Chasing the Bear (7 page)

I felt more of the overheating feeling. But not much else. No stars fell. No skyrockets. No moon-beams. No music. She kept pressing against me. I didn’t think this was going the way it should. I liked her fine, but not the way I think she wanted me to. And I thought we might be making a mistake that we weren’t really ready to make. On the other hand, there was that overheated feeling and the sense that I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

She broke off her kissing and leaned back with her arms still around my waist and looked up at me.

“My mom doesn’t come home until eleven,” she said. “You want to come in?”

From off to one side, where there was the me that always looked on calmly, I heard myself say, “Sure.”

My voice sounded kind of hoarse, I thought.

“No
surprise there,” Susan said. “A young woman with an abusive absentee father whose mother feels a woman is incomplete without a man.”

“I was a little surprised at the time,” I said.

“You were fourteen,” Susan said.

“I was,” I said.

The sun was now entirely behind the low buildings in the Back Bay, and the people walking past us in the Public Garden looked like people going home from work.

“So here she is kidnapped by her brute of a father and the handsome young Galahad comes galloping”—Susan smiled—“or in this case, mostly drifting downriver and saves her.”

“My strength was as the strength of ten,” I said. “Because my heart was pure.”

“Sure it was,” Susan said. “And then you defend her honor from a local bully.”

“It was probably mostly about my own honor,” I said.

“Probably,” Susan said. “But she almost had to fall in love with you.”

“Or what she thought was love.”

“Shrinks call it cathexis,” Susan said.

“Cathexis?”

“A powerful emotional investment in something or someone, which in fourteen-year-old girl terms feels like love, but probably isn’t.”

“You were once a fourteen-year-old girl,” I said. “Did you do a lot of cathexis?”

“Several times a year,” Susan said. “But I was, of course, always waiting for the one.”

“Are you making sport of my obsession?” I said.

“I am,” Susan said. “How did it work out after that night?”

“Not too well,” I said. “She always sat beside me in study hall. She wanted to hold my hand if we walked anyplace. She started talking all the time about
us.
”

“And that wasn’t what you wanted.”

“No. She was a friend, but not the only one. Sometimes I wanted to play ball or hang with the guys.”

“Did you tell her this?” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“How did you break it to her?” Susan said.

“I told her about what I just told you,” I said. “That she was a friend, but not my only friend. And, you know, we didn’t have an exclusive contract.”

“How did she take it?”

“She cried,” I said.

Susan nodded.

“I remember so clearly. It was raining like hell, and a lot of wind, and we were standing under the marquee of the Main Street Movie Theater to stay dry. She cried for a little bit, and I felt I had to put my arm round her shoulders, at least. And she shook it off, and took in a big deep breath, and said, ‘No. I’m okay.’ And I said, ‘You’re sure?’ and she said, ‘I can wait.’ And I didn’t say anything. And she said, ‘But I have to walk. You have to walk with me.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ And we walked for about an hour in a driving rain. And when we finally went to her house, she turned around and put her head against my chest and said, ‘It’s okay. I’ll be fine. But I’m not giving up.’ Then she gave me a little kiss on the lips and went into her house.”

“How was it next day?” Susan said.

“Fine,” I said. “She stayed my friend. I’m sure she was waiting to be more. But she never pressed it again.”

“Good for her,” Susan said.

“Good for both of us.”

I
was in study hall pretending to take notes on a book I was reading. The book was a novel about Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodman, by Rex Stout. My father had come across a Nero Wolfe novel at the library a while ago and brought it home and we all read it, and now all of us were reading all the Rex Stout we could find. Their household was all men, like ours.

Jeannie came into the study hall and sat down beside me. The teacher eyed her, and Jeannie opened a geography book and began to look at it.

The teacher looked away and Jeannie whispered to me from behind the geography book.

“My mom wants you to come for supper,” she said.

The teacher looked back at us. Her name was Miss Harris and she was lean and kind of leathery and hard eyed. She frowned and shook her head. We were quiet. Miss Harris went back to correcting papers. The room reeked of silence.

