Ray had been stationed for five years in Yokohama during the sixties, and the Parnells had returned with a houseful of Japanese things. The carved pumpkin shared the porch with a stone lamp shaped like a pointed Japanese house, and as Nathan and his mother stepped up to the front door — you could already hear them inside, dozens of laughing adults — it struck him that a jack-o’-lantern was truly a lantern. His last thought before Eleanor threw open the door was an idea for a science-fiction novel in which the denizens of a distant world furnished their lives with various giant vegetables, carving out their beds, dressing in long, curly peels, illuminating their homes with the light of pumpkins. Then the door flew open. In all his anxiety over his own wardrobe, in all the editing and revision of the tortured sentence he intended that night jauntily to pronounce to Eleanor, he had forgotten to wonder about what she might wear, and he found himself taken completely by surprise.
Nathan had been prey, of course, to night fantasies of Eleanor Parnell. He concocted these happy narratives of seduction with the same thoroughness he brought to all his imaginary projects, such as Davor, the Golden Planet, and the vast turnpike, each of its rest stops and motor courts carefully named, that he had once mapped across two hundred pages of his loose-leaf notebook. He had envisioned Mrs. Parnell in all manner of empty rooms, and on desert beaches, and under a remote lean-to in the Far West, but during these trysts she remained demurely clothed. (At those crucial moments when Eleanor began to remove her garments, Nathan’s vision tended to falter.) But he had never imagined her in a black leather bikini, black cape, black boots, and black visor with a great pointed pair of black leather ears.
“I’m Batman,” Eleanor said, giving Nathan a dry kiss on the cheek. “You look wonderful,” she said to Mrs. Shapiro. She stepped back to examine Nathan, and her eyes narrowed within their moon-shaped black windows. “Nathan, you’re a — You’re a lamp. You’re a lamppost.”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Shapiro.
“That’s right,” said Nathan the Lamppost. “Ha, ha.” He could not say whether it was desire he felt for her or total, irredeemable embarrassment.
“Nathan,” said his mother. “You are not a lamp. Tell her.”
“Come in,” said Eleanor. “We’re in the Yellow Room. So what are you, Nathan?”
She drew them into the house, taking their hands in her own, as was her habit. The Yellow Room was filled, as Nathan had known it would be, with alcohol and disco music and adulthood in its most intimidating aspect. Two dozen men and women in costume — Nathan spotted a knight, a baseball player, and some sort of witch or hag — held their drinks and shouted mildly at each other over the agitated music, and five or six couples were dancing in the middle of the room. Ever since his mother had become a single woman she had increasingly involved herself, it seemed, with adults who liked to dance — a sight that for Nathan had not lost its novelty. He especially enjoyed watching the diligent men as they jogged in place.