“Did the man ever come in after she took off?”
“Just once, the next night. But he left early. I’m thinking he asked around, found out Carolina had quit.”
“What did he look like?”
“Six three or four, your height. Brown hair, about the color of yours. And blue eyes-” She stopped, looking at my face.
Something oily was working its way up my throat. She could have been describing John Reynolds.
“Have you rented her apartment?” I asked.
“Didn’t seem right, after she went away,” she said slowly. “She’d cleaned it real thorough, and there’s no trace of her left, but I’ve just never gotten around to putting another ad in the paper. I guess I was keeping it for her, in case she ever wanted to come back. Everybody needs a place to come back to.”
“Can I see it?”
Dina dug in her purse, took out a ring of keys, and detached one. She handed it to me. “I’ve got to get to the Scupper, but you can look around.” She told me where she lived and said to bring the key to the Scupper when I was done.
I walked her to her car in the parking lot. She got in and started the engine with the door open, to let the air-conditioning blow out the superheated air. She looked up at me as she reached to pull the door closed.
“She ever say anything about a family?” I asked.
Dina looked at my eyes until I thought to take sunglasses out of my shirt pocket and put them on.
“A family?” she repeated.
“She ever mention anybody at all?”
“You mean like parents?”
“Anybody at all.”
“I don’t know about any family,” she said and drove away.
Twenty-five
It was the first warm day of spring. We were a half block, and three minutes, from where she would turn for her apartment and I toward the laundry.
Suddenly, she took a couple of giant strides to get in front of me, turned, and stopped. “So what about it, Vlodek?” She grinned. One of her eyeteeth was slightly crooked. It was enchanting.
“What about what?”
“Taking me to the Spring Dance.”
“I don’t go to proms,” I said, hoping that the blush warming my face didn’t betray me. I wanted, more than anything I’d ever wanted, anytime, anywhere, to hold Maris Mays, to make contact, flesh-to-cloth-to-cloth-to-flesh.
But I didn’t dance. I had never danced. I believed fervently that were I to try, my legs would knot themselves twice or three times over, and I would collapse into a lumpy, gnarled skein of limbs and elbows and knees and pointy head, a pathetic pretzel.
“I don’t have a suit,” the stuttering idiot who managed my mouth said.
“I’ll find you a suit.”
“Leo,” I stammered. Leo and I barely spoke anymore. I told myself it was because there was no time. We passed in the halls, smiled, flashed a thumbs-up like always, but it was a charade. He knew that Maris and I had been hanging back, every afternoon, just enough to be alone. He knew about me and the girl who had caught his heart.
“Leo?” she asked.
“He loved you first.” Baboons were loose in my mouth now, throwing pots and pans out with the words.
Her eyes, always as blue as the best of skies, widened in surprise. She leaned closer, and I could smell Ivory soap and roses and spring and a moment that might never come again.
“Take me to the dance, Vlodek,” she breathed.
Dina’s house was like most I’d seen along Shell Drive. It was a two-story white-sided box with shallow balconies and dark windows, set up high on cinder-block piers. Noah wouldn’t have gotten any ark-building assignments from the folks who lived in such places, for they knew that when the floods did come, they’d be safe enough, high up in their stilt houses, to sip mai tais and eat Oreos and watch, with impunity, as streams of donkeys and geese, coconut palms and yachts and Wal-Mart trucks, got washed away to oblivion right beneath their very own verandas.
I parked on the crushed shell driveway and walked around to the back.
A week before the dance, Maris found me a four-dollar suit. It was an itchy brown wool thing with big lapels, and it stank so badly of mothballs that the tea-sipping lady at the resale shop threw in a wrinkled floral necktie and a yellowed shirt with a long, pointy collar.
“Twenty-three skiddoo,” I said, copping a line from an old gangster movie, as we walked out. Maris laughed. I’d gotten far wittier in the weeks since I’d been walking with Maris.
I climbed the outside staircase that led up the two flights to her apartment. A clutch of yellow flowers bloomed in a red clay pot on the second-floor landing. I bent to sniff them, but they didn’t smell of anything.
The key turned easily in the lock, and I stepped inside.
The night of the dance was warm, scented with the lilacs that blossomed, mostly untended, in old bushes in many of the backyards in Rivertown. Maris was waiting for me on the sidewalk, which meant her father was still upstairs, splashing on cheap cologne, before he set off for another night of groping for love in the tonks on Thompson Avenue. I’d only met Herman Mays twice, and then only at the base of their stairs. We’d disliked each other instantly; he, I thought, because he saw me as unmarked, yet to live the disappointments he cried about, Maris said, even in his sleep. My dislike was simpler. I despised him for the rage he directed at Maris.
Maris wore a blue and green leaf-patterned dress of thick brocade-like my suit, too heavy for the warm evening-and tiny sparkling earrings.
We walked to the high school, both of us dressed for winter, because it would have been unthinkable to ask my aunt Rosemary-one of the bad aunts-for the use of her Ford. She’d barely looked up as I cut through her apartment in my big-lapel brown suit and razzmatazz necktie, trailing my musk of mothballs, as though it were usual for me to go out dressed as a junior-grade gangster.
As Maris and I stepped into the gymnasium, I saw, to my horror, that most of the girls were wearing corsages. Embarrassment heated my face; I had not thought to buy one for Maris. “It doesn’t matter, Vlodek,” she said, squeezing my hand.
The dance passed in a blur. There was a punch bowl, filled with some fruity red mix that I joked would never be noticed if spilled on the riot of flowers that was my necktie. There were bright overhead lights, excellent for spotting basketball fouls, just as good for spotting hands rising for social fouls. The music was fast, dialed up on the treble to shut out the bass, lest something primal be aroused. And everywhere there was a teacher, eyes darting like a falcon’s, making sure minimum intervals, flesh-to-cloth-to-air-to-cloth-to-flesh, were being maintained by all the couples on the gymnasium floor. There was nothing for them to worry about with Maris and me. We danced awkwardly, as stiff as back patients recovering from surgery.
There was an after-dance party, a rec room affair in the basement of a two-flat, five blocks off of Thompson Avenue. A friend of Maris’s, another junior, invited a dozen couples. There were fluorescents in the ceiling there, too-strong and white, like in the gym, and quite overpowering a low lamp with a straw shade-switched on by the girl’s mother, switched off as soon as she climbed the stairs.
The music was vinyl and old, slow love songs of the fifties and sixties, played on a portable record player. It wasn’t listening music, it was rubbing music. And it was there, in that two-flat basement, lit softly by pale light from a straw-shaded lamp, that itchy brown wool at last met heavy blue and green brocade. At the end of the first dance, a blessedly interminable Johnny Mathis swoon, I looked down, Maris looked up, and the orbiting at last was complete. We kissed, nervous lips on soft lips, her smelling of Ivory soap and roses, me of mothballs and wonder.