“Sure,” I whispered.

Jeannie nodded.

Miss Harris had her head down, making notes in the margin of a blue book. I could see the thin white line of her scalp down the middle of her head where she parted her hair and pulled it back tight.

“Friday night?” Jeannie whispered.

Miss Harris’s head jerked up and her eyes darted around the room.

“This is a time set aside for you to study,” she said loudly. “Obviously some of you think it’s gossip time. You are wrong, and if you continue, you will be here late after school.”

I was industriously taking notes on my Nero Wolfe novel. Jeannie appeared entranced with her geography book.

Me? Dinner with Mrs. Haden? And Jeannie?

An eraser came sailing past me from the back corner of the room and bounced off the back of a chubby girl with a hair ribbon, who was sitting right in front of Miss Harris.

“Ow,” the girl said.

Miss Harris got to her feet.

“What is your problem, Betsey?” she said.

“Someone threw an eraser at me.”

“Sure,” I whispered to Jeannie.

She smiled and nodded.

“Do you know who threw it?” Miss Harris said.

“Joey Visco,” Betsey said.

“Mr. Visco,” Miss Harris said.

Joey Visco said, “Miss Harris, I didn’t throw nothing.”

“I didn’t throw
anything
,” Miss Harris said.

“I know it,” Joey said.

There was a lot of giggling.

“See me after class, Mr. Visco,” Miss Harris said.

“But I didn’t do nothing.”

“After class,” Miss Harris said, and went and rested her hips on her desk and folded her arms and stared at us silently.

It
was a pretty bad neighborhood. Mean-looking dogs behind chain-link fences. Chickens in some of the yards. Streetlights few and far apart. I wasn’t comfortable. But I figured if Jeannie could live there, I could walk through it.

I didn’t want to go to dinner at Jeannie’s house. But her mother had invited me, and I couldn’t just say no, so here I was.

Mrs. Haden met me at the door and I put out my hand like a well-brought-up boy. She took it and then pulled me to her and gave me a hug. I had very little experience at being hugged by a woman. She was wearing a lot of perfume.

“Oh, you dear thing,” she said. “Jeannie’s told me so much about you.”

I nodded.

“And you’re so handsome too,” Mrs. Haden said.

I sort of nodded and sort of shrugged.

“I just had to meet you and thank you for saving my little girl,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say, so I nodded again and smiled as hard as I could.

“Come in, sit down, would you like a Coca-Cola? Jeannie, get him something while I look in the oven.”

“Want a Coke?” Jeannie said.

“Okay,” I said.

She and her mother both went to the kitchen. They looked sort of alike. Except Mrs. Haden was about twenty years older than Jeannie and looked like she might have had a hard life. She was still kind of pretty. Her hair was long. She was slim, and she wore a lot of makeup. She had on a black dress with no sleeves and black high-heeled shoes. It seemed very fashionable to me, and I wondered why she dressed up for dinner with her daughter and a fourteen-year-old kid.

Jeannie and I drank our Coke uneasily in the living room. Jeannie’s house wasn’t much. I’d been there once before with Jeannie when her mother was at work. The house was shaped sort of like a railroad car. There was a little front porch. Then you went in the front door into the living room, through the living room to the kitchen, through the kitchen to a bedroom, and in a little L off that bedroom there was a bath and another bedroom.

Mrs. Haden had cooked a chicken and some white rice and some frozen peas. We sat at the kitchen table. There was a candle lit on the table. Mrs. Haden was drinking some pink wine. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you some,” Mrs. Haden said. “But I couldn’t without your father’s permission.”

“That’s okay, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t enjoy wine so much.”

Actually I didn’t know if I enjoyed wine or not. I wasn’t sure I’d ever had any.

“Oh, you will,” she said, and drank some from her glass.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Jeannie says you don’t have a mother,” Mrs. Haden said.

I ate some chicken. It was kind of dry.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You live with your father?” she said.

“And my two uncles,” I said.

“Isn’t that interesting,” she said. “Three brothers raising a child.”

“Actually they are my mother’s brothers,” I said. “My father and them were friends and when my mother died, they moved in to help out.”

“Do you remember your mother?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Three men and a boy and no women,” she said.

She drank the rest of the wine in her glass.

“Oh, there’s women,” I said. “My father and my uncles all have a bunch of girlfriends, but none of them has got married.”

Mrs. Haden gave herself some more wine.

“A house full of boys,” she said.

“I guess so.”

“Probably living on peanut butter sandwiches and cold beans from the can,” Mrs. Haden said.

“We take turns cooking,” I said.

“You too?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you suppose they’d like to come here with you next time for a home-cooked meal?” Mrs. Haden said.

“I guess so,” I said.

“Well, that’s what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’m going to invite them for a home-cooked meal.”

I looked at Jeannie. She smiled blankly. I nodded.

“That would be nice,” I said.

Susan
and I left the bench and walked up to the little bridge over the swan boat lake. We stood leaning our forearms on the railing and watched the boats and the people and the ducks, green and quiet in the middle of the city.

“It sounds like Jeannie’s mother might have wanted to promote you as her daughter’s boyfriend,” Susan said.

“I think that was one thing she wanted,” I said.

“And the other?”

“I was a way to three eligible bachelors,” I said.

“Two for one,” Susan said. “A boyfriend for her daughter and one for her. She seems in retrospect a woman who needed a man, who thought all women needed a man.”

“She stayed a long time with one of the worst men in the world,” I said.

“To some, a bad man is better than no man,” Susan said. “I stayed a long time with the wrong husband.”

“I think you’ve changed since then,” I said.

“Yes, I think so,” Susan said. “Did your father and your uncles go for dinner?”

“They did,” I said.

“What was that like?”

“They went the way they went to PTA meetings and stuff,” I said. “They didn’t want to go. They didn’t expect to enjoy it. They didn’t enjoy it. But they were polite about it.”

“Did she flirt with them?”

“Oh, my, yes,” I said.

“Was it embarrassing?”

“Yes. It didn’t seem to embarrass my father or my uncles, but it embarrassed the hell out of me and Jeannie.”

“She get drunk?”

“Yes.”

“Any of them ever ask her out?”

“No.”

“They say why?”

“No.”

“You have a theory?”

“She drank too much. And she wasn’t very bright. And she was needy. My father and my uncles never much admired needy.”

“So they just came to dinner to help you out,” Susan said.

“Yes, and I suspect that if they thought I needed more help, one of them would have dated her. Probably Patrick.”

“Why Patrick?”

“He was the youngest,” I said. “My father asked me about my feelings for Jeannie. I said I liked her but not as a girlfriend.”

“Waiting for the one?”

“I was,” I said. “And she wasn’t it.”

“But you might well have been it for Jeannie,” Susan said. “Girl with no stability at home, looking for someone, seeing it in you.”

“I was fourteen,” I said.

“And she probably hoped for the stability that your father and your uncles provided you, though I’m sure she didn’t know it.”

“She probably did, and I tried to help her with that. But she wasn’t the one.”

Susan smiled at me.

“What if I’d still been married when you met me?”

“I’d have made my bid anyway,” I said.

“And if I hadn’t responded?”

“I’d have waited awhile and tried again.”

“You’ve never been a quitter,” she said.

“No,” I said.

We looked down as a swan boat slid under the bridge. A couple of kids in the front waved at us.

“I would have responded,” Susan said.

We
played six-man football in my junior high school. I played in the three-man backfield. Since the man who received the snap from center could not run the ball past the line of scrimmage, I played sometimes at the tailback position to pass and sometimes at left halfback to take a handoff and run. The high school coach had already been to see me about next year to be sure I didn’t go to St. Mary’s. And everybody said I was pretty good. Which I was.