When McMillan reached the head, Brierly waved him away.
‘No seconds, not yet.’
McMillan was still protesting when a short, obese fellow George did not know backed out of the box, refastening his trousers.
‘What a swamp!’ he said, and the hallway again rocked with laughter.
Brierly pointed at George. ‘Next,’ he said, ‘in the tunnel of love.’ Only then did George see that Hugh was collecting money, ‘Rent,’ Brierly said. ‘It’s my box.’
George dumbly picked ten dollars, a week’s spending money, out of his wallet.
‘You have five minutes, Mason. Do your best.’
He did not even touch his belt to lower his trousers until he had crept inside, where he was overwhelmed by the intense odor. Someone, probably the girl, had vomited, and the smell was heavy in the close air, which was sodden with overheated breaths and perspiration. The box was so low he could not really kneel over her and had to support himself with one hand to pull down his pants. The girl was talking to herself, half sentences, song lyrics, he thought, a high-pitched mumbo jumbo. He made out one phrase she sang: ‘I want to hold your hand.’
She addressed him when he touched her. ‘Hey, honey,’ she said in a lyrical, drunken, carefree voice, seeming to relish this fleeting moment of anesthesia.
He wanted to make the most of his opportunity and explored the girl’s skinny body without much tenderness. A wool skirt was in a lump at her waist, and a silky undergarment had been pushed up to her shoulders. Lying down, she had only the smallest swell of breasts and tiny nipples like peas.
When he had first crawled into the carton, revolted by the heat and the smells, it occurred to him that he had to do no more than push his pants down to his ankles. None of the boys in the hallway would know what had happened. He could rock a bit, then talk the good game that so many fools talked on Sunday morning. But that was the point. No one would know. He was free. And although he was drilled by terror, he was going ahead, because he wanted to get this moment over with. There were two groups in the world, the ones who had and the ones who hadn’t, and he was convinced that every uncertainty of his age would be abated if he crossed that divide.
When he entered her, after a terrible moment of fumbling, his body was divided by a scream from his own heart. With startling clarity, he heard warnings of damnation. But those were the voices he was determined to be free from, and so he continued and finished that way, determined, somehow isolated from the sensations of pleasure. The girl, as he remembered, had rested a hand on his back and made some effort to move below him.
When he was done, he refastened his trousers.
‘Are you okay?’ he whispered before he crawled out.
‘Oh, honey,’ she answered.
‘No, really. Are you okay?’ He touched her cheek for the first time.
She was singing again, with a sudden clarity that frightened him.
His eyes stung when he emerged into the blazing fluorescence of the hallway. A few men reached out to pat his back and joked about his speed-he might not have been inside two minutes-but he wanted to escape the hungry pack. They had no idea what had actually happened. It was not what they thought or what they were celebrating. A moment later he was downstairs, trying to make whatever he could out of having passed through the membrane between his fantasies and his life. The Scotch was starting to back up on him.
Mario Alfieri’s blind date, Joan-with whom Mario was destined to spend the next thirty-seven years, until he died in the second World Trade Center tower on 9/11-appeared from the door of the bath designated for the weekend as the ladies’ room. She nearly ran into George while he was still trying to jam his shirttails into his trousers.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked.
He could not find a discreet answer. ‘Life is strange,’ he told her.
As much of a wise guy as Mario, Joan eyed him at length and asked, ‘Compared to what?’
Over the decades, when Judge Mason has loitered with the incident in recollection-and that is not often-he has dismissed it under the rubric of amusing follies of youth. Everyone had a first experience, and half of them were crazy. Faltering. Unsuccessful. Life and love moved forward to a better footing. He has not fully considered this moment in years and never attached to it the name he is required to apply today: a crime.
He reconsiders the word, the idea. Crime? He is a lawyer, a master of distinctions. It is not the same at all. Yet the incident is too close to the case he heard this morning for any comfort. The girl was drunk. Virtually incoherent. Her actions might have passed for consent in those days. But not now. The men in that dormitory hallway, including most especially him, had, in every sense of the antique phrase, taken advantage of her.
In the tomb darkness of the parking garage, George Mason feels how harshly his heart is beating. This is serious. Because he realizes that he has suddenly lost one of the comforts of middle age. There is joint pain, fading hearing, and trouble recalling names-even cancer. But generally speaking, not this. Yet now his soul seems as insubstantial as a fume. At the age of fifty-nine, George Mason wonders who he is.
6
“Did we ever talk about my first time?” George asks Patrice at the hospital that night. The radioactive treatment required her to suspend her thyroid-replacement therapy, and she has been left feeling, as she puts it, ‘energetic as moss.’ At 7:00 P.M., she lies in the hospital bed, paging through a magazine. George himself is wrapped like a present-paper gown, cap, and booties-and sits behind a line taped on the floor, seven yards from his wife. Tonight, after they let him through the sealed outer area into her room, he did not get within ten feet of her bed before his wife raised both hands in warning to keep him from embracing her. ‘George, don’t be Sir Galahad. I know the nurse just told you not to get near me.’ She made him leave the burrito dinner he brought her on a table across the room, from which she retrieved it.
Despite the required distance, it has been a companionable visit, much better than their stilted exchanges yesterday through the prison-like phones. Patrice is looking forward to her possible release tomorrow night and has offered several entertaining thoughts on what she refers to as ‘life as hazmat.’ But the question he just asked her was apropos of nothing, and Patrice’s eyes, a penetrating blue, distinct as gemstones, flash toward him, one eyebrow encroaching on her dark forehead.
“I mean sex,” he adds.
“I understood, George,” she says and with that casts her eyes at the intercom rising on a separate metal stalk beside her bed. George, however, is secure. A loud bleat echoes from the speaker before the nurses’ station may listen in. More to the point, his memories from the garage lie on him like a heavy stone rolled off the entrance to a tomb. He has been waiting for the right moment to discuss all this with Patrice and has spoken up suddenly, knowing the staff will shoo him out soon. The radiation-sensitive badge they pasted on his gown over his heart remains green, but the bar is shrinking.
“Did I?” he asks. He has known Patrice’s story for decades. At seventeen, with a man of twenty-six, for whom she thought she had a passion. The backseat of a car. The usual squirming. Tab A. Slot B. And realizing in the aftermath that her main desire had been to get it over with and not for the smashing, handsome, worthless buddy of her older brother.
Patrice frowns, turning another page. “Not that I can recall, Georgie,” she says, then adds, with typical tart understatement. “Perhaps it means something that I never asked.”