And from somewhere behind the straw-shaded lamp, the vinyl band played on.
The second-floor rooms were hot, at least a hundred and ten degrees. I stood by the opened door for a minute, to let the scorching air rush to the lesser heat outside. Hoping, I suppose, to inhale some scent, some trace of Maris. There was only old air, trapped in the heat.
The tiny apartment combined a living room with a kitchen setup. An open door offered a glimpse of a bedroom and, beyond that, a bathroom.
All the walls were a pale yellow, and completely blank. The vinyl tile floor was a bright, clean white, free of heel scuffs or scratches. They were rooms that had been decorated and then never marked, rooms occupied by someone who’d been careful to leave nothing of herself behind.
Everywhere, there was sun, lots of sun.
I walked through the living room to open one of the windows that faced Shell Drive. The soft white curtains stirred for an instant, then collapsed back against the screen.
It was good that everywhere, in those rooms, there was the sun, the bright yellow-white sun.
Maris liked the sun. She liked that it was the color of her hair.
For the first days following the Spring Dance, we were tentative, fellow adventurers who shared a secret but were afraid to put a name to it, for fear its magic would disappear if we spoke of it aloud. Passing each other in the halls at school, we smiled but then quickly averted our eyes. Walking after school, it took us two or three blocks to say anything at all, and then our words were careful, of assignments and tests and term papers, things that neither of us heard. It was prelude.
On Monday and Tuesday, we kissed on the sidewalk in front of the door that led up to her apartment, a quick, furtive brushing of lips. On Wednesday, we stepped just inside the street door, into the dark at the foot of the stairs.
The weekend was interminable. Her father was home, not about to allow his daughter to slip out to see some boy. He had need of her. There was cleaning to do, and ironing. Things a wife would have done.
On Wednesday of the following week, we went upstairs to the landing outside the door that opened to her father’s apartment. Not that many days later, we moved inside that door, to the nubby orange couch in her father’s front room.
No longer did we find reasons to stay after class. There was no time. From the last bell until I had to be at the laundry, we had a narrow window, seventy-five minutes, and we learned to manage them with the cunning of museum robbers. We met outside the southwest door of the high school at three eighteen. By three twenty-one we had passed the parking lot, walking purposefully, not saying much for fear it would slow us down. We crossed to Thompson Avenue at three thirty-one if the truck traffic was light; three thirty-two if it was heavy. By three thirty-seven we were up the stairs to her landing, and she was fumbling with her key. A second or two later, she’d have the door open, our books would drop, and we would be on the nubby orange couch, daring only to touch each other’s face.
I moved through the tiny apartment, trying not to place the girl I’d known on the beige upholstered chair, hear her lifting a Coke or a lemonade from the kitchen counter, or see her picking up a book of poetry from the lamp table.
In the far back corner, by the stove, refrigerator, and sink, there was a yellow kitchen table and a white ladder-back chair. She’d sat on that chair, eaten at that table, alone, for over a decade. The boy I’d been the summer of high school graduation wanted to rejoice; she’d shared her meals with no one. The man that boy had become wanted to cry at the loss of it.
From the doorway to the bedroom, I looked at the twin bed, made up with a white bedspread pulled tight. Next to it was a night table with a frilly-shaded lamp, and across the room, a painted four-drawer dresser. It was the bedroom of a woman alone. Or that of a young girl.
People called Lillian, my mother’s youngest sister, flighty and scatterbrained. Perhaps that was true. She was easily overwhelmed and took care to lead a spinster’s ordered life, taking the train downtown to Chicago to work in the ladies’ coats department of Marshall Field’s.
She was the kindest of my mother’s three sisters. She was the one who fussed over my clothes, made sure the sheets for the sofa were clean, and kept meals warm for me for when I came home at midnight from the laundry. I looked forward to every third month, when I could stay at her apartment.
Her funeral was five days before my graduation. It was afine day late in May, heavy with the scents of flowers and beginnings, a day too bright and alive for burying a woman who’d lived quietly and demanded nothing of anyone. I rode with her two remaining sisters and their husbands and children from the funeral home west on Thompson Avenue to the cemetery but stood apart from them, at the back of the small cluster of people, as the minister mouthed words that made no sense on such a beautiful day. When he was done, Lillian’s sisters dropped roses onto the coffin that rested on low metal poles, and everyone began walking away from the opening that had been ripped into the ground.
My skin was tingling. Crazily, every breath I took went deeper into my lungs than ever before. The sky was bluer than I’d ever seen it, the smells of spring stronger. Time raced. No matter where I looked-the dash clock on the funeral home Cadillac, the Timex Lillian had given me for Christmas-minutes were disappearing, fast and forever, like petals thrown to a gusting spring windstorm.
Still in my Spring Dance wool suit, I ran to the high school, waited for Maris outside our door. When she stepped into the bright sunshine, agonizing minutes later, I grabbed her books, then her hand, and half-pulled her across the grass, toward the parking lot.
“Vlodek! Where’s the fire?”
I had no words and no time to tell her that the flames were all around me. The whole world was ablaze with life and death and vanishing minutes.
Inside her apartment, I tugged her past the nubby couch. She put her hand to my chest at the door to her bedroom, bright from the sun at the window. Never before had I touched anything except her face, her arms, her hands. She paused, trying to see what was raging behind my eyes, but it was only for an instant. Then we were inside, and I was pulling at her clothes, ripping at my own, and we were naked on her narrow twin bed.
I was somewhere else, then, looking down at her, at me. I saw her face change from acceptance to need and then to something that I didn’t understand. She started to cry. I saw myself stop. She shook her head. “No,” I heard her whisper. And I saw myself start again. I was not that boy slowly moving on the bed; I was watching, detached, entirely accepting the inevitability that I was seeing down below. When the boy who was me at last stopped, she continued to hold me against her, her hands clenched around my back, her face wet against my shoulder, until we started again, and later, again. I left at six o’clock, late for the laundry. In all that time at Maris’s, I had not uttered one word. I didn’t know what I could possibly say.
I walked around the bed, to the door to the bath, and stood for a moment, holding on to the jamb. There was nothing of her left in that heat, of course. Nothing at all.