"I have my reasons," was all she said, then added, "and they're none of your business."
"I thought I was your friend."
"Nobody is my friend. You're just a kid in one of my classes who drives me to and from school," she said quietly, turning her head away.
I pulled over to the side of the street and parked. Susan was staring stiffly straight ahead. I put my finger under her chin and turned her head to face me. Her skin was so soft there that I almost leaned over and kissed her. I had the feeling that I could have, but I didn't. I just looked through those stupid glasses of hers and into her eyes. She looked sad, a lovely face looking sad and compassionate and her eyes were a little wet.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean that."
"Didn't you?" I asked.
I threw the car into gear and drove her home in silence.
It wasn't so much what she had said; it was just the idea of Susan pulling rank, reminding me that she was the general and I was just one of the -troops who had become too presumptuous and familiar, stepping over that invisible line between professional acquaintance and friendship. Now, she had seen to it with one simple sentence that I was put back into my proper place, Leroy driving Our Miss Brooks to school.
The way we looked at each other, however briefly, the electricity that had grown to spring from each of us to the other, told me that she was full of shit. Susan, I thought, was scared, and still I knew that" there was something not right. Sometimes I felt so close to finding what it was, but it always seemed to slip past me, elusive and subtle.
It was warm and balmy, so I went home and changed to old Levi's with the legs cut off at mid-calf, grabbed a windbreaker, and headed for the beach. I parked by the windmill at the end of Golden Gate Park and walked across Great Highway past the seawall to the beach.
The surf slid in slowly, smoothly, caressing coarse, granular sand, wet from the previous surf. The water was a rare deep blue and the air so clear that I could see the small Coast Guard lightship parked at the three-mile limit, and the Farallone Islands a few miles beyond, inhabited only by birds. I walked in the wet sand for about a mile, feeling my toes squish in and make little puddles, the windbreaker slung over my shoulder.
When I returned there were four people leaning against the seawall, watching the sky and water: a couple, an old man, and a young girl listening to classical music on a portable radio. I walked slowly over to the seawall and stood a few feet from her, facing the surf while watching her from the corner of my eye. She was beautiful, long, black hair flowing free to the small of her back, tight Levi pants cut off like mine and showing slim, slightly muscular legs and a small, firm ass. She was wearing a loose, white T-shirt which revealed tanned arms, and breasts which were neither large nor small, but in perfect proportion to the rest of her body. Like me, she was barefoot, and seemed to be a few inches shorter although it was hard to tell because she was leaning over the top of the seawall, with her chin cupped in her hands, delicate fingers making a lovely spread pattern up the side of her face. Her radio played a Beethoven piano sonata, but I can't remember which one.
I edged a little closer but, lost in thought, she didn't notice me.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" It was just a statement to get her attention, not a real question.
"What?"
She turned to face me and suddenly the green of her eyes seemed to bore into my soul and explode, shattering my consciousness to a thousand pieces and leaving me speechless with shock.
"Oh my God! What are you doing here?" Susan gasped, her expression filled with a mixture of fear and surprise which couldn't have been any less than mine.
"What are you doing here?" I asked, my mind reeling. I felt as if all my senses had failed me. It-was beauty and the beast, and all I had ever seen was the beast. How could I have been so stupid as to not see through it?
Suddenly, she gave a huge sigh and shrugged, actually smiled. And then she laughed, a different laugh from any I had ever heard from her. "I asked you first." Those beautiful eyes became bright, even mischievous.
And then I understood. It all came through at once, like a downpour of insight. Instantly the whole thing, the whole big mystery, the something that was always not quite right about her, the constant thorn that bothered me so, it all carne clear in a flash.
Now I smiled.
I reached down and took both of her hands in mine, reveling in their warmth, in the feeling they sent through my body as the slight squeeze I had longed for was finally returned.
I shouted at her in delight, shouted for all to hear. "Susan Lawrence, you're a fake!"
And she laughed still harder.
"And a phony, and probably the biggest fraud of all time, and you're glad I know and don't deny it!"
Susan stopped laughing and looked very seriously at me. This time, she sought my eyes and held them, not averting. Her face, smooth, delicate features, like a fine porcelain vase shaped so subtly into lines of grace and beauty, studied me. Her whole body, her whole bearing, was graceful and beautiful. Just her touch and the way she looked at me had given me a hard-on.
"Yes, Richard," she said softly, "I'm glad you know, relieved. I wanted so much to be myself with you, but I didn't dare."
I tightened my hands on hers. "You must have known you could trust me. I think you must guess, at least a little bit, how I feel about you."
She withdrew her hands from mine and turned back to the seawall. "Maybe. Maybe that's one of the reasons I didn't want you to know."
"What do you mean?"
She turned to me again. "I mean, now that you've ripped off my mask, I'm practically defenseless."
"Defenseless? Against whom? What?"
But she was too smart for me. "Oh, Richard, don't play dumb. You've always been honest while I lived a lie with you, so don't start to lie just as I'm becoming honest. I'm a very sensitive person, like you. I've felt the same things that you've felt, what's grown between us. And you know damned well I've felt it.
"I hadn't planned on this. I wanted you to know so badly, but I'm confused. I have all sorts of stop-and-go signals lighting up at the same time. I'm, I'm really very vulnerable now, so if you care about me please don't push, please.
"I humiliated you this afternoon because I'm frightened, because I have a feeling that you're going to screw up my life and I don't want it screwed up. I don't know, I don't know what to say."
As I had done earlier in the day, I put my hand under her chin and turned her face to me. The electricity generated by our closeness was frightening, even to me, and I had to fight taking her into my arms, knowing that if I did she would come willingly. "Susan," I whispered, cupping her cheeks in my hands, "did you have so little faith in me that you thought I would ever hurt you, ever? I'd rather die. It's nice to know that under all that camouflage you're really a beautiful young girl, a good ten years younger than I had thought, but it doesn't matter. Don't you understand? It doesn't matter to me. What I feel is for what you are, and that's something not even you can hide. It's not what you look like.
"I always knew, from the first time I saw you walk into that classroom, that something was wrong with the picture I got. It just didn't make sense, but I could never quite catch it, not till just a few minutes ago when I suddenly realized that those beautiful eyes of yours were always clear through your glasses, and that meant that they were just that, glass. There was nothing wrong with your eyes, or they would have been at least slightly distorted by the prescription. You wore them for effect, and the old-lady hairdo, and the combat-boot shoes, and those ridiculous clothes to hide your body.
"Everything was to make you look older, straighter, stricter, and with the faculty you're afraid that if you talk too much you'll give yourself away. That's why you got mad at me today, because I pushed the point